2 Bit Hacker

So, another birthday come and gone. Nothing terribly eventful this year. Delia gave me a tool bag along with an RJ-45 crimper and a Cat5 stripper, so I can finally make my own cables without having to use tools at work. She also picked up a business card holder for my desk at work, and some additional coasters for the apartment.

I’ve also been on a bit of a spending spree lately, picking up some new shoes from Zappos (online shoe buying is so much easier than offline), a new mouse and laptop AC/DC adapter from Woot, and a new 2007 Toyota Prius which should arrive on Monday or Tuesday.

Another Christmas come and gone. Doesn’t even really feel like it was all that big a deal this year, probably because I only gave one gift out, since I couldn’t afford to get gifts for a lot of people. Hopefully next year I’ll have more spare cash to throw around.

Anyway, early last week my dad and Mary came out to visit. They attended Delia’s Winter Solstice Celebration concert on Sunday, and we ate a bunch of dinners together. I couldn’t really get any time off from work, so we didn’t really have time to do much other than that. Mary got a massage from Delia though, and seemed to enjoy it. The evening before they left we did the whole gift thing. They gave us some holiday dishes, an RC car to play with, and a check to cover the cost of getting some new (and badly needed) tires on the Focus. Delia also gave me her gifts then, including a Game Boy Advance SP Classic, a case for it, and Hellboy and Ella Enchanted on DVD.

Later in the week, my mom and Ralph came down from the frozen northern regions of Maine. They were actually down for some tests for Ralph, but it was good to see them around the holidays. I really should get up to Maine more often, but the drive is such a pain. Anyway, Ralph was looking better than I expected, though the drug he was on caused him to gain a lot of weight. I guess he’s starting to do a bit better, which is good. I hope to head up there for Easter. We ended up getting together on Christmas morning for a bit of breakfast. It wasn’t the big traditional family breakfast, but it was still nice to be together and have cowboy eggs. They ended up giving me a check as well, though I wasn’t expecting anything. With Ralph being sick, things have been pretty tight for them.

Oh, and on Sunday, I was rather surprised that kat_ra gave me a gift; Arc the Lad 4 for PS2.

I think that covers everything, though I’m sure I forgot something, I always do.

Edit: Of course, I forgot the gifts that Delia’s aunts gave me, a gift card to Best Buy, a calendar, and a new shirt.

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.

Well, I’m officially a year older now. My birthday was on Saturday, and I woke up to find a cryptic note on my chair; the start of a scavanger hunt of sorts around Manchester. Delia set it up for me, running around Manchester finding clues, eventually leading to her and a bunch of friends down by the river behind UNHM. I’ll be scanning the hints at some point and putting them in my gallery sometime soon. From the river, we went over to Bickford’s for breakfast, then the group broke up, since lithiumlilly had to go to work, and angry_amy had some other things to attend to. So the remaining group (myself, Delia, Dan, Dave, and Tim) made our way down to the Loop to catch Spider-Man 2 with a bunch of FoR. This was my second time seeing it, as we caught the 11:59 showing on Tuesday, when it opened as well. It’s a great movie, as good as the first one, and certainly among the best comic book movies ever (X-Men being the only other good series that comes to mind.)

After the movie we wandered back to my apartment to play some SC2 before wandering off to dinner at La Carreta, perhaps the best Mexican food place in the area. Then we caught some of the fireworks, and went back to my place to play Apples to Apples until far into the night. Oh, and somewhere in there Matt gave me a call, which was cool, since I hadn’t heard from him in a while. Overall, I think the day went very well, and I’m still amazed at how much Delia did for me. It’s certainly the best birthday I’ve had in recent memory.

Oh right, the booty list: Delia got me DVD’s of The Two Towers and Invader Zim, a ton of red pens, a bunch of graph paper (my favorite kind of paper), a fishie (from last month, but he’s still a birthday gift), and some other stuff once she finds it. Amanda gave me a gorilla keychain with an LED in the mouth that lights up. Dan claims my gift isn’t here yet. Tim or Amanda (I’m sure one of them will correct me if I’m wrong) gave me a Dogma inaction figure of Silent Bob wielding a golf club. absinthexl and shiftless put together a poster of p4t images, which is really cool, I should get it framed. My grandma and grandpa Nixon sent some money, as did my mom and Ralph. My dad is making me drive out there to get my gift. I think that’s everything, but I’m sure I’m forgetting something or someone, I always do.

On with the weekend. On Sunday, Delia and I went to her aunt and uncle’s house in New Boston for breakfast and to watch the parade. We hung out there for a bit before heading over to kyotemusings’s house for a party. There was a lot of food (which I ate too much of), and a lot of drink (which I drank very little of) and we managed to get some new people to play Apples to Apples. We left kindof early from there and met up with darkenna and theglitterfades for dinner at Denny’s (a Sunday night tradition) before finally wandering home to collapse.

Yay! I got my first birthday present yesterday! Delia surprised me after breakfast by having me drive to Petco, where we proceeded to pick out a nice little betta fish. I don’t have a name for him yet, so if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to comment. I was kindof thinking of Eric the Betta Fish, but I’m not so sure. I do have a fishiecam up, currently using Yahoo Messenger, so if you use YM, you can add the fishiecam and watch him swim around.

This was a rather early gift, seeing as my birthday isn’t until July 3rd. That means there’s still plenty of time for the rest of you to buy me things Now seems like as good a time as any to post a list of things that I wouldn’t mind owning. I don’t really expect receive anything, but if you want to get me something for some weird reason, here’s some ideas:

• Something from ThinkGeek
• One of these shirts, though they don’t go up to 3X, so it would have to be another incentishirt. (Soon…)
• Can’t really think of anything else right now. I’m sure I’ll come up with something and add to this.

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?