So again, I'm not behind - go look at my twitter feeds they are moving. But that said let me jump in on why I'm going to rant now, and rant I will! But first the back story, last night I got an invite to go to the Google dinner for OSCon. Really LH is the one I should blame the 'you will be there!' with glares of death if I didn't say yes (was going to anyway) were a key part to this. It was a lovely evening, I caught up with a bunch of people, had some good food and at the end of the evening walked home with an Android G1 Dev phone. Score one for my side!

Now, if you have been hanging around with me at all for the last year or so, you would have heard me rant at some point about how I'm dead convinced that all the cell phones (new) on the market these days suck rocks. Now I'm being specific to the smartphones here, "normal" phones just work thankfully and I can't fault them in the slightest. Smartphones however, suck, plain and simple. Lets break this down some, shall we?

What options exist for smartphones:

• Apple - iPhone
• Access - PalmOS
• Palm - WebOS
• Google - Android
• Symbian - Symbian
• RIM - Blackberry
• Microsoft - Windows Mobile

So realistically that's a solid list, there should be competition, ever increasing features, selection, and really all kinds of awesome there. However, there's basically several piles of steaming poo, a couple of antiquated offerings, and one or two things that only a corporate IT department could love. Really I'm mortified and angry, unsurprisingly since I'm moved to 'blog'. So while I come up on 24hrs with an Android phone let me get down in writing my experiences with the above and ponder what can be done.

Access - PalmOS I'll start with the old PalmOS, now owned by Access. I've been a Palm user for ages, I've had Palm's, Handsprings and my latest is a Treo 755p from Sprint (yes I'm on CDMA in the States. I understand this adds to my angry bitterness because CDMA is the unloved protocol, rarely gets the 'cool' phone and generally gets screwed. Why do I stay? I've got a good phone plan with Sprint and I'm reluctant to change it.) I've had the phone for two years now, and it's a frelling tank. I've dropped it down flights of concrete steps, water logged it, dropped it, thrown it, and by and large it's got very little damage for all of the abuse and daily battering it takes. The software stack is time tested and while quite antiquated at this point, does generally just work. The only really big gripe I could have with the PalmOS is the fact that the phone applications, interactions, etc are clearly giant shoehorned applications onto the side of the original PalmOS. It works, it's just clunky though, and by today's standards is anything but sexy.

Ultimately if the issue was that the PalmOS wasn't sexy, I would happily live on with the PalmOS and accept I am not hip or cool. However developers have fled from PalmOS, or really they fled 5 years ago when Palm (at the time) hadn't done anything resembling a major update to the OS in years and was working on it's "new improved Linux based OS!". There are still a few places putting out new or updated PalmOS apps but at this point it really feels like I'm standing in a ghost town when I pull out my Treo. But I'll also say that as of right now, it's the best smartphone platform on the market today.

Apple - iPhone As much as I want to hate the iPhone, it's lack of 'real' keyboard and all, it is probably the second best smartphone & smartphone OS out there right now. Why? Well it comes down to this: that's where all the development is. Apple, right now, is winning if by no other virtue than they have convinced the ravenous hordes of developers that their phone is the one to program for. My bank has a bunch of mobile apps to make depositing checks, and doing other things out. What platform do they support? The iPhone & iPod touch. Do they support anything else? Nope. Why? Not enough market share. Same goes for Skype, I would love to be able to use my phone as a wifi connected device I can throw in my back pocket and make Skype-to-Skype calls, however the only platform you can do that on is *drumroll please* the iPhone. Everyone else gets thrown into the "Skype Lite" category which doesn't use your wifi connection, should you have one, for the voice portion of the call.

So what does this mean? Apple is winning, and if they continue to have a dominance in the developer community and mindshare they will force every other platform out there to suck, and eventually faulter and possibly die. If that's not depressing as hell I don't know what is, I like the idea of an 'open' platform a la the old PalmOS, you could do basically anything on it, install anything you want, etc. With the Apple and the iPhone you can do sorta everything you want assuming you either jailbreak your phone (a constant cat and mouse game with Apple) or you bend to Apple's whims.

Palm - WebOS So after Palm sold off their antiquated OS to Access, they finally got their act together and got something that resembles a good phone stack out the door again. From what I've seen the WebOS is a very, very solid stack. They might have even been justified, for a time, in calling it a serious contender against the iPhone and launching it as an iPhone killer. Well that was until a week after the Palm Pre (the only, to date, WebOS enabled phone) launched, the latest iPhone came out and drowned out the Pre's existance. This particularly sucks because it's a CDMA phone on Sprint's network. Bonus points the hardware looks like it takes the same, built as a tank, stance that my Treo has. Really I should be practically giddy over this phone, and yet I'm not. I feel like it's an utter disappointment, a phone that *SHOULD* be perfect, have everything I could dream of, and I already know it's not what I want. Palm has taken a novel approach in WebOS and created what they call Synergy, or in lay terms - take all this data you have in various places like Google and Facebook and mash it all together so that it looks like a single contacts database, calendar, etc. It's neat, but it (currently) has one downside I can't condone: it only supports Facebook and Google as it's "cloud" storage medium. Me as someone who, shockingly, doesn't use these primarily is left completely out in the cold. There is not way to sync it to a CalDav or SyncML server that I run, there is nothing right now but what Palm approves of to use Synergy. Heck there's not even desktop syncing.

So if Palm would be kind enough to let those of us who *DON'T* trust our data on these "clouds" and let us use our own storage and accessing systems to handle our contacts, events, todos and notes I would probably jump on a Pre without question (Also if Sprint would stop being idiots and not force you to have a specific data plan to use a phone - LAME and DUMB!) WebOS and the Pre are still new, maybe I'll be proven wrong and what I want will come to it soon. I'm not going to hold my breath though, I'm getting convinced the entire cell phone market just hates me and all it's users.

Google - Android Here's another platform that has a huge amount of potential, possibly even more than the WebOS if you ask me, it promises a completely open phone stack that should be extensible, modifiable, and really just plain awesome to use. It has a lot of the hallmarks of the original PalmOS, I can even (and have) installed apps that aren't available in the store on the phone, even going so far as to install an entire additional appstore in parallel with the Android Market. This has serious potential, and since it won't be limited to a specific vendor (a la Palm & and the Pre/WebOS) there's room for it to grow in ways that Google (the main backers) weren't expecting or intended. This is *GOOD*!!!

However Android (as anything that isn't the iPhone these days) is really a second class citizen from an apps perspective. Skype doesn't have a client that's worth having, Facebook is having a serious spat at Google (so no nice and good Facebook app, like the one on the iPhone) and the development model for Android is a little cumbersome in comparison to the iPhone. Couple that with the whole thing feeling SLUGGISH in comparison to both my treo 755p (PalmOS) and the iPhone, and you have a platform that's got a black eye. It still suffers from the same problem as the WebOS & Synergy, in that it only syncs with Google, but I have more hope of fixing that than I do on the WebOS in the short term. Really if Android continues to feel slow and lack some of the pizzaz that the iPhone does, it will always be a second class citizen.

Symbian - Symbian Sadly I don't have a lot to say here, I haven't used a Symbian much ever (though I hear good things about it), and they seem to be well respected. It does have the same issues with Skype that Android does, and all of that but at least it doesn't seem to be embroiled in the same scuffles as everyone else. Sadly I can't say more than that.

Rim - Blackberry It's a company that wants to be hip and cool, and as those Mac vs. PC ads that Apple ran seem to indicate, it's a stodgy business suit trying to be hip and cool. I know a few people who use them, and love them, but really I think they are at the point of trying to do to much to stay afloat and not sure how to break out of the corporate & and push e-mail business.

Microsoft - Windows Mobile At this point, it's as antiquated as the PalmOS. It has been around long enough that software is plentiful and 'first class' so to speak, Skype being able to do Skype-to-Skype and such. But Microsoft needs to spend some time updating it and trying to make it better for today's market. Yeah it works fine, and businesses love it at this point - but if Apple pulls all the developers away that won't last forever.

*sigh* ok I've ranted myself out it seems. I'm really disappointed the more I look, the more I explore the more I get my hopes up, the more they get dashed. Well now that I've got a G1 I can at least try and help make it better in the hopes of succeeding but who knows.

So I'm not nearly as behind as my blog would indicate, I've taken up a bit of twitter (both warthog9 and warty9 over there, the former is private and please don't be offended if I don't let you in to that circle), and I've come to the conclusion on it that's it's really just the 21st century version of a private IRC channel where I can vaguely control who see's what I say. You younguns and your fancy new technogadgetry *waves cane* you ain't done nothing new here, so get off my lawn!

Also, lightly succumbed to Facebook. I at least partially blame Terri for it, and I blame the rest of you hippsters out there practically forcing one to be on it. That said it isn't all horrible, if you know that nothing is private and the more apps you use the more distributed your personal data becomes it is an interesting experiment in social networking. Heck I'll admit to having a serious idea for an app on Facebook right now, spurred on by an idea of Terri's. We'll see if I go insane and actually do it! For as horrible as Facebook is (Discussed here, here, here, here, here to name just a few), it is not *ALL* bad, I was able to connect up with a couple of people I haven't heard from in years and see how they were doing and I now have a semi-decent way of keeping up with them. That said I still fear Facebook, Google, and heck anyone who wants to have access to all of my data. If they have my data, they control it - not me, and losing control of my personal data is not something I want to do personally, which means I'm really not a huge proponent of the 'cloud' as it currently exists.

But the cusp of that, and before I start ranting about how both the general populous, and especially younguns are idiots and give away their personal information without any regard or consideration for it, is that I've been making shorter more timely updates there where people might actually read it (I fully know, understand and accept that no one reads this - and I'm really quite ok with that). I'll consider integrating my public twitter feed here, but that would also mean I would have to change off of my ohhh so high tech blogging software of vim & editing raw files to put my comments up and actually use one of these new fangled things like wordpress. I'm not entirely convinced yet so that pipe dream may not yet come to fruition for all of you who want an RSS feed.

Been working my butt off on a pile of things, from papers for Linux Sysmposium and LinuxCon, getting various work things out the door (archive.kernel.org, working on GSoC w/ BKO, account request systems, and a pile of other things), been traveling a fair amount between Ottawa in February, and now Iowa (longest stay back in Iowa since I moved). Even took my first vacation since I last changed jobs, as Mom had declared "We are going to Disney World!" and we went! I've been working on getting photos up and dealt with, but I personally took 40 some Gigs of photos so you can imagine it's going to take me a while to sift through the over 3000 photos before I get those up. Had Tom & Amanda's wedding, I was the usher, and that was a blast and at the rate I'm going really looking forward to getting past September because I can stop being gone most of the time. I mean it's June, and of the 163 days that have passed this year I've spent 78 of them (to date) away from my semi stupidly expensive apartment. I like travel, but this is much busier than I would normally have expected. So far it looks like it's all worth it, but it's weird being this mobile.

Anyway it's getting late and I should crash. Just wanted to update, let people know I was alive and that I've had idea, after idea, of rantable material to blog about - just never seem to get around around or have the time to do it.

So I've been playing with lightroom, and been working on getting my gallery back up and running fully. I think I've got it basically done and have been pointing a lot of people at it but I'm not *quite* ready to link it to the webpage. So I've got a digitial photography management system - Check. I've got a good panoramic image processor - (Hugin - I pronounce it hug-in - it's logo looks like it's trying to hug me) - Check. Geographic information in photos so that you can build pretty google maps and the like - *screaching halt* - not so checked

So Really what I'm saying is I was playing with Gallery and noticed that there's a plugin to do nice pretty google maps things. So I got to thinking - "hey how can I add the GPS data back to my photos after the fact, this has got to be easy right?" Why is it whenever I think things like that I'm completely and utterly wrong usually?

So I started looking around trying to find some software to do what I wanted. After some head banging, a bunch of downloads and mucking with a sample photo set for a while I can now pronounce GeoSetter to be pretty darned good. Now there are those out there that will start screaming bloody murder about it being a Windows program, and me a Linux geek. Well, deal. I do all my photo processing in Windows, it's the sad truth but everything I've seen that's cross platform or open source, etc - doesn't cut it. It does genuinely sadden me, yes, but I don't have the time, knowledge or interest in writing that kind of software. That said GeoSetter does seem to run under WINE so that's at least one thing I don't need windows for ;-) (my photo management software does not sadly *shakes fist of doom*)

GeoSetter has a good solid interface, though the first thing I did was turn off the extraneous effects. I've got a dual core reasonably high-end athlon, 4G of ram (though windows can't use it all), and generally a darned beefy machine and it still chugged with those effects on, without it's pretty zippy. It uses google maps to let you select and apply the location if you don't have a gps log (which I don't, I might start looking into cheap gps units just to do that logging though) and it has a *lot* of options on how to deal with the writing of the tags, from writing it only in an xmp sidecar to actually filling back in the missing portions of the EXIF data. Now I'll be honest I haven't fully vetted how it does it's writes, but it does seemingly (if you don't just use sidecars) have to create a new file to get all the EXIF data right. It does however seem to do what I would expect, if the writing is a bit slow.

Something to keep in mind, I'm going to keep playing with it for now and see what I think of it later on.

So my laptop, my primary workhorse when it comes to my day job, has been acting very wonky lately. I thought it was the wireless card for a while - so I bought a replacement. Didn't really solve the problem though, and further testing seems to look bad. The machine just hard locks, no kernel panic and the caps-lock light has a tendency to blink, which if I can't remember if that's kernel panic (thought Linux did both caps lock and num lock though), or more likely I think I remember reading that the blinking caps lock on an IBM (Lenovo now) T42 is a hardware fault of some sort. Considering that this kernel has been rock solid stable (no it hasn't been updated in a while, yes I'm a bad human being), and considering that this can happen back to back very quickly - this is seemingly hardware related.

Joy.

So in classic fashion I started fretting, the T42 *is* over 3 years old, probably pushing closer to 4. I do use the machine a *lot*, and it's not like it hasn't served me well (it was bought off of what was left of Orion Multisystems when they imploded - the words "cheap" don't begin to describe how much I picked it up for back then). So couple that with the fact I just started working for kernel.org full time, cross that with my increasing want to work from wherever I want to (like going to Ottawa to see Terri in Jan/Feb) and really it boils down to - I need my laptop to work. So dickering with the hardware and trying to get it to limp along a while longer, while admirable (and I will likely do it anyway) isn't going to cut it.

So after mucking about, and fighting (literally) with Lenovo's website (ok honestly Lenovo - your website SUCKS - when I'm getting "Session Timed out" when I've been on your website for a total of 10 minutes, most of which has been constant clicking on your site playing with options and reading help and such and I'm in the middle of putting something together is just not right. Bonus goes to your rep that when I mentioned it to him, he sighed and said "Yeah.... we know about it, we are trying to fix it... sorry..." this should tell you something) I got a quote together, sat on it, stared at it, talked with the bosses about it and then because the holiday deals were so good - I jumped.

So I've got a nice Lenovo T400 on it's way, given what I remember of Lenovo's shipping habbits I'll see it sometime next millenia (Their record stands at average wait for machine from purchase at 1.5 months from purchase date from my own, my brothers and friends experiences). I'll be happy if I see it before I go up to Ottawa in Janurary. It's a pretty nice machine, reasonably decked out though not quite every option checked. Price was still *quite* reasonable too, got something like $571 or something like that off the machine, bought some extra ram and a bigger hard drive 3rd party and saved another $150 over Lenovo's pricing and the final total was still cheaper than what my brother paid for his T61 a couple of years ago.

So yeah, I'm now moving slightly closer to being an all 64-bit, only things left are my T42 (which I think is still going to get used but in a less critical role), my firewall (via epia-m system), and my mythtv frontend box. Of the machines that I currently use those are the only 32-bit machines left. I do still have my old Fujitsu P2040 that's 32-bit (though that's a Crusoe processor too) and a few other odds and ends but yeah.

Looking forward to it, hopefully won't have to wait too long for it.

ADDENDUM: I'm a little shocked, Lenovo claims my T400 shipped today (Dec 3, 2008) and I should have it next week. Either I'm hallucinating or they are on the ball right now. Well more time to play with the new pretty I suppose!

So - I have just witnessed, and lived through, probably one of the most profound events of the decade. Today we, the United States of America, have looked past the race of a gentleman and elected our 44th president without prejudice. If the polls and commentary I'm seeing are corret the win, from an electoral college perspective, is rather a landslide. The popluar vote is within a few percentage points - but that isn't the bit that really elects our president.

It is a good day, and I'm proud to have voted and helped this process. I'm proud of my countrymen, and I'm proud of my country. That said our 44th president, Barak Obama, is already faced with several calamaties: the economy, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, wiretapping mess. I wish him luck - he's going to need it to lead us out of this mess.

So I've got a smidgen of insomnia, between the book I'm reading ( Terry Pratchet's The Truth, which is a rather interesting take on the rise of journalism and the printing press. The Truth shall set the Free ) and the fact that I think I might have found an rental worth going after ( sadly it's not quite what I want - but this would be a step up in the right direction ) that I'm just a bit wound up, and need something to finally calm me down and get me to sleep. So I'll fill everyone in on the last couple of months.

So August was hectic - as usual. Towards the beginning (not long after my last post) we got word that a friend of mine, Scarybug, of the now famous Scarybug Games, had his game Chronotron accepted into the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX)'s PAX10. This was pretty awesome, to say the least! So having a desire to go and attend PAX last year (which I got ditched for), I thought it would be awesome to go and support Scarybug and generally get to go do something way cool. Terri was roughly planning on coming out around my birthday anyway, so I checked to see if she was interested in joining our little cadre heading north - and she was as excited by the idea as I was (I love that woman so much!). So plans were made, hotels were scrambled for, mini-vans were setup and tickets were purchased.

Terri came out a bit before PAX so we were able to have some time together before PAX all happened. Really, I'm not sure there is ever enough time to spend with Terri, but I'm exceedingly happy to have gotten to spend time with her. PAX was pretty awesome though, both Terri and I got a pile of photos ( Terri's set, My Photos ) and we had a blast! I even got to help out with Scarybug's PAX10 booth - twas fabulous! I really had a blast, and am seriously looking forward to maybe going next year!

Now that it's getting late and I'm winding down finally, a heads up I changed jobs part way through September as well. The long and the short of it is that Kernel.org, as mentioned at OLS this year got funding for a full time person. Well - I applied and got the job - so I'm now employed by the Linux Foundation, working full time on Kernel.org. Really this is a pretty fantastic job change, and I'll have more to say about it when I'm not vaguely coherent and it's not 4:16am ;-)

Ok the universe is out to amuse me. So I went for a 25.7 mile bike ride today, explored up around the airport since I happened to notice what looks like a re-opened bike trail. Low and behold I found 2, one that goes under 101 and one that clearly is mean to get you around to the point where you can circle the airport. w00t! Good find, good bike ride and my legs don't hurt too much.

So my mom poked me this evening mentioning she couldn't print, figured out it was an issue with the internal dns + dhcp, fixed the problem and all was good. Now since I was playing with the printer anyway I figured "I bought this HP Busines Jet 2250 years ago, the firmware is likely never to have been upgraded - I should fix that" (keep in mind I bought this printer while I was in college and it's a phenominal printer, it's current duty cycle claims 25,843 pages - get that out of the cheap $30 printer - HA!) Anyway, so I went and snagged the firmware update thing from HP got it pointed at the right subnet (I.E. the one on the other side of the VPN) it found the printer and off to the races it went, upgrade went fine (I'll admit how cool it is to upgrade a printer that's 2000 miles from me without issues!). So it all went well till I check the status page on the printer and one line on it caught my eye.

System Contact: IS Team 713-500-5400

Ergh - that's interesting, a quick google search seems to indicate that the phone number in question belongs to The University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. So I apparently bought the JetDirect module (after checking my inbox) and found that it was an e-bay purchase, apparently I bought it from the University of Houston and they forgot to clean it out. Haven't figured out how to change it, not that I care a lot - mom is going to bug me long before she figures out the hostname of the printer to begin with.

If anyone cares, I will be up at Linux World on Tuesday, mainly because all the Etherboot stuff going on (and I believe my code for Rom-O-Matic is going to get merged into mainline there). Should be cool, if you want to meet up e-mail me or ping me.

Off for home, both the Bof (link) and the talk (link) went really well. The talk went over it's time by about 20 minutes because people were discusing stuff so much, and discusion seems to be continuing after the fact - all in all I think that's a succes. Downside on the talk - I kinda said, rather vehemently that someone rather important was wrong. There was a fantastic write-up that I was included on over at linux.com (link).

Only other downside - heading home sucks - it means Leaving Terri, and that only seems to get harder. If I could stop having to leave I think I would be a lot happier :-) but for now, the grind of work calls.

Off to OLS, giving my paper talk on "Issues in Linux Mirroring: or BitTorrent considered harmful". Really looking forward to the conference, and definately looking forward to seeing Terri!

Ok took down the original post as I've got a new full length video - warning it's the whole thing and I've been recommended to watch it at 4x the speed I've got now, and warning the file is 100M or so. Click here to see the movie. I've got a whole slew of photos from the trip up to Crater Lake and all the side trips to Lava Bed National Park, and such. I'll try and fix the full gallery soon and get the photos up. Downside of the digital camera is that I need more storage now! Working on that.

Work has been "exciting" over the last few days, so I'm feeling a bit down. Additional bummer - Terri went home today. To quote us both - parting doesn't get easier, it only gets a lot harder - every time. So yeah - bumming - I miss her already. We hung out at the rose garden yesterday, got some really good photos, and we went to the Montery Bay Aquarium last weekend and had a lot of fun. It was exceptional just hanging out with her - and I'm really looking forward to July when I get to see her again!

Ok so Molly's wedding was awesome and I was very glad to have made the trek back home for it! Got to see a couple of people from high school that I hadn't seen in a long time. In fact the pastor who presided was a friend of mine from West High and who I hadn't seen for a couple of years - totally crazy! But it was a beautiful ceremony, and the party was good despite having to get moved inside due to some sprinkles that happened outside. Terri and I had dueling cameras going a fair amount of the time, have to take a look at the photos and see who wins [ED: Terri won for all of the inside shots, I couldn't even compete but I kept up without too much issue on the outside shots]. Even their official photgrapher (who tend to be the bane of my existance, always doing their job and stepping right into the photo I've got lined up and generally being in the way) was good, and during some of the dancing took quite a number of photos of Terri and I - have to poke Molly about those and see if they were any good.

Though bonus points to Molly - she mentioned to Terri and I that Wylde Nept was playing that night, and that if she could wrangle it she was going to go change and go listen to them on her wedding night! Go Molly! I ended up convincing Terri, my younger brother and Ben M. to all go out with me. It was highly amusing to be out listening to a traditional Irish Celtic Pub group at a table where no one drank at all. Twas awesome - I've got a really bad movie I took at The Mill in Iowa City where they got Molly and Benjamin to come up and dance. It's horrible but I will hang onto it as blackmail material against Molly (or for anyone who begs me enough for a copy!). Awesome trip so far it's going great and I think Terri is enjoying herself too!

Terri gets into town today so going to be a bit busy for a while hanging out with her! Heading to Iowa for Molly's (my little sister's* wedding. Should be fun, and Terri is going to get to meet the family too - I'll have to admit a little concern over that but I have every reason to be confident that she'll like them and they will like her too!

Other than that life is going ok, got a few things planned to do while Terri is here, know we are likely hitting the Richard Cheese show up in The City on the 30th, and maybe go for a drive and see California. Only downside to right now is that I'm looking to move so hopefully I can keep up with the search without impeeding too much on her being out here.

* She's not really my little sister but we kind of decided that I was her big brother and she was my little sister in High School and we kinda just accepted that that was that!

So for those of you who didn't catch what was going on yesterday - this was an April Fools Day joke. It was concieved by HPA and I last year, though there was some reasons we didn't do it last year. This apparently has had a number of people in a bit of a stir! I have heard rumors there's even a FreeBSD board that's still debating the validity of the original message. The main point of contention is based on when I sent the mail out. Specifically the mail was sent a little after midnight UTC as the kernel.org machines themselves are set to UTC and currently span the globe. Hopefully this will help set some of these things to rest!

I made the announcement today that Kernel.org was going to switch to FreeBSD 7.0 Found on LKML here. I'm sure I'm going to get a fare amount of hate mail for this - but we are convinced this is the right course of action.

Well kinda ;-) - More on this tomorrow

So Terri and I were talking about random stuff (not that we don't talk quite a bit in general but yeah, and we came up with a new system of dealing with the progression of relationships, as well as the operators that can be applied to them:

There are some additional things that have come to me while writing this up, operations that can be performed on the subject (ok this just proves I'm an utter geek - hopefully someone will smile at this)

Ok, I accept that my blogging skillz are t4 5ukz0rz (translation: they need lots of work). Considering that I've gone, ::looks at the date:: 6 months without letting you, my non-existent readers (if you actually still follow this at all your clearly my friend or just glutton for punishment), know what has happened in my life.

If I said "lots" and ended this entry would you all be happy? Yes?! Ohhh... no you wouldn't, I see - making my life hard ehh? Well fine! Here we go.

No further airlines have tried to kill me, though American Airlines is still serving nuts and their trail mix on their flights. Traveled quite a bit these last few months, went back for Moms birthday this year, I hadn't been back home since Novemeber, and the beginning of the "black months". It was a good trip and I'm very glad I went, it wasn't nearly long enough. Went back again in October for the annual Halloween Party, which was, as always, awesome! Looking forward to this years which is now only 8 months away and I have unconfirmed reports already of people discussing it already and saying things like "Need more crackballs" [ Editors note: crackballs are the term given to the secret Hawley family recipee for for meatballs that are traditionally served at the party. The are awesome, and we make small batches to keep demand high for them. No, really we won't give you the recipee - don't ask, well unless you ask nicely and bribe me ;-) ] After that went back up to my beloved Boston early in December for Sean's wedding, I'll get back to this but it was awesome! Other than that *my* traveling only extends around Northern Cali, but I have been busy touring, seeing and doing things.

Lets see general things to let everyone know about, well I'm not dead yet (unless I've successfully implimented myself in bash and that's what's typing up this entry - if so kudos to me!), I've actually decided to "grow up" some and I've bought a suit and some nicer clothes (yes I realize that this is one of the signs of the apocalypse, I'm sorry - but I do look good in the suit! Really! Isn't that worth maybe a *little* apocalypse?), I bought more art while I was back in Iowa again (darn you Scheels! Darn you and your wonderful clearance isles, staf who knows my name and possibly my address by heart, and your fine selection of paintings and vases that make my apartment seem so much nicer!), I've bought some furniture (w00t nightstands for cheap! My mother is a genius!), I'm dating a wonderful girl named Terri, Spent some awesome time in Boston - even getting a chance to see my old abode once more before it's leveled flatter than a pancake, went shooting with Crypto Rob (ar-10, m1 garand, m2 carbine, xd 45, cz-75, ak-47 is whats written on my dancing card), taken more photos than you can shake a stick at (digital cameras are evil! It's not uncommon for me to now have to sift through over 1000 photos after a major event! Clearly I need to take fewer photos. - if you don't have the link to the temporary gallery - email me and I'll get it to you), working my tail off on kernel.org stuff and generally well - being me ;-)

Whats that? Ohhh you want me to expound on stuff, well clearly you want to know why my Mother is a genius! Well she told me at one point to watch the clearance section at places like Crate and Barrell and Pottery Barn and see what turns up, well I did and pretty quickly found a $400 nightstand for under $100 - good buy in my part, it's awesome! Thus my Mother continues to be a genius!

What? Ohh not that, well it must be about the shooting - it was pretty awesome. Went out with Crypto Rob and a friend of his to the public shooting range out near North Liberty. We had bought about $100 in ammo and were on a bent to let loose - which we did (didn't use up all the ammo though). Shot fairly well, particularly with the ar-10, at 150yards or so. First time shooting in a while (say 3years), and it was a blast. There was another gentleman there who had brought out a collection of WWII vintage rifles with him. He was amazingly kind and allowed us to fire off a couple of rounds on a vintage M1 garand and M2 carbine, the M2 using vintage 1943 ammo. To be perfectly honest I was more at home and I believe more accurate with the pinhole sites on the M1 & M2 than I was with the scope on the ar-10. They were amazing machines - and it was nice to hold and fire them, I've got a much greater appreciation for them now - and the men who used them.

What? Not that EITHER?! Grief what do you want me to talk about? The painting? The suits?

Ok, Ok - Yes I'm dating a wonderful girl named Terri. We met up at OLS this year (though I'm fairly sure we had met the previous year as well - just didn't quite hit it off as well). However this year we ended up talking a lot after the conference, and she happened to come out here in early Novemeber at which point we realized how much we actually cared for each other (yes we were both living on the river de-nile for a while). She's wonderful, plain and simple, I can't think of any other way to put it. There is only one real downside - she lives 2900 miles away right now in Ottawa ;-). Yes, I know we are insane - trust me Terri and I probably spent 6 hours striaght talking about this trying to figure out if this was even a sane thing to undertake, but in the end love won out, and yes I do love her very much.

Terri was even able to make it out to Boston for Sean's wedding. Flights happened to get cheap right around then and she was able to come down. It was awesome, she was able to meet a lot of friends of mine - which many of them are now flung to the far corners of the earth - so it was a fairly unique opportunity to meet so many people! Was even able to spend some extra time wandering around Boston together, I believe Terri summed that entire day up best by saying "Best date ever!". Ended up seeing the Aquarium, the Harvard Natural History museum, got a light snow fall while looking out over Boston from the end of the pier near the Aquarium, saw a giant glowing blue thing, and had dinner with MDC of the etherboot project and his wife and heard the wonders that is the amplified electric clarinet!

Speaking of which I'm heading up to Ottawa to (1) see Terri :-) & (2) get away from this abysmally nice weather that lacks snow! Heading up towards the end of Winterlude which should be cool, and work has been awesome about letting me work remote for this trip. Even going to get to spend some time back home with the family for Ayyam-i-ha this year!

Getting back to Boston and Sean's wedding though, Sean's wedding was spectacular. I have to hand it to him Christina is awesome! Congratz man! The wedding was quite a hit, with Sean being as irreverant as he can be (his vows included Sean declaing "AND you're wicked hot." to Christina. Christina even came up with the idea to march out to the celebration music from the end of Star Wars IV. That was awesome! The reception was held on, of all places, Hanscom AFB - which happens to be, litterally, my old stomping grounds. The reception was held in the Minuteman Club (The officers club) which the last time I was in was for my Father's Air Force retirement ceremony many years ago. That was something else. Even ended up catching the garter, though I don't know about this tradition of the guy who catches the garter and the girl who catches the bouquet having to dance together (I swear Sean made that up on the spot!) But it was a good reception.

I have to thank Sean though from the bottom of my heart. He gave me an opportunity, albiet not one he neccisarily explicitly intended, for me to do something which I thought I'd never get another opportunity for - to see some of my old stomping grounds. It was a treat. Even found out my old houes is going to get demolished as they rebuild that section of housing, and it was odd knowing that the house was empty, in a neighbourhood of houses I remember beeing teaming with people who were packed in like sardines. Thank you Sean.

Hmmmmmm - I know I've just skimmed over 6 months in a mere smattering, and for those of you trying to follow along in general - I'm sorry. My new years resolution, as always, is to blog more - and we'll see how 2008 faires, hopefully a few more than 2007 ;-) - Terri blogs a fair amount so maybe some of that will rub off on me.

To quote a movie I own (Milipitas Monster): "I'm NOT having a good time"

So I'll give a quick update since February before I move on to how I am vehemently mad at American Airlines.

So life has been been insanely busy since Februrary. The months have flown by, and can't even tell you everything thats been going on. I know I've kept meaning to blog and tell you all how I'm angry at this, or the stupid thing I saw (like people backing up on the highways and such) but I've been busy enough that I haven't been able to do it. A lot of huge changes on kernel.org have been keeping me busy - we've deployed 4 new servers, and two of those were to Europe. My dad was able to land a job so things got a lot better on that front, though it wasn't perfectly ideal - but things are working out there so it's all good.

I just got back from Ottawa, which I was up there for the Ottawa Linux Symposium - which was a really good trip. I happened to be up there to give the BOF for kernel.org, which went really really well. a bit more than 70 people ended up showing up to the BOF, which far exceeded the 5 I was expecting - and to top it off people seemed to find it very useful. At some point there will be video footage of me making a complete idiot of myself in front of people, and now in front of the whole intarwebs ;-)

Ended up staying up there for Canada Day which was one of the most amazing street parties and national holidays I've seen. It was something else, and it isn't something you would find in Washington, DC. I mean, the national museums were free for normal exhibits (in fact I wandered over to the national gallery and saw the Renoire landscapes - which was an awesome exhibit). And had an interesting run in over at the Dominion tavern. If you've seen Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter you'll recognize the Dominion as the tavern where the giant fight with the vampires occured. Well I happened to go in and I ordered a coke, there were a couple of people at the bar and I asked the bar tender 'Have you ever heard of a movie called Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter? The people at the bar started laughing nigh uncontrolably and the bar tender calmly said 'Jesus is out back'.

This is the point where most people would double take and go *WHHHHHHAAAAA?*. Thats exactly what I did. So in true fashion I went out back, and yes I found Jesus. (I've even got photos of him)

Finished my coke and headed out and called HPA to let him know of this fantastic news, and he came straight over and we went back in. Turns out that 'Jesus' must own the Dominion as he was behind the bar serving when we went back in, so we wandered up to him and ordered two cokes and I calmly asked 'Are you Jesus?'

J: I was once

And I shook his hand and thanked him for such an awesome movie. And I can now say 'I found Jesus, he was out back and he served me a coke'.

So yeah Canada day was fun and I would love to be around up in Canada at some point again for it! But sadly this brings me to the part of the entry where I'm going to turn quite bitter, angry and I'm going to say a lot of things that will probably not endear me to American Airlines.

American Airlines or how they tried to kill me

Let me preface what I'm about to say with a few statements. I have in the past been a VERY happy American Airline customer, I'm a frequent flyer member with them and I have a reasonable amount of miles with them (enough for a couple of free flights I think), and of all my airline stories American Airlines has never made 'the cut' so to speak. I mean I was FLOORED and impressed back in Novemeber when I flew home and there was a measely delay (not anything to even worry about in my book) and I couple of weeks later I got an e-mail profusely apologizing for the delay and showering me with free frequent flyer miles (I never even complained, a delay of less than a day is peanuts when you compare it to sleeping in airports when trying to get to interviews, or being told your flight hasn't come to this airport in 6 months, etc). So when I say I'm VERY disapointed I want you to understand why I'm dissapointed.

American Airlines unwittingly caused me quite a bit of suffering, grief and anger because of a 4.5 hour flight from Chicago O'Hare to San Francisco Intl. I would go so far as to claim they unwittingly tried to kill me.

A bit more back story, to make my point very very clear. I have a nut allergy. Specifically I have a tree nut allergy, not to be confused with a peanut allergy as peanuts are legumes. Peanut allergies and tree nut allergies are actually very similar, and in a lot of cases having one means you have the other. I scaped the serpents tongue on the peanuts though but for the purposes of my rant the same arguments and concerns come up for people with peanut allergies as well as tree nut alergies. I digress with the peanut allergy explination however.

I have a nut allergy. One could even go so far as to call it a severe nut allergy. To give you an idea of how severe I've had an epipen since I was probably 5, I will likely need a constant perscription for an epipen for the rest of my life. Luckily I have had only one occasion where an epipen might have been useful, and that was before my family knew what an epipen was. All of my friends have a good idea of how serious this allergy is, and I don't hide it from them. In general this is something that's actually quite easy for me to avoid and manage (which is a bit different than people with peanut allergies - I do feel for you guys out there with those) Nuts are most commonly found in desserts, so I tend to be overly cautious about eating them, along with medeteranian food, and a few things along those lines. And MOST nuts I'm not so allergic to them that accientally eating a small amount is going to send me anaphylactic, it'll just make my mouth tingle. So while it is normally manageable there is a specific situation that is unavoidable and can cause massive havoc.

Peanuts and nuts have a tendency to leave small amounts of dust (or in the case of bagged varieties quite a bit) that is easily kicked up into the air. Now in a normal environment this isn't that big of a deal, they will float around for a bit and settle like normal dust. In a normal sized house (lets say my apartment with about 1K sqft of space) a small handful of nuts from one person means there's a very small particle count in the air, and it's unlikely to affect anyone but the by far most severely aflicted. However, lets change the environment here. Lets take that one person with a small bag and double the total sqft to 2K, but instead of something like a house you make it a presurized cabin that's recirculating air, a lot of recirculated air. In this environment your going to basically keep most of those particles in the air both as people move a lot and as the forced air is recirculated. This makes for the concentration of nut dust particles in the air to be a lot higher with very little effort.

Which brings me to my main complaint. American Airlines (along with a lot of other airlines apparently - they aren't on their own but my rancor is currently targeted at American right now) have reversed a long standing choice to not serve nuts on aircraft (along with peanuts - though peanuts seem to still be mising). In fact they have gone so far in the reverse it's mind boggling. Apparently first class passengers (on flights who's 'snack time' is after noon) are being given a mixed nut assortment which consists of cashews, almonds and walnuts I believe. And in coach the 'cheap' option for a snack (at $3) is a trail mix assortment with cashews.

Needless to say when I found this out after 3 hours of being in the air and experiencing some odd itching, a bit more caughing than I would have expected and a nose that made the niagra falls seem like a babling brook a light went off in my head and I dove for the benedryl in my backpack immediately, and called for a stewardess.

I was in the process of a good sized (though at the point non-life threatening) allergic reaction to the nut dust that was being forced to breath, and could not escape from because the other passengers were being given / sold nuts on the aircraft.

What followed is as close to a timeline as I can give, but due to me being absolutely internally livid and being very concerned with my own internal state (being very aware of what was going on and trying to make sure that if things got worse that my epipen was easily available and that my traveling companions were aware of what was going on)

~3hrs into the flight (at least 2 hours after the nuts were first served) I make the realization that the insanely runny nose (as well as the other symptoms) I've had for that last 2 hours or so is not because of the normal random traveling bits but because I'm in the middle of an allergic reaction to the nut dust in the air. There's nowhere to go to get away from it all, and to be honest the worst of the damage is done - the particles are already logged in my lungs, even putting my on oxygen at this point won't really fix the problem as the bits are there in my lungs and my body is already inflamed. I dive for my backpack under the seat in front of my and pull out the benedryl down two tablets, pull out my penguin mints (caffinated mints) start chewing them like there's no tomorrow and call for a stewardess. I inform my traveling companions of my sudden epiphany. I'm now actutely checking myself and paying attention to my breathing and such - if things get bad my epipen is in my backpack and the only thing I could do is down a non-recommended amount of benedryl, take the epipen and chew through what's left of my 'caffiene pills' in the hopes of them getting the plane down in time for them to get me an EMT. We are at cruising altitude for an S80 - 30,000 - 40,000 ft. An emergency landing might not be fast enough for me if it gets that far.

A stewardess comes over and I ask two very blunt very simple questions:

1. I need a glass of water immediately
2. What are the EXACT contents of the trail mix as I have reason to believe I'm having an allergic reaction to the nut dust from it. (that's all the nuts I know about at that time and I need to know if the REALLY bad nuts were included. If so this is going to get a lot worse, if not it won't get really bad for a while yet but I'm not in a good situation)

The head stewardess for coach (seemingly) came over a couple of minutes later and asked a few questions and tried to figure out what as going on exactly. I explained that I had reason to believe I was having an allergy attack due to the nut dust being forcibly recirculated through the cabin from the trail mix containing cashews. She quickly pointed out that 'Policy does not allow us to not sell the snacks' (fine, great the damage is already done and at that minute I didn't care but for the record that's a darned bad policy) and two 'That first class had a mixed nut assortment'.

I quickly interogate her with regards to the contents of the mixed nut assortment and make sure that the danger nut is not present. I'm now even more concerned as first class was just given the assortment, this explains a lot more about why I'm having the troubles I am. She mentions understanding allergies, as her daughter (may she rest in peace as she died of a medical condition) was at times on some of the very heavy duty anti-histimens and epipens and such were not uncommon to her because of this. She understands my concerns but ultimately (and I agree with her) there isn't anything she can do to stop the cause (it's already in the air - the only thing they could do is recirculate out all the air and pump in fresh air). She also mentions the morning / afternoon thing (even going so far as to suggest that I only fly in the morning! I've always had connecting flights when I fly and invariably I get leg 1 done in the morning and leg 2 done in the afternoon / evening) and asks me to make sure that if there's anything I need to let them know.

I am then stuck on the aircraft for another 1.5 hrs until we get to San Francisco Intl.. My brain is fried, my nose is a mess (the second stewardess had given me some tissues, and wow did those tear my nose apart), the caughing and breathing issues are now a bit more noticable. I get off the plane get to my luggage and at that time I'm rather sick and in no capacity able to fight / argue with American over the predicament. I did however make sure to ask the stewardess for the 'correct' path to complain through, as this wasn't going to end there.

I get home, still taking benedryl, take a very long hot shower (which helped a lot but obviously not enough) and tried to sleep. I didn't very well, between caughing and my nose I slept in 45 minute chunks and that was only about 6 hours at best.

I filed my first complaint, requesting a responce from American on Tuesday morning. I have kept copies of the form that was sent. I have not had a responce from American thought they claim it can 'take a week to respond to your request'.

Wednesday was the first day where I started really feeling 'human' and not fuzzy brained. I was able to sleep Tuesday night, I was still on benedryl and I was using my inhaler.

Today is July 6th, I flew on Monday. I'm still caughing (though thats getting better), and my nose is still not 'normal' (being unnaturally stuffy / runny). I don't consider being forced to breath a toxic substance in an enclosed space for 4.5hours, and then suffering for a week afterwards to be an acceptable way to fly. It absolutely shocks me that American, as well as many other airlines, would serve nuts on the aircraft. They already know how allergic people are to these and it's not like they bill their flights as 'contains nuts', and by the time someone who's allergic to them finds out it's too late to get off. I'm genuinely scared that for the airlines to take this seriously someone is going to have to jab an epipen in their leg and land an aircraft, and I pray that that someone won't be me. For now I will wait to hear what American has to say, I am trying not to harbor explicit ill will towards them and I want to continue thinking that this is a problem of the left hand not talking to the right hand about the issue. If AA responds and takes my issue seriously I'll be happy, if not I will contact a number of advocacy and complaint departments (including the FAA) about the issue and the problem the issue presents. I would just rather AA not try to ignore this but take it seriously, and I understand one of the issues the stewardess brought up: they can't stop people from bringing nuts onto the aircraft and consuming them. While I understand that, and I accept it - the airlines shouldn't encourage nuts being on an aircraft by giving them out or selling them. If someone brings nuts onto an aircraft on their own thats one thing, but if the airlines gives them out that's quite another.

Ok I've ranted enough on that, and I know right now I'm hurt (both from AA making me sick for several days and for them taking up serving nuts again after not doing so for such a long time) and I'm angry (same reasons really) and I'm giving AA a chance to make things right, I just hope they take it seriously :-/

That time of year again

So generally speaking things are going well. I'm really happy with work, progress is being made on all of my projects and I'm quite happy. I've been quite happy with everything there all told, and even getting some work in on things like PXE Knife (hoping to get a new version of that out later this month, but we'll see). So work is going well and it's definately keeping me busy ;-)

Dad is doing ok, but things could be better. He got contacted by a couple of different groups recently, and both turned out to be duds. The first one billed themselves as a government federal agency, and they were relatively near to home. So this sounded ideal, until dad got the confirmation e-mail and it turned out to 1) not be a federal entity at all and 2) it was more or less a scammer group. So double whammy. Now I'll admit that they didn't explicitly do anything to Dad, but Mom found a lot of unpleasant information on them online. So they git nixed. Next up was a billed 'head hunter', and surprise surprise - it wasn't. It ended up being a similar entity to the governments called T.A.P. or Transition Assistance Program, or a set of resources designed to help people change jobs, etc. Now in and of itself this isn't a bad thing, however when dad went to talk to them it became abundantly clear just how useless they were going to be for him. So all in all, things aren't going spectactularly on that front :-/ If you get a chance, remember them in your prayers and well wishes, because any assistance at this point would be appreciated.

Anyway before I close for the night (it's 2am) I just wanted to comment as to the time of year, mainly because well I'm single. Valentines day is in a couple of days, and I've had my fair share of awesome Valentines days, spent with S.O.'s of the time. Sadly though, I'm single and it's just kinda of a grating holiday to a degree. It reminds me of past loves (and reminds me that there are small pieces of me that do still love them), causes me to reflect and re-examine those relationships and by and large, and I'll be honest, makes me jealous of all the people who are in love right now. I don't begrudge them their happiness, in fact I'm really quite happy for all of you, but I am jealous all the same. Heck I'll even go so far as to admit I've made several decisions I've regreted in the past couple of years, and do seriously wonder if I was right, or just frightened or controlled by my own demons.

In all likelyhood I'm not alone, I'm sure there's a nice large portion of the population that is dealing with the same set of emotions, troubles and what not. To a certain extent, Valentines day is an interesting semi-exclusive holiday, with those who get to enjoy it (typically those who are in happy relationships, though thats not always the case) and than the rest of us. For some a reminder of their happiness, for others the opposite. In the end I suppose the only thing that will really affect me this year is the fact that Valentines day falls on Wednesday, the day a small group of us typically goof off and hang out in Everquest 2. Two of the four members are happily married to each other, and the other member is married as well. Probably means we will game on Thursday instead of Wednesday, maybe I'll get some work done on PXE Knife or maybe if Poseidon (new kernel.org machine) makes it out to OSUOSL I can finish setting that up and get it synced up and live. I mean heck, if nothing else I have a couple of bad movies I can watch which will amuse me all the same (Tank Girl being the most notable)

Happy Valentines Day to those of you who will be celebrating, and to those of you who aren't at least your in good company.

The life and times of a Warthog

So the last month and a half has been..... Interesting and it's been busy. First a quick update on the situation back home. Things have calmed down some, though the entire family is still on edge. No one is sure if dad's going to survive this ordeal he's being put though. There is a small reprieve so to speak and he has gotten an extension so things are now delayed until the end of February. Which currently begs the question since I'm penny pinching as much as possible, do I spend the money and go back to Iowa for a short while for Ayyam-i-ha, or do I sit and have a gothic holiday (sitting in my apartment and celebrating alone)? I don't have an answer but I'll certinaly keep my eyes peeled on plane tickets. If you find some cheap ones or know of somewhere to find them cheap, let me know.

So beyond that lets see what else is going on. Thanksgiving was a bit hectic, getting people to / from the airport and such. I ended up going home for Turkey day as I had already had tickets. It was good, and it helped the family a lot to see me, heck it helped me a lot. It was a good Thanksgiving, though everyone was on edge and stressed. It was good to be home, and just be with everyone.

December was fairly quiet, work was busy, hectic and insane. I got some decent testing done for a demo we were working on with a 3rd party, though I'm not entirely sure how that finally turned out. So the big news of December was I went into talks with 3Leaf Networks, and found out they were pretty cool and my 'Christmas Presant' to myself this year was accepting a job offer from them. C2 wasn't exactly thrilled but they took the news fairly well.

Christmas eve I ended up doing a big dinner party and made deliciously yummy food. Well, it wasn't my best dinner I've cooked but it was reasonable, and I've got some notes on what I can do to improve it if I cook it again (Pork tenderloin over potatoe beds, string green beans, salad, etc). Everyone seemed to enjoy the evening in general, did dinner and than we were going to watch a movie of some sort but got side tracked and played with my MythTV setup for a while and just chatting. People really seemed to like the setup, so I might just try and do a dinner & a movie thing maybe once a week or once every other week or something, kinda depends on how gung ho I get about it all. But it was fun and I definately want to do it again.

Christmas Day however was eventful. I awoke, and was an utter bum for most of the day. At some point I decided to start text messaging everyone a Merry Christmas. About 3/4 of the way through this process Rob M. gives me a call and calmly says 'Hey, I was about to call you anyway as I was going to ask if you could give me a ride - I think I may have broken my foot'......... Well as you can imagine, I dropped everything I was being a bum and doing and went and got him to the emergency room. So I spent several hours hanging out at the hospital. It turned out to not be broken (WELL they don't think so anyway.... but thats an odd story), and I got Rob home and went to pick people up from the airport (I did a lot of that in December, something like 5 trips to SFO and a strip to SJC in the span of a couple of weeks). The only downside to spending the time at the Hospital, which makes for a good story and was well worth it, was I caught a cold that I only got over a couple of days ago, so par for the course I suppose.

Anyway New years eve was pretty quiet this year, nothing really to report on that front. It was spent more or less about the same as last year, though instead of being subjected^H^H^H enthralled by Happy Tree Friends, we played 'House on the Hill' an Avalon Hill board game. If you haven't played it, it's a lot of fun and because of the way it's done it's new and fresh almost every time you play it. Go check it out!

Anyway this week has been my first week at 3Leaf, which you can imagine is filled with brain dumps, and just trying to figure out whats going on and getting settled in. I've already got a quote back on my desk for a new build server that I get to rig out as part of my duties (it's monsterous, trust me so you can imagine how much glee it brings me). The funny thing is not two days after I'm out of my last job, they had to call me up to have me come in and fix a few things that had broken, and in them trying to solve the problem ended up making the problem worse. Go figure, I'm gone two days and they end up having problems. Cest la vie! Things are fine now, and should go back to the smooth sailing I would have expected (the problem was a partial hardware hiccup, and not something I'd expect to happen again)

And here I am up to date, in a whirlwind update. My goal is to update this a bit more often and to vent more random frustrations and comments with the world in general. Not that I think anyone actually reads this, but hey it's like shouting through the void, maybe someone will hear you, and if not at least I feel better for having shouted ;-)

Happy New Year everyone, so far this year is looking up and I have high hopes for it!

Today has been one of those days. Heck it's been one of those days the last couple of months. It's been a pretty big mess lately, and I'll be perfectly honest I don't know how to do about most of it. Back in October my company ended up letting some people go. With any layoff you can imagine it didn't come at an opportune time, they never do. I scaped the serpants tongue so to speak again, but I'll admit it's not a pleasant thing to be a sysadmin at layoff time. I had to worry about a lot of the security concerns with people leaving under those circumstances. Not fun. We are surviving right now, but the group I'm half with took a pretty drastic hit. More or less I'm back to a two man department, and I'm still half duty on IT. So you can imagine - I'm up to my eyeballs in work.

So I've been on edge in general given that my company has been going crazy and such, but yeah my dad found out today that he's probably out of a job in two months now. So I'm now wigging out over that, there are visions of what happened 9 years ago floating through my head over the whole issue. I'll go out on a limb, that entire situation was probably one of the saddest most painful times in not on my life but I'm fairly sure of everyone in my family. We have the good col-o-nel and the Air Force to thank for for much of that, as well as it seems my dad's current boss. She seems to have it out for him, I won't get into it but she seems to have been gunning for him when she got the managers position over dad. It's odd to be in a position where I might be slightly more stable than my father. Wow does growing up suck :-/

My little sister is up a creek right now too, as she going to be bailing on grad school for the time being, seems like things didn't go nearly as well as she had hoped (mainly due to the primary costume professor leaving just weeks before she showed up on campus leaving her department in turmoil). My brother had and lost a girlfriend. And I probably can't even think of all the rest of the stuff that's been going on with the universe. Sucks don't it? When it rains it pours.

It hasn't been completely bad, but I'll admit some of it has me pretty flustered. Halloween happened and that was pretty darned cool. Flew home for the annual halloween party, it was awesome though a little bit smaller than normal. There are a few photos floating around, even one or two that prove how 1337 I am ;-). it was a good trip home and I'm glad I went. Heading back for thanksgiving as well. Also was able to make it up to San Francisco on Halloween night, and hung around out in the Castro. It was pretty cool, and there were a lot of awesome costumes. For those of you who know what was going on - yes we weren't very far from the shooting. We didn't actually hear any of the shots, but when you see the SFPD draw weapons and start marching for the scene in front of you, you know it's time to leave. We all made it out ok, about the worst thing that happened is a couple of us seem to have picked up a minor cold from it. Everyone seems to have recovered by now so it's all good. I finished getting my apartment clean, it's actually really cool and it's quite nice now. It's about time I start having people over for dinner and such, any takers?

Anyway - it's been one of those days, and I don't even know whats all going to happen. The joy, you know it's bad when your boss who's in Beijing even tells you to go home.

Central void of yuppiness or Why some companies are dumb or please lord let me never be THAT pretentious

So today I decided to add a 3rd shelf to the growing number of shelves bolted to my living room wall. A couple months back I bought some shelves from Ikea and had to stain them to get them to match the bookcases that are in my living room. This is anothe one of those, it's a bit darker than the other two but since it's further up you can't really tell. So I ended up putting a rather large book full of shakespeare and the dragon poster I bought at Gencon on it. Honestly it looks pretty good and I am now inspired to actually get things framed and up on my wall! I also decided that since I've been on something of a cleaning and organizing kick that I should go and buy the bookshelf for this one nook I have. It didn't go well.

So, what I want is some sort of modularish shelving thats about 6ft tall by roughly 36-40in wide and about 12 - 14in deep. I originally thought something like Ikea's Gorm collection would work. But sadly it's made of pine, and honestly, not the best quality pine at that. So even if I stain it, which will be a giant mess and nigh impossible as I don't really have the space, It's flimsy and well.. yeah. Not going to work. So I've been pondering what can go there, ohhh it has one more requirement: the electrical breakers for my apartment would be at the back of this, so it needs an open back. So since I've been putting up all this wire shelving at home, and since The Container Store is just up the road in Santana Row, I thought I'd give them a shot. They actually cary some of the really GOOD wire shelving, and since I'm going to be using this rather seriously I would like to make sure it's of some quality. So I give them a call and ask 'do you have the silver/chrome metro shelves in the 14x36in size in stock?' they wander off, come back and tell me that indeed they did. So I decide to trek over there. This too did not go well.

So I get over to Santan Row, and for those of you not in the San Jose area, let me explain Santan Row: It's pure yuppie central. I've sat at a cafe thats on the main drag there, doing my best to spend as little as possible, just to watch the cars drive up and down the main drag. Why? In 10 minutes I saw 3 ferrari's, 2 lamburghini's, a lotus and several other cars that are probably worth more than the total sum of all my assetts. The funny part was, they were all looking for parking spots on the main drag so they can show of their cars, instead of parking in the parking garage like 'normal' people. Anyway, so I get to Santana Row, and I get into the parking garage where people immediately turn dumb. I mean it's unfathomable how people will be fighting for parking spots on levels 1 or 2 of a parking garage where by the time I get to the top level (4th in this case) there are more parking spaces than I can shake a stick at. Lazy human beings! (DARN YOU KAISER PERMANENTE AND YOUR THRIVE CAMPAIGN CONVINCING ME TO PARK FURTHER AWAY SO I WALK MORE!) Anyway, so I park and wander into The Container Store.

The store is fairly quiet, so I head up and run into another gentleman looking at the metro shelving. So this other gentleman gets some assistance and starts pondering some of this shelving for his work (he apparently works at cisco). So yeah, this didn't turn out well. An incredibly nice associate, named Christina, came over to ask the guy who was helping the Cisco employee a question. This is where things start going wrong. He basically starts trying to put some moves on the poor girl and the associate helping him kinda plays along with the whole thing and teases her as well. They end up delaying her while she's trying to help someone else and yeah. So she ends up escaping and I make mention that what the Cisco guy is after is this certain size of the metro shelving he's after, since I'm using the stuff exactly as he wants to use it, at work. Well so now I'm designated a buddy of this guy for just trying to help out, joy. Anyway the Cisco gentleman and the associate go back to talking at some point, half including me though I'm not doing much to stay included, and their conversation quickly devolves to talking about Christina. I wouldn't normally care but when the associate starts commenting about how horny she is to a customer, and they go so far as to call her over to ask her her age - there is something WRONG! Even when she had finally escaped again and some lady who was reasonably attractive walked by at the other end of the isle he gawked and nearly cat called, turned to me and said 'hey I'm single what can I do?'. I genuinely felt sorry for Christina, she seemed lovely from the information that was dragged out of her by those two, and she didn't really seem to appreciate their advances. I did try to divert her from those two, but they didn't make it easy which probably makes me as guilty as they are :-(. And after ALL of that, and getting down there 'ohhh yeah our company doesn't even carry the size of shelf your looking for, we don't have anything for you - can't even special order it.' Joy.

So I'm annoyed and I leave The Container Store empty handed, head over to Crate and Barrel to pick up a replacement plate since I chipped one of mine and so the trip wasn't a total waste. Get my plate and leave. Parking garage is again a pain, and when I get out I get dumped onto the main drag. As I was looking out my car trying to get back to a normal street is boggled my mind at how yuppie they all were. It was just dripping with it. I ended up punch some deep base techno / grunge up on my car's stereo, turned up the volume and had to drive all the way down and all the way back to get to where I wanted to go.

Only thing I could do to try and bring reality to yuppievill.

Today, I am a quarter centuary old.

All told it's been a good day, spent most of it up in 'The City' (San Francisco). Had lunch with an old Orion co-worker, which was good to catch up. Hung around up in the city just being a bum and wandering really, I've got a couple of blisters to prove the wandering. It was good, got to think a bit see the city some more and generally just explore more of the area around where I live (well SFO is actually about 45 minutes north but still). Had dinner at the Bistro Boudin, and since Brian and Kathleen moved out here we are semi-sorta restart the tradition of the shared birthday. We'll do a better job of it next year but it was a reasonable start. I'm actually quite stuffed, and I bought some of their asiago sourdough bread to bring home.

We came back to my, now, mostly clean and semi organized apartment for a delicous cake that Kathleen made. I have a couple of ideas for Kathleen's birthday (which is in a couple of days) so she better keep her eyes peeled for a surprise ;-) (Note: I know I have to take pictures of the apartment!!! Particularly the office since few of you believe it could ever get better.)

All in all the day was a really good day, very busy day (in an odd sense) but a good day! Thank you all for making it a good birthday!

Well there was one odd point, that is sadly keeping me up. Got an e-mail that has me very confused. It's not the first e-mail thats done this to me, nor do I expect is it the last. In the end I don't know what to do about it. There's a fair amount of pain still lingering with me associated with this e-mail, pain I'm fairly sure will never go away. I'll have to sleep on the e-mail, figure out what I'm going to do about it - maybe talk to my little sister about it see what she thinks about it. I think in the end I just wish I knew why the e-mails started? Did something happen? Who knows? <joke>ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS!</joke>

So I'm sitting here tonight, being a bit depressed. Gencon is coming up in a couple of days and I'm really looking forward to it and I know my Brother is too. He's going to be flying in on his own - hopefully the curse of flying is not hereditary.

So speaking of my infamous flying curse, it's struck again AND WITH A VENGENCE! But I get ahead of myself. So HPA and I went to OLS this year. It was pretty darned awesome, from going drunking with Alan Cox (who turns out to be one of the coolest guys on the planet) to Ralf Bächle who's the Mips Linux maintainer (another very cool guy). Went to some excellent talks, which mainly seemed to focus on (para-)virtualization and filesystems. Even got talked into doing some stuff with Busybox and Klibc by HPA and Rob Landley.

Beyond the conference, Ottawa was utterly gorgeous! When they say that Ottawa is one of the pretties G8 capitals on the planet, they really mean it. Wow. I'm not sure I can eve describe it, it was just amazing, and parliment was gorgeous, though I do still swear that Serious Sam II modeled the end after it to a degree. Saw the lighting of Parliment was pretty cool too, apparently they do it twice every night which is awesome. I'm definately looking forward to going next year.

Anyway, so yes the curse came back to haunt me in it's normal fasion, sneaking up on me and beating me with a stick. I've posted a detailed copy of the conversation I had with Brian when I got home. The short version is that when I went to get onto the plane from Toronoto to San Francisco, they kindly told me I didn't have a seat, while HPA borded the aircraft. I went and started to talk to the people up front and about 4 minutes later they closed the aircraft. It seems that their computer got confused on how long I was in Toronoto and instead of me being there 3 hours thought I was only going to be there 45 minutes and wasn't going to make the flight - along with 5 other people (which we all were standing there trying to get on) and 20 minutes before the plane boarded they gave 6 seats away to the standby passengers.

My biggest complaint about the whole thing isn't that my seat was given away, which they did the right thing... sorta, it's that they gave it away without CHECKING if we were there or not. I mean I had been sitting there for 3 hours, they claimed they bumped me because my luggage wouldn't make it - turns out my luggage made it home on the flight with HPA, and I had to spend a night without my luggage. It was a pretty bad SNAFU on their part and it disturbed both me and HPA since he sat next to a gentleman named Jack instead of John.

So yeah, my birthday is coming up later this month, and I've been taking stock a bit. I'm going to be a quarter of a centuary old. Roughly 1/3 - 1/4 of my life is over. Decided to track down a few people, see where they are at with their lives - mainly just flexing my google foo, and tracking down old blogs and what not. There were a couple that genuinely made me sad that I was pushed from their lives. Well pushed isn't the right word, torn asunder from would be a better phrasing. Old wounds have itched a bit over some of the digging and it hasn't been exactly pleasant. While I miss them I know that it's the past and the wounds of old while scabbed and grown over are there, they are real, but it's the past and will stay there. I'm truely sorry, I really am.

The world isn't all bad, though there's a dark cloud over it, the sun will shine again - and I'm looking forward to it. Ok enough with me being mopey! The world isn't that bad, and I'm walking my own path, and I'm proud that I'm still walking it, and I'm enjoying the trip!

So for all of you who actually still follow my exsistance I thought I'd give you an update so that you know I'm not dead yet. I'm alive, doing fairly well, and things are going well. I ended up going back to the farm last month and going to the last extended family High School graduation for roughly 18 years. It was a good trip, got to see some great family that we still aren't entirely sure how we are related but we know we are releated and that's just that! It was a good trip, the corn is coming in really well.

Quick side note: I'm sitting here watching the Barbeque episode of Elton Brown and it just told me happily that Bucaneer actually comes from 'he who barbeques' isn't that amusing? I love the food network!

Anyway Brian D. has been out here the last couple of days as I got him hooked up with a pretty sweet interview with Rob M., my old boss from Orion. The whole thing looks like it's going to turn out well, now I just have to finish convincing him that moving out here is a GOOD thing. But I fully realize that this is going to be anything but a simple decision, particularly complicated by the fact that he's looking at moving across the country and he needs to discuss and ponder the whole thing with his wife. I would love to see them out here but I also know that it might not work out for other reasons. To the best of those two no matter what!

So we've been doing the touristy stuff the last couple of days, went to frys, the Computer History Museum (we got a tour co-done by Steve Russell the gentleman who created the first computer game - Spacewar!), Sharffenberger Chocolates (did the tour and ate their chocolate), Did Fisherman's Warf, saw both the silverized guy and the man who hides behind the bush in San Francisco, went to and trapped all around Alcatraz, saw Lombard Street, ate at Boudin and rode on a cable car. All in all a good weekend.

Though a quick point of math concerning Lombard street that Brian D. and I are asstonished at. Given that Lombard street (at it's curviest section) is 433.33 feet long linearly (Google maps + a ruler ( 6.5 inches / 3/4 inches ) * 50 feet). Also given that Lombard street is at a 27deg angle ( Wikipedia ) and given that cos(27deg) * 433.33 SHOULD be the height of the street, that works out to be 386.102826851 feet tall. That's a HUGE drop over that distance. It's a rather amazing sight really, though I'm not sure I would ever drive it.

Anyway it's like 12:22am and Brian D. flys out of here at 6:20am or some ungodly hour like that so i need to crash so I can drive him to the airport. Hopefully I'll be picking him up from the airport again in a few weeks, but we'll see. Out.

Wow. Is it worth even apologizing for the world ganging up on me for the past few months. The world has been going crazy on me since November, and I suppose I should cactch you all up on it. Particularly since I can now speak about all of it publicly.

Well up for starters, lets go back to December. I was grousing around how California didn't have any snow, how the weather was abysmally nice and that was about it. I was working on an open source project within Orion called OpenSSI. Basically a set of extensions and patches to the Linux kernel which allow an entire cluster to more or less function and act as a single multi-processor machine. It's got some very nice features and I was tasked with bringing it up on our clusters. To be honest I loved working on it and I was able to show at SC'05 a running demo of a full 96 node OpenSSI 1.9.x cluster. To the best of my knowledge, at the time, it was the largest running running OpenSSI cluster.

So because of some interest by a large and prestigeous University in Boston, and the opportunity to sit down with some of the OpenSSI developers in person I got a trip to Boston in December! For those of you who know me, I love Boston, and Boston in the winter is a good treat! So a couple of days before Christmas I jumped on a JetBlue flight from San Jose to Boston. For those of you who have an opportunity to fly on JetBlue, take my word, it's TOTALLY worth it! I had a redeye flight into Boston, I didn't sleep much on the plane but the fact that there was a TV in the headrest in front of me made it a lot easier to deal with. I got into Boston at 4 or 5am, made it over to my Hotel and crashed for a couple of hours.

After I had gotten a smattering of sleep, I headed out for the meating and was able to show off the 12 node cluster I had flown out with (Sidenote: we had a fantastic carrying case for the 12 nodes! Basically one of the hardcases with wheels and a nice pull handle, made flying with it a breeze) The demonstration went really well and the following discussions were good as well. After the meeting I walked back to the hotel (only about 6 or 10 blocks or so) and called up Sean, buddy of mine from Iowa who had the lucky fortune to move to Boston. We went and had dinner at Cheers (the tourist Cheers not the 'real' place) and had a good time. It was good seeing him, and the bum was enjoying Boston - I will have to move up there just to mock him at some point ;-)

Anyway I was able to convince Orion to let me stay over a couple of extra days in Boston so I went and stayed with Karl. That was absolutely awesome, I hadn't seen him in a while and it was good hanging out with him for several days. Was able to go to Legal Seafood with Karl, Sean a very cute munchkin Karl and I were watching for her parents and myself. Awesome food, as always, and the jokes about it being the Legal Seafood across from the Boston Aquarium were well placed. I love Boston!

Anyway got to spend several days hanging out with Karl and his friends who were all awesome! Wandered around Boston a bit, and generally got to have a good time 'back home'. So yeah flew back to San Jose on Christmas day. It was an awesome trip, and very productive.

Well I did new years with HPA, his wife and my boss Rob. We watched Happy Tree Friends, and shot off a whole pile of bang makers. It was a good evening and Happy Tree Friends are delightful little shorts full of death and mayham, we enjoyed them throughly.

Well all told Janurary was pretty quiet... well until Janurary 31st. Janurary 31st was a day that I will not quickly forget. ::sighs:: the long and the short of it is - Orion Multisystems closed up shop that day. I found out that afternoon while I was at an offsite meeting, a phone call from my boss was answered with 'is the news good or bad', the responce was 'bad'. Needless to say I excused myself form the meeting and rushed back to the office. It was strange cleaning out my cube and the office I had been working out of, Rob, HPA and I were wandering around joking and generally singing "It's the end of the world as we know it, and we feel fine!" We were all really sad though - we really liked working at Orion. But we had our walking papers, and everyone was pretty upset. Needless to say for the first time in more years than I can remember I was 100% unemployed. That was a new experience.

Well by the end of February I had found a new job, working with a company who's making a product I am pretty darned excited about. I'll talk about them a little later but suffice it to say they are doing something very cool, and their philospohy was a key selling point in my taking the job.

Anyway, life has been busy since than. Lot of stuff going on at work, flew back home for Ayyam'i'ha and spent a week hanging out with the family. The company I'm working for exhibited at Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), Rob and Tristan were out here in February which was cool - I enjoyed having them out here and I'm hoping to get them back here again soon. March and April have been busy and crazy. Last week I bought a new Gary Fishter Advanced bike as my co-workers have been making me jealous of riding into work.

Well the world is still being crazy, things are starting to calm down - thank goodness. I've had enough excitement for a while. I'm signed up for OLS this year, and going to Gencon in August as well. I wish I had more antics in this posting, but the world has been throwing me more curveballs than normal, look at Orion for instance. Anyway it's late now, it's not even the 4th anymore ;-) I'll catch you all on the flip side and try and keep you all (probalby like 2 of you) informed of whats going on.

I realize I've been quiet for almost 2 months (there's a lot going on, trust me I'll write it up soon) However I have found the cutest monkey on the planet.

Was talking about cars with some friends today, and how some repair shops are just abysmall (sorta like this frelling abysmally nice weather in California! Someone make this nice weather stop, make it cold and give me snow darn it! I'm never going to be a "real" Californian...)

Anyway the conversation drifted a little and we started talking about The Car Clinic (Europe) in europe, and the WONDERFUL finished work they provided someone.

http://cats.meow.at/~mariab/2005-12-08/

Isn't it just the most wonderful looking thing you've ever seen! I'm honestly a bit amazed they even let it leave looking like that ::shakes his head:: the guys doing the work for the body shop must also for for UPS (I'm still having fun with them at over a month later, joy)

There will be some updates in the next few days concerning the awesome Halloween party we threw back in I.C. last weekend and the awesome concert / short plays I saw up in S.F. on Halloween.

Been busy with work, very busy. Should start calming down pretty soon, but there are definatly good things going on in that front.

Just finished the latest Harry Potter book. I'm amazed at JUST how much I've come to actually care about the characters in J.K. Rowling's books. She has a style that makes you love the characters or truely despise them. There were a couple of aspects I didn't like all told, but I am definatly looking forward to the next book. It is bound to be dark and insanely sinister.

The stuff from the 24th is resolved more or less. There is a whole wealth of just unhappiness that has been sewn and reaped. In the end I've found another knife, happily planted in my back, and noticably twisted by two different hands. And here I thought I wasn't going to find one of those this time around. ::sighs:: it's a long story to explain why it's there for those of you who aren't in the know, suffice it to say a woman I considered dear put it there.

I just don't even know what to think about the whole thing really. I'm just glad I have a 2000 mile buffer between me and it. To be honest, there's a lot in the world I don't know what to think about right now. I need to go and sit on a mountain for a while and figure it all out......

Thats it my new theory on life - the world is at a constant state of equlibirum. When things go very well things will eventually go very wrong eventually evening out to a nice medium. The pendulum will swing in either direction but will average out to the mid point (or there abouts).

I've been having two fantastic weeks at work! Major breakthroughs and progress on the stuff I'm working on and just a lot of good things going on. Life has seemed good, stable.... almost "normal" for me.

Today conspired against me to adjust itself back to the medium. Was awakened to the bass of one of my neighbours vibrating through my bed (I could vaguely make out the music and these are concrete walls / floors). The DMV took a lot longer than expected (but I have my new license plates WARTHG9) work was more or less realizing the insane deadlines I need to meet which means I'm going to be putting in a lot of hours tomorrow and Wednesday to try and meet them. And to top the whole day off I got some incredibly bad news about a good friend of mine and an ex-girlfriend. The news worries me a lot actually, and there aren't any good roads I can take with it. Joys of a rock and a hard place :-/

Tomorrow isn't going to be much better because of what I have to do now. ::sighs:: joy

eCost and why I will never buy from them again

A month ago I ordered a relativly nice Denon AVR-2105 from eCost.com on the recomendation of some guys back up in Madison as they had had good luck and decent prices from eCost. However as of today I still do not have a working unit in my house.

Needless to say I'm rather ticked off.

I recieved a unit some 3 weeks ago, about a week after ordering. After much happiness and about 2hrs of organizing cables and wiring the thing up to everything I proudly turned it on. And not a sound was heard. Ok... maybe it needs some setup. Tried playing with the setup.... nothing, in fact it gives off errors. Hmmm...... 10 minutes of nothing and than *** BOOM *** sound of some such comes blaring out of my speakers at the full capacity of the reciever. Needless to say I'm still not sure my ears are happy with me. After a weekend full of fiddling I determined that something was wrong with the reciever's audio system, as it switched video just fine, because not even the headphone jack would produce sound on a regular basis.

After trying to figure out eCosts's return mechanism out I found this lovely piece of information that was never brought to my attention at any point through the checkout process.

In addition, the following products are not returnable, and all sales of these items are final. This policy is necessitated by restrictions imposed by the respective manufacturers: ........, Denon, ......

Ok THAT sucks and I should have been informed of that prior to purchase. So I called up Denon, talked with them, they agreed it was broken somehow and that they could fix it but that I'd have to ship it to them. Fine. They also said call up eCost something isn't right with that policy.

So I did. I talked to someone who mumbled the entire time, I asked at least once for them to clarify something but they wouldn't clear up what they were saying. After getting an RMA and stating I wanted them to replace the item they kindly told me "We are out of that model".... Ok so where does that leave me? Something was mumbled about something else but they didn't expound and I disheartendly gave up and decided to call back the next day.

The next day I call and ask whats going on (this is after I've sent an e-mail asking to be contacted mind you with the same concerns I called about). I was told they suddnely had 6 in stock and they weren't sure why I was told they had none (ok most of my concerns now vanish yay) however they forward my phone call stuff off to the Denon person in the company and they will call me back.

Ok I pack the blasted thing up, and pay another $30 to ship it back to them (stupid big and heavy thing). A week goes by, they get it and I call to see where things are at. I'm informed my money has been returned. ** WHAT? ** I tell them that I explicitly wanted it replaced. They look back through their logs seeing I said "replace" several times and go ahead and do up an order to replace the unit. Fine, can I have the tracking number because UPS around here is stupid? No? Ohhh I can call on Monday and get it, thats fine.

I than watch the money returned to my bank and the next day taken back out (at least they aren't charing me shipping to get the thing here this time) Monday rolls around so I call and ask for the tracking number. "I can't give you the tracking number." ** WHAT?! ** "It will be there on Friday." Fine...

Yesterday was Friday, I couldn't make it home before the apartment office shutdown so I stopped by today... no package. eCost doesn't have weekend hours at all so I can't call and ask where the thing is or whats going on. Come Monday I'm calling eCost and I'm demanding to talk to a manager, this is getting rediculous, particularly when I could wander down the street to Best Buy and pick up the AVR-2106 (the current model slightly upgraded not a big deal) for getting close to what I've paid for the AVR-2105 plus all the extra shipping.

Please SOMEONE tell me I'm being unreasonable that when I buy a $300 piece of electronic euipment and than spend another $80 shipping it all over the country, waiting a month to get something to work that thinking eCost should have contacted me on their own (they have NEVER contacted me, I have always contacted them) and at least told me what was going on?

Peeking behind the curtains

First and foremost - CONGRADULATIONS are in order to Mary and Noah! On Saturday they become the proud parents of Michale Scott A., baby and mom are doing fine - dad is more insane than normal. But all told I'm estatic for them!!! Those two are going to make great parents and I HOPE they write that book: Parenting D20 style ;-)

Beyond that life has been mundane (almost) caught a concert series on Saturday with Scott, bands of note (that were good) The Arcade Fire and The Killers. Bands of note NEVER to see live in concert again - Modest Mouse (I like their music it just did NOT translate to stage at all). That was cool, Noah happened to call in the middle of one of the intermissions to let me know about his joyous news! It was a good concert.

Sunday I stopped by the Ren. Faire for one last time this season. It's really a lot of fun and I'm seriously considering being a player next year. Did vaguely make some romantic overtures towards a young lady, who in classic me messing up with women, happened to already be happily married. Doh! Well no harm, no foul and generally seems to be the way the world works for me. Did get some awesome pictures of the whole thing though, and I hope people enjoy them.

In the Wizard of OZ there is the man behind the curtain, the one pulling the strings of what people can actually see. As I grow older I keep getting peeks behind that curtain at how the world really is, sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry and a lot of the time I have to slightly re-adjust my view of the world. I got another glimpse behind the curtain tonight.

All I can say is the workings behind the curtain are a lot more interesting and complex than the facade would have you think.

This came to me tonight in the very small minutes of the day. Take it as you will, I'm not explaining why it came to me.

the twists of fate that women weave upon the hearts of men, to live or die we do not know for we are merely puppets in their games. Though these puppets may not know the course they take, they feel the pain just the same. To go on ever forward not knowing where to go

The strange world we live in & Why marketers don't understand the geek world.

The last few weeks have been an interesting experience in how the world works. Things have been stressful, panicy and at least for me lately a bit nervewraking to downright scary. Things finally don't look like they are getting worse, but I'm not out of the woods yet, I still have a very hard decision to make in the next couple of days... and I'll be honest, I don't know what I'm going to choose. Regardless the apartment made some progress today, and I finally got a couple of snaps of the digs. It's a mess but I'll get them posted soon so people can laugh at how messy my place is currently (and how badly I need to go and buy more shelving!)

To add to the strangeness, the peaks and vallies my life has been going through one of my little projects went live last night over on http://www.kernel.org/faq/. I'm pretty happy about it, and people seem to actually be reading it.... I've had 6 e-mails on it already ;-)

Today I ran across a very interesting website http://www.delltechforce.com/. It's premise is taht Dell has partnered with a bunch of companies to try and take the place of larger mainframe deployments. While in a lot of cases that makes sense (mainframes have really moved more towards large database servers or other very very beefy systems) dell has a UNIQUE view of this task force, or at least their marketing people do. For starters they had EMC2 while this wouldn't be too amazing except.... EMC2 is very closely linked to mainframe systems. DOH! But it gets better...

Next up is Oracle, the software company that provides the de facto standard in enterprise level commercially produced databases. Now here's another strange gotcha.... Oracle has been known to run on mainframes before (or at least my understanding is that they have been) Strike 2 for the marketing team. Now lets go in for Strike 3 (there are 4 strikes to this game) Strike 3 is that both Microsoft and Redhat are put right next to each other on the screen, the marketing people are basically saying that Redhat is just as good and powerful as Microsoft's solution, ala Linux is just as good as Windows. (putting my personal feelings aside obviously thats a MAJOR blunder in the view of Microsoft and I'm sure that Dell will hear about it at some point).

Strike 4 the killing shot - Redhat is a distributor of Linux. Linux is a very fine OS, and it runs on a whole lot of different hardware.... including mainframes! So of all the vendors that these little short videos show, most of the "tech force" are actually companies that are also in the "big iron" world!

I dunno I just chuckled when I realized how silly most of these commercials were. I'm a geek, I admit it.

Someone beat me up and drag me out of this apartment more often ;-)

The Move

Uneventful really, which I'm quite happy for. It took a total of 3 days for stuff to be in Des Moines, to the apartment complex had their keys back. The guys helping me get the stuff out of the apartment deserve way more than the dinner I got them, I have some evil thoughts now on how to make it up to them, braving 90 - 100 degree weather, and a 3rd floor walk up apartment (I vow, never again). My parents also deserve a huge thanks. The apartment was spotless when we left, and I couldn't have done it in such short time without them. They also kindly let me store all my stuff in the garage while I apartment shopped out in Cali.

The new pad is South of downtown San Jose, not very far from a couple major highways and expressways. I've got a stunning view out all my windows of the mountains in the distance, and I'm on the 3rd floor again. This time however, there is an elevator ;-) Dad drove out with me in the Budget rental truck (HIGHLY recommended, Budget has newer trucks, they are cleaner and just nicer to deal with than U-Haul. Nothing Against U-Haul, but Budget is cheaper and cleaner.) We pulled the whole trip off in driving time 28hrs or so (roughly the same as what it took me in my car) We started late on Monday, and we had apartment keys before 5pm on Wednesday. HPA & DrSuzi helped me and dad get the stuff into the apartment. Didn't take too long and it was relatively painless all told.

There have been requests for pictures of the pad, I'm going to try and borrow a digital camera and get them for you all. I'll post them up when I have them. The apartment is a total disaster area. I don't even have my beloved Smaug up and running yet, the computer rack is only half put together (as I'm using the top of it proped on some plastic draweras a desk right now since my desk won't be here for 7-10 more days). So yeah thats where that's at.

Birthday

I apparently got more ancient at some point recently. This also means that a shout out to Sean and Kat are in order as they also got more ancient. Even though we were unable to throw the giant Birthday bash I thought of you guys! We gotta work on another giant bash and get everyone together sometime.

All told it was pretty low key, after work HPA, DrSuzi, my boss, co-worker and a buddy of mine from Iowa City went toe Dave and Busters. Dave and Busters is like Chuckey Cheese, only for adults, and with switches for nice people to come scurrying over and take my drink order while I play the game. It was kinda nice, just kinda wandering around and arcading with people. I'm kinda in the mood for a lan party, need to poke people into doing this.

Not much else to tell on that.

Gencon

Was awesome, as usual. I had a lot of fun and it was a really good trip. My younger brother joined the crew for the first time, and I think he's already pestered me into agreeing to pay his part of the room bill next year so he can come again (bum, but he's in college trying to pay his way). Also my girlfriend jumped onboard last minute and came out and hung with a bunch of crazy gamers, she even got into it and bought a corset while we were out there and painfully forced me to lace her up while we were there. OHHHHH the pain ;-) (for the record she claims I'm pretty good at it)

In general though, this was obviously an off year when compared with the last two. Nothing really big happened, White Wolf didn't have anything spectacular to wow us with, it wasn't the 30th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. The shwag was way down, and I didn't see a lot of new games floating about. Highlights though: Serenity the rpg was there, I tried to snag a copy but they were sold out (they could only get 500 copies from the publishers before Gencon this year. I put in a pre-order and they promised me a bunch of extra fancy signatures in it when it arrives at my apartment. That reminds me I haven't seen it yet, I wonder where it is :-/

They were showing neat previews out of City of Villians, I'm looking forward to that. Reminds me I need to pre-order that....... (BTW P.A.N.T.S.)

Andrea (the g/f) got me to take my pants off in the middle of everyone at Gencon. Ok it's not that bad, I tried on a UtiliKilt. Honestly, I was surprised I liked it quite a bit. If it wasn't like $250 for the kilt I want I would have bought it than and there! It even fits my laptop in one of the pockets (pictures of me in a kilt and pictures of the laptop in the kilt coming soon)

Zonk, of Slashdot fame, got married a week or so before Gencon. And with the people I usually hang out with, decided that it was his quasi honeymoon and should tease and poke and prod at hime the whole way. They went so far as for a klingon and a blind Federation chaplin to come and serenade the newly weds. Zonk, we love you man and congratz on getting hitched!

I helped with LRPC this year, that was cool. Saw Pat, Sam and Mark, thought not as much as I would have liked (the trip was running on overload to begin with and trying to keep up with everyone was hard) Played SFB canisters again, and for the first year Pat and I didn't kill each other. In fact we didn't even fire shots at each other. (someone make sure neither of us was physically dead!) It was a good game. The creator even stopped by and told us about a very simplified version of SFB he's got cooking. The rule book is apparently MUCH thinner, like 30 pages or so versus the serveral hundred for the rules I currently have for SFB. Andrea even thought it was cool, and was interested in the simplified version. About it really. Looking forward to next year, just not going to stay at the Hilton near the convention center (they screwed up our billing, and just generally weren't that good. I'm still not sure where the billing thing sits. I should check on that) About it really.

Plates and why they hate me

So, in the middle of packing up the plates I had in Des Moines I decided that the scary plates that were serving as my everyday plates weren't going to be coming to California with me. For instance, they do weird things in the microwave like melt, but they aren't plastic (this scared me). So those went to goodwill, and the scary ones from the microwave went into the trash. So when I moved to California I was plateless and pots and panless (those went the same way as the plates)

Replacing the pots & pans was easy. I now have a mix of Farberware Classic, Farberware Millenium, and All-Clad pots & pans. I'm quite happy with this arrangement, but will probably slowly aquire more All-Clad, Le Cruset, and Lodge pieces over time. However the plates proved much less easy to deal with.

After finally deciding on a pattern I could buy locally, and buying it and getting it home (fairly happy and looking forward to being able to eat at home) I went to put them in the dishwasher......... Where I found that the plates were too tall, and prevented the upper washing arm from spinning freely.

::blink, blink::

(Insert explitives including: frelling, poo-flinging, and many other ones I won't mention)

I'll admit, I was seriously considering modding the dishwasher to accomidate the dishes. Several other people's more rational "DON'T DO THAT!!!!!" won, and I didn't. Dismayed, the plates went back and I began a new hunt: for plates I could live with, AND that fit in my dishwasher. (Whirlpool, the maker of this dishwasher, has apologized for the inconvience their stupid lack of forsight has caused me. The dishwasher has a "standard" 10in tub and in only 10in plates will work. The plates I bought were 11in. If your renting, measure your plates. If they exceed 10.5in, check the dishwasher before signing the lease)

So yeah, I'm drawing this story out. After checking two Bed Bath and Beyonds, two Linnen and Things, Target, Wallmart, and several online places I ended up at Crate and Barrel. I wandered around their store, checked prices, debated this and that and after a phone call to the master authority on kitchens (my mom) to check on a couple of things I went with the Crate and Barrel Madison collection. A nice elderly lady was helping me out and scurried off to the back room after a small bit of banter to fetch me my plates and such. While she was ringing me up the following happened

Nice Old Lady: So you must have taste.

My inner monologue: Sales pitch for something incoming, or she doesn't think me in a t-shirt and jeans would normally shop here

Nice Old Lady: Why just last week Steve Job's personal chef was in here buying exactly what you are buying, the 16pc set of the Madison Collection, for Steve Job's everyday place settings.

So apparently Steve Job's and I will be eating off of the same pattern of plates and bowls.

Also to note the Crate and Barrel was the Santana Row shopping center, the words "upscale" don't even beging to cover it: I saw three Lamburgini's and two Ferrari's in the maybe 20 minutes I spent getting to and from Crate and Barrel.

Thoughts on California, and why it's just weird here

California is interesting. It has a lot of cultural and local attitudes very unique to it. This is going to all be from the perspective of San Jose / Bay Area as this is all I've really experienced.

(1) WHY CAN'T I FIND A GOOD GROCERY STORE?!?!?! Seriously, I have within reasonable distance two Albertsons, two Safeways and a Trader Joes. They are all small, and more or less carry the same things (caveat I haven't been to one of the Albertons, I'll try them in the next day or so but I'm not holding my breath) The trader Joes is obviously targeting the organic market, but even than it was only like maybe 10 short isles of stuff.

Things I have not been able to find at all that I have looked for:

• rasberry cream cheese
• Dawn Complete - Blue kind (original I believe)
• Jimmy Dean ready to cook bacon
• Pillsbury Chedder Garlic oven baked buscuits
• Garden Of Eatin Black Bean Tortilla Chips - low or no salt variety
• Almond Flour (local friend is looking for it not me)

(list may not be complete it's what I can remember off the top of my head)

So I don't know what to do at this point, I'm willing to expand out in the hopes of finding what I'm looking for, but I don't think I'm going to find it :-/ I'm also truely confused about why a grocery store has an entire isle devoted to computer things, cables, ink cartridges, etc. Thats the job of an office supply store not the job of a grocery. Give me a better grocery!

(2) California is based on the idea of service industries. This one just kind of dawned on me today while I was watching my car get washed. Most car washes out here are a 3 stage process (from what I can tell) They vacume your car out, not amazingly but it's pretty decent enough to get the worst of the dirt out. The normal car wash machine washes your car. Lastly a small horde of people decend upon it and clean the inside, and dry the outside, clean the windows with like windex on the inside, tire grease your tires, etc. It's quite a sight to be seen, and something I'm going to have to get used to. I don't mind detailing the inside of my car, I'll spend a good amount of time doing this, but since I'm out here I know it would be more difficult to do that. Regardless it got me thinking about a few things. There are a lot of duplicated stores around here. Within a 30 mile radious of my apartment there are like 10 - 15 bed baths and beyonds. Within 5 Miles there are 2 Albertsons, 2 Safeways and a couple more smaller grocery stores. there are 5 targets within what I'd consider reasonable driving distance, and a new one to open soon. There are 4 home depots within easy reach of my apartment.

Businesses also seem to try and distinguish themselves by offering you more service to make things more convient or easier on you. Safeway for instance has the ability to shop online and have your groceries delivered. Every home Depot I've seen has a huge selection of rental tools, from normal household tools to huge pieces of equipment (this was never seen out in the midwest or in the north east that I can remember). I'm sure if I think more I can come up with other businesses that go out of their way to make things easier for the consumer. There are two large populations that make this possible: a large number of people with a good chunk of change, silicon valley houses are anything but cheap and a large population of immigrants willing to work for cheap just to start the process of carving out a good life for themselves.

ok it's late and I'm now tired. I'll expound on this more later. I might even keep a running log of things I can't find but I know exist and are still made somewhere else on the site in case people can point me to where I can find them......

Post Note: I got new plates for my car since I had to register out here, I have temporary ones right now but I will eventually be the driver of the "WARTHG9" car ;-)

The cats out of the bag now, for anyone who actually reads this the news that I've been hinting at and hiding under my hat for so long is finally out and in the open: I'm moving to California & Silicon Valley.

I've just accepted a new job with Orion Multisystems, I'm going to be working on the software distribution group on the linux distribution in the systems. I'm VERY excited at this point, but as you can all imagine it's a big change and I'm still reeling from the changes as they dawn upon me to a degree.

As you can all guess I've been keeping this under my hat for a while, as you can imagine, but now that the cat is out of the bag let it be known. So let it be sung from the roof tops! Sorry to keep you in the dark for a while, just a lots been going on, and there's something else new too which I'm going to include in an e-mail, if you haven't heard what that is e-mail me and ask.

A lot is going to be happening and going on, poke me please I'm probably going to need it!

Twice in one month! Heaven forbid!

Hey all I've had some pretty awesome stuff go down in the last couple of weeks, I'm going to try and sum up what I can, and there are a few things I won't toss out here as they aren't finalized but there is some cool stuff coming down the road.

First up, an incredible shout out goes to my little sister She just recently dragged me up to Cedar Falls and the University of Northern Iowa to see her 1 minute and 30 second of fame and glory for her 2 1/2 months of hard work on SWEENEY TODD. To qoute my little sister "It's a lovely story about rape, murder and canabalism..." Which by the way does sum it up, however it was really quite enjoyable and I'm glad I went. Molly ended up working on some masks that were used, and there were a lot of them, I'm going to guess around 50 or soand they all looked fantastic! I wish I had pictures, but sadly I don't (Molly toss some up!).

Molly also introduced me to a couple of people from Cedar Falls, in particular there was a lady by the name of Annie she was quite anxious for me to meet. I'm guessing Annie didn't actually believe that I exist, and that I was merely a phigment of Molly's imagination. Not much else to tell about the trip, except DANG the UNI dome is big! It is truely a giant structure, and something completely unexpected from Iowa. Side note I like UNI's stage for the performing arts better than ISUs

Kathleen, Brian's wonderful wife, apparently has been found to have WAY, WAY, WAY too much free time on her hands, and not only turned me into a South Park charater, but has also turned most of her friends into South Park characters as well! It's pretty awesome all told, however look at how many images she has spent, and it seems, a fair amount of time creating... I SOOOOOO need to harnes this free time, with it I could.... well ruling the world is out it's not quite that powerful... mmmmmmm dunno something but it would be AWESOME!

For those of you who have been thinking I have lost my mind, good news! I might have ;-) At Gencon this last year I bought an absolutely fantastically cool game called "Ogre Bash" from Cloud Kingdom Games. If you've been to Gencon, you know these people as the riddle guys. But they really do put a lot of thought into what they do, and I commend them for it. Well about 30 seconds after getting home from Gencon, I promptly LOST the copy of Ogre Bash that I had bought. Hadn't even opened the packaging on it. Fast forward to last weekend (yeah it's something like 8 or 9 months later) I'm doing some minor cleaning and just HAPPEN to open a duffle bag sitting, litterlly, 1 foot away from my computer chair. Whalah, there's my copy of Ogre Bash! I felt like an idiot, however went to the new Bostons and played the game. General thoughts on Bostons: Drink selection need serious work, particularly with Old Chicago just down the road (Note: this means I can't play my semi-infamous waitor / waitress game :-( ). The food is good though, I would probably rank the food a bit better than Old Chicago. The tables are also a fair bit bigger and thus makes invading a table and playing games easier / better.

The stuff that's missing from here, suffice it to say, is all awesome as well. I wish I could tell everyone all the stuff / good news thats running around, but I can't QUITE yet. Hopefully the next time I blog I can spill all the beans I've got stashed away.

Anyway, time to get back to doing other productive stuff.

Parting note, I've finally started posting some of my Open Source Software stuff, most notably to start with are my svn-wrapper scripts which can be found http://www.eaglescrag.net/oss/ right now!

So I've had a good weekend but for some reason I'm sitting here feeling more down than I've felt in a long time.

Had the good fortune to have my godson and his parents come visit for a couple days. He has gotten big, and very drooly ;-) He's walking and nigh talking now. He's insanely smart, after randomly hitting buttons on my stereo system he honstly started figuring it out, and understanding what he was doing, and by stereo system I mean the entire audiotron, tv, dvd, hifi system. The kid is smart, end of story.

Example: His parents bought him one of those battery powered Eeyore toys, it does stuff and is battery powered. On his own he figured out that when Eeyore runs down to go get batteries (he grabbed two for this story), Find the screw driver (he picked the right one out) and unscrew the back panel and replace the batteries. Admittedly he was a battery short of restoring Eeyore, but he was halfway through the screw before he was cought.

He was fun to have around though, and me being the evil human being I am, spoiled him :-D. He got his quattro (1-3yr old legos) blocks and his Baby Gund Girrafe and was running around playing with them like a mad man! Wandered around Jordan Creek Mall a bit with them, obviously since we ate at the cheesecake factory, and he ended up ridding up on my shoulders most of the time. Those were the times I was like "dude I really do like kids! I want some someday!"

The times when I realized kids are evil was this morning when he woke me up at an ungodly hour. The only thing saving his life was he was cute, and I realized that the only thing preventing parents from killing and possibly eating their children at an early age is they are cute, and we as adults are pre-programmed to not kill that kind of cute. (Mark obviously roled a nat 20 for his charisma roll, with an obvious baby bonus of +20 and cuteness bonus of +20)

I've been a bum the rest of the day. Work is going down the tracks at the typical breakneck pace, the end is in sight I just need to survive long enough to get to the lull and catch my breath. Stage 1 goes live this next week, and stage 2 goes live in a couple of weeks (though of note we haven't even really laid the new code neccisary for stage 2, WHEEEEE!) So to bed with me so I might sleep!

Waking from a long winters nap

*Yawns awake* ok so I bought the bed, fell asleep and I swear it's only half past noon right? On WHAT day? Man did --> I <-- oversleep!

Not a lot to report really, work is going completely insane (we have 4 new sections of the giant app going live next week and another 8 much smaller portions going live in about a month) so I have been working my tail bone off. It's been stressful, it's been long, it's been insane but I'm looking forward to getting it all done and getting a much quieter pace for a little bit. Huzzah!

I'm seriously sitting here trying to think of whats been going on that might be of any interest to everyone, and there isn't much really. Bought some more decorative art things for my apartment so it doesn't quite seem to baren (I'll get pictures up of the stuff some time, it's really very nice). Co-worker gave me an amoire, it's a pretty nice armoire though doesn't quite match the style of furniture I would go for but it's storage and I've needed storage so it's been put to good use. Read some good books (Nemisis by Issac Asimov) which was first rate. Got killed twice in one night in D&D the other night and get to make a nice ubber character.

Worried about software patents in Europe (someone prevent that insanity please!), watched some movies (saw Kill Bill I & II which I must say are VERY weird movies, not bad just very over the top), hung out in Madison with Brian & Kathleen and the whole crew up in Madison (truely you guys rock I need to come hang out up there more often!), bought my brother and myself passes to Gencon and we are both looking forward to that.

I DID hear through the grapevine that Karl that bum up in Boston might be getting married! He needs to call me back and let me know whats going on, das bum! And my godson is coming to visit with Pat & Sam this weekend so it's all good

There really isn't a lot to report, I'm decent, I'm tired and I think it's bedtime ;-)

I'm not sure whether to be giddy, or just plain insane. I've been riding one of the strangest high that I've ever ridden...

I figure I'm insane ;-)

I bought a freaking bed! No more air mattress for me! woohoo!

Sadly the experience of buying it was not as pleasant as I could have liked, but Sears will be hearing more from me on the subject

but I bought a mattress :-D yay sleep, sleep is good mmmmm sleep!

Something just doesn't seem right to me. Copyright law around the world is one of the greatest things in the world. It gives people protection for their ideas and the creative works that they make. However in recent months (possibly even the last year) I've seen the copyright system so badly abused it's driving me nuts.

Recently a German court handed down a verdict that all computers sold in Germany will now have a tax levied upon them that will go to a company by the name of VG Wort. Sadly I don't speak or read German, and the translators seem to have a hard time on their website so some of my thoughts and opinions to follow will probably be misdirected a bit but still valid in general.

This kind of taxation is taxation without proper representation. Plain and simple. I'm guessing that VG Wort is either a clearing house for people to get some royalties for lost revenues (how they decide what you get is beyond me) or that it's a company working for the German version of the RIAA. Regardless while I can see their position of wanting to protect their works and that the internet has brought a rampant and easy means of making perfect digital copies of stuff that this threatens their livelihoods there are some limits to what they have a right to. For starters companies taking this battle to the courts in the way VG Wort did is just outrageous, they went to court asking for a tax to be levied so that they could collect the funds. Canada has a similar tax on their media (specifically CD-R's and CD-RW's, not sure if DVD's have made it that far yet or not) however there are some differences, lets explore the two.

Hmmmmmmm so if I'm reading this correctly even though Canada has a tax on their media that goes into the pockets of the RIAA in Canada, they have more or less told that body that "Yes we are willing to pay you a tax on the media that is the media of choice for your product (cd's) in exchange for being able to make copies of the music"... Brilliant (when is the USA going to adopt something like this?! ok probably never but thats besides the point) Where as Germany has basically just said: "Yeah here's a tax to help sustain and uphold and old business model that is in obvious need to change because the consumers want it. You've cried wolf and here's your cash" and blanketly taxing everyone regardless of guilt and they don't seem to get anything for this taxation. Thats just not cool.

Lets switch to the USA, shall we? We are embroiled here in a fight that may affect the rest of the world, even possibly our children's children's children. We are trying to figure out what constitutes the rights of the holder of a copy of something, what they can do with it and what the big giant corporations want you to do with it. A quick summary boils down to this: The consumer just wants to be able to use what they have in any way they like for their own personal use. When I record something from cable I want to fast forward through the commercials. When I buy some music I wish to put it into a convient format for me so I can listen to it in my car while I drive, in my house while I cook, or heaven forbid use it to make derivitive works. This all sounds fairly reasonable. Now what the Companies want: money, lots of it, now. Well duh, let me expand that a little. They want to limit your use of the product you buy, they don't want you to modify it, change it, copy it stare at it, and in fact I don't think they want you to even use it without you paying them more money. Many companies even try to limit what you do own (Microsoft's XBox for example) and yeah, ok I'll grant you that the companies are looking out for themselves BUT they are going to far and it's really starting to tick me off.

There is legislation that is trying to be passed that would prevent people from fast forwarding through commercials, prevent me from recording stuff from television if the cable companies don't want me to record it, they want to prevent me from listening to my music where and how I want to listen to it, and they want to make me pay every time I want to watch a copy of a movie I have. As a consumer, this is absurd. And much of this is being percipitated by people copying stuff over the internet. Ok lets look at the root cause of the problem. CD's and DVD's haven't changed in price in 10 years. Music still costs $15 for a cd where you might get two good songs on most modern Pop cd's. DVD's still start you out at $20 or so. Now it's gotten cheaper, easier, faster, etc to produce and get the consumer these products, but the prices haven't changed. The companies making them just keep the difference. Most consumers know they are getting gouged but there isn't a whole lot they can do about it. Now along comes the internet, and it's suddenly easy to share the music, and in a situation where people don't feel like they are getting gouged. This is where the media companies call foul, and rightly so, but instead of going after the infringers they deicde to try and just take on the whole system and change it for their benefit instead of seeing the root of the problem and make it inconvient to make illegal copies of the music. Than along comes iTunes and it starts selling music like a gang buster, hmmmmmm I can buy music legally, I can copy it to cd's, and I can use it in places where I want without a whole lot in the way of restrictions AND it's CHEAPER than buying a real cd? BRILLIANT, this begins making copying a lot less disrable and file trading drops a little. Wish that bit of logic would thunk someone upside the head.

Instead we end up with legislation that makes waking up in the morning illegal, Digital Rights Management that is a complete waste of time and a hassle for everyone, and me wondering when everyone is going to wake up to what the consumers want, and the fact that the government is for the people by the people, not for the big business by the big business. Someone find a balance so everyone can be happy?

Happy New Year Everyone! May this year bring us all happiness, peace, love and understanding!

ok I'm going to bed now ;-)

So I have recently been offered a very odd trade:

My couch

For an iMac

Fooey! I can't sit in an iMac!

From me, to all of you I'm wishing you the happiest of holidays whatever it may be.

A Toast for the new year:

To those who have come before us,
To those who will come after us,
To those with us now,
May we live our lives to the fullest,
May we support and help our friends,
May we love our families,
And do the best we can.
For we have lost another year in our lives and we have precious few left may this coming year be the best year we have had yet!

Ohhhh the weather outside is frightful, and the drivers are dumb as a doornail. So let ist snow let it snow let it snow!!!

So that impromptu singing, as bad as it is coming from me, does have a point. We recently got our first "major" snowfall of the season here. Got about, I dunno, 3 inches of snow tops (man I miss getting +100in a year) so I'm pumped, it was snowingly beautifully and I was pumped completely. So it worked out that the next day was heading into work and I SWEAR the intelligence of the people driving is directly proportional to the temperature! For instance on the way to work was driving on a 6 lane high way (three lanes either direction) and I'm heading in on the far left lane and than suddenly traffic started coming to a halt.... odd... after a couple minutes I found out why. Someones car had come to an absolute halt in the far left lane, the person put on their blinkers, got out and left the vehicle. (Note: they couldn't have gotten it off onto the left shoulder as their isn't one yet, lots of construction). I was FLOORED.

However thats not the end of the tale, I wish it were. In my way home I saw three OTHER things that left me pondering. A gentleman was apparently hauling a matress and boxspring on top of the back of his pickup.... well one of the items didn't stay. It ended up across the middle and right lanes. ::blink blink:: Ok and it keeps going, another car had it's gas cover open and the cap just flaping around. Lastly when I finally got to my exit I was greeted with the flashing of a bout 4 police cars and a couple fire trucks that were on the scene of an accident, I hope no one got hurt but it just amazed me that THAT many problems on the roads existed.

PLEASE be careful on the roads over the next month or so, i'm guessing it's not going to get any better any time soon

Beyond that life is fairly quiet, not much to tell. Work, finding new oddities with state, I'm still single, and the world is still flat! Going to be finishing up one of my open source projects, a dynamic dns updater, think I'm going to call it dnsUp2Date, and if I'm lucky I'll have it done in the next week or so. I'll start a new section of the website for it when I'm a bit closer to it's finish.

I miss fresh seafood, snow and an ocean

So yeah the world has been turning and going by faster than I can even imagine lately. On the work front several of our apps, mostly ones I've worked on, have gone live and people are using them. This is great and wonderful HOWEVER there are just signifigant problems, mainly on states end of getting things. Things are slowly getting better but not without a lot of pain and anguish on our end.

Beyond that I've been running a lot lately, part of the season. Younger bro just got done with a play not too long ago. He did great (it was Anything Goes and he played the steward and had a lot of fun with it!). Saw the Nutcracker and a concert recently as well. It's pretty good. I dunno I'm just kinda mentioning that I'm not dead yet, and I'm more or less ok. Des Moines still isn't my most favorite place on the earth and life on some personal levels isn't working out the way I expected (mainly a female is involved and she's not taking the hints of no really this isn't going to work at all ::sighs:: not much I can do on that at this point.

Dunno I'm not much more than tired right now, lots of things to be tired about and I'm looking forward to some downtime in the next couple weeks. Hopefully get to chat/see/poke most of yous while I'm in "down" time.

Proper use of e-mails and the generation behind me and why we should just nuke the world

So life in general has gotten more insane, work has gone from being just normal insane to I'm taking names insane. But all is well on that front products start shipping here in the next couple of days so life should be a bit more sane. Addendum to the halloween party: we were all exposed to plague (whooping cough), so we are on drugs now to nip that in the butt. Though it's not a horrible thing, ended up with a four day weekend because of it. Other than that I'm doing ok, nothing really to report, the world is still flat (or round if you believe that dissilusion), my spelling is still horrible, and yeah.

There have been some interesting happenings as of late, well interesting to me ;-). Few days ago I got an automagic e-mail from ofoto.com. Now it was an e-mail confirming my account creation ::blink:: my WHAT? Now as most of you know I maintain my own archive of photos, it's rather large, extensive and contains a pile of stuff, so why would I even consider an ofoto.com account, let alone make one and get an e-mail about it. So I stare at the e-mail some more until my brain clicks in, the e-mail address isn't my normal e-mail address. It so happens to be bilbo AT rivendel, one of the domain names I own but haven't come up with a good use for yet. So I'm thinking, ok some automated bot has created an account and this is more or less spam for me. So I thought I'd at least check the site out, see what was actually put up there since I'm now linked to the account.

So I went and reset the password and logged in, sadly to find that there are pictures that have been stored in it :-( Some halloween pictures and what looks to be pictures of a young childs first birthday. I'm guessing someone just didn't want to put in their own e-mail address to create the account to get these pictures up, and put in an e-mail that happens to get to me. So, honestly I am not mad about the e-mail thing and at this point I would like to return the pictures, and if the person in question here needs an e-mail address we might be able to come to some understanding, so yeah. Ladies and gentleman, be careful what you use made up e-mails for they might actually get to people and if anyone knows who created the account bilbo on ofoto.com please contact me!

As for the generation behind me, friend of mine invited me into a chat room full of 15 - 18year olds this evening, from their conversations I suddenly appreciate my insanely thick skin more. They are a much more messed up generation than we were, more preasures and things that I can't even remember being worried about at those ages. Makes me wonder what my kids, if I ever have any at the rate I'm going, what the world is going to be like for them to grow up in, and I just hope they have the strength to grow up in it. Or we could just nuke the world now and save them all the trouble. But I'm being more cynical than I need to be ;-) Anyway night all, this plague ridden sleepy head needs sleep.

::looks around:: no it CAN'T be! ::looks around again:: Question: What happaned to 2004? I mean it's Novemeber already and so much has happened already! The end is nigh! It's just amazing how time has flown this year, I'm sure it won't get any slower.

So some quick updates on what happened recently: The halloween weekend was awesome, and the halloween party rocked, though some interesting happenings occured that I'm still figuring the fallout from. The elections have come and gone and we are doomed to another four years of his royal shrubness, ohhhh well he's a lame duck president so there's some hope for us yet ;-). So all is reasonably good.

So I participated in a Milleniums end game, it was absolutely awesome, and I'm looking forward to sticking with the campaign, it should be good, though I'll admit we gave weapons grade nuclear material to the badguys..... oops ;-) Though apparently I cought on the quickest as to what the item was unlike some groups that have apparently picked it up and handled it for extended periods of time. Yay for our group of characters possibly being able to have children latter in life ;-)

Not much else going on really, I get thursday off and I'm starting to try and plan out what the heck I'm going to do, which probably entails cleaning the apartment and getting some other stuff done around the apartment. Did buy a set of barley twist candlesticks which are really quite nice. But yeah the apartment is slowly coming together. Anyway I'm going to crash, it's late and I'm dead tired

So I'm sitting here this evening, looking around and seeing a lot of things, realzing a few and generally being more stoic and reflective than normal. It's a bit interesting really, if I come up with any amazing revelations I'll let you all know ;-)

So since I last write I haven't done tooooo much, built a MythTV box, which went interestingly (messed up the config pretty bad on the first try which I din't realize for a while) For those of you who don't know what MythTV is, think of a TiVo only not in the pretty box, louder and I made it from spare parts around my apartment. Anyway I saw and enjoyed the Farscape: Peacekeeper wars mini-series, and for the record I'm very, very sad about the character that dies, I liked that character a lot! Ohhhh well not much that can be done about that now. Started to play a Mage / Vampires game with Gabe, Sean, Ben S., and a new gent named Oney on friday. Not much, played till 2am, and drove to IC from DM, not a short drive ;-). Had fun though, looking forward to the next run on that game. Beyond that I had a completely useless weekend, only thing I really did was start a small project, that I'll make Open Source in the not tooo distant future.

So lets see what else, still single, insane, working my bloody tail off and recently declared by my office to be more British than American. Go figure, you read too much British literature, realize you actually enjoy reading Shakeaspeare and you watch too much British Comedy and suddenly people think your British ;-)

Dunno, there are some other things slowly getting planned, sounds like Pat, Sam and my godson Mark are going to come and camp out in my apartment with me sometime, trying to go see Karl around new years and Molly, my little sister, has invited me to come hang out with her when she goes to Canada (me thinks it's not a bad plan) so I'm trying to see if I can work all of that out :-)

Anyway, this tired little code monkey is going to hit the sack, ::yawns:: night

Me and the quest for curry!

When I interviewed at the BNC earlier this summer they took me to a fantastic Thai place and I had the most succulant food I have ever had: curry. It was good, ohhhhhhh so good and tasty. Regardless I found a wonderful Thai place back in I.C. that meet my needs, and now that I'm here in Des Moines I suddenly had a hankering and went in search of curry. Now my intuition told me to find a slightly upscale strip mall near a major road, and there I would find what I sought. My intuition was right and I stumbled across one about 3 miles from my house (I made a total of 4 turns to get to it without looking it up or asking anyone, I felt impressed with myself anyway) walked in ordered my yellow curry to go and went back to my placeto munch happily that I not only explored but came away victorious...... almost

What I got might have been curry, maybe, in some lifetime. It wasn't very good, seemed to be done wrong and the whole nine yards (it wasn't even a yellow curry I think it was a red one but I can't confirm that). I was saddened and dismayed, particularly considering it was a nice place and seemed to have won several local restraunt awards. So I was put on a quest: the quest for a yellow curry!

I started my search, as with all good searches, with google. Google knows everything, plain and simple ;-) just gotta ask it the right questions. So I dug around a bit, found a couple of recipes, compared, contrasted and formulated my recipe. Now with what I thought was the hard part done, went in search of my ingrediants the next day. I found some, but the curry paste eluded me, no major grocery store in the area carries it. Ok fine, you all loose! So I dug up some asian markets today, and hit one near my work on the way home. It was a dive, plain and simple. It also stank incideously, I'm still shaking from the smell and it still feels like it's lodged in my nose slightly. Found my paste and fled, found another one closer to my house that looks to be much much nicer and I'm betting doesn't smell, I will frequent that one from now on ;-) BUT I have all my ingrediants for curry. I have to make it here in the next few days and see how badly I can futz it up ;-)

Beyond the curry life hasn't been too horrible, except for work. Work is getting nuts, lots to do, little time to do it in and in testing what I thought was done, the customer is informing us of major changes that have to be done because "ohhhh yeah it needs to do that too, sorry forgot to mention that and it needs to still ship with that in there, THANKS!". Honestly if it was one or two things I wouldn't complain, thats almost to be expected, but this is starting to turn into something where we would have re-written the spec completely as what I have now doesn't even meet the original spec.

Probably going to get stuck doing a lot of late nights soon, very soon, to try and get everything done I'm starting to feel very behind on my current project seeing as it hasn't even left stage 1 of it's probably 3 stage development and it has to go live November 1. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I have to perform some sort of a miracle. Wish me luck.

It's late, and I'm dead tired............ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Zz Z zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZ zZz Zz Zz Z z ZzZ z ZzZzZ zZzZzZ zZzZzZ zZzZ

Holy Bloody poo!!!!!!!! I jut watched history, the world has yet AGAIN changed and I am no longer living in the same world I was born in. Spaceship One, the privately built and flown spaceship (yes spaceship it goes into space!), made it into space and is currently on it's way back down. I'm watching this on streaming video, and a myriad of technological things have made this happen. I'm at a loss for words really except: wow. Wow. WOW. It is quite possible that in two weeks, the Ansari X-Prize may be won. WOW

I'm not sure what to think about anything anymore. The world is a bit topsy turvey and a bit hard to explain. The emotional landscape I live in is quite interesting, ambivolance is not only common almost everything that goes on brings it forth. Welcome to being an adult, the world is by far no longer simple, sane or anything like I would like it. Maybe with time the world will straighten itself out and things will look more normal or at least the way I think they should be. Just have to get to that point.

So the world is not as I knew it yesterday, nor will it be the same tomorrow.

Hey so I have some pent up blogging & things to get off my chest, hope you all are in the mood for a long read ;-)

Gencon: It's hard to describe 40,000 geeks, nerds, gamers, and a plethora of other people gathering Indianapolis for the best four days of gaming. Simply put, it's a geek fest waiting to happen ;-) It was great. Thought the story goes something like this:

Headed out bright and early on Wednesday morning of August 18th, wheeee long drive in my car ;-) it went vroom and complained when I had driven 2hrs without a signifigant break..... at 4hrs without a signifigant break and at 6hrs without a signifigant break ;-) wheeeeee. On the upside of the adventure I was able to go from the Quad cities (Davenport / Moline) to Indianapolis on like 3/4 of a tank of gas (maybe a little less) so I was very very pleased with my car. Good car good car you are in the good graces of the owner.

Now got to the hotel, which will remain nameless, I wandered up and said "yes I'm here to check in, I'm with the Brian D. party and my name is John" to which they responded "Ummmm your not on the room, we can't let you check in" WHAT! Now Brian is one of those people who is absolutely miticulous and when he tells you he's done something, it is bloody well done. He had told me he called the hotel and ensured that they had put me on the room. Now this bodes oddly so they kindly accept my baggage to hold, and I head out to visit Pat, Sam & my godson Mark, as they live just south of Indy. I hung with them for a while and boy is Mark getting big?! Wish I had taken my camera! Stupid John. Anyway all was cool and eventually the hotel was sorted out and all of that, though they messed things up constantly the whole time we were there which resulted in several free breakfasts and a discount on the final billing so all was well

The con itself was great, ended up playing in True Dungeon (think Dungeons and Dragons, only instead of a game, think of actually going THROUGH the game!) It was pretty cool, though I got bit by a spider and ended up being killed but it was fun. Played in Star Fleet Battles - Canisters which was awesome, Pat joined me for that and I know he had a blast (we ended up trading crippling blows as always, jeez pat we HAVE to stop doing that you know!), sat in on a game bout cartoon action hour, seems interesting but I probably wouldn't play it very long, and played in Live Role Playing Chess that Brian and his crew hosted, Patrick and Sam both joined me on that one. Quite awesome, I'll do it next year for sure.

Beyond that the exhibit hall was nice, though I don't think it was as packed as last year. But there was a lot better quality of stuff ;-). Ended up buying "Fishing for Terrorists" (bloody awesome game, think go fish with made up funny terrorists, and government agencies) Bought Ogre bash (mmmmm ogres bashing) and another game I can't remember the name of. But I ended up with like 6-7 new t-shirts and big pile of free dice, and a few free games, etc so it was a good trip full of good shwag.

Honestly I had a complete and utter blast, w00t. My family and I were all talking about my adventure and all and I made the offer to my brother that this next year he would be more than welcome to join us. Thought about it for a minute and than re-itterated he's graduating from high school, right? To which he nodded. I responded with "Well guess what, I suppose you just found out your graduation present, I'm taking you to Gencon next year." You should have seen his face, it lit up like a christmas tree :-D

But yeah all is well that ends well.

Life: Life has been ok, sorta, lot of changes recently. For starters I got old again. Man that really needs to stop ;-) Right after that I had to start going nuts trying to get an Application complete for work, went nuts and got it done this last Thursday. On top of that on the 10th I took posession of an apartment and got a large chunk of my stuff moved out to Des Moines on the 11th with the wonderful and very much appreciated help of Noah A., Bob A., Sean L. and of course Ben S.. Couldn't have done it without you guys, kudos go to you all! Slowly getting unpacked, kitchen is almost done (that poor poor dishwasher has run almost continuously!) The living room is almost complete (couple more things to deal with) the computer lab.... yeah. The bedroom... yeah. I'll get there. I have a couche, a recliner, a table w/ 2 chairs, couple filing cabinets, 3 wire mesh shelves, a desk (on loan), and a computer rack in terms of furniture it's not much but it's working out ok. Sleeping on an air mattresse for the time being, hope to change that in the next few months if I can (we'll see). But yeah giant insane changes over here.

However with moving one realizes much, as I have always realized when I've moved (and I've moved at lot for my age thanks to the U.S. Air Force which my father was in) 1) Iowa City really wasn't that bad, (2) I'm a lot more of an extrovert than I thought (3) I'm not a hugely big tremendous fan of Des Moines :-/ (4) My family means a hell of a lot to me (5) Stability is a new found feeling. Having moved a lot in my life it's hard to point to a time and say it was stable, but now that I had spent 3/4 of my high school career and my entire college career in one spot... I think I have a good taste for what stability is/was. It's just different though as of late very little has been able to call itself a pillar of solidity in my life, but I think I'm through the worst of it (I hope) so here's hoping.

Also to amuse my little sister (Molly), I would like to point out that today I was shopping around for a vacume cleaner. Yes, I was shopping for a vacume cleaner you heard me right, no wait STOP LAUGHING!!! I'm serious, jeez I doubt any of you believe me ;-) but I was! ::Sighs:: Anyway, I'm going to crash, early to rise and much to do on the morrow.

So apparently today I get old, again...... weird how a year ago I got old too ;-)

Also I have to at some point fill you in on Gencon went (it went amazingly well!) explains latter

You know, driving for ~3hrs a day gives you a lot of time to think.... maybe I shouldn't be allowed to think this much. Since life has vaguely calmed down (I.E. I'm not quite working myself to death anymore) I've been taking stock, seeing whats left, where I'm at and how life is.

I'm looking around, and I know there is more to life than money, cars, work.... I think I'm sitting on a nasty conundrum of problems. I want out of this state but a lot of my friends are here. Argh I dunno just trying to figure out what I'm really thinking. I guess mostly I'm sitting here wondering....... jeez I don't know.

Honestly..... I still love her, and I know it. It's not a secret that I'm more than a bit stubborn, and well this wasn't completely unexpected... at least from me. I'm sitting here also wondering and knowing how do I go around finding someone else after her.

Wish I had all the answers here, unfortunately I don't. I don't know if anyone does, I don't know what to do at this point. So many things up in the air, so many different problems I need to solve and sort through in my life. It's going to be a bit before things settle down and out.

I know I'm not in a bad position overall, and things are generally going my way.... but there are things more important in life. Maybe a bit more sleep will help me.

...Sleep take me to oblivion let me dream not let me forget what I must no longer remember. The world is not as it has been, this is not the world I once knew, I now realize my own insignifigance.... what am I to do now...

You know, it's a bit amazing to actually find myself on the other side of 16 years of school. I mean thats 8/11 of my life! Freaky. But I'm done... I'm graduated. I am going to get the little piece of paper saying Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

One of my professors who I do greatly look up to, Prof. Jones, happened to stop by my graduation party. On his way out he specifically said I need to come back and get my masters, so I am no officially doomed, I will have to get my masters at some point ;-)............ It can wait a couple of years though.

So I've been awful quiet the last month and a half, school was taking up a lot of time and I had this insane urge to make sure I did fairly well in all my classes. I also started my job hunt, which I pretty much clamed up about, not wanting to say anything here that might come back to haunt me. I will relate parts of it here to fill you guys in in general.

Started the job search back in June, in retrospect maybe a little early, tossed my resume all over the bloody place. I signed up on Monster.com, I signed up on Dice.com, I wandered through job posting websites, I e-mailed, called, wrote everyone I knew and sent a copy of my resume. Suffice it to say I was putting forth a pretty good effort to find a job. It turned out my then current job was unable to hire me full time due to budget problems, the University is going through all kinds of cutbacks, chops, etc and there just wasn't the money right than to do it. Asked them to keep me in mind in the future and kept looking. Interviewed with the Baha'i National Center up in Chicago, interview went well I thought except.... once I was in Chicago the truck blew a tire. So here I was in my good interview clothes, in the parking lot of the BNC changing a flat tire. Ended up having Sears up there put a new tire on the rim while I finished up day 2 interview and than drove home on that. It's still going so I must have done something right with it. Unfortunatly I didn't hear back from them until just recently about finishing up some interview stuff, at which point a decision had already been made about my own prospects.

Interviewed with a company in Des Moines called Iowa Interactive, a small tech company basically doing websites for the state of Iowa. It so happens a buddy of mine, Ben works for them and apparently was telling them I was almost as cool as sliced bread. Went out there and did the interview and hung out with Ben, Sean and Josh for the rest of the weekend as we basically had Ben's bachelor party. Went to adventureland and hung out there, than went go-kart racing and car staring, etc. I ended up burning my right arm on the muffler of the go-kart though, not sure if I STILL have the burn mark on my arm or not have to go look...... It was a good weekend, filled with NO tires being blown ;-)

Life was quiet for a while, got a call back for Iowa Interactive, tossed some more resumes around worked my tail off trying to finish up school. Than I got an interview from a company out in San Jose, arranged to fly out Wednesday, interview thursday and fly back late that night. Sounds good right? Well it's an interesting story.

So also for the record.... I bought a car :-D. Ended up looking around for about two weeks, checked out places here in I.C., C.R., Des Moines, online, etc. I was looking everywhere. Started looking at new cars, decided I couldn't affoard that. Started looking at used, and realized a lot of them were kind of expensive too, looked, and looked and looked. Early on in the looking Sean mentioned that Carousel Motors there was an intersting looking Audi on their lot that he saw from their website. Made note of it and just kept going. Carousel had some interesting side notes to it, (1) I already knew one of the dealers there, he's a member of the Boy Scout Troop. (2) Josh was one of their mechanics. Hmmmm..... anyway so my general requirements for the car were:

• manual transmission
• drive well
• sporty-esque, not looking for a two seater but I'm not looking quite for a grandma car either
• people need to be able to actually get in the back seat and sit comfortably
• price ;-)
• sound system (either before or after modification) be good
• techy good ;-)

Sadly though I kept looking around for something else that I liked and could affoard, nothing seemed to fit right. So seeing at this point I hadn't gone and talked to my friend down at Carousel, bro and I headed over to see that car Sean mentioned a couple weeks back. Found it right away and took it for a test drive in the rain ;-). It's a '99.5 Audi A4 Quattro 2.8L V6. It stuck to the road very nicely despite the rain (yay for the quattro awd), and was a very nice car featuring a leathor interior, Bose sound system, moonroof, alloy wheels, power seats, electronic climate control, manual transmission, etc. It drove well and was tagged at about the same price as the tC. Hmmmm..... The downside to the Audi though is it was a used car, and it had several things noticably, and unnoticably wrong with it. All told it needed a new information console, cup holder, cruise control switches, head unit. But it was a certified pre-owned.

So now I had two cars, equally nice (more or less) with equally annoyances, etc. Had to choose. Argh! Ended up with the Audi :-D. It's a very nice car, and it's doing me well so far.

So back to the story of San Jose, picked my car up Wednesday afternoon after classes, got in it, and drove it to the Moline airport, and left it ;-) Great way to start the owning of a car by going and parking it somewhere and flying off. But got to the airport and found that the flight was delayed. Ok, fine not a big problem. Sit around la la la. Also found out that there was a major computer problem for Northwest and that all their flights were delayed. Ok even better. la la la. So plane comes and hour behind schedule, they get us onboard within 15minutes (bloody amazing!) and we are off and going to the Minneapolis airport decently on time. So land in Minneapolis, and taxi to our gate and than wait 15 minutes for the plane already there to clear off. Ok. Not much in the way of aniety at this point on my part. I originally had a 1hr 15 minute layover, and if all flights are delayed I should be just fine. Get of the plane at A14 (this is key), look at the status of my flight to San Jose and find it's only delayed 20 minutes! Aww poo I in theory have 5 minutes to get to..... F7. Awww carp. Book it. I'm running flat out with my carry on (all my luggage thankfully) and in the process sheer the strap's clip, but I cought it before it hit the ground, not missing a stride. So I'm flying through the concourse here, I did A14 - > F7 in 4 minutes I think, maybe 5. However.... I missed the plane, regardless, by 3 minutes. Going: ok this is pretty typical, lets get on the next flight tonight and I'm delayed a little bit tonight. But wait, NO! The next flight out is at 9am the next morning which puts me in San Jose at 11am. Carp. Ok fine, if thats the best we got lets run with it, and oohh yeah go talk to the ticketing agent back at the front of the airport to see what they can do for me tonight. Ok fine, sounds reasonable. So at this point I'm not mad, angry but a little annoyed. Thats it, I'm used to this by now. I'm also hungry hadn't eaten anything since lunch and it's like 9pm now or something like that.

So I get to the front and find a long line of people, ok fine, get in line, stay inline, wait my turn. each person is taking about 20 minutes for them to deal with. Ok, I mean there are going to be people w/ issues and problems on a day that the computer system fails. No biggie, so I'm talking with the nice people standing around me, a family of 4 or 5 heading to a wedding and a business traveler. Nice people, so we get to the head of the line after an hour (rather insane but hey I'm not going anywhere) and the family goes up and finds out they aren't doing any more hotel vouchers. What...... but I was overhearing this one gent two people behind me just tryig to make it to the checkout window to make his flight, I kindly let him go ahead of me after checking with the people behind me so at least SOMEONE could get out of the airport that night. So I get up to the front and see if they can do any better with the flight in he morning, another airline perhaps, etc. And than ask for the hotel voucher. Uhhh un nope, no can do. Not only are they not giving out vouchers, every hotel for 30 miles is full, bad night to fly. Carp. Carp. Carp.

Me: So what am I supposed to do?
Agent: Well your welcome to stay in the airport, probably as good as it's going to get

CARP! So they did give me some food voucher stuff, and I went and ate, knowing I think better with food in me. Also started letting everyone know what was going on, the delays the insanity. So I ended up spending the entire night in the airport, for the record it's not fun. did find a couple of chairs, I pulled together and did my best to sleep on, about it really. Woke up from my 3hrs of sleep, change into my interview clothes and got some breakfast. Waited a cuple hours for the plane (it was ontime, I was early) and got to San Jose right at 11. Did the interview, and because my interview was going to be so short I had my departure time pushed back.... except that means I'm overnighting in Minneapolis again. GRRRR. Luckily I had what I THOUGHT was a voucher but what ended up being a "we'll get you a hotel... cheaper". So I did the interview, got back to Minneapolis overnighted in a bed and got a shower. Went home, grabbed the car went to class, grabbed Sean and... went to Ben's wedding. Talk about a whrlwind.

Now things have pretty much calmed down, ended up taking the job in Des Moines, at least for now, and I'm commuting back and forth. All the stuff on the car is fixed and I'm doing well. Not much else to tell really.

I'm beginning to wonder just how complicated the world really is trying to make things for me. So many things I want to go certain ways. Finally decide to commit to something, and get shot down... might be the right call but it still feels wrong

Things don't always turn out quite the way we expect or plan them to, we make compromises, we make adjustements as we go through life. We all know where we want to be, me.... I want to end up some day owning sea side property up in the New England area, over looking some channel where I can see boats coming and going on chilly winter nights, curled up on a couch with a fire crackling to my right, and someone wonderful curled up on the other end of the couch.

Wonder when I'll make it there...

Being graduated hasn't really sunk in yet, it's starting to but it's not there. Maybe it will start sinking in more on my drive to work tomorrow, I should be asleep right now, but my body isn't quite ready for it.

I should be absolutely overjoyed about graduating right? Why do I feel happy, but am looking around knowing I'm a bit sad? Am I looking at the future now and realzing what I thought was there isn't? Am I looking around and wondering where I lost track? I'm not sure what I think about the world right now, hopefully it will get better.

Next blog I'll give everyone the backstory to the job search, etc. Not horribly exciting but ::shrugs::worth telling, to sleep with me now, tomorrow I drive.

So ends another chapter of my life....

I graduated tonight, finally..... it's all over..... I have receved my Bachelors of Science in Computer Science.

I apologize for being so quiet lately, lots and lots been going on, job interviews, school work, sleeping in airports, 1200miles on my new car, etc. Quite a number of things have happened and I will detail them all just been waiting for things to calm a bit and for me to stop needing to keep hushed up on a few things. Time will soon tell.

look for something in the next week or so... I think ;-)

The wayward adventures of our intrepid hero

I'm home, I'm in one piece and the reports of me being torn limb from limb by wild rabid carnivorous dragon flies, apparently never got reported.... have to check on the rumor mill machines....

Anyway the trip was more or less uneventful, and by more or less uneventful I mean completely not uneventful ;-). Anyway the drive up was uneventful, save one annoyance. Apparently the DeKalb Oasis was going to be closed starting the 14th, I really like to stop there as it's only about an hour outside of downtown Chicago, good place to gas up and grab a bite and keep going. But they are doing something to the whole mess, it better be good!

So after I got up to Chicago, decided to go scope out my route to the interview and since I knew the interview was only like 6 blocks from the Baha'i Temple, I went straight there. The temple really is wonderful, had the opportunity to pray for like and hour, it was nice, though there were a lot of tourists which was a bit distracting but still, once it was all said and done I felt.... better.

So I found a Panera bread w/ free wifi access, that saved my butt, had dinner went back to the hotel, watched Pitched Black and crashed

Woke up the next morning, got ready and headed out and low and behold the world has found a NEW and CREATIVE way to annoy me. Someone yelled at me at a stop light, about halfway to the interview, I had a flat tire.

Joy

So yeah, did the first day of the interview, meet a lot of people and got a good look around the building. After it was done went out, changed the tire, and found that the spare was a donut and not the full spare we THOUGHT it was

Further Joy

So yeah, I'm stuck 250+ miles from home, the truck isn't 100% and I'm starting to debate how much more the world is going to toss at me, getting kind of sick and tired of it at this point. But yeah, with the truck at least moveable I went to dinner with Mojan, her husband and four other Baha'is from the area. It was a good evening, I enjoyed it throughly. So I crashed for the night, as the day ahead was going to be long

Woke up a bit earlier, and went in search of Sears to have them deal with the tire while I got on with my day. Found it, they found the tire was fried, Joy, and I just had them drop a new tire on the thing. Went, dealt with the rest of the days interview, went back snagged the tire and grabbed a dunkachino (WHEN will Dunkin Donuts come to Iowa, really, get me addicted to Dunkachinos and than not let me buy the stuff in bulk from them, and not be in Iowa, grrrr) and headed home.

Trip home was completely uneventful, the tire I put on didn't come tearing off so I assume I did it right. It was a good trip, glad I did it. Heading to another job interview on Friday, so we'll see what happens

anyway I'm going to crash, I'm tired and need sleep

Heading to Chicago in a little bit, so begins the week of insanity. Going to try and hit the temple while I'm up there, do some praying.

Not sure how much internet access I'll have till Wednesday, if you need me call me or e-mail my cell phone.

Just wish I was feeling better

Talk about sprinting to the finish line... I'm back in classes already, the three days off between classes was needed for sure. Just about finished running through my first week back and my classes seem ok, Basic Acting really is nothing but playing around, Classical Mythology is short and sweet, and the only class that comes close to making me sleep is Intro to Pre History, but I have my second class of that today so maybe I will be proven wrong ;-).

On the graduation front, I got Calc I waived by the Computer Science Department, w00t! That cleared up my my degree evaluation and I got that all turned in and done with, thank goodness. On more good news for the sprinting me, got a B+ in Quest for Human Destiny. I'm in the home stretch, I just need to try not to screw this up! (Note: a quick check of my degree evaluation hasn't shown any changes on this and magically the calc I requirement has shown up on it, joy.)

So yeah, things are slowly starting to fall into place, starting to get job interviews which is good. Should be interesting to see where I end up. The resumes are flying all over the place, now to do the interviews and see what happens.

Speaking of interviews, I have two this next week. One in Chicago, leaving for the on Sunday (think I mentioned that before), the other in Des Moines on Friday. So going to have a busy week with it all! Wish me luck

So in the grand scheme of things I'm getting better.... about as good as it gets I think. You lift sixteen tons, and woulda ya get? Another day older and deeper in debt....

Wow, been a busy week! Bro made Eagle Scout, which is really awesome and go him! It's something like 2% - 3% of Scouts who enter Scouting who actually make Eagle Scout, and joins such people as Neil Armstrong, Gerald Ford (President), Steven Spielberg, James Stewart, Walter Cronkite, H. Ross Perot, and many more amazing people. It's pretty darned awesome!

So in an alternating good / bad thing, the U. is currently blocking my graduation. Yes, Virginia, the world has found another new and creative way to tick me off! I couldn't believe it when they told me, but I jump ahead in this story. I went in for my degree evaluation so that they can certify that you graduate. Ok Fine, paperwork and administrative stuff ::shrugs:: So I go in to fill it out, and they pull up my degree evaluation and... It claims I need to take Calculus I. They ALSO claim it's been on my evaluations that I've been getting since I was a Freshman. WTF MATE!!!! I checked it's not on any of them. To top this off the University told me 4 years ago, when I took my math placement test, to (1) Take Calc. II and (2) that I had tested out of Calc I and wouldn't have to worry about it. So yeah I'm sitting at the office there devistated, I've worked this bloody hard, burnt the candle how many ways and now to be held up by this. There was a ray of hope, get the Comp. Sci. department to waive the requirement if they would be so kind. I went and talked to them, they checked on my math placement and knew that I had Calc II under my belt already and they said they would have it done early this week. So it's not ALL bad just..... ARGH.

Ok now for something good... Done with the 3 week session for classes, I'm 3 credits closer to graduating, only 7 more to go! Enjoyed the class, but it was a whirlwind class craming 15 weeks worth of stuff into 3 weeks of daily 3hr classes. It was fun, but wow! I'm enjoying this weekend and the monday where I don't have classes before I go into the 6 week session! At which point I go back to going insane ;-) Intro to Pre-History, Classical Mythology and Basic Acting are on my plate for the next six weeks. I'm insane, but I'm going to graduate... gotta keep my eyes on some sort of a target

Ok for some bad, the bill came for all my schooling this summer. It's a lot ;-) That and I went and bought clothes to go do interviews in... those were... alot too. I'm in the poor house ;-)

Good: Went and saw Wylde Nept last night as it was a buddy of mine's B-Day. Crowd was awesome, the bad was good as always, the fellowship just what I needed. We figured it out that half the establishment knew each other through no more than 2 other people. IT was really quite amazing actually. But yeah, did a little irish jig, drank a couple of Sprites, and had a good time loosing my voice ;-)

The bad: I'm still bloody depressed. Had some rather stupid stuborn, heal dug in and the world is going to end before we change our arguments, arguments with some friends I've known for nigh on 10 years now. Everything is ok now, just needed a good swift baseball bat to my head.

So yeah, job interview that I'm leaving for on the 13th, be up there till the 16th. Going to be up just north of Chicago in Willemette, Evanston and Skokie. I'll have a little bit of free time, if anyone up there wants to get together, let me know. Probably mostly evenings but I have the 13th to myself as well.

Think thats about it here.

Little brother made Eagle Scout tonight!!!!! I'm so proud of him!!!!! And you know what.... he went in there and told them I was his role model, the person who inspired him..... Wow!

I'm not only pumped that he made it, I'm honored. Congratz to him!

So yeah, I've been up here in Madison for the last couple of days just kind of hanging out. The drive up was rather uneventful, and in fact almost pleasant now that highway 151 is nearly 4 lanes of split highway all the way up. Gave me several solid hours of thinking to do, and I look forward to the several solid hours of thinking I will have to do latter today (it's about 2am now) to get home. The trip has been pleasant though, it's just been good to get away and be away.

It's kind of interesting right now though as I type this, in this house full of people it is quite evident that I am the only single person here. Just ::sighs:: I don't know, it's been so hard to even quite realize or explain to people what I need, what would help. I'm in an odd state of ambivolence over the entire world and I just don't know how to rectify it all. The only thing I can see, the only thing it seems I can do is to just press on. I have a major life goal staring me in the face, the finish line is ahead and I'm sprinting down the last stretch towards it. I can't clearly see beyond it, and I know when I get there the ambivolence that chases me will finally catch up and I will be forced to do my best to deal with it. Just not really looking forward to it....

Kinda wish I had a crystal ball to see the future and something to dull my fealings now... I know this shouldn't still be bothering me this much, but it is... I haven't really heard anything from Carol since it happened, and I miss her. This is normal, I know but the saying goes you don't know what you have until you lose it.... someday some will wake up next to her, kiss her on her forehead and suddenly realize just how lucky he is, because if he doesn't he's doing her the greatest dishonor I can think of.

As for me....

To qoute the magic 8 ball (closest thing I have to a crystal ball):
Outcome uncertain.

maybe another days driving will clear up that answer?

To quelch the fears that I may have found the edge of the Earth and been sucked off into the vacume of space, I haven't. I'm still here, been busy.

So yeah, life has been interesting since last Wednesday. Still haven't gotten a GREAT night's sleep. My sleep pattern has to be so shot up at this point, but I'm sleeping relativly peacefully at this point so I'm not terribly worried about the messed up sleep pattern. Class is still amusing, Holstein is by far one of the most engaging professors I've ever run across. Though we are still talking about the copulation in all kinds of odd ways, but he seems to be slowly tiring of that particularl subject. Last Thursday was an interesting day, still not 100% sure what I think of it, but suffice it to say it was interesting. Friday did some consulting, someone with a lot of spyware on their machine cloging up the whole works.

Which brings me to Saturday... Saturday was an interesting day, mowed the lawn, generally killed some time till that evening when a friend of mine invited me to go dancing. Now this struck me on a couple of levels, (1) I wasn't sure if dancing was a great idea and (2) Dancing in this town?!?!?! you have got to be joking me from the start! I have yet to find a good dance club in this town, but I get ahead of myself. I eventually relented and decided to go out, I mean heck what else was I going to do? So I met up with my friend and a couple of her friends and we promptly proceeded to wander around the downtown for an hour trying to figure out where to go. Despite it being the off season for bars, there were plent of drunken men wandering around that for the life of them, couldn't descretly admire the ladies I was walking around with if their lives depended on it. I was saddened by the state of humanity a little because of their actions. Ohhhh well, but a couple of things that DID surprise me... there were like 4-5 bars downtown that were flat out closed, and a couple of them with for sale/lease signs in the windows. *blink* *blink* ok this can't be right but no the shock continues, there is a new JAZZ cabare eating establishment in the downtown!!!!!! Maybe the world has gone topsey turvey, bars closing places without bars opening.... wonder when I dimension jumped?

Anyway we ended up at one of the closest things to a dance club in town (note: the dance floor is only maybe 15-20ft by 10-15ft) and was surprised to find a couple of people I knew working there. So we danced for several hours, and generally had a good time. Though on my way home I had really pretty mixed feelings over the whole thing, but I enjoyed myself which made the evening worth it.

Ohhh yeah one other thing for Friday, I had a phone interview, from which they decided to drag me out for a three day interview. So I will be just North of Chicago from June 13 through the 16. Not sure how much time I'll have to myself, but if anyone is interested in hanging out let me know and we'll try to hook up.

Lets see anything else exciting...? Not really been rather quiet other than that. Probably heading to Madison this weekend, buddy out there wanted me to come hang out, so I'm going to go and just get some time away. So much traveling to do this summer, it's starting to REALLY pile up, but it'll keep me busy so it's all good.

Thats about it

Status: Still failing at this sleep thing, but when sleeping sleeping a bit more soundly and peacefully. Getting better, still confused and frustrated but nothing I can do right now.

I fail at this whole sleeping thing, went to sleep at 11. Woke up at 5something spent almost 4 hours trying to go back to sleep. HMPF.

Wow.... twice in one day, new record for me huh?

One of the scariest things that a person can do, is to honestly and unabashedly walk up to a mirror, look into it and see the person they really are. I haven't done this in a long time, and something has made me think it's time to take another look, make sure I am who I THINK I am......

There has been an absolute outpouring of support, something even a couple of weeks ago I thought impossible. I'm not living, apparently, in the same world I thought I was. I remember the world being absolutely cruel, uncaring, mean and downright disgusting when it came to who I was and am. Someone once even commented that I was one of the few people they had known that honestly didn't care what other people thought of him. I would still like to think that, I am who I am only to please myself, but that doesn't seem to be the point anymore.

Somehow I missed something... when did the world around me go from being the uncaring, unrully place that it is where the only friends I had to count on were Karl and Patrick? Where did this world where for the most part, most of the people around me actually give 2 cents about me? Somehow I've gone from the kid who was shunned in school because I liked computers and was "geeky", quite possibly being the most unpopular guy in school (maybe...), the guy who the girl at one point he was after didn't even think of him as human, to.... what I am now....

Honestly the revelation has surprised me, the further revelation as to what it means again has surprised me, and now I must ask.... if I look in the mirror is the same guy I THOUGHT was looking out at me, really the guy staring back at me? When did I stop having to be completely self-reliant, a one man army against the world? I look around me and the world HAS changed, and I forgot to change with it.

I'm pretty sure I'm not quite the man I think I am anymore, heck even looking at myself right now I'm wondering about some things. Particularly in light of recent events, and knowing somethings now I didn't realize before. On a few issues I'm a lot more screwed up than I think I am, and I'm going to have to deal with that.

I am who I am, and that's all that I am..... now to figure out who I am.

To all of you, thank you. Thank You from the bottom of my heart. I want you all to know that I really do appreciate your empathy for me, and it has been something I have leaned on, despite many of you being to the four winds. Today has been a bit of a rollercoaster but I think at this point I can start to heal... maybe. There are a lot of things I need to realize and deal with. But thank you all, I owe you all a big hug at some point!

The rantings and ravings of this tired soul will now sleep, and I think I'll sleep ok tonight we'll see if I'm proven wrong.

Status: I'm not ok, really I won't be for a while. But I think at this point I have enough to work on to start getting better, and while I'm going to grieve for and over Carol I'm going to be all right and maybe, if the gods smile upon me, she'll keep me as a good friend. To sleep with me

I woke up much to early this morning crying before I was even awake, I remember the dream that caused it too. That was at 7 this morning, tried to back to sleep and couldn't than. Took me over an hour, got back to sleep and within another half hour I was bolted awake with something similar. And now here I am.

They say that when you sleep your sub-concious mind is working, and that in my case now it's trying to sort through everything. It's trying to make sense of what has happened. I don't know what this means but it does mean my sleep was cut short again.

Crashed hopelessly tired at 11 last night, bolted into conciousness at 7. Thats 8 hours of sleep, a small repayment in the debt of sleep I need to make up.

Status: Questions left unanswered, feelings torn in twain, and all in all the only thing I can think of is is she doing all right? Sleep deprived and knowing it, but finding no solace either awake or in sleep obviously. I don't know what I need either. Going to try and put together enough energy to play ultimate frisbee tonight, maybe that will help.

Started the first summer session yesterday with an amazing professor. The man is best described as an atheist-jewish rabi. He is quite a character, and is taken to making the most inane comments in class you can think of, it's pretty cool, and should at the very least prove amusing for the next 3 weeks.

Dang I'm tired I'm going to try and take a quick nap before my alarm goes off to run to class.

Status: I have slept a total of 11 hours since I woke on Thursday, I am completely exhausted I'm hoping to sleep dreamlessly and fretlessly. The LAN Party did nothing but give me a small delay in my emotions, nothing more. Though the lack of sleep actually helped. Regardless being awake for 61 of 72 hours is not a good thing, I sleep.

Reality sets in

I really wish I could sleep, I got maybe 5 hours of very fitfull sleep yesterday..... today 4, this is not a good trend. I can't get TO sleep and once I'm asleep it's not deep and restful. Keep waking up around 7ish.

I had an interesting talk with a friend of mine last night, it ended badly but it was probably really quite helpful before it ended. It partially ended because I was being forced to stare at the truth and I didn't like what I was seeing, it didn't match my little wishful thinking dream world. She's gone, she pushed me away. I on't know where to turn at this point. By instinct I want to wall off my room and deal with this, by sanity I can't be alone for long, I just want to scream. I'm having to come to terms with Carol not loving me but caring a whole hell of a lot for me. I'm having to understand what love really is, I'm having to deal with.... she's gone.

love: 1) the state which you care deeply for a person and from that care want to care for, protect and share with them life experiences. Also gains pleasure from the simple act of spending time with them. 2) Definition 1 + an innate unexplicable attraction.

I think that that might possible be, one of the best definitions of love man will ever come up with, I can't come up with a better one anway.

I'm sorry I can't type anymore.....

Status: still not good, probably getting worse on some respects. I don't know what to do, I don't know what to think, my mind is and has been racing. I can block the pain out but it's not easy either. I don't know. I just don't know. The only reason I'm as stable as I am right now is the news from yesterday. Thats my current corner stone. It's propped me up enough to keep from falling into the abyss. Shit, I'm crying again

There does seem to be some good news in spite of Carol breaking up with me.....

I passed numerical...... I'm going to graduate in July........

Ohhh the world finds new and insane ways to annoy and befudle me!

Status: still not doing real well.... woke up at 7:40ish and couldn't get back to sleep.... cried till about 11.

The good news: finally done with finals, everything is done with, everything is now set in stone: the second semester from hell is over. Tomorrow (Friday) I find out if I will graduate this July, which would be nice

The bad news: as with the first semester from hell........ Carol broke up with me today......... I'm not taking it horrendously well........ I mean, how can you handle the person you love telling you that they don't want you to love them anymore?

<whining rant>DARN IT! I'm so tired I can't sleep</whining rant> no really you don't understand I've gotten to the point where I'm so tired I can't sleep. My mind is racing, and I'm just.... blah. On the up side tomorrow is the last day of classes for this semester, next week is finals. This doesn't help though, I'm dealing with a back log of stress, sleep deprivation, and basically an entire mental, physical and emotional system that has been working way over capacity for too long. Yeah me and everyone else, I'm not alone thats the only good thing.

I dunno, I'm not dealing well with this bought of prolonged insanity for some reason, and this coming from the guy who held down 5 jobs at once, is sadistic enough to go looking for stuff to do all the time, alwas takes on too much and everything else. I dunno I just need a break and I haven't had one since winter break, just worn to the nub right now. Didn't even get Spring Break off, worked my tail off there so I could have enough dinero to get me this far. Not much has gone right this semester either, from getting stuck in groups that bailed on me, to teachers who have an obvious want to not be there teaching and the whole nine yards, honestly what it boils down to: I'm feeling sorry for myself because I've just gone through an entire semester of working my ass off (along with everyone else I know), and yeah....

For the record I'm curious if there is anyone out there that actually keeps up with this, I'm guessing there isn't. Or at least not right now as everyone and their dog has been as busy as me. If you do still read this let me know because I'm starting to feel like the guys at Humorix

Yeah I dunno, honestly I'm here trying to tire myself out enough to sleep, though I've been DEAD tired all day I don't understand how this works. To qoute my away message right now:
I'm so tired I can't think straight.
I'm so stressed I'm an emotional wreck.
I'm sick of doing this much work.
I'm sick of being busy.
All I want to do is have a few hours of peace, a few hours of calm and no stress, a bit of sleep and a hug....

is that so much to ask? I sleep now

Ok, thats it! Am I really on the right planet? Did I get abducted and am on some weird screwed up alien world?

Ok it might not be that bad but some quick highlights for the last 10 days or so go along these lines:

In the News Diebold, one of the largest manufacturers of electronic voting machines, has been publicly humiliated by the STATE of California. (For the record it's nice to see California do something intelligent for once!) Basically California found that Diebold's voting machines were completely flawed, miscounting votes, loosing them, etc. and has now banned the purchase and/or use of Diebold's voting machines in California. Score one for the side of democracy! Prediction for the future: Diebold sues the state of California for mis-representation, slander and defimation of character. Whats worse, I bet Diebold wins

In the News SCO, the most pathetic excuse for a Unix/Linux vendor, is starting to waffle and give up. Anyone who's followed this has been waiting for this to happen. They're largest investor has asked for a bunch of their money back, their lawsuits are getting mean TOWARDS them, and more and more people are coming out of the woodwork with evidence against them. Go figure, sadly the geeky amusement of the week will go away, sadness. Prediction for the future: Linux will gain credibility, the GPL probably still won't be put to the legal test in this battle, SCO folds before the lawsuits actually make it to trial.

In Real Life The end of the semester draws near, I work on a lot of back homework in an attempt to pass all my classes. I go nuts. Prediction for the future: I go insane, eventually have a massive caffiene crash, sleep for 3 months

In the News Ok this one takes the cake. Saw in the news paper an article concerning very religious students havinga serious conflict with High School Proms. The article pointed out that they see the prom as a morally degrading experience with grinding, dancing in the precence of the oposite sex, and the ever popular after prom activities. There were several things that struck me as outstandingly INSANE in this article. First, and for the redord, I'm a Baha'i which just happens to be one of the smallest religious minority's out there. Also for the record I'm getting absoluetly SICK of all the "Political Correctness" that has permiated our society. Winter Break is and always will be Christmas Break, regardless of their being a few other convient religous occurances around the same time. Those other religous occurances are minor by comparison to Christmas. I can go off into an entire tirade here but I won't, suffice it to say the world is currently walking a really fine line of being completely accepting of religous difference and giving everyone fair shot, and going back to dealing with the majority and calling it good. Honestly I just want them to choose. However back to topic, I am FLOORED that this even made it into the paper. Well.... duh there are people who are going to take offence to anything. I mean come on, you can please ALL of the people SOME of the time OR you canplease SOME of the people ALL of the time, not both and on top of that you can always find someone that will object to anything, this is the way the world is. But for crying out loud this drove me nuts. You have a religious minority now trying to dictate possible policy to the VAST majority, and an attempt to sway opinion and force the value structure of their beliefs on everyone else. Unbelievable. I mean I came to the conclusion a LONG time ago that the path I choose, being a Baha'i, was what made sense to me, myself and I. If it made sense to someone else kudos to them, if not well honestly I can't say with 100% certainty that what I've found is "right" but I've made the choice and I'm agreeing that others are free to find their owns paths. Just argh.

I dunno the article just made me rather angry, and I'm finding it hard to explain why. Best guess is that it boils down to being sick of every little minority trying to tell everyone else exactly what they should do, what they should believe and if you don't than your a horrible individual regardless of your reasoning or beliefs. I'm sure I can't be alone in this, because there are a lot of minorities that do this. Luckily there are minorities out there that don't try to force their entire beliefs on you, the Baha'is are an example of this and there are others I merely use the Baha'is as an example. Saw a really good qoute the other days on of all places slahdot.org in the comments of all places (a rare occurance to be sure) but to qoute it:

The United States is a democratic republic whose objective is to rule by the majority while protecting the rights of minorities. Political Science 101. I'll have to disagree. The United States is a representative republic whose function is to represent vocal majorities, rich minorities and sympathetic, guilt-inspiring minorities, while completely ignoring non-vocal and non-rich minorities and even majorities. Poltical Science 102.

Yeah, that sums up my feelings. At least I'm not alone in thinking this.

Lets see anything else? No I think that satisfies my angst for now. Back to homework, I have 5 days to finish everything for the semester. Than finals. Wish me good luck..........

AHHHHHHHHHHH THE SHAME!

I know I haven't blogged in a while, and you are all figuring I've given up on this, well I haven't quite yet! But life has been busy.... ohhhh sooo bloody insanely busy! Since I've last blogged I've written (in possibly reverse chrnological order) finished up two business plans for classes, given a presentation in three classes, dealt with a massive amount of homework in all my classes, midterms, smaug taking a vacation for 24hrs, insanity ensues. There's just been a lot going on, understatement anyway. So I apologize. For those of you who know me and have seen me lately know I'mbordering on a mental breakdown a lot (one of those business plans was done completely by me because my "group" didn't do anything for it) and know I just need to graduate and get done with all of this.

Anyway, there is one thing I wanted to say though. The world is full of dumb-idiots and idiots who take advantage of them.

You heard me right! and I'll say it day in and day out now! I've been reading a book entited "Black Box Voting - Ballot Tampering in the 21st Cent." mainly because Prof. Jones lent it to me. It's good though, and details a LOT of things that are wrong in the voting system today. Things that as a computer scientist with 6 or more brain cells make me cringe, curl up and scream! Did you know that most electronic voting machines have this odd history of loosing votes, miscounting them or giving negative votes to candidates? Trust me, there's more proof out there of this than you want to know about. And today I saw that India, the worldest largest democracy, was going to do an entire vote on a change of government using electronic voting machines.

Wait..... voting machines have a track record of being innaccurate, un-auditable and quite possibly corrupt and the worldest largest democracy is going to hinge it's entire election on them?

::pause a moment for this to sink in::

On top of that today I recieved ANOTHER of the mailings from "Domain Registry of America" (these people are sleaze bags through and through, truely the idiots taking advantage of the dumb idiots). The last time I saw anything from them the mailings (for at least two of my domains if not three) looked suspiciously like BILLINGS (format and wording and all) for search engine service. They WERE billings except for the bold notice hidden away somewhere on the page that said "This notice is not a bill". Sure it isn't. Well today I got a domain name expiration notice. While this usually wouldn't bother me two things about this bugged me. 1) I just renewed all my domains earlier this year, I'm good till like 2006 or something like that, odd..... 2) it's for a domain (www.ebooksresell.com) that I don't even OWN! Now this has GOT to be illegal somehow, I mean by sending me this notice in theory it would be trivial for me to domain hi-jack that domain from it's current owner (who I tried e-mailing and who's e-mail address doesn't work due to another domain being broken, it looks like a squat personally but ::shrugs:: who cares) THIS IS WRONG! And apparently I'm not the only ones who have seen the SCAM that these people are pulling. I found a blog by a gent in England: Andy Budd - http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2004/01/domain_name_registry_of_america_scam/. These people do not follow what I call being reasonable and are just out to take your money. MAYBE if for some odd reason, by blogging about this I prevent one person from giving anything to D.R.O.A than I've done my good for the day.

But yeah nothing else really going on, lots of school work lots and lots and lots. But I'm slated to graduate this summer (or come bloody darned close to it!) so all is well with the world, for the most part.

Carol hasn't blogged lately, she's been just as busy as me, particularly with the Business Plans and all, she's hiding out this week pretty much throwing in the ceramics studio as the last wet clay day is on Friday. So I'll bug her this weekend that she might want to blog to make sure the world knows she hasn't fallen off the face of the Earth ;-)

Anyway all I've procrastinated from my work long enough, and the man with the whip is coming back................... NO REALLY SIR I WAS WORKIN.... ::KATHWASH:: ::scribble scribble scribble furiously::

Sorry about the delay guys, no I'm not dead contrary to popular belief. ;-)

Honestly, not much has really happened lately. Teeth are fine, all is well there. The holes in my head are now slowly filling in. So all is good on that front. School has started back up, and things are going well on that front, taking 16 credit hours this semester, which should keep me busy and has been for the most part. Some interesting classes though like High Performance Computer Arch. and Masterpieces. Going to be fun, but a lot of work all told.

Funny thing did happen to me the other day though. I was called up to do some computer work for a friend of a friend who happens to be this nice older lady and her husband. Well as I was working on her computer (this was the "first" time I had met her, or so I thought) she made mention that about a year earlier she was working at a local store that happens to sell text books, which I refer to as "Book and Crook" (hey text books are expensive no matter how you slice it and I have to blame someone for it! I mean I spent just SHY of $300 on textbooks for this semester!) anyway, apparently she was working there during the rush sesson (when all the students are buying their text books) and she was having trouble with the computer checkout system. A young man happened to be checking out and was in a bit of a hurry I guess, suggested a fix to her on how to keep going (if memory serves me right it was hit alt+tab) and whalah problem solved. She thought this was wonderful and took down his name and number in case she needed computer work done in the future.

Fast Forward a year now. I'm sitting in this ladies basement fixing the problems on her computer and she's looking through a pile of papers and has just told me the story of this nice young man. She also mentions that somewhere in this pile of papers is the information for him. Now for the record the story sounds like me, but for the life of me I could not remember this so I claimed it probably wasn't me. Well several minutes later she finds the paper and low and behold, it has my name and home phone number on it. So here I was doing work for someone I didn't know before doing the work and I had already helped her once before ;-) small world (it gets smaller she's good friends with my boss too!)

So that was amusing and brought me a smile :-) Other than that, glad to hear that the Patriots won the Superbowl (I was at an RPG having a much better time than watching it)

BUT I have 3/4 of the family in my room right now, and it's 2:37am, thus meaning I can't go to sleep as I would have nearly a half an hour ago, and I don't know when I WILL get to go to sleep now (mind you my brother is in worse, he's the reason we are up and he has to be up in like 3-4hrs for school) so yeah, I'm stuck being awake when I'm dead tired and wanted to try and get to bed early tonight..... go figure (partially my own fault didn't make it home till 1:30am).

Two Part updated today:

Part One:
I'm not dead yet!
The swelling is going down, and I'm slowly looking more humanish. I'm still on mush for food (ok someone out there owes me a pan grilled steak when I can eat solid foods again, I SWEAR!) but I'm surviving. Staring to get a bit antsy as I've been stuck inside since the operation, and the IV sedation stuff has finally (I think) worked it's way through my system. Eating has been interesting but it's all good now, won't disgust you with the details. So yes, I'm alive and slowly doing well.

Part Two:
Continuation of the trip story

Jan 2, 2004

So I wake up several hundred miles from where I was the day before, and for the life of me SWEAR I could hear my girlfriend laughing upstairs, look at clock, 9ishAM. Hmpf. She's up early, better get moving, I would rather spend time with her than sleep at this point.

Start wandering around in early morning mode (I.E. I'm not awake, half asleep and I'm being deadly silent as I don't want to wake anyone else and leave them in the same stupor as me). Make it to the living room, notice that my girlfriend is not up, but my girlfriend's mother is. Decide to have a seat, make it half way into the room and she looks up and is startled to find me half way into the room.

Good Morning

I sit down and we talk for a good while before anyone else ventures forth from slumber. It was a good morning. Even saw my girlfriend groggily wander to the living room and instinctivly curl up and try her best to fall back asleep curled up with me. It's wonderful to not be dating a morning person, that would make my life so much more difficult, and shes dead cute being groggy in the morning too ;-)

Ended up going to a fantastic all you can eat stir fry place for lunch though, absolutly fantastic. If you are ever North of Chicago and need a place to eat, give me a ring and I'll tell you the name! (namely right now I don't remember it)

Jan 3, 2004

The day started about the same as the day before. Good deal :-D And ended up going to the Science Museum with my Girlfriends Older Brother, a friend of his and my Girlfriend. Had a blast, tons of pictures and just fun wandering around in the museum. Got there early and went through the U-505 on the last day they were going to be touring it before they started in on the new enclosure for it and stopped letting people through, and the "Mine" exhibit before lunch and the crowds hitting. Great fun. Had lunch and meandered throug hthe rest of the museum. Saw the Christmas trees still up and lit (have some pictures). Saw the baby chickens, to which my Girlfriend said "I want a baby chicken, please?!" I hugged her and didn't say much knowing full well that was the best course of action. They were bloody cute I have to give them credit for that! And saw the giant model train set that's STILL up. w00t w00t! To which I said "Can I have a train set like that!" It was finally agreed upon the more baby chickens I buy my Girlfriend, the more model train stuff I get. Honestly, I think I'm getting the better end of this deal ;-)

Ended up getting done about 4ish, and headed to the gift shop, where I told my Girlfriend (she was still talking about the bab chickens) that if she found a baby chicken I would buy it for her. Low and behold, she found a baby chicken. Almost as cute as the real thing, but definatly much less hassle ;-) She got a baby chicken that day, and I got a train (it's on my keychain currently replacing the giant string bauble I had) So it all worked out

Ended up having dinner with her family that night. It was quite a production, all the younger than parent age folk got draffted to help with making manicotti. It was good fun, and tasted awesome as well. Ended up telling stories after dinner, and apparently was privleged to hear my Girlfriend's father not only laugh out loud (doesn't happen often), but he or the first time in the lives of my Girlfriend and her brothers, told a story about his childhood. It was quite an honor and a privlege.

Jan 4, 2004

Wake up, getting quite standard now ;-)

Ended up sitting around most of the day and just chilling out, quite nice and enjoyable. The snow was coming down, and was just a good day to chill out and be kind of a vegitable. :-D

Did end up going out to eat with Mojan and her husband Eric, for dinner. And ate at a chinese place ;-) hehehe the odd traditions that are slowly growing around me. But it was quite an enjoyable evening.

It was a bit odd, I was the "odd man out" being at a table with mostly english majors and being the only person at the table with a technical background. You know as different as it is from my normal environment. It was nice and good. I didn't have to talk shop at all, got to listen in and be a fly on the wall :-D. Wow. The conversation that evening was good, and a great way to wind up my visit to Chicago. Next time though I'm going to have enough time and energy to make it to the temple with my Girlfriend :-)

Thus ends another day to which I was excedingly happy an enjoyed

Jan 5, 2004

Woke up, see above EXCEPT. Birght and early the carpet cleaners came around to clean the carpets and try and get a stain up. In the end we were drafted to help move stuff around and it was all good, glad I could be of help though. Ended up wandering out and taking care of a couple things and then driving home.

About it really, not much else to say.

They are out....

I woke up as they were sewing up the third tooth of the four they were taking out.......

more on cable companies, AVP2, and my teeth latter

owwwwww........., pain

Ok Back to my story.... where did I leave off.....

OHHHH YES!

So I'm in Ohio and I've spent the rest of the 30th hanging out talking with my buddies wife and playing with my month and a half year old Godson (yes I'm a godfather, and YES I WILL make you an offer you can't refuse ;-)) So all was good with the world. Thus ends the 30th with me curling up falling asleep and sleeping straight through the childs 6am feeding and not evening knowing the world was amiss.

Day 2

UPDATED:Ok quick thing to add to this day, the story of the truck light.

Ended up waking up kinda on the early side, and saw my buddy off to work. No biggie so I decided to go and find this Ford dealership that he had just bought his new car from and where I might be able to get the truck checked out since that stupid light came on (see previous blog) So I ended up heading out east on this road as my buddy had told me "head away from where I work" so I did.... just so happens in the wrong direction. I did however find every car dealership EXCEPT a Ford dealership in that direction. Finally decided I was "lost" (I knew where -- I -- was just not the dealership) and he told me I was headed in the wrong way, go figure. So somewhere in turning around.... the light went out.

I stared at the truck.

It putted away normally in front of me.

I stared at the truck than screamed at it that it KNEW I was now headingfor the dealership. Grrrr

Finally found the dealership and went in to talk to them, and told them the whole story. And Basically they COULD hook the truck up to the computer, it would run me $70, and they wouldn't be able to tell me anything because the computer only keeps that error code active for as long as the light is on (or the sensor is tripped). The guy I talked to did mention that the light that had come on was pretty specific to the entire fuel system and that it's most commonly triggered by air in the tank. Odd, that PODUNK gas station I stopped at right before the light came on was very podunky...... I WONDER. Anyway

--- End Update ---

It's December 31st, New Years Eve. 2004 is about to usher itself in... but not QUITE yet. My buddy has to work AGAIN. Poor guy really is putting in 60hrs/week which stinks but ::shrugs:: not much you can do ehh? So his wife and I decide to head out to the Wright Patterson Air Force Base Museum. It's an AMAZING forray and display of American, and some non-American, aircraft. Under the hangers of that museum is housed some of the most historic aircraft that have ever flown: the Bockscar, Wright Bros. 1911 Flyer, The last B-36 ever flown, The ONLY XB-70 left in existance, the SR-71 (I've sat in this, honest injun I got pictures to prove it!), and much much more! This museum has is of special interest to me for a couple reasons 1) I'm an AIR FORCE BRAT, 2) I used to live litterally just down the street from it, 3) My mom used to be a tour guide for them. So I was really pumped to say the least, AND they had just put in a new hanger which is ALWAYS good news.

So I went and borrowed my buddys car as we were taking young master Mark with us, and the truck will NOT fit me, his wife AND a baby seat. So we finally make it to the museum and then the fun REALLY began

WARNING: Me being stupid ahead

So we get there and since I was driving (my buddies wife is from England, and isn't 100% official here yet so she doesn't have a drivers licence) and I chucked the keys in my coat pocket and then was rummaging around, got my camera out and helped get master Mark out and settled.

By this point I had decided that I didn't want to wander around the museum with my jacket on, it was a really nice and warm day. So I tossed my coat into the car and we headed inside

I had also brought my camera from home, and didn't have any film. So the plan was to buy some film at the gift shop and get pictures for my mom of the changes and the new hanger. So we get inside AND... They are doing inventory in the giftshop and it's completely closed. So I'm kinda bumming I REALLY wanted that film, so sam and I head back out to the car to head down the street and grab some film until....

.... It dawned on me, I wasn't wearing my coat. The keys were in the coat... I didn't have the keys. MAYBE JUST MAYBE I didn't lock the car because I didn't have the keys, right this makes sense! ::running to the car:: nope subconcious was smarter than me on this day. I had, for the first time EVER, locked the keys in the car.

I was a bit annoyed, and wandered back in to talk to information to see if they could give me the phone number for the security police so they could unlock the car. Apparently they don't do that anymore though, and gave me the phone number for a company called pop-a-lock. They said it would take 45minutes to an hour, and they would give me a call when they got close so we could still wander the museum, really very decent of them and I appreciated it alot!

So we wandered around, and I babbled off bits of history and gawked at the changes, etc. and had a good time, THOUGH we went through the ENTIRE museum in 45minutes to an hour and had a bit of time to sit on the car when I got the call. He was a really nice guy, and I made mention I figured it would take him 10 minutes to open the car, and he claimed it would take 5 seconds to which he promptly proceeded to prove me right ;-) He had a bit of trouble with the reaer passenger door and honestly had it in about 5 seconds when he FINALLY tried the driver rear door. Sam was aghast at how easy it was for him regardless and just was not real happy about the whole thing ::shrugs:: anything that is made to be opened CAN be opened. It's not a matter of can it be but when will it be.

After that we headed out and I showed her where I used to live, and such, and headed back to their place. Pat got off soon after that and we had a good time playing Star Fleet Battles, I just wish I got more chances to play the game but we had a great time and rang in the new year with fizzy grape juice, a table full of Star Fleet Battles and us calling up those we care about :-)

Day 3

Relativly uneventful day, played a game or two more of SFB with my buddy and just sorta rested. Ended up going out to dinner w/ some friends and my buddy and his wife and just had a peaceful day. Afterwards got on the road and made my way to Chicago. And yes, just barely I kissed my wonderful girlfriend on Jan 1, 2004! ;-) Then promptly fell asleep ;-)

I am falling asleep again, more tomorrow

Well... maybe I'm getting my wisdom teeth out so I might not be coherent or anything by that point we'll see

Ok Ok, so it's LATE on the 6th! I told you I would post, I just didn't garuntee it would be 30 seconds BEFORE the 7th ;-)

Well lets see, you probably REALLY don't want to know about my day today, though not much happened honestly.... well except that the humidifier for the furnace leaked for several hours (not drips, leaks) so we have been pulling up water and stuff that has soaked all over the place, argh! Not NEARLY as bad as the basement flooding of 98, 99?

Anyway NOW for something completely different...

Well to start off with, the trip was a resounding success! I am glad I went! Had a lot of fun, but on to the details!

I left on the 30th heading for my buddies place in Dayton, OH and well.... about 1/4 of the way there the truck decided to pull a fast one on me and lit up it's service engine or check engine light. It's a pretty yellow light and immediatly lead me to freak out... I mean I had 3/4 of that days driving to do, and two other days of driving ahead of me. Called Dad to check when the truck was last serviced, thinking either something might have gotten knocked loose or some other issue maybe. Well it had been serviced a month before the trip, not likely to be having problems. So I glanced over the gaguges I had, and everything looked ok. Listened to the engine, nothing amiss..... And decided to progress cautisouly but progress nonetheless. The truck made it to Dayton just fine, the light on the last of the way.

Once there I stopped into my buddies store to snag that PC100 ECC ram he had told me about, really good deal if anyone needs it. But ended up standing around and talking with him for a good hour or so, and had a couple of arguments with his employees about HyperThreading and AMD X86-64 and ATI versus NVidia, etc. Though honestly.... my buddy isn't really a general manager... more a..... well babysitter, his employees have a lot to learn either about selling things, managing or the products they are selling. He's moving to a new store soon, brand new one and he gets to hire the entire staff, so I would bet things get better for him real quick.

Well lets see he also had inventory for his store that night (odd, does anyone else see an odd pattern to my vacations?) so naturally I offered to help, it was turned down but I still offered. Anyway after hanging out at his store I went over to his house and saw my Godson for the first time. HE'S BLOODY CUTE! And I got to play with him for a while, and I have learned 2 things. 1) Babys are just downright cute, and I certainlly want to have kids some day, just more a reinforcement of what I already knew. 2) It's AMAZING what the human ear can withstand! Baby Mark must have screamed into my ear for several hours, he's got a bit of colick and some gas problems so you can imagine he's fussy.

Lets see.... honestly I'm getting tired, so I'll finish the whole story tomorrow. Night all

YES I made it home finally, I'll make note of it SOON enough and put up a quick synopsis here. If you want a quick tidbit and snippet take a look at Mojan's blog, http://www.mojansami.com/blog/home.htm it's a QUICK reference, just enough to whet your pallete ;-) ok, sleep now... in my own bed, however nice it is I would much rather wake up, sit down on a couch and get curled up against..... now that was nice.

From my heart to yours, Happy New Year!

May it be blessed with happiness, humour, love, friendship, a good dose of insanity and of course the usual amount of insane miracles that occur to make us all happy

Trip is going well, got 2 stories so far to tell but (one about the truck, one about Pat's car...) but those can wait, for now I'm enjoying a new year!

Beware the blogging, it can only suck you in!

Sorry guys phone, an incredibly wonderful woman has called you guys just have to wait

My poor girlfriend is soo tired :-( she called and instantly sounded tired :-( poor thing. Shesh I thought breaks were for catching up on sleep, and just trying to get stuff done! Apparently she doesn't perscribe to this philosophy and has been getting up at like 6AM every morning!!!!! Isn't that BED TIME! ::shakes his head:: poor poor thing, I'll have to find some of my surplus sleeping and send it her way.

So Christmas has come and gone for the twenty second time in my life, nothing much to report really worked on Christmas day trying to catch up on some work, and saw LOTR:ROTK for the second time on Christmas Eve (EXCELLENT MOVIE well worth seieng it the second time!!!!!) and today, did some work, and than went in search of a harddrive I can't find... so if anyone knows what I did with a maxtor 80gb w/ 2mb cache let me know I can't find it :-/ Hmmmmm..... lets see, really thats about it... Looking forward to my little jaunt starting on the 30th, heading to Ohio first for New Years, going to see my Godson little Mark :-D (I'll add a picture in a day or two he's cute). After Ohio, quick trip up to Chicago to see my wonderful, but sleepy, Girlfriend and meet her folks, brothers and her twin brother's girlfriend, and all her friends.... and and and wow..... thats going to be a lot of names to remember, and if any of you know how well I deal with names know how well this is going to go over :-(

Speaking of remembering tons of names, I definatly have to send a shout out to my partner in crime for the website, dude congratz you have truely floored me for me to mention it in not one but TWO of my blogs. Shesh I'm just looking around at all my friends they are all getting married & engaged, shesh at this rate Karl and & will be the only two who aren't married or engaged! And even then I can't vouch for Karl for long, I'm going to start wagering he will pop the question before toooooo long. You know what? I'm getting old, thats got to be the cause of all of this!

Well to all of you who read this blog (now confirmed at 3, and two of you as of the writing of this blog are without internet access) Sleep well, for today is now yesterday and tomorrow and it is time to sleep. Sleepy sleepy sleepy sleepy sleepy sleepy....

P.S. There will be some major ranting coming concerning ATI, as in I am really starting to hate their products and I am strongly considering advocating a complete boycott of thier products... more latter

I'm getting better!

No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.

Ok so honestly, I am getting better. Almost completely back to "normal". Feeling better is a good thing, however other members of my family seem to have contracted my misfortune, both of them are running similar problems and they are running temperatures, which must mean that this is in fact the dreaded flu. (Sorry Mom, Sorry Bro!) So the gift that keeps on giving is out and about, anyone want it ;-)

On a more serious note I should be shot. I looked in the paper today and saw that there was going to be a 9:30 showing of the LOTR, here I was feeling all happy for myself that this was going to work out nicely and simply. My girlfriend is here (staying with us, yes I know half the family is out of commision, but this isn't that bad honest) this weekend as she needs to get some work done for her ceramics (mainly watching the FIRE and tending to it in the kiln as it burns this week) So we were going to go watch it tonight...

Apparently the paper lied to me.

There was no 9:30 showing, in FACT the last showing was at 8:20 here, at BOTH theaters that would show it AND they are apparently only showing it on one screen at each?!?!?!?!?!?! WHAT THE HECK IS UP WITH THAT! So yeah, my girlfriend and I were toodling around town trying to get into the non-existant 9:30 showing of the movie, luckily all is not lost (hey good wins, in the ROTK which is what we were going to see Frodo finally ditches the ring after getting his finger chomped off, but you all know that you've read the books!)

We made it home, a bit dismayed at our plight: no LOTR:ROTK. But Carol found that I left her two x-mas presents on her bed (mine and the one from my parents) so we decided to exchange gifts, and she made me go first. The first one I opened was a book of the 505 worst websites, copyrighted 2003. So I will soon be adding a links section and a category that states "A Website so bad, you must see it" the author makes some really bad comments about these sites, such as the "church of gerbil" commenting that who DOESN'T want to worship a small fuzzy creature, I mean they bite, smell and are generally a neusance right?

The second gift, was a small box of chocolate from Fanny May, a complete assortment...... ALL WITHOUT NUTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have a box of kicking chocolates, none of which have nuts, and I'm going to hoard it! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ok enough ranting about me, it's my girlfriends turn. She just about died at my parents gift of Ghirardelli Hot Chocolate assortment, she was happy :-D

Than she opened mine... She had a look of a deer cought in the headlights of an on coming car, I think I rendered her speachless for a short time. She liked, she liked it a lot. A 1980 printing of the 1954 edition of Emily Dickinson's poems bound by Easton Press, in green leather with a very nicely done gold inlaid border and such. She was very very happy. I done did good! I do have to give part of the credit to this success to the guy who set us up, as he suggested getting her a book of sorts. Dude, you rock ;-)

And now I'm munching on a piece of chocolate, finishing this up so I can go to sleep now.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

P.S. For those of you who don't know, my partner in crime, the man who helps with the hosting stuff (www.holyarmy.org) and a good buddy of mine, is now engaged. Congratz man! Best of wishes on your demise forth coming wedding!

You know, miracles do happen! I just got news a friend of mine will not be heading to the sandbox afterall. Seems her unit has too many people in it and she is undertrained for the "mission". She gets to stay home.

While this is a boon, I really dont like to see friends go into harms way, this is an incredibly selfish happiness I am feeling. I have friends that are there, there are people that are still fighting. This isn't overwith and I shouldn't be as happy as I am, there are people still in harms way. But this is a small victory, and I'm going to be selfish and celebrate for what I can. Take what happiness you can from the world and run with it for now, it's not a perfect world we live in ::shrugs::

We got him........

You know, for as little time that I have been alive, the world has spun and changed beyond recognition. Challenger exploded, Columbia also. We have been to the sandbox twice. The Berlin wall came a crumbling down. Russia is no longer communistic. The internet was born, the personal computer happened. Y2k came and went. 9/11 shattered the bubble in America. Saturday morning cartoons are no more. The cold war is over, the war on terrorism is just begining.

I am no longer living in the same world I was born into, no one is. But we have finally started getting the job done. I may not neccisarily agree with everything that has lead to Saddam's final capture, but it's done. The US has finally corrected one of the mistakes it has made in the past.... lets just hope they finish the job right, and honestly... I think they will.

On a completely different note..... I'm sick as a dog. I've had odd backaches all week, slept like crud all week. It's been kind of an odd cold up till today really, I haven't really FELT sick really, it's just been kinda like I'm overly tired and backaches. Then yesterday my nose finally started draining down the back of my throat which is a good sign I'm going to be laid up for a bit. The hacking up crud started soon after obviously. I now FEEL completey sick, and am still sleeping badly and all that jazz. Today I will not be leaving the house, I'm holing up till my final on monday night, working on drinking my first half gallon of water for the day (shooting for 2 - 3 gallons of water drunk by the time I go to sleep tonight) Going to work on that program for my networking term project that way I can try and get it done and over with. It doesn't need much, basically I'll get the multi-user code finished up and be done with it at that point.

Finals are this next week, going to get that done and whalah, done with yet ANOTHER semester of classes. I'm finally getting close to being done, close enough that I can ALMOST taste "reality". Though in reality I have no clue what I'm going to do when I get out. Few friends of mine are already starting to look out for me and see what they can find jobwise for me. I should be able to land on my feet somewhere, I just hope I'm happy with what I find in the "real" world.

I do have a small trip planned for right around the New Year. Going out to Ohio to a Pat & Sam's. for New Years and to see little Mark, definatly taking my camera with me ;-). Staying out there till the 1st than heading up to Chicago to see Carol for a few days. Going to end up meeting her father, two brothers and her twin brother's girl friend while I'm up there. I'm looking forward to the trip it should be fun, lots of driving but definatly going to be a good trip :-D.

Anyway a lot more going on but I am sworn to secrecy on that till latter, hopefully more info next week.

DARN YOU TRYPTOPHAN! and your little dog too!

Well basically after the 19th, I ended up getting into T-Day break, and working a lot and than eating lots of yummy turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie, and just plain old yummy yummy food, after which I promptly fell asleep. ZzZzZzZzZzZzZzZzZz

Did end up getting a lot of work work done that week, it was nice, even went in to the office on Friday, and it was really quiet and peaceful got a lot of work done, couple of major bugs squished and all is good in the world. Even worked on T-Day, on a project my father asked me to do, a website for his Boy Scout Troop. It's really quite nice and it's going to work out pretty well. Couple of things I'm not jumping up and down about about how it's all setup, but it's the best I've found yet for what I want to use. Hopefully it will go up soon, it's really quite something though not QUITE as integrated or as nice as I would have liked.

Most of break was really quite uneventful, everyone went home and left me here all by my lonesome. My Girlfriend ended up going home and spending T-Day w/ her family. Talked with her on the phone quite a bit, and got a chance to talk to her twin brother, who luckily doesn't want to kill me which is ALWAYS a good sign ;-). Worked and then got back.

OHHHHH Brother did his Eagle project the first Saturday of break, went REALLY well. He ended up building something like 60 or so wood duck houses for his project, lot of people helped it was all quite good.

This last weekend was busy though, my Girlfriend got back into town on Sunday and went to lunch with a friend of hers and her. It was all good talked a bit about RPGing and such. After which I went right back to an RPG I was playing in, than that night went out to lunch with an old friend of mine from when I worked for The Evil Empire(tm). He's doing quite well which is quite awesome for him. He works for a very nice media company now (software kinda media) He's working on some very awesome things maybe once I graduate I can go help him out wit that stuff, who knows.

Lastly my Girlfriend seems to have tossed up a blog of her own on live journal, maybe I'll setup a small links section for the site thats page / context based. Ehhh something to work on eventually.

You know it's amazing how the world works. I found out today that I am now a godfather to Mark S. born to Sam S. and Pat S. at 12:30 this morning and weighing in at 9lbs 2oz and 19inches tall. The world kinda changes and I now feel much older than I have in a while. I do however wish Pat, Sam and Mark all the best wishes I can and Congradulations to all!

On another note I got ahold of Karl this evening and was able to check in and make sure that the people I know over in the sandbox are all ok, and no news is good news. Whole thing was brought upon by a friend of my girlfriend's who is comming home from the sandbox. He was recently hit by one of the I.E.D.s when the Hummvee he was riding gunner in drove over it. The driver was fine, the passenger was killed and he, he recieved quite a bit of shrapnel. He's ok, and is fine now, thank God for good military doctors and the construction of the military Hummvee.

Wow, the world seems to WANT me to blog ;-) OR are you all just interested to see whats going on with this amazing girl I mentioned earlier?

Figures, the latter. Really, all you silly people!

Ok but you will now be forced to read through a quick run down of my life for the last couple of weeks till you get to the good stuff. Halloween came and went, had a party went amazingly, lots of people showed up and had a spooky old time. Been going through midterms, which honestly is the most insane time in the world... just like finals, and just life normally..... ok so I'm bloody busy! But I did have a perl program due and a ten page paper, a communications project and several midterms, does that count as busy yet? Ended up missing the Programming contest that was on Saturday, mainly because of a dentist appointment I had on Friday, had to have a filling re-worked because apparently my old dentist (one whom I had no major love for and recieved many 45 minute rants about flossing from) mucked it up big time and it was falling apart after only a couple years. Joy! Lets see what else, anything that I can force you to read till we get to the good bits yet? ACM Meeting this week, doing a presentation on securing a windows box. Truely it can be done, don't laugh and it's not REALLY all that hard, it's just not as out of the box as Linux ;-) lets see what else....

Hmmmm really I can't seem to find anything else I really want to rant about... I have a LAN Party this weekend about it.

OK, Ok, I'll get to what you REALLY want to read about.

Well, rewinding a bit back to when I last mentioned that I had met this amazing girl. Well we started talking a bit, found out that both of us had a lot of similar views and additudes towards things and hit it off. I invited her to the halloween party I was throwing and she said she would make an apperance. I was pretty pumped honestly thought it was a good sign. So we kept talking and things just sorta started falling into place and we just clicked. Halloween night came and she asked me to come pick her up, and by this point we were everything but "officially" dating. So I went to pick her up (got bad directions from the friend who set us up, I must remind him that two parralel roads only intersect at infinity) and I met a bunch of her friends and took her back to my place. The party was winding down a bit by the time she was able to come over, and a few people had headed home, there weren't many games to play and such but we did get a game of Munchkin going, and she seemed to enjoy that and we poped in "Yojng Frankenstein" and she came over and immediatly curled up with me. It was one of the most amazing feelings I've ever had. It just felt right. There were several other couples and people curled up here in the basement. It was just good and happy.

After the movie as we were heading upstairs to get her home and to see people off, we looked at each other and made it official, we were dating. And oddly enough I've worn this silly grin on my face since Halloween, wonder what caused that....

So ladies, far and wide, I'm no longer on the market I'm happy to announce. I've been horribly proven wrong (see earlier rant) and am fling on cloud 9 and very happy to be there

About it for this one, if you want to know more about her you can e-mail me ;-)

Ok be prepared to be amazed! I've blogged TWICE this week, and this is not going to be an angsty evil blog either!

Life has been busy, plain and simple, got Linux running on a StarMax 3000/180 (an old macintosh clone) for my MIS Communications class, and all the rest of the stuff going on.

Did however meet an incredibly charming, witty woman today... honestly... she was freaking amazing, cute, smart, witty... sorry still a bit floored I might have to retract my earlier statement here as it might have been proven false today! <cliche bits>She has beautiful blue eyes, kinda hard to miss, they are just beautiful</cliche bits> And you know the most disgusting thing? I didn't do a darned thing to try and look presentable, didn't know I was going to meet her, haven't shaved for several days, hair was mis-behaving a bit (stylist cut it badly last time, grrr gotta have it cut again sooner than I expected) so go figure, the one day I look like carp, is the one day I meet a cute girl ;-). Honestly though at first when I meet her I didn't know what to think, but there is something about her.

Ok enough on that just thought I'd drop that little tidbit out there, having dinner with Benjamin and his GIRLFRIEND ;-) Saturday, going haunted housing tomorrow night w/ WICS (should be fun though I'm not sure who's all going), RPG Sunday night, homework, work (ohhh man gotta get SERIOUS work done tomorrow!). Just nuts

Had a midterm in my CS Grad Communications class.... one gent who we thought was one of the smarter guys in the class sat down, looked at the test, waited 5 minutes got up and handed it back in and left. He didn't answer anything on an open book, open notes, open laptop test...... it really was pretty bad I THINK I got one question 100% right, that is the ONLY question I think I got right, out of 4 BLAH!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, ok, I'm blogging! I know I'm a horrible individual for not doing so more often but come on, if you all know me than you also know that me blogging is nothing shy of a miracle.

Well went back home to Neb. saw the relatives, and all that jaz, everything is going well out that way. Wandered around and saw my step-grandmother, she's in a nursing home now and the words senile don t begin to cover her anymore. For a while there she thought I was my father, she barely remembered my mother (who's side she's from) and in the 45 minutes we saw her for, we basically had a single 10 - 15 minute conversation that looped. Mind you I hope I never get that bad, and I'm sorry that she has deteriorated this far, BUT honestly I have had little to do with her through my entire life, she has never been very "grandmotherly" or made any attempts to get to know my brother or I through her entire life, so my feelings more or less end there. My family has, as far as I was ever concerned, been my immediate family, my mother's brother, his children, my grandmother on my father side... and thats about it. When my mother's father was alive I ddidn't know him very well as he developed alshimers which took him away. My fathers side I honestly do my best not to have anything to do with them, to describe them as a living soap opera, but not quite as high class as a soap opera, would be the most accurate statement one could say about them.

Though honestly most of the reason for the above is because I'm a military brat, and was never near any of my relatives where we lived, for better or worse thats how it works... when I think of family I think of my mother, father and brother as opposed to my complete extended family, heck honestly I consider Karl, Patrick, Molly, Jason and Dorrie to be more of an extended family that my true extended family... now you have entered my truely skewed viewpont on life ;-)

What is wrong with the frelling world? Honestly? Has common sense, decency and morality been thrown out the window?! I have friends running around love struck and doing things that would make your toes curl, others who are finally getting help for doing JUST that, SCO suing everyone it can, the RIAA doing the same, people being sued for pointing out the shift key is a neat way to prevent cd's from autorunning software which is now a violation of the DMCA, Boy Scouts being sued and beaten on because they are a private organization with strict views and on top of the whole bloody mess large corporate likeentity that might also sponsor a football team and just HAPPENS to teach people, threatenining legal action against a group of people for a WOPING $53.51! Honestly, between the legal system, the greed, and the general lack of commonsense and morailty of people is just driving me nuts, is making me bitter and I'm HONESTLY debating taking over a small island off the coast of Maine and Canada, declaring it a soverign nation called "Sanity" and kicking people out that have not used the grey matter that was given them at any point in their lives! I'm not asking for much, I know people are stupid but there is a level of stupid that you must not sink to! Anyone want to come join me? Going to be a blast, offshore colocation, reasonable laws, employment for everyone, food, happiness, and radio stations that don't suck! Come on! I'm not asking much!

I've finally broken down and put together an INCREDIBLY rudamentary blogging system to this page. Amazing huh? MAYBE just MAYBE I'll move this page beyond more or less a static html page ;-)

On a more serious note I've decided to do this more or less to voice my views on the world. Which is mainly why people blog, because they feel there are people out there to listen... who knows... man is quite an odd animal.

Mainly I'm here to ask a simple question: Is there something wrong with me or is it REALLY just this hard to find someone? Now for most of you, you know this is about the only thing I complain about to any real extent, though I only really do it when I'm slightly depressed after being horribly stressed and tired ;-) (wait.... when am I NOT that way!!! moving on...) I just don't know, I'm a pretty close to resigning myself to being a permanant bachelor... or at least waiting till I leave Iowa for I honestly am believing, at the very least, there is no one here that meats the standards I hold (and I STILL hold they are quite few! read reality of life if you want to see them) or at the worst case scenario I just have no clue how to approach women or I just can't find them, honestly it's probably all three but ::shrugs:: not much to be done there huh?

On the lighter side I'm looking forward to December: no more ACM President! Now don't get me wrong I have enjoyed doing the job, but reality is it's a LOT of work (what presidency isn't?) and not going as insane will be nice. About it really guess I've had my say for tonight