Skudd.com

Happy new year, and such

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:59:36 -0500

Well, in a little less than 24 hours, I'll be on CO 2607, from Indianapolis to Houston on an ERJ145 in seat 12A. The holidays went pretty well, overall. Christmas was nice, but the time with the full family was almost as short as it was last year. We had a good time all in all though. The day after Christmas, I was ordered to bathe the dogs, which kinda irked me. I figured I would do that though and it would be the end of the big laborious tasks while I was here. Wrong. I ended up spending the following day helping Dad (which in and of itself wasn't bad) fix some plumbing in a neighbor's house. The next day was again spent helping Dad (I still didn't mind helping him, it's just the rest that was annoying) clean up fallen limbs in the neighbor's yard. The next few days blurred together, but they all started with being awaken sometime between 6am and 8:30am, and were filled with the typical "Tim, I need you to..." tasks. This is the only rant I have about the entire time: I was on vacation, and I was here to visit my family. I didn't come here to break my back cleaning the house because someone else lacked the motivation. I took Mom and Dad out for a nice dinner last night at Mountain Jack's in Lafayette. We also saw "Seven Pounds" before dinner, which was pretty good. For the money I spent on the meal, I was far from impressed. I don't know if I've been spoiled by the Texan food or what, but it was basically a $40 meal that cost $100. Yeah, it was a lot of money, but I wanted to go somewhere with supposed good food. I don't think we'll be going there again. Yesterday for lunch, I went to Grandma's house for pizza and some board games she and I used to play a lot. We had 2 rounds of "Sorry", which had a final tying score of 1-1. We followed that up with 2 rounds of "Yhatzee", which Grandma won both of. It was a good time though, and I really enjoyed it. Today, Mom and Dad and I went to lunch at Pizza Hut. Aside from the waitress being a complete n00b (or idiot, I'm not sure which), it was a decent meal. When we came home, I helped Dad with some things on his computer, then we had dinner. I don't completely remember what else happened, but it was a decent day. Tomorrow will be spent on the road to Indy, then in the air to Houston, then on the road back to my apartment. I have to work Saturday morning, so I'll probably be in bed fairly early tomorrow night. Overall, I rate this trip 7 on a 1-10 scale (1 being the worst).

Lovely flight, I must say.

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:18:01 -0500

My flight today went pretty well, with a few exceptions. First off, the ascent was painful for me. With the sinus crap I've had lately, my ears are also stuffed up. Until we got some altitude and my ears started popping it seemed fine. But when the popping started, I found out there was a large chunk of earwax buildup in my right ear. By the time we started the descent, I was pretty much deaf in my right ear completely. You may remember from an entry a couple of years ago that I decided to go shooting without any hearing protection. This left me with some hearing loss in my left ear, so today's experience put me in the position of not being able to hear a darn thing. Fun. While we were in flight and the flight attendant (who had a bit of a flamboyant outward appearance) started passing out the snacks, he almost got a nice fight started. One of the older passengers had his legs stretched and his feet hanging out in the aisle. When the cart came up and barely bumped his feet, the passenger kicked the cart rather hard and started swearing at the attendant. It didn't escalate beyond that, but it did make for a bit of an uneasy flight. Our landing was pretty stellar. The weather conditions made for an icy runway, so our touchdown was a bit sideways on the runway. After taxing up to the tarmac, the pilot started his turn in to the gate. When he hit the brakes, it sent the plane into a spin, which stopped after about 180°. He completed the rotation and stopped, then announced that we would be waiting for a Tug, because as we were aware, the braking conditions were poor and he wasn't going to chance trying to taxi in. The road conditions here in Indy are pretty rockin', too. It took us 4 hours to make this trip. The roads were shut down because of the ice, so we ended up getting a hotel room, where we are now. What sucks is that my uncle's place, which is where we were going, is only 5 miles from here. So yeah, hooray for Indiana weather and awesome flights.

Xbox Live Avatar

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:38:11 -0500

Tell me, does this avatar look at all like me?

Dear Texas,

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:37:58 -0500

Dear Texas, It's not cold outside. Stop being such pansies and get on with it. In fact, throw your ski jackets away (at least until you see snow) because I really don't see it getting that cold here. Sincerely, Tim

Yay weekend!

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:51:12 -0500

I'm sitting in the terminal at IND (Indianapolis International Airport) right now, waiting on flight CO 1001 to head back to IAH (George Bush International Airport - Houston). I took the weekend to come back home and see the family, and to wish Mom a happy birthday in person. :) I really wish I could have spent more time here this weekend, but that wasn't really possible due to work and such. The bright side though is that I will be heading back up here on December 23 through January 2, and that's not very far away on the calendar. People have been surprised that I've been comfortable with the weather here this weekend; They expected that I would be freezing after staying in the sub-tropical environment of Houston for the last 3 months, then coming back to 30° weather. I do admit, it has been a little chilly at times, but overall it has been very bearable. Friday, I got to go back to the old office in Lafayette for a bit, had lunch with the current office manager, followed by dinner with a very close friend and his wife (and their 1-year-old daughter). After dinner, I went to hang out with another close friend and his roommate for a bit. By the time I got to Mom and Dad's, it was almost midnight, and I was beat. Saturday morning, the oldest sister (FueyLulu) and her husband came over to Mom and Dad's, and we went to lunch at "9 Irish Brothers" in Lafayette. There, I had a quick run-in with my cube-mate from work (TSRum), the aforementioned office manager, and the two former head sysadmins from Touch Support. I wish I could have stuck around to talk to them outside, but the family wanted to get inside where it was warm and where there was food. We stuck around Lafayette for a bit, then went back to Mom and Dad's for a couple rounds of "Settlers of Catan". Sunday, we woke up for french toast, sausage, and ham for breakfast, then FueyLulu, her husband, and I took Grandma out for lunch at KFC. After lunch, we headed back to Grandma's for a couple rounds of Yhatzee, then Mom and Dad joined us all for cake and ice cream. This morning, I had a light breakfast with Mom and Dad, then went to meet the one friend and his roommate for lunch, which was then followed by my journey to the present at IND waiting for my flight. I'm really looking forward to the trip back up here for the holiday, but I wish it could be more than what I have.

Short Game review: Race Driver: GRID

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:26:28 -0500

Holy crap, am I really playing video games again? Yeah, I admit to it. I picked up an Xbox 360 a couple months ago and have found myself playing quite a bit since. Anyhow, last weekend I picked up Race Driver: GRID and have been playing it a fair bit. I'm going to give you this review in 3 short categories. Graphics Simply amazing. Gameplay The controls are okay. The game modes are good. The AI is stupid/aggressive, even on the lowest difficulty, thus making it nigh impossible to do much. Overall experience If the AI wasn't so annoying and I could actually complete a race without being knocked off the course, I think it would be a great game.

An Terabyte!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:26:41 -0400

I spent a small portion of my relocation funds on new storage space for my computer. I ended up with 2 500GB SATA drives, which I added to my system in a RAID0 stripe. Click here to see the resulting disk space. :)

The end of a long week

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:40:13 -0400

Typically a week is defined as 7 consecutive days. The work week is generally 5 consecutive days long, broken up by a "weekend" of 2 days. For me, this week has been 10 days long, and my weekend is today and tomorrow. I've often been frustrated on those days where I sit at home with nothing to do but sleep, but my plans for today are just that. I may get up and around and take care of some cleaning or other stuff to finish this process of moving, but I just have no inclination to do much of anything. On a somewhat related note, who told the Xkcd guy how I was trying to get internet?

Texan Rodents

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:10:23 -0400

Back in Indiana, we always had problems with mice and chipmunks. Here in Houston, it's a little different: Meet "Liz". I'm not sure what kind of lizard it is, but it's one of the many that run around the courtyard outside my apartment. This one was sitting on my doorstep just now when I got back from the grocery store.

End of week 1 (sorta)

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:12:13 -0400

It's almost the end of week #1 here in Houston. It hasn't been too terrible, but it has most definitely been a challenge. From watching Mom and Dad leave on the bus to the train to Indiana, all the way down to sitting in my apartment ready to pass out after swimming 5 laps in the pool, it's been an interesting week. I spent most of the evening Wednesday trying to figure out something for internet here. I ended up throwing together the repeater I mentioned in the previous entry, which (knock on wood) has been okay so far. It has dropped connection several times, which has been right in the middle of me trying to do something. I've learned from that to not do anything too important over this "free" connection. I had one case where I needed to change some settings on this server, and actually had the sense to use 'screen' for it so when the connection did drop, I didn't lose whatever I had started. I have been working this week in others' cubicles, because the shipment of LCD's hasn't arrived for our department yet. I don't know if Edouard held them up or what, but it is quite frustrating to have to stop in the middle of something so the next person can get to work. I guess that's a small blessing though, because it means I don't have to work as late. :P We're supposed to get the rest of the screens sometime by Monday, so I'll probably be back to working long hours again soon. Because of the weak internet here at the apartment, I still haven't uploaded any more pictures. As soon as I get my DSL connection though, the 200MB worth of images is going straight to the gallery. Well, I'm going to spend tonight as I have every other night this week: Falling asleep to a random movie from my collection. You are all more than welcome to e-mail me or call (if you have the number), or attempt to talk with me over one of the various messenger services I use (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Smoke Signal, Semaphore). I look forward to hearing from you.