Some good and eventful news

I was delaying this post until I [hopefully] had some more news about the application process for work. Not only have I gotten more information, I actually got a job offer. Since I'm pretty excited about that, I'll hop right into that part of the post.

Work:
I had originally been applying to places to the immediate west of Seoul. That would put me in a very convenient place to make it to Starcraft matches should I desire. Due to the presence of Starcraft there, it was an area of Seoul (that isn't the metropolitan area, but is close enough to Seoul that I would lump it into that myself) that I was familiar with. Gwangmyeong is the name of the place I was looking. If you zoom out a bit from that map, you can also see Bucheon to the west and Anyang to the southeast. Those were the other two places I was primarily looking towards. I've been working with a recruiting agency as you know by now because that's how it is done. In addition to recommending teachers to jobs, they also recommend jobs to teachers because some schools in less desirable places will put their school out there if nobody seems to be applying. The hunt in the areas I preferred was going well it seemed, though too slowly for my taste. During that process, a school was recommended to me in Dongducheon (you can zoom out a bit and see that I'm north of Seoul). The location is less desirable than what I was hoping for. Though I'm right along a subway line (that was pretty much a requirement for me), the ride into the heart of Seoul would still be about an hour or more. Fortunately the subway cost is pretty low, so that shouldn't be an issue. I just may not go to town on days other than weekends.

An added bonus about this school is the type of school. In the other areas, I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I would be teaching elementary school students. This would be very basic stuff and to be honest I didn't really mind that since I have no teaching experience. My only preference for age was to not do middle school (elementary school students have motivation, high school students have smarts, and middle school students have neither). This school is actually a high school. More than that though, it's a foreign language school where the students are supposed to be more proficient in English since they're planning on going to study in America for college. So I will be teaching students in a speaking/listening class and a writing class. I realize that all sounds normal, so you may be wondering what caught my eye specifically about this school? They are also asking me to teach AP microeconomics and AP macroeconomics. They were requesting someone that majored in econ. So this means that I actually will get to make use of my undergrad degree. I'm super excited about that. I'll probably need to refresh my memory on Asian economic development though. Fortunately at SU, I was on the IED (international economic development, not expolsives T__T) track, so I have a lot more information on international economic development than the normal standard econ major might.

So anyway, I start on the first of March and it seems like I might need to leave in mid to late February for an orientation period or something. I'll know more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, it will be good to spend as much time as possible with people before I go. Speaking of which.

People are here:
Davis and Orion are both in town this week which has been cool. We've been kind of formulating a plan to set up a big get together for everyone. In addition to that, Davis and I have been playing Halo 4 which has been fun. We're hoping to beat it before he goes, which is looking possible. It was also nice to catch up with everyone. I got to sit down with Eric, Davis, and Orion over the course of this last week which has been good because those three are notoriously difficult to facebook stalk.

Games:
I've been slowly starting the shift off of my Xbox to my PC because it's not going to be an option when I'm in Korea. I did pick up Assassin's Creed 3 because I put a lot into that franchise and I really like the games. That will likely be my last game on the Xbox though. I cancelled my Xbox live gold account after 9 years on it. I still have the account I guess, but now I can only access the marketplace to give Microsoft more money.

Over on the PC, I've still been playing a lot of League of Legends. I finally climbed up to gold tier, putting me in the top 5%. I haven't played as much ranked as I want to recently due to lag, but I'll start again soon. At the moment, I'm a higher current elo than Eric, though that will soon change I bet. He and I might duoqueue sometime. I was really happy about getting to gold though because it means that I've now officially become a better League player than I ever was in Starcraft. I haven't played Starcraft in a long time, but I still watch it really often. Terran is really weak right now, so I see little point in playing and just getting smashed. I'm holding out until Heart of the Swarm comes out in spring and then we'll see. I'd still like to get moderately good at that game. In the meantime, I'll be grinding at League trying to get better there. Keir is playing League now too and getting pretty good, so that's been fun to play with him.

A final note is that the four of us (Steven, Eric, Chris, and I) are finally getting into putting time into our four player co-op games that we've accumulated over the years. It's been fun so far and I hope this continues. It's nice to actually be playing games that we bought and shelved too quickly.

Well I don't have much else for you guys. Christmas was pretty nice, I got some good stuff that will be useful when I go to Korea. I stream games still at twitch.tv/runninginsquares and now have a webcam if you ever want to see my beautiful face on those dark, cold winter nights. Oh and on a side note, my phone has been having battery deterioration problems and now holds a charge for about 2 hours. I keep it on silent to prolong the battery life as much as possible, so the only way I would answer a call on my phone is if I'm actually looking at the phone as I am getting called. This crowd isn't really the crowd I need to be informing given that you know how often I'm online, but emailing/texting/instant messaging me is the way to go to get a hold of me. As a result of the phone problems, I've started getting myself into the habit of checking email more often. Also, my house phone is an option.

Ok well I need t go meet Grandpa for lunch today so I'm off to do that. Until next month (and next year!) peace out.

Another month, another check-in

Good news everyone, this post won't be too long! I still have not secured a job in Korea, but at least this time I have an actual timeline I'm working with. About half of the post might be about that, so you know it won't be too heavy of a read. I'll get straight into it now because I haven't got much else to mention here.

I have done the document submission and other things requested of me by GEPIK and I'm currently being recommended to schools. A couple early possibilities have come my way, but they were in pretty undesirable locations (...locations for me that is. They're good locations that just aren't close to the area I would like to base myself in) so I turned them down and I'm currently waiting on schools to show an interest in me. I'm of course worried because I keep hearing about how the job market for teaching jobs is shrinking, but the recruiter I'm working with is pretty positive and helpful, so I have to figure she knows something I don't and maybe my chances are better than I think. At any rate, I should start to get an idea of schools that might be interested in me by late December and in early to mid January, I should be doing interviews and finding out if I have a job or not. By the end of February then, I would be going out there if I do wind up getting a job. The process is long and it gives me time to get all my ducks in a row as far as paperwork goes, but I'm starting to get to a point where my work here is drying up and I'm going to start feeling like a bum when I have no jobs to do here and all I can do is wait to find out if I have employment. I'm really banking on getting a job in Korea though, I hope I just get one and this all works out. On a related note, I mentioned my project not being accepted in my last post. It was indeed a quick fix and a quick turnaround for grading as I received a notification that it was accepted about a week after I finished it. So now I can OFFICIALLY say I have a 4.0 GPA in my current pursuit of a masters degree (whether or not I continue to pursue that remains to be seen).

So yeah my jobs are drying up. I still do stuff with Grandpa of course and I still do stuff for other family members too, but as far as my steady work with the shed goes, that is pretty much complete. I need to remember to post pictures eventually. I've been taking whatever jobs need to be done for family members though, not being too picky because I really feel like I should be out doing things at least 3 times a week. Though I enjoy playing all the new games I'm getting on super sale from Steam, I should be doing good stuff and helping people as much as I can before I (hopefully) leave. Plus, maybe I can earn some good karma along the way or something. I haven't been picky though, I even drove down to Vancouver, WA to help my Grandma with some things down there. I had only seen her at my graduation in the time since I've been back from Korea, so it was nice to catch up.

For Thanksgiving, my family got back into our tradition of going down to central Oregon (Sunriver) and renting a big house for my family and my uncle's (mom's oldest brother's) family. He has two daughters and a son, each married. Both the daughters have sons, one is 6 and the other is 4. The 6 year old and his family couldn't make it, but we'll see them at Christmas. The other two kids did make it which was nice. I hang out with their son a lot even though he's older than me by about 14 years. We're the lefties of our generation and since we both like beer, we did a big brewery series of tours in Bend which is the nearest city to Sunriver. That was a pretty fun way to spend the time. Other than that, it was nice to see everyone there and just hang around for a few days.

In League, Keir has been playing more and getting better. That has stopped now though as his finals are approaching, so he can't play again until those are done. I'm not going to let him and additionally, he requested me to not let him so we are doubly sure I will not be letting him break his study routine. Outside of that, I'm trying to soloqueue a bit more. I haven't done it as much as I would have liked, but I've seen more success than I expected, so I'm pretty happy. Maybe I'll get out of "ELO hell" this season haha. Our ranked team dropped the guy we didn't know in real life and we picked up our friend Wolen as well as Eric Canada. They will be good additions to the team. Eric Canada is the main replacement for the other guy and Wolen plays with us when Eric Canada can't. Peter is on the team too, but I haven't heard from him in quite a while actually.

A few of us have also been having fun with the Tekkit mod for Minecraft. Aside from that, I just picked up Civ5 (as did Chris and Steven) and that has been super fun and super hard to tear myself away from. It's reminiscent of the Total War series, but a bit more polished in ways. I like it.

EDIT: Hey everyone I just remembered. If for some reason you really need to get in touch with me, use the internet. I am able to check my email multiple times a day and I try to stay on facebook for the chat feature when I'm at my computer now (since I don't use gchat anymore). Failing that, you can also use our mumble server if you have it/have the information. You can still contact me on my cell of course, but I recommend you don't do that because it is slowly dying (charge now lasts part of a day) and I won't be getting a new one until I know one way or the other if I'm leaving for Korea. So that would be 2-3 months of my cell being kinda shitty.

That's all I have for now, so until next time, peace out.

Not good news. No bad news either, but things have happened.

Well when I last posted, I seemed pretty sure I would have a good idea one way or another whether I would have a job lined up for next year. Turns out I was wrong. I'll speak more on that soon though. This past month has been filled with things happening, most of them pretty okay. This is my first weekday where I've had the day to myself (which means I was doing work that didn't require leaving the house). In fact, I've only really had one true day off since the first week of this month. I've been keeping really busy, but it's not such a bad thing. Being so occupied helps me remember what day it is. Additionally, it's good to try to make myself feel like less of a bum.

Teaching Jobs:
I had a couple interviews with a couple different recruiting companies. One dealt only with EPIK/SMOE (all of Korea or just Seoul). One dealt with those plus GEPIK (the province around Seoul). Both told me that it was going to be difficult for a new teacher such as myself to get a job within the Seoul Metropolitan area, so I decided it would be best to work with the company that offered me a shot at GEPIK. Unfortunately (also kind of fortunately), the application period for GEPIK starts a lot later. In fact, it should be coming up this week or next week sometime. It meant I have more time to wait before determining whether I have a job next year or not, but it was good in that it gave me time to prepare my materials for application. I've spent very little time working on the lesson plan I will need to make. I've been doing a lot of shed work and though I've been thinking about my lesson plan, I haven't really sat down and hammered it out. It will be easy though, I'm going to tweak one of the many plans I made in my teacher training class last summer. On that note...

My project:
I found out today (though I received an email on an address I rarely check anymore on October 15) that my project was not accepted. This means I don't officially have graduate credits yet. The project requires minor tweaking that according to the professor should be easy for me to fix, but were too crucial of details to let slip by. No worries there. I wish I had noticed my notification back in mid-October when it was sent so that I would have had more time to work on the project. It's due a week from today though, so I will have more than enough time. It's just one more thing I have to do in addition to this lesson plan I'm making for applications. It looks like that last little bit of work on the shed will have to wait for next week sometime. Speaking of the shed...

The Shed/Work:
How are you liking these amazing transitions? Most of my work this month has been on the shed. I had the canopy up above all the contents of the shed and I assumed it was keeping it dry, but I failed to remember that we just had a dry summer. When the rain came, the canopy proved still effective, though things needed to get sorted fast. Due to the rain we've been having, I've been spending a lot of time working hard on the shed. I re-carpeted it, sealed it up a bit more, installed shelves, fixed things that were supposed to go back in, put things back in, and organized it. I also set it up with internal lighting which was pretty fun. As of right now, it is nice enough that I would be willing to show it off to people. It is not yet complete however. I still need to do a bit more organizing and take the remaining junk off to Goodwill or the dump. the shed has provided me with good work though. Between working on it and working with Grandpa, I've been pulling at least part time job hours. Now if only this came with a paycheck. I may get paid, though I don't necessarily expect to (I never said I was doing it with the expectation of being paid). Soon this job will dry up though and at that point, I'll be focusing more on my applications, studying Korean, and playing League of Legends. Speaking of League of Legends....(yeah we're keeping this combo alive)...

League of Legends:
Keir has started playing more often which is cool. He seems to be enjoying it a lot and he is definitely getting better. I've been doing ranked matches off and on getting mad and stopping, then starting up again. I would love to get gold ranking before next Tuesday's season end, but that seems unlikely. In other news, Steven, Eric, Albert, and I have formed a ranked 5s team to start getting better. Chris stepped off the team, opting to manage us instead (for tournaments and whatnot). This has left me as unquestionably the worst player by a large margin on the team, but soon I will start practicing a lot and that will help me get better. We needed a fifth player, so Chris found us a guy off Reddit who seems pretty cool. We haven't practiced in a while because he's been sick, but we should be getting back on track soon. Normally, we're keeping to a schedule. Additionally, congratulations to Steven for getting Diamond rank. A big accomplishment and we're all proud of him for it. Looking forward to watching him go pro someday (you never know!) and seeing him play.

Other stuff:
C-c-c-combo breaker T__T. I'm sorry, I couldn't relate League to other stuff. I haven't had much time for other activities recently due to my schedule of work and League. Fantasy football is going well though I am getting destroyed this week. Five of my best players were on bye. Keir is starting his second half of the season dominance this week. I want to find time to study Korean, but I have to wait until I have free time first. I guess it will work out well because I will likely finish the shed around the time I find out if I will get hired for a job in Korea. Other than that, I've been thinking of things I would need to get done before I leave for Korea and keeping track of those for when I get time to do them.

Hope everyone is well. Until next month, peace out.

Almost forgot about this!

It's been a while since I posted. I've been keeping pretty busy and to be honest, I might have missed September completely had I not remembered the blog exists. I've been doing mostly the normal things and just trying to spend as much of my time doing those as possible. On top of those things, I've started to try to become a power user on Reddit to chase after Keir's success. That will happen perhaps never because he is just too good at Reddit. But enough of all this, I'll probably just move to things and keep this post moderately short.

Games:
I've given up on soloqueue for League. They changed the rating system to one where your highest ever elo is now the reward tier you will get come season end. Unfortunately, this means that if I had never played following my placement matches, I would be about 200 elo higher right now. But after the reset, your "current" elo was made your new highest. On top of that problem, people are now trolling and not caring in matches because you can get your highest elo to the point you want it, then trash your elo for the rest of the season without really caring because your highest elo will always be there. I really wanted to pull myself up to gold rating, but it seems that will not happen in soloqueue. Fortunately there is another way to get gold (well two actually). I can get gold on the ranked 5s team I'm on (which is unlikely because we rarely are all on) or to do ranked 3s for which there is no real defined metagame. People don't play it very often, so there's no real set way to compose a team (though there are dominant strategies, but they are not common knowledge like other game modes). Anyway, I played a couple games in a team with Eric and Eric Canada and we went 2-0 pretty decisively. We are having schedule problems right now because Eric Canada just started school so we will have to work around that. It seems that this method is my best bet of getting to gold though.

Guild Wars 2 has been good. I've been leveling up a lot slower than Chris and Steven though. Steven has been level 80 for just over a couple weeks and Chris has been there for about a week now. I'm still level 51. Now that I'm not playing League as often though I'll probably start catching up. Recently, I've been using my former League time to step up my search for work.

Search for work:
It's been going well. I did a lot of research and I think I have a program nailed down. I want to apply to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education program (SMOE) because it would put me in Seoul (though the location would be random, but anywhere in Seoul is fine with me). Failing that, I could always do GEPIK which guarantees placement in the region immediately surrounding Seoul. I would rather be in the city though, so if SMOE doesn't work out, I'll be probably giving another program that could place me within the city a try before doing GEPIK. As of right now, I've been trying to work with my resume which at the moment looks like crap since I'm just starting out. It's hard to find ways I can tailor it to a teaching job, but mom agreed to help look at it so that will be nice.

The shed and work and things:
That has all been going well. I think the shed is going to be done soon. The cement pouring was supposed to happen a couple weekends ago, but it wound up not happening. I really hope that goes down soon though because its starting to turn cold and this is getting ridiculous that we haven't done it yet.

Other stuff:
My great aunt (grandpa's sister) died last weekend. It was pretty sad because it was unexpected. She went really bad in just a couple of days out of nowhere (the couple days prior, she had been up and having fun at a wedding). We all made it down to see her in Port Angeles before she died though, so that was nice. I learned while I was there that I am apparently the only one interested in our Dutch heritage. Or at least I'm the only one deemed smart or resourceful or willing enough to look into it so I can summarize it for other people? Either way, it looks like the burden is on me. I was planning on doing all this someday anyway, but not for a while. I guess no change there, I really need to learn Korean before I invest time in learning Dutch.

In girl news, I haven't gotten to see my friend in a while. We had opposite schedules for a while and then a couple weekends ago, we were supposed to get together (she asked me then I responsed and I never heard back from her with a plan) so I'm not sure if she didn't get my text and thinks I didn't text her and is mad at me or something or what (have fun decoding that sentence, I'm not going back to edit it :/) but I haven't seen her. I might try to hang out with her this weekend if we can get in touch. On the plus side, this means she hasn't had time to set me up with a girl. The more and more I think about that, the less I figure I want that because I don't want her to set me up with a girlfriend for two months before I go off for a long time. If I get in the right place in Korea, I've begun entertaining the idea of staying longer and longer. We'll have to see where it goes though.

So this was a pretty quick post, which I guess is good and bad. I keep busy, hopefully everyone else is doing well. You can always get in touch with me on facebook and crap like that. We have a private mumble server now too, so if you want the info, ask Steven or myself and you can hop on and voice chat with us there. Until next time (when hopefully I have a job!), peace out.

A Quick, Late Post for the End of August

Hey everyone. I've been having a pretty good August. It was nice to no longer be in that class all day (though my work schedule will soon take up a large chunk of my life similar to that). I wish I had been as productive as I planned to be this month, but things kept getting pushed back on me. Here's the fun chain of excuses! I was going to clean my bedroom, but that requires cleaning my computer area at the same time. I was going to clean my computer room, but I needed to finish this project I'm working on (more on that later). I was going to finish the project earlier, but I had communications issues. At the same time, I was going to work on the shed more, but I had to wait on my aunt to get some guys to install a door first. I was going to pour some cement, but terrible things kept happening. Fortunately now, things have gotten on track. All that really happened was I was left with a couple weeks after class where I got very little done. Guess I'd better get describing now.

Graduate Project:
This project is basically the same exact project as our final project for the intensive class. The only difference is that was a group project and we had less than 72 hours to complete it. This time, it's an individual one and we have until September 3. It also requires approval by the professor via email. I planned to leave a full week after the class to let myself relax, then I would get started on the project. Unfortunately, I had trouble contacting the professor at the end of that week and it wound up taking another week to just get the project approved. I'm currently breaking from working on it. I work quickly, so having only two (crowded with other things) weeks to do the project is still plenty of time for me. I can't work on it tomorrow, but I'll definitely be done with the whole thing by Wednesday, then I get to pray that technology doesn't fail me and the submission is easy. The project's purpose is to give Seattle U reason to consider the classes I took actual graduate credits at Seattle U. They were graduate level classes, but Seattle U is reluctant to actually give us the credits unless we do this project. I guess they don't like the fact that we earn so many graduate credits for such a relatively small sum of money (a small fraction of the cost it would be if I had done this actually at Seattle U).

The Shed:
I worked on my grandpa's shed more recently. I had to wait for some screen door guys to install a door on the back of my aunt's house because they needed space and I was going to take up that space with crap from the shed. This year is much better than previous years for cleaning the shed. In previous years, I had to wait on my uncle (who was terminally ill and could very infrequently make it out) to determine what to do with objects I wasn't sure were garbage or not. Now I feel better informed on everything in there and he is no longer able to make it at all (he passed away in January) so I made sure to assert to the whole family that they are welcome to take things from the shed and I'll help, but they have to make time or specifically declare things they want because I have final say on everything in that shed and I'm not waiting around for everyone to go shopping around in the shed. I'm getting it done this summer. Also nice is this year we finally got a canopy that I set up outside the shed. In previous years, I would have to spend an hour or more on either end of my day's work on the shed to unpack and pack it. Now, I just put things under the canopy and dive right in when I start and just stop working when I'm done for the day. I plan to pull everything out of the shed, sort through it, then add real shelves and possibly insulate the thing. If I get time, I'm considering fixing or building a new door for it too. I want it to look excellent when I'm done. I'm conquering this thing this year.

Sam & Jared's Wedding/Ocean Trip:
I planned to go to the ocean with Grandpa and my aunt on the second weekend of August. It had been in planning for a long time and I was able to even include the other grand kids (Kathryn and my two cousins) as well as my grandpa's sister (who is turning 90 in a few days) to come as well. That ensured a more interesting time would be had than in March when we went. Unfortunately, when I figured out a day, I didn't realize it overlapped with Sam and Jared's wedding. The date I thought that was on was apparently a Wednesday (should have checked) so it meant I would have to get to the ocean in my own care and late at night, missing the first few hours that they would be there (since they would get there at about 6pm on Friday night). It worked out really well actually.

The wedding was super cool. I got to hang out with cool people there that I hadn't seen in a while. I got caught up with everyone and brought back peoples' plans to tell mom since she keeps asking about everyone. I got to talk to pretty much everyone I wanted. The ceremony was nice and hanging out after went well too. I had originally planned to leave at 9 or 9:30 because I wanted to make sure I got to the ocean before it was too extremely late, but I wound up staying until the end at about 10:30 or 11:00 when everyone went back. From there, I dropped Orion off and continued to my house and pretty much dressed down, threw my stuff in the car, and took off to ocean shores. I got going pretty fast and I'm impressed I didn't get pulled over or anything. I wound up making exceptionally good time and got in at 2am (so about 2.5 hours for a normally 3.5 hour drive). The next day was our full day there and we spent it doing pretty much everything we could do. We got into ocean shores and Grandpa rode the go-karts and my great aunt got to finally see that he could actually do that. People clapped for him a bit because I guess it's not every day they see an almost 89 year old man using a walker getting in and out of and handling a go-kart pretty well. On Sunday, we headed back home, going via Forks to drop my great aunt off at her house. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful.

Other Stuff:
I'm still playing League pretty often. Even now with Guild Wars 2 out (which is really good, but more on that later), I still have a huge desire to be doing ranked games. The season ends soon and all I want to do is get to a higher elo. Fortunately for me, some people (mostly just Eric Canada at this point) are working on their second accounts so they can duoqueue with me which will ensure that at least two people in my games are competent. That will be nice. Keir also started playing recently which was really fun while it lasted. He seems to like it a lot, so when he's settled into his schedule at law school, I look forward to playing again. He's getting pretty good and I anticipate many good times in the future.

Guild Wars 2 came out last Friday and it has been pretty fun so far. There's a World Completion which kind of gives me a clear definition of when I will be done with the game. It's nice to have that definitive end for me and at the same time, it's far enough out that I'm not concerned about hitting it too quickly. Steven, Chris, and I have characters that we only play with each other, so that is fun. Other than that, I play on my main character. I plan to do less of that though and continue playing League more often so I can raise my ELO.

I haven't seen my friend since class ended at all due to conflicting schedules. We had plans to go out last Saturday (a couple days ago) and she was bringing a friend of hers who I assume she was trying to set me up with. Unfortunately, they couldn't do Saturday and asked to switch to Friday about a day in advance. I had to say I couldn't go because GW2 came out that night and I had made plans to hang out with Steven and Chris months and months ago, so it's not like I passed up meeting a girl for a videogame (at least not entirely, there was also commitment to friends involved so its more legitimate righT?).

Outside of those things, I've been mainly relaxing around the house, enjoying my remaining moments of free time before I eventually have to start real work. I got to see ZZ Top in concert last night. It had been a long time since I saw them. I last saw them in September of 2004, the first September in my now very long streak of wearing shorts. Last time, dad had to drive us there, now it was at a casino and I could drink before and after. Needless to say they rocked pretty hard and it was a great concert. Totally worth the money too because I wound up winning my ticket price (and half of dad's) in the casino afterwards while we waited for traffic to clear out.

So in the coming weeks, I'll be working more. I am going to spend most of my time doing this project until I submit it. Then, I'll be working or playing League during the days between then and when we go camping around the 7th. After that, I start looking applying for jobs and I'm going to start my regiment of Korean language study for a couple hours every day. Looking forward to all that. Until later, peace out.

4.0

Well the class is done and once again, my life shall slowly return. I managed to weather the storm pretty well (as you may have surmised from my title, I 4.0ed the term). I called it my class, but in actuality it was a 12-credit term of graduate level courses just condensed into a month. This is the first time I've ever gotten a 4.0 on a term anywhere, so I was pretty happy when I did it. And it was especially good because I don't know how much more school I have left in my life (at least as a student anyway). I feel like I'm actually ready to teach now that I'm done with the class. But since Korean schools are on semesters, I will have to wait a little bit before I can get out there. I doubt this post will be too long, so I'll just get on with it now.

The class:
The 16 students in the class all became pretty close friends and it was sad to see everyone go, but I think we'll all be in touch to some degree. I made good friends with the guy from Mongolia, and if I see only one other person from the class in the rest of my life, it will most likely be him. I might try to find time to travel over there from Korea since he said I should. The night class went pretty well too, it was nice to see the students making progress using methods we were learning to teach them. Other than that, the class was just a lot of work. I didn't play many games at times (most times) throughout the duration of the course, but now I can get back into that.

Tournaments:
There were two LoL tournaments during the class term. One was at the end of the week I last posted on. Eric and Steven were on a team together, but then someone was added to that team who had a higher priority than those two, so Eric said he was fine being an alternate since he didn't want to steal Steven's spot. A couple days before the tournament, another team posted on the facebook page for local LoL players that they needed players for their team due to people not being able to make it. Eric signed up since his other team wouldn't need him (the captain of that team actually referred him) then Eric signed me up as well. Then the next day, Steven said he couldn't go to the tournament, leaving the other team one Steven down. Eric and I wound up playing on the fun team we were on and we got unlucky and got put against the best team in the bracket. We lost by some crazy amount of kills, but we had fun just messing around because we wanted to not be too pathetic looking in defeat.

This week, we had another instance of the same tournament (it happens every other Friday), but this time we had our ranked team with us. It was Steven, Eric, Albert, Eric Canada (filling in for Chris who couldn't make it) and myself. We lost in the first round again, but we really should have won. Nothing much else to say. Next time we got it.

Plans after class:
Well now that class is out, I have a fair bit of time before I can really start working. I figured I didn't want to just work somewhere and only be there for 3 months, so I'm doing odd jobs in the meantime. I will be finishing the shed and my Aunt's backyard this year finally. Also, my other aunt is moving into a new house, so I'll be helping with that. Then, my cousins occasionally need my help with their yard work. Additionally, I have one weekend worth of things to help my Grandma in Vancouver with. And I now may be going to my uncle's house in Kennewick for a couple weeks to help him out there. In addition to all this, I'm still working with Grandpa once or twice a week for pretty much the whole day. Then around all that, I'll be studying Korean and playing League to try to raise my elo. I sound kind of busy with all that, but I doubt it will be more than I can handle. It will feel like a vacation compared to the last month.

Hanging out:
I spent most of my free time since the last post just playing League here and there. I did manage to hang out with my friend a couple times. She suggested throwing a party at her place and inviting just a bunch of girls and I be the only guy. That was kind of an intimidating thought and I don't know if it would happen, but she seemed convinced it would be a good idea. Either way, she has begun looking for people to set me up with so we'll see what happens.

Other than all that, I haven't gotten to do much. My family took a trip over to the tri-cities this weekend to see my cousin's new baby that was born on July 4th. It was pretty cool. I am now facing a lot of promises I made to do things coming up before I leave so I'll probably be starting all that up tomorrow. For now though, maybe I'll finally find some time to have to myself for however long I can get. Until next time, peace out.

Warning: Long Post Incoming

I was hoping to get a post in before the class started, but I wound up being busy that weekend. Unfortunately, my schedule quickly filled up from there. But no worries, I have returned to make a long (but hopefully not too long) post! Take your time reading it if you don't want to read it all in one sitting. I can fully guarantee you that this will be my only post in July. This class has me too busy to do anything else. I happened to get lucky today because we finished one of the classes today and have a light homework load going into the next class. But I also did things before the class started, so it seems logical to jump in way back there. On the PC pictures, I may get them up here, but it would be next month. I haven't put my backed up files on this computer (because organizing them would take an hour or two and I would absolutely feel compelled to do it as soon as I put the files on (and I don't have a spare hour or two that I care to devote to that at this time)).

PC Completion:
Well it turned out that every problem with my parents' computer was just a slight mistake I made at different parts of setup. All were resolved though and the computer now runs well. I haven't taught them how to run the new SSD/HDD combination they have, but they're in no particular rush to learn since they can use the laptop upstairs for now. In the meantime, nobody really comes downstairs anymore. They have new furniture upstairs and a new TV and with the laptop, nobody really needs to come down here except once a week for laundry. It's kind of nice to have the whole floor to myself, especially in busy times like these.

"Work:"
I did what I could, but my Aunt's backyard is not yet complete. I knew it wouldn't be, but I did less than I had hoped. Her neighbor who was going to help pour concrete had an unexpected death in the family, so we scrapped that plan last minute and will probably be doing it in August. Either way, I'm not too concerned because I'll get all the things done that I need to do. It's just that I may not get them done in time for the outside area to be any good for this summer. Oh well, there's always every summer in the future.

Videogames:
I played (and streamed) some SC with Keir shortly after finishing my PC. That was unfortunately the last I've been able to play with him (it was the first couple of days in July, somewhere in there). Given my schedule, I don't anticipate playing with him until early August and then, we'll have only a few days before he heads off to law school. I'm going to help him shop around for a decent laptop though and he's expressed interest in starting League of Legends, so that will be exciting. I'm going to create a smurf account to level with him. Hopefully someday he'll be added to "Get Carried," our ranked 5s team. In other news in League, Eric and I have decided to become a good duoqueue group. We try to practice bottom lane together (he AD carries which is his strongest role, and I support). We're getting good at predicting each other's play styles, so hopefully we will be able to queue together and increase our elos when I am done with the class. Currently, I average time for two to three games on school nights, so I've been using those to soloqueue to increase my elo or to practice with Eric. It's not as much playing as I would like, but it's enough to make sure I stay in practice. Steven meanwhile is starting to knock on the door of 1900. Congrats to him on his ding.

Because Chris' laptop has been broken, we haven't been able to get our ranked team going as much recently, but that will be soon remedied. Our team cohesion is starting to get better. I'm still a little frazzled, but that's because I have trouble getting settled on one role. Since I'm the greenest player, I came onto the team when everyone else had established their roles. Even though I'm one of the three regulars, I still am a utility that fills in what role we need depending on who's absent. Steven, Eric, and I are the regulars. After that, it's Chris, Albert, and Albert's brother. They all have their roles and depending on who's not playing with us, I take their role. If Chris doesn't play with us, I play support. If Albert doesn't play with us, I play jungle. If Albert's brother doesn't play with us, I play top. Steven always has mid and Eric always has AD because those are their best lanes. I don't mind being utility, it's kind of fun. And I generally play tanky champions, so there's some role consistency between my different lanes.

Oh and on that note, you can sometimes catch me streaming here.

A life? I have one of those?
Yes I do! I don't know if you guys know my friend from school that everyone keeps saying I should ask out (well don't worry that's not going to happen). We like to hang out because we are both big on drinking a lot and we like that we validate each others' alcoholism (that doesn't exist >___>). Anyway, I got to hang out with her at her birthday party back the weekend before graduation. It was really fun and I got to meet some people that went to Shorewood (she was in Shoreline until leaving right before high school). The party was cool and I got to actually meet her ex-boyfriend (the guy she was dating when I met her who she's good friends with still) who I actually knew through the frisbee circle. We had a good time hanging out and it was a cool party. Since that, her and I have tried to hang out more often even if we don't necessarily have anyone else around. Now I know what you're thinking and my God yes I would love to date this girl, however it's not possible. While I was in Korea, she started going out with this girl. I thought it was just one of those not serious things that you post on fb for shits and giggles at first, but it's become apparent that they're in a legit relationship. So that kind of takes that off the table. However, she keeps insisting that I would be an excellent boyfriend and is dead set on setting me up with someone. She even got my preferences out of me (I told her preferably Asian, short, fairly smart, and tolerant of my gaming habits). I know she knows I basically described her right to her face, but I'm glad she knew I was speaking generally and not trying to imply anything (or was I???). Anyway, she's determined to set me up with someone (or some people depending on how many attempts it takes) after my class ends so I'm tentatively looking forward to that.

This last weekend, we had a pretty fun drinking adventure across downtown. She's kind of a lightweight, but is still fun to drink with. I even got to meet her girlfriend who failed to make a good impression on me. She doesn't like my friend drinking (since she does it a lot (which confuses me because you think you would have to be okay with that to be with her, but whatever)) and she was kind of rude to my friend when we met up with her. My friend got mad at her, but I insisted she not be bitchy back at her. Bad first impression of the girlfriend, but I'm sure she's more cordial normally. After that, my friend got really tired (because she's a lightweight and I could probably drink her under about five tables (but that's what you get for being about 5'2" and 100 pounds) so I took her home. We had planned to make a stop to see a couple more friends of hers who I met at the party (and one of the girls is actually the girlfriend of...THE REID!!!) but since my friend was sleeping, I took her back to her house instead.

Oh and on other alcohol adventures, Grandpa and I bought a bottle of bourbon at Fred Meyer. He wanted to check prices of alcohol for fun and one named "Wild Turkey" caught his eye. I thought it would be really shitty and cheap, but it turned out to be really good (and cheap!). After taking a shot with him, I realized I have now done shots with both of my grandparents. I am so....cool?

And now to the important thing!

This class I'm taking:
This class has kept me really busy. They said it would be 3-6 hours of homework a night and I thought they were full of it (my other professors in college often said things like "You will spend 15 hours a week working on this class" which was never true and my grades were fine). They weren't kidding though. I'm not sure if its the intensive nature of the class or the fact that it's a graduate level course, but the homework actually does take up a lot of time. This has been my schedule for the class on weekdays so far:
7:00am - Wake up, eat breakfast, get ready
8:15am - Leave for class, find street parking
8:40am - Enter classroom, wait for class to start
9:00am - Class
3:20pm - Arrive home, since I'm burned out from so much class go ahead and browse Reddit
4:30pm - Start homework, eat dinner within a few hours
9:00pm - Finish homework, play League of Legends for a couple games
11:00pm - Go to bed
And it repeats. I don't get much time to do anything on weekdays, but it's fine. I'm getting a lot done and soon it will be over and I will have earned a cool certificate in just under a month (and I'll have 12 graduate credits). The class itself is really fun actually. Though it's 6 hours, the day just flies by. Despite that though, it still feels like the week drags on (mostly because I can look ahead and see how much class I have left for the week). And we go for the full 6 hours too. We get one bathroom break of about 5 minutes around 10:30am, then for lunch, we have projects to work on during lunch so that's not really an "official" break. The worst part about that going for 6 hours is definitely the fact that I have to hold in a fart for 6 hours. TMI probably...

The homework isn't too bad. It's much simpler than my econ stuff, just more time consuming. I really like the teacher and the school actually seems like their first goal is getting full employment for all their graduating classes. That will be nice for me. They're even doing a big employment seminar on the last Wednesday of class just for us, so that will be helpful. Also, since it's technically a teacher training as well, they're really big on assigning homework and doing tasks in class that we can then turn around and use in our own classes. For example, our weekend project this weekend was to make a 10-12 hour unit plan for a hypothetical class with a specific learning objective in mind. We each brought in enough copies for everyone in the class to have one, so now we all have 16 more or less ready to go unit plans that we can take with us when we go off to teach. Stuff like that is really cool. The people in the class are nice. Two actually dropped. One was a girl after the first day. She had been teaching in Seoul for a year and I wanted to ask her about that, but I never got the chance since she dropped. The second came after the third day. It was this really annoying guy that tried to use fancy words to seem smarter than he actually was. He also liked to talk a lot and it took away from some lessons, so it wasn't so bad he dropped. Everyone in this class is becoming like a big family since we see each other for so much of the day and then hop on our google group at night to talk about homework. Shared pain makes for strong bonds I suppose. Anyway, I'm going insane slowly over the workload they're giving me in this class, but since the end is so near in sight, I can already see how good this will be for me. It turns out it wasn't technically required of me to go teach in Korea, but as an Econ major, I had no idea how to teach students. This can only help. And the certificate I will be earning can significantly up my paygrade, so that's a plus too.

Twice over the course of the four weeks, we have to sit in on an adult ESL class offered there in the building. I actually had a lot of fun my first time there and I might do it an extra time. I met a young man (about 30) from Sichuan Province in China. We were able to use the Easy English times to generate material to talk about if we wanted, but I just talked to him about China and what he thought of it here. The teacher and him liked that because he doesn't get the chance to use relaxed conversational English much since he works as a custodian. Also in that class, I met a couple from Russia (the husband is a Boeing engineer in Moscow and they're here for his training and they figured they would learn English while they were here). They were really funny and cool to talk to. There's a really really cute girl from Colombia in the class and a Tibetan Monk who is funny as hell. I didn't get to meet either of them (I'll get to that in a second), but I will try to meet them next time I go. The reason I didn't meet them is because I wound up spending most of the time with an older gentleman from Korea. He was impressed when he learned I had lived and studied in Seoul. I got to use some Korean with him to help him translate some things and he was really impressed with my pronunciation and penmanship in Korean. He is a children's songwriter who wanted to learn English so he could write children's songs in English. He's been here for a couple years, but he will soon go back to Seoul. He gave me contact info in case we're both in Seoul at the same time. I'm looking forward to that if it comes up, it would be cool. Anyway, he was a really neat guy and it was also interesting to learn we studied at the same university in Korea.

Outside of that class, I've been doing my usual stuff. I help Grandpa with groceries on Wednesday still (which cuts into time, but it needs to get done and somebody else might get it wrong) which works out well since my classes are pretty near his place. Also, I helped my cousin out last weekend. We moved 2 loads to the dump (one 400 pounder and one 800 pounder). We also hauled back about .75 to 1 ton of topsoil (in two loads) from my aunt's house to his house. And to cap it all off, we put the heaviest load ever into my truck. It was a bunch of big cement blocks that all together weighed over half a ton. The truck had some trouble braking on the last hill going towards the blocks' final destination, but luckily I'm a good driver so I was able to keep us from dying.

Me: So we're pretty much an unstoppable object right now. I really hope I can make this turn, otherwise sorry if we die.
Kevin: Oh well, at least we got a record load in the truck.

We didn't die because I'm pro. When I finally got the truck stopped in the driveway, it reeked of burnt brakes. They're fine now though, I just need to wait a while before loading the truck up nearly that heavy again. I probably won't reach that much weight again though because the stuff in the shed takes up a lot of space and is light. These were compact and heavy. Rolling those things down the hill behind my uncle's shed (to prevent landslide by building up the hill!) was extremely fun. After that, I went back to my cousin's house where they were having a BBQ. My cousin (his sister) and her cousin from their other side of the family had been at the military base in Port Angeles and brought back actual shit tons of alcohol (8 half gallons of Smirnoff and then 10 other assorted bottles of things that were equally as large) since it was so cheap there. I had some drinks with them, then went home to my parents having Margaritas, then out to hang out with my friend where I still drank her under the table. I look forward to hanging out with her more in the future and anyone she might set me up with (if they're cool). Also, I need to party with my cousins more, they keep a well stocked liquor cabinet!

Well I've eaten up enough of  your time now. Enjoy your July for me!

A much delayed (but much appreciated?) new update

Hey, sorry about the delay in updating. I quickly began to enjoy my free time which led to me forgetting to post. From there, I was putting off updating until my computers were completed, but now that I'm remembering how much crap I have to download, it seems better to use that time to make an update rather than browse Reddit for several [more] hours. I'll go ahead and quickly go over what's been happening.

School Ending:
Looks like my quarter wrapped up well. It was a long, busy finals week what with my multiple finals and essay due. On top of that, I was trying to practice for the League tournament which made me have no free time (though one could argue playing videogames is free time whether im training or not). It seems that I clobbered my final project and exam in Microecon because I raised my grade significantly in that class. Oddly enough, my worst class was the one I didn't care about (though it was my easiest one). Usually my easiest classes are just the highest grades, but this time I cared so little about this class that my grade actually fell for it. In the end it doesn't matter what grade I got because I didn't need the class to graduate. In the end, my final GPA is somewhere around a 3.44 so not quite the 3.5 I was hoping for, but not terrible. I don't think I would have been able to raise it to above 3.5 unless I 4.0ed every class this quarter (though that may have not actually gotten me there) and with two of those classes being as hard as they were, it was but a pipe dream. Nonetheless, I was happy to be done with school for a month before I start again.

League Tournament:
This will be short. We lost an embarrassing game in the first round. The enemy team counter banned our best player's champions and despite counter banning their top lanes champions, he was still able to outplay me (he was really good). I actually wound up getting our team's only kill. The other team did some tricky stuff and it paid off for them. In watching the cast of the game, I was happy to notice that whenever the announcers talked about me in my lane, they didn't ever say I sucked, it was always about how great my opponent was. That was a bit of a confidence booster that I've used in playing since then. I haven't gotten too much in recently though because the servers have been critically laggy and buggy since an update implemented on fathers day weekend that went awry.

Graduation (Mine and Kathryn's):
My graduation was the week before Kathryn's. There were 1,100 people graduating in my class, so it took about 3 hours. It was a nice ceremony though. One stupid moment was our only student speaker who talked about having been awarded the *GATES* scholarship which gave her a full ride to the institution of her choice. Not 3 minutes after that, she quoted Steve Jobs. I thought it was not only silly, but actually pretty stupid of her to do that. The awarding of diplomas expectantly took forever, but eventually it finished and we all got to go outside (after I ran across my Econ thought professor and said goodbye to him). Afterwards, I got to see people I knew to say goodbye. I missed seeing Wennie, but we're going to hang out this summer anyway, so I didn't dwell too much on it. I had also gotten to see her the night before for her birthday party which was nice.

Kathryn's graduation was also pretty good. Senorita Stoker was the senior class adviser so she gave one of the speeches. It was weird to see her speak English. In Kathryn's graduation as well, several people quoted Steve Jobs. I didn't realize he was Jesus Christ reborn until now. Afterwards, I ran into a bunch of people I knew who had siblings graduating as well (including Willie, Oliver, Katie, Sam, and others). It was cool to catch up with some of them. Unfortunately we didn't get a picture with Kathryn's boyfriend because it was too hectic, but they had spree for that so it wasn't a big deal.

Oh right, Kathryn has a boyfriend. I kept forgetting to mention that. He asked her to prom (the weekend I was gone at a tournament in April) then took her to prom (on the weekend I was gone for the tournament in May) and they started "officially" (or whatever the hell it's called) dating shortly after. Going steady, that probably still works right? Not too outdated? Anyway, he's a cool guy (they've known each other for a long time and I know him moderately well already so no vetting required). Kathryn ditches us a lot to hang out with him now which is okay, but it is foreshadowing what life will be like for me when she leaves for college and I'm still at home alone with mom and dad for a few months before I leave to Korea (fingers crossed for that). It does not look pretty T___T.

Since Graduation:
I've spent a lot of time working in my Aunt's backyard. It's getting closer to being done which will be nice. I haven't touched the shed yet because that is a multiple week venture that I need to start after I have finished my class in August. Mostly for now there has been a lot of gardening, landscaping, and things of that sort going on. It has been fun.

I've been playing some videogames, but mostly League since that's what this laptop can handle. I try to play SC with Keir and Mike (one of Keir's friends who I have established a good rapport with), and sometimes Martin or April (two of Keir's friends, one of them is funny and one of them is attractive and both are really cool). I can't do too much SC though because if we get into a long macro game, I get about 1-5 frames per second making my army uncontrollable. Fortunately I can sometimes give Mike or Keir control, but that puts more work on their shoulders. Mike can generally handle it, but it's not too fair to Keir. Macro is my weak point, so I'm looking forward to getting my micro back so I can at least contribute to teams in some way. I play more League still, but not as much recently because the servers have been super messed up. It has been moderately to extremely annoying at times.

I  built/am building myself and my parents computers. Since I had to order parts for mine, they finally caved and decided it was time to get a new one for themselves. I built myself a top of the line rig (keeping only a few components) and built them an economic model that is a bit better than what they need,  but still a moderately powered PC which cost them just shy of $300. I was pretty happy with it. At the moment, my PC is running and I'm currently setting it up with everything it needs and trying to get my SSD situation figured out. I got my parents one too, so I'll be familiar with the process of loading an operating system onto one of those by the time both computers run. At the moment, their computer is having some power issues, but I'm still trying to determine whether it's something I did (I might just have to rearrange what is plugged in where) or if it's the Power Supply that was not good enough. Looks at the moment like I can fix it by just plugging things in differently, but we'll see. I'm happy with their computer because I weighed it yesterday and it is 57% as heavy as their old computer. It also came at about half the cost, which is nice. I'll be putting up an album of pictures on Facebook eventually and I might include a couple here.

So that's been about all I have done recently. I'm currently just awaiting my class to start soon so I can get it over with faster. The schedule will be brutal, but it's only a month, so I can handle it. Mom and Kathryn absolutely had to get out of town (though I'm surprised Kathryn was willing to be gone from her boyfriend for 10 days) so they went on a cruise up to Alaska, leaving dad and I alone for 10 days. They were worried that I wouldn't want them to be gone over my birthday, but I told them that their absence would be my present! And there's a kernel of truth behind every joke...

So not much is going on until class starts. If anyone wants to hang out, let me know.

The end of most things

I am writing this post having completed my final lecture as an undergrad. My last class met today and now all that stands between me and graduation is a final essay, two final exams, and a 45-minute personal interview about the last 500 years of economic thought (and graphs!!!). It's been a busy couple of weeks and you'll see why shortly enough (that's right, an interesting post for once!). I do sincerely wish interesting things that happen to me would spread themselves out more, but it seems that is not possible. Since I do believe this post contains several interesting things, I figure it will be best not to reflect on how school is ending (I'll do that after school ends properly I suppose) and instead I'll just dive right into the post.

THAT (The Hot Apple Turnover (Frisbee Tournament)):
This is a tradition of our team to attend this tournament. It's mainly a tournament for older groups as it's a non-serious quasai costume tournament (not required, but observed). I don't know how we wound up going, but since most of the team tends to like drinking, we wind up going every year. I didn't go last year due to wanting to win my bet, but this year I figured since I'm an alcoholic now, why not go? It was a really fun tournament actually. We got there on Friday night and promptly set up tents, then began drinking. From 6pm through whenever I went to bed (I lost all concept of time (I'll get to that, don't worry)), I was constantly working on a beer. As soon as I finished one, I opened up another. Needless to say, I was pretty full of booze by the end of the night. I wound up talking to a freshman girl who sat next to me and complementing her and talking to her about frisbee for about half an hour. I was probably over complementary, but she is a very good player so it's probably not a bad thing to say so many nice things about her. Plus she's attractive so...

Aside from drinking, a select group of people on the team also took part in numerous "Safety Meetings." It's an ultimate tournament and the meetings don't involve drinking or ultimate, so I'll let you decide what the meetings refer to. Anyway, I always said to myself that I was open to that, but the opportunity never came up, so I never partook. During the first meeting, the captain and one other guy he was doing that with asked if I wanted in. I said sure, but I didn't know how. So the next time they started up a meeting, they were gracious enough to let me in on that. I have to say, it was an enjoyable enough experience (and wound up being pretty funny too because I was such a rookie). I would be willing to do it again, but I don't know how much I would actually value the experience at. That night, since there was a shortage of tents, me and my Starcraft playing friend on the team decided to sleep in my car (I had the Taurus, so the back seats all folded down and it was like a big floor big enough for the two of us easily). I don't remember much else from that night to be honest.

On Saturday, we started the day with a tag-team disc chug. Discs hold four cans (tall boys) of beer, so it took two people each to finish those off in a reasonable time. We had a good first game, followed by a frustrating lack of success the rest of the day. It can be attributed to the fact that we had some alumni on the team that most of us had never played with. They could play, but the team cohesion we had in more serious tournaments was not there. That night, we ate at a Mexican restaurant where one of the other seniors got super drunk which led to good times. That night, most of us were frustrated (I was mostly super tired) and we drank more moderately and then went to bed (I assume) at a more reasonable time. I went to bed at about 10:30 and was the third person to do so. I thought my friend coming into the car would wake me up since the light would turn on and he would make noise getting into his bag. That did happen, but I was passed out so hard (from being tired this time) that I didn't wake up and when I did eventually wake up, I jumped a little in surprise to see him laying there asleep already. On Sunday, I wound up seeing Zach and some of his Eastern crew. I guess they might do their tournament in the fall this coming year and we agreed that if that happens, we should get a Shorewood alumni team going for it for fun. On Sunday, we had a bit more success, but played good teams, so we didn't do very well on the whole again. It was still a really fun day. Oh and additionally, one player dislocated his knee and went to the hospital for it. He had two beers beforehand, so they weren't able to sedate him to reset his knee. He had to do it with minimal painkillers, what a badass. Fortunately for him, he has the full summer to recover.

My Computer:
Shortly after getting back from THAT, I hopped on for some D3 to try to catch up with Steven and Chris. Now when I first installed D3, I got the warning that my graphics card might be out of date. I figured since it runs SC2 on ultra with no problems, I could try default graphics settings to see how it worked. I didn't really notice a problem and the graphics didn't look like they were too demanding. Unbeknownst to me, my graphics card was not able to handle it. That day that I signed on, it finally gave up the goat and decided to overheat and cause my computer to crash. Subsequent tests to see if it was actually the card causing the problems led to more crashes and my computer being able to not even run SC2. Eventually, after a few crashes in quick succession, the boot files (or OS files located on it associated with booting) that were on my main hard drive became corrupted, so I couldn't start up my computer anymore. After a couple days, I was able to get my Windows 7 disc from Steven, but it became clear after I tried a reinstall that the graphics card is super dead. It gets extremely hot even at low-demand tasks (like starting up or being idle).

For the time being, my laptop is working for me. I'm much less productive on it, but not enough so that I could justify diverting time from my busy schedule to fix it before I graduate. Fortunately, I was planning to upgrade it this summer anyway, this just moved up the timetable on me. I'm going to build my parents a decent computer that will run the things they want to run on it, so I'll be ordering parts for me and for them right after finals end. In the meantime, I hadn't been gaming very much because I was so busy, so it didn't really matter that I was relegated to my laptop. Now that I'm getting more time however, I'm noticing that my laptop is really not equipped for gaming (especially not for 4v4s with Keir since we can't seem to avoid those long macro games).

Videogames:
Back in early May, Eric found out about a tournament for League of Legends held by the UW's team. Our 5-person ranked team all signed up for the tournament, but due to high demand, some of us didn't get placed on the main list and got put on the alternate list. At first, I thought I was an alternate, but it turns out I was actually on the main list, guaranteeing that I would be drafted. Since  I was the only one there that nobody had played with, I was drafted last (Eric said that it was undeserved since he knows for sure a bunch of people drafted before me are worse than me). I'm spending most of my week practicing League now which is kind of annoying because I have to use a backup mouse that I have which is less accurate than my Deathadder. I don't know how I got my good mouse to work correctly on my good rig, but for some reason when I play League with it on my laptop, the clicks get reversed. After I finish this post, I'll be back to training, so hopefully given that I have a week, I will be used to the crappy mouse by then. I still have my same keyboard working since I brought back several of the same model and one happened to have a usb connection. That has made the keyboard problem less bad. I still wish I could use my checkered one, I didn't realize until now (this one is all black) how useful it was to have every button alternate colors.

School Stuff:
Most of my time since my last post has been spent working on small homework assignments here and there alongside my final project for Microecon. Now all I have left for that class is an exam next Thursday (my last "exam" which is followed that same day by my final thing which is the 45-minute interview). Aside from that, I have a big paper in my Policy class and a written exam for the History of Economic Thought.

My advertisement seemed to go over well when I got the grading back, so that was good and now all I have for that class is a 7 page paper to write about recommending a policy of my choice. It's going to be not too hard, but will be a pain in the butt because I'll have to look at and break down senate voting records in order to make a coherent strategy to recommend my bill to specific senators to get it passed (in a hypothetical situation of course).

Thursday (I took a break overnight and I'm writing this on Friday now if the timestamp is telling you otherwise) was my last day of regular instruction at Seattle U. My policy class wasn't meeting that day, leaving me with free time between 10am and 3:30pm. I decided to spend it the right way to honor how I spent all my free time at SU, in the small study closets in the library. I went up to my favorite one and consumed much good bread that I brought along as my lunch as well as my finest (read: only) scotch whiskey. I drank and played SC2 with Keir, then moved onto other things like sending some emails, then playing a game of League. It was time well spent. I showed up to my last class after having finished off a lot of scotch whiskey (flasks hold a lot!) only to discover that my good friend (also a gamer and an econ major so we get along really well) had the same idea and brought with him a water bottle filled with champagne. We had to laugh at how great minds do indeed think alike. The class was nice; it was good to be done with classes, but at the same time I will miss it (until I start up again in the summer). I even took good notes it seems, so a plus to that too!

That night (this is no longer school related, but whatever), I went and hung out at Chris' for game night. We (minus Eric since he had to work) tried playing Arkham something (we suck so much at it, I couldn't even remember which kind of Arkham it was...), but wound up giving up and deciding to go play League which was also very fun. Hopefully we get more of that in the future.

Well I'd better get to training at League for today. I gave myself the day off because yesterday was really the first time I had played games in a long time and since I had nothing major due soon, I wanted to have one day off. Until I graduate (yikes!), peace out!

I forgot to post this with the last one, but here is my graduation photo in case any of you haven't seen it yet. Skyway and I are just classy as hell.

Sunny Days!

Not only does that title describe the weather of late, but it also references the fact that the most beautiful girl in the world had her birthday yesterday. Now if I could just meet her in Korea, that would be amazing (beyond that, it would be head asplodery kind of stuff). I lucked out today and for the second day of classes in a row, I didn't get any homework. It's just coincidence though and I know I'll start getting more again soon. My current lack of homework combined with the fact that I'm installing Diablo 3 right now (I'll let you know how it is in the future) made it seem like a really good time to make a post. On and before I forget, congratulations Orion! By the time you read this post, you'll have graduated!

I finally got an Elo ranting in League of Legends. It's a mere 1278, but I'm quite happy with it considering how little time I've put into the game. I haven't had time to do solo ranked matches since getting the rating due to my workload, but I will definitely be improving it as my assignments begin to decrease in number and severity. I'm not sure, but my elo may actually be higher than what Chris' was. Shoutout to Steven and Eric by the way for getting to the next range of elo (generally it seems each 100 elo is a range). Eric rose to the 1500s and Steven is now up in the 1800s. I've also started playing Starcraft more with Keir and Mike (Keir's friend that I now play with a lot). It's been really fun to mess around in fours. I also want to get better at Starcraft again, but that will definitely wait until I'm free for the summer. The only other game I've really played has been Guild Wars 2. They did a beta weekend and a recent stress test day. I played a lot with Steven and Chris and I have high hopes for the game, it's been really fun to play.

PAX screwed us over big time this year. They had to delay their ticket sales by a week and when they came up that second time, there was no prior warning. As a result, all three day passes sold out within the first 9 hours. By the end of the first day, there were only single day passes for Sunday left for sale. Shortly after that, no tickets were left. All we can say about that is scalpers are douchebags. So since none of us could get tickets, we decided we may do something else and are currently looking at possibly camping or something. Since Steven and Chris have more free time, I've deferred to their opinion on where and when to camp. Occasionally, I might have input if a site where we went during my time in Scouts comes up, but other than that, I trust them to make cool choices and it seems like they are.

The sudden lack of caring about my third class bit me in the butt a little bit recently when I got 0.5/10 points on a quiz. Fortunately, the lowest of our quiz scores is dropped (which will be that one) and in addition, the quizzes only count for a small portion of the grade since they're more or less reading checks. I still try as little as possible in that class though. We recently had an advertisement project where we had to create an ad for a policy. I decided to make mine really cheesy, which seemed to go over well. After watching it enough, I didn't think it was very funny (I had to cut a lot of humour due to the time constraint), but people laughed during it and I got thumbs up from people on my way back to my seat, so I felt pretty good. I was really nervous presenting it because I know nobody in the class (they're all in the PoliSci department), so I fear I may have been shouting at them during my presentation, but I guess that's better than me being hard to hear.

Link to my advertisement: http://youtu.be/Mrba1VDYIPg
Yes, it's meant to be extremely cheesy and no, I don't agree with anything it says.

I've hardly been playing frisbee. After the last tournament (sectionals) where we played five games a day for two days, my knees started hurting really bad. They are fine now, but the slight pain combined with my homework load and the fact that I can play with Eric at a pickup that runs during the same time as our practices lowers my interest in going to play with the team. We do have our final tournament coming up this weekend though. It's The Hot Apple Turnover (THAT) and it's in Wenatchee and basically all that happens there during the weekend is a large amount of ultimate and massive amounts of drinking. All the seniors on the team are going and this is where we get to do our disc chugs, so that will be fun. Unfortunately, I'm going to miss Diablo 3 with the guys this weekend as well as Squirtle (the guy who beat me back in the Code A qualifiers back in September) is playing in the Code S finals. He got really good since I've played him. I'll be rooting for him in spirit though!

Well that's about everything I had to say so until the end of the month, peace out!

The final month begins

I realize it's April when I'm making this post, but it's mostly through the day already so therefore as good as May. May isn't really my final month I suppose, but since I get done so early into June, May might as well be considered the end of college for me. I don't know what the deadline for accepting law school acceptances is/was, but I have now fully committed to not going (at least not in the immediate future). I can't get Korea (and some people and things there) out of my mind no matter how hard I try, so I'm going to start looking for jobs. My parents have started to back the idea more and mom even did a bit of looking and found a class I can take that might at the very least make me a more desirable hire. It could also increase my pay scale, which would also be cool. It means now that since I'm not starting law school in the late summer/early fall (how many slashes am I going to have in this paragraph?), I'm going to be doing nothing much with my life outside of that class I might take. My parents actually sounded fine with that though and it's not like I won't volunteer to work around doing things for the family this summer anyway. In the past, I was a little hindered on the shed cleaning because my uncle would need to double check everything to see if it was junk or salvageable. The trouble was he was sick and rarely could make it and we agreed on the junk or not junk status of things every single time anyway. Unfortunately, now that he has passed away (didn't mention it, but it was in January), I shall clean the shed once and for all in my own little way of paying tribute to his memory. He had very little to do with the process other than looking at things, but I know he always wanted to see the eventual end-product of a clean shed and I will try to do that this summer. Anyway, I dragged on this paragraph enough and you get the idea (that I'm going to try to go back to Korea by the end of the year to live and work hopefully for a long time).

In other exciting news, I got my transcripts from Yonsei! I finally had to go to the study abroad office at my school when they were 3 weeks overdue. I had to pop in also to get some forms signed, but I brought it up with the advisor there and she said she would contact the necessary people. That was a Thursday. The following Wednesday (mind you there is usually a snail-mail like time delay when sending emails to/from people  in Korea (AND it was going into the weekend)), I was emailed by the registrar that my transcripts came in and everything was approved. I almost 4.0ed my semester there which came as a surprise to me, but was a quite welcome one. Now that I have that sorted out, I realized I definitely don't need my policy class to graduate. Unfortunately, it's past the withdrawal date. I got rid of my W in Accounting 202 when I transferred (dropped the W because of a change in major and the class was suddenly irrelevant). I decided in the interest of not getting another W on my transcript, I would stick with this class. I can now care less about that class though. I'm putting out the minimum effort that I believe will give me an A in the class, so that has opened up some good time. Time I have filled with work for my other classes. The time opened up for my other classes has benefited those greatly. I'm having a lot more time to get the subjects we're talking about. And when I understand things more easily, assignments get easier and I get more free time. With that free time, I've been playing LoL more often and have even found time to get back into SC2 with Keir.

SC2 has been fun again and hopefully I'll get to play more in the future. I figure I'll have lots of time when I'm back in Korea, so I've put off my single player plans until then. I'm considering starting to train in the summer though. I've noticed that PAX prime last year, then PAX east this year both had SC2 tournaments and I think the skill level will be low enough that if I get going and train hard, I might have a shot. In League of Legends, I recently got level 30! Now I can play ranked games on my own (I will when I get time) or team ranked games with Steven, Eric, Chris, Eric (Canada), Albert, Albert's Brother, Peter (when he gets level 30) and anyone else we eventually add to the team. I can't wait to get back into that. I would have spent most of this weekend doing that, but they had the first open beta weekend for Guild Wars 2 so I spent my time doing that.

The Guild Wars 2 beta was so awesome. Since I planned on doing Guarding in the main game, I wanted to use these beta weekends to try a profession I didn't think I would consider playing when the game was released. My first one was engineer. I spent a lot of time this weekend on my engineer (and not just because I designed her to look like Sunny). It was a really fun class to play. Steven and Chris played a lot too and I have to say being able to play with them was extremely fun. Playing on my own was more enjoyable than Guild Wars 1, but still wasn't as great as playing with people. I do like the changes they've made to the game though (and there have been a lot). Not having to worry about mana is the best among those. I think next beta, I will try a mesmer to see if that goes over as well as engineer did.

This was a nice break from my work, but I suppose I had better get back to it. I had a six day weekend this week thanks to mission day (which was so perfectly timed given the presence of the beta on Friday-Sunday). I am now left with only studying for my microecon midterm this week which I think I have a chance of doing well on. Until mid may when I next post, peace out.

I Hath Surely Stepped in it this Quarter

Sorry about the delay, I got legitimately busy for once after the quarter started. As a senior and an Econ major, my life in classes recently has been mainly reading articles and research reports and preparing to discuss them in class. On top of that, I have to work really hard for part of the quarter (or if I were smart, spread it out over the whole quarter) to study for tests and to write papers. But this quarter, I wound up in two of the econ classes that actually give regular homework. On top of that, my third class is also doing that. As a result, I've found myself doing pointless busywork with most of my free time since the quarter started. On top of that, it's tournament season for frisbee, so I have to be extra conscious about how much I can get done ahead of time. But enough complaining, I'll make a quick post here to talk about my classes.

Intermediate Microeconomics:
This is that one course where no matter who you talk to, it gets a groan and a negative response. Everyone thinks it's really hard and I have to agree. But I became an econ major after taking my first micro class, so I have high hopes for the class even though it's apparent I am behind on the math. I would have been doing better had I taken this course last year, but they couldn't fit me in then. Now, I'm taking it in my last quarter alongside the capstone course. Both of those classes are really giving me a lot of work. The math for micro is slowly coming back to me; it's been since 2009 Fall quarter that I did any math that was relevant to this subject, so it's fair to say I was more than a little rusty going in. The course is taught by my stats professor (the first professor I had at Seattle U, my last math teacher, and one of my two advisors at the school), so that's at least nice. I keep winding up in an early class when I'm with him, we're just destined not to sleep in I guess. This time though, I'm not falling asleep so much.

The Policy Process:
I was originally hoping my transcripts from abroad would come in on time which would allow me to only take two classes this quarter. Unfortunately they STILL haven't come in (a concern all of its own), so I was forced to keep this class. When registering, I didn't care what class I got because it was early February and I figured my transcripts would come in on time anyway. I wound up just going by the timeslot I wanted and filtered that for any philosophy or political science classes that fit and this was the only one. I didn't even know the title of the class until I walked in the room on the first day. The professor for this class looks like a student; he has a lip piercing, wears chains on his jeans, and is young enough that he is still finishing his doctorate. It's clear that he is still getting his bearings as a teacher, but he's a pretty nice guy nonetheless. This class is rather light on the actual problem-solving homework load (unlike the other two classes which assign large lists of problems to solve) and is instead very heavy on reading. In some ways, it's worse than the problem solving because I have to retain everything I read. But hopefully, this class shouldn't cause me too many problems this quarter and I can devote more time to my other two classes.

The History of Economic Thought:
This is my fun class and it's also going to be my hard class. It is the capstone course for econ majors which means it is the final course we get before we graduate. In lieu of having a huge final essay (which is what I thought we did), the class concludes with a 45 minute interview (per person) between the professor and one student at a time. He has said that other professors often like to come watch it happen, which means I will likely get anywhere from 1 through 4 of my old professors watching me get interviewed on the last 500 years of economic thought, seeing how I retain my knowledge. I'm sufficiently afraid of this final and I want to absolutely kill it, so most of my late-quarter time will be spent studying my ass off for this interview. Aside from that, this class is almost completely the same people (and we sit in the same places) as my markets class from last quarter, so there are cool people to talk to in it. On top of that, the professor is extremely funny and though he's scatterbrained, he's easy enough to learn from.

Frisbee:
We had our first tournament of the year (calendar, not school) and my first tournament in almost a year recently. We went to Ellensburg for CWU's tournament. Only 7 teams showed up, but it was still a pretty good time. I didn't get much play time as I wanted, but I got as much as I should have because I was still out of tournament form after missing so much practice time. It was no big deal though because we had over 2 full lines (I think there were about 16 people in total there). Our one grad student (law school) was talking all  Saturday about how he always wanted a Finafrock (terminology changed for my blog, but you know what I mean) and he was running out of tournaments to get it at since this is his last year in school (he finishes law school in May). The next day, I was running on the D1 line (our zone defense line which turned out to be super baller for some reason) and he wound up getting a Finafrock. The whole team ran up and partied with him after he got it. On the weekend, we wound up going 4-2, so not too bad, but room for improvement. We have sectionals coming up in a couple weeks, so we'll see how that goes. With our field gone, our practices have been limited in existence, so I haven't been able to get playing much. I hope it doesn't hurt my play coming up.

Other stuff:
Not much is going on otherwise. I've still been working along on League, trying to get to level 30 so I can do ranked teams with Eric, Steven, and Chris. That will be fun when it happens. I beat Mass Effect 3 the other day and was disappointed by the ending as was the rest of the internet it seems.

I'm actually going to try to get ahead on homework again since nobody is online for LoL at the moment, so until next post, peace out!

Regular updates, how do they work?

Ah the problem of continuously putting off posting, I am unfortunately left facing a lot of things to say. Warning, you have what will possibly be a very long post ahead of you. But eventually I'll get the hang of posting more often again and hopefully I can get to posting twice a month at least so I can keep the size of each post down. I did finally decide I had to post though after a couple important straws broke this camel's back. Those things happen to both involve Seattle U; one being my clearance to graduate (I was starting to get worried) and the other being my acceptance to Seattle U law. I'm still leaning towards applying for teaching jobs in Korea, but it was nice to get that acceptance; my family had gone almost a week without hearing about a college acceptance (Kathryn has heard back positively from 6 of 8 so far). So anyway, time to reminisce about last quarter.

Projects Galore:
To wrap up the quarter, I was faced with two group presentations (a 20 minute one and a 50 minute one) as well as two 3,000 word essays. The level of business was almost reminiscent of spring quarter 2011 when I was doing projects alongside LSAT study. This quarter was less busy and the pain was less that I had so much to do and more that I had been lazy all quarter and brought this upon myself. My essays actually turned out to both be more enjoyable than I had hoped. My videogames and culture essay discussed the past, present, and future financial success of professional Starcraft. It wound up going over the limit by about 2,000 words; however I don't think the professor minded. We had to make a brief presentation to the class in addition to the paper and mine naturally went long (I couldn't help myself, I had a captive audience listening to me talking about Starcraft!), but everyone seemed to really enjoy it and was asking me questions about it afterwards. My second paper was a market analysis on the market of my choice. Since I chose my topic late, I wrote about how OPEC countries act as a cartel to control market prices. It was a pretty dry paper, but I had fun researching and writing it. I think it was just nice to get back into that grind that I never really had to get into in Korea.

My presentations were another matter. The 50 minute one actually went pretty well. There were only four groups in the whole class, so each group had 8 people, which is more than enough people to hide amongst. My other project was not as successful. We were the last to choose our topic, only really deciding on it a week before the deadline. What's more, we only had time to work on it during a four day weekend. It was a pretty stressful project in that I wound up doing almost the entire thing. I felt under pressure to do well and to carry it because the professor teaching the class for which this project was to be turned in is one of the ones that wrote me my letter of recommendation (the one I really respect and am terrified of). She also seemed to really only give me any credit for being intelligent in the group which I think was partly due to the fact that she knew me (which should suggest otherwise...) and the fact that I was the one that nobody ever had a problem with. The other three kept pointing fingers at each other for some problem. And I don't know what goes on in the International Business department (all three of them were in that major), but they turned in some really unprofessional crap to me that I had to really edit. One guy is from China and English is his second language, so I was fine editing his stuff, but I expected to have to edit less from the other two. Fortunately, I had allocated an entire weekend to devote to preparing the project and that seems to have paid off given my final grade in the class. On the day of the presentation, one of the girls in my group showed up late to class. It would be excusable normally, but she was late by 15 minutes consistently every single day of the quarter. The only day she showed up on time was the first day of presentations when we thought we were going to have to go, so we met before class. When the presentation started without her, I had to be ready to take her spot on it because not only was I the only one that read over everyone's part, but the IB people seemed really unable to publicly speak (but again in one case that's because he's not confident in English even though he did really well). Anyway, I was happy to put all that behind me. I even got time to study for the last test ever with my favorite professor and based on how I feel about the test and how my final grade turned out, it seems that it was my best grade on any of her tests.

Frisbee:
I actually wound up missing pretty much all frisbee events and practices between the beginning of February and the end of the quarter. I had some really bad sickness that we thought was pneumonia at one point, but now we have no idea. I'm basing it on what dad's doctor told him since I gave him exactly what I had and I refused to go to the doctor myself. Either way, I seem to be over it now. I did make it to the last practice of the year on our field. It's being torn down to make a really nice one that will be available next fall once the seniors have graduated. Those of us that showed up celebrated the last practice with drunk frisbee. I brought a shit ton of PBR (I bought it ironically which probably makes it 1000 times worse) and we had some hard stuff too. There was a lot of public urination, burying cans on the field, jokes, and the captain even gave a speech from LotR whilst riding around on his imaginary horse at one point. It was a great way to send off the field in style. Now that I'm healthy(ish) again, I'm looking forward to tournament season. We have one this weekend in Ellensburg, then sectionals next month. After that, hopefully one at EWU which was really fun last year and then a tournament at a location which I do not know, but I do know it involves a weekend of solid drinking. I opted not to go last year because I didn't want to tempt the fates with my 21 drinking bet and all, but I'm for sure going this year.

Videogames:
Well this is mostly League of Legends related. I did recently get Mass Effect 3, but nothing to report right now. I haven't seen the supposedly shitty ending yet and I hope it's not as bad as they all say. I've been playing a lot of League with Eric, Steven, and Chris. The occasional drunk LoL is also fun. I'm starting to narrow in on a few champions that I suck slightly less with although I still have a really bad game all too often. I haven't played much Starcraft recently, but I've been occasionally watching it still when I get time and am up late enough.

Spring Break:
I spent my spring break doing my tour of the family which has basically involved me talking about Korea to every family member that hasn't gotten to see me since I got back. I spent some time at the ocean with Grandpa over the weekend which was fun even though the weather was kinda crappy. We got up to see my  great aunt and uncle in Forks which was nice as always. After that, I had about a day back, then went to Eastern Washington to see my uncle and aunt and cousin, then to see Shorewood do the state drill competition (Kathryn's in it, I'm not a creeper). I found out my cousin's husband plays League, so hopefully I'll get to see him online sometimes.

Teeth:
So I don't know where I last left off on my teeth and all, but I had that root canal for the tooth that long ago was chipped and had since died. Looks like I'll need a second because the one next to it was involved too. But in the meantime, I'll be getting permanent plaster caps (veneers?) on my front teeth tomorrow. For the last two weeks, I had temporary ones which are actually one unit and are made of plastic. Having two teeth as one has been uncomfortable, but I will soon not have to bear that annoyance anymore. The biggest pain in the ass about the temporary caps has been I can't bite my fingernails which has driven me insane to a point where I would be biting my nails even more frequently. Tomorrow I get it all fixed up though and I'll have nice, permanent caps over my front teeth. I elected to have them look exactly the same as before rather than make their bottoms level with each other because I decided I liked it being just slightly off like that since the teeth are otherwise perfectly straight. I'll take picture of it and I'll include those in my next post for your viewing pleasure (on an imgur account, I don't want to subject you to my teeth every time you hit this page).

Wow, that's actually all I had to say. Maybe we got lucky and this post was a little shorter. I'll probably wind up posting next Monday after the tournament in Ellensburg. If not then, I'll be posting in the second week of April. Until then, peace out.