Well, as per the previous post, I went ahead and scanned Mom’s laptop after she admitted at dinner last night that she opened one of those “greeting card” virus emails. I loaded ClamWin Antivirus Portable and AVG Anti-Rootkit Free onto the laptop and scanned it… to find nothing. Afterwards I talked to Mom, and it turned out I had misunderstood her. She had opened the email, but hadn’t actually gone to the link in the email. I was definitely breathing a sigh of relief at that point, let me tell you. :-)

On a completely different topic, I was reading a Fark forum thread earlier that was originally about an article bashing nightclubs, and there was a lot of debate over the subject. I was slightly amused by it all, really. Truth be told, though… I hate nightclubs. I always have, really. Don’t get me wrong, though… I like a good bar where I can sit and have a drink. Nightclubs are a different story.

Anyone who’s been with me in one (Jesse, Matt, Chris, and Scott Howell, for example) would tell you that it is a completely alien environment for me. Malia might actually agree when I say it’s probably mostly my Asperger’s at work. It’s too loud, the lights and whatnot are too disorienting, I don’t dance, and I’m shy. As a result, I usually end up at a back wall or on the railing by the dance floor having a drink by myself. If I get out on the dance floor, I literally have to be DRAGGED out there. 99% of the time I end up standing around waiting for the night to be over. The last few times I went was because it was either 1) free and others were going, or 2) I was the designated driver. Otherwise, I avoid nightclubs like that like the plague. I’m sure others can have fun there. Chris always seems to have a good time at the clubs. It’s just not my thing, and I never can enjoy myself even when I try.

Ah, well. I guess I don’t really have to worry about it too much anymore; my friends (other than Louie and Chris) aren’t really the clubbing type, and when I go to dance clubs with Louie I can always talk to Dave and BS for a while. :-)

As for the rest of this week, here’s hoping it goes fast. Friday can’t come fast enough, really… heh. We’ll see. :-)

Eh. I have to say it’s been a slow weekend so far. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you; it’s been somewhat productive and relaxing at the same time. Still, like I said, it’s been slow for the most part.

Before I go any further, though, I switched my main PC’s wallpaper recently. I figured some people might get a kick out of it.

Yes, that is Samus Aran from the Metroid games. You can get the wallpaper from here.

My actual main productive time today was this morning. I had to go get my hair cut (before I go to visit Misty on Friday), and while on the way home I picked up my glasses from the optometrist. The last prescription I had, well… heh. It’s kind of funny. When you have your eyes checked, the optometrist keeps going from lens to lens to see which one you see better with. I must have chosen wrongly the time before, because my glasses never seemed right. My close-up vision was screwed, as was my far far vision… and I’d get headaches if I pressed it. This time, though, I put the glasses on and my vision was crystal clear. I’m a very happy camper.

I also tightened up some of the security on my mail server today. Several days ago I instituted greylisting to reduce the amount of incoming spam, which it has done tremendously. Today I added some new definitions to my Clam AntiVirus install that should start blocking the “greeting card” virus emails. So far it’s worked perfectly. Now, though, I need to check Mom’s PC. While we were at dinner, she admitted she had opened one of those emails… bah!

I had planned on going to the mall today to buy some new jeans. Unfortunately, it was so hot outside that Mom didn’t feel like going to the mall, and we had planned on getting dinner after the mall. So, we ended up just going to Strack’s for dinner instead. I’ll probably go up to the Woodlands Mall after work one day this week (seeing as it’s less of a hassle to go there from the office than it is to go to Willowbrook) and get some jeans then. Ah, well.

Otherwise, things have been relatively busy here. Fortunately I’ll be going on vacation on Friday; as I stated earlier I’ll be going to visit Misty for a week. That should be relaxing and a good way to get away from it all. For now, though, I need to get mom’s laptop scanned to make sure that virus didn’t get a foothold on it. Fun fun…

Yes, I admit it’s been a while since I’ve done a post with actual happenings and whatnot. It’s actually been relatively busy here with work and other things, and haven’t had much motivation to actually post. So, consider this something of a potpourri/miscellaneous post. I might start posting regularly later… but then, I might not.

I finally bit the bullet, and went to see Transformers on Thursday. This will probably shock a few people, as they would have expected me to see it the day it came out. Truth be told, I’m not much for going to see movies on my own and really didn’t have anyone to go with. That said… I really really liked it. It’s definitely one to get on DVD when it comes out. I suppose my only complaint is that we didn’t get to see enough of the interaction between the Decepticons. Otherwise, it was well worth seeing.

Actually, I went onto the iTunes Store on Friday to see if the score for the Transformers movie was available. Unfortunately, all they had was the soundtrack, which I wasn’t too keen on. However, they DID have the soundtrack from the 1986 animated movie, in a new edition that included four more of Vince DiCola’s instrumental incidental music. I went ahead and picked that up instead, but will be keeping an eye out for the score in the next few weeks…

Last night we went to PF Chang’s, as it was my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary and they wanted to celebrate. I mainly went because I was going to act as a designated driver. The food was pretty good as always. My only real complaint came near the end, and it had nothing to do with the restaurant itself. Mom had ordered some peach tea but had neglected to say she wanted it iced… so it arrived as hot tea. She ended up cooling it off by pouring it into the glass her second margarita was in. Then she reached over for her glass of water, and started scooping up water and ice to put in to continue to cool it off. At least, she THOUGHT it was her glass of water… until I finally could work up the words through my indignation to splutter, “Excuse me… that’s MY water!” Of course, that drove Mom and Dad into a fit of laughter…

As for today, it’s been rather quiet. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon down in the kitchen on my PowerBook; it had been a couple of months since I last used it. I still need to replace the keyboard on it, as the spacebar is still wonky and only works part of the time. I can get a new one off eBay at some point; I definitely can’t justify the cost of a new laptop at this point, especially as the PowerBook still works fine for personal use, and for work use I have the company-provided Dell. Otherwise, I spent the day catching up on sleep, and spent the evening watching Cops and playing Gears of War.

As for the rest of this week… well, I’m not sure what I have planned. Personally, the only project I have to do is to update the SSL certs on the darquecathedral.org server. As far as work goes, I probably have a number of things that need to be done, but they’re probably not all that pressing and I can deal with them as they come. Hopefully I can spend the time needed for sleep and rest (unlike the past couple of weeks), but otherwise… we’ll see how things go.

I suppose it was inevitable.

As more and more of my friends use MySpace, I find myself having to devote more and more attention to my own MySpace page. This annoys me, as I’ve always had two common beliefs about MySpace:

• MySpace is GeoCities ten years later.
• MySpace allows everyone to have his or her own website. Unfortunately, everyone does.

In any event, I’d just as soon put as little time as possible towards my MySpace page itself, and devote that time to my main site. To that end, I’ve installed a new plugin by Roderick Russell that crossposts entries from this site onto my MySpace blog. If you’re interested, you can find the plugin at its page here. In essence, my MySpace blog will be just like my LiveJournal: a redirect and/or mirror of my main site.

We’ll see how this goes.

EDIT – 9:32 PM – Apparently it’s not going. Looks like I’m going to have to figure out what’s going on as the plugin is not playing nice with my site. Ah, well…

You know, given the hectic nature of this month so far, it’s kind of relaxing having such a slow and uneventful three day weekend.

So far today, I’ve pretty much done nothing of note. Of course, I wasn’t really motivated to go out anywhere as it was, considering we had a massive storm overhead most of the day. At one point the power went out here for about 30-40 seconds; fortunately both of my main servers and my main PC were all on battery backups. That actually led to me doing the one thing of note I did today: I finally ran a USB cable from the UPS under my desk to the main PC’s USB hub. That way when I’m not home the machine will shut itself down on a power outage. Of course, I had also planned on installing APC’s software for UPSes, before remembering that Windows XP supported them on its own. We’ll see how well it works in the long term. Of course, both of my servers already have their own UPS monitoring solution. I admit, it was kind of funny the last time there was a major outage at the house that I wasn’t present for; I watched remotely as the main server announced there was an outage, and then ten minutes later announced it was shutting itself down…

Okay, so maybe that was only amusing to me because I’m a computer geek. So sue me.

As far as the rest of the weekend goes, I don’t have much planned. I’m considering going out tomorrow for dinner and drinks or something, but other than that I don’t think I have anything in mind. I’m just going to enjoy some quiet time. Heh.

I do admit to some annoyance earlier this week, though. As is no great secret, my site’s blog is mirrored onto my LiveJournal account. However, for a couple of days, none of my posts were mirroring over to the LJ. As near as I could tell LJ was having some problems and finally got them fixed, but still… it’s damn weird. I’m finding it sad how my small personal website was being the anchor while other big sites I use like MK Online and LJ were down for various issues. I guess it helps when the server itself is in the next room…

Ah, well. I’m just going to continue drinking this bottle of water and keep an eye on #mortalkombat (and keep talking to Misty, of course). Like I said before, a slow weekend is a nice change, and I’m just going to keep enjoying it.