1. What do you do for a living? Write code.
2. What do you like most about your job? Solving problems.
3. What do you like least about your job? Meetings that keep me from solving problems.
4. When you have a bad day at work it’s usually because _____…

Some stupid bug is jamming me up and I just can’t get my head around it. When I leave for the day I am all pissed off, and then the next day I walk in and figure it out in like 5 minutes…

1. What other career(s) are you interested in? Filmmaking

You know when it’s June, and Christmas seems soooooo far away? And then all of the sudden life fast forwards 6 months and you’re drinking egg nog? When I saw these pictures I was just completely stunned. While the kitchen isn’t completely done (backsplash tile is on order and some random finishing work has to be done), it is a far, far cry from it’s initial state

Last night was work’s small poker game, which was fun as usual… They play a small \$5 no-limit game every week, which is helping keep me sharp while I wait until i get some money to hop back in Adam and Rory’s game (which is more expensive these days). Anyway, I bled a bit of money, but it was mostly on blinds and a few unlucky hands, no real awful plays… I actually made some pretty good laydowns, imho. But the hand of the night was between Garrett and Aaron… There were two queens out, and my amazing read on Garrett (which was like 95% accurate last night) told me he boated it up. I don’t have a good read on Aaron yet, and he plays pretty erraticly, so I wasn’t sure if he had a boat or was an idiot. On the river, a third queen drops, and Garrett moves in. Aaron calls right away, and flips over the 4th queen… It was awesome.

I started copying the 100G of data off of the fileserver ( morimoto) my parents brought up last weekend onto the Mac since I don’t really need a fileserver when I only have one person using the data… It made more sense in the apartment with , , and . But now it just seems silly to have to maintain that… So I am moving all the data to my workstation, and am putting the server in cold storage.. If anyone has a use for a Dual P2-350 box drop a line, I might sell it for the right offer.

Anyway, so I started copying that before I went to bed at 1am last night and it still had 30 minutes to go when I woke up at 7am. It amazes me that I am slinging around 100G of data… I remember slinging around 180k floppies on my C=64, or even cassettes on the PETs at school (or my dad’s Super-Board III).

Thank god there are several sets of restrooms here, because I just walked into one and someone was having a case of the Adriana’s.

I called in sick yesterday… I woke up and had a killer headache and was sore all over… I just kinda blobbed around sleeping and watching TV (catching up on all the programs that accumulated on the TiVo while it was away). By the afternoon I was feeling OK, though, and decided to go to last night’s Fantomas show (since I had already spent the money on the tickets).

I missed the first act, some laptop warrior who goes by the name “end.”, but what I heard was actually pretty good… Made me wish I didn’t miss it. After that was the ever glorious Melt Banana (a.k.a. The should really like this band, band), who I had seen on the Ipecac Geek Show tour with James and Carol last year. You can’t go wrong with Japanese Punk, really. Yasuko (the female lead singer) started up saying, in a very thick Japanese accent “We are Melt Banana from Tokyo, Japan. We hear people in Boston are Wicked Retarded”. This was completely hilarious when processed through the very thick accent.. Anyway, they rocked, and I should buy some of their albums. They tore up the stage for about 30-45 minutes, and then made way for Fantomas.

I had never seen Fantomas live before, through a series of complications and mishaps, but I have been dying to do so because I love their studio albums (and the bootlegs I have accumulated over the years). They were freaking amazing, Dave Lombardo impressed me more than he ever did in Slayer, and Trevor Dunn on bass is a force to be reckoned with… Buzz Osbourne, of the horrible band The Melvins, did a fantastic job too on Guitar, showing that just because a musician is in a shitty band doesn’t mean they are a shitty musician.. Mike Patton was spot on, doing his beatbox-from-another-land routine… Wonderful, wonderful show…

“Because it’s the W that is causing all the problems.”

Zany.

When I was working at Sears I remember this time when I was opening the department (Office Center) and the employees were in our usual hour early for opening cleaning the place up, etc. The Office Center was right by the main mall entrance upstairs and the doors were locked to keep the mallwalkers out. All of the sudden there was this lady aggravatedly knocking on the glass doors, and she wouldn’t stop until someone went over to her… She angrily asked why the store wasn’t open yet, and why we were making her waste her day outside… She treated us all like complete shit.

I made this simple statement: “Excuse me, Ms., but are you sure you didn’t set your clock forward instead of back?” (it was in the fall, at the end of Daylight Savings Time). She looked back and forth between Erik and myself, and her watch, blushed, turned around, and walked away without even an apology… I couldn’t help but laugh. I’m sure my laughter didn’t jive with company policy, but whatever… :)

Not to give too much importance to the event, but I can’t believe Cobain killed himself 10 years ago… That really makes me feel old. I dug on Nirvana when Nevermind hit, but never really got into them so much until College… Not sure what changed, but it was probably me.

My parents visited this weekend to celebrate by birthday (which was on Wednesday), which means not only do I get to hang out with my super-rad folks, but I get PRESENTS!!!!!!!!! :)

Thanks to my sisters for a new pair of Samba Classics, which is awesome because my old pair was starting to look pretty beat (although I am still going to wear them into the ground… :)… My parents, in a crazy display of prestidigitation got me a replacement stereo for my car! They got me an Aiwa CDC-X504MP, which supports MP3 CDs, but more importantly it has Aux In so I can once again use my iPod!

My dad had the brilliant idea that we should drive to a mall parking garage to do the installation so we didn’t have to do it on the side of the street here in Boston. So all 4 of us got into Hawkeye and we went to the Galleria… First we went to the food court for lunch, and then we split up and Dad and I went to Radio Shack for butt connectors while the girls shopped. The real trick was getting the dashboard molding off, which was huge (it is one big piece, surrounding all the accessories and the instrument panel). But it came off with a little encouraging. They got me the installation kit too, so I had the harness for my car, which we just had to hook up the stereo’s harness to, which meant we didn’t have to do any wiring inside the dash, which is good. We hooked everything up and tested it and it worked like a champ, so we finished the install and reassembled the dash. We took off and did some more errand running, but later that day, when I was parking the car back here near the apartment, I noticed that the entire left side was dead…

I didn’t want to neglect my family or girlfriend anymore that day and so I figured I would take care of it today and went back up to the apartment. Before dinner, I wanted to set up the TiVo, which my parents had also brought up for me, so I hooked it up to the TV, and plugged the ethernet cable directly into the cable modem (since I didn’t have a router). The short version of the story is that the TiVo was unable to connect to their servers, so I assumed that the cable modem service was tied to the MAC address of my Mac. So I figured that was another failed project for the day, but my mom said I should go out with my dad to get a router (that does MAC spoofing), so we went to Micro Center and got a Belkin home router with 802.11b and 4 100Mb Ethernet jacks too. It was \$40 with a \$20 mail-in rebate, so it was a pretty good deal! We came back to the apartment, and and were watching Strictly Ballroom and there was about 30 minutes left… I set up the router, and waited until the movie was over to test out the new config, but while the movie was ending I noticed the TiVo wasn’t grabbing an IP. I figured something was really wrong, but didn’t confirm that until the movie was over. My dad suggested that perhaps the NIC came loose in transit, so I took the case off, and lo and behold that was the problem! So problem one of two.5 was solved (problem 2 was the left channels of my car stereo, and 2.5 is the CD stuck in my old car stereo).

We went out to dinner at the Stockyard which was awesome, some of the tastiest, tenderest steak I have ever had. And the garlic mashers rocked socks. Everyone seemed to really enjoy their meal, and I recommend the place for sure. It was getting real late (past 10pm), so my parents headed back to the hotel to pack it in, and Corinna and I headed back to the apartment. I cut out to catch the end of the Squarepusher show at the Paradise with Adam and Rory (who were already there). I wasn’t planning on going, but when my parents packed it in so early (for me, late for them… :P) I decided I could probably catch the main-attraction, and I’m glad I went. I caught the tail-end of the last opening act and the entire Squarepusher set, which was just unbelievable. He is one of the most amazing bass guitarists I’ve heard (or seen).

This morning my dad and I got together to fix the car stereo… We took everything apart and one of the connections fell apart and must have shorted the left channels, so we fixed it up and now everything works like a champ. We went to IHOP for breakfast, which was good, and they had to head back to NJ, which sucks…. Corinna and I headed back to the apartment, and I tore my old CD player apart, freeing my Squarepusher CD from its evil clutches, which escaped its prison camp with only a mild scratch. I have since made a copy to listen to in the car.

My Squarepusher CD is still stuck in the god-damned CD player. I had that CD for less that 12 hours before my stupid car decided it was dinner. Fortunately I ripped it to MP3, but I wish I had made a copy of it (which was my plan, I don’t have any originals in the car) and the copy was eaten by the car…

My parents are on their way, should be here in about 30 minutes or so… I had started to watch Old School, but I was like 10 minutes into it when they called and said they were 45 minutes away so I will just finish it another time.