The Gaytriot's Journal: Good weekend and my new Acer

I started a journal yesterday but didn't finish it since I was hanging out late at work and needed to be getting to school. I detailed my last weekend which was one of the more eventful ones I've had, and it came after a long, boring dry spell. Part of the trouble is not having a whole lot of friends in the area, most of my good friends went away for college. I did too, but that's before I decided to change my major and came back to Colorado for school.

I have one good friend down here who, like me, keeps pretty busy. My best friend, Derek, lives about 3 hours north of here so I visit him regularly, but not often because the trip can be tiring and a little expensive for gas. Nevertheless, him and his roommate were hosting an Olympic party in their college town, having partners sign up to represent countries in the beer Olympics Friday night. Derek had already signed me up to represent Cuba before I even knew I was going, so I had to find a partner. Another good friend of mine was back in town for a few weeks from Iowa, so I recruited him to be the other half of Team Cuba.
It worked out well because his last name is Castro.

I left Thursday night to travel up to Castro's house, taking Friday off of work so I could have a long weekend. We went up to Derek's apartment the next day and learned that we were supposed to be costumed up for our country. Dustin and I were a long way away from our homes, so we had to find some props. We just ended up getting a couple cigars while picking up cases of beer at the liquor store and that was that.

Back at the apartment where the party was just getting started, teams were showing up and pretty soon about 11 or 12 countries were there and the games got started. The three events were beer pong, asshole, and quarters, none of which I played very often. Regardless, Cuba did fairly well against our opponents despite losing every game. I even resorted to playing dirty and outright cheating in quarters, but we were still the first team out of the running.

I went out with my partner Castro to smoke our cigars and talk to a couple good looking girls. It really only made me want to go to a regular college even more.

I spent my first year majoring in music performance playing my trombone at the Boston Conservatory, not exactly a regular college but I still lived in dorms and was surrounded by college aged kids. Now I'm computer engineering at Colorado Tech, where a majority of the student population are older folks, especially in the evenings. I'm on a pretty good path as far as career and making money are concerned, but I would readily trade that for a better social life.

But I digress, as the party wore on more teams were knocked out of the running and people started trickling out, probably going to sleep. Most of the people at the party were music people, predominantly band geeks of some sort. Derek is still majoring in music and most of his friends are from that college. So I get along with most of them just fine, being a former music geek myself, although slowly turning into more of a computer or science geek. Which I guess brings me to my next story.

I just ordered a mini laptop, the Acer Aspire One. I'd had my mind set on a EEEpc for some time after seeing them online and thinking how cool it would be to have a portable computer like that, especially for the price. I ended up ordering the Acer instead for about $390 with shipping. I decided to get this instead of one of the EEEpc's because it looked to be the overall better deal. I was originally looking at the $300 ones, but the tiny 7" screen was very off-putting because you'd have to scroll left and right just to view regular websites. So I bumped up my budget to $400 for one of the newer ones with the larger 8.9" screens before I learned that the new SSD's (16gb) were slow as hell. I looked in the same price range on Newegg and found the Acer with glowing reviews. It had similar specs to the EEEpc but a quicker SSD and it was only $380.
I'll hopefully get it by Friday so I can mess with it and start taking it to school.