All right, first Ginny posted this, and then I saw it on Ain’t It Cool News. All I have to say is… Bruce is the Man. :-)

Heh. This kind of occasional zinger is one of the reasons I love Misty so. :-)

I was driving past Haude Elementary on the way home from work tonight, and had Misty on the phone with me… and the following exchange ensued.

Me: “What the hell? `Mathematics hip hop program’? What is that supposed to be?”
Misty: “How is THAT supposed to go? `One, two, buckle your shoe; three, four, bitch shut the door’?”

I damn near died laughing….

Well, I’m sitting here in our Robstown location, on the second half of my lunch hour. I’ve already been over to Denny’s for some lunch, after spending a couple of hours here setting up a couple of terminals and getting ready to do an inventory. All in all, it wasn’t a bad drive; fortunately, Misty called me sometime around 7:30 AM and talking to her helped make the drive seem like it was going by quicker. I’ll be getting out of here at around 5 PM, and anticipate being back in Houston around 9-10 PM (seeing as I plan on stopping for dinner and gas).

Actually, before I continue, our marketing director sent me an email last night. To my amusement, it contained pictures of me she took while I was working at our booth at the Offshore Technology Conference last weekend. I figured some people might get a kick out of seeing them, so…

I’ll refrain from posting the third pic. Suffice to say she caught me at a point on the fourth day when I was dead tired.

Anyway, I still need to figure out what I’m doing for dinner tonight. Normally when I come to Robstown I have dinner at the Denny’s here. However, on my way in, I saw that they had built what appears to be a brand-new Chili’s. So, I went ahead and had Denny’s for lunch hoping for some Chili’s for dinner. That’s when an employee here told me the Chili’s wasn’t open yet… damn. I’ll double-check on the way out to make sure, though. In addition, they completed all of the highway construction that had been bugging me the past few times I’d been out here, so that was good. Unfortunately, they also closed the gas station I usually use when out here. That sucks, considering it usually had pretty reasonable pricing…

As for the rest of this weekend, I really don’t have much planned now other than helping with these upgrades at work, trying to get MK Online back up and working, and spending time talking to Misty. The only thing that comes to mind is Mother’s Day dinner for Mom, and we’ve got a reservation at PF Chang’s at Willowbrook tomorrow evening. That should be interesting, as Mom and Dad have never had it before…

Ah, well. It’s time I got back to work. Fun fun…

Well… damn. Heh. I knew yesterday when I put up that post about MK Online’s downtime that it would add to the amount of bandwidth the site uses. What I WASN’T prepared for was the sheer volume I got, not to mention the fact that I got more comments in that one post in less than 24 hours than the site got in the past six months. :-) (No, that doesn’t count the comments on the LiveJournal mirror.) I admit I’m kind of surprised I haven’t really been Slashdotted, but all in all things are going well on that front. I’m just hoping MK Online’s hosting provider has the new server ready sooner rather than later…

I’m just spending my lunch break relaxing and mentally preparing for the trip tomorrow. Day trips to Corpus Christi are rarely any fun, as it entails a three to four hour drive through mostly boring countryside, with a couple of slow spots through small towns. The plan is for me to leave Houston at 6 AM (which is when I usually leave for work anyway) and hopefully be back on the road to Houston by 6 PM. (I need to get dinner and gas before I drive back, after all.) About the only thing that makes the drive bearable is the fact that I always take the iPod with me… heh. Ah, well. It should be an uneventful trip.

As far as this weekend goes, though, it’ll be anything but uneventful. I have two massive upgrades at the office to help with, and if the new MK Online server is up by then I’ll be working on that. Throw in the fact that I have to take Mom to dinner for Mother’s Day on Saturday, and I’m looking at a very busy weekend. My one hope is that maybe Louie will be up to going out and getting drinks somewhere Sunday night. God knows I’ll definitely be ready for a couple by then.

Otherwise, other than dealing with a couple of work issues, it’s been a relatively peaceful day… other than dealing with a few trolls on the downtime post. I replied to one twice, before deciding said troll wasn’t really worth the space and deleting all of his posts (and my replies to him). I’ve taken to firewalling off those people. *sigh* Believe me, it gets old. Ah, well… they’re not really worth worrying about. :-)

Anyway, gotta do a couple of things now during lunch to prep for tomorrow, so I should get that done. Fun fun…

Bleh. Right now I’m sitting in the kitchen, working on my work laptop. I’ve been doing maintenance on a couple of company databases for most of the evening; unfortunately, it’s mostly consisted of sitting here and watching an import command run in a terminal window. Fortunately I’ve got most of my personal communications programs like Thunderbird and Gaim installed onto a USB flash drive, so I’ve more or less kept myself occupied. Still, it’s slow work and I’ve come close to falling asleep more than once.

It’s been an uneventful week so far. I’ve found that I’ll need to go to Corpus on Friday for a full equipment inventory and to replace a couple of workstations at our location there, so that’s something I’m not exactly looking forward to. Tomorrow will be spent at the Cypress location to do some work on the timeclocks; I’ll use that as an opportunity to take Mom and Dad out to lunch at Red Robin. I had taken Dad to dinner at Denny’s this evening; originally I had asked Mom if she wanted to go to Red Robin as a kind of balance, but then Dad wanted to go so I agreed to take them both. By a lucky bit of timing, we got a $3 off coupon for Red Robin in the mail today, so it won’t cost as much…

The Offshore Technology Conference was also rather uneventful for me for the most part, other than the fact that if I ever got out of IT, I found I can get a job as a bartender. ;-) Our booth had a bar stocked with coffee, soda, water, fruit juice, and beer, and I was acting as the unofficial bartender the entire time. The only requirement for getting a drink from us was that you had to get it in a koozie with our company logo. I referred to it as “ad-supported drinking”. :-) When the show was over, we had enough leftover beer that I managed to get a 24 pack of Miller Lite to bring home. (Hey, it’s one of the few American mass-market beers I’ll drink.) I also got my hands on a new travel mug and a REALLY nice Leatherman tool with our company logo on it. I’ll just have to remember to remove the Leatherman tool from my laptop bag when I travel…

Ah, well. For now, I’m just going to go back to watching this terminal window. Hopefully it’ll end within the hour, so I can have the second bit of maintenance run while I’m sleeping. If not, it can wait until tomorrow. Fun fun…

Okay, I just had to share this pic. I know Jenn and a few others would get a kick out of this…

Thanks, George!