The view of this dorm room is great. I am 16 stories up and have a full view of Lake Michigan. It is absolutely stunning.

Classes start Monday, but Loyola has been working hard to get freshmen prepared for college life. There have been many fun things like an outdoor “festival” with games, activities such as the movie Sin City being played on the big screen. I enjoyed that very much.

I went to my first “college party” last night. It was, well, a college party. The cops came by and were like “Enjoy your beer.” I got out of there before I drank too much, mostly because they oversold cups at the door and it was 100 degrees with all the people. There was a much better party next door run by one of the frat houses but the people I was going out managed to stake out a proper location next to the keg for optimal beer access didn’t want to go. Whatever. I enjoyed myself.

I just downloaded the latest episode of The Daily Show (I need to get my computer’s DVR working) and I must admit: I am really impressed by Trent Lott.

Every time they go on the show, Stewart takes the middle road. He doesn’t alienate his guests, but lets them speak their mind while he makes jokes and tends to slip in a bit of his opinion. I think this is exactly what this country needs! Liberals don’t know how to talk to conservatives, and that just seems to piss off conservatives to no end.

Although I doubt Lott will run for President in 08′ (just don’t have the feeling, I think he enjoys the Legislative branch too much and wants a leadership seat in there) he makes compelling, and moderate, arguments. For instance: in the interview they go over how Lott has never really enjoyed how Presidents take so much time away from Washington. But not just Bush, he went on to focus on Bush the first and Clinton and their crazy vacations.

A long time ago I heard a quote, it went something like “I remember the time when the biggest enemy of the Senators was the House and the President, now it is each other.” Partisanship is too damn sharp in this country, and I understand why, but there needs to be more moderate voices. I think the country works best when one party controls the legislative branch and the other controls the executive, with a strong moderate voice in the legislature. It means more checks and balances, and what it lacks in efficiency is made up for what it has in integrity and sound direction.

Its nice to be on the road to School. Or, in the case of my brother, uncle, and father, their summer baseball trip. Finally.

I am sitting in the back seat of my car, going at 45 miles per hour around the Marquette University Interstate 94/43 interchange here in Milwaukee. Scratch that. Already through it. My uncle, who has been reading my blog over the past few weeks and commented about not having to pay for parking, is driving the car. Finally.

I woke up this morning at 5:35, we were suppose to leave at 6. Fat chance of that EVER happening. I went down and had some Frosted Flakes and as I looked out the window I saw that my dad’s old car had a flat tire. Now that wouldn’t be that big of a deal usually, I mean, my Dad is going on this baseball trip. Only we are taking the van, because we have to lug all of my stuff down to Loyola. So of course my mother has to take the car around. We will definitely be missing the 8:00 move-in goal. Not like I care.

The advantage of getting to Loyola early is that I would be able to give the group of guys a long tour of campus. But it all depends on how fast I move in. Lunch should be good, and I wanted to go to a Cubs game all summer.

More soon.

Update: Official Google Talk Page Now Online

Alrighty! Looks like Eoban was right and Google has unofficially launched Google Talk.

To set it up on Trillian Pro get the Jabber Plugin and follow the wonderful instructions found on this page by user Simplex:

OK, here’s how *I* got it working.

Trillian doesn’t like renaming Jabber accounts, so I had to create it with the following information:

username: %username%@gmail.com
password %gmail-password%

Then I had to go into the settings and change the server to talk.google.com — after that, everything worked.

More setup instructions (for other clients) available here.

Update: Not getting the best results via the Trillian Plugin, some error messages:
[20:20] *** Reconnecting to gmail.com, attempt #0...
[20:20] *** Creating connection "nickcatal@gmail.com/Trillian"
[20:20] *** Server supports TLS encryption...
[20:20] *** Negotiating XMPP SSL connection...
[20:20] *** Connection established using EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA (TLSv1/SSLv3)
[20:20] *** Attempting to authenticate using PLAIN
[20:20] *** Authenticated.
[20:20] *** You have successfully connected to Jabber.
[20:20] *** ERROR: iq error 501
[20:20] *** Retrieved user roster from server.
[20:20] *** ERROR: iq error 501
[20:20] *** ERROR: iq error 503 from gmail.com
[20:20] *** ERROR: iq error 503 from gmail.com
[20:20] *** ERROR: iq error 501
[20:21] *** Retrieved user roster from server.
[20:21] *** Retrieved user roster from server.
[20:22] *** Retrieved user roster from server.
[20:24] *** ERROR: message error 503 from eobanb@gmail.com

I was doing a bit of searching on Google about myself, seeing what all is out there. Then it dawned on me. Archive.org has records of my first sites!

Check Out The Remnants of The simSITE, my first experiment in PHP!