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!