Where there is light, there is darkness...

So you may have noticed ---

2008-12-03T23:12:39Z

My LoudTwitter posts stopped the other day. This was in fact on purpose. I'm tired of them in my personal journal. I do like the idea of them being culled together like that and posted somewhere, but here is not really where I prefer them to be. So I have a new personal site that part of it culls together -all- of my blogs into one, and I think I'm going to effectively redirect loudtwitter to that. Except it's not working so instead I think I might write a quick drupal plugin to auto-cull twitter posts into itself. =) Anyway, I'm going to go back and wipe all my old loudtwitter posts at some point from this journal.

hahahahahah!!!

2008-09-25T02:21:25Z

Copied from a commenter on wral.com because I thought it was hilarious:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me this is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully, Minister of Treasury Paulson

Unnerving Dream

2008-03-13T12:03:30Z

Last night I had this dream where Jessie, myself, and some other person whom I don't remember, were all playing some game on our Nintendo DSs and the game was actually causing physical reactions. Like at one point I distinctly remember our eyes being on fire. Another time there was some sort of bleeding going on, I don't remember details. And apparently we couldn't stop or that would have been worse than dealing with the burning and such.

But then at one point I remember thinking "wait, this is ridiculous, a video game can't cause this" and it all just stopped (for me at least, by that time the dream didn't include Jessie or the other person).

Huh...

-8 Lameness Points

2008-03-09T05:20:33Z

Re: http://jadestorm.livejournal.com/109468.html

So I drove up to Gamestop, saw a mass of cars and a line of people stetching a couple stores away, muttered to myself "I'm too old for this shit", and decided to come back home. I shall come back during normal business hours probably on Monday when there are less kiddies.

+10 Lameness Points For Daniel

2008-03-08T20:18:17Z

Why you might ask? Because Super Smash Brothers Brawl arrives in the stores at midnight tonight, and I have a reserved copy and am actually going to go and pick it up tonight. Been looking forward to this one for a long time now.

Now for the "old fuddy duddy" part of me, I will point out that if I get there and there's a lot of "pointless hooha" going on and a ridiculous amount of people, I'm going back home and getting it during the day, probably on Monday when most people are at school.

On a side note, we all (we all being, my local buds who come over on Friday nights for game night) got our xbox live accounts set up and hit the online circuit. GRAW2 has been having a lot of map packs released recently. Very cool. Still my favorite game. Either way, after we tried all the map packs, we went online and caught two folk who seemed obsessed with trying the same map over and over again, and put the ax to that crap after a couple games.

Then we decided to try out some Halo 3. Joined this one glorious game with like 16 people in it, team deathmatch. Holy shit did we get our asses kicked. 100 to 19. Terrible. Course 3 of the people on our team weren't actually doing anything (literally, were standing there) and they had 3 people who were crazy good. So.... we punted out that and went looking for other games. Found out we could do ranked play which theoretically meant we'd be matched up with similar skill people. 'cept it matched us up with one level 4 compared to our level 1. The level 4 person was crushing everyone else. Then we went searching again and found these two guys from detroit. Had a quick amusing discussion with them at first, and then went at it. We lost that too -but- it was far more "fair". Plus we were kicking our own asses too, so it was like we normally play offline, just with a couple more people. Pretty cool.

It was also neat to look at the "who all is connected" map, because the US was lit up, hawaii included. The coast of Australia was lit up. There were two small dots in Asia. It got me wondering it this was only showing people in our native language. Anyway, twas quite fun.

Frontlines ... I downloaded the demo for that. Seems like a lot of fun. Also 1 player per screen so screw it. ;)

So the PSP I have has a web browser and there's a PSP site where you can download demos. 'cept nothing has been really done with that site in a while. I figured they gave up on the idea. Not so! I get email the other day indicating that store.playstation.com has lots of demos AND games ported to the PSP to download! Holy crap! I can get the original twisted metal 2? Cool! So I try to go to it with my PSP. Guess what. "this site only works with a PC". The hell is that? That's -so- lame! Why wouldn't they bother to make their site function from their very own machine? Sigh. Well, hopefully USB works via VMWare Fusion.

Oooookaaaaaay

2007-12-28T03:51:31Z

While getting gas this evening, there was an SUV in front of us. As we pulled up, a sketchy looking guy got out of the passenger side and pumped gas. Fair enough.

Except that... after he finished pumping, and the driver was back, he jumped up onto the top of the SUV, climbed over and down the other side, and got in on the passenger side. He left the gas cap open, and also left the gas nozzle on the ground. As far as I can tell, they paid. The machine was confused about having the nozzle off of the machine. They didn't squeal off or anything as you might expect if there were gas stealing activities going on. (or even drive off fast, they pulled away, and then stopped for a bit in the parking lot and then left)

I stopped and rehooked their gas nozzle as we left in confusion. I did not, however, jump over our Maxima. I apologize for my lack of action hero-ness.

Uhm

2007-12-15T22:15:44Z

http://www.kittywigs.com/wigindex.html

It's official!

2007-10-11T01:04:57Z

October 24th will be my last day with the university! I will begin my new job at http://www.jivesoftware.com/ on the 25th! Yay!!! I shall miss the university for sure, but it's time for me to move on, do something new, something more exciting, while I'm still young enough to do it! I'm quite excited! =)

Congrats Kat! ( I think ;) )

2007-08-29T18:50:22Z

Kat, you should know why I'm saying this. ;D

These are quite interesting!

2007-08-22T11:34:39Z

http://felipec.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/ted-ideas-worth-spreading/
I'm especially enjoying the "no more boring data" talk!

Whee!

2007-07-06T18:42:38Z

Well Bellsouth is taken care of. All should be well. Turns out we don't get our first combined bill until next month. News to me. Guess that shouldn't surprise me. They did indeed get our long distance all set up. And as always wanted to convince me to switch to their DSL service instead of roadrunner. I was interested to see actually that they now have 6MB down and 512K up which is pretty damned close to what we get with roadrunner. Our "turbo" roadrunner is 8meh down and 512K up and it runs us something like $60 a month whereas bell south's was $42 not including whatever bundle discounts there might be. I really don't know though what the downsides of DSL are aside from my general experience being "this kinda sucks and feels slow". Something to ponder though. Would be nice if we could have switched to DirecTV, but alas...

What a busy freakin' friday!

2007-07-06T18:33:00Z

Good lord, what a busy day. One would expect Friday to be same tame but no. Everyone has been popping in and asking me about things that I'm not really focusing on right now and it's awefully hard to shift gears at the moment. Likewise at the moment I'm on the phone with AT&T/Bellsouth to make sure everything got set up correctly for our plan and apparently no, it didn't. The "all in one center" was supposed to do something that they didn't. WHEE. So I'll be getting that worked out. But work has been crazy today! I've got ........ 8? 8 different things going on at the same time right now that aren't related. All kinds of "can we change this" type stuff and "what are your plans for" and "when can we roll this out" kinda crap. I'm told that the next welcome id thing is going to occur on Tuesday. In theory there's a piece that was supposed to be done by then that we haven't gotten the info we need to do it, so...... either I'm going to be smacked with a "hey can you do this and test it TODAY" thing on Monday or we're just going to hold off until afterwards. Apparently the admissions people are involved in it on Tuesday. Don't know what that means for fussings or possible changes to the system. As far as I know I don't have to go and/or wasn't invited. LDAP has been driving me crazy today, because everyone and their mother has something to say about it or some opinion about the way something should be or a couple of "this is wrong" (without any reason why it's wrong). BLAR. Now there's some password change hooha and printing hooha and ... I'll be glad when this day is over.

The weekend itself should be relaxing and fun. We're going to the art museum on sunday with Libby to see the egyptian exhibit. Should be cool. Otherwise it should be verrry tame. Jessie's been having fun with her cool farming game and I've been enjoying looking up at it periodically from my computer and/or DS. =) (I've been playing pokemon pearl) All in all it should make up for this crapstorm of a day. =)

I'm finding it amusing that . . .

2007-06-28T13:48:00Z

Mental Health Association of Greater Dallas - more info »
624 N Good Latimer Expy, Dallas, TX
(214) 828-4192 - close call

Comes up when I click on my location link of "Dallas Motherfucking Texas". =)

On an unrelated note, the lady just spoke up and said she has the standby list and we can go up and look at it, but we can't ask her anything. lol Apparently it's shuffled around for some reason and "it's a mess" and something like 160 people are on it now and ... yeah. Either way, I'm not going to go look. I'm going to sit here and listen for my name and hope for the best.

What the fucking hell

2007-06-28T13:32:00Z

There's some complete tard here in the gate I'm waiting at who's trying to explain to everyone how the airline standbys and such works ... and yet she's wrong. On top of that she's part of the stupid family that didn't show up at the first gate this morning and probably lost their spot.

God. I think I'm going to wander off for a bit just so I don't have to listen to this idiot.

God dammit, she's getting louder and...

2007-06-28T04:53:35Z

She sounds like she's singing Christian music.

Perhaps Dallas is Hell? Yes, I'm going with that theory for now.

Oh great, now she's singing...

2007-06-28T04:43:57Z

that is all...

Fuck Dallas to fucking hell

2007-06-28T04:40:28Z

What the hell is wrong with this god damned airport? This is 2 for 2 of not being able to get home through it. That's right, I've never successfully gotten home through DFW. I -have- gotten elsewhere through it, just not home. In this particularly instance we would have been screwed through Chicago too as it was cancelled way back at portland. But then, at least there I could have called my in-laws and stayed with them until things worked out.

125-ish flights got cancelled. We say in a holding pattern for a bit and then landed and sat for 30 minutes waiting for a gate to open up.

What the FUCK is up with this god damned woman over here playing her guitar? People are fucking trying to sleep you stupid waste of space!

Anyway, yeah, no flights until friday. tomorrow I'm on a potential standby but I'm not holding my breath. No hotels either except for one that was $264 a night and that's beyond me sense of reason.

Nutmeat silenced her guitar finally.

On a bright note, I do have someone I'm stranded here with. Charles from work is here. (he's more than just a work friend, we used to play DND together as well) He's playing worlds of warcraft now (LOL) so I think I'll watch him a bit. The wireless here is at least great. Way better than the hotel we were in in portland.

Well, maybe I'll post more later if there's more eventfulness.

Oh good lord, she has the guitar again.

I'm not going to be surprised if the guy nearby doesn't get up and yell at her because he and his kids are trying to sleep.

I have a nintendo DS and headphones. That's how I'll be drowning these things out. Thanks.

Most amusing statement I've heard at the camp so far

2007-06-26T14:39:19Z

Upon heading towards the restroom at one point, I was walking next to two of the staff who were discussion where to put the t-shirts and one of them said "We better put them over here.. these people are crazy about some t-shirts." =) ... well -I- thought it was funny...

A Quick Bit Of VMWare Humor, Sorta

2007-06-26T13:45:22Z

http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=228

That wasn't so bad

2007-05-25T17:26:01Z

Well, I was still nervous as hell when I got there, but the Nitrous helped relax me while they did the IV. They failed the IV on the first try, saying that I have a small vein. (hrm, guess I inherited that from my dad) So he did it in my hand instead. All in all though, I didn't feel like I went to sleep and woke up. I felt like ... well I felt like I was sitting there, IV went in, and I asked the doc "what do you mean by puny vein?" and he answered, and I said "wow, I'm starting to feel loopy" and then he said "you're gonna feel a lot loopy in a moment" and then I felt them removing things and saying we're done. It was neat. I expected it to be more like sleep but it was more like that period of time was deleted. But it was soooo seemless. Very cool. I was weak feeling but otherwise fine. I'm really really hungry at this point but I don't really have the ability to eat right now. Still bleeding a lot where I had the teeth taken out and my mouth is still numb. It's weird to drink water. Kind feels like I pour it in my mouth and it just goes no, no "me stopping it first". Anyway, I'll be more pleased when this bleeding stops. Especially when I can stop having the gauze in my mouth. All in all it wasn't nearly as bad as I made it be in my head.

T-minus an hour and 15 minutes

2007-05-25T11:37:26Z

At 8:45am today I will be having my wisdom teeth extracted. I will also put to sleep for the duration. I've been nervous about this all week. After speaking with the doctors office a bit on Wednesday, I felt a lot better. They explained exactly what was going to occur and it put my nerves at ease a bit. That said, I'm back to fairly nervous at the moment. I'm also rather uncomfortable from not having been able to drink anything (even water) for the last 8 hours or so. Anyway, it'll be over soon. I'm sure it will all be fine. Jessie is here to take care of me. =)

Storyboarding

2007-05-24T18:56:06Z

In the past, I never storyboarded projects I was working on. I just kinda dove into them. Nowadays, especially these last couple of weeks, I've been storyboarding things left and right. I find myself wondering why the change of tune. Am I getting older and can't hold as much info about a project in my head at one time? Do I just have too many things going on in my head at one time nowadays and need to write it down to keep track?

I like to think it's something different. I like to think that it's a technique I have learned and adapted into my internal procedures that's improving the development process. I definitely believe it to be an improvement. Just looking at what the plan is on paper (or MacOS X stickies) makes the whole thing seem so clear and not this momentous task. More importantly, it also makes me stop and think about what might come up, what issues there are, that sort of thing. I guess in the past I ran into the issues, fought through them, and kept going, instead of trying to identify them right up front.

Is this another step in maturing as a developer? I don't know. It's weird that it sometimes actually occurs to me "maybe I'm just getting old" nowadays. I'm only freakin' 31, that's not old. =) I don't feel like my mind is weakening or anything.

At some level I wanted to post this for my own historical purposes. Some day I'll look back at this and "know better". =)

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself..

2007-05-18T22:19:55Z

No one was as surprised as me to plug in the replacement hard drive from microsoft that arrived today and have it actually show up and be usable. Glory be that I have a functional hard drive and am now able to use my 360 to it's fullest extent. On an amusing side note, the thing is half filled on arrival. One free game, bunch of demos, videos, etc. Looots of stuff I'll be deleting probably. ;D None-the-less, yay!

Arg... it's just so god damned boring..

2007-05-16T15:20:23Z

http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=276

I am not interested in this at all... bah. Maybe it'll be more interesting than it seems.. who knows. Maybe by then I'll have washed the irritation with the welcome id system out off my hands and will be more open to learning about it.

I predict there will be a lot of phone calls with the foo with both of us complaining about how lame our classes were.

The irony is, I would rather be going to the training that Jessie is in and Jessie would rather be going to Portland. =D

One hooha after another

2007-05-16T15:04:23Z

Well the bathrooms are getting finished up today, aside from the vanity top which is in the middle of UPS claim territory. None of us particularly believe UPS actually broke it, it looked like it was done at the manufacturer, but whatever. We have to wait 8 days or so for the claim to process. Eventually we'll have a good solid top and be done with all of this. Arg... I'm very mentally worn from dealing with all of this.

The fact that the XBox crap is still up in the air isn't helping. In general that's a trivial matter. However, piled on top of everything else . . .

I'm having my wisdom teeth pulled in a couple of weeks. I'd be lieing if I said I wasn't nervous about it. It'll be the first time I'm put to sleep.

Now out of the blue my boss wants to send me clear across the god damned country to a conference that I don't want to go to. It's in Portland. At least I'll be able to see the in-laws and maybe my friends that live there. None-the-less, it's probably going to be boring. I have to decide whether to stay with the in-laws or let the university pay for me to have a hotel room. I think I'd rather stay with the in-laws. I would have to find my own way home after the conference is over, but that should be fine. I'm a big boy, I can take care of myself.

This is also during some assinine training thing that Jessie has to go to that she also doesn't want to go to. And it's in freakin' Morrisville, which means fighting RTP traffic. Bleh....

There's some sort of possible rattle going on with our Maxima. It's not clear what's causing it or if it's just the road at this point. Keeping an eye on it.

On top of it all, on Sunday Jessie's mom fell on a glass pie plate and hurt her pinky on her right hand badly... really badly. It's fixed and I'm sure it'll be ok but it's just so upsetting to hear such a thing.

I'm trying not to be annoyed about all of this shit. I'm trying to buck up and look at the bright side of everything and keep my emotions in check. It's just not working all that well. Kind of overwhelmed with negative thoughts about it all.

In theory I'm going back to the office tomorrow. I've missed the office. I've missed life being 'normal'. At least things at work are starting to come together. Pending projects getting closed out. That sort of thing.