Rising Above Mediocrity
by Benjamin Geiger

I arrived in Blairsville yesterday (that’s Wednesday) at about 7:30 AM. I knew Mom was going to drop Josh’s fiancee, Amanda, off at school, so I waited in the parking lot until about 8 AM. She didn’t show before then, so I figured she had come and gone by the time I arrived.

When I got to the house, I met up with Josh and hung out until noon, when Josh needed to pick Amanda up from class. I went to Mom’s workplace and went out to lunch with her, then came home for a nap (which lasted from about 2PM to midnight).

It feels good to be back in Blairsville, but I keep remembering why I left; not the least of the reasons is the allergy situation. Claritin keeps things tolerable but between the animals and the vegetation, my nose is threatening war with the rest of the world. Bugs are ridiculous here too; I had a moth going kamikaze on me all night last night.

Today I went to Wal-Mart and bought the ingredients for sauerbraten, which I will make for Mom, Josh, and Amanda in about… oh, three days.

Well, I’m off to see my mom and brother again. Last time I saw them was at Christmas, and since I have a month between terms at school , I have the perfect opportunity to visit.

I’m going to be leaving here in about an hour (about 9PM EDT). From here, I stop at the gas station at the intersection of CR 54 and US 27, get a six-inch sub (hooray 24-hour Subway!) and a few 20 oz bottles of something caffeinated, make sure my tank is full and windows are clean, then I’m officially on my way.

If all goes according to plan (that seems to be the critical phrase for this trip), I should be rolling into Blairsville at about 8 AM tomorrow. This may be delayed, however, since I might take a nap somewhere along the way. (There’s a nice TA truck stop near Cordele, GA, with a good parking lot that I’ve slept in a few times.)

I’ll be posting updates whenever I get the opportunity.

I guess the world wasn’t ready for wiki.

Instead of using my old comment system , future comments should be directed into the new comment system. (If there’s no comment form below, click the “Comments” link.)

I’m not really a fan of the new system (which is the standard pyBlosxom comment system), but it seems to be easier for the uninitated to figure out. It also has the advantage of supporting trackbacks (if you don’t know what they are, don’t worry about it).

With my recent switch to the pyBlosxom comment architecture, I gained the ability to receive trackback pings . However, I didn’t have the ability to send them. This is where Simpletracks comes in.

This handy page lets you send a trackback ping to a trackback-enabled blog, even if your blogging software doesn’t have this ability innately. pyBlosxom does not have this ability, and I post entries with a text editor (vim, if you’re curious), which doesn’t have that ability either.

My only complaint is that Simpletracks does not support trackback link autodiscovery; you have to find the trackback link and paste it yourself. However, that’s a very small problem, and a very useful tool.

For once, I actually made a decision about my academic career. Since jobs in the computer field are disappearing (or going overseas), it would be more helpful to have a more… prestigious… major.

So, I’m now majoring in Electrical Engineering, in addition to CS.

Yes, that’s right. I’m dual majoring. Adding an additional degree requires 30 more credit hours (minimum), and the difference between the CS and EE degrees is approximately 30 hours. Besides, I’m almost done with the CS degree.

Anyway… the bottom line is that I will be in school for another year or so beyond the year I had expected. In other words, I’ll be here in school for two more years, but when I graduate I’ll get two degrees.

You’re not crazy, and you aren’t at the wrong site. The name of this blog did change, from “Yet Another Worthless Blog” to “Rising Above Mediocrity”. This name may not stick, but at least it sounds better (and has more potential for Googlejuice).

It was actually a very easy change; I had to change one line in pyblosxom’s config file and create a new banner. That’s it.