The contractor is here demolishing the Master bathroom… My parents are renovating both bathrooms and the kitchen over the next few months, all of which sorely need it. The Master bathroom, however, is in the worst shape, so it is definitely the launchpad. I am certain they will have the thing gutted today, because the tile is barely held on the wall as it is.

was here all weekend for the long weekend, which was awesome. She took the cheap bus to get down here Friday night after work, and she didn’t get into Hoboken until around 11pm… She said it was a miserable trip, involving people vomitting and lots of traffic. She eventually got here and was pretty pissed, but she eventually warmed up … :) We went for a nice walk around Hopatcong on Saturday, and were supposed to go see Kill Bill: Volume One with “The Boys” that night, but plans fell apart so we just hung out at the house and rented Spider which I only thought was so-so. David Cronenberg’s last two movies (Spider and eXistenZ) have been total letdowns for me, hopefully he will get back on track with his next picture.

Sunday we were hanging out most of the day, we rented Saving Silverman based on the presence of Jack Black, but while the first half of the movie was fairly funny, the second half was painfully boring. Later Sunday night we finally did get out to see Kill Bill with Chuck, and it was just as enjoyable as when we saw the preview screening back in August. The movie we saw in August was almost identical to the release version, albeit the ending was slightly different (for those who saw it this weekend, A bit was added into the conversation between Bill and Sophie Fatale, as well as the footage of The Bride on the plane making her list), but it didn’t “change” the ending. After the movie we stopped by the Budd Lake Diner for some chow.

Monday found Corinna and I sleeping in for quite awhile and finally wandering into Manhattan to visit her friends Sara and David (and their daughter Sappha). Originally, we were supposed to meet with them and then Corinna was going to leave for Boston that evening, but she couldn’t get a ticket so she had to leave Tuesday morning. So I hung out with them until about 10:30pm and Corinna spent the night so she could be closer to Chinatown (and the bus stop) for her 7am bus. It sucks being so far away from her, but at least it’s “do-able”.

It looks like I may have some very short-term contracting work doing some Mozilla development for a Spanish company…. Nothing is finalized yet, but they pursued me and we have discussed rates and stuff, so it looks good. It will come out to probably about 600 bucks, but with the potential for more work in the future.

I have been wanting a few pictures of our backyard groundhog for years, but finally was able to snap a few pictures today!

1. Do you watch sports? If so, which ones? Poker, Sometimes Soccer, Downhill Skiing, Skateboarding, Hockey when I can watch in person
2. What/who are your favorite sports teams and/or favorite athletes? Glen Plake, Howard Lederer, RIT Tigers
3. Are there any sports you hate? Most
4. Have you ever been to a sports event? Several, most were many years ago, though.
5. Do/did you play any sports (in school or other)? How long did you play? I played Basketball for awhile in school and was pretty good, but was asked not to return after breaking my arm skiing.

The past two nights I have gone with Chuck over Martin & Jen’s house to play Monopoly. Last night, we started playing around 9:30p, and the one game went on until about 1am. Martin was the winner of that game. Tonight we squeezed two games between 9pm and 12:30pm, with Chuck and I each winning one. But in addition to the usual assortment of house rules, Chuck, Martin, and Jen play with one rule I’ve never heard of before. If, after winning the game, you count up all your cash (not including selling houses and such, just your cash on hand) and have more than \$10,000, your name goes on “The Box”. So there are now, really, two goals: To win and make the box. Jen has the current “high score” on the box with \$30,000+. I haven’t even come close to the box yet… Each of the other three are on the box twice, but they also had a head start as I have only just joined in on the competition.

One entry found for awesome.

Main Entry: awe·some

Pronunciation: 'o-s&m

Function: adjective

Date: 1598 1 : expressive of awe < awesome tribute> 2 a : inspiring awe <an awesome task> b : TERRIFIC 2, 3; especially : EXTRAORDINARY 3 : A girlfriend who sends you a binary encoded message on a postcard <an awesome coco_b \> - awe·some·ly adverb - awe·some·ness noun

The Ultimate LiveJournal Obsession Test CategoryYour ScoreAverage LJerCommunity Attachment48.39% There’s a party in your comments page, and everyone’s invited!23%MemeSheepage40.35% An expert on multiple-choice questions, an whiz at the cut-and-paste28.96%Original Content85.48% Newsweek, People, and your journal38.96%Psychodrama Quotient44.58% Would it kill you to smile? CHEER UP!17.16%Attention Whoring43.18% You’d sell your mother for another three friends20.86%

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I ended up getting my TiVo fixed thursday night, after many retarded mistakes along the way. Friday morning, the TiVo had updated itself to v3.0 and I pulled the drives again and did a backup so I will have less trauma if something like this happens again (or if one of the drives go bad). This is the first bit of trouble (that wasn’t overtly my fault) I have had with the TiVo since getting it like 2.5 years ago, and I am not even sure it was Tivo’s fault… Besides my doing guided setup like 3 times within 3 days (I did guided setup twice in Boston when we returned the cable box, and I did it again when I got here), I also have hacked the shit out of my TiVo, and it’s possible that I caused some kind of unexpected condition in the OS. Regardless, it’s all fixed now, even if I lost a bunch of shows.

I am downloading Thursday’s episode of CSI which didn’t get recorded due to all this Tivo-trauma. It’s slow going but it will eventually finish (thanks BitTorrent).

I fixed the fileserver, morimoto, last night as well. Just before I left Boston, it’s boot/root drive started making the lovely ball-bearing-on-sheet-metal noise that marks a dead hard disk. I was able to keep it alive long enough to back up /etc, and shut it down for the move. I had a spare 10G drive in the Mac that I wasn’t using so I decided that would become the new boot/root drive for morimoto. I reinstalled Gentoo on it and everything is swimming along nicely now. I brought the LVM LVs back up without incident (I’m actually really impressed at LVM on Linux, I thought it would be much trickier than it was). I ran some Cat5 downstairs and stuck the machine down there so it’s out of everyone’s way.

1. What vehicle do you drive? 1996 Plymouth Voyager
2. How long have you had it? A year in November
3. What is the coolest feature on your vehicle? It gets me around. Other than that it isn’t really that “cool” of a vehicle.
4. What is the most annoying thing about your vehicle? It is a gas-guzzling pig that barely runs anymore.
5. If money were no object, what vehicle would you be driving right now? Tricked out Mini Cooper (no turbo, though)

Well, I’m getting situated here at home… It’s odd being here again, but it is of course very nice at the same time. A strange confluence of events today occured to make my life a living hell. First off, I sustained a back injury while walking around the house. I can’t imagine that this actually caused it, so my guess is that it was some latent injury sustained while moving and it just reared it’s ugly head when I was walking around the house. Later, I discovered that my TiVo had hosed itself and could no longer contact the mothership for service updates. Thinking this was a problem with the NIC I had installed, I hooked up the phone and had the same problem. I did lots of debugging before I realized that I needed to blow the entire drive image away and start from scratch. I had a backup of the drive from before I added the second drive, but it was a v2.5 image, and I was hoping to find a v3.0 image somewhere. I found one, but it was apparently incompatible with my hardware, so I wasted alot of time trying to get that to work. I also wasted alot of time with a drive with very confusing master/slave jumper settings (it has some funky action since it is a “large drive” [80GB]). So right now I have the original 30GB drive in there, which I restored my v2.5 image to, and am currently running through Guided Setup. I will let guided setup run through, and I will let it do it’s thing until it updates itself to v3.0. When that happens, I will take the drive out, make a new backup CD, and then install the second HD.

In better news, I ran the cat5 through the house today and setup the firewall/router, so I have net in my bedroom… It will probably take me awhile before I am properly situated in here, but I am always cozy here, so it doesn’t really matter how long it takes.

The car is all loaded save for some stuff I can take on my way to the car. I am writing my last entry from Boston for awhile.

Corinna left this morning… It took quite a bit of effort to keep myself together, but I managed to do so until after she got in the ‘vator. :) Last night’s poker was awesomely fun, a bunch of people came out to play, which was nice for my last game here for awhile. What’s also nice is that I almost doubled up, walking away with \$15 more than I started with. I changed up my play quite a bit, and I was running the table for quite awhile…

I’m not exactly in a good mood, so I think that’s enough for this entry.