Today’s mail consisted of bills and credit card applications. Both are quite ordinary, save one credit card application that was forwarded to me from Texas. Yes, my Mother took the time to put the “Validation required within 7 days”, Bank of America, unopened credit card application into a new envelope and forward it via snail mail to me in Georgia. And no, I’ve never held a BoA account at that address. From the looks of it upon opening, they got my info from the Association…

I don’t know how your brain works, but I’m often curious about mine. I have been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do when I grow up. And it bothers me some that I haven’t figured it out yet, and it bothers me even more that I don’t feel like I’ve really crossed anything out either. I don’t think that I want to be a manager, and I don’t think that I want to be a project manager, but how can I know for sure without going down a long road of actually being or half being one of those things for some period of time to know for sure? I dunno. But, back to brains. I consider myself to be a pretty logical person. I like logic, and logic likes me. But there is this general field call logicstics. And, I’m pretty sure that I don’t like logistics and logistics doesn’t like me. But why would that be. If I’m logical and it’s logical, shouldn’t we get along? I assume that there’s just something about it that my brain doesn’t naturally gravitate toward. Perhaps any psyche majors reading can chime in… I recall even during middle school, having issues with these sorts of problems. I was in GT (Gifted and Talented — yes I’m a dork) during middle school. And I distinctly remember the teacher (Mrs. Pelfrey(sp)), giving us these certain tests. They went something like, five people live in a five story apartment complex. No two people live on the same floor. Each tenant owns a pet. Et cetera, et cetera. (example). I never “got” those puzzles, even today, I despise them. Which I assume the same disdain I have towards those puzzles is the same disdain I have for the “if I move X, that frees up space S₁. If I need to free up S₂ to accommodate constraint C, Y must be moved before X, blah, blah, blah”. I just don’t care about those types of problems. To me, there’s no fun in them. My brain just doesn’t gravitate towards them. Maybe I just see them as mundane, without adventure, and a lackluster creative problem solving outlet.

A better list there never was.

While the ski trip overall was very good, i.e. the skiing was good and the partying was good, I seemed to have caught some sort of illness. I woke up this morning feeling a little nauseous, but didn’t think too much about it. Later I realized the my throat was getting more and more sore, and that I was getting progressively more and more nauseous. So, I finally realized I was in the process of getting sick. My throat is sore and feels all scratchy. I have a small, dry cough mostly, with the occasional real cough. I’ve been loosening mucus in my throat all day when I clear my throat, which is the cause of me feeling pretty much horrible the entire day. I’ve napped a bunch during the day’s travel, so that I think has helped some, as after the flight, I didn’t feel quite as bad as when I began the flight (I pretty much slept all the way from Boston to Atlanta). So, I will definitely be sleeping a bunch over the weekend, taking copious drugs, and drinking lots of water (I’m nursing a Nalgene at the moment). We’ll see how it goes…

This is the terrorism stance I would use if I were running for president:

“It’s time to chill the f*ck out. To quote some old dude, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. Enough said, next question.”

In addition to all of that (you are reading this in chronological order, aren’t you?) I’ve watched my Netflix movies, too. “The Puffy Chair” sucked. Even with it being an indie film and all, the dialog, plot, and character development just wasn’t there. Next I watched “Clerks 2” which I thought was great and their best film yet. Them being the director/production staff. I didn’t really get the original too much (I don’t get a lot of the really indie genre), but this one was a little more normal of a story (if you can call it “normal”), so for me it was more enjoyable. It just wasn’t out as far as the first, so easier for me to watch and enjoy. Then, I watched “Wordplay”. After having watched “The Puffy Chair” I wasn’t really in the mood for another independent documentary, but it was surprisingly good. I would definitely recommend both “Clerks 2” and “Wordplay” to anybody, but stay away from “The Puffy Chair”.

Both of my sisters have now recommended to me that I become a movie critic. I’m not sure what I think about that.

I placed an order for 2 of these just now. With shipping my total was ~$40. Did I pay too much? I know it’s eclectic and all, and since it’s from the UK, I doubt I’ll run into someone else who has them, but paying for shipping them across the pond is a little much. I effectively used some b-day money, so it’s not like it was simple out of pocket money, but money given with the expressed purpose of being used to buy something I normally wouldn’t, which this easily falls into the category of. I guess that between this and my Fry’s run yesterday, I don’t want to lull myself into a buying spree.

The Fry’s buying spree was a new server for Wesley. They’ve been having some problems with it as of late, and have an itch to replace and consolidate, so I’m scratching it for them. I think I might have overbought: 1 gb corsair ddr2, athlon 64 x2 3800+, black antec case w/ 450w ps, dual 250gb maxtors, ecs gforce6 mobo with gig nic, pci-e, and onboard video, pioneer dvd burner. As Cole said, “yeah, it might get kind of bored just routing packets”. Dual core, yeah, I think so. I’m pretty sure that it will be the most powerful computer at Wesley, but will be doing the least amount of real work. I bought some more dual port intel nics on ebay, so after the ski trip, I should have those. I’ll put them in, take a few days to install and configure, and then ship it off to them to physically install.

That’s right, a ski trip. Going with the company. Taking a few days off will be nice. :)

I’ve had two very strong memories surface over the past couple of days. During some internal monologue ramblings, I was taken back to the first few days of our family owning Baxter, and how each one of us kids took a night soothing the beast, as he was crying at night. The other was one night, Dr. Moore brought over to our house some copies of scales for the Tuba. I remembered this because I was watching Wordplay, and remembering romantically how I wished I still played regularly and was good, how practicing the fundamentals sucks, and that scales are part of those fundamentals, hence the memory. I was still pretty young and didn’t know him all that well, so it was a little nerve racking to have him do me a favor. I don’t even remember how it came to be that he was going to bring them over to us. Maybe it was right after I switched to Tuba or something. I honestly don’t recall.

Today I got a bunch of errands run. I paid rent, finally deposited some checks, paid a bill, went to Kroger to pick up a few things (crap, they’re still in the car…), and have caught up on laundry. Yay for checking things off a list! Unfortunately all of the Bank of America ATM’s were out of whack. Bummer. I still need to sign my lease renewal and fill out the rebate forms from the computer parts… I probably should do that now…

“Babel” is the best movie I’ve seen since… I can’t remember. I watched both “Children of Men” and “Babel” at the theater tonight. I cut it close with Children, but I slid in right on time. I went to eat at Popeyes beforehand, and simply cut the 7.40 a little close for comfort. I went to see “Children of Men” first because it is currently getting an 8.2 at IMDB, I like Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, and Michael Caine, it had the dude from Serenity in it, and I like films with an indie feel. This one let me down a bunch. For an 8.2, I was disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, just not #159 on the list of IMDB’s Top 250 good. Afterwards, I greatly debated if I should have seen another movie. I felt pretty odd and e-something (from the tip of my brain — affluent and bourgeoisie of me) about going to an expensive movie twice in one night. I guess I paid 2 * $9.25. A little stiff, if you ask me. But seriously, Babel was totally worth it. There was almost no one in the theater. I wasn’t 100% sure that “Babel” was the movie I was thinking of, as I had looked at a bunch before I left home. I was pretty sure, though, so took a chance. IMDB has it right now at a 7.8. It is easily 10 times better than “Children of Men”. Like I said, I can’t think of anything to compare it to. The only things I can think of are “Crash”, “Man on Fire”, and “V for Vendetta” (which apparently I didn’t blog about — I would have sworn I did… the mind is going). I’m not talking about comparing this to the old films, just new ones. I was so emotionally connected to these characters and what happened to them. They had me emotionally suspended and unresolved until the very end. Even then, I still have questions. Awesome, just awesome. I hope this one takes best picture.

I’ve felt of late that over the weekend I tend to post several short, disjointed posts, so I figured I’d save up and just post once this time.

Hilary and Barack and who knows who else have formed presidential exploratory committees.

“You pick the smartest, most capable, most honorable individual you can think of…”
— Leo McGarry

I think that sentiment will be driving my decision. A person who is honorable, trustworthy, dare I say patriotic, who would adhere to a more strict interpretation of the Constitution. Actually, I don’t think I can use patriot as a criteria. It has been twisted. I don’t mean it in its current connotation, but that connotation from the Colonial era. A statesman, a patriot, a federalist, a contitutionalist.

I finally just put 2 and 2 together. For the past day or so, I’ve noticed a severe slowness in the responsiveness of one of my shells in a screen session. I had also noticed in a “ps axf” that there was an ssh session open to wesley. Neither of these things were adding up. I just realized that most likely I had ssh’ed to wesley, then back again to argento. The reason for the slowness wasn’t due to high load or low memory, but simply network lag and overhead of going to Texas and back again. Oops…

I have spent a good deal of this weekend again working on the home network. I installed a new Xen image for my database machine, figured out that Samba can’t do straight Kerberos authentication (only with real AD :(), packaged Resin for Debian for real this time (yay! finally!), watched a bunch of Scrubs, watched a bunch of movies over again, got Azureus working headless on my new shell server (compute0), did some laundry, stayed up too late, got up too late, found out my internet connection can push 15Mbps+, setup cricket for snmp monitoring of all of my new machines, hmmm, that’s all I can think of right now…

I haven’t fixed the car door and it’s been too cold to ride or finish the table.

I’m out of photos now. Must take more.

I don’t remember if I’ve blogged about this before, and I’m too lazy to do a search, so I’m just going to post (possibly) again. It sucks that I’m caught up with all of my shows. No more West Wing or Sports Night and I’m caught up on Lost, Studio 60, and Scrubs. Having to wait a week is a chore, and then if you watch them on real TV, there are commercials. What’s up with that? Commercials and waiting for next week’s show is for the birds…

There were three major things I should have gotten done this weekend. 1) Get my car door handle fixed. 2) Ride. 3) Finish my coffee table. I did none of them. Well, I did ride on Sunday, but I should have ridden on Saturday and Monday too…