Bears preseason football starts today. How is that possible? There is no way it should be time for football to start already. It comes on a good day, as there is no Cubs game tonight so I don't have anything to watch this evening but still regular season one month off. Olympics started too. Not super excited or really even interested in them, but I'll probably check out the Judo and Wrestling coverage, as it looks like you can see some of that online which is cool.

This week has been pretty rough sleep wise. I started coming in an hour earlier to make up for Joe not being here any more. I've been going to bed earlier, or so I thought but apparently not enough, because I've been dead all week. So much so that I've not worked out, which is bad but still. So sleepy. Tornado weather at the ball park delaying the game 3 hours or so Monday night didn't help any I'm sure, since it was pushing 1am by the time I did go to sleep. It does give some bright side to the otherwise terrible game Saturday that starts at 2:55, meaning I can sleep in. Otherwise really fox afternoon games are brutal and shouldn't happen any more, and then a 7:00 game for Sunday night baseball. Which is nice because I can go out Saturday night and come home Sunday with enough time to park and do stuff before work.

Horseshoe has done renovations or something and is reopening it's casino in Hammond. It's supposed to have a fairly nice poker room. It's a little closer than the one I occasionally go to in East Chicago or Gary so I may have to check that out one of these days. Like next week when I finally get a weekend off, and also get paid by both jobs. How's that for timing. In fact, that's the third Friday of the month I'll have to move my car for parking that week too. Yeah I'll be there. Playing live is way different than playing online. Live players are just So bad. Sounds like a good plan.

Busy week or so. Cubs are playing great ball all of a sudden, right in time. It's exciting. They're coming home for a big 9 game home stand, of which I work 5 games. With last weekends games that makes 3 weekends in a row of working, but oh well. Tuesday there was a minor league game at the ball park, which was pretty cool. It did show me that if I didn't like the team so much I wouldn't be working there though. It's a lot more of a job when you don't care what's going on on the field heh.

Some changes at the real job as well. Joe the other guy I work with was let go, so I'm back to answering phones as well as programing. For the time being anyway till they replace him. It isn't a huge deal, I was doing most of the actual work to fix problems anyway but yeah not optimal. I did get a fairly respectable raise as well though. I probably Could get more by going elsewhere, but not enough to give up the intangibles of working here (such as generally flexible schedule, lax dress code stuff like that), and put up with the hassle of looking for and changing jobs for the time being. It also means I'll definitely be moving when my lease is up to a place with a bedroom.. and probably parking. So that's a bonus. I've also been working on some pretty cool things, and fixing some problems we've had in the past so definitely is good in that respect.

( Jitz stuff )

SO, I've had enough driving for a while. Not so much the act of driving, but putting up with everyone else who is also driving. Two weeks ago we drove to the family reunion in Montana. Rented a big ol minivan. Dad and I did all the driving, well he did a large chunk of it and I took over while he napped. Still 20ish hours each way.

This last weekend I went out to Minnesota. It's about 400 miles or so. It took 7 hours there and 8+ home. It usually doesn't take that long. I don't know what it is but Wisconsin, I'm sure it happens other places too, but I almost always run into it on WI, has points in the interstate where everyone stops. There isn't an accident, or construction, or a lane reduction or even vehicle broken down or pulled over ... just people stopped. Seriously.. if there is no outside reason for there to be a parking lot in a 65mph speed limit then everyone should be able to go in the forward direction.

The weekend was fun though. Celebrating the Fourth of July in a state that it's legal to buy and blow things up with fireworks is a pretty good thing. Apparently MN has some rules that are a little stricter than Wisconsin but yeah, still some good stuff.

Ugh anyway.. home, back to work.. yay work....... right.

I got a call from Dad while I was driving home and he was asking if I was going to stop by the house to meet the new dog. This was news to me as no one said they were getting another dog, but apparently they did. His co worker had to get rid of their pug due to changing living situations so yeah. I'll have to stop by next weekend. luckily Saturday's game is an early one so that works out. Should be a good time. Always enjoy animals. Animals and little kids love me after all.

Almost time to go get killed at Jitz. I'd actually been doing well the last few weeks, but two weeks off by it self is going to pretty much kick my ass, not to mention you know, the guys attempting to choke me or bend limbs in sub optimal directions. Good times.

Yesterday we all got up early and took Dad fishing. Pretty much every vacation my family ever took was a camping trip. We didn't get to do much fishing before typhoon style storms hit. We literally went from the sun starting to peek through the clouds, to lightning, thunder and rain coming in sideways in the span of twenty five minutes. We'll get some time to fish when we go to Montana at the end of the month for the family reunion though, so it'll work out. Half the fun for him is getting the gear out and playing with it anyway. We went home, got Mom outta bed and got breakfast.

TJ came back to the states last week too so we got to hang out and play cards for the first time this year pretty much on Friday. He was in Thailand for the last six months or so for his job. We stayed up pretty much all night playing cards. Good times.

Over all good weekend, but not much sleep. Add to that having to come in early this morning and I'm flagging some. Plus the Cubs and the Sox play next weekend, so I'm working all next weekend so not much catchup there. Cubs Sox is always a very busy weekend. Sunday is a night game though, so I can sleep in. Night games during the weekend can get ugly.

Weekend after that family reunion.

It's world series of poker time again. Another year I won't be going. Not that big a deal, it's not like I made an effort to qualify but one year I'd really like to go though. What is pretty cool though is that ESPN has been broadcasting some of the final tables live. Daniel Negreanu, one of my favorite players and the owner of the poker website I spend time on won a bracelet last week and getting to watch that was pretty cool. Unlike watching poker on tv they obviously don't show the cards, because it's live and could still effect things some how. It gives a different look for studying things. He's in another tonight if I get back from Jitz in time I'm probably going to check it out some.

For the first time in a while I have a weekend off. Well the weekend of the wedding I was technically off, but this weekend I don't have Anything to do. I'll get to sleep in and such. Next weekend as well, as the Cubs have a weird 3 game mid week homestand and then go back out of town. It's rare to have back to back weekends off where the team is out of town. I've had to get up early to work a few days this week, so it's definitely a welcome break.

I'll go home and see mom and dad tomorrow. I need an oil change, and we'll probably go to the bar, or Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the UFC pay per view in the evening but no plans tonight. Was considering driving out to the boat to play some cards, but that's usually a late night and yeah between early days at work this week and west coast baseball games that's probably not going to happen.

I've been reading the Vampire Earth series by EE Knight lately. I'm about 100 pages into the third book. They're pretty good. It's a dystopia/fantasy type story, I like it.

There is a Whole Foods near my apartment. I recently went in there because it's on the way home from the ball park, as opposed to the Jewel, which isn't far either, but isn't on the direct route, and while I don't mind walking a few blocks, doing it with multiple bags of groceries gets old. Anyway I don't eat all that much stuff these days. My dinners basically consist of sandwiches almost exclusively. It works for me. Every time I go into Whole foods though I just feel outta place. I keep waiting for an employee to come up and act like I'm lost or that I walked in to the wrong store. I donno, I guess it's kinda trendy and organic and healthy and what not and I really don't care about any of that I just need some lunch meat and I like the mac and cheese at the hot bar.

Anyway, finally done with reports and such. It's been a long day time to go home.

I have to do some stuff for this old system we have. No one here has hardly any experience, and there is almost no reference to what some of the data in the tables and stuff are. I gotta write a fairly decently complicated query to extract data for a report we need. Not all that hard, but the database is somewhat convoluted to begin with. In theory I understand why they did it like they did, and it's all pretty and normalized to some degree that's important I'm sure (I was terrible at that part of my db classes). All of this would be fine, but I keep messing things up because the table that holds the order movements.. is spelled order mouvements... why!! who spells movements like that... grr.. seriously .. Is that some strange British/Canadian color colour thing? It's driving me nuts.

Guess what.. Not dead. I know I know hard to determine that's the case when someone doesn't update for something like 15 months, but yeah still here. I actually pretty much check the page every day or so, just haven't updated... in well pretty much forever. 68 weeks it says there. There really wasn't a reason to stop posting either.. just kinda happened. Seems like as good a time as any to fix that.

Anyway, ( What's New? )

So yeah. That's a lot of it anyway. I'm sure I'll come up with other stuff assuming I get back onto a semi regular updating pattern.

Day 11.

The company I work for now, before I started here, acquired a second system, that does other trading things. It's pretty decent, and there is use and a market to keep the two systems. The back end of the system we acquired however, is terrible so they've been trying to integrate the two since we got it. This is not easy and has since gone well over any initial estimated time table. Anyway the bosses decided we were going into rush full out work mode. We worked all last weekend, well both days anyway and are supposed to do so again this weekend. It sucks.

I was supposed to work last weekend anyway at the cubs convention, so I missed out on most of that. A bright note was that having to get up anyway at an unnatural hour on a Sunday (ie 7ish when a natural time to wake up on a day of is noonish) I was awake in time to go to my local target and wait in line to purchase a Wii. I wasn't able to get extra Remotes or numchucks, but still I got one. Awesome.

Anyway back to work, well not literally but as a subject of conversation. Initially I was just doing support/operations stuff. Then I got some little basic operational tools to develop. An app to get stuff into the system and whatnot. Then I started making a monitoring app to keep track of who was logged on and that all the appropriate systems were connected and functional and whatnot, and then I got moved to working on rewriting one of the client applications. It's different, and a little scary, I worked on the client App for Risk but I never had to build one. This isnt' even from scratch I pretty much copied the design from the exisiting device but it's overly complicated and it's much easier to rebuild then to try and learn how it works and then retrofit it to the new system.. Either way its a step in the right direction and will hopefully give me some leverage for some stuff after we finish the project up.

Oh yeah Super Bowl. I was four last time we went to the Super Bowl. We were planning on renting an RV and road tripping down there to tailgate. They banned tailgating. Gay. It works out as I would most likely be here anyway, but yeah, it woulda been a hell of a trip. Instead we're talking about renting out a hall/bar or something but still.. road trips in RVs sounds like a blast. Either way, Super Bowl.

The government is cracking down on online poker. It sucks, and really is very shortsighted as it would seem it would be a great source of taxable income, like the lottery and so forth. That's probably how it'll end up working too but in the mean time it sucks. Maybe one of these days I'll take a ride out to the boat to get my fix. hmm

TJ pretty much decided he doesn't want to rent anymore and plans to move back home and start looking for places at the end of our lease. That's pretty much the last thing I want to do, move back home that is, so It looks like I'm in the market for a one bedroom/studio, or perhaps a roommate. I'd probably have to move either north a bit more, west more towards the blue line, or to the south side (least interesting). Probably north is the way to go. still have a few months to figure it out.

Well, I stepped out of the house this morning... earlier than I should ever Have to get up, but I'm fairly awake, and it's not too cold, at least compared to the week before, and I turn on the ol' IPod. (Which, is really not old as all seeing how I got it a week or so ago) The play list was over so I shuffled all the songs and hit play. First song is Closing Time. For some reason I immediately thought of a drunken huddle including Jim, Brian... Rob I think, and maybe some random girl who I seem to remember doing shots with, singing that song at a bar ( Brothers?) in Champaign as they tried to kick us out, well most of us were singing that song someone was trying to transition to Greenday's Time of Your Life. Then five dollar pizzas... waking up Shane at 2:30 under the guise of bringing him 5$ pizza, but really because he didn't hang out with us and the need to use his bathroom. Sitting on and breaking his box. Finally Brian climbing into, and possibly falling out of, a tree. That was a fun night.

I don't know why I thought of that this morning, I've heard that song plenty of times since then, but it was an amusing start to the day.


Not much other than that. Well, I suppose there is but I gotta get back to work so maybe later

It's been a long week. Since Friday of last week I've been doing the operations work pretty much solo. Kevin my boss/operations manager went to Cancun.. I had guys help out, but I've been stuck in the office from opening at 7am til the last of the reports go out around 5. On top of that it can get pretty stressful. Our clients are traders. Traders who are risking sums of money greater than the total sum of money I've ever had any part of. And they only call up here when they need things, which usually means somethings wrong, which means they're none to happy. LIke I said it's been a long week. (and yes, or clientle at RISC were also traders, but it was a smaller base, and by the time I Was doing this I was a lot more knowledgable on our system. ) I had one major glitch in dealing with all this. It wasn't good, and was totally my fault and cost the company money. It was, however, also received about as well as something like that could have been, which I guess is a good sign.

When I left Risc Jesse, the owner/boss, pretty much said he wasn't going to run the system anymore. One of the clients decided to buy it off him. They're contacting me for consulting work in regards to it. Extra money would be nice, but I didn't perticularly enjoy working with the software, and I don't know how much more time I want to spend doing stuff like that. Guess we'll see, right now it's just supposed to be on a temporary basis while I help them learn the system, so that's ok so far.

I think I'm going to get a Christmas tree for the apartment. It's a pretty big investment, as I have no christmas stuff to speak of of my own, but still.. I want one. We put up ours last Sunday. Went home, watched the Bears choke, ate some 'fried' (really baked) chicken, did a christmas tree. Good times.

Thanksgiving was pretty good. Pretty much a lot of the usual. Left early and went with Bryan to go see a movie. It had been a long time since we'd gotten to hang out and the Tenatious D movie had come out, and he's a fan so yeah. It was ok, there were funny parts. The only thing about Thanksgiving is that it's also time for Chrismas/Birthday lists to be given out. I've never been a fan of lists. Well, at least for some time I haven't. Especially now where I can pretty much go out and get something if I want it bad enough, (see FFXII and GUitar hero II in the last post) ::shrug:: the physical possession thing isn't that big of a deal anymore. Sure, I like to get stuff, but having a list, and pretty much knowing what on there I'm going to get kinda takes some of the surprise/fun out of it. I like the unexpected stuff better I guys.

Oh, it went from very nice, to pretty shitty very fast. That wasn't good.

Guitar Hero II kicks so much more ass in two player mode, I brought it home a few weekends ago and was supposed to go do errands and stuff but instead spent the day rocking out with the family. good times.

anyway, there could be more, but time to run late reports and get on the train.

Comment and I'll give you a letter; then you have to list 10 things you love that begin with that letter. Afterwards, post this in your journal, and give out some letters of your own.

I was assigned the letter "M" from Maggilicious, who also said I had to do it and couldn't qubble.

1: Meat. It's good. Grill it.. put it in stuff, on stuff.. like pizza.. cold with cheese and bread. Meat is good. Beef, Pork, Chicken... it's all good.

2. Music. most music really.

3. Money. Well, I don't really care so much about the money, but having enough to buy what I need/want is pretty nice.

4. Mozzarella. Cheese is good. it goes on many good things.

5. Mom self explanitory. corny, maybe but also true and 10 is a lot... kinda

6. Mom's Cooking. Mmmm yeah there are a lot of food items on here.. I'm a big guy.

7. Micro limit poker. enjoy myself, pass the time, little risk, ltos of bad players.

8. Movies. Going to, renting.. I like movies

9. Mythbusters. Also good stuff.

10. Mickey's. it's a beer/malt liquor. IT's also good.

Ok, so I'm like a little kid. Except I have expendable income. FFXII came out Halloween. I made a beeline to Game stop on the way home from work (it's about a block and a half from the apartment) get in line hoping it's not sold out. I'm not the only person in there. The guy at the counter asks if anyone doesn't have a preorder ticket. I didn't he looked and says, "Well you can't by the regular FFXII... We only have spare Collectors editions in stock.. "It's... (some amount I wasn't paying attention too because I was already handing him my card) more." A week, or maybe two later Guitar Hero II Came out. I had been in Best Buy the weekend before getting my mom a cd player for her car. It was her birthday. Bryan 'borrowed' her car and we had it installed. Good times. Anyway, they had the demo version out, we rocked out a bit, it was fun. I got home from the gym the day it was released and TJ was going to best buy.. (which is also, a block and a half or so from the apartment) Now, going into best buy has always been an expensive venture for me. If I get out with just a CD or DVD it's a successfully cheap trip. I had talked myself out of going to get guitar hero two. I didn't even have as much time as I wanted to devote to FFXII I didn't need a second game.... TJ was getting whatever, I forget, and I sat and played some STP, and yeah I walked out with Guitar Hero II.

Both games are definitely worth it. FFXII made some fairly major changes to the combat system, but after playing through the first handful of major battles the important stuff really isn't all that different, and when you're in the thick of something major has much the same feel to it anyway. The other thing that changes from game to game, the class change/power learning system is kind of an offshoot of the grid layout from FFX, but everyone starts in basically the same initial place and you can advance them how you like from there, at least from what I've seen thus far, there may be characters further down the road that're different.

Guitar Hero II is much the same, and the changes are all for the better. Plus from what I saw in the store two player mode is a lot more fun.

( Gym stuff )

I got a development project to start on at work now. I rarely had new applications to develop with Risc it was just maintaining/updating existing stuff. It's a pretty big part of the system integration that the company is working on now too so it's pretty cool. I gotta finish reports and such and go home/force myself back to the gym so it'll have to wait.

Bethy did some thing where she listed Six random facts about herself and then had to tag people after. She picked me. I think it was out of spite because I wouldn't captain the team for TDL this season ;). Anyway I didn't copy it down but I'll do it anyway.

1. I wrestled in high school. People know that, I wrestled for a high school that had a very good program and several guys who contended for state titles in my weight classes. Had I gone to a different school, I might have been a pretty decent varsity wrestler (of course without training day in and day out against said guys I was behind I wouldn't have been as good) but I stayed mainly JV, I have two notable things though. These might get split two to facts if I can't come up with six. I hold(or held I donno) the schools record for the fastest pin at 4 seconds into a match. we shook hands, ref blew the whistle, I stepped in and bear hugged the kid straight to his back for the pin.
I am also 7-0 with seven pins in matches which I threw up before hand.

2. When I was little what I wanted to be when I grew up in order went somewhat like this. Fireman, (seems like most little kids have this dream at some point), Guy who makes sky scrapers ( I was going to make one and let my mom live on the top floor) guy who jumps out of airplanes, guy who makes video games. This somewhat started round about second grade or so, originally just being drawing pictures/writing ideas. I later started writing (well copying from books) games to an old Apple IIe. I kinda stopped looking for jobs I wanted to do when I grew up there.

3. Another when I was young story. At a family BBQ, when I was five or so, I sprayed down my entire family with the garden hose. Grandma, Great Grandma, Aunts, Uncles cousins. No one was safe. This ended with various family members yelling 'commere you little shit' and chasing me as I laughed and ran. Without fail this will be brought up every major gathering of my dads side of the family.

4. I've helped coach little kids Wrestling, Football, and Baseball on teams my brother has played on. I could he happy doing something that included that for a living, and have considered going into teaching for the express purpose of also being able to coach. I've also considered looking into volunteering at whatever local team, and have thought about taking the IHSA referee test to do that.

5. Having unread messages in my mailbox drives me nuts, also things flashing in my task bar.

6. Up until last summer when I got an eye infection so bad I was unable to open my eye in the light I had never called in to work to take an unscheduled day off. This included nearly four years at UPS, two and a half seasons with the Cubs, Six months at Kraft and four at RISC. Before that I never had regular hours and always worked odd jobs (paperboy/golf caddy). One day off in six years isn't too bad.

This would be where I pass this duty on to other people, but since I didn't copy it I won't do that.. people should do the same for the hell of it though.

I've been meaning to update for real, but here, this is awesome.

http://tvlinks.50webs.com/My%20Name%20Is%20Earl_links.html

I just blew Ramen noodles out my nose. That is all.

My computer is still down for the count. I went out and got a USB keyboard for the tablet I'm using so at least I don't have to manually peck out every letter to type, but things are not looking good.

I get an error then a physical memory dump just after the windows logon screen. I tried booting from a windows CD to either reinstall, or repair the installation but I get another error after things load for a while, and I never get to the Windows setup screen. This pretty much makes me think the hard drive is fucked. How this happened, when it worked fine before I left, and sat there , not only shut off, but without power for a week, is a good question. So my thought now is get a new hard drive, swap out the old on, install windows, and then try setting up the old one as a slave drive in an attempt to save any data on it. I donno. pretty much sucks though.

home safe. get here computer ha corrupt regestry won't load. tablet = slow typing. can't sleep. this week officially sucks, and it'sonly tuesday.. and i was on vacation... good start. fuck

last week was great at least can we do that over?

LAX has internet terminals. I had an hour stopover... ( Would have been nice to have a direct flight, or a meanigfulstay but anyway) off to SAC in 45 minutes. Id seriously need to be a millionair to survive if the internet was really $.25 a minute.

first flight wasm't bad.

the M and N keys are switched around on this keyboard. also i can't find a place here to buya pepsi... wtf..