Sitting on the Seaside Heights beach with the family. It is a beautiful day today, but the water is really freakin’ cold again today (as it was yesterday).

Chuck arrived Wednesday night with my sisters and their friends. We did some boardwalk stuff that night but pretty much saved most of the fun for yesterday. We went to the beach first thing in the morning (read: 11am) and I headed for the water right away. Chuck was reluctant because it was soooooo cold, but he relented. I braved the freezing water for 30 minutes, which paled in comparison to Chuck’s 45. After exiting the water we headed to a local shop to purchase sand castle tools. We built a massive castle that even the surf feared (pictures to come). We finished construction around 1pm and it was still standing at 11pm; nobody screwed with it which was surprising.

After the beach, Dad, Chuck, and I headed down to the far end to have lumberjack burgers (burgers, cheese, taylor ham on a bun) at the Sawmill. Then we met up with the rest of the crew (sans Mom) for some rooftop minigolf on the boardwalk. After putt-putt we went to eat as a big group and finished the night with some more boardwalk fun. Chuck left at 11:30ish with Casey & Nick.

So here we are today, on the beach, on a beautiful day…. Allegedly “Uncle” Johnny is meeting up with us today which is cool cuz I haven’t seen him in years. Enough geeking, it is time to wrap this up.

As much as it makes my security-consious-inner-self cringe, I discovered that while they locked-the-shit down on these workstations, they didn’t block telnet:// URI’s. So I was able to telnet to fury. I’ll just have to remember to change my password when I am back in a “safe place”.

I am sitting in a crappy net cafe here down the shore (Later I’m headed to the Sandbar… It’s this bar that lets underage kids drink… I heard this Doors cover band Crystal Shit there….. It went a little something like this…).

This place won’e let me connect to fury.csh.rit.edu using the Java SSH client on the CSH webserver. It’s locked down to the point where I can’t press Ctrl-L to get to the navbar… Sigh…

My goal in using this place was to look for jobs, but if I can’t have regular access to my email/resume/etc it is kind of useless. I guess I can go for a few days without looking but it kinda makes me feel like i’m being lazy.

I changed my journal’s style to the new Component layout available to paid users. I wish I could use the new S2 style system to create a new style, but this one is pretty sexy. My personal pages at sean-graham.com, codeninja.net, and CSH will retain their current style until I figure out something that isn’t so ugly.

I’m glad I brought my iPod to this place because they have the worst music playing..

Left Cambridge today around 1:30p and didn’t arrive in Seaside Heights until 8:20p… It’s only a 300 mile highway trip so it was all weather and traffic that delayed me…. What a shitty trip…

But I safely landed here and grabbed a dinner with Mom and Pa. Apparently the weather has been mostly good here, so I hope I got my allotment of rain for the holiday….

This weekend was one of the most jam-packed I have had. Late Friday Night Johnny and Calmie arrived for a visit. Originally Chuck was supposed to join in on the festivities, but he got tied up at work. Anyway, 2/3rds of the troupe arrived a bit after midnight Friday and we just hung out and talked for a few hours before hitting the sack.

Saturday morning we woke up, picked up Corinna, and ate lunch at Eagle’s Deli in Cleveland Circle. I used to frequent this place back when I lived out that-a-way, but haven’t been back in quite some time. I got their awesome bbq chicken sandwich and Johnny attacked the Godzilla burger (1 lb. meat, 1 lb. fries, 4 slices of cheese). He polished off the burger, and most of the fries. He said that he could have kept going but didn’t see an incentive. :) After this we drove to Kendall and parked, walking to the Boston Common across the Longfellow… We ended up at Quincy Market/Fanueil Hall and did some touristy stuff… We then walked back to the car, drove to my apartment, did a quick changeroo, and then started walking towards Harvard Sq. so Johnny could browse some used bookstores. After shopping we took the T to kendall and ate dinner at Legal Sea Foods. After dinner we walked back to my apartment, stopping at the liquor store for “supplies” and headed back to the apartment to blob around for the rest of the night.

Just about as everyone was going to bed, arrived at the apartment with his friend Evan as well as Adam and Helen. I let everyone else go to bed and stayed up for a \$3 no-limit game (which I lost). After the game I hit the sack.

Johnny and Calmie left early Sunday morning. I tooled around in the morning and in the afternoon Corinna and I headed out to the animal shelter to walk some dogs. The dog supply was actually a bit sparse this weekend (seemed to be many more cats), so we walked a few who needed it and then took a walk towards the Common. We stopped at a restaurant to grab some dessert as a snack, and it was awesome. I had their “Pound Cake”, which was really more like bananas foster. After that we went to the Boston Common theater for the SNFC outing. This week was “Pirates of the Caribbean”, which everyone enjoyed. After the movie we went to a local pub (Remingtons) for food and drinks, as usual.

THEN after that I got back to the apartment, and turned right back around to the Middle East to help out Jon Whitney. He wanted a second camera at the !!! concert last night, so I did my civic duty and recorded until my camera battery died. I returned home, exhausted and collapsed into the bed.

1. When was the last time you cheated? February 2001 - Calculus III. I put some formulae in my calculator since I have lots of trouble with rote memorization.
2. When was the last time you stole? I lifted a dry-erase eraser from the nice lecture hall in the renovated part of the Science building at RIT after a BUGGER meeting.
3. When was the last time you lied? Probably recently, but it was a “white lie”. I haven’t issued a major lie (in seriousness) in quite some time.
4. When was the last time you broke or vandalized another’s property? I intentionally delivered a virus to some kid when I was living in Hopatcong. The kid was a complete dick to me until he needed computer assistance (so i gave it to him).
5. When was the last time you hurt a loved one? I try not to do that. If I have hurt a loved one, I can’t remember it.

I wanted to give Audblog a swing (even if it uses the evil word in it’s name). It now supports Livejournal, so it was a pretty braindead setup. I think I have to pay for future use, though, so I am not sure if I will bother with it again.

audblog audio post

Let’s just say that I am not going to get my old job back. While it’s possible I could see some work from them, I am not even crossing my fingers anymore let alone holding my breath. I had lunch with Omar and Mario today, and we discussed the whole mess and how similar things are looking now for the new company as they did 2 years ago for Rovia. While I wouldn’t mind some income, I think that any work from them would be more temporary than Rovia ever was.

So where does that leave me? I have enough money to pay rent next month, and maybe even the month after… If I can’t find any real work, I am either going to have to pick up some bogus job (Retail, etc) to pay the bills or retreat back to New Jersey. I know which option my family wants, but I also know that if my desire to stay in Boston was strong before, it is fierce now that Corinna is in the picture. I am going to figure something out, real fucking soon now. I thought yesterday’s setback would have really affected me badly (which it did until C-note came over for a bit of a cheer-up), but now I feel it has only strenghtened my resolve. Today I applied for a sick number of jobs, including sysadmin stuff, which I never gave much thought to before. Don’t tell the prospective employers, but these would obviously be temporary and evacuated ASAP, but it is just another way to pay the bills. Anyway, enough of that… I am OD’ed on serious thought for today.

I bought Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold’em awhile ago from some online poker shop… It’s a great book, but what’s interesting is that it came with a coupon for \$10 at 24 Hour Poker. I cashed the coupon in and started playing… It took me awhile to do it (since the site is mainly european and isn’t very busy during US hours), but I worked my bankroll up to the point where I had \$50. This was my goal because I wanted to buy in at Poker Stars, the site that Rory and Adam play on all the time (and PokerStars [PS] has a minimum \$50 buyin). So as soon as I could I cashed out from 24hPoker and moved over to PS.

Last night I sat down for a Sit-and-Go tournament (NL Hold’em, 9 person, \$5 buy-in) and came in first, the 1st place prize was \$22.50. I then went over to the \$1/\$2 Limit Hold’em tables and had an amazing night. I ended up about \$100 by the end of the night, and decided to cash some money out to make up for the bit I lost this weekend at Foxwoods. That little \$10 coupon has really turned out to be a windfall, eh? Hell, if I can keep this up perhaps I will just go professional. :)

This is fantastic news!

Things have been hectic, so I will summarise:

• We missed the poker tournament, it was sold out by the time we got there. It turned out to be a Limit tournament, anyway, so we probably wouldn’t have been interested. We played on the \$2/4 Limit Hold’Em tables for 7 hours instead and had tons of fun. I lost a bit of money, but it was definintely within the reasonable swing. I was up for quite a while as well. I look forward to a return trip, I will do better next time with what I learned this time around.
• visited his sister in Quincy on Sunday, and the two of them came over here in the afternoon. We went to the Christian Science Center, as well as the top of the Prudential Tower, and Rhubarb (sans sis) came along for the SNFC festivities, even though we had a poor turnout. Here are pictures from the day
• It doesn’t look like my chances for getting my old job back are that good, but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed.