I… am not amused.

Those who know me well know that my middle name is a bit unusual. It’s very similar to a much more common name, but is missing one letter. All my life I’ve been having to deal with people misspelling and/or mispronouncing my name. It was old back in grade school. Hell, when I was in high school, it literally took me three and a half years to get the school district to correctly spell my name on my transcript. I’d gripe and complain, but nothing was done for the longest time. Fortunately they fixed it before I graduated…

Speaking of which, at my graduation, I was ready to take the stage to receive my diploma. I stood there, next in line… and Mr. Schwetmann mispronounced my middle name. If you had looked closely you could have seen me muttering under my breath as I walked across the stage to get my diploma. Meanwhile, down in the orchestra, one of the flutists looked at the program and said, “Hey, they misspelled Scott’s name in the program!”

Malinda, my girlfriend at the time, replied through gritted teeth, “They didn’t misspell it. He mispronounced it.”

What brings this up, you may wonder? Well, last week I ordered new checks from my bank. I didn’t specify the name to be put on them, as it really didn’t matter. Well, they arrived today. I took them and opened the box… to find that they included my middle name on the checks, and had the misspelled version. *sigh*

I’m going to go in to the bank first thing in the morning and gripe. This time, maybe they’ll do it right and just put my middle initial instead of putting the full name. It’ll be less headache for everyone involved, methinks. I just wish that for once someone would get it right on the first try…

Well, I have to admit that this is one of the slower Saturdays I’ve had. Right now I’m down in my kitchen, on the PowerBook, keeping the dogs company. The parents are out at some function at a restaurant off of Beltway 8. I wasn’t invited, but then I’m not sure I would have gone anyway. It was obviously a suit and tie affair, and I don’t really do those (unless it’s a wedding or a funeral).

Of course, this leads in to the fact that I have to get suit dry cleaned and ready in the next week and a half. I’ll be going out to Jackson on the 9th to visit Misty and accompany her to her friend Dani’s wedding. I already checked the suit and it fits okay. However, I apparently need to get a new white dress shirt as mine is about a half an inch to an inch too tight around the collar. Great. Fortunately a tie won’t be an issue either, as I have plenty of those. As near as I remember, this will be the first time I’ve worn a suit in over three years (the last time was Winterfest 2003), so in a way I’m surprised my suit still fits without any issues. Ah, well… it should be a good evening.

On the other hand, I’ll have to go on a business trip earlier that week to Conway, AR. We have a new location there (the site of which I evaluated a couple of months ago), and I’ll have to work on getting it onto our corporate network. Fun fun. I’ll be there two nights, leaving Monday morning and coming back Wednesday morning. Hopefully that will give me enough time to get everything taken care of.

I have to admit to a bit of annoyance. The spacebar on my PowerBook has been giving me issues for the past week or so. In order to help try and fix the issue, the PowerBook was subjected to a somewhat thorough cleaning. The PowerBook looks a lot nicer as a result, but the spacebar is still not working properly. If I hit right at the center with a bit of force, it works. If I’m more than a bit off-center and/or lightly hit the spacebar, it doesn’t register. I’m more than a little irked by it, as I’ve had to backspace several times while writing this post. I think I’m going to have to have this looked at before long.

For now, though, I’m going to go back to some web browsing, chatting with friends, and listening to iTunes. Fun fun…

Okay, this is a new one…

The folks over at 419 Eater have had a history of playing with email scammers, wasting their time, and mocking them in some original ways. This time, however, they took it one step further. This particular scammer fell for 419 Eater’s bait, and ended up… well, I’ll let their words explain it:

This is a video created by a Nigerian email scammer who thinks he is producing a video for a scholarship payment from a victim he tried to scam. Unfortunately for this particular scammer, the “victim” fought back and created a fake video production company with promises of cash!

I have to admit, this was pretty damn funny… heh. :-)

I saw this over on Jenn’s LJ. I still don’t know what the hell this is, but it’s funny as hell.

(Oh, and it’s also NSFW. Be warned. :-) )

Well, here I am, at the end of another weekend. It’s been relatively slow, for the most part, other than a couple of things yesterday. Still, I do have to admit that it has been rather relaxing.

Among the things I did yesterday was finally introduce Jenn to online kombat. She had just gotten Mortal Kombat: Armageddon a couple of days ago, and we decided to both get onto PS2 online to try and play against each other. Before long we were using random select, as she wasn’t too familiar with most of the kombatants and I wanted to give her a fighting chance, so to speak. However, most of the matches ended up ending with the connection being lost, so we were getting rather frustrated. (At the time, my friend George was uploading a demo of Supreme Commander to my FTP server, so there were some bandwidth issues…) Anyway, we decided to play some Motor Kombat instead, and had a great deal of fun (as it required less bandwidth). We’ll probably try again in a couple of days, once she gets some time away from work and comics. :-)

Also, one of my favorite Star Trek episodes got the remaster treatment, and was aired last night. The episode was “The Doomsday Machine”, where the Enterprise finds the wreckage of the Constellation and has to fight off this almost-invincible planet killer. The reason I had been waiting for this episode is because it’s one of the most special effects heavy episodes of the original series, and was very interested in seeing how it would look updated. I wasn’t disappointed; it came out looking REALLY nice, and I’ll have to consider picking it up when it comes out on DVD. :-)

I did find a bit of annoying information earlier today. Apparently Apple has already sent my iPod back, saying they found nothing wrong with it. I’m hoping that’s not the case, as I’m pretty damn sure the battery in it is dead. *sigh* I’ll have it back in a few days, so I’ll check then. Ah, well… I can still use it with a charger (either at home or in the car) when I use it.

This week should be more of the same old, same old, methinks. Ah, well. I’ll probably pick up an Xbox Live Gold membership at some point this week (I had thought of picking up Justice League Heroes, but it’s not playable on Xbox 360 yet), as well as finally try out this Supreme Commander demo. Not to mention… well, work, work, and more work.

Oh, well. We’ll see how it goes.

What a weekend. As some of you might know, I went to Las Vegas over the weekend for the Midway Winter Gamers Day 2007 event. I’ll tell you a little about that in a second, but first… a new desktop (the old one wasn’t quite safe for public viewing, and I was going to be using the laptop in McCarran International Airport):

Anyway, we’ll move right along, and put this under a cut…
Read more “Back from Vegas…”

This has been one messed up day down in the ol’ work parking lot.

I got in at my usual time (that is, to say, 6:45 AM), and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. When Jesse (my IT coworker) got in at 8 AM, he told me there was a panhandler down in the parking lot who hit him up for money. He apparently also got the corporate controller and the CFO as well. I don’t know if anyone ever ended up telling him to leave, but still… this is a first for my building.

Then, it got weirder. Around lunchtime I went up to the datacenter, and there was nothing out of the ordinary when I left or came back. However, 5 PM came around, and I packed up and left. When I got down to the car, I noticed some… marks on the driver’s side window that had not been there when I got back from the datacenter.

I apologize for the crummy pic, as I used my camera phone and the lighting outside is terrible, but that is what it looks like: lipstick stains. Someone, for some reason, kissed my driver’s side window three times. I have no idea who, and I have no idea why. Considering the area of town my office is in, I almost don’t want to know. I suppose I could check the security camera footage, but A) I don’t know if my car was in camera range, and B) I’m not sure I want to know what it was.

Let’s just hope this isn’t an omen for how the rest of the week is going to be.

Well, it’s not been THAT interesting of a weekend, mind you, but it’s been an okay one. First off, though, I changed wallpapers on my desktop PC… heh. I liked how this one matched my current WindowBlinds theme. :-)

This does remind me… I need to complete Halo for PC. Heh.

I can’t say that I got too much accomplished yesterday. I did go out with the folks to the mall and took them out to eat at Macaroni Grill, but that was mainly because I had a $25 gift card to there. Otherwise, the most I did yesterday was re-enable comments on my Gallery, but only after putting in a captcha system to hopefully block out any more comment spam. *shrug* I didn’t even realize I was being hit there until I just happened to take a look at the database and noticed them. Bah. I also managed to switch off remote hotlinking to the images in the Gallery, after noticing someone was linking to one of the images in a forum post somewhere out there. I just wish I had found it sooner… heh.

As for last week, I suppose you could say one of the highlights was that on Thursday afternoon, Dave called me asking if I wanted to get dinner somewhere. So, I ended up meeting him over at Cheesecake Factory. So much for eating light; I had gone to Chili’s for lunch with the new coworker and the sysadmin. Still, I got something different from there: a barbecue chicken pizza. To make up for it, I ended up having a sandwich for lunch and soup for dinner on Friday.

As for this week, well… I need to stop at Fry’s at some point to pick up a couple of MiniDV tapes, and maybe pick up Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Dark Crusade. Then I’ve got other things going later this week, including a much-needed vacation. In any event, it should be a good week, and I’m looking forward to it. :-)

And now, your daily wildlife documentary.

(Demmie might want to avoid this one.)