Nick’s Blog

Dear Computer…

I gave you life. I built you from custom parts. I knew very little of computer construction but I did my homework, and learned how to make you. My friends just bought that Dell crap, but I wanted you to have a personality and some power. I gave you everything a computer could ever want; power, two giant monitors, and all the illegal pirated software I could download.

So why did you BETRAY ME!!!!!!

This video is due in the clients hands (well, projected on their wall) at 6pm tomorrow, and I had intended on finishing it by midnight, and then getting some studying and sleep in.

But you had to fuck everything up, eh?

Why would you just shut off. Well? Huh? The experts will say that you had some bad sector in your hard drive that now means that you can no longer boot into Windows, but they are wrong. You did it out of spite.

As we both know, I got this pretty little laptop, and just because it’s skinnier and younger than you, you had to through this stupid bitch-fit and eat all my project and refuse to boot up after I did many, many hours of work on you. Now I have to start from scratch, making me pull my second all nighter in… well, two nights.

This was not a technical error, and you know it. YOU ARE A VINDICTIVE FUCKING COMPU-BITCH! Why put me through this. You could have died last week when I was looking at the stupid Chris Crocker video on YouTube… you could have passed away peacefully the week before while I was downloading that new iTunes song… But no… you died at the absolutely least convenient time for a computer to die in the history of my owning you. I’d rather you have died the week I built you, so that you wouldn’t take my pictures of college memories into the digital abyss with you.

I’m going to fix you… I’m going to breath life in to you once again, and then give you the worst virus you can ever imagine… I’M GOING TO MAKE BLUE SCREEN ERRORS SEEM LIKE A PEACEFUL MASSAGE!!!!! AAAAAHHH!!! Why? Why?????

You team-betraying fucktard. I hope you go to computer hell and are forced to have some jackass play nothing but solitaire on you for the rest of computer eternity. I hope you go to the same level of computer hell that they send spyware servers and spam generators.

I hate you…

with every fiber of my being…

You ruined the start of my carnival week, and that is unforgivable…

If you ever come back, I’m loading your iTunes with nothing but Sisqo.

Well, another way to systematically destroy an engineer is to force him to cram for a test in dynamic systems and control. Here it is after 1am and I’ve been studying all day for a test that I still feel rather unprepared for. Still, I feel compelled to comment that the only thing between be and the sweet release of spring break at camp bob cooper is Wednesday.

I’m actually in pretty high spirits, as my RedRover project turned out very well, and this new laptop has given me nothing but content since I deleted every trace of Windows Vista from it’s bowels.

I did find out some very depressing news today though. I haven’t had a good complain-about-Carnegie-Mellon moment in a while, so I feel the need to comment about my disgust upon hearing that our spring carnival musical performer is none other than Sisqo. Yep, thats right, the thong song guy. Way to go Carnegie Mellon. Generic 90’s hip hop, thats been sold out and stale since I’ve hit puberty, and has no musical benefits to my ears. I do not want to cram myself into our gym all excited about carnival and have to accept that I have to listen to some under-achieving musician talk over sampled loops of boring rhythms and very little real musical content. Maybe I’m over analyzing this and would be better suited to say, CMU, the thong song sucked in 2000, why bring it back in 2008?

Carnival will still be fun, even though Sisqo is a huge downer. That, and if I stay committed to semester’s goals, I’ll spend all 4 days of carnival as a stone-cold sober. I’ve kept up the semester with this goal superbly until now, but in case you don’t go to CMU, pretty much the whole idea of CMU is to get drunk and party and forget about classes for a weekend. Oh well, the sobriety is paying off and I still feel great, so maybe I’ll enjoy babysitting more.

Back in the nineties, I was convinced that mankind could not create a band full of douchebags that could top Creed. In fact, to this day if you Google “the worst band in the world”, Google will try to correct your search by looking for Creed. Creed maybe wasn’t as bad some ‘talent’ on the music scene. They were certainly no worse than Vanilla Ice, Menudo or MC Hammer. However, Creed had an X-factor that seemed to agitate us more than most. See, most acts in music know where they stand. Sure, Ricky Martin may have acted like a sex symbol and Limp Bizkit may have pretended to rock harder than Zeppelin, but deep down, they all seemed to view themselves with a sense of humor. The music business is ludicrous to begin with, and most don’t take themselves too seriously. But Creed, or at least the lead singer that people barely knew, always had a smug aura to his personality. That transient quality seems to be conveyed through every song or photo every created by the band.

So by the time I entered high school, and left my nineties prepubescence in the past, I was thankful that bands were generally mundane and tolerable. Sure I didn’t like everything I heard, but the general public felt the same way, and there didn’t seem to be much pressure. The sea of music was calm, albeit full of whale feces as usual.

But than something amazing happened. Although U2 had been big for decades, I started to realize that these guys made Creed seem no as bad as before. It seemed like every time I heard someone mention U2, it had little to do with their music and more to do with some sort of public initiative.

So whats my hang-up with U2? Bono.

Bono makes his fame by making every American feel like shit for not donating their life saving for some green charity. Bono wants you to feel like crap for not going more for the environment or poverty or whatever cause hes representing today. Bono is a disgrace to all of the cool Irish people I’ve ever met. Lets review some of my favorite Bono quotes:

“I’m very secure with the fact that I’m not black. I’m white, pink and rosy. But I’ve got soul.”

“Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby’s head.”

“As a rock star, I have two instincts, I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both.”

So I’m watching TV today and the commercials start running. Mundane stuff, penile enlargment, chemical depression treatments, the usual. But then I hear U2 music. Cringing, I look up to see a beautifully edited commercial showing U2 in front of an audience. Odd. You certainly don’t see advertisements for concerts very often. To my horror, U2 is now showing a movie thats nothing more than one of their concerts. But wait, theres more, its finally in 3D!!!!! Yes, thats right ladies and gentleman, a 3D U2 Concert coming to a 3D theater near you.

85 minutes of U2’s music. Now, let me also note that I don’t dislike U2’s music. It’s delightfully average. But I find a huge contingency with respect to their attitude. This film doesn’t just feature one encore, it features three. Interesting side note, this film is actually sponsored by National Geographic.

So overall, as you can see, I find this concept really appalling. Only a band as pompous and righteous as U2 would film an exclusively 3D movie starring themselves, and present it to the world as some greater world cause, even though 0% of the film’s gross goes to any charities. Bono, please stop doing what your doing. You make American’s feel like crap, and you actively try to be this biggest douche bag possible. Certainly, you are an embarrassment for any country thats had to put up with your terrible attitude.