Meh. I should be packing right now, or at least pretending that I am. Instead, I’m sitting here at my PC not doing much of anything, while my TV and satellite receiver are tuned to CourtTV and I’m half-watching Cops. The trip is going to be to Conway, AR, to get a new location there up onto our corporate network. Fun fun…

At least it’s been a semi-fruitful and eventful weekend. Yesterday I went over to Dave’s apartment at around noon. Once I got there, we left for Fuddrucker’s for some lunch. I ended up trying their new chipotle BBQ burger, which was decent (if they had remembered to add the barbecue sauce in the first place). After that, we went to Spec’s so Dave could stock up on some scotch. Once that was done, we headed back to his apartment.

When I went to Dave’s apartment, I had brought my DVD box set of volume one of Batman: The Animated Series. Dave had never seen it before, so I figured I would introduce him to it. I ended up showing him the episodes “Heart of Ice”, “Be a Clown”, and (the appropriately two-part) “Two-Face”. Half-way through the last episode, Louie arrived and watched the rest of it with us, and then we switched over to the OSU and Michigan basketball game. Before long, we were discussing places to eat dinner. The final choice came down to Cheesecake Factory, so we piled into Louie’s truck and headed over to the Cheesecake Factory at First Colony Mall in Sugar Land. After a 40 minute wait, we sat down and had dinner.

Once done, we made our way to Slick Willie’s on Westheimer for some pool. I actually won a game… go me. :-) After we played a round of eight-ball and then a round of nine-ball, we went back to Dave’s apartment; Louie dropped us off and left, and I went up to get my DVDs and left back home.

Today was more or less uneventful, other than going to K&G to pick up a new dress shirt for Dani’s wedding on Saturday. Fortunately I found a shirt pretty quickly, bought it, and brought it home, with a stop at CVS for deodorant and toothpaste for the trip tomorrow. That last stop ended up being a bust, as they didn’t have anything in the size I needed to take on the flight. I ended up going to Walgreen’s later for what I needed. Anyway, now I have my entire suit ready to be sent to the dry cleaner’s for cleaning; I’m more or less ready for this coming weekend, methinks.

I’ll probably do a bit of a technically-oriented post a bit later on. As for now, I think I’ve dawdled long enough and should get to work at least getting my laptop case ready for the trip. (Aka, remove the computer toolset and put phone/earpiece chargers in, that kind of thing.) I’d rather get it taken care of now, especially as I have to be at the airport by 6 AM, seeing as my flight is at 7:15 AM. Ah, well…

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…”