Hey, no macking on the fiancée!

Last night, Jennifer and I went and met some of her coworkers for dinner. On the way back, she needed to stop for gas. While I waited by her car, she went in to pay. When she stepped out, she had an odd expression on her face. When I asked her what was wrong, she looked at me and told me that when she walked in and asked to put money on the pump, the cashier replied with, “You are very beautiful.” She was thrown and didn’t expect that, and asked him to repeat it as she wasn’t sure she heard him right. He repeated what he said, and asked, “When will we be having dinner?” Jennifer just looked at him, and said, “Well, I’m not sure that’ll be cool with my fiancé, who’s right outside…” He replied, “Tell him he is a very lucky man.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, after she had pumped her gas and we had left, she called me (we were in separate cars) and told me that as she was telling me the story, she looked into the store and the cashier was looking at her and making motions implying she should call him. What the hell?

Listen, folks. If someone says she’s unavailable, she’s unavailable. Don’t annoy them or their significant others.

How do you like your barbecue? TOASTY!

TeeFury’s shirt design for today (and only available today) is just awesome. I’m definitely planning on wearing it next time we have a cookout at the house. I’ll let the design speak for itself. :-)

Broken phone? You have a cheap option.

I was talking to Scott Howell earlier, and he mentioned that he had broken the touch screen on his cell phone. Worse, he isn’t eligible for an upgrade until July. Fortunately, though, he uses AT&T, which is a GSM provider. I had originally planned on asking my dad to send a spare phone to him to tide him over, but my dad had a much better idea: buy a cheap prepaid phone and use that. Scott researched it, and ended up buying a cheap GoPhone at Walmart for $11. I guess the GoPhones are unlocked; he put his AT&T SIM card in it, and it worked fine. Now he has a phone to tide him over until July, when he can get a nice phone.

So, if you’re on a GSM provider (AT&T or T-Mobile, for example) and need a replacement cheap phone, just get yourself a GoPhone and you should be fine. :-)

I have to give Jennifer a lot of credit.

She’s been very supportive of the fact that I’m into gaming. She’s been willing to come out to Dave & Buster’s with me whenever I’ve had an itch to go, for example. Then again, it gives her an excuse to play some Time Crisis 4, which is her favorite arcade game. She also lets me know when she hears about arcade conventions coming into town, and comes out with me.

Yesterday was another example of that. She received an email alerting her that Stern was having a release party for their new The Rolling Stones pinball machine, and the Houston one would be at Joystix. Seeing as we had nothing else going last night, we decided to go out there. While on their normal “Pac-Man Fever Fridays” the whole showroom was available to play, only the middle showroom was available this time around. I entered the tournament they had for The Rolling Stones; the objective in the first round was to hit twelve million points in as few balls as possible, and you had three tries to do it in. On my first try I did it in four; it would have been three had my third ball not gone into the right drain almost immediately. Unfortunately, by the time I got to my second try, enough people had done it in three that I had to do it in three balls or I would be eliminated. I didn’t manage it. It was fine, though; considering the other people in the tourney played a lot and I don’t get to play pinball too often outside of emulators, I was happy I did as well as I did. :-)

The thing is, for various reasons, I’ve been getting a nostalgia for old arcade games. My home office is an extension of my geekiness, so to speak, as I have framed posters and other memorabilia set up around it. For example, I have two Mortal Kombat II posters in my office. A couple of weeks ago, though, I was browsing around on the net and found a movie type poster for the game Dragon’s Lair (as seen on the right). I went ahead and picked one up, and this weekend I will be seeing if I can get a 27″x40″ frame for it. It’ll be replacing one of the two Mortal Kombat II posters.

However, what I would really like to have is an arcade machine or pinball machine in the house. I admit I’m a little jealous of my friend Eric, who not only has Ms. Pac-Man and Scramble machines, he has an old Pinball Wizard pinball machine. The problem, though, is that I almost literally have no place to put a machine. As it stands, about the only kind of machine I could reasonably put in the house is a cocktail table machine, as it could double as actual furniture. If it were available, too, I’d love to get one of the pseudo-arcade cabinets NetherRealm Studios made for the new Mortal Kombat game. Unfortunately, I don’t have the money available for it, and if I did I wouldn’t have a place to put it.

Ah, well. It’s a nice thought to have an arcade machine or a pinball machine (preferably Doctor Who or Bram Stoker’s Dracula), but we have more important expenses to worry about right now. For now, I’ll content myself with Pac-Man Fever Fridays, Dave & Busters, and the occasional Game Night at Eric’s house. :-)

I’ve been living in Pearland for eight months now, and truthfully, it doesn’t feel like it. It almost feels like I’ve only been there a few weeks still. This is actually a good thing, as it shows how Jennifer and I are meshing well. We definitely haven’t gotten tired of being around one another, and we’ve been enjoying the time we’ve been spending together. Now that we’re past the initial adjustment period, things haven’t really changed much. Life is good.

However, I’ve had one thing still tying me back to the parents’ house, in a sense: the darquecathedral.org servers, which were still being hosted on the DSL line there. I had been planning on moving them down to Pearland anyway, but Mom and Dad decided they wanted to get AT&T U-verse to replace both their DSL and their DirecTV. So, we went ahead and purchased Comcast Business at our house, arranged for static IP addresses to assigned to us, and then went up to Spring this past Saturday to grab them. All in all, it was a pretty quick and painless process, and fortunately everything fit in my car, including the cart the servers were sitting on. Once I configured my parents’ PCs and their router to work without the servers, we headed back to Pearland. We got home by 9:30 PM, and had the first two servers online by midnight. I got up from bed at 7:45 AM the next morning, and had the third server online 45 minutes later.

The one thing we were worried about most with the server move was the heat generated by the servers. Fortunately, we’ve found keeping my office door open keeps the room at a somewhat normal temperature. The temperature gauge on the front of one server shows normal temps, too, which is a very good sign. We’ll keep an eye on things, but all in all the server migration was a great success. Now I just need to clean out boxes to make more room for me to be able to walk around…

The amusing thing, though, is that now that the servers are migrated, we’ll be getting away for a few days soon. Jennifer and I have decided to take a vacation to Las Vegas, as she’s never been and we managed to get good deals on airfare and a hotel. We’re only going to be gone for a couple of nights, but I figure I’ll introduce her to some of the sights and a couple of the shows. I’m thinking at the very least I should show her the dancing waters in front of the Bellagio, the volcano in front of the Mirage, the Forum Shops at Caesars, and the canals at the Venetian. As for the shows, well… Cirque is out due to the high prices of tickets, but we have a couple of other ideas in mind. No, the wedding is not one of them. :-)

Speaking of which, I know I mentioned it on Twitter, but forgot to mention it here: Jennifer and I are officially engaged. :-) Right now, it’s looking like the actual date is going to be sometime in late September. We’re looking at having a small intimate ceremony with just close friends and family invited, and then a few months down the road have a nice big blowout. We’ve been spending days off (on Jennifer’s end) and weekends going to different places to get ideas of venues and the like, plus potential food options, etc. It’s been a bit overwhelming, but we’re off to a good start. Hopefully we’ll be able to announce something to our friends in the next month or two, even if it’s only a “save the date!” type of thing. We’re looking forward to it, and we’re definitely making sure it’s what we want. :-)

Like I said earlier, life is good. Here’s hoping it just keeps getting better.

One of the things Jennifer was looking forward to when I moved in was the integration of my audio/video equipment with hers. While she already had a DVD player and HDTV, she didn’t have a sound system to go along with it. On the other hand, I DID have a home theater setup, consisting of an Onkyo receiver and Aiwa speakers and subwoofer (the speakers were part of a “home theater in a box”; the original receiver was long destroyed). When I moved in, we put my receiver in place, along with my DVD player (as it was upconverting). While I hooked the DVD player to power and had it ready, we left the receiver disconnected for a few months.

The problem wasn’t that we didn’t want to use it. The problem was that we didn’t know what to do about the rear speakers. Our floors are hardwood, so we couldn’t just run the wires under the carpet. Also, we had NO desire to run wires through the wall. I did that before at my parents’ house, and did NOT like it. That’s also the reason my office at home is linked to the home network through a wireless bridge.

A few weeks ago, however, I came across the perfect solution. A company called Rocketfish had a universal wireless rear speaker system. We picked one up from the local Best Buy, brought it home, and I spent the evening wiring up the receiver to the speakers, TV, DVR, DVD player, and Wii.

The end result was very satisfying. The sound came through very crisp and clear, and the rear speakers were clear as well. Even my friend Mike, who has the most impressive home theater room I’ve ever seen, was impressed by how well the wireless solution worked.

In fact, the home theater setup revealed a weakness in how I had the speakers set up at my parents’ house. When we wired them up at my parents’ house, we put them up by the ceiling, facing out… but not down. The sound as a result was always subpar, and I thought the speakers themselves were probably very low quality. It wasn’t until I listened to them at ground level on the new setup that I realized why they seemed low quality: they projected across the room, but not down to where I could actually HEAR them properly. Oops. At least now they sound great at room level.

Since we put it together, we’ve gone ahead and added a Blu-Ray player to the mix, and use it to watch Blu-Rays and instant viewing from Netflix. We ended up getting a decent little player from Samsung for about $140; a number of people had recommended that we get a Playstation 3, but we didn’t think it was worth it. It cost twice as much as the Samsung (which does everything we’d want the PS3 to do), and we wouldn’t be using it to play games. It’s worked out beautifully so far; the best test was when my parents came over to visit a week ago last Sunday. As I sat Dad down in front of the home theater, he asked if he could borrow my copy of Avatar… and then sat, mouth open, as the Blu-Ray version of Avatar finally finished loading and started showing. He asked Mom for a similar setup, but I don’t think Mom’s going to go for it. :-)

Since then, it’s gotten plenty of use. We still have two movies waiting to see for it from our Netflix disc queues (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Cloverfield), and my entire instant viewing queue. Looks like it’ll be serving us well for quite a while. :-)

It’s been nearly three months since I moved in with Jennifer. Honestly, it’s been pretty much smooth sailing here; or, as Jennifer has put it more than once, it’s been the most “non-event” event in her life. We’re pretty much crediting it to the fact that not only did we do a lot of preparation work in advance of my move in, I had been living here pretty much half the time in the months leading up to it. I made every excuse I could think of to spend nights down here… even if Jennifer herself wasn’t the primary reason, it helped that the drive to and from work from her house put together was shorter than the drive between my parents’ house and my office, one way. The one disadvantage of me being down here, so far, is that a good number of my friends live up in Spring. However, we make time whenever we can to go up and visit them.

About the biggest hurdle that I saw regarding the move in was the electronics. Of course, I had a number of electronics, and we had to decide what to do with them. The PC, game consoles, and TV ended up going into my office. The PC was a given, but with the consoles I can play games without bothering Jennifer if she’s watching TV. My home theater and DVD player ended up going into the living room. Jennifer didn’t have a home theater system already, so it made sense to put mine in place. As for the DVD player… her existing one wasn’t an upconverting DVD player, so we put mine in place there and moved hers to the bedroom.

However, our biggest foe so far has been wiring. The first of the two big examples has been in terms of networking. Her office is on the opposite side of the house from my office, and the cable modem and wireless router are located there. We REALLY did not want to run ethernet through the walls, and buying wireless adapters for my Xbox 360 and PC would have been expensive. (Not to mention it wouldn’t have helped my wired-only IP phone for work…) So, after doing some research, I ended up buying a ZyXEL WAP3205 wireless bridge. It basically bridges my ethernet network in my office onto the home wireless network. So far, it’s worked flawlessly. I’ve even been able to play online via Xbox Live with no issues. We’re also considering getting a second one to bridge our Wii onto the wireless network. (No, it won’t join our wireless network. We have no idea why, so the easiest solution is an ethernet adapter and wireless bridge.)

On the other hand, we’re not sure of a decent solution for our other wiring issue. We haven’t actually hooked up the home theater system yet, simply because of the speaker problems. Now, hooking up the front speakers and the subwoofer won’t be a problem (once I retrieve the left/right speakers from my parents’ house). HOWEVER, we really don’t have a good way to hook up the back speakers without running wire through the walls (again). Neither of us like going through the attic, so that’s kind of out. Running it under carpet is out, too, because the living room (like most of the house) has hardwood floors. We’ve tried looking at wireless solutions for rear speakers but have had no luck. So, here’s my question… does anyone have any ideas they’re willing to bounce off us? :-)

Otherwise, life has turned out to be pretty good here. I’m enjoying living with Jennifer, and things are looking pretty good for the immediate future. Here’s hoping things stay that way. :-)

The past week or two, I’ve been noticing on Facebook that friends of mine have been joining a group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia”. I don’t generally join such “advocacy” groups, as for the most part the people who the complaints are directed to simply don’t care. In the case of this group, I actually agree with the sentiment of the group, as I for one am tired of seeing all of these posts on my wall from people using apps I will never use. (Really, I’ve seen Facebook games. They’d bore the hell out of me.)

Well, yesterday, a friend of mine posted on her Twitter that she planned on doing double posting of her games to her wall simply to annoy those people who had joined that group. Her point was that instead of complaining, they should just use the built-in functionality in Facebook to hide the apps. Normally I would agree, but there are two problems I have that prevent it from being a long term solution.

The first problem is the sheer number of apps. It seems to me that every time I hit “Hide” on an app, two more pop up in peoples’ wall posts to take their place. It almost seems like every day I’m having to hit “Hide” on one app or another to get rid of these annoying posts. I’d love to be able to just click a box or set a setting to hide them all en masse… and that’s the second problem. To my knowledge (and I’ve asked others to no avail), there is no way to just hide all application wall posts. In short, I’m fighting a losing battle: I can constantly manually hide apps, but new apps keep springing up every day and I have no way to just blanket hide them.

I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to stop using Facebook, but considering how many people I know plan events and get-togethers using it these days, it would make life much more inconvenient in that respect. Unlike before, I actually DO have a social life now. I don’t begrudge people actually using the apps; I (and others) just would like a way to not see them, and Facebook doesn’t offer an easy or convenient option to shut them up. I don’t foresee it changing anytime soon, as I’m willing to bet the money made off the apps overrules any number of complaints. Until/unless something is done, though, those who use the apps should understand that while it might be easier to click “Hide” than complain in the short term, in the long term all we have to look forward is constantly clicking “Hide” or bearing with the annoyance of this filler crap polluting our walls.