Author: Sam Steele

Ok, so Gillian, Jay, and I went to The Break today. They have a bunch of arcade machines, including DDR Extreme, DDR 5th mix, Beatmania 6th mix, Guitar Freaks (wasn’t turned on), and another Beatmania mix.

Gillian and I decided to try out Beatmania while Jay was playing DDR Extreme. We walked up to the newer machine (I forgot the mix), and it had written on it “This is for advanced players! Don’t try to play this if you’re not comfortable with level 7 or higher!” So we avoided that one and went to the Beatmania 6th mix machine.

Beatmania is basically a piano keyboard with 5 notes, with a turntable next to it for “scratching”. You have to press the notes and scratch according to the screen, like DDR, and it’s hard as hell! But… I GOT THE #1 HIGH SCORE ON THE MACHINE!!! Which is sad, because I did horribly. I assume the machine was recently reset, or noone else plays it, or everyone else just sucks too. The machine itself was frustrating, it takes forever to start playing a song, and the high score screen only displayed for a few seconds, so I didn’t manage to get a picture of it. I kept waiting throughout the attraction mode demos, but still no scores 🙁

After that we played with the DDR Extreme and DDR 5th mix machines, it was a lot of fun. Jay kept picking hard songs, and Gillian kept picking easy ones. No more high scores, though. Apparently they have competitions and stuff there, so people a lot better than us have been using those machines. There was actually someone there that was better than Jay! But don’t tell anyone. We’ll pretend it never happened.

Next time, hopefully they’ll have Guitar Freaks hooked up so we can try that one out too!

K, so I haven’t posted in this thing for like a million years.

I got invited to join Orkut, google’s social network thing. I wont spam all of you with emails, so if you actually want to be invited, let me know and I’ll click the magic buttons on the website.. lol.

Also, my financial refund check came, so I can finally pay Capital One, T-Mobile, EZ-Pass, and everyone else I owe money to! yay! And I can pay rent, which is also good.

Finally, my job training for NJIT’s helpdesk started yesterday. We spent about 3 hours learning about the history of the department, the layout of NJIT’s organizational chart (ugh, bad memories of MGMT-390), and the names and positions of some important people that we’ll be quizzed on on Wednesday. I’m still not really feeling the whole phone support thing, I’m much better at doing on-site stuff, but at least it’ll look good on a resume, and I can get some more $$!

Jay and I had some fun terrorizing Scott’s development, and the neighboring development while waiting for scott to come back.

Interesting how one of the best days I’ve had in a while can be ruined by just a few minutes…

First, I finally made it to the class I’ve been oversleeping for for the first time this semester! And guess what? Today was the first class, anyway! Apparently I didn’t miss anything after all!

Next, my psyc. class was cancelled! We got to fill out a survey and earned 1 r-point, and then we went home.

Next, I went to PathMark to use the CoinStar machine, I got $35 from my change jar and used that to buy a lot of food for my roommates, since they’ve been buying while I was broke. I didn’t make it to the bank before they closed, but I can do that tomorrow. I did fill my gas tank for the first time in months, it felt great to say “Fill it regular, please!” and actually have money in my wallet to pay for it!

Then I got home and started thinking this day was too good. So I login to NJIT’s financial aid system to see when the refund check is coming and…. I no longer qualify for aid because I dropped a course and am now considered “part time”. I now owe NJIT $2700ish.

This starts to sink in, and I start writing an email to the financial aid office to see if there’s anything I can do, and I get a call from my mom. Apparently EZ-Pass sent her a bill instead of me, because my car is still registered in her name. For those of you who don’t know, I haven’t been able to pay ez-pass for a month or so, and didn’t have enough for tolls to get to scott’s and back, so I went through the ez-pass lane anyway. “Call Service Center” the display says, I figured whatever, I’ll call them in a few days when I get more money.

So now my mom knows, and she starts complaining about how we have to make my car registered to me, I need to pay ez-pass, “no more surprises”, blah blah blah.

I’m officially broke, $4000 in debt, and unemployed, since my on-campus job would have been Federal Work Study, which I no longer qualify for.

But at least I have a full tank of gas.