All better?
I think everything is fixed now. What a pain in the ass.
So a big thanks for tossing a brick through my glass window to AlganX from SpyGrup.org. A simple email would've sufficed.
Atlas Shrugged
Katie got me Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as a kind of gag gift for christmas. It's a gag because I've been reading a lot of big novels in succession pretty slowly (I tend to only read before I go to sleep or when I'm out doing something time consuming like waiting for the car to get fixed) and it's a doozy and it was also mentioned in a South Park episode where Officer Barbrady learned to read and then read Atlas Shrugged and vowed never to read ever again. Well I'm a glutton for pain so when I went to Fort Knox, it was the only form of entertainment I took with me. Surely I could read it within the span of two and a half weeks of downtime since I'll have absolutely nothing better to do.
I'm almost halfway done with it and I'm throwing in the towel. In those two and a half weeks I had plenty of downtime and I spent it all reading the book and now I know that it was time utterly wasted. Here's what's wrong with Atlas Shrugged; it's a platform for Ayn Rand's philosophy on economics and little else. The story takes a backseat and stays there the entire time while she bludgeons the reader into submission with her ideas on industrialism and society and money. I didn't even finish the book and I feel like I've read her personal philosophy on life a hundred times over already.
To mark my acceptance that I will never finish Atlas Shrugged, I spoiled the "plot" by reading the wikipedia summary and it turns out I got through the bulk of it within those four hundred pages that I did read. Once I get my bookshelves arranged there will be a special place for Atlas Shrugged, where it can rest in peace with any other book I won't finish ever.
CPL Hubbard
This is what's called a lateral promotion. From Specialist to Corporal. It's almost the limbo between junior enlisted and junior noncommissioned officer. Either way anyone who's not a noncommissioned officer will now call me "corporal" or "corporal Hubbard", instead of just "Hubbard".
I got back from Fort Knox last night just to find out that I leave Tuesday morning for Fort Polk for eight days. I couldn't tell you exactly why I'm going to Fort Polk either but from what I gather it's to set up a computer or two and spend the rest of the time bored or goofing off. Or as goofing off as I can get being the lowest ranking guy stuck with a group of officers.
Katie got me my Xbox 360 and Dead Rising and Gears of War. It's beyond awesome and I haven't even touched Gears of War yet. The new Bayside CD came out sometime recently so I picked that up from Best Buy tonight. I'm still on my first playthrough and I'm not paying a ton of attention to it but it doesn't kick like their last one did. I missed being home.