Wow. Been a while since my last post. I guess nothing uber has really happened. I had been trying to trudge my away through the last couple of work weeks until the holidays and stuph. Didn’t take much doing; yesterday was my Friday. w00t.

I finally got my frelling phone. I was about to curse Verizon to high heaven; I filed for a lost phone last Wednesday. Monday came around, and no phone had arrived at my place. So, Monday I went over to the local Verizon place for a little bitch-fest, but I stayed nice and level-headed–although I did have to sit there for about 20 minutes waiting to talk to a customer service representative at the 800 number on the phone there. It turned out that they hadn’t even sent the phone yet. So, someone there in the local store set up the phone to ship and said it would take 2-3 days. The phone came yesterday 🙂 Verizon is back up on the awesome list for getting the phone to me overnight. another w00t 🙂 So, now I have my Super Mario ringtone on there and I’m currently tracking people down for numbers–all the numbers I had were on my old phone. Argh. This is what Outlook is for; I really should use it better 🙂

So, we’re leaving for Disney World tomorrow. It should be quite the blast. If anyone wants me to bring anything back, lemme know.

I hope everyone has a wonderful and safe holiday!

Time for an obligatory Penny shot..

So I lost my frelling cell phone 🙁 It was definitely quite the bummer, since that is my only phone. But, Verizon so graciously spotted me a new one since I had decided to take their insurance when I signed up with them. w00t. I just have to wait a few days for it to come in the mail–which isn’t too bad.. I’m not a real phone yacker, as it is. I think I typically use 125/400 minutes a month. I really don’t know what happened to the old one–perhaps it fell out of my pocket or something. Argh.

It’s quite cold this evening; as I write it is 28 nippy degrees. No frickin snow in sight, though. That’s something I definitely miss about the north, for sure. Heck, I even miss shovelling it.. Shovelling is almost relaxing for me as cutting the grass is. I lit the fireplace for the second time ever. It’s pretty frickin warm, for a gas fireplace. There’s no big chimney to it, so all the heat has nowhere to go but all over my place.

This week is totally crawling along, probably because in one week I’ll be shaking hands with Mickey. w00t. Plenty o’ pics will be taken, for sure. Have to get through this week first, though. Ugh.

I think winter is just about officially here. It’s sad; I could take -40 degrees in Chicago (no wind chill) when I was uber young, but 44 degrees gives me the chills here–even indoors. Lousy stinkin humidity is making my skin thin 😛

I’m definitely ready for a big Christmas break. Only a week-and-a-half to go. w00t. This one is going to be really groovy, though; I don’t think I’ve ever travelled so much during this time of year. It’ll definitely be good to see real mountains again.

I need to go up to Monte Santo and bring my scope. I haven’t been up there to observe in literally years. Shoot, it’s been long enough since I brought my scope anywhere–which I really need to do because the winter skies are the ones I love the most. My favorite deep sky objects are up this time of year, and I’m missing them.

I can’t believe it’s been a frelling year since I graduated. Time has passed in what seems to be a heartbeat. I’ve definitely been enjoying the time in the evening to just chill, read or play games 😀 If I ever grow out of computer games, that will definitely be a sad day. lol. I almost forgot how awesome recreational reading was–just about all of the reading I did in college was school-related and I got uber sick of it.

I haven’t put up any Christmas decorations this year, mostly because I’m going to be gone 80% of the season, so I didn’t really think there was much use. So, since I’m being all Grinchy this year, I’m going to go uber next year 🙂 I’m going to go Grizwold on my apartment. lol. Actually, today I may see if I can get one of the tiny trees that my parents have.. Better to put something up, I suppose.

Penny is mischieviously staring at me

Today was just one of those days where I was totally exhausted by the end of it. I took a nap this evening after work and, when I woke up an hour later, I thought it was 6:15AM instead of 6:15PM. It was quite disorienting and disturbing. I’m glad I had the sense to look at my cell. Penny gave me dirty looks the rest of the evening.

Anyhoo, I spent a good bit of last nite (perhaps too much time) giving my new toy a good shakedown cruise. It’s kind of like an iPod, only with less capacity–and much cheaper. I was going to get a Rio, but the cost of this was actually cheaper than the Rio player and SD cards I was going to get for it. Either way, it is quite the uber sweet little music player.

Other than that, nothing much has been going down. I reserved plane tix for New Year’s. I’m going out to Colorado on New Year’s Eve and I’m coming back on the 2nd. A nice short & sweet little trip, but at least I’ll get to see some good friends 🙂 That’s definitely a huge plus. With the fact that my family is going to Disney World for Christmas, this is going to be one very awesome holiday. Lots of roadtrip-age. Good times, good times.

Matt and Carynn’s wedding was on Saturday. It was a very nice ceremony. It was a mixed wedding; part Catholic, part not. Actually, it was mostly Catholic except that Communion wasn’t involved. Anyway, it was at Visitation in downtown Huntsville. I had never been there before, and it is a very nice church; it’s certainly a tiny one, but there weren’t many people in Huntsville in 1861, either.

Anyhoo, nothing much else to report. Work and sleep, mostly.. And getting ready for the Christmas thing 🙂 Now I must go have my weekly viewing of the Episode III trailer before bed.

I need to bring Penny to the frickin vet or something. She has chewed through my DVI cable for my LCD monitor *sigh* As a bonus, I found out she is also chewing through the power and surge protector cables. ARGH!! This is the main (and really only reason) cats sux0rs; you can’t teach them as well as you can dogs.

Anyhoo, I replaced that cable with a new VGA cable that came with the monitor. I really don’t notice a difference at all–so much for the uber expense of a DVI cable. If there is a difference between the two, I don’t think it’s really all that noticable by the human eye. I played Half-Life 2 and it looked very much the same. Perhaps side-by-side it might look a little different. But not frickin much.

If anything, Penny has given me a reason to see how much DVI really doesn’t gain you much in performance. lol. Stupid frelling cat.

It’s almost Christmas! ARGH! I need to do some shopping.

Well, this Thanksgiving was fairly decent, I suppose. After having had the turkey earlier with my family, none was really had on Thanksgiving. But, Chicago was quite awesome. It was quite cold, and there was some snow involved, but all of that went away later in the week when it rained like buckets.

The trip up there was fairly uneventful. I watched some Family Guy–gets better and better with each viewing, of course. I got quite bored, so I did a little rural wardriving in Indiana. I was surprised to find 78 wireless networks between Scottsburg, IN and Indianapolis. After passing through the city, I had about 173 found. Anyhoo, less than half of everything I found was WEP, and surprisingly 1/3 of them were 802.11g networks.

Anyhoo, most of this trip consisted of helping my aunt move out of her apartment. She is now in a nursing home. It was a pretty sad weekend; moving all of her stuff out, stuff that I remember from when I was a kid, left me with quite the bad feeling. My aunt was just about on the brink last spring when it was discovered she had cancer. She fought through it, though. She’s pretty healthy now for someone her age, except that she’s now confined to a wheelchair. Needless to say, she really needed to be in a nursing home. Still, it was just plain depressing. Seeing her relatively healthy, though, was definitely a huge frelling plus.

We went to the Museum of Science and Industry in-between all of the moving. It was quite nice; they have the Christmas exhibit on display now. Every year, they display Christmas trees from around the world. It’s one of my favorite recurring MSI exhibits. I’ll eventually get pics of it up on the site.

I did a little more wardriving on the way back. The state which had the least number of wireless networks within range of my lil wireless card was, oddly enough, Alabama *snicker* From the state line to exit 351 at Athens, there were only 7 wireless networks. Damn, I’m such a frickin nerd 😛

Anyhoo, that was my Thanksgiving.. I’ve been trying to recover sleep since, but you know how that can be 😉 I think I probably won’t be able to get it back until Christmas break (3 weeks away. w00t). And, even then, it’s off to Disney World and then most likely Colorado (w00t!!!!!).. Argh.. I’ve been procrastinating plane tix. I really do need to do some Travelocity-ing.. I hope I can still get something that remotely resembles a good deal..

Well, I get to go to Chicago in about 12 hours or so–actually more like 10. My family is going up there to visit family for Thanksgiving. It should be quite the groovy lil trip, although it’ll be a little strange since we usually go up there in the summer and all. There’ll be no Cubs games this time around. lol. I think I’ll survive.

I’ve left Penny uber amounts of food and water. I hope it’s enough, and that she doesn’t totally gorge herself while I’m gone. Hopefully, the only bad thing when I get back will be the litter box. The record for leaving her alone is 3 days. This will be about 4. I might leave the TV on to keep her company. hehe.

Anyhoo, the main reason we’re going up there is to help my aunt move out of her place–she’s moving into a nursing home. She had surgery over the summer. Even before that, though, I think it’s been exceedingly harder for her to take care of herself. I think we should all just stop getting old right now 😛 It’s a horrible practice that should be made illegal.

I hope everyone has an awesome Thanksgiving and safe travel! 🙂

Nothing much has really happened this week, which is definitely a semi-good thing. I was sick for the first half–I still am, but the pain killer and antibiotics are certainly making life much better.

I’m definitely going to catch up on some sleep this weekend, though–I’ve been scrambling, trying to get some software whipped up at work. I got most of the way there; my co-workers are helping me debug. The hardest thing to do as a programmer can be to debug your own code thoroughly. So, we usually debug each other’s apps, to get to things that we might miss on our own run-throughs.

Tonite, like every Friday, I feel like doing nothing but snoozing. lol. I must use my brain too much during the week, but of all days of the weekend, Friday nite is the worst. I’m always quite exhausted. Saturday & Saturday nite are almost always much better.

Speaking of which, there is a bachelor party for a friend tomorrow nite. w00t. This should be quite interesting; I’ve never been to one.

Half-Life 2 is SUCH a frickin awesome game. I don’t know where the plot ends, but I hope it isn’t anywhere soon. The game is sooooo saweet. It has a pretty good plot (albeit, plot is kind of hard to see in games many times I think because the player is so immersed in it). Of course, the uber awesomeness is the engine; the textures are massively saweet, movement is quite smooth, there is just about no mouse lag at all.. All-around, it is a pretty saweet game–I really do need to go get the first one and finish it.. I played a little bit of it, but didn’t finish. It’s too bad Valve hasn’t put out Half-Life: Source in stores. Anyhoo, I’m not so jealous of the Halo 2 crowd anymore, now that I have my own fixation. hehe.

So today was another one of those days where I was the only one I knew with a day off *sigh* Definitely no fun. I did play a little more Counter-Strike: Source, though 🙂 *drool* It is such a fun frickin game. Halo 2 no doubt blows in comparison 😉 hehe. I’m just saying that because I’m just a wee bit jealous that Halo 2 came out like a full 2 weeks before Half Life 2.

I also played a lil Call of Duty with my bro here. It was pretty niffty.. I whooped him, he whooped me. I’ll still always own him with Age of Empires, though 😉

Yassar Arafat died yesterday. I just hope that the Palestineans don’t substitute him for a whole bunch of terrorists.

In other news, tomorrow is Friday.. It’s weird, having an off-day in the middle of the week. But, being that tomorrow is the day after an off-day it’ll probably seem like a Monday. But, it’s not because the next day I’ll be able to sleep in as late as I did today. lol.

Saturday, is a football day. I’m going to play football for the first time in a long, long time. Matt Weber is getting married, and a cookout is being thrown for him.. Before the more than likely quite wild bachelor party after. lol. I literally haven’t played football since middle school. Hopefully, I won’t get too stomped. hehe.

Today is one of those eerie fall days where the sun is completely out–there’s not a cloud in the sky. It’s about 74 degrees and, of course, the weather can’t make up its mind about whether it should be 70-something or 50-something. It’s one of those curses of living in the south–erratic autumn weather. We’re just heading into the second tornado season of the year now, too, so I guess it’s kinda fitting.

The LAN yesterday was kewl, as always. I kicked a little butt, and also got my butt kicked a little. Most of our games are co-op, so it’s not like we’re whooping each other. The bots that come with most games today, though, have wonderful and challenging AI. Sometimes, it almost seems as though they can strategerize (hehe) as well as a human.

I started downloading Half Life 2 last night (and finished). I won’t be able to play it until the release date of the 13th, but it’s still kind of kewl to realize that I’ll be able to play it once the release date hits. I think it would be so frickin awesome if we could buy more games or software that way. Counter Strike: Source is already playable, and I played a little bit of it last night at the LAN. I’d almost say it’s more awesome than Raven Shield, but I’d have to play it a wee bit more.

Anyhoo, nothing much else is going down. Chilling around the parents’, as any usual Sunday. Downloading HL 2 onto my laptop as I sit here–I’m not sure how well it’ll run, though. Watching the movie Signs with my dad and bro.. To me, in many ways, I think this movie is probably M. Night Shyamalan’s best. I still need to go see The Incredibles–but, mostly for the Episode 3 trailer, of course 🙂