//Posted Yesterday at 11:12 PM - 0 Comments
I had different plans this weekend that seemingly fell through, but hey, so far everything is turning out just dandy! If you’re wondering what was up, my original plans called for a surprise visit to a certain someone in Michigan (if you haven’t figured out yet, I seem to be in geosynchronous orbit around her [email me if you know what phrase I just paraphrased in my own way]) that would have consisted of food, fireworks and mainly just me not sitting on my ass being bored; obviously those plans fell through (I don’t want to talk about why) and while I’ve been sitting on my ass, I sure as heck haven’t been bored!
I woke up around nine this morning, having hit the sack early last night, and lately I’ve discovered that one of the benefits of having the iPod Touch is that I can browse the Interwebs from bed so I just layed around browsing and drifting in and out of consciousness for the next hour. It was awesome. Eventually though I drug myself out of bed and fired up the 360 to play some Battlefield Bad Company. I’m not going to spoil the story since I know most of you reading this don’t have the game yet, but let’s just say the last two levels (what I played today) were just frakin awesome. Bad Company really is one of those games that just keeps getting better and better the more you play it; and I still have to go back through it again to pick up the rest of the gold and the three or four collectable weapons I missed!
I was scheduled (as in he sent me an appointment in Outlook) to talk with Josh earlier today; his idea, but like Richard expected he didn’t show. I was kinda pissed but then again this *is* Josh we’re talking about. Forum members know what I mean. But then again it did give me more Battlefield time, so I can’t really complain that much!
On top of all that I took a nap today. I know, you’re probably wondering ‘Um, why the frak do I care about that?’ and to be honest I don’t know, but to me it’s a big thing because I’m not a nap person, it fraks with my internal clock and completely screws me up, but today was different and it was just awesome. But yeah, I woke up, played *even more* Bad Company and then ordered Donato’s. I just love pizza. I mean it’s probably the one thing I love more than burgers, fries and Katie (did I just say that out loud? Whoops… I’ll probably get an email about that, and not a happy one either…). I guess it’s a holiday tradition around here.
Fourth of July? Pizza.
Easter? Pizza.
Thanksgiving? Pizza.
Christmas? Get pissed because none of the pizza places are open until I call the Dominos 15 minutes away in Brecksville.
Just swap out any of those holiday names with, well, anything and it’s an excuse to have pizza, though to be honest I haven’t been having a lot of it lately, partly because of my gut and party because I’ve noticed that I spend ~$100 bucks on pizza a month!
Reflecting back on the past few weeks it’s been a blur. I’ve been racing time to get to next Friday when the iPhone 3G launches. Sean and I are set to goto the Apple Store next Saturday and I think one of two of his buddies are tagging along. What else? Oh yeah, I guess I’m currently not talking to my #1 and my #2. My #1 apparently hates me and says that they ‘need some space’ (it’s not the first time I’ve heard that, but it’s the first time I’ve heard it where I didn’t do something to deserve it) and #2 and I fight so much we’ve just stopped talking. A few days ago was also the ‘anniversary’ if you will (couldn’t thing of a better name) of it being 10 months since E talked to me.
Seriously, what it is about me that drives people away? I know I have the God Complex and all but if you people don’t tell me when I piss you off you can’t as well blame me when you blow up in my face and stop talking to me. Oh well, it’s not the first time I’ve lost really close friends and it won’t be the last. Sadly it’s happened so much that I’m really just null to the feeling, I guess that’s just my defense reaction so I don’t have to feel the ‘pain’ if you will.
I kinda got sidetracked there, sorry. But anyway, I got a message on Xbox LIVE so I’m going to check that out. I’ll leave you guys with three things:
#1: Talk to me.
#2: Dump ‘Amber’
#3: Wake your lazy Canadian ass up and call me
Currently listening to:
Battlefield Bad Company Main Theme
//Posted Wednesday, July 02 2008 at 11:02 PM - 0 Comments
JAMCON: Green
Edit: Standing down to JAMCON: Black
//Posted Sunday, June 29 2008 at 12:57 AM - 0 Comments
So I came home last night (hmm, just noticed that I start a lot of these with ‘So [something]’, haha) and got an IM from Sean asking if I wanted to go see WALL•E; heck, of course I wanted to go see it! We met up at the Best Buy over in Macedonia where Sean was (not surprisingly) in the Apple mini-store. Now of course me being the Vista-loving programmer/technical genius that I am and him being the super-duper Mac fanboy and with both of standing at a table full of Mac’s… yeah, it turned into a ‘My OS is better than your OS’ debate and both of us trying to sell a system made by our favorite OEM to the other. It was fun, just like the old days at Netstink, except that we weren’t arguing while standing over a Mac that is about as old as John McCain (Sean’s G4 PowerBook).
Oh, and I should point out that I saw a Dell XPS One in person for the first time and besides putting off enough heat to fry an egg, those things are kinda fugly when you see them up close; the pictures Dell has on their websites don’t do justice to how bad they look. Sean, like I said in the store, yes, in this *one* scenario the iMac wins hands down. Though I still say it’d be better if Apple shipped a *real* OS on it.
And speaking of a *real* OS, I love how when Apple advertises that Mac’s can run Windows they show XP with the default ugly blue theme running and on the rare occasion they do show Vista (some places on Apple.com like MobileMe), they have Glass shut off and are just running the standard theme. Seriously, are you guys that concerned about how bad your OS looks you need to switch Vista over to its craptastic theme? Ok, moving on before this turns into an Apple rant (note: two weeks till iPhone 3G!)...
After leaving Best Buy we grabbed some pizza and talked about how retarded my former boss was/still-is; thank the gods I don’t work there anymore. There’s nothing worse than having your manager, who admits in front of the whole staff that she knows nothing about what the people she manages do, married to the owner of the company because if your manager is a complete r-tard you really can’t complain to her boss about it because she’s kinda married to him and he won’t give a crap. That plus the pay and hours really sucked.
But now WALL•E.
(Warning: I may give spoilers out below so stop reading if you won’t to know anything)
Wow! Once again Pixar really outdid themselves! The movie was just hilarious from Twinkies to the fat people rolling across the deck of the ship to the HAL wanna-be autopilot. When the critics say that this movie will be an instant classic they aren’t kidding so just get off your ass and go see it in theaters; don’t download it for once! Hell, I’m probably even going to see it a few more times. I know my dad wanted to see it, my sister will probably want to see it and depending on when I’m in Trenton again I’m betting I know a few people up there who’d want to see it… Me wanting to see it again really does say a lot for a movie because the only movies I’ve seen multiple times in theaters are Titanic and Star Wars. Classics. See?
Great, I said Titanic. Now I have My heart will go on stuck in my head which means fun death nightmares tonight. *grumble* Ok, sleep time. Night!
//Posted Friday, June 27 2008 at 1:45 PM - 1 Comments
So today is Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft and by the coverage I’ve seen on the Internet so far you’d think that this was a really really really big deal. And it is. Good luck out there with the Foundation, Bill; though feel free to stop by Microsoft any time when you think you’ve come up with the next big thing!
So I ran out and grabbed Battlefield Bad Company on Wednesday and I’m loving it just as much as I loved BF1942, BF2 and BF2142. The Single Player campaign is actually existent, i.e. there actually is a single player campaign that isn’t the multi-player campaign with bots. So far I’m really loving the story, the attention to detail, oh, and blowing the crap out of buildings! Being online in Gold Rush is just great, in between Richard’s bitching about getting killed when the fall in front of him magically ‘vanishes’ I’m just having a blast (pun intended) though I can’t wait until Conquest is released. A Battlefield game just isn’t Battlefield unless it has Conquest mode.
Overall this week’s been good. I’ve actually been relaxing at home and getting a decent amount of sleep. Granted I’m still worried about a certain friend of mine but there’s nothing I can really do except sit here and hope this person doesn’t make the wrong choice. It’s a bit un-nerving at the moment to be honest because I’ve always been the person everyone has gone to for advice on everything (and I mean everything, you think it, I’ve been asked it [@Smith: No]) and to see someone going through this and just clamming up and not talking just isn’t sitting well with me… Ugh.
So this weekend is looking good. Honestly I’m planning on just being on Bad Company and GTA IV all weekend but I may take a break this weekend and head out to see WALL•E if I get an invite. And hey, speaking of movies, you know what we need? An alternate future WWIII movie that takes place between the US and Soviet Union. I’m not talking some 100 years in the future cyborg vs. cyborg, I’m talking about the Red-frakin’-Army versus NATO. Modern technology. I want to see M1A2 on T90 action. Hell, spread it across a few movies. Make a trilogy and at the end of the first movie let’s see the bloody bomb drop. Uh oh, I’m thinking about nukes again…
*transmission ends*
//Posted Monday, June 23 2008 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments
So this is Bill Gates last week full-time at Microsoft, wow, I really never thought we’d actually see the day when he left but at least he’s doing so for
good reasons. It’ll be interesting to see where this takes the company and the industry as a whole because let’s face the cold hard facts (Sean), our industry revolves around Microsoft and the guy who’s been helming the company and industry as a whole since its inception is on the way out. I’m excited for some of the things Microsoft might do, because let’s face it, a lot of good projects got shelved under Bill to not take away from sales of Windows and Office, but at the same time I don’t want to see Microsoft turning into a web-based
Me-too! type company which is churning out products just to compete with the
stuff (crap) that Google offers, something I’ve seen a lot of lately. I don’t care what Ray (Ozzie) says, the future of computing it not ‘in the cloud’, at least not yet. I don’t want my data stored on the cloud, I don’t trust the cloud and should one day the cloud break or a government decides to seize servers, well, there goes my data. Also the tubes that connect to the cloud (for those going ‘wtf is the cloud?’, it’s another word for the Internet, also known as a Series of Tubes or a Big Truck) just aren’t big enough yet.
Yeah, it’d be great to backup all my documents, pictures, music (etc) to the cloud, but it’d take the better part of a day to upload everything and if I wanted to access my files again, well, I need to be connected to the cloud or I’d be SOL (unless the service supports Syncing like Mesh does). But yeah, a Microsoft without Bill Gates is like a world without America (pre-Bush), it’s just not something that sits well with me.
So off the subject of BillG, this weekend was actually pretty nice. I slept for about 12 hours on Saturday, woke up and played a couple rounds of World in Conflict before getting a call from my dad because my sis and step-mom were out of town and he wanted to go see the new Hulk movie and then grab dinner. So I did that (the movie is *much* better than the first one) and then came home and crashed; I don’t even think I turned the Xbox on that day! Oh yeah, did I mention Bloomin’ Onion?
Sunday was a nice lazy day, I watched a few movies (McHale’s Navy, Red October and a few others), played some Bad Company and capped the night off in GTA IV with Don and Dick. Though I must admit Pizza Hut pissed me off because their online ordering system was down (and before anyone says it, yes, I know there is such thing as a ‘telephone’ so shove it, lol).
Today started out good, granted like every other Human on this Earth I didn’t want to get out of bed, but I got in and got to work on the ecommerce site I’ve been talking about for awhile. The day then took a nose dive for reasons I don’t know if I should post about online, but let’s just say I’ve been a bit nervous and apprehensive since because there’s nothing I can do about it short of pissing my boss off. Frak me. I hate being helpless and stuck between a
rock and a hard place. Bah.
Current music stuck in my head:
Something Dark Is Coming (BSG Season 2 Soundtrack)
//Posted Wednesday, June 18 2008 at 1:46 PM - 4 Comments
So today’s been boring as hell; and not boring like I-don’t-have-shit-to-do boring, boring as in goddamnit-I’ve-been-stuck-optimizing-databases-all-day boring. Now granted this made the morning fly by and hopefully it’ll make the afternoon fly by as well, but I really wasn’t planning on spending the day optimizing databases, confirming that the backups are running, calculating disk space, etc etc. Don’t you wish you could do this all day? You know you wish you did.
I really don’t have anything to talk about today. Everyone who knows me knows that my life isn’t all that exciting, I get up, work 8-5 five days a week, come home and I’m lucky if I can keep my eyes open till eleven… Only about 43 more years left, haha! But seriously, all you people that are working part time jobs at twenty five hours a week (or who don’t work), sleeping in until noon on most days and going out drinking at least once a week, just quit your bitchin’, ok? That aint that hard, trust me, I’ve done it (well, just minus the drinking!).
(edit: I should note that I’m not targeting any one person, this is pretty much just every one of my friends, lol)
//Posted Tuesday, June 17 2008 at 1:30 PM - 4 Comments
It’s gonna rain!
Yes, yes, it looks like it’s gonna rain. Then again, it looked just like this yesterday; if I look out one window I see white puffy clouds and if I turn a bit and look out the other windows I see big pissed off gray clouds. Weather confuses me.
You know what else confuses me? Radio waves. On some days I can plug my iPod Touch into my little FM transmitter thingy in my car and it transmits clear as day. On other days the frequency I use, FM 101.5, picks up a radio station. What confuses me about this? Isn’t crosstalk like this inherently normal when you’re piggy backing on squawks owned by someone else? Well, nothing much except that this station is transmitting out of
Toledo and 95% of days there is nothing on that frequency but pure unadulterated static. But yeah, some days I guess the planets align and I can get crystal clear reception from this Toledo radio station most of the drive into work. I just find it weird because Cleveland radio stations don’t make it more than 70% of the drive to Toledo so I’m not entirely sure why I’m intercepting this down here. But oh well, at least I’m not hearing that
fraking music.
//Posted Monday, June 16 2008 at 1:47 PM - 0 Comments
I know, me finding something to complain about is like the sun rising. It’s bound to happen every day until the sun goes nova and there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you have a trilithium torpedo). But anyway, something I noticed at work today is that us dev guys never get taken to lunch. I mean the sales guy takes the graphics guy, the boss takes the sales guys and on most days the sales guys just go with other sales guys. But the dev staff is never asked. Now sure, occasionally the boss does order in pizza, but it’s not just for the dev staff, we have to share with anyone who’s in the office that day (boo sharing! Lol). Now to be fair, I have been asked to go to lunch twice, and this was literally about 11 months for both times, and both times was for Chinese… Yeah, anyone who knows me knows that (Jason + Chinese) == (Richard + Mexican). Haha. But enough of that, I said something out loud (sort of), so now I’m happy.
Work’s been going good as of late. For the past few weeks I’ve been implementing an ecommerce site (think Amazon, then make it a lot smaller) so I’ve been fairly busy and the days are just seeming to fly by. I honestly do like my job and the folks I work with, my only problem is that I’m pretty much stuck here in Ohio if I want to keep this job so that kinda blows. But oh well, you can’t have
everything you want, right?
Bah, ok, this pisses me off. XocNet is using an old form a Jason-customized-BBCode (because I couldn’t figure out how to do a few things correctly when I built the site) and I always have to jump through a few hoops to get this working correctly. Obviously its nothing that pisses me off to much because it hasn’t pissed me off to the point where, you know, I fix it, but still.
Alright, that’s all for now. I’ll try to start updating this thing more often with more diverse content other than me bitching or giving a SITREP; but then again I’ve had a couple of you IM me telling me that my constant bitching is why you read this thing... Apparently I’m amusing? Meh, whatever works.
Well anyway, time to get back to my desk. Looking out the windows here it looks like the sky is going to let go any minute, well, that is until I turn my head 90 degrees and it’s nothing but blue skies…
//Posted Sunday, June 15 2008 at 11:40 PM - 2 Comments
Which is kind of different for me, it’s just weird not to be all stressed out over something like work, people or just general life things that stress me out daily. The day started out nice, I woke up early around 9am (before I get two emails going ‘WTF? You get up that early on the weekends?!?!’, remember I don’t stay out partying until 2am so I don’t need to sleep until that late) and being the dork that I am, the first thing I did was to grab my iPod Touch and start browsing the ‘net from bed. I finally was able to drag myself from bed and after getting my land legs cooked up a big breakfast which I guess has sort of become a Sunday morning tradition in the Cox House Apartment; there’s no better way to start out the day than with eggs and bacon! Gods I love bacon…
After that I futzed around with the desktop for a bit before hoping into Mass Effect, which happens to be one of those awesome games you just don’t play enough after you beat it the first time. The afternoon was a mix of Mass Effect, the new Futurama flick, GTA with Richard and another movie who’s name I can’t remember (edit: The Bank Job). Tonight was Polish Night (aka kielbasa & pierogies) followed by a fun little argument with Sean over how Uninstallers work across different Operating Systems and then this (and for those who follow me on Twitter, ‘this’ was interrupted by the weather radio which scared the living crap out of me like it always does).
I’m not sure what made today so stress free but it was nice and I wish more days could be like it. Money is actually looking stable for once which is more than I can say for the last year and half since I was canned. I’ve got my eyes set on an iPhone 3G that I’ll probably be trying to grab launch weekend and pending whenever I can get Katie to commit (this is about as easy as resisting the Borg), I’m planning on getting back up to Trenton a bunch more times this year so vacation is set, I’m just not sure when it’ll be!
But off that topic before I end up writing a whole page on it, haha. One thing I’ve noticed about myself lately is that I’ve just stop caring. About me, about you, about everyone and everything. Josh onetime told me that how I cared about people no matter what was one of my best qualities, that whenever he or Sam had a problem I was always there to talk to and I always knew what to say and what to do to make everything work out in the end. But the fact of the matter is this endearing quality has always done me more harm than good. I had a habit of picking up other people’s problem and making them my own. And while this is a great thing to have when your best friend is thinking killing himself, for life’s everyday problems it just compounds stress on me exponentially.
[2 paragraphs deleted]
So I just stopped. I mean if you stay up until 3am talking to someone trying to help them out when you know you have to get up at 5am to head into work and one day out of the blue that person just ups and stops talking to you over something so insanely stupid that everyone you tell just looks at you like ‘They did what?!’ and who then hasnt spoken a word to you in almost a year you just tend to stop caring. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the two deleted paragraphs, they probably explained a few things but I was starting to get sidetracked and was diving into a few personal issues I have with a few people and a few things that I’d probally regret posting on the Interwebs; so I just deleted it.
So yeah, today was nice but it’s time for me to hit the racks. Actually I intended to do so about an hour ago but ended up writing those two paragraphs which are now lost to the sands of time. Anyway, night y’all.
//Posted Tuesday, June 10 2008 at 10:27 PM - 2 Comments
So yeah, on Saturday I’m sitting around talking to one of my friends about the yet-to-be-announced iPhone 3G when I get an email from my mother say that our cellular contract (family plan) has expired and that they’re dropping our carrier, Sprint, in a couple months and that I better start looking for a new phone. I figure what the hell, if the new iPhone is really as cheap as they were predicting it would be I might just jump the fence over to AT&T and get the latest and greatest version of the Jesusphone (now with built in 3G action). And well, after watching the WWDC stuff yesterday (scary, huh?) and the official announcement coming out that the iPhone 3G would be in fact $200 bucks for the entry level model I’m thinking that I may actually make the jump over to the iPhone.
Those who know me know that I love my iPod Touch and my biggest complaint about it is that it’s not online 24/7 (that and Safari could really use an upgrade, it can be slow as frak sometimes). Take right now for example, I’m sitting in the cafeteria at work and while my laptop can get a signal just fine (assuming the planets align properly...), the iPod cant. That’s the biggest reason why I want an iPhone. Screw the phone part, I just want a 24/7 internet connected device that can fit in my pocket so it can go with me where I go. While I love my laptop, hauling around a 13in notebook can get a bit tiring plus you can’t really set it down (compared with putting Jesus in your pocket) without worrying about someone swiping it.
But anyway, I was in the middle of typing that when a Client’s website went down and that was like 8 hours ago so here we are. Well, not be anti-climactic, but ‘night! :-)