Those two words sound weird together. News implies that something new is going on with coffee, which is dubious since the splendid stimulant has been around for something like 1100 years.

Anyhow, this is more about a deal on coffee if you like the stuff.

As of today (8/5/08) you can buy a coffee at any Starbucks before 2PM, and then after 2PM go to any Starbucks and get any cold drink for only $2. I was on my way to my usual 14th Street Starbucks to get my usual $2 Tall Americano when I heard about this on WSB. I say “hmm, I wonder if this is happening in Atlanta yet” (then wonder who the hell I’m vocalizing to) and sure enough, my barista told me to hang onto my receipt so I could take advantage of it today.

Here’s what it says on my receipt:

Make a purchase prior to 2pm
Bring receipt in today after
2pm for a Grande cold drink
For $2+tax at select US stores
Same day only. Value 1/20 cent

No idea what the “value” part is, but the rest is pretty self-explanatory.

So I spent my usual $2.16 on my Tall Americano only half-filled with water (to make it stronger), and can go back and get a grande iced mocha, which usually costs over $4, for only $2. That’s a win for me. I think it would be less of a win if you’re one of those people who buys the $5 drinks in the morning, but since I spend so little on my Americano, I feel I’m getting more for my money.

Also, I’ve been trying to train the baristas on how I like my Americano… apparently me saying “Tall Americano, half water” sometimes means 80% filled. The guy this morning did that, then asked me if that’s how I want it. I told him to try to finish it at half-filled next time, and then he convinced me to let him make me a second one. So now I have 2 Americanos on my desk for me to drink.

We picked up our new puppy today. If you remember, her name is Zoë, and we arrived in Athens at about 12:30 PM today, picked her up and got some documentation about what shots she has and when she’ll need her next one. We left, and within 10 miles, she had pooped in my car.

I actually felt bad, because she was getting excited and whimpering right before that, but we thought she was just upset about being in the car and away from her family. But then she dropped a deuce and quieted down: she was trying to tell us she needed to go but we just didn’t know.

We had a towel with us, and it would have gotten on there but in her excitement, she had moved it off one spot of the seat, and of course that’s where she went. Mel was able to get it on the towel, and 2 miles later I stopped at a Starbucks where we ganked some napkins to clean up. Later, Mel even cleaned the couple spots left with some resolve, and it’s as good as new now.

One funny thing was that some of the poop got on the leash Anita got Mel at the puppy shower she and another lady from QTS threw for Mel. I cleaned the leash later, so it’s fine, but it was just kinda funny that we had barely used the thing.

On the way home we stopped by PetSmart for a few things and took Zoë inside. She isn’t leash trained, so trying to get her to walk around with it around her neck was hopeless. We left it on her, but just put her in the cart where she was completely content. And she was a hit with everyone who walked by. She’s great with people and other animals, never once barking or acting scared.

We got her a collar, a huge bag of food, food and water bowls, treats, one of those Kong chew toys (which so many people swear by on the internet), poop bags, a portable water bowl (it’s collapsible to be taken with you on road trips), a bell for the door (so she rings it when she needs to go outside), some doggy mouth wash (lady at the pet store swears it prevents doggy breath), and a crate.

When we got home I assembled the crate, and we decided to see if we could get her started on crate training so we could possibly get her in there by tonight. So we sat over by it with her and let her smell it, but she didn’t really want to go inside. I got some treats (which she loves), and gave her one to chill her out. Then I put one inside the crate and she stood outside the crate and grabbed it. So I put another one farther inside the crate and she got in and ate it. We expected her to come right back out, but she just kinda sat there looking at us. We praised her about it and she kinda laid down. We closed the door to the crate, and she stood up looking at us, so I gave her another treat and she was completely ok. We opened the door to the crate, but she didn’t come out, just remained laying down. We got up and left, she remained inside.

A few minutes later she came out, but after playing a bit, she went back in and laid down again. For the rest of the day, she did that: came out to play or sniff around or eat or whatever, then go back and nap in the crate.

Easiest freaking crate training ever. We even went to pick up some food at dinner, left her in the crate with the door closed, and she didn’t so much as whimper as we left or even as we came back. I couldn’t believe it (still can’t).

We’re hoping this continues tonight since she’ll spend the night in the crate in our room. But she still hasn’t barked once and the only time she whimpered is when she needed to poop while we were driving back to Atlanta.

Gaby isn’t happy though. She’s just starting to warm up a little bit, but mostly she’s been slinking around avoiding the dog. And if she gets caught off-guard by the dog, she’ll bolt back to the spare bedroom.

Hopefully Mel can post up a couple pics soon.

Considering I need a 5 on my final in 12 hours to finish college, I think my degree is fairly secured. So I think I should take a look back.

I started college in a crummy town renting a crummy apartment while in a crummy relationship. Thankfully I was there with a close friend: Joe. There were cool parts to Georgia Southern such as the people, the parties, and the general state of fun to be had. A few years later, we’d lament about wishing we could have that Georgia Southern college experience in Atlanta.

Alas, that wasn’t meant to be. After spending a couple years working hard at maintaining good grades but still having a good time, a lot of us transfered up to GT where the people were nerdy, the classes boring and difficult, and “a good time” was difficult to find.

I remember meeting some guys in a few of my ECE classes and running into them on Skiles walkway. If anyone has any question about how soul crushing GT really is, they were throwing themselves into Holly bushes and rolling around. My opinion is that GT had sucked all the feeling from them, and they needed the pain to maintain their sanity (ironic, since them rolling around in Holly bushes certainly made them look insane).

A big surprise to me was that after working (comparatively) hard to maintain a decent GPA while at GaSou, GT wiped our slates clean and didn’t transfer all of our credits. Had they told me that at the beginning, I’d have spent a lot more time partying down there than I did. I came in feeling GT had robbed me of something, thus starting my downward spiral to failure.

To try to clear my head, I decided to coop my second semester at Tech. I interviewed with a Maryland-based engineering firm and they loved me and offered me the job on the spot. I accepted, making more than I ever had up to that point in my life (I think it was something like $15.50/hr, which in 2002 dollars is like a million dollars an hour I think). However, after going up there, it was NOT what I expected. I was taught very little, and what I learned I had to on my own given massive schematics as my only guide. They told me normally they have the previous coop train the next one, but it was a luxury I didn’t have, and so I hated it. When I thought I was doing well, the horrible managers would tear me down for something small. I came back to GT 6 months later even worse off than I was before.

And that summer after was the fateful summer that I joined the Square Root Club. The Square Root Club is where you can take the square root of your semester GPA and it is higher than your actual GPA (for those of you a bit slow, the only way that is possible is a GPA below 1, but greater than zero).

Georgia Tech (particularly the ECE department) is setup in such a way that once you do poorly, it is very difficult to bounce back. I had to make above a 2.0 every semester for the following 3 semesters, and on my third semester, by way of some REALLY bad advisement, I took classes together I shouldn’t have and made 2 C’s and a D (all passing, but not good enough to maintain contract).

I had to leave school for a semester. Not only that, but the ECE department is REALLY difficult to get BACK in once you’ve dropped out. So I stayed dropped out. For 2.5 years.

I went back at the behest of my (now) wife and applied to join the school of Industrial Engineering for two reasons: 1. a friend of mine (Keenan) swore up and down that the major was a lot of fun and given my personality he thought I’d be a good fit and the advisors were really understanding; and 2. it was the major I would lose the fewest ECE credits. Additionally, I had been working at OIT long enough at that point so that they’d pay for my school.

So I did that. I talked to one of the advisors who, just as Keenan had said, was very understanding and even said they had accepted estranged ECE majors who had even fewer credits til graduation than I had (I think I had less than 30). I was also at a different place mentally than I had been 3 years prior, and was ready to study and do well in school. At first I was under two contracts, one for the state paying my tuition, and another to remain in ISyE (that one was setup to last 3 semesters and I had to make over a 2.4 each time to stay).

Three semesters later, after making over a 3.0 twice and just under a 3.0 once, I was in good academic standing for the first time in five years. Needless to say, that was a proud moment for me considering I figured I was never going to go back in the first place.

I continued on with my classes, and last semester took the most difficult class I ever took in my life: Senior Design. Senior Design for Industrial Engineers isn’t “do this complex math that means nothing” like some other majors. You have to find a company who needs work done, propose the work to the GT ISyE faculty, and if approved (which is rare without serious expansion of scope), do the work with a group of 5-6 students being advised by a faculty member. Keenan, the same guy who convinced me to come back as an ISyE, was one of my group mates, and I’m sure he’ll agree that we had the best group project experience ever. It was unfair to other groups how well our group got along and worked together.

In the end, after a semester of almost completely ignoring my work and spending 30+ hours a week (50+ toward the end) arduously working on the project, we ended up saving our company a projected $5-12 million annually and getting an A in the class. It was easily the most rewarding experience I had in college.

Of course, making an A in the class that is supposed to be the last one you take REALLY made the senioritis kick in this past semester, but I’ve made it. I’m done.

And thank God. After 9 years, I don’t think I could have gone much longer. I’m graduating with some insane number of credits even without the 80 I had at GaSou they wiped out.

I went from eager freshman to betrayed student to angsty do-wrong to studious workaholic. Kinda makes me sound like a lunatic really.

I’ve mentioned my comic book class before on this website… and how God awful it is. I dunno, I guess it could have been MODERATELY interesting, but the graphic novels and anime chosen were mostly just horrible and retarded and not interesting. And we had four grades in there, 2 group projects which weren’t too bad (my group was pretty good) and two web pages, which is just plain silly. For this last project in the class I have to write 6000 words in argumentative form about a topic covered in the class relating it to 3-4 of our primary texts then bringing in no less than 5 secondary scholarly texts. Now, all that is bad enough… that breaks out to about 24 pages of typed text, all MLA cited and whatnot, but what steps it up a notch in the suck factor is that I have to incorporate it into a webpage.

When choosing my subject, I looked over the main points of all our books then looked around on Google Scholar for about 10 minutes and it looked like the easiest subject to cover is homosexuality. So, yeah, I’m doing a gay paper about gay.

Earlier I started thinking about funny ways I could take this… in classic argumentative format, you have a thesis which covers a little history and then finally gets more specific about your thesis, then you spend a couple paragraphs covering the history of the problem in more depth. So what if I made up the history of homosexuality? It could go something like this:

Homosexuality started in the early 1900’s when drugs such as cocaine, heroine, and marijuana was sold over-the-counter at drug stores. Eventually the government would try to put a stop to homosexuality by outlawing these drugs, but it was too late by that point: homosexuality was in.

When the 1960’s arrived and John F. Kennedy started the worldwide campaign for free love, homosexuality really took hold in society. However, the latent-homosexuality induced homophobia expressed by Republicans became a plank in their growing religious platform. So during the Reagan era in the 80’s, teams of elite black ops killed a large portion of the gay community and brainwashed most people into thinking homosexuality was an underground culture not meant to have equal rights.

Like, I think that would be hilarious, especially if I cited some bogus crap, forcing her to look at the citations to disprove what I’m saying. Too bad I’d probably fail, and the paper is worth 30% of my final grade.

In other news I had a roofing contractor come out yesterday to check how extensive the damage was to the roof and how much it would cost to repair it all. He said a repair would cost between $800 and $1000 and I’d likely still have to replace the roof next year. The price he quoted me for a new roof is $9000, which I think is ridiculous. Also, he was 2 hours late, so I doubt I would use them for those two reasons. I dunno what to do, though. We just moved into the house 4 months ago so we don’t have the money to replace the roof and not enough equity to get a HELOC. But then we can’t allow the roof to continue leaking, especially with hurricane season here.

Owning a house kinda sucks.