The Halls

I have taken this week off to get the floor in the bathroom done, and today I finished laying it. It does not look quite complete though, because there is no trim, so I went and got that, and got it stained tonite. I'll see how much cutting and nailing I can get done tommorrow, but time is working against me because I have several things to look forward to.

Tommorrow nite, I'm hosting a poker tournament, and I bought the PPV UFC title fight. I'm really looking forward to that. I plan to win the tournament, win big in cash, and enjoy the fight. I have gone all out on tricking out the garage for this event, running a seperate line of cable to the garage, so we can watch 2 channels at the same time (I have dish now, remember? That's actually not a trivial thing anymore.), plus I have borrowed a small LCD TV and projector to watch the fight on. It's like a full fledged sports bar in there, complete with kegerator, and poker tables.

Then sunday nite I have a big new years party. That should be more couples-oriented, but still should be pretty fun. It was last year.

Then I have to go back to work. I got this email today

Posted by Aaron at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ok, had a bit of a problem with the new dsl modem. It was a default setup to not allow anything through, so the webserver and nothing else worked for several days. The sad thing is I still have a ways to go.

Christmas was good. The kids all got way too much stuff, as usual. I got a cool set of knives, which we really needed.

For the last 2 months, I have been planning a surprise birthday party for my parents, as their birthdays are at christmas. So I contacted all their friends I could find, and invited most of the family, and we surprised them good last nite.
It was a fun time.

Now I'm going to try to finish the bathroom floor this week, laying some laminate flooring despite several warnings about it's usage in a bathroom. At the end of the day, I decided it's not going to be a very high moisture bathroom most of the time, so really it's like a normal bathroom.
We'll see. I hope to finish it all here tomorrow.

Posted by Aaron at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

wow. I've heard it said that there are no bad ideas. But I don't believe that's true.
This is a bad idea.

Posted by Aaron at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

All is slowly becoming right with the world.
I have the comments on the site working again, we have directv or some equivalent, so I can watch tv again.
I have just setup a long overdue website on our work server, which can do many things, but for now all I wanted was something to keep track of all the software releases we do. dotproject seems to be the answer, at least for now. It's pretty impressive so far.

I also setup a friends brand spanking new website. It's dirt simple, and primarily just a front page to a gallery of pictures of his artwork. But it was mildly amusing, and some of his stuff is pretty cool. Check it out, so it can be popular enough to get accessed by google.

Posted by Aaron at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

warning readers. I mention last week that I had catastrophic failure of several pieces of electronic equipment. Now they are all back to life, for no reason at all. And I found one very interesting metric that I would not have guessed.
This router

It has the same part number as the previous router I had from Belkin, which was this one.

But the behavior was clearly different. I'm sure you all noticed, because I sure did, that the web page was served very slow for a while. That was while I was on the newer model.  I have no explanation for that either, it's just a hub, and should have had no effect on that, but it clearly did.
Then the old one seemed to come back to life, so I don't care. I'm happy to have the old one working again.

Posted by Aaron at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David has commented on the weird al song, White and nerdy, which is a very good song. In fact, the whole new weird al album is pretty good.
Speaking of comments, class finished last week, and this weekend, when I finally didn't have anything else to do, I fixed the comments on my site.
They were broke, and I'm sure that's the only reason I haven't been getting any comments, and not due to lack of interest in commenting on my daily writings.
I admit, my entries recently have been quite dull. I'm going to have to try and liven things up...

Posted by Aaron at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Have you tried the new spicy sweet doritos? They're my new favorite chip. I can eat doritos in general until I'm sick, but I can eat a whole bag of these things no problem.
The first time we tried it Ann said "it kindof tastes like chinese food". I agreed, it definately reminded me of chinese flavors.
In fact, the first chip I tried, I kindof made a nasty face, but, I was intrigued enough to try another later.
Then I kept having more and more.
I'm officially addicted.

Posted by Aaron at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Played a little poker last nite at the boats, and didn't lose, so I can't complain about that for once.

I've got a lot going on at work right now, so I'm really busy, but I won't complain about that either. Better than the alternative.

My only complaint is that I seem to be the only person in my class that is still struggling. We have a largish homework assignment to turn in for a final, and I'm not making great progress. It's going to be another "turn in what I have, and pray" kind of class. I must be getting stupider as I get older.

In the meantime, Ann got the basement bathroom painted the foofoo color she wanted, so it look pretty good now. Now it's time to put in a floor, which has become a subject of some debate. She wants pergo, and I don't care, but I'm not sure pergo works in a bathroom with lots of moisture. Still checking. Let me know if you know for sure.

Posted by Aaron at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had major electronic failures over the weekend.
My laptop toke a major dump, and I am in the process of wiping it clean and completely starting over. At the same time, my router seemed to have died, so I couldn't tell why suddenly there was no internet, and diagnosing would just show that everything was dead.
So the website was done for a few days while I brought it back up, and of course got a new ip which takes a day or two for all the DNS servers to realize.

Add to that I just got the windstream bundle of phone, dsl, and dish network. This switched my long distance phone service to them, which of course wasn't done right, so currently I have no long distance service at all.

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On another topic, Ann's favorite site is www.gofugyourself.com, a particularly catty but occasionaly funny site. Recently, Ann seems obsessed with Carrot Top, who seems to deserve it, really.
These pictures are great. The guy belongs in a circus.

Posted by Aaron at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Have you heard this song? Most have already, but I just heard it recently, and I really like it. They are clearly so similar that it strikes me that the green day song is not that original.
I knew a guy who claimed that the biggest Queensryche hit "silent lucidity" (a song I hate BTW) was a direct ripoff of Pink Floyd's "comfortably numb". I didn't believe him until I played them both back to back. From then on, whenever I hear silent lucidity, I can only hear comfortably numb.
Maybe over the holidays, I'll get bored and try to mix a similar queensryche vs pink floyd song to show this.

I had my last lecture of the semester yesterday, which was a surprise to me. I had been in Chicago, not really thinking about class at all, and when I got back, for some reason I had never really studied the academic calendar, so I assumed we had at least one, maybe two weeks of class left.
Nope. Final homeworks due next week. Final homeworks based on the two lectures this week.
So Tuesday was a bad day to miss....

I recently switched internet providers, going from cable to dsl, because now it's a no brainer cost-wise. I called to cancel cable yesterday, but she wouldn't do it, because I have to bring my modem back. But last nite, all the internet connections seemed to become very unstable and unreliable. I think they're sabotaging my connection already.

Posted by Aaron at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So I'm working in Chicago again. Not too bad a deal, it's not a crazy high pressure situation like it usually is. Just trying to convince a customer that our stuff is worth buying, and otherwise lying to them.
We're doing the usual making all kinds of promises that will surely never be kept, and I do it all with a smile on my face, knowing there's no way in the world this is going to happen in the time frame we're talking about.
It's currently 27 degrees here, and 50 at home. Awesome.
It was 4 degrees this morning. Even more awesome.
Factor the windy city's namesake winds in, and it's a fun time.

Flight back home is tomorrow nite, so hopefully that will go off without a problem.

Posted by Aaron at 7:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm sitting at work right now, waiting for a flight. United had not got their act together. O'Hare is completely screwed up, so none of the inbound flights are able to get in due to weather. This has been the case for over 4 days! It's not snowing there anymore!
So I get a phone call in the middle of the day saying that all flights today are delayed, and my 6pm flight is currently scheduled to leave between 9 and 10pm. I check the web site flight status, and it says the same.
Then I eat dinner, and at 6pm check the flight status on the web. It suddenly says that all is on time, so my flight is leaving in 30 minutes! I call the airport, and she says "the plane in due here in 5 minutes, and it could leave anywhere from on time up to 10pm.
How helpful.
So I leave, stop at work and call again for more details. Sure enough, I talk to someone who actually checks on a computer for the current status, and says it's scheduled to leave at 8:30.
Neat.
Now I'm just sitting here at work, waiting to go to the airport.

Ann and I watched Clerks II friday nite. I can't say I liked it as much as the first one, but it was still pretty good. It's worth renting anyway.

Posted by Aaron at 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)