I used to think I was pretty good at raquetball. Yesterday, I played 6 games, and won 2. My knee feels like it wants to leave my body and kick me in the butt, rather take any more of this abuse.
I'm old. I need science to hurry up and get that "grow your own clone" thing and brain transplants up and running so I can have my old body back.
How awesome would that be?
"Ever notice how everyone driving slower than you is an idiot?
And how everyone driving faster than you is a maniac?"
-George Carlin
Still funny.
Lately, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Chad and I have been playing raquetball over lunch. At first, I consistantly schooled him, but he has been getting better and better. He has beat me one game thus far. I've also played a couple times with a guy we met at poker named Bill. He just recently won his gym's raquetball 'B' league, but I can consistantly beat him too. I've been trying to get a game of cutthroat going for the three of us, but schedules never work out. Yesterday wa the first time it did, and it was pretty fun. Bill is lefthanded, and Chad and I are right handed.
So this requires a bit of knowledge of raquetball, but what this means for playing cutthroat is that one of us (Chad or me) is going to be at a huge disadvantage because he will be serving to Bill's forehand on the left and another forehand on the right. Of course, that guy was me.
I still managed to win the first game, but I couldn't score the rest of the day, and Bill won the second game, and Chad the third.
Chad was limping around in the middle of it all, saying he hurt his leg, but he played the whole time with full mobilty. But I just talked to him, and he says his knee is now all swollen, and he's crippled. So, even though he beat me a game, I cripped him.
I finally got my remote control working on the new mythbox, so now it's 100%. I need to add some more modules, but I am now recording from two sources, transcoding, rsyncing it to my house where I can watch it. It seems to be working fairly well. Some better scripts need to be written, but I'm pretty pleased with it even now.
I've had something like 7 hours of sleep over the past 2 nites, so I can't figure out why I'm still up right now.
I hang about 1 small piece of drywall everyday, so I've been making progress, but it's incredibly slow. Someday I may even mud the place.
Server is back up, and I'm much happier about that. I still haven't got my remotemyth box working exactly as I envisioned, but it's getting closer.
I got my webserver box back up, and I hung a few more sheets of drywall in the bathroom. I'm still nowhere close to being done, or even ready to mud, but I can at least that I'm making progress.
I got zero homework done all weekend, so that stinks. Not that I didn't try, mind you. I just could not make any real progress on any of the problems.
Ann and I saw Little Miss Sunshine Saturday nite, which was a pretty decent movie. Then ate nachos and went home. I wanted to go bowling, but no place was open.
Sunday the girls had a soccer game, which they won 1-0. The score was not indicative to how much they dominated the other team, but they still got the 'W'.
I hopefully fixed a non-working tail light on the GS, I was sort of just waiting to get pulled over because of that.
Spent most of Sunday nite on the phone with Ann's brother Jon, as we're apparently buying a piece of land in Beatrice. I'm not as excited about it as he is, but I really should be investing in something.
So, mostly, all is well. No complaints, anyway. Except for optimal filtering kicking my butt all over the place.
disaster averted! I got ncurses re-installed on the webserver, and now it's all back to normal. whew!
Man, I just made a critical error. I tried to update the webserver machine, and I completely screwed it up. The webserver part seems to mostly work, but the rest of the machine totally screwed up, so I have bad feeling I'm going to have to rebuild it. Fun.
So don't be surprised if it's not accessible for a day or two....
Well, Steve's last day was fun, anyway. We talked about what the new roles would be, and Steve pointed out that I am the new head of the office, which I liked. I guess it will be live or die my way.
We then took Steve out to eat at BW3's, which has been Steve and my favorite restaurant of late. We're both totally addicted to wings lately. And BW3 has good sauces.
There, we drank several beers and went back so Steve could wrap up his last day activities.
Then we had (what I hope is) a stroke of luck.
And now for the long, drawn out story.....
wow. you're committed, aren't you? Well, don't think I don't appreciate it. You know what? You're my favorite reader.
So anyway.
We work in office building that has several offices. All one floor, just a long hallway with several doors to the various offices, and much to my displeasure, on bathroom. So I went to the bathroom, and as I was walking back down the hallway towards our door, I saw a familiar sight. A new person, mostly lost. He was standing at our door, tentatively. This happens all the time, idiotic, new salesmen, forced to cold call places for God-only-knows what. I hate dealing with these guys. I decide to not walk towards our door, and let whoever he catches first inside to tell him to piss off.
So I wait for 1 minute. Then two. He's not coming out. So I finally bite the bullet and go in, and it's the worst possible scenerio, which I kind of had to expect, now being the new head of the office, he's standing there talking with one of our engineers, I have no idea what they had said, but the second I walk through the door, the engineer says "Oh, there's the guy you need to be talking to"
Yes, great. Allow me to deal with this idiot.
Then the guy explains that he is an engineer for a small company in town, and does work very similar to ours, and thought he we drop off his resume, as he's looking for a new engineering job, but doesn't want to leave lincoln.
Holy jesus. Do you know how many guys there are like that?
Three. Exactly three.
And here's one of them, and he's got great experience, and he's looking to jump jobs, and we need to fill a spot. Timing couldn't be more perfect.
That said, the timing is perfect, hope I can convince the powers that be to hire someone this quickly....
Modern communication is interesting to me.
100 years ago, if you wanted to send a message, it was generally a handwritten letter, and an emergency might constitute a telegraph message, which still was ultimately hand-delivered.
Then, most communication was carried out by phone, and probably the majority of it still is.
But now there is email, instant messaging, text messaging, and even things like this very web page.
When I was a kid, always annoyed me because you cannot tell you is actually calling you. Every time the phone rings, you don't know if it's for you, or someone else in the house, or if it's really important or not.
This lack of knowing the importance of the call I've found artificially inflated the importance of any given call. Essentially, the lack of that knowledge forces you to assume the worst.
Even with today's most important phone feature (in my opinion) of caller ID, (which of course, has limited usefulness), you still do not know the importance of the call.
Maybe some people feel the need to answer the phone every time it rings for fear of the worst, or maybe other reasons I haven't considered.
But I don't. I treat the phone like email, which to quote my professor, is great because it allows you to respond when it's convenient for you, much unlike the phone. But in my mind, that's what voice mail or the answering machine is for. Basically, if I feel the potential importance of the phone call outweighs the inconvenience for me to actually answer the phone, I will. Otherwise, I will let the machine or voice mail get it, listen to the message and judge accordingly how quickly to respond.
So I feel bad for others who treat every phone call like a potential emergency, and answer at inopportune times. I see it happen all the time, and I don't get it. I feel even worse when I don't notice or consider the time I'm calling someone, and they answer and abruptly cut me off, saying to call them back or can they call me back later.
I just think "why did you even answer? If it had been me, I wouldn't even have bothered."
So follow my lead, America, you won't hurt my feelings if you don't answer right away.
Weekend isn't over, but I'm avoiding doing homework that is completely baffling me.
Friday I had full-on cold symptoms, and even went home early to sleep. That made me fell considerably better, so I went out and played some poker at Pete's, but just broke even. Which fine, considering I started digging a very deep hole early, so I was happy just do be able to crawl out of it.
Saturday went to BJ and Shelly's parents to swim and watch the pathetic NE game. I was offering to take the 18 point spread on for USC, but no real takers, even though Chad made the mistake of placing real bets elsewhere on them. Big mistake. They predictably sucked. But otherwise it was a good time.
The next potluck dinner should be pretty wild, it will be out at Jake's not-yet-built house on an acreage, complete with bonfire and guns. He wants us all to do some skeet shooting, which I haven't done since I was a kid. So, fire + guns + booze = good times for us. Been nice knowing you all.
Today the girls had a soccer game which they won 1-0, to remain undfeated for the year, even though we "don't keep score". Bah. I managed to hang the last bits of the ceiling in the bathroom today, with Ann and Aubrey's help, so now I move on to hanging the walls this week, which should be much easier.
I revived my mythbox, and am currently bringing up gentoo on it, which takes a while. But once it's done, I have ~25G worth of shows to transfer from the remote recorder to watch.
And of course, I still have lots of homework to do....
I have another trip to Vegas coming up. This is the annual one that started the whole Vegas craze for me. This time we're staying at the Plaza, an equally big hole as Binion's, because unbelievably, Binions was totally booked up the weekend we're going. I couldn't believe it, Chad got a room at Binions the day before he went to stay there, in the middle of the WSOP!
Since I have another trip, Ann is going somewhere without me. (How dare she!) So she's going to see Def Leppard and Journey in Omaha with friends. Since the tickets are $80 each, maybe it's for the best I don't go. I don't think I'd appreciate it as much as her anyway, plus, she deserves a trip on her own as well.
I have a busy weekend ahead.
-Continue drywalling the bathroom
-rebuild the mythbox
-homework
-potluck at BJ and Shelly's
-soccer game
So I've plenty to do. And I just talked to my cousin-in-law who is painting the savage, and sadly, it looks like it's going to be a long time before that gets done. He estimated thanksgiving! So now I'm bummed to not be able to ride the new hot rod looking version this year, but it should look good in the end.
A guy at work gave me a cold yesterday, and I have it full force today. We typically lift at the YMCA over lunch together, and that was when I noticed he sounded funny, and then it was more apparent at work as the day went on. Even towards the end of yesterday I was starting to feel it, and right now it is full on.
