hello, sorry about the (sometimes unattended) mess

This waiting that I'm currently going through just seems SO long.

It's akin to feeling like a child does before say, Christmas morn'. Probably not quite as full of wonder, but it was the first thing I thought of.

While it wasn't a Patrick Swayze Christmas at the Road House, we did have TONS of food and plenty left over as well.

Our Printing Services and ITS divisions were just about all in attendance for our annual Christmas potluck. We set my iPod to play holiday songs (oddly enough, a lot of Gloria Estefan versions of songs were played) and sat down to enjoy our meal. I found it interesting that I only had 71 songs tagged as Holiday.

Now experiencing mid-afternoon lull in activity. Must stay awake.

After a few days of trying different flavors of Linux, and other OS types thrown in for grins and giggles--Ubuntu, Freespire, MEPIS, DSL, SLAX (Kill Bill edition), E/OS, and ReactOS to name a few--I've FINALLY got Freespire 1.0.13 running at home AND gotten wireless to run as well. Ubuntu was nice and easy to install, but I couldn't get the wireless going for anything. So, on my bosses suggestion, I tried out Freespire. I had actually been running it, but was never able to get my wireless to run correctly, despite setting ESSID and key information properly. The info would never stick even though it could detect my network as well as my neighbor's open network. So I started trying other OS flavors out and ended up hosing Freespire on my box. I blame ReactOS--as it failed when trying to install itself.

So, I thought a bit and went with Freespire again. The main thing I did differently was having the OS detect before its first boot and then it eventually set everything, save for video, up. After about two hours of tinkering, I was online and looking at my screen set at 1024 x 768 resolution--it was only displaying 640 x 350 previously, which cut off a lot of Control Center windows and was not at all easy on the eyes.

Because I mentioned to Adam that I was in the middle of working on two towers, I ended up deciding on Isengard as the PC name. Can't wait to get another box to name it Barad-Dûr. Yup. Hey, no making fun of the Linux n00b, alright? You're glad to have this kind of exciting posting again, aren't you?

It's so odd (to me) that one can import a blog into their Facebook. Thankfully, private entries don't seem to be imported, well at least they don't seem to be.

Is anyone else using this feature? Does anyone else care about it?

Snagged MST3K: Werewolf last night and queued up MST3K: Gamera vs. Barugon this afternoon before coming back to work from lunch. Next, getting the AVIs into DVD format. From what I've read and Adam's counsel, this can be done fairly painlessly. Still left to see as I haven't bought any blank DVDs yet.

Managed to get someone else addicted to KoL this week, and it was a good thing. Also finished my ninth ascension with my main character and am only missing a couple of the top level bankable skills to make my HC runs quicker (though I've been happy with finishing my most recent one in 14 days).

Poor Jonothan has brochitis and I'll have to have his script filled a bit later. He seems alright considering he had a temperature last night. Rachel took a 1/2 day off and planned to have tomorrow off, just in case. While he seems a bit more sensitive than usual, he's mostly his jovial self. Mostly.

Also managed to clog up my kitchen drain but good last night. Stupid me didn't rinse the drippings from dinner and as such all outward access was denied. Some Drano, a plunger and about forty minutes of work got the clog gone but I poured a more Drano in for good measure. I'll have to remember NOT to do that again.

So I've long been looking for a way to get rid of all the dead tracks in my iTunes library (sad, but true) for a while now and ended up discovering the iTunes COM Windows SDK, which one person used to do this.

Amusing to say the least, though I wish I'd found that SDK long before today.

I must sadly admit that my list is not ABBA free.

So we did the Bertie Bott's jellybeans thing again.

This time I wasn't nearly as fortunate, I got sardine and earthworm! BLECH!

At least I fared better than our one student worker who got a vomit flavored one. Ew.

I'm so glad I've gotten these 554 Spam-Relay error messages figured out.

Now I can get back to my other work.

In case I don't sing Adam's praises enough...

He and I just traded Tostito's and cheese dip for thin mints. I SO needed those thin mints.

I don't know what someone's microwaving nearby, but it smells very much like urine.

Ugh.

Forgot to mention that one morning this week that someone must have given one of the many squirrels around here a very large chocolate chip cookie. All I could see when looking at the thing was the cookie and then two little furry paws holding it and then the little squirrel head peeping up to take small bites of cookie. He wasn't at all bothered by my walking near it, though I wondered if it might have thought that I might try taking its cookie.

I didn't.

This morning, Mark (our department head) and I were walking up the stairs to our offices and noticed some writing on the sidewalk. Written in pastel yellow chalk was, "You're Beatiful." Perhaps it was an inebriated homage to James Blunt?

Not a very good one, though. At least the you're part wasn't your.

Huh...we're under a tornado watch until 3:00 p.m. this afternoon?

Weird.