OK, I have a new object of geek desire: this MP3 player. The little radios we have for working out are nice, but the reception at the gym is rather spotty at times and I’d prefer to be able to have something pre-recorded sometimes. I also like Takaza’s suggestion of renting audio books, ripping them, and storing them on each of our MP3 players so we can each listen to them at our own pace (then deleting them, of course).

It’s cheaper than an iPod and has about as much memory. The only drawback is the slowness of the USB interface versus iPod’s Firewire interface, but I’m willing to work with that.

All I need is the two hundred bucks…well, that may take a while.

I wasn’t much fun last night, I’m afraid. I was having one of those days where things seem to break all around me – first my car, then my computer. Bleah.

My car decided on April 1 that it didn’t want to start. No, not just wouldn’t turn over, the key wouldn’t turn in the ignition, period. April Fools! Not.

takaza came over to pick me up, and after I had called the local dealer (just a half-mile away) and the national roadside service, he managed to wiggle the key enough to get it to start. We took it down to the dealer and left it with instructions to fix it (along with giving it its 12,000 maintenance, which it needed anyway). The service rep found that she, too, couldn’t turn the key after she parked it, so that confirmed the problem.

So I got a call yesterday that I could come pick up the car. I asked what was wrong with the ignition, and was told that the technician couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Fortunately, it was the same service rep, and she assured me they’d look into it, and to hold off on picking up the car. Later, I got a call that they’re having a locksmith come and look at it, but that he couldn’t be there until this morning. Which is why I’m driving a shiny new Ford Focus this morning, since they’re providing me with a freebies rental. Not a great car, but the headroom in the Focus is surprisingly large. Pity it’s slow, Spartan, and uncomfortable. Anyway, I should get a call sometime today for me to pick up my Alero and all with be right with the world. And the ignition problem is covered under warranty, thank the gods.

Then there’s the computer. The laptop took a slight spill off the coffee table over the weekend and bent the wireless networking card. Now my transfer speeds have dropped to half (or less) unless I push the card a certain way, and even that’s not a surefire fix. This definitely means I’ll be buying a new wireless card soon – that’s about a hundred bucks down the drain. Damn.

These add up to being in a crabby, unsociable mood yesterday evening. Bless his heart, Dan put up with me, and I got over it eventually. Working out helped, too – good to work out your aggressions on the bicycle and treadmill. I’m feeling much better today, fortunately, and even have a blessedly light day at work, so I don’t feel so stressed out.

Some wonderful quotable passages from my daily weblog reading.

From b-may:

There is just no socially acceptable situation in which a person may smell their fingers in front of another person.

From diveintomark (bonus points for usage of the word oubliette):

She watches, she swoons, she is overwhelmed by his stunning display of machismo, his confidence, his raw virility that oozes from his every pore. She watches as, with one swift stroke, he severs the main cable line, thus sending the entire household spiraling down an oubliette of disconnectivity.

From dooce.com:

If I can bring light and hope to a dreary canine-cum-elephantine existence, why not scratch a little chaffed hind leg? Who wouldn’t?

And finally…
From Adam Curry (yes, that Adam Curry):

Currently I’m in Dubai, dialed into the net at about 21k/sec, a far cry from the DSL speeds I’m used to. ‘Checking mail’ results in 20 minutes of downloading penis enlargers.

By the way, check out Curry’s inside scoop on stars he met during his MTV days – pretty funny stuff.

Goodness, I’m getting bad about keeping this updated.

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they were contemplating the leak in the living room ceiling. Well, we have graduated to no leak, but a nice big hole in the ceiling. I’m telling myself this is an improvement.

What happened is, the plumbers used some kind of crappy gasketing material between the drain opening of the fiberglass shower insert and the PVC piping; when I unscrewed the drain head, I could see that the gasket was pretty much completely deteriorated and half gone. A trip to Homo Depot later and I picked up some good waterproof silicone caulk, which sealed everything right up. I found something called “Plumber’s Putty” which seems to be what the plumbers used, in spite of the large warning on the back, “DO NOT USE ON PLASTIC”. Anyway, now that the drain is sealed, I can go to work repairing the 20″ x 6″ hole in the living room ceiling that I made to determine just where the leak was coming from. Actually, the hole will get bigger before I’m through, because I need to cut away the water-damaged sheetrock, too. Fortunately, I got the sheetrock I needed from Home Depot for free (came from a damaged sheet), but I also had to buy all the accoutrements to make the repairs: joint compound, trowel, sanding block, sandpaper, paint roller, paint tray. Not too expensive, fortunately. I’ve been putting off starting the ceiling repair, but I’ll probably go to work on that tonight – at least cutting the sheetrock and screwing it to the rafters, as well as putting on the first layer of joint compound.

That’s what I did on Friday. On Saturday and Sunday we did approximately diddly, and it was lovely. Well, we got the grill into working order (had to repair the burner – it was whistling. After whistling comes fire from inappropriate places, and That’s Bad), mowed the lawn, fixed the track light in the kitchen, and did some laundry.

This coming weekend should be fun. What began as Todd and Bookshire coming over for dinner and games has blossomed into a full Gang event and cookout (thus the rush to get the ceiling repaired 🙂 We’ll need to do a bit of cleaning and other preparation for that, but it should be fun. Looks like the weather will cooperate, too, though it might be a bit chilly.

I won’t go into my tale of woe from work – suffice to say that it involves lots of fun (and not so much fun) with chemistry, cow-orkers with their heads up their asses, and deadlines that are completely impossible. This has eaten all my time this week, which explains why I’ve been so silent.

Now, I’ve an hour to go before I take off for a three-day weekend. Whee!

Looks like the weekend will be spent doing a lot of work around the house. No sooner do I mow the lawn for the first time this season than it needs to be mowed (mown? moan?) again. I think this time I’ll lower the mowing deck a bit. Then there’s the hole in the living room ceiling…

Mind you, our house was built in July of 2000 and is very new. Why is it that a few weeks ago I was lying on the sofa and looked up to see a lovely water spot on the living room ceiling? I ignored it, figuring it was a leftover from a past incident (the brain-damaged plumbers didn’t put in the gasket between the tub and the tub overflow pipe – water slopped over and went down the side of the tub and down the wall, not the pipe). Every so often I’d look up and wonder if the spot had gotten bigger, or was damp. Last weekend I finally poked at it a bit…and my finger went though the sheetrock. Well, that answers that question. The master bathroom shower is now out of commission, and tomorrow afternoon I’ll be spreading out a tarp on the living room floor, pulling out my trusty sheetrock saw, and doing a bit of exploratory surgery to determine the source of the water leak. Given past experiences with the plumbers for our house (see previous example), I’m halfway afraid of what sort of idiocy I’m going to encounter when I start poking around. I’m reasonably handy, but if it looks like it’ll be a big job, I’m calling the plumbers. Different plumbers.

Oh yeah, I still need to do taxes this weekend, too…

In today’s N&O, Dennis Rogers has an interesting column on “Operation Catnip,” an effort in the city of Raleigh to trap, sterilize, vaccinate, and release 1,800 to 2,400 feral cats per year. Mind you, that’s a drop in the bucket – the SPCA of Wake County estimates that there are 57,000 – 85,000 feral cats in the county.

While I’m not wild about the idea of releasing them back to an uncertain fate, I suppose it’s an improvement on keeping them for a while then killing them (euthanize is just another pretty euphemism). What really grabbed me was Rogers’ closing paragraphs:

I wish I had the answer. I don’t want to see any animal destroyed. I also don’t want to see them lost, cold and huddling by the side of a busy road, waiting for death or rescue.

“At least the Operation Catnip people are not just sitting back and complaining about it,” [Mondy] Lamb [of SPCA of Wake County] said. “We all have to do what we can, not because it will solve all the problems, but because it is the right thing to do.”

My project is to find people who cruelly abandon their unwanted pets for the rest of us to take care of. I’d like to leave people like that in the woods for a few nights so they’d know what it is like to be cold, hungry, lost and unloved.

Then I’d sterilize them.

Here’s a link especially for bookwurm. I saw it and thought of her 🙂 (See especially “Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian“)

You know, I’ve always found those “What X Are You?” tests really freakin’ annoying, but this one is actually not too bad…

Interesting Enneagram test results below

As promised, here’s the recipe for Bul Kogi, Korean Barbecued Beef:

Click here for something truly yummy!

I was thinking today that in the three+ years that takaza and I have been together, I can’t recall that I’ve ever been home alone while he was out of town. I’ve been out of town numerous times, leaving him alone, but never the other way around. It’s a weird feeling, and it hearkens back to my days of bachelorhood. I am and always have been an independent sort, so it’s not like my world is crumbling apart in the four days that he’s gone; in fact, I think occasional separations are a Very Good Thing. They remind us of how we rely on one another, what our identities are as a couple and as individuals. And absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder.

Click here for the minutae of my last few days

Wow, having one of those “Fun With Health Care” weeks.

First, the good news: went to the gastroenterologist yesterday and she said that the fatty liver thing was pretty much nothing to worry about. I’m doing what is called for to relieve it – exercising and losing weight (or I will be losing weight after a while, anyway. I hope). She could have called for a liver biopsy (basically sticking a needle in my abdomen a few times and pulling liver samples) but since there’s really not much to do for the condition regardless of what the results may be, she opted not to. Whew.

Then we got to the fun part. I’ve always had a problem with heartburn, and typically have relied on Pepcid Complete about four or five times a week. In the last few months have had an occasional problem where, while I’m asleep, stomach acid creeps up into my throat and I wake up feeling like I’m about to vomit. Bleah. It’s about as pleasant as it sounds. Turns out these are all classic symptoms of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD). What this means is the sphincter at the base of the esophagus into the stomach which is supposed to act like a one-way valve has been weakened and allows stomach acid back into the esophagus. This is a pretty common condition, really.

The biggest concern is that while the stomach lining is made to deal with stomach acid, the esophagus is not so there concerns that ulcers or scar tissue have formed. The only way to know for sure is to get an esophageal endoscopy, where they stick a camera down your throat and see what’s up down there. I get to partake in this little bit of entertainment in about a month. Sounds like it’s going to be interesting – intravenous sedation, have someone there to drive you home, don’t plan on doing anything else for the rest of the day. Still, it’s a necessary evil – I’d rather know what’s going on down there, I suppose.

You can be a computer whiz and still be a moron.

(Finally got around to updating this)

Wow. Bunch of stuff to do tonight, in spite of the fact that I got way too little sleep last night.

Bookshire and Toddfox moved into their new apartment in Durham yesterday, and we went up to lend a hand and pick up Stevie. We put in some time hauling heavy stuff, then had to take off, since it was 10 PM and we still had to get food for Stevie and drive the 45 minutes home. We went by Ninth Street near Duke University (which Stevie said reminds him of Green Street in Champaign – yeah, I can see the resemblance) and got Stevie a nice gyros platter for munchies and got us a yummy dessert at Francesca’s. a wonderful lesbian-owned ice cream place. We headed home from there, and I crashed early while Stevie and takaza chatted until about 1 AM. Needless to say, da wolf is a wee bit tired today. Takaza took Stevie to the airport this morning, and apparently there were no problems there.

Tonight…well, in spite of the fact that I need to get some sleep, we’ve got a wealth of stuff to do before going to bed:
– I need to work up the final budget for MFF Registration for aureth as well as send off a Registration report to the MFF Staff list since there’s a meeting this weekend.
– We need to get all of our laundry done.
– We need to pack for the weekend.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll drop Takaza off at work. In the afternoon, I’ll pick him up and we’ll continue out of town, headed north for Blacksburg, Virginia to attend Technicon. Reminds me – I need to confirm our room reservation.

Also tonight, we need to finish prepping for the panel that we’re doing at Technicon, “What Is All This Furry Stuff, Anyway?” I figure we’ll run through a timeline of the fandom (drawing heavily from Fred Patten’s excellent article), then talk about the rise of different interests making furry the hodgepodge that it is today, then mention some of the Internet resources available, and hand out a list of said resources. Then we’ll take questions. Naturally, the first time someone mentions MTV or Vanity Fair, we have a perfectly sensible response prepared: we’ll point at the door and scream, “Oh my god, it’s William Shatner!” and jump out the window.

OK, maybe not 🙂 Actually, I think we can defuse and disabuse any hostile or warped interpretations of what furry fandom is and isn’t in a reasonable fashion.

Oh, and one more thing – Let’s all welcome Osiris (kittylad) to LiveJournal! Yay!

I’m in the lab across campus for most of the day today, making the first of what will eventually be 27 batches of materials for testing. Theoretically, this is supposed to be done by the end of June…we’ll see.

Naturally, I have to stop in the middle of making the batch (it’s about a five-hour process) so I can attend the mandatory “Zero-Tolerance Sexual Harassment Policy Training Seminar.” Whew, that’s a mouthful. These things always amuse me because I’d like to think they don’t apply much to me – 99.99% of the materials is all about heterosexuals. This actually surprises me because 1.) I’m sure I’m not the only non-straight person working on this campus, and 2.) Same-sex sexual harassment has been proven to be a valid workplace issue. Typically, they dance around the whole issue of same-sex harassment, never even bringing it up.

Though on the other hand, I guess if it was identified as a problem, that would make me a possible bad guy. Do I want that? Not particularly. I suppose it would just be interesting to see Corporate America acknowledge that there are non-heterosexual employees in the workforce, however backhandedly they go about it.

Hm. We need to work up an outline for the Technicon panel tonight, if we’re not too tired after working out. If nothing else, it’s stuff to think about while zoning out on the treadmill.

So we begin a new week, though I’m not sure I’m ready yet. Where’d I leave my jumper cables?

So as I mentioned before, partran drove in to spend the weekend with us. Yep, we got him hooked on LiveJournal too. We’re just evil that way – it’s a hobby, y’know.

Rundown of our weekend – read if you’re interested

As jenwolf reminded me, I was remiss in posting the Final Jeopardy question. My apologies – a pile of meetings this afternoon, then having to rush out right after work messed me up. Without further ado, here’s the answer:

The Final Jeopardy category is “Biblical People”

He was the first person who died in the Book of Exodus.

This is for all the marbles!

Big fun coming up.

We’re meeting Partran in about 15 minutes, then going out to dinner. Tomorrow is Adventures in Retail Hell (aka venturing out to the new mall that opened today – all 1.3 million square feet of it) (but they have an Apple Store!) followed by possibly a nice wine tasting and then, who knows?

It’s gonna be a fun weekend!

Not a bad showing for us today. See how you do:

$200
Competition began in 1900 for this cup awarded to a national men’s tennis team.
$400
Before and After
The lead singer of Hole appearing on Chuck Woolery’s old dating show.
$600
Title occupation of Caleb Carr’s Dr. Laszlo Kreizler.
$800
This “giant” ocean dweller has the largest eyes of any creature.
$1000
This St. Louis University founded in 1853 has a 169 acre hilltop campus.

Give up? Here are the questions

Big surprises today, but you’ll have to read below what they are. First, the answers:

$200
The con in con man is short for this.
$400
Category is Tom Swifties
It’s the secret or enigmatic way Tom said, “Let’s go look at those tombs”
$600
This cartoonist who created Beavis and Butthead was influenced by Monty Python.
$800
Ellen must have been burstyn with pride when she won an oscar for this 1974 road movie.
$1000
It’s a sequence such as the 4, 6, 7, & 8 needing one tantalizing card to fill it.

The suspense is killing me!

(Three posts in one day. Unusual for me…)

This song has been rattling around in my head for the past day or so. The lyrics apply to a recent incident very well, I think.

Gratuitous song-lyric posting alert

Well, at least we met and talked about the questions. Not that that did us much good…

$100
The last name of the woman who’s cow allegedly started the great Chicago fire.
$200
TV’s Dr. David Banner.
$300
It’s a monk’s hood or a draped neckline for women that falls in soft folds.
$400
The White House wasn’t yet finished in 1800 when this president moved in.
$500
Trader Vic claimed credit for inventing this rum drink & said it was named by a Tahitian friend.

And the questions are…

It never fails – after several months of not a whole lot to do (projects delayed before the reach me, or cancelled altogether, or waiting for customer feedback), three project hit at once. Theoretically, I’m supposed to be over in another building three days each week starting next week working on the conductive adhesive. Additionally, I got three process records yesterday that the customer wants yesterday. I can’t even get the raw materials in for that within a week. And today I got word that we need to make three or four batches of a urethane for a customer and my boss promised to have it for them two weeks after we get the raw materials in, which works out to within four weeks. That’d be great except each batch takes about 25 hours, or three days (at 8 hours/day) to make.

Something’s gotta give. I’ll be talking to my boss this afternoon about whether I can get some help for all of these batches I’m supposed to make.

Something else that’s weighing heavily on my mind is the fact that my review, which was originally scheduled for Friday, then moved to this afternoon, got pushed back to tomorrow morning so that his boss would have time to read what my boss wrote about me. I assume this is standard practice (his boss is a micromanager to the nth degree), but it makes me nervous nonetheless. I freely admit I don’t have the greatest work ethic, and I’ve been called on spending too much time on the net before. My boss doesn’t seem to like me that much, and communication is almost always instigated on my part, not on his, though talking to people they’ve supervised in the past this is pretty much exactly the way they’ve always worked. We had a few layoffs here last year, but the word since then is that “the budget is secure” which I read as code words for, “no one’s getting laid off anytime soon.” Still, I’m the second-least senior engineer in the department, and before these three projects hit there really wasn’t much for me to do.

On the bright side, this can’t really affect my promotion or raise: I’m not getting one. No one is. We’ve been under a 12-month hiring/promotion freeze since last May, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was extended for another six months before all is said and done.

Maybe I just worry too much. I guess I’ll know tomorrow morning…

UPDATE at 16:41 on Tuesday: I do worry too much. I got a printed copy of my review in advance of the meeting tomorrow morning. Essentially, it says I’m a competent, if not stellar, employee. This is just fine by me, since it’s been proven time and again here that there is precious little reward for excellence.

So this week we’re starting another “team building” exercise here at work (something far less horrid than other such exercises documented elsewhere). This time around they’ve divided us into six groups of three and we have to work together to answer five Jeopardy! questions each day. As a “team building” exercise I don’t think much of it, but I enjoy it because my brain is full of useless trivia. Anyway, here’s the answers for today:

$100
The last name of Moe (of Three Stooges fame)
$200
In 1997 Bill Cosby won favorite male in a new series, his 15th of these awards.
$300
In 1988, 9 years after her father’s execution, she became prime minister of Pakistan.
$400
Police warnings stem from the 1966 Supreme Court case of this man vs. Arizona.
$500
This star of “China Beach” is the heiress to a toilet flush valve fortune.

What, you want the questions, too?

Mmm…Boomtown Rats, baby.

So anyway…It was our last quiet weekend for a while. Saturday Dan and I had appointments at the health club for equipment orientation and such, and we really didn’t get a whole lot accomplished. Dan wasn’t feeling well that night and went to bed early, I bummed around online ’til way too late.

Sunday was a bit better – we got our weekly shopping done, and I had dinner over at Donald and Janelle’s with the gaming group. I got to chat with Brad and his new girlfriend (!) about Carbon Leaf (a great band in which his brother plays bass) and Technicon. Came home, chilled out a bit, and went to bed. Yay.

We also finally started making preparations for our annual Memorial Day party. We’ve sent out invitations and hope to see a lot of familiar faces and a few new faces, too. Eventually, this may evolve into something bigger, but for now we’re just looking to have a good time with friends. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to find someplace for all of them to sleep now that most of the beds have been claimed. I’m looking forward to spending some good times with friends, trying out cool new recipes, grilling burgers, playing games, and other fun stuff.

So, looking into the future, we have Partran coming to visit next weekend, then Technicon the following weekend, then I’ll be all by my lonesome while takaza has fun up in Chicago. No plans for Easter weekend yet, but that’s likely to change.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I really miss a good, heavy snowfall. Not any of these rinky-dink two-or-three inch jobs they usually get down here in North Carolina, but a park-the-car-curl-up-by-the-fire-with-some-hot-cocoa-and-stock-up-you-ain’t-going-nowhere-for-a-few-days kind of snowfall. Looks like y’all in the Chicago area are getting one of those tonight and I’m jealous. Looks like the forecast is for 8-12 inches in the metro area, 6 to 12 inches in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, we’re going to get…rain. Whee.

As an aside for you weather geeks out there, if you want to see the scoop on what’s going on behind the forecasts, and how meteorologists figure out what to publicize, here’s a nifty page (for the discussions in your area, just change the state abbreviation in the URL as needed).

It’s wrestlers versus pandas in a battle royale! Who will win? My money’s on the pandas.

I had to go back into my e-mail archive (yes, I keep e-mail forever – my archive goes back to 1995, and before) to verify this since my memory for dates is terrible.

Three years ago on February 27, takaza and I had our first date. We went and saw “Payback” in Crystal Lake and had dinner at a so-so family restaurant, then adjourned back to Dan’s place and hung out and watched roller coaster videos and what aver was on TV. And I, uh, spent the night. Anyway…

It’s hard to believe it’s been three years. Those first few months were a wild ride – just weeks before that first date, we had both broken up from previous relationships (can you say rebound?). Dan lived in McHenry, while I lived in Joliet, about an hour and 45 minutes away. Not bad as long-distance relationships go, but it was an added stress. And right after Duckon ’99, Dan’s former employer (K Mart) started giving him crap about not showing up to work the weekend of the con even though he had scheduled it off months in advance. We talked, and even though we had agreed that moving in together was something that would have been good to wait on, the job prospects were much better in Joliet. Four months into the relationship, Dan moved in. With all that going for us, it shouldn’t have worked.

But it did, somehow, and it has worked amazingly well.

Two years, nine months, and 22 days after that first date, we stood before our friends and families and declared our love in a ceremony celebrating our commitment to one another for the rest of our lives.

Dan, you’re the best damn thing that ever happened to me, and I love you very, very much.

A link stolen from BoingBoing:

Freeze a can of shaving cream and then peel the can away from the cream. Put the canless cream into someone’s car. Let the oven-like heat from the car’s sitting in the sun defrost the shaving cream. 2 cans will fill an entire car. (Coulter C. Henry, Jr.)

– 1001 things to do with Liquid Nitrogen

From the Department of Draw-Your-Own-Conclusions, Stereotypes Division:

Gay penguins surprise caretakers

The latest gay couple in New York to be photographed in matching tuxedoes isn’t a pair of businessmen or male models but a pair of penguins at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island.

Wendell and Cass, both 14-year-old penguins–in their forties in human terms–have been together for about eight years, but since penguins have no external genitalia, it was only recently that keepers discovered they are both male.

“They’re one of the most dedicated couples in the penguin enclosure,” Angie Pelekedis, a spokesman for the New York Aquarium, told The [London] Daily Telegraph. “They sleep in the same nest. They even have sex, though I don’t know how successful that is.”

Penguin keeper Stephanie Mitchell added, “I was only seeing one mate with the other, but then one of the other keepers saw it happen the other way round. We did a blood test that proved they were both male. Cass tends to be a rather aggressive bird. Wendell is very nervous; always has been. He’s on edge all the time. They’re currently in a dispute with another couple over their nest. It seems to be one of the most desirable places in the penguin enclosure.”

– The Advocate, 2/25/02

(This post gets no fun context links ’cause I’m running back and forth, typing and cooking)

At last, something constructive…

We were going to get stuff done yesterday, really. We went out and did a bit of shopping – Wal-Mart (yeesh, talk about your dregs of humanity), BJ’s Warehouse (unimpressive – glad we have a Sam’s Club membership) and a few other places. We had big plans for cleaning when we got back, but I pretty much just ran out of gas late in the afternoon. Bless his heart, Takaza just let me veg out on the sofa and made up a yummy batch of homemade macaroni and cheese (with that bacon-y goodness!). We ended the evening watching a few episodes of Junkyard Wars on the TiVo and I feel asleep in Dan’s lap watching the Olympics. Mmm, truly a lovely way to end the evening.

Today was a bit better – following the usual Sunday morning rituals of coffee/newspaper/music/call parents (ever the dutiful son, I am), we actually got motivated and cleaned up the house some. As I was scrubbing the underside of the dishwasher kickpanel, I had time to reflect on the nature of the anal-retentive… 🙂

Anyway, after that, Dan went off to do his first (of three) orientation sessions at the health club. I went off to Kohl’s and picked up some shirts and a pair of sneakers (somehow, working out in my black walking shoes seemed a bit…unstylish). Then it was the weekly grocery shopping, and then home. Right now, I’ve got beef stock simmering on the stove, a nice honey-corn bread in the bread machine, and I’m making up a batch of chili for dinner (and subsequent lunches this week). Making up for yesterday’s inactivity, I suppose.

As an aside, I’m amused to note that event hough I gave my parents my Livejournal URL, they don’t read it. I know this because they would be dancing in the streets if they knew we’d joined a health club, but they didn’t say anything about it this morning. Ah well, I guess the net’s not for everyone…

You know, the next time I’m sitting in front of my computer feeling uninspired about what to write here, I’ll let this page do the work for me.

Mmm…Saturday morning. I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got my newspaper, I’ve got some nice classical music in the background. Domesticity is good.

Strangest thing this morning – I was sound asleep having a dream about a phone call I needed to make this morning, when I was a awoken by a terrifically loud BUZZ! Now, the strange thing about this is that 1.) I sleep with earplugs in, and 2.) takaza was still sound asleep. I suppose I dreamed the buzzing noise, but it’s odd. Unfortunately, this was at 4:30 AM and I never did get back to sleep. I did get in some lovely snuggle time with Dan, though, so all was not lost (and he didn’t growl at me for waking him up. Probably ’cause I made it worth his while 😉 I’ll probably be pretty snoozy come tonight, though.

On the agenda for today: cleaning up around the house, and a trip to Wally World for a few things for the kitchen, plus some more shopping for sneakers. And I’ll probably make some bacon and eggs for Dan when he wakes up 🙂

Good grief, I’m glad it’s Friday.

Where did I leave off…oh yes.

So we went and toured the health club on Wednesday night and all I can say is day-ummm. This place has everything that I’d been hoping for – on-the-spot exercise counseling, health monitoring, assistance in putting together an exercise plan, nutrition analysis, plus really, nice facilities. It comes at a cost, but at least it’s strictly month-to-month, they don’t lock you in. takaza and I are going to drop off our membership forms on Monday and schedule whatever appointments we need to get us started. The plan is that we’ll meet at the health club every day after work (it’s between us, so it’s convenient) and spend an hour exercising, swimming, or whatever our plans work out to be, then head on home from there.

A side note: This journal will not be turning into “Tom’s Exercise Journal” – I hate those kinds of things, and find them incredibly tedious. I may record some of that elsewhere, but not here.

After touring the health club, we joined The Gang for dinner and games. That was a lot of fun – Thomas is a good friend of the owner of a local small restaurant and he has no problem with us showing up there and hanging out. So we got a yummy dinner and then the twelve or so of us broke up into groups playing Connect Four and Settler of Catan, and Dan and I a couple of others played a few rounds of darts which watching the Olympics. Much fun was had by all, even if we did get kicked out at 8:45 so the owner could go home (they normally close at 8).

Thursday wasn’t too exciting, though we did head out before dinner and pick up some workout shorts at Target, looked at music devices at Best Buy and looked at sneakers (and got completely ignored by the incompetent sales staff, as usual) at Just for Feet. After that it was home for a cozy dinner of pork chops and steamed corn, yum.

Tonight…well, not sure what will happen tonight. Given my choice, I’d rather curl up with a nice threesome of me, Dan, and the TiVo (we’ve got about eight hours of stuff stored on there right now), but Dan mentioned some of his co-workers were getting together tonight for dinner and then going to see “John Q”. Now, the reviews for “John Q” have sucked and I have no desire to see it, and even less desire to spend time around his co-workers who (in my opinion) tend to treat him like crap, but if he feels that it’s in his best interest to be there, I’ll be there with him (And I’ve told him this – one of the promises I’ve made to myself is that Dan will never read anything about us in this journal that will come as a surprise to him). Not sure what will happen, but we’ve done too many things that I wanted to do when he wasn’t too keen about them for me not to reciprocate. We’ll see. Well, time for me to head home. Have a great weekend, all!

Well, Monday’s trip to the doctor told me that my weight is getting up to downright embarrassing levels and roller coaster season is coming up and I like swimming but there’s those darned body issues…

All of which adds up to the fact that we’re going to start looking more closely at improving our diet and getting more exercise. I’d toyed with the idea of just fixing up my bike and cycling a bit around the neighborhood but I’m coming to understand that that just isn’t going to cut it. After work, takaza and I are going to check out one possibility, and there’s a couple of others we want to investigate (and one we don’t). The way I see it, the only way it’s going to work is if we do it together, with a steady routine, and improve our diet in addition to the exercise. We’ll see what happens.

As an aside, I’m mightily annoyed that this is going to be an expensive proposition for us because we are, of course, not married in a legal sense of the word.

If you are an OS X geek, I highly recommend you keep an eye on Ken Bereskin’s weblog. You can learn all sorts of useful stuff from this fellow, who just happens to be the Product Manager for OS X., like the fact that v.10.1.3 was put up on the servers for download yesterday afternoon.

You know, nothing in this world makes me feel as safe and as good as being in the arms of my woof.

I love you, Dan.

Well, yesterday, out of the blue, an appointment popped up in my Outlook mailbox: Team Incentive Checks.

Well, that was a surprise. It’s no secret that last year completely sucked for us. I was pretty much expecting a whole lotta nothing in the way of a bonus check (if not, as I joked to co-workers, an invoice “for the pleasure of working here”). After all, the fourth-quarter division report last week started with a slide describing the preceding quarters: Ugly, Uglier, Ugliest.

So this morning, the head of the department starts to run down the numbers: this was plan, if exceeded plan by this much, we maxed out the bonus at X, if we were below plan by that much, our minimum bonus was Y.

In every case, we were so far below plan we didn’t even make the minimum bonus. When all was said and done, our total accumulated bonus is…0.00%. whee.

At this point, the department head launched into this whole cock-and-bull bit about how he fought to give is something, a token at least to reward us for all our hard work during the year (trying to set up, yet again, an us-versus-them environment within the department), and announced that everyone would get a check for $100.

I guess I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, a regular bonus would be great – in good years, that could about to several thousand dollars for me (not that I’ve ever actually seen such things). It’s understandable that last year sucked and we’re not getting a bonus, OK fine. This has the feeling of a sop almost, a shut-up-and-take-what-you-get kind of thing. Speaking on sheer principle, I’m not sure we wouldn’t have been better off with nothing at all.

All that notwithstanding, though, you bet your ass I’m depositing that sucker on my way home form work, ’cause I’ll take any money they give me, principles be damned 🙂 Hey, if nothing else it will go into our coaster trip fund.

So much to do, not sure where to start. Need to wrap up the project plan for P042 – gods, I hate writing these project plans. They’re just going to get run over roughshod anyway, but we have to follow the procedures. Bleah. 15 pages of nonsense and pie-in-the-sky sales projections. Heh. And people wonder why I have such contempt for marketing droids.

So I’ve been following the back and forth elsewhere about CSS (cascading style sheets) vs. tables – yeah, I know, it’s stuff well outside of my areas of expertise, but I like to dabble. The concepts seem fairly reasonable, at least, and I hate setting up tables anyway.

I badly need to update my Coming Out page; it actually gets quite a bit of traffic (about 20 hits a day) due to it’s position in certain search listings (second from the top). I notice my traffic spiked on February 3 – 8 – weird. I wonder if I made someone’s link of the day or something. Nothing evident in my referrer log, though it’s rather rudimentary. Though I notice that I’m on the front page of several search engines if you search for Tom Brady. Looks like many people must have me confused for someone else.

Anyway, so yeah, I’ll be trying to figure out CSS and applying it to my site Real Soon Now. I’ve got some good references, so that should help. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even explore how to apply it to my LiveJournal.

Well, instead of working on my project plan I’ve spent about 20 minutes writing this entry. Who says LiveJournal isn’t useful? 🙂

Looks like we’re well on our way to getting online registration for Midwest Furfest up and running; we’ve checked out possible vendors, got approximate prices, and gotten the go-ahead to pursue the project. All that’s left is to nail down the details of how to integrate it into the Furfest web site and we’ll be off and running. My personal goal is to see this up and running by the end of the month, but to be fair I’ll need to talk to our webmaster and see if that’s realizable.

Also been gathering information on sponsor freebies – lanyards, tote bags, pins, etc. Not sure which we’re going to go with just yet, but the prices are surprisingly affordable. Heck, if we can do it maybe we can give them more than one freebie (this is, of course, in addition to the free T-shirt and two sponsor prints). We’ll have to see how the budgeting works out. If anyone is interested in seeing what I’ve come up with so far, drop me a line and I’ll send you the URL.

Last night was quite entertaining. As a birthday gift, my parents subsidized a nice dinner out, so we went out to Copeland’s with friends. Yummy, yummy food, though a bit spicy for some in our group 🙂 We were also celebrating a bit since the night before Thomas (who some of you may remember from our commitment ceremony) proposed to his girlfriend Sherry the night before. Yowza, what a rock she has on her finger now! After dinner we realized it was a bit late and headed on home for a quiet night and then to bed.

Today,…well, takaza is still asleep of course. Franklin called earlier and said that Amelie is still showing in the area, but only in Chapel Hill. We’re going to meet over at his place and car pool up there. The word of mouth is very good on this movie, so I’m looking forward to it. We were going to check out other ceramic tile stores in the area but after looking through the phone book it appears that none of them are open on Saturday or Sunday. What the hell is up with that? I think we had other errands to run today, but I can’t remember what. I’ll talk to Taki when he gets up. I know I need a haircut – when it gets long like this, it approaches Posi-hair…

Oh, as an aside, I wanted to mention that my parents sent us a lovely card for Valentine’s Day: “You two make perfect Valentines…because you’re both so special. We love you both, Mom & Dad. Give each other a hug for us!”

Wow. You know, my parents are so damn cool 🙂

Well, off to make waffles…

So when last we left Duncan, he was ranting in a curmudgeon-like fashion about how he dislikes birthdays…

takaza, that sneaky bastard, had ideas, you see. After ascertaining that I had no plans for the evening, he started asking around at work to determine nice romantic places to take someone for dinner. Right after he got home, he hustled me into the car and surprised me with a lovely romantic dinner at The Melting Pot. It was just wonderful, a leisurely meal, just the two of us, and I had a great time. The food was tasty, too 🙂

Tuesday night I was feeling kind of tired so Takaza took the initiative and cooked up a yummy dinner of linguine with tomato sauce and Italian sausage. I felt bad because I was pretty much a complete lump and just sat on the sofa while he cooked and cleaned up but he swore it was OK.

Last night I had a bit more motivation, so I set some pork chops in to brine when I got home and started a loaf of bread in the bread machine. Saute up the pork chops in olive oil with a little Penzeys Old World Seasoning, add some steamed corn and we’re good to go. After dinner we watched Swimming to Cambodia, one of my all-time favorite movies. Spalding Gray is an amazing monologuist and I always find his movies riveting. I’d seen this one before but it had been a while and I wanted to see if Dan would like it too. Well, it wasn’t particularly to his taste, but hey, I suppose we can’t have matching tastes in everything. I still have Taboo (Gohatto) sitting on the TiVo to watch, but I suspect Dan won’t be much interested in that one so I’ll probably watch it by myself this weekend.

Then we have today – Valentine’s Day. Dan surprised me with a card and a box of chocolates left for me to find after he’d left for work. Then, right before lunch, I got a cryptic voice mail message from him asking if I’d changed CD’s on the way into work. I checked the center console in my car and there was another card from him, as well as a little gift box of Tic-Tacs (which I love, but they’re addictive!). Silly woof. I have a very small something for him when he gets home – I honestly hadn’t intended to celebrate the day much, but I’ll see what we can do tonight 🙂 I wanna snuggle me some wolf!

I’m feeling restless lately. It’s only been a month since we were up in Chicago, and the next scheduled bit of traveling we have is Technicon in March, a month away. I’m kicking around the idea of an inexpensive weekend trip sometime in the next few weeks – maybe the Outer Banks, maybe the mountains. I’ll need to think about it more.

Check out this wonderful story about The Origin of Love, from my favorite musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

It’s worthy of note that the song is based on the Speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. Heh. Most palatable version of Greek philosophy I’ve ever heard.

I can smell your brains.

🙂

So it was the day before the Super Bowl and I’m checking to see what has accumulated on the TiVo overnight. Lo and behold, we have a message and a new option on our menu – well, cool. In addition to the Joe Montana TiVo commercial, there’s bloopers from the commercial as well as a three-minute piece explaining what TiVo is that you can show to all of your friends when they come over to watch The Big Game.

I’m thinking, “This is just bizarre.”

A few days later, what should come in the mail but a letter from the good folks at TiVo explaining that we’re valued customers and we should be sure to tell all of our friends about how wonderful TiVo is, and hey, here’s a nifty TiVo logo static sling sticker to help you start conversations about how wonderful TiVo is.

I’m thinking, “This is getting stranger.” Until I realize what’s going on…

What we have here is a classic example of viral marketing. TiVo knows it has a good thing. Its customers know they have a good thing. The trouble is, everyone else doesn’t know they can get a good thing (thanks to linnaeus for that link). Realizing that traditional advertising methods don’t work – I recall seeing several TiVo ads over the past few years but never got a grasp on what the actual product was – TiVo changed advertising agencies and is focusing more on getting its educated customers out to spread the gospel of TiVo. I think there’s parallels to be drawn here between TiVo and Linux, and, to a lesser degree, TiVo and Apple as well. Certainly in the case of Linux, it’s the word of mouth that does the marketing and the customers that do the evangelization. In many ways, the case for Apple is that it’s David versus Goliath and for TiVo it’s the consumer versus the programming giants. And everyone always wants to cheer for the underdog.

Which is why I may yet put up that sticker on my car or window at work 🙂

Just in time for Valentine’s Day…

Courtesy of the ACME Heart Maker