friends in the ether

March 8, 1999

Hey, it's been a great break so far. I'm sort of snowed in at our home near Bottineau. Again. It happened during Christmas break as well. But this time I've got stuff I can do to keep me busy. I was up until 3 a.m. last night working on a candisc cycling tour journal to put up on the web. Jesse pressured me to get one up, and I finally did it. It took me until 3 a.m. but it's finally up. You can read about my 1997 candisc tour here if you want.

Today I've been on the computer since I got up. I never realized how many of my journal entries were linking incorrectly. I think I've got that fixed with a little re-organization and a new naming convention for the entry files. It should help avoid a little confustion when I'm editing the files. Not only that, I think I'm going to avoid the temptation of Netscape Composer from now on. It's notepad for me, baby! Yeah! Composer just makes very complex code that's often hard to read.

If you read my entry on the third, you might recall I was a bit depressed and confused. I put a small link saying "tell me," asking people to let me know how the entry made them feel. I didn't really expect any responses, but there are more people out there reading my rambles than I thought, and you were happy to lend some encouragement. I got an email from a man working in the IT field, his name was Tom I believe. Tom gave me a little of something I'm not getting in school. That is, he gave me a little bit of an idea what it might be like to work as a programmer, etc. He also encourages me to finish up my calc, saying it will be easier now than later. I can see how it would be better to finish now, but it's not easy and I tend to complain quite a lot (to the annoyance of my roommate, girlfriend, and family) when I get depressed about calc, etc. Anyway, thanks Tom for the perspective and encouragement. I appreciate it.

Kelli has e-mailed me a few times lately. She tells me my confusion about life is common and she knows it as well. I suppose it is, but it's still a tough thing to deal with, isn't it?

Another surprise message from the ether arrived from a friend of mine from Unalaska, AK. Her name is Andree. We sort of found each other on the net as her uncle was doing a geneology search. We're related in some sort of distant way, I think. Back in high school, when I was still living in Mohall, we started corresponding via e-mail and kept in contact for quite a while. Then we both graduated high school and went off to college. I hadn't heard from her in about a year and a half when, as I was sitting here, ICQ pops up a message saying "Jason, this is Andree. Do you remember me?" Of course I did. We talked for a while and caught up on the last year. I guess she found my graduation announcement and thought she'd try to find my email address via icq.

It won't be long and I'll be up in Winnipeg (assuming there's no huge snowstorm, etc.) enjoying the Collective Soul concert. It's still a week away, but I'm excited about it. I've never been in Winnipeg before.