reason 1,000,100 (and counting) …
Originally written 05.21.2002.
why i’m straightedge. fire safety. last night, i had just finished having a really nice phone conversation with erin and was about to go to bed when the fire alarm went off. i ran into iain in the hall and he asked me if i smelled the noxious smoke that had been seeping into our rooms. i said i had,and was a bit relieved because i had initially thought that i smoked some electriconics somehow. so we evacuated the building, and the firefighters came, as is a pretty common occurence here due to numerous false alarms, but this time, we thought, it must be the real deal, because, as the old adage goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. so this senior resident comes across the street looking for people in flat 2. flat 2, we thought, that can only mean one thing. nat! our suspicions were confirmed when we saw a sheepish, and smoky nat emerge from the building shortly before the firefighters arrived. once the firefighters entered the building, we saw them throw nat’s dustbin into the street, fetch buckets of water and fire extinguishers and throw half of nat’s room’s contents out his window. we’re not sure what the whole story is, but what i gathered is that somehow a lit cigarette was either thrown in a dustbin or on the floor and quickly ignited a bunch of clothes and whatever other shit nat had lying around his warzone-like room. i can only imagine nat trying to put out the fire. that kid’s a liability and a half.
paybacks …
Originally written 05.21.2002.
are a bitch. left over antics from the weekend. saturday night iain, marco, and i were sitting down in our common room watching dvds when we realized that the flat next to ours was having a rather loud party. the following tactics of inter-flat warfare may sound really lame, but to contextualize things, at least one member of the the flat had indicted at least one member of our flat in various wrongdoings, bringing the full pressure of the man down on the inhabitants of 29/5. now my flatmates are certainly no angels, but iain and i have never done anything wrong, and lately, even marco has been really, really, good. so getting the finger pointed at you for things you haven’t done, by people who commit the same damn offences is lame. besides, we were trying to watch dvds, and given the poor quality of iain’s computer speakers, we couldn’t hear it very well.
so, iain placed a call into the local police department reporting a noise disturbance. address? “i’m not sure, i think it might be 29. i know it’s a student flat” identity? “i’d rather not say if that’s alright”. i told him that he should have said that he feared reprisal by the vicious, out of control students. haha. so, the cops took forever, but when they arrived, they couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. the partiers had just finished throwing bottles from their windows and were starting fights with people on the street. the cops came in, and by the time they left, the snobby american girl from across the hall was in tears and saying things like “i don’t want a criminal record”. sucka. i think the incident spawned a bit of intra-flat infighting as well. so our psy-ops strike was successful. we may have our differences, but dammit, 29/5 sticks together. represent.
it bitch
Originally written 05.21.2002.
so lately, despite the fact i live in scotland, i’ve become everyone’s it bitch back in columbus. first it was my girlfriend’s house’s windows xp cablemodem nat setup, and now it’s my friend yon’s poor little virus-ridden laptop. luckily, they both had windows xp which has a feature that is actually useful and doesn’t just make the os crash and die a horrible death. remote assistant allows someone to connect to and control your computer a la vnc. i’m positive the feature was added because windows crashes so much that ms thought it would be clever to add a feature that would cause people to go to their friends for help rather than calling support. i’m also sure that the thing is a huge security risk, but in the end, it makes my job easier. it was surprisingly easy for people on the other end to set up, and despite the transatlantic connection, the interface was fast enough to be useable. rad. summer project that will probably never happen would be to set up a wrapper for vnc that would allow users of older versions of windows and linux to have similar funtionality.