Whew. The week’s over. Well, not for most of you, but for me it is – tomorrow Erika and I are taking a road trip down to New Orleans to see Better Than Ezra play the House of Blues. She got me tickets for our 3-year anniversary because BTE’s my favorite band, and has been for a decade now. Come to think of it, I’m a little surprised that they’ve remained in constant rotation on my playlists even though my musical tastes changed so much. It’s also the week of Mardi Gras, so we’ll be taking in the festivities.
I’ve been playing a lot of Gran Turismo 3 on my new Playstation 2. I know, I know, everybody else got one of those a long time ago, but when it comes to video games I’m a late adopter. I feel guilty spending money on those, and the only reason I got one is that my DSL provider gave me one free. I love car racing games, and flying around corners sideways in GT3 is making me hungry for some real-life racing. I’m really tempted to join the local chapter of the Sports Car Club of America – they’ve got a Solo class starting in May. Since I was old enough to read Car & Driver, I’ve wanted to attend a class at Bob Bondurant or one of those high-speed driving schools, and SCCA membership is probably a good first step. My Volvo is nowhere near a good car for autocrossing – even though it’s sublimely quick (140mph, thank you very much), it still isn’t tossable around curves like – uhh, like Erika’s Jetta. Not that she’ll let me race it! So I’ll probably end up getting a little used Miata or something, but that’s down the road after we get a house. Ah, yes, a house.
Ah, forgot to mention my webcam changes. When I moved over to a new Dell desktop machine, I didn’t install my webcam software that timestamps the images. I gotta dig that up and reinstall it on this box. Right now, I’m using the Timershot utility from Microsoft, but it only saves one picture at a time, and doesn’t date-stamp. I hate it when I see unmarked pictures on webcams, because you never know if it’s a recent photo or not.
Brrrrr. It’s frigid here, maybe 30, and I think the cold weather & rain is wreaking havoc on my DSL connection somewhere along the line. Speakeasy’s status pages don’t seem to indicate problems, but I keep bouncing on and offline. Props to ServersAlive for keeping me posted, but it’s not making the line any more reliable. Ah, well – sometimes telecommuting has its tough spots. Might as well go to lunch.
Grrrrmph. My Volvo’s stereo won’t play CDRW discs, but Erika’s Jetta will. They’re both great stereos – stock stereos have improved quite a bit in the last five years or so – but the fact that she can play CDRW’s means that I might take hers for the next trip to Dallas. Then again, maybe not, hahaha. But it’s nice to be able to burn my favorite radio shows to CD without blowing through CDR’s like crazy. They add up quick.
Sure, I could replace the stock deck, but it’s one heck of a nice deck, and I hate doing that just for the Dallas trips. In a perfect world, it’d also be able to read MP3′s, too, so that I could fit several hours of public radio on a single CD.
It’s another beautiful sunny day here in Houston, while the weather spawns tornadoes and truckloads of snow in less lucky regions. I’m just doing some contract work in my home office, sipping Pellegrino, and smiling at my turtles as they laze around their patio. Life is good.
I can’t even bring myself to complain (oh, wait, I guess I’m doing it) that Microsoft Access is worth less than what you pay for it, and it’s cheap to boot. I’m doing my first Access-based site in quite a while, and I’m surprised by how much I take for granted in SQL. Stored procedures are the bomb.
Both Joe Millionaire and the Bachelorette ended last week, and I wasn’t really interested. I can’t get into shows like that: they strike me as drawn-out versions of The Dating Game, peering into the personal relationships of people I couldn’t care less about. I don’t even like watching half-hour dating shows, let alone a multi-week series. The only reason I sat through a few episodes of Joe Millionaire was to see the castle where Becky and I had stayed in France – that was a hoot.
Tivo rocks. It’s ghreat to have on-demand Miami Vice, X-Files, and MST3K. I work odd hours, and I love being able to just code away with my favorite old TV shows in the background. Makes it hard to concentrate sometimes, though. I wish we’d get an office in Houston for those of us who work out of here.
Work’s been a zoo the last couple of weeks, but it’s all been self-driven. I’ve got a wild idea about a project that I just can’t shake, and I can’t wait to see it completed. It’ll have huge implications for the company, and we’ll all be rich! Okay, well, maybe not, but it’ll be fun trying, anyway.
I got fed up with the incredibly poor service at my apartment complex, Towne Plaza, and wrote an email to the execs at the management company, The Finger Companies. I detailed all the problems I’m having with this new apartment. The good news is, I finally got some results – the apartment manager and HER manager showed up on my doorstep within a couple hours. They were both very polite, very helpful, and very apologetic. Mike, the maintenance guy (who’s the only staff member still remaining from the original crew when I leased this place, and the only one I totally have faith in) showed up shortly thereafter with the equivalent of a blank-maintenance-check and instructions to fix anything and everything wrong with the apartment. Things are getting better already.
The guys lost on Survivor last night, and Erika insisted I write something in here about it. I actually told her after the first commercial break that the girls would win, but she still got a big kick out of being the “winning” gender.
But what really interested me was how they kept camp. I totally didn’t expect the women to have such a problem putting together the basics like shelter and fire. I don’t know where they found these women, but the women I know are butt-kickers who would never stand around washing their underwear instead of building a shelter. (Or at least, that’s my impression of them, anyway.) If Erika was out there with a machete, she’d be waving it at those slacker women to get their act together.
You wanna learn how to be a programmer? Forget college, forget those correspondence courses, forget those stupid boot camps. Everything you need to know is right here. A fellow Texas programmer put together a wonderful 45-page PDF with the gems of his programming experience – everything that I wish I would have known before I got started. I got lucky in that I had a great programming mentor along the way, but still, there’s no substitute for this kind of detailed documentation. When programmers talk about how they want good documentation, this is exactly the kind of thing they want.
Woohoo! Survivor’s almost here! I can’t wait. This time around it’s guys versus girls, and already people are shaping it up as a battle of the sexes. My hunch is that you’re not going to see the same types of challenges that we saw in the first five seasons. While you will still see physical challenges, they won’t be as frequent. I’m not saying women aren’t as strong, I’m not saying women can’t win (because they’ve won Survivor 2 of the 5 times), I’m just saying the Survivor producers will go the extra mile to make sure it’s completely fair.
The NBA All-Star Game is coming on in a few minutes, and what the heck, I’m watching it. I’m starting to get more into the NBA since Steve & I will end up getting season tickets for the Rockets next year. It’s great to see two Rockets on the All-Star team. Yao’s a celebrity here in Houston, of course, and he’s just a fun guy to watch.
Okay, wait, maybe it’s not called the Original Salmon. The Einstein people smacked me down when I tried to order it that way. It’s just a plain old lox & bagel, they say – the Original Salmon also has egg. That’s not quite so good. Now I have egg on my face, because I always wondered what lox & bagel was.
