2 Bit Hacker

The drive up to Michigan ended up getting delayed a couple days, as I came down with what seemed like a bad cold last week. I started running a fever on Tuesday night, and could barely move on Wednesday. Delia ended up making the drive to Michigan on Thursday, and I was starting to feel better by Sunday, then one of my tonsils decided to swell up to the size of a kiwi. My dad ended up dragging me to the hospital, where I was checked out and given a prescription for Motrin and an antibiotic. Doing much better now. The swelling is still there, but no more pain. Hopefully it’ll shrink back down in a few days.

Anyway, I finally ended up having the meeting for the job in Saline today. The meeting was a lot shorter than I expected, they just asked some basic questions about my backgrounds and skills. Apparently the job won’t actually be opening up for a while, so, although it would be a really cool job to get, I’m not going to be holding my breath for it. I need to give RNet a call to see if they’ve decided on anything yet, and once I get back to NH I’m going to look into getting some temp work or something.

That’s about it. We’re going to be heading out tomorrow, starting the nice long drive back to home. It’ll be nice to be back in my own bed again.

As some of you know, Delia and I have been on a road trip since Friday. It’s mainly a trip for me to try and find gainful employment, since I haven’t been having much luck in the NH area. Yesterday I interviewed at RNet, the ISP that Jason works for. I thought the interview went pretty well, but we’ll see how it goes. One of the interviewers seemed somewhat concerned about Jason and I being friends and working together, but I don’t think it ever caused a problem at JLC or Net-Temps. Delia seems to like the Bloomington area, and has already interviewed with a massage place in the area.

Tomorrow we’re planning to head north to my dad’s house for a few days before heading home. I hope to meet with someone concerning a system administration job at a school in Saline, MI. It’s pretty close to where my dad lives, and the job looks pretty interesting from the description.

Other than that, not a lot going on. It’s been cool seeing Jason and Stacey again and hanging out and getting Delia away from WoW for a bit. Unfortunately, my trip coincided with Matt’s trip to NH, so I completely missed seeing him, which sucks.

Although, if I move out here, it would be a shorter drive to visit Houston…

Well, I finally managed to snag the laptop away from Delia long enough to update again. Day 2 was mostly spent finishing the drive from Rochester to Michigan. I got a little lost trying to find my dad’s house, but we got here eventually. My dad wasn’t doing too well, but he was social for a little while, and got to meet Delia and such. I got the last of my birthday gifts, a tea mug from England and a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR250, for the HTPC. I can hardly wait to get home and install it.

Day 3 was mostly spent in the hospital, waiting during my dad’s surgery. It sounds like everything went fairly well, though they’re still not sure if it was cancerous. I guess they’re going to run some tests on the stuff the removed, and they’ll know more at the end of the week. We visited with him for a bit afterwards. I had received warnings that he was going to look horrible, but I didn’t think he was looking all that bad. He seemed pretty tired, so we left after a bit.

That evening we went into Ann Arbor looking for a BookCrossing book at a cafe, but were unable to locate it. Then Delia played some DDR at a local arcade and we hit a Borders, where I grabbed a book on house buying. Apparently Ann Arbor was the location of the very first Borders book store, which is kindof cool. We then went back toward my dad’s house, and went into a Meijer, so Delia could experience the less evil version of Wal-Mart.

Today the plan is to go visit my dad again, then head up to Toronto to meet Delia’s sister, and probably do some touristy things. Hopefully I’ll find a place to hop online again to make another update.

Sitting in a hotel room in Rochester, NY with free Internet access, so I figured I’d do an update. Yesterday was the start of Summer Vacation 2004 (SV2k4!) Kindof followed Doug and Delia out to Vershire, VT for the wedding of Doug’s roommates, Michael and Michelle (probably spelled wrong, ah well.) It was a renaissance themed wedding, and Delia managed to get me to dress appropriately. Once I find a CF reader, I’ll work on getting the pictures posted.

After that we started the long drive to Michigan. We were going to stop in Syracuse, but all the hotels were booked. After checking a couple of exits, Delia had the bright idea of calling and finding a room while we were on the highway, which led us to Rochester. It’s kindof ironic, since we were thinking of trying to visit Dave when he went back to school here, but we ended up being here a week and a half before he’s heading back.

So today, Day 2, we’re finishing the drive out to see my dad. We’re heading through Canada, which is always a nice, boring, flat drive. This is the first time I’ve made this trip with someone else, it makes it a lot easier. I’m looking forward to seeing my dad again, and I’m happy that Delia’s coming along to meet him, but I’m nervous about his operation tomorrow. I’m sure everything’s going to go well, but I’m still nervous about it anyway.

Hmm… I really haven’t been posting much, have I? Well, not that much has been going on really. Work has been going pretty slowly latety. It seems like I’ve been caught on the same stupid modem problems forever now. I wish we could just throw the whole voicemenu system idea out the window. It currently works such that we can either use the modem in our remote systems to do a voice menu system to access data via a normal phone, or we can get a data dial-in, but the modem at this point is refusing to switch over into data mode correctly. It’s a major pain. I hate modems.

Outside of work, things have been going fairly well. Delia and I went up to my mom’s place in Maine a few weeks ago. Delia ended up doing pretty much all of the driving on the trip, which surprised me, though she did get pulled over for speeding by a state trooper (“Ever been stopped for speeding in Maine before?” “Uh, not in Maine, no” I had a good time on the trip. Ralph was out of the hospital, and seemed to be doing okay. Delia seemed to like it up there, with the lake. I was hoping for a clear night to be able to see the stars so far away from the city lights, but the clouds were against me.

The weekend after that was Delia’s concert with the Merrimack Community Chorus. She attracted quite a group to go see it, including myself, Dan, Dan, Dave, and the one I’m not allowed to mention on LJ. I enjoyed the concert quite a bit, and look forward to getting a copy of the CD. Unfortunatly my leg was hurting quite a bit that night, which sucked. Hopefully it stops doing that soon. Delia looked extremely silly in her mismatched tights, skirt, orange shirt, and pimp hat. Unfortunately none of my pictures came out well.

I think that catches us up to Memorial Day weekend. I ended up spending most of the weekend at home working on computer stuff in the apartment. I swapped around a bunch of motherboards, upgrading Delia’s work computer, putting a DVD+/-RW drive into Vincent, dismantling Terra, getting a DVD-ROM into Shadow (which is now ready to go back into the entertainment center), and building a new Interceptor, this one running OpenBSD. It’ll replace the sparcstation 10 running NetBSD that I’m using as a router at home currently. I mainly just wanted to play around with using OpenBSD in a firewall/router situation, since I’d like to switch over the firewalls at work to it. We’ll see how it goes.

Saturday night I went with absinthexl and shiftless to see The Day After Tomorrow. I thought it was an okay film. The effects and CG were pretty, the whole thing looked nice, but the story was pretty flat and predictable. It was good to get out of the apartment though. We went to TGI Friday’s after the movie, and Ryan kept choosing the same things I was thinking of ordering. For some reason I have this thing where I can’t order the same thing as someone else at a restaurant. Seems like it takes all the fun out of it. But eventually I gave up, and we both had jalapeno burgers. It was tasty.

Sunday and Monday I accomplished approximately nothing, which I’m not exactly happy about. Ah well. Delia came back from the Realms event she was at on Monday morning, then had to work all day, and was dead tired by the end of the day. She had a great time, apparently, and is all excited about upcoming events. She keeps mentioning how she tried to get me to go. I probably should have, or at least gone to the Loft or something.

Now it’s Tuesday, and I’m back at work, and the modem is mocking me again… Where’s my hammer?