So 2004 rolls around. Yippee. Ended up ringing in the New Year at Medill, but eventually made it to Top Shelf. Loft warehouses are freakin' cool. Makes me wonder what could have been with Monster Loft. Oh, the New Year's Eve party that could have been. Didn't drink, was a driver, not a loser, baby. Had a family luncheon out in Schaumberg, which was good. Finally finished, well, mostly finished cleaning up the place. Still need to organize/trash a bunch of electronic stuff, go figure. Started trying my hand at CafePress stuff. It's really really cool. Very very easy way to sell personalized stuff. Easy, super easy way to do jerseys for a special occasion. Looks like Sai tonight. And hopefully, a whole lot of sleep.

So my ongoing issue with Outlook at work and iCal/AddressBook at home and a t68i at both, well, I've decided to try something else. Using iAppoint to turn my outlook calendar into an ics file, scp it home, and using phpicalendar to publish it, and then use iCal to subscribe to it, and then use iSync to sync the phone. Long and convoluted, I know. It also doesn't put my personal calendar into Outlook. But then again, why should it. But we'll see how long this lasts. If only there was an iSync client for Windows.

Jack Frost finally made an appearance in Chicago and dumped some snow. So after Christmas and New Years, on the last night of Zoo Lights, it snows. A lot. It really feels like winter now. Makes me happy. Makes me happy that I don't have to drive. Makes me want to get my boots though, which I don't have. Anyway, weekend was good, sushi on Friday, pre wedding party and birthday beer in Andersonville on Saturday, and lots and lots of sleeping on Sunday. One look outside and it was back to bed. Back to the diner this morning, definitely good to be back. Only thing on the horizon is Vegas this weekend. I'm rather interested to see what Apple will be releasing tomorrow at Macworld, and I'll be reloading constantly, trying to figure it out. Or, maybe I'll try out IRC.

Kept track of my first Macworld via IRC with the #macrumors crew. IRC's pretty cool, which I guess makes me a newbie, bigtime. But still, nice real time transcript. No pictures, but then again, nothing too exciting. I'm only really excited about iLife '04, mainly iPhoto. More Rendezvous sharing rocks. Otherwise, G5 Xserves. mini iPods, which I don't get. The Xserve is interesting as I research more and more on co-locating. I'm doing bandwidth research on my home machines to figure what plans might work for me. Using ipfm. It's freakin' cold out by the way. Finally. Started Clear and Present Danger. Good to get the intro and history of Ding and Clark, especially after Rainbow Six.

The most exciting thing so far from what I've read on Macworld, is elgato systems and their EyeTV and EyeHome products. Finally a firewire TV Mac system and a set top box to hook into desktop media. My issues, beside not being official Apple products, is that the TV thingie isn't HD, and the set top box isn't Rendezvous with iPhoto and iTunes, it uses an additional server on the computers to serve the stuff up. Oh well. Maybe next time. CES started today, and even though I'm going to Vegas, I don't think I'll be able to get in, since you gotta pay to do so. Probably be pretty busy anyway. Watched Finding Nemo last night with Leah. Good movie, but quite sad, depressing, scary at the beginning. Like I wonder how little kids could sit though it.

Even heading to bed at a very early hour, waking up this morning I would have loved to have kept sleeping. If only. And with Vegas this weekend I have no idea how much sleep I'm going to get, not much I assume. Wonder if I should even bother to bring a book to read on the plane ride, or if I should just use that time wisely to sleep. Leah made dinner last night, good stuff, and Monday night as well. I'm making something tonight, I'll figure out something. Gotta pack and do laundry tonight. Still keeping track of Macworld and CES. Nothing too life shattering. Dave Morse managed to get himself to CES this year. That's pretty cool.

Vegas was a good time. Flying was no problem, especially since I packed light, a backpack is all. So easy. I managed to miss a bunch of the hassle leaving on Sunday by flying America West, which put me at a B gate, and using an E-ticket. Managed to get a Cinnabon both coming and going. Driving also no problem. I never thought of myself as a traveler, but it's pretty easy to deal with. Alias was a good time last night. 2 big Oh My God moments on the show, and a whole handful of other Wow moments. Pretty big reveal. Still wonder what they're going to do for the Superbowl. Also can't wait for the 3rd Season to end and come out on DVD. I need a whole lot more sleep to catch up.

I still haven't caught up on sleep yet. Currently I'm going on a 1:4 sleep/awake ratio. Ideally I'd like to be at 1:2 sleep/awake ratio. Oh well, I'll catch up hopefully eventually. Watched S.W.A.T last night finally. Good summer movie. Not as much close quarter combat as I wanted, I must have misremembered too much. I'm loving CafePress. I'm getting ready to roll out my own store, mostly ultimate stuff, almost all stuff by Tony. It's so easy.

Dinner last night was at Green Tea, a little tiny sushi place on Clark just north of Webster, just down the street from Leah's place. The sushi itself, at least the makis were very good. The miso soup could use some help, the edemame wasn't so hot, but the wasabi shumai were wonderful. And the rolls, the rolls were quite good. And much closer than Sai, and cheaper as well. And finally, plenty of sleep last night. Still could use some more, but that's always the case. Oh, a Harris Bank is going up on the corner of Halsted and Addison, which puts a nice no charge ATM right around my home to correspond to the one close to my workplace. That was a pleasant surprise.

So I'm picking up my tux today for Russell's wedding this Saturday. He'll be my first good friend to get hitched and it'll be my first (besides my brother's) wedding I'll stand up in. So that's a little exciting. Otherwise, Leah and I snuck in a viewing of Bed of Roses last night over fried rice. It was the first showing of that movie on my big screen TV, and it looks mighty fine.

I finally got my GPRS internet connection through T-Mobile working flawlessly last night. It's amazing. Not speedwise, because it is like dialup, but just the fact that almost anywhere I can receive a phone call, I can now go online, ssh around, check my mail, and so on. It's really really cool. Really cool. Last night I whipped together a little Honey Mustard Chicken to go with a salad by Leah for dinner. And them some chillin'. Got my tux, and I have to say, I look pretty sharp. Fits great. And so the true festivities begin. I haven't made too much additional progress on my shop, but I'll put it out there anyway, so people can at least check out the beginnings. I'll make notes when new products are released.

Sarah and Russell's wedding went well. A lot of fun. From the rehearsal dinner at Rock Bottom to the wedding and festivities at Hotel Intercontinental. All in all a good time. I'll see what I can do about getting some pictures up, finally updating the gallery. The new year and new projects start to pile up. Gotta add more stuff to the shop, fix up that Spring League Draft App in Java for the upcoming spring league for Ultimate Chicago, pictures on the gallery, that whole linux box for Bjorn. Small things, but it adds up. Not much in terms of plans for the next couple of months.

Upgraded most of my software last night to the newest iLife stuff. I did not have any corruption of my iPhoto library so far, knock on wood, and managed to do a DVD backup of my images, currently at 2900 or so. iDVD looks definitely cool, as I tried to back up my photo library onto a DVD that I could pop in to my DVD player to view, but decided against that. I also got an , which is a pretty cool little dohickey. Recording into iMovie seems just fine. Might have to actually put up a web cam on this site, huh, wouldn't that be a trip. Don't really mess around with GarageBand at all. I'm thinking of getting one of those Macmice iSight flex holders. After seeing some pictures by Sally, I find my camera, the sony u30, to be merely adequate. But it's the trade off I accept for portability. Oh, and I'm going to start using the red eye reduction flash from now on, since everyone except me manages to show red eyes when I take candid pictures. Odd, makes me wonder if it has anything to do with contacts or not. Making dinner tonight, Chicken Paillard. And I get Overnight Delivery, a nice romantic comedy that I've been waiting for on DVD.

Daily Radar might just be coming back, possibly, in a new form. Ever since that humorous look at movies, television, video games, and other stuff went away, I've been looking for a replacement. As the Apple Turns, Crazy Apple Rumors, ESPN's Page 2 all try to fill the void, but fail. But ESPN's new venture, Page 3, just might fill the bill. It takes a Page 2 view on Entertainment. And that is good news to me. But it's got some navigation issues, and I'll wait and see if they can keep it up or not. But it's promising.

Added some new products to the shop: for Ultimate Chicago fans, trucker hat, which means I should probably ask for permission or something to use the logo, which I hand converted from the GIF it was to a nice Illustrator doc, and for Kaze a set of other panda stuff featuring sumo, spendy, preachy and happy on a mug, a large mug, and a stein. Also new is a spendy panda camisole for those kaze or kaze significant other's that like to shop. I'll probably end up breaking the store down to Official Kaze Replica stuff, and then fun Other Panda stuff. Look for the 2003 Season t-shirt soon. Most of that was accomplished while watching S.W.A.T. with Leah and Christie after a fabulous fajita dinner by Leah. I finished up Clear and Present Danger and I'll move on to Cryptonomicron again.

Added a Kaze 2003 Season T-Shirt and a whole slew of things featuring the Scandal Logo. In the workings is some Tea & Strumpet stuff, and maybe adding some things with color instead of all this black and white stuff. Dinner at Sai last Thursday. Watched Keeping the Faith, a wonderful movie. One of my favorites, maybe more so because of the personal connection I might have to it. Also finally watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Did some laundry with Leah on Sunday, watched Overnight Delivery. Guess I've decided to start linking movies now. Looking forward to You Got Served coming out Friday. On the non movie front, not much else. Oh, Jessica Jenkins was kind enough to invite me in to orkut, which makes me feel pretty cool, in that geeky sorta way.

Vacuumed last night. Exciting. Found and cleaned off my boots. Good considering the weather. Also exciting. Updated machines around the house with security updates and airport. Too exciting. Ate leftovers and cleaned the kitchen. All so very exciting. Tried to watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom but failed. Got too excited about adding a Tea & Strumpets section to my shop. Figured out how to do that nifty starburst background. Sleeping was difficult. Steam radiators suck. Especially in a three story apartment building with the thermostat regulated on the third floor and sleeping on the first floor. Snow's cool though. Tired. I believe I'm finally all caught up with Nationals finances.

Wow, so I missed a day. That hasn't happened in a while. Go figure. Tuesday night got some bad chinese food and finished up Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Wednesday got to watch Spellbound with Leah and good chinese food. Gonna try and watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Got lots of leftoever delivery food to eat too. Gonna try and make some cookies.

It's cold. Damn cold. Groundhog Day's coming up. Time to watch Groundhog Day. Didn't watch Last Crusade, maybe tonight, maybe Monday night. Baked a few cookies. Saved some batter so I can make up some fresh baked cookies this weekend, holed up at home. Still got lots to do. Started taking customization orders for the shop.

Watched a bunch of movies this weekend. Finally got Indiana Jones Trilogy wrapped up with Last Crusade, finally watched American History X, a very good but very intense film, watched Keeping the Faith for the second time, and still very funny, and Starship Troopers and started the Core. I realized that the hero from The Core is also in The Company of Men, which was showing on IFC, which made me want to watch the Core again. Anyway, flipped though the Super Bowl a bit, not really watching, but updating Lunchboxes in the store. Good to see that You Got Served won the box office this weekend. That's pretty cool. No plans for the week, just day to day.

Updates will come not so often. Or maybe they will. I'm still struggling with how much of my life to put up here. Go figure, after all these years, that I still don't have an answer for that. Anyway, I finished up the Core Monday night, and got in Groundhog Day because it was, and then WB's Tuesday night, which will probably become regular viewing, of Gilmore Girls and One Tree Hill, at least until those become a little too much. Got some cleaning to do, still. Started listening to NPR in the mornings, which isn't a very long time at all, maybe 10-15 minutes. Perfect Score and dinner on Friday with the boys. Parents in town over the weekend.

I figure I actually should say something. Because not saying anything felt like lying, which it was, because what happened, and the current state of my life is different, and not to say that, well, to me, that's lying. Anyway, Leah and I are no longer together as a couple. Explains my 5000% increase in movie and TV watching. It's hard, and I miss her, but it was a great 1 1/2 years. So now that it's out in the open, there actually might be an increase in my updates, as I try to reconfigure myself to being a bachelor again, and reestablish the fortress of solitude.

I forgot to mention, last week at work I upgrade to a three headed beast. I'm packing 3 monitors, 1 19incher flanked by 2 17inchers. It's amazing and extremely productive. I'd actually want more, and a concept setup like Swordfish might actually be possible, but with CRTs instead of flat panels. Besides that, sort of sold my first shop product. Got Sally a lunchbox to even out finances from last November's Nationals trip. By the way, all the stuff in the shop is only available online. I put up a Kaze mousepad the other day. I'm probably going to switch my home server to use Postfix and Cyrus IMAP simply because that's what Mac OS X Server uses. I figure familiarity would be good.

Finally wrote myself a journal entry reader as a shell script. I'm in the middle of the Die Hard trilogy, just have the third one left. Got an eye appointment tomorrow, finally. Have to get new contacts, since I keep losing mine down the drain. Also think it's time for new glasses. In that vein, I think I want to grow the hair out, at least enough, so whenever the next Art+Science hair model show is I can get in on it.

I'm somehow decided to start using punctuation in my titles. Weird. Friday night, instead of Perfect Score, Russell and Bryan indulged me and watched You Got Served. I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Great dancing. Just funny all around, but probably for the wrong reasons. Saturday getting my eyes checked out. Dropped a notch in my left eye. Getting new glasses, contacts and disposables. Expensive trip. Dinner at Chen's with my parents, where I found out that Koi's, the new chinese/sushi place in Evanston, is a sister restaurant. I think there was a movie in there, or two. Lazy sunday, some piano playing, go figure, the start of a living room furniture rearrangement, possibly the return of stadium seating, more TV, and a short break for a poker game. Not sure yet how extensive the rearrangement might be, it might increase to a full on redecoration. Think paint and wall hangings.

Did laundry last night. First time in a long time just doing 2 loads only. Managed to find some missing sheets and socks that Leah and I left up in the laundry room the last time we did laundry together. Ugh, that's sad. Anyway, being a sucker for punishment, finished up watching the Wedding Singer. I found this sweet plug in for iPhoto, Keyword Assistant. It makes keyword assignment easy, and best of all, it can alphabetize the keyword listing. Dinner with friends for the rest of the week. Possible run out to Woodstock next weekend. I still can't get to bed at a decent hour. I've also missed the diner the past 3 business days. Seriously slacking there.

So I've been looking for a new bag for my laptop, a nice vertically styled man bag, messenger bag, briefcase, or something to that effect. I liked STM's Regular Alley, but that would have to be a special order since they only have one US reseller that doesn't normally carry that bag, and I also liked Crumpler's Wee Bee, but it's bigger than the Alley. So I wandered over to Uncle Dan's, a Crumpler dealer, to see if they had any, and instead came across an Eagle Creek Vagabond, basically a larger version of my existing man bag, which is an Eagle Creek Guide Bag. So I got it. Works well, just slightly larger than my powerbook, so now I'm looking at sleeves to use with it. Dinner at McClain was good as usual. Not that hard to get to from Evanston. Wine made sleeping easy last night.

Caught up with Katie Kelly last night. Good place, Filter, out in Wicker Park, coffee place. Wireless access available. A good number of laptops in attendance. I had leftovers last night for dinner. I also made it back to the diner yesterday morning, and again this morning. Going back to a full breakfast after even just a short break like 3 days is a challenge. I wasn't hungry until 4pm after my denver omelette. AJ's birthday dinner tonight. Got another ticket for not having a city sticker on my car. Working on getting one now.

Dinner was good last night. It was AJ's birthday, so she got a bunch of people to go to Rose Angelina's for dinner. Good food, rather interesting company. Still spreading the news. I actually ended up walking home, instead of either taking a cab or a bus or the el. Good walk though. Ended up sleeping on the couch, and never made it to the bed last night. Woodstock this weekend, and trying to figure out how to get my Dad's new iPaq to work with their Cube and try and get ePocrates up and running. New Alias on Sunday. I got inversion boots yesterday. Means I get to do sit ups upside down, and other random stuff upside down. Exciting.

Not that exciting of a weekend. Got my contacts, so I'm wearing those again, but the lenses for my new glasses weren't rounded and polished, so those have to get redone and they'll be sent to me in the mail. Woodstock was good, as usual. My dad got a Tugsten T3, which is a very cool pda. Made me jealous. ePocrates though doesn't install at all on a Mac, which is just plain stupid. I guess after doing a little research that it hasn't been working since June or so last year. Ugh. Also had lots of software upgrades for the Cube, also upgraded the video card to a GeForce3 so it can now do the nifty cube transitions for Fast User Switching. Oh, and my dad also got a new HP 4120 Photosmart Multi Function Device. Go figure, changing the paper size when printing is done via the file:page setup menu, rather than anywhere in the print dialogs. Ugh. Alias was good last night though. Missed my usual viewing partner. Got myself an Alumni card today, and I'm heading up to SPAC to do some running on an indoor track. So starts the long road to inshapedness.

Running at SPAC wasn't very enjoyable last night. It was my first time back in ages, since college I believe, and it's completely different. Track is tiny, one of those stupid above the basketball court type of things. No fun to run on at all. So I don't think I'll be going back there. I'm gonna try my building fitness room tomorrow, and see if a treadmill is good enough until it gets warm enough out. Got dinner from Whole Foods. Decent meal for $7. Also got 3 different brands of Green Tea ice cream. I'm still searching for the store bought equivalent to Sai's. Watched a little Die Hard with a Vengeance. And an actual early bed time. Probably end up staying at work late, got a project that needs finishing, and then some Gilmore Girls and One Tree Hill and some exercises, and that'll be my 27th birthday. Next?

Had some fish yesterday. Got carryout with some co-workers from Koi, Chen's new Evanston sister restaurant. Good stuff. Happy to have a couple rolls with mango involved. Then Leah took me out to dinner at Sai. Good to see her again. Saw Marc and Julie also having dinner at Sai as well. So I didn't get to see my shows. That'll have to wait for Sunday. Still sore from my running on Monday. Thanks to all for the birthday greetings.

Went running outside for the first time since probably last November. A good 3 months or so? Good though. Feels like I can't run slow anymore. If I try, I immediately switch to walking. It's either running or walking, no jogging. Odd. But that probably won't last long. I finished up Die Hard with a Vengeance, and I think I'm gonna try and work my way through my entire DVD collection in alphabetical order. Try is the operative word there. I also found a really cool solution to provide whole condo music: Nicecast, a pretty GUI on the icecast/Audio Hijack Pro setup. Basically, I get to use iTunes on my main desktop, which then streams this out, and any other machine or device on the network can listen to this stream. So, the iMac in the bedroom, the laptop out wherever, even the desktop that's doing the streaming, all playing the same music, controlled from a single location. It's really cool. I think I'll do some laundry tonight.

Didn't do laundry last night. Just too tired. Watched 8 Mile instead. Got my new credit card, finally. Now I've got to memorize a brand new number. Parents coming in to town this weekend. Going to see Eurotrip tomorrow with the boys. Might try and get a run or two in this weekend. Otherwise, continue to work my way through the dvd collection.

Friday night I had dinner with my parents. They brought in Fried Chicken from Chop Suey Hut, best fried chicken ever. Saturday went and saw Eurotrip. Very funny movie. Catchy song throughout the film. Lead character reminds me of a poor man's Freddie Prince, Jr. Dinner again with the parents after mass at the Cathedral. Drinking that night with Russell and gang at Charleston's. Also managed to see the Blanchet-Ruths' new Ping Pong/Table Tennis table. Sunday brunch with my parents at Orange and a lazy afternoon getting an upgraded Gallery up and running. Couldn't just do an upgrade in place because of all my modifications to the look and feel. So that'll be coming. And since I managed to keyword all my photos in iPhoto, more pictures should be going up in the gallery soon as well. Poker last night with they boys, poker tonight with the coworkers. Otherwise, try and continue to run and workout a bit this week.

Finally upgraded the gallery last night. Now up to 1.4.2. Sweet. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing. I did put up Rick and Sarah's wedding gallery up. Lost in poker last night. Somethings haven't changed. Papa John's is soooo good. Look for more galleries to go up soon, along with a slight reorganization, like sub-albums and so on. Oh, and I still really need to do laundry.

Laundry's finally done. I do however have a ton of ironing to do. Because I decided that dry cleaning dress shirts wasn't worth it and I have lots of free time on my hands to do things like iron shirts. Now talk about exciting. I think I'm addicted to caffeine. I was really tired and not feeling all too well while doing laundry, and then I had a Coke, and suddenly, it was much better. It's just so good when it touches your lips. I watched 10 Things I Hate About You, and started 12 Monkeys. I updated more stuff in the gallery, adding pictures to Leah and Me, adding a Kaze 2003 and a Kaze 2003 Nationals albums along with Paganello 2002 and more photos to Paganello 2003. Tonight I need to work on an SBR 'O4 design, maybe do some Spring League Draft App tweaking. Friday is a the return of Kaze Club Night, this time up at SmartBar.

Had dinner last night with Akira at Sai. Good food, hadn't seen him in a while, got to catch up a bit. Dropped by and talked with Leah, since I was in the neighborhood. Thinking. Whipped out an SBR design this morning over breakfast. I need to get a lot of sleep, catch up on sleep soon. I'm running on empty right about now. Oh, got some nifty iSight stands from MacMice. In addition to the current written journals I keep, I might start keeping video diaries as well.

Managed to get a full 8 hours of sleep. Went to bed and was asleep at 10:30. That's so early for me. Managed to get stuck on the train getting into the Belmont stop because of that fire near the Brown line for 20 minutes or so last night. A little annoying. Finished up 12 Monkeys and started 36 Chambers while working on an SBR design for my cafepress shop. Looks like a busy weekend, Kaze Club night tonight, poker tourney tomorrow, Medieval Times on Sunday. Figured out the settings for my video diary with my iSight, using Quicktime Broadcaster, MPEG-4 compression on video and audio, 320x240, best quality for video. I think that roughly equates to 2 MB/sec. On second thought, maybe I'll tone down the quality a bit. I don't have that much space. And also with the music setup, I might start using Salling Clicker and use my phone to control iTunes on the desktop serving streaming music.

Busy busy weekend. Friday night, dinner was carry out sushi from the Ecce Cafe, just down the block from me on Broadway. Good rolls, big rolls, but lots of mayo and unagi sauce. Then, a couple drinks at KK's till more of the gang showed up and we hit Smart Bar. I liked the place, it's a dancer's club, and I get to walk home afterwards. Saturday, rolled out and went to pickup. I move slow. And I've been sore ever since. After that a poker tourney where I came in 2nd on extremely lucky draws. Then a ping pong tourney or 2 at the Blanchet-Ruths. Sunday had to go outside because it was 60, but not so warm on the lake where I was sitting and trying to enjoy the sun. Then was the belated Christmas present to the Russell's: a trip to Medieval Times. Fun. And now I think life quiets down a bit.

Got my new glasses yesterday. Finished up 40 Days and 40 Nights, which will be added to my list of calendar related movies, this time for Lent. Up next in that vein is Boondock Saints for St. Patty's Day. But up next in the collection is 100 Girls. Managed to get to bed before 11pm last night. Impressive feat for me. And I got in to the diner this morning. New month and all I guess. Dinner with Leah tonight.

Leah and I are back together. Dinner at Sai was good last night, as was figuring stuff out. It's all good. Dinner tonight at Angelina's, celebrating our return and using the 25% locals' discount. Gonna try and sneak a run in there, maybe, if it isn't raining by the time I get home. Wore my new glasses today, trying to get used to them. Starting to. Made my first big cafepress order yesterday, and hopefully will get it all before Florida in a week. Crazy.

Running was good last night. Movement is good. I didn't even get rained on at all. Made it to bed at a really decent hour, 10:30pm. A good 8 hours. Still wanted to stay in bed though. I love Safari's Open in Tabs bookmark menu command. So instead of what I used to do, which was type them all in, to using the bookmarks individually, I get to open them all up in tabs all at once and then close each one as I read them. Very nice, very easy. New web page I'm reading, engadget, by the creative force behind gizmodo. Guess I'll read both.

I'm playing Spring League with Leah. Hoping to finally get around to updating the java based spring league app tonight, along with documentation finally. Got to bed really early, earliest in a long time, around 9:30pm. If it's nice out, gonna try and play some pickup tomorrow, then Starsky & Hutch, then a friend's place for dinner. Laundry on Sunday along with Alias HD.

I got a run in Friday night, some exercise. A relatively early night as well. Saturday, no pickup, but brunch/lunch at Leo's Lunchroom and Starsky and Hutch. Dinner at KK's, then another quiet night in with lots of sleep. Sunday I brought Leah to Dim Sum at the Phoenix. Then groceries and laundry and dinner (Red wine and tarragon chicken) along with Alias, which is getting a little disappointing. It's slightly tempting to just wait for the DVD of the season and plow through those in September, than watch the episodes now. What was up with the quantity of repeated scenes, even if some of it, little of it, was from different points of view? Cafepress stuff came on Friday. All the goods look great. The Kaze mousepad looks especially fabulous, as did the other panda mug.

Not much going on. My cable seems back up and running after some issues last week or so. For some reason I had to turn the VCR on to get it to work, go figure. Watched some Monster Garage where they turned a Peterbilt engine into a trike. Impressive. Some new Sony Ericsson phones were announced yesterday. The S700 looks pretty sweet. Oh, current reading is the Illuminatus Trilogy when I have my backpack and the Day of the Jackal when I've got my man bag.

So this whole blog company thing? Crazy. Why can't I get paid for this site? Well, because I'm not famous. Oh, never mind that this site doesn't provide any sort of service or give any kind of information that people would be willing to pay for. But still, from online diaries to web sites that go for 3.5 - 4 million dollars. Crazy. I'm not selling this anytime soon, so back to the updates. Green Tea last night. Good, and a couple different rolls. Tried to get a USB 2.0 Hard Drive working with Elisa's computer, but no luck. Gotta pack tonight, leaving for West Palm tomorrow night. Coming back bright and early straight into work on Monday. Unsure if I'll be updating at all over the weekend.

Sitting at gate A2, Midway Airport, about an hour before boarding. Gotta love T-Mobile and unlimited data plans. Anyway, congrats to Leo and Stacy on "Peanut". Dinner was fried chicken from Jewel, after getting smiley cookies from the corner convenience store and a Slurpie from 7-11, from which I won my first iTunes song via the Pepsi promotion. That's pretty cool. Vacuumed. Put clothes away. Put on 100 Women. Ripped some new music, John Wesley Harding's Adam's Apple and Garden of Eden EP, and Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales. I also got Snow Crash, so that's on the list. Packed, ironed some clothes to pack. Oh, went shopping after work for some new board shorts at Urban Outfitters up in e-town. Worked a bit today. Got stuff done. Exchanged the board shorts for a slightly bigger size (winter weight). Oh, only takes about 1 1/2 hours from Evanston to Midway via "el". And the shoes are off already, the sandals are on, and Florida is 4 hours away.

Back from the PBI (West Palm Beach) from a long weekend of beach time. It's so nice down there. SBR '04 Score! A quick couple shout outs to the Inker/Double Double for putting this together, and the Kindreds for the food, the hospitality, and the ChuckTown, Holler. Good times, good times. The recap, mostly broken down by meals: thursday fly in, mad car Avis rentals, stop at Steak and Shake for a split shake with fudge, breakfast at Sonny's at the Days Inn, a day on the beach with beer friz and ocean time, no e.coli this time. Friday night dinner at a cuban joint, quite good, then caps, music off a powerbook, the playing on Saturday. Got used to the sand, won all our games, stupid matches games to 7-7-5 if necessary, no individual games lost, even beat Sunburnt. Saturday night food at a local bar/tavern, more caps, Sunday breakfast and play, get to Semis and lose to other Miami team, who loses to Sunburnt in the finals. Ick. Cookies and Cream milkshake and toasted coconut on a cake cone for a snack. Trip up to Ft. Lauderdale to the Kindred's for pasta, meatballs, and cake. Relaxing on the intercoastal waterway, Oh Hell, and a sketchy Ramada. Early flight, last purple line express, and here I am at work. Water's nice. Board shorts are nicer. Sleep would be good. GPRS slow but usable, even in Florida. Missed Alias. But good times. Holler.

So I guess the groundhog really did see his shadow. And I missed a day. Sue me. Not too much going on. Watched the end of Se7en last night with Leah, dinner courtesy of my Mom, and some discussions. Headed to San Fran for a long weekend in April. Watching last week's Alias tonight. That's all.

Java's fun. Spring League Draft coming up soon. Headed out to Woodstock afterwards. Naniwa tomorrow night. Maybe some sort of entertainment activity afterward. Finally watched last week's Alias. Entertaining. Played some Ping Pong. Went to Piece. Lunch yesterday with Leah and Remy at Joy Yee's. Good stuff.

Ah, late night early morning programming. Bread and butter. Last minute fixes updates and changes. Love it. And this is what I do for fun. Spring League Draft App rolling out tomorrow. Should be good. Backgrounded my way through Boondock Saints, 2001, Adventures in Babysitting. Sleep would be good. Looking forward to sushi. NU's spring break. It's sunny. And then again the weather's supposed to get nasty on Sunday. I don't think things are gonna quiet down for a while.

Draft went okay. A couple of hangups, but I've already started making changes for next year. Hopefully I'll fix the problems now, as opposed to waiting until the Thursday before the draft to fix them next year. Woodstock was good, nice and relaxing. Good bad food though, fried chicken, fried shrimp, fried bananas and donuts. Gotta find something healthy to eat for a couple days. Got some pictures from Sally from SBR, so I'll try and get that gallery up sometime soon. Alias was good last night. Oh, did some shopping with Leah yesterday on the way back in to the city. Got myself some new brown shoes for work and stuff. Finally. I also cleaned out my trunk, well, organized it anyway. Got another ultimate related web project to work on. Only other big plans for the week is meeting and having dinner with Leah's parents on Thursday.

Still need to catch up on sleep. Running on the bare minimum, actually, looking historically, I'm running on plenty of sleep, so never mind. Having issues with converting to an Alphabetic Base from Decimal. Warm today. Sunny. Nice. Cooking tonight, might try taking the easy way out and getting premarinated stuff from Whole Foods. Feels like cheating. Laundry tonight as well.

Getting ready to cook food from Whole Foods is genius. It's great. It's easy. And, most important, it's good. The Mango Teriyaki Salmon Filets are great. Mangos are good too. Leah and I still have so many socks that are unpaired. Absurd amount of socks. Double digits even. Stupid sock monsters. Sai tomorrow night, hopefully some more sushi on Friday night before the Great Big Sea show, first spring league game on Saturday.

Yeah, so I'll update. No dinner with the Gesoffs last night, my first meeting of the parents will have to wait for another time. Instead had a nice dinner at Via Emilia. Wednesday night had a nice quiet night, dropped by Gamekeepers to say hello to Bryan and friends, fixed Leah's curtains with stitch witchery or something. Tonight headed to see Great Big Sea with a bunch of people at the Metro, probably having dinner at Addis Abeba. Tomorrow is my first spring league game. Saturday is date night. Maybe some pickup on Sunday. Did some research, figured out what Kramerica Industries is, which will make it easier to come up with a jersey design. Also found out that HDTV is supposed to get to my building sometime in April. Which is sweet. Finally.

My first time eating Ethiopian food Friday night, good stuff, even if I didn't get to have any meat. Great Big Sea does put on a good show, the crowd's energy was very infectious, even for someone like me who is completely unfamiliar with the music. Spring League Saturday was fun. Interns of Kramerica is quite funny. And we managed to squeak 1 point wins in both our games. Then some sushi at Tsunami, with a sake flight, quite good, and some much needed sleep. Sunday brought supposed pickup which ended up being boot, dinner at Joy's, starting Amelie and Alias and The Practice. Not too much on the docket for this week.

Finally put up SBR '04 pictures. They're in the gallery. In doing so I found yet another really cool iPhoto plug-in, iPhotoToGallery, which allows me to export directly to my gallery from iPhoto. It rocks. Sidetrack for powerbooks also rocks, and got updated to .8, with corner taps. Expose with a trackpad tap, control click in a corner. Hey, it's the little things. Oh, watched Monsoon Wedding last night. Very good. Reminded me a bit of the Philippines. Oh, listening to Great Big Sea, good stuff. Weather's been nice. I forgot to mention that I jammed my middle finger on the right hand at Boot the other day, it was pretty massively swelled yesterday, but gone down a bit today.

Got a whole lot colder, didn't it? Have I mentioned how good the Grey Album is (again, thanks to Akira for the link)? It's so good. I wonder if owning Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' White Album makes having the Grey Album okay, at least in my ethical world? Scrubs is a funny show. Walking around after going to the bank yesterday, I couldn't decide on what to have for lunch. So many options, so many choices, I settled on a meatball sub. But there's just so many options. It's so good.

It's that day of the year again. Silly. Puck got his oil changed this morning. Dinner last night was Dijon Tarragon Chicken, roasted veggie medley, and a rice pilaf. Breakfast at home this morning, part of a new saving money plan. Bowl of cereal. And now I'm starving. Might see Dawn of the Dead tonight. Might see Hellboy tomorrow. Headed to Madison Saturday after spring league.

So last night around 4 or so, my linux box at home started acting strangely. I thought my main hard drive had gone south. But when I restarted and checked it out, everything was peachy keen. So my 470 day uptime was killed, oh well. I set up some other hard drive I had hanging around as a backup, just in case the main drive does fail, which should happen eventually, since it's a consumer level drive that's been on pretty much for 4 years straight, in a computer that's probably 6 years old. I watched an episode of Faking It on TLC, about some pizza guy transforming in 4 weeks to a believable executive chef in a competition. Very cool. No movie last night. Gave myself a haircut. Looking for a Mac OS X version of DVD Profiler.

Postdated an entry from Friday morning. No movie Thursday or Friday. Interns of Kramerica won another 2 games on Saturday. It was another cold windy day of Spring League at Schiller. On the way up to Madison Leah and I stopped at Woodfield for lunch at La Vie de France and Mrs. Fields Cookies and a Cinnebon pocket knock off dessert. Madison was fun and rather interesting, partying with a) people 5 years younger than me besides Leah, and b) real college party people at a real party college. It was quite different from my own college experience. Sunday's drive home went much quicker and easier than Saturday's windy drive up. Poker game was quiet. Going to a seder or Tuesday. Laundry Wednesday. Possibly Hellboy on Thursday. Maybe sushi tonight and Friday. Spring League on Saturday, then probably Woodstock Saturday and Sunday.

Monday night dinner at East, or CoCoRo, one of Akira's favorite sushi places in the city. It was quite good, quality was excellent, nothing fancy, just absolutely solid sushi. Tuesday night was the Seder at Remy's Dad's place. Very interesting and fun. Finished up both Illuminatus Trilogy and Day of the Jackal. Not sure if I'll move on to Snow Crash or maybe some non-fiction for a change. Hellboy finally definitely on for tomorrow, City North, 7:15pm.

I made a sort of Kosher lasagna last night. Rather interesting. Leah made matzah ball soup too. Laundry got done, I've still got plenty of things to iron. We're gonna stay at the Hotel Del Sol for a couple nights in San Fran next week, should be fun. Otherwise, some computer things: I've switched to vim instead of nvi, I've installed Movable Type for a friend and might be looking to use it for things. Oh, I've started running a couple mornings during the week, and I've realized that I can jog still. Leah leaves tomorrow, I've got a team BBQ for spring league during our bye, and then home to Woodstock for Easter.

I'm really liking Movable Type. I think I'll move the backend of daily dose anyway to the mt db schema, and then maybe switch over, maybe not. I did get the styles and layout to mimic the current site. I've currently got my laptop set up as a development environment, mysql, php, mt, with cocoamysql my new best friend. Besides that, the weekend went well. Dinner was chirashi at Kuni's in Evanston, just on my way home. Interns lost our first game of the season Saturday morning. We did win our second game of the day though. Woodstock was good, no Easter Vigil, just mass Sunday morning in the newly redecorated St. Mary's church. It's good, but I need to see it a couple more times to get a better feel for it. I ended up helping to make Easter Brunch, just the potatoes and the beans. Stopped by and said hello to the Walls. Picked up a slurpee on the way back in to the city, and didn't win an iTunes song. I'm now 2/3 on that Pepsi promotion. Finally did some dishes. put some laundry away. Oh, alias was fabulous last night. Good return of Rambaldi stuff.

Flying out to San Fran tomorrow. Crazy. Feel like there's so much more I should be doing. Anyway, got to eat some Halo Halo last night, hmmmmm, it's nothing like the game. Going to see Girl Next Door tonight, River East, 7:40pm. Gotta pack. No idea what to pack. Oh well, short week.

San Francisco is a great town. Good visit. No problems flying, it did take me 2 hours or so to get to ORD by public transportation from Evanston. Stayed out in Berkeley Wednesday night with Sarah Kopple and gang, the some hiking up on the North Bay, very nice. Thursday night in the city, sushi with Whitney at Ebisu, very good fish, live scallops are sweet. Lots of walking around, a ride on a Muni bus, dim sum at Yank Sing, a look at the seal lions, some walking up hills, a trip on a Muni train, hanging out with Rocky and other ultimate players for the evening on Friday. Good time. Saturday was more lounging about, a trip out to Oakland's Lake Merritt for a bake sale, hanging out with hippies, and then some chilling in the Mark Hopkins (get a room cheap online). Dinner with Jessica Jenkins and Whitney again at a cute little Italian joint nestled among porn stores. Then drinks and dancing at the Top of the Mark. A really good visit. I like San Francisco. And then I come back to this, extremely windy and hot hot hot. Nothing planned for a while now. Happy belated birthdays to Russell and Remy.

Nothing really exciting to write about. Packed a lunch today after grocery shopping for lunch food. Pastrami. Yum. Chips and carrot sticks and celery. Didn't have a brown paper bag though. Maybe next time. Finished up Snow Crash. I've moved on to Bobby Fisher Goes to War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, a suggestion by Russell.

It's what's for lunch. I'm chomping down on yet another packed lunch, this time of sliced deli meatloaf. It's good. Last night dinner was Leah's Lentil Soup, quite good, after catching the 36 Broadway bus down, for a change. I think I'll stick with the 151 Sheridan. That's all.

Less and less to write about. Had what I termed a bachelor's dinner of pasta with pasta sauce from a jar. Did a small load of laundry last night. Installed some stumbler software on my powerbook for fun. Cooking dinner tonight and watching some Alias. Gotta try and catchup. Had breakfast really early this morning at Einsteins. Walked by this fabulous 3 Flat on Buckingham that sounds awesome. Spring League on Saturday, Kaze pickup on Sunday at 1pm, dinner at Fogo Sunday night. Maybe visiting with Al and Nicole in town for a wedding.

So this whole triple OS environment is a little annoying. I like iCal. I'd like to use it as my calendaring. Except that I spend a lot of time ssh'd in to a linux box. So I'd love to have a console scheduling program that uses icalendar format files. But are there any? Haven't found any. Tempted to try and write my own, but I've got too many hobby projects I'm supposed to be working on. So it goes on the stack. Just found out today that there's a Cold Stone Creamery going on a couple blocks from me, right around Halsted and Cornelia. Watched Must See TV last night. Laughed out loud at Scrubs. Almost always do. Also caught up on Alias. I wonder what's next for them. I also wonder when Irina (Lena Olin) is coming back. Sushi tonight somewhere.

Tried to catch up on sleep, but I don't think I managed very well. Friday night date night was sushi at Cocoro again, and then looking for coats after missing the early enough showtime for 13 Going on 30. Interns went 1-1 on Saturday morning for spring league, with leah playing savage and the guys having 1 sub. Then naptime, which was nice, some hanging with the parents, some ambrosia, and another early bedtime. Oh, I missed again on an iTunes slurpee. Sunday was pickup in the cold and wind. Then dinner at Fogo, with too much meat, and not getting up until the meal was over. Then Alias, a couple Practices, some website coding, and a very early or late bedtime. Gotta do some grocery shopping. Need to get some batteries for my mouse and my remote. I know, exciting stuff.

While looking for the playfair code, I came across a mirror of banned software. One of these things was ip2nation, which I found out has a website. It is a couple database tables with country and ip associations. So I went looking for other examples, maybe something more specific. So just plugging in ip to geographic location into google I get a whole bunch of different services. So I try it out on my logs. And I have a reader from New Hampshire. Go figure. Oh, might as well take the time to say hello to Donna, thanks for reading, say hello to my mom for me. Anyway, rather cool and interesting. Might be going to see Kill Bill Vol. 2 tonight. Slipped in a viewing of Dracula 2000 last night.

I finally enabled ClearType on my work machine and it's pretty cool. I now have nice smooth fonts both at home and work. Registered to vote yesterday at the Free Cone Day at Ben and Jerry's. And that's about it. Still playing with Movable Type, there's a whole lot of template customization that needs to go on before I'm willing to show anything. Leah's got a friend coming in to town so I get to amuse myself for a couple nights. Some hobby programming hopefully. Maybe some cleaning.

Might actually really be here, maybe. Anyway, nothing exciting at all. Finished up the Bobby Fischer book, and now I've got to pick something to follow that up with. Maybe some more non-fiction. New iTunes and stuff from Apple. Not bad. I missed yesterday's free song, which is too bad. Hate missing out on free stuff, well, most of the time. Otherwise, a cold office makes the outside springtime a bit unexpected. The web site I worked on went live on Monday, I think I forgot to mention that.

I did the Oath to Vote by Ben & Jerry's and got my free iTunes song. So I'm definitely not passing up my free stuff. And, sad to say, I promise I will vote in my first election as a US Citizen. And might as well document it all here.

Weekend's here. That's good. Unsure of plans still, but have an offer of drinking and ping pong/table tennis. Cold out again. My craving for sushi has left the building, and I think my new craving is for pop, cola, soda, sugar water, Coke, whatever you want to call it. Spring league tomorrow again the best 2 teams in the the league. Sweet. It's supposed to rain tomorrow I think too. Sunday's free though, which is nice. Used my 2 free iTunes songs to get To Be With You by Mr. Big and The Rockafeller Skank by Fatboy Slim. Too much fun.

A rather quiet and relaxing weekend mostly. Friday night got killed in ping pong by Kevin and Bryan. Lost both games on Saturday spring league, which I'm going to blame on chemistry, since it was the first time since maybe the 1st or 2nd week that we had a full team. Hung out a bit with the girls and got to watch Mean Girls. Quite funny. Then got to eat some McD's and get to bed really early and sleep lots before breakfast the next morning at Nookie's Too and mass and laundry and goat cheese and roasted pepper stuffed chicken breasts and couscous. Still could use more sleep. Alias was good, and can't believe it's 3 weeks until the finale. Long term plans fell through and I'm not going to Potlatch. There was an outside chance, but oh well.

Managed to vacuum last night. It was pretty exciting. Finished up Matrix: Reloaded and try and fit in Matrix: Revolutions sometime soon. Going to see Shade tomorrow at 7:25pm, River East 21. Scrubs season finale tonight. Got my tax return, which is pretty cool. It helps. I keep forgetting the free songs from iTunes. Whoops. Friends Series finale on Thursday. I've started looking into home theater PC's or media servers; basically I'm looking for a method to make TV seasons on DVD randomly accessible, and also be able to view easily across seasons. I think about it since it would probably be better to just flip through my DVD collection rather than flip through tv channels. So if at least the TV portion was on hard drives, and I could pick one easily to load and watch, it'd be better, I think, or at least more conducive to watching. Plus, I'm lazy. But, nothing but research.

Leah made meatloaf, garlic mashed potatoes, and broccoli last night. Quite good. Late night at work, some ironing and some wasabi peas. Weather's quite nice, if a little cool. Scrubs finale was so-so. Friends on Thursday will most likely be another letdown, I'm guessing. When was the last series/season finale that just kicked ass? Alias, maybe. That show has better midseason turns though. Dawson's Creek? Maybe. My so-called life? Can't say I've followed or remember too many other shows' season/series finale. Seinfeld wasn't anything special in my book. Anyway, I'll watch it. Got an old family doctor friends' son's wedding/reception to go to on Friday in Barrington. Kaze pickup on Sunday. I think I failed to mention that Leah got me sunglasses, Smith Vice's in Black. I went out and got a decent sunglasses case that I can attach to various bags.

I forgot to mention a while back that I noticed the Sony Store on Michigan Ave. is closed. Just like that. Too bad. I really like that block, with Apple, Nike, and Sony all having company stores there. Moving on. Shade is a really good movie, I think anyway. Very entertaining. Not a whole lot of people go to movies on a Wednesday night.

Wedding reception tonight out in Rolling Meadows. Exciting. Date night tomorrow is dinner and jazz at Green Dolphin Street. I love OpenTable. So easy. So quick. Friends was okay last night. Saddest part for me was Joey and Chandler saying goodbye. Ross and Rachel was expected, assumed even. Got MSN Messenger on my home machines which allows me to chat with co-workers if that's ever needed. If I could just figure out how to VPN into work with Mac OS X, that'd be sweet. Maybe.

Wedding was rather interesting. Old friends, sitting at the kids table. But good. Spring league went 1-1, played savage, quite the change from the previous week. Missing next week, will be in Madison for Alison's, Leah's sister, graduation. Finally meeting the fam. Green Dolphin was okay. Overrated, maybe. They did have a really cool flutist, grammy winner, who did a couple songs with the jazz triad that performed. Had a negroni and a sidecar. Kaze pickup on Sunday was windy, yet again. Then a surprise dinner at Sai, so good, and since the weather was so good, a small pina colada italian ice. So good. Finished up Matrix: Revolutions as Leah finished up some Grad school work. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there, by the way. Going to Piece tomorrow night, Wednesday watching the Godfather and making tarts.

Sony releases their 2004 Vaio lineup. And the U50, supposedly the replacement for the U101. Well, what I'm guessing to be the replacement for the U101. A little disappointing. Getting rid of the laptop form, and turning it into a giant PDA, well, it's intriguing, a little. Display probably looks nice. But no keyboard? That's no good for me. But maybe there's another model yet to be announced, since there's a VAIO World this coming weekend. Oh well.

I didn't have a single drop of caffeinated beverage yesterday, and paid the price; a nagging headache all day. So I finished off the day with a couple of beers and pizza. Good times. PSP and Nintendo DS revealed. Sweet. Good week for tech stuff. I got Step Into Liquid on DVD yesterday and didn't know that it came with a WMV HD version of the film on the second disc. 720p. Now all I've got to do is either find someone with a 3 GHz P4 laptop with component video out or a Home Theater PC with a 128MB graphics card to hook up to my TV to see it. Or, the Bravo D3 which does WMV HD. Whenever that's supposed to come out. Weather's continuing the Chicago craziness. And Kaze steering committee meeting tonight.

Made it to the diner this morning. First time in a long time. They had new menus. It was good. Last night Mongolian BBQ. Also good. My first ride in Bryan's Miata. Also good. Not much else. Got a busy Wednesday ahead of me: grocery, precooking, watching the Godfather. Hopefully I can finish everything up. It's gonna be close. Tomorrow is a dinner for Jeff (Leah's brother and Emmy winner), Christie and Elisa. Friday is a viewing of Van Helsing, maybe some dinner, maybe some looking at a cute puppy. Busy busy week. It'll be nice to someday get some more sleep or something.

Here's what I'm gonna try and make for tonight: Portabello Mushroom Brushetta, Gnocchi Pomodoro, Roasted Vegetable Medley, Chicken Breasts with Sundried tomatoes and Shiitake Mushrooms, Poached Halibut with tomatoes and basil, Chocolate Molten Cakes and Cappuccino Tarts. Okay, looking at that, it might be a little bit of an overkill. Oh well. Not sure I'll be able to pull it all off anyway. On a relatively random note, I think I'm gonna try and switch over to the Metric system. You know, grams, liters, meters. Just something I'll try and do. Oh, and my email, especially my homegrown listservs seem to take a while before they go out, so delayed communication should be expected. Except for this website, of course.

Okay. Long overdue update. We'll start from Thursday night. Jeff's plane gets delayed, as does Leah's parents because of the weather. I just keep cooking. It ends up they all come to dinner and drive up with Leah the next day. So I met them. The Gesoffs. I like 'em. Dinner went well, and nobody got food poisoning, so I think that's good. Work Friday, and see Van Helsing. I'm not going to bother linking because I didn't like the movie at all. Oh, and Friday I was part of a long and involved process verifying the ineligibility of a certain former ultimate player at Northwestern. Saturday head up to Madison a little late, go to graduation. Bradley Whitford gave the address, and it was great. He even made fun of his stint in an Adam Sandler movie. Dinner at L'etoile, fabulous. Breakfast the next day at Sophia's Bakery and Cafe. Then Leah and I stopped in Woodstock on the way back from Madison, had dinner with my parents, and then shuffled back into Chicago. Monday night Leah finished up the dishes from last Thursday's dinner. Tonight is Sushi at Sai, 8:15pm, organized by Remy. Really have to do some laundry, my brother and sister-in-law are in town for the week, Elisa's going away bash on Thursday, spring league tourney on Saturday. I think that's it, so far. Oh, and Alias finale on Sunday. And I thought it was quieting down.

Sai was soooo good last night. Very good. And Really good company. Leah and I show up first, then Akira shows up with his new bag, then Remy rambles through the door. We head back to a round table of 8, and sit in a nice crescent, backs against the wall. Sally shows up, Mia shows up, and Sarah brings up the rear. Mostly ultimate talk, what can you expect, but good stuff. No Italian ice, it was closed when we left. In a surprise move I'm going to see Troy tonight at 6:25pm River East. It's a DLP showing. How can I pass that up. And while finding the link to Troy I see that Saved! is opening up in a couple weeks. That movie looks funny.

So a long time ago I talked about getting a bag for my laptop, 12" powerbook. I was looking at the STM Alley, but it was special order? Well, the special order came in. And it's a sweet bag. Very nice. I like it, a lot. I wish it had a nice easy access slot for books or papers, but otherwise, I have no complaints. I didn't like Troy last night. I never entered into the movie. I did with Gladiator. Oh well.

So much laundry to do tonight. Not even funny how much needs to be done tonight. Scary amount. Makes for an exciting Friday night. But necessary, considering the lack of sleep over the previous week. I know it's unhealthy, but I just can't beat the cheap goodness of a Dunkin Donuts breakfast. $2.50 or less for a filling breakfast? Naperville tomorrow, Woodstock also tomorrow, and some ultimate stuff on Sunday. And Alias on Sunday. Last one in 2004. That's just a long time to go without the Bristows.

Laundry got done. Interns won our first game then lost our second, by a lot, before bailing to join some AYSO teams' end of season celebrations at a South Naperville Giordano's. Woodstock was good, hanging out with Al and Nicole, Julian and Steph, and the parents. Nice and relaxing, even if we didn't get to have a bonfire. Maybe next time. Sunday got to have the Port Edward's Brunch, which I had been craving, but they seem to have retired their deep fried french toast, which is a huge disappointment. Alias goes out with a whimper, at least I thought so. And Sunday also was my last practice as an official member of Kaze. I've taken myself off the team, as an official move to take the season off of Ultimate. Boston Invitational will be my farewell tournament. I've definitely enjoyed myself playing with Kaze, past and present.

I'm getting tired of wearing my glasses, but I need to get some contact solution before I can get back to my contacts. Got some much needed sleep last night. What else? Nope, nothing else. Really. Maybe there's something missing on the edge of my mind that I'm not remembering. Or maybe this is just a peek into the near future, of not having anything on the schedule. I am headed out to Woodstock to be a Godfather. That's on Saturday. Three day weekend, with no other plans. Maybe some movies.

This looks fabulous. Impressive. Looks better than that new Sony I was underwhelmed with. And they're actually sending them out to companies. The product is actually being made. I'm really impressed. I'm a little underwhelmed by the screen though, but if I'm mostly doing ssh stuff on it, what's the point? Impressive. Instead of the diner in the mornings I've been going to Panera Bread. Cheaper, and free wi-fi. I'll probably do that for a while, until I overdo it and move on to something else. New trend?

My home email server was fixed, finally. Which means it should no longer be my fault that some people don't get my emails. Then again, maybe there's something else. Anyway, watched Waterworld last night, a movie I actually like. Alternate futures, always interesting. Beach Pickup tonight, if it's not raining. Headed home tomorrow, back on Saturday. Maybe hang with AJ, maybe see the puppy, maybe watch Soul Plane. Sunday is an SBR reunion, and monday is a day off. Might be able to sneak some movies in there somewhere too. I should also clean up a bit as well. I figure I should also muse about giving up on competitive ultimate, maybe tomorrow.

Looking forward to the weekend. Scoreomatic coverage of UPA College Championships is pretty sweet. Beach was good last night, except when you layout on your own fist. Not so good for breathing. Should be a pretty easy weekend. I'll see what I can do about posting on the weekend. Might be a good time to start.

So my big plans of writing over the weekend? Failed. I'm now a godfather. Made it home and back again from Woodstock in under 18 hours. Dropped by the Michigan Ave. Apple Store to pick up a wired mouse and, why not, a sightlight for an iSight I never use. But just in case. Got to see Soul Plan, funny, with Russell and Sarah. Hung out with AJ and Ed for a bit at her new place. Letizia's looks like an absolutely fabulous bakery. I'm looking forward to trying that place out. Got some donuts and icecream on the way home, partly because I watched a bit of Strange Brew while at AJ's. Caps and a little beer schtick on Sunday. My caps arm is a bit sore for the past couple of days. Watched a whole bunch of movies on Monday, Resident Evil, Serendipity, The Core, Wargames. Good movie watching weekend. Signed up for Summer League with Leah too. Otherwise, not much else. Can't say I've got much planned for the week.

I finally fixed a problem I was having with Terminal.app and ssh'ing to my linux box and the delete/backspace key. Ended up just making all incoming terminals into xterm rather than xterm-color. Anyway, if anyone else has that problem. Did I also ever mention that the cheap Dunkin' Donuts breakfast, the #1, Med. Coffee and 2 donuts, that the Evanston one raised price sometime in the last year from $2.40 to $2.50? Relatively random piece of info. Had some sushi last night, at 2 separate places. Buses take longer when there's a Cubs game just getting out. I'm already done with the first Harry Potter and moving on to the second. Fast reads. Beach tomorrow.

Okay, just noticed that Weblogs, Inc. new Autoblog, about, you guessed it, cars. Gadget cars. Cool cars. And the occasional minivan. Anyway, I read a lot on-line. Or is it on line, two words? Anyway, I'm passing on beach tonight for chores. This weekend Jessica Jenkins is crashing at my place, for a wedding, which will be good. Might try and get some sushi, maybe watch some movies. Got the NU Old vs. Young game on Sunday. Jeff's Graduation party on Saturday. And, not much else.

Okay, I'll update. Jessica Jenkins crashed on my couch for the weekend. Went to sushi on Friday (had sushi 3 times last week!) and watched Better Luck Tomorrow. Saturday got up, made some breakfast, waited for Leah to come back from practice, Dave and Shaw dropped by to say hello, and then Leah and I went to Jeff Bacote's Graduation Party (Congrats!) sharing a cab with KK. Ended up at Bryan/Carlo/Tony's for a little Ping Pong, dropped by the Russell's interim home to see Marla again, and made it back home for bedtime. Sunday, dropped Leah off at her place early, didn't wake Jessica up, went to an Old vs. Young game for NU (Old won, 13-8, 13-8, last 2 points scored by captains only 6 on 7, but the young looked good), did some laundry, dropped Jessica off at the airport, ended up at KK's for a BBQ and in bed by 10:30, which was good, because I'm sick. Head cold. Just in time to start summer league and poultry days. Sweet. Other exciting news is that Apple released what I've been looking for, a device to serve up music from iTunes. Sweet. Too bad I've got to wait until July. I forgot to mention that the last Airport Extreme client software update improves my home connection by a lot and reduces drops in connectivity. All good things. And I think that's it. Summer league Monday and Wednesday and leaving Friday day for Versailles, OH.

So last night marked my return to summer league after a year off. I played with team 5 on the South side and we lost our first game (that doesn't count). Should be fun. Driving wasn't too bad down from Evanston. Got a Teach For America event on Thursday to go to with Leah. All this driving means I don't get to read my books as much anymore, which isn't too good. And don't even get me started on the heat. It's finally getting pretty bad. And then poultry days this weekend. It's supposed to have scattered T-storms through Monday. Storm system looks like it's coming out of Texas. Ugh. Another wet Poultry Days. I should really try out my tent.

So you know that movie Twister? The one with the flying cows? Anyway, the weather reports make me think of that movie, actually, the weather from the last couple weeks reminded me of that movie, especially that day when there were multiple Tornadoes that touched down in the Pennsylvania area, even an F5. But it's supposed to thunderstorm all weekend long, maybe, possibly. Very up in the air, quite literally. I have a GMail account, courtesy Katie Kelly. I guess I traded an orkut invite for it. What I might use it for, I have no idea. And remember how much I looked down on EasyMac, that how hard is it to boil water, well, I'm one of those people. Well, I could be, as soon as I pop one open. But I own some. I know.

Poultry Days was fun. Quite fun. I expected about 250% more rain than I got, pretty much Saturday morning only. No sleeping in the rain. No actual playing in the rain. Just some good playing, some quality hanging out, some good fair food, missing all the traffic. Full writeup on the more. Summer league Monday and Wednesday, Sushi maybe on Tuesday, Beach on Thursday, and oh, Father's Day this coming Sunday. Poultry Days was fun. Quite fun. I expected about 250% more rain than I got, pretty much Saturday morning only. No sleeping in the rain. No actual playing in the rain. Just some good playing, some quality hanging out, some good fair food, missing all the traffic. Left Chi-town around 10:45, apparently just before the way to Versailles turned into a parking lot, got a tarp, a camping lantern/flashlight, and some Arby's before rolling in to a fairly empty campground around 6pm. Set up in the middle of Party Central, whoops, got some fair food, started drinking, waited for the friends and teammates to roll in. Finally did meet some teammates as Jessie stepped in for Ethan (who raised the money) for the Cool Hand Luke egg eating contest for charity and won us some swass Gaia jerseys (with the cloth lip for wiping the disc off). Tried to sleep, but failed miserably because of poor location choice. My tent's awesome, my first ever (thanks Leah!), actually used this year. Playing on Saturday was delayed by a thunderstorm, which eventually gave way to beautiful day. Slim Chickens did pretty well, winning out and and managed to get a 3 seed in the A bracket. Watched Batch represent as best she could in the All Star game. Had some chicken, showered in the pool showers (Now with Hot Water!), and some more drinking. A game of Table Ball after some team bonding lead to an early bedtime. Sunday rolled around and a quick start on the day's games brought a quarters birth against last year's winners Breasts and Thighs. Tough game, especially since I watched my guy (Aaron Bongard) score the winner, 11-9, from about 20 yards away. Not a great way to end the weekend. Packed up, said our goodbyes, planned on Potlatch, and made our (Leah, Remy and I) way back to Chicago, a slight pause for Steak n' Shake and a random gas stop visit with a couple of Leah's friends from Barcelona now in Madison and their new baby. Some personal highlights on playing:

• watching Rocky Beach move on defense. So fast. Not just his legs, but this arms too. Got his hand on a disc, oh, a lot. I still remember one, turning away from the mark and his hand hitting the swing.
• leah picking the disc up, getting called by Rocky for first cut, noticing that they're forcing leah backhand, taking my defender 5 yards in before going deep for her sweet backhand put. Yeah, it was the honey connection.
• my first true layout D in a while. top of the cup, maybe short deep, heard leah oh the left wing call out "on your right" and the full extension fingertip D, onto the wet soft grass.
• watching Pat Hard put a 50 yard hammer, low and fast upwind

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate trojan spam harvesters? Someone I know, well, at least one person I know, must be using Outlook, got a something, clicked on something, and now there's a whole set of emails spoofed from people who are in some collective Chicago ultimate email address book that's just plain spam or trojan bearing. Ugh. Mutt, is where I'm at. Or even Mail.app is where I am when I'm not mutting. Anyway, spam and trojans suck. Captains of Olde lost last night to Old Number 7 (KK and Chuck really). Moving around was a little difficult. Sore from the weekend. Still on for sushi at Sai.

Didn't go to Sai, but got sushi anyway, delivery from Chen's, while doing laundry. I know, exciting evening. But good. Watched Shade while folding. Summer League soon, beach tomorrow if it isn't raining, and Woodstock on Saturday night for a Father's Day dinner. Weblogs, Inc. keeps on coming with the hitz, now with Joystiq, a blog on gaming. I like these blogs better than traditional news sources, why? Not sure. But whoever is writing them seems to like the same stuff I do. Oh, and now definitely going to Potlatch. Should be sweet. My digital camera use is falling dramatically, which is a little sad. And I keep looking for something new, some gadget, something to buy, even though I don't need anything and don't have the budget for it. Oh and up to 5 friends in orkut.

So, I changed my password on my home account, the linux box, with all the emails and stuff, last night, and didn't try and log on until this morning. Guess what I forgot? My new password. So, I'm off the grid till I get a chance fix this particular problem. Otherwise, lost again in summer league, went to Piece, paid for pizza after watching hungry summer league players fight for the free stuff. Still on for beach tonight, with no rain in sight. And after today, no more ultimate till Monday. My cell phone, my trusty old t68i, roughly 1 1/2 years old, is dying on me. I think anyway. Might be time to get a new one, which makes me happy. Maybe have a good reason to get a new gadget. Shibby.

Too much ultimate. And it isn't even really too much ultimate. But I'm tired, and sore, and my body needs the rest. Beach was a blast yesterday. I brought out my handy dandy port-a-field. Easy to setup and take down. Quite nice. Gave the whole game an air of legitimacy. Good crowd too. Taking it easy tonight and plan on sleeping in tomorrow. Phone seems to be working no problems again, so hoping it was just solar flares or something. I'll shoot for the 2 year mark before replacing it. Shoot for it anyway.

Fairly quiet and way too short weekend. Tried to watch the Harry Potter's on Friday, and only managed 1/2 of the first one. Enjoyed the sunshine on Saturday before driving out to Woodstock for my mom's Father's Day dinner. Helped my cousin move a couple pieces of furniture into her new townhouse in Cary after my first ever breakfast at Around the Clock (Crystal Lake diner, reminds me of Omegas). Took the long way in to the city, just like before, 14 to 22 out to 94. Just like going to NU. Bummed around Sunday after getting back in. Got some good shorts at Urban Outfitters. And a retro jacket thingie. This style thing, it's weird. Summer league tonight and Wednesday, some packing, getting things in order for the upcoming coast to coast tour. Gotta hydrate since it's pretty much savage this weekend. And I think that's it.

I borrowed my dad's Tugsten T3, just to try it out, see what it's like, and spent the morning commute browsing the web over the GPRS connection bluetoothed with my phone. So that was pretty sweet. It's nice, except for the Graffiti2 stuff, since I don't like writing when I could be typing. So it's nice. But there's no nice SSH client for the Palm OS. So I looked at the Sharp Zaurus 760 or 860. Nice looking machines, full fledged linux boxes, VGA screens, command lines, very very sweet. Also very very expensive. Ugh. Oh well. Other things, I'm halfway through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Movie version).

I skipped summer league on Monday. Driving down I went through some bad rain, so I went home instead, and watched the weather clear up from my living room. But I'm going tonight. Then I got to pack for Boston. My car needed some fuel timing thing-a-ma-bob replaced, and now I've got to go pick it up.

Since when did I turn into Information? Has my cell phone number been inextricably linked to 411? I know I always provided info to Leah, that's just normal, expected. But providing people's names? Status of public transportation in Chicago? Interesting, that's what it is. Headed to Boston this afternoon. Packed up and ready to go. No idea what's on tap for tomorrow in Beantown. Boston Invite this weekend with Kaze, err, University of Chicago, err, just some random team. Back on Sunday. On a side note, I just read a rumor off The Digital Bits that there's a new Collector's Edition of Rounders being released on Sept. 7th. Sweet. A quality effect of the the poker fad.

A short couple days in Chi-Town before heading out again. Boston, well, it was alright. Kaze tanked. Well, whatever team that was that I played with, tanked. I didn't help at all. Ofer. Haven't done that in a long time. Really long time. Flying had no problems. Driving after the Thursday night arrival was a problem. Stupid traffic. Bad directions, bad signage. Not fun at all. Very frustrating. Anyway, that's behind me. Skipped summer league last night. Unsure of my evening plans. Might go to summer league tomorrow. Then leaving Thursday for Seattle. The 3 things I remember from my previous visit there with my family was a really really short monorail trip, eating at Wild Ginger, and having my first Italian Soda at my brother's friend's house. I wonder what this weekend will have in store for me. Oh, Puck has been emissions tested and passed. Ordered a new city sticker.

Tried to do an update yesterday, but lost it due to poor programming. I never do error handling with shell scripts. Anyway, I talked a bit about DDR, and how there should be a movie, and I saw a commercial about it, I think from FinishLine, which was really funny. Otherwise, not much else. Headed to Seattle tonight. Gone till next Wednesday, almost a full week. Then things quiet down after that. I think. And hope.

Back again. No email though, at least from work. Got to check out my home linux box. Might have died again. Not good. Get to find out tonight. Potlatch and Seattle rocked. Many thanks to Rocky and Shaun and the rest of the folks with Beer Run out of the Bay Area. No problems getting out there, did some hiking on Friday after driving by many many Teriyaki places in strip malls. Got to see a freestyle jam session at Green Lake. Set up camp, got some groceries, tried to sleep, found our team, played some games, went to the Titcomb Seattle Home Base, jumped in the lake, ate some pasta (Thanks Xtehn!) hung out, sat by a camp fire. Very nice saturday. Played some more on Sunday, stopped by the Titcomb home for showers and a dip in the lake before heading to the party. A little disappointing, or just maybe not my scene. Played even more on Monday, ended up somewhere in the middle of the B bracket, enjoyed playing very relaxed and fun, especially after a mini twister blew some straws onto the field, and I found my rally straw. Headed back into Seattle, into a great location hotel with tiny rooms and no AC, had a great seafood dinner with fabulous green curry mussels. Walked around Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, and the City District, finally got some Teriyaki, then headed to the REI flagship store, which was awesome, and I don't think I got to spend enough time there. Then the long travels home, a layover (and quick loss to Leah in Rummy 500) in San Fran before the red eye back to Chicago and in to work this morning. Fun. I managed to do something to my right ankle playing on Monday, it's all swollen and stuff. I also managed to lay out sometime Sunday and get a huge nasty bruise above my right hip. But otherwise I seem to be healthy. Except for not sleeping. And so Potlatch 2004 might very well be the last grass tourney I play at for a while (not counting League stuff).

RCN I think is upgrading. Which is good. And it's bad. I'm having network connectivity issues from work, so email, hosted email lists, like beach, kaze, and the rest, all have issues. Oh well. Still tired, I'm looking forward to sleeping in plenty on Saturday and Sunday. Anything else? Nope, not really. Friday night going on a double date to Blind Faith Cafe and watch Fahrenheit 9/11 up in Evanston. Should be interesting. I might try and turn musings into my public journal for that whole voting thing that's gonna happen in November. Would that be exposing too much? Maybe. I'll show up at Beach tonight, won't necessarily play though.

Well, it looks like I'm back up to speed with my RCN cable modem service. No problems all day so far. Sweet. Beach was a bust for me, no playing, my ankle couldn't take it. Oh well. Ended up at some bar for food across the way from Adobo, had me some bangers and mash. I forgot to mention that I found my favorite, close to perfect, sandals for casual wear: Merrell Tacoma's. Only found one place that sells them online in the US, VillageShoes.com. And only in black. I'd like to get the beaver brown ones, but the only online place I found doesn't ship to the US. So that sucks. The strap is still a little too wide and they take a little breaking in (apparently my left foot is bigger than my right), but after that, they're great.

Had a pretty good weekend, and realized that I've got to find something to do with my time now that I don't really have ultimate anymore. Friday night watched Fahrenheit 9/11, read my take on it. Dinner was good at Blind Faith, had some Seitan Stroganoff. Saturday watched The Perfect Score, some TV, cleaned some, then went to Ravinia, got to use Leah's Porron, got stuck in traffic, all good stuff. Made me want to get all sorts of picnic related gadgets, fold up tables, lanterns, and so on. Sunday just lounged about, made breakfast, watched Search for Bobby Fischer, such a good movie. Made some Lemon Chicken, got some groceries to cook dinner for the next couple of days, watched Marge Vs. The Monorail and I Love Lisa Simpsons episodes from Season 4 and tried to see the resemblance between the The Neverending Story's Falkor, the luck dragon (pic halfway down) and myself. No summer league, trying to rest my ankle. Sony Ericsson will supposedly release new phones on Thursday, July 15th, maybe a P910, something else for me to drool over.

Watched Kissing Jessica Stein with Leah, and high fived at mention of a Jewish dinner in Scarsdale. It's a good movie, I thought, but the ending was a little perplexing and confusing. Made some fish, and cheapening out by using onions instead of shallots is not a good idea. You definitely lose some flavor by doing that. Not good when it's one of 4 ingredients. Also made some cookies and froze some batter for future easy fresh cookies. I learned that you can update the P900 firmware from Virtual PC, which removes yet another obstacle to getting a new phone. It's finally feeling like summer. I also saw a schedule on a store front for the Chicago Lugnuts, a semi pro baseball team. The Cubs, the Bears, the Bulls, Blackhawks, Wolves, Rush, Fire, Machine, Nemesis, but Lugnuts?

So the UK edition of Queer Eye was not so good. Maybe it's because I don't get that British humour, or maybe QE has either jumped the shark or gone GP. Either or, not so entertaining. Made some sweet quesadillas with pesto and goat cheese and a roasted red pepper sauce. My Airport Express shipped. Sweet. Oh, and Twenty Bucks was just announced for release on DVD. And I'm looking for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to be announced too, but no luck there. I found another pair of sandals that I like, the Adidas Dakar II which fit fairly well.

Got some sushi last night. Sai was especially good. Just sort of a last second impulse dinner. Then tried some Australian Homemade ice cream over on Southport, quite good Nut Butter Crunch, and found MyGuysWireless, also on Southport, which sells the P900; they actually had one in the window! So I finally get to lay my hands on one, and, just in time, SonyEricsson released info on the P910, it's replacement. Sweet! Damn. Anyway, I'll still check it out. Best new feature? Memory Stick Duo Pro support = lots of space for bring it with me TV and Movies. Anyway, brought Leah to the airport this morning, she's away until Monday. Gonna try and catch up on some movies, Anchorman, Harry Potter, Spider-Man 2, maybe Dodgeball if I can squeeze it in there. No beach tonight for me, still resting my ankle. Oh, and I keep forgetting, I have some Gmail invites to give out, so if you're interested, drop me a note.

Finally watched the HPPA (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) which I felt was good but completely different from the first two. That took a little bit to get used to. Would have been nice if WB had waited until all the books were finished and filmed all 7 back to back. Course, that would have been horrible for the kids. Definitely felt different watching the kids growing up, that's for sure. Going to see Anchorman tonight at 6:30 at City North before getting some Korean food. On a somewhat related note, Bryan's brother's band, Lystra's Silence, has one of their albums, Brink, available from the iTunes Music Store. That's pretty cool. I'm gonna try and get a viewing of Spider-Man 2 in sometime this weekend.

Anchorman was sweet. Very funny movie. Woo Chen, korean BBQ, was great as well. Saturday lounged about, watched a whole lot of I love the 90's and A2Z on VH1. Did some computer housecleaning, watched a couple of movies, Spider-Man and something else. Definitely a lounging day. Still got to go see Spider-Man 2, maybe later tonight, and headed to Russell's for a BBQ this afternoon. Leah comes back tomorrow, and I might try and play summer league, although the ankle still doesn't feel all that good.

BBQ was fun. Aside from friends, food and games, I got to play with some speaker wires. Whole house audio is pretty cool. I snuck in a late night viewing of Spider-Man 2 last night. I really liked it, struck a chord or something. Starsky & Hutch comes to DVD tomorrow, that's exciting. Sandblast this weekend.

So the ankle, not so good. Played a handful of points at summer league and it just doesn't seem to work right. Good thing I don't really have a season to worry about. I guess 2 weeks isn't enough to fix whatever is wrong with my ankle. Did manage to get some greek food afterwards. Really have to do some laundry. Found out that Cake's new album, Pressure Chef, is due out Oct. 5th. That's exciting. I wonder what their 1 radio hit will be this time? Maybe songs about being in love again, I think that's where their at in terms of their music/relationship cycle.

Laundry, Starsky & Hutch, and fried rice last night. Exciting, I know. Airport Express is really cool. I tried setting up WDS (Wireless Distribution System), but of course, I didn't look up any sort of directions, that would have helped me. But I think I've figured it out now. Got a couple, one for the living room and another for the bedroom. I'll use VNC to control the main Mac with all the music. That allows me to whip open the powerbook, set up some songs, then sleep the powerbook and keep the music rolling. It's just plain sweet. I've fallen in love with Wikipedia, an online open content encyclopedia. My favorite article from yesterday: 47, interesting because of it's prevalence in Alias.

Sketchy weather conditions and my choice not to play meant no summer league last night. Instead, Leah and I picked up her new REI fleece from the Niles store, got some dinner back in Evanston at Barcelona Tapas, had a Taro freeze with tapioca balls, and watched Dodgeball after getting caught in a torrential downpour and subsequent changing back into dry clothes. Funny funny movie. Seriously gets me to want to play dodgeball. Sandblast coming up, and I think I'm gonna have to play with an ankle brace.

So, it appears that friends of mine have been getting spam from my email address, or email addresses like mine, or at least from my domain. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that it's not actually from me. Why would I say that? Besides the fact that I get spam to, from me, to me, even to the point that I have a spam addressed management@abando.com from me (eric@abando.com) complaining about receiving spam from that domain. Said spam in question also contains a .bmp file and a password protected zip file with odd names. Anyway, to get spam from me, to get email address of people in my address book, that would be someone hacking into my linux box, looking in my home directory at my alias list for mutt and going through my procmail recipes for the pseudo listservs that I run for the email addresses, then sending out a bunch of emails with zips and bmps and pifs and what not. So, I'm gonna guess I'm not sending any spam. So who might be? Well, here's the kicker: I've gotten spam on my beach, boston, poker, and kaze lists. Trojans that run on windows harvest email addresses to either spam or propagate themselves from existing emails in Outlook. So, my guess it's someone on all three of those lists, who runs Windows most likely Outlook, and saves email. Doing some more digging, the only person currently on all of them is me. Whoops. That doesn't sound like a scapegoat. I still don't think I'm sending out all that spam. Anyway, Sandblast captain's meeting tonight, playing tomorrow and Sunday. I need to pump up the tires on my bike so I can ride to the beach. Managed to get my Airport Expresses working with no problems, no longer WDS, I didn't like the requirements.

So, I think, my competitive ultimate season for 2004 is over. Sandblast was a lot of fun, playing with some former Kaze teammates and extras. We, Burning Bush or Honky Kong, won our first two games, lost the next one, then lost the next two in our reseeded power pool. And power pool is right, because the next day our pool's top seed made it to the finals and the bottom two ended up fighting for 9th, which we got. Lots of fun. Piece was good on Friday and Saturday nights. Went to Adam's on Sunday for some chilling and dinner at Hillary's Urban Eatery. I hurt though, body's sore. Dropped by Russell's for some Scattergories (which I'm bad at) before watching Marc, Schulzie and Chuck play a set at Piece on Saturday. Summer league tonight, possibly Grant Park movie tomorrow night.

So summer league last night helped with the general body soreness from the weekend. Too much laying out. Gonna try and head out to Grant Park's outdoor film festival tonight, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Might also actually use my bike tonight as well. New windows are getting installed in my condo building, and I'm guessing are going in at my place in 3 weeks or so. Otherwise, not much else. No new toys, gadgets, or movies, really. Just pretty cold July weather.

Okay, I've done the Grant Park outdoor film showing. Good, hard to see, but the projection was great, at least from my vantage point. And Mr. Smith in Washington is a good movie. Getting there at 7:25 is still way too late to get a good spot. Also it's true about all the folding chairs that destroy sightlines for a good many people, they do get in the way. Kaze Social Club had a good showing as well. Not sure if I have to go back, but I could. Summer league tonight, might try and hit the beach tomorrow, and then it's the weekend.

Okay, so I forgot yesterday, and I'm really late with my update today. So I've got to recap all the way from Wednesday night. That was a late day at work, no summer league, some chilling on my couch, trying to watch Fight Club. Thursday more working, hitting the beach for some mediocre play, a dip in the lake to clean off and dinner at Leah's. And tonight, probably catch a movie at home, do some ironing, some cleaning, try and put some camping stuff away from the beginning of the month. No real plans for the weekend, might try and go out to see some movies, maybe a drive in, maybe some mini-golf, maybe something else I haven't found yet. So if possible, my legs hurt from beach. Kinda annoying. And I think that's all she wrote.

I'm taking a cue from Gizmodo and a suggesting from Russell and introducing a GadgetBag segment. That's on the more. Weekend was pretty laid back. Friday night movie at home, TV, living on the couch, Saturday doing some ironing on the couch watching TV and movies, and headed out with plans for the drive in but failed and stayed in town, BBQ at the Russells', sweets at Sweet Mandy B's, then I, Robot at Webster Place. I liked the movie, summer blockbuster, and it takes place in futuristic Chicago. Sunday more TV and movies and ironing. I think I've managed to get rsyncx up and running, which is a good thing. I am running out of Hard Drive space, if that's believable. Too much music. Gadget Bag
So what's in my gadget bag?

• Apple Powerbook 12" 1.0 Ghz. I maxed out the RAM and HD, with an Airport Extreme card. Otherwise, nothing too fancy about it. Used a little bit on the El, in the diner at breakfast, or at Leah's house. Set up as a web development, java development environment. Named Aluminum, which is unoriginal but fits into the element naming scheme I use. Also an AC adapter. And a firewire cable (short one).
• iPod 5GB, one of the originals. I did get it replaced a year into the warranty for a bad firewire port, but no problems since then.
• Sony Ericsson t68i (with T-Mobile). Had it for almost 2 years, looking to upgrade eventually, maybe the p910, but the t68i is still working. Love the bluetooth. I've got a data plan, so if need be, I can go online with the powerbook.
• LED Head lamp. This is new, got it for Poultry Days this year, but comes in handy.
• Swiss Army knife. It's the cyber tool or something, it's translucent red, and comes with hex and torx drivers. Also comes in handy.

And that's pretty much it. I don't do much computing on the road, nor have I gotten anything more recent than my powerbook (Oct 2003).

Summer league was alright. Ankle doesn't feel good, but I'm able to move around at least without a brace. Not well, but able. Really cool to read about Rohre Titcomb on RSD and how she's awesome on the US Junior Women's team. Oh, the Titcombs. I hope someone puts together the all sibling team for some tourney, and I could watch the Titcombs (all 4 current players), the Blanchet-Ruths, the Forth twins, oh, and don't forget about the Sheils, and many many more that I'm sure I haven't seen yet. That'd be a really fun team to watch. Going to the Bacotes' tonight, sushi and some CSO tomorrow, not much else I can think of. I'd like to sit through some episodes of Sliders, if I get a chance.

Tried to help Jeff and Becca finish off their leftover beef last night, and whiled the night away with some Taboo. I'm much better at guessing then I am at giving clues. Did some late night babysitting of a work related process. I don't like the packaging for Sliders Season 1 and 2, it's a little disappointing. Weather's a little crazy, big storm running through, much cooler now. Skipping yet another summer league game tonight, friend in town for sushi and music.

I really need to catch up on my sleep. Good thing the weekend's coming up. No beach for me, too tired. Maybe start the Sliders watching tonight. palmOne might be releasing an SD WiFi card, which would make my dad's T3 much more usable, maybe. Also looked up some info on maybe trying ePocrates again, maybe using Mark/Space's Missing Sync, maybe trying it with Virtual PC? I've got to upgrade my storage space, get some new HD's, try and do an actual back-up every now and then. Space is cheap.

So my dad has an ePocrates account, and it wasn't installing and syncing on the Cube at home with his Tungsten T3, so I brought it back into the city to see if I could get it to work. That was months ago. I finally did some work with it last night, and guess what? Work just fine. So that means I've got to go out to Woodstock and install it out there. Which is too bad, cause I spent a lot of time last night looking and installing different cool things, like Mapapolis, getting AvantGo to work, using NewsMac to get and sync RSS feeds. I guess my dad will be able to use all these cool things. Sliders is a good show, too bad it's not widescreen. I just wonder why, no matter what Earth they slide to, their personas are always important in some way. Wouldn't that be nice to know?

So I'm actually using my brother's bike, an old Trek 7000 from way back in the day. Works well enough for me. Friday night from my house to Leah's, Saturday morning from Leah's to mine and back again, then down to Michigan Ave, then up to my house. Sunday down to North Ave. beach and back to my house. It's nice. The lakefront path is especially nice. But another pretty chill weekend, plenty of TV and Sliders. Finished up Executive Orders, and Harry Potter 5 is out in paperback tomorrow, and besides picking that up I'll look for Pattern Recognition, Bear and the Dragon, maybe Teeth of the Tiger, all in paperback. After getting my dad's T3 back up and running, he asked for it back, so now I've just got to get out to Woodstock to get the actual update software installed. Last week of ultimate, summer league on Monday and Wednesday and the tourney on Saturday. Leah leaves for New York on Thursday for a couple weeks. We made it down to the beach for a swim and some sand time on Sunday, so check off another of "summer things to do in chicago".

Lost in summer league on Monday. Managed to get home, order up some Chen's, and do some laundry in spite of the loss. Watched Disney's The Parent Trap, my guilty pleasure movie, with Leah because of some Camp Walden scenes. Got my new hard drives, put them in firewire cases for Carbon Copy Cloning and then replacing the existing drives in my machine later this week. Summer league and team BBQ tonight, and thanks to the Russells' for the Cubs game last night. It got a little exciting in the 9th, with 2 men on, 2 outs, and down by 2. Oh well. Organized some more photos with Leah. Started Order of the Phoenix.

Summer league win last night, seemed fairly unusual for some reason or the other. A quick stop at Colin and Jason's Team BBQ and then off to Chinatown for dinner with Kevin, Sally, Bryan, and Leah. Taro root freezes with tapioca balls are much better at Joy Yee's. Leah's having some issues flying out to New York today, a nice huge storm system standing in the way. One canceled flight after a 2 hour delay, and a current 2 hour delay on her new flight. Tomorrow is Harold and Kumar at White Castle at 7:30 at City North. Maybe Golden Nugget for an early dinner. Saturday out in Naperville for Summer League tourney, maybe some suburb fun as well. Sunday computer upgrade with Marc, maybe some cards with friends. And then another week will start. I've also got a craving for some chicken soup, which my daily visit to Whole Foods was unable to satisfy. I found my blue trendy track type jacket which I thought I'd lost, which ended up, wonder of wonders, in my closet. And I found my sunglasses, which were MIA since the failed drive-in outing of July, in the trunk of Puck. Still have to find Leah's blue backpack.

Friday the 13th. Ha. Had no idea until I read it on some other website. Funny. Did some cleaning last night, thinking about reorganizing the data center. Eventually I'll reorganize everything, around the time the new windows go in. Maybe I'll stop having a data center altogether. Hey, stranger things have happened, like not playing ultimate. Might try and get out for some minigolf and go-karts after summer league tomorrow. Won't have to drive anymore, won't have anything to do on Mondays or Wednesdays anymore, I can put my cleats away. Looks like a nice fall.

Summer League's over, Captains of Olde won our first game, lost our second, won the third and then called it a season. Fun. Got to play with El again. Pretty quiet weekend overall, Friday night dinner with some married folks (Bacotes and Russells) and Sally at Silver Cloud, my first time, pretty good. I had the Chicken in a Bowl, which was good, but still didn't satisfy my craving for chicken soup, which I think has passed. No movie, a trip to the dog park, and a quiet evening at home. Saturday was showing up late for the tourney after getting Krispy Kreme donuts for breakfast, then getting Wendy's (so good) on the way out, or back in. Some cleaning, reorganizing, trying to figure out what to do with the data center, some serious kitchen cleaning. Now I've got more counter space, and I don't know what to do with it all. Sunday friends for poker after grocery shopping. I'm gonna try and make some zucchini bread. And I got my brother's old Wallstreet out and installed Mac OS X 10.2 on it, hoping to either turn it into a big giant digital picture frame or something else. Slow though. And figure out what to do with the old iMac as well.

Finally working on the digital picture frames from old laptops. My old Sony 707 looks like a winner, but my old 505 looks like a loser, unless I figure out which screws ground out on the case. But otherwise, really interesting stuff. There's not much to laptops, a whole lot of empty space in there. Heading to the Russells' tonight to give a 7 month late wedding present. Maybe catch a cheap $5 movie after. Might have to do some more wedding present shopping tomorrow, pick up some stuff at Leah's, try and find some nice picture frames. Headed out to Woodstock on Friday, dinner with the 'rents at Bistro Wasabi. Currently watching Only You.

Dinner was good last night. Got caught in the rain for a bit, nothing too bad. Dropped by to drop off Tony's present, a script version of Fast and the Furious. Hope to see a friends' stage production of that someday. Didn't end up seeing a movie, maybe some other time. Still have to figure out software for the picture frame. I've heard something about zgv, which I'll try out, but it'd be really nice to have some sort of transitions like Mac OS X has between photos, like cross dissolves and pan and zoom too. Got to do some more troubleshooting of macs, and this whole 411 aspect of my life is still pretty crazy, not bad though, so keep calling if you need some info.

Finally got my bowl of Chicken Noodle Soup. I felt like a kid again, having soup and peanut butter sandwiches. Watched Out Cold. zgv is a no go in terms of image viewer, and I couldn't find a frame I liked at Linens n' Things, so I'll try and find something at a craft store, probably Michaels, when I head out to Woodstock this weekend. I also definitely killed my 505, but it had a bad hard drive before that, so I'm not heartbroken. Princess Bride in the park tonight, some more Airport troubleshooting. Oh, I finally baked some zucchini bread last night. Good, but not great. I'd like to try some other recipes as well.

The movies in the park, a much better idea, I think, than the Grant Park movie, occurs all over the city throughout the summer at various parks. It looks like a nice system, rear projection, and smaller parks make it much easier to see. And last night being at Churchill Field Park in Wicker Park/Bucktown, well, it was good. Helps that it's in everyone else's backyard. Princess Bride is a great movie, even better with friends. I like the outdoor atmosphere, I feel like it's conducive to comments, involvement, stuff like clapping during the good scenes, audible reactions from the audience. Anyway, makes me wonder if there's more next year that are in my neck of the woods. Played some beer schtick afterwards, but without the beer for me, I had to drive home. No sushi tonight, getting my favorite chinese food, Hong Kong Chicken from Plum Garden when I get to Woodstock. Got some computer stuff to do out there as well.

The trip home to Woodstock ended up being quite eventful. Direcway sucks for large updates, so I brought back the Cube to get it back up to speed. I'm also gonna do a full format and reinstall to get the ePocrates install to work, which of course didn't when I tried. Damn the Cube's awesome. Such a nice little machine. Maybe after Tiger comes out I'll get my parents something new, and never upgrade the OS to another point release. I've got to think of it more as an appliance, rather than an actual computer. But Saturday went to a funeral with my mom, a graduation party, and a birthday party. All we needed was a wedding to complete the cycle, I thought. Ran into an old high school French substitute teacher at the graduation party, talk about a blast from the past and a relatively odd occurrence for me. Stayed up way to late trying to get my digital picture photo frame working, which I thought I did, but then the screen keeps shutting off, but it looks good when it's on. And because I was up so late, I managed to see all the events I've been wanting to see on the Olympics: Badminton, Table Tennis, and Team Handball; all on at 4-5am on Sunday morning. I finished up the 5th Harry Potter, and I've started Pattern Recognition. Cleaned up a bit, did some ironing, watched Fast and the Furious and way to much other stuff on TV, and lounged at home. Had lunch with El today, good to sit and talk with her for a while, and got to pick stuff up from Leah's, do some laundry. I leave on Wednesday.

Took a nice long walk back up to my place from Leah's yesterday after picking up some odds and ends. Did my laundry, had a craving for a sundae, reformated and reinstalled OS X on the Cube, got the CD drive working again on the Sony picture frame (either doing a reformat and factory restore or installing linux). Gotta pack, iron, clean, and hopefully do some more computer stuff tonight.

So I'm leaving tonight, flying out of Midway on ATA (go figure), and gone till Monday. Got lots done last night, err, this morning. Other news, Big Wig's closing, which I found via a couple new Chicago blogs, Chicagoist and GapersBlock. I watched a bit of Olympics last night in High Def, which was pretty cool, except for the slow motion replays, which don't translate well, especially with the diving (I think digital moving pictures have extra special trouble with water). I polished my shoes for the first time last night, err, this morning, so that was kind of exciting. Good as new. Well, almost.

So NY and NYC are pretty cool. I don't think I spent enough time there to get a true feel of the place. Saw my first broadway show, the Producers, good, hung out with the Gesoffs, including Dusty, and met the Skioffniks. Auburn, NY, at least on the lake, is beautiful, as was Elisa and Brett's wedding. Pictures will go up soon. Too tired to really do any of it justice in writing. I am feeling a little under the weather, a nice summer cold or something. I might be joining a gym today, and might start swimming for exercise. Get to go get some sushi some night on Leah's Dad after helping him set up a network at home. Hero and Weber Grill on Friday. New iMac was announced. Watched my first episode of Entourage, which I really liked. More details about the weekend later on.

I hate this tail end of cold, with a head full of snot, a dry cough, and waiting for it all to pass. Enough with the pretty picture though. I now belong to the Multiplex East Lakeview Club, about 1 1/2 blocks from my place. Hopefully means I'll get into some sort of non ultimate related shape. It will be rather interesting, anyway. Might actually show up at beach tomorrow. Still got lots of computer stuff to do. Finished up Pattern Recognition and moved on to Generation X, which also means I need to pick up Microserfs sometime. After that, maybe back to some Tom Clancy, or maybe something a little more serious.

So, the cough's worse, and I'm not feeling a whole lot better, but hey, I mean, it's great timing coming up on a three day weekend, that last of summer, right? Got a fitness consultation, free, from my gym. Interesting notes: 60 resting pulse, 104 active pulse, 122/80 blood pressure, 16.6% body fat percentage, which all means I could stand to lose like 5 lbs. We'll see if that happens. Beach maybe tonight, since there's a Pro Volleyball tourney coming through town. Hero and Weber Grill for sure tomorrow.

Leah and I showed up for beach last night, and we left not too long after. Bjorn and Kevin were throwing, and Carlo showed up later. But no game. So Leah went out with her sister (and new roommate) and sister's friend for free drinks and apps. I went home to do some more iBook troubleshooting and get some soup. I'm still feeling under the weather, almost 5 days after I started feeling bad. And I've got this insatiable craving for soup. So no luck on the iBook, resetting the power manager at least go the green light to go on the AC adapter, but still no charging. A quick little research finds that some people had issues with it before, not charging, and got the DC board replaced while still under warranty. But it's old, an original (Dual USB) iBook, just like mine. Except I think mine's got a bad logic board, but it charges, which means I could either try and get it fixed, or cannibalize one of them for parts to get the other one working. We'll see. Nothing planned for the long weekend, maybe some more wedding present shopping, sleeping, and lounging.

Back to the grind. A nice 3 day weekend, fairly uneventful. Hero was good Friday night, as was dinner at Weber Grill. Saturday was more lounging around with a quick stop over at the Russell's to fix a networking problem. Dinner was with my parents and Leah at Angelina's Ristorante, and a face showing at Alison's gathering of ultimate folks at Lemmings. Then plenty of sleep, getting more than I have in a long long time. More lazy day Sunday, getting linux on the digital picture frame, dinner at the Gesoffs' by the Gesoffs', Leah's eggplant parmesan and Alison's salad. Stopped by their friend's place, Brian, and the more sleeping. Monday was yet another lazy day, capped off by beach, and some chicken/egg drop soup for dinner. I'm still battling whatever cold/cough thing I've got. Finally got some cough drops, my favorite from childhood, Luden's Wild Cherry. But I think they might be too much like candy. Maybe some beach on Thursday, maybe some heckling of CHC teams this weekend, but that's about it on the plans front.

So I felt the worse I've felt in a week with this nagging cough/cold thing yesterday, but I'm feeling much better today. I'm finally drinking tons, so that's probably helping. New blog I've found: CTA Tattler. Watched Sneakers with the girls and had some Green Tea as well last night. I'd like to get in a Resident Evil viewing before the weekend release of the sequel. Oh, I forgot to mention that I printed from my powerbook to the shared USB printer off my desktop the other day, and it was so easy. No install of drivers, or nothing, I don't think. Super easy.

Got a viewing of Resident Evil in last night. Well, it played in the background as I got SSHKeychain up and running. And I'm retracing my steps on getting a Orinoco WaveLAN Silver wireless card up and running under Debian 2.0 (I know, it's old). Now I really think I'm on the tail end of this cold, blowing my nose and coughing up stuff, finally. A couple more days I think. Time to get some more water.

2 things. 1) Evanston Public Library is having their semi annual book sale, I think, this weekend. I'm hoping to pick up some Ludlum books myself. And 2) When did the nickle get redesigned? Or when did they release a new version? I just got one back from Whole Foods (trying out their hot bar for lunch), and see this shiny nickle, which is 2004 but Lewis & Clark on the back in some sort of ship. When did this happen?

So I guess the Evanston Public Library isn't having a book sale this weekend, it's now December 4-5. That's a long time away. Did some impulse grocery shopping, which means I came home with lots of unhealthy junk food. I cut a hole using my Dremel in my G4 desktop which allows for great airflow for the CPU fan. Which is good. And then I flashed my DVD-R drive to be region free and other updated goodies. Zgv now does look to be a quality image/screensaver for the laptop, and still working on the wireless card, apparently compilation of the driver requires the pcmcia-cs source. Headed out to Woodstock tomorrow, should be back Sunday to Naperville for a drop in. Might stop by an Apple store to get a USB 2.0 cable for Leah's iPod which she'll need for her computer.

Things just didn't go according to plan. Ended up staying in the city Saturday, still trying to get the digital photo frame working, basically, getting vesa and frame buffer video support into the kernel, along with getting the pcmcia stuff working, along with a new kernel too, 2.4.19, so a lot of stuff there. Watched a bunch of movies while this was happening, Antitrust, Swordfish, Ocean's 11 and Italian Job (which is a bit scratched). Oh, and then a late viewing of It Could Happen to You. Eventually got all the stuff working, went out to Naperville Sunday morning, in time to see Machine win their semi, say hello to some peeps, and then headed up to Woodstock for an eventual dinner with the 'rents at Bistro Wasabi. And then even better news with the photo frame, got SVGAlib working properly which means zgv is working flawlessly. The only problem now is control. I've got to see if external keyboards work, and maybe even bluetooth. But soon. Leah comes back from her weekend in NY. And Sky Captain opens Friday.

Picked up Leah from Midway last night. 25 minutes from my place to the airport. That was awesome. Otherwise, nothing new. Linux kernels these days can do so much more than when I used to play with them, back in 2000-2001. USB and bluetooth support all built in? Crazy. Twenty Bucks got delayed, indefinitely, so I've only got Star Wars coming next Tuesday. But that's a little exciting.

Tuesday Night dinner at Leah's, thrown together chicken and noodles, who knew milk makes all the difference in a tomato sauce? Some Scrubs watching with their new cable from ComCast, and trying to figure out what the problem is with their cable modem, it would get a DHCP served IP address, and it looked like UDP traffic went out fine, since I could resolve DNS, but no pings, no web requests, no nothing else. Hopefully it's all fixed now. Wednesday helped my Mom, or at least tried to help, put up the window treatments. Got em all up but 2. She also brought in Chop Suey Hut's Fried Chicken for dinner. I also got some stuff together for Marc's Mac OS X upgrade, which has been about 2 years in the planning, which finally happens tonight. I'm hoping things go smoothly. And I've started gluing back together the frame and stuff for the photo frame. Expect some pics sometime. Tomorrow is date night at Mirai, Saturday some setup for Leah's new computer, and maybe a viewing of Sky Captain on Sunday.

I ended up at beach last night, a bit of a surprise. Good, but no cones. Then it was a 4 hour upgrade for Marc's powerbook. 10.3.5, with 9.2.2, all the most current software updates. That's a lot of optimization. But easy and straightforward. He made some grilled salmon and veggies as well. Tired though, not enough sleep. BBQ tomorrow night and beyond previous plans, nothing else extra. But definitely got some cleaning to do.

Friday night at Mirai was good. Ate upstairs in the lounge, definitely good fish, but still, not quite the value, the fillingness of Sai. But definitely some good stuff, the Chef's special rolls are fantastic. Then an early night, trying to catch up on some sleep after a viewing of Face/Off (which Leah liked, surprisingly). Saturday I upgraded her new laptop to XP SP2, got some free photo software (Picasa and OfotoNow), and started transferring her Documents, Music, and Pictures from her account on my desktop. It's got a 1400x1050 14" LCD that's just, well, to die for. BBQ and party at Akira, Lorra, and Sarah's was fun. They've got an awesome place, with the best view of the city among all the people's places I've been in. Good time. Sunday, went to mass, saw Sky Captain with Bryan, and finally finished up the photo frame. It looks good. I think I need to hang it on the wall, which will require some additional engineering. Tomorrow night is Kaze Alumni night at Kaze at 8pm. Wednesday is the Lost premiere. Oh, I finished up Ninja by Eric V. Lustbader and moved on the the Miko, and will probably finish up with White Ninja. It's definitely been a while since I've read them. But it also has me craving a good quality ninja movie to watch.

Got the Gesoff/Freemen household set up with a wireless network and an ethernet hub so they can use laptops on the couch and additional computers at the desk. I'm currently loaning them the hub and Airport Extreme (they were sorta extras after I upgraded to a switch and I got a couple Airport Expresses). So that was pretty cool, as even I get to be online when I'm over there, which I am. Some bad news though, my digital photo frame fell off my piano, and the glass chipped, but amazingly enough, the guts were just fine. And since I want to hang it on the wall, I think I need to upgrade the case to something beyond foam board, and move up to some sort of wood. We'll see what I can do with balsa.

Lost. Not just the premiere tonight, but the lack of email. I can't ssh into my home box right now, not sure why, I'll have to figure it out tonight. Last night it seemed like I needed to enable ping to successfully get any internet action. So who knows what the actual problem is. Kaze was good last night, some very interesting combinations of sushi and toppings. Small and not too expensive. Might have to try it again when their seasonal specials change. Good to see a smattering of Kaze alums though. I think I'm going to turn sake into my drink of choice. I got some Pride of the Village for dinner last night, and it's pretty good.

Go figure, my home networking problem was/is a loose power cord into my pretty old cable modem. With all this upgrading going on, digital city action, I'm wondering when I should get around to upgrading to digital cable and the rest of the stuff along side it. I did read that HD isn't coming till next year at the earliest. Which sucks. But would rock if it comes in time for Alias or the Superbowl. So back on email. Did some more networking stuff for 332 W. Dickens (Leah's apartment). Got to do some cord cleanup tonight in prep for their party tomorrow night. Lost was good last night, as was Veronica Mars. I'll try and keep up on Lost, especially since it's in HD and looks pretty spectacular.

Late night at work yesterday, late for me anyway. Not enough sleep either the night before. So I'm looking forward to the weekend, which starts in a few short measly hours. Stars Wars viewing at my place tomorrow starting around noon or so. Come if you're interested, just let me know. Otherwise, maybe I'll actually try and do some programming, or attempt to do some programming. Like that's actually going to happen. But got another idea to throw onto the list of things to someday program.

Friday night party at Leah's was interesting. A handful of ultimate players showed up, and some didn't even stay, but I left early instead of making new friends with people I had no clue of how or who they were. Only got through A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back on Saturday, and never got around to Return, at least not yet. Got some sushi to Break the Fast with some Jews Saturday night, and I went to mass on Sunday morning. Installed a new 80 GB hard drive on Leah's laptop and restore factory settings (exciting). I also managed to take my iBook apart for the DC board with hopes to replace another iBook's broken one. No programming done on the weekend which is a surprisingly short amount of time. October's right around the corner, and I've only got 1 DVD on preorder, which makes for a good thing. Went over to Bryan's to catch some football and hang out with Whitney, in town for the holidays, and chilled with Nemesis over at Lorra's for the evening. Cooking dinner for Leah tonight (it's her birthday tomorrow), another birthday dinner tomorrow night (not by me), and that's it for plans.

Dinner went well last night, Leah helped a lot with the chopping. We went and made the Beef in Puff Pastry, Potato Latkes, and Zucchini stuffed tomatoes. Good stuff. I'm about to hit some of it for lunch right now. I successfully reinstalled and upgraded her laptop, there's all the other stuff I need to install and get working before I can release it back to the household. Lost on Wednesday.

Leah's Birthday dinner by Christie and Judy was fabulous; Lamb and a great mixed green salad with baby bellos and other good things with Hello Dolly's for dessert. Very good. I did miss Veronica Mars, which is on UPN at 8pm, but dinner conversation was good. Their laptop is now back up to speed, and all that's left is the music transfer, again, but this should be easier with the USB 2.0/FireWire 2.5" 40 GB hard drive I've got now, except that the USB isn't enough to power it so I've got to find a 5V DC adapter over 500 mA that fits. FireWire works like a charm.

It's getting cold out these days. I think I fried a hard drive after applying too many amps to an external HD case, but we'll see. Made some sesame chicken last night, watched Lost (it's tempting to wait for the eventual DVD Season 1 Boxed Set because of all the commercials), and started Return of the Jedi. I also sold an extra Powermate to Tony. Replacing the DC board on the other iBook should be pretty easy because of pbfixit. Just gotta find the time. Gonna watch the presidential debate tonight. I also found out I live in Congressional District 9. That whole voting thing's coming up soon, and now I'm leaning Independent.

I played a little bit with Matt's Blackberry, a nice color one, I think a 7230, and while I didn't take a look at the email part, the rest of it was pretty damn cool. I'm impressed with it. Thumbboard's really easy to use too. Anyway, Leah wants a Konfabulator like application to get the weather on her desktop, and so I did some research and tried out Samurize. And, it's just about perfect. No Konpose, but still pretty good. I'm impressed. Plans for the weekend? I guess it's apple picking season. There's also the drive in that hasn't been visited yet. Wait and see.

3 days, no update. Busy yesterday. Let's see, to recap the weekend, Friday night not sure what I ended up doing, I think a quiet night at Leah's, I think Meatloaf was made, Saturday, some laundry, finally finished up RoTJ, some more TV, replaced the DC-in board on an iBook to make it charge again, copied some music around, did a full home backup, fixed some sync scripts, general computer home maintenance stuff. Sunday was some hanging out at Becca and Jeff's (Congrats again on passing the bar) and a viewing of Shaun of the Dead with Russell and Bryan. I know there's something else on Saturday, but I forget. No drive-in or apple picking, too cold and too much effort. My new favorite Krispy Kreme is the cinnamon bun. Dinner last night by Alison, Olive Lemon Chicken, Favorite rice, and steamed broccoli, along with a nice brownie sundae from Ben & Jerry's. Ugh. It's only Tuesday. Managed to transfer some music to Leah's laptop finally, simple ethernet connection using the auto crossover nature of the powerbook to make it work super easily. Still don't know where my Varsity Blues DVD is.

Late night at work, probably burning the midnight oil all week at work. Sushi is so good, even from Whole Foods. The Tekka-don is so good and filling. I could have it every day. Got a new HD for the powerbook yesterday, hopefully I'll install it tonight since my warrantee ended yesterday. New Cake, Pressure Chef, is pretty good. Definite country twang to some of the songs. Lost tonight, if I get home in time, and once again I missed Veronica Mars. Oh well. Guess I'll catch it in syndication some day, maybe, or just get the eventual DVD Season releases.

I've got an old 1G 5GB iPod, an original, well, until it got replaced under warranty. But I was thinking, and keep thinking, that the interface is so great, why not try and keep the interface and put it on a huge drive? like a 3.5" desktop 120GB or something. Or even put it into a nice car stereo type unit so I could have an iPod in my car, granted, it would be harder to update the music, but then again, with that much space, why have to? But this is apparently much harder than it looks. It might involve firmware hacking and the like. Dropping in a bigger drive doesn't magically make it work. Oh well, I'll still take a look at things. It would be cool. Missed Lost last night. Ugh. Just working a bit. Gonna try and see Friday Night Lights tomorrow, but that's a little dependent on work. Otherwise, no plans.

2 days on either side of the weekend and no updates. No, the world isn't ending, at least my world isn't ending. Friday night, quiet night at home, relaxing after a long work week. Watched some movies, can't really remember what. Saturday, some more lounging about, replaced the HD in my powerbook, a nice zippy 7200 60GB, and then headed over to Bucktown to try and fix Russell's new Airport Express, failed with that, and then finally saw the Lost episode that I missed over at Bryan's and watched Slider and Cash go at it for a bit. Dinner with the parents, a little catching up with them and their trip to South America. Mass on Sunday after crossing the moat of marathon runners. Breakfast with the 'rents before heading out to Bucktown again to finally fix Russell's AE and watching Friday Night Lights on a Sunday afternoon with Russell and Bryan. Noone told me it was all handycam style, ugh. I liked Varsity Blues and its cartoony send up instead. Picked up Leah from the Airport after dinner at Bryan's, and lots of sleep. Monday, Leah and I jumped out of an airplane. We went skydiving at Skydive Chicago. Wow. I'll post the video of my jump soon, hopefully. 13,000 ft, 60 sec freefall. Then some chilling with the gang of 332 W. Dickens and some Cranium action, which took away from quality sleep time. And that's about it. So maybe a bit more about the whole skydiving bit. Skydive Chicago is a pretty cool place, out in the middle of nowhere, Ottawa, IL, about 1 1/2 hours outside of the city. Leaves were changing, and it's right by the Fox River, and that little valley looked amazing. We pulled up, paid our outstanding balance, ordered the DVD's of our jumps, and pretty much signed our lives away. There were only 7 people jumping that day, including one guy, Mike, who's never even been in a plane before. Well, a short video, 5 minute overview of the ordeal, and then the first group was suiting up. Leah and I were in the second group with another guy who was going for his second time. We tried to pass the time by watching Face/Off. I was hoping for some Drop Zone or some Terminal Velocity, but no luck. The other group gets set up, walks out to the plane, we head out to the landing area 10 minutes later and watch them softly glide to Earth. 5 minutes after that, we're suiting up, Leah in a pink jumpsuit, me in fluorescent green. 5 minutes later, we're getting on the plane. We take off, backs to the nose, sitting, with the door wide open. We, my tandem master, David, and I, go through the jump a couple more times. Pretty easy, head up out the door, arch the body, arms in a W, hands about even with the head. Check altitude, check the release location, smile and wave to the camera, wave off, pull release at 5500 feet. So Leah jumps out, and before I know it, I'm flying through the air at around 130 Mph. I do my stuff, ham it up for the camera, and before I know it, 5500 feet. Wave off, pull the release and floating. Some big nauseating turns later, and we're landing, me on my ass. I greet Leah as she lands, quite gracefully, on her feet, and it's over. We lose the suits, get our certificates, and wait for our DVD's to be mastered. We also lay out on the picnic table near the jump zone to stop the motion sickness that is overpowering at least me. And then we're out of there. Simple, easy, fast. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. And the actual jump was easy, the freefall not so bad, the whatever you call it after the parachute opens, I could do without.

Yeah, I've been busy. In which case I don't have much news, events, or anything to post. I've been fighting headaches all week though, ever since Friday Night Lights pretty much, then aggravated by the SkyDive, which I haven't gotten around to converting to a web friendly format. But trying to get plenty of sleep when I can. Weather seems to be more Chicago-like, cold, gray, and wet. It's Friday, so that's good. Sushi and meeting the final Gesoff sibling I haven't met yet, Robin, up from Indiana University for the weekend, on Saturday. But otherwise? Try and find some documentation on how to plot the moon's path across the sky for a personal widget for Konfabulator. Oh, and finished up Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland, which was quite good. I'm back on Tom Clancy with The Bear and the Dragon. Windows for the Condo are coming soon, within the next week or two.

It's amazing how little time there is in a weekend. I swear, since I stopped playing ultimate weekends actually seem shorter. A couple movies and bad Chinese food with Russell Friday night. Some reediting of Leah and my skydiving videos. I have now learned how to rip a DVD using MacTheRipper, convert the resulting VOB files to DV streams using MPEG StreamClip, and then edit as I see fit. It's pretty cool and super easy. Possibilities are endless, especially with the size of my clip library. Saturday did some ironing before getting some sushi at Sai and hanging out with the Gesoffs and gang. Sunday went to Mass with the 'rents and breakfast at the North Coast, which was actually bad diner food, which is disappointing. Then nap time with Leah after her practice, some computer lessons also with Leah, a quick dinner courtesy my mother, and bedtime. Wednesday night heading to the new Soldier Field to watch the Women's US Soccer Celebration something. And that's about it.

In a big way. 2 more days go by, no updates. Probably because there's been no updates. Monday, let's see, don't think I did anything, just was at Leah's trying to fix a battery that wasn't charging (fixed itself) while she was down with the flu. Tuesday? Maybe that's when I fixed the battery, and ended up watching part of the Transporter on HBO. Wednesday I actually did something, went to a KK organized US Women's Soccer Celebration at the new Soldier Field. That was cool. And fun. Interesting to be at what seemed to be a professional sporting even surrounded by little girls cheering on Mia Hamm. And the new Soldier Field is clean and nice. I think the US won. It was 5-1 when we left. Nothing on tap for tonight or Friday, maybe a dinner date with Leah. I've got to start reorganizing for the window installation, since they're currently prepping 701 and others. So I'm 1 floor away.

Leah and I aren't together anymore. There, I've said it. Sort of makes it more official. I guess. I'm still in a little shock about it. Happened kind of quickly. But it was something we both, independently, came to understand. So now what? Try and find things to do with even more idle time I'll have now, without Leah and Ultimate. I'm back to walking to Belmont for the purple line. I'm thinking of just staying on the red line to Addison on the way home. It didn't take me too long yesterday. I think my beer fridge is set too cold, as my Sapporo's have a little too much bite.

I had to do some housecleaning, basically just get stuff away from the windows which start going in tomorrow. So I went whole hog at it. And I realized, wow, I've got a whole lot of crap. While organizing, at least a little bit, I found out I have 7 powerstrips, all to myself, 5 or 6 extension cords, more cat 5 cable, coaxial cable, speaker cable than I know what do to with. Not that I'm gonna throw any of it away, but damn, that's a lot of crap. But I'm definitely gonna change things up some, move some furniture around, try something different, cause it seems like the season. I put my 22" Cinema Display to good use, as my home theater was in shambles, so I watched DVD's with my powerbook. It's a sweet setup. Makes me think and do a little research about watching TV on it. Elgato makes some interesting things, including a firewire HDTV system. Would be pretty cool to use the EyeTV500 to record the episodes of Lost that I keep missing in HD. Only thing is I couldn't watch them on my TV with the EyeHome since that doesn't do HDTV. But it got me thinking. There's also the AlchemyTV PCI Card, which is cheaper, and an option for plain broadcast and analog cable time shifting. But the whole RCN Digital City upgrade roadmap throws a wrench into that idea. Ugh. Wait and see I guess. Just more toys to play with. I've also started to justify my DVD library, by pretty much having one playing anytime I'm home. Speaking of library, I'm pretty excited about Delicious Library. iSight UPC recognition? Awesome. Also, the company is pretty much my ideal of what a software development company should be. It is, in my opinion, the Apple of Apple software houses, if that makes any sense. Other news this week, an Apple-U2 announcement tomorrow, along with the release of Shapeshifter 2, which I have no real reason to be excited about. Wow, long update. 1:18 PM Wednesday, October 27, 2004 (Update)
So, how about the Roku HD1000 as a HD terminal? Here's a possible setup. Desktop with EyeTV 500. Records OTA HD programs to the desktop. I can watch recorded or live HDTV on the desktop with the Cinema Display. Or, I can watch them on my TV with the Roku. What happens with the future? If RCN starts delivering HDTV over digital cable? I guess I'd have to get an additional device, or hopefully, maybe, output the cable box's signal over firewire over to the desktop to record. But does that even work? What about this whole Cable Card thing? So a little research leads to VGA -> Component video adapters and also an ATI HDTV Component Adapter, which I'm not sure is Mac compatible or now. So another option is having a computer next to the TV and outputing video directly. But that brings up sound. Recording gets a dolby digital track, so I'd want to have an optical output, which I don't currently have with my desktop. Ugh, too much to think about.
3:29 PM Wednesday, October 27, 2004 (Update)
But I'm losing track of the goal, which is to use the Cinema Display as a TV to view DVD's or HDTV in another room than my current HDTV. So I'm now thinking the EyeTV 500 and the Roku HD1000 is my best bet for now. If RCN gets HDTV up and running, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Now to find the funding.

Oh, I forgot to mention that since there will be construction of sorts at my condo, it's possible my home server might get knocked off line, which would a) kill my mail access and b) kill off all my self hosted procmail based listservs. So if all the kaze, kaze alumni, beach, poker, and other miscellaneous listservs don't respond (not that anyone's actually using them for anything besides spam these days), don't fret. Hell, there's a chance my regular email might bounce when I'm not fetching mail every 5 minutes off the abando mail server. Still want to someday upgrade to a co-located box. I also neglected to give a recap of my weekend, besides the DVD watching and fall cleaning. Saturday went over to Russell's for some steak, chilling, and watching of The Cooler. I need to watch the rest of my vegas related movies before heading out over Christmas. Wow, 2 updates, one day. Don't keep your hopes up.

Yeah, I miss her. I do. Anyway, went to the Golden Olympic for breakfast yesterday. First time in a very long time. Long time. Crazy long time. But I've been waking up hungry, like really hungry, also for the first time in a very long time. Got in 2 DVD's last night, Overnight Delivery and Conspiracy Theory. Justification. The condo's getting prepped for window installation tomorrow. Crazy. Means I won't have blinds for like 7 days or so. Should make sleeping interesting. I definitely enjoy the watching of DVD's on the Cinema display, enough that I'm probably gonna move the desktop into the bedroom permanently. Probably add a wireless card to it, so I can move it around and only have to plug the extension cord in to watch anything. Although I think I saw 3 dead pixels on it, but I couldn't really tell, only if I'm up close and inches away.

So my email went down yesterday for a while, and didn't get it back up reliably until 11pm or so last night. I gotta remember that my home server needs a keyboard and the X10 serial controller plugged in to get all the services up and running. Guess I should just get rid of some of those unnecessary services. Apple announced the iPodPhoto yesterday, color screened version of the 4G iPod with photo display capability. Reason to upgrade for me from my 1G 5GB with poor battery life? Nope. Windows go in today. Steam radiators are funny looking, at least in my building. It'd be nice if the covers were user removable, so maybe I could do something interesting with them. Good luck to all those competing at the UPA Championships starting tomorrow. Safe travels. Watched Contact last night. I'm still interested in HDTV for the mac, and since I was an early adopter, it makes it difficult with my current equipment. No DVI or Firewire on my TV or OTA HDTV receiver. So even if I get HDTV recording on the mac, I can't watch it on my current setup. Stupid.

Even if I'm not playing ultimate, I'm still keeping track, or at least trying to. Currently in 3 tabs, Mixed, Women's, Open, pretty much in order of importance for me. I might try and keep a running commentary going, in honor of the Sports Guy's running diary of things sometimes. So the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. I guess that's a Chill Scene, right? Yeah. Some of the writeup gets a little emotional at times. Besides that, didn't see the lunar eclipse, but the moon did look nice last night. Windows are in, waiting for plaster and painting and putting the treatments back up. I decided to go with the EyeTV 500, which I should get today, I think. Other World Computing, besides being run by a high school classmate of my brother and based in my hometown of Woodstock, rocks because something I ordered yesterday is getting delivered today via free UPS shipping. Now that rocks. It's only Thursday, in what feels like a really really long week. Here's my first day diary write up from reloading the UPA scores page. Not too interesting

Oct 28 10:25:29 CDT 2004 (Thu) Nemesis got killed by Riot. 15-3. First game done. Ouch. Mixed looks like some upsets possible, at least by half. Chad Larson over B+ 8-7 at half, kinda like Kaze over Donner at half last year. Let's hope their captain catches the goal to let them score the first point after half. Also Hot Action over Drive Thru Liquor at half, 8-6. Go Central region! except for Carleton of course, but they lost to Brass Monkey.

Oct 28 10:28:32 CDT 2004 (Thu) Machine lost already too, the Condors. Possible upsets, Pike over Sockeye 8-6, GOAT over DOG 8-6, and Sub-Zero of Johnny Bravo 8-4. Love those upsets. Forgot to mention that Adam Goff, cut by machine earlier this season, is now playing for 6 Trained Monkeys out of Boston in the Mixed division with his brother, Marshall.

Oct 28 10:40:40 CDT 2004 (Thu) Wow. Pike pulled off the upset. 15-12 over sockeye. Crazy. Johnny Bravo pulled it out over Sub-Zero though. But sockeye losing? #1 seed? I'm rooting for them since it's mostly Carleton kids, and I still have that brother connection there somewhere. Just noticed that No upsets at all in Mixed. B+ pulled it out over CLE 17-16. Hot Action fell to DTL 12-15. Boring. Also no upsets in Women's either. Underdogs are great, that's for sure. Wonder what the weather's like?

Oct 28 11:02:25 CDT 2004 (Thu) Okay, no upsets in Mixed and Women's. DOG pulled out over GOAT by 1 to prevent another upset in Open. The closest score in Women's was 15-10, Godiva over BNOGO. Wow. Not a lot of parity in that division. 1 upset, 2 1 point games, a bunch of 15-12 games in Open. A lot of parity in that division. I'd say mixed is inbetween the two. But no one scored less points than Nemesis and Electric Mayhem. (3). Machine scored the least in open at 8.

Oct 28 13:22:34 CDT 2004 (Thu) Ugh. Getting bored. No commentary makes this uninteresting. Also checking roughly every 1-2 hours for updates makes it difficult to hold my interest. No surprises in the women's division, with a bunch of 15-x scores, where x <= 4. Men's side, Chain wins a squeaker over upset specialist Pike 17-16, and Furious and Sub-Zero are locked at 10's. Otherwise, no upsets. Machine did break into double digits against Jam, which I'm thinking reunited Northwestern teammates Chucktown and Mike Zalisk as well as Machine former teammate and ultimate whore Ron Kublanza on Jam. As for mixed, looks like B+ is getting tuckered out, losing half to Puppet Regime 3-8. Otherwise, everything else held seed. Checking weather.com, looks like 80 and sunny, 10mph winds. Not too shabby. Funny to go 60-0 in 12 months. I was awefully excited to be going last year, and this year? not so much.

Oct 28 13:43:50 CDT 2004 (Thu) Wow. Chad Larsen gets a win in, upsetting Bad Larry and Mike Sheil. That's awesome. CLE and Pike are the 2 upsets so far in 96 games? Wow. Good job seeding so far. Furious wins by 1 over Zero. And women's? Ho hum. Looks like Pool B in Mixed is the pool of death, with B+ winning by 1 after coming back after a huge halftime deficit. No other pool looks as close among all 4 teams as that pool. I don't think CLE will be able to keep it up, I mean, the lose one 16-17, win the next one 17-16, and it's only the first day.

Oct 28 14:17:20 CDT 2004 (Thu) Nemesis loses as well, by 2, into the cap to Ozone. ugh. Chicago teams winless. Granted, Kaze went winless first 2 games too, didn't we? We might have one our second game against Persuader though.

Oct 28 14:51:42 CDT 2004 (Thu) More ugh. Nemesis losing to Electric Mayhem 4-8 at half. What's going on over there?

Oct 28 15:06:51 CDT 2004 (Thu) More upsets, finally, in the women's division. Zanzara going up big over Brute Squad, 8-2 at half. Otherwise, nothing interesting. Some close games, but that's to be expected, as it's 1-2 and 3-4 pool play.

Oct 28 15:19:48 CDT 2004 (Thu) Mixed: Goffs and 6 Trained Monkeys up over Shazam by 2 at half. Brass Monkey losing to Holes & Poles by 2 at half. Womens: Riot's already done. 15-4. Most points scored on them today. Rare Air up on Godiva by 1 at half. Open: Sockeye up by 1 at half over Chain. They need to win by more than 5 I think to get win the pool. Odd. Always one of these pools at Nationals.

Oct 28 15:26:53 CDT 2004 (Thu) 6 Trained monkeys still up, 10-7. Brass Monkey takes the lead 10-9. Open, 4 8-7 (A,B34,D12) games, 1 8-6 (D34), 1 8-5 (B12), 2 8-3 (C)

Oct 28 16:18:17 CDT 2004 (Thu) Nemesis didn't win a game. Highest they can finish is 9th, again. Machine didn't either. Sockeye won though, which is good, almost good enough to win the pool, but coming in 2nd. Sends Pike down to the lower pool. Brass Monkey and Holes & Poles knotted up at 14's. I'm pulling for BM because I played with Pat Hard at Poultry Days. I'm pulling for 6 Trained Monkeys because of Adam Goff. I'm pulling for Sockeye because of the aforementioned tenuous connection with Carleton. And Chad Larson because of the central region and I think they play like Kaze did. I'm looking forward to the writeups though. Wow. A quick refresh and we see that Bad Larry pulled off the upset and beat B+ leading to a 3 way tie. If I can read it right, Bad Larry takes 1st, CLE takes 2nd, and B+ drops. Wow. BM pulled off the upset, 17-15, as did 6 Trained Monkeys. Universe (Central Region) pulled off an upset 15-13 over Duff. So Central Winless teams are: Hot Action, Machine, Zero, Nemesis, Clutch, and Collide. Best team out of the Central Region? CLE, 2-1, 2nd in their pool. Wow. Love it. And Pool D in Open? Killer. Everyone held seed, but close games every round. Very much like Pool B in Mixed. Just plain killer.

Oct 28 16:59:10 CDT 2004 (Thu) I thought I was done, but last check, DTL pulls off the upset at the buzzer, 16-15 over Red Fish Blue Fish. So in Mixed, no #1 Pool Seed held. That's just crazy. Women's everyone except Brute Squad and Nemesis held seed, both of those teams going 0'fer. And Open pools B,C and D all held seed and A was all fucked up. Now I really can't wait for the writeups. RSD checking throughout the day yielded only comments about the Pike-Sockeye upset, nothing else.

Put up my running diary from reloading the UPA tourney pages for the Club Championships yesterday. Not quite as funny as the Sports Guy's, but then again, I'm not being paid. Money can make me funnier, I think anyway. Watching TV (via EyeTV 500) on the computer's pretty sweet. However, I don't think my G4 is up to the task anymore. Not sure if it's a hard drive issue, as I haven't tried it with a Firewire drive yet (I've heard it can be an issue). But still, pretty sweet. Integration with titanTV is superb. No complaints. Still need a better antenna, or a way to add channels by hand. Since my Silver Sensor is highly directional, and I suffer from extreme multipath, I get 11 channels one way, 13 the other, and a couple exclusive to either direction. Not very fun. Also, I'm not getting any sound out of the UPN digital station. Not good for Veronica Mars. But we'll see. I might look at the Roku HD 1000 at the Best Buy on Clark on the way home. Maybe. Nothing like spending money to keep my mind off things.

Oct 29 09:56:06 CDT 2004 (Fri) CLX and Brass Monkey must have someone on the sideline calling in scores, cause they were first on the board with scores at 4-1 and up. Impressive. Then they got to tie it up at 7's. Also impressive. Currently, 6 TM down to RFBF by one at half, BM pulling away over CLX, H&P over BL by one, Hot Action and Universe both continuing the Central region trend downward. In women's, Nemesis down to Zanzara (and the Forth twins?) by 2 at half. Safari blows by Collide. Powerpool's have half at 8-4, 8-3. Really, where's the women's parity? On the open side, JB and Pike knotted at 12's, Sockeye over Furious by 1 at half, and BAT over Machine 8-5 at half. Ugh. Chicago, gotta win a game. A game. But all the parity seems to be in the Open div. Oh, and still no writeups, aside a quick one from bil from Shazam on RSD, but otherwise, nada. Disappointing. Too bad score-o-matic is concentrating on the college market. No money there. Granted, no money really in ultimate at all.

Oct 29 10:27:58 CDT 2004 (Fri) FG gets back on top of Sockeye, 15-13. this makes the sockeye road to the finals a whole lot more difficult, doesn't it? They need to win their last game to hopefully escape a play in round, right? Shazam, Brass Monkey continue the NW dominance in mixed. That's 3 teams in the upper pools with a combined record of 9-2 so far. Wow. Colorado and the SW come in 2nd so far with 2 in the top pools with a combined record of 5-2 so far. NW seems like the place to play mixed at a certain level. Must be nice. Over in open, JB takes out Pike by 1. Pike's definitely brought it this year. Props out to JT.

Oct 29 10:41:40 CDT 2004 (Fri) Nemesis still winless. Lost to the Texans. RFBF beat 6 TM. Hot Action and Universe still winless. Sweet. Go Central Region. CLX is the best central team at Nationals. They've got a 2-2 record with a -2 point diff. Best central team. That just rocks.

Oct 29 11:07:09 CDT 2004 (Fri) I think first round is done. Undefeateds left: Brass Monkey, Riot, Fury Godiva and Prime, Jam, Ring of Fire, and Furious George. All 4 top seeds in Women's continue to hold seed. Everyone but sockeye in the open holds. And noone, absolutely noone, holding really in Mixed. Brass Monkey, NW3, is the only undefeated. They've got a point diff of +26. I think the lowest point diff for an undefeated team is Furious, with +9. Women's don't even count. They're boring and expected.

Oct 29 12:14:57 CDT 2004 (Fri) Brass Monkey takes first in this round, with a 15-3 dismantling of Bad Larry. I think they got the easier of the 2 power pools. Hot action is running on away from Uncivil Union, 9-2 past half. Nemesis down again 4-8 against Brute Squad. What's gonna happen if they don't win a game? A complete collapse of the Nemesis? Finally? Furious over Pike at half, Johnny over the falling Sockeye 5-2. Some commentary would be great. Injuries? Maybe? Machine lost to intra region rival BAT last round. Still winless. 3 games to go to squeak out a W.

Oct 29 12:53:26 CDT 2004 (Fri) Hot Action on the board. They win over Uncivil Union 15-3. Sorta like Brass Monkey. Just sorta. Just checked, the Day one writeups are up. So I'm caught up in that.

Oct 29 13:04:06 CDT 2004 (Fri) 6 TM over DTL, making them 2-1 in the power pool. Looks like another 3 way 2-1 setup. Fury down to Godiva, and Riot still on top. George over Pike, Ring of Fire over Jam, and GOAT over Machine. Chicago still winless. Ah, sweet home Chicago.

Oct 29 13:39:24 CDT 2004 (Fri) Wow, CLX beats H&P to get a free ride into the quarters. No play in game for them. Means they meet RFBF tomorrow. When has a Central team played into the top 8 automatically, without playing themselves there? Wow. Chances of them beating Blah's 6th place finish last year? Not too shabby. Chance of them making semis? Can't say I see them beating RFBF. Too hard. That rocks though. Nemesis is officially 0-5. Damn. Not a single game. No parity in the women's div, and central region teams go 0fer against other regions, the only win by Collide against in-region Clutch. That's not good at all. And it's not like they all went to play Mixed, since there's no overlap between team cities. Mixed draws from Iowa and Minnesota. Women's draws from Chicago, Detroit, and Ohio. Ugh, I guess the central region does suck at this game. Except for Iowa. Ha. Pike has a play in game vs. Doublewide or BAT. Condors play Kaos, I think. Pretty damn crazy. Who am I rooting for? CLX. Props to them and their twins, if they're playing. I think Brass Monkey, RFBF, Shazam, and 6 TM. Go NW.

Oct 29 14:00:45 CDT 2004 (Fri) Guess I was reading that wrong. RFBF vs B+ in one pre-quarter. Soul Patrol vs. Bad Larry in the other. CLX vs. DTL. I think CLX's chances to the semis just got a whole lot better. Crazy. Central Region + Electric Mayhem for 13-16th in Women's. That's awesome. Wow, pre-quarters for Open just got posted. Johnny Bravo vs. Doublewide and Condors vs. Chain. I guess I seriously can't read powerpools. Pike and DoG square up and Jam vs. Sockeye. Interesting.

Oct 29 14:06:16 CDT 2004 (Fri) Have I mentioned how impressed I am with Rodney Jacobson's score reporting tool? Aside from the poor display in Safari, it's pretty cool. Wish it would do point diff's automatically. Some interface design help, something prettier to look at would also be nice. But it rocks.

Oct 29 16:23:40 CDT 2004 (Fri) There's been some fluidity in the score reporter. And since games are so close, and point diff seems to always matter, it's been crazy trying to figure out who goes were. Mixed: B+ vs RFBF, with B+ up 11-8. Soul Patrol vs Bad Larry 11-8. Bad Larry seems to be losing something. Women: BNOGO vs Ozone 8-5 and Rare Air vs Zanzara 8-7. Riot hasn't gotten double digits scored on them yet. 9 is the closest by Ozone. Open: Sockeye over Doublewide 15-9 and DoG vs Chain 11-8. Sockeye faces up Ring tomorrow morning. Pike (2-3) faces up against the Condors (3-2). Sockeye (4-2) gets Ring (5-0). Jam (4-1) vs Bravo (3-2). A team with a losing record is in the quarters. That's pretty crazy. I think I'm bored of this.

Oct 29 17:00:28 CDT 2004 (Fri) Stage is set.
Mixed: 6 TM vs. Bad Larry. CLX vs DTL. BM vs B+. Shazam vs. H&P. RFBF out. CLX now, I think, has a great shot at the finals. I say they play 6 TM in the semis. BM plays Shazam in the other. BM goes to the finals. Where they win it all over the upstarts from Iowa. But that's just my guess.
Women: Riot vs Rare Air. Fury vs Backhoe. Godiva vs Ozone. Prime vs Schwa. Let's go with unbeatens and say Riot vs Godiva in the finals beating Fury and Prime to get there.
Open: FG vs DoG. Jam vs. JB. Ring vs. Sockeye. Pike vs. Condors. My picks? FG vs Jam. Sockeye vs Pike. Sockeye vs Jam. Sockeye. It's been interesting, that's for sure.

Went home to Woodstock yesterday. Slightly spur of the moment, but really just a chance to hang out at home and do some laundry. A whole lot of laundry. I need to remember to get an attenuator for my HD antenna reception. That might help some. Stopped by the Woodfield Apple Store on the way out and played with the iPodPhoto. It's a chubby little guy. The photo interface is pretty slick, but I finally read a review someplace that said importing photos in the field using the Belkin card reader interface didn't allow the photos to be put into the interface. Too bad. Also took a look at the iMac G5, a slick looking machine, but small. Odd how that is now. I also drooled over the PowerMac G5's and they had a 30" Cinema Display there as well. That thing is just huge, like get lost on your own desktop huge. The 23" looks might fine though. They also had the old style ADC 23" on sale for $1500. I did not walk out with it, even though I wanted to. I also brought home my HDTV reciever, an old Samsung SIR-151 to try out with my parent's TV. And guess what, it picks up all the Chicago stations except WBBM (notorious low power VHF digital broadcast) with the huge antenna on the mast. It's sweet. I'm also leaving it out in Woodstock, and will use the EyeTV 500 as my sole HD source from now on. Crazy. I watched Monters, Inc. in HD last night, and it looked pretty much incredible. Also, WLS does their news in HD. Very nice. I still have to watch the Frighteners today, since it is Halloween, and maybe the Sixth Sense and Ghostbusters too? I forgot to mention that I had my dad finally look at my ankle. Without additional checks, it looks like I either damaged some ligaments or even worse, some cartilage in my foot. Sweet. Nothing I can do about that. So it was a good thing, health wise, to stop playing ultimate, and now, I've got a pretty good physical excuse to go along with my emotional and psychological reasons for not playing, which I'm not sure I've explained here yet.

Wow, so Seattle pulled it off, winning Open, Women's and Mixed at the UPA Club Championships this past weekend in Sarasota. That just rocks. Only 1 non Northwest team in the finals (sorry, but I'm not really counting Masters, even though I should). Oh, and that non-NW team? Chad Larson Experience from the Central Region. I'm waiting to hear some first hand observations from friends who went, but the only thing I'd really want to know is if it was windy. But spilt milk, right? Got in my Halloween movies, The Frighteners and The Sixth Sense, fairly related movies with main characters anyway. Didn't realize this until later. Got a bluetooth Apple keyboard, which rocks. Wireless everything rocks, except of course for the power, but it's really nice, and clean. Brought back a bunch of my mom's food from Woodstock. Got a couple new DVD holder things, something instead of the homemade cardboard thingie I was using. I do need to figure out how to quiet down my G4 desktop. It's quite noisy. Brought back a bunch of books from home as well, and I'm on Heir to the Empire, Book 1 of the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, set 5 years after Return of the Jedi.

Windows are in, blinds are back up, everything's been plastered, primed and painted. So last night I started the unenviable task of redecorating, or whatever you want to call moving furniture around. Sleeper sofas are heavy. I still have to figure out a place to put my computer desks, which as of now will be without a computer on them. But I almost immediately got the home theater back up and running. And, Sony had a special rewards program discount, so that 400 DVD changer I've been eyeing for a while? Completely free through my Sony Points. That just rocks. But definitely still have lots to do, to clean up, to organize. Still got to vote today, will try tonight, but I expect huge lines. At 8am this morning there were probably 20 people waiting in line, outside the door to my polling place. Sweet. I'll bring a book.

I voted yesterday. No problems, wandered downstairs at 6:15, only 1 person in line. They didn't ask for photo ID or voter registration card, which I found a bit odd. But relatively easy and straightforward. I'd have to admit that I got a little bit of a rush from it. But of course, my Libertarian/Republican votes didn't quite matter. Moving on. My HDTV antenna woes continue, as the SquareShooter provides no magic cure, neither do the rabbit ears from Radio Shack and the attenuator. So now what? Good question. Might try and get some splitter/joiners and just put all of them together and hope for the best, but that's just wrong from a scientific standpoint. But whatever. Going to try and record my first HD broadcast over EyeTV tonight, Lost. Granted, I haven't seen it for a while, and will have to completely catch up when it's eventually released on DVD, but it'll be a good test. Oh, and I found out that UPN in Chicago isn't quite broadcasting in HD yet. So no Veronica Mars either.

I realized something about Delicious Library and my idea to replace DVD Profiler with it: Delicious Library doesn't have one of the main reasons I love DVD Profiler so much, the ability to choose an cast or crew member and see what other movies I own that they've been in. And after installing it at work since my VPC install is hosed in which I was previously running DVD Profiler at home, it's great. It's much faster, responsive, and a joy to use. Decisions. It's wet, and continues to be wet here in Chicago. Nice and cold and grey. Haven't made any movement on more cleaning and organizing at home, I guess that's what happens when the first thing to get connected is the home theater. I've now got Lost 1.6 on my hard drive in 720p High-Def glory. It's only 6.5 GB. And they're showing a rerun on Saturday of I think last week's. This only means good things for the upcoming Alias season 4.

Went and saw Team America: World Police with Russell and Bryan last night. Good funny stuff. Ah, parody. Going to see The Incredibles tonight, City North, 8:30 show with them as well. I was supposed to be doing more clean up and organizing while watching American Beauty last night, but I just got caught up in the story. I've moved on to Dark Force Rising, Book II in the Thrawn Trilogy. Not much else. Family cleaning tomorrow. No plans for Sunday. And that's all.

I've been pretty successful in not using lip balm. I was pretty much addicted to the stuff, carmex, or one of the many UPA 2003 Club Nationals lip balms that I have, using it after every time I brushed my teeth. But I'd say for the past month or two, I stopped. And then, yesterday, I caved. Maybe it was the drier weather, or the fact that I had to turn my radiators on, but I needed to use some. Anyway, the parents came out, we cleaned, reorganized my place. Looks, well, pretty different. I'm actually cleaning out and reorganizing drawers and desks that haven't been touched, well, since I moved in a long 5 years ago. Went and saw the Incredibles on Friday, great movie. Star Wars Episode III teaser at the start, the one thing that got me pretty excited? A bunch of angry looking Wookies. That's pretty scary. Watched a bunch of DVD's. Found out that my old Think Different posters are worth a pretty penny. Caught a bit of Jack and Bobby on WGN, realized that I should be watching that. No plans for the week.

Baby steps. I think UPN is broadcasting in HD now in Chicago, and I finagled the antennas to pull the signal in, so I think I'll be recording Veronica Mars tonight. I figure I need to set it up to pull in UPN, WGN, and ABC for now, Veronica Mars, Jack and Bobby, Lost and Alias respectively. We'll see. I do have the desktop setup finally, it's in the bedroom now. It's loud though, so I think I've got to figure out a way to quiet it down. Added what I hope is a good sound buffer for the TV room, finally making use of the cement blocks, plywood and rug from the stadium seating experiment. I think I'll need to add something behind the screen as well.

Got an episode of Veronica Mars in HD. Sweet. Hopefully will record Lost tonight. Haven't actually gotten around to watching any of the recorded episodes yet, but hey, it's only a matter of time. Watched Truman Show last night instead. I guess it's sort of a bridge between Real World and Survivor, right, in that reality television kind of family. On to the third and final book of the Thrawn trilogy, The Last Command. Fluff reading goes by fast. And it actually makes me want to watch more Star Wars movies. Ankle's still bugging me, probably will bug me forever. Got plenty of sleep last night, which is good.

Dinner with Whitney, Russell, and Bryan at Darwin's last night. The meatloaf was quite good, and the sweet potato fries were awesome. I got Lost recorded no problem, which is good. Now I've got to just figure out how to watch them, or, burn them to DVD. Baby steps, as always. Happy Veterans Day. Banks, Schools, and other randoms get the day off. Oh, I'm dog-sitting Marla and house-sitting this weekend for the Russells. Should be fun. I get to find out what it's like to live in Bucktown. Tired today. Not enough sleep, after getting a good amount the night before. Ugh.

A couple things might be dying on me. Last night as I was trying to burn last week's episode of Lost to DVD from the HD transport stream I had, my desktop seemed to crap out, like the video card died or something. But after shutting down and leaving it for a bit, it started up just fine. Which is too bad, cause it's like 4 years old, which is way too old in my book. But it's still kicking, so no need yet to go into debt. And then this morning, driving to work, ole Puck stalls on me. Now, I know I need an oil change, it's roughly 2 months overdue, but still only 1500 miles since the last one, and it crapped out. So I'm sitting there, corner of Sheridan and Sheridan by Loyola, at a light, at roughly 8:30 in the morning, you know, rush hour. So the honking starts, the blinkers come on, and in a couple minutes, Puck starts up again. It's going in for a checkup on Monday. So, where does that put me? Nowhere different. Definitely start saving the pennies for a new G5 most likely, probably when they go PCI-Express. Might even happen at MacWorld in San Fran. As for Puck, I start to question how much I need a car in the city anyway. But iDVD and EyeTV is pretty cool. I was able to burn a nice DVD with the episode of Lost with no problems, except that it's 4x3 letterboxed and not 16x9 widescreen with DD 5.1. But I'm learning. I think I can use ffmpegx to transcode the MPEG Transport Streams to 16x9 NTSC 720x480 MPEG2 Program streams for use on DVD. I think.

Dog and house sitting for the Russells was fun. Marla's a great dog. Very chill. Pretty much spent the weekend with Marla, with the only time out heading to the dog park. That's a whole other subculture that's really interesting. Caught up with a couple people on Sunday; threw with Carlo and Bryan, dropped by to chat with Akira, watched some more football at Carlo and Bryan's, and went to mass at St. Mary of Angels in Bucktown. Big church, ornate, old world. A little too old school for my taste. I might have to try a couple other churches round Chicago, there's tons out there. Also dropped by Leah's to do some more personal object exchanges and to say hello. So I wasn't home from Friday morning to Sunday night. Rather interesting. Puck's camshaft sensor is on the whack, so that's getting fixed. Didn't get Jack & Bobby recorded, my antenna placement is only good for UPN and ABC right now. I'll have to do some more work to get that setup properly.

The Manhattan Project is a great movie. Smart kids. Love 'em. Anyway, I figured out how to put together a tab delimited list of UPCs from DVDProfiler for import to Delicious Library. But I found a problem. DVDProfiler accepts 10 digit UPCs for region 1 DVDs. Delicious Library expects the full 12 digit UPC. So, I think I'm gonna update all my DVDProfiler entries to the full 12 digit UPCs. There might be a way to do it mathematically, instead of manually, but some research required on that. Ugh. I blame DVDProfiler for this one. It should required all 12 digits of the UPC. So that might take a while. Might try and do some laundry tonight.

2 mentions: Rachel Ray, of 30 minute meals, $40/day, and Inside Dish on the Food Channel is in town, hanging out at Piece for the night. Things supposedly start around 7pm. And I just read today that Wil Wheaton will be giving a presentation at MacWorld San Francisco. I'm thinking I might have to get his book, too. Don't think I'm gonna get out to Piece tonight. Probably gonna be packed anyway. I know, just making excuses. But Elf came out on DVD today too, so, it's not like I don't have something waiting for me at home.

So I've got a problem. With sleeping. Or, more accurately, not sleeping enough. I was doing pretty well there for a while, but I fell off the wagon last night. I didn't get to bed until 3am. Why? TV, DVD organization, dinner, mostly TV. Not so good. Feels like I could have an illness coming on if I don't get more sleep. But I did start on importing my DVD's to Delicious Library. DVDProfiler still only stores the 10 digit UPC code, even if you put in a 12 digit one. But the iSight scanning with Delicious Library is sweet. However, I'm probably taxing my old Powermac a bit too much when I've got the EyeTV500, 2 Hard drives, a Compact Flash card reader, and the iSight all over Firewire. Using the iSight anyway with all that causes what looks like a video card failure that popped up on me last week. If I get around to it, I'll try and narrow down what exactly is causing the problem, if possible. I've started reading non-fluff, The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize winner. I don't remember where or how this ended up on my bookshelf, but I figured I'd give some "real" books a try. And it's good stuff. So far, about 60 pages in, I see it as an intro to Information Theory kind of. I thought it'd be too dry or boring, but I'm enjoying it.

Finally got my Roku HD1000 working perfectly, well almost perfectly. I wish they'd release a new firmware that updates NFS to see files bigger than 2 GB. But in the meantime, I just have to cut Lost episodes up into about 3 segments to get it to work well. But HD almost on demand. It's pretty cool. I had to run cat5 to the powermac, as 802.11g wasn't fast enough. So I've got 4 episodes on disk, waiting to be cut up and watched. It's not on next week, stupid Bachelor something, so maybe it's time to get caught up. New version of Delicious Library is out. So my next step is to start seriously putting my stuff into that. And I've got to clean up again, as setting up things always messes stuff up. No laundry, I'll push it off to the weekend. National Treasure opens up this weekend. Might actually be time for me to start exercising again.

Christmas decorations are going up all over the place, well, at least on my commute. The big Christmas tree at the Orrington plaza is up, they were putty lights on the lamp posts this morning, and I saw someone's Christmas tree through the window at the Howard El stop. And to think it was pretty warm the last couple days, too. Bittorrent rocks. I've got the episodes of Lost that I missed already, and I'm just having some issues getting them to a format I can use with the Roku. Video's great, but no sound. I'm using ffmpegx. After that, I still have to figure out how to easily split them up into Roku-sized chunks. Apparently mpgtx doesn't like MPEG transport streams. I'd like to not do it manually with MPEG Streamclip, but we'll see. Watched Tomb Raider last night to prep for National Treasure on Sunday. More hanging out in Bucktown/Wicker Park this weekend. Still need to do some laundry. Frozen food's great. Stouffer's Macaroni & Beef with tomatoes brings me back to my childhood. Good stuff. Oh, and the Sports Guy? Genius.

Saw Chronicles of Riddick Friday night at Bryan's after dinner at Darwin's with Kevin and Bryan, and seeing Russell and AJ with separate groups there as well. Bucktown, small neighborhood. Chronicles should have been written and performed Shakespeare style. I thought a lot of the ideas seemed very familiar in that sense. Laundry and School of Rock on Saturday before heading out to Bucktown again to see Marla. Ended up watching Elf over at Bryan's before heading home to watch Rock Star. Went and watched National Treasure on Sunday, good stuff, and finally watched a couple episodes of Lost. For all my effort at trying to get the DivX files from Bittorrent transcoded to MPEG Transport Files for use with the Roku, I just gave up and watched them on my computer. They kept getting out of sync. Too much work. The episodes from the EyeTV work great though, and that's all I've got left. That's just an awesome show. Caught Jack & Bobby on regular TV yesterday as well. That's also a really good show.

I'm in the process of getting all the episodes of Veronica Mars. On tap are all the episodes of Jack & Bobby. If I can properly figure out how to transcode these avi's to MPEG Transport streams, I'll be able to watch them all on TV, otherwise, my computer works just fine. A new version of ffmpegx was released yesterday, so maybe that will help. Very exciting. I watched another couple of episodes of Lost last night, I'm now just 2 behind. It's so good. Headed out to Woodstock tomorrow night for Thanksgiving. Back to work on Friday though. Just found out I get Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve off.

Thanksgiving's tomorrow. My friend James is in town, down from the AK, so I get to see him tonight. Been a while, approximately 15 months or so. Weather's taken a turn for the worse, or better, depending on your view. Watched the first couple of episodes of Veronica Mars this morning. Finished getting all 10 episodes of Jack & Bobby. I'll be back in Chicago tomorrow night, seeing as how I've got to go back to work on Friday. Finally went swimming last night. Ugh, I'm really out of shape. But good. Didn't quite make me want to go to sleep right away though. I just realized that MPEG Transport Streams, which is the broadcast format of HDTV, is roughly 5 GB/40 minutes for full 1920x1080i, and 3-4GB/40 minutes for 1280x720p. Enough to fit on Dual layer DVD's now. Interesting, isn't it?

Yup, I'm here at work. Took me 15 minutes to get up here though, since everyone else isn't working. Anyway, Thanksgiving was good in Woodstock. Weather made it a bit difficult to get out there Wednesday night, 2 hours instead of the usual 1:20. But it looked quite pretty driving home. I like winter. Watched the Bears lose in High Def before heading back into the city last night. Of course, I brought back some leftovers. Mom's cooking is just too good. Family's headed in to the city tomorrow, so that means I should do a bit of cleaning tonight. The one thing I'd like to find out is if my laptop can drive my TV as a second monitor since it has an RGB VGA port. Hopefully, which means I won't have to transcode those Veronica Mars and Jack & Bobby avi's I got off bittorrent to watch them on the TV. Oh, met with James and his wife, Meadow, Wednesday night. They look good together. Congrats.

Went to the Shedd Aquarium Saturday with my parents and aunt in town for the day. Haven't been there in forever. Made me really want to eat sushi though. Got some Chinese food at my family's standard, Szechwan Restaurant off Michigan. Finished up watching Veronica Mars episodes, so I'm all caught up there. Structure is beginning to remind me of X-Files, with monster of the week vs. mythology episodes. But good stuff. Got some jammers for swimming, board shorts don't actually work that well. Made it over to Bryan, Tony, and Carlo's for a quality turkey dinner. Quite good. Good food and good company. People I hadn't seen in months. Tried to fax for the first time under Mac OS X last night, I'll have to ask my mom if it went through all right. Not getting enough sleep, so I've got to work on that. December's right around the corner though. And then the year's gonna be over.

Went swimming this morning before work. Kind of nice. I feel pretty awake. Except for the chlorine smell. Not sure how it stuck around after the shower. I'm definitely finding my groove, although my breaststroke needs some serious help. Got plenty of sleep last night, so that's another reason I was able to get up and go this morning. Put some new pictures from Thanksgiving up in the gallery. I'll try and be a bit better at posting stuff. If you haven't noticed, Danger Party this weekend at Sarah, Lorra and Akira's. Also this weekend, Evanston Public Library is having a book sale. I'm looking for Ludlum books personally. Yesterday saw the release of ApeironX, a shareware version of centipede, the arcade game. It's awesome, and the old classic version was loads of fun back in college.

Went swimming again this morning. I'm curious to see if I can keep this up. Better question would be how much of a workout I can get with 1/2 hour of swimming. Stayed in last night, and out of the rain/snow cold. I'm just plowing through "The Quark and the Jaguar", just like back in college and reading words on the page. Not sure how much comprehension's going on there at all. Need to sneak in a laundry set soon. Added another gallery, this one mimicking this page. So add your own funny comment, like this one . I'll add the funniest ones as captions instead of comments. Oh, and the last thing for the week, company holiday party on Friday. Exciting.

Well, didn't go swimming the morning. Too tired. From what? Good question. Got most of my costume for the Danger party, just have to get some accessories and a toy. Hair is definitely getting a little out of control. Starting to feel mulletish. Oh, I didn't get last night's episode of Lost recorded in HD (stupid antenna placement), which means I'll grab it via bittorrent again, but still, I thought I had it all set up properly. And it doesn't look like ABC's gonna rerun it anytime soon. Ugh. Just wishing RCN would provide HDTV. Would make my life a whole lot simpler. Also realized that my TV does not have a VGA input. That sucks. So I guess, not that good of a Wednesday.

I guess this exercise stuff takes something out of me. Made it swimming this morning. Got new shoes, didn't even have to roll any dice to get them, Merrells, a new brand for me to follow blindly. Still working on the hair, it's not quite long enough to do anything interesting with it yet, but I am hoping for maybe something like anime style, like the Artifical Kid, well, maybe not battery powered. Still haven't done any laundry. I might have to go check out Escape, a new store/gaming location down on Halsted between Dickens and Webster. Someplace I can check out Japan-only Sony products, along with all the other stuff I read about at Gizmodo and Engadget.

Holiday party, Danger party. Dinner with Russell and Sarah Saturday night, before the Danger party, also some ice cream too. Good stuff. Realized that a flask filled with Scotch is a good thing. Made it to mass Saturday afternoon as well. Oh, and since I seem to be doing this update in reverse order, earlier Saturday afternoon used the paper cutter at Kinkos for some rasterbation image. I used this one, and made it 44x77" big. It's sweet. Anyway, printing them out with margins meant I needed to trim them. But I screwed up, so I'll see if I can print it out in color without margins at Kinkos soon. Also while looking for a toy for the Danger party I found out that baseball gloves are really really expensive. Good thing to know. Oh, and Saturday morning did some laundry, finally. Sunday was pretty lazy, but I did head up to Evanston to check out the library's book sale. Got nada. But a pleasant way to spend 3 hours. Oh, Vitamin Water has a couple new flavors, Defense, a nice apple raspberry with C+Zinc, and Formula 50, grape with 50% across the board. Defense is good, of course, and Formula 50 was pretty bland. Oh, and I finally caught up on all the Lost episodes too. I think I want to catch Closer sometime this week, you know, twist the knife and all. Lost is new this week, Veronica Mars is a repeat, and Jack & Bobby goes on hiatus for a while.

Just trying to make it through the days. Thought I might be coming down with something, so I'm hitting the vitamin water pretty hard. Not stopping me from swimming though. I'm feeling better about my breaststoke, for sure. Still not ballsy enough to try the fly yet. Popped in Ocean's 11 to prep for the sequel this weekend. I completely got that and Blade: Trinity's release dates mixed up, Blade comes out tomorrow. Tomorrow is also Feast of the Immaculate Conception. And today's only Tuesday.

Can't get to my home box, so no email connectivity for the day. I did get a 400 DVD changer by cashing in my Sony Points. It's all for TV season sets. Makes it easy to plow through, say Buffy seasons 1-7, or randomly watch some episode of the first 8 seasons of friends. Any sort of distraction helps. I'm also rapidly running out of hard disk space. This 8 bay firewire enclosure looks awfully tempting. Filled with 400 GB drives, that's 3.2 TB. A little overkill, sure. But probably worth something since a high def DVD replacement won't be out for another year or so. Gonna hit my first Immaculate Conception mass in a good while. I'm leaning towards my current regular, Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Belmont, but it's been a really long time since I've been to the Sheil Center up here at Northwestern. Tempting. Third day in a row for swimming. Helps me get to sleep at night, that's for sure. I'm off of loofah/loofa/luffa/loufahs and back onto bar soap. Still need to get a haircut.
I think my home box just has a new IP address. At least it's still pulling down mail. I really do need to fix the posting of the IP address when it changes. Never mind, it's still around, old address, just having trouble getting to it. Slow network or something.

4th day for swimming. I'm really getting tired, but it's good. Definitely good. Got a monster paper cut at Kinko's yesterday, trying to print out color version of my rasterbation file, but no luck. Issues with margins, as I expected. If anyone else is interested, I'm gonna hit up the William Ferris Chorale at Out Lady of Mount Carmel church tomorrow night, 8pm. A little pricy, $30, I think, but hey, I've never been. Catchup dinner with Katie Kelly tonight at Yoshi's Cafe. I've walked by the restaurant many times and I always glance at their menu, and it looks fabulous. Listening to my iPod, again. Holiday music, of course. Not that I haven't spent enough money already, but I really need some sort of AV rack for my equipment now. Not sure what, but I'll probably try something simple to get some air to the receiver/amp.

Dinner was good, Yoshi's Cafe is a really nice restaurant. And it's so close too. Catching up with Katie Kelly was great as well. So nice to be able to walk home from things, instead of cabs or driving. Went swimming this morning, every day this week, and I'm exhausted. And I found out the pool size, it's tiny at 50ft (~15m). Just over a 100 lengths to get a mile. I've got a lot of work to do. Might catchup dinner with AJ tonight, movies and such tomorrow and Sunday with the boys. And sleep. Definitely need some sleep. Or rest. Or both.

Wow. Posting on a Saturday. Impressive. I did make it out to the Choral concert Friday night. Honestly, a little disappointed. I was hoping for something awe inspiring, jaw dropping, chilling. But just a good quality chorale. Finally replaced the water filter on the fridge. The water was definitely tasting a bit off lately. Hung out at the Russell's before watching Ocean's 12. Great movie. Good fun. Dinner at Darwin's, as usual. The Apple & Honey Roasted Ham is quite good. Then headed back to Bryan's and watched the first episode of Carnivale. Also quite good. I've got all sorts of TV on DVD that I'm looking at, now that I've got the big changer. And an early bedtime.

Been going through My so-called Life episodes. At first it was a little difficult to get back into, even if it was my favorite TV show when I was, what, 16 or so? But I slipped back in. Almost able to quote the pilot episode word for word. Took out the shoulder pads on a camel blazer I have, and then tried to sew it back together. I may have to get a professional to do it, as my stitches were coming apart last night. Might try and watch a couple movies this week.

First time I've gone to the gym and the pool was full. A little annoying, but I just went home and had some breakfast and watched another episode of MSCL. I guess I just have to go earlier. Or learn to share a lane. Going for Blade:Trinity tonight at River East at 7:40pm. Ray tomorrow night at City North at 7pm. I always associate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with chicken soup, or the other way around. And PBnJ is always Grape Smuckers. And chunky peanut butter has nothing on creamy. The preordered DVD's for this Tuesday didn't get shipped out till today, a change. Means I won't get them till end of the week.

So Blade:Trinity? Ugh. Not good at all. When did vampires talk like they have braces? I don't even know if I'm gonna get the DVD, and people know, that's definitely a sign that it's a bad movie, cause I buy crap DVD's. But Jessica Biel is hot, and Ryan Reynolds is funny. But still, ugh. No one was in the pool this morning, either at 6:10am when I got in, or 6:50am when I left. I guess Tuesdays are the busy days, but with such an early start, I made myself breakfast and finished another episode of MSCL, the one where Jordan holds Angela's hand walking down the hallway at the end. I'm finally turning into the morning person I've always wanted to be.

I've agreed to return to beach ultimate, at least for one tournament, Lei-Out in Los Angeles, January 15-16, 2005. We'll see what this means for the 2005 season. Guess I'm not Ricky Williams. Did not see Ray last night due to my ineptitude reading movie listings. I thought it was playing at 7pm, it was actually playing at 8:30pm. It does play at 7pm starting tomorrow though, not that that helps. Also on a bad note, I missed the last 1/2 hour of the 2 hour pilot of Lost in HD. I was hoping to get them all in HD. No idea why it stopped working. Also, had some sort of power outage/failure yesterday mid day. Had to reset all my clocks when I got home. Also set up my home theater stuff a little bit better. Racks are pretty cool. Gotta do some cooking tonight for a pot luck tomorrow and try and fit in some laundry as well. I definitely feel like I'm making progress with swimming, but now that I'm coming back to ultimate, I'll have to try running or something too. It's almost gotten to the point where I don't smell the chlorine anymore. Oh, and my ankle's feeling just fine now. I forgot to mention, it's not cartilage damage at all, just a displaced ligament that popped back into place a couple weeks ago. So it's fine.

Did laundry and made some food for the potluck tonight. Of course that meant a really late bedtime, but I still managed to get up and go for a swim this morning. Good stuff, feeling sore, and all that. Would be nice to get some more sleep though. One definite plan for the weekend is seeing Russell's assisant's band playing up at the Red Line Tap at 11pm tomorrow. Let's hope I can stay up that late. Otherwise, might try and watch a couple movies, maybe head outside, maybe stay inside, who knows. But so tired. And to think I've been doing so well with my sleep habits as of late.

Busy weekend. Potluck for C.Moore and Monica Friday night at Tun's, which went well. Good food, good company. Kaze was a great team. Also got to play a little Celebrities. Good, wholesome fun. Saturday, finished up MSCL. Some napping. Watched Happy Gilmore with Bryan before Raz came over before heading up with the Russells to see Quinn's Uncles at the Red Line Tap. A dive bar, but I liked it, probably because it was pretty quiet with live music. The band was good. 2 brothers, singer, guitars. Simple and good. More napping on Sunday before heading over to Bryan's for Chili. Leaving Las Vegas is still such a good movie. So is Dodgeball. Did some sewing clean up as well, a button here, a torn pocket there. All hackish, not very nice. But the stitches hold together. Going to start running on top of the swimming this week. Figured that'd be better than just showing up on a beach to play ultimate. Headed out Friday night for LA. Nothing else for the week.

Swam my first mile this morning. Well, sorta, if swimming a mile 50 ft at a time counts. Watched A Christmas Story a couple days ago, and put on Mr. Destiny last night. I'm definitely running out of hard drive space. Since the 3 shows I record have reruns, it means I get to catch up with all the episodes that I've missed, and well, that eats up space. And fast. Right now I'm just shuffling things around to make sure I've got enough to record. Even that's getting sketchy. Hard to believe Christmas is right around the corner, like 4 days away. Oh, and I got a haircut yesterday. Haven't gone to a barber in well over 2 years, I haven't looked like this in well over 2 years. Crazy. Different. Good.

Went to the gym twice yesterday. I went back in the evening for my first run in months. Rough. I don't like those elliptical machines, doesn't seem to have a good range of motion for me, so it was the treadmill. Good thing is, I wasn't winded. Legs definitely feel tired though. But there was no chance of me getting up this morning to go swimming. I was wiped. Started watching Rounders to prep for the upcoming trip to Vegas, where it's currently not that warm. It's 54°F for a high, and supposed to rain while we're there. Sweet. However in LA it's a respectable 70°F. I might have to try and do some swimming at my brother's place. But it's freezing here in Chi and E-towns. Karl's in town for the holidays, back from Japan, so meeting up with him for dinner and drinks.

Dinner with Karl at Angelina Ristorante was good. Good also was catching up with him, hearing stories of life in Japan. I think I've got to put it on the calendar for next year, since it's his last year. I could manage spending a week there, right? It sounds interesting, that's for sure. Last day of work until the new year for me. I sorta need it. Also looking forward to the slight break in working out. I'm fairly tired and my triceps have been pretty much sore ever since I started swimming, even with the weekends off. Didn't do a mile this morning, but still a heavy dose, 81 lengths. Got plenty to do tonight before shipping off tomorrow. My parents and I are gonna try and get on an earlier flight, instead of our schedule 7:45pm tomorrow. Should be interesting. Hopefully everyone's flying out today instead. So Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas to all my readers.