Category: life

Bring it on Osama!

The ACC party at Dream last night was lots of fun. In attendance were: the mayor (allegedly), ex-Terp Juan Dixon (tall), FSU cheerleaders (whom I will marry one day), Smashmouth (…), and Buzz! Smashmouth is not my favorite band, to say the least. In fact it was pretty telling that their best songs were the two Van Halen covers — “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” and “Runnin’ With The Devil” — and the seminal party favorite House O’ Pain jumping song. But hey, we all had a good time.

Here is the equivalent of 17000 words: pictures.

Last night I had dinner with Joe, Jessica, and Jerome. This alliterative bunch was nice enough to treat me to dinner for getting older. Good food, good times. I only mention it because Jerome told me I had to blog it. I think that is now the standard price of admission.

In other news, SounDriver might be over for good now. Bass player extraordinaire Paul “Two Hands” C. has announced today that he will be taking a hiatus with all of the looming business and marriage commitments he is facing. He will be sorely missed. We haven’t officially decided what to do next.

And tonight is the mayor’s ACC party at Dream. I don’t have any idea how dressy the affair is supposed to be, so I think I’m pretty close to the average of casual and suit: fashionable monotone sweater with exposed collar and slacks (Scorpio-style jeans and sportcoat also acceptable). Anyway it should be good: Smashmouth, that’s the band with the “rockstar” song (according to the organizer), will be providing music along with DJ Rob Or Some Other Bland First Name, and drinks are free…ly obtained by plunking down lots of money at the cash bar.

So this weekend I made my first trip to Atlantic City, aka “The Bank,” with some other GT alums. This was my first visit to a real casino, and the good news is that I still have my house. In fact, I walked away from the $15 tables with $50 extra, so my hours spent Friday night cramming on Blackjack basic strategy seems to have worked out (also, I got lucky). What is remarkable to me is how many people were playing by superstition rather than by statistics, and how prevalent is the spectre of gambling addiction. How anyone can enjoy feeding quarters into the one arm bandit for hours is beyond me.

Anyway, we spent most of the time at Trump Plaza but also walked up the boardwalk a bit. I can’t say that the gleam of golden buildings and electronic symphonies of the slots has filled me with any more desire to spend the rest of my weekends working out a flawed system to beat the house, but now I am at least slightly more inclined to visit the tacky wasteland of neon that is Vegas someday.

Saturday afternoon we went to see the Boardwalk Bullies take on some other unknown regional hockey team. It was a great game as minor league hockey goes, except in the defensive arena as the final was 5-4 in overtime. There was only one fight, no blood, but plenty of good checks against the glass.

Congratulations to Wake for managing to not lose to NC State and giving Tech the first round bye. The tournament is up here this week; I don’t think I’ll be able to secure a ticket but I am going to a party at Dream on Wednesday for ACC fans. It should not be on the hook.

My notes from this week’s conference:

One thing that struck me during the presentations is that people, mostly the ones in suits, kept making a distinction between “geeks” (using that word) and management types. I’m pretty sure that ‘geek’ as a badge of honor has gone out of vogue. Or has it?

This week I am in training for a law enforcement standard XML data model. Borrrring. It’s like returning to some of the poorer college classes where the lecturer has zero charisma and continually appeals for audience participation to deaden the empty echoes of his droning voice. Like any good audience, though we know all the answers to the questions, we refrain from speaking up so that we may watch him squirm. On the plus side of this seminar: free food!

Last month, without comment because I forgot about it, my blog turned two years old. What a medium-length, not particularly strange trip it has been.

Also, this weekend my body turns 29 years old. Ancient! I’ve spent a small amount of time mulling what to do with my life now. I didn’t expect to spend more than a couple of years up here in NoVA, yet now I have a house here and a successful career. But do I want to be here five years from now? I’m not so sure. At any rate I feel like I should be doing something, like getting a master’s, learning to rollerblade, or applying for my Brazillian visa.

Another week is upon us and the march of time brutally continues.

Somehow or other I bit the back of my tongue. I think my tongue is too large for my mouth. Anyway, this is a source of incredible pain whenever I try to swallow and it apparently takes a long time to heal. I hate life.

I started doing my taxes via H&R Block’s webapp. They are mostly complete but I had to quit until I could go through my filing “system” and locate last year’s car tax and some charitable donation receipts. H&R’s site will hold onto your data for a while until you finish it, but you don’t pay for it until the end. So they sent me an email about a week ago entitled, “Please finish your taxes.” This week’s email: “Do your taxes now.” Suspect next week’s will be along the lines of, “Listen bitch, you best get ’em done or there’ll be trouble. Don’t make me come over there.”

Elevators chime once when going up and twice when going down. I don’t know if this is written down in a standard somewhere, but go hang out by an elevator sometime and you will see that it is true. After I learned this factoid, I began using the auditory cue more often than looking to see which way the arrow was pointing. But the elevators here at work tend to use the “if they really feel like it” algorithm for chiming twice on the way down, so I find myself going the wrong way a lot. Not a big deal, but the elevators here are so notoriously slow that making such a mistake can set you back three or four hours. No, they won’t let us take the stairs.

This weekend nothing much was going on. I painted my living room, so at some point, perhaps after I finish painting my bedroom as well, I shall post before and after pictures.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a picture of a Jackson 5 artifact that I had found in the recesses of my home. I’m now ready to tell the story in a circuitous fashion.

Long time readers, if such creatures exist, will know that for a while now I have been using MythTV. To recap, this glorious piece of software is like a better Tivo for your PC. I built a machine to run it and have gone to some effort to make it less obvious that there is a hulking computer sitting in my living room (spending the cost of a Tivo on the case alone). For the most part, the illusion is pretty good.

Like all other PVRs, Myth needs to download the guide data periodically, and therefore needs a connection to the internet. Until now, this has been provided by a cable that snaked down my stairs from my bedroom to the living room. While this is great for comedic effect (i.e. for other people who get to see my un-coordinated ass trip over it all the time), I’ve been told it isn’t the most pleasing aesthetically. I’ve tried dispensing with the wire by throwing a wireless bridge in my living room, but I would get dropouts of the connection all the time, and anyway that setup was too low-bandwidth to do fun things like stream television across the LAN so that I can watch TV in my room on my laptop. So, the only thing to do is to install real live wire like people did back in the day.

It became clear to me early on that the proper route would start from the (real) wall near my (computer) firewall, go up into the attic, across the attic, down a wall somewhere, all the way into the crawlspace, along the floor, and then back up a wall into the living room. So I went exploring in the attic and found a couple of old antenna wires that were clearly not in use anymore, and determined that at least one of them somehow made it into the dark dungeon-like depth of oblivion that is my crawlspace. I could trace the start and end of this cable but couldn’t figure out how they got from the second storey attic over to the first storey coat closet. (Rather inelegantly, the installers of this cable had just run it straight through the back of the coat closet by punching a hole in the top and bottom. I had noticed this before, and when I had my house carpeted, I cut the wire and made sure the carpeter covered up the hole in the floor.)

I estimated the path of this cable and decided it either went along the plumbing of the guest bathroom or behind the linen closet next to it. So I took a good look at this closet and noticed that there was a false back to it. Part of the wall was a big sheet of plywood that was just squeezed tightly between some crown molding. I ripped out the shelves and wrenched it free, and found a secret passage! It was just like Chronicles of Narnia, except without the lion and all the whiny bitches. In this second attic is where I found the head of Michael Jackson emblazoned on some cheap plastic. Also, this was clearly the route of the antenna wire, so this is how I would run the ethernet.

Howard dropped by on Saturday with all his expertise to help me take on this task, and we got it done in about an hour not counting the work that is still remaining. As it turns out, pulling wire is pretty straightforward: you just cut a hole in the wall, drill through a stud, and pull the wire through. Repeat until you reach the destination. Obviously, there is some collateral damage here, so you must be prepared as I am to patch all of the holes (three in my case) and paint the associated walls. In this process, I was surprised to learn that there was something even uglier behind the flowery wallpaper border in my bedroom: painted red hearts and blue leaves. It needs some green clover and purple horseshoes.

I now need to pick out wall colors for my living and bedrooms. I have one of these sheets from Behr and it reads like a coffee shop menu: Brown Bread, Cinnamon Spice, Pumpkin Butter, Cup of Cocoa, Toasted Grain, Sweet Marzipan, Butter Cookie, Baked Scone, Swiss Coffee, Warm Nutmeg, Vanilla Cream. I feel left out. They are missing some of my favorite colors here: Steak Prepared Medium, Pepperoni Pizza With Extra Cheese, The Number 6 From Wendy’s, and Another Shot of Tequila.

No, not referring to that football game that I didn’t watch. But yesterday was so nice out for the two or three hours that I spent outside my lair. And here is what I did: I cut a tree the hell up. Listen: on Saturday I had bought a chainsaw with the intention of cleaning up my shrubs which are nearly six feet tall now and horribly overgrown. I don’t think they have been pruned ever. So yesterday, a bright sunny day in the 60s, I fired the sucker up. Soon after, bush number one of four was reduced to a stump. At this point I learned a little bit about a chainsaw because the chain popped off and I had to fix it. Four times. So, I gave up after the first shrub but it was still a fun expenditure of energy and cursing.

Around my house, these kinds of projects are always a sort of trip back in time. Here are the things that I found inside the shrub:

• Five decomposing tennis balls
• One red plastic ball
• One Falcon brand “Super Sound” air horn canister
• One label, Diet Rite cola, circa 1983

Apropos of a certain trial starting today, here is a little bit of past Americana that I found in a secret passageway within my house this weekend (I’ll write more about that later). I have no idea what this used to be.