I’ve been meaning to post about this but I never seem to get around to it. In perusing my Flickr Photostream, I rediscovered my old photos from a recent trip to Canada.

This is the first part of that post.

Last year, my mom, sister, and niece came to visit our new home Vancouver, WA. After a couple of days chilling at home we drove up to the other, more well known Vancouver.

My sister, the architect of the trip, wanted to hit a couple of spots that included Stanley Park, The Capilano Suspension Bridge, and Grouse Mountain. Now, for those that don’t know me personally, I’ll get this right out; I’m terrified of heights. Well, that’s a misnomer really. I’m terrified of what happens when you fall from a great height. If I could fly under my own power then heights probably wouldn’t be as scary.

The Capilano Bridge was up first. We drove up to the parking area and headed toward the bridge area. As we walked up to the entrance, I started getting nervous. They made it seem so official and so final. As if “if you get past this point you have to cross the bridge”.

I asked the gal that was herding lines of people, “Has anyone ever gotten halfway and then couldn’t make it the rest of the way?” I just imagined myself getting halfway out there, suddenly being paralyzed with fear, collapsing into a fetal position where I would wet myself, suck my thumb and whine incoherently until being rescued by park rangers. She looked at me incredulously as if the thought was inconceivable and simply answered, “No.”

Goaded by my family, we all paid and entered the park area. It seems that my paranoia about entering the park was largely unfounded. You could pay the money to enter and actually not go across the bridge at all. I was somewhat relieved. This could be my spot to chicken out and not cross the bridge. Before I made that decision though, I wanted to take a look at the beast. The first time I viewed it, it didn’t look that bad.

In reality, this is an optical illusion. The bridge actually looks like something out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Witness a far away shot of the bridge!

Feeling somewhat encouraged by the first view of the bridge, I decided to cross and confront my fears. Upon setting foot on the bridge, the first thing that I noticed was that it swayed, a lot. Of course as a suspension bridge, this is a good thing. If the bridge was rigid, it would certainly snap in the face of mother nature but that didn’t help to allay my fears.

I steeled myself and continued. As I made my way forward the enormity of the situation (the bridge is 230 ft/80 m above the Capilano Canyon floor and has a 450 ft/150 m span) started taking hold and fear started to rush in. I could feel the blood rushing away from my face as I stood paralyzed on the span grasping both of the hand rails. I felt the bridge sway underneath my feet and imagined kids horse playing behind me and accidentally knocking me off to my death.

I considered my options. Turn around and head back leaving my family to wonder where I had gone, collapse in a pool of my own fear and urine, or keep going. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, refocused and miraculously continued forward.

I made my way slowly all the while holding both hand rails with an eagle like grip until someone wanted to pass me in which case I gripped the right hand railing with both hands and stopped moving until they passed. Although it felt like a lifetime of anguish while crossing the bridge, I reality it probably took 60 seconds to move across the entire span.

Once I was over, I felt like kissing the ground but I was exhilarated by the fact that I had faced my fear, set it aside and accomplished the task at hand. It was definitely worth it for the resulting “treetop adventure” on the other side as well as a personal sense of satisfaction.

In the Pacific Northwest, rain is almost a daily occurrence but this rarely comes in the form of thunderstorms. Growing up in the desert Southwest, I miss the power and emotion that a thunderstorm can bring. I miss the otherworldly yellowing of the sky as the sunset bounces off of thunderheads high up in the sky.

Last night, that familiar scene played itself out here in Oregon and Southwest Washington. I couldn’t let the beauty of the storm pass overhead without taking some photos of the clouds.

My favorite photo out of the series appears below. It’s actually a photo that was taken vertically instead of horizontally (the position of the camera), but I like the way it turned out when it’s rotated.

To see the entire set, go to my flickr stream.

It’s almost April and it’s snowing in Washington. WTF is that?

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that this was taken mid-December in Saskatchewan.

Last week, during my code sprint to release version 4 of my home grown blogging engine, I seem to have upset my upper back. Most likely this pain can be attributed to poor posture while sitting in front of the computer (which I was doing for 10 hours+ at the time). You know the pose; lower back out, shoulders up and rolled forward and head down.

The result of neglecting my body is sharp shooting pains whenever I look down. I’ve felt this pain before, usually from “sleeping wrong” or something like that. Historically, pain in my upper back or neck tends to alleviate itself in about 2-3 days.

Unfortunately, this time it seems as if I’ve aggravated my back more than usual. So much so that I went to the doctor just to make sure that there wasn’t another underlying cause other than poor posture. After a standard exam testing my range of motion, the doc sent me on my way with a new prescription in hand; Cyclobenzaprine.

Now I’ve never taken muscle relaxers before and when I first looked at the dosage I was a little disappointed. At 10mg, I thought this isn’t going to do much. Boy was I ever wrong. He might as well have given me voodoo zombie stuff because that’s what I turned into for two days; a walking zombie. Naturally, pain relievers and the like only target the symptom and not the cause.

With that in mind, I’ve started becoming more aware of my posture both at home and at work and correcting it when I notice myself regressing to my old habits. I’ve also been stretching more so that my range of motion isn’t as limited throughout the day.

A few years back, I was taking a Tae Kwon Do class and I enjoyed the warm up before the actual class started. Taking my previous experience with me I’ve turned to Sang H. Kim’s DVD Ultimate Flexibility: Stretching for Martial Arts which I try to do for daily stretching.

The workouts are separated into Easy, Moderate, and Intense with each one lasting approximately 20 minutes. I’ve done both the Easy and Moderate workouts and I’ve been extremely happy with the routines in each.

Dear GF, who has done the Easy workout with me, remarked that some of the techniques used in the DVD borrow heavily from yoga. I’ve been interested in yoga for a long time, especially after reading Mark Verstegen’s Core Performance_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205026282&sr=8-2 books which borrow extensively from yoga (in fact, I’d say that a lot of it is yoga).

To get basic comprehension on the subject, I picked up Sage Rountree’s the Athlete’s Guide to Yoga_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205026577&sr=8-1 (which now has a companion DVD) and I’ve been reading it from time to time. From what I’ve read, I’m been really pleased with the format and text of the book.

Hopefully with a pairing of martial arts stretching and yoga, I can avoid injuring myself even when it’s just sitting at the computer.

I’ve always been interested in solar energy but I’ve never dug deep enough to understand the mechanics or the economics of it. Tonight, Dear GF and I are attending a free workshop that might be interesting; Basics of Going Solar at the Ecotrust building in downtown Portland. The summary of the workshop reads that at the end “…you’ll come away with basic knowledge about solar energy systems…”

Hopefully, the workshop will be illuminating (no pun intended) instead of being a sales pitch.

Update No sales pitch at all. It was actually very informative. Might do a write later about it. If you’re in the Portland area and want to know about solar energy, go the website above and take a look. Best of all it’s free.

I’ve finally finished ripping my CDs to my file server. I finished yesterday afternoon which makes my estimation of twelve days spot on. The final count: 537 CDs ripped and approximately 56 GB of music, but that’s not all of my CDs. So what gives?

Well, there are three CDs that are missing, meaning that I have the cases but I can’t find the CDs. I’m sure that they are around here somewhere because I recall seeing them recently. So I’m sure that they will turn up. Then there are 17 that were damaged or destroyed during The Dark Times. Unfortunately, I’ll have to replace these. So I’m done for now.

Now that I have everything ripped to my file server, I did the prudent thing and copied all of the music to my external backup drive just in case the main drive of the file server fails.

Now that I have a Linux file server with Samba up and running, I’ve decided to tackle the next project; ripping my 500+ CDs and putting them in a digital archive. I honestly don’t know how many I actually have, but I think it’s somewhere to close to 500.

I had two goals when I started the project. First and foremost, I was tired of not have all my music at the tips of my fingers when I was either at my computer or downstairs. Second, was to liberate my office from the space that two huge CD racks were taking up.

I’m not going to sell them like some people do when they digitize their music, but I fully intend on boxing them all up (maybe with the exception of a few display CDs) and putting them in storage.

It’s certainly a time consuming task and not something that you can do in a weekend but I know the end goal will be worth it. I can now finally see the end of the tunnel. I’ve just completed CD number 376. Only 130 or so to go…

I’ll be truthful, my last dog owning experience was a disaster. The puppy was given to me at the worst possible time in my life. I was working two jobs at the time and I lived in a 1 bedroom 500 sq ft apartment.

Add to that, the puppy was a Border Collie/Lab mix. Probably the smartest dog that I have ever seen in real life, but those type of dogs need full time jobs with full time owners.

You can see where this takes a bad turn. Basically, my life consisted of the following:

• Leaving for work in the morning
• Coming home to pick up poop and pee and to let the dog out to stretch its legs
• Rushing to my other job
• Rushing back home to let the dog out, eat dinner, rinse, lather and repeat.

One can understand why I refer to those days as “The Dark Times.” I eventually had to give the dog away. It wasn’t fair to both the dog and I. It broke my heart (I loved the little pup) but I had to do it.

That was years ago. After that incident, I swore that I would never put myself or a animal in that position again.

When Dear GF suggested that we get some dogs, I nearly died from the flashback. I imagined our brand new house being torn to shreds and the lovely odor of doggy bodily fluids filling the air. I resisted.

I resisted for months, but eventually Dear GF wore down my defenses and she got me to agree to “just look at some dogs.” It always starts out by just “looking at dogs” and the next thing you know you’re taking two of them home with you.

Needless to say, that night, we took home two [Australian] Silky Terriers. I have to admit, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

You can see more doggy photos on the Flickr set.

It seems I’ve been remiss in my blogging duties. I’ve had a lot to blog about but somehow I never seemed to sit down and blog about it. Now that most of our commitments are done and over with for the summer, I’ve decided to sit down and get to it. So over the next few days, I’m going to hammer out some posts.

First off, and I’m sure most of you already know this, but Dear GF and I bought a house last December. It’s a 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath house with an office (read: man-room).

We love it. If you want more photos, see the Flickr set.

My girlfriend just called me because she was woken up by “something that shook the whole house.”

She surmised that it was an earthquake, but had no way to verify it. Remember the days before the Internet when you had to see if your local news (BTW, I beat all the news stations to the punch. Think bloggers don’t matter?) had something about it or you had to ask the people at work the next day if they felt something?

In a few minutes, I was on the USGS website and I found the culprit. A 3.3 earthquake about 12 miles from her.

The detail of the information is down right astonishing.

Not only do you get accurate information about the quake itself, but you get tons of maps as well (and they seem to be adding maps as time goes on).

One map reveals that 20 minutes after the quake 467 people have reported the intensity of it to the USGS website.

Damned impressive for a government outfit.

The Man wants you to be in debt up to your eyeballs. He wants you to have tons of credit cards and carry balances on them. He loves it when you pay interest only on those credit cards so that you never get out of the hole.

With The Man in mind, I alluded to some big news in a comment and now I’m ready to fess up. As of today, I’m sticking it to The Man. I am officially out of debt. No car payment, no credit cards, no black marks hanging over my head from The Dark Times.

There were times where I didn’t think I would ever get here and it’s been a long road, but it’s finally done.

It’s been a weekend of deals and good prices.

On Friday morning, I checked the RSS feed for the pro-consumer website consumerist.com and found my way to Amazon’s weekly Friday deals. I’ve been an Amazon.com shopper for years and never knew about their Friday sales.

Browsing the items, I managed to get a Hoover Windtunnel Vacuum for 79.99 (originally 329.99 and a Calphalon Saucepan for 16.99 (originally 119.00) and another Calphalon pan for 20.99 (originally 168.00).

The prices have come up a little bit on Amazon, but you can still get them for good prices.

If that wasn’t enough, my girlfriend and I stopped by Copeland Sports and managed to get a good snowboarding jacket for ~27.00 (originally 170.00).

This post is about a dream that I had. If you don’t like reading about other people’s dreams, just skip this one.

Often my dreams are very grand in scope and follow an almost movie like script, so you’ll forgive me if this is rather long.

I remember running down a hill somewhere in the suburbs of Portland,
Oregon. As I reached the bottom, I passed through a gas station parking
lot where my ex-girlfriend was standing smoking a cigarette. I ran past
her hoping that she didn’t notice me but lady luck was not in my
corner. She immediately recognized me and started following me. The
more I ignored her, the more determined she seemed to want to talk to
me.

I ran into a large multi-story bookstore attempting to lose her but she
was right behind me. This is when things started to crystallize for me.
Her insistence on getting to me was not just to talk, I believed that
she was out to get me or the person that I was attempting to protect.

In the dream, I was what I call a Scion (although that’s never
mentioned by name in the dream) of God or perhaps one of the Seraphim
itself.
The Scion’s job is to protect people that have the power bring about
the end of the world from harm and manipulation by dark forces. These
people (called
The Gifted from here on out) usually don’t know that they have such
extraordinary power and usually are oblivious to their importance in
the cosmic scheme of things. If a Scion fails to protect one of The
Gifted, the dark forces usually use him or her to bring about the end
of the world. Interestingly enough, the end of the world, is not really
the end as it gets recreated again and the cycle begins anew. The
Scions live throughout the end and remember everything from past
worlds.

The Scions (I was one of several) have no extraordinary powers with the
exception of knowing who The Gifted are (and where they are at) and the
memory of worlds gone past. Unfortunately, the enemy of the Scions
(called The Enemy from here on out) do have extraordinary physical
powers (strength, speed, agility) and therefore Scions usually tend to
try to run away from them. All of the Scions are male, while conversely,
all of The Enemy are females. I don’t know why, that’s just the way it
is. One more thing, while Scions are naturally immortal (they can’t die
of old age), they can definitely be killed by The Enemy.

As I was hiding from my ex-girlfriend, it started dawning on me that
she could be one of The Enemy and was attempting to either kill me or
get to The Gifted that was assigned to me. I went to the elevator to
try to go up a floor. I pushed the “up” button and waited for the
elevator to come down.

As I was waiting, she saw me! It was one of those moments in the movies
where you’re waiting for the elevator while some danger is getting
closer. Just as she was upon me,  the elevator came down and the
doors closed in her face.

I  knew that The Gifted that I was assigned to was in this
bookstore, so I started searching for him/her. After a few minutes of
looking through what appeared to be the warehouse portion of the
bookstore, I found him. I’m not sure why, but it was a childhood friend
of mine named Wayne.

Thinking that The Enemy was still here to get him, I tried to get him
out of the bookstore urgently. Naturally, he didn’t want to go. I’m not
sure what I told him, but I seemed to impress upon him the idea that he
was in immediate danger and we headed out the fire escape to the back
alley.

That’s when I saw her. A beautiful blonde woman leapt from the roof
into the alley just a few feet away from us (told you they had special
powers). I immediately started running with Wayne in tow. At this
point, I realized that my ex was just a plant. She wasn’t The Enemy,
she was just really annoying.

Although we attempted to get away from the blonde, she eventually got
to Wayne (the details of how it happened blur). What I do remember is
there being a lot of wind, lighting, and dark clouds all over the
place. The world, was seemingly coming to an end.

I found Wayne in a trance while the world was falling apart around us.
Still unaware that he was causing it, I laid it all on the line
(normally you aren’t supposed to tell The Gifted about the immortal
struggle that they are involved in); I told him that he was causing
what was happening and told him, “Look dammit, the world is gonna end
if you don’t do something. I’ve seen it happen once and it’ll happen
again if you don’t act.” The information seemed to hit him hard, but it
seemed that he was starting to understand.

And as luck would have it, that’s when I woke up. {sigh} Oh well, c’est la vie.

Hollywood, call me. I got plenty more where that came from.

My friend Jon has posted some great photos from this year’s Bridge Pedal. You’ll note that I don’t appear in any of them…but I’m sure you know why.

I left my house early this morning to I meet Jon and Greg to take on the
Providence Bridge Pedal (check out the animated map). 1 city…10 bridges…34 miles…south side to
north side.

We started at around 6:45 am from Naito Parkway and then immediately get onto our first bridge.


1: Morrison Bridge

First bridge, it was easy peasy. Didn’t look through the grating to the
river, tends to give vertigo. Woman biffs it right after crossing the
bridge and nearly takes Greg with her. We keep going (she’s all right)
down Water Avenue and then it’s a jaunt down the Springwater Trail. I’m
amazed at how fast we went through the Springwater Trail; we were at
the next bridge before I knew it. Greg and Jon still with me? Check.


2: Sellwood Bridge

Nothing much to tell about this one. Gorgeous view from the top. Greg
took a photo from the top and we continued on our way down Macadam
Avenue to the next bridge. I almost lost Jon and Greg but caught up
with them at a light downtown.


3: Hawthorne Bridge

Third bridge, still going strong and still got my peeps with me. Then
disaster hits. The Hawthorne winds us back to Water Avenue where there
was an insane amount of people. There was so much confusion and no one
telling the bikers were to go that I easily lost Jon and Greg in the
crowd. Got my front tire caught in the rail road tracks (easy fix) and
then I almost went down the Springwater Trail again but I figured out
that the people lining up (with red vests (red vest =10 bridge) were a
later 10 bridge start time). Because of my detour, I’m sure that Greg
and Jon are ahead of me. I Finally figured it out and went up a couple
of streets to the next bridge.

4: Ross Island Bridge

The had only one lane blocked off for bikers which means that it got
crowded quick. I saw some of the bikers head into the closest car lane
(but sticking close the bike lane) and I decided to get ballsy and do
the same; after all I’m trying to catch my lost cohorts. Again the
bridge ends and then the road loops around downtown and I start getting
confused as to where I’m supposed to go. I yell out (to the volunteers
on the side of the road), “Which way is 10 bridge?” They ignore me, I
hear another person ask the same question and she answers, “I don’t
know, have you seen me before?” I’m starting to see a pattern, most of
the volunteers are completely useless. Mental note: don’t pay attention
to them. Also, bike is starting to make strange clicking noise in
between 30th and 32nd gear (hrrrm….)


5: Marquam Bridge (Top Deck)

The entire top deck was closed off for bikers. At the beginning of the
race, Jon, Greg, and I said that if we got separated we would stop at
Marquam and Fremont and scope for the lost squad members. I stopped at
the River City Bicycle hut and had them check out my bike. Looks like
the tires were low (I must have a small leak because I went to RCB
yesterday and they pumped them with the compressor) and I also found
the culprit that was making the noise. Looks like part of the wire was
rubbing up against the chain but only when in those gears (the other
gears move the chain away from the wire). We crimped the wire and I
looked around for my comrades and then left. Remember, by this time I
thought that there were long gone. Off to the next bridge.


6: Burnside Bridge

Bridge is flat and uneventful except for the homeless people saying
that there was an accident at the bottom of the hill when their wasn’t.
Damn crackerjacks.


7: Broadway Bridge

This bridge was recently overhauled so the pavement was nice and
smooth. I’m still going strong, which is a good thing because the
bridge that kicked my ass last year (I’ve affectionately named it
Leviathan) is coming up. Get off the Broadway, loop around Albina 
(the uphill battle started here) then Russell and finally Kerby and off
to…


8: Fremont (Top Deck)

It threatened to kick my ass but I shrugged it off. It was a climb but
nothing like last year’s (we came from the other side this time). I’m
getting hungry and don’t want to eat my power bar. I look for the
bananas that they were handing out at Top Deck Marquam. No such luck.
CRAP! I take a few swigs of my Gatorade and I don’t even wait for Greg
and Jon. Hell, they are probably done and sipping margaritas at the
finish line. I shoot down the hill down to Vaughn. Mental Note: I
installed one of the clip pedals wrong and unless my foot is against
the far edge it starts rubbing against the pedal arm; time to get some
Shimano shoes and clippy pedals.


St. Helens Road (not a bridge but it kicked my ass)

For some reason, I thought that Vaughn (which turns into St. Helens
Road) was all downhill. Boy was I wrong. It’s all freaking UPHILL. I’m
starting to lose energy and willpower. I constantly hear other bikers
yell, “On your left!” as they pass me. Old, young, it doesn’t matter.
Everyone is passing me. I half expected to see some old people pass me
using their walkers on their way to Denny’s.

I’m starting to lose concentration and go from shifting down to the
easiest gear to shifting back up to get more torque. For the longest
time, I can’t see the next bridge, which is the St. John’s Bridge.
Finally I see it. Good lord, it looks monstrous and it’s way above
where I am at now. How the hell am I supposed to get to that!? Then I
see, it a LARGE upslope to the bridge. I steel myself for the pain, I
try to stand up and generate more torque but my quads are burning. I
sit back down and decide to ride it out in low gear. A Rubenesque black
woman passes me going up the hill. I’m not sure what she put in her gas
tank, but I think she’s got some NOS under the hood. Finally, I reach
the crest and stop. I scarf down my chocolate power bar (which is
melted) and then I have to stick the wrapper in my empty water bottle
because there are no trash cans. I wait there for a good 5 minutes
trying to recover some strength. By now, I’m sure that Jon and Greg at
the finish line.


9: St. John’s Bridge

Look at this beast. What a monster. There were a lot of people camped
out on the sides recuperating from the terrible climb up St. Helen’s
Road. I don’t stop and push on. The bridge isn’t hard, but I expended a
lot of energy before it. One more bridge to go. But before I do that, I
have to ride back down into town via Willamette Blvd, Greeley and then
Interstate. Maybe it’s because I was tired but how the hell is St.
Helen’s Road uphill and the way back is uphill too? It’s a short hop to the last bridge…


10: Steel Bridge

There was a small incline right before this and I stood up to achieve
maximum torque. There was no way that I was slowing down. I crossed the
finish line and finally got a banana from one of the volunteer girls.
As I’m eating my banana, Jon comes from behind me and zips past me. I
yell at him and he stops. I ask him where Greg is and he says, “right
behind you”. I guess they weren’t ahead of me after all. :)

There is no greater feeling than challenging yourself and succeeding. It’s a great day to be alive!

I’ll preface this post by saying that the contents
of it deal with death, grief and loss. I personally don’t deal well
with any of those subjects so I understand if any of the readers out
there skip this post.

I stole the title from an Ah-Ha song, but for some reason it jumped into my head.
This isn’t TV and as such, the sun doesn’t always shine and things
aren’t always perfect. I’ve been torn for the past two weeks about
writing something about this. I’m was torn by the idea of honoring
someone’s memory in a way that I can or if it cheapens their memory by
writing about it in a blog. I’ve obviously chosen the former.

My uncle and godfather, whom my family and I visited recently in
Florida, passed away on July 25th after battling through that weekend
with a failing liver and kidneys. He was 80 years old.

I regret to say, that because of distance (he lived on the East Coast
and I live on the West Coast) and sheer stupidity, I didn’t know my
uncle as much as I wish I did. With all that being said, I can safely
say that he was a great man. Although he didn’t invent anything,  and he didn’t win a
nobel prize he was still a great man for other reasons.

He, like my father, left his homeland (without any reassurance of ever
seeing it again) to come to a country with no possessions and without
the the ability to speak the language. All of this to provide a better life for
his family. He left the newly created communist Cuba, never to see his
homeland again all when he was my age. Because of men like my father
and my uncle, I am able to have the freedoms that I currently have.
Most people don’t risk as much as he did in their entire lives,
especially for a future that uncertain, that is one of the reasons why he was a great man.


My family is small and because of his passing, it’s shaken me more than
I was prepared for. Add to that the fact that my father, mother, and
Tita (Spanish for aunt – pronounced “tee-ta” – she’s like a mother to
me) are just a handful of years away from his age and it really starts
to get to me. What I would give to go to a free Cuba where I could walk
with my mom along Varadero beach, The Malecon, and visit
Cienfuegos…but enough of that.

I don’t really have much to say as I think I’ve said enough. We miss you and love you Tio Rene.

I’m going to come out of the closet here. I’m a GUI and wallpaper addict. I think that the hack to the UXTheme.dll is one of the best things to happen to Windows XP (although I personally use StyleXP).

I think I change my Visual Style and wallpaper (to match the Visual
Style (after all it’s all about coordination)) on a monthly basis but I
often run out and have to cycle through my old stuff. I think it’s hard
to find quality stuff out there. A quick stroll through some of
the sites out there will show you that anyone can make a shitty ass
wallpaper and Visual Style as most people don’t know a thing about art,
art composition, color theory, UI, etc.

Hrrrm…Maybe I should add a new section to my sidebar that shows what VS and wallpaper I’m currently using…

I recently took a 12 day vacation to South Florida. I flew out there
from Portland and the rest of my family flew out from LV. While
there, my cousin Betty and I, took off to Key Largo for some scuba
diving.

This is what I got certified for. Perfect weather, crystal clear 80
degree waters, diving off a large boat. It’s so much different than
my…um…interesting experiences in Hood Canal.

Although, looking back at it, I think getting certified in the 50
degree waters of Hood Canal really made this a cake walk. During my
open water dives in the canal, I constantly struggled to maintain my
buoyancy. I would shoot off to the surface, sink like a rock. This time
around, I was able to control it with just my lungs instead of
inflating and deflating my BCD.

If you are ever in Key Largo, make sure you check out Sea Dwellers. They offer the best service and boat around.

Every once and a while one has to stand up and say something. Usually,
I ignore people and their asinine behavior but if it keeps happening
over and over again I’ll say something. One of these days I’m going to
run into a fool that has something to prove I’m gonna have to get in a
fight, as it turns out today was not that day.

Here is how it went down today. I’m at the gym and I sit down to do
free weight bench press. Although there are weight racks all over,
these particular benches have the weight racks on them making it a bit
easier and convenient to transfer weight from the bar back to the racks
and so on. In the gym, there are 4 of these standard benches with one
positioned right behind the one that I was at.

I’m doing my first set and the idiot behind me starts removing and
replacing weights from the racks that are on the same bench that I’m
using. I’ve been in and out of gyms for a long time. Most people know
what to do. It seems like common sense, if I’m lifting or getting ready
to lift, don’t go removing and replacing weights from the racks on the
equipment that I’m currently using. Wait until I’m done,
ask me, or find some weights elsewhere. Never, ever in all my time in a
gym has anyone pulled this shit and I certainly wouldn’t do it to
anyone else.

I ignore it and finish my set. Maybe he didn’t notice before he started moving weights around.

I get up to get a drink of water and go back to the bench. I lie down,
getting ready to do my second set and I feel that vibration
on my bench again. He’s doin’ it again! The guy moving shit around was
pretty muscular, I know he’s been in a gym before. I don’t know why he
thinks that this is cool behavior. Finally, I glare over at him and
say, “Can you wait until I’m done before you do that?”

I can feel my words percolate in his pea sized brain. I wait for him to
either acknowledge that he was being a retard or for him to be
obstinate and say something stupid. It takes him about 10-15 seconds to
react; he just nods and says “ok.”

As I said before, I know the guy has been in a gym before but for some
reason he felt the need to be a dick. I put the kibosh on that.

I recently took a vacation to Phoenix and Las Vegas where I took a bunch of photos with my new digital camera. I was thinking about using Flickr
to post them but I really like the notion of writing my own photo
gallery.  Re-inventing the wheel? Sure it is but I kinda like
doin’ it and it keeps me own my toes in programming ASP.NET and T-SQL.

I really liked Phoenix (Northern and Scottsdale). It reminded me of home
(Las Vegas) without the ever present gambling influence (something that
I’ve grown to dislike about my hometown). The entire time I was there,
I was in shorts and a t-shirt enjoying the warm weather and sunshine.
When I got back to Portland, it was 45 degrees and raining (big
surprise). It’s as if I flew from Tatooine to Endor. I’m not sure how
I’ve managed to last this long here, cut off from the sun and all.
Considering all of the changes that have happened in my life this year
I wouldn’t be surprised if the call from the sun filled lands is
answered.

I’m home at last. My Open Water scuba trip to Hoodcanal is finally
over. After dive 3, I had to refuel with some food and water and relax
for about 15 minutes. I was glad to find out that I was not the only
one who lost a fin in the water, well not glad for him, but glad that
me losing my fin wasn’t because of my own stupidity, it can apparently
happen to anyone.

After the break, I had to don all my gear and walk back down into the
water. At this point I was really tired and I just wanted to take a hot
shower and take a nap. While on the way to the water, I remember
something that my friend Natalie said to me when I was describing the
pool sessions to her. She said that scuba diving sounded “like torture”
and as I was making my way down there I kept thinking to myself “this is torture.”
I would not be denied though, I got in the water and did another free
descent (this time deeper) where Dan and I did a full removal
of the mask, replacement and then clearing it. Dan was the first to go
and in the middle of it his regulator flew out of his mouth (apparently
he was having a hard time with that the whole trip). Like a true
champion, he didn’t freak out and Billy recovered the regulator and
stuck it back in his mouth. Of course, after witnessing this first
hand, I was thinking to myself, “Shit, that better not happen to me.”
Luckily it didn’t and I was able to remove the mask, replace it and
clear it without any major difficulties. After that, we did a swim
underwater with the compass which I didn’t do too bad in and then it
was time for our recreational swim to look at stuff. He took us to 40ft
(we can only go to 60 feet as Open Water divers) and I can honestly say
that I don’t think that I’m cut out for deep diving. At 40 feet, it’s
pretty dark and the squeeze on my dry suit and mask were incredible. I
was able to equalize them, but I just didn’t like the notion of being
40 feet underwater. It’s probably something that will pass over time
but for my first time down that far it made me uneasy.

After the recreational portion, we ascended and as Billy was swimming
to shore he said “Congratulations, you’re certifiable now.” I’m sure
that to him, we seemed like hapless fools that should be sent to a
mental institution.

So now I’m Open Water Certified! Although I might just be certifiable
too. If you’ve read all of the Yellow House posts and this one you’d
think that I would never want to go diving in the Pacific Northwest
again. Maybe I like being challenged to the extreme, but am I crazy because I want to go again?

I was able to borrow a dry suit for dives 3 and 4 today (Sunday). Thank
god too, I’m not sure if I could have finished in a wet suit. Here’s a
bit of info for you. The hobby of scuba diving, especially in the
Northwest, can drive you to the poor house. The DUI (Diving Unlimited International)
dry suit that I borrowed was sold at the time for the whopping price of
4000 dollars! Although looking at their website today it looks like
prices have come down to ~2700 for the most expensive suit. That was a
big shocker to me. If you dive in the Northwest, then you definitely
need a dry suit.

A dry suit is much different than a wet suit for two primary reasons.
One it keeps you dry during your dive. You do feel the cold but with
the water not actually touching your skin, the dry suit slows down the
heat loss dramatically. Second, there is air in the dry suit and as
such when you descend it will create a “squeeze” on the air space. A
“squeeze” in scuba terms is a pressure imbalance in which pressure
outside an air space exceeds pressure inside an air space, resulting in
pain or discomfort. In order to relieve “squeeze” in a dry suit, you
add air to it using a button on the front of the suit. What does it
feel like? Well, if you’ve seen those commercials where they vacuum
pack something in a bag by removing all of the air, then you have a
pretty good idea of what it feels like.

On dive 3 we had to do a 50 yard straight line swim on the surface
(with all of your gear on) to a target by only looking at a compass.
I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never used a compass. I know the basics
of how it works but I’ve never actually used one. Swimming, heads down
just looking at the compass in the rough current of Sund Rock was
difficult at best. In fact, I don’t think that I completed the task to
my satisfaction but we were running out of time so we buddied up and
completed the task for the certification. Next in line was a free
descent (no holding onto a rope like in the first two dives) to 20-30
feet followed by a neutral buoyancy check and the bottom. I was the
last person to have the compass, so during my free descent I had a hard
time holding on to the compass with my right hand while attempting to
put air in the dry suit to prevent squeeze (my left hand was busy
venting air out of my BCD). When I reunited with Billy and Dan, I
shoved the compass at Billy because I didn’t want to deal with it
anymore. We also had to do a complete mask flood and clear which I
didn’t really have a hard time with (although feeling the cold water on
your face as you break the seal of the mask will shock you). For the
second to the last test, we did the buddy breathing where we remove our
primary regulator (the thing in your mouth that you breathe from) and
we get our buddy’s alternate regulator. I was pretty happy with my
performance there except I really couldn’t tell when I was supposed to
breathe on my own regulator again because I couldn’t see the
instructor. Eventually, I saw Billy’s hand come into view to tell me
that I could resume breathing from my primary regulator again. The last
part of the dive was the CESA (Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent)
test with oral inflation of the BCD. Basically, in order to pass this
you have to take a breath in then swim like all hell to the surface
exhaling all the way up. You cannot take in another breath of
air on your ascent to complete the CESA test. It was challenging to say
the least. We were following the rope from the dive flag and while
ascending the current wrapped the rope around my left fin and ripped it
off. When I got to the surface the current was kicking the shit out us
and I told Billy that I lost my fin. I think that the only word that he
said was “Fuck!” before diving underwater to look for it. I’m not sure
how he did it, but about 15 minutes later he came back with it. He’s
like an underwater Superman. After finding it, we took a recreational
swim underwater and saw a bunch of sea critters. By the time that dive
3 was over I was completely exhausted and I could barely pull myself (and about 60-70 pounds worth of gear)
up the hill to the trucks.

First night at Yellow House. Located in Hoodsport, Washington, Yellow
House is often rented by scuba divers looking to dive at Hood Canal and
the Sund Rock dive site. It’s something that I’ll be partaking of
myself tomorrow morning. This will be an experience for me; staying in
a house full of strangers with the only common bond being scuba diving.
I kept picturing something out of a reality TV show like Big Brother or The Real World
but I don’t think it’s going to get to that point. 2 days and 2 nights
is really not enough for people to get on each other’s nerves.

As soon as I walked in, I was greeted by Emily (a fellow scuba diver)
and asked if I wanted some spaghetti dinner. It’s nice to have a warm,
friendly atmosphere after the rain drenched ride here. I stowed my gear
and picked a bunk downstairs making my way down the stairs that look
like they belong on a Navy ship or submarine. Tomorrow the diving
begins bright and early and to be honest I’m fairly nervous. With the
exception of my dive buddies in class (3 others), everyone else here
has a million and a half dives under their belt. I really hated my
sissy performance in the pool (the first day of class a few weeks ago)
so it’ll be interesting to how I do at a real depth. Hopefully, I’ve
learned enough to keep me from flipping out and doing something silly.
I wonder how I will handle the cold water. I have a full exposure wet
suit, a short wet suit, hood, and gloves but with the water temperature
at 50 degrees it’s still pretty cold. I’m not really built for the
cold. We’ll see what happens.

I got asked my dreaded question tonight after dinner, the one that I
hate answering when meeting new people, “Where are you from?” I hate
that question because it’s always followed by “Why are you here?” By
here, they mean the Pacific Northwest, because understandably it’s
quite a move from Las Vegas, Nevada to Portland, Oregon. I hate hearing
the words “a girl” come out of my mouth in response to that question. I
just know that the next thing that comes to their mind when they don’t
see “said girl” on my arm is “I wonder what happened?” It’s a weird
feeling. Maybe I’ll just lie next time.

After the meet and greet in the living room, we all went to sleep, some early than others.

I’m convinced some people shouldn’t write reviews. A friend of mine recommended a book titled Freakonomics to me, so I went on Amazon (#2 on their book list) to try to figure out what it was about. These are helpful:

The book is excellent. It really encourages an analytical approach to problem solving while encouraging creativity of thought. This is a rare combination. Likely to be of value to anyone who has to adopt an analytical approach in their work.

What separates this book from so many of its ilk is its ease of use. I’m a dunce when it comes to these matters, but this book spells things out so that I finish it and have a stronger and better understanding of all of the concepts within. Well done, Mr. Leavitt!

Levitt/Dubner present complex ideas in the most straight forward, enlightening way possible. The topics range from interesting to fascinating, and the authors are consistent in their logical prose. The reader is encouraged to open his/her mind, and after poring through so many examples that undermine the pillars of conventional wisdom, the reader emerges with a new world view (as well as great anecdotes to tell friends).
This is a fantastic book!!!

After reading all of that, I’m still not sure I know what the book is about. I guess I’ll just have to buy it and find out.

It’s raining again here in Portland. I didn’t get up until noon. It’s probably because my body can’t tell the difference between night time and the perpetually clouded skies of Portland. A few weeks ago, when it was unseasonably sunny I was waking up early, even before my alarm went off. I guess that’s what I get for living here.

Watched Part I of the season finale of the new Battlestar Galactica on the Sci Fi channel.  Now I have to wait an entire week before I can see Part II. {sigh} I can’t get over how good this show is. It continues to push the boundaries of sci fi television as we know it. I especially like how they don’t skirt away from sex in the show, they embrace it and use it to their advantage unlike the Star Treks and others. Besides great storytelling and great acting (Baltar (actor is James Callis) is the best character on the show, completely self-absorbed – I love it!) the reason that Battlestar Galactica is kicking ass and taking names in the sci fi community is because the creators of the show actively participate in the community. It’s something that J. Michael Straczynski did during Babylon 5. Battlestar’s new creator has a blog on the sci fi website which helps him maintain this camaraderie with his fans. Not to mention embracing technologies such as podcasting for episode commentaries and video featurettes.  Contrast this to Star Trek. The writers are untouchable, nameless faces. No wonder Enterprise died. If there is to be a next Star Trek, the creative team should definitely start a blog and actively participate in the sci fi community.

Let’s see what else do I have? Oh yeah, the PS2 game God of War is shit hot as Gabe says. Well, it looks shit hot to me, I don’t have a PS2, so I don’t know how the game actually plays but by looking at the videos of it I might just have to go out and get me a PS2. I love it when he smacks the Hydra’s head against the wall!

One more thing, Nine Inch Nails released their single The Hand that Feeds from their upcoming album With Teeth (scheduled to drop 5.3.05). It’s on iTunes for a buck — apparently it’s been on the radio since 3.16. What can I say, I NEVER listen to the radio.

It’s been about year since I stopped taking Tae Kwon Do due to cash flow reasons. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to either go back to taking Tae Kwon Do or take another martial art form altogether.

During the summer, while watching a local cable access channel, I came across a program about Aikido being taught at a local dojo here (called Budo Dojo). I watched about two or 3 of them over the course of a couple of weeks and I decided to email the dojo to find out if there were any beginner classes starting soon. Sensei Penrod emailed me back to let me know that the next beginning Aikido would begin in January.

I missed the first class because I was working late and was willing to go without until the next session in March but Sensei emailed me back and said that there was still a chance to join in. Maybe it takes little to impress me but I was impressed that Sensei Penrod followed up with me to find out if I was still interested.

Aikido is very different from Tae Kwon Do. One of the most obvious differences is that Tae Kwon Do is a Korean form while Aikido is a Japanese form. Because of this, the terminology is easier for me in Aikido because I’ve taken a couple of classes in conversational Japanese so I know the phoentics and how the language works. The other most obvious difference is that Tae Kwon Do is mostly an offensive martial art form while Aikido is purely defensive. It would be interesting to combine Aikido with knowledge of some form of karate.

Today, during the training session, I noticed that Sensei Penrod moves like water flowing and Aikido in motion, when done by a seasoned practitioner, is quite beautiful.

I like Aikido, by the time that I leave there I feel very relaxed and not stressed at all. Of course that all vanishes when I get in my car and have to put up with the mass hordes of sheep that are Oregon drivers.

I installed a pair of new hard drives in my workstation so I backed up everything that I needed and now I’m restoring it. I setup the share to restore to and set Backup Exec 9.0 to restore some files to that share point. I accidentally forgot to set the write flag on the share permissions so the backup software could write files there. That was my fault but what Backup Exec did is even worse. The software started “restoring” files to the directory and it did this for a good 46 minutes. At the end of that time I received an error message stating that “access was denied” to that share. Why the HELL did it wait 46 minutes before telling me that? Backup software is not a new thing, it’s been around for as long as there has been data to backup. I’m baffled as to why Backup Exec 9.0 has this atrocious bug.

Ever since I got back from Thanksgiving, where I spent 12 days surrounded by goddamned cats, my asthma has been really bad. For those 12 days when I was at my mom’s house, I basically lived off of my inhaler (Albuterol) to keep me alive but I thought it a bit strange that after a while of being back, I was still having symptoms.

After a terrible bout with said asthma last night, I decided to go to the doctor so that he could hook me up to one of those nebulizer things. He did so (which helped a million) and then proceeded to give me a veritable pharmacy in prescriptions; Serevent, Qvar, Imitrex (for migraines – I snuck that one in while talking about the inability to breathe) and finally Prednisone. The last one is funny because while talking about it, he made a funny face when he got the part about the side effects. Interested in why he made a face, I inquired further about the side effects. He said, “It might do funny stuff”. “What kind of funny stuff”? I asked. He explained, “Among other things, it might make you euphoric, in some cases have hallucinations, and in long term use it might cause psychosis”. I almost laughed in his face because the first thing I thought of was The Simpsons episode (El Viaje de Nuestro Jomer) where Homer eats the Guatemalan insanity peppers (at the chili cook off) and proceeds to have hallucinations which involve a coyote spirit guide.

I was looking to find a simple wall shelf to put my DVDs on and I found one that I liked on Ikea’s website. If you look at it, it’s just really a piece of wood with a little mounting kit to go with it.

I was excited to notice that not only could you browse individual items but you could also order from them online as well. I filled out the order opting to have my billing address different from the shipping address. Although I did select that option, their system didn’t prompt me to input another billing address. I kinda shrugged that off. I put in my order and I get this email from them:

Due to a high volume of orders, we will contact you to confirm your order with the details about your delivery and total cost within 5 – 7 business days.

I’m thinking, this is really dumb. This is the year 2004 (almost 2005); online stores are nothing new why can’t they rollout a system that doesn’t suck ass? If it were 1997-1999 I think I would be more understanding, but come on. I have to wait 5-7 business days before they even tell me how much it will cost? With the shipping time, it’s gonna be 2 weeks before I get a piece of wood. By this time I was starting to get that sinking feeling.

Then a few days later I get another email from them:

Subtotal: $12.99
Shipping & Handling: $19.14
Tax: $0.00
Order Total: $32.13

Let’s see 12.99 for piece of wood – check. Shipping and handling comes to 19.14…19.14?! It costs more to ship the piece of wood than the piece of wood is worth! I was floored. This is absurd. I called Ikea and spoke to their customer service rep and I told her that I was ordering a piece of wood and the shipping costs…she cut me off and told me that anything that’s made out of wood goes out freight delivery. If this is true, which it’s not (it clearly states at the bottom of the message that it would be shipped via UPS), it would be the most ludicrous thing ever. After I told her that it would be shipped via UPS she said that it was that much because it was being shipped from Baltimore. I could see that; if it was Baltimore, Mars perhaps. 20 dollars to ship a piece of wood; incredible.

Needless to say, I promptly canceled my order.

I mentioned this lunacy to Megan and she said that I was like Michael Douglas’ character in Falling Down because of my notable fervor on the matter. Interestingly enough, that dude is my hero and I can totally see myself getting fed up with traffic and leaving my car sitting in it.

I’m at the airport now after a short ride on the MAX and a long wait through the security line. I’ve gone through so many of these that I’m like a pro. Put all my gear in my coat and put it in a bin, take my laptop out and put it in a bin. I’m ready to roll before I get to the metal detector which I can’t say for some people.

Most modern airports should have wireless access points throughout and PDX is no different; so I’m actually blogging at the gate which to me is pretty cool. Now I’m just waiting when airlines actually get Internet access in the air, then I’ll join the mile high club (of blogging that is).

In a few hours I’ll be sitting at the airport awaiting my flight to take me to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving. Since the flight leaves at 6:30 in the morning and I have to be there 2 hours early, I decided not to go to sleep because if I did I would probably miss my flight. So it’s 2 AM and I’m still awake.

This past weekend I attended my second AppleCup game. This one was in Pullman, Washington instead of Seattle. It was a good time and there are some nice and embarrasing photos of me with my shirt off while wearing a big huge cowboy hat. I’ll have those posted a little later.

Apparently Jennifer Garner had signed up to do an Elektra movie since it’s coming out in January. This is the first that I’ve ever heard of it. While Jennifer Garner is one hot little mama, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the movie will become a box office bomb. 

I’m at the Residence Inn Marriott at Lloyd Center in Portland, Oregon and there is no water coming out of any of the faucets. No shower, no brushing my teeth, no cleaning up. {sigh} How come they didn’t do this in the middle of the night? What, people don’t take showers at 11 am? This is the first time I’ve stayed at a lodging place and there hasn’t been water available to me when I want it.

• Ever wanted to know what is encoded on that barcode on the back of your license? Now you can with the SWIPE toolkit.
  
• View the trailer for the extended edition of The Return of the King (requires quicktime).
• View the E3 trailers for The Battle of Middle Earth RTS video game (requies quicktme).
• View The Ring 2 movie trailer (requires quicktime).
• Want to keep up on the latest gadgets, check out Gizmodo and Engadget (they both have RSS feeds).
  
• Jar-Jar funniness.
• The video of Jon Stewart on Crossfire is tearing up the blogosphere. See what the hype is about. Look for links here.
  

I’m in Washington right now (Vancouver) at my friends house kickin’ back and hanging out. The trip here was rather interesting.

Now, I grew up in Las Vegas which has to have one of the biggest populations of aggressive drivers that there are, so usually my driving style is pretty aggressive (no I don’t tailgate and commit road rage but slow, dim witted drivers will task my patience greatly). In Oregon where I live, the ratio of drivers that are awake to drivers that seem to be sleeping at the wheel is about 1 to 100. Once you cross the border into Washington that all seems to change. People that once were driving 45 mph in the right lane seem to wake up and figure out that they are being nuisances and get over right away. I don’t know what it is about getting to Washington but it’s like a mystical speed border. You gotta love driving down the freeway at 100 mph.

Last Saturday, a few of us guys were supposed to bike up the main trail of Forest Park. Unfortunately, two of them canceled because they were sick and then the 3rd canceled because the other two canceled. I woke up that Saturday and took a peek outside to see what the weather was like. It didn’t look good, it was completely overcast and threatening to rain but that wouldn’t deter me either.

It sprinkled all the way from my house to the park (which I drove) and then as soon as I got on my bike the torrential downpour started. Figures. I only took that as a challenge to see how far I could get in those conditions. I think I got up more than 3/4 of the way there before I turned back around. By that point I was soaked to my boxers and couldn’t feel my fingers; being soaked on a cold Saturday morning will do that to you.I also encountered one of those optical illusions that you see in horror movies. The one where the path in front of you seems to stretch making it seem longer than it really is. That was kind of intertesting.

On Sunday, I walked (not ran…I still don’t trust my shins) in the annual Race for the Cure. The rain held off that day until the last part of the walk but I had fun regardless. It’s good to see 37,000+ people show up for a good cause.

I might not be bored this weekend. On Saturday, a few of us from work are supposedly going to bike up the trail at Forest Park (unless we get rained out) and then I have a racquetball game scheduled for sometime after that. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to fuel up in between the two.

As to what will occupy my time after that, I’m not really sure. That’s a toss up between re-arranging some stuff in my apartment and seeing if I can create a relatively secure wireless network at home with the help of a Cisco 2500 series router.

Then to round out the weekend, I’m going downtown to participate in the annual Race for the Cure (which I don’t intend to run because of problems with my shins, but I still intend to to the 5k walk).

September is almost half way over and I’ve only posted once (well this counts as twice).

Right now, I’m so bored at work to where it’s driving me nuts. We are in the middle of doing a major security audit of our internal systems and I have to analyze Nessus reports for our LAN. The problem is that they are so repetitive and so mind-numbingly boring that I have to stop every once and a while to just stay awake. It feels like I have ADD to where I can’t sit and concentrate on this task for more than 30-45 minutes at a time. So, now to curb boredom I’m blogging.

I had another lesson in how easy it is to mess with people’s perception of reality. After eating a late lunch I decided to take a nap from 4:30 PM to 5:00 PM or so. I didn’t set the alarm because I wasn’t really thinking that I was going to sleep for very long.

The next thing that I know it’s around 8:45. I remember opening my eyes and thinking to myself, “I’m glad I woke up early, I can get a jump on the day”. Looking out the slits of the closed blinds, I was relieved to notice that the sun wasn’t shining (if it gets too hot outside, it makes the inside a living hell). “Must be an overcast day”, I thought to myself. I figured I would lounge in bed until 9:00 am and then get up. I was startled by the ring of my cell phone and jumped out of bed to locate and silence the offender of aural peace. Looking at the caller ID, I noticed it was my mom. Thinking to myself, “That’s odd, she doesn’t normally call this early”, I picked up the phone and told her that I was still sleeping and that I would call her back in a little while. I put the phone down and noticed that the time read 9:05 PM. At this point, I was disoriented that I didn’t even know what day it was let alone what the real time was. I started back-tracking mentally trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

It’s simple really. I went to sleep at 4:30 and woke up at twilight thinking that it was actually 12 hours forward (or backward) in time. The overcast day was obviously attributed to the darkening sky. As to why I think that I went to sleep on a Sunday and woke up on a Sunday is beyond me. Perhaps I wanted to replay it in my mind the way I thought it ought to have happened. What a mind-job.

Days like this, I’m reminded how easy it is to distort the spatial and temporal reality of humans. I guess shows like Nowhere Man, and The Prisoner aren’t so far fetched sometimes.

I think I caught a virus. No, not one of those that you get from opening an attachment like a nit-wit and not like the ones you get when you stick your wanger where it doesn’t belong. It’s the kind that makes you feel ok some of the time and then at pre-determined times (say night-time or early morning) makes you feel like hell. It’s also the same kind that hangs around for a week or so and makes you wonder if there is something that is seriously wrong, then you spend 10 bucks to see a doctor only for them to tell you “Go home you hypochondriac, and drink lots of fluids”. So that’s why I haven’t been blogging.

About every 2 months or so I open my front door and I find that some mysterious stranger (probably dressed in black and very ninja-like) has deposited some little presents for me. I call these little presents PhoneBook SPAM.

Both Verizon and Qwest send me their crap without me asking for it. Isn’t there some list that I can get on to where they don’t keep putting crap on my doorstep every 2 months? I wonder what would happen if I never picked them up? I didn’t ask for them, I didn’t actually take posession of the things, so how could the apartment people get mad at me? It would be like a random stranger just dumping off stuff at your door that you didn’t ask for and you have to be responsible for it…in fact that is exactly what it is! Keep in mind that I don’t have service with either phone company, hell I don’t even have a land line! As to why they think that I need one of these every 2 months is beyond my comprehension; all I do is just throw them away. It seems that it would be easier for them to just send me a CD that I can load instead of wasting all that paper, time and effort on sending me these damn books!

Technology is my friend. I don’t hate a lot of tech stuff, but I hate my DVD player and CD player (Kenwood DP-M5570). I also hate the networked copier at my work, but that’s because it’s like a communal toilet. Imagine a toilet that everyone shits at, but when it overflows or breaks, you have to clean it…now you understand why I hate the copier. Anyway, back to the DVD player and CD player. I’m watching the third episode of Firefly a few nights ago and I’m getting really into it when it freezes! If this is the first time that it did this, I wouldn’t care, but it seems to do this often. It freezes then I have to press pause until I see the screen shift a bit and then I hit pause again and then it starts where it left off. Maybe that’s what I get for getting a semi-cheap DVD player. Although from what everyone says on the Internet, it is good stuff. I’ll try a cleaning kit and if that doesn’t work I guess I’ll have to invest in a real one (read expensive DVD unit).

Interestingly enough, my CD player at home sometimes refuses to play CDs. I have tried time and again to play The Last Samurai on that CD player and nothing happens. It’s like it just ingores it. Sometimes it does it to other CDs too. Makes me want to launch both pieces through window, run outside and stomp them both into little pieces of plastic and circuit boards.

Yesterday, I picked up that old server from work. Man was it heavy. The friend that helped me lift it up the stairs said that it weighed more than a refrigerator! It was back breaking work, but it was worth it. I’m surprised that the security guards at work were kick back about me taking a huge piece of equipment out of the basement (I was on the list though).
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Then I picked up Joss Whedon’s Firefly series on DVD and a CD at Best Buy. The total? 98 cents. Gotta love a Best Buy gift card. After the alarm clock fiasco, that was a good way to spend that card. To top it all off, I found the missing Cisco 2514 that I couldn’t account for at work. It was sitting in my trunk from my Roseburg trip. At the time, I didn’t realize that it was the one that I was looking for because the dual Ethernet ports are AUI ports and you need a TP MAU to convert them to using CAT5/RJ-45 cable. Soon, I’ll have my Cisco network put together.

Today I’m going to take home a Cisco 2514 router with 2 ethernet ports. I’m going to do dual firewalls at home and that way I get to learn hands on the Cisco IOS with IP Plus and I’ll be a little more secure because the Cisco’s firewalling rules are more robust.

Tomorrow, I get to take home an ancient but purely capable server for my home needs (Did I say needs? I meant wants). I think I might even upgrade my Exchange Server. Which reminds me, if you have an Exchange Server, don’t install it on your domain controller.


And finally, I got a new alarm clock. Well sorta. I’ve been wanting one of those alarm clocks that will wake you up to a CD gradually and then I thought to myself, “Hey it’s the year 2004, I’m sure that they make some that you can upload MP3’s to”. Well there is no such animal at Best Buy, Target or the like. So I fished out an old laptop that can barely run XP and installed alarm clock software that will play a CD or an MP3 playlist; and the best part, it will play it gradually instead of full volume from the start.

Well, I’m 31 now. How did this happen? Anyway, Megan outdid herself again by making me a batch of cookies. Yummy! And I get to keep the jar. :)

Oh yeah and I also heard that something called Star Wars is coming to DVD on September 21st.

Robert sent this to me. This is an actual ad on one of those dating sites. I must have written this subconsciously.

Sugar Daddy seeks . . . hmmm.
I have everything you want and more, honey, so what are you waiting for? Get your sweet behind over here and wait for further instructions; Knee pads will be provided…… Young, flexible, lithe, ready, eager, and willing to learn at the hands of a master.


Which reminds me, I was talking with my mom this weekend because I picked up a book titled Cubans in America and I noticed that Fidel Castro had some help in his revolution by someone named El Comandante Che Guevara and I thought that is why she called me El Che Che. However, she said that is not why she calls me that. El Che Che, is a moniker that in Cuba that means stud, pimpdaddy, etc. I love my mom, one of the funniest people I know.

Back in my alarm dispatch days, it was fun and often informative to listen to what the police using a scanner. I found a link that will allow you to listen to some of the frequencies that the police here use. It’s kinda interesting to listen to some of the stuff that never makes it onto the news. You will need RealPlayer to listen.

I’m going down to Eugene and the fringes of Oregon today (Southern Oregon) to setup up some telecom stuff. Fun for me. I listened to the radio for a little bit this weekend and I keep hearing the ads for My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance and I thought that it was My Big Fat Obnoxious Beyonce (the announcer didn’t enunciate very well). I kept thinking that this celebrity reality TV was getting out of control. Then I figured it out. Silly me.

I’ve been in the office this year a total of maybe 8 hours. I was allowed to work from home the day after New Year’s and then we were snowed out of the office for 3 days. Which leaves me to last Friday where I actually took a sick day. Wow! I think that’s the first time since early May that I did that. I would take another sick day today just to gather my strength but last time I did that everyone freaked out about one thing or another. It’s just not worth it might as well get it over with. It’s no wonder I have over 3 weeks of sick time.

Here is a billboard (originally found here) that doesn’t seem to be getting the message across correctly. Where is it written that you have to forego sex to be an engineer? No wonder there are so so few engineers nowadays. I bet the “doctor” billboard says “Be a doctor, you can have money and SEX too”!

Apple Cup weekend has come and gone. This time around it was 15 of us in Seattle. On Friday we all met in this pub/eatery joint called the Ram-something and started the drinking, talking and fun-having. We migrated to University Ave. for some pub crawling shortly after that. I can’t remember what time I got back to the hotel room, but I think it was after 2 AM. Sometime at about 3 am, the Jagermesiter and beer started having and all out brawl in my stomach and I spent most of the rest of the night praying to the porcelain gods.

The next morning I got up and dragged myself to the tailgate party where I took it easy in an attempt to recuperate from the last night. Not a whole lot of drinking happened before the game. The game was a good time although we had horrible seats. I guess 2 of the people in our group were interviewed for King 5 in Seattle although I never saw the interview personally. After the game we did some more tailgating and I made out with some college girl. Then it was back on the road the next morning for the trip back to Portland.

I’ve been out of town for what seems like 2 weeks (it’s actually more like a week and 2 days) but it feels like longer. Well I’m officially back and will be posting again like a fool.

JO has moved his blog over to here. It’s chock full of geekness for you.

I know that I’m late with this one, but I thought I might remind people just in case they were feeling generous this year. :) Time Magazine has released a list of the coolest inventions of 2003. The invention of the year goes to Apple’s iTunes (although I don’t think that’s a real invention per se – just a company opening their eyes to a market that was ripe for the picking).


Other cool things on the list are:

• 
  This car that can ride the waves (imagine the chicks that I can get riding down the river in that!).
  
• 
  These sunglasses that allow the wearer to read email, look up information online, and grants a +2 bonus to your AC (it just sounded like it fit). Imagine reading your email and looking up google stuff while on the treadmill!
  
• Last but not least, this oven. It allows you to put food in there before you leave for work, call it from your cell phone and it will automatically start cooking. I need this shit now!

My friend and co-worker, Jason Olson, has started his own tech-centric blog. Check it out.

This past Saturday was the 30th Annual Martial Arts competition and it was hosted by Master Hung Choi and the school that I go to (Choi’s Tae Kwon Do). I got there way early to pre-register and then sat around forever (they start with the younger people first) waiting to do my Poomse (form exhibition). I got 4th place in that and got a medal.

While waiting, I saw some cool stuff. One of the dudes did an “open form” exhibition. OMG, he rocked the house. He was a cop from NYC and is a black belt in Karate. He did everything in style which included leaping kicks and backwards leaps. The next cool thing that I saw was a self-defense exhibition between said NYC cop and what I think was his sensei. The NYC cop dude had a knife (fake) and attacked the sensei guy. As the NYC cop charged him with the knife, the sensei intercepted him and turned his arm around so that if it were a real knife the attacker would have stabbed himself in the stomach. The other cool one was where the sensei had a belt and the NYC cop charged him with the knife (again). The sensei looped the belt around the attacker’s wrist and then turned him around so that the attacker was holding the knife to his own throat all in the span of 1 second!


After another huge long wait, I got to do my sparring in which I got another 4th place medal. The first time I fought, I won by two points against a yellow belt (I’m a white belt which is underneath yellow). I think it was 4-2 in my favor. The rounds were a minute and a half but while you are in the ring and actually fighting with all that gear on, it feels like an eternity. In the second match I fought another white belt and he was good. I was still tired from the first round and this other guy came in fresh. Oh well. At the end of the match it was 8 to 7. All in all, it was a great experience.

It’s 3 days before the Tae Kwon Do tournament and I’m not really all that nervous. Last night, during class one of the higher black belts gave me insight on how to perform my form in front of the judges and gave me some sparring tips. As soon as I can after the tournament, I will see about testing for my yellow belt. Everyone in class says I’m ready, I just weak on some of the Tae Kwon Do vocabulary. Hopefully, I won’t need to run out and get some Depends on the day o the tournament.

I went out on a date with this girl that I met on the Internet on Saturday night. She had me meet her at a Warren Miller exhibition. After that we went to a bar called the Paragon and shared a burger, fries and had a few drinks. Although neither of us were watching the clock and we seemed to get along quite well there was no “chemistry” per se. Which is good because I really didn’t dig her anyway.

24‘s new season debuted tonight. There are some interesting plot twists already and they take some of the main characters from their “invincible” status and bring them down to earth. Quite interesting really.


A couple of other things. I don’t know why Jack and Kate didn’t get along, but I think that she should give me a call. I’ll give her the lovin’ she needs. Second, the little display of techno-legerdermain by Kim seemed a bit odd, seeing as how horribly stupid the character was in season 1 and 2. That would be akin to my ex beating me at computer/system administration.

Although it says that I’m reading the book, I’m done with it. That doesn’t mean that I actually read the whole thing. I couldn’t stand it to finish it. The main character breaks up with his “Legendary Girlfriend” and then mopes around for almost the entire book. As someone that has done their fair share of moping, I don’t think that I was ever that bad even during the dark times. Will (the main character) was such a mopey, whiney, pussy that I felt like strangling him just so that he could be put out of his misery. This book is a piece of shit.

November will be a busy month for me. On the 21st, I will be going up to Seattle for Apple Cup where we get to see UW and WSU fight it out on the football field. Then we hang out in Seattle that night and get loaded, come back on Sunday, and then on Monday I will be leaving early in the morning, headed to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving.

There is a TKD tournament on the 1st of November and I’m gonna sign up for it if I can. I just have to have money and have it postmarked by tomorrow. The TKD school that I go to is hosting it so our TKD master wanted everyone to go to it. So if you are in Portland and want to see me fight and stuff, pony up 8 bucks and come watch the pain (hopefully it will be someone else’s pain and not mine).


Interestingly enough, I’ll go in as a white belt but I could probably take the test for yellow belt now.

I didn’t post for 4 days (15th – 19th) because I didn’t want to shoot off my mouth about work stuff. Needed to do some coolin’ off before I started writin’ words. I had been developing an Intranet site for work for some time. The first version was a horrible looking (it was just text links) site done in ColdFusion, but it was the template to empowering the staff to use web based tools to help them with their jobs.


After I started playing ASP.NET and C# on this site and I decided to try my my hand at porting that site to the new .NET codebase. I should mention that at the time of the first site there wasn’t an in-house development team as our IT infrastructure was in its infancy. However, now that we have a great development team in place, there was no more need or want for me to develop the site and the project of making an “intranet site” was handed over to them.


My first opinion? SUCK! As with all things that one creates, it sucks to have that given (your baby per se) to someone else to take over. I know each and everyone out there knows the feeling. If you say that you don’t, then you are either 1) Still in high school, 2) Lying. But what am I going to do, cry about it? Nay laddie. Truth be told, it’s better off in their hands than mine. I just don’t have the time to really devote to that as much as I would like. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.


The good news is that I will be able to devote all my coding to my sites instead. Keep down your applause.

Last night Mike and I came in to un-rack some servers from our oldest rack and place them into one of our newer Blackbox racks. Unfortunately the custom Compaq rails don’t fit in the Blackbox rack, so we had to put them all back. I finally got to bed at around 1 am only to get up this morning at 6:30. Normally I get up at least 2 hours later than that. I swear that man wasn’t made to get up before the sun, it just seems wrong.

I got up so early because my friend Kathy asked me to take her to work in the morning and she had to be here before 8:30. I noticed something on my way to work this morning. Traffic is really horrendous at this time in the morning. Normally when I leave I don’t have to sit in traffic behind lines and lines of cars. The most I ever to when I leave work is sit at the poorly managed traffic lights. I’ll stick to coming in later rather than waste my life sitting behind some yahoo in an SUV.

Every once and a while we have a joint developer and IT meeting. Most of the time during these meetings I sit there think about other things and maybe interject a few words. Although this meeting was a bit more involved, when I was finished, my notepad consisted of a smiley face and a cube. That’s the extent of the notes that I took. Luckily during that meeting I kept thinking about our big NT to 2003 domain migration.

Earlier today the weather got real nasty outside. It was so dark that it seemed like a giant space dragon had eaten the sun (if you know what that is from good for you!). So I’m working away at the office and all of the lights go out and so does the power to my PC (much to my chagrin since I have a mini-UPS). Immediately after the power outage, someone screamed like Flanders and (it lasted for a second) there was a huge boom of thunder. I wonder if the building got hit by lightning… Oh yeah, and some of our servers got rebooted as well, even though they are connected to a huge UPS. I guess it doesn’t help that the UPS, with its batteries, has been around since I was in high school.

I’m still missing my John Mayer CD but Megan was kind enough to tell me that she had the entire album in WMA format at work. So on Friday night, I logged into our Corporate VPN Server to and assumed it was on our file server. Interestingly enough I couldn’t access her home directory by name, so I went to the root and saw that there was still a home directory for the original programmer. Thinking that it was blank and just needed to be deleted, I took a look inside. There was still stuff inside of it, including photos of said original programmer and her sister (the one that I met that the mall the other day).

On our way to racquetball Robert and I saw the strangest thing. This lady was walking her little Cocker Spaniel dog and upon closer inspection the little beast had a mask over its muzzle that looked like something that Hannibal Lecter would wear. I curse myself for not having my digital camera!

On Tuesday when I went to Tae Kwon Do, Master Choi said that there would be a TKD Tournament on the first of November and it was mandatory that we participated. He then later said that it wasn’t really mandatory, it was just recommended since his school is hosting it this year. So I might be getting my butt kicked in front of a lot of people on the first.

I haven’t slacked off this much on a Friday, since, well, I can’t
remember the last time. I came in talked over our chat program (Exodus)
with a co-worker and then went to lunch with Lana and the accounting
girls. It was Lana’s last day. Sad. Boy after that, I came back and
have done nothing since. Ok I did install Win2k on a server that was
having problems. I think it was one of the pairs of RAM that I yanked.

At work, we have made significant database and web application changes. Yesterday was our big deploy day which consisted of a 14 hour outage of services while we upgraded. I left work at about 5 PM to go work out and then go to Tae Kwon Do and then came back at about 8 PM. Hung out with the boss man, Megan and my other co-worker while they deployed files, database changes, played Diamond Mine and Alchemy (ok Megan played these while we watched), and spun the back off to tape.

Since this was such a big deploy, the boss man rented a suite at the Residence Inn down the street so we could catch some z’s before coming in to do our part. Megan, the boss man, and I went to the suite watched some TV and then Megan and I decided to make a late night run to Chez McDeath for some chicken nuggets. About halfway there, her phone rings and we have to go the office because my co-worker is having difficulty getting SQL replication to work through the firewall. After doing some IP trickery (yes Megan, I said it again) and then setting up replication we were on our way to McDeathville and then back to the suite. I think at this point, it was like 1.30 in the morning.


After eating the not-so-good-nuggets, I decided that I should get at least some sleep since I had to be back in the office at 4 am to do my part. I went into the bedroom laid down and immediately thought to myself that Megan would be knocking on the door to use the bathroom. Sure enough, like 30 seconds later, there was the knock. I was laying there in the dark after she was done and I kept hearing the toilet re-fill its water supply. After a minute, I’m thinking to myself, “This can’t be normal”, so I get up turn on the light and there was water all over the place! I go and get Megan and show her the disaster and we just start laughing over and over again. Megan turned off the water and then we used all of the towels in the bathroom but they sent more up because it was dripping through to the suite below. HAHA. The deployment worked great and services were restored to our membership 30 minutes early with one exception, third party access.


There are third party applications that access one of our SQL servers directly to get data. Despite having known about these massive changes for 30 days and having a development SQL machine to develop against, most of them didn’t do crap until today when their applications broke. It’s incredible, how does one run a business like that and succeed?

The new Matrix trailer is up. It reveals more than has been revealed in the past few teaser trailers about what is likely to be happening. I would suggest downloading WGET (available for both Linux and Windows) and using it to download the trailer. If you use your browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, etc.) you will only time out about thousand times. WGET has a resume function, so if the connection gets cut off, it will re-try and resume where it left off downloading. The link for the big trailer is: http://progressive.warnerbros.com/thematrix/us/med/rev_theatre_0x3839_640_dl.mov.


Unfortunately, the trailer is Quicktime 6 only.

My friend Lana and I were walking through the mall on a break and on the way back I spotted this good looking girl walking the other way. I looked at her and she looked at me then she kept looking at me…then it finally dawned on me…I know this woman from somewhere…now if only I could figure out from where. We stopped and exchanged glances and then she said hi. At that point, I figured out who I was remembering, sort of. See the woman has a twin sister and at one point they looked pretty much the same. After I heard her talk for a while then I figured out that it wasn’t Sarah (I used to work with her) but it was her sister Jennifer. I got her new cell phone number and I told her that I would call her. Weird how things work. Good thing I didn’t randomly ask her out.

I’ve been kinda slacking on this and not posting. For the next month, I’m going to try to post at least once a day. Now I’m going to run off to the gym.

I’m almost through the 2nd disc of 24 Season 2 and I’m really annoyed with the character of Kim Bauer. Granted, when she is running around and her boobs are bouncing that’s great but the character is so colossally stupid that it boggles the mind and the whole rescuing Megan thing gets really annoying. Thank god for her boobs.

I don’t know how I forgot to post this, but yesterday was Megan’s birthday. Luckily, all I did was forget to post here. I got her a card and wished her happy birthday! Happy Birthday Megan!

Well, the Race for the Cure is on Sunday and I will be walking instead of running it. My shins still bother me when I run and even in some other activities now like Tae Kwon Do. I’ll have to go back to the doc and have her send me to a specialist or something. Maybe they will give me bionic legs and then I will become a super-hero.

This past Saturday was the company picnic at the beach. We all went to Rockaway Beach and the company paid for rooms for each of us at the Surfside Resort Motel.

I didn’t want to drive, so I hitched a ride with some co-workers (Johnny, Trish, and Autumn to be exact). Johnny drove, Trish played navigator and Autumn and I rode in the back. Autumn slept, my stomach was growling, and I could have sworn that Trish and Johnny were married by the way they carried on. Overall it was a good trip with no one strangling each other.

When we arrived at the motel, we all got our rooms, put on our sweatshirts (this is the Oregon coast remember) and went down to the beach to play some team volleyball. For some reason, everyone there thought that I was some sort of volleyball god. There were 4 teams and to win the tournament and it came down to a tie breaker match to win between the team that I was on and another team. Needless to say, the team that I was on won and now I have a medal on my desk as well as the trophy.

After winning we all took little break in our rooms (I actually went up to Megan and Ernest’s room with Terra) where we hung out and watched TV. Then we went back down to the beach to eat, make S’mores, drink and hang out. Lana got me out into the water up to my ankles in exchange for promising to get me a cool FBI visor when she goes back to DC. The water was so cold it hurt.

A while after night fell, we went to the party rooms where board games and drinking games were played. After the drunken debauchery was over, Terra and I stayed up a had a great conversation.

The ride back the next morning was a bit less animated as we all had hangovers of some kind. There are lots of photos, so I will put them up when we get them back.

It’s almost 3 am. Can’t sleep because it’s about 1000 degrees in my damn apartment! I never thought that I would hear myself say this, but “Bring on Winter Time”! By Saturday the temperature is supposed to drop 20 degrees at the high and isn’t supposed to reach 90 during the day for the rest of the year. GOOD. I don’t care if by Sunday I’m wearing a fur coat that is bigger than DMX’s.

Oh and one more thing, boss scheduled a 9 am meeting tomorrow. Great that means that I have to wake up in 5 hours.

I started writing this at 12.48 AM. I tried to hit the sack over an hour ago, but alas I am not destined to go to sleep early. So I’m sitting in my living room watching VH1 and I hear my phone get a text message. That can only mean one thing! Gotham City (please don’t sue me DC Comics) is in trouble and I need to go bust some heads. Ok fine, it means that a script of mine that I wrote is has failed or there is a warning alert. So I look at it and sure enough my script that detects low disk space on servers kicked off (damn I’m good).


So now I’m at work completing a full backup of the email server; which truncates the logs and gives me my disk space back. Can’t wait for those 36GB drives to come in.

If you follow the news at all, you might have heard that FOX News was in litigation to prevent Al Franken’s book from using the words “Fair and Balanced” in the title. Of course they lost. I was doing some surfing, since I can’t get to sleep, and came across some spoofs of Al Franken’s book cover. This one is one of my favorties. I also like this one, this one, and this one. You can see the entire list here.

…is not now. I tried to go to bed 30 minutes ago. No love. I just laid there in bed listening to the people above me stomp around their apartment and other various nocturnal noises. So I broke out the MP3 player and started listening to music. Still can’t get to sleep. So now I’m writing posts. Note to Sandman, please come to my house earlier. Thanks.

I got a my wedding thank you note from Megan this week. I go to open it and there is a sticker label on the back. It’s one of the best labels I have seen…ever.

I went to see Bruce Almighty at the Bagdad this last Friday with Terra. I had never been to that theater but it was really cool. It’s a McMenamins so it’s not your regular movie theater. Eating and drinking (spirits) while watching the movie is a must. After the movie, we were walking back to my car and we were accosted by a someone pandering their reggae wares. Joy. Luckily I was able to fend him off with quick comebacks and we walked away without further incident.

On Tuesday, I went to my first class of Tae Kwon Do. It was a fun time. Since it was my first day, one of the black belt students took me aside and taught me some basic moves and stances as well as the correct way to do stretching, etc. Today is going to be my second day in class and I’m eagerly looking forward to it.


I also went to the doc today to see what could be wrong with my calves/shins. She taught me some other stretching for calves/Achilles heel and shin muscles. She also suggested that I walk for 5 minutes, do the stretching and then try running. So I’m gonna try that out and if that doesn’t work then I go to a specialist.

I might not be able to run in the Race for the Cure marathon in Portland. For a few months now, when I run I get this awful tightness/sometimes pain in my shin/calves area. So I’m going to the doc on Thursday to see what’s up. Maybe, he can patch me up for the 5k run. We shall see.

I was gonna write a post yesterday but I upgraded to .NET Framework 1.1 on my webserver and I couldn’t put HTML in the body of my posts anymore. I fixed that and all is well now. Well, regardless here is what has been going on.

• Went over to Terra’s house and watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and America’s Sweethearts. Then we rode pink elephants. Good times.
  
• Starting Tae Kwon Do today. That should be fun, I’ve been wanting to do martial arts ever since I was young.
  
• Watched Pirates of the Caribbean finally. It was a damn good movie. Definitely going to order that on DVD when it comes out.
  
• And finally, ordered Babylon 5 Season 3 on DVD. Should be here in a week or so.

The max is 180 now, not 170. :)

I rounded out max week at the gym. I took a week off last week to rest my left arm. I must have hyper-extended it one time working out and anytime that I push pressure on it, it would hurt. This week, I wanted to know what the maximum weigh that I could lift, push or pull was. My goal was to do only one or two reps. If I was straining my the first or second one, that was my max. Here is what I did:

• Bench Press: 170lbs
  
• Decline Press: 250lbs
  
• Incline Press: 190lbs
  
• Flys: 160lbs
  
• Cable Flys: 60lbs (each arm)
  
• Triceps: 100lbs (both arms)
  
• Iso Row: 180lbs
  
• Lat Pull Down: 140lbs
  
• Shoulders: 150lbs (both shoulders)
  
• Leg Press: 340lbs (both legs)
  
• Leg Extensions: 180lbs (both legs)
  
• Seated Leg Curl: 160lbs (both legs)
  
• Calves: I’ll have to re-do this one as the results are suspect.

Last Sunday, Megan and Ernest finally got married. The ceremony was held at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in North Portland. Most of the times, I think weddings are dull and boring, but hers actually entertained me. Megan looked stunning in her dress and the ceremony was sprinkled with Filipino traditions. After that it was off the reception where I sat at a table with 3 people from Spain. I actually talked to them a lot in Spanish. After that there was eating, drinking, and dancing. I stayed pretty late helping Donna (Megan’s mom) out with the presents and then I went home to go to sleep. All in all, it was a good time even though I couldn’t find my black socks.

For the past week I have had a friend parked outside my apartment door. The damn beast must love it there because other than his legs, I don’t see him move…ever. Even when the door slams shut, he stays there happily. I could attempt to kill the blasted beast, but that would leave a mark the size of my wallet on the wall. Of course he could retaliate against my indiscretion and cover me in silk and then eat me. I’m still waiting to see his friends (yeah I know Mothra is technically a female) flyin’ around. Where is he when you need him.

Eno-Palooza was this last Saturday. For the un-initiated, Eno-palooza was the bachelor party for Ernest.

We met over at Adam’s house and donned out panty hose (on our heads) ready to kidnap Ernest. Our plan was to throw duct tape over his mouth, put a pillow case over his head and then throw him in the getaway truck. Unfortunately he woke up just in time to see 4 masked men in his bedroom. His brother Jon was the first to jump on him followed by Adam. I attempted to bind his feet with makeshift restraints they had made with zip ties. Unfortunately, the bride (love you Megan!) put the kibosh on that shit. She also denied Brian of putting the duct tape on his mouth. Eventually we got him restrained and out the door although Brian nearly killed himself going down the stairs carrying our prisoner.

We tied a ball and chain around his ankle and then hit the Denny’s for breakfast (the ball and chain was a real chain with a 12 pound bowling ball screwed to it). Soon after, we were on our way to Splat Action in Molalla. Now, I’ve never played paintball so it was really an experience for me. The first game was a game of capture the flag. Right after the referee said that the game was on, everyone took off. A bunch of guys, including myself, took off to the right towards the enemy fort. Since it was my first game ever, my adrenaline was pumping like mad. You wear a mask (much like this guy has on) so that the paintballs don’t take you out permanently if they hit you in the face. All I could hear was my breathing in that damned mask. As we approached the enemy fort, I kept thinking that I was seeing Charlies in the trees and I was sure that I was making enough noise to wake the dead and kill it again. Didn’t get much action that game as the ref called game over before I got in any type of firefight.

The next game resulted in my first kill. Some girl popped my friend and then took cover behind a tree. Unfortunately, she didn’t see me and she peaked her head out. I unleashed a torrent of paintballs her way until I heard her call out “HIT”. The third game is where I first got shot. It was in the right leg and it didn’t hurt as bad as I thought that it would. I guess the first hit made me fear death no longer (ok well I wasn’t scared of getting hit anymore) and I became a man possessed because Megan called me Rambo on Monday morning. Here are some of the results of paintball. I’m not sure where this came from, but it might have been from my warrior-type action skillz. Gotta love it.

After paintball, we headed on over to Stanich’s but alas it was closed due to a company picnic day. So we ate at a really good pizza place (can’t remember the name of it) and met up with Dustin. We headed out to some place in BattleGround, Washington to do some swimming in some river but we weren’t there very long because it was lame. We headed out to his parents house where they have a huge plot of land, partook in some hot tubbing and that’s where I had my first taste of the Yucca. All in all, it was a good weekend and a great bachelor party for him.

My email server decided that it was hot enough today and it was gonna take a nap. Shortly before I leave work, I get an IMAP message that says that my mail server wasn’t responding anymore. Oddly enough the web server and my workstation were doing fine. When I came home after my work out I rebooted it and everything is fine again (let’s see if it stays that way). For those that would like to know, it’s almost 90 in the room where my servers are at. Blasted Oregon and their no-air-conditioning-having-apartments!

I’m having one of those days where you are so tired that you get nothing accomplished. Even the slightest task at work seems so energy draining that I might collapse onto my keyboard. Hopefully, I will get a surge of energy before I hit the gym today or it might be a lackey weakling workout day and I hate those.

Good news is that I found my missing Office 2003 Beta 2 CDs at work. I was looking for the CDs this weekend and I only found the beta CDs that I didn’t want to install (Front Page, Publisher, OneNote). Now if only I can find the Red Hat Linux CDs that I burned a little while ago. After I find those, I will install Linux onto a VMWare 4 virtual machine. The last time that I installed Linux into a virtual machine (3.0), it couldn’t detect the video card and I was left with console only. Reminds me of the early days of Linux when I had Caldera and it would never detect my video card. VMWare 4 has better support for Linux though, so hopefully I will actually be able to see a Linux GUI that isn’t 5 years old. The keyword is hopefully.

I saw Terminator 3 this afternoon. I would have to say that it’s not half bad. Not great, but not bad. There were times that I thought that the humor that was injected into the scenes were a bit “forced”. Humor is fine, but this is a Terminator movie. I thought the guy that played John Connor did a pretty good job and made the character seem believable. The girl in the movie was played by Claire Danes and played the character of Kate Brewster. Mostly I thought that she was annoying because all she did for most of the movie was scream and just react to the stuff that was going on around her. The special effects were top notch.

Below are some observations that I had about the movie (I’ve made the text white because it contains spoilers). Highlight the blank area below to read.


At one point early in the film John has a dream about Judgement Day. I like the visual effects of the skulls all over in the water. Then it pans to hundreds, if not thousands of Terminators (without their human “skin” moving and firing at humans (you never see them though). My only problem with this is that John Connor has never seen a T-100 Terminator without its skin. Only Sarah has.

John Connor keeps trying to stop Judgement Day. I don’t know why he is doing this. It would be impossible for him to stop judgement day. It’s only because of Judgement day that he exists. If there is no Judgement Day, Kyle Reese can’t be sent back through time and there is no John Connor. Judgement Day MUST happen.

Also early in the film, the female Terminator (TX) is driving a huge semi with a crane attached to it. She extends the crane so it is facing sideways into the street in an attempt to destroy Arnold (he is hanging from the very tip of the crane). She drives through three for four buildings, through cement blocks, over cars, through telephone poles, etc. I don’t care how tough a semi is, if you ran into that much shit, friction would eventually take over and you would slow down and/or stop.

Arnold tells John that he didn’t send him back in time this time around. It was Kate Brewster. She did so because John was killed by the same Terminator that is protecting them in the movie. However, by telling him this, he probably won’t allow that to happen. Oy time travel stories are hard on the brain.

This morning, I was awoken by the sounds of music. Awww how nice. WRONG. I left my windows open in my bedroom open so that it could cool off in there (yeah there is no AC in apartments – unless you want to pay the really big bucks). I have no problem with people playing music, ‘cause I play it all the time. However, some music should really be played with headphones so that no one else can hear it. The song that was being BLASTED throughout the corner of the complex where my apartment is at sounded like something off American Idol – one of the LOSERS of American Idol. The woman that sang the song could sing in a so-so manner, but whoever gave her a record deal should be sent to prison. She was flat all over and couldn’t hit notes worth a damn.

The kicker? Whoever was playing the song, had it on repeat or something because it was playing over and over and over and over…you get the idea. <sarcasm>Ahhh, I love apartment living.</sarcasm>