So finally (after what? years now) fixed the history template, that got broke when I upgrade the code base here last time I updated the thcnet forum software. There are still a few bugs, I have to fix yet on this site, but that's a start at least. The code on that is ancient now.. and parts of it really need a rewrite from the ground up, since there are sections of the code that are so complex and so inefficient, that it takes me a good couple days of staring at it before I'm ready to start making changes. Recursive functions oh boy!

I am happy I got the mileage out of the software that I did. It was a project originally to replace the Renegade dial-up BBS I use to run called The Hotel California, and thus where THCNET get's the "THC" part. I decided I wanted to learn PHP, and used it as a project to do so. Over the years it's evolved quite a bit from the original code base, and has some features that I haven't seen elsewhere. It's templating and macro system, is quite complex in what it lets you do. The idea being that to add features, and conditional formatting, you shouldn't ever have to change the source code itself, but can use the template system. When that wasn't powerful enough, I added the policy system, which since I was a network engineer, was modeled after Cisco's policy based routing. It's probably one of my favorite bits of code I've written for THCNET.

Problem of course is having time. These days I'm quite busy with work, the house, the hackerspace, hacking on electronics, and attempting to have a life and do things.. so don't expect any major updates any time soon is what I'm saying. Still it is cool to take a look at the old code, and see what I've accomplished with the software.

So it's been since 2009 that we've been doing the hackerspace thing.. that's quite awhile (and clearly I haven't updated my site in forever) now things are happening over at SYN Shop. We're do to be in the new location soon, so go check us out.

Now updating this old thing...

One of my latest projects is starting a dorkbot chapter in Las Vegas

http://dorkbotlv.org/blogs/krux

Created the second vegas tgimboej (The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk) and got it delivered to it's next owner. I managed to snap a few more photos of the box's contents this time. Check it out here:

Vegas TGIMBOEJ No 2

So I already soldered in the 3-Axis accelerometer onto last years defcon 15 badge. Did finally get around to writing some code to make use of it. I also cut circuit traces into the board using the knife on my leatherman, and added a nice surface mount max1555 lithium-ion battery charger, and rechargeable battery to replace the coin cells. took a steady hand to cut pads and traces for the SOT23 chip and surface mount capacitor I needed. I could have tried etching the board, but I didn't really want to risk damaging the existing components, and pretty paint job.

defcon badge 1
defcon badge 2

Now this sound pretty cool and is post worthy, The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk.

As I've been getting back heavy into my electronics dabbling recently, since my discovery of how cool microcontrollers can be, I've acquired even more electronics junk than the staggering amount I had previously. So it sounds like a cool way to get rid of some of the duplicate items I have, things I've just had for too long and haven't found a use for, and a way to get some new interesting gizmos to play with. Probably have enough laying around here to start a box or two myself.

this years winter break is a two part adventure... well three really. first week I'm here in the frozen tundra of michigan. I head back to vegas to hit the party at rook's on new years eve, and then off to another cold place, santa fe, new mexico, for another week.

partied late friday night, two bottles of wine, and I passed out on the couch for a few hours some time around 4am. eventually I got up, talked to the roommate for a bit, and saw zan off as she had also crashed here. then went up stairs for some more sleep, waking up around 4:30pm. good party.

saw eddie izzard at caesars palace saturday night.

and spent till now screwing around with microcontrollers, when I should have went to bed, which won't bode well for my sleep schedule.

went hiking sunday. great weather. awesome scenery. pictures don't do it justice.

mummy mountain

of course I'm sore as hell.

I was poking about in my old email and found this gem:

"I thought I mentioned it.. but here goes..

my friend john use to always make the reference "about the diameter of a
d-cell maglight" just to watch the other males get uncomfortable or self
conscious. He would of course never really say what he was referring to..
but of course the mind is more than happy to play the association game
even if it is way off...

The original reference came from a innuendo filled conversation he was
having with some friend of his. "so big and juicy you just have to put it
in your mouth", and "about the diameter of a d-cell maglight" were the
ones I remember.... the topic of conversation was some sausage that he had
gotten.

I however got the ultimate come back to his reference, when while sitting
at the dinning room table (which was always a mess BTW) he had picked up
one of the mag lights which were sitting there.. It was a four cell
model.. I had picked up the other mag light which was a three cell. At
this of course a comment had to be made...

"Mine's bigger" he said rather smugly...

"Very true, but... ", since I lived there I knew that my roommate Stacey's
kid had pretty much gutted the larger of the two flashlights, so I click
mine on and shine it in his face, "Mine works."

It was great."

so last night's sexy party was a great success. everyone enjoyed themselves immensely. made up some buffalo burgers. my pool actually got used for some swimming. I got lit, thanks in part to some stiff screwdrivers, and the pitcher of booze kelly mixed up. RSA SecureID security tokens are remarkably resilient to pool water. there was concern for the well being of the "trash can guy" as he clearly decided to enjoy himself to the point of excess. two chicks making out on your lap in the pool is every bit as awesome as you would think it to be. jose's strategy to wear a bikini top made him some new friends. I have enough beer in the fridge to supply a whole new party. the only real casualties were one glass bottle which shattered on the kitchen floor, an over enthusiastic flusher who broke the down stairs toilet flush arm, and one guy who threw up and then passed out in a trash can. and thanks to the people who decided to clean up a bit before going home, the aftermath abatement consisted of making the kitchen not sticky, cleaning up the missed bits of glass on the floor, and gathering up the last remaining cups, bottles, and towels which were scattered about.

so the trips I have plannes are...

cisco networkers, anaheim, july 22 - 26
penny arcade expo (pax), seattle, august 22 - 26 (including the west coast train trip)

woo.

posted the pictures and video from coachella. my camera was not designed to accurately pick up bass 15 to 20 feet from a bank of speakers the size of your living room, so the audio quality is crap. ::shrug::

here is the list of bands I ended up catching while at coachella...

[ more ]

so I've been sending updates of what I've been doing at coachella to my twitter account, since I can do that from my phone. ok, I could update this from my phone, but this doesn't automatically let people know when there is a change. twitter is kind of like a mailing list for im/phone text/web messages. I thought it would be useless at first, and now I see it's actually kind of cool.

http://twitter.com/krux

totally dominated tonight at rummy and dominos. i rock.

picked up the car, which turned out to be more of an annoying process than it should have been. go online, and book my reservation about a month ago. got a decent deal so I'm happy. today I walk down to the rental car place, only to find a bunch of empty lots. seems it's no longer just a walk to get a rental car. they've moved everything down to paradise and warm springs area, so this means I have to walk over to the airport to catch the shuttle, which is still close, but not as close as the car rental places use to be.

the shuttle driver was a hoot, and far more entertaining than you would expect a rental car shuttle driver to be. get to the new rental car complex-o-rama, and walk up to payless where I put my reservation in at, and to which I'm pleased has no line. now here is the bitch. I've rented with them a couple times in the past, and if you're local you have to fill out this annoying form that has a bunch of personal information on it, more than your usual car rental that just needs maybe a couple forms of ID at most. but you only have to do this once, so I didn't worry about it. ah, but today, it's a new policy. seems I have to bring a copy of my insurance, and a local utility bill. Ok, I walked to the airport, and there is no way I'm walking back and again to get absurd amounts of paperwork just to rent a car from these fucks at payless. not that I could even give them a copy of a utility bill, since those all get sent to another state where I do all my billing electronically.

I'm annoyed at this point and don't really want go through the pain of trying to figure out who has the next better price on my phone, so I just pick one at random. now I see why they had no line at payless. seems every other rental car counter has people in front of it. payless is a bunch of asshats, and I'm the only one who didn't get the memo on this today. so lucky rental car company who gets my business is dollar, who like every other rental place in the world, just needs a credit card and to see your drivers license. they didn't even want a copy of it, just seeing I had one was well enough with them.

now down in the garage, I look for a mid-sized car, and see there is exactly one, and it has people getting into it. ok.. but before I am annoyed further, an employee says, "no midsized cars? here, free upgrade, take one of these." my choices are old man mercury boat car, dodge charger, or a nissan altima. so I get the nissan altima. nissan is the poor man's infinity, so I'm happy on the car at least.

now I suppose I should finish packing.

so today was a fairly decent day. I managed to wake up on time, even got into work 15 minutes early. last part of the day dragged a little, but the morning was busy enough. good message activity over on thcnet. even got around to getting a workout in once I was home.

so I decided that I needed to treat myself to some fish tacos and a side of guacamole from baja fresh. the fish tacos, were good as usual, but that last part of my order was a mistake. see what I got was not guacamole, but rather totally inedible and bland green stuff. I swear if you took avocado, and cut it with water, you wouldn't have something as tasteless as this. I ended up throwing it away, because it was just pointless to even try to consume.

to make up for this travesty against one of my favorite food stuffs, I've no choice but to make a proper batch of guacamole for when I have people over this thursday.

so rental car, hotel, and conference tickets are all set. need to purchase the return flight back once sw actually lets you buy them. going to pax in august. sweet.

other than that, not much I've felt like publicly bitching about, so as a result the lack of updates here.

solar cover has been on the pool past few weeks, and the water is at 65 degrees and rising. still not quite swimable yet.

bjork, red hot chili peppers, placebo, air, rage against the machine, interpol, the arcade fire, arctic monkeys, the decemberists, damien rice, kaiser chiefs, sonic youth, dj shadow, faithless, travis, of montreal, rufus wainwright, the roots, the new pornographers, regina spektor, regina spektor, explosions in the sky, lcd soundsystem, kings of leon, the kooks, we are scientists, manu chao, jose gonzalez, peaches, the jesus and mary chain, blonde redhead, the rapture, cocorosie, lily allen, jack's mannequin, paul van dyk, mando diao, hot chip, benny benassi, gotan project, fountains of wayne, felix da housecat, crowded house, andrew bird, !!!, infected mushroom, against me!, ghostface, ratatat, circa survive, the black keys, willie nelson, tilly and the wall, soulwax, the fratellis, david guetta, vnv nation, lupe fiasco, tapes 'n tapes, gogol bordello, sparklehorse, klaxons, junior boys, the lemonheads, peter bjorn and john, the cribs, cornelius, mika, tiesto, amy winehouse, the feeling, grizzly bear, happy mondays, cansei de ser sexy, brazilian girls, peeping tom, el-p, nickel creek, ozomatli, girl talk, gillian welch, amos lee, silversun pickups, spank rock, julieta venegas, pharoahe monch, the good, the bad & the queen, mstrkrft, the frames, tokyo police club, busdriver, evil nine, justice, jarvis cocker, teddybears, richie hawtin, brother ali, the coup, anathallo, rodrigo y gabriela, digitalism, pop levi, fields, noisettes, roky erickson, mike relm, stephen marley, fair to midland, the nightwatchman, kid beyond, dj heather, konono no 1, comedians of comedy, the avett bros and yeva

I think merits a well deserved woot.

so some idiot spammer decided to try posting here, and I'm not having any of that. so now that means you can't post if you're anonymous.

ps,

please be so kind as to die a million deaths.

I love hiking at valley of fire. I took some pictures when I went out there today with a couple people from work and hiked around the white domes.

In other news, my fortune cookie told me: "simplicity in style will bring desirous eyes your way."

I'm not sure what that's suppose to mean, but my best guess is that it's saying not to dress like ziggy stardust if I want to get laid. now, even though my first girlfriend totally had a thing for bowie, making the ziggy thing something that probably would have worked, I still say it seems sound advice to follow.

so when I went hiking last, I was all set to take a bunch of cool photos of red rock. that was at least until I actually used my camera and it promptly refusing to turn on to take pictures. as most people know I'm fairly adept with fixing things, so out come the machine screw drivers and micro tweezers to take apart my Canon PowerShot S50. now canon makes a pretty good camera, but I read that the small little plastic gears in the lens cover door have a tendency to break. this was what was preventing my camera from turning on, since the camera never senses the cover has been opened.

first off let me say that there isn't a whole lot of empty space in the PowerShot. it's pretty much packed tight with circuitry, lenses, and salted nuts!!! ok... no salted nuts. but you can see they don't waste a whole lot of space. I would have taken a picture, but.. well... you know.

anyway, i managed to get the front half of the camera off, after removing the appropriate screws, and took a look at the tightly packed series of levers, springs, gears, and latches which trigger the camera on/off switch. after everything is apart and the broken door gear removed, I tested it's operation one gear short. seemed to be workable, so it was back to assembling, after first testing the camera on switch manually to be sure the electronics were still ok. some time later, it's back together and I once again can take pictures.

so this isn't so much a post bitching about stuff, but rather to point out how bloody awesome I am.

go me.

argh

one thing about driving is that I can always count on it to be there for me when I think I don't have much of anything to complain about lately. I'm not sure what happens to people when they get in their vehicles, but you are always sure to find someone making a complete annoyance of themselves in their anonymous metal cocoon. I could write volumes on the subject, were I so motivated, but today I'll focus on annoying SUV drivers, or rather annoying SUV drivers who have no business driving a SUV.

the catalyst for this post was probably one of my longer lasting hatreds towards my fellow motorists. if you are are driving a truck, or what is essentially a truck, you need not treat your vehicle like is being held together by scotch tape and butter when passing over the smallest of divots in the road. seriously. the suspension and clearance your auto possesses is more than adequate to handle passing over the drainage gully at a reasonable speed. this also goes for speed bumps. and when you slow down to almost a stop and pull over to the side to pass over the section of the bump which is shallower, don't be annoyed with me when I think you are turning and pass you.

this same class of driver are also the ones who buy a SUV which will never so much as see gravel, let alone any off road use. early SUVs, such as the 1995 ford bronco I drive, were more or less just a regular truck, with a shell on the back, and a full furnished interior. since SUVs have become a class of vehicle unto themselves. however they still are still built on a truck chassis, which means they are designed to travel off the paved road. most of them have four wheel drive, beefed up suspension and shocks, and higher clearances to accommodate this. my own truck has metal plate shielding underneath to protect against rock strikes. I take my truck off road. the lexus "suv" down at the starbucks (parked in all three of the motorcycle parking spots no less) might get a little dusty if the owner neglects to wash it one day. perhaps the parking lot will be dirty. buy a minivan, since that's all you are using it for.

today, as I was putting a pizza away in the refrigerator, the normally empty shelf I reserve for putting some sort of leftover on, already had something on it. to make room for the uneaten portion of my dinner, not wanting to reprove the fact pizza boxes don't bend all that well, and of course, being far too lazy to actually take the pizza out of the box, I had to clear off the shelf that normally has wine bottles and that sort of thing on it. now as I'm moving various bottles of wine I've purchased or was given over time, I get to the last bottle on the shelf. a bottle you might note, that while keeping with the theme of my fridge mostly being use to keep various bottles of alcohol chilled, doesn't really belong. yes, I held in my hand a bottle of boone's farm strawberry hill flavored citrus wine.

I have to point out that while I am by no means a sommelier, and comparatively know very little about wine, I do at least have enough of a palate to know what I like. boone's farm is not something I would ever, even in my most frugal of times, purchase.

no, not even the marketer's inclusion of the words "country style premium quality" on the label will sway my opinion.

now I don't really remember when exactly this bottle ended up in my refrigerator. I moved into the house during july of 2000, so if I were to guess... it was most likely something that was brought into the house at one of my earlier fourth of july parties. those tended to attract a large number of people I either didn't know or who I could possibly see as being cheap enough to think bringing a bottle of "boones" as being an acceptable party contribution. really I have no idea. I just know it has been there for as long as I can remember.

I thought to look for a date, since that would be a good indicator, however initial and repeated inspection of the bottle did not reveal anything obvious. It would figure, since a wine with a screw off top, probably isn't something you keep around for a special occasion.

"hey honey, I just got that big promotion. open our finest bottle of swill."

determined to find some hidden date marker on this intruding alcohol, I looked for a third time. on the edge of the label, over by the "ca cash refund", in very small print says (c)boone's farm winery. next to that, in impossibly smaller print, the year 2001. two thousand and one? I'm not sure which is more disturbing, the fact that someone with such obviously bad tastes in alcohol showed up to one of my parties, or that I managed to ignore the bottle being in my fridge for six years.

The question I have is does the energy savings gained from displacing a 750ml of volume air with liquid enough to offset the the original purchase price after a time frame of six years?

so this morning, I didn't have anything at the house to grab for breakfast, and since I actually eat breakfast now instead of stupidly skipping meals and fucking my metabolism, I needed to pick up something on the way in to work. now my drive to work, when I go towards the data center, takes me along tropicana. and for some, undoubtedly annoying reason, it worked out that the only thing even remotely edible on the south side of the street between my house and the freeway is burger king. oh sure there is a bounty of goodness on the north side of the street, but then I'm wasting a good ten to fifteen minutes trying to make two left hand turns in rush hour traffic. I detest burger king. but despite my dislike for them as fast food joints go, I can at least stand their overpriced coffee and hashed browns. I say over priced because it seems every time I go there, which isn't often, the price is more for the same two items. I didn't really care that much about that this morning, needing to eat something, the decision was made to shell out $3.33 for coffee and hashed browns.

which brings me to the real point of my rant today. see what never ceases to annoy the hell out of me, is when someone asks me a question, I give a response, and then their very next action, the one they just asked me my preference on, is not changed in the slightest based on my response. This morning, it went like this:

Lady at the window: "Would you like cream and sugar with your coffee?"

Me: "No."

Lady at the window hands me my coffee in a bag which is also filled with cream and sugar.

I take my coffee out of the bag, and then throw said bag, with the cream and sugar I just said I didn't want, at the cashier.

Ok, what the fuck?

You just asked me if I wanted the cream and sugar and I told you, clearly I might add, no.

If you were going to give me the cream and sugar anyway, why the hell did you waste my time asking me? I wouldn't have cared had you just gave it to me without asking. that speaks efficiency on your part. you figured that a good number of people want cream and sugar with their coffee, so we'll just hand it out to everyone. that's probably the reason why the price of my coffee keeps going up, but hey, you've at least made your job that much easier by lining up a series of bags, all with cream and sugar in them. add coffee and another satisfied customer. I'm not even going to go into how annoying it is to have your coffee handed to you in a bag in the first place. I would much rather you hand me my cup like any normal human would hand another human a cup. However I at least realize that because some idiot spilled coffee all over themselves, the lawyers over in burger king land, who are also idiots, came up with giving me a container filled with hot liquid inside a paper bag as the miracle way to protect me from myself.

but that isn't what you did. since you asked me what I wanted, by doing something other than that, you have now done something I didn't want you to do. you went out of your way to find out how I prefer my coffee, and then give me something that is no use to me what so ever. do you want me to to smack you up side the head with a shovel? no? well too bad... ::thunk::

the only reason why I'm ranting about this particular incident, is this kind of thing happens all the time. I always get asked by the drone behind the cash register if I want something. I tell them, no, no I do not. and then the majority of the time the very person who asked me the question hands me a bag filled with the exact thing I specifically said I didn't want in it, be it ketchup packets, hot sauce, or the cursed cream and sugar.

dear person who got me sick,

thanks. this is just what I needed today. this could be the worse possible day for me to have to stay home from work. yet here I am at home.

a million stabby deaths,

me

hmmm... my system probably is in shock, since I haven't had a pierogi to eat in almost a week. we ended up making two batches of them while I was at my mom's place in michigan. and since they're my favorite polish food, I decided to pick up the stuff needed to make some more. since I was tired of using a large polish vodka bottle to roll out dough, I also bought a rolling pin. this was to replace the one I use to have before it was stolen, vindictively no doubt.

why I waited years to do this is beyond me. the best explanation I can come up with is I really get annoyed with I have to purchase something I had already owned in the past, and by all rights should still continue to own. so much so that I will go years without something I like or need just because I'm too damn stubborn. someone stole my favorite pink floyd tape (wish you were here) and it wasn't until the advent of CDs where I could finally justify buying the album again.

so how did I manage to pick up a new rolling pin and not have my compulsion not to re-spend money take over? this one was black and had a cool non-stick rolling surface.

I've been vising my mom and brother in Michigan, so things are rather relaxed. the only amusing thing I can tell you is what was involved with the flight here.

in order to be a well behaved citizen in this terror stricken world of ours, I arrived at the airport two and a half hours before my flight. in reality I would have been fine with showing up for my flight a bit later, but I was packed and had nothing to do but sit at my house and wait, so I decided to just walk to the airport, since I wasn't short on time to kill.

so at the airport, the e-ticket machine says it can't process my ticket. odd. I'm mixed on the whole ticket machine thing, as I feel installing some automated machines it's no excuse for not having adequate customer service. however I generally have had good luck with the e-ticket machines, and have even gotten an occasional upgrade offer to first class. it's just the idiots who don't seem to understand how to operate anything which remotely looks like a computer screen that bug me. anyway, technology failing me, a short wait in line and I get to speak with a real person. my flight has not been assigned a gate. as a consolation, I at least get the location of my flight narrowed down to either the A or B gates. both are behind the same security checkpoint so I can go kill some time, get an over priced drink at the bar, and maybe some food.

after eating I was bored and decided to ride the moving walkways. there really isn't a whole lot to do at an airport, so this is a viable method of entertainment. it's like Disneyland, but flatter. wheeee. on my way back from the end of the B gates, my progress is stopped by a moving walkway which despite it's name, isn't. as I still have no actual destination, I use this opportunity to at least amuse myself with the situation presented. what other to do than to stand in the middle of the walkway pretending it is moving forward, and occasionally look at the time and impatiently sigh. it's not long before this act gets the desired result. some guy walks past me, stops, and is unable to resist the urge to point out that the walkway is not moving.

"it better start moving soon. I'm late for my flight."

acronyms.. yes they have their place. when you are talking computer or network terminology you tend to encounter a lot of them. hell when you talk about the topic of ATM networking alone, you get into multiple hierarchies of acronyms leading to more groups of acronyms. it's enough to fry your brain if you've never worked with it before. what I don't like are the use of acronyms for the sake of using more acronyms.

the company I work for absolutely loves acronyms. problem is they use acronyms which conflict with other acronyms which are in common practice. they'll even go so far as to use an acronym which is already in use elsewhere on the project. I'm constantly having to do context evaluations to try and determine which meaning they are intending in their use of certain acronyms.

"Hmmm... they are the (blah) group and used NTS, but are also talking about computers at the ESF Pad (Exploratory Studies Facility)... do they mean Nevada Test Site, or Network Telecommunications Services?"

if that were not enough, just when they have an acronym which has been establish and you know, having had it repeatedly beaten into your long term memory, they'll change the name of whatever it was and create an entirely new acronym for it. Or not change the name but create a new something which seems suspiciously like it has the same exact purpose as the other something, but you have to try and keep straight in your mind when to use the first something and when to use this new something. why must we try to make things more difficult than they need to be? I really rather not spend my time trying to remember what a bunch of stupid acronyms for things I don't care about mean.

I'll give you another example which never fails to just bug the hell out of me every time I see it. over at thcnet, voltaic has taken a liking to using "FTW" and other acronyms that no one but people on IRC and myspace use. I find it annoying having to do a google search to find out what the hell the cryptic one line message he just posted means. and since I don't care about these acronyms, I don't remember them. the last place I saw such rampant use of needless acronyms was on IRC.

ROTFL (Rolling on the floor laughing)

Are you really? How about you FADHAGZA (Fuck a dead hooker and get zombie aids)


WTG (Way to go)

Gee, thanks you lazy fuck. Guess you didn't really care, or you would have typed those six extra letters.


IMNSHO (In my not so humble opinion)

News flash. Your opinion sucks, no one cares, and you should kill yourself now to spare yourself the horrible lonely existence in the old folks home as you sit there rotting, with the only thing to look forward to being drooling on yourself, and if you are lucky, maybe being smothered by an orderly.


Here's a fun filled page: Parents Guide to Myspace.com

How fucked up is this web site that we really need the following acronym?

HDOP (Help delete online predators)

wooden christ in a toothpick factory, why? there is an acronym for that. are teenagers being so inundated by perverts they needed to save time by having an acronym? turns out it's this.. http://www.missingkids.com/adcouncil/ which at least makes sense.. I can't see the acronym getting a whole lot of use by the people on myspace.

I hope you see my point here. the use of acronyms where they are not needed is bloody annoying. I'm not saying ban all use of acronyms. that is silly. deciding to type NIC instead of Network Interface Card. that's perfectly acceptable. just don't be the idiot who types "NIC Card." does your network interface card card come packaged in card card board? no it doesn't, so stop saying that. how about another example. you're sending a quick text and you're trying to use the stupid number to letter thing on your cell phone. yes you can abbreviate if it makes sense. just don't expect me to know what you mean if you use some obscure new acronym and I haven't been hanging out with all your myspace pals. lets say you are kicking some n00b's ass at UT (which is an acceptable acronym for a gamer) and need to rub it in. but wait, you don't want to get sniped while typing the magna carta. yes, another good use for your quick friend the acronym. and a final example. you're on a message board and have all the time in the world to compose a thoughtful and well versed reply, as your finger is hovering over the "F" key... no! wrong! don't even think about using some pointless acronym like "FTW". for that matter "for the win" is a pretty fucking gay saying in the first place. however, I do see FADHAGZA as being a big internet hit.

so I went to the store and bought some bananas and a box of prilosec, and the cashier asks me if I need help with that out to my car.. it's two items, and you saw me carry them to the checkout counter. both items fit in one hand. I should have said something like, "no, I don't want to be a bother." and then make multiple trips to my truck carrying one banana at a time. Really get into it, like get mad at them if they dare insult me by trying to help anyway. I could have been out of there in seven trips, it'd be great.

so I caught both shows of bob saget tonight at caesars palace.. when I bought my tickets I wanted the late show but they only had one listed, which I assumed was the one I wanted.. anyway, I had to pick up a second ticket since the fucks at vegas.com don't allow any changes.. both shows were pretty damn funny. I loved watching the old ladies who had their hand over their face with abject terror at sagets routine which is about as raw, rude, and crude as you can get. eventually they walked out. I love when people walk out. that just makes my day.

the second show was great.. everyone killed. my voice is actually sore from laughing.

I decided to take apart my dead laptop to see if I could figure out where the problem was. seems the power board was just not fully seated, and so it was an easy fix. nice. I once again have my own laptop which works, and am further able to resist spending several grand on a new one.

last night I had a dream I had insomnia. It was 6:00am and I had not slept yet. I'm even dreaming about fucked up sleep schedules. yay me.

yes.. finally, I get to be less of an asshole driver. some of you may remember my off roading adventure where I totally fucked up my trucks electrical system. well today I was so motivated to finally trace down the last problem which was preventing the turn signals from working. that done, I could put my dash board and steering column back together. awesome. to celebrate, I drove to del taco and bought myself some food.

went to first friday, which was before the callmanager upgrade. met up with rub there, and he pointed out a few places most people don't think to go. cool stuff. it was mostly just hanging out bsing about random stuff while people watching, and making wise cracks. didn't see as much art I liked as the previous first friday, but there still was some good works. I need to get back into painting... I keep telling myself, but getting inspired to actually do something is another story.

Just spent two hours bike riding from west trop near the 215 up to around red rock (top of the hill heading toward red rock) and back. I took some pictures along the way, which will be uploaded at some point.

Wooo.. Cisco CallManager upgrade went well at work. I am "teh awesome."

I've actually had some time to code lately, which is cool. made a nice update over on thcnet, to allow multiple themes to be defined.. and while I was at it, coded up a nice new look for the site. I need to do something here, but I've been less than motivated.

laptop is still dead. every so often I'll go over and futilely press the power button. not that I really expect a different result. you pretty much have the same chance of getting something interesting to happen by poking your finger at a brick. I want the toshiba tablet pc, but then to get the model I want it's a bit more debt than I want to accrue at the moment.

I'm still awake from yesterday. I've been in an odd OCD mood all night, consuming my time with database maintenance, some programming, some graphic design work, getting side tracked from actually going to sleep, and lots of music.

I probably should eat something since it's been... a quantity of time... since I've eaten last.

I just got finished taking the Cisco BSCI test, which was brutal. Had to study IPV6, EIGRP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, route redistribution, policy routing, etc... Passed the test, but I"m fried after taking it. Three more tests to go, and I'll have my CCNP. I'll probably also go for my CCIP, since this test which I just took counts toward it as well.

so I finally made it down to first friday, which is a monthly event they hold down town in the art district.. I was surprised to hear we even had an art district. las vegas isn't known for culture which doesn't involve casinos, strip joints, and seedy books stores. well I guess first friday has been going on for four years now, and has grown from an event with a couple hundred people, to one that has 1500 people or so.

I had been meaning to try and catch this for awhile now, but would usually forget about it until the event was over. you wouldn't think trying to remember the first friday of the month would be difficult, but after a few weeks, it's slipped my mind, and I'm horrible about putting things in my calendar to remind me.

so this month, I actually managed to remember, with the thanks to a couple friends of mine telling me that I should go. I headed down there and walked around for awhile, checking out the cool art work, and listening to the bands. some really nice work. a few of the artists really had me wanting to get back into painting again. it's been far too long since I've painted anything.

after that, it was over to rub's office to hang out with the crew there. anyway, tonight ended up being an odd sort of reunion, since people crawled out of the wood work who I haven't seen in eons. pretty cool night.

So I had been saving up mall gift cards for some time now, and finally cashed them in for a new Craftsman 17" drill press, well about half of one, the rest I had to put on my credit card.. not bad, since it was essentially half off for me. It was a toss up between the 15 inch drill press and the 17 inch... and the 17 inch seemed to be constructed a bit better, and had a nice push button stop switch, which comes in handy should you need to stop the machine because you have some body part caught in it. The 15" model had a small stop switch which seemed like it would be a problem to shut off in an emergency. Stupid work and their safety program has me thinking about this kind of thing. Bah. Oh and get this, it has lasers.

I guess this means I should clean up the garage at some point so I can get this setup with my other tools.

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why in the fuck am I awake at 6:49am listening to music and sorting my mp3 collection when I should be sleeping?

In related news, last.fm kicks ass... check out:

http://www.last.fm/user/delusion702/

Some fucking bastard registered krux and krux702... what in the fuck? yes I'm saying fuck quite frequently in this post. fuck it.

quit bitching about updates. I still don't know what to put here.

I got tired of looking at my broken tempest arcade machine, and decided to see if frys had the power transistors I needed to fix it. I'm pretty sure only one of them were bad, but usually when one goes you just replace the whole set of six. they have to be balanced anyway, so since frys doesn't carry the exact model I needed I had to go with a substitute. the part I hate about working on monitors is the high voltage from them scares the shit out of me. well not so much the voltage, since I can do work with other things which are high voltage. it's the amperage potential. anyway, once you disconnect the hot lead on the picture tube, you're ok, it's just doing that part that gets me nervous.

so the game is working again. yay.

the four wheel drive is fixed on my truck now. I replaced the auto-locking hubs with warn manual locking hubs. I was going to swap out the transfer case motor as well, but after swapping out the hubs, it seems that fixed the problem.

while I was there I also replaced the front two ABS sensors on the truck to see if that would correct the problem I was having with the ABS brakes. unfortunately, that didn't fix the problem, so I'll have to look into that one a bit more.

I hate credit card debt, and I have about $19,000.00 too much of it. really racked up a lot in travel expenses the last couple months, so I'm going to have to try and knock things back down again. I'm getting two grand back on my tax return, and instead of getting a new laptop like I wanted, that's going to just get dumped straight into my evil mbna card.

in other news, i bought some parts to fix my abs brakes and 4wd system on the bronco. that's my plans for the weekend. have to replace the two front abs sensors, the factory auto locking hubs with manual hubs, and the transfer case drive motor.

which I already knew of course. however their cisco tests are horribly dated. hardly anyone uses IPX anymore, and they seemed to focus a lot on that. I missed a bunch of obscure stuff that I would normally just lookup when I needed to do whatever it was I was doing. still they said I scored higher than something like 98% of the other people who took it, so that's not all that bad.

stopped by frys on the way home today and picked up a 250gb sata drive to add to hiro. the server now has half a terabyte of storage.. or is that a tebibyte? here you go:

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well I'm in michigan right now on vacation at my mom's place. didn't get a direct flight out, but the longer leg of the trip I did get an upgraded seat to first class, which was nice. all I ever get is lots of coffee when I fly first class, but it's cool to be waited on the entire flight, and not be crammed into a tiny seat. the second leg of the trip sucked, since there was maybe a hand length between my seat and the one in front of me. I could barely fit in the damn seat. fortunately the guy in front of me didn't try to recline his seat.

so it's a week of here in michigan, then I head to new jersey to see morgan. yay!

I need to make flight plans, etc... not even sure what dates I'll be gone yet.

yay.

so I've been up for... oh 42 hours now, I'm not really tired, and I'm not sure why... last night I tried sleeping until 4am.. and I figured fuck it... by that time even if I were able to get to sleep, I wouldn't be able to get up till really late, and then I'd be at work even later, so I took a shower and went into work early. it's been 13 hours since I've had any caffeine, which was a cup of green tea before I left work. so since I'm up, It would be nice to at least do something productive, however it's a case of you have more time but are far to unfocused to do anything useful with it. kind of the explanation dun malg gave me why meth addicts never actually accomplished anything of worth. so here I am, and other than wonder why the hell I can't sleep this time, or reflect on how no one I know anywhere on the planet is awake or at their computer to remotely entertain me, I suppose I'll try sleep again. maybe it'll work this time.

there is a set of infinity speakers I had that I have been finding when I didn't need them, and not being able to remember where they were put when I actually ever needed them. probably have been going back and forth on this for a couple years now. well today I was listening to my XM radio in the bedroom, and found I again had the need for those damned speakers. I had been using the XM by using it's FM transmitter to send a signal to my clock radio, which has a very touchy receiver, and has an audio quality that is marginal at best. anyway, the last encounter with said speakers I was very smart and happened remember that I never find these things when I need them, and that I could at least make an effort to place them someplace I'd likely look. that plan, put in place probably about three months ago, actually worked. today as I yet again yearned for an audio quality that doesn't suck, had the ability to actually correct the problem easily this time. way to go.

Uploaded the pictures I took of my case mod. Here are the pictures of Raven.

well almost. there is one minor thing left to do, but all the major stuff is completed. I found some paint that bonds to plastic and doesn't require a massive amount of prep work, so the front of the case is now black. The CDROM and DVD drives both have black aluminum face covers. I replaced the beige face plate for my audio controlled light circuit with an aluminum face plate. I made an aluminum industrial looking filter insert to take up the three open drive bays. I used my angle grinder to remove all the beige paint from the top, and give it a brushed steel look, and coated it with a clear coat so it doesn't rust. I also made a plexiglass top, with six aluminum standoffs to hold it over the brushed steel top, and inside each standoff are blue LED lights so the plexiglass lights up like the side of the case does.. The only thing left is to either make/find aluminum or black face plates for the floppy drive, and it's totally done.

I'll take some pictures, but since you can't use a flash and still see how the case lights up, I'll have to setup my tripod and take some low light photos.

finished the other side of the case. now if my camera battery was charged I'd post pictures.

...or why I'm up ay 3am. I bought a quarter inch thick piece of lexan to use to mod my case. at first I was planning on going with a window, but really didn't care for any ideas I had.. and cutting complex designs in metal is a bit more work than I had in mind at the moment. Anyway, I figured the sized window I would need to show case all the lighted fans, corsair memory, and the silly power supply with lights and a window, I figured I would just make the entire side of the case out of lexan. Plus it gave me an excuse to use my drill press as well as the tap & die set.

so working on that I lost track of time, and honestly I started way to late on it anyway, but I get easily diverted on such tangents, so I figured I would be creative and constructive while I was in the mood. next is putting in the two side fans with filters, and picking up a second piece of lexan for the other side. eventually I'll want to do something with the computer beige top and front of the case.

I'm not too worried since fridays are shorter days for me, and are never really that busy of a work day, since around half the people are not even there.

so I found my old flight stick, and since this new motherboard I have actually has a joystick port on it, I can use it again. it's the microsoft force feedback one. nothing too terribly fancy, but not bad either. I remember it not being a cheap item when it first came out. anyway, to try things out, I installed a copy of ms flight simulator 2004. screwed around for awhile, and found on it's default settings.. kind of boring and unrealistic. eventually found where I could turn the realism up, and decided to try things out that way. chose the lear jet out of mccarran. on the runway, fired up the engines.. and just as I am off the ground, both engines stall just as I clear the runway. crash and burn into the ground. well at least that part was more satisfying than bouncing off the ground and back into the air like it did prior. second try, I get off the ground a bit sooner, but still both engines stall.. this time I have some runway left so I decide to be smart and not restart the level. I land the plane, and try to restart the engines.. nothing. WTF? sure I'm no ace pilot, but getting off the ground is suppose to be the easy part. kids have stolen cesnas for a late night joy ride, and have landed safely.

then I realize why it's not working. the plane has no fuel. in an attempt to make things interesting earlier, I had removed all the fuel from the plane except for a small bit in the center tank.. figuring that both engines cutting out mid flight might make things more fun. well all that did was let the fuel run down to zero sooner, but the plane still ran because the default setting is unlimited fuel. ok, so now my plane has fuel in it.. give it another try. much better.. the lear jet is interesting to fly, since it seems to WANT to gain altitude. truly to maintain a constant level, you have to push forward on the controls just a bit. so after a bit, i turn around and try to land it. well the problem is, I haven't figured out the navigation yet.. hell I didn't even bother with any of the instructions or tutorials on the game. so lets just say actually finding the airport is kind of a challenge. I didn't do too bad, since it's las vegas, you can see the skyline, and kind of figure things out. I even managed to approach the landing strip in the correct direction. problem was I was flying much too low too soon, so as I started to see the runway, maybe a mile ahead.. I hit the ground.. probably wouldn't have happened had I been looking in the aircraft at the time.. instead I was on an outside view looking around.. kind of like trying to drive, while you are outside checking to be sure the trunk lid is closed, and oh look you can see the passengers screaming as the driver is no where to be found. oh well there is next time.

discover just sent me a "you've been pre-approved for our discover platinum card" letter.

hello discover, I already have a discover platinum card. quit wasting paper.

well actually the phones are fine, but there quite a few small fires to put out at work today which we didn't find out about till today.

watching the clueless drivers on the news who can't seem to figure out that if they have to slow down to go over a speed bump, they can't cross flood waters. people are idiots.

today was quite a long day at work.. started at 5:30am, and didn't leave till 7:30pm. the good news, the call manager upgrade went without a hitch.. it just takes a very very very... very.. long time.

had sushi again tonight.. unfortunately it wasn't free..

had sushi for dinner today. went to sushi on trop, which seems to have expanded their all you can eat menu since I was there last. four pages of sushi goodness.

I need a new laptop. the video card in my laptop died, so I pulled the hard drive and put it in a compatible work laptop, but now the hard drive is failing, and this work laptop has issues as well, so I had to pull my CD drive out of my old laptop and put it in this one. also for some reason any time I play audio in winamp it sounds like I'm listening to it on a scratchy record player. video plays fine, though it'll get choppy after about 40 minutes of playing, so I'll have to close the file and then reopen it, then skip to the point I was at. this laptop also has a couple glitches in the LCD on occasion. I also had to grab one of batteries from my laptop, since the one in this laptop was bad. so this work laptop needs replaced as well, but has been working well enough to limp along with.

I was looking at the Toshiba M4 touchpad laptop. it looked pretty cool, though I lose having 1600x1200 screen resolution at that point, which is something I've been rather spoiled by. The other option is going with one of the Dell laptops with the 17 inch 1920x1200 screens, which would be nice. both of course cost more than I can afford right now, so buying one would mean incurring more credit card debt. I could buy a cheap laptop, but i don't want a cheap laptop. i may as well stick with what I have if I'm going to go that route. that means I'll probably just look at laptops and occasionally build one online, only to not buy it.

...has my entire call log from March 2004. impressive.

so I live across from a grade school. the only real annoying aspect of it is occasionally if I happen to be home when school is in session, particularly when parents are dropping of or picking up their children, some moron will block the culdesac I live in off with their SUVs so I can't either get in or out of my place. they also have this annoying PA system which is really loud, and chimes on the hour during the day. well today... labor day.. a day when no one is at the school, it's still chiming. so, I wake up early in the morning to the sound of it chiming. I didn't want to wake up early in the morning, as I had been up rather late. I also usually can sleep through anything. so why would I wake up so early? Well the chiming system system is also broke, so it's going non-stop, and you can hear it everywhere. ::bing,bing,bing,bong...bong,bong,bing,bing:: <repeat> I'm sure you've heard the cheap radio shack chimer before. they get old after three seconds, and this has been going on for over an hour at least.

fortunately I own loud power tools, and owners of loud power tools, at least ones who care about their hearing, own ear plugs or some other method of hearing protection. so a quick trip to the garage, and it's blissful silence.

if I tie all my hair ties together end to end, they total over eight feet.

so I've been playing ridge racer and loving the game. it's all about the drifting. so far I've completed the races 01 through 06 of the basic tour. there are a total of 46 races you have to beat, plus a mini-game, so looks like I'll be getting some good game play out of this game.

I received my free PSP today, and since I didn't have any games for it, I went down to the mall to spend some of the gift cards/certificates work gives out as a reward on our safety program. I picked up three games, Ridge Racer, Lumines, and Mercury. I had to shell out a buck twenty three in addition to what the gift certificates covered. Not bad at all. And I was impressed by the store clerk, who not only knew how to handle a single gift card, but knew how to handle multiple gift cards, and a gift certificate on a single purchase. Keep in mind the first few times I tried to use the damn cards I was either told they were not accepted, or didn't go through because the cashier was an idiot. And we were also told you couldn't use more than one card per purchase.

on the way home I stopped by Del Taco to pick up my usual veggie works burrito w/o sour cream. good, cheap, and not bad for you. the lady working the window asks me, and I quote, "you want hot sauce mild?" what? I think she needed a few more EASL classes, after hearing that brilliant phrasing. whatever, I don't want my hot sauce mild, I don't even want any hot sauce at this point. I pay, drive home, to finally relax after dealing with the mall, and eat my food. I open the wrapper, take a bite, and it's a beef burrito. what the fuck? I look at the wrapper in disbelief, seeing clearly that it is a veggie works wrapper. this sucks. Not only did I not get what I ordered, I quit eating beef awhile ago. generally I just feel healthier without red meat in my diet. so there I am looking at something I couldn't eat, already home and not wanting to get back in my truck just to bitch out some del taco employee. so, since I'm still livid, and figure calling the store wouldn't do a whole lot of good, I find the corporate number and give a full report of the shitty service I've gotten from the place. this isn't the first time they either screwed up my order, or just generally made a low quality burrito.

so I'm making rice in the steamer, and I'm going to play some ridge racer.

so I got the parts I ordered... well, not really. I got the gas tank fill pipe I needed, which is nice since trying to put 30 gallons in your truck 5 cents at a time is a pain in the ass... however I didn't get a windshield. seems their web page was errored, and while I thought I was ordering a windshield, I got a rear view mirror.. no where did it say mirror ever when I was ordering, so I sent and email to the company to get this resolved. it looks like they have since fixed their site, so they had to know it was a problem. i'm annoyed.

Tonight I've been cleaning and listening to XM Radio. Looks like they're going to have a new unit available come the end of the year, which combines a MP3 player, FM tuner and XM radio tuner. Nice. I kind of kick myself for not shelling out the extra bucks for the Myfi, which is a portable XM radio w/ built in antenna and 5 hours of storage. But when I was looking to buy my radio, which is by no means bad with a 30 minute buffer, i find times where having more of a buffer would be better. I'll live for now.

just got notified that I won a playstation portable. quite awesome. should get it within a few days.

so while returning from Santa Fe, I had my rear drivers side tire go out while I was going about 80. Seems a tire shredding at 80 miles per hour causes a lot of damage to the near by areas. really bashed in the rear fender, and flattened the fuel filler pipe. So to get home I had to put in gas really slowly. Fortunately I got lucky and found one gas station with pumps that could be set slow enough so I didn't have to pump 5 cents worth of gas, stop, pump 5 more cents, stop.. etc... real sensitive pumps are a pain in the ass here.

anyway, after some searching I found a place that sells oem ford auto parts, since the fuel filler pipe isn't really a common part. I searched about a dozen sites before finding one that sold what I needed. The really cool thing... replacement windshield.. $27. Damn, if I had know it was that cheap I would have replaced it sooner.

the replacement parts are on there way, and as a makeshift fix I used a piece of pvc and a mallot to at least open the filler pipe so I can put more gas in the tank at a go before the pump stops. I'll have to bang out the fender, should be possible to fix it easy enough, just another pain.

been busy with work, not getting enough sleep, being generally lazy, etc... thus explaining the general lack of updates here.

I've been messing with bit torrent lately, and was kind of annoyed that most public trackers don't let you upload your own torrent files for tracking... so since I run my own server, I just put up my own tracker so I wouldn't have to deal with that. (tracker.thcnet.net) Not that I have all that much I want to create torrent files for, it's just there for convenience mainly. After all, you never know when you'll get a couple terabytes of videos you want to serve up. I think it would be funny to create a torrent file that held my entire mp3 collection, albeit not entirely practical. Anyway, for now it's a public tracker, at some point I'll make it private should I see a lot of abuse of the thing.

thrilling I know.

So I had another bout of insomnia last night, and canceled going on the boat trip, since i couldn't get to sleep till almost 6am, and i had to be up at 7am. Did do a little swimming in the pool. Water is a good temperature finally. Normally I have swimmable water much sooner in the season, but my solar cover is dead, and I haven't picked up another one. They just don't last in the sun out here. Back yard is filled with pine needles from the neighbor's tree, which is annoying. it's at the point where a shovel would be the tool you use to pick them up. Bah. There is so much work to do around the house and I'm not at all motivated to do any of it.

so all this week I've been at Cisco Networkers, which is a big conference they hold with 200 some courses on routing, firewalls, ip telephony, etc.. so far it has rocked. lots of tech info, free food, and best of all I'm not at work. it's also a lot closer to my house, so the commute is a nice change of pace as well. bloody 40 miles round trip to work kind of sucks, when you are already working 9-10+ hour days.

In Santa Fe for the weekend, and then next week is the Cisco Networkers conference. Nice not to be working.

decided to shell out some money to buy a cisco pix 501 firewall, since I want to be more familiar with the pix software. I know how to use it now, but it's not what I would call second nature yet. I can also turn off the linux based firewalls, and the cisco 3002 hardware vpn client for work, which will save me some money.

The new drive shaft arrived in the mail today. Didn't take too long to install, since I had all the bolts broken free already. Just jack up the back end, slide under, unbolt, bolt. 100x better ride, now that the drive shaft isn't vibrating. going to replace the control arm bushings and the two front tires next.

I just finished watching the first disk of the BBS documentary I ordered. I'm thinking I need to throw the old BBS back online, maybe if I get time sometime this week I'll see about getting a system rebuilt to run that. I wonder if I had a dialup node if anyone would actually call it.

just finished watching The Fisher King. good movie. glad I have tomorrow off work.

my laptop display is giving me random noise. Could be a loose connector I suppose.. I may take my laptop apart at some point and see if it's fixable. Tends to be rather intermittent. Some times I can't even see the screen, and other times I'll work for hours with nothing, or just a few glitches which can be worked around.

well, it seems every bit of documentation on the Ford Bronco drive shaft, including the two books I own, are wrong.. see the part of my truck which is squeaking is the double cardan joint, particularly the socket in the middle to keep the joint from bending too far. on my particular bronco this socket is directly attached to the drive shaft, and not a part I can replace without of course replacing the entire drive shaft. On the plus side, it's a hell of a lot easier than replacing three U-joints and the double cardan spindle bearing. On the negative side it costs a bit more.

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So after being told it would cost $6400 to fix my truck, and having the mechanics hem and haw about how really I needed everything done at once, bla bla bla... fuck them. First off I think a couple of their diagnostics seemed a bit skeptical. Like needing new rotors.. ok well I had *just* got my brakes done, and the time before that I had new rotors put on. The rotors were not warped, and there is no way they machined too much off them. And then they said there wasn't even a radial control arm bushing on the passenger side.. ok well I put that in *myself* and when I looked it was there.. hell it wasn't even dirty. stupid crooked mechanics. And the only reason why I went there is because I wanted my abs system fixed, which they quoted I'd need about 3600 just to do that.. hmm.. no. I'll disconnect it first. Hell my cadillac was bigger and didn't have ABS breaks. Besides, I can probably fix it myself. They did point out where a lot of the problems were, so I can get around to fixing them myself as I get time. First is replacing the U-joints.. they're $13 each, and I need three. They wanted to replace all five on the truck, but since the front two never get used, one they are not worn, and two, there is no point. I went to harbor freight and picked up the tool I need to remove them. Good to go... well almost..

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I'm getting tired of this... or rather I wish I were getting tired of this. unfortunately it's 2:30am and I'm wide awake.

woke up with a bad headache this morning, so I took some meds and went back to sleep. ended up getting to work at 10am, so that means I didn't get out of work till 7:30pm. so much for accomplishing anything.

in good news, I got my books from amazon today. four books by David Foster Wallace, and Network Security Hacks. I'll probably take that into work tomorrow and go through some of it. it looks rather spiffy.

finally got tired of only having a 32mb compact flash card for the camera. at 5.0 megapixels, that space gets eaten fast. while browsing DVDs at bestbuy, I saw that they had 1GB UltraII SanDisk cards for 105, and then a 15 dollar mail in rebate. now provided I can remember to mail in said rebate, that means I'll have picked up the card for 90 bucks. that's about what I could find them online for before shipping, so not a bad deal. so now 394 pictures at max quality instead of 11.

Took my CCNA exam today. Ok, so I know what you're going to say, "Didn't you already have your CCNA?" Well yes, and no. I had one back in 2001, but the certification only lasts 3 years, so it was expired, and I didn't get around to taking any of the CCNP tests to renew it, and so I had to take the CCNA again in order to take the CCNP tests. I paniced however when I started taking the test, since they were asking about things I had not studied for. Seems the training material I got from Stealth wasn't very current. I passed anyway, since I knew everything they were asking minus some stuff on NAT with routers (i've always used a firewall for that), but you can't help but worry when the test you are taking is not at all what you were expecting to take.

I'm actually thinking I may go for the CCIP path instead of the CCNP path. CCIP focuses more on service provider type networking, so very heavy in BGP routing, etc...

crazy night last night. a very drunken crazy night.

so my work use to give us mall gift certificates for rewards on the safety programs we have. Well they stopped doing that and giving us gift cards. this sucks for two reasons. One the cards get bulky, so you can change them out for a single card at the mall, but to do that you have to buy a *new* card. Also you can't use two gift cards on a single purchase so you kind of have to combine them to buy things. Also with the gift certificates, you could get change back. So say you have a couple hundred dollars in gift certificates, easy to do when you don't go to the mall that often, you could buy a few cheap things, and have a good chunk of change in return. Not anymore, you have to spend your mall gift money at the mall.

Ok, you've conceded to actually buying stuff at the mall. It sucks, we know this, but we can live with the hassles so far. Well two out of three places I've been to in the mall couldn't actually use the card. It gets rejected. Probably it's because the monkeys at the registers don't know what to do with a gift card, you would run into the same problem at times with the gift certificate, but with the certificate at least I never got turned away and told, no we can't take this. So I have a mall gift card(s) that I can't actually use at the bloody mall.

So instead of getting a couple hundred dollars in clothing for essentially half that price, I just gave up trying to make the cashier drone do her job and paid for the purchase on my macy's card. managed to save 10% on the entire purchase by putting it on the card, plus the 25% savings on about half items which were on clearance, but still.. would have been nice to not have to shell out that much cash. I guess I'll just save up for a welder.

i should be studying for my ccnp certification. instead i'm killing time by drinking a bottle of pepi cabernet sauvingnon and surfing the internet.

speaking of wine, i'm actually getting to the point where I have certain wines I know I like and buy. big fan of the australian wines. little penguin, black opal, and yellow tail are all quite good. australian wine doesn't usually cost a lot either, which is another good thing.

I'm still alive, just been busy. spent the last two weeks with morgan on her spring break. we drove down to santa monica for our anniversary, which was fun, despite it being cold and raining, and the hotel we stayed at being about the worst place we've stayed in. going to be driving morgan back to santa fe, tomorrow (sunday), then rest a bit and head back. good thing I have XM radio, since it'll make the drive bearable. I'd fly, but it's cheaper to drive, and I prefer it really. there aren't a lot of major airlines going out of santa fe, so it kind of limits your options.

allergy season is killing me as usual. I think one of the few things that has managed to save me is I work in summerlin, where there isn't a lot of the fruitless mullberry trees I'm allergic to, and at home we have an ionic breeze air cleaner in the bedroom where I tend to hole up.

I'm quite happy with the XM radio. to give you an example of the coolness... I was on my way home from work, and needed to stop off at Lowes to pick up some fluorescent light bulbs for the kitchen. Well just as I was pulling into the parking lot they were starting an hour long program where they payed a bunch of songs from 1980. I wanted to hear what they were going to play, so I just put the music on pause... bought my goods.. and then resumed playing where I left off in the radio broadcast... and if they played a song I didn't like I could skip to the next one.

second bit of coolness. Tivo released their tivo2go software that lets you download recordings to your computer. Well a quick search later and I found a utility/method to convert the .tivo files which require a password to play into decrypted mpeg files I could burn onto a DVD. Boojah!

and I released a new version of PHP Bookmarks, which has some features I've been wanting for awhile... mainly how to lock categories open/closed unless you are logged in, and to hide items or comments on items unless you are logged in.

So a couple weeks ago I rented a car to go to New Mexico. Since it was a one way trip, Avis ended up giving me a luxury car for the price of a regular car, since that's what they needed moved at the time. It had XM radio, so I got to listen to some kick ass music the enire way, which made the drive go fairly quickly. I think the fact I was driving 80-85 most the way also made things go quickly. Anyway, they have a station called "fred", which is labeled as a deep classic alternative station. I listened to this station most of the way there, since just about every single song they played was great.

Anyway, I had been wanting to pick up satellite radio for some time, and was kind indecisive between Sirius and XM. I kind of wanted Sirius since Howard Stern, which I usually listen to on the drive in to work, was moving there. But since I really liked the music line up on XM, I decided to go that route. Well that wasn't the entire deciding factor. Delphi has a radio that lets you skip back up to 30 minutes so if you want to hear a song again, you can, and search for songs/artists on other stations. Since I'm such a tivo fan and figured that they needed to have that for radio, there you go.

Anyway, I picked up the SKYFi 2. Since the next better model looked a little too froofy for my tastes, even though it can store up to 5 hours of playback. That and it was over twice the price.

one of these days I'm going to get home before 10pm. last night was work, tonight was a a going away dinner for a coworker. um... tomorrow? i give up.

well last night my mind would not "shut up," so I didn't end up falling asleep until almost 5am... ick.. slept through my alarm and woke up to the phone at 9:45 because I had to sign my time card. Well crap. It's almost 10am, not going to get to work till 10:30am, and have to leave work at 2:30pm, since I'm flying to Santa Fe. I figured it wasn't even worth going in at that point. So I ended up taking the day off, and have been playing half-life 2 and answering my work phone occasionally since people are still calling.

morgan sent me a picture that I played around with in photoshop.

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So this was the weekend of suck. Lately I have had pretty bad insomnia. Hopefully at some point I'll get over it, but for now I'm usually getting no more than 3-4 hours sleep a night. Anyway, this Saturday we had a really early outage that was going to last most the day which I had to work for.. well of course I couldn't get to sleep, so I ended up staying up all night.. I took a 45 minute nap around 3:30pm, got home around 10:30 or so, and then was up till 4am again. I don't get it.

I finally got my new PC up and running. I had the motherboard last week, but have been busy so I didn't make very quick progress in getting it up and running. Last night, after a few days of the system being built but no operating system, and then no drivers, I finally devoted enough time to load the drivers for the video and sound, etc.. and install half-life 2. Everything turned up to maximum, great frame rate at 1600x1200. Worth the wait. Sure I could have probably managed to make it run on my system, or have installed it on Morgan's system and played it.. but the whole point was that I wanted a super bad-ass system to play this game at the best possible settings. And finally that's what I have.

this weekend I drove with morgan to santa fe, new mexico, to get her settled into her dorm room/college. We left a day early so we could get some sleep after the 9 hour drive, and decided to stay some place nice, since we were not going to get to see one another for some time. I found a really nice hotel, The Inn of the Five Graces. They were out of the smaller suite, so we got a room upgrade at no additional cost, room number 23, which isn't on the web site yet. we were pretty impressed with the place, since it's not your typical hotel. first off the rooms are gorgeous. hand painted, mosaic tile work. antique furniture and wood working. fireplace, huge down padded bed, jacuzzi tub, a big shower, kithcenette, chess board, satellite tv, and lots of little details everywhere.

we get in the room, and they have fresh chips and salsa set out for us, a carafe of some of the best margarita i've had, a plate of cookies, pate and crackers, and a stocked fridge of soda and water. they offered to park our car for us and take in our luggage. I probably spent the first half hour exploring the room, finding little things they provided in the room that really made it nice, and showed they thought about the people staying there. things like providing an umbrella, electric kettle and a coffee pot, setting up the fire for us, giving us a complimentary dream catcher, providing a selection of magazines, and other literature on the area, offering wine and cheese, and many other things I probably forgot to list.

I was so impressed by the tile work, I think I'm going to do something similar when I redo the master bathroom. check out the pictures we took.

well i'm home, finally.. actually got in around 3pm, but needed some sleep before I decided to address the world. still groggy and out of it, not to mention my ears have not adjusted to the pressure changes, since flying why sick is the definition of suck for me.

so on this trip morgan and I took the train from Newark to Boston, with stops in New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, thus checking off five more states from the visited states map, and adding more more mode of transportation I've utilized.

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Well christmas dinner with morgan's family was entertaining. the kids there were being well behaved, the food was good, got to drink some wine out of some pretty funky wine glasses. the only major down side is we ended up getting colds. so now we're both coughing -- more so morgan than i -- with sore throats.

i scored some new pajama pants, puzzle peg games, a cool thing of ciroc vodka with a blue martini glass, some sweaters, and a new wallet to replace the thread barren chunk of leather I had been passing off as a wallet while occasionally stopping to pick up all my credit cards which it failed to contain.

last I talked with them, which was the 2nd, they said "We are expecting the motherboard to be with us in approximately 1 week." ok.. it's now the 15th.. almost 2 weeks. I wonder how long Royal Mail International Priority Signed mail takes to get here from the UK.

Morgan actually made it to the airport today, got a ticket (how novel), and made it past security without being hassled (yay!). I miss her already.

my mom picked up this watch for me from thinkgeek. it's binary in blue LEDs.

so.. obviously... I don't have my spiffy new motherboard yet. looking at the web site, expected availability is four to seven days, since it's been this way for a few days, figure some time next week hopefully, otherwise I don't get to spray extra-dimensional alien brains on the walls till after the new year. that's what I get for having expensive tastes.

through some screw up with the airline and the credit card company, morgan's plane ticket was never actually paid for. she was suppose to leave today for boston, but won't be leaving until tomorrow. she could have left today, but the lady at the ticketing counter quoted a figure over two thousand dollars to buy the ticket then. that number is bullshit. I just did a search, and booking TODAY, I found that you could fly the same trip non-stop on Delta's Song Airline (the ones with the TVs in the back of each seat, etc..) for $411. if I look through America West, the airline she was on, you could book a FIRST CLASS non-stop ticket tonight for $1421. I really hate airlines, since they pretty much just consistently screw over passengers to line their wallets.

since we stayed up most the night, as it was going to be the last time we would be together until december 24th, we have been sleeping most of the day after said airport fiasco.

so why am I up now? some guy knocked on my door and said they are having a special on replacing old windows, and sliding doors and are offering free inspections. sounds good, since I have to replace the sliding glass door and one of the windows already. if I could get some energy efficiency, that'd be even better. I'll see what the quote will be and do some research on how much it costs to buy the windows and doors myself, and see if it's worth the cost of having them do it. it'll be the cost of labor which makes the difference of course. I'm quite capable of doing the work myself, but if it pays for the labor in savings, I might have them do it quicker.

the other night we were craving italian food -- well actually I was craving italian food, I'm pretty sure morgan was indifferent as to food type -- so I did a search for italian food on the yellow pages web site, and found this place, The Pasta Shop and Ristorante. the web site, with it's background, is a little geocitiesish, I'll admit. I decided to give the place a chance however, since it's location is incredibly close to my house.

it's located next to Bono's which sucked, and thankfully looks like it went out of business. it's a really small place, I mean *really* small, but it has a cool look to it. the walls have colorful metal sculpture things, zebra striped table cloths, a mesh tapestry thing hanging from the ceiling. a unique decor to be sure.

I had the Tortellini Au Gratin which was very good. we also ordered a cheese pizza, which according to morgan who grew up on the east coast, was the only pizza that was done right she's had in vegas. I'll admit, the pizza was quite good, and better than most pizza I've had in vegas. comes in close with Northside Nathan's Detroit Pizza, which is a place up in summerlin that has a great lunch special. personal detroit style pizza (square) and a drink for around five bucks.

now morgan is sick... :(

delivers -- AND has online ordering. I didn't know that. here I thought I was forever doomed to only being able to choose pizzahut or papajohns when I wanted food brought to me, but didn't actually want the bother of talking to an annoying human. food gets here at 8pm.. yum.

i wonder if there is any other online food delivery I'm missing out on?

the texaco station right by my work -- where I usually pick up my morning coffee -- decided that it would be extra festive if they placed a dancing santa in their store for the holiday season. So as you walk in the door, you're nearly assaulted by a four foot animatronic creature bearing a resemblance to a dwarf in a santa suit, bobbling about drunkenly while bleating christmas carols. now I realize that a certain amount of festivity and glit should be expected this time of year, but the thing is just plain creepy. I'm generally not at all violent, but my first instinct, every time I enter the store, is to punch this evil monstrosity.

Morgan got her new laptop this weekend. It's a Compaq Presario R3000 AMD 64 w/ 15.4" wide screen display. Though it came with XP SP2, which can be described as nothing less than insideously evil.

I still do not have my motherboard. I expect it to get here on the 10th.

Morgan's hair is currently an unnatural shade of bright red. :)

when asked why you are laughing hysterically in the middle of class, replying with the words "suicide is painless", but neglecting to mention the reason for your amusement was a sudden revelation about the M*A*S*H theme song, will get you sent to the counseler's office.

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/4092/

I have a cold.

[Dec 3: still sick.]

since we didn't have enough pie already in the house, I'm making up a pumpkin pie. Yum. And since I have three hours to kill before it's done, I just might have some apple pie while I wait.

so the motherboard for my super-elite badass system does not get here until some time early december. when it gets here i shall explode.

had to work on Saturday, so it's been a really short weekend. that and I've had a knot between my shoulder blades for the past several days... it's getting better slowly, but being in pain constantly sucks..

morgan and I drink a lot of water, a lot of water... and of course being avid fans of water, we don't like vegas tap water. So, since I was tired of buying bottled water every week, I picked up a reverse osmosis unit from home depot. they have a new one which doesn't waste 5 gallons of water for every 1 gallon of clean water produced. kind of an ingenious design really. since a regular reverse osmosis dumps water into the drain, they just moved that to the hot water tap, and added a pump to create a difference in pressure.

the second job of the week, was to replace the faucet. the old one started sticking, so if it was on hot, and you wanted it to be warm, it would either stay at hot, or swing all the way to cold. and with this absence of a happy medium, and growing tired of burning and/or freezing my hands while trying to clean dishes, i decided it needed to be replaced. this job was the one that sucked, since the fasteners for the faucet are at way up in the back of the cabinet. getting anything done requires contorting blindly with your face pressed up against the front of the cabinet in a vein attempt at reaching the nut in question. sure they have plumbers wrenches, which are designed for the job, but that is one of the few tools I don't have.

next will be the task of running a water line from the RO to the fridge, since that water is merely filtered. Sure it's better than straight tap water, but it's not as good as RO water. the difficulty in this is that there is no clear way to run the water line which does not involve cutting holes in drywall. I'll have to run it up the inside of the wall, across the inside of the ceiling, and then down to the back of the fridge. I might use it as an excuse to redo the kitchen lighting, which is a little inadequate.

So... on the drive home to work, I'm talking to morgan. in mid-sentence, the phone cuts out. it still shows that I'm connected, but nothing.... I call back, never rings... try again, same thing. I call the house and still, the phone doesn't ring, nothing but silence. I hang up, but on hanging up I accidentally bump the speaker phone button, and hear the last part of my voicemail prompt. I switch it off speaker phone and can't hear anything. I try the same test with my work voicemail. looks like mid-call speaker circuitry just disconnected itself.

Then, after I get off the highway onto the street to my house, my truck kind of dies... very slow acceleration. turn off of Russel, and the engine wants to stall on me. I barely get the truck into the driveway. so in addition to needing to replace my phone, I also have to get my truck repaired, or try to figure out what the hell is wrong with it myself.

Ok, so I'm home from work, we're hungry... I borrow morgan's car to go pick up some food.. they make our two burritos at chipotle's, reach into my pocket to grab my wallet, and it's not there. I give up.

Well today Morgan and I voted. Let's hope florida doesn't screw things up with the election again this year. If they do, I say take away their right to vote. I mean come on, how difficult is it to be given a list of choices and asked to "pick one."

I picked up the new GTA game today. Pretty good, even if it's a bit heavy on the R&B music for my tastes. Ok sure you play the role of a black gangster in the game, but who is to say that all black gangsters listen to rap music? Are there no gang bangers who really get into their 80's music? No popping caps to the great works of ludwig von beethoven?

so after telling amazon repeatedly that yes I really wanted it and to not cancel my order which was placed on june 2nd. I now hold in my hands Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Woo!

We picked up a couple more rats today, two males. One half-albino, and one "blue" rat, which is actually brown and gray two tone fur... kind of cool looking actually. We're going to breed them with the female we have and see what kinds of babys we end up with. Fun with genetics.

this morning we went to go see the national wild horse auction over at the henderson saddle association. forgot to bring a camera of course, but the horses were pretty. it would be nice to own a bigger place with space to have some horse stables one day. after that was back at the house for a bite from taco bell (grilled stuffed chicken burritos and chicken mexican pizzas are about the only things I'll eat there) and watching of some law and order.

then since we were feeling all outgoing, having gotten up early, we went to the mall. I scored some new jeans and bought a gift for Morgan. I'm kind of annoyed that it's unusually hard to find something in my size. judging by the sizes they have on hand, this country is filled with a lot of short fat people. bah. I did find a pair of blue jeans, a pair of black jeans, and a pair of faded blue/brown jeans that looked neat.

now I think it's nap time.

Yes, I haven't posted on here in some time. But then you know that already.

I finally finished the built in book shelves for Morgan's office. They look really nice. 84 inches in height and just over 10 feet in length. Take up an entire wall. The obvious next step is to build one of those cool rolling ladders so you can get to the top shelf. I'll post pictures at some point.

The dishwasher broke, so I had to shell out some cash for a new one. Installed that after work today. This one has more space, and you don't have to wash the dishes before putting them in the dish washer, so I suppose it's a good/bad thing.

I moved the site to the new server over at server beach. That's all you get for an update right now.

Morgan made up a monster sized batch of her Chicken Scampi last night. Mmmm... good stuff. Had Jeff, Anthony and Karen over and sat around chatting till well past midnight. All in all a good night.

Work has been keeping me busy lately, though standing around watching people inventory things in a freezing computer room for 6 hours is the definition of suck. I was so cold, that after I turned the AC off in my car (which has been sitting in the desert sun all day), and drove from the building we were inventorying to my office. I was still cold when I got there. Next day I brought a jacket, but it was still cold, and just as mind numbingly boring.

Fortunately the company I work for realizes this, and has chosen NOT to follow the new laws concerning overtime:

New overtime guidelines will not affect employees

On Aug. 23, for the first time in almost 70 years, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) changed its rules governing the payment of overtime.

Because our overtime policies are more generous than FLSA requirements, it is not expected that the changes to the law will cause any reduction in pay or overtime compensation for employees.

Employees in grades B through H and 21 through 24 will still be eligible for one and a half times their straight-time salary rate when they work overtime. Grades 25 through 27 will still be eligible for overtime at the straight-time rate when their overtime is scheduled and approved in advance of being worked. See DIR-HR-006, Overtime and Work Hours, for details.

If you have any questions, send an e-mail to: Ask HR.


W00t!

Finally... after many coats and touch ups... the paint in morgan's office is done. I have all the tile down except for the border, which I'll need to pick up another box of tile for. Then it's on to build book shelves, enough book shelves to hold all of mine and morgan's books (which is a lot) I'm going to do an antiqued black finish on them to match the desk and chair she has.

Her friend JD visited for a few days, which was cool. No wild excitement, just mostly hanging out and chilling.

Well, just about finished painting the library/morgan's office. Just need a final clear coat over the crackle paint on the trim, a couple touch ups on the door and shelf, and it's done. I started putting in the floor. Just cheap peel-n-stick tile, though for peel-n-stick, this stuff is pretty nice. Has a nice stone pattern which doesn't seem to obviously repeat, one thing I always hated about fake tile floors. The only worry I have is that it'll stay in place. You're not suppose to lay it over primer, but to seal the floor we had to paint it. Kind of a bitch, since our only other option would be to rip out the sub floor and replace it. Eventually I'd like to get bamboo flooring for the entire upstairs, but that's a long way and lots of dollars down the road. This stuff is good enough to make the room usable, and if a tile comes up we can always glue it.

Updated after our road trip... Added a few states, plus a couple I forgot I had been to.

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Well today is the last day of my vacation. Defcon was pretty weak this year, with only about half the people as previous years. However the few days off after are always nice.

Morgan and I have been working on painting the spare room, soon to be library/morgan's office. Probably work up the motivation to seal the floor today.

I just finished reading Permutation City again. Good book if you can find it. It's out of print so I had to buy it used off amazon.

Lets see other things I had not mentioned. Morgan and I spent the weekend with her family the weekend after we got back from driving across country. Her car is nice to drive, especially compared to the U-Haul of suck.

For the most part it's been short work weeks for me. Kind of needed the time off I think. I go back to work tomorrow, and thursday, then have another three day weekend. Then it's back to the five day week.

Ok yea, I know I'm terribly behind on this.. but here you go..

Day three starts out with us calling U-Haul yet again, since the truck is barely running. The guy comes out and replaces the fuel filter and adds some gas additive. Says we're good to go, and admittedly the truck is a "little" better. Not much, but at least the check engine light is off and it's running smoother. He follows us for about 10-15 minutes to make sure we're ok. About 30-45 minutes the check engine light is on again, and next time I'm at a stop I notice the engine is still running rough. I also figure out that part of the problem is a vacuum problem. See the air vents on fords are run by vacuum, and will default to the defrost vents if there isn't any. Well the second you put any load on the engine, the vents shut off.. I check the defrost, and sure enough cold air is blowing from there.. I say to myself damned this U-Haul I'll drive it into the ground before I call them again.

Morgan got Scarface, so I had to try it out

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Finally got around to updating my site.. so here is the diatribe of day two.

We made quite a bit of progress on the second day, around 1100 miles. While driving thru St. Louis we took a quick stop to see the arch. Now the street was closed that had the oversized parking so we didn't actually get to go out of the truck or anything, however we did drive REALLY close to it and saw it was quite shiny. And driving down by the river was quite annoying with the large amounts of pedestrians and other people who should have been walking since they can't drive. Speed sight seeing at it's best. Later in the trip, Morgan after looking at the Atlas, came up with a good plan to drive through New Mexico. Sounded like fun, so we decided to go for that and yet another state to my visited states map.

Well the trip so far has been quite an.. um... adventure. We're in Indianapolis getting some shut eye at the Hampton Inn, but more on that later.

So after a short three day work week, I'll be flying out to Maryland Wednesday night with Morgan to pick up the rest of her stuff, and then driving across the country in a U-Haul. I'm looking forward to it, since I haven't driven cross country in some time. Last time was when I drove the Cadillac out here from Michigan. Ok so a U-Haul won't be as cool of a vehicle as the Caddy to drive for that long of a distance, but at least I'll get to add a few states to my visited states map.

I'm watching Cox inventory their fiber boxes. Weee.. it doesn't get any more exciting.

The stupidity of people at times just amazes me. Take just now for example. I just got an email from our help desk with a question about our ftp site. Now this is a big long chain of emails, of people asking to find out what the username and password to access the FTP site is. It went something like this:

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I took this test. Here is what it says about me:

"You are an SRDL--Sober Rational Destructive Leader. This makes you a mob boss. You are the ultimate alpha person and even your friends give you your space. You can't stand whiners, weaklings, schlemiels or schlemozzles. You don't make many jokes, but when you do, others laugh out loud. They must.

People often turn to you for advice, and wisely. You are calm in a crisis, cautious in a tempest, and attuned to even the finest details. Yours is the profile of a smart head for business and a dangerous enemy.

You have a natural knack for fashion and occupy a suit like a matinee idol. Your charisma is striking and without artifice. You are generous, thoughtful, and appreciate life's finer things.

Please don't kick my ass."

Nifty.

Some times I really like my job. I needed to test some stuff with policy based routing and didn't want to "play" with the production system, so I pulled out six Cisco Catalyst 3550 switches with routing enabled, and recreated our firewall/internet setup, simulating our internal network, our two firewall systems, and our internet routers with a BGP peering to our providers internet router. So I collapsed about 14 devices down to 6. Ok, could have done it with 4 or 5, but since I had the hardware I figured I would be detailed.

Who the hell "borrowed" my copy of Permutation City? I was telling Morgan about this book and how it was really good and that I wanted to read it again. However, when looking thru my inventory of books, a massive pile currently in the dining room, it was not to be found. I look on Border's website, which has a feature where you can check to see if something is in the inventory locally or not, and the book is out of print. Amazon doesn't have it new, so that means I had to buy it used. I hate buying things I already owned, but this is worth having, so I bought another copy.

This weekend I took Morgan up to San Clemente for a little weekend vacation. We got a room at the Sea Horse Inn with an ocean view, very short walking distance from the pier and beach. There were some things about the room which could have been improved, but generally a pretty nice place. We were on the ground floor with a patio in front of our room, and double doors that could be opened to the outside. I'd stay there again, even if for two days we were staring at "Pandora's towel" which was used to cover one of the ceiling fixtures.

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Morgan's feeling sick and went to bed early... :( But before she did she made me a wonderful chicken and rice soup. :) I'm both happy and sad.

News: We have a cat, it's name is "ka5tte", the 5 and e of course being silent. Well she started out as the cat with no name, we toyed around with Shiva, but that name never really stuck. We both pretty much call her Cat or Kitty, so Morgan joked that we should call her Cat with a silent 5, which I found so funny at the time I laughed for several minutes. Dorks, I know.

Yesterday I worked till 11:30 since we had a network failure. Fortunate for me, I got to do so from home.

I have to work late Thursday out at the test site. Long long day, but at least I'll be pulling in a few more hours of OT.

And this weekend Morgan and I are heading to San Clemente, CA to enjoy the beach, southern california, etc.. staying at this place which is right on the beach. Woo! Should be fun.

Last Christmas, we found out that my good wooden rolling pin was now gone. I had it at this house, turned the kitchen upside down.. no where to be found... well, add to the list my 9" glass Pyrex baking pan. Again, I knew I had one, we were preparing to make something that would use it.. go to get the pan and it's nowhere. Not in the kitchen, checked everywhere. Again, something I've had here, and remember using here, and have had for some time. Damn it. I'm going to start labeling stuff that's mine.

Morgan and I picked up a kitten last night. It's cute, and hasn't quite worked out the concept of mirrors yet. Keeps trying to get around the cat in the mirror, and occasionally just runs into the mirror because she thinks she can be quicker than her reflection. Heheh.. I'm sure there will be pictures at some point.

Finished reading Neuromancer again the other day. It had been so long since I had read it that I had forgotten much of what the story was about. Good book. I'll have to re-read some more of Gibson's stuff when I get the chance. Right now I'm working on reading Quicksilver, and have a few more books queued up after that. Ahh reading.

Oh and it's a FOUR day weekend this weekend. Boojah!

Last night Zeb came over since Zoe was off eating sushi and entertaining pr0n people. For dinner, Morgan was in the mood to show off her impressive culinary skills and prepared for us perhaps the best stir fry ever. The house was filled with a mouth watering aroma from it cooking. And there were left overs! Mmmmm.. more stir fry dinner tonight.

I'm very happy these days.

I gave up on ever cleaning the carpeting in the 3rd bedroom. Deanna's cats have ruined it and there is no point in trying to undo the damage. Savage and I both steam cleaned the room a few times each. In an act of desperation, the final attempt was made using straight vinegar. I had hopes that with the vinegar, it had some how managed to become clean. However, after the smell of pickles wore off you could still smell the cat piss. By that point it was pretty clear the carpet has been destroyed, and the only solution is to pull it out and replace it with something else.

The inspiration for this act of home improvement is the plan Morgan and I have for the room. It's going to be turned into a library. We both have a ton of books each, and are always collecting more. This also gives her a place where she can concentrate on her school work, get away from people, etc... So yesterday we ripped out the carpet. I had started it the night before, but the stench was so bad, I had an immediate allergic reaction and could barely breath. This time, armed with a filtered respirator, we finished pulling out the carpet, and I went about the task of removing all the staples and carpet tack strips from the sub flooring. Once the carpet had been removed you could see there were areas of the floor that still needed to be hit directly with vinegar. Yes, the cat urine had penetrated through the carpeting, through the foam matting, and into the plywood. With the worst part gone, and the room aired out you can be in the room without dying at least.

Demolition done, now the part of rebuilding it. The walls were all dirty, so Morgan scrubbed those down, patched the excessive number of nail holes, and is in the process of painting over the dirty green color. Once the room has been painted we'll throw down some quick and cheap tile as an improvement over the carpeting. I'll probably also replace the fan with something that is not shiny brass while still in the productive remodeling spirit.

Oh and Morgan had her hair cut and dyed today. Came home to a even more sexy girlfriend. Grrr baby!

I have some of the E3 pictures up now.

rest your peeps over here

E3 went well. Pictures will be up once I go thru them and delete the crap. Oh and Zeb if you could send me the original pictures of ones you took that'd be cool.

Last night I made up a batch of my Chicken Enchilada soup for Morgan. She liked it which was cool. I mean, everyone likes my soup, but it always is good to hear when someone new tries it and thinks it's really good, even more so when that person is your girlfriend and you were making it for her.

Went with Morgan and my brother to toys-r-us and bought... toys. Heh.. picked up another model car, a 69 charger, to add to my collection. Cars are already dusty. I just cleaned them all the other day. I should pick up a display case.

After we headed to Game Stop and picked up a couple PS2 games and some movies. Ran into Zeb there, which was amusing.

And then it was a random mass donut craving, so we headed to Winchels for some concentrated sugar. I'm pretty sure the guy working there didn't really know what a donut was. It's the only explanation.

No super excitement here, just a relaxed weekend after E3.

I'm at E3. It is goodness.

edit: back.. friday night 11pm, long drive of suck.

Morgan is here! She's also very tired. More later.

Just talked with morgan. At 2:00am, 1831 miles, and has 10 hours of driving left. Woo!

Edit: Ok, at 7am, 180 miles out. She says 3 hours. So guess it's between my original estimate of 8-9am, and hers, 11am-12pm. Hehe..

She's in Missouri. :)

Edit: And at 12:47pm, at the 1000 mile point.

Edit: 8:47pm, around 100-120 miles from Denver. That's where I was guessing she would be.

Morgan is in Pennsylvania Ohio headed west. Seems the whole state has no cell phone reception. How bloody annoying. She's driving out here with her friend Laura, so that means two drivers, and more time spent on the road moving. Very cool.

I've been kind of a drugged out blah mood today. Didn't really want to do much of anything, so well... I didn't. Minimal work, a minor bit of social activity, and we're good. I blame the Allergy meds, but at least I can breath. Last night over at Wally's place sucked. Just wanted to sit there and do nothing. Lawn is sitting there growing because I'll die if I attempt to cut it. I hate this time of year.

Went and had Mexican food at this place called Inca on Maryland Parkway in celebration of Cinco De Mayo with Barry and crew. Good food, though the service was a bit slow. I think the waitress was too easily side tracked. Still it was entertainment enough for the evening.

Edit: She just called from Ohio. Yay!

Morgan has three more days left of class, then she'll be throwing stuff into her car and driving across country from Maryland. I'm very excited. We'll see how much of a margin she beats the N more days counter on the front page.

weeeeee!!!

I got into a bit of a coding zone, so I did some more work on the code for thcnet, which runs this site, and of course https://thcnet.net. Mainly I figured out an easy way to enable sticky logins, and still keep the existing authentication system in tact. This was really brought about by a bug I found, where sessions were not getting deleted from the database like they should. I had like 75000+ sessions in the session table. I learned that with mysql, if something is NULL, it doesn't pass the check to not equal to 1. It just ignores them when doing that check, so unless you explicitly to an IS NULL check or IS NOT NULL check, it wont work for records that are null. Damn. Easy enough fix there, and gave me my inspiration to add the ability to keep you logged in. Which means... you only have to login once here.. well once per browser, assuming your IP address does not change. I know it was a pain in the ass to always have to login here, and now you don't have to. You still can if you like, just don't check the stay logged in box.. but it's an option.

i'm posting from the Crystal Method concert. They're about to go on, but have been playing some kick ass mixes while everyone waits. Just played something called "i've never been to the usa" which I'll have to find when I get back... could also be called "stuck in the uk" no idea. Someone download it and send it to me.

Edit: That was an awesome show. Awesome!

I can't think of any words that have not already been said a thousand times over... so I'll let Frank say it for me.

Out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plum
You came along and everything started to hum
Still it’s a real good bet, the best is yet to come

The best is yet to come, and won’t that be fine
You think you’ve seen the sun, but you ain’t seen it shine

Wait till the warm-up is underway
Wait till our lips have met
Wait till you see that sunshine day
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet

The best is yet to come, and won’t that be fine
The best is yet to come, come the day that your mine

Come the day that your mine
I’m gonna teach you to fly
We’ve only tasted the wine
We’re gonna drain that cup dry

Wait till your charms are right, for the arms to surround
You think you’ve flown before, but you ain’t left the ground

Wait till you’re locked in my embrace
Wait till I hold you near
Wait till you see that sunshine place
There ain’t nothin’ like it here

The best is yet to come, and won’t that be fine
The best is yet to come, come the day that your mine

Jenny and JennaBea's birthday party went very well. Everyone had fun. The only casualty was my book case exploding unexpectedly.

so yea, this week has pretty much sucked ass at work. One of the core routers decided to have all kinds of problems, so this week has been spent tracking the problems down, replacing components which might be bad, etc.. hopefully Friday night when we replace one of the blades that'll fix things once and for all. If not, my coworkers will have fun replacing the entire chassis Saturday night. I however will be otherwise busy with party shenanigans.

Just finished reading Enders Game earlier today. Great book. Go read it.

Well the drunken walk for omnibuscortex went rather well, despite it being cold windy, etc.. the bar at the treasure island was quite animated. Drank too much of course, but then that was the goal now wasn't it.

Now about the most ambitious thing I'm planning on doing is sitting on the couch watching Montey Python while waiting on food to be delivered.

Well I'm back in Vegas, and probably still a bit fried from the trip. Went to Sushi Fever with Zoe and Zeb right after I got back, and while talking with Zeb on the way there I was pretty out of it. 2+ hours of rush hour traffic, then flying across country kind of gets to you.

Cordelia flew into town tonight. BSed for awhile before her east coast time zoned self decided to crash early... and of course I'm up late, since I drank a big iced tea from Del Taco when she got in.

My trip to DC/Maryland was great. It was really nice to spent time with Morgan again while I was there. She's such a wonderful girl. The longer I'm with her, the more I know that I'm really quite in love with her. I know I'm being sappy here, but she is and I am. We really click well with one another. Right away she was someone with whom I was totally relaxed and comfortable with. That's a bit of a rare thing for me. I tend to be the type that is quite reserved, quiet, and hiding behind the safety of my firewall. But with Morgan, it was like there was some process running in my subconscious mind that quickly evaluated her, took a look at the embankments I had set in place, and started frantically kicking at the bricks and mortar since they would obviously just get in the way.

What's worse that two hours of rush hour traffic from Washington DC to Maryland every day? Two and a half hours of rush hour traffic from Washington DC to Maryland when you got out of work early to hopefully avoid some of the rush hour traffic... blah. Got there in time to see Morgan before she had to go to class however, so at least I don't feel defeated. But HATE... I HATE traffic. Interesting side note.. that's driving across three freeways and even though traffic was very heavy and it was raining like a son of a bitch, there was not one accident yesterday or today. Oh and the Chevy Monte Carlo has no pickup. Step on the accelerator, 2 seconds later the car thinks about going fast.. the radio however shows you the song names that are playing on the radio station. Nifty.

I'm in Maryland now. Add three states I've driven thru to my list. Morgan is such a cute organ sack. Weeeeeeeeeee!

Just received the badge confirmations for the Sin City Software folk in the mail today. I suspect the Alternative Nation ones should also be here. DIY Games should be in the next day or two. So who doubted my forgery skills? Who? Now I guess I should buy the plane ticket for my brother.

Cleaned up the master bedroom tonight. It's a million times better. Some times I don't understand why I put that off for so long. A lot of things had been collecting up there that needed to be stored other places, or thrown out, etc.. Good to finally have that done. Now to go about actually "cleaning" the room. Hahah..

I get to go to Baltimore from the 9th till the 15th. Well actually work is sending me to DC, which happens to be very close to Baltimore. I'm very happy and excited that I get to see Morgan. Well happy and excited is a little understated. I'm ecstatic.

Today is my normal day off, but I have to go into work tonight at 7pm because we're moving some servers to the data center. Probably be done with work a bit after midnight.. later if things don't go smoothly. After which I'm going to want beer and food. Who is up for the Freakin Frog?

Who hired monkeys to put this rack together? Ok, so a little background. We're building out a new building, and so we hire a contractor to do the data work. We've worked with them before and they generally do good work. Ok but not for this... we have a four post rack for mounting our UPS equipment for emergency power. Big huge UPS. Two fully loaded APC Symmetra's with extended run frames, environmental monitoring, etc.. It's a nice UPS. Also heavy, which is why we need the four post rack. So the electricians put together the rack, bolt it to the floor. Looks ok by casual observance. So today I get the UPS in, manage to get the 40 some boxes into the small equipment room and still have room to work. Attempting to mount the first component, it's apparent that the rack is not shaped like a rectangle. No, that would be far to easy, what we were provided with was a parallelogram shaped rack, in that one side was about a half inch off from the other. So when you put in the equipment, one side is flush and the other sticks out. Then I look at the rack closer and notice two things. One they seem to have a lot of extra parts left over. Two, the person who put the rack together took great liberty in interpreting what a rack should look like. Obviously they didn't actually READ the instructions on how to put the rack together. Not that you should need instructions. These racks are pretty basic. Just an open box frame, just for different kinds of pieces, totaling 12 straight segments which you must assemble. If done right, the rack will be really close to square, if not square. There will be no extra holes, no extra pieces, except for a hand full of spare bolts they give you just in case you drop one into a bottomless pit or something. And the thing is, there is a grid line on the floor. It's tile. Just line it up with the tile and you're damned close enough. I've put together a half dozen of these and never had a problem.

So just so I don't have another headache tomorrow as I pound my skull into the nearest wall when I see yet again another screw up, I have to be in there at 6:00am to explain elementary geometry to the wire monkey that they send to fix this. Hopefully they saved the parts they didn't use. And if they did, I do have a stash of some extra bolts, I'll just be annoyed with them even further. ::sigh:: I suppose it could be worse. The rack could have been trapezoidal.

Just to further assert my utmost geek status, I am listening to mp3s on my laptop. Now anyone else would do this the simple straight forward method. That however would be boring. Instead of listening to them directly off my laptop, I setup winamp with a shoutcast audio broadcast stream connected to my server down stairs. Next, with my new phone I launched the mp3 player and over the wireless internet connection on the phone, connected to my shoutcast audio server. It's a good thing Sprint gives me unlimited Internet access on my phone, since this is the ultimate in pointless. Still I could do something like setup a play list of music I wanted to listen to, connect the audio out of the phone to the aux audio input on my truck's stereo, and listen to music while on the road. Ok, we're ignoring that I could just hotsync the mp3s to my phone, or for that matter my truck's stereo is also an mp3 player and I could just burn a CD with what I wanted on it.

well this is definitely annoying. The linkage from the ignition switch broke on my truck so it is in the shop. It's also going to be expensive to fix due to the amount of labor involved. Add to that they were short handed at the place on Saturday, so they still have not fixed it. I have to wait till some time Monday before I get my truck back. So so I can still function, go to work, etc.. I'll need to pick up a rental, which of course is more expense I wasn't planning on.

I should be working, but I have a heaping helping of the fuckits going on. I already took care of getting pricing for the serial port adapter modules for the DS1 to Washington, DC. At some point I'm going to hook up a couple 2500 routers and see if I can get them working as a temporary solution. And then a bunch of mindless grunt work that I'm putting off. Oh and Verichat no longer marks me as away if I close the program on my phone, so people thing I'm online and keep text messaging me, which only further distracts me from doing anything productive.. <shrug> I wish it would allow you to set an away message, that would be useful.

Hey look, it's a man in a dress!

kilt of doom

So yea, I decided that I must have a utilikilt. I've wanted a kilt for awhile, but the key thing that finally made me buy one was Cordelia pointing out the incredibly geekly Utilikilt. It's a kilt with pockets, how can you not like it? That was all the convincing I needed. So after many weeks of patient waiting, and nearly forgetting I ordered it, I get a nifty package in the mail today. It's awesome (like a hotdog).

yes it's 2am.. yes I'm still up. Just spent the past three hours talking to Morgan on the phone...

who needs sleep anyway.

It's annoyingly NOT 5:30 yet. Work has been dragging today for some reason. Though I have at least had a steady stream of amusing and or distracting text messages to try and help the day go by quicker.

I am happy with how my E3 credentials turned out. Of COURSE I work in the industry... see pay stub, corporate credit card, what more do you want? Should have no problems getting the badges this year, unless they decide to run background checks. THAT isn't going to happen. The mindless drones are happy if it looks convincing enough. I know my pay stubs have worked four years in a row, so why shouldn't my credit cards. Just need a black sharpie to block out the card number so they can't actually check anything, even if they wanted to. They let you do that on the pay stub, so should be ok on the card. If not I'll make up W2 forms. That's only annoying because it has a company id number, which could be cross referenced so I rather not go that route.

Oh the devious actions some gamers will do to get into E3. I don't feel bad though since a good portion of the people there probably are not in the industry either. So just because I'm not part of a REAL business that actually pays people, doesn't mean I shouldn't get to go. There is my rant.

I really need to clean out my garage. There is way too much crap in there. A lot of it not even mine. Empty boxes, etc... I know a good portion could be thrown out. If I'm to ever hope to make my own bedroom furniture I'm going to need a good bit of work space.. oh and a place to put a surface planer. Gotta have the surface planer.

(yes stealth this is going to be a sappy post)

A few of you may already know this about me, but beneath the cool geek exterior you normally see, I'm really a bit of a romantic. I like doing sappy things that melt away at a girls heart. Take for example something so simple as buying a girl flowers. You can never go wrong with flowers, especially unexpected flowers. My advice to you, those are absolutely the best. It's like you took the result you get from a woman when she knows she's going to be getting something, and amplified it.

Today I had a dozen roses sent to Morgan, and as you can see by her response she loved them. And that's really the best feeling, knowing that you made someone that happy.

it's too damn early to go to work. no... that's technically wrong since I was suppose to leave the house 17 minutes ago. damn.

didn't do a whole lot today. didn't get some of the things done I wanted to. But it's Sunday and I didn't feel like much of anything anyway.

Watched The Eye with Jeff and JennaBea, as well as much Invader Zim goodness.

And I put a counter up on the main page. You can probably guess what it's there for. I'll give you a hint, it's not E3 this year. Though speaking of E3. I need to finish working on the required documents.

Pretty laid back day today. Watched the first season of coupling with Zeb, Zoe, and Savage. Ordered a Gourmet Veggie pizza from Round Table. Mmmmm veggie no greasy pizza goodness. Chatted with Morgan, now I'm burning DVDs. I'm happy.

This didn't tell me anything I didn't already know:
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Yes, I'm quite smitten by this woman. For the past week, I have been spending day and night with Morgan, who came out here from Baltimore to visit with Jeff. Interestingly enough, we hit it off very well the first night, and from that point we pretty much were always together for her entire stay. She was both welcome and unexpected, and I'm glad to have her now. May is going to be a month which is impossibly far away.

So here is the summary of events.

Friday... work just dragged on endlessly. I was the only one there, and it took much force of will not to fall asleep at my desk. However since I skipped lunch, I was able to take off early and get to work on getting the house ready for partyage.

Friday night... the party. Zeb had a couple friends of his from Baltimore in the attractive 20 year old single college girl variety, in for spring break. Had quite a bit of fun. The hot tub was an obvious hit. Though in our drunken antics, someone accidentally turned the temperature controls to standby mode, so the water got cold fast. And once everyone left the spa, the water level was down so low the jets were uncovered. At least the spa works, and was cheap enough to fix.

I'd say that people enjoyed themselves at the party. Ok, that's the understatement of the year. Events were um... interesting. Not that I'd really know, since after hitting it off with Morgan, I pretty much ignored the rest of the party, not even entirely certain when people eventually left.

Saturday was a road trip to Lake Havasu to go play on Keith and Holly's new boat. Had quite a bit of fun. Keith has an awesome boat. I'm thinking regular road trips are going to be required there. Had to head back a little early due to an emergency, but all seems to be better now, which is good.

Sunday spent the day with Morgan, good part of it just recovering from Saturday, but some fun was had once we were up and about. Damn shame she has to live on the other side of the country.

I managed the day on 3 hours sleep.. though I'd have to say I'm pretty dead at the moment.

After work today I finished rebuilding the spa heater. Cleaned and filled the spa, and now we'll see if the magic of electricity going thru my shiny new (well rebuilt) heater unit makes the water hot. This involves waiting overnight to determine if there is a noticeable difference.

So tonight was the gathering to say hi to Squerk who is in town from Seattle on a visit. Great fun, and lots of good stories. We pretty much took over the Freakin' Frog. Of course now I've had way too much to drink for a Tuesday night. Mind you I was cool before some representatives for some beer who happened to be there that night, decided to buy everyone pitchers of their beer. It was quite good, but then free beer is always the best kind anyway. Now it's past midnight, and I have to work in the morning.

So the plan before bed is to drink massive amounts of water... get ready what I need to get ready in the morning so it doesn't take me very long to get ready, wind down, and go to bed.

Ahh but it was fun.

Well last night's party was stupid amounts of fun. Didn't get home until around 5:30am or so. Jenny was bartending all night, and managed to get me quite intoxicated with various alcoholic concoctions. And she made enough in tips to pay for the supplies she had purchased, plus a little extra. Cops were called at one point in the evening, and since they didn't have anything better to do they wrote up a citation to Nathan for excessive noise on a repeat offense (back in October they were called before, jeesh) Just about died laughing as Mark turned the pocket pussy someone had bought Nathan into a noise maker/balloon. Then there were the condoms with beer cans in them. We determined first hand through scientific experimentation, that if you are going to put a beer can in a condom and inflate it, that the Trojan condom holds up better than the Lifestyles condom. That's good information to know.

So today didn't turn out to be as productive as I would have liked it to be, but I still managed to get two things done on my todo list, as well as most of another. Plus there was some good hanging out with friends time, so I'm quite happy with the way the day turned out.

I had set the alarm clock for 9am. I was planning, and I know this sounds absurd, on actually waking up early on a day off so I had time to do some of the things on the list of things to do. 9am, alarm rings, I shut it off and go back to sleep. I finally wake up oh.. around 2pm. Read my email, and the daily web sites, and start on burning the DVDs I needed to burn. Well I knew I wouldn't have time to burn them all, so I mainly just ripped them to the hard drive on the machine down stairs for later burninating.

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So one of the guys at work last day is tomorrow and his current mental state towards the company is complete apathy. Hardly a stitch of work out of the guy, deliberate violation of silly bs rules and all that, since what are they going to do, fire him? He's quitting anyway. I think If I were leaving I'd do the same thing.

What does everyone want to do something every night this week? Next free day when I'm not doing anything looks like sunday. Well no solid plans for Friday really, but some talk of a couple of things, and I have to hit the mall to buy clothes.. after that.. well monday is probably movies, either that or tuesday. Usually wednesday is open... thursday seems to always have something going on lately... and then friday certainly booked.. well see what the rest of the weekend looks like after that. Though boss wants to do some work thing for a co-worker who is leaving. Never really like work social events, though I suppose if nothing else is going on, that'll be up. Oh and for future events... Got a weekend in mid april entirely booked, week in may entirely booked, end of July/start of August block of 5 days totally booked... It's unlike me to have anything actually planned, so I'm not sure what to make of it... might use this calendar feature of my phone, considering I paid money for it and all..

Went to the Huntridge tonight to check out 12 Volt Sex. Black Camaro, Drawing Boxes, and Jr. Anti Sex League opened for them. Black Camaro and Jr. Anti Sex League were both pretty good, but Drawing Boxes really put on a great show. Picked up one of their CDs while I was there. Of course 12 Volt Sex were who everyone was there to see, and they didn't fail to impress. Have to thank Mikki for pointing them out to me.

Friday night the group went out to watch Club Dread at the Neonopolis. The thing about the Neonopolis is while it's a great place, it also sucks because the location is bad, and as a result there are no businesses in the place. Still while it's open it's a good place to see a movie, since it'll be you and a hand full of other people in the theater. I can see why they're probably going to close the place down. I mean, it's down town, so right there you have crap. Bunch of small one way streets. Pay for parking, though you can get it validated it's still a pain in the ass. This is vegas. Parking is suppose to be free and plentiful. And since they kind of wanted it to be a locals type of place, it's not in a good location for that. Locals don't go down town. Hell a lot of them don't even go to the strip.

The movie was good. Lot of cheesy scenes, funny one liners, etc.. not the best movie of the year or anything, but it was worth seeing.

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So I watched Super Troopers to today after eating sushi with the gang. Damn funny movie. Also rented a bunch of DVDs of stuff I haven't seen yet so there's my plans for the weekend.

Of course here it is 1:42am... up too late again, so I should really try to get some sleep.

Watched Go and Run Lola Run tonight over at Nathan's. Great movies. I own Run Lola Run, but had never seen Go before. I'll be picking this one up for certain.

More later, but sleep awaits.

Thursday night's festivities were hanging out at the Freakin' Frog with Dan, Jeff and Anthony, and watching the carnage of magic play that ensued. Had the portobello mushroom, and a couple dark hefeweizens. Great beer and food and a cool atmosphere get my vote for the Freakin' Frog. And even watching the obvious fun of the evening I was not tempted to buy magic cards and get back into the game for two reasons. One, I really hate buying things I have already paid money for in the past. I use to play Magic the gathering, and had a nice selection of cards. To date when I was playing, Legends was the only expansion set at the time and they had just started going into whatever the next one was. So I had a collection of original mint condition cards.. which was stolen from me when I was away on a TDY in Saudi Arabia. And anyone who knows me can vouch for this, if I paid out money for something once, it will take a great amount of desire and force of will to get myself to pay for it again. I can spend my money at times like it were nothing, and at other times I am a down right cheap tight wad bastard, and that's one of them. And not because I mind spending the money, I mean I do but that's not the reason. It's the principle of it. I shouldn't have to damn it, and so, usually I don't. Second reason is that the game has changed so much from when I use to play that I'd pretty much have to re-learn how to play the game. I really don't have that kind of time to devote to something right now, so I'll happily leave MTG off my list of things I know how to do.

Friday night it was meeting up at the Freaking' Frog again with Nathan, Anthony, Kelly, Jeff, JennaBea, Mikki, and Terry for some drinking and conversation. Good night of fun, and tried some beers I have not had before which is always good.

Just being a bum and enjoying the day off today. Slept till 2pm.. Ok I set the alarm for 11:30, but obviously that was far too early, so it was promptly silenced and I continued to sleep. Not much else in the line of excitement. I have clean socks.. woo... At some point today I should do the remaining bits of laundry, or at least collect all the dirty laundry into a single location. Oh and I have to run to Frys to exchange some blank DVDs I bought. Damn +R -R formats..

This entry is most certainly *NOT* awesome... not even awesome like a hotdog.

Well after installing cable runway, gang boxes, running over 1000 feet of cable, and a few hours of terminations, I'm just about complete with my cabling project. I only have to mount the panel and wire management into the rack, and dress the cabling from the rack to the wall (which is mostly done already) I must say it looks good. I'll post pictures at some point...

Oh and here we go:
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So today in the mail I get a small little envelope with no from address and a chinese new year stamp. Curious, since it's not the normal stack of mail from people offering to refinance my house. I open it to find the following so elegantly written:

Ok get this... I think it may be time to fdisk and reinstall on this laptop, as windows has obviously lost it's mind. You put in a disk in the DVD drive, any disk, like a movie, HP drivers CD, your archived porn, whatever you have around. I happen to be copying DVDs off my internal drive and burning them with my external burner, so I have a bunch of DVDs and other media at my disposal. Reads it fine. If that's the only information you want to get from the drive, the computer is hummingly happy with that. Ok, time for the next disk of your game install, or time to put in a different DVD movie, etc... eject the disk, put in the new disk, computer makes it's I'm scanning the DVD drive to see what you just put in noises... you look in explorer and it insists it's still the old disk. No you're not the old disk, that's sitting right next to me on the desk. Let's try to hit F5 to refresh.. that always works right? In fact no amount of hitting F5, Shift-F5, Ctrl-Alt uppercase Q left toe to the F5 key will get it to discard the information it has cached. Eject the disk and try again.. same story. Ok, well let's try killing off explorer and restarting it.. nope, still reading from cache, computer still thinks it's the first disk. WTF? Ok, log off... hell no. The computer brightly tells you that you have the first disk in the drive. You can even navigate the directories. At this point you hold the original disk in front of the machine, crack it in half and throw it in the trash... read that bitch! "Haha! No, I refuse to accept change" the computer tells you.

I found two ways to get it to read the disk, first of course is to just reboot the computer. That's a pain though because the firewire DVD burner I have is a little picky at times, or rather windows is picky since it doesn't always correctly identify the device as a DVD burner. And there are no drivers to update, since going to the manufacturer of the DVD burners site will only get you the sentence "no drivers needed, works with any IEEE 1394 compatible machine" Yay. The other way I found to get the computer to be my bitch and do what I want is to uninstall the device in device manager, and then tell the computer to look for new hardware. "Oh look, I found a new DVD drive!" says the laptop. The technological equivolent of playing peek-a-boo with my computer. Where's the DVD drive? There's the DVD drive. Yay! I'm thrilled the same tricks that use to work on my brother when he was 3 also work on my laptop.

So this weekend Zeb came over and I started on the cabling project. Didn't really have a lot for him to help me with, since I was in OCD mode and focusing on the hard parts of the job, that being how to join up 3 different cable raceway sections at different levels and angles to one another. I managed to do so and make everything look good that night, but it probably wasn't exciting watching me work. Also installed two new holes in the wall, i.e. one gang junction boxes with a face plate for cable to run from inside the closet, under the stairs, and out into the computer room. That also turned out well, despite the Zeb's over zealous cutting of the drywall. Heh.. We'll just say that now there is back board on the inside of my closet as well. What every data closet needs anyway.

Monday I actually finished cutting all the straight pieces to length, and attached everything to the baseboard. I also ran about half the cabling, and will probably finish the other half tomorrow.. then it's the terminations, and I can clean up.

Had people over tonight to play some Illuminati. Good fun that game. Jeff, JennaBea, Dan, Bubs, Jenny, and Mikki all showed up to play. Played two games, one with five of us, and a second with seven. Last game was interesting, as it was a cheating frenzy. Unfortunately it was running long, so Jeff and JennaBea had to bail, which made the rest of the game interesting, since we still had a low goal but less players, so EVERYONE was one card away from winning.

Of course now I have to get up early tomorrow to go see Waldo play at 11am, so right now it's sleep for me.

With the purchase of the massive switch, comes the need to finally get off my ass and wire the house, or at least the down stairs. Since my network requirements are what you might say a little more than most folk, and I'm not really ready for the work that would be involved with running flex conduit everywhere, I decided to take the cheap and easy route and use surface mounted cable runway. Doing things correctly in the walls requires cutting a new attic access way, getting really dirty while I'm up there trouncing around in insulation, and a lot of cutting/patching holes in drywall.

Since I would have to cut this stuff to fit in places (it's kind of like plastic molding you run wires through) this of course required the purchase of a compound miter saw. I was debating on getting one for awhile but had been holding off because the ones I wanted were always really expensive. Looking today I saw they had some Ryobi ones that looked pretty good and were not too expensive. And then I saw the one equipped with a laser.. A LASER! So of course I had to have it.

have not posted an update here in some time so lets see...

Saturday I helped Jeff and JennaBea move out of their town house and into Waldo and Regina's spare bedroom. Took three trips with my truck, two to Waldo's and one to a storage place down town.

Sunday I was pretty sore from saturday, so I spent most of the day sleeping. Didn't watch the super bowl, since 1) I don't watch sports, and 2) didn't care about the superbowl, and 3) I was sleeping. Good day.

Monday, worked then cleaned the house. Mikki had a problem with one of her hard drives so we ordered pizza, I fixed her computer, and then we watched Invader Zim.

Tuesday, comedy night at my place. Watched Chris Rock, and Robin Williams. Hilarious. I was in pain from laughing during the last part of Robin Williams. It was good having everyone over. Lots of fun.

Wednesday, started setting up the new 96 port behemoth of a switch I bought off ebay. It's a Nortel Accelar 1200, six 16 port 10/100 cards, switch fabric module, and two power supplies. I can replace some of the cards with 2 port gigabit cards and run gig if needed.. though fiber gig network cards are not cheap, so I'm not going to do that until I have more money burning a hole in my pocket. I'll be doing a lot of wiring here shortly since this switch will replace the two 24 port switches I have.

Whooo...

Went bowling tonight at the Orleans. Regina opted to skip bowling and play photographer for the evening and got some great pictures. I bowled a 150 something... well if you add up the scores to both my games I bowled that. Of course the alley screwed up and didn't actually credit us for one of the games so we kind of stopped mid second game. I'm sure if I would have been allowed to finish I would have totally owned... or something.

Played Cranium over at Zoe's place tonight. I had never played the game previously, so really had no clue what it was about. But having played it I can say it's a pretty fun game. I also found out I can't hum a tune to save my life, can create an amazing sculpture of an ass in seconds to demonstrate the word "spank", and it's insanely funny watching the chaos of everyone try to act out something at once while others try to figure it out.

After which we tried to play some horror movie card game, which may have been cool if we were in the card game playing mood, and had time to devote to actually figuring out it's confusing set of rules. But it probably just wasn't the game for that night so we aborted after like two rounds. And if we're going to play a card game it I'd vote for Illuminati, since it's just such a great game. But apart from the failure of the attempted card game, it was a great last hoorah for the place.

So this weekend she's moving over to Waldo and Regina's place, so I volunteered my truck and ability to make heavy boxes move from one location to another location on Saturday.

Once again, it's 1am and I'm not yet sleeping, and probably wont get to sleep until after 2. Maybe next week I'll get more than 4 hours of sleep a night. Honestly I'm surprised I not only was not late to work at all this week, but was usually the first one there.

I liked the results of this one.

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So on tonights movie agenda was Happyness, a film that was anything but happy. Very disturbing on oh so many levels. It was a good movie for that. I'm a fan of any movie that just wrenches your senses around for awhile. But it was also very very wrong. Go watch it, just be prepared to say "oh no.. they didn't just go there... that sick bastard." and such.

After that was Ichi the killer. A strange movie, though the copy we had was highly edited. Damned region 1 dvd releases.

Oh and this was neat:

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Had a very fun sushi night over at Chef Wayne's sushi bar at Shilla. Wayne's a riot as usual, and we had a turn out of Mikki, Mishie, Jeff, JennaBea, Eric and myself. Waybe gets the award for good customer service. He didn't have any ice cream left, so he went to his house to get some for us. W00t! We all filled out best of Las Vegas forms and put our vote in for Shilla, as well as made some amusing entries for worst of, etc.. Biggest threat to southern nevada... California. Best place to go in vegas if under 21... Arizona.

Full of sushi now, and time for bed.

Last night was the "green fairy" party over at neongothic's place. He makes home made Absinthe, and people were partaking of such. I passed and stuck with sipping on a couple of glasses of red wine all night. I already had my experience with absinthe, which was enough for me. I don't know, something about waking up in a room where it had been sitting open over night and it's smell permeating everything, kind of puts a negative spin on it for me. That and I've seen people get *way* too silly on the stuff, so I was just there to watch and be the sober one. Good evening. There are some interesting photos over on zoenation, some of them where I didn't blink because of camera flash even.

After a long day at work, and about 3 and a half hours of overtime caused by cox communications dropping 802.1q tagged packets across the fiber circuit we ordered, I went out to get sushi Thursday night with Jenny. We ate our fill of sushi. Jenny recreated goatse with the use of wasabi, soy sauce, and ginger. And we just sat around talking till the place closed. Good night.

Today was spent sleeping till noon, getting up to eat cold pizza, and then more sleep. I managed to drag myself out of bed at 3, to go do the one bit of productivity I had to do today. That being mail out something I was suppose to have mailed out two days ago, but had not since it's been a very busy week at work. That annoying bit being complete, I'll pretty much be doing fuck all for the rest of the night.

Watched the movie Storytelling over at Waldo and Regina's place today after work. Kind of a messed up film that would make me hate people if I didn't already have a general distaste for the human race as a whole anyway.

Now when I say I hate people, I often get a response of disbelief, but really I do. A good portion of our society just manage to annoy me to new ends every day. There are exceptions. I find a hand full of people here and there who are able to single themselves out and earn a spot in my heart where I no longer wish for their damnation. But often I see how people when looked at by example are just a constant annoyance I am forced to dead with. You take your idiot drivers, you know the people who do the same drive every single day, yet some how manage to fuck it up and screw up traffic for every other driver who happens to be misfortunate enough to have been behind them. That group of people I could really live without. How about the psychotic sick bastards who snap one day and decide to take several people out with them. Sure, there is a chance some of the people they helped along the path towards natural selection are better off that way. But I like to at least give folks a opportunity before being removed from the flotsam of the human populace. And I really don't like the people in malls/casinos/and other public arenas, who are walking along in front of you at a slow but ok pace, yet suddenly just stop for no obvious reason directly in your path. I guess the dust motes are just particularly interesting right there or something, but you're now bothering me more than you were before. There are a ton of people who's presence you would just better be without, and it's this which has driven me to my cynicism.

Having said that, I really do like the friends I do have. And people taken individually often will exhibit exemplary traits which would make you think, at least initially, that they are good people. Some of them even are so. Which is why when I say I hate people, I don't say I hate all persons. I reserve that for when they have shown by example they are the cause for my disdain.

Read the TMI, it's worth logging in for.

Worked MLK day, since my company doesn't observe that as a day off. Actually we do, but we just bunch all the little BS holidays to one big chunk at the end of the year so we can pretty much just take off for two weeks during Christmas and New Years. That's the way to do it.

And in tonight's entertainment, Jenny conspired to get Mikki to call me a geek, and me to call Mikki a geek. I'm not sure the reasoning as to why this needed to be done. Most likely it's part of some sinister plot that only Jenny really understands.

Lan party was yesterday. A little too much drinking and not enough game play for a lan party I think. Still had fun.

We played about an hour of postal 2, which really wasn't that good of a game. Weapons had far to much recoil, and were too inaccurate to do any sort of distance. When you get more kills off with the default pistol weapon than you do with any other weapon in the game, that's a problem.

Tried to get Raven Shield up and running, but there wasn't much luck at that. So it was drunken PS2 playing for the remaining portion of the evening.

I had promised Jenny a home cooked dinner, so tonight while we were over at JennaBea's place for the geek session (read games of magic the gathering, and Gauntlet PS2 playing) I made her my Chicken Enchilada soup. To say she likes the soup is an understatement. When given her first bowl she barely came up for air. And as usual it was a big hit with everyone else. The soup rocks, that's all there is to it.

Good night. I cooked, watched people play their silly magic games, watched JennaBea steal all the treasure in Gauntlet, drank wine. Sadly I had to leave just as Mikki showed up, with work at 4 in the morning.

Speaking of, I should get some sleep.

Yes, I'm quite well aware that I have not updated this site in ages. In typical fashion for the past several days, I've been quite busy with work, and then off on some madcap frenzy in the evening that follows. Picture if you will, a swashbuckling adventure filled with pirates and salty sea dogs. Our grand hero pitting himself against certain peril. Now quickly forget that, since it's not important to our story.

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Went to go watch Big Fish with Lynn last night. I'll go more into it later, but it was a good movie. Since Tim Burton had his hand in it, you are not disappointed, as the movie is touched with his usual unique perspective.

After the movie, we decided to grab some food and drink. Sat around talking about the fun times we've had partying over at Will's old house, The past couple Defcons, my place, etc... Had some laughs when I found out some more details of some of the events that transpired at various parties and get togethers. Determined that we need to have some more gatherings at the bar in Alexis park, especially if we expect to have discounted drinks from bartender Gary come defcon. Still planning on the 2 story hotel room this year, but need to have more than three people to do it.

Movie night over at her place tonight to bust the cherry on the new big screen. No idea what's on the plan of things to watch.

My dog snores, and sleeps with his head on a pillow. I think it's funny.

Ok, I go to sushi factory on Trop and Jones a lot, and I mean a LOT. Probably an average of three times a month, for about ten or more months now, and usually order all you can eat at about $30 a shot. That's an average. There are times when it's less there are times where I'll be there four times in one week, and will have paid for my food and someone else. All in all I figure I've spent close to a thousand dollars in the place. Oh but wait. Not only do you have my personal patronage, I've brought many other people to the place. In short, I'm good for business.
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Ok since work pretty much all but shuts down for the two weeks prior to new years, Sprint, Cox, and Verizon all scheduled circuit/fiber installs for today. So my day was pretty much just running around and baby sitting the vendors as they installed various circuits. Ended up telling one of the sprint installers to just go away, as they had four different people out on different jobs, and we had no idea what one of them was for. Need some coordination people. Add to that trying to catch up on a couple weeks worth of voice and email messages. All I want to do is sleep at the moment.

But I'm not going to do that. I vowed to myself I was going to exercise today, so that's on the plan after the wind down from work. Then to run some errands. *maybe* I'll even get to eat dinner.

Well not to much went on today. Slept till 2pm. Watched some TV. Jeff and Mikki came over to play games on the PS2. Had a 22 minute battle to the death race in NFS:Underground with Mikki, where she accidentally won while trying to run my car off the road. The game would be entirely more satisfying if the vehicles showed damage.

Well off to get food and then new years party over at Mindshadow's with the lvgeek crew. Get to partake of my Christmas present from Savage. Mmmm... Vodka.

I just got done fixing my truck. Ok, nothing was terribly broken with it, just a couple vacuum lines were broken, so things like the AC vents didn't work right, and the check engine light would come on. If you know anything about autos, you know vacuum is used to run a lot of the things, so without it the engine will still run, but you loose performance and fuel efficiency.

Anyway, a quick trip to auto zone, and $5 later, I had the problem repaired. It's a simple thing, but I still rock. Makes me glad I picked up auto mechanics from Gary, even if he turned out to be a dead beat father to my brother.

Well last nights party was a blast. Much drinking and debauchery was to be had by everyone. Only a few annoying moments, but all in all a good time.

Yoinked this from Stacey. It's the IMDB best/worst 100 films. So which of these have you seen?

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Just got back from my visit with my friend Cordelia in Ventura. It was really good to see her again, become reacquainted with many of the reasons I consider her to be spiffy, as well as discover new ones. I've been friends with her for almost five years, but since she lives on the east coast I don't really get a chance to see her.

I'll continue with the excessively long account of my trip:
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So I ended up missing the flight out of Detroit by 5 minutes... I could see the plane still there. Damn the FAA and their silly rules. So I got to sit on standby for 12 hours. Finally got on the 7:30 flight to Phoenix, and thankfully I made the first flight there, otherwise I would have rented a car and drove home (only 4-5 hours).

Unpacked and the hand boiler and the newton gravity glass were in tact. They are tucked safely away on display in my entertainment center, so I don't have to worry about them getting knocked over or anything. Also found a nice package on the counter when I got home. A huge, and I mean positively huge bottle of belvedere polish vodka and a martini mixer. Almost the same thing I got Anthony, just a different brand of polish vodka. Good call by Madarab there.

Have to pack for tomorrow and such. Hopefully I'll get into Ventura at a decent hour. All depends on when I get up of course.

Feels good to take a shower at home again. Ahh.. Water Pressure. My shower is by far the best. Actually Eric's place has more water pressure I think, but not by much. And I always tear out those low flow valves that come with shower heads anyway, so it's a bit better than what you would pick off the shelf. So after a long hot shower, I think I'm going to sleep in my own bed, instead of on a couch for a change.

Interesting thing about being at my mom's place is when I'm here I drink a LOT of coffee. When I'm at home, I'll have a cup, maybe two, a day. But here, there's always a pot of coffee on, so I'll end up drinking a couple pots of coffee a day. Then when I get home, of course there is caffeine withdraw... yay.

Pretty much slept all day yesterday, so I got up at a decent hour today. Ok maybe not decent.. insanely early is more accurate... 3am. But that's good because I don't want to sleep all day the last day I'm at my mom's. Drive down state tomorrow to see my sisters, uncle, john and ruth (aunt and uncle), bobbie, the fuckton of cousins, sister's kids, etc..

Finally watched LOTR:Two Towers, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Snatch. Good movies.

I'm typing this in front of a nice warm fire. Mmmmm... cozy.

So the flight went without a hitch. Landed in Detroit, didn't have to stand out in the cold (28 degrees) for too long waiting for the shuttle. Talked with this cute chick in the shuttle ride to the rental place. She had the whole snow bunny thing going for her. Yum... Rented a Monte Carlo from another attractive bird at the rental place. Grabbed some breakfast from McD's, turned on WRIF, and hit the road. Made record time since I was going about 85-90 the entire way. At one point I was pretty damn tired, since I only got a few hours sleep the night before, and was up all night because of the flight, so I turned on an oldies station and started singing to Elvis songs. That managed to get me to the 27 turn off, which put me almost at Harris. By then the two large cups of coffee I had kicked in.

Got to my mom;s place, and sat and drank coffee and talked with my mom and brother. I like visits like this. Any stress I may have had just melts away, and I can just spend time staring out the window into the snow filled yard doing nothing in particular if I want.

Also met some of my brother's friends, as well as his new girlfriend Kim. I'd say he did well, she passes.

...or, "I wanted to be the first kid on my block with a confirmed kill"

I'm typing this while on the plane. I just finished my peanuts, ahem... Luxury Salted Peanuts. Go ahead, try to hide it. They'll have to invent new words just to describe the jealousy you hold towards me right now. This is perhaps the safest flight I could have possibly asked for. About 25% of the passengers of this flight are hard charging United States Marine Core. Ooorah! The chances of any terrorist actions on this flight are a whole number less than one. I also got an aisle seat, even though by the web site the only thing remaining was middle seats. Yep I rule. I'm so jealous of the first class passengers though, because they get the big cushy seats, and I'm so close I can taste the free alcohol. Bastards. If there is a terrorist, I hope he takes out that bitch right up there first.

I'm off on my 6 day trip to Michigan to see the family.

I normally don't post these, since usually the quiz is crap. This one did amuse me well enough so...



What Kind of Krispy Kreme Doughnut Are You?

Tonight went wonderfully. I'm about to burst with happyness.

Waldo cooked a supurb dinner, which everyone raved about. Had spiral cut ham, ginger carrots, green beans with mushrooms, crab stuffed mushrooms, and mashed potatoes cooked by Mikki. I'm going to have to get the recipe for the stuffed mushrooms, as they were awesome.

After dinner was present exchange time. Everyone was thrilled with their gifts. Mishie got me three wonderful gifts. The first was a set of brushed metal dice that you can roll to make your decisions for you. What do I want tonight? sushi, mexican, hamburgers, etc.. roll the dice and it's clear. Four dice for the categories, food, night out, work out, and indecision. The dice were nestled inside a box of "yummy candy", so right there she nailed two of the things that make any guy happy, food, and releif from decision making. And the third part, she buys me tools with the mighty flashlight of DOOM! It's a flashlight/tool kit with an auto hookup/charger. Funny thing was that the work light I had in my truck had died, so this is perfect. I'm happy.

I picked up Anthony some Chopin Polish Vodka and a Mixer. After having no idea what to get, scouring fry's electronics for naught, I saw this while picking up supplies for the party, and knew right away it was the perfect gift. He made up some martinis after dinner, and I tell you Anthony can mix up a good smooth drink. We (the guys) sipped our drinks, while watching the girls attack one another all piled on the huge beanbag chair. It was a moment of bliss.

After gifts, I finished the prep work and put my cinnamon apple pie on to cook. The crust was a pain in the ass as usual, but turned out good and flaky. I used a butter flavored shortening this time, which worked well. It was being super sticky though, so the bottom didn't want to be freed from the wax paper. A little flower on the rolling of the top crust worked well though, so I think for the first time ever I managed to get the top crust on in one piece. Woot.

We played a little improve theater game while waiting on pie to cook. People would start a scene, and occasionally someone would enter the scene or replace one of the existing people and then things would continue off in another direction.

And finally pie with ice cream was had by all and they were happy.

Shadowbeast sent me the pics he took at the LAN Party... you can find them here. I'm thinking Saturday, January 17th for the next LAN Party. I'd also like to play something other than UT, so discuss.

Well the lan party went well. We only really played UT. I mean we tried some other games but battlefield 1942 was having none of it, so we just decided to stick with what worked. Good fun. We had eight to nine people playing at any one time, which was a good number. There were a few other people who showed up and didn't play, and the break where everyone did shots and drank random concoctions of alcohol. Need to have more lan parties I believe, as they're good fun.

So I got on a cleaning kick, and actually cleaned my desk, dusted, etc... Also did some setup for the LAN Party tonight at 7pm. Still need to get the floors, but I'll do that later. Right now I really should sleep, considering it's 7:30am.

Madarab can attest to this, I get an incredible amount of mail. And since all my bills are handled online, it'll just build up on my desk until eventually you don't see desk anymore. Then I'll get a hair up my ass and open it all and shred the stuff that needs to be shredded, etc... So I figured with the lan party tomorrow, I probably should do some cleaning, and that means uncovering the desk.

Anyway, since I've been actually opening my mail here I've been thinking about my finances...
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work was just annoying today.. not because I was busy, but because I couldn't get anything done since I was filling out stupid paperwork. Bugger.

Maybe people will let me work tomorrow.

Ok, so after some rather difficult soldering, I managed to get the mod chip installed in my PS2, and everything put back together all happy like. Plugged everything in, and the PS2 booted. Good sign there. Put in Soul Calibur II. The game booted and I kicked some computer ass with Taki for a bit. Ok, so I know now it at least had the functionality it did before. Next for the real test, burning a PS2 game. Burned Grand Prix Challenge to DVD and put it in the now modified PS2. Boots the game, no problems. Very cool. I'll have to test out a region 2 DVD video next and see if that works, and then maybe play with the developer mode a bit. Weee! I managed not to turn my PS2 into a $170 piece of slag.

So living 6 minutes (4 with the way I drive sometimes) away from Fry's Electronics has it's good and bad points. I mean you can't beat the convenience. There is a store that has everything I want from real electronics components and tools for such, to computer parts to dvds, etc... there is even a coffee shop. What's bad is their prices are not the best, and I have a tendancy to spend a lot of money there at times.

Just yesterday I went there and layed out some cash, for a new 200GB hard drive, Promise SATA150 TX4 controller, some solder flux, and a Sopranos DVD box set.

So today was the task of getting the new hardware in Hiro, which is my main file server, as well as host machine for the Tivo MP3 file share, and PS2 Gameshark media player. The machine is a full tower, which is filled with SCSI drives. Nine of them before the upgrade. They're all 9GB 10,000RPM server drives that I've collected from various sources over the years. That connected to a bad ass three channel HP SCSI controller courtesy of Stealth. Since I was out of drive bays, I raided my parts bin and found a drive cage from an old machine I had. A few cuts with the band saw, and it fit in the space to available in the bottom of the chassis. Bam, now had space for the three new drives I needed to install. Two more 9GB SCSI drives for use as hot spares, and the SATA 200GB drive. Installed the SATA controller and wired it up. Soldered a couple more power splitter cables. And swapped out the 6 speed SCSI CDROM with a 12/32 speed burner I had. So there is now one 18GB SCSI, nine 9GB SCSI, and one 200GB SATA. And I still have room to throw in a second power supply if I feel it ever needs it. That's why I like big tower cases.

Now the task of updating the kernel, and grabbing the GPL'd Promise SATA controller drivers for linux.

So last night was Bubba Ho-Tep at the one theater in town that's actually playing it. Bruce Campbell plays Elvis, who is alive in a retirement home because he switched places with an impersonator and it was the impersonator who died. He teams up with another guy who believes he is JFK to battle an Egyptian Mummy who's eating the souls of the old folks. The movie is hilarious, and I'll certainly be picking this one up on DVD. I should probably pick up evil dead, and army of darkness while I'm at it.

After that it was over to the R-Bar, for long islands, food, and BSing, then on to JennaBea's to play Game Cube, and witness the great flood.

Watched Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction tonight over at Nathan's. Great movies. I forgot how many great lines Pulp Fiction had in it.

Oh and to add to my attire, I picked up a leather trench coat from Willson's. Mmmm... leather. It looks great, and I saved a hundred and fifty bucks on the price, so I've no complaints. Of course now I'll have the conundrum of if I should wear my suede leather jacket, or the leather trench coat each day. I love both of them, and are thankful for the cows that died to make them. Let's hear it for the cows. Moo!

Need to get more sleep, but the past couple nights I haven't been able to get to sleep until after 2:30. And despite going into work a half hour late, I'm still putting in about an hour a day extra. Bah.

I think I found the trench coat I want. Curiously it was the first one I tried and didn't buy because I wanted to look at others. The others are not as expensive, but they don't fit as well, so there you go, it's an easy decision.

Found my old combat boots, and they are not in as bad of shape as I had thought, but still beat to hell. Leather has a lot of knicks, scrapes, and the heels are coming loose. Most annoying is that they squeak when I walk sometimes. Good news is Nathan's sister picked me up a new pair so I'll be set in the combat boot department.

Started working on installing the mod chip. I have one challenging bit of soldering to do, and the remainder is easy work. I didn't have nearly enough light when I was working on it earlier, so I'll probably install the spare floods in the computer room to give me the required light of a thousand suns, and then I can finish. Well do that and modify the tip on my soldering iron so it's a bit finer. Might pick up some flux as well.

I finally watched a number of episodes of Invader Zim, thanks to Sleazy Pancake who had about 1.8 gigs worth. Good stuff.

Oh and going to go see Bubba Ho-Tep this Friday at 7:10.

"Salted Nuts!!!"

Well thanksgiving was pretty spiffy. Good food and friends, as well as many animals to play with and be entertained by.

On the road trip to AZ, I hit one hundred thousand miles. Took a picture of the odometer when it was all 9's and when it hit 100000.0. Check out the cam page to see it.

Yea, I'm a geek.

Picked up a mod chip for the PS2 finally. I'm about to unleash an unholy hell upon the insides of my faithful game machine.

Then it's packing for tomorrow's road trip.

Update: Decided to hold off on the install until after I get back, so I can pick up a 15 watt soldering iron element. Everything I have is a little too high powered for that detailed of work, and I rather spend $20 on a soldering iron element, than $150-200 on a new PS2.

So since it's actually cold out, I can actually use my computer downstairs with the big comfy chair (of doom), the 21 inch monitor, and the computer with the bad ass video card. Today I booted the computer for the first time since august, applied the gagillion microsoft updates, as well as update other drivers as required. Then just to break things in, I fired up a little UT. I'm terribly rusty at the game it would seem. Still I managed to grab the flag a few times on an 8 to 8 player lava giant game. Didn't make it back alive mind you, but it was more than the rest of the team was doing. Score in the game was 0:0 for the longest time. It seemed if you somehow were lucky enough to grab the flag, your fate at that point was inevitable. Quit out after a bit, since I did have things to do, but I wanted to at least get the computer up to a playable status.

I'm bored to tears over here. Read all the forums I check. Read everyone's blog. Sorted through the MP3s I needed to sort thru. I have several books I want to read, and video games I want to play, TV and movies to watch etc.. however I don't want to do any of those things. Instead I'm sitting here listening to music, currently Natacha Atlas, and am notably bored. I could go out and socialize with people, but I don't want to. That would require me to change out of my pajamas I've been wearing all day. And as far as socializing, I don't even want to talk to people on IM. That would involve thinking of something to say, which at the moment seems like too much effort. I would go to sleep, but I rather stay awake. So best as I can tell, I'm currently bored because that's what I really want to do. How odd.

I added an Art folder to the pictures section. I'll add stuff as I find it on my various computers.

Yay! I have Thanksgiving plans. I'm drive down to Phoenix to go hang out with Stacey, Mark (sleazy pancake), etc, for a few days. I was just thinking to myself how much I missed thanksgiving dinners over at Stacey's, so this will be cool. Though in sad news ROHO is no more. The wall of graffiti, painted over. It'll live on in memories I suppose.

So yea, this holiday season will be the season of road trips. I have the two weeks I get off for Christmas/New Years all planned out. I had typed up a big post on it, but then left to do something, and forgot the laptop was on battery power. Came back after poker night, and the battery was dead, and of course I had not done a preview yet, so nothing was saved. But I'm going home to Michigan, driving up to see my mom and brother, driving back down to see my sisters/aunt&uncle/and slew of cousins, flying back, driving to ventura to hang out with Cordellia for a few days, driving back, sleeping, new years party, and then recovery from said new years party.. and pretty much rest until work on the 5th. Woo.

Oh and on a related note to last night, why in the hell do the cute ones have to be already spoken for. Bah.

So tonight I headed over to The Comedy Stop on the Trop for Suzana's birthday. My sides were hurting from laughing so much. Jeff Fox and Al Ducharme were very funny. Best of all it was two for one on Thursdays, so it cost me ten bucks and I got a long island. Good night overall.