so we're back from florida. actually we got back a while ago (we must have, since mary nell left for china this morning..). it was very much fun. got to hang out with my momma, go to the beach, see matt, and slack off. all in the first two days of the trip. then on saturday morning, we left jacksonville, bound for fort myers. en route to ft m, we learned that we were expected to make a short shuttle run to naples as well. once all of that was taken care of, we loaded the 'truck' with all manner of accoutrements and began another 4.5 hour journey. all in all, we put on 850+ miles that day, and arrived just as sunday approached in marianna florida (central time zone saved us an hour, hooray!). mary nell's grandmother was waiting for us at the front door, and immediately began to offer us food when we arrived. we ate sandwiches, visited a bit, and crashed for the night. late the next morning, we woke to the wonderful aromas of southern cookin. chicken and dumplings were served along side salads of fruit and vegetable varities, peas, broccoli, biscuits, and homemade creamed corn (yeah, that's right). needless to say, noone could move much after that ordeal. we had more of the same for dinner several hours later with ice cream and pound cake in between to cleanse the pallate. mmm... the next morning, nell (the grandmother) was still insisting on waiting on us, and woke and made pancakes upon which we gorged ourselves just before hitting the road and heading back to atl. we were all exhausted on the return trip. the one thing that could have made our trip complete was a stop at taco bell which never happened. so to make up for that, mary nell's mother picked up three grande meals for us and dropped them by when she came to wish mary nell well on her journey. that's all from the front.

Ultimate geek link! But, even more so, is this - a Digital Mini VAX converted into a keg cooler and tap that has its beer temperature and keg levels wired to the web! This would be hard to top. But, maybe the fortress could top it. And remember folks, EVERYTHING you read on the web is true! ;)

drink of choice this evening: Capri Sun and Appleton Rum.

yum. (8

What the fuck are you talking about? Donny, you're out of your element!

It's quite amusing to watch the phatcam sometimes. Most of the time, it's pretty boring. But, every now and then, we're able to gaze upon a fine game of bowling. Don't know what I'm talking about? Obviously, you're not a golfer.

it's thursday, so some of the guys at work & i order chinese food & have it delivered. i got some of the coolest chopsticks ever - the translation is absolutley horrendous! looky:

(front of package)

Welcome to Chinese Restaurant.

pl ease try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks

the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history.

and cultual.

                    BAMBOO CHOPSTLCKS

                    PRODUCT OF CHINA

(back of package)

Learn how to use your chopsticks



Tuk under              thurnb

and held firmly




Add secord chcostick

hold it as you hold

a pencil




Hold tirst chopstick

in original position

move the second

one up and down

Now you can pick

up anything :




PRODUCTOF

CHINA

These came from Win House, just a stone's throw from work (in Chamblee). i've also gotten these chopsticks at Chinese Buddah (14th street), Doc Chey's (N. Highland avenue) and Yum Wok (in Pittsburgh).

on the way to work this morning, i was stopped dead in my tracks by a rainbow. it was quite possibly the most beautiful thing i've ever seen.

even though i know exactly what makes rainbows happen & why (snell's law, refractive index, internal reflection, angle of incidence, angle of refraction, etc...), i'm still transfixed and amazed by them.

guten Morgen, K�se! i'm back at work, doing whatever projects everyone feels like doing. it's summertime and as such, Georgia Power isn't going to shut down a turbine for love or money (unless it's a catastrophic failure). Hence, not much work for the turbine department == not much for me to do, except people's pet projects. whatever. 8 and the gate, mon thru fri. keeps me off the streets (mostly) and put baksheesh in my coffers. yeah, it's nice to be back.

charlie spent sunday and most of monday with us, trying to get a computer to work. i tried to get one to work as well, and i just figured out my problem. the newer versions of lilo don't have the 1024 cylinder limit, which was the problem with trying to boot off a 20 gig drive. it was cool to have him around for a while. mark & i may just go up there this weekend to bar hop & eat at Zeb Dean's. mmmm....Zeb's...

more to come, film at 11.

hmmm.... so the girls are finally really getting moved in. it has been a long time coming, it seems. kate's last day as a resident at avery glen is tuesday (the twenty-second), so we absolutely have to have all of her shit out of the joint by then. most of it really has been taken care of, though. now all they need to do is unpack the massive amounts of shit that they have. that or put it in the attic, which is now accessable for storage, etc, thanks to butch who spent all of yesterday being a huge burly man and moving kate's shit/doing home depot type stuff. mn's mom also showed up and made us lunch (poof) and then blah blah blah. it was complicated. eventually more unpacking was done and we went to hang out with paco. then everyone dashed off to kroger, and then we got home and realized that there was no way in hell we were going to be making dinner for the evening cause it was midnight-ish. wacky. this is just me wasting time before going to work this morning. on a similar wasting time/not going to work sort of tach, we (by which i mean whoever wants to) are going to florida this weekend to visit family of mn's, maybe get some shit of some sort, and hang out with the jacksonville crew (matt's and my families). maybe see some other people too, but prolly not.
peace

After working at my old, yet not so familiar delivery job for a week now, I've decided to return to the engineering world. Robert and company will apparently have me back, and I'll be making better money. The reall up side is that I'll be within walking distance of work, the down side is that I'll have to go work 8-5 again, wear nice clothes, and feel creatively stifled for another 8 weeks. But I need the money so I can go roadtrippin' at the end of the summer, and delivery just isn't cutting it. Brad also has a job now. He works for "The List." I'm sure he will blog what that is eventually. So now everyone has something to do with themselves during the day and we all have an income (except for mikex0r, who is a student so it is O.k.). My knee hurts, it hurts a lot. But they tell me that it is still solidly attached, which is good. I had a good solid night of paranoia a few days back, and busted my ass to get someone to tell me either way. It was a rough night. It would have been nive to have Mikki around to talk to but she was in Florida. Fortunately Brad stepped up (or actually sat there and played Diablo II) and helped me stay sane. Time to go work on my laptop and make it do things.

On the videogame front:
---Onimusha is a fantastic game with an incredible combat engine. It is obviously built by the people from Resident Evil, but apparently not many of them for the game is very short (5:30).
---Jeremy is playing Paper Maio as I write, and will have to buy the game. Looking at it, it seems to do a great job of maintaining som of the 2D scroller elements we all love, while being a decent roleplayer. This was a good move by Nintendo because RPGs are getting way too complex unless you are an addict.
---SSX now has two complete trick lists. Jeremy and I finished Kaori off.
---Dynasty Warriors 2 has yet to entice a single soul. I played it for 20 minutes yesterday, and got bored. Not a good sign.
---Brad is currently going through Diablo 2 after a short stint with FF9. He is a card fiend in FF9 but doesn't advance plot, which is probably why he turned to Diablo 2.

It turns out that out of 5or6 people living here, I am the only one taking classes. Tonight, we won 2nd place in trivia at Rocky Mountain. It was good.

Agnes Scott Graduation and debaucherous after-party pictures and video are up! Some of these shots sure are charming. I think this is a particularly good shot of Ray and Mary Nell. This shot really shows the bunch of characters that we are. We have the Fortners being bored and unconventional, Jeremy being an all-corduroy wearin big grin dude, and the fine upstanding young men Brad Thurmond and Mark Honeycutt on the right. Those kids are so upstanding that they even brought biscuits to the ceremony and then offered it to the 'lil old ladies all about! Of course, we were definitely not so upstanding later on. Jeremy was in extremely rare form with his alcohol consumption. That was entertaining, to say the least. Quite a memorable day, I must say.

wahoo. for still being an unemployed summer bum I sure have been eating well. lunch at wan lei, cookouts, prime rib, fatty burritos and cookies. i am hitting the mooch factor pretty hard.
video games have gone well. i also traded ted $15 and an old motherboard with a pentium II processer and about 32 MB of ram for a 20 gig hard drive. this is the first time in a while i've felt satisfied about my hard drive girth.
ted's fish are cool but i wish the tank was higher off the ground.
matt will be leaving soon - that's too bad - i still have yet to officially live with matt.
the social scene is alive and kickin' with the friends but not with the ladies but that is okay.

Many of us have been committed to video games for the past 3 days. We've spent a considerable amount of time playing SSX on Martin's incredible Playstation 2. He purchased an additional PS2 controller, so now we can actually race each other (beautiful Japanese snowboarding game). Right now, they're immersed in the rented game Onimusha, a Resident Evil esque game. Summertime = video games. Can't wait for the Xbox.

and to elaborate on the road trip and to catch up on the past week or so:

florida was fun. the weather was pretty nice for florida, as i don't deal well with stoopid summery heat. matt's dad is a cool cool guy. blow is a great movie, so go see it. the beach was awesome - i went 3 times and got zero sun each time (twice at night, once during a cloudy day). the sea was angry, my friends. posiedon was angry indeed - violent waves and strong rip current make for not good swimming. monster plantation was...interesting. pecans (peh-kahns, not pee-cans, damnit!) are tasty and make good candy. it's good to have martin, brad and mike in the fort (you guys kick ass!). my grades were good. my new bike is great. ray, mn, kate and kim baby's new house is pimptastic. their party really whipped the pony's ass. it was good to see mark (not markh, although it's always good to see markh) and antonio again. a good drunken debaucherous time was had by all. banana needs a bit more work. pbnj is afu at the moment, hopefully i'll have that sorted out today.

i'm sure i have more sentence fragments to post, but this must be the most boring-ass post ever.

yeah yeah yeah! i sure do like fish. i got 2 swordtails, 2 mollies (one black, one yellow) and a plecostomus at petsmart yesterday afternoon. brad and mike went with me - it was a fun trip. unfortunately, petsmart doesn't sell monkeys. that's really the pet i want. floated 'em in the tank for 10 minutes and cut them free. i'm letting them get used to their tanks, which oughta take a week or so. hopefully my swordtails will get it on so i'll have small fishies soon. so yeah, fish aren't much for interactions with humans, but the whole aquarium thing is great. the sound of the waterfall filter, watching the fish languidly swim about...man, aquariums kick ass!

Fortress blog is visible to the world again. Since blogger rules, we were still able to maintain the Fortress blog while my server was down. Troo!

we have fish. that is pretty cool, i guess. frankly, though, fish are pretty lame. they just sort of swim. and have mouths that go moom moom moom. whatever. also, ray is gone. that is sort of sad. but we had a good time before he left. ok, that is all. not that anyone can read this right now.

i still don't have a job but i cleaned some today so i feel productive. i'm also about to send off my resume to Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport for some possible intern action. i'm also hopeful that Roadway Express might love me. LTL trucking. mmmm... IE stuff. i think i'm supposed to make dinner for my parents tonight. i'm not currently so i must be suckin'.
you know... this summer seems to eerily be parrelleling last summer where i started off playing video games, going to trivia and just generally wasting away while looking for work and then magically finding a job i could walk to from the Fort(there is a chance i have found a sweet little "filing monkey" job a couple blocks down the road at Something and Something law firm). giddyup.

My fellow Fortress compatriots have left Jacksonville and I'm here alone. It sure is quiet round here. We had a great time during the past two days. I do indeed like my hometown Jacksonville. Should be a great summer.

oh, also, grades got posted. everyone in the fort who took classes made dean's list. i like having smart friends. go fortress!

martin: go banana!

so we are in jacksonville. actually this is the end of the trip... sort of. mark, ted, matt and i drove down right after the party, and have been beach bums ever since. went thricely. well, they did. the last time (monday night) i hung out with the mom unit. so that was fun. kids are getting cleaned and thinking about heading home. it was fun to come to florida weather (which ted will contradict soon enough) and to go to the beach and to have a free weekend on matt's dad. but it is going to feel good to get back to the fort. new roommates and video games and trivia. gotta love road trips. unfortunately, we have been naughty babies on this trip and it has been very ill documented aside from a couple of pictures that matt took. look for them shortly (along with party shots) in unprocessed media.

Right, so, I've been living here for the past two days, and until last night around 11 pm I was the only one here. It was kind of cool and kind of sucky. On one hand I had the place to myself, and this is a HUGE place to have to yourself. On the other hand there was no one to do stuff with. Anyway, the Fort now comes equipped with a PS2 for the summer. That pushes the console count up to 5 I think (Genesis, SNES, Dreamcast, N64 and PS2). No new consoles are coming out until after I go back to school, so I doubt we'll get any more. One the game note: SSX is awesome. Mario Party 3 came out, so we'll see how long it is before jeremy convinces me to rent/buy it. The Fort also has Loaded Questions, a fun party/get to know someone game. That's all for me now. I'm going to go try and set my computer up.

just so you know, kegs are heavier than they appear. to me, at least. on the upside, i currently have a keg of Honey Brown sitting in the floor in the kitchen, just chillin', waiting to be tapped...gotta love parties!

just so you all know, soon we will not be updating this blog with the fervor that we currently are. or at least i won't be. this is probably one of those things that i will do way too much of too soon, and then get totally burned out. i am like that. anyway, i wanted to say that amazon.com rules. i went and modified a bunch of my settings and whatever on there, and they are amazing. i bet that it would be really fun to work for them. come up with services that people would wand and then use what i imagine is a very extensible database infrastructure to construct whatever. so the main thing that impressed me today is a new option for the about you area, where you can share with others the purchases that you have made. if ever you mark that you own something that you view at amazon.com, you can show other people that you own that item, and write a mini-review of it (comments) and rate it. pretty cool. well, that is my rant for the 'evening'. perhaps i will clean some more now. or perhaps i will sit around and listen to stereolab. i bet you know which one is winning right now.

Almost everyone in the fort is done. All the Tech kids finished up their last final and are now slackin off. David is here studying and hating the idea that he's stuck here with textbooks while all his friends are at Music Midtown (Bob Dylan!). I came home a while ago, realized that I was hungry and had no plans, went to the sto, bought pizza, beer, and death by chocolate ice cream. Now I will consume these goods and think about cleaning this place up for our party tomorrow. All is well.

so this is pretty fucking cool. yeah, communal blog. so to elaborate on breakfast, we did in fact go to the Happy Fun Panda Express Chinese Food Buffet Family Restaurant Yummy Smile for breakfast. i found the place to be nothing like what the name implied. there was an asian woman behind the counter not english speaky veddy well (see here for more info). i got what i assumed was general tsu's chicken. that assumption turned out to be wrong, unless i got the feet of the general's chickens. i mean, this shit looked all the world like anonymous-fried-up-breaded-saucy chicken. when i found the first few bites to be rather chewy, i was suspicious. then quite a bit of the rest of it simply resisted my urge to bite through it.

me: "hm, i think i'll bite through this chicken morsel..."

"chicken" morsel: "yeah, right. like hell you will."

and that's pretty much how it went. i ended up not eating half of it, simply because i couldn't bite through the fuckers. ugh. i ate a few mouthfuls of shitty flied lice and called it quits. that restaurant just made it onto my list of Places To Never (Ever) Eat Again (In Hell).

that being said, i reckon i oughta get back to studying for my materials final. i'm not too concerned about it...i've done well in the class, i understand and like the class, etc. one last final to go...then beer, sex, bowl. mmmm...

One more final to go and then I get to move into tha fort. My current room is the poster child for the National Association of Privately Owned Garbage Dumps. I'm thinking that the fort will be no better from the last time I visited. That thought is comforting but I wish I had more boxes. I also wish I had a choice job lined up for the summer. You'd think after four years of going through the same thing I'd learn by now that finding a job at the last minute is an exciting and fast paced ball of stress. Ha, take that cognitive learning process (or whatever you call it, i made that term up). Back to studying.

hey. just got the invite from matt. this is way better than studying for emag. today has been pretty interesting so far. for whatever reason, all fortess members found themselves awake at about 930. so we decided to go to the chinese panda express buffet restaraunt happy fun hour for the one ninety-nine breakfast special. well, it was two ninety-nine. so that was sort of weird. matt had the breakfast, and ted and i had the lunch, which was salty fried rice and some lumps of breaded chicken and a couple of vegetables plus a hotwing. that's right. a hotwing. ted and matt thought that their meals were pretty horrible. i mean mine was bad and all, but they just couldn't shut up about how wretched everything was. which is cool, i guess, but mine was worth about one ninety-nine. unfortunately, i paid about four and a quarter for it. hmm... blog. yah, i don't know if i am going to use this or not.


what else? oh, i got a job. so that is cool. gcatt is going to fund my research over the summer. pretty phat.

Just created this blog. Everyone who lives in the Fortress will become a part of this blog's "team" and therefore can contribute to the blog. Should see some interesting content get posted here!