I just realized that I’m going to be a step-uncle-type-person on Saturday… how weird is that?

I got the white board hung tonight, with the help of a couple of nails, some speaker wire, two pci slot covers, and some bubble wrap. Last night I had the idea from some home makeover show to nail into the top cap of the wall to hang up my whiteboard. Looked at it this morning and realized/remembered that I have quite a large pseudo crown molding. Since this “crown molding” has a small strip of molding about 6–8″ below the ceiling, I figured that putting nails in at the very top of it would work great because they won’t be able to see the hole from standing on the ground. So, great, no holes to have to fill later. Has some small guage speaker wire, since I didn’t have any string. Ripped it apart to form 2 strands. Then bent the pci slot covers into a J to hold the white board. Fastened the wire to the pci slot covers. Then tied the wire to the nails and voila, a hanging white board. Then I had to make it so that the top would stay against the wall. Used some other semi-stiff wire that I had to make the board “stick” to the wire. Was worried about getting metal stuff on the wall (which wound up happening some before I fixed it, but hopefully not too bad), so I used a bubble wrapped envelope to keep the pci covers from contacting the wall. Not too bad for an engineer. :)

Too bad I don’t have a camera, else I’d just show you. :( I guess I’ll have to work on that… after I pay off the washer and dryer.

On a more serious note, I’ll try and respond to the comments given graciously by you guys about “The Pickup”. Hopefully I will get that out tomorrow, but since I’m heading out on Friday, if I don’t get it done, then it may be Sunday night or Monday night. Let’s hope that it’s tomorrow. :)

So, as luck would have it the two things that I wanted to do tonight happened be right next to each other. How convienent that Home Depot is right next to a Papa Johns? So, in my lust for a 4×8′ sheet of white board, I went off to Home Depot. Before I left, I measured the Yukon. Over 4′ of cargo space in the width direction. Not quite enough space in the height direction… more on that later. So, I finally tracked down their sheets of this stuff. A 2×4′ sheet would have cost something like $7. The 4×8′ sheet costs something like $11. So, I went with the big sheet. Pondered having them cut it then and there, but figured that I would regret it later. About this time I figured that I would call ahead to PJ, so that I could pay out at HD, pick up my pizza at PJ, and then go home to eat it. Well, they don’t like it if you don’t have a local phone number. The wankers. So, I paid out at HD, drove to PJ, made my order and waited. Read some of the USA Today that was in the store. Oil doesn’t look to good in the near future. Well, bad for me, good for people who own lots of oil. Anyway… oh, and there was this crazy lady that came in, screaming about how the guy was rude on the phone and how she wanted to talk to his manager and all of this. Makes me think that you get more with honey than vinegar… I digress more. So, after 12 minutes, I got my pizza and took it home. Good $13 (or however much pizza). Then End. Oh, I almost forgot. Laid the back seats down, but essentially had to duck the entire drive home. I guess they didn’t figure many people carrying 4×8′ sheets of stuff when they designed it. Ah, fond memories of many a mission trip to Mexico… ::Single tear::

P.S. I’m taking bids (suggestions really) for how best to hang this on the wall without making ginormous holes in the wall. Also remember that I am lacking in the power tool dept… I could buy power tools, but I’d rather buy techie tools…

I just poured most of a half a gallon of milk down the drain that had a “Best if sold by” date of Jul 09! That may be a record for me, as I’m usually pretty good about these things…

I ran across some guy’s dissertation on “The Art of the Pickup”. I’m sure that there are those of you reading who will immediately balk at this *cough*MAX*cough*. Just hold on for a sec and hear me out. Some of the things that this guy mentions I have actually been kicking around (independently and beforehand of reading this).

I guess mainly what I have been wondering is since I’ve moved out here and all, that nobody knows me, that I don’t have this pre-existing set of friends and possible hindrances due to those friendships (in terms of keeping friendships as opposed to the possibility of ruining them), that can I appear to be someone who I’m not quite. Take for example the couple of guys that I went to the concert with. They are very outgoing, boisterous kinds of fellows. Like if I acted as the person that I expect women to respond well to, would I have a better chance? I think that we all know what type of results I mustered in CS.

It reminds me of the movie “Hitch”. There is a line in there where Hitch says something like “ ‘You’ is a very fluid concept right now.”. In the same way that Hitch asks Allegra Cole if she would have ever noticed Albert had he not stood up in the meeting, I beg the question, is always being yourself truly enough in the beginning to set things in motion?

Somehow I don’t think that I’m going to like the comments on this one… :/

Maybe in my mind the question that it boils down to is who is the person that you think that you are? Who is Thomas? And unlike virtually every other friendship and relationship that I’ve ever had (and against probably every bit of advice that I’ve ever gotten or read on the subject), how much do I have to change, while staying Thomas at the exact same time, to achieve what I want to achieve, a girlfriend and a wife?

Well it’s 2am and the time is finally starting to hit me… Comment away…

MickeyD’s Apple Pies… four of them. Brings back many fond memories of many late night trips to McDonald’s with good friends…

A financial investment will yield returns beyond your hopes.

Hmmm… does that say what I think that it says?

‘Bout to go to work. Since I’m flying out on Friday, I figure that I don’t particularly want to loose those three or so hours of pay, so I’ll pick it up today all at once instead of sometime spread out this week. Watched “The Ladykillers” last night. I saw the original in my music in film class, so I knew pretty much what was going to happen. Odd that Tom Hanks was in it… Disappointed that there wasn’t a director’s commentary. Watched “Blazing Saddles” as well yesterday. Good flick. Thanks for the thought, Ben. I’ve also got “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” as well as “The Life of Brian”. We’ll see about watching one of them tonight. Well that actually depends if one of my network cards hasn’t bittent the dust… Also got through some of my book yesterday. It seems pretty good, but is really too early to tell. Picked up some Chinese for lunch today at a little place near by, hence the cookie’s fortune. I seemed to have bought too much food (my traditional meal of sweet and sour chicken). We’ll see how well the chicken and rice keep. Maybe I can stretch a couple of meals out of my $7.75.

laters

Got my first two Georgian mosquito bites last night. Got them while standing around outside before a live concert. For you see that several guys from work were going to go see this band, O.A.R.. Well, actually I’m not exactly sure about how they spell their name, whether I have the correct capitalization and punctuation, but that is neither here nor there. I don’t know this because I had never heard of them before, and now I’ve heard them live. They are pretty good. A really relaxed type of music, not mad or anything. So, these guys from work asked me and just said yes, without any real hesitation (which is somewhat odd, but eh…). So, while the opening acts were on, we were standing around outside the venue, and I got bit a couple of times. Anyhoo, it was a good concert and I got to go out with a couple of friends. Good times…

So apparently a while back I came a little closer to being fired than I would like to have been. Unbeknownst to me, I had a review at the end of my 3 month contract. Emails went around to the appropriate people, seeking reviews. Between what essentially boils down to clerical errors and some miscommunication, I was almost let go. But it was pretty quickly found out, and settled, all without my knowning. Good to know that they do in fact like me and want to keep me around a little while longer. :)

Watched “Cast Away” last night and the commentary tonight. I really liked it, but I bet there will be an ensuing flame war about how people didn’t like it.

Essentially impulse bought a book this morning from Amazon, Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. It would be nice if I could plow through it this weekend. We’ll see.

Since I’ve been looking into buying an Avel Linkplayer2, I have found out that you can get the Linksys NSLU2 to act as a media server for the Linkplayer. That way I could have my external connected to it, to serve as a normal fileserver as well as serve up content for the linkplayer, without having to run their software on a linux box nor have to connect the drive directly to the linkplayer. Fun stuff.

The weird thing is that in thinking about this I have a craving to fab essentially the same thing as the NSLU2, but with 1394b and gigE. How nice would that be? You could have raid 5 over 800Mbit firewire, with hotswapability due to CHEAP ata drives in firewire enclosures. ATA drives are freaking dirt cheap nowadays after rebates. You would even gain some reliability if you used different drive vendors as they would be less prone to crash at the same time. Everything would have its own dc power supply. No noisy fans or high current draw.

Maybe I should take up pcb fab as a hobby?