It is official now, Lance has wone 7 straight Tour de Frances. Watching the last stage was pretty interesting. They have to do 8 laps on the champs de ellyse, which is cobble stone. This makes it very difficult and causes a ton of crashes, but because it was drizzling, the tour officials initiall had cancelled the time bonuses on the part making the players final times when they started on the champs de ellyse their final time. But then it got sunny and in the end they did end up awarding time bonuses, which screwed and American rider Levi Leipheimer who was in the 5th position less than a second ahead of Alexander Vinokourov. Vinokourov ended winning the stage after the 8 laps and got a time bonus pushing him ahead of Levi for the 5th spot. I like vinokourov generally, he has a lot of fight in him, but I felt that Levi got screwed and couldn't even challenge for the time bonus cause he didn't know there was going to be one.

Anyway, I have one more day until my budget project is due. Saturday I had a huge break thorough after must frustration and figured out a more accurate way to calculate the number of employees. I will have to run it by the TAs today to see if it is correct. It still gives me a higher number than what they say is correct but I think they might be rounding incorrectly. Yesterday was pretty rough and it had gotten the best of me for most of the day. But after a nice soak in the tub, I destressed a bit and got a lot done. Hopefully I can push through and get the last bit done and done well for tomorrow.

Well class beckons.
-Jesse

Yesterday was no good and just frustrating. A lot of things that should have been much easier were just a pain in the ass and some things that should have been done are still not. arrrrggghhhh.

Ugh. Republicans also are getting on my nerves too. Not all Republicans, just the ones who shoot their mouth off and sound like morons and/or assholes. There are a couple of people in my program that fall in to this catergory. The more I hear them speak, the more I feel repulsed by them. What comes out of their mouthes always sounds selfserving and greedy. Last year I saw former Bush press secretary Ari Fleisher speak at my school. He made the point that the one thing he would change about how the Republican party presents itself is that they do not show compassion for others. As a Republican, I could not agree more with this statement. I am sure there are some Republicans that are greedy self-serving bastards,but many do care about people who get the short end of the stick. I am just sick of the greedy ones with the loud mouthes being the ones representing our party.

Gotta get to calss,
-Jesse

Day 2 of daily posting. So right now for my Public Budgeting class I am working on a budget for a hypothetical daycare center. (If you would like to see the actual assignment, here it is ). I like it but it is such a pain in the ass. We are working in excel and the budget has to be "flexible" - meaning that you have one page of inputs and the second page, which is the actual budget, cannot contain any numbers on it just refernces to numbers on the inputs sheet. It is very useful but it can cause problems in that one little mistake or bad assumption can throw everything off. This becomes really annoying when the TAs keep telling me that my deficit is still high. So last night, I went through the calculations by hand but I forgot to email the revised excel sheet to myself. So now before I can work on it at school, I have to go back to my apartment to email to myself. It is just annoying.

Today we have a brown bag lunch on the specialization I want to have on my MPA. Some key professors in the State and Local Government Financial Analysis and Management program will come talk to us about it and their classes. Hopefully it will be useful.

Now for some random thoughts:
1. Everyone in Graduate school is married or engaged regardless of their age.
2. I am really obsessed with Billy Talent songs lately, but I don't know if I could handle the whole album. It might be a little too whiney. But I really like the singles. To get a sampling go to the videos page
3. Packing a lunch for yourself is a good way to save money, but it sucks when you haven't gone shopping for any snack foods so you just have to make two sandwiches for yourself instead. I guess I better get on that.

Oh well, I guess that is all for now. (e:Mike) I would be happy to help out in your soap opera if I can. Let me know and good luck finding people. All (e:strip)pers should go and do a part it was fun the last time I did it.

Take care,
-Jesse

Hello all,
I guess you know that the world is moving fast for you when in three consecutive posts you are living in three different cities, are in two different schools and have one sexy new user pic.

I am currently 2.5 hours down the thruway in syracuse at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs . My masters program started on tuesday. I am working on my MPA (masters of public administration - think MBA but for government/nonprofits) with a specialization in State and Local Government Financial Analysis and Management. It is a one year program with summer sessions at the beginning and end of the program. Right now I am in a one credit colloquim that will last a week on ethics and public administration. If you want to see what I am doing at any given time this week, here is a link to the sylabus . It is also a get to know one another type course. After this, I have a 3week/3credit course on public budgeting and then another 3 week/3credit course on public administration and democracy.

So far, the course has kind of sucked. Well, let me revise that, the content that we have done is pretty interesting and taught well. Today we watched a really good documentary called "Grandfathers and Revolutions" it is about the grandson of the prime minister of hungary interviewing his grandfather on why he called Soviet troops in to crush a rebellion and we discussed the abu grad prison abuses and the organizational failures that caused them. The problem with it is that it is all get-to-know you stuff, and I hate that especially with such a large group (there are 134 in my program). And there are all these afterhours get to know you things, that I absolutely can't stand because I hate having to engage in forced small talk. It wears me out and I feel awkward the entire time. As a result, I have skipped all of the optional interactions, which is bad because when I go to class, I really don't talk to anyone. I should probably just suck it up and deal with it but I hate it so. I just want public budgeting to start, both because I want to see what it is like and to get through this bs. Hopefully after this week it will get better. It is ranked the best program in the country for what I want to do and people keep saying how intense it is. I just want to get started and get into it.

On to other annoyances. So, I moved most of my stuff to my apartment on friday with (e:Maureen) (thanks again for your help). And drove back the same day. I was going to move for good on monday when my dad got back from work. My dad called me tuesday night to tell me that work was not sending him back to buffalo but to indianapolis and chicago (my dad is a truck driver for Yellow - the orange trucks that say "Yellow" on them). So when I call my mother the next morning to tell her this, she kinda freaks out because she hates driving on the Thruway. She asks if she can call me back in a minute to collect her thoughts. When she calls me back, she asks if I can be ready in a half hour. I say, no way, because I have a bunch of supplies I still have to buy - including a long coaxle cable for my tv, a microwave, etc. In addition, on Tuesday morning I have to hand in to Syracuse a resume and memo on where I would like to work after I gradute. I had finished the resume but had not started on the memo and I do not have a printer at school (I use free university printing but I couldn't use it before class). She says that Rich, her ex boyfriend (but who is still close with my sisters and I) can drive but he has a family event that he can only get to if we leave immediately. I flip out and get angry, but she insists that she can't drive on the thruway. She says she can come out here in a week with the rest of the stuff I need when her friend can drive. I get annoyed and hang up the phone and rush to get anywhere near ready. Three hours later (I did not speak to my mom for the first hour of the ride), I am in Syracuse without many things that I need.

This leads to my second set of annoyances, once I am here, there is nothing to do. I can't hook up my tv to cable, the internet won't work until I install university privided anti-virus. Ugh. I sucked knowing that my computer was so close to high-speed internet but so far away.

I also stole my father's printer in order to print my resume and memo once they were done. But in order to use it, I had to use my dial up to download the driver at an incredibly slow rate.

My computer annoyances do not end there. When I got to school I bought the windows xp upgrade for my laptop (it is moody and still uses windows '98). At school, I was able to get the academic price. This would also allow me to use the wireless card I had previously purcased but would not work on windows '98. Well, my moody computer decided that my cd-rom drive does not want to work (It does this unfortunatly pretty regularly). As a result, I have a $99 windows upgrade I can't use until my computer decides to led my cd drive work. (If anyone has any ideas as to how to upgrade without the CD and without the internet because I cannot install the anti-virus program to get on the internet without my cd drive, I would be open to any advice).

ALso, the shuttle to campus does not run on weekends.

Well, I guess that is enough for the negativity. I will switch to a more pleasant topic - I went to a Billy Corgan concert :-) It was saturday night in Toronto. I drove up by mysefl in my cousin's car. I love driving on the QEW because those canadians make me look like a good driver. The openers were pretty good. The first band was The Crimea (e:Jill) , I think you might like them. The next band I really liked - Doris Henson The lead singer really looks like matt lillard They were really good and I would have bought their cd if they weren't charging $20 canadian. They even had a tromboner who looked incredibly out of place compared to the rest of the hipster looking band.

So, I originally had reserved balcony seats because that is all what was left when I bought them, but I was able to sneak out on the floor, which was much better because I was much close and seeing over people on the floor is nver a problem for me. The concert was at the Carlu which is on Younge street, but the stupid part about the venue is that it is above a mall-type building and you can only get to the venue by elevator, which caused much waiting on the way up and down.

On to BC. I will start out by saying that I will see every billy corgan concert I can for the rest of my life no matter how bad the album he puts out are. The latest album is a tribute to his 80s new wave heroes. As a result, the band all came out in black military-like over coats with big boots etc. They looked like they came out of the 80s new wave scene. When the pumpkins put out electronicish records, at least when they played live, they use guitars , bass and a regular drum kit making electronic songs more rock live.This was not the case at this concert. Billy was the only one on stage with a guitar. There was no bass. The drums were electronic, and the other two band members were using key boards. As a result, there was no rocking. The songs sounded how they sounded on the album - electronic and boring.

The good parts of the show were as follows: 1) the female in the band is very attractive even though she acted a bit too much like machine/billy's puppet when she was singing back up, 2) he did a tease of the pumpkins classis "Today" during one on the encores, 3) he made fun of live 8 (the concert was on the same day in barrie) by saying he just got back from live 8 where he preformed a rap medley with DMX and the Barenaked ladies, 4) the backgroud of the stage was really cool. It was one large white board that lit with computer graphics kind of like Windows media player visualitation, but better and that went with the songs really well.

Overall, it was BC and how can I ever pass up any taste of the pumpkins I can get.

Well this post has got somewhat out of hand. I would like to end by apologizing to my friends in the -lo for not getting to say goodbye. I really had a great time hanging out this sumemr and wish I could have been in Buffalo longer. If you ever want to take the 2.5 hour ride down the thruway to visit you are more than welcome to.

Hope all is well with all of you.
Take care of yourself and one another.

-Jesse

Lately, I have been obsessed with the Tour de France. Watching it is now part of my nightly routine and I haven't missed more than 3 stages. (I do kind of cheat because I watch the 3 hour nightly shortened replay of the tour rather than watching the entire thing live in the morning). I was surprised at how exciting it is. There is so much strategy involved and whether you work with your opponents or not. I am quite impressed. Unfortunately, there are only 5 days left. But I guess it will be good for me to not waste that much time doing essentially nothing each night.

I am also going to try and start posting for a little each morning. I arrive on campus each day a half hour before my class starts. I usually use this time to check my email, read (e:strip) etc. But now I will try posting each day too so I can be a bit more regular in my entries rather than going weeks at a time without posting anything.

Well that is all for now. Got to get to class.

-Jesse