Putnam

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Shooting Reeder

I had a very strange day yesterday.  I was asked by a friend to use my [lack of] photography skills to shoot some photos of her for a campaign.  I told her I had no idea what I was doing, that I'd never taken pictures of people before.  I was scared to death.  After the first few shots, I got a little more relaxed and just tried to have fun with it.  It also helped a lot that Erin is a very pretty girl and did a great job with her poses and looking natural.  Here are some of my favorites:

Thanks for being such a great model, Erin!  It got me pretty excited about photography again; I just wish I had more time to practice.  Summer (the season), I need you now!

Peace.

PS - I got an email from Blizzard last night asking me to send my thesis!  I was very excited about this, and I know YOU are too!

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Such Great Scooters

Oh the many crazy things I do for this blog.  I've drawn stick figures in class, I've walked around USU campus holding a 44 oz. coke mug (that I don't use anymore) in front of me recording its journey across campus, I've hooked my brain up electronically to my computer to extract a recording of my strange dream, and I've even broken through ice and stood in a frozen lake to take a picture for a girl.  "What will he do next?" you're all wondering.  It's your lucky night.  

I recorded a song today. This is the first time I've ever put anything I've actually recorded on here.  It's a cover and is extremely serious, so please, no laughing.  See if you can guess the song covered.  Sorry, this one's so easy that I'm not offering any rewards, such as dinner, for guessing the original song and artist...unless, of course, I like you.  

Since I couldn't figure out how to put a solid mp3 on here, I decided to add it to a video clip.  Once again, I busted out the dusty photographic memory, recorded myself (from my own perspective) driving around the block on my scooter, hooked my brain up via bluetooth and extracted the footage.  It was dark, so it's kind of hard to see.  Given that it's still winter, it was also extremely cold and I had on a light jacket and no gloves.  I reiterate: the things I do for this blog.  Hope you enjoy it! 

Peace.  

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Jason's Needs

I'm sitting here this morning [thoroughly] enjoying my breakfast consisting of All Bran cereal, a [delicious] braeburn apple and a glass of orange-guava juice, [effortlessly] wasting my time on Facebook (FB here after) before I [dreadfully] go to campus for the day.  (Please note that I would not be eating this crap at all were it not for my hot personal trainer that would kick my A if I didn't...)  On FB, I saw a note of one of my "friends" and I thought it would be kind of funny to try it here.  I don't apologize to those of you who [systematically] hate these little games.  In fact, I don't apologize for anything that I've done to offend you.  Eat it.

Here's the game.  Google the phrase (including the quotes) "[your first name] needs" and write down the first 10 results.  It's surprising how much these sound [exactly] like me.

1. Jason needs a pismo. (I have no idea what that is)
2. Jason needs to SHUT UP.  (Indeed)
3. Jason needs to diet because he has become too fat.  Although he admits that his tummy sticks out a bit, he doesn't agree that he has become too fat.
4. Jason needs a toilet fast.  (Ha X 6!)
5. Jason needs a bandaid.
6. Jason needs a ring.  Jason finds a ring and proposes. (Never)
7. Jason needs to put on his shirt, overalls, shoes and socks....Understand that Jason needs to carry his pitchfork and he is off for a fun-filled evening, full of excitement and maybe a few screams.
8. Jason needs a helmet.
9. Jason needs a good slapping.
10. Jason needs your micro-cash.

Wow, that was a good time.  

Peace.

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Resplendent Sunrise and Blissful Waves

Some of you may be asking why my blog is entitled thus.  This is a simple question to answer, and I believe a story goes along with it.  Some years ago I had a roommate that had a piano.  You know, one of those Clavinova type pianos on which you can record songs in MIDI format.  It felt just like playing a nice grand piano, sounded great, and it had the option to record up to 12 tracks on the same song and various MIDI instruments such as drum sets, ocarinas and mandolins.  A few posts ago (7, for those keeping track) I wrote about some things that I do when I feel defeated.  This was not an exhaustive list as I forgot to add my favorite self-defeat-remedy to the list.  This would be music: playing the guitar, piano, and back in the days of the Clavinova, writing music on the piano.  

For whatever reason, I would sit down at the Clavi, put on the headphones, push record and just play.  The songs I came up with would generally reflect the emotions I was feeling at that moment: silly, sad, happy, etc.  Soon I had recorded enough songs to compile an album, entitled "Your Face and the World Within." At the time, my artist name was JMoney Cricket and his One Man Band.  Though the artist name was pretty lame, I had quite the cover art and song titles to match my strangeness:

Of course, this isn't the full cover art.  Just imagine this in the center and loud orange letters surrounding it announcing my artist name and the album title.  

Upon making the CD and importing it into iTunes, I had some struggles coming up with names for the songs.  As I said above, they were strange names, such as "80-D: The True Workings of an Inept Mind," and "Standardized Studies of Statistics and Greek Mythology," and everybody loves, "The Resplendent Sunrise over the Blissful Waves of the Caspian Sea."  

About a year later, I cut a second album under a new pseudonym, "JMoney." The album was entitled, "The I Like Jason Bell Stage" due to a funny story that my friend Brittany told me.  For details of this story, and additional funny facts, ask me in person or via email.  There were a couple different cover arts for this one.  The first consisted of many pictures of this Jason Bell character all within a year's worth of time, and showed the versatility (and hotness) of his looks.  Here, I'll just show ya.

Due to the large amounts of color ink needed to print this (since I had about 1000 requests for the new album), I changed the cover art to something a little simpler, but much sexier.

And the back of the album:

The new album is exactly the same as the old with an addendum of about 9 songs.  The song names were also changed from the first album due to the more serious nature of "The I Like Jason Bell Stage."  

I am glad you took the time out of your busy days to join me on this magical adventure of the history of JMoney and his music.  I hope you enjoyed the journey.  Now comment and get back to real life outside of cyberspace! 

Peace.

Addendum: My good friend, Garrett, was actually the one who came up with the name for the song Resplendent Sunrise over the Blissful Waves of the Caspian Sea.  He's also the one who inspired me to start this blog and hence the name "Resplendent Sunrise and Blissful Waves."  GWard! Thanks for getting me so addicted to blogging!!! :)

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Summer

I'm going to be honest here for a minute.  I'm sick of it being so cold all the time.  As many of you know, I generally prefer winter over summer any day of the week.  I have my thermostat tuned between 64-65 degrees, and if anyone turns it up, I sit down and have a nice chat about why they can NOT do that.  Well, this was before DeEsta (my Honda Metropolitan).  I have been determined to ride it all year long, even if it's 5 degrees outside.  I have been true to this, and have prolly killed a few brain cells in the process from the countless ice cream headaches I have gotten from riding it this winter.  

Now that my minute of honesty is over, you will no longer know if I'm telling the truth for the remainder of the post.  

For the reason listed above, and various others (listed below), I don't want summer to begin. 

• I love school.  I NEVER want it to be over.
• I love riding my scooter in the cold.
• Believe it or not, Logan is my favorite place on Earth.  I don't want to leave this place EVER.  Thus, I'm only looking for jobs here.  You may see me someday working for Burger King.
• I'm not at all stressed out, I have nothing to do.  I want it to stay that way forever.

Take that.

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Interviews and Pranks

As can be noted from the title of this post, there are many highly correlated things in life.  This post will deal with two of these, namely interviews and pranks.  

Yesterday I had the awesome opportunity to interview with the part of the Terran race that dwells in Irvine, CA.  Let me just say this: it was HARD!  It was honestly the craziest job interview that I've ever had.  I thought it got off to a good start, me bragging a little bit about the competitive model that I developed (with my advisor) for detecting differentially expressed genes in high dimensional genomic data.  But the questions and nested questions kept coming.  I think I was able to handle them OK.  One thing I found interesting was that they seemed pretty interested in reading my thesis, and asked me to send them a work-in-progress so they could start reading it!  I was floored.  I promise to keep the entire world updated via this blog as soon as I find anything out.

Let's go ahead and switch gears a bit.  Two days ago, my roommates and I woke up to a heart-attack on the front door.  To those of you unfamiliar with this concept, it is where a person (or group of persons) will cut out paper hearts and entirely cover a door of the poor, pathetic soul (or souls) chosen to clean it up.  It's completely analogous to the game 52-card pick-up, especially when you are the chosen poor, pathetic soul.  This was us.  Upon cleaning them up, Kendall noticed a subtle, yet not so subtle, accusation accusing us of stealing the heart of these girls.  Apparently, upon the door of BLAPT 6 hung a feather covered, red heart-shaped wreath, and we were accused of stealing it implying the retaliation of said heart-attack.  

Later that day, the heart reappeared (we really didn't steal it) on their door, so we devised a plan to steal it and hold it for ransom (brownies).  We were able to pull off the restealing of the heart and successfully convinced them that it wasn't us.  That night we played a game of buggers and astronauts and almost got away with stealing the brownies left for us without getting caught.  I feel like this post is way too long, so I won't get into the details.  Ask if you must know!  Kendall and I celebrated by eating a brownie.  By this point, it was around 1 a.m., so we all went to bed.  The next day, yesterday, Kendall ate 3 more of these brownies.  It's important to note that there was a 1-inch thick layer of frosting on them.  I was about to eat another one, and I noticed some green powdery crumbs throughout the brownies.  They poisoned them (!) and hence the frosting.  I was affected a little by it...but Kendall...poor Kendall...

I'm almost done, I promise.  So last night, we pulled out most of the stops.  I say most because I'm sure Kendall still has a few up his sleeve.... We sent Micah over to their apartment and he, with a very serious face, has the following conversation with them:

Girl 1: Hi! What's up?

Micah: (Sad face, mind) Hey, umm, did you make those brownies?

Girl 1: (Smirk) Haha, um, ya.

Micah: Well, we need to know what you put in them.

Girl 1: .....OK....

Micah: (Starts to get choked up) See, umm....Kendall is in the hospital.

Girl 1: (Now serious) Oh my gosh.

Micah: He got really sick today.  He was up on campus and he fainted.

Girl 1: (About to cry)..............

Micah: They have him on an IV and the doctors need to know what he ate so they can help him.

:

:

:

Girl 1: Well I can't find the box, so I'll have to go out and look in the dumpster.

And she did.  She climbed IN the dumpster to get the box of laxatives that they crushed up and put in the brownies.  If you want to actually HEAR this convo, I recorded it.  I felt...sort of bad....for doing this.  But I wasn't the one sick all day!  Ha! Later that night, the word got out by a blundering fool that we were just messing with them.  Girl 1 ends up texting Kendall telling him, "Good job, you got us real good, white flag, we surrender, etc. etc. etc."  We'll see...

Oh man.  This is way too long.  Bye.  And happy Friday the 13th! 

Peace.

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A Bag of Four Grapes

This is going to be an update post, but to me these this is way cool.  For example, check out this email I got today from Blizzard:

Can you see it?  If not, you need bifocals.  It's so great though, huh? HUH!?!?  I'm way scared for the interview, though.  When I got the email, the only thing that came out of my mouth was s$%t! S$%T! about 5 times.  Oops! Well, wish me luck friends, and PLEASE don't call me at 11:00 AM PST or I will be PST!

This is a weird post.  I feel weird.  

Second update: my legs hurt really bad.  You could say that I'm just a little bit out of shape.  I bought some good food today: apples, bananas, cranberries, and bread.  I think that's it.  Maybe some peanut butter so I will stop eating out.  It's only Tuesday night and I've eaten out twice already.  It's a good thing I don't have a date tomorrow night!  Ha!!

Tonight for dinner, I wasn't really feeling like eating, so I had some beef jerky, peanut butter and chocolate cookies, cranberries, a banana and water.  Gross, eh?   Also, I'm doing really good on my cut-back-on-soda-because-my-personal-trainer-said-I-had-to goal.  I haven't had ANY pop today! :)

That's it for the updates.  It was a very weird, boring post.  Do I feel bad about this? No.  Bye.

Peace.

PS - Check out the new Wikipedia entitled Summerpedia now!  This is going to be huge, folks! Hehe...

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Coming Soon

I hope everyone came here expecting more words of wisdom. 

1. You should realize that you will never receive words of wisdom from this blog.
2. I am going to post something way cool later today.

Have a nice day.

Peace.

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New Life

Today is the beginning of a new life for Jason Cloud Bell.  You may be thinking that I'm off to join some special forces team in the FBI, e.g. the X-files.  As much as I would love to work on cool cases where a guy can transform into a girl and kills people with mucus, and hang out with the younger Gillian Anderson, it's just simply not true.  I will not be joining the FBI today.

In reality, I'm going to start a new workout routine today.  Included in this is running, biking, walking, and some various exercises to work on my belly and back.  And butt.  Gotta have a nice butt....

My beginning workout routine and new diet was written on a piece of paper in OK handwriting by my personal trainer (and cyber-relationship girl).  I'm not very happy about one part though: she cut out all but one 12 oz. can of Mountain Dew per day.  Remember my 44 oz. mug? Yeah, I get to fill it with WATER from now on.  :( And I can only eat out at most twice a week.  This is going to kill me faster than the 78 oz. of soda per day and eating out twice a day would... Hmm, maybe this is going to be a good change for me....

Well wish me luck and some encouragement.  I'll need it!

Peace.

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Today

I'm sick.  I have a lot do get done and no energy to do it.  I'm stressed out.  I'm scared.  I have no idea where life will take me.  My brain is not working.  But overall, I'm happy.

Peace.

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What do you do when you feel defeated?

On February 2, which is Groundhog's day, Sarah's birthday, my brother's birthday, and my roommate's birthday.  So to celebrate both Kendall's birthday and Todd getting Temple Girl's number, we did the only thing we know how to do: Shoot %#$&, which is only way we know how to say it.  

There was just something that has been eating at Kendall for a few weeks now:  a picture frame that he didn't know what to with (and forgive the preposition at the end of this sentence).  You could say that it has been a weight on his shoulders like a bowling ball dropped from the top of a 50-story building.  Here is what it looked like being shot with a 12 gauge:

And this is what it looks like AFTER being shot with a 12 gauge:

And yes, we also shot at the bowling pins.  You should have seen what the 12 gauge did to THEM!  And for the record, I beat Kendall in a shooting contest 2-1 with our 9mms.  :)  And I started 4 sentences with the word "and." Forgive that as well. 

So this is what I do when I'm feeling defeated:

1. Say to myself, "You're hot.  There's no need to feel defeated."
2. Shoot %$#&.  This applies both to real guns and Sniper Elite.
3. Have ALL day text conversations with a cool chick.  This can really cheer a bloke up.
4. Think about having a job with BLIZZARD and how cool it would be to tell my mom that all those "wasted" hours playing video games ACTUALLY PAID OFF.  Take THAT Ma! 

That's all I got. 

Peace.

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Temple Girl

Let me tell you a tale entitled the Temple Girl.  There was once a guy named Todd and he had a friend named Jason.  These names have been changed to protect the identity of their true identities and save them from the humiliation that will surely follow.  If you're asking yourself, "Is this going to be a true story?" the answer is yes.  

Todd was sitting next to his friend Jason in the chapel of the temple (a very special building in the LDS church) waiting to go in.  He looked up and saw a girl walk in that he had known from an art class years earlier.  Alas, her hand was covered and he couldn't see her ring finger.  

On to the next room, he leaned over and told his friend, "Hey, there she is.  Can you see a ring?" Todd is very pathetic, mind.

 

"No," Jason said.

Todd looked over and noticed the girl tapping her ring finger and laughing with her friend.  She had caught Todd and Jason looking for a ring.  Pathetic, little Todd.

Today, Todd saw his old friend from art class and got her number!  Here's how it went down:

Todd: Hi Sandra!

Sandra: Who ARE you?

Todd: Who are YOU?.... We had art class together....4 years ago....

Sandra: [Feeling the need to avoid the creepy, bearded man] Um...oh yeah....isn't your name...Steven?

Todd: No.  It's Todd.  

.

.

.

Todd: [Feeling pretty cool at this point] Well, let's chill sometime!

Sandra: Sure! Here's my number!

Go Todd!

Peace.

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