Michelle and I are in the Twin Cities this weekend, and we’re staying with Dave and Andrea. They live in a large apartment complex, so you can imagine there are dozens of people with wireless Internet broadcasting all over this building. The one that I’m hooking through right now actually has an SSID of “TLA Best Stay Out Punk,” and it’s configured for wide open access… hey whatever.

Nice to visit these kids– haven’t been able to since they moved to MN. Dave is right, the layout of their current apartment is really similar to the place they had in Madison, so if you ever visited there, you have an idea…

Later on, Michelle and I are going to St. Cloud for Storyhill, but our hosts are unable to join us. I’m hoping we get back in time to do something social this evening, but if not, certainly that’s on the docket for tomorrow.

We did get to go out for coffee this morning. 😛 It was about 6:30 and the fire alarm went off in the building. There were some very pissed off 20-somethings tumbling down the stairs in their jammies at that time on a Saturday, let me tell you. But Dre bought us coffee at Caribou, and then she had to go into work. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so Dave and I talked about the latest goings on with our friends, agreed that X-Men? 3 sucked ass but Superman Returns was at least OK, and then we looked at some photos from Lorch’s wedding.

Michelle is still asleep on the couch, and right now Dave is getting his hair cut. We’re gonna bum around town a bit today, and I wanted to give Schneider a call. Not sure if he made it to Madison for homecoming or not. I sorta doubt it…

OK, more on these and other topics later.

So we have a kid working in our office who is really smart. Like, honestly—probably has the highest IQ out of everyone working here (students or permanent staff). I can tell he’s more “on the ball,” and picks up things a lot quicker than some of his student co-workers.

I find out today that he’s in College of Business for finance or accounting (hasn’t decided yet). And in my head I’m going, “Nooooooooo-ooo!!” My question is, does it make me a ‘humanities snob’ to look at this guy and say, “Man, what a waste of potential to be sunk into bean-counting. He oughta be working toward something that deals with ideas and innovation, not facts and figures…” (?)

Other than that, I’m sorry to have been neglecting the blog a little over the last couple weeks. Truth be told, I have busied myself around the house with either computer tinkering or (sighs) Madden. Inevitably, I get caught up in it for a week or two each year, and I think it’s passed now. Last Monday, I sat there playing and said to myself, “What the hell am I doing this for?”

The nice thing is that my stretch of Madden-play is usually followed by a guilt-provoked streak of mad-crazy productivity, so let’s be on the lookout for that!

In other news, I briefly entertained the notion of moving just one door down, to a 2-bedroom apartment, earlier this week. I found out my neighbors were moving out, and thought I would check into it. Turns out the place is already re-rented and it wouldn’t be a cost-effective move for me anyway. I was thinking of “saving” the money I spend on laundry every month (since the 2-bdrm has a washer/dryer), but the extra rent is a lot more than I spend on laundry. If I had a roommate, different story. But if you know me, you know how I feel about roommates at this stage of my life.

Michelle and I will be driving out to the Twin Cities this weekend, and we’re staying with Andrea & D-Slo?. If you’ll be around, gimme a call, maybe we can meet up for… something. We are also going to St. Cloud for Storyhill on Saturday night, so that night’s gonna be out, but…

Anyway, back to it.

Learned a life lesson this week, and I’m thinking it will change the way I approach this topic in the future.

My car insurance just went through the damn roof with my latest policy renewal. Having been covered under my folks’ policy for longer than most people, and only ever having had one company for auto insurance, I never thought a bit of what the rate was. I’d get a new policy renewal in the mail, file it, and watch the money fly out of my checking account once a month.

It never changed that much, but this month, the difference was to the tune of 20 bucks. Over six months, that’s a bit o’ cash. So, I went shopping a little, found a better rate, and I think I’ll be switching sooner than later. It seems too bad, though, having been with one place ever since I could drive a car…

Anyway, in the future, I’ll be watching that rate with every renewal, and I’ll be ready to switch at a moment’s notice.

Thinking of heading out to LaCrosse? for the weekend. They’ve got Ocktoberfest wrapping up, and Michelle has a friend who lives near the downtown area and enjoys the… debauchery. I also want to visit Grandma & Grandpa’s grave stone, and pop in to Uncle Jim’s, too. It occurred to me that I haven’t been out there since Grandma’s funeral.

In unrelated news, I was in the throes of more computer modification last night, and did two things:
– I installed a copy of Windows Vista, and it’s quite pretty. I don’t know if it’s any better than anything I have now, but aesthetically, it’s definitely an improvement.
– I somehow managed to break my TV box. I’ve done this (sort of) before, and one day it just magically fixed itself. I have to tinker with it a little bit more, but I might end up doing a cost-analysis to see if it would be cheaper to try to find a new motherboard that would fit the chip that’s in there, or try to do a whole different setup. I was going to put Linux on there in order to run Freevo, but then I ended up with some error or problem where the mother won’t boot.

At work, the speed is considerably lower, and I’m even online for the IMs periodically. Maybe I’ll see ya.

Oh, and I thought this was funny from yesterday – I re-registered to vote, what with having moved a couple months ago, and my new polling place is actually closer to my old apartment than the place I used to go. I dunno, maybe you had to be there.

Just got a new dual-layer DVD burner for my desktop computer. Which, if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know is now running Ubuntu.

I plugged it in and realized, “damn, this is the 7th or 8th different optical drive I’ve had in this mofo…” OK, so, disclaimer time– you’ll probably only appreciate this post if you’re a nerd.

I got my desktop machine as a gift from my mom and dad for graduating from college. I graduated in December ’01, but they were nice enough to buy me the machine before my last semester started, so just at the end of August, this computer crossed the 5-year mark for age.

I could note that in that time, I have also had a grand total of 7 laptops (although 2 of them I didn’t buy, and three of them were someone else’s used shite by the time I got to them via ebay).

The machine was pretty near the top of the line when I got it (in the upper 95% for standard home/office use anyway), and when you think about how quickly people throw out computers these days, it’s pretty amazing. Obviously, there have been upgrades time to time, but man– that processor just keeps on chugging, and doing a damn fine job of it. There have been times I’ve tried to retire this thing and it just won’t lay down.

Granted, there was the fire in 2002 out in Bozeman, and when all was said and done, that resulted in a ‘TMP’-level refit (new motherboard, hard drive, heatsink and power supply), but I don’t think anyone can say you haven’t gotten your money’s worth out of a computer that is still extremely useful after more than 5 years.

So Red-Five: long may you run.

OK, yeah… this is a really weird post, but whatever. I’m gonna go install Vista RC1 now.

Work finally slowed down this week, and I am catching up on things (at work, I mean) that I had to put on the back burner for a while.

I am simultaenously trying to steel myself for another onslaught that is sure to come.

Haven’t been much with the blog this week, mostly due to visits and TV. I watched the third season of Arrested Development early in the week, and it is really unfortunate that that show was forced off the air. It was brilliantly hilarious, and they succeeded in sewing up all its loose ends down the stretch. If you haven’t seen this show, I definitely encourage you to take a look on DVD…

Michelle came up on Monday night and we watched Garden State. I think it is one of her new favorite movies. We also ordered out for Chinese, and Michelle had such a good time on the phone making the order, they almost hung up on her. You’ll have to ask her about that story.

Wednesday I was down in MKE, hooking up a desktop computer at Michelle’s, since her aging iBook is just not a practical computing solution any longer. I lent her a P-III 733 running Ubuntu. I think she’s going to adapt to this new OS very quickly. Michelle’s computing needs are fairly straightforward, and there doesn’t seem to be anything she does that Linux can’t handle. So it’s all good.

Last night, I hooked up with Devin at Peabody’s to watch the Brewers game. Not sure if it was a great game for the Crew, or a hopelessly shitty game for the Cards, but either way, it was a win. My favorite moment in the game was in (I believe) the 4th inning. Tony Gwynn Jr. hit a grounder to first with 2 outs and nobody on. The St. Louis infield sort of lolly-gagged on the play, fully expecting the inning to be over, but little Tony shot up the line like a rocket and BEAT THE THROW. It was pretty awesome.

Don’t have much happening as far as “plans for the weekend,” so let me know what’s up.

Twin Cities be aware: I will be visiting in 2 weeks…

I really have no idea why I did it, but I downloaded the new version of iTunes on my computer at work today. Honestly, the biggest reason was that I wanted to remind myself why I don’t use iTunes (typically, it’s the memory-sucking, vs. the relatively low consumption of Winamp).

But I loaded the modest collection of music that I’ve compiled on this computer into the ‘Library,’ and promptly didn’t like the way it was indexed (combined with the old list, and some things doubled-up for some reason, etc.). I decided I would flush it out and start over.

Well, I’ll have you know that iTunes 7 is a lying sack of shit. When I selected everything in my ‘Library’ and hit delete, it asked if I wanted to delete the files, noting that this command would only affect those that were in the ‘iTunes Music folder.’ I don’t keep anything in the iTunes music folder, so I said, “yeah, whatever, just empty the damn library.”

Apparently what iTunes considers to be the ‘iTunes music folder’ is ‘every folder on, in, attached to, or nearby this computer,’ because what it did is erase all those files, leaving me only with now-useless .m3u files, like a plate of breadcrumbs on my harddrive.

Bastards!

I might just bring the external hard drive back in to work to replace the items in question. One thing is certain, though: I am not letting iTunes anywhere near my music.

I had a guest this weekend. Michelle’s dog, Snoopy stayed over here while Michelle and her mom are having a weekend ‘vacation’ of sorts here in the Fox Valley…

Last night, I went out to dinner with Joe and April at the Gardenview in Oshkosh. They commented on how none of the other diners were under age 55, and that is certainly true when you visit the Gardenview. But the fish was decent.

After that, I went with them over to Scott and Tracy’s house (friends of theirs) and did a little troubleshooting on Scott’s new router/network. It was hard to do because he’s working with some really old hardware (and software). I don’t really remember how/why Windows 98 works at all… So I gave them an upgrade CD for Windows 2000, at least.

We had to come back to my house to meet Michelle, Mom, and the dog, and then Lorch came over, too. We hung around the house, threw the longest game of darts ever, and played Michelle’s “Table Topics” game. I guess it’s really not so much a game as it is a… what does Amazon call it here? Eh, it’s a set of cards with interesting questions on them, I guess. We had some fun talking about those things. And making fun of some of the questions.

Writing all these sentence fragments is OK, too.

I just got the email that said Milwaukee beat San Fran again, by scoring double-digit runs, again. I am really hoping that Geoff Jenkins has provided some schmuck of another team’s GM with enough of a glimmer of hope that they’d be willing to trade for him this off-season. God, I hope the Crew gets ANYTHING for that guy. It’s sad, but seriously– I’ve had a hard time believing they stuck with him this long.

I don’t remember if I mentioned this earlier in the week or not, but I set up a Linux box for Michelle to use until she can afford to get a new computer in the spring. I dressed it up to look like Mac OS so she would feel right at home. I liked it well enough that I did the same thing on mine.

I also watched Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back this evening– the original cuts, ripped from the laserdiscs. Snoopy enjoyed them as well and has decided to be Yoda for Halloween. I think the picture helped. I might end up getting those damn re-release DVDs, though, if they’ve cleaned up the negative, etc. I would definitely wait for them to go on ‘used’ sale at Hollywood or something.

A couple things from my walk to work this morning:
1. The thing I’m looking forward to about this winter is having my car in a garage.
2. Why would anyone want to live less than 3 blocks from campus with a baby?
3. Dude– it’s not my fault you have to cut the grass when it’s 40 degrees out, so enough with the dirty looks.
4. Young female student gossips about a friend’s wardrobe choices while walking down the sidewalk in her pajamas.
5. Yeah, I sure do hope that WI manages to vote down the Gay Hatred Amendment in November…

Some of you won’t even remember these…

But here it is.

You might as well have a spin around the videos while you’re there, too.

I’m going to stay busy with what I’m doing. Trying to get some misc. media files to work on Ubuntu…

Oh, and with the video– you may need to pump up the volume.

I walked out the building today and I had to cinch up my jacket, what with a stiff breeze blowing across the campus.

I don’t know if it’s just the warm memories from college days past or what, but on days like this, the first couple that really feel like fall, I tend to want to be in our state’s capital, milling around state street and the surrounding territory.

I wonder if I could still get away with parking in the lot on Gorham…