Published on Sunday, March 27th, 2005 .
Well, I somehow made it through my 16 hrs on, 8 off, 8 on schedule just fine without dying. I was dragging ass at work like nothing else then once I got out and rode home, I suddenly had energy and now I’m not tired. Go fucking figure. I made it home tonight in just over an hour @ 14mph or so average speed. Not nearly as good as the other night when I made it home in under an hour and must have averaged every bit of 15mph. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that again anytime soon on my tank of a mountain bike (31 lbs or so). Speaking of commuting by bicycle, something amusing happened this morning…
I was talking to this girl on the phone and she was asking me when she’d get to meet me. I told her I didn’t know because of my crazy work schedule and the fact that I hadn’t even talked to her much… so she eventually asks me what I drive. I tell her I don’t drive, that I ride my bicycle everywhere by choice and have no desire to own a car. She thinks I’m joking and when I convince her that in fact I am dead serious, she says that she has to go and will call me back later because she has to call her mom really quick. Not surprisingly, she hasn’t called me back since (and won’t). I have to say that is about the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard of a girl wanting to get off the phone with me. Why not just say “hey, I don’t see any point in talking to you anymore because you don’t have a car and I’m a shallow materialistic cunt who thinks a guy should come see me and pick me up and drive me around and show me off in his nice car.” Instead she has to take the cowardly way out and come up with a bullshit excuse to stop talking to me. I still laugh my ass off thinking about it. In all honesty, I don’t quite understand why me having a car is such a big deal to girls. I guess they’re still clinging to that thought that’s been drilled into their heads that the guys are supposed to be the dominant one… the one to “court” them.. the one to drive and pay for dates, etc. Sorry, but tough shit… That’s not me. I have no desire to own a car and deal with the requisite costs involved in owning one (gas, insurance, car payment, maintenance, etc.). I’m sure as hell not going to buy a car just to please other people. It’s really amazing how people have become so attatched to the automobile that NOT owning one is seen as somewhat like having a 3rd arm growing out of your chest. In all honesty, it amuses me. I’m perfectly happy not owning a car and don’t feel that the very few positives of having one outweigh the numerous negatives involved with owning one. Hence, I stick to the bicycle. I have to say I find it amusing that someone would let something as trivial and stupid as a car effect their decision as to whether or not they want to associate with a given person. Just goes to show how materialistic and stupid people really are.
Published on Saturday, March 26th, 2005 .
Yeah, so I’ve now been here at work for 12 and a half hours. I’ve been sitting here by myself browsing the web and talking to people online for the past 6 and a half hours. I’m not even sure when the next person comes in, but the last person left at midnight. I’ve taken about 3 calls an hour on average (19 calls in 6.5 hrs), so I’ve had plenty of time to do random stuff online. Nobody’s really online at this hour of the morning, so I’ve been basically researching bike parts and toying with my website. Dr Pepper and chips have kept me going thus far and I don’t think I’ll have any problems making it til 10am. Making it back here at 6pm should be interesting, though. Luckily I’m just going over to Sam’s and passing out on his couch for a few hours instead of going all the way home and all the way back here. I wish I knew who was coming in and what time they were coming in. I might have them hold down the fort when they get here so I can run to McDonald’s and get some sausage biscuits and orange juice. 
Published on Saturday, March 26th, 2005 .
Yeah, I changed the theme again… I found this one on Alex King’s website where he’s having a contest for best wordpress 1.5 theme. I found this one and REALLY liked it a lot, so I snagged it and I’m doing some tweaking now as we speak. I can’t find much about it that I’d really like to change, but I’m sure I’ll do some minor tweaks. I had to change a few of the headings and such for the links because my link categories are different. Outside of that, works great right out of the box. Here’s the author’s homepage for your perusal.
Published on Friday, March 25th, 2005 .
I love this weather… 72 degrees today! It’s supposed to be nice the next few days, too. Shitty part is that I have to work. I rode 16 miles or so today because the weather was so nice. I normally ride a few miles, then take the bus out to where I work. Today I just rode the whole way and made a couple of stops at the bike shops because I felt like it. Seemed like there were a ton of people out today. I guess it’s not only the fact that the weather kicks ass, but that it’s a holiday as well. I’m getting paid basically 2.5x pay to work today since this is considered our holiday. I’m also working a double shift and getting off @ 10am (16 hrs total) so this should be loads of fun. I’ve done it before on a few occasions and it didn’t kill me. The only drag is going to be getting off work at 10am and coming back in at 6pm. I’m just going over to Sam’s and crashing on his couch so I can get more sleep. I’ve decided I’m building a road bike, so I’m going to try and work as much overtime as I can for the next couple of months. I’ve already bought the frame and it should be here sometime next week. I’m still debating on what components to use on it, but I hope to have it done within 2-3 months.
Published on Thursday, March 24th, 2005 .
God I love this weather we’re having all of a sudden (minus the intermittent rain). 56 as we speak right now… high of 72 tomorrow and a LOW of like 53. Talk about great riding weather. Had I gotten up earlier, I might have considered riding all the way to work. Oh, well. Off to work I go!
Published on Thursday, March 24th, 2005 .
So yeah, about 2-3 times a week I go to Waffle House after work because it’s right across the street. Very convenient for those nights when I’m hungry as fuck leaving work and can’t wait until I get home to eat. Anyway, there’s this stupidly cute waitress that works there named Amber. For the first time tonight, I actually decided to attempt to have a conversation with her and it turned out surprisingly well. She’s actually pretty nice. Not stuck up at all… not to mention she actually seems to have a decent amount of brains. I did happen to notice a ring on her left ring finger that looked like it was an engagement ring, but she’s never made any mention of a boyfriend. Turns out she also seems to like one of my new favorite movies. I recently saw “Requiem For a Dream” and absolutely loved it. She actually owns a copy… said she bought it at Best Buy but hasn’t actually watched it since she bought it. I also found out she’s 19 and has a 2 year old daughter. I guessed her to be 19 and turns out I was right. The really fucked up thing is that she completely reminds me of the first girl (actually the only) I ever really dated in HS. Same hair, eyes, facial shape… small boobs, nice ass. Everything is damn near a spitting image of her. To top it off, her fucking voice is even similar! Luckily their names aren’t even remotely similar. At any rate, this girl’s pretty hot in my opinion and I’m rather proud of myself for talking to her. I didn’t go so far as to do anything that I considered to be hitting on her, but at least I managed to engage in some sort of conversation with her. Amusingly I walk in and she starts pouring my sprite and recites my order back to me before I even say a word. I should fuck with her and order something different next time I go in there.
Published on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005 .
Ok, so I’ve slacked off lately… big deal. I’ve gotten some new stuff, but not much else has changed. I’ve just been working a shitload as usual. I managed to do some minor upgrading on my computer and bought a home theater system for my bedroom. Joy joy!
For my computer, I got a new SCSI card (a Tekram) and hard drive (Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP 18gig), a Vantec aeroflow heatsink & fan, an ATI TV Wonder Pro Remote Control Edition and an Abit NF7-S 2.0 motherboard. I bought all of it used off the forums @ anandtech and hardocp. It worked out really well and now my computer’s faster. The SCSI hard drive has made a good bit of difference being that it’s 15,000 rpm. Boot time is faster and time to load larger applications is faster as well. It’s louder than your average 7200rpm IDE hard drive though. The TV card is installed but I don’t have a coax cable running to it as of yet. It’s going to require a little bit of work to get cable into my room as there’s a hole in the baseboard barely big enough for it to fit through. I don’t watch THAT much TV… I more or less just wanted it for the input & video capture and to record a couple of shows here and there that I miss while I’m at work.
The home theater had to be the best investment I’ve made so far. I got a great deal on a refurbished Onkyo HT-S700 for $250+shipping+tax. They’re back up to $269.99 now, but that’s still a great deal on a system that costs $500 from Circuit City. It’s a 6.1 system, which is really nice. The only problem is that most DVD’s are only encoded in 5.1. It does both Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES. I watched Gladiator the day after I got it all setup and was quite impressed. It comes with a 10″ 220watt subwoofer, so it definitely has some boom. Overall, I’m more than happy with my purchase.
Published on Wednesday, March 9th, 2005 .
Just a random thought, but is google trying to take over the world? What’s next? GoogleOS? As it is, they offer their regular search engine, plus it has now added the capabilities to search weather, maps, and video (TV shows or something). Not to mention they have gmail still in beta, which gives you 1GB of email storage. I use it and like it quite a bit. Rumor also has it that google is going to start selling domain names in the not-too-distant future. They also offer a google desktop search tool that searches files on your local PC. They have Froogle which searches various online stores for the best price like pricegrabber and pricewatch. They have Google Groups that searches newsgroup postings. Google News, which indexes news headlines from various sources. At this point, there’s not much google can’t find for you. They’ve even got this software called Picassa that “helps you find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC”. I don’t have that many images so it’s no big deal to me. But those who have huge collections of pics might find it useful. It’s goten really good reviews from what I’ve read. They also have their toolbar, deskbar and gmail notifier. They can all be downloaded on their software downloads page. Oh, and one more thing I forgot to mention. One of the Microsoft engineers that worked on WindowsNT (the precursor to Win2000 and WinXP) left Microsoft and went to work for Google. Looks like we may have an interesting war on our hands in the near future. Google vs Microsoft anyone? Place your bets!
Published on Saturday, March 5th, 2005 .
Just a few random things for today…
First, my site went down a bit earlier due to the database server going down. Pretty fucking gay, but nothing was lost *whew*. A friend notified me of the problem and I checked it out, sure enough.. cannot connect to MySQL. I was like.. “FUCK!”. So I call tech support for my webhost. Wait on hold about 12 minutes and finally give up on trying to figure out what the problem is. It eventually came back up on its own, thankfully. So yeah, I can already tell that my webhost’s tech support is nothing to brag about. Luckily that was the first time I’ve ever had to call. For what it’s worth, it was 7pm on a Friday night so that may have been part of the issue?
Second, I’ve ordered some new computer stuff because, well, I CAN. I got an ATI TV Wonder Pro Remote Edition for my computer that I haven’t installed yet. I don’t really watch much TV but there are a few things that I miss on occasion that I’d like to be able to record and come home and watch. The TV wonder will allow me to do this. On top of that, it comes with an RF remote that will allow me to control my PC from anywhere in my room. Joy! I’ve also got a new mobo on the way since my existing mobo won’t go over 192Mhz FSB. I want to be able to clock my CPU a bit higher, so I got myself an Abit NF7-S v2.0 guaranteed to do 200+. Amusingly, neither of these parts are new. I actually picked them up off the Buy/Sell/Trade forums on a couple of tech sites I frequent. The TV card was picked up from a dude on hardforums and the board from a guy on Anandtech. After I get both pieces in, I’m going to rebuild with the new parts and then install Windows Media Center Edition 2005. My computer’s been locking up and being a general whore, so I know it’s time for a new Windows install. It’s been a year, after all. I think I may get myself some 5.1 surround speakers too. Might as well turn my PC into a nice multimedia box.
As far as work goes, my job still kicks ass. It’s kinda nice working with actually decent people. Probably the most laid-back non-jerkoff group of people I’ve worked with so far. I work a fuckload of hours, but I don’t mind. Next week, I’ll end up working something like 57-60 hrs or so because one of my co-workers is taking 2 days off for his significant other’s surgery. That means I’ll be working from 6pm-8am (or later) one night.. then 3am-11am the next. I get to sit here and talk to my friends online in between calls, so it won’t be too boring. Plus I can listen to music as well… so I’ll have plenty of stuff to keep me company. Oh well… nothing else random comes to mind at the moment. Ciao!
Published on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 .
Wow… great game. Sam and I have been addicted to it for like 2 days now. They’ve basically taken everything good from 2 and 3 and put them together into one game. The cars seem to be a bit more realistic with the handling now and the graphics are just outstanding. Tons and tons of cars to choose from, too. I can’t say I really have any complaints about it other than the fact that you have to keep re-running a few series near the beginning to actually make any money. Plus getting your licenses is still a royal pain in the fucking ass. All in all, still a great game and worth the money. We’ve managed to put together a 900+ hp Mercedez Benz, a 715hp Chevy Silverado SSR Concept, an 850 hp 350Z LM Concept Car… and a few other interesting rides. Tricking them out and taking them out on the track is like half the fun of the entire game. We haven’t found any cars that will crack 1000 hp just yet, though. Looks like no Escudo Pike’s Peak in GT4. At any rate, I’m going back over there to play some more after work tonight. That’s how addicting the game is.
