For example, tonight. I have a project due on Friday, and it involves a crapload of work on the Internet. I planned to sit down in front of the computer and finish it. All of it! Tonight! I was going to start in between commercials of bad reality television, and keep working until it was done! Unfortunately, my ethernet was down yet again, so I shut the damn computer off in frustration and walked away. Boo. Hiss. If they hadn't just credited my Visa card $55.00, I would have e-mailed them again and threatened to cancel my service.

Then Tim called, and I talked to him until 9:30 or something. Then I tried the ethernet again and it still wasn't working. Blast you, Egix! It finally came back around 10-something, just as I was sitting down to do my nightly work on Ye Olde Pitchforkmedia.com News. Just like magic. It's moments like these that make me not want to switch to a different ISP. Of course, my only practical choices would be to use the UIUC dial-up that I fall back on when the ethernet dies (slow, busy, ties up the phone line), or a cable modem (which I can't afford). So it's not like I have options, really.

Enough of my fist-shaking and sob stories.

Last weekend, on my way out of town, I noticed a Wienerschnitzel restaurant on the outskirts of Champaign. I thought Wienerschnitzel was something that only existed in Descendents songs. (Not the food, doofus, the restaurant.)

Joe College across the courtyard has a couple of new challengers in the "most annoying neighbor" category. The guy who lives on one side of me has developed a habit of blasting Elton John's Greatest Hits superloud. Like Joe College, he only plays his music for ten or fifteen minutes, then he turns it down. And it's always the same three songs. The girl on the opposite side of me probably beats him in the annoying category, though. She blasts Sum 41/Linkin Park/Papa Roach-type crap whenever she's in the bathroom. Of course, the stereo she plays this music on is on the other side of my bedroom wall. I think she showers every night at 11-ish, because that's when the music tends to start. I was so irritated the other day that I ended up pounding on the wall with a screwdriver. (The hammer was in the other room, okay? And I was pounding with the rounded end, not the pointy end.) It worked, though, because she stopped, albeit temporarily.

I met Arvid last week. No, he doesn't look like the guy from Revenge of the Nerds--he doesn't have greasy hair or taped-together glasses or body odor or poor fashion sense. Anyhow, we chatted over beer (him) and cider (me) about crazy Internet psychos, crazy real-life psychos, screwy ethernet connections (though his ISP is different from mine, it's just as unreliable sometimes, which made me feel better for some reason), computers (he's got a Mac in his collection), Champaign-Urbana, geek toys, relationships, music, and other stuff that I can't remember. I still don't know too many people down here, so it was nice to meet someone else to hang out with sometimes.

I'm headed home this weekend for the Tenacious D and Modest Mouse shows. Quinn is supposed to be at Modest Mouse. Quinn recently declared that one of the most important things he's learned at NIU is "no food/drink in Mr. Born's classroom." It's nice to know that their MIS curriculum is so rigorous. In his next class, he's going to learn that you can't chew gum or pass notes in Mr. Born's class. At that point, Quinn will probably drop out of school.

It is now...bedtime. I should get up at a reasonable time tomorrow so I can work on my papers. Ech. Papers.