Pulled another all-nighter at work last night getting ready for the demo this morning. I thought I was going to lose it a couple of times, but everything came together pretty well. I ended up getting home around 11am and just dropped into bed. Mark seemed pretty happy with how everything looked and worked, and hopefully we’ll get some business out of this.
Aside from work, which has been taking up far too much time recently, not much has been going on. Andrea has pretty much been ignoring me for the past week, I can only assume she’s either pissed off at me about something or too busy with school to bother talking to me. Not really sure what to do about it at this point.
At least this weekend should be a good time. Tomorrow morning I’m leaving for Houston for Matt’s wedding. He’s my second friend to get married, Jason being the first. At least I’m not the best man this time, I suck at giving speeches. 
I’m sure Chris will come up with something good though.
I’m still pretty tried at this point, but I suppose I should go round up some dinner. There’s basically nothing in the apartment that could be called a meal at this point. And I should do some laundry and get packed. And I meant to get a haircut today, but slept instead. So I’m not sure when I’m going to fit that in before Saturday. Tired of thinking about stuff now. Maybe I should just go back to bed.
So, I went into work around 11pm last night, stayed here until about 7 when Mark showed up. Got a ton of stuff done, went home, slept from about 8 to noon, then headed back into work. Looks like we’ll be in good shape for the show, which is on Wednesday. I thought it was on Tuesday, which is why I worked all last night, instead of tonight. But it’s better this way, I think. I just have a few more things on my to-do list, all of which are relatively minor. Wheeeee! I so much want to just go home and sleep at this point.
I also want to play more Shadowbane. So addictive, so counterproductive. Probably not a healthy alternative to a social life, but I’ve never been much of a people person anyway.
Lots of stuff going on at the moment. Last weekend I drove up to northern Maine to bring my mom back her cat. It takes about 7 hours to get there, so I spent most of the weekend in the car driving. They’ve got a nice little place up there. It’s a lot smaller than their house in Milford was, but it’s nice. It’s right on a lake, and I guess Ralph has been talking about getting a boat. My mom let the cat out on Sunday morning and he disappeared for a couple days, we thought he had just run off, but he ended up coming back. I guess he just wanted to run around for a bit after being stuck in my apartment for over a month.
Spent most of the time since then getting ready for a SimPro demo coming up this Tuesday. We’re working on rewriting pretty much the entire system, and Mark wants it at least somewhat functional for this demo. I think we’ll make it, but it’s going to be close. My code is about 90% there for collecting data, but I still need to modify the notification stuff so people get calls when something breaks. At the moment I’m working on installing Linux on the new remote system. So sick of working on this stuff already.
Luckily, I’ll get a break from it next week. I’m leaving Thursday to fly down to Texas for Matt’s wedding. It’ll be nice to get away from NH for a bit and see some of my friends, if only for a couple of days. I still need to get a gift and stuff. Such a slacker, I am.
Also, Dave and I have hit a couple of geocaches to break up the monotony of code writing. We found two, but couldn’t find a third that we tried for yesterday. I did pick up a travel bug, which I’m planning to plant in Texas next weekend before I fly out. It’s fun to get out and wander around the woods trying to find stuff. Reminds me of back when I lived on Summer St. in Milford and would wander on the trails by the water tower. I think I should make a point of going to one each weekend, though it’s going to be tricky once it starts snowing.
Well, enough rambling. I should clean this place up a bit while I wait for junk to compile on the SimPro box.
I got somewhat bored the other day and have decided to try out a different anti-spam (or UCE if you perfer) tool called Active Spam Killer. I’m currently using it instead of SpamAssassin, which I have been using for a while now. Basically, instead of taking SA’s approach of trying to determine if a message is spam or not based on a number of patterns, database checks, and word probabilites, ASK just considers all mail to be unwanted unless it’s sender is on it’s whitelist. Any sender it doesn’t know about is sent a confirmation message, and once confirmed, they’re added to the whitelist.
So far it seems to be working pretty well, havn’t gotten any spam through it, which is to be expected, and after a little bit of work of setting up all my mailing lists, it doesn’t appear to be trapping any of my legitimate email. I know it’s a slight inconvenience for other people when they first send me something, but since I don’t get much non-list mail anyway, I don’t think it’s a big deal.
Somewhat odd thing happened today, Dave and I went to lunch at Foodee’s, which, in itself, is not odd, but I saw one of my old teachers from high school there, Mr. Garnham, my American Government teacher. This is also not all that odd, as we were in Milford and all. The odd thing was, after work I went to the grocery store in Manchester, and as I was driving through the parking lot, I noticed my old chemistry teacher.
Two teachers, one day. What are the odds?
Andrea and I did something a little different this weekend, she dragged me out of bed Saturday morning at some ungodly hour (I think it was close to 8, far too early to be awake on a weekend) to head into Boston to visit the Museum of Fine Art. We went through nearly the entire place, I think we missed some of the Greek and Roman stuff though. I found the ancient Egyption, Chinese, and Japanese stuff to be interesting. The more modern artwork was somewhat less interesting to me. I have a feeling that I just don’t get a lot of it. Ah well, I had a good time anyway.
On Sunday I tried to clean up the apartment a bit, though I didn’t get far, partially because I was also playing around with Shadowbane, an MMORPG that a bunch of people that I used to play CS with are now into. It seems fairly interesting. They’ve got a 10-day free trial that I’m on now, and if I choose to subscribe I get 31 days before they start charging, so it’s a decent period before I have to pay for anything. In other game related news, I filled out a collection over on IGN. Not a bad total value, if you ask me.
As for apartment stuff, I should have received a package today containing the rest of the X-10 stuff that I want to get installed, including a couple of wall switches, a computer interface, and some wall plates so I can get ethernet and cable trhough the wall seperating the bedroom and living room. Should be pretty nice once I get it all in.
Oh, and my mom and Ralph’s whole cabin plan in Maine fell through, so instead of buying the set of four cabins they’re just buying a house up there. My mom seems pretty happy with it, not sure what Ralph thinks though. Apparently there’s also some computer company up there that’s hiring a bunch of people, so it looks like they both might get jobs there. At least things are finally working out for them. Sounds like I’ll be bringing the cat up this weekend, which will be nice. No more litterbox! Yay!
