Did I say that out-loud? Oh, damn ... well I can blame it on the exhaustion. Working 8pm to 8am sucks rocks. No matter how 'early' I go to sleep when I get home I just can't get enough rest to stay alert when I get back to the lab.
Now I've got 4.5 hours left of the shift to make it through. Took a bit of a nap at 1am but it isn't helping. I just want to go curl up under my desk and sleep until dawn. sigh.
oh well. Only 9 more days.
Well, I may have been a bit premature on the hrumphing of the refi. I called my broker yesterday to let him know that I was planning on selling in a year+ and that I wasn't sure that it was still worth doing the refi. He said that he'd run the numbers again and see if it made sense. So he e-mailed me later and suggested a 3 year ARM instead of a 5. Would save me roughly $400 a month and only cost $2K at closing. No brainer. So cross your fingers for me.
And I just had a wierd conversation with Ezekial. She called me on her way home for x-mas. Told me that she was going to resign her job and move back to SLO for a while. I"m not quite sure what is up with her. She sounded distracted ... but that might just have been because she was driving. Well, we'll see what happens. Hey, it's been 4 years. What's a few months eh? :-)
Patrick suprized me today. He invited me to spend Christmas with them. I have no family in this area and I'm not traveling this year so I was really just planning on staying home and catching up on sleep for a day. But this is really nice. ... now I have to get a present for Keith ;-)
And the last .... we shipped the first half. Whoo-Hoo!!!
That's it for Blog land tonight.
Not much been going on lately. Just work, sleep, work, sleep, etc ad infinum. I'll be REALLY glad when this month is over and I can get back to a regular schedule.
My boss did something really cool. My company has an asnine time off policy. We don't just have Sick time and Vacation time. We also have "Personal" days and "Floating" holidays. As far as I can tell the only difference between a personal day and a vacation day is that a personal day can be taken anytime you need it ... like if your car breaks down or something. A floating holiday is no different. However, the BIG difference is that your vacation time can accrue over the years, but you lose the P & FH days at New Years. But since we're working over Christmas Patrick got a 2 month extention for us. Nice.
For me personally that means I will have close to 7 weeks paid time off on Jan 1. Of which I will HAVE to use 6 weeks before the end of Feb. Cool :-) Lots of reading and comp games to catch up on. Yah! Then I still get 3 weeks of vacation to use in '04.
On the other side I'm still getting screwed about my retirement time in service. Despite all the circumstantial evidence that both Stef and I have to show that HR intended that we get credit, them simply saying (now) that they didn't nullifies it. I'm pissed. If they do this with my review and bonus schedule (ie, prorate to 10.5 months for '03) I'm going to pitch a fit.
At home I've got a copy of X2: The Threat sitting on my desk just begging to be played. Unfortunately it is such a cool, in-depth game that I can't just log on for 10 minutes and play. And that's about all the time I've got to play these days. Sigh.
I'm thinking of hitting Colorado for a skiing trip in Feb. Just searching for some good deals right now before making a final decision. We'll see :-)
Ok, back to work. Happy holidays all.
2 Weeks ago I got pulled over on the way to work by a cop because my tags had been suspended for failing to smog my car on time. Not my fault since I bought it 8 months ago and was never informed. Anyway, she gave me a whopping $275 ticket.
Last week I went to the MVA (DMV for all other states) and got an extention, changed my address, and found out who to call re: getting smogged.
So today on the way home a cop waved me up next to him and told me that he had run my tags and they were expired and that I should get that taken care of. I explained that I got an extention and was in the process of getting it smogged. Nice guy ... until a friend of mine pointed out that he probably didn't want to get out of his car in the cold to give me a ticket ;-)
Anyway, I called up the agency that was supposed to inform me and spoke to a very nice woman named Donna. She said "ooops" and would mail me a letter to show the judge when I go to court and that usually gets the fee waived.
Ok, back to work.
XIII is one of the more dissapointing games that I've played.
Which is a real pity because it had great potential and in fact shined in many places. The levels were challenging, but not impossible. There were missions that required pure stealth and non-lethal force. And the story was simply excellent!
The little touches make the game. Guards will respond if they see a downed comrad. And will check their pulse as well before running for help. Pretty nifty. To avoid this you can pick up the bodies and dump them somewhere out of the way.
However, the main menu interface was clunky and poorly documented. The save game feature was very frustrating. XIII has a 'checkpoint' system that only allows you to save after reaching certain points in the game. Fine. I like this system, it prevents the gamer from hitting quick-save/quick-load to get the 'perfect' play and often missing out on something cool. But the readme.txt file says that there is a quick-save/quick-load option. And in fact the keys do work and you get a little status message "saving game" when you use it. But it doesn't do anything! All it does is save the game at the last checkpoint/level. My question is: Why doesn't the game save automatically at these points? It would have been really nice if the game saved at all places so that you could go back and replay from a place in history.
That brings me to a small gripe. While the story is excellent, the designers decided to 'tell' the story to you during the missions ... frequently with long cinematic style FPS dialogs. Really cool. But they usually occur just AFTER a 'checkpoint' not before and there is no way to skip through it. So you frequently have to re-watch this scene over and over again if you buy the farm in the next 2 minutes. Adding a checkpoint immediately after these scenes would have benefitted the game play greatly.
One last little gripe before the big one is the movement controlls. You're limited to forward, back, stafe. No rolls even though the enemy can do them. Hhrrrmph!
Ok, now my BIG gripe. The ending. There isn't one! Just a "Too be continued" screen. You never find Number 1. You don't kiss the commando (but you do get to see her in a backless dress). And I never got to try the double weapon skill. I was frankly dissapointed. I don't think that I'll be buying the sequel when it first comes out. Wait until it hits the $15 bin.
Sometimes I really don't like the robots I'm working with ... the rest of the time I simply hate them.
I have two 8-probe instruments under my care and tonight both of them crapped out. "Kuznetsov" decided that Valve #2 didn't want to turn anymore. And Syringe drivers 6 & 7 kept losing position. And I noticed that Syringe #8 was leaking constantly. So replace the 3 Dilutor Packs and replace the faulty syringe. Then the joyous "Calibration" (puke).
"Flogger" on the other hand has decided that Probe #7 doesn't want to go down anymore. Hmmmm ... can't fix that one. And of course our tech support is closed on the weekend and won't be able to ship parts until Monday ... assuming that they WILL ship parts. They have a nasty habbit of not servicing the equipement here.
So I spent half the night fixing Kuzy and the rest configuring our 4-probe instruments "Nimitz" & "Warthog," to do the same protocols. Just lovely. FICK!
Oh ... and it's still snowing.
Just another lazy night at the lab. Last night I had to go home early. Some sort of stomach bug or another. Yuck.
But tonight is going well. We're progressing very nicely on our big project. The end is near! Whoohoo!!
So mainly I've been doing the grunt work that I've been putting off. So now that that is done, it's BLOG time. hehe.