Well, it’s Sunday night, and I’m just sitting at my computer desk listening to music from my iPod being played through the home theater and having the last of my Shiner Lights. Not that I’ve done that much productive today, for the most part. About the most productive thing I’ve done today has been to figure out a problem with how I’d configured the MySQL install on the main MK Online server. Apparently I didn’t realize that all of these huge files in the base of the MySQL data directory were in fact what are called “binary logs”, which act as transaction logs showing what changes have been made to the filesystem. The problem was that I never quite took into account that they needed special attention in regards to cleanup, so I actually had something like close to 4 GB worth of logfiles going back to 2003 or thereabouts. :-/ I only need a week’s worth of these logfiles, so I’m probably going to come up with a solution in the next couple of days that will allow us to keep these files cleaned up. Heh, it’s amusing sometimes how I’m still learning stuff about these things…

Yesterday was fun, though; Dave and Louie came by the house and we hung out for most of the day. Dave had brought his father’s laptop around to see if there was anything I could do to salvage it, but unfortunately it only has 128 MB of RAM, and it was thoroughly infested with spyware and viruses. At this point, about all I can recommend to Dave is that a wipe and reload might be in order. *sigh* Other than working on the laptop, though, we had lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings, played some Midway Arcade Treasures and Midway Arcade Treasures 2, and had dinner and drinks out. We had fun, all things told. It certainly beat sitting at home doing nothing. :-)

I must say, though, I’m looking forward to the short week this week. We get Good Friday off, which is certainly welcome to me; I could use the time off. However, it’s not as if it’ll be a quiet week for me, as tomorrow I have to rush around and get packed to move into my new offices on Tuesday. This will have to be done in addition to whatever other work I need to do; chances are I’ll end up working late tomorrow to get everything finished. Oh, well… as long as I’m not there all night I won’t complain. In addition, the new office is a bit more out of the way, so it’ll be harder for users to come seek me out instead of submitting support tickets like they’re supposed to. :-)

As for now, though, I’m just going to sit back and relax. I got my hands on the Doctor Who – The Beginning DVD box set, which has the first three Doctor Who serials from late 1963 and early 1964. I watched the first one, “An Unearthly Child”, tonight. I’ll probably watch the other two (“The Daleks” and “The Edge of Destruction”) later this week. I’ll probably finish up the night by playing some Cyberball 2072 or Mortal Kombat II by way of Midway Arcade Treasures 2. Oh, well… might as well before the storm of work hits tomorrow. :-)

Okay, so I haven’t posted in here in a while. So sue me. I’ve been kept pretty busy over the past week or so, and haven’t really had time to come in here and do a post. I’ve got a half an hour or so now, so I can elaborate on how my week’s been.

As I’ve said before, I went on a business trip to Rock Springs, WY this past week. I left on Monday, arriving in Salt Lake City at around noon local time. From there, I rented a car and made my way to Rock Springs. I must say that driving to Rock Springs from Salt Lake City is a hell of a lot more pleasant than driving to Dallas, Lafayette, or Corpus Christi from Houston. It’s about the same amount of driving time, but it’s a lot more scenic (with mountains and the like), so it doesn’t seem as boring. Of course, it helped that I brought my iPod and FM transmitter/car charger with me. I arrived in Rock Springs at around 4 PM local time, and met up with coworkers at the location so I could get an idea of what was going on. Then, I went to my hotel (the local Hampton Inn, which was as nice as always), and got settled in. I then went for dinner at the local Applebee’s, which was in the parking lot of Rock Springs’s mall. (For those of you familiar with the north Houston area as it was in the 70’s and 80’s… the closest comparison I can make is that the mall reminded me of North Oaks Mall. :-) ) It had been twenty years since I’ve been at an Applebee’s. It’ll be another twenty years before I go back. The food just wasn’t that good. :-/

I got to the factory early Tuesday morning after having a very nice breakfast at the hotel (they even had my preferred brands of syrup and coffee creamer!), and got straight to work setting the time clocks up. I managed to get all of the timeclocks operational, other than missing a fiber-optic port module for the switch. I must say, though, that re-running a bunch of ethernet cable in the shop was not my idea of a fun time. :-/ After the day was done, I headed back to the hotel, and pretty much hung out there the rest of the night (other than a brief run over to Burger King to get some dinner).

I checked out of the hotel Wednesday morning, and went over to the factory to work; I ended up setting up a small networked laser printer and installing the second fiber-optic port on the switch (which didn’t arrive until that morning). From there, I had lunch with two coworkers at this neat little Italian place called Rocky Mountain Noodle. After lunch, I said goodbye to Lance and Ralph, and began the drive back to Salt Lake City. I was understandably nervous about doing so, as SLC had been getting some rotten weather (aka, rain and snow showers) and that it was travelling east towards Rock Springs. It didn’t help that Ralph, Lance, and Kelly (the general manager at the Rock Springs location) had been giving me shit about it. Fortunately for me, though, it turned out that most of the weather was actually 40-50 miles south of I-80. Other than a rainshower outside of Little America, it was nice and sunny until I got within 30 miles of Salt Lake City. At that point I hit some serious snow showers. I was nervous, but it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I had feared. I finally reached my hotel (the Comfort Inn at SLC International Airport) after a wrong turn or two, got settled in, and worked from the hotel room that night (excluding dinner in the hotel restaurant). I likely won’t stay there again; two of the lamps lacked bulbs, the bathroom’s fan was too damn loud, and I kept getting disconnected from my home server and the work VPN.

The next morning I did some more work from the hotel room. At about 10:30 AM, I checked out, went to the airport, returned my rental car, and went to the gate to work from there. Unfortunately, despite all the ads they had at the airport for wireless network access, my laptop was unable to get onto the airport’s wifi system. So, I just watched the CNN monitors and took calls on my Blackberry while waiting for my flight. I got on the flight, arrived back in Houston at 5:30 PM, and Dad picked me up. All in all, an uneventful end to the trip…

… or so I thought, until we got into a wreck on the way home.

We were on Greens Road heading westbound; we had just crossed Aldine-Westfield when I noticed a white Buick Regal preparing to pull out of Chevron. I had hoped she wouldn’t pull out as we were approaching. She did. Next thing I know, she’s T-boning Dad’s car on the passenger side right in front of me. *sigh* I looked over at her, and she had a perfect “Oh SHIT” expression on her face. Fortunately no one was hurt; Dad’s car was dented and scratched, but the Buick’s front bumper was torn off. We waited a while for a policeman to show up to file a police report, but none came, so we decided to file one the next morning and get home. (It was after dark at that point and that area of town isn’t a very nice one.) I got home, unpacked, and caught up on some stuff… and that was my day.

Friday was rather uneventful, other than the fact that I got a new cell phone. This new phone is supposed to be one of the “Blackberry killers”; it’s a Cingular 8125, which runs Windows Mobile 5.0. I already have it linked to my office email account, and it’s been working rather well. In fact, the only reason I carried both it and my Blackberry around is because they won’t have my number ported to the 8125 until tomorrow morning. After that, I’ll be rid of the Blackberry and using the 8125 full-time. It really is a nice device, though I imagine people like Agilo and kryptondog will be scandalized that I’m using a Windows device as my cell phone. Heh.

As for this weekend… about the most productive thing done was to fix the satellite dish. We first noticed a problem yesterday evening when I tried to watch Cops and found my satellite receiver wasn’t getting anything from the dish. After a bunch of troubleshooting (involving re-running coaxial cable and moving receivers between locations), I finally went to Best Buy to purchase a new dual-LNB for the dish, as Dad found the old one had somehow been damaged. The receiver’s working fine now, thankfully… no complaints from me or anything. :-)

And now, I should consider going to bed. It’s been a long day, and it’ll be a longer one tomorrow. Fun fun…

Well, I suppose I can think of worse ways to spend a Saturday. I’m sitting at home, keeping an eye on IRC, having a beer, and listening to my iPod (which is hooked up to my home theater). I had come up with the idea earlier of challenging people on #mortalkombat to Mortal Kombat: Deception, and giving them five Dragon Points (used for rank upgrades on MK Online) if they could beat me without using cheats or infinites. Unfortunately, the one time I actually tried playing against someone, I kept getting an error saying, “Connection quality is inadequate.” Gah, so much for THAT idea… So, now I’m just relaxing and not doing too much.

Tomorrow would normally not be too busy either, except for the fact that I need to head over to my office to pick up asset tags. I’ll need them for my business trip next week, and I won’t have time to get them before I leave on Monday. I wish I didn’t have to go to the office, but it’s my own damn fault for forgetting the damn tags in the first place. I’ll also need to pack for the trip tomorrow evening as well, but that shouldn’t take too long. Otherwise, like I said, it’ll be a quiet day.

My real busy day this weekend was last night. I needed to go over to Louie’s apartment after work to finish up getting his machine into some semblance of stability; as I believe I said in a previous post, his machine is so advanced that I’m having to be creative about driver installation. For example, the motherboard drivers were only available in the 64-bit of Windows XP, so we ended up putting Windows XP Professional X64 Edition on it. Then we found said motherboard drivers didn’t include audio drivers, so I had to install the audio portion only from standard nForce 4 drivers. About the most embarrassing part was trying to get the network card working; it took me an hour before I realized that the ethernet controller Device Manager wasn’t recognizing was the onboard NIC, and that XP had recognized the Realtek PCI card I had installed. When I left, the machine was up and running and all of the important hardware had been detected. Only time will tell whether it’ll stay stable or not, though.

Oh, well, that’s my weekend in a nutshell. Now to find something to occupy my time… fun fun.