Last Friday, I had a runing with some supervisor (aka Jack Ace) from the athletic department. The university has purchased pads that go around the basketball court for advertising purposes, anyway, when I arrived at the game, I went past the ad pads and took up position underneath the basket. The game hadn't even started yet when I hear the aformentioned "ACE" yell, "Excuse me"! Of course I ignore him, pretending not to hear because I know that he's just going to tell me that I can't shoot there. On his way over to me, I just ignore him as he yells to me a couple more times. Finally he arrives and taps me on the shoulder and tells me that I'm not allowed to shoot there.
I say, "Well, why not?"

He says, "Because you could get hurt, or break your camera."

I think, grow a pair of balls and say, "Because I say so" or at least pretend you care about the welfare of the players. I say, "That's a chance I'm willing to take."

He says, "What am I supposed to do if you get hurt?"

I say, "Laugh and say I told you so. Even if I do get hurt, you've mitigated the University's legal resposability by telling me that it's dangerous to take pictures there."

He says, "These pads are here to keep people out."

I say, "No they're not, they for advertising. See all those signs and the phone number to call if you want to place an ad?"

He says, "If I let you shoot there, I have to let everyone shoot there."

I say, "No you don't. Tell them one at a time, or that I am with the university so I get special priviledges."

He tells me, "NO".

I say, "Then I'll publish all crappy pictures and have the athletes talk to you about why they get crappy photos, and why you can't give me good access to the court."

He says "Fine".

That's why he's a Jack Ace. So I shoot the girls game, and the best photo I got was of a girl shooting and her arm was in front of her face. The worst of it is, he won't even know why that photo is ugly, and post it on hiw wall of fame in kineseology.

Anyway, this story has a happy ending. I know both the coaches for the Dinos. Brad, the assistant coach, was my apartment manager in Bowness, and Dan, the Head coach purchased two or three 8x10's from me when he coached in Medicine Hat. As luck would have it, Mike Connelly had become the coach of the pronghorns in Lethbridge, and I knew him from Medicine Hat as well. I asked all the coaches if they cared if I was on the inside of the pads and they all said that they didn't. Mike actually asked that I email him some photos if I got any good ones. So I shot the Men's game from inside the pads, and got good photos.

I went to play floor hockey two nights ago and I still haven't recovered completely. We played 3 on 3 in the church with no goalies. After the first 15 minutes of light playing, I thought that I was going to die. We took a short break, then I knew I wasn't going to die, but just wished that I would. Then after another 30 minutes or so, I stopped longing for death's sweet release and was actually ready to do some hard playing. But by then it was time to go home.

Here I go stating the obvious. The student loan people are BASTARDS. Not just garden variety Bastards, but real Bastards the kind that would rather spit on you than look at you. Capital B Bastards. I think people know the kind I mean.
I got a message on my machine on Friday night pretty late, and called back yesterday evening. Apparently they wanted to get my new address, because a form they sent me got returned to them on Oct.18th (yes over a month ago). It seems that they have been charging me $3 a day since the end of april because I failed to send in my confermation of enrollment. Just to make it clear to everyone, $336 were rolled into the principle of my loan on the 18th of October, and $50 more have been added since then. Now even though the form showing that I have been a full time student this whole time, I'm still screwed out of the $336 which has been added to my loan, and they want the $50 before they will reinstate my fulltime status. So that means $400 for filling out a form late.

Here I go stating the obvious. Waiting until after watching The Lord of the Rings extended edition to do my homework was a bad idea. It resulted in me writing a very bad paper. I can hardly wait until school is over.

On Wednesday I'm going to Winnipeg. You can see how I compare to the rest of Canada here. You have to understand though, my new best time for 50 free is 26.05 so I rank much higher than shows.

Anna and I went to see Bowling for Columbine on Saturday. I just loved it. It was a great documentary about violence in America.

Today Anna purchased the special edition Lord of the Rings. We are watching it right now, even though I have homework due tomorrow. You know, sometimes an English paper just needs to wait. Well Anna is back from talking on the phone, so I'm going back to the show.

Ever since wednesday my stress level has gone way down. I handed in my Africa term paper, I have been getting more sleep and things in general have been great.

It seems to me that not all sleep is equal. That is to say that any old 8 hours of sleep does not equal an other old 8 hours of sleep. The best sleep starts before 12:00 midnight. I have found that going to bed at 1:00 and getting up at 9:00 is not as good as going to bed at 12:00 and getting up at 8:00. What even more interesting is that going to bed at 2:00 or 3:00 and getting up 10, 11 or even 12 hours later is not as good as a good eight hours that start before the stroke of midnight.

I finished my handwriting font yesterday. It's still missing a few of the weird characters and could use fine tuning, but it's a lot better than the first one I made. I might even post it here for the world to see if it ever gets good enough.

Shouting amen didn't work. Taking off my pants did. Direct quote from my prof, "I can clearly see you're nuts!" Just kidding, the class went on without interuption, and now I know a lot more than I ever wanted to know about distributed databases. Strike that, I now have forgotten more than I ever wanted to know about distributed databases. On a better note, I got my Africa term paper done. I layed it out in Indesign. I'm thinking of making it into a pdf. I might also do my resume, as a .pdf as well. I'll have to find a pdf maker for my computer so that I don't have to do it at the school.

A guy I know said that he would burn me a copy of font folio. Apparently it cost like $8000. But you get a crap load of fonts. I'm not really a font guy, but I could use a few nice ones. I wonder if my computer would boot faster if I took some of the crappy fonts off. I mean really I only use Arial and Times New Roman. If I could get rid of all the fonts that suck and have 5 or 10 really good fonts, instead of 2 ok fonts and 20 crappy fonts, as well as have my computer boot faster, I would be a happy kid.

Need Sleepy a little less now than before.

I'm halfway through my 3 hour database class, and this is one of the most boring days of school I have ever had. NEED SLEEPY! NEED SLEEPY!
When will it ever end? In about 10 more minutes I'm going to stand up and shout AMEN! AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!

I've been burning the candle at both ends. Apparently I'm not responsible enough to stay home alone, when Tracie is working nights. I stay up until 2:00 or 3:00am everytime she isn't here. I don't know why. What is worse is that even when she is home, during her night time rotation, I stay up late anyway. My internal clock is set to goto sleep at 2:00-3:00am and to wake up at 7:00 or 8:00am. This has been going on for about 2 weeks or so. I don't know what to do. I'm so tired, and taking a nap only makes it worse.
On another note, as far as work goes, we got 4 or 5 requests but 2 of them are out of town. One is in New York and the other is in Norway! Oh well.
Need Sleepy, Need Sleepy.

Well I'm pretty glad I didn't go kayaking on the weekend. Even if I would have bothered bringing my kayak to Calgary there is no way I would have gone. I did however talk to the guy who gave me the idea to go this morning. He said that he did go canoeing, and that one of the guys got hypothermia, also he lost his canoe for about 2 hours when it dumped and one of the girls that was there was so cold she couldn't swim so he went after her instead of the canoe. It was really interesting to talk to him. I'd write more but class is starting.

Jeff, Mom and Dad came up to visit over the long weekend. The weekend was great, and I had a really good time visiting everybody. Jeff had lots of interesting things to talk about. I would go into it a little more, but he's the only person who ever reads this, so what would be the point? I worked on the hockey pictures I took saturday night, and I took a picture of Ralph Klein's wife getting an honourary degree (doctorate in law) from the University today. I'll bet she ordered it through the internet. King Ralph was there and I got a few pictures of him sitting on the stand. He must have been pretty bored during his wife's speech, because his eyes were closed. Maybe he had stage fright and was imagining the coed's without thier graduation gowns on.

Today was my last day of being free from school, but I must admit that I didn't get a lot done school work wise. I did some work on my stupid database yesterday. It appears that the lab notes that the prof. has put up for SQL loader have bugs in the code, and just by chance I found a debugging site and was able to figure out what was wrong with his code and modify it. I'm behind on my africa readings again, but I'll read a couple of chapters before class tomorrow. I looked at a calander, and I found out that I'm pretty close to a BSC or BA in Geography. I think I only need about 4 or 5 more classes in it. Which is about what I need in Management. So I'm thinking of doing a double degree. Since it may not even mean any more time in school than I'm already going to spend, just a few more classes. I'm going to look into it a little more closely though.

It seems that I had a couple of good rants to write while Jeff was here, but I seem to have forgotten them for now. They'll come back to me, don't you worry your pretty little head.

Here are a few of the kickboxing photos, I didn't scan all of them, and there is no fancy interface for them, but you can just click on the file name and then click back to go back. I don't really have much to say today, altough I might if I am able to make it to the swim meet.

I found this site called googlefight.com where you can type to search queries in and find out which has more results on google. Unfortunately for me, Gary Milner beats Jeff Milner by a few thousands results.

But on the bright side of things, life is good, and school is at least tolerable. I applied for the Faculty of Multimedia the other day, and I've even updated my portfolio. Can life get much better? Oh and one last thing... I think you use the right amount of boldness Gary.

I tried to upload my kickboxing photos, but I forgot the password to the stupid telus site, and they only give you 5 tries to get it right. Like someone will hack a homepage. Or like someone would be able to get the password if even if they had 100 tries. I guess I'll have to phone some dumbass telus phone service guy, and he'll think that I'm not really the owner of the internet connection even though I'm calling from the Milner residence. I'll have to get him to phone the police, because obviously I broke in here to use the phone to get the password to hack some guy's website.

Hello I Kiss You! I am a HaXor! I Rule! SuXor to you!

OH NO! My blog has been hacked! Someone must have had more than 5 tries to get my password right. Damn those blogspot web designers! Don't they care about my security? Don't they know that potentially millions of web surfers want to destroy my sight? Don't they want the internet to be a happy place? Don't they love me anymore?

Now that I am done ranting (or maybe not). I had my last midterm today. What a feeling of relief. Now I only have 3 big ace assignments and a few quizzez to worry about. I am sick of school. I want it to end, and I still have a year left. I have two major problems (not counting being a suicidal procrastinator). They are the fact that I am indifferent to most things and that I just don't care about my apathy. At least if I cared about being apathetic, I might be temped to care about other stuff too. Right now I just want school to end so that I can get a job, pay back my stoopid student loan and start having an adventure.

The way I see it, you really only have time in you life to have 2 really good major adventures before you have to settle down. Living in Argentina was definitely number 1. Now I pretty much only have time for one more. It's too bad really, because that means that Tracie is stuck only getting one, and that one is sitting somewhere between, we've got our tickets and maybe it will happen.

I guess I have had side adventures, but they are different. Like driving to Disneyland a bunch of times. Sure it's fun and a pretty good road trip when you are little, but not letting your brother control the flying elephant isn't exactly a Herculean feat. Or even as exciting as getting yelled at by a bag lady outside a Honolulu McDonalds for trying to horn in on her garbage can. Mmm, McMuffins only slightly used. I guess seeing a Mexican border guard beating the crap out of a Mexican with his baton is pretty cool, especially when your Grandma is stopped for looking slightly Mexican not a minute later. When it comes right down to it, I guess I have had quite a few good adventures.

ps. Do I use too much bold type?

I'm off to Calgary on Saturday, and I must admit - I'm pretty excited. I guess kayaking in the cold was a bad idea to begin with but the weather in Lethbridge has been so nice it's hard to imagine the cold winter that Gary has described in Lethbridge. Anyway the meet is going to be a short one. I am only competing in 2 events. The nice thing is that I do get to miss some school, but really it's Multimedia which I enjoy anyway so it's a mixed blessing.

The fact that I don't have much to write about shows how boring my life really is. I mean I could go on about how my rake sucks and my lawn looks horrible littered with leaves. Perhaps I could ramble on about the wind in Lethbridge - of course that never gets old. But instead perhaps I should just say that life is good.

I do have one thing that's slightly interesting to tell you about. My swimming is coming along nicely. Yesterday we did a set of 75m - 75m - 100m with each 75 or 100 both done in less than 1:35. Well for those of you that are not big into swimming let me just say that doing 8 of those is VERY VERY tiring. I'm happy to say that I was able to complete them.

I downloaded the demo for Tribes 2 on the weekend. I am completely addicted to that game. Anyway I played it all day Saturday, and a couple of rounds Sunday morning. Don't worry though - I decided for my own good to erase it, and hopefully I'll be able to resist downloading it again.

In other news I am going to Calgary for the weekend for a swim meet. The swim team is having a mandatory meeting this Wednesday at 9pm. It kind of ticks me off that they are always having these 9pm meetings. I mean we see each other at practice and I usually don't leave the school until after practice ends at 4:30, so to have to come all the way back at 9 just sort of bugs me. I am excited to have another meet so soon though. I hope Gary takes some good pictures too. Maybe there will be an angle where you can get some Calgary swimmer in with me and then publish the picture under the pretense of that Calgary swimmer, but I'll actually be in the picture too. That'd be sweet.

I went to watch the Muay Thai Kickboxing last night. It was wild. Muay Thai is just like kickboxing except that you are allowed to knee and elbow your opponent. Elbows are padded for the safety of the competitors. I got to go right up to the ring, and take pictures underneath the ropes. When I get them developed tomorrow, I will post a few so that you can see a little of the action.

I always thought that I would see a boxing match before I went to see kickboxing, but I guess that it just didn't work out that way. Some of the fights went all 5 rounds, but some were shorter, like only 1 or 2 rounds. Unfortunately, they had girl fighters, which doesn't seem quite right. Although people only go to see fights, which seems pretty crass in and of itself. A couple of guys got kicked in the head pretty hard.

An intersting thing to note is that when you see a guy get hit and a spray flies off his head, it seems to me that most often, it's not actually sweat flying off but water. In between rounds, they pour water all over the competitors. I don't know if it's to cool them down, lubricate them so the gloves don't stick and tear their skin or what. But it sure does make punches that connect a little more impressive.