11.25.2002
RETURN FROM EXILE
What a brutal week. Sunday morning got up early, hit the road for Albuquerque, wandered into the airport, got my boarding pass, made it through security, and all I had to do was - remove my shoes, my belt, my jacket, oh and my dignity as a human being too, but that was easy. say around slurping Quizno's soup for a half hour and then finally was airborne for the trip to Florida. Got to hang around Orlando's airport for 90 min. waiting for a shuttle van to wisk me to Daytona (which was a very non rowdy town the 2 1/2 days I was there), and checked into the hotel. Some ESPN, some roomservice and a hot bath almost made me feel human again.
Things got better Monday, as I attended to the task at hand which was hanging ot with educators, to discuss how they are spending your tax dollars in interesting ways. I assure you they are very interesting ways that have been devised to spend your tax dollars, but as far as effectiveness goes, that's anyone's guess. A nice group meal and several gin and tonics monday evening made me feel even more human than the night before, and I fell asleep to the sounds of John Madden's incomprehensible babbling. - I awoke, however well ahead of schedule when a "ruckus" erupted in the room next to mine. Much screaming and slamming of doors, things calmed down after a bit and i fought off the urge to call security. That is until :Ruckus part II" happened almost 60 min. to the second later. A quick call to the front desk, and a polite transfer to hotel security, and an explaination of the domestic disturbance that seemed to be going on, and things quieted down much quicker this time. I have no idea if security intervened, or if all the idiots next door collectively passed out, but at least I got a few more hours of uninteruppted sleep. What I really want to know is, if the hotel was as deserted as it seemed (and as staff told me it was) why the hell did they put someone in the room right next to me? I mean this is a 16 fstory beachfront hotel, not a fucking Red Roof Inn!
Tuesday brought yummy breakfast foods, and a much more relaxed day of meetings, and a non-shuttle based drive back to Orlando, where I checked out yet another fine hotel (fine in that it was right in the airport). To celebrate (that is, kill time), I supped on charred groud beef and a 10 dollar Margarita. I slept VERY well thank you.
Wed. brough another fun round of airport security, though I have discovered that early morning travelers seem to be scrutinized just a wee bit less than any other time. Odd because there are a lot less of us, so they could easily be more thourough accross the board. The mind reels at the nonsensical nature of airtravel in the new world order. Another two hour drive home to Gallup, and a fine job of collapsing by yours truly was but a mere pause on my weeks agenda. Though I did have time to discover that while I was away my DSL modem died. This is the second DSL modem I have lost in less than 3 months, and I am strting to really HATE MSN for legitimate reasons instead of all the wacky conspiracy theories that I usually cling to.
Thursday brough yet another drive into Albuquerque, this time for two days of seminars on Dreamweaver and Flash. Nothing really grounbreaking here, but it was useful to get a refresher on the interface. Truly though I could have skipped the flash seminar, and not missed a thing.
So If I seem a bit foggy to you in the next few days, forgive me, I'm just trying to readjust to the routine, and get my head together for the big push to the holidays.
go and tell me all about it
What a brutal week. Sunday morning got up early, hit the road for Albuquerque, wandered into the airport, got my boarding pass, made it through security, and all I had to do was - remove my shoes, my belt, my jacket, oh and my dignity as a human being too, but that was easy. say around slurping Quizno's soup for a half hour and then finally was airborne for the trip to Florida. Got to hang around Orlando's airport for 90 min. waiting for a shuttle van to wisk me to Daytona (which was a very non rowdy town the 2 1/2 days I was there), and checked into the hotel. Some ESPN, some roomservice and a hot bath almost made me feel human again.
Things got better Monday, as I attended to the task at hand which was hanging ot with educators, to discuss how they are spending your tax dollars in interesting ways. I assure you they are very interesting ways that have been devised to spend your tax dollars, but as far as effectiveness goes, that's anyone's guess. A nice group meal and several gin and tonics monday evening made me feel even more human than the night before, and I fell asleep to the sounds of John Madden's incomprehensible babbling. - I awoke, however well ahead of schedule when a "ruckus" erupted in the room next to mine. Much screaming and slamming of doors, things calmed down after a bit and i fought off the urge to call security. That is until :Ruckus part II" happened almost 60 min. to the second later. A quick call to the front desk, and a polite transfer to hotel security, and an explaination of the domestic disturbance that seemed to be going on, and things quieted down much quicker this time. I have no idea if security intervened, or if all the idiots next door collectively passed out, but at least I got a few more hours of uninteruppted sleep. What I really want to know is, if the hotel was as deserted as it seemed (and as staff told me it was) why the hell did they put someone in the room right next to me? I mean this is a 16 fstory beachfront hotel, not a fucking Red Roof Inn!
Tuesday brought yummy breakfast foods, and a much more relaxed day of meetings, and a non-shuttle based drive back to Orlando, where I checked out yet another fine hotel (fine in that it was right in the airport). To celebrate (that is, kill time), I supped on charred groud beef and a 10 dollar Margarita. I slept VERY well thank you.
Wed. brough another fun round of airport security, though I have discovered that early morning travelers seem to be scrutinized just a wee bit less than any other time. Odd because there are a lot less of us, so they could easily be more thourough accross the board. The mind reels at the nonsensical nature of airtravel in the new world order. Another two hour drive home to Gallup, and a fine job of collapsing by yours truly was but a mere pause on my weeks agenda. Though I did have time to discover that while I was away my DSL modem died. This is the second DSL modem I have lost in less than 3 months, and I am strting to really HATE MSN for legitimate reasons instead of all the wacky conspiracy theories that I usually cling to.
Thursday brough yet another drive into Albuquerque, this time for two days of seminars on Dreamweaver and Flash. Nothing really grounbreaking here, but it was useful to get a refresher on the interface. Truly though I could have skipped the flash seminar, and not missed a thing.
So If I seem a bit foggy to you in the next few days, forgive me, I'm just trying to readjust to the routine, and get my head together for the big push to the holidays.
go and tell me all about it
11.15.2002
UG!
That pretty much sums up how I'm feeling today. Very much like being asked to perform intricate physical feats while on a mild dose of horse tranquilizer. It's not really all that bad, but My mood is certainly on the side of sour, so the combination is a poor one. Particulary since it's friday. I should be all hippity hoppity, weekend's on its way, and instead I'm morbidly obsessing with this damn trip to Florida - How many people get upset about going to florida? I'ts just that logistically its a whole lot of flyin' and driving for a few days of chit chat. Tha't how I see it anyway, hopefully I'm wrong, and thee'll greet me at the airport with firetrucks and hookers. Well Firetrucks would be interesting anyway. The Library server is being very much not my friend today, I've been trying to re-index the database, which is a real nice way to say "clean it up". Usually this process takes about an hour or so. I'm heading into hour four of this task, and something seems very much not right. The thing that sucks is that the Library folks are among an elite corps of people here, who never fail to make me feel appreciated for the effort i put in for them, so it really aggravates me when I screw things up for them. Damn stupid concious. Why can't I be completely self absorbed like so many others around here? I attribute it to the last remaining vestiges of Catholic Guilt. Not a completely bad thing to have retained, but on a day like today, it only serves to enhance the inherent drudgery.
go and tell me all about it
That pretty much sums up how I'm feeling today. Very much like being asked to perform intricate physical feats while on a mild dose of horse tranquilizer. It's not really all that bad, but My mood is certainly on the side of sour, so the combination is a poor one. Particulary since it's friday. I should be all hippity hoppity, weekend's on its way, and instead I'm morbidly obsessing with this damn trip to Florida - How many people get upset about going to florida? I'ts just that logistically its a whole lot of flyin' and driving for a few days of chit chat. Tha't how I see it anyway, hopefully I'm wrong, and thee'll greet me at the airport with firetrucks and hookers. Well Firetrucks would be interesting anyway. The Library server is being very much not my friend today, I've been trying to re-index the database, which is a real nice way to say "clean it up". Usually this process takes about an hour or so. I'm heading into hour four of this task, and something seems very much not right. The thing that sucks is that the Library folks are among an elite corps of people here, who never fail to make me feel appreciated for the effort i put in for them, so it really aggravates me when I screw things up for them. Damn stupid concious. Why can't I be completely self absorbed like so many others around here? I attribute it to the last remaining vestiges of Catholic Guilt. Not a completely bad thing to have retained, but on a day like today, it only serves to enhance the inherent drudgery.
go and tell me all about it
11.13.2002
| /\/\ s0 l33t
Being stuck in the middle of nowhere, or a bit west of nowhere depending on your perspective, leaves you with a limited number of options when it comes to spending free time. I ejoy the outdoors, but I hate the cold. The bike is pretty much done for the year, and I don't see any icelimbing or winter camping in my future. In my mind, winter and camping are mutually exclisive terms.
So what to do with my time......
It's somewhere between couch potato and geek. I enjoy the TV, mainly because I can yell at it and never worry about it snapping and killing me for it one day. But even more of my time these days is spent on line. And much of that time is spent playing Unreal Tournament.
I've been playing Video Games regularly since the days of the Atari VCS (which some of you younger kids may remember as the Atari 2600), and there were 2 arcades withing walking distance of my house by the time I was 12. So when you read articles in Businessweek about how demographics for Gamers are skewing older and older, I'm partly to blame. Between my Atari, my C-64, Amiga 500, and finally PC's I have been playing games on Cathode Ray tubes for about a quarter of a century now, and I see no reason to quit. But back to Unreal Tournament (UT for Short).
UT is a first Person Shooter, which is to say the game is played from a first person perspective, you don't see yourself, per-se except for the extension of your hand and any particular weapon you might be deploying at any given time. The goal breaks down to basically 2 game types that I play regularly - Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, there are variations, but these are the two most common types. Deathmatch is a race to see how quickly you can score a predetermined number of kills, and Capture the flag involves runing to your opponents base, getting their flag, and returning it to your base without them grabbing your flag. I played Unreal Tournament for some number of months as a stand alone game. It was plenty fun. But since I got DSL in March 2001, I have become full on obsessed with this game. Beacause now instead of playing a program as an oppponent, I get to play with real people. It completely changes the dynamic of the game, and in my mind is where the future of gaming lies - period. Stand alones will always be there, but the bread and butter of the gaming industry (and it is a lot of bread and butter - videogames grossed more than hollywood last year). But what i find most interesting is the social dynamic that goes on in these games, as you can type messages to your team mates and opponents as you run around laying waste to all that you can. Anyone familiar with Instant messaging is knowledgeable of shorthand lol=laughing out loud, ty=thankyou, IMHO= in my humble opinion, and so on, but in games it goes a step further - i'm talking about l33tsp43|< - or in plain english 'leetspeak' - I guess after typing on a keyboard for so long, some folks got tired with the same old same old, and strted using the alternate charachters, and numbers to represent traditional text. What amazes me about its poularty, is that I find it incredibly inefficient. I understand the economy of lol, but to write something as simple as L4/\/\3rz takes 3 extra keystrokes than writing lamers - add it up, and the economy is completely blow in the other direction. It's a weird phenomenon, and sure there are more than a few English teachers trying to figure it out right now, for me, I don't practice it outside of pointing out I have a basic understanding of it, but still sometimes b3l|\|g l337 0\/\/nz d00d!
go and tell me all about it
Being stuck in the middle of nowhere, or a bit west of nowhere depending on your perspective, leaves you with a limited number of options when it comes to spending free time. I ejoy the outdoors, but I hate the cold. The bike is pretty much done for the year, and I don't see any icelimbing or winter camping in my future. In my mind, winter and camping are mutually exclisive terms.
So what to do with my time......
It's somewhere between couch potato and geek. I enjoy the TV, mainly because I can yell at it and never worry about it snapping and killing me for it one day. But even more of my time these days is spent on line. And much of that time is spent playing Unreal Tournament.
I've been playing Video Games regularly since the days of the Atari VCS (which some of you younger kids may remember as the Atari 2600), and there were 2 arcades withing walking distance of my house by the time I was 12. So when you read articles in Businessweek about how demographics for Gamers are skewing older and older, I'm partly to blame. Between my Atari, my C-64, Amiga 500, and finally PC's I have been playing games on Cathode Ray tubes for about a quarter of a century now, and I see no reason to quit. But back to Unreal Tournament (UT for Short).
UT is a first Person Shooter, which is to say the game is played from a first person perspective, you don't see yourself, per-se except for the extension of your hand and any particular weapon you might be deploying at any given time. The goal breaks down to basically 2 game types that I play regularly - Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, there are variations, but these are the two most common types. Deathmatch is a race to see how quickly you can score a predetermined number of kills, and Capture the flag involves runing to your opponents base, getting their flag, and returning it to your base without them grabbing your flag. I played Unreal Tournament for some number of months as a stand alone game. It was plenty fun. But since I got DSL in March 2001, I have become full on obsessed with this game. Beacause now instead of playing a program as an oppponent, I get to play with real people. It completely changes the dynamic of the game, and in my mind is where the future of gaming lies - period. Stand alones will always be there, but the bread and butter of the gaming industry (and it is a lot of bread and butter - videogames grossed more than hollywood last year). But what i find most interesting is the social dynamic that goes on in these games, as you can type messages to your team mates and opponents as you run around laying waste to all that you can. Anyone familiar with Instant messaging is knowledgeable of shorthand lol=laughing out loud, ty=thankyou, IMHO= in my humble opinion, and so on, but in games it goes a step further - i'm talking about l33tsp43|< - or in plain english 'leetspeak' - I guess after typing on a keyboard for so long, some folks got tired with the same old same old, and strted using the alternate charachters, and numbers to represent traditional text. What amazes me about its poularty, is that I find it incredibly inefficient. I understand the economy of lol, but to write something as simple as L4/\/\3rz takes 3 extra keystrokes than writing lamers - add it up, and the economy is completely blow in the other direction. It's a weird phenomenon, and sure there are more than a few English teachers trying to figure it out right now, for me, I don't practice it outside of pointing out I have a basic understanding of it, but still sometimes b3l|\|g l337 0\/\/nz d00d!
go and tell me all about it
11.12.2002
ADULT LEARNERS
I like to think that most people fit the definition of "Life Long Learners", that is they are always expanding their knowledge and understanding of various topics of interest, be it for personal or proffessional gain.
Then there are ADULT LEARNERS.
This is, in my opinion, Colleges answer to "Special Class" as a group these are some of the most infuriating, whiny, demanding group of students you will ever encounter. This is saying a lot, seeing as how today's breed of college student is more likely to launch a protest over parking spaces, than any globaly relevant issue. My first encounter with the Adult Learner was when I attended CCAC, after having uncerimoniously been evicted from Pitt, for, ahem, -not applying myslef. (Well not applying myself to anything but playing 9 Ball in the Union anyway) The Adult Learner on the surface is a Nobel Creature. They are well beyond their primary schooling years, and have for varying reasons decided to tackle the University Enviornment, in most cases as a response to economic emancipation. I laud them on their efforts. However, certain common traits have been observed by me about them over the years - At CCAC, at Duquesne University where I received my B.A., and M.S. degrees, and most recently at my current place of employ, which most resembles a Community College in structure. Here are the dominant beliefs of the ADULT LEARNER
My "Life Experience" should;
a. compensate for my inability to meet a deadline
b. automatically give me better favor with the instructor
c. Make me infallible on almost any topic
I'll break it down further. I appreciate the dificulty that must come with making a radical life change, hell I've done it myself. Let me tell you, going from living with the parents in comfortable middle-class land, to being debt riddled, and working part time as a Janitor (with a degree - no less), just to make ends meet is a shock nobody can prepare you for. Rub dirt in it. Life aint fair, and if you want to eat, you will have to find a way to pay for the ramen.
I appreciate that to move from laborer to academic is an equally uncomfortable situation for many. But to tell me that digging ditches give you any insight into corporate script writing, or statistics is laughable. Admidt that you need to build a new skill set. shut up and take lots of notes. I don't care about your past unless it is RELEVANT!
Oh yes one more thing, just cause you raised/are raising a child, does not give you a fucking Psych degree, does not excuse you from your respnsibilities of doing the work on the same schedule as everyone else, does not mean you can modify the assignment to suit your whims, does not mean the instructor must cater to your other respnsibilities. Lots of students have other responsibilities too, just cause yours happens to make a mess in it's pants is not anyone else's problem but yours. I adapting to the rigors of a University education requires too much adaptation by the institution, you really need to look elsewhere for enlightenment, because when all is said and done, it's not their fucking problem.
go and tell me all about it
I like to think that most people fit the definition of "Life Long Learners", that is they are always expanding their knowledge and understanding of various topics of interest, be it for personal or proffessional gain.
Then there are ADULT LEARNERS.
This is, in my opinion, Colleges answer to "Special Class" as a group these are some of the most infuriating, whiny, demanding group of students you will ever encounter. This is saying a lot, seeing as how today's breed of college student is more likely to launch a protest over parking spaces, than any globaly relevant issue. My first encounter with the Adult Learner was when I attended CCAC, after having uncerimoniously been evicted from Pitt, for, ahem, -not applying myslef. (Well not applying myself to anything but playing 9 Ball in the Union anyway) The Adult Learner on the surface is a Nobel Creature. They are well beyond their primary schooling years, and have for varying reasons decided to tackle the University Enviornment, in most cases as a response to economic emancipation. I laud them on their efforts. However, certain common traits have been observed by me about them over the years - At CCAC, at Duquesne University where I received my B.A., and M.S. degrees, and most recently at my current place of employ, which most resembles a Community College in structure. Here are the dominant beliefs of the ADULT LEARNER
My "Life Experience" should;
a. compensate for my inability to meet a deadline
b. automatically give me better favor with the instructor
c. Make me infallible on almost any topic
I'll break it down further. I appreciate the dificulty that must come with making a radical life change, hell I've done it myself. Let me tell you, going from living with the parents in comfortable middle-class land, to being debt riddled, and working part time as a Janitor (with a degree - no less), just to make ends meet is a shock nobody can prepare you for. Rub dirt in it. Life aint fair, and if you want to eat, you will have to find a way to pay for the ramen.
I appreciate that to move from laborer to academic is an equally uncomfortable situation for many. But to tell me that digging ditches give you any insight into corporate script writing, or statistics is laughable. Admidt that you need to build a new skill set. shut up and take lots of notes. I don't care about your past unless it is RELEVANT!
Oh yes one more thing, just cause you raised/are raising a child, does not give you a fucking Psych degree, does not excuse you from your respnsibilities of doing the work on the same schedule as everyone else, does not mean you can modify the assignment to suit your whims, does not mean the instructor must cater to your other respnsibilities. Lots of students have other responsibilities too, just cause yours happens to make a mess in it's pants is not anyone else's problem but yours. I adapting to the rigors of a University education requires too much adaptation by the institution, you really need to look elsewhere for enlightenment, because when all is said and done, it's not their fucking problem.
go and tell me all about it
11.08.2002
CONTRADICTORY POSITIONS
I have never put myself up as the posterboy for overtime. The fact of the matter is, that I believe that people who willingly work overtime with no compensation, on a regular basis (i'm talking several times a week, every week, kinda foks) really fuck up the workplace for the rest of us who like to go home. Home after all, is the only reason I have a job in the first place - so i can pay for my home and all the stuff in it. Still Found myself in an 11 hour marathon yesterday, no lunch, and a few smoke breaks to keep me going. It was for a good cause. I was helping one of our faculty members prepare her electronic portfolio for tenure review. See I guess, not so long ago, you pretty much had to put together a shitload of paperwork, organize it into a big three ring binder, and then make like 7 copies of it. Kinda silly to do it that way these days when you have the power of cheap cd-burners, and adobe acrobat software. Throw an HTML front end on to it, to give it some continuity, and bingo! a sweet presentation. As an added flourish, I set the CD up so it would autorun - further idiot proofing the experience.
Now here's the ironic part - it almost didn't happen. See this instructor is a teacher in the Bus. Technology department. - Computer Science, and various other PC related subjects. She was originally told that she could not do an electronic portfolio. If you follow this blog with any regularity, you know I've been to a few national conferences this year. ALL anyone talks about at these things is ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIOS - Hello!? One more way Gallup sits in the stone ages, because of short sighted morons, who want to pretty much make decisions based on the fact that they can - power for its own sake, i'd say.
As an aside, I later foundout that the mandate came from a professor on campus who's primary computer is an Apple IIe - I shit you not.
Well luckily, our protagonist in this struggle did what anyone would do in this situation, she went over his head for approval, and got it. I like to think that people can work out differences and come to reasonable compromises, but sometimes you really need to fuck people over.
go and tell me all about it
I have never put myself up as the posterboy for overtime. The fact of the matter is, that I believe that people who willingly work overtime with no compensation, on a regular basis (i'm talking several times a week, every week, kinda foks) really fuck up the workplace for the rest of us who like to go home. Home after all, is the only reason I have a job in the first place - so i can pay for my home and all the stuff in it. Still Found myself in an 11 hour marathon yesterday, no lunch, and a few smoke breaks to keep me going. It was for a good cause. I was helping one of our faculty members prepare her electronic portfolio for tenure review. See I guess, not so long ago, you pretty much had to put together a shitload of paperwork, organize it into a big three ring binder, and then make like 7 copies of it. Kinda silly to do it that way these days when you have the power of cheap cd-burners, and adobe acrobat software. Throw an HTML front end on to it, to give it some continuity, and bingo! a sweet presentation. As an added flourish, I set the CD up so it would autorun - further idiot proofing the experience.
Now here's the ironic part - it almost didn't happen. See this instructor is a teacher in the Bus. Technology department. - Computer Science, and various other PC related subjects. She was originally told that she could not do an electronic portfolio. If you follow this blog with any regularity, you know I've been to a few national conferences this year. ALL anyone talks about at these things is ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIOS - Hello!? One more way Gallup sits in the stone ages, because of short sighted morons, who want to pretty much make decisions based on the fact that they can - power for its own sake, i'd say.
As an aside, I later foundout that the mandate came from a professor on campus who's primary computer is an Apple IIe - I shit you not.
Well luckily, our protagonist in this struggle did what anyone would do in this situation, she went over his head for approval, and got it. I like to think that people can work out differences and come to reasonable compromises, but sometimes you really need to fuck people over.
go and tell me all about it
11.07.2002
YIKES
Not that I was really looking for ine, but here's another reason to dislike New Mexico. Next thing I know, they'll be opening up a leper colony down the street or something, sheese!
So along with all my playing on the G3, I've been finally ripping my CD's to MP3 format. Said CDs have been sitting in cardboard boxes since May, when we moved, and I have been, uh, distracted. It's been fun going through the boxes though, I've got a few thousand tracks on my work and home computers, so it's not like I've been starving for variety, but still, there are some real gems in those boxes I had almost forgotten about. The Breeder's Safari EP, Corrosion of Conformity, Sunny Day Real Estate, Inspiral Carpets, King Missile - Damn! how did I go so long without craving some of this stuff? Well it's all good now, and still several hundred discs to go, so I'm looking forward to some more surprises, as well as some old favorites.
Speaking of all things music, if you have speakers on your PC, you need to check this out. Thanks to Mr. Brown for pointing me to this one. There are some others there as well, but I think this one takes the cake.
go and tell me all about it
Not that I was really looking for ine, but here's another reason to dislike New Mexico. Next thing I know, they'll be opening up a leper colony down the street or something, sheese!
So along with all my playing on the G3, I've been finally ripping my CD's to MP3 format. Said CDs have been sitting in cardboard boxes since May, when we moved, and I have been, uh, distracted. It's been fun going through the boxes though, I've got a few thousand tracks on my work and home computers, so it's not like I've been starving for variety, but still, there are some real gems in those boxes I had almost forgotten about. The Breeder's Safari EP, Corrosion of Conformity, Sunny Day Real Estate, Inspiral Carpets, King Missile - Damn! how did I go so long without craving some of this stuff? Well it's all good now, and still several hundred discs to go, so I'm looking forward to some more surprises, as well as some old favorites.
Speaking of all things music, if you have speakers on your PC, you need to check this out. Thanks to Mr. Brown for pointing me to this one. There are some others there as well, but I think this one takes the cake.
go and tell me all about it
11.05.2002
OUT FROM UNDER A ROCK
Well, dear reader(s), seems I got myself into quite the technical quandry last week. Our campus library server (which is running NT 4.0, sp6 and IIS 4 for those of you who need the gory details), tanked. It started out as an innocent database connectivity problem, but upon reboot, I was greeted with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. To add to the mirth, it added in a nice indecipherable memory dump message, just to remind me of howlittle I know about computers when all is said and done. After several almosts, and a couple of maybes, Burley Mike and I got it up and running again. Seems that there was a combined problem of a dead hard drive and a very tempermental RAID controller. Which means that we spent much of our time trying to fix things that were not broken in the first pace. Oh how I long for the days of pen and paper.
That in a nutshell is why you have not seen a post on this site in a while. Oh, I did write one yesterday, but apparently when blogger tells you it updated, it aint always so...
Dave has me all a tizzy over his new setup at work. A G4 with dual processors and dual 21" monitors - very tasty. ALl the more appropriate that i ran accross this, which made me think of Dave immediately, and not because of the Mac reference either.
Did I mention I hit the "Rolling Rock" B-day this past sunday? for those not aquainted with Latrobe's second most famous export, next to Arnold Palmer, Rolling Rock Beer has the number 33 on it's bottles, for no apparent reason other than to make drunk people wonder about one more useless bit of trivia. 33 years old. I have to say I'm pretty nonplussed over this one, partly because there was nobody around to give me a hard time about it, and partly because this weekend was pretty much like every other weekend in Gallup, which is to say quiet, and football filled. Mikey called me from Boston, though, and that was a very good thing indeed. I haven't seen him in quite some time. He's in the home stretch of getting a PHD in Psychology, and that's some crazy shit I tell you. He says that he is in the planning stages of a long, and much needed vacation, and Gallup is on the list of potential destinations. It will be great to have him out should it all pan out. He's the smartest fucker I know, plays a mean guitar, and has a great sense of humor and humility.
I'm rambling again, I need to cut that shit out. OK one more thing, I now have all three machines at the house networked, and im now in the process of learning all the command line trickery of OS X. And apps I need to get me some apps for that puppy. iTunes is way cool, but I kind of cant see just using it as a jukebox - seems a bit like overkill to me.
go and tell me all about it
Well, dear reader(s), seems I got myself into quite the technical quandry last week. Our campus library server (which is running NT 4.0, sp6 and IIS 4 for those of you who need the gory details), tanked. It started out as an innocent database connectivity problem, but upon reboot, I was greeted with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. To add to the mirth, it added in a nice indecipherable memory dump message, just to remind me of howlittle I know about computers when all is said and done. After several almosts, and a couple of maybes, Burley Mike and I got it up and running again. Seems that there was a combined problem of a dead hard drive and a very tempermental RAID controller. Which means that we spent much of our time trying to fix things that were not broken in the first pace. Oh how I long for the days of pen and paper.
That in a nutshell is why you have not seen a post on this site in a while. Oh, I did write one yesterday, but apparently when blogger tells you it updated, it aint always so...
Dave has me all a tizzy over his new setup at work. A G4 with dual processors and dual 21" monitors - very tasty. ALl the more appropriate that i ran accross this, which made me think of Dave immediately, and not because of the Mac reference either.
Did I mention I hit the "Rolling Rock" B-day this past sunday? for those not aquainted with Latrobe's second most famous export, next to Arnold Palmer, Rolling Rock Beer has the number 33 on it's bottles, for no apparent reason other than to make drunk people wonder about one more useless bit of trivia. 33 years old. I have to say I'm pretty nonplussed over this one, partly because there was nobody around to give me a hard time about it, and partly because this weekend was pretty much like every other weekend in Gallup, which is to say quiet, and football filled. Mikey called me from Boston, though, and that was a very good thing indeed. I haven't seen him in quite some time. He's in the home stretch of getting a PHD in Psychology, and that's some crazy shit I tell you. He says that he is in the planning stages of a long, and much needed vacation, and Gallup is on the list of potential destinations. It will be great to have him out should it all pan out. He's the smartest fucker I know, plays a mean guitar, and has a great sense of humor and humility.
I'm rambling again, I need to cut that shit out. OK one more thing, I now have all three machines at the house networked, and im now in the process of learning all the command line trickery of OS X. And apps I need to get me some apps for that puppy. iTunes is way cool, but I kind of cant see just using it as a jukebox - seems a bit like overkill to me.
go and tell me all about it
