Holy crap.

As a lot of people know, the first official trailers for Team Fortress 2 were released within the past few days. In a bit of nostalgia, I decided to see if I could find the intro for the original Team Fortress… and I don’t mean Team Fortress Classic, I mean the ORIGINAL mod for Quake. Sure enough, YouTube failed to disappoint. :-)

Just as a side bit of trivia: the music is “Ecce Gratum” from the Carmina burana. When I worked for Custom Computer Centers, the sales manager loved that intro. So, for his birthday, I picked him up a copy of the Carmina burana on CD. He didn’t realize why I got it for him until it got to the appropriate track… ;-)

Well, this is fun. As I stated in the last entry, I was supposed to go out to Odessa today on a business trip. What neither my boss nor I realized when we scheduled the trip, however, was that I was leaving on the day of the annual stockholder’s meeting. It was quickly decided yesterday that I needed to be here for it instead of on the road, so I ended up rescheduling my flight and hotel for two weeks from now. Fun fun.

So, instead of being on a flight to Odessa right now, I’m sitting in a corner of the training room at the office, waiting for the stockholders’ meeting to start in an hour or so. I’m hoping everything ends up being uneventful, but with our luck if I HAD gone out of town, everything would have fallen apart and no one here would have quite known how to fix it. I had looked forward to this trip, but I easily admit it would have been problematic had I gone. Ah, well… I still have the one in two weeks to look forward to.

I did get to go out and unwind last night, though. Dave called me at around 3 PM asking if I wanted to meet for dinner and drinks somewhere, simply because it was his day off and he was bored out of his skull. I readily agreed; as soon as I was done with most of the preparations for the meeting last night, I made my way over to the Richmond Arms to meet Dave. For those who don’t know, Richmond Arms is a British pub over off Richmond Avenue. We ate, had a couple of beers (I had a pint of Guinness and a pint of Shiner Bock), and generally talked for a long while. Afterwards, I made my way home. All in all, it was a nice diversion from the usual weeknight humdrum (which does not include talking to Misty… heh).

Ah, well. I’ll just see how things go from here. On the bright side, as said earlier, it’s a three-day weekend… and I plan on going over to Cypress tomorrow to get myself out of the office (but not out of work) early. :-) Maybe Mom would want to meet at Red Robin for lunch… who knows. I guess we’ll see…

Well, it’s the middle of another week… or close to the middle anyway. I’m just stuck at my desk right now, talking to Misty via IM while doing some work on the Mortal Kombat Online server. Nothing too serious, mind you… just finishing up working on the backup scripts. It was a good weekend this past weekend, for the most part… which kinda makes up for the crap day I had today.

Friday night was fun. After I got off work, I made my way back to north Houston, and instead of going straight home went to Becky and Brian’s house, where preparations were being made for a surprise birthday party for Becky. While Brian and Becky were at a school play, we were at the house getting things ready. In the end, I felt like a bit of a tool; I helped Heather get some balloons up, provided some wiring, and helped Autumn’s husband Brian get some streamers and lights hung. The rest of the time leading up to Becky’s arrival, though, was spent in the house in front of my laptop, helping out with a couple of database upgrades at work. :-/ While people were prepping I was waiting for scripts to finish running. In the end, though, Becky got home and was suitably surprised and elated. :-) The party itself was great, catching up with old friends. I must say, though, that I did a lot worse at Karaoke Revolution than I normally do. I’ll have to practice. After a while, though, I said my goodbyes and left; Sean, Jinny, and Henry were good enough to give me a lift back to my car, and I headed home.

Saturday was fun as well. At around lunchtime, I made my way down to Louie’s apartment, arriving at right about the same time as Dave did. From there, we went to Fuddrucker’s, where we had lunch. After lunch, we headed back to the apartment. While Louie and Dave worked on scanning slides, I got on the phone and talked with Misty. After talking to Misty a while, I fired up Louie’s PS2 and played a few rounds of Mortal Kombat II, followed by a game of Cyberball 2072. Once Louie and Dave were done, we sat down and watched the Mets and the Yankees play, followed by… God help me… bullriding. (Actually, bullriding is quite amusing to watch… what with watching how riders get thrown combined with the redneck accents of the announcers.) After that, we went and had dinner at Chili’s, followed by browsing at Borders then Barnes & Noble. Then, after getting some Marble Slab, we went back to the apartment and watched a bit more bullriding. Soon enough we were all getting tired and ended up heading home.

Not much happened Sunday, other than my sitting in the kitchen most of the afternoon working on my laptop, working on the Oracle servers at work. Heh.

As for today… blah. Today was the day from hell. As I was getting ready to leave this morning, I had to unplug the power to my laptop so I could pack it up. So, I go under the desk, and I kneeled under the desk to remove the power cord… and I heard something rip. It turned out I ripped my Dockers. :-/ After putting a new pair of pants on and packing the laptop, I headed to the datacenter… only to find that the version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 I had was old enough where it didn’t have the drivers for the hard disk controller on the server I needed to install it on. Gah! I ended up going back to the office so I could download new ISOs. Then, while at the office, I get a message from one of MK Online’s mods leading me to find that there was a problem with the server. After talking with the hosting provider support, CCShadow, and his father, the server was brought back up and running. Finally, I got an email this afternoon on my MK Online email account that ended up incensing me. *sigh* It didn’t help that I didn’t get any caffeine until 3 PM. (I usually have two or three cups of coffee in the morning.)

As for the rest of this week, well… on Thursday and Friday I will be out on a business trip to Odessa, TX. After that, I’ll have a three-day weekend to look forward to. I need a chance to relax and unwind… heh. For now, though, I’m just going to keep talking to Misty, have a beer, and continue working on these scripts and let them run. Ah, well… just another fun day for me.

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…