Rolling Thoughts

Merry Christmas...bah humbug!

It's christmas and I get a couple of days off ... and more importantly get to spend them in Maryland.

I'm playing hermit this weekend and probably most of the week too. I was invited to a couple of dinners for x-mas, but I really needed some quiet time.

I was browsing Best Buy on Thursday ... yes, the day before Christmas Eve ... and found a wierd game box on the shelve. Pirates! I couldn't believe it! Sid Meier's Pirates! He re-released it. I remember hearing about 6 months ago that he had re-aquired the rights to the name, but I had no idea that the game was ready for release. Let me just say that it is awesome. All the fun and excitement of the original with new graphics and sound. I really hope that other game designers follow suit with this and simply re-make the original instead of "re-designing" it ala Tempest or the like.

So with that I'm going to go crawl under the covers and read for a while.

Mobius Pics

Cool

Had an absolutely wonderful time yesterday. Tonia took my to the bunkers overlooking the entrance to the Bay. These are old gun emplacements....and perfect movie theatres. We watched about an hour of Aliens before it got too cold.

It was great ... and candid shots of Tonia turn out well:

"Sweet Home Alabama"

... is 'my' ringtone on Tonia's phone. Oh joy.

I'm out on Alameda this week and it is an absolute Charlie Foxtrot. I'm moving 10% of the equipment here to Alabama for setting up our new lab. You should hear the people bitch. Just wait until I take 40% in early Feb. But the truck is loaded and on the way to Alabama. I'll meet it there on Monday.

I got to see Yen-Knee yesterday. Haven't seen her in over 2 years. It was good to catch up.
Also did the standard D&D with Kris on Tuesday. Her soon-to-be-X-husband is being a schmuck and she needed to unwind. Mission accomplised.

Other news is that Sigrid quit her job at MIT. She's pretty stoked about it. I hope that this means she's going to move to Huntsville now. Crossing fingers :-)

OH!! And the big news is that I've decided to adopt a cat. I've been thinking on it for a while, but the hold up was my travel schedule for the next 2 months. Well, Tonia voluntered to take care of any critter I adopt while I'm gone. So there we are. Week after xmas we're going to go scour the SPCA for a feline. I was checking out the MD branch and found Shadow Angel
Her description sounds like just what I want. Of course I'll still have to go meet her. And I will be renaming her to Specter ... or maybe Shade. Either one works for me.

Ok, time to go do some lab stuff.

Shooting & Sushi

I went to the range today with Tonia & we had a lot of fun. She's not bad ... was hitting the target with 4-8 inch circles at 20 feet. Interestingly enough she was better with the 9mm than the .22. And when she did 10 shots rapid fire on the 9mm she did the best of all. She owns a 9 and a 45 ... says that she's best with the 45. Wierd woman. I'm liking her more and more ... I just wish I knew if she thought of these things as 'dates' or not.

It's been the first time in almost 3 months that I've been shooting and the first time since being depressed that I held the guns. Thank you (again) to Patrick for holding them for me. In any case I need to practice a lot to get back to where I was. But by the end of the shoot I was getting 4 inch circles at 50 feet with the .22. That's a head shot by any definition. I still need to do a lot of work with the 9mm before I'm there yet.

Afterwards we got some really good sushi.

Freedom & F&^$%$& APLUS.NET

First. Michael is out. Moved out without a fuss and turned in his keys today. I'll be changing the locks tomorrow after work. I didn't realize how much stress I was carrying around just having him here. My shoulders relaxed this morning and I've been in general good spirits all day ... general ... you'll read why in a sec.

Yesterday ... My web site goes down at 2pm. I wait till 3 before calling APLUS tech support. No, no problem just that they've suspended my account! WTF!?!? Turns out that I've been using more than 20 minutes of CPU time per day which is my cap. A completely frustrating 18 hours later my site is up and I write a scathing letter to escalate@aplus.net. 30 minutes later I get a call from someone who actually knows their ass from a UNIX command and I figure out WHY I blew the cap. My IMAP mail server was choking on the 2 years of e-mail I had active (6000 messages btw). So I spent 20 minutes archiving and unsibscribing folders that I wasn't using and I got that down to 2000. 500 of which I will unsubscribe on Dec 31. The Tech guy said he would check my statistics over the next couple of days to see if they would drop below 20 and let me know. If so I can go back to my original $10/month plan instead of the $20/month that I upgraded to in order to get my service back.

fucking a.