Sunday at work.

What a bummer. Oh well. Diana's working today, too, so I'm really only missing the La Costa golf tournament on TV. Maybe I'll be able to catch the end.

Friday night was first ever "couples" poker. We (Baditude/Hbomb, Iwan/Sara, Norm/Teri, me/D) played cheap stakes ($5) structured limit Hold'em. It was mostly an excuse to get together and hang out, as well as introduce some of the newer players to the game. I had a lot of fun, and everyone else seemed to as well. Diana and Iwan and I were big winners, and Sara and Teri, while lasting quite a long time, both busted out on the same hand (I don't remember who won). I was particularly proud of Sara on one hand, who slow-played a flush to perfection, only calling my bet on the turn (I had two pair, A's and K's, and she just made her flush). On the river, I bet, thinking I'd surely won, and she raised. I re-raised (I now realize this was a mistake), and she called and killed me. Props to her for that.

Saturday morning, I went to Fry's and returned my defective hard drive (that's my story, at least... I confirmed that I did not, indeed, kill the thing by using two power supplies, at least). Then Diana and I went to an opening of a furniture/home-decor store nearby, and found some really nice paintings for our living room, which we purchased. We then headed up with Eryn and Heather to Irvine to go visit Gabe and Rhiannon and see new baby Landon.

We got there around two, and the li'l guy had just been fed, and slept until 4, all during this time, people took turns holding him and stuff. I eventually took him and kind of slouched on the couch and let him lie stomach down on my chest, with his face turned sideways. Very cute. I have to admit I wasn't completely petrified at the idea of holding a newborn (like Little (oops, UNCLE) Buhr... but he did a good job).

We were there for the afternoon and for dinner, and then headed back home to bed.

Now, I'm at work getting some stuff done for Monday. Tonight there was some talk of going over to Eryn's to hang out and watch the Oscars (and maybe set up some sort of betting pool), so that will be fun.

OK.

I think I killed the computer problem once and for all.

With the other new upgrade, I bought a new Serial ATA hard drive. There are TWO power sources on the back of the drive: a new-style one and an old-style one. I, unknowingly, hooked them both up, instead of choosing one like the instructions say. Whoops.

So, I bought a new hard drive, and am going to return the "broken" one ASAP. Why am I returning it? 'Cause I was having a bunch of problems with it. I don't need to tell them that *I* caused the problems do I? I hope not.

In spite of a good weekend, I'm now in a world of frustration.

Frustration at work: Project due by Feb. 29 and requirements are STILL being discovered and changed.

Frustration at home: My new shiny computer has something wrong with it. It's gotten slower and slower and slower. I think it has something to do with the hard drive, but I'm not sure. I'm going to reformat and reinstall everything tonight. Ugh.

Don't get me wrong, things could be a lot worse. It's just one of those mildly stressful periods that keep life interesting.

And as an island in a sea of frustration, Diana is a glorious ray of light. It's really incredible how we can both be tired and worn our and frustrated at the world in general, and get totally recharged just by spending 10 minutes in passing during a lunch hour. She's my fave.

That is all.

PS: I now know how to spell frustration. There's no 'e' in it.

PPS: OH! My boy Gabester has just become a father, and started a blog chronicling the event and so forth. Read about it here!

In the song 867-5309, the line goes:

"Jenny, Jenny, you're the girl for me...
You don't know me but you make me so happy..."

What are the chances that line originally said "You don't know me but you make me so horny"?

Seems to fit so much better.

Ok. I'm really not in a bad mood or anything, but there are two trends that need to stop.

1) The phrase "bling bling". It's over. It's gone from cool, hip, underground rap lingo to something Kate Couric would use on the Morning Show. (No offense to Katecouriciloveyoukthxbye!) Just let it die gracefully.

2) Enough is enough with the goddamn blog phenomenon of "Which *blank* are you"? You know, "Which Smurf are you?" or "Which Lord of the Rings character are you?" For the uninformed, you fill out a small questionaire, Seventeen-magazine style, and at the end, depending on your answers, you are assigned a particular identifying Smurf or whatever.

I just saw this on another blog, and it's just too much:


You are Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the
beginning of the end for HP. In this novel, a
darker tone is set throughout the course of the
story, involving madness, murder, and
resurrection. Not only are there raging
hormones throughout the course of this book,
darkness sets in on Harry like a deadly plague.
He takes on an unwanted responsibility, watches
someone die, and on top of that, unwillingly
helps resurrect his darkest enemy.


What Harry Potter Book Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I'm "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire!" I'm not quite sure why, but there it is. Dumb. We got through this with "All your base", we can get through this, too.

I like/disklike when Diana's gone. I spend most of the day in front of the computer or TV, and generally be a slob. (That's both the like and dislike part, see?) Seriously, though, we're pretty independant, but it only takes a full day of apartness for me to miss her and be lonely. Oh well, she'll be back tomorrow.

Yeesh.

Diana left this morning to visit friends in Santa Barby. I've been working all day building my brand-new computer. Tough going, but it's going OK. Obviously I'm able to get online. But I think I need to re-install XP, so I'm going to give it another shot. Wish me luck! :)

update

Success! I think. I have a fresh Serial ATA hard drive running a fresh install of WinXP Pro. I moved over all my old bits into my secondard case, installed a power supply, and low and behold, it booted up just fine.

Now begins the fun game of reinstalling everything I had on the old machine, finding all those little utils I love so much, etc. Woot!

update #2

Complete success!

I just played a rousing game of BF1942. I had all the graphics stuff turned on all the way, and still was getting maximum FPS. I'm VERY pleased. Yay me. Not only games, but the whole system is nice and speedy.

I had lots of crazy problems to overcome, but I did, and I'm happy.

It's been a weird day. For a moment there I thought I hadn't even seen another human all day, but I just remembered that I hit up a trip to Fry's this morning. Seems like forever ago.

Hey kids... time to do some good.

My boy Wil Wheaton and his wife are participating in a fund-raising marathon here in San Diego in June to raise money for leukemia research. Stop by and read what they have to say, and if you're so inclined, donate a couple bucks. You can use your credit card, donate any little amount, and it just takes a minute, and you'll feel good that you're helping make the world a better place.

Optimism and Pessimism

So I was thinking about optimism, pessimism, good luck, and bad luck.

I'm not sure if I truly believe in luck or not. It's an easy thing to offhandedly talk about, but when you get down to science, luck quickly gets pushed out the door.

If asked, I'd say that I consider myself lucky. That is, good things seem to happen to me. But I can't help but wonder if there is a chicken/egg thing going on. Maybe the same amount of good things and bad things happen to me, and I just have an attitude that enjoys the good things, and can easily brush off the bad. So it's not really luck, right?

Enter optimism and pessimism. If I, in a subconscious way, believe that good things are going to happen, will they? Probably not. But will I be more likely to dismiss bad things, or at least put a positive spin on them, making them not-as-bad? Maybe. And maybe I'll enjoy the good things a little more, the sum total giving me a brighter outlook on life...?

So does the opposite apply? If I'm Mr. Grumblypants, and I tend to look for negativity in the world, does finding it not only give me brief morbid satisfaction, but also reinforce my own grumbliness? Good things are immediately dismissed as flukes, yet bad things are relished and dwelt upon.

My ex-girlfriend from college claimed to have really bad luck. And in spite of being a positive, selfless person, really seemed to. Things just seemed to go wrong for her. It was sort of eerie.

But thinking back, I can't help but wonder that if we all kept a running tally of good things and bad things that happen to us, if it would all come out about the same. And that it's our level of optimism/pessimism that interprets those events, and changes our outlook, and creates a more or less hospitable environment for more good or bad things to take hold.

Add things that are under our control into the mix, and the conversation really gets interesting. Sure, a tree branch could fall on your car randomly, and that can be interpreted as you will. But when you are having fights with your partner, and lose your job, and cat gets sick, there's a possibility that you somehow have a hand in that (which opens up more of a chicken v. egg, outlook v. occurrence conversation).

Does anyone understand what I'm saying? I'm kind of all over the road on this one, and would be interested in your thoughts.

PS: I'm not picking on any specific person in this post. Honestly. Not even you (you know who you are). But I am thinking of general classes of people (optimists and pessimists), which we fall into in some capacity.

I wonder... an optimist might respond: "Yes, good things happen to good people!"
A pessimist might respond: "No! Bad things happen to good people!"

Ha. :)

A day in the life of Adman

I've read a couple "days in the life" type entries on some blogs, and thought I'd pick today as a random day. Here's how it went:

The alarm probably went off around 5:45am. Diana apparently rolled out of bed and started her morning. My first memory is her standing over me sometime around 7'ish (I think?), saying goodbye and looking at me lovingly.

She resets the alarm for me for around 7:45am. It has an 8 minute snooze which I usually make liberal use of. I snoozed until around 8:20am. I HATE the moment I roll out of bed. Rolled out of bed, stumbled to the computer to check early emails (mostly to see if there's any critical problems at work). A true geek checks his email before getting dressed in the morning, and I am no different. Jump in the shower. Get dressed, don't forget lunch (Diana makes it for me. Can you believe it?) Leave around 8:45am, get to work a bit after 9.

Once at work, morning emails from previous day. Read my standard list of webpages:

My Yahoo news page
Slashdot.org
Slashdot games
Wired.com
World of Warcraft news
aspragg.blogspot.com (and all linked blogs)

Think about what I need to do that day. Have a donut or bagel and refill my water bottle.

Depending on what I'm working on, try to get some solid work done from 10-12. At this point, I'm designing and doing initial coding on a C# component, so this involves writing my design document, talking with peeps about stuff, etc.

Around 11:45am, started eating lunch at my desk and looking for a foos game. Played a long foos game from about 12:15pm to about 12:45pm (don't remember if we won or lost). Finish lunch. Diana usually calls in the early afternoon. I really enjoy the recharge I get from just talking with her in the middle of a workday.

At 1pm, I had a mini-meeting with someone about the stuff I'm working on. Then continued to get my design together in preparation for my 3pm design review meeting (where my design is being reviewed). My project supervisor comes over and tells me that things have changed, and I don't need to do *this*, but need to do *this*, *that* and *the other thing* instead. This sort of changes my design I'm about to present, so, I change as much of my design as I can before the meeting.

Have my design review meeting (third so far). It goes pretty well, but the new requirements require more work from me. Meeting was from 3:30pm to about 5. Play a post-meeting game of foos until the present (5:15pm).

Started writing this document.

Typical workdays, as well, are liberally peppered with people asking me for advice on things that I know about, me asking people for information or advice on things that THEY know about. Check the above webpages and personal email. Chatting with peeps. Etc.

I'll probably leave here around 6pm. Diana's tutoring tonight, and won't be home until 9pm, which means I'm on my own for the evening.

This means I'll fix some dinner, eat it in front of the computer while I do my Age of Wonders:Shadow Magic turn (me and co-workers are playing a game via email) or watching the Simpsons and Seinfeld. I have some computer building to do, and I might get that all prepped for some serious work this weekend. Probably play a little more BF1942, as I'm trying to gain more of an appreciation for this game. Oh, and I need to remember vacuum. It's my job and I frequently forget (as I did just now).

Diana returns around 9. Seeing her for the first time is by far the high point of my day. (Interesting that the low points and high points are at far ends of the day). We hang out and talk about our days and so forth. Today, she mentioned interest in watching another "Band of Brothers" episode tonight, which we've been enjoying, so we'll probably do that. Then maybe some reading, and to bed by about 11.

Looking back, that's very typical weekday.

Update!

On the way out of work, I caught a little hoppy-frog! This change my entire day. I brought him home and made a little house for him. Very exciting. I think I'll let him go tonight, but he's been a fun little friend.

I don't often do this, but here goes:

There is a little fish shop nearby called Pelly's and it has the BEST CLAM CHOWDER I'VE EVER HAD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Honestly. And I've had a LOT of freakin' clam chowder in my day, including in honest-to-goodness New England. So, check 'em out.

Another wizeekend rizoundup. Huzzah.

Diana recently rented Band Of Brothers from the library, and we've been watching those. Pretty good. We watched a couple episodes on Friday. Then as we were getting into bed, I noticed something weird with my eye. The area above the inner corner of my left eye was starting to swell.

Regular readers might remember this happened to me about a year ago, as well. In that case, I went to bed, and woke up with my eye almost swollen shut, with the upper inside corner swollen down over my eye. Really gross. At that time, I had gotten jacuzzi water in my eye, and figured I had some reaction to that.

This Friday night, when I noticed the swelling, I guessed it was some sort of allergic reaction? To what, I don't know. I took some Benedryl, applied hot compresses, and stayed upright as long as I could (that Benedryl is crazy stuff). While upright, I did some seaching, and found that the area that was swollen was where anatomy pictures show the lacrimal sac to be. Web pages also talk about an infection of said sac, where a blockage can cause bacterial to build up, causing redness, swelling, pus, etc. I didn't have any infection-type symptoms. Just swelling. Over the course of half an hour, I had painless (almost kind of numb) swelling up to about the size of a small grape. When I woke up in the morning, the swelling had mostly gone away, and continued to dissappear throughout the day. Definitely a better result then the last time this happened.

I know for a fact that three MDs read this blog. Any ideas what could cause such sudden onset swelling?

Anyhoo, that Saturday morning, Iwan came over, and me and Iwan and D hit LSM for a little golf. I didn't golf particularly well, but it was a lot of fun. Diana's getting better and better, which is really fun to see.

On the way back, we stopped by Fry's, where Iwan and I each picked up a 250gig Western Digital hard drive for $149 after mail-in rebate. Unbelievably good deal. Such a good deal that I bought one without realizing that I'm about to buy a new computer and need a serial hard drive rather than IDE. So I returned mine the next day.

Anyhoo, we spent the rest of the day trying to figure out Iwans computer problem. The problem turned out to require flashing the BIOS on his motherboard. We had a hell of a time doing that, even though we followed the instructions perfectly. The problem is, the instructions were wrong (I later learned from a message board online). The motherboard manual said that in order to flash the BIOS, basically a switch had to be set to position 1 (in the other position, it wouldn't work). The manual was backward. It had to be set the OTHER way to work. Dumb.

We fought with that for a good couple hours, and didn't figure it out until the next day.

Sunday, Diana worked, and I went to Fry's and started my big computer upgrade event! I bought a new motherboard, AMD Athlon 3200 processor, and 1 gig of RAM. With existing and currently spare parts, it should be pretty easy to make a mostly new computer for me, and pass the existing one to Diana for her very own. I didn't do any installation or anything yet, but I opened the motherboard (which had been returned previously, but still carried the warranty), and found that a little clamp that holds the RAM in place had broken off. Sweet. So I get to return that (hopefully for a new one) sometime soon.

D and I also went furniture shopping. We've got some big ideas for a big desk/office type system, and looked around for things we liked. We saw some stuff we liked, but now I'm kind of second guessing if we really want/need the stuff that we saw. So, it's sort of under review.

Eryn called and I played a little BF1942 with him and Mick, which was fun. Then some more Band of Bros, and to bed.

Now, after a busy weekend, I'm back at work and don't feel rested at all. :P

So.

The weekend started off in a very strange way. Eryn had a busy week of work, and decided to try to rally the troops to head out on Friday night for some pizza and beers and hanging out. I headed over to his pad right after work, and was surprised to find Diana there (she said she probably wasn't going to come out). Eryn asked if I wanted to see his new computer, which of course I did. I checked it out for a second, and heard a familiar "Hey dude..." I turn around my Mick was standing there. My brain reeled and seeing this familiar yet totally-unexpected face. I then got to watch the same trick be pulled on Iwan, which was lots of fun.

The weekend was a good one. Hanging out Friday night, went for a nice long walk and dinner on Saturday, Superbowl Sunday, all of it with special guest star Mick in town. It was good to see him, and I'm sorry he has to head back to his grueling work. Poor guy.

As it turns out, my old high school friend Eric was in town for the weekend as well, and a small group of us got together for dinner on Monday. Although it was just for an evening, it was nice to catch up. Best part was watching Eric transform from so quiet and humble and polite to a barely-contained maelstrom of boiling rage (ok, maybe a little exaggeration) when a "hot topic" was mentioned. Don't believe me? Tell him feeding sharks will likely lead to increased attacks on humans and watch what happens. Good to see him. Not only is it just fun to catch up with old friends, but I think both he and Mick lead pretty different lives than I do, and it's interesting to just see how other people get by.

In other news... I can't believe this whole Janet's boob superbowl debacle. My religious radio boys were giving out CBSs number to call and complain. The FCC is launching an investigation. AOL is thinking about asking for money back. All of this is just so much bullshit for such a tiny little thing. I know, I know, kids (won't somebody please think of the children?!) were watching. But I have the feeling that if no one made a big deal about it, there wouldn't be a big deal made of it, you know? I don't think a kid would be traumatized as such by seeing a flash of boob on tv (as they might be, say, if they saw someone's head getting blown off). It just doesn't seem to be worth the fuss. (Am I missing something here? Anyone want to play devil's advocate?)

The really funny thing is that, in spite of the outburst of moral objection, TiVo and Internet searches are reporting record high numbers stemming from people rewinding and doing web searches for Janets boob.

In yet other news: I played Battlefield 1942 online with Eryn and Mick the other night. We used an online voice program called "TeamSpeak", which worked really well, so we could talk to each other during the game. Good times. I'm not yet a really big fan of BF1942 as compared with my glory days of Counterstrike and Quake III, but it's definitely a lot more fun to play with friends.

Ok, well, that's about the news from me. Back to work.