It's weird how karma works. With most things for me I either have a really good day followed by a really bad day, a bunch of so-so days, or a day mixed with good and bad things. Today was the third variety.

The full time staff at work all had a mandatory meeting all day so my area was closed and I had to work at the helpdesk. The day at work went pretty well. It was a nice change of pace for a day working in a different place (where I work during the school year) and doing different work for a day.

The day ended at 3 (w00h00!) so we could drive to Look Park in Northampton Mass for part 2 of the mandatory staff meeting, an OIT picnic. The drive over from Amherst to Noho is where the troubles began. I was driving on route 9 and almost at the Coolidge Bridge when I started to wonder why my air conditioning was not cooling my car off. I take a look at the temperature gage and of course since this is my car it is up all the way! After opening my window and turning the heat on full blast I was able to get the lever back down to an acceptable level and finish my drive to look park, just before it went all the way up again and the car started beeping at me.

[As a side note, I got my car back on Friday after they had it for 16 days fixing an oil leak.. stupid head gaskets. ]

Ok, so end of bad news, onto good news. I didn't expect the picnic to actually be good, but it turned out to be fun. After saying hello to a bunch of people that I knew Elliott, Dan, Liz, Liz's kids, Liz's friend, and Liz's friend's kid all hung out together at the park. It was cool going back to a place where we used to go in elementary school at the end of the year. We first talked for awhile while the kids played on the playground, then got some grub. After dinner I challenged Elliott to a chess match but after each of us moving two pieces we got kicked out since a tournament was about to begin. At this time we left and headed to a new edition to Look Park since I was there last (~9 years ago), the sprinkler area.

At the sprinkler area we all got wet, especially Elliott and the kids who got soaked. The sprinkler area had water shooting out of the ground and on various structures such as flowers and towers with buckets. If you wanted to get wet this was a great place to do it. After we left there we were all much cooler.

The next stop was the train. This was one of my favorite memories from when I used to visit Look Park when I was young. Of course it wasn't all the fun I remembered it being but it was still a good ride. We had just missed the last real ride of the day, but got to ride for free as they were bringing the train into the tunnel for the night.

After the train ride we took a tour of the zoo area where we saw, among other things, two bald eagles. Upon completing the self-guided tour we started to leave. Liz's friend and her kid actually left but the rest of us headed over to where I was parked to take a look at my car. We ended up adding a small bottle of water into the cooling system of the car hoping that would help and then just chilling.

At one point while Dan Elliott and I were talking Liz-n-crew went to the bathroom. It was light when she went in, but dark when she came out. Right. I guess you really don't care about that, but I just though I should let you all know. :)

Anyway, we just hung out in the parking lot for a while more while Elliott tried teaching Liz some self defense moves.. and I was the demo person. I got tossed on the ground a few times hehe.

It was about 10 when we got kicked out by the park rangers saying that the park was closing. We all had a good time as far as I can tell. I'm sure I did. The car ride home proved uneventful (that’s a good thing). I guess Elliott was beeping at me at the red light but since his horn is so soft I couldn't hear him. My car took the drive home without a problem staying below the half-way-hot mark.

Even since the car was ok then I'm going to be stopping by Carz in the morning to get the car looked at. I was planning on driving to the cape this weekend and would rather not have it overheating down there.

Now you can see what I mean about today both being good and bad. It's good that my car had problems since the rest of the day was really good or tomorrow would totally suck on me. =]

Well I hope this long blog makes up for the fact that there have been no entries in over a week again. It is over 3 pages double spaced. If only writing school papers was as fun as this. =] I'll blog again soon, promise. Oh yeah, and anyone knows about "The Lemon Law" (returning a bad used car for a refund) lemme know in a feedback post.

For the past few hours at work Liz has been bragging about how smart she is with her 133 IQ test score from emode. Hey Liz, LOOK AT THIS!. I'm not bragging, but do I get to keep my title that Casey gave me now? Huh? Muwahahaha. =]

To other people, take the test if you have time. Its fun. Post your score here too if you'd like by clicking on the "What do YOU think" link.

It's been over a week since I last publishing. In that period of time a lot of things happened. Two episodes of southpark, big brother 3 started, a new .GET intro was introduced (Wanna .GET high?), I finally got grub working on my linux boxes, mef finally took his domain back, I got a 32x cdrw drive and 10 80 min cdrs for $30, my xbox is in pieces..., cmatera started a blog and connected via ftp to my site over 600 times, Liz tried to make a blog, Martha posted for the 1st time on Russ's Aim Log, The US House of Reps Voted to give hackers life in jail, beefylogs went to Hawaii, my modem is still suckin, a new virus struck umass, rose has been buggin me for DCG logs, kornball has been buggin me for pics, irpaC had a yardsale, AND MY CAR IS BROKEN AGAIN!

For a week now (Since Thursday last week) Carz has been in possession of my car. This time I noticed it was leaking oil, and it appears the head gasket is broken. Thank you 3 month warranty! Yesterday Carz finally gave me a loaner car.. one with 231,000 miles on it so I can get around. This thing is a killer. It is a Mazda Protege that gets like 10 miles to the gallon. At least I have a car to use now though.

Oh, that party I talked about last time at Dons.. It sorta didn't happen since I did not have a car. However, there is a party on the 27th at Mac's where he and his band Not Yet will be playing. I will definitely be checking that out. You should too.

PS: Be happy I use ieSpell

First off, PARTY AT DONS THIS SATURDAY! We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging:

Most people that use the internet (as much as I do) these days started out back in the days of modems. I'm talking POTS modems here, not those new fangled cable modems. The keywords here however are *started out* and *back in the day*. I to this day am still faced with a modem connection at home. Not even 56k, but 24k. Normally I don't complain tooooooooo much about how incredibly slow that is, but the thing that pisses me off is when my connection just goes dead.

In the past few days my isp keeps loosing its connection to the rest of the internet by way of qwest. A lot of the time the connection goes smoothly (as smoothly as 24k can go) but then Global Crossing just decides to drop 60 to 100% of my packets. YAY FOR GBLX (and qwest sometimes)!

Here is just a little example thats shows my love of dialup. If you need help reading that just remember red is bad.

Oh and for those of you who care, there should be a new .GET out by the end of the week... I hope. =]

Oh soo tired.. going to keep this one short. Hope everyone had a great 4th. Here is one of the many pictures I took from this evenings firework show in Amherst.

Click here to see fireworks!

PS: Good news, tomorrows high is only 84! Oh and for an update on my last entry, I made my own little mIRC script to grab the data from weather.com and store it for looking up later.. Today's high was 97 feeling like 104 @ 4:52pm. It was 97 from 2:06 until 5:07. 73 degrees now. Good night. =]

Today was a scorcher. Our air conditioning was on the fritz today at work so I was so glad when I finally could leave. While writing this entry I looked around on the web for a half hour to report todays high. While I could not find exact days (yet), I found that in hartford (an hour or so away) todays high was 97. According to weather.com, right now at 8pm it is 91 degrees and feels like 100 so you can just imagine what it must have felt like earlier in the day. If anyone knows any better sites for getting today's high temperature (hourly temperature reports or something) please let me know (click the what do you think link).

After I was let out of work today I stopped by Puffer's Pond. This is a stream fed pond in Amherst that I have only been to three times now. It is a great place to stop by after work and cool off at. I was planning on blogging about this today so I took my digital camera with me today and snapped a picture of part of the pond.

Since weather.com tells me that tomorrow is going to be 97 I think I'll be stopping by the pond again. Again, if someone knows a place that will list the high/low or exact hourly temperatures for 01003 please let me know by leaving a comment.

It was so hot today even today's foxtrot is about swimming