I got around to posting some new pictures if you care to look at them. They are pictures of stuff in Houghton, pre-Winter Carnival 2005, and then final Winter Carnival 2005 pictures. I'll eventually put up Winter Carnival 2006, but I have to figure out which ones to post, since I have a million pictures of it. But you can check out the new pictures here. I also got the better version of the photo viewer I was previously using. Now when you click a photo it enlarges it in a much cooler looking window.

Work was awesome today. It was the first day of the summer intern kickoff stuff and we got to hear presentations on a bunch of things, including the history of some of the things they make at this location. We also got a really nice 2 hour tour. It was really cool. Tomorrow it's back to work though.

I just read the forecast from the ForecastFox extension for Firefox and it has some interesting words on it. Tomorrow there will apparently be a 'damaging thunderstorm' (I don't see anything on the radar, but I guess that's why I'm not predicting weather) and Friday it is supposed to be 'delightful'. The delightful description made me laugh; I wasn't expecting that at all.

We received a bill from Charter today in the mail. Much to our surprise, we found that the bill was for $80+ instead of $60, which is supposed to be the normal monthly fee. I checked to see what they added on to our bill and, you guessed it, they charged us for having someone come fix out problem with connecting to the Internet. So not only did we have crappy Internet for about two weeks, they decided that it was our problem that it wasn't working like it's supposed to be. I immediately called their support line, which funny enough was receiving a high volume of calls (hmm... probably because everyone got their bill today), and convinced them to drop the charge. Actually I was surprised how well they handled it, they didn't make me have to fight to get it taken off at all. I basically just asked. But in the end, Charter still sucks.

This weekend was really, really hot. We ended up turning on our window a/c unit Sunday (I think) but it doesn't work that great. Basically you need to be laying on the floor and you have to be pretty close to it in order to feel remotely cool. When you stand up you just get hot again. We were thinking about geocaching but it was way too hot to do anything like that, especially since some of the caches say it is quite a hike to get to them. It also prevented me from riding my bike until last night.

I bought the Napoleon Dynamite Special Edition DVD at Wal-Mart the other day. Wal-Mart has a 'exclusive' version of it that includes a free t-shirt, so obviously I picked the version with the free shirt. The shirt is pretty crappy and has a saying like 'Dance like you mean it' or something on it. I probably will never wear it, but it was free. The DVD is pretty good though, it has a lot of extra features about making the movie. The movie overall is really funny, but I think I find it more interesting than most people I know since I lived in Utah for a while and know some of the customs of that area (like how you are supposed to be creative when you are asking a girl to a dance -- when Pedro bakes Summer a cake). It's also cool to see some of the extra content when he is in Park City, Utah and at the Sundance Film Festival. We lived pretty close to that area, so I like to see if I can recognize anything.

Anyway, I'm pretty tired so I'll probably head off to bed soon.

I'm not sure what I'll be doing this weekend but I'll find something to do. Hopefully it will cool down a little later today and I can take my bike out again.

The Cubs have pretty much been one of the worst team's in baseball since Derek Lee got injured. They finally have Mark Prior and Kerry Wood coming back into the rotation (Wood is already back actually) so hopefully that will help them a little bit.

I changed my music over the sidebar. The Course of Nature album is pretty good but I needed a change. Justin has Eve 6 playing in his car lately and sometimes it's been getting stuck in my head, so I decided to burn that and listen to that for a while.

Justin and I went to see X-Men 3 tonight, for our usual Friday movie. It was pretty good overall, there were a few surprises. There is a scene after the credits so if you go make sure to stay and see it. It's only a few seconds so you might as well just wait to see it.

I changed the movie on my sidebar to a big '?'. We don't know which movie we are going to see next Friday yet (if we even go, since there isn't many good ones to choose from). If anyone has any suggestions feel free to let me know. There are a few good ones coming up, but they aren't until later on in June.

Today is was pretty warm out, but it was a lot worse than it has been because it was pretty humid too. Normally opening both doors to the balconies works great to get air flow through the apartment but today it just didn't seem to work at all. I had to go get a desk fan at Wal-Mart so I could actually stand being in my room. It was pretty cheap and it's doing it's job so I'm happy for now. This weekend it's supposed to get into the 90s here, which is going to really suck. Hopefully it won't be very humid.

I finished putting up the rest of the sections. Most of them are pretty bare but that's ok, I don't have much to put in them yet. I did update the pictures though. The stuff section might be updated later.

I decided to put what CD I'm listening to in my car on the sidebar to the right as well as what movie I plan on seeing next and when (most likely). Justin and I are probably going to see a movie every Friday, as something fun to do every week. This week we're going to see X-Men 3.

So today at work was pretty good. I went to a presentation in the morning and then had a pretty good lunch and the rest of the day went by pretty quickly. There was a new hire gathering in the evening that I went to too. Hopefully I can go to more of those so I can meet some more people.

On the way home from work today Justin said he was a cop on the side of the highway holding a shotgun for some reason. I passed by probably 5 min later and I saw the cop in his car but I didn't see him holding anything. I have no idea what was going on, I didn't see him pull over anyone or anything like that. It would be weird to see a cop on the side of the road holding a shotgun though.

It's still hot here, or at least I think it is. It's raining right now so I hope that will cool it down.

As you've noticed, the blog has a new layout. I also basically made my website, which I never updated anyway, basically become my blog. I have several links at the top for stuff I plan to put on the site. At this time most of the links don't work (yes, that's why they are crossed out) but they will when I get around to making their pages.

To those of you who didn't already know: dstanich.com is registered to me so I'm just going to use that as my website's title now instead of Void Online. Both will still get you here but please use dstanich.com so I can eventually get rid of the other one.

I thought I'd be coming home early/mid June to get my braces off but it is going to be early July.

So July 7th I'll be back in Green Bay for the weekend. Maybe I'll be back before then, I'm not sure.

It got to around 80 something degrees today here, it was actually pretty hot, or probably at least the hottest day so far this year. I like the 60s or 70s better though, I don't stick to the table when I'm typing on my keyboard. It's still hot now, hopefully it cools down before I goto bed.

We saw the Da Vinci Code again tonight. There was a new hire social thing to go see it, but there wasn't much socializing obviously, since it was a movie. Hopefully there will be more in the future.

The cable guy came today and spent a good hour and a half doing stuff. He first rewired our cable jack, since you could physically turn it in the wall, which probably isn't good. He then messed around in the cable box for our apartment block for a long time. He said he upgraded a bunch of stuff, so hopefully the problem would go away. So far so good. I hope it stays this way.

Hope everyone is having a good summer.

More and more co-ops and interns are arriving at work now. I guess there is going to be around 240 something of us just in Rochester. They have a bunch of things planned for us that we can particiate in. Tomorrow night is a movie night that you can goto. We're planning on going to that so hopefully that ends up going well. At work we have a room with several different co-op teams in it and the other teams are starting to show up, so that should make things a little less boring sometimes. It could get very quiet with just my team there.

I've had a lot of time to think about things that have happened lately while I've been here. I still don't really exactly know what to think or how to react, but I hope things are starting to turn around now that it looks like I might actually meet people to do things with. Hopefully that will take my mind off of it and put it back to something fun.

I bought a new bike last week, I can't remember if I put that in the last post or not. I bought it earlier in the week and got to pick it up on Thursday. It's a mix between a mountain bike and a street bike. So it looks like a mountain bike but its tires are a little thinner. I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to do different but the lady said they were better for Rochester style trails and they seemed to have a ton of them in the store, so I figured I'd just get one since I already have a mountain bike at home. I really like it. I took it for a long ride the day I got it and then during the weekend I'd go out for about 2 hours each day just riding around the huge amount of trails they have here. The great thing is that I can just ride my bike to them, I don't have to drive there. The entry to one of them is only a mile away and then I can take that trail pretty much as far as I want, from only half a mile to another 15 miles. It's all been really nice so far and I'm getting a lot of excercise doing it, but I run out of water really fast.

Our Internet has only gotten worse since the last post. I tried using the cable amplifier that we had at home that we bought to try and fix Road Runner back home, but that didn't work at all. It's pretty much been dead for the past 3 or 4 days, off almost all day. We keep having to use other people's wireless connectios for basic "needs" like instant messaging and e-mail. I called Charter Saturday or Sunday, I can't remember when, and the support guy (yes, he sounded like he was from India so it was horrible support) even tried to sell me things when he was telling me steps to fix it. While I was waiting for my modem to reset he asked me what I liked to watch on TV, so I just told him news and he preceded to try and sell me CNN and BBC. Then later he tried to sell me some $2 a month charge for a technician to do something for me every month, but I couldn't even understand what he said anyway. But finally, he said he'd schedule a technician to come take a look at our problem. He's coming tomorrow, but of course they gave me the time of 1pm - 3pm. Thankfully I told the support guy that I have a little thing called a job, so he said he'd write in the description to have them call me before they are going to come so I don't have to wait 2 hours for them. All I have to say is he better fix it quickly and it better be fixed for good.

I'm thinking about redesigning this site since I never update anything except for the blog. I'll probably end up making it a really basic design with pretty much just the blog and maybe some other personal stuff like pictures or random crap I feel like putting up. I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing this, but I hope to eventually.

So post some comments, you people are boring.

Charter can now be added to the list of cable companies that are horrible at providing any reasonable service. First in Green Bay we had Time Warner give us a faulty modem and then blame it on our connection in our house not being strong enough. And now we have Charter in Rochester settings us up without giving us a username and password for e-mail and now the Internet keeps dying every night. Oh, they also decided to send us a bill for the inital payment for some reason, eventhough I already paid it. I guess service isn't something cable companies take pride in.

Anyway, aside from that rant, everything is going ok I guess. I bought a new bike yesterday and I should be able to pick it up tomorrow. It's a weird looking bike. It has the frame of a mountain bike but it has thinner wheels like a street bike. It's pretty nice though and it supposed to be good for long distances. I can't wait to try it out.

Work is getting better every day. It's difficult to be thrown into something new and learn it all quickly, but I'm doing my best. I got my first headache at work the other day which means that I'm finally doing work that I understand and I'm probably concentrating too much for too long on it, but that's good since I at least know what I'm doing now. More interns and coops are coming every day so hopefully they'll have some coop events like they said they would have soon so I can meet some people. I'd like to meet some people because it is pretty boring after work every day. I pretty much have a choice of about three things to do for fun since I didn't bring that much. I can mess with the computer/play video games, watch tv, or explore places. Usually I'm pretty tired so it ends up being sleeping or watching tv. Hopefully after I meet some people I can be doing more things after work.

Little Caesars just opened here today. Justin and I went in to get some $5 hot and ready pizzas. We had to wait in line for a little while because all the emploees are new obviously so it takes them a little while to ring everything up. Also, apparently a lot of people don't understand that $5 pizza is a good deal and that's what most people who goto Little Caesars get. Almost every person that was waiting in line (about 7 or 8 people) got multiple pizzas and ordered them with special things on them so they ended up paying more. I guess to me I don't really care what's on it for $5.

So far it looks like it's going to be a really long summer and fall. I hope it changes soon. Things are going really slow and I'm probably not enjoying them as much as I should be. I guess sometimes I just wish I was back at school and things were back to normal.

If anyone ever wants to come visit you're always welcome to. I live about an hour away from the Mall of America if that's any incentive.

This weekend was pretty uneventful overall. I slept late like I normally did at school and then just sat around for a while. Saturday Justin and I explored a little in town looking at the various parks and shopping places. We ended up just buying some stuff that we still needed at Wal-Mart and a few other places. Actually we probably didn't need any of the stuff we bought, but it was all food type stuff. Then we went to see Mission Impossible 3 at the movie theater that we hadn't been to yet. It's a really nice theater, but is pretty much the same thing as the other one we've been to here. Mission Impossible 3 was also good. Pretty much action through the whole thing. Today I just hung around the apartment being lazy. I also got everything ready for my first day of work tomorrow. I reread all the stuff they sent me to make sure I didn't miss anything really important.

Tomorrow I have my first day of work. I hear it's mostly filling out paper work and then learning about the company and how things work, so it shouldn't be too stressful.

There's a website that has a bunch of information on Rochester called Rochester411.com. Listed under the attractions is Silver Lake. My dad had mentioned that there are supposed to be a lot of geese there. Well I looked it up and there are an estimated 30,000 Canadian geese there in the winter. It sounds pretty crazy, I guess I'll have to wait to see all them at once.

I'm also thinking about buying a bike here since they have a lot of bike trails. I'll have to check out some places this week and see if it's worth it.

Some of you asked me for pictures and I tried e-mailing them but they are too big, so I just uploaded them so you can see them. So if you didn't get the e-mail or you want to see pictures of the apartment, then IM me and ask for the URL.

Well I've made the move and I'm now living in Rochester, MN. I left school April 28th and then my dad and I left for Rochester May 3rd. I ended up taking a bed and the futon, so the Suburban was pretty stuffed since I had some boxes in there too. After we got there and unpacked everything we decided to goto Ikea in Minneapolis. A lot of their furniture is pretty cheap and comes in really small boxes, since it's mostly breakdown furniture. I bought a desk and a small 3 drawer chest to put clothes in. We also bought a table and four chairs for really cheap, only $100. The next day was spent putting all of that together, which pretty much took most of the day. Since then I've just been settling in by making sure everything is put away and getting used to the area.

A good chunk of today was spent getting Internet setup. The cable guy came and turned on the cable around 1:30 PM and I spent about an hour getting it setup for just one computer connected directly to the modem. Justin and I wanted to have a wireless connection though. We were planning on having a router in the den area (since it's the only place that has a cable jack) and then some sort of wireless bridge in each of our rooms so we could hookup multiple computers to each of them. This sounds easy enough but it ended up eating up almost all night. We both bought Linksys access points which claimed that we could do what we wanted to do. We could, but unforunately they don't tell you on the box that it will only work correctly if the router is also Linksys brand. So we had to then go buy a new router after trying to find ways around it for a long time. Even after we got that we had problems, but we FINALLY got it working.

The apartment is pretty much all setup and organized now. It's pretty nice, I think. We may still end up going to a furniture store somewhere and buying a couch, except that we want a really cheap one. If anyone wants to see pictures just IM me and I'll show them to you, since I don't really want to post them here.