Just another slackful Saturday.. It was pretty alright, I suppose.. It was hotter than blazes, that’s for sure. I can’t wait until fall arrives. I really don’t know why, but autumn has always been my favorite time of year; perhaps it’s because winter is just right around the corner.. Although, then again, Halloween has always been my favorite secular holiday 🙂

Anyway, that’s all for tonite–I’m quite tired and still recovering sleep from last night 😀

I had an awesome time last night at the Sobro Summer Nights music festival with mwshook and pescivendolo. It was a nice quaint little parking lot venue in the middle of downtown Nashville. There were three groups but the best were the last two, Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and the main course, They Might Be Giants.

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players were unlike any band I’ve ever seen. They take old slides from yard sales and such and write songs for them. It’s really quite bizzare, but strangely hypnotic. There’s just no way to describe their strangeness. It was definitely quite the kewl prelude to the big guys. They’re most likely the only band out there still protesting Vietnam.

They Might Be Giants were frickin’ awesome. They played a good bit from their new album, The Spine. They had an awesome energy on-stage. Of course, my ears are still no more than stumps right now 🙂 They played a number of classics, too, and ended the night on “Istanbul”; quite the fitting end to an uber awesome night.

I’m just SO frickin glad tomorrow is friday. I think I’ll definitely catch up on some Zs this weekend–I think that supercharged Monday just made the end of my week a longer way down to the weekend.

Had a nice little evening tonight. We celebrated my dad’s birthday in true nerd fashion by watching War of the Worlds.

Other than that, just a plain Jane average day.

I think I’ll go start on those Zs early.

So today was just kind of your average day in Kevin Land. I downloaded some musc tonite *GASP* I haven’t done that in ages.. I’ve been too busy copying DVDs *evil, devilish laugh* I’m going to hell, I know. Hey, at least I’ll have a pretty good movie library to usher me out of this world. haha.

Did a good bit of gaming tonight. Haven’t done any real hardcore gaming in a while, and I should most certainly be punished for that. lol. Supposedly, I’m hosting the LAN this month at my place. We’ll see–no one has signed up on the website for it. I hope it doesn’t fall through, because I got quite addicted to Call of Duty at the last LAN 🙂 I’m probably going to get into Star Wars: Galaxies quite soon. I’ve heard it’s as crack addictive as EverQuest.

Cubs actually won today, but they’re still slipping badly. They’re 10 GB and only in 2nd place by 0.5 games. I really don’t think the baby bears are getting anywhere, but we shall see. Even if they don’t, it’s strangely zenful; watching them play every weekend. Of course, it’s all like going home again–minus the kewl pizza.

Anyhoo, I’m off to watch some ATHF and then slip away into blissful unconsciousness.

I don’t know what it is; my phone has been off the hook tonite.. Am I really that popular? lol. Nah. At least they were kewl people and not posers 🙂

Matt has invited me to a “They Might Be Giants” concert on Friday evening. It should be quite the hoot; I’ve never seen them live and I hear they can be quite the fun group to see. I don’t go to many concerts. In fact, I think the last one I went to was Cake a couple of years ago. I really would like to see Jump one day, if they ever happen to be around Nashville or Atlanta.. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t come to pidley little Alabama, but I guess you never know.

Today was fairly kewl. I coded some software that none of us ever thought was remotely possible. It’s good to know that all that book learnin’ about programming and software development stuff actually paid off. lol. Whenever I get in the zone when I’m coding, I seem to slip out of any standard temporal frame of reference and, before I know it, it’s already 4:00 and time to head home. I wish that would happen more often 🙂

Looks like the tire on my Ion is low already :\ I got the car about 3 months ago, and already it’s giving me lip. How rude can you get?

Anyhoo.. Off to do that sleep thing I do this time of night.

Today was definitely one of those supercharged Mondays. I was more awake than usual–normally on a Monday I’m a zombie until at least lunch time. It was all clicking today so fast that I didn’t even notice the time slip right by. I think I coded today, but I was so in the zone that I didn’t even really know what I was doing till it was done. I definitely like this kinda Monday.. I wish it would show its head more often.

So a friend of a friend is getting a team together to do a mod for Half Life 2, and I was thinkin’ of getting in on it. Even if it turns out to be nothing more than ideas, it’ll be kind of kewl to at least brainstorm neat ideas for what we as gamers really want in a game. And, of course, if it does go anywhere then perhaps I can get my foot into the door at Activision or something *snicker* I wish 😉 Either way, it would be kind of awesome to put my coding superpowers to fun use.

Getting souped up for DragonCon in the fall. It is going to be quite uber sweet. My first time was last year, and I wish I would’ve gone all along (Joe would say “I told you so” about here 🙂 ). Before DragonCon, the only convention I had really been to was one here in Huntsville long ago. I think it was around ’91, and the only star in attendance was John DeLancie. He was quite hillarious. DragonCon hands-down blows that pidley lil con away. A definite must for nerds and geeks of all ages 🙂

Anyway.. Off to that happy sleep land of happiness.

It seems that since I graduated college in December, the weekends are seemingly shorter now that I am working full-time. It’s kind of a drag, that’s for sure. Maybe I should start on my Masters so that I can get back to those infinite-like weekends 🙂 I’ve been musing getting my Masters in Computer Science and also a second Bachelors in Astrophysics. Working for the university has some perks, especially free tuition 🙂 May as well take advantage of it. Keith thinks that I have reached a new plateau of nerd-dom in that I wanna get a degree “just for the heck of it” 🙂

If I do start on it in the fall or spring, I don’t think I feel as pressured as I did the first time around–a Masters is quite optional, and I can actually pace myself this time around a lil more and not feel like I need to kill myself getting to the finish line. That and, strangely enough (I may delete this line later), I miss school.

Anyway, today was a nice quiet sunday at the folks. We saw the Cubbies fall to the Brewers 4-2 *sigh*, but we also watched that M. Night Shyamalan special on SciFi. It was pretty much what I thought it would be–hokey promotional drivel for “The Village”. I still wanna see that movie; I think it will be atypical to what I’ve seen in the previous three biggies (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs).

Off to dream land.

Last night was quite awesome. I went to VBAS and listened to a NASA Payload expert speak about the space station. It was quite an interesting talk; he talked about the construction of the station, where it is today, and hopes for the future. I’m actually thinking of rejoining VBAS–back when I participated with my dad, it seemed like there was an informal membership to all family members of VBAS members. Anyway, it’ll give me an excuse to take some road trips with my telescope, and finally get to some wide open dark skies 🙂

I’m watching Stargate: Atlantis at the moment. It looks like it’s staying fairly true to Stargate lore in the basic ways, at least in the fact that there’s a Stargate. The premise almost reminds me of Star Trek: Voyager; they’re trapped on the other side of the known universe with no forseeable way home. Hopefully, they won’t make the same mistakes in plot that Voyager made. The baddies in this one seem to make the Goa’uld seem like punk kids.

So, I’ve seen so many of my friends use this thing, so I thought I’d finally give it a whirl. Being the first entry, I thought I’d give a bit about myself. By day, I’m a computer nerd. By nite I’m, well, a computer nerd 🙂 I work for my alma mater, the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the Systems Management & Production Center, which does applied research for the Army and NASA. I am one of a few software developers.

The Cubbies aren’t doing so hot this year, but they could be doing worse. The All-Star Break was this week, and they’re 48-40 as of tonight. They won 4-1 against the Brewers, a team they’ve been strugging against this year. If you couldn’t tell, I’m an avid Cubbie fan 🙂

The main reason I wanted to put this up was to help keep my website nice and changing–there’s nothing worse than a stagnant website, especially if it is your own. I’ll have to get the details about how to read the RSS (nerdspeak acronym for an XML format that I can easily integrate into my site).

The other reason was that I want to get into writing again, and this seemed to be the grooviest way to get my writing back on.

Anyway, I’m quite tired. Off to sleep land.