February 24, 2005

The router went down again just minutes after I had gone to bed for the evening. That sucks. So this morning I installed the fourth router that we have here to see if there is any chance that it will work any differently than the others before it. I find that to be very unlikely. If this one goes down, then I have to start the very difficult process or rebuilding the whole thing which is a royal pain, let me tell you.

Because the line went down last night after I went to bed, the SUSE install that I was working on online stopped about 2/3rds the way along. Now that is annoying.

While I was working down in my office, I finished watching Down With Love, what a weird movie that was. Min said that it got all bizarre at the end and it really does. It is all over the place. But it is very entertaining. Unfortunately we weren’t able to find it in widescreen so we have a pan and scan version of the movie. I can’t believe that they still make this stuff in that old format.

I was told today that I am the top pick for a job in Albany. Ha ha, right, like I will ever get a job in Albany. We have been through this many times before. The job is a 2-3 year deal out there and I would be a senior engineer on a big state migration project. It wouldn’t be very much fun but it would pay the bills. The recruiter that I am dealing with has a really hard time with English so there are a lot of details that I am not very clear on. I know that it would start in about three weeks. But, to put the job into perspective, I have put more thought into writing this paragraph about the job than I have put into the job itself. I am very sure that they will not call me again and that I will never hear another thing about it. Because that is just how it works.

Here is an article proving that Canadians are weird. And here is another one to prove that we are too.

Well, I spoke too soon on that Albany job, they called back already today. I still don’t believe that it will go anywhere – but I am surprised just how much phone traffic there has been about it. They said that they are going to call in a few hours too.

I am really exhausted today. I don’t know why but I am just really, really tired. This happens sometimes. I think that it has something to do with having coffee in the afternoon. Everytime that I have coffee when I am at home I get really tired and can barely function. I think that the caffeine dehydrates me and makes me feel really tired.

That computer that I am installing crashed on its own this time and so I had to start over for a third time. Third time is a charm, I hope. It takes so many hours to get one of these older computers installed that a few crashed can be a real set back.

I decided to try turning the SGL Archives into a regular word processing document to see how long it would be in that, more traditinal, context. It turned out to be, in Times New Roman 12pt Font, 524 pages long (this is only up through December 2004.) Or… 335569 words! I even turned in into a PDF document… of over 18MB in size! I had no idea that I had been writing so much over the years. I have really become a prolific writer, apparently, even if not a good one. If that was to be condensed to a novel sized book, it would be close to 800 pages or so! Think about that when you tell people that you have sat down and read SGL! I have heard of people reading the site from beginning to end before. That is no small undertaking. This has become a major literary milestone.

I got a call from a person in Groveland that I have been supporting and I had to run back out there this afternoon. Just before I headed out, dad emailed me and is taking Min and I out to dinner tomorrow night at Cracker Barrel in Henrietta to get the Friday night fish fry for my birthday.

Min did a ton of cleaning today and the upstairs is really looking good. She did a bunch of work on our bedroom which has been a complete disaster for as long as I can remember. It is really nice to have a bedroom that isn’t a mess. She even did laundry today too.

We went out to Walmart to do some shopping. Min wanted to get some picture frames and some curtains for the living room because our side windows have been left exposed all of this time. We picked up some movies while we were there, surprise, surprise. We weren’t going to get anything but Disney and Studio Ghibli have just released a number of their classics and you get a free movie if you bought all three at the same time so how could we resist? We picked up The Cat Returns, Porco Rosso and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind which is a real classic that they talk a lot about in my history of Anime book. And, in the bargain bin, we also picked out Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th which has to be completely awful but it has a few good people in it like Tom Arnold and Majandra Delfino from Roswell.

We got home and had PB&J for dinner. Sounds like we were being cheezy but we really like eating PB&J.

While we were at Walmart, apparently, the router went down again. This was the first time that the fourth router went down. Now I have to move on to the next phase of trying to get that unit working.

Min came down to the basement and sat down at one of the computers that I have set up for the school to start working on her curriculum for tomorrow.

The other day, when Min and I went over to pick up Jeremy so that we could watch some Star Trek, I got hit by a door on my elbow. We were worried that it had fractured my elbow because it hurt so badly. We ended up being pretty sure that that didn’t happen but my elbow is still bothering me today, several days later. It doesn’t feel broken but it definitely hurts still. I hope that it isn’t broken, that would suck.

Dad IM’d me tonight to tell me that his car is dead again. He thinks that his alternator seized on him which caused his belt to burn up which caused his engine to overheat. He says that the car has 108,000 miles on it (that is 108.000 to our German audience) and that it should be having these kinds of problems by now but it seems like an awful lot of problems to me.

Grandma is on some medication for her ears that is working. She is able to hear well enough tonight that she was able to use the phone. So she is much happier now.

I have decided that I need to start posting some of my non-SGL work to SGL so that people have access to some of the stuff that I have written. It isn’t anything exciting but I do write stuff from time to time and it would be at least partially useful if it was available online. So, I am going to, in the next few days, post an essay concerning computer education to SGL. I will let you know when I put it up.

Ok, so apparently McDonalds has gone completely out of their minds and has recently begun an advertising campaign to get people to have sex with their hamburgers. No, I’m not kidding. Do a quick web search on “McDonald’s I’d hit it” and you will find tons of links to places ripping on McDonald’s for either being so gross or so dumb. For those who don’t know, “I’d hit it” means “I would like to have sexual relations with it.” Andy commented on McDonald’s other poor advertising choice of recently trademarking “‘m Lovin’ It”… um that just isn’t right. He also made a rude comment about happy meals. So, here is a link to some new “proposed” McDonald’s banner ads that are freakin’ hilarious. And, just so you don’t think that this is just a joke, here is a link to a site hosting a copy of McDonald’s actual banner ad. Notice the guy looking inappriately at his food. There are a number of funny links backing up this story. And here is a link to a the Urban Dictionary which explains what this all means. Someone needs to talk to McDonalds and explain that this is not going to make us want to eat this stuff. I am very glad that I am a vegetarian.

Min wrapped up getting ready for her class tomorrow at about a quarter till one in the morning. We were pretty tired and we have to get up in the morning and get down to the school in Castile so we decided to head off to bed. Tomorrow is likely to be a very long day so we need our rest.

I almost forgot, it is after midnight so… happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me…

Okay, just for Wil Wheaton, here is one final and completely unnecessary link for the evening. Everyone’s favorite television actor, William Shatner! (By the way, everyone does know the dictionary definition of Shatner, right?) 😉

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