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Philosophy: This is going to be a year-long class. It's a survey of world philosophy, a semester of western and a semester of eastern. The reading list, for your pleasure:

Plato's Republic
The Essential Augustine
Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes
Bhagavad Gita
Confucius's Analects
Tao-te Ching

It's going to be hard but totally worthwhile. Oh, and my professor speaks with a *thick* Korean accent so it's going to be very fun trying to understand him. Moreover, my prof likes making fun of people. Let's hope I don't end up in his crosshair too often.

Japanese: Like the first class, hard but worthwhile. The overwhelming majority of students are white, which amused me heavily. My TA session today was conducted entirely in Japanese, which was tough and at times funny. I'm pretty motivated to keep learning this, so the difficulty will be worth it.

History of Western Music: What a freakin' breeze. I'm not even buying the book for this class because it's that crazy easy. All I have to do is show up to class, do nothing outside of it (except attend a couple concerts) and I've got an A.

Plan 2 Economics: This class rocks. It's got a lot to do with the inevitable ties between politics and economics, except that this class doesn't devolve into senseless political debate. The professor described it as his goal to "make you able to hold your own at cocktail parties." Interesting stuff definitely coming.

Government 2: I haven't been to this class yet, but it's going to be largely dull, lame, and generally a weed-out class in a topic (state and local governments) that doesn't mean a damn to me.

So I'm going to stop posting on this little 'saga' because it's entirely too confusing to the unfamiliar, but I will say what happened:

We tracked the location to a payphone inside the state capitol. 25 people were there. One guy answered the phone, used the right passwords, and passed the test. So, the "hey dad" clue is available partially thanks to us.

Click here to get the whole story, or just read the next sentence: ilovebees.com is an alternate reality game being run as a buzz campaign for Halo2.

For what it's worth, it was cool as hell to go to the capitol and wait at a payphone for a call all in the name of a game. Gotta love the wonders that college can work for your life.

As you all know by now, ilovebees.com is a site designed as part of Bungie's Halo 2 teaser. If you check the links page, you get a bunch of random numbers in a funky format. Those numbers are GPS coordinates with times on a 24-hour cycle that all take place on August 24th (a date gotten from previously-decoded messages), and one of the coordinates points to downtown Austin around 4pm. So, my trusty Halo freak roommate Tim Allen (cue manly laughing sound) are headed downtown tomorrow afternoon.

I'll report back if we see/do/hear/get anything cool.

I'm online once again and can be reached through all the usual methods of communication.

As of this post, I'm tearing down my computer to pack it up. It's just about the last thing to go. It's off with me to a last night out on the town here in A-town, and I get to wake up bright and early tomorrow morning to take off for year #2 of college.

So thanks, everyone. All of you SSB kids, all the random Oakridge people I saw over the summer, all the gamers, all the young guys and girls, all the crowd that spent half the summer at Starbucks, you guys rule and I'll be home again before long.

UT boys and girls, see you tomorrow afternoon.