2 Bit Hacker

Back at work after Memorial Day weekend, it’s beautiful out and I want to get out of here, so I’m killing some time by doing a quick general life update.

The holiday weekend was good. On Saturday I went to a cookout at the house of one of my coworkers. It was a good time, though I ended up having to leaver earlier than I would have liked in order to get Jason back in town in time for a family event.

Sunday had a new first for me, a family event at my home! In the past my apartments have always been too small or too unpresentable to have people over, so it was nice to finally have my mom, one of my stepbrothers and his family over for a cookout. The weather was great, and it seems like everyone had a good time. Bailey was a little freaked out about all the people, but was okay with the kids.

Life in generally has been going pretty well. I hit 30k miles on the Prius last week and purchased a new set of tires, Goodyear Assurance Fuel Max. We’ll see if they actually make any difference on the fuel mileage. I’m still on track to hit my savings goal to hopefully get a house next year. Also decided to switch banks. I don’t really have any complaints with TD Bank, but their online services have somewhat stagnated. A lot of places now let you set up e-mail or SMS alarms on limits or events, and they’ve shown no improvement to their services in the past 4 years or so. Opened up a couple of new accounts at Bellwether and will probably be transitioning over there in the next month.

With the nicer weather, I’ve been giving more thought to taking a real vacation this summer, but I have no idea what to do. I was thinking it would be cool to get a few people together to rent a house somewhere for a week. Not sure who would be interested or where to go, but I think it’d be fun.

This is my first family holiday in a while where I’ve had no family things to go do. It’s kindof odd. Just me and the Bailey cat at the moment. He moved in on Friday, and seems to be enjoying himself. I think he’s a little confused that the floor is covered in carpet and there aren’t cages on the walls. He’s kindof like a big old kitten; everything here is new to him, and he has some of the kitten skittishness to him.

Work has been going well. My department just finished up a major project, which went pretty smoothly. Now we get some breathing room and will hopefully be able to fix up some of the less important things that deserve to be fixed. The company has issued me a Mac Book Pro, which I am quite liking. I keep comparing it to having a Linux laptop where everything works properly without having to futz with it. I’m really liking the little things, like iCal and Address Book, and how well everything syncs together, including my BlackBerry.

Stuff in the apartment has stalled a bit now that most of it is how I’d like it. The past couple of weeks I’ve been coming home, taking a walk, and just haven’t felt like doing much around the place. I should probably work on the office a bit this afternoon. Once I get that squared away, I’ll have a nice work area for doing projects. I should get some pictures posted once I get everything in place.

Another year, another post for the holidays, whichever ones you might choose to celebrate. I’ve been claiming Pastafarianism for most of this year, which prescribes a simple Holiday season. I really ought to pick up a copy of the holy book one of these days.

Anyway, I’ve got my desktop PC up and running again with a shiny new power supply. Hopefully this one will last for a while. Delia’s desktop’s video card started having fits when we hooked it up to a DVI monitor. I had similar issues with another card back when I first built this system, so I think it may have been a flaw in that line of cards. We picked up a new one at Best Buy, so it’s all happy again.

What with the new expansion pack and all, we’ve decided to take up WoW again. I figure with Jason playing and a few other friends on there, it’ll be a good way to waste away some winter nights. I’m looking to avoid all the stupid guild drama crap this time around though. So far it’s been pretty fun. A lot has changed since we stopped playing, so it’s kind of fun to discover all the little new things.

Not a whole lot going on otherwise. Thinking of having a New Year’s Eve party here. Slowly working on getting my stuff out of the second bedroom so Delia can use it as a massage room. She still needs to get in a bunch of practice hours before she can get her state certification back, so I figured having a place to practice would help.

Not a terribly exciting T-Day this year. I have the week off from work, planned on just rearranging some stuff in the apartment and relaxing, but instead I came down with a nasty cold on Monday. Delia caught it on Tuesday, and so today we’re both in pretty sorry states.

We ended up going to Bugaboo Steakhouse for a decent turkey dinner. It’s only the second time I can remember going to a restaurant for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t bad, and I was a little surprised with how many people were there.

Afterward we came back to the apartment, were in the door about 5 minutes when the fire alarm started going off. Shuffled back outside into the cold. Turns out that something on the first floor trigger the alarm, though that’s all the detail we got.

Since then, we’ve just been watching Bond films on TV. Delia has to wake up at some inhumane hour to go into work to open on Black Friday. Not a whole lot going on the rest of the weekend, then it’s back to work as usual on Monday.

Happy Independence Day!

Was playing around with my Canon SD870 last night, using the CHDK firmware to do long exposure images of the fireworks. Some of them turned out nicely, I think.

Not bad for having no idea what I’m doing anyway. See the rest of them in my gallery.

Happy holidays to everyone and all that. Delia and I just got back from her aunt’s house after eating far too much tasty food. I’m now the proud owner of a number of shirts courtesy of Delia’s family, a few more t-shirts, a neat mug, and PixelBlocks from Delia (in addition to the EV mode kit and floor mats for the Prius she already gave me on the solstice,) and a Garmin nüvi 250W from my dad.

Over the weekend Delia and I got the new TV hooked up, and it’s looking good. I also decided to go ahead and get the Xbox 360, and I’m rather glad I did, as the TiVo HD turned out to be dead on arrival. For some reason it was stuck in a reboot cycle and couldn’t get past it’s initial welcome screen. TiVo support was pretty cool about it and are doing an advanced ship RMA on it, so hopefully I’ll have that soon. The Xbox has been filling the time we would have normally spent watching TV, so it works out, I suppose. For games, we picked up Assassin’s Creed for me, DDR and Katamari for Delia.

Unfortunately my bad luck with new devices has extended to the Garmin my dad sent me. It powers up then complains that it has no maps and is therefore useless. Garmin’s online support is equally useless it seems, as they try to load pages from RFC1918 private address space, or try to redirect you to hosts that don’t exist in the DNS. Their phone support is, of course, closed for the holiday. Hopefully tomorrow will be more fruitful.

All in all though, I’m happy. I still think Delia spent too much on me, and I feel bad that I didn’t get her more, which seems to happen every year.

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.