A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
I needed a break last week. For some reason I just didn't want to do ANY typing or ranting, or even sharing myself. Last week was an introverted and boring week. But this week is different, most definitely.
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So my job search is really becoming repetitious, and not in a god way Damned the alleged economic crisis. I do have two new eds that I think should be promising, Petsmart and Bed Bath ad Beyond thanks to someone I know. The Bed Bath and beyond will NOT be floor work if I get it, it will be night stocking work, so be quiet about me selling perfume and crap, lol. OH! And the US Census 2010 is also hiring, so I've got to find a time to get an interview there too.
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TechMCC is turning out to be quite a strange little dangle off of my life. More about what happened at the last meeting in the Daily Life section, but just thank god that next week is the Movie Night, where I don't need to do any planning or whatever. Demolition Man FTW.
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What else do I usually say here? College is exactly the same as it's been so far, and my home life is pretty simple, so yeah, that should be it.


-- Music Release --
I know I haven't done this in a WHILE, but I've had a few ideas after listening to so many different tracks in my car on the way to and from college, so I MAY end up doign a new mash-up or two over the course of the month, so if you were interested in that, keep a lookout here for if and when the arrive.

Daily Life:
So let me talk about TechMCC, because really not much else is happening that I can talk about besides what goes on there. I mean my job search is getting redundant and predictable (Go to the place, get application, fill out, return, call back 3 days later to have them say sorry, do the same a week later to have them say sorry again). So are my college courses, well, about as redundant as they can be with me still learning something every day. So yeah, the club is the most interesting thing for me to talk about because I don't go out much, though I should mention the past 6 days or so have been absolute HEAVEN for me. Because with my sister at Monmouth University, my parents took a vacation down to Myrtle Beach and the new house. So I was left alone for 5 days to tend to the pets and do whatever. I love it whenever I can just walk around nude through the house and nobody's there to do anything about it, lol. But that was great, so now back to techmcc...

So this week was supposed to be two things, the Inter-promotional game tournament between TechMCC and the Anime Club, which would be a dollar entry fee, a third of which will be split evenly between the prize pool and the two clubs, in a neutral game which neither club had an advantage in. This was all setup very nicely, and then in the 2 days before the meeting, the entire thing fell apart ad there was rumors of it being cancelled. Well, after having it fly apart at the seams, me and the event organizer for Anime Club decided at the meeting to postpone it for 2 weeks, so now basically TechMCC was at the Anime Club meeting for no reason other than to play video games for nothing. Which was kind of useless, BUT THEN, that was only half of what happened.

Also, that day was the day that me and Gordon decided to go hang up fliers around campus for the club, and we'd already gotten the design and details approved, and we went to make copies, which was fun. Gordon told me that we'd be printing and copying them in the office of our supervisor because he had a color copier. Turns out, not true. What he had was colored paper and a black and white copier. Now. That was ONE problem, the next thing that happened was how after I spent a LOT of care in making the design, all the sudden the advisor says that the border I made to attract attention looked bad, and on THAT ALONE, he cut off the border and started making copies. Basically no input from me, and for no other reason, he changes the ART MAJOR'S design. How much sense does that make?

BUT THAT'S NOT THE END. So the next half hour after that, Me, Gordon, and two other club members are going around campus stapling them up, which was no problem, and we did a good enough job of it that we ran out just as we each finished our assigned buildings. So fast forward a DAY. I receive an call from Gordon telling me that ALL of the fliers we'd put up have been torn down. That gets me confused and pissed at the same time, I ask why. "Someone made a complaint about one of the things on it and notified the staff. The staff then too them down." So they didn't even BOTHER to contact me, or even let me know what was going on, they just went "Oh! You're complaining about the posters? Well we can't have that happen, let's tear them all down!" I'm going to go in on Tuesday and find something to complain about with EVERY POSTER PUT UP IN THE COLLEGE.

I eventually learned that what was complained about was a line I had on the flier which simply said. "Learn how to unlock your media and to make money on craigslist by selling old things." This was taken as "We the Technology Club of Middlesex County College, support the practice of PIRACY and will INSTRUCT you how to pirate media from companies!". Which is crap, but I can see the leap they made, and though it's not a small pond or an Evil Knievel record, it's a fair jump. So NOW I have to change the design AGAIN, and then next meeting we will make copies AGAIN, and put them all up, AGAIN. God damnit I hate administration. This is why I believe in small government EVERYWHERE, at college, the Federal gov't, etc...

And that was my TechMCC Hell over the past few days...

Juggle This:
So let me talk about my new best pal Jacob. Youtube user The Rising Iris. I go to college with him and we've had a lot of the same classes before, all for engineering. Now this semester he's in my Strength And Materials Testing class, and that meets three days, and I never have a class after them for at least a few hours, and neither does he. Now, you're wondering what this has to do with juggling, well, he's my new apprentice. I say new, though he did learn to do it a while ago, actually about a half a year ago at least, but recently he's become as addicted to it as I am, and has asked me to coach him and teach him some new tricks every time after that class. Being a juggler, this is one of the most wonderful things you can ask for, it to have someone who is absolutely hooked and looking to you as a mentor, because you have the opportunity to not only watch him progress and reflect on how you progressed when you were learning, but you can also steer him in the right direction so that if he keeps going long enough, he will become better than you. That and it's just great to watch someone and know they're having a blast.

So three weeks ago, I sold him my set of 6 fo-leather penguin balls that I had never used, and every day now he brings at least 4 of them to practice with, and over the course of those three weeks, I have taught him a 3 ball half shower, reverse cascade, tennis, 423, 1up 360, 2up 360, 1up 180, 1 up 2 up, and the 4 ball fountain (synch and asynch). I've taught him about how siteswap works and he seems to have a basic grasp of it, so I can tell him a random siteswap and he'll be able to know if it's valid or not and with how many objects. Oh, and he's also gotten a 5 ball flash on camera, so go him.

He's progressing really well, and one of the things I'm, I guess proud of the most, is that he is getting good enough now to recognize and see where his mistakes are. He doesn't need me to tell him that he's throwing his 4 ball throws in front of him too much and not to the same height, he says it before I do. Of course, seeing the problem and fixing it are two entirely different things, but then again, he is just learning and it's good to go one step at a time.

But what I'm more impressed by is not how many tricks he knows right now, because tricks are fairly easy with balls, but it's that he's also learned to juggle rings and clubs even. As you can see in the video above, his 3 club record is 13 catches, 1 past a double qualify! And that was only about 30 minutes after he first touched a set of clubs. Needless to say, I was impressed. He's also been practicing with my rings almost as much as he has with balls. On Thursday (the last day I saw him practice) I saw he was only a few practice sessions away from qualifying 4 rings. This was again, his first time ever trying 4 rings, so even though the best I saw him do was 6 catches, it still was really good. I let him borrow 4 of my rings to practice over the weekend, and we'll see what happens on Tuesday when he shows me again.

But to end with, let me tell you what I'm most excited about in terms of him and his juggling. It's his enthusiasm. He's pretty well obsessed with it, and when I told him abotu Juggle This (the Pratt Institute convention) coming up in about a month and a half, he said he's right on board and will go with me.He's also proposed to me the idea of doing a joint juggling video like what me and Joseph Jaeger did with Two Guys From Jersey, the only difference being, that he's not just proposing a joint JUGGLING video, but a joint juggling and longboarding video. He's also a really good longboard rider already, and so we've been coming up with ideas as to what I could do creatively juggling in a skatepark, and what he could do combining longboarding with juggling. So far, we've come up with a LOT of good ideas, and it looks like we're going to start shooting the video in summer.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

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Listen Up!
Sorry about the late/no post this week. I'm busy looking for a job because that last one I was talking about, they said they were going to keep the job internal, and when I talked to them about it, they were pretty deadset about it, so now I'm off to look elsewhere for money....

HOWEVER! I have finished and uploaded my latest video! And you can check it out right now, it's already proven to be tied with No Sleeves Attached as the highest rated of the series, and so far is doing very well in terms of comments and views, so go ahead and check it out!

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Number 17! And talk about a technical improvement! 5 ring 97531, 3up 360, 18 catches of flat front reverse! Not to mention the 8 ring flash and 7 ring qualify! OH! And don't forget the new box tricks including the super-stack collapse! What about the 7 ball half shower? Or the 3 club shoulder pads?! Bottom line, I have never been better than I am right now.

I've been told by a few jugglers already that it's the most well edited video I've made, and I'll tend to agree with them, because after watching it a ton of times, I noticed there's something in general about the video that I can't quite nail down. Something that makes it feel different than the others, and I'm guessing it'll make it fairly special. We'll see when you reply. Oh, and PLEASE REPLY. Leave a comment no matter what you think. If you think it's the best video ever, Say So! Same goes for if you think it's the worst video ever made by human hands! I've got thick skin, and I love to hear what people ACTUALLY think as opposed to people just being nice.

It still blows my mind to think that I'm the #12 most popular juggler of 2008...


Hi Res Download: Link
Wallpaper: Link
Ad Image: Link
ANIMATED: Link

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I swear I'll make up for this next week, I've just been having the flu or something, plus work searching, plus college, plus etc = too damned tired to care about a blog post right now.
A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Listen Up!
The more I feel like ranting about political stuff. But I realize that it's really hard to do that without pissing a FUCKLOAD of people off, so I won't do that until I grow an even bigger set of balls. Granted, I know I've got some nads like you wouldn't believe (just look at JoJ when I started), but they're not that big to publicly talk politics yet.
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So I just had my interview today with the Circuitboard Manufacturer today. It wasn't so much an interview as the manager introducing me around and showing me the process and what parts EXACTLY I would be designing. What the company does is make multi-layered circuit-boards. This is 2 or more circuitboards that are sandwiched together to make a more compact and efficient circuitboard. What I would be doing is designing the bridges between the 2 boards. The bridges are bacically thinner sheets of material with copper that goes THROUGH the material, instead of just staying on the surface like on a normal board, and the copper would be lined up with areas or the 2 boards being put together that it would make an electrical connection between the boards. It's all very technical how it works, but it's a really simple part in terms of how it works and how it will be designed. I mean, from what I saw today, it seems as though he's already hired me!
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College is college. I have found a good use for my Applications In Business class (the most useless class ever), it gives me access to a T1 connection and a computer for about 4 hours, so that I can update my website and blog. Because all the assignments I finish within the first 10 minutes of the class, and ace all the tests in 1/4 the time it takes for the rest of the class. As for my other classes, it seems my art professors really like canceling class or not doing much work. Each one of my art classes so far has had at least one canceled class. Interesting to say the least. Otherwise things are moving smoothly.
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NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO COMING! MY NEXT [JUGGLING] SERIES VIDEO IS FINALLY READY TO GO! It's going to be called "Slow Freeze" and I'll upload the trailer on the 12th and the video on the 15th. I'm a little bit "eh" about what I think of this video. I mean the tricks I manage in this video I have absolutely NO idea how I did them, and the editing is good, but just the overall feeling of the video seems weird. Maybe this is a good thing? I'll email a few of my big juggler friends and get what they think.
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Mobius-X's redesign is goin pretty smoothly behind the scenes, I'm almost halfway done with the new skin, and we've pretty much decided on the new logo. We've also go the youtube channel off to a FLYING start, and we've got a few new members on the boards too. Things are lookin up for MX.
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Tech.MCC, Damnit I wish I had more time to think about this damn thing. I am president after all, but strangely, it's not really that high on my list of priorities. HOWEVER! Meetings are doing fairly well, with about a dozen members showing up for the first two meetings, and us getting a LOT of stuff planned out for future meetings and official business with the college. We'll see what happens there...
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Daily Life:
So, let me think of a good story to tell from the past week. There really hasn't been much in terms of stories to tell for the past couple months, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I only want to tell really good stories? I have no idea...
Well I guess I'll go through my day on Monday, because it was a pretty long day.

So I have to get up at around 9AM< because I've got a BIG interview today, and I need to get ready for it. Now, the main thing I have to do is shower and get myself "Presentable", which is something I hate doing, and only kind-of understand the point of, but I won't get into that. Bottom line is that I need to take a long shower and completely wash-cloth myself off. Now, if theres ONE THING I HATE besides mowing the lawn, it's taking a shower in the morning. The earlier, the worse. Because you've just woke up from your nice warm bed, moved into a room that is 9 times out of ten colder than the room you were just in, have to deal with the fact that the water temperature is NEVER comfortable, and then deal with the coldness of jumping out of the hot shower (because there's no such thing as "warm" in the morning except for the bed you were laying in). It just SUCKS, end of discussion. I'd rather stand outside naked in 40 degree weather than take a morning shower!

But so I've taken my shower, gotten my flash drive and laptop with directions, and headed off to rt 287. Only to realize as soon as I parked at the facility that it's 10:55, and my interview is at 11:00, and I've forgotten the hard copies of the AutoCAD examples I spent an hour fussing with to print out last night! GAHHHH!!!! Turns out I didn't need them at all, because he didn't even really care to look at any of the work I'd done, plus I didn't use a plotter to print out the examples, so they were muddy looking and not sharp at all. So he explains to me exactly what my job will be and then tours me through the manufacturing process as if he'd already hired me! Wow things are going good! So I then am shown exactly the part that I would be designing and drawing out, and explained what it is and what it does, and then the interview was pretty much over. It took about an hour, and I was now free to decide whether I should head to Middlesex County College to work on a Phtoto 2 project that day or whether I should wait until tomorrow to do it. I decided to head home because I was starving and hadn't eaten anything yet. I could do the project tomorrow.

So after an hour of being home, I get a message from Logokas (the current co-runner of Mobius-X, myself being the other one), and we start going through making a new logo for MX, and over about 2 hours of constant inspiration, collaboration, and going back and forth checking how each design looks on the website, we decided on the ultimate redesign, and now all I have to do is finish the skin design and upload it all to MX. Sounds pretty dull, but collaborating with another artist over something is almost as good if not better than hanging out with another juggler of equal skill level. Just constantly bouncing ideas and designs off of each other and working towards a common goal is one of the most productive feelings you can have, because it IS productive as hell. Either way, just know that collaborating with another artist on a design is just as high on my list of things I love to do as juggling by myself. That's how awesome it is.

So now that that's done, it's time to head to the most useless class ever, Applications In Business. Before I leave home though, after working on a website for hours prior, I get a GREAT idea for MY website, and that's to make a new page for just my juggling video series where it's got all the links to every video and everything related in a nice looking easy page. So I pile all the original hi-res files of my old videos onto my flash drive and head out to class. When I'm in class, I upload all the files onto my website, and then start designing the page around the files. It takes me the whole time, but I was able to participate in the class and do whatever she needed, because all we were doing was learning how to make a font bold and crap in MS Word. Wonderful. So I finish the web page and put it up, and then it's time to head back home again.

Now, I get home at around 9:30 I think? Which was midway through the new episode of Heroes! Luckily, my mom got caught up in a phone conversation about 209 minutes ago, and had paused the tv, so she only saw the first ten minutes. She finishes her conversation and we play it from the beginning. Now, I'm not going to talk about this new season of Heroes yet, because this is a long story as is, so that may come in next weeks post. But we get through the first half hour, and then all of the sudden, I see something on the DVD, it's stopped recording for some reason! So I stop the playing, go to live, and hit the record button. Somehow, this completely fucks up the operating system of the DVD, and now it's frozen and I have to go over and hard reset the box, my mom yelling at me to fix it the entire time! It takes a good ten minutes and 3 tries before I finally get it back working again. Ten minutes of constant frustrated groans from both me and mom, and hopeful wishes that all we missed were commercials and 5 minutes of the show. Unfortunately not the case, we missed a good ten minutes. "Well, that sucked", I said as I walked back upstairs to watch it on NBC.com...

Juggle This:
So some of the tricks I've been working on recently are really pretty boring. I think that after I did a 97531 with rings, I pretty much ran out of ideas and inspiration. Now I'm not practicing many new moves, but I am working on solidifying a lot of my lower number stuff. However, my 7 object patterns are solidifying like you absolutely would not BELIEVE! Just today, during my practice session, I got 16 catches of 7 rings and around 30+ catches of 7 balls! It's absolutely the most amazing thing that I've ever seen. I'm just sitting there, having warmed up and already doing a few runs of 6 rings to warm up, and the third or so attempt of 7 rings, I can see and understand the pattern PERFECTLY and CLEARLY. And I end up just watching this 7 ring pattern like I was watching a 3 ball cascade! But what's even better was how 7 balls looked. My god, I was CORRECTING ERRORS IN THE PATTERN AND CONTINUING! That's how well I was understanding the pattern, was that I was in TOTAL CONTROL of it! I guess unless you've gone through and done 7 balls you will have a tough time understanding, but I know a lot of better jugglers than me read my blog, so they should know the feeling and wonder I'm trying to communicate.

But besides all that, my next video. I'll be releasing the actual video with next week's blog post. SO I've just finished sending it out to a few of my closest juggling friends, and got their feedback on the finished video, and really I was hoping for a lot more negative criticisms, and I did ask them to be a bit harsh, but ALL of them were blown away by the video. I can see why after watching it having read their comments, because really these ARE tricks that could get me a medal in the WJF Intermediates comp if I could pull them off first time, and definitely the editing is great. I was really hoping to get comments about the FEEL of the video, because after watching it a lot, I could sense something different about the complete video that wasn't there in any of my others, and I couldn't nail down what it was for all I was worth. I'm not sure whether it's going to make it the best video yet, or whether it will detract from it, but we'll find out next week! Until then, the trailer for it will be up on Thursday.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Listen Up!
Well, once again it's Monday. Time to update you on everything. Let's start with Tech.MCC, because it's the most complicated thing by far. I was able to get the GPS over with from last semesters contest (remind me never to do that again because it was such a hassle for so little of an effect). But what I was REALLY happy with, was about how we finally got down to actually taking apart a monitor and building the digital projector that we decided upon last semester. Of course, he got the wrong kind of projector for it to work, so we have to get him to find someone willing to trade his front-lit reflective projector with a backlit projector. We'll see what happens, but at least we were about to take apart the LCD screen we needed without a hitch. I was able to get video of the entire process, and should have it up on techmcc.com as soon as Gordon gets it setup for me. Speaking of Gordon, he showed up and basically we had a massive thing with all the members where we figured out what we wanted to do this semester and how Gordon is now in charge of the off-campus meetings and events. There's a whole lot more that I don't have the typing space to cover, but let me say it was an awesome meeting and we got a LOT covered.
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Now, let's move on to my classes. Good god is my Computer Applications in Business course crap. Today we learned how to create a file in word, save it, and email it to the professor, and then we learned something completely irrelevant, the history and origin of the internet. Wow is that useful in business. As for my other courses, well, 2d Design is looking more like middle school arts and crafts class than anything else, but I'm cool with that, because I am experimenting with 2d Design physically again, instead of all in Photoshop, and it is a good artistic path for me to go down. My Photography class was canceled due to snow, and my Strength Of Materials class couldn't be more awesome. Bottom line, things are going as smooth as a milkshake.
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Where am I getting money right now? That's the big question, and the one that doesn't have an easy answer at ALL. Basically, every job I've looked at is not hiring because of the alleged economy (I say alleged because I think you have to always just ignore the economy and spend. Because SPENDING STIMULATES THE ECONOMY AND KEEPS IT GOING! More of that rant later). So I've got a few alternative options, Gordon is showing all the members of Tech.MCC sometime how to setup an anti-virus computer clean-up service that each of us can run by ourselves and make money with. This will be great because all I have to do is run a few programs and defrag a drive, and it'll net me about 40 bucks a pop if all goes well. Another option I've got is one I'm REALLY trying to hunt down, and that's the job my professor is looking for in Materials. He''s looking for an AutoCAD person with a background in electronics, as I explained last week, and I've gone past the resume stage and am looking to receive an application sometime this week. Bottom line, I may be down, but by no means am I out.
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MY NEXT JUGGLING VIDEO WILL BE OUT WITHIN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS! I just wanted to say that, because I've been putting quite a bit of work into it over the past week or two, and it's almost ready to go. just need to finish up a few things in editing it, save it, promote it, and then upload it.

Juggle This:
So anyone that knows my history, or even just watches my main video series, knows that I love half showers. Half showers with balls are absolutely one of my favorite tricks and I do them with any number I can flash. Right now I'm thinking about doing an 8 ball half shower flash, because I have flashed 8 balls (and rings), and it's the next easiest trick. But before I go that far, I want to qualify a 7 ball half-shower. My most recent record as of today is 12 catches, and I found something very interesting that I want to share.

With higher numbers like 6 and 7, I don't like to go from a basic pattern and transition into the half shower, just because it takes so long, and I can only run 6 and up for a short time anyways, so I always try to cold start the half shower. This has been a bit of a challenge, because the way I like to do half showers, is in a timing rhythm I like to call "Quarter Sync". It's a timing that goes something like this. RL--RL--RL--RL Basically, very close to being synchronous, but with the hands staggered by about a quarter of a beat. I find it works WONDERS with the half shower pattern, but the hard part about this timing, is getting into the rhythm. Until today.

I discovered, and I'll be using 5 balls as the example, that if you start with a sync set of 6x4, then make the next set of throws in the regular pattern of 6x4x, then the timing is perfect that all you do is throw the last ball, and when that first 4 comes down, it's setup perfectly for quarter-sync. Don't ask me how it works, all you need to know is that is you, and I'm using 7 as the example now, throw this sequence, [8x6][8x6x][8x6x], you will be setup absolutely perfectly for the half shower. My previous record before today was 7, just a flash, but then I found this method and my record is now 2 short of a qualify.

(Sorry about the short post this week, I really couldn't think of any stories to tell or rants to rant about, so next week I'll have something good for you guys to read. For now, you've got a few extra minutes, go enjoy a sandwich!)

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150