A coworker came up to me today and said what a good couple Diana and I made.

I agreed and thanked her, but since she's only seen Diana and I together only once or twice, asked her what made her think so. She said that she finds that a lot (perhaps a majority) of couples she sees always seem to be pairs of people at battle with each other. She commented that there always seems to be some sort of power struggle going on, and a snotty comment here or "joking" insult there can be really telling. Even just an offhand "see, I told you!" can indicate (she said) a sort of inherent competition, emphasizing a pervasive one-up-man-ship rather than mutual teamwork. She said that she didn’t get any of this from me and Diana, and that was a good thing. She said we were one of the good ones.

I thought this was a really nice comment. I'm forced to admit that I share in some of her observations and opinions (although I'm less willing to catagorize an entire relationship over a single instance of disagreement). However, in spite of the compliment, it's sort of a sad state of affairs when a (basically) stranger comments on how good a couple you are because neither one of you said something mean to each other in a span of 4 hours.

Anyhoo, just some thoughts from me.

Bad news: Going to the dentist and having a cavity.
Good news: Showing up for your filling, and having the dentist discover you don't actually have a cavity! Huzzah!

Here's a excerpt from an email to Norm, but I'll add it here just for fun.
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Nethack status:

I'm in some trouble here, but I think I know how to get out of it. I'm playing a wizard, and I can't do the quest because my god is pissed at me. My quest leader doesn't let me continue. I've completed Medusa and cleared the castle (and gotten my second wand of wishing!), but I'm sort of stuck for the time being.

I did some reading (read: massive spoiling) today on how to mollify angry gods. I think I'm going have to reverse genocide some creatures and kill/sacrifice them. We'll see how it goes.

I did something called "nurse dancing" for the first time, and it rocked. Nurses are human creatures that attack you as normal, but if you're not wearing any armor or wielding any weapons, their hits actually HEAL you, and in some cases, will add to your max hitpoints. They'll do this for a while, and randomly teleport away (or I guess sometimes just dissappear).

So, a common thing to do is go to a non-teleport level (I went to the first level of Sokoban), and undress, and send in some nurses! I did this, and then just rested on the spacebar letting them whack at me. They eventually all dissappeared, but I gained like 125 hps for this. Pretty snazzy.

Nethack is a good game.
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I'm leaving early tomorrow morning for the weekend to visit my bro and his wife and my new li'l nephew! So, smell ya later…

Pet Peeve #427 (work related): If I email a single person a small question, I generally expect the answer to come back just to me. I don't like it when the reponse is cc'd to a bunch of other people who aren't in the loop. Especially if your original email contains information that you don't necessarily want shared around (which was NOT the case in my instance, thankfully). (Not sure if the above makes sense to you, but it does to me).

Thing I Like #835: I like when I'm driving, and the road is curving in one direction, and I want to make a lane change in the opposite direction. Say, the road is curving to the right, you're in the right lane, and want to be in the left lane. To do this, you still turn right, just not as much, and you drift over to the left. Not as much turning. I love that.

Our cablemodem is down. Has been for the last two days. I actually called Adelphia, and was just about to go into it when I noticed that, because of the painting, I'd actually unplugged the cable from the wall. Oops. I plugged it back in, but we still aren't getting service. I've tried different cables, different outlets, etc, but no signal. Diana and I are both pretty addicted to checking our stuff, and we're getting pretty ansy. Someone is coming by today to take a look.

I was at Diana's parents house last night briefly, and was asked to take a look at their computer. I'll say it again: the average person simply isn't equipped to maintain a computer without outside help.

From Wired website

For instance, a recent survey by the National Cyber Security Alliance found that nearly 90 percent of all personal computers could be infected with at least one form of spyware. A separate study by Internet service provider EarthLink found more than 29 million spyware-related files on the 1 million computers the company tested.

I'm not saying the average person is dumb or incapable, but merely lacks the time to invest in really learning the insides of their system to protect it from viruses, spyware, or generally keep it clean and running in good shape. This shouldn't be a surprise. A person can't know everything about everything. We all specialize in our knowledge, and not everyone specializes in computers.

The same could be said about me and cars. I don't know anything about the insides of my car, because I haven't invested the time or energy to learn. The difference, though, is there aren't a hoarde of bad guys actively trying to screw my car up.

I find this whole concept unfortunate. Have computers gotten easier to use over the years? I really wonder sometimes.

I have a really good game of Nethack going, this time with a Wizard. Got an early wish, and wished for "blessed fixed +5 silver dragon scale mail", and lo, I actually got it +5 (there is a 1/5th chance of this). Sokoban gave me a bag of holding, thankfully. By the time I reach Sokoban, I'm usually REALLY stuffed with stuff. I have a bunch of spellbooks, and the identify spell at 0%, which is great. I haven't found ANY altars, though, aside from co-aligned in Minetown. I have a pet orange dragon and pet grey dragon. I'm on the Big Room level now, and just found a wand. ID'd it:

j - a wand of wishing (0:3)

Boo ya.

The only problem is that my god is angry with me. I'm not sure why. My pet dragons killing his priest might have something to do with it. If I could just find an altar in the dungeon, I could do some sacrificing and get back in good standing.

Paint!

We're up to our butts in paint! We have a guy over painting the ceilings, and Diana's been repainting the whole house. The new ceilings looks great, and Diana's doing a really good job on the painting. Everything is pretty much in dissarray, with furniture all moved around and drop-clothes everywhere. It's very dynamic.

The whole house used to be a light yellow'ish. Now, the hallway and one bedroom are a very light tan/purply (really almost white). One bedroom (my office, soon to be guestroom) is going to be a sort of smoky green, and the bedroom (guestroom, soon to be my new office) is a steely blue. The living room and dining room are a the same tan/beige/purply color that the hall is, but a shade darker (which is still very light). Family room and kitchen and master bedroom and bathroom are still TBD.

It's really good stuff. I didn't like the whole house being one color, and not only that, the previous paint job was terrible. I've helped a little, but Diana's really done a huge amount of work and seems to be enjoying it, so mad props to her. It's going to be great.

Saturday, we headed up to Vista with Diana's parents for some sort of Highland Games festival. Lots of people in kilts (and not a few white-supremacist looking folks) wandering around, watching bagpipe bands, cabers being tossed, and sheep being rounded up by sheepdogs. The sheepdog competition was pretty cool to watch. Those dogs are incredibly well trained. Good stuff.

Saturday night, I gave my boy Iwan and call, and we decided it was high time to head up to a local casino to play some poker. Diana wavered on joining us. Iwan claimed that we'd be home at the latest by 11:30pm (he had an early golf round the next day). Diana decided she'd come and watch, so off we went.

The casino we played (apparently card rooms are legal in California? So I don't think this was an indian Casino?) looked pretty seedy from the outside, but it was bright and nice inside. It was non-smoking, which was VERY nice. The obvious choices were 1-2 or 2-4, and the waiting list for 1-2 was pretty short, so we signed ourselves up. Diana went from "I'll just watch" to "Adam, how much money do you have?", and signed up to play, which was great.

We ended up at three different tables, which was probably good. I decided I like live play a LOT more than tournaments. Tournaments with raising blinds really put a lot of pressure on you to really win quick or lose. Live play was really no pressure, and I think I played really well. I don't remember throwing away what would have been winning hands. I also didn't stay in too many hands. In fact, I only saw 5 showdowns, and won 4 of them. I never got more than a few dollars below my original buyin. Letsee how much I can remember.

I got pocket 10s, and the flop came 9 high (I think like 2-6-9). I bet, and get a couple callers. Turn comes some small card. I bet and get a couple callers. River comes another 2. I bet and get a couple callers, and win with my 10s and 2s. Nice.

I played a K-9s in a late position, and flopped a king and turned a turned a 9. That went pretty well for me.

I got pocket 10s again, and flopped another 10. At some point, someone bet, Doofus (more on him later) raised into me. I immediately re-raised, and they both called.

I think I had something like A-J and an ace came out, and I outkicked someone else with an ace.

The hand that I didn't win, I had A-Q, and the flop came queen high. I was in the big blind. Little blind was checking, I'd bet, and a couple people called. The river made a potential flush on the board, and the small blind now bet. He'd been chasing flushes and straights all night (and showing me his cards if I wasn't in the hand), so I knew I was beat. I threw in the $2 to see it, along with a few others, and he flipped up an A-6 or something for a flush. I told him what I had, and he kind of apoligized and said "Don't worry, I'm sure I'll pay you back by chasing these". I told him quietly that some others at the table had already paid me back for him by doing the same.

There was a guy (Doofus, above), who literally didn't know how to play poker. He had a loose idea of what hand beat what, but didn't know what a flush was or how good it was. He was happy and good natured, and eager to learn, but he really should have done some studying up before showing up. The other players were very nice to him, and eager to help him out. It took me a good long time to figure if it was an act or not, but when he called to the river with 2-7o with absolutely NOTHING helping him, I figured it was either a great act or he really didn't know what was going on. Good times.

At some point, he ordered a beer, and set aside $3 to pay for it in chips. Before the beer came, he ran out of chips, and debated about and finally called with some of his beer money. I made a comment about two addictions in battle with each other, but (probably thankfully) quiet enough that no one heard me.

There was another guy at my table who understood the concept of a kicker, but didn't really realized that it extended down the line of cards to the end. That is, A-A-K-J-8 would beat A-A-K-J-5. Lots of people really had the "hey, it's low limit! Let's just play and have fun and chase those straights and flushes." I got a good natured comment about being the rock at the table, which I took as a compliment. People really played pretty passive: lots of checking and calling. I was lucky/patient enough to get the right combinations for hole cards and flops a few times, and got callers to the river.

I checked the clock at around 11:20pm, and saw that Iwan and Diana were still at their spots. I looked down to see I was up $39.50. I played until the blind came to me, and checked out of the game. I walked over to watch Iwan win a monster pot, catching a straight draw on the river which put him back to even, which was good. Diana was down $9 at this point. They checked out of their games, and we headed off, sharing our stories. It was a really good time, and I'm glad that we didn't have any big losers.

Iwan and I both cashed in for $90, but that was really overkill. I don't know about Iwan, but I only went into my original stack just a tiny bit. I luckily won the first hand I played out, and just played with winnings the whole time, which is a much better feeling than trying to get back up to even. If you played tight, I think you could sit comfortably for $40 or so and have some fun.

Whew.

Sunday, I went over to my parents house in the afternoon. My dad and I got his computer all set up and running, the result of which was his ability to connect to the hospital computer system in a secure manner. With that, he could us a program that allowed him to see patient records. He showed me how he could look up notes and things about patients. I asked if they had X-rays and stuff, and a moment later, we were looking at the chest X-ray of someone, right there online! Really pretty cool. This probably means that he can do more work from home, which I think is always a nice option to have. Good stuff. Diana showed up later and we had a nice steak dinner. We went for a little walk around my old stomping grounds, which was fun, and then home.

So, there it all is.

Unbe-freaking-lievable.

Our computer got taken over by spyware last night. I can't believe how nasty this stuff is.

I logged in, and pretty quickly got some pop ups, which was an immediate warning sign. I checked the running processes, and saw something called "bargain.exe". Uh oh.

I run anti-spyware stuff, and it finds a lot of stuff and cleans it up. I then go to the Start menu, choose "run", and run "regedit". Nothing happens, but now the system is reinfected again.

I go and look in the Windows, System, and System32 directories, and see that the fuckers replaced regedit.exe, notepad.exe, wordpad.exe, and ping.exe with their own versions (presumeably that run/download something to reinfect the system).

Two spy-ware removal tools and several scans/reboots later, I think I've gotten all the bad stuff out. The only symptom left is that my Quick Launch toolbar is gone. I can re-enable it using the Taskbar properties page, but the change doesn't stick. I'm sure it's a registry setting somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. If worst comes to worst, I can do a System Restore from Sunday night. I actually tried this (fixed the Quick Launch problem), but for some reason the virus scanner didn't want to scan after doing that saying that the installation was messed up. Which doesn't make sense, since it was installed properly before Sunday.

I think I'll do the System Restore from Sunday and reinstall Norton to get that working. If the spyware has changed registry settings involving Taskbar toolbars, who knows what else is messed up. I think that's probably the safest route.

Bad, bad stuff, spyware. I simply can't believe that there are programmers who would create such beasts. Man, computer support business must be moving with all this shit out there. Diana and I are pretty savvy computer users, but one of us must have clicked in the wrong spot. I can't imagine that the general joe-schmoe windows user would have a chance once they were infected. Maybe I should look into that as a side business. I wonder how much money could be made from simply (Download spyware remover -> run spyware remover -> install pop-up stopper -> reboot). Hell, if I can remote-desktop in, I could do it all while in my underwear from home!

On Friday we had some peeps come and scrape all the popcorn stuff off our ceilings, and retexture them. They did what appears to be an adequate job, but what do I know. It was crazy to come in on Friday and see plastic and dropclothes everywhere, and wet ceiling scrapings all over the place, but they did a pretty good job cleaning up. We're still finding little flakes of stuff here and there, but it could be a lot worse.

Now that that is done (I can't believe I know people who've done that themselves! Looks like a really hard job), we have a painter-man over to repaint the ceilings, which sounds like a break-neck job as well. I didn't mind the acoustical ceilings that much, but I think the new ones will look a lot better. I'm pretty excited to see how things look when he's all done.

Diana and I started working on picking out paint colors this weekend to repaint the walls. This is something I have a pretty tough time with. I can't look at a little postage size splotch of color and from that, determine what an entire room will look like when painted in that color. Diana's found a pretty cool thing on the web where you can choose colors and it shows you a virtual room painted in that color. Pretty neat.

The paint color names themselves keep me entertained. Who comes up with these? They're all so cheesy, like "Distant Laughter" or "Vanilla Dreams" or "Family Heirloom". What the hell? We came up with some of our own names, like "Pinkus Malinkus" and... another one which I shan't mention here. We went to Home Depot on both Saturday and Sunday and picked out some sample colors and painted posterboards, and put those up in rooms to get a better feel of how things are going to look, and I think we're narrowing down our focus.

In other news, Friday night a small group met up at Norm and Teri's new house for some hanging out and poker. We played a mini-tournament, which was a lot of fun, and then a normal game. Norm's new house looks great as they're getting all their stuff moved in and their artwork put up and stuff. They've got some pretty big plans for their backyard, and that will be fun to watch develop.

Iwan and I golfed yesterday at Lake San Marcos. I don't know how he does it, but Iwan keeps score, and we played stroke-play, match-play, skins, and bingo-bango-bongo all at the same time. Crazy. It was a close match, but he beat me in all games, although we both tried to lose on the back nine. I just tried harder, I guess. Good times. Afterwards, Eryn joined us (with his new car! Keep your eyes on his blog for that, I'm sure) and we watched the Lakers get walloped by the Pistons. Good times.

And now, back to work...

So… today was the ol' Mud Run.

Long story short, I'm alive and very pleased with how I did.

We got to the checkin area at 6-freaking-30 in the morning, which is when they recommend you arrive, even though the race doesn't start until 9am. So we hung out for a couple hours and let our bodies fill with nervous anticipation. Well, I did at least.

At 9am, the individual racers started. At 9:15, it was our turn to go.

The start of the race was pretty easy. Because we were all glommed together and the track was pretty narrow, there were lots of spots where we were forced to walk. After about a mile there were marines with firehoses spraying down the crowd, which was very refreshing, but the water weight seemed to add about ten pounds to our clothes. There were some obstacles in the course along the way, like hay-bales to jump over, and a couple little knee-deep swampy areas to cross. The idea of not getting ones feet wet was very unrealistic.

Pretty soon, two of the guys who'd trained the most were ahead, and three of us remained behind a little. After a little while, though, I soon looked around and found myself alone.

After two miles was the start of "Suicide Hill", the two-mile long hill that I'd been told ghost stories of for a while now. It was roughly analgous to where the coast highway goes up towards the Torrey Pines golf course, but maybe a little longer, and maybe more steep in small parts, and less steep in others. For whatever reason, I didn't have nearly as much problems with the hill as I anticipated. Near the top, I passed one of my teammates who'd jetted ahead early on. We stuck together for a little while, but he soon fell back.

The great things about hills is that they go down as well as up, and the back of the hill was a nice stretch leading into the second half of the course. This was generally pretty flat, with some more obstacles. There were two areas of really nasty, gloppy mud, about 30 yards long, each with a wall in the middle that needed to be climbed. The wall was about chest height, and I had no problem jumping up enough that I could easily straighten my arms, and then throw a leg over and jump off. There were a lot of girls stranded at the walls, though, that required the assistance of big burly men (like me). I offered my help to someone, and she said she wanted to give it a try herself first, which was admirable, but she didn't even come close. I gave her a quick boost and over she went. Yay. There was another muddy area that was a very short, VERY steep hill that had been watered down and was VERY muddy. That was a killer, because every step made your foot slip back a few inches. It too was conquered, however.

At the first of the obstacles after Suicide Hill, I found my other teammate waiting. He said he wanted to go through the obstacles with someone else, and also said he'd only been waiting for a minute or so, and didn't expect to see me (I haven't really been talking up my running abilities). We traversed the obstacles together, and ran together the rest of the way, getting to the final big mud pit (250 yards from the finish line) in 1 hour and 18 minutes. There, as arranged, we rested and waited for the rest of our teammates, the last of whom arrived 10 minutes later, looking very pale and complaining of feeling like he was going to throw up. We rested for a little more, and finished the race officially at 1:31:55 or so.

I felt pretty good after the race. I never really felt like I was panting for air. My legs were tired, but not really that tired. We were all pretty jazzed at our performance and were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We got a little cleaned up, and got some sandwiches, and that was that.

Now, a few hours later, I'm definitely feeling it more. The sun came out right as the race started, and was shining brightly all through the race, and then it got cloudy just as we finished. I got a lot of sun. I'm pretty wiped out now, and feel pretty out of it, so if this writing doesn't make sense, there's the reason. But, all in all, I feel pretty good about how everything went. I'm not really looking forward to doing it again anytime soon, but who knows.

Memorial day weekend has come and gone.

Letsee here.

On Saturday, we had some some business appointments with slimy windows salesmen. Well, only one was slimy, but it was fun to joke about after he left. He gave us a "deal" which for some reason was only good that day. When we told him that we were still shopping around, and that we weren't going to buy windows from him no matter what price he named, he said the deal was good until Monday, then Tuesday because Monday was a holiday. I'm VERY tempted to call up tomorrow, and ask if the deal is still applicable, and when he says "yes", tell him we're not interested. I'm normally not vindictive like that, but he's asking for it. :)

Diana finished her final paper for her class, and we did a little geocaching afterwards with some work boys. There was a fun multi-part cache with various puzzles and stuff that we worked through. We didn't quite finish the thing though, before throwing in the towel.

We did a good bit more yardwork. Clearing the yard is happening in three phases: pulling out plants, digging up roots, covering the resulting clean soil with mulch to stave off new growth. It's actually going pretty well. It's a lot of work, but luckily we have a lot of time, and a couple hours every weekend isn't too bad.

Sunday evening, Diana and Iwan and I headed out for a cheap poker tournament. It turns out it was a $50 buy-in special tournament for Memorial Day. The girl there said that it was a "really great deal", and encouraged us to play. We politely declined. We did watch some of the new "WPT All In Poker" table game (multiple players vs. dealer a la blackjack), and spent the car ride back analyzing it, which made for a pretty interesting brainstorming session. We hit up some dinner and parted ways.

In other news, my lovely alma mater has finally shut down my unix account. I used it to read newsgroups, 'cause I for some reason really hate the Windows newsreaders that I've seen. I checked out one this morning and it just gave me shivers. I need my rec.games.roguelike.nethack! Does anyone (well, Norm :) have a *nix account with 'tin' and a newsfeed that I can use?