To quote the message this pic came with:

“When you are in deep trouble, look straight ahead, keep your mouth shut, and say nothing.”

Well, it’s Sunday night, and the weekend’s over. It was kind of productive and kind of not, but all in all I can’t really complain. Well… I can complain about my wireless keyboard trying to tell me the batteries are nearly dead, but that’s about it. Otherwise, it’s been decent.

Back around Christmastime, Missy bought me a $30 gift certificate from the iTunes Music Store. I didn’t get anything until this past week, because I really couldn’t decide what to get. Finally, I went ahead and bought three albums this weekend, and got them burned to CD and into jewel cases with CD labels and case inserts. I got…

• Madonna – The Immaculate Collection (This is actually my partial quota for 80’s pop music, as the album doesn’t have any of her work post-1990 or thereabouts. I can’t say I like her recent work, but this stuff is okay.)
• Blue Öyster Cult – Workshop of the Telescopes: Best of Blue Öyster Cult (I’ve been wanting to get a “best of” album from this group for a while, and this was too good a deal to pass up at two discs for $10.)
• The Alan Parsons Project – Eye in the Sky (I got this for the first two tracks; the funny thing is, I had been looking for “Sirius” as it had been part of a game called High Impact Football by Midway. However, it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I found out who actually made it.)

Yesterday, Dave came around around lunchtime, and we had a nice lunch at Fuddrucker’s. Afterwards, we returned to the house and watched “Tomb of the Cybermen” (which is a Doctor Who serial from 1967). Then we headed down to Louie’s apartment and met up with him there. We WERE going to go to Macaroni Grill for dinner, but once I stepped inside and saw just how many people were waiting on a table, we got back out of there in a hurry. From there we went over to Richmond Ave. and hit India’s Restaurant for some good Indian food. I had keema curry, which is a minced lamb curry… yum. :-) After that, we did a bit of driving around to kill time, and then we went to Club Tropicana for drinks and salsa dancing. I should say, Louie went to dance… I’m not going to get into specifics, but I contented myself with having a couple of beers, talking to Louie and Dave, and observing. Even Dave danced the merengue with this girl named Natalie… but then Natalie is a friend of Louie’s and merengue is not that hard of a dance. About midnight or so, we went back to Louie’s place to get my car and to get the 1 GB memory chip he’s selling me, and then Dave and I headed back to my place (where his car was). After Dave left, I went upstairs, talked to Missy for a bit, and then went to bed, exhausted.

This morning, I got up, had breakfast, got coffee, and proceeded to burn the albums I had bought off the iTunes Music Store (and Chrono Symphonic, a Chrono Trigger collaboration I had gotten off of Overclocked Remix) to CDs, put them in jewel cases, and put them up into my CD shelves. I also upgraded the memory in my main PC; it now has 2 GB of RAM in it. I’ll have to try DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 on here now. I also helped Dad pick out a new print server and wireless access point/router for his new office. So, it’s been a bit productive today too…

I’m not looking forward to this week, though. At some point I’m going to have to run up to Buffalo (which is just over halfway between here and Dallas) to get the computers and printers set up for our new location there. I also have a vacation two weeks from Tuesday I’m going to have to keep in mind. Oh, well… at least I’m being kept busy. Tomorrow should be another busy day as well, with meetings with cabling contractors, setting up a pair of printers, a meeting with security system personnel, and a conference call to end the day.

I suppose I should go start winding things down here. Fun fun…

First off, I wanted to share with you all my new desktop. If you’re an MK fan and you like the wallpaper, you can grab it from here; we at Mortal Kombat Online released the wallpaper this morning in four different sizes.

All right, now that that’s out of the way…

So, I got back from Canada on Saturday afternoon. I’ll go ahead and be kind by putting this under a cut, so that those people who may not be interested don’t have to read the whole thing. :-)

Read more “The post trip post… heh.”

Well, here I am, sitting in the hotel restaurant here outside of Edmonton, waiting for my breakfast.
Truth be told, it’s not really been that bad here. The temperatures have been hovering right around the freezing point, and there’s not been any snow. I was expecting a foot of snow and temps about ten to twenty degrees colder. I got most of what I came up here to do done, and today will be spent mostly doing cleanup and making sure everything is kosher. The main thing that sucks is that my flight out tomorrow leaves at 6:15 AM, so with taking customs and immigration at the airport into account, I bed to be up at 3. Bleh.
Anyway, my breakfast is served, so off I go. I’ll post a long trip summary tomorrow.

I’m off to Rock Springs, WY today, and then will be off to Edmonton, Canada for the rest of the week.

I’ll probably post from there, but if not… I’ll be back Saturday.

*sigh* I must say, this weekend has been a mix of both work and laziness; I’ve either been hard at work on stuff or laying in bed and sleeping. I guess part of the problem has been the fact that my trip to Wyoming and Canada is on Tuesday, yet I’m not exactly motivated to go quite yet. *sigh* Oh, well…

Part of my job this weekend has been getting data off this one drive; even on a 100 Mbps LAN connection, 30 GB takes a while to transfer. The worst part is that the only place I could store the data was on my iPod, as I’ll need to take the data to work with me tomorrow so I can transfer it back onto that hard drive once it’s been formatted with NTFS. (If anyone from work is watching; the machine was heavily firewalled and only I had access to it the entire time.) Once that was done, I had to put the test server the drive was sitting in back on the outside network, and put my spare 80 GB drive in place of the drive from work so that it could be used for backing up the MK Online site data. Most of that stuff has been hurry up and wait type stuff… *sigh*. Oh, well.

Tomorrow’s not going to be fun, either. I have to do some general cleanup around my desk area, check a gate card for someone at another company at our campus, burn a couple of data discs for the trip, transfer the data off my iPod and then resync it with my iTunes collection, etc. Then, when I get home, I need to make sure my laptop bag is packed only with the equipment and paperwork I need (I REALLY don’t need to have TSA asking about the computer toolkit should I forget to take it out), pack my bags, and then be up in time for me to leave for the airport at 4:45 AM. :-/

Ah, well. I suppose I should see about getting some AA batteries charged for my digital camera; I’ll need it for the trip to Rock Springs. Fun fun. Once that’s done… who knows.

Okay, what I’m about to say does not reflect the views of the other staff at MK Online, nor is it meant to be a mean-spirited jab at other site webmasters. That said…

We at MK Online have had a policy on the site for a few years that I’m sure several of the members never quite understood. This policy is referred to as the “no scan” policy. In effect, we don’t allow scans from magazine articles to posted in news articles or on the forum. Not only is it a breach of the magazines’ copyright to post the scans, it’s also a show of respect to the magazines to not post them. (Posting scans deprives them of sales.)

A couple of weeks back, a magazine called Game Informer released an issue with a preview of the next game in the MK series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. A few sites decided to post scans of the magazine. We held back and just reported what we saw. To the average user, it probably looked like we dropped the ball on it. We held back for what we felt was a good reason, and I even warned one of the webmasters to tread very lightly. For the record, Game Informer was one of those mags whose threats had lead us to implement the “no-scan policy”.

I just found out tonight that, well… as of the time I write this, two of the most prominent sites hosting the scans have had their webhosting accounts suspended. I don’t know if the scans were the reason, but it seems most likely, as I see no other common denominator between the sites.

All I have to say is this: let this be a lesson to everyone. Try and respect other people’s copyrights. Not only does it put them on better terms with you… it avoids a potential smackdown later on down the road.

Well, all in all, it’s been a fun weekend… though this morning I did NOT get as much sleep as I had hoped. That’s a story in and of itself, though…

It pretty much started yesterday when I headed over to Louie’s after getting my hair cut. I was bringing a 3Com network card and my unused copy of Windows XP Professional upgrade so that Louie could have a working PC that would support his printer and scanner. (He has Windows XP Professional X64 Edition, but HP and Nikon didn’t have 64-bit drivers for his printer or scanner, respectively.) When I got there, I saw that Dave had beaten me there, so I went ahead and gave him his Christmas gift: a DVD boxset entitled Doctor Who: Lost in Time, which is a collection of rare Doctor Who episodes from the 1960’s. In return, Dave gave me my Christmas gift: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on DVD. We went and had lunch at Fuddrucker’s while waiting for the drive to format and Windows to install… and then things took a turn for the wrong.

Dave had ordered a copy of Flesh Gordon on DVD (no, that is NOT a typo), and had brought it along with him just so we could all see what the hell it was. What followed was a porn parody of the serials of the 30’s and 40’s that, well… words cannot express how wrong it was. It wasn’t the sex or anything… it was, just, well, everything. The sad thing is, at one point Louie put the movie on pause to go into the study and see how the format of his machine’s second hard drive was going. He stepped up to it, looked at the percentage indicator, and read it off: “Sixty-nine.” Of course, reading that after an hour’s worth of Flesh Gordon was the straw that broke the camel’s back; the absurdity of the whole situation hit us and we spent the next few minutes dying laughing.

Anyway, when Louie was all set up and the movie was over, I went ahead and made my way to Sean’s and Jinny’s house for Sean’s 32nd b-day/PJ party. I’m sure Sean, Jinny, Henry, or any of the others could give a more accurate detailing of the night’s goings on than I could, though admittedly I was probably one of the most sober of the bunch by the time the night was over. We did play a few games including the Story Game, Haggis and the McBastards (aka a murder mystery type game), and an attempt at a karaoke game that fell flat on its ass. Personally, the most fun was the murder mystery game, where all the house lights were turned off, everyone ran in and hid (given thirty seconds between each person entering), and then one person (designated the killer) would try and “kill” everyone. I got nailed in the first game… but in the second game, I hid behind a door and as soon as the killer walked past me I booked and got downstairs as quick as possible… in the process slipping and falling down the steps, losing a shoe. During the third game, I went to the bathroom and stood behind the shower curtains. Then, inspiration hit me and I lay down in the tub. It ended up benefitting me considering Sean (the killer in that game) went into the bathroom, pulled the shower curtain, and moved on… not realizing someone might be laying in the tub.

Later on in the night, after everyone but myself, Bryan (Sean’s brother’s brother-in-law), and Henry had left, we all decided to make a run over to Denny’s for food. Seeing as it was a PJ party, Henry, Sean, and Jinny were all wearing PJ’s there. I ended up telling Sean he had a really nice Arthur Dent look going. After food and coffee, I ended up saying goodbye to the group and heading back home. I was in bed by around 5:45 AM or thereabouts. All in all, it was a great night, and I enjoyed meeting epiphany, Psy-Guy, Henry, and the whole crowd.

… and at 10:45 AM, I was woken up by Louie calling my cell phone. Apparently he was having issues with his keyboard; he has a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard/mouse set exactly I have, and his mouse had been acting weird. Now that the keyboard was being wonky too, I’m kinda convinced his USB Bluetooth transceiver is defective and needs replacing. Oh, well…

I’ll probably end up going to bed early tonight, as I only got less than five hours of sleep this morning. Tomorrow does not look like it’ll be a fun day, so I want to be well-rested for it. *sigh*…