2005. Okay. Here we go again. Anyway, holidays went well. Flew out to LA at our scheduled time on Christmas Eve, just in time for Midnight Mass at the LA Cathedral, which is always good because of the Plenary Indulgence granted by the cardinal. Sweet. Some snacking and present opening, then sleep before heading out to Vegas on Christmas Day. Carl's Jr. was the only restaurant open that we found along the way, so that was the Christmas breakfast. They didn't even have breakfast foods. Anyway, stayed at the Venetian, fabulous suites, split level, 2 TV's, pull out sofa bed, enormous bathroom with 2 sinks, marble all around, giant tub. Oh, before that got to spend some time with the extended Basa's, my brother's in-laws, which was cool. Al's nephews, Ben, Sebby, and Thomas were all little bundles of fun and excitement, especially Sebby's Hot Wheels. But did a little gambling, ate some dim sum at Jasmine again, great stuff. Akira came out Wednesday, and we tagged along with my family for the next 40 or so hours he was here. Also made it out to see the Welshes, since Sarah was in town, and Akira wanted to see Cash. That's a big family. Learned how to play craps, did well thanks to rolls by Al and Nicole. Managed to get a peek at the new Forum Shops at Ceasar's Palace, very nice. Also got a peek at the Sony Style store there, and the Qualia section. Wow. That projector, the 004? Drop dead amazing. Absolutely amazing. They were using a Blu-Ray HD source for it too. Wish I could have spent a little more time there. Travel back was easy, no problems. New Year's at the Russell's. Good times. Made Potatoes Deluxe and some stuffed Chicken breasts for the potluck. And now it's the new year. Huh, 2005? Bring it on.

So I guess I started mine early, swimming and all. But I'm gonna take it to the next level. Nice and cliched. I was surprised at the relatively lack of resoluters at the gym this morning. I was expecting it to be packed. Made it out to pickup yesterday. Not so good. I'm much slower than I used to be, which is a sad realization. Kind of takes away my game. Otherwise, lots of napping. Watched What Women Want and Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Eating a lot of empanadas from Valerio's bakery in LA. Best ones I've ever had. New Veronica Mars, Lost, and Alias returns this week. But since the Roku HD1000 had a new firmware beta out, I can get rid of the 2GB or smaller chunks of the TV shows that used to be required. It frees up some space, but might not be enough. We'll see. And to think I'm trying to save money.

Watched The Family Man last night, when I should have been sleeping. But that and What Women Want, those two are associated for me, I think because I saw them both, on the plane to Paganello one year. Crazy, you know. I noticed this morning that in my cowlick I have 3-4 gray hairs. Weird place for them. And another strange thing, the streetlights were out between Broadway and Lake Shore on Addison. Definitely looked a bit strange. I actually did some grocery shopping, and I actually plan on making myself dinner tonight, easy, Italian chicken tenders. Simple, but good. Just need to pick up some tomato sauce. Oh, and I also picked up some swimmer's shampoo, Ultraswim, which works pretty well. I think I'd like to try the conditioner as well.

Tired. Working out a lot. More than before. Swim in the morning, abs and push-ups and a run at night. It's way more than I'm used to. But it's good. I think. We'll see. I've stopped carrying a backpack to and from work. No need, since I come and go straight from home. That also means I've stopped reading on the el. Mostly staring out the window. Good down time. I've got a kitchen sink and a shower drain that aren't draining very well. Beautiful Girls is such a good movie. It's starting to be very applicable right now as well, as I'm either approaching or at the age of the characters in the movie. Sweet. Still don't have a Christopher to my Pooh though. But it still is a brotherhood, no doubt about that. The Consumer Electronics Show starts up in Vegas. Macworld next week. LA Auto Show also started up. Lots of new stuff coming out right now. Good for a technophile like myself.

Snow. Lots of it. Looks like good packing snow, good for a snowball fight, except I haven't touched any yet. Wasn't snowing when I went to the gym this morning, but snowing when I went to work. Odd feeling, like it was two completely different days. I don't think it was. Watched Buying the Cow last night. I keep forgetting why I got it, but watching it I'm reminded. Yet another sappy romantic comedy, but with Ryan Reynolds too. Managed to do some laundry last night, much needed. Really think I'm just about to hit the wall with my conditioning. Well, either that or the lack of sleep.

I so can't wait to sleep in tomorrow. And by sleep in I mean sometime later than 6am. Oh, can't wait. Put up some more Holiday pictures, didn't take too many over the actual Christmas and New Year's events though. Watched Eurotrip last night. I probably should get Roadtrip, someday maybe. I have a hankering to watch On the Line, so I'll probably pop that in tonight. No big plans for the weekends, just poker on Sunday. Parents might be coming out to the city. Just looking forward to sleeping mostly.

Thanks to those who let me know that this website was having issues. Next time, shoot me an email, and I'll get to it sooner than I did. Basically, something's wrong with the musings table. It's in the older ISAM format, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. But it's still got some issues. At least I'm catching the error now. If I end up losing it, it's got about 1 1/2 years worth of sporadic musings. Not too bad, but still pretty annoying. Definitely means I should craft some sort of remote DB backup script or something. Otherwise, Friday night was nice and quiet. Finished up my workout, watched On the Line, got to sleep. Watched Return to Me on Saturday, lounged about, cleaned up since my parents came in to town. Had a nice turkey dinner with them, and called it an early night after catching Rookie of the Year on Fox Family. Lots of Chicago filmed movies recently. Sunday, more lounging, and friends came over for early poker. Good times. I don't seem to be getting better conditioned with swimming yet, so that's a little disappointing. Macworld starts tomorrow, and the rumormill keeps churning away. Should have something exciting, I'll try and get updated via IRC, but we'll see.

Quite tamer than you'd expect. Another window open with IRC at macrumors, awaiting the MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs. It's gotten so big, I heard something about it on CBS Channel 2 last night. That's kind of crazy, I think anyway. But should know soon enough. Slacked off last night, didn't go running, didn't work out, just sat around, watched TV, cooked 3 lbs. of Sesame Chicken and watched Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. Kinda hits a little close to home, you know? At least in some strike zones. I think I'll try and sneak a viewing in of Swingers before heading out to LA this weekend. Didn't go swimming this morning either, just go running tonight, I think.

So, my reaction? Pretty much everything as leaked. The only thing I was hoping for, and this was right away, when Jobs said something about it being an HD presentation, there was a rumor last year I think of Apple working on a HD projector. But nothing came of it. And then I got excited again when Jobs got the Sony guy up there, thinking maybe a joint project with a Sony-Apple HD something, but no luck there either. Maybe next time. So in order, Tiger, blah blah, sounds good. Final Cut Express HD? Sounds nice. iLife '05? Good stuff. iMovie supports HD. iPhoto adds RAW support, should make some people happy. Garage Band, no idea, doesn't interest me. iTunes, same old same old. iWorks? Looks good, Pages looks sweet. Probably going to be some sweet integration with .Mac. MacMini? Wow. Cheap and tiny. I don't think it'd be good for a Home Theater Mac though, vid card and processor not up to speed, I think. Also, just a G4. But I've got a spare monitor, so it'd be really easy, except that I have no need for one. iPod? Factory interfaces from Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo...? Also from Ferrari and Alfa Romeo? Wow. Talk about an emerging standard. Talk about an emerging standard on the high end. And the shuffle? I don't get it. I do remember paying through the nose for an old Nomad II MG with 512MB, which I could now replace with $99 iPod Shuffle. That's crazy, and about 3 years removed. Overall? Apple's swinging low, consumer show and all that. Cheap cheap cheap. Guess I'll have to wait for the pricey stuff later. Also, macrumors IRC was solid. Macnn went down for a little bit, engadget went down, macrumors went down, but Gizmodo stayed up for the duration. Overall, not too shabby. On the list, at least iLife and maybe iWork.

Completely skipped out on working out yesterday, no swimming in the morning, no running at night. Instead, went to dinner at Darwin's with Sally and Bryan and KK and then played Ticket to Ride. Fun game, but as usual, my attitude was less than stellar. I'd like to think it's my non-competitive nature, but I went small ball in tactics, which didn't pay out at all. Next time, and I'm sure there will be a next time, there's other playing styles I'd be willing to try out. I did go swimming this morning though. There's this one swimmer who I see occasionally in the mornings, maybe every Wednesday, but she looks like she was/is a synchronized swimmer. That's just pretty cool. Try and go running tonight, do laundry tomorrow night. I did order up iLife '05 last night. I also had to Autotune the eyeTV again last night, since ABC-WLS did something with their OTA HD signal since the last Wednesday.

Didn't go running last night either. Slacking, big time. Well, that and there was a flood warning, and my legs hurt for some reason, which probably means I'll stop running and just swim from here on out, and I was really tired. But who wants to read about me whining? Right, moving on. Watched Swingers last night instead. I might have to get the version with the anamorphic transfer, cause the one I have just doesn't cut it. Got my additional Airport Express properly set up as a Wireless Distribution System (WDS) Remote Base, which means no ethernet cable to stream music to it for future poker games. Good thing. I did do my handstand pushups and some inverted situps, good stuff too. Don't think I have to do laundry tonight, I can get by with what I've got for L.A., that's right, headed to L.A. tomorrow for Lei-Out. Should be fun. 60's and Sunny. Good to get away from this crazy weather, that's for sure. Taking the redeye back in Monday morning.

"All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go...". Beach tourneys are great, packing light it easy. I'm also, get ready for it, not bringing a single piece of Underarmour outerwear. I'm going old school with cotton t-shirts and board shorts. I spent too much time trying to setup a Lei-out 2005 playlist in iTunes instead of say, sleeping. Just have to try and get a rental Taurus with a tape deck instead of a CD Player. I did manage to catch Tilt. And I'm hooked. It's like any other hour long scripted drama, but set in the poker world in Vegas. So much Vegas recently. But I find the snippets of backstory intriguing, like Lost, and Vegas is Vegas. So I'll be watching every week. Now I only wish RCN would get around to HDTV so I can get ESPN HD to watch a poker drama in high definition, you know, to see the grain on the cards, or something.

And tired. Lei-out was fun, once again, great group of people to play with. I was reminded of what is good about ultimate again. So maybe I did just need a break. So I guess I'm out of retirement, but just for beach tourneys. The team I played on, Naughty by Nurture, did alright, 3-1 on the first day, lost first game, won second game, lost third game on Sunday, which I think puts us somewhere between 17-24th place. Got to see some San Fran players I'd played with last summer. So besides having a good time, had some good food, Korean BBQ Saturday night and In-and-Out Sunday afternoon. Tired and sore now. Good sore. Feels good to be sore. And the Chicago/Jam team represented, winning it all, which gives them a free entry to Chicago's very own Sandblast beach tourney this summer. Nice. Remind me to never fly a red-eye again; I arrived this morning early enough to take a nap before work, but still, I should have just taken a vacation day. Also, GPS nav systems in rental cars? Genius. Absolute Genius. Got some Merrell Primos in black before heading out to pull double duty as beach shoes and everywhere else shoes. Working out well. Otherwise, not much else on the calendar for this week.

Plenty of sleep last night. And slept in this morning, well, to 7:30am. Probably start swimming again tomorrow. Maybe go for a run tonight. I'm thinking laundry on Thursday. Given my current obsession with Vegas, I'm adding Las Vegas to my HD recording set. And look into getting the first season on DVD. Except for that whole cutting back on DVD purchases. Veronica Mars pilot on tonight. Hopefully they'll show the first 6 or so episodes so I can grab them in HD. This is definitely cheaper and quicker than waiting for and buying DVD season sets. And it looks better. Now if only I could get ESPN HD. As the cold Chicago winter finally settled in, so did the static electricity. Might be time to bring out the humidifiers to take care of that.

Got some great news yesterday, a letter arrived in the mail from RCN saying that by February 2005, next month, my building gets HDTV, I'm guessing at least broadcast in QUAM. Which means, I'll finally get to see CBS HD, possibly get ESPN HD, and won't have to deal with antennas anymore. Also means I'll probably finally step up and get a digital set top box from RCN, so I'll be able to watch HD real time, instead of recording and watching it later. Very good things. Awesome things. Been waiting for a year or two on this one. I'm also working on getting more drive space, but not quite there yet. I've decided to switch to Firefox on Mac OS X, to make my browsing experience the same cross platform. It also helps that I've started to use del.icio.us for my bookmarks and found Foxylicious, a nifty firefox extension that integrates del.icio.us into the bookmarks menu of firefox. So tech stuff definitely coming together.

So, for some reason tonight my EyeTV 500 didn't tune in ABC correctly, and I missed recording tonight's Lost and Alias. RCN HDTV can't come soon enough. I had to retune the EyeTV to get the stations to come back in. Ugh. Don't know when I'll be able to get the missing episodes back. Don't know if I'll ever be able to get them back. Slightly upsetting. But since I haven't tried watching them yet, it's alright. As long as I snag them sometime. Went for a catchup dinner with AJ at Mas. Good food, well, a little pricey for the serving size, but still pretty good. Dessert was excellent though. On a relatively unrelated note, I've stopped combing my hair, just relying on my hands and a hat to keep it in place. Seems to work alright. Probably helps that I haven't gone swimming in almost a week. Yeah, skipped out on running last night, no swimming this morning, and no running tonight. Slacking. I'll chalk it up to recovering from the weekend.

Probably my fastest commute ever this morning. Out the door, got on the 152 Addison bus. Immediately at the Addison Red Line stop hopped on the Red Line going to Howard. Stepped out at Howard over to the Purple Line to Linden. And off at Davis. I think it might have been my first time that's happened. Definitely have to do some laundry tonight. Other World Computing rocks, and I think I've mentioned it before, but it's awesome. Decent prices, and better yet, it's based in my hometown, and it's owned by one of my brother's classmates from high school. But ordered some stuff Tuesday night, and it arrived this morning. And my iLife '05 shipped. So I guess that means my life should arrive soon enough. New episode of Tilt on tonight. Definitely felt on edge all day. Like too much caffeine or sugar. Hyper even. Not sure why. Might have been the Dunkin' Donuts I had for breakfast, but I think I felt like this on the commute. Interesting.

Headed to the Dells this weekend. Great Wolf Lodge with indoor waterpark. Should be fun. I'm helping Mina move in Madison on Sunday, so probably won't be rolling home till late on Sunday. Another weekend away from home. Didn't get a chance to watch Tilt last night. I did get to see a bartending competition on the Food Channel. That was pretty cool. Of course, made me interested in drink making again. Managed to get the episodes of Lost and Alias that I had missed over BitTorrent. Too bad they don't have torrents for HD transport streams. I'd grab those in a heartbeat. And I'm still really looking forward to finally getting HDTV over RCN. Can't wait. I might even have to go for any and all available HD Channels, including premium ones. Have to make sure I get a set top box with Firewire so I can record them too. Wow, can't wait. Makes me giddy.

Wonderful weekend in the Dells. The Great Wolf Lodge rocks! Drove up Friday night with Bjorn. That big snow storm? Drove right through it. Good times. Got excited when I could see pavement and/or hash marks on the road. Love driving down 2 lane divided highways as if it was only 1 lane. Also, love Puck, my Subaru. Stopped at the A&W on the way up. Took a slight detour and picked up Mina. Rolled into the the Lodge at around 11pm. Drank some beers, played some Ticket to Ride. Strategy of grabbing as many 6 train routes before trying to establish destinations took me to 2nd place. Water park's great. The Howling Tornado is sweet. The giant bucket? Nice. Taking over the kiddie pool to play 4 on 4 water basketball rocked. Arcade's also fun. Ryan and Lisa? Great DDR'ers. Mina? Monster on the token-ledge game to spit out tickets. Dinner at Marley's, playing the movie connections game, Bjorn comes out the winner. Some Catchphrase with the Boys just dominating. More water park action. More sleeping on the floor. 13 crammed into an 8 person room. Good times. And moving Mina on Sunday was easy. 2 hours, tops, including driving times. Watching a Pats game with Akira is an experience everyone should have. And the drive back from Madison took 2:20, door to door, including dropping Akira off and getting gas. So that was a good weekend. On tap for this week? Nothing. Sweet.

Access to the home box seems to be down, so email could be sporadic today. Haven't been to the gym in more than a week, I'd say. Installed the new iLife instead. iPhoto '05 is pretty sweet. Photos from the weekend are coming. Another random note, I've started using honey instead of sugar in my morning tea. Las Vegas is such a good show, combining Vegas with spy stuff? Genius. I think I'm going to stripe my internal hard drives on my desktop to get more space. I was going to wait until Tiger, but hey, might as well do it now. Might do a complete reformat and reinstall to get a clean slate. My version of spring cleaning, even though it's January. Going to see Elektra and Assault on Precinct 13 tonight in a double header at the ghettoplex on cheap movie night. Oh, and I've moved back to using a manbag. Too many things in the pockets.

Yesterday's email sporadiciousness was from my flakey cable modem. It's got issue with the power input the the ethernet cable. Hopefully I'll upgrade when I get digital cable and HDTV. And also hopefully that's the only problem. But we'll see. Otherwise, movies were good last night, entertaining at least. Went swimming this morning, all freestyle. Walked to Belmont to get on the Purple Line instead of my usual Addison Red Line. Didn't save me any time, ended up seeing some regulars at Howard even. Working on trying to get my internal drives striped on my desktop. Might have to jump through a couple hoops to make it work. Otherwise, gonna try and go running tonight, try and get back into the whole sound body sound mind deal.

So I guess I should have done some reading before trying to stripe my internal drives. I guess it's a) not doable without a G5 and b) not advisable because they're on the same channel (which I could change by switching the DVD-R with one of the drives). But I'll try again later. Just takes so long to move stuff around. But I ended up using the Powerbook as a firewire target startup disk to use Carbon Copy Cloner. I did make a Boot CD but couldn't run CCC, I probably could have used ditto or something, but didn't feel like it. Too late. Went running last night. Also watched probably the best new movie I've seen in a long time, Napoleon Dynamite. That movie rocks. It's awesome. Totally cool. I had to see it finally after seeing this over at defamer.

So I now have striped internal drives with more space as my startup disk for my desktop. That's exciting. I think it was repairing permissions using a copy of OS X with the most recent security update applied, which wasn't applied to the internal drives. Anyway, my external firewire 800 enclosure wasn't being recognized last night, and at one point, could have been initialized by me. But it worked this morning. Which is good. But I almost had a good enough reason to try and get a G5. Oh well, just keep plugging along. Didn't do any exercising last night, too tired and lazy. Also made the choice to get my computer back up and running vs. just plain running. Started watching Maverick last night. Jodie Foster is just awesome. John Wesley Harding's playing at Shuba's tomorrow night. I might go, maybe. Otherwise, a nice quiet weekend at home.

A Saturday, err, Sunday post. Odd. I was supposed to go to a surprise dinner party for my parents Friday night, but that fell through, so I got to stay in, finish up Maverick, and get to bed. Today I cleaned up a bit, well, put things away anyway. Watched some more movies, 10 Things I Hate About You since last weekend Akira was talking about Kay Hanley and Letters to Cleo. Then I watched You Got Served just cause I wanted to. Then Josie and the Pussycats, and finished up with Reign of Fire. I'm also doing some work for Tony's work blog, and also trying to get some episodes of Lost on DVD for Tun. I found out how much faster optimized firefox builds are for a G4 and the wonder of wonders that is TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software. It's a great free text editor. I've also gone back to using Mail.app on the desktop, especially after I found out how to sync IMAP folders. So, a fairly productive day, even without going to the John Wesley Harding concert. Just wasn't in the mood for that one.

It was like my own personal Sundance yesterday. Scotland, PA followed later by Garden State. Garden State's such a good movie. Slice of Americana. Like Beautiful Girls. And Natalie Portman is amazing in it. So cute. Finished up working on Tony's work blog, I went old school with tables vs. new school with css positioning. Makes more sense to me at least. Couldn't get Tun's episodes of Lost correctly transcoded for DVD burning. I'm still working on that. Swimming in the morning still hasn't gotten any easier yet. I'm tempted to try a stairmaster this evening. I'm planning on a viewing of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but we'll see if my horoscope(s) come true, which will change my plans.

Did go running. Didn't watch Endless Sunshine. Didn't have my Horoscope correctly plot my evening. Did get Quinn's Uncles cd. Didn't get Wonderfalls Complete Series DVD set. Okay, enough of that. Got some more pictures from the Dells from Sally, so I'll finally be putting up the gallery tonight. Got a shower drain that isn't draining. Ripped the Lord of the Rings Trilogy to disk for possible Roku enabled marathon. Thinking of replacing the disks in the home firewall/server box, since the hard drive whine is pretty annoying.

And you know what that means, a viewing of Groundhog Day sometime soon, maybe even tonight. I love that movie. No running last night, too tired. Had to do some cleaning too. Quinn's Uncles is awesome. Great stuff. Catchy too. Although good music almost has to be catchy to be good, doesn't it? Dells pictures are up in the gallery, finally. You know what other music is also good? Martin Sexton. Random folksy singer found in my iTunes collection. Old Lost tonight, one I missed in HD, and no Alias because of the State of the Union, and that's not the movie. Drove to work this morning, and when I do, I've started taking Wilson or Lawrence over and coming up Broadway rather than LSD to Sheridan. Not sure if it actually saves me any time.

Went on a date last night. First first date in years. Tracy and I went to Angelina Ristorante for dinner, then came back to my place for some more conversation. She ended up staying for my annual viewing of Groundhog Day and a Jasmine. I thought it went pretty well. Wait and see. Besides that, got a USB-MIDI adapter so I can now make the piano (Yamaha Disklavier MX-80) play any MIDI files I download. It rocks. Just have to find the MIDI files and a decent MIDI Player to external devices with playlist support. Probably means I should get the piano tuned. Been almost 2 years since the last tuning. Not so good.

It's February. Full force. No exercising yesterday. More sitting around. MIDI is a rather interesting beast, I need to do some research to figure out how to get it working right with the piano. But a couple I downloaded did work great, like a version of the Piano Man. Maybe, if I'm especially courageous, I'll write my own playlist front end for MIDI playback, just for me. I'll just add that to my list of personal software that I'm supposed to write. I did succeed in getting the proper Samba shares off the desktop and to the Roku, and setting up a script to call MPlay to watch the entire extended edition of the Lord of the Rings. Super easy. And now I really need more disk space, because the Roku is now my preferred way to watch movies. No load times. Headed out to Bucktown tonight to hang with the boys. Catch up on some TV tomorrow. Headed out to Bucktown for the Superbowl. Pretty much sums up my weekend. Oh, and Lent starts next week. Sweet. Forced sushi on Fridays. Awesome.

Huh, late night Sunday post. Odd timing. Friday night played Ticket to Ride with Bryan, Carlo, and Russell. Came in dead last, not making 2 of my destinations. Not so good. Saturday, got some odds and ends cleaned up, the Roku front end for ripped DVD's is working well, cleaned up some HD TV stuff. And then went out on a second date with Tracy to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. I really liked their red sangria. Another good time. Long table wait though. Worth it. Found another fan of the bacon wrapped dates. Also made some cookies for the pot-luck Superbowl mini get-together. Game was alright, definitely felt that the Eagles lost rather than the Patriots won. Need to do some laundry this week. Try and talk my brother through a little tech support. And Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday this week. And I'll try and get to the gym more that 3 times this week.

Couple computer things I managed to pull off this weekend too. Got MySQL and PHP installed on the desktop. I used to remember when there were unsupported binary installs of both, and it was a little sketchy getting them working on OS X, but these days? Easy schmeasy. I did it to get a working development environment at home for this site. I'm thinking of adding comments and maybe direct linking to posts as well as upgrading the gallery. Besides that, I also used Gimp for the first time. Also, easy schmeasy. I used it to create 82x82 icons of DVD's for the Roku interface. Free stuff is pretty cool.

Katie Kelly came over tonight to finally watch Eternal Sunshine. And you know what? That's a great movie. A wonderful movie. Amazing movie. Wow. That and Garden State in about 2 weeks. Impressive. So good. As for working out, I think I'll stop the 2-a-days, and just alternate swimming with running. And start doing some pull/chin ups instead of just inverted push ups. So that means no more evening gym runs. It's the little things that make me happy. I'll try and do laundry Tuesday night. Had some random computer networking issues (DNS problems). It'll be nice to get a newer cable modem hopefully when the digital cable comes in, hopefully.

No idea why. Did laundry though. That video floating around of the new easy way to fold t-shirts? Works like a charm. I'm really impressed. Mardi Gras was yesterday, Lent starts today, or, tomorrow. This late night posting is really screwing with my scheduling language. I'll probably hit mass at Mt. Carmel before catching up with Remy and finally getting some sushi at Sai. Yummm, sushi. Getting colder again. And if anyone doesn't have a gmail account, let me know, I've got 50 or so invites. I'm guessing Google's moving on to stress testing their beta service. Oh, and the Google Maps service? Sweet. Vectors rock. Oh, should probably catch a viewing of my Lenten related movie, 40 Days and 40 Nights. And I'm having issues with my rip of Serendipity, because of the multiple angles (they were nice enough to include the credits in both english and french).

Sushi is soooooo good. Sai is sooooo good. I've been away from sushi for too long. Away from good sushi for too long. You know what else is good? Sapporo. Don't think there's anything I can do about the multiangle credits for Serendipity, but we'll see. I'm thinking of chopping the hair again. Besides the hair all over the bathroom, had at least 2 people think it might be better shorter. Again, we'll see. Doing some volunteer work with the company tomorrow night. Friday night going to see Luke's band, June's Arrival at the Double Door. Might go out for some drinks and dancing afterwards. And again, we'll see. Parent's coming out this weekend. Oh, and it's now Lent. Instead of giving something up, I'm thinking I should turn it into something like a resolution, like New Year's, something to better myself. Like playing piano again. And again, for the last time, we'll see.

Try and sneak in some more sushi tonight pre Double Door. Blue Fin anyone? Again, up way too late for no particular reason. Figured out that MPlay can create bookmarks to jump to particular scenes in ripped DVDs. Also managed to rip only the english language version of Serendipity, I just have to manually put in the chapter stops is all. Need to get Puck's oil changed. I should also add a photo of my hair to my hairstyles gallery. I'm probably not gonna keep up with the late night updates, and move back towards morning. The time shifting screws too much with my head. Taking the day off tomorrow from going to the gym, headed to the Golden Olympic instead. Yum, breakfast.

Busy weekend. Friday night Blue Fin with Akira and Russell. Very good, along with the sake. Then the Double Door with Russell. Of the 4 bands that went on, the last two were decent, Trim (with quality female lead singer) and June's Arrival. I'd catch either of them at a show again. Saturday finally went through my mail, dinner with the parents at Joy's, and drinks at AJ's b-day party. Lazy Sunday until people came over for my mom's cooking and Ticket to Ride. I also figured out how to get midi working well with the piano. I've got to use QMidi for the playlists, and use MidiPipe to coalesce all the channels to 1 (so the piano can play them all). Makes for some rather interesting sounds though. But it's fun. And very cool. Quite easy to do something like karaoke at home. But add another software project to my list: creating an iTunes like midi player.

Bah, valentine's day yesterday. No exercise this morning. My dishwasher does work, it just needed to get wet. New Veronica Mars. Making dinner for Tracy tomorrow. Getting a real hair cut, or I guess, a style session at Art+Science. I've been wanting to go there since college. And since they seem to have stopped with the hair model thing, I guess having it be a birthday present to myself isn't a bad thing. Sushi on Friday, as usual for Lent, and Marla sitting on the weekend. Still got some cleaning and ironing to do.

Haircut's set for tomorrow night, post work. Kind of exciting. I'm leaving my head of hair entirely in the hands of Mel, my stylist. Should be interesting. Hopefully. Tentative plans for some dancing Friday night. I've also tentatively agreed to work on the Ultimate Chicago Spring League Draft App, which would be my 3rd year working on it. But we'll see if that pans out or not. Running was extra hard this morning, not sure why. Maybe it's the lack of sleep. I've also just discovered .kar files. They are midi files with lyrics embedded. Which means, I have my very own piano bar karaoke machine. Awesome.

Dinner went well last night, even if I was a little out of practice. Ended up watching a bit of 40 Days and 40 Nights (my Lenten movie). Still not sure what's gonna happen with my hair. Possible Karaoke at Piece tonight, but I've got a mess to clean up at home. Otherwise, no other new plans. Wow, this is a short one.

Birthdays are sort of like little personal New Year celebrations. I like that idea. Haircut's good. I'll post pictures soon. But Mel, my stylist, doesn't use scissors, just one of those blade type things. First time for me with that. Dinner at Silver Cloud with Bryan, Tony, and the Russells. Ice cream from Cold Stone. I finally walked by the new Cold Stone that opened up in Evanston yesterday as well. And then ended up playing Ticket to Ride (slightly timed speed version) and losing pretty handily. Speed TtR is much better for my MTV attention span. Dinner at Usagi Ya, I think. No working out yesterday or today. Finally cleaned up the kitchen this morning, ended up sleeping instead last night. Planning on working on the Spring League Draft App this weekend, maybe converting to a client-server architecture, or maybe even rewriting it in Cocoa. We'll see. But in Bucktown for the weekend.

Good time hanging with Marla in Bucktown. Usagi Ya is alright for sushi, nothing special or anything though. Dancing with Tracy and gang was fun at the Artful Dodger Friday night as well. A nice lazy Saturday, no work on the Draft App, dinner courtesy Bryan. Finally got to see Best in Show. Sunday brunch at Silver Cloud, dinner at Penny's. Lots of good rainy day couching with Tracy. Might be coming down with something, scratchy throat and all. Gotta work out tonight, that's for sure. Almost been an entire week since the last time. Oil change for the car tomorrow, eye checkup on Saturday. The little things are starting to pile up again.

Guess what Art+Science is having a mere week after I get my hair cut? Right, a model call. Wouldn't even know if I'd qualify, but still. That just sucks. Definitely under the weather, but not full on sick yet. But it's creeping up on me. Odd to have a slow burn flu going on, at least that's my guess. But still no exercise, but plenty of sleep. Also really need to do laundry. Again. Some addendums from the weekend: good to see Ryan, Lisa, Carlo, Sally, KK and AJ on Friday, Joe and Bryan on Saturday, Sarah and Russell on Sunday. A long way from me holed up in the fortress of solitude. Watched Harold & Kumar again, and I've got the craving for White Castle. Also watched Desperate Housewives for the first time. Quality soap opera. I keep waiting for the gay guy from Melrose Place to come out to his wife from Sports Night.

Finally went swimming again this morning. Good times. Actually much nicer now that the sun rises at a decent hour, which means the pool is actually lit by natural light. Made some Rice Crispie Treats last night. Easy schmeasy. Probably end up making another batch tonight, with laundry. Took a peek at the 2005 Subaru Legacy while waiting for my car last night. They look pretty sweet. Wagon too. I think an Impreza is a little too small for me though. I also got caught watching WB's dramas last night: Gilmore Girls with its post breakup fallout and One Tree Hill because it's a soap opera. I couldn't help myself. Still no reason to get a new iPod, even with new mini's and a cheaper iPod Photo released today.

Happy Anniversary to my parents, and a Happy Birthday to my brother. And moving on. Laundry was done, and, oh, maybe 3 shirts were ironed. Only 33 more to go. I have trouble watching Unwrapped on the Food Channel because only recently have I learned that the host, Marc Summers, previously hosted Double Dare. I keep expecting green slime to come down from somewhere. Watched a bit of Starsky & Hutch. Gonna try and see Tracy, but she's feeling a bit under the weather. Hanging with the boys tomorrow night. Probably headed out to Woodstock after the eye appt. on Saturday.

Tracy made dinner and we watched Anchorman last night. Damn that's a lot of deleted scenes. We did not check out the additional, Wake Up, Ron Burgundy! which is probably made up of some of the deleted scenes. Duke of Perth and a viewing of Life Aquatic tonight. Still got that spring league draft app to work on. Found another scale to weigh myself, and with all the exercise, I'm not losing weight, I'm actually gaining weight. Which is not what I am aiming to do. Crazy.

Full weekend. Fish and chips at the Duke of Perth is so good, along with the beer. Yum, Belhaven. Life Aquatic is a very funny, very good movie. I loved it. Then a quick game of TtR before heading home, thanks for the ride, KK. Ended up late for my eye appointment on Saturday, there was some random 4 to 2 lane merging on 290 that slowed me down. No need for new prescriptions, which is good. Bad because I didn't get new glasses, but maybe next year. Then back to Woodstock, stopping at the Huntley Prime Outlets. Managed to get a $9 pair of cords. Off the clearance rack. I kinda get this buying stuff on sale deal. Ended up at Dr. Monje's for a memorial service/party for the evening, and then 9 hours of sleep. I haven't slept that much in a good long while. Very nice. Then back into the city, and got to see Tracy last night. Didn't realize that it snowed last night until looking out the window this morning.

There's 20 some odd days left in winter, and it still manages to snow. At least February's over. Forgot to mention that I managed to compile Mutt under OS X over the weekend. That's kind of exciting. Well, maybe not. Tracy made steak for dinner last night. Yummmm, steak. Otherwise, not much else going on. Got my replacement Varsity Blues yesterday. I wonder whatever happened to my original? Probably try and go swimming tonight. I think my exercise schedule is gonna be completely whack, and by whack, I mean non-scheduled. Just have to fit it in when I can. And maybe I'll actually get around to the mini projects I've got on my plate.

Took the night off last night. Frozen pizza, soda, ice cream, Gilmore Girls and One Tree Hill. Just felt like vegging out a bit. Hopefully that'll rejuvenate me for the rest of the week. I did manage to back up my music to bring in to work. Formatting firewire hard drives under OS X isn't as easy as I thought it'd be. I also might ship out the hard drive to my brother and sister-in-law for use with their new iPod minis. Switched back to a backpack today, no real reason. Got to take public transportation in to work today. Been a while for that.

Headed over to the FreemanGesoff household to fix their wireless network. Since I had set it up for them originally, I'm responsible for the upkeep. Caught up with the girls over dinner, Leah made Asparagus Potato Leek soup. Also I haven't done that circle of public transportation, Purple to Armitage, 151 up to Addison, in a very long time. So no exercise again. Decided to sleep this morning instead of going to the gym. Slacking, that's what I'm doing. Headed out for dinner with Tracy tonight. I really need some nicer shoes. I think I've decided on a new phone, the Sony Ericsson K750i. Won't come out for a another couple months, but I should be able to retire my small camera and phone with it. Watched a bit of Varsity Blues last night. That movie is so good. It was hard to stop watching and go to bed.

That's right. Ads. Why? Because I can. And I like Google. And it was really easy to sign up for their AdSense program. And I've always wanted ads. I had ads way back when I first started, but without any payment, just random banner ads that I liked and added to the bottom. Now? Google ads. Sweet. And the ads are automagically related to the content, with no work of mine. Awesome. Work's gonna be a bear for a week or so. Still got lots to clean up at home too. And that draft app is still on the plate.

Headed out for dinner with Bryan and Kevin at Banderas after a quick shopping trip to the Levi's Store. I got some pants. And another pair of jeans. I love that store simply because everything's the same size for me. Makes it easy to get in and out really quickly. Watched movies, napped, and cleaned out my fridge today. Also finally started fixing up the draft app. Movies watched today: Starship Troopers, S.W.A.T, Varsity Blues last night, probably gonna watch Shade as well, along with some Gilmore Girls. I also got around to editing out the commercials of a bunch of TV I had recorded. Frees up a ton of space. Also set up NFS exports to use with the Roku instead of Samba sharing. Better performance. Have I mentioned how good Varsity Blues is? It's so good, even standing up to soooooo many repeated viewings. The chill scenes still get to me.

Finally got back to exercising. Tried the old school escalator stairmaster yesterday. That's rough. But not quite the same as running stadiums or stairs. I feel like there's more explosiveness with real life, rather than the plodding of the stairmaster. And my knees aren't happy about it today. So I don't think I'll be doing that again. And I went swimming this morning. Coming back after 2 weeks or so, it was rough. Made a run out to Shaumburg yesterday for some Dim Sum with family. Also to help my parents pick out a new computer (they're getting a new iMac). Shopping malls are funny places. Tracy came over to hang out last night. That was a pleasant surprise. Watched Arrested Development, such a good show. Great show. Making good progress on the draft application updates.

I'm actually happy that there's reruns on. It allows me to catch up on my HD recordings of Veronica Mars and Lost. I also realize that maybe I should try and implement an auto html link functionality, instead of always looking up and linking to the imdb. Have I shared my bookmarks yet? I also love the popular links from del.icio.us. Good stuff. I like the folksonomies. I like tagging. I also like wiki's, and would like to set one up eventually for personal use. Oh, I managed to lose a musing yesterday, just disappeared into the ether. Going to see Hitch tonight with Tracy, cheap movie night at the ghetto plex. Started working on the draft app on the train. Makes the trip faster, except I'm adding another 45 minutes or so of computer time to my day.

Hitch was good, if a little sappy at parts. I should definitely stay away from trailers though, especially to comedies, they give away too many payoffs. As a side note, just installed the IMDB search under Firefox, so now I can select it instead of Google to do a search. Very handy. Dinner last night at the Golden Nugget. Not that good. Made it to swimming this morning. Drove in to work. Not sure what I want to do with my hair anymore.

Late night at work last night. Got stuff done though. Good feeling when that happens. Postponed draft app work till tonight. Spilled a big glass of juice in the TV room, finally. Took me long enough. Watched a bit of Shade last night, err, this morning. It stars an Oscar winner. Also got my Photobridge updated with a new Beta Firmware and the newest version of MPlay. Took me a while to remember that portmap needs to be running to mount nfs. Guess I'm a little link happy. It also might be because of the Google's AdSense, better to have links than to not, I think. Thinking about finally making the call to RCN to step up and get some digital and hopefully HD cable, along with some faster cable modem speeds, and maybe picking up a SB5100 instead of renting the modem. We'll see.

Crazy. Not real insomnia, just lack of sleep, because I'm busy. Currently running on 8 hours since waking up Wednesday. I'm thinking of upgrading the home network, well, not really upgrading, but taking out xenon, the really old IBM Aptiva (circa 1997 or so) that's been serving as my router and firewall. I did some research, and really liked the Linksys WRT54G. Why? Third party firmwares. Like OpenWrt, among others. Except the one I got is V2.2, which isn't supported yet. This would mean I could get rid of xenon, which is loud and whiny, and move any server based stuff to the Cube I'm getting back from my parents, because that's nice and quiet. The SB5100 didn't work last night with the auto-provisioning setup from RCN, I might try it again this weekend before doing an exchange. Finished up most of the bugs/enhancements for the spring league draft app, just running issues into handling non-qc'd data. Still have to implement the 3rd buddy special case. Hitting Sai tonight with Tracy. Spring League Draft run through tomorrow. And lots of sleeping. Robots on Sunday. I did catch the trailer for Revenge of the Sith, tuning in for the last 10 minutes of The O.C.. Good stuff.

Caught up a bit on sleep this weekend. Saturday, Tracy met the parents for brunch. Then we went out, did some shopping at the Orland Park Mall, nice place. I picked up an argyle sweater from Express. Realized that I should probably update my closet, again. Dinner at Jin Ju. Had a Saketimi, good stuff. The whole parents meeting new girlfriend, it went well. Sunday was pretty lazy. Managed to go running. Ate some hotdogs. Had to fix the computer network, I guess my new cable modem does work, or the changes just took a while to propagate. After first trying the SB5100 out, didn't work, so the phone tech reenabled my old one. That was Thursday night. Worked fine until Saturday, the next time I checked. So, plugged in the SB5100, and works beautifully. Also, I'm at Mach7 (7Mbps down, 800kbps up). That's nice. Went and saw Robots. Okay. Did some more work on the spring league draft app. Java just doesn't treat strings like datatypes, more like classes. Also moved the antenna around a bit so I could record Arrested Development, which if I haven't already said, is a great show. Looks good in HD too. I've got laundry to do. I've got Boondock Saints to watch for the upcoming St. Paddy's day. And I'm leaving early Friday morning for BOTB.

Got laundry done last night. Fun thing, something blue decided to bleed, and since I don't separate, I've got a couple blue tinted undershirts. Exciting, especially when it was on cold wash to begin with. Not sure what it was that caused it, since I had a bunch of blue or new blue things in the wash. Next time, a whites only load with bleach. Definitely finishing up that spring league draft app, just some testing to do, and a full on run through tomorrow night. Watched Mumford last night. Such a good movie. Started to watch Who Am I? while finishing up folding. Didn't exercise, as I felt like I might have been coming down with something, maybe a cold, but sleeping made me feel better. I've forgotten to mention that I buzzed my hair last Thursday. Just got tired of it. So starts the long process of growing it out again. Headed out to the Homer G for dinner with Tracy tonight. My dad's iMac got delayed another 4 days. Here's hoping they push it back far enough to get automatically upgraded if and when Apple updates the line, which should be soon according to Macrumors Buyer's Guide.

Got myself a nice Irish Breakfast for dinner last night. Yum. Bummed around with Tracy at various shopping establishments. Fun. Lots of fun, actually. Puck's headlights keep acting up. First it was the left, then they both worked last night, and this morning the right was out. Odd. I'll get it checked out when Puck goes in for the 90K checkup. I don't think I've mentioned a new tv show that's caught my eye, Rescue Me. It's good. I've started downloading episodes via BitTorrent, along with Arrested Development (2nd current season), Entourage and Tilt. If any of these end up coming out on DVD I'll probably delete them and buy the official versions. Can't say I'd do the same thing for the HDTV that I record OTA. Finished up the spring league draft app finally this morning. Also, Safari has made it back to usage on my laptop because of Full Screen via Saft. I updated my del.icio.us mac+software bookmarks to reflect that as well.

Happy St. Patty's Day. And welcome March 17th with snow. Sweet. Thank God I'll be in Florida in, oh, about 22 hours. New hard drives arrived, which is good, since Dad's new iMac shipped out yesterday. Sweet. Definitely need the space, for all those TV shows I'm grabbing. Realized that either I'm pulling an all nighter or I'm just not sleeping much tonight because of my travel plans. Should be fine as all I'm planning on doing tomorrow is laying out on the beach, in preparation for which I got sunblock. Yes, and I plan on using it. I went with Coppertone Sport Sunblock Lotion, as opposed to the Gel. Personal preference. Have a good weekend y'all.

Ugh. I did a big write up this morning, which disappeared. I'll have to work on my command line website updating tool. Anyway, spring break was fun, as usual. 4th year going? Good times. Early flight out Friday, Delta's a little odd with their seat request boarding passes. Enterprise was very personal, lots of human interaction to get the car, black Nissan Sentra. Should have brought the iPod because it had an AUX IN port. Next time I guess. A bit of traffic up 95 on the way to West Palm Beach. Got the house, chilled on the beach, got some lunch, got some supplies with Bryan which turned into picking up Carrie from one train station which turned into picking up Fritz fromt he another train station which turned into going to dinner at our usual, Aleyda's. It was good enough that both Tea & Strumpets and (Cowboy Up|Caps) went back on Saturday. Caps was played, Akira and I beat Court and Becky 7-5, then got destroyed 7-1 by someone I don't remember, and then I crashed early. Saturday was fun playing. Still able to walk to the fields. Lost our first game, won the next two. Lost our last pool play game Sunday morning and got knocked out first round in bracket play. Lots of down time, because of the format, 45 minute timed games with 2 hours between game starts, and for us, a 2nd round bye. But good times. Good to see and play with T&S Alums, Trudy and Lex and Sasha. A pretty quiet Saturday night. More chilling and beach time Sunday. Sunday night headed back down to Fort Lauderdale for the Kindred Soiree. Great food by MJ. Quiet though. The 3-1 Chicago team lost in the finals. Probably should change the team name to Always a Bridesmaid. I did manage to get some coconuts fresh from the tree on request. That was fun. And monday was the usual fun and refreshing Fort Lauderdale beach day with Carrie, Fritz and Becky. No problems getting home. It was really nice to sleep in my own bed last night, instead of with 2 other people or on the floor. Only thing planned for this week so far is Marla sitting this weekend.

Got to hang out with Tracy last night. Went to Silver Cloud for a celebratory dinner for Bryan's new job with Bryan and the Russells. I just signed up to be an Amazon Associate, so expect some more ads and probably an Amazon search box somewhere soon. Watched a couple episodes of Arrested Development recorded in Hi-Def via EyeTV 500 played back via a Roku Photobridge. Okay, so I've started using the Amazon Associate links. Anyway, first time watching an entire episode of something in that manner. Good times. Dad's new iMac arrived yesterday, got all the files transferred over from the Cube, ran Software Update. All I've got left to do is install iWork. And now that it's 2 days into spring, I've got to start planning on the painting and the redecorating, if you can call moving furniture around redecorating.

Feels like Friday. Probably because I won't be going home until Sunday. Dogsitting Marla starting today. Got some 5.25" bay to 3.5" drive adapters from MicroCenter yesterday, along with some DVD-R and a couple cheap DVD's. Installing RAM and replacing the hard drive is super easy in my Dad's new iMac. Such a nice machine. Quiet and fast. Also installed a couple more hard drives in my firewire enclosure, I needed more space for all the TV I'm bittorrent downloading. That and I've got 208 GB of HD recorded material, so I was already running out of space just for the EyeTV. Now I've got to figure out how to transcode the avi's from downloaded shows to transport streams. I'm thinking about putting sidebar ads down the right side of this page. Might be too much.

I really need to get more sleep. I've been working on setting up my own version of Wikipedia using the Mediawiki back end. It's really really cool. Serious repository of personal information. Finally, an pretty easy way to go back and find out who was on my Summer League team in 2001, if I can find and populate that data. Watched The Ring last night with Bryan and Kevin after dropping by Piece to grab a beer with Becky and see Remy, all because I was in the hood. Marla's good, likes running around in the backyard now. Oh, it was snowing this morning. Snowing! Might hang with Tracy tonight, might just cook in, probably making a ham for Sunday Brunch tomorrow, and sleeping.

Nice to get back home after the long weekend in Bucktown. Dogsitting Marla was good. Went out with Tracy and met up with Ryan and Lisa and April at Four on Friday. Lots of lounging on Saturday, watching lots of movies. Sunday watched a couple more movies, including a new favorite, Love Actually, and the imported Ping Pong. Also went over to Bryan's for sourdough pancakes and some a movie quiz and a Star Wars Quiz. Worked a lot on my MediaWiki install, except I'm starting to question if I should go public with it, since it could contain all sorts of information about friends that they might not want on the web. Ah, wrestling with privacy issues. Think I'll try and do some laundry tonight. June's Arrival is playing on Tuesday, round 8pm, at Joe's. Probably showing up for that. And I think I don't have too much else planned. Which is good. I'm looking for a little downtime.

I'm figuring out how to include links to my wiki site from here on the Daily Dose, which means I will be rolling out the wiki eventually. I'm still adding content, and privacy be damned. Didn't get to laundry, so that's sitting in the hamper, waiting to get done. I did figure out a default setting to use with ffmpegx to get transport stream files to use with the Roku Photobridge from the bit torrent downloaded TV Shows. I've got the complete Space: Above & Beyond downloaded along with the 2nd season of Arrested Development. Tracy and I will probably head out to see June's Arrival tonight around 8pm. Definitely catching up on sleep, since I woke up at 6:25 AM this morning without an alarm. Probably time for me to start hitting the gym again.

No concert last night. Instead, Tracy and I just hung out, watched Gilmore Girls and Scrubs, had a nice Easter Ham dinner, and called it an early night. Nice and quiet. I've also started wikifying these entries, so when I decided to make it available, there will be a bunch of links available. That also means real links from here won't really exist from here on out, which probably means my AdSense ads won't make much sense anymore. Still working on transcoding the rest of the Arrested Development episodes, started some Entourage, and probably then start Tilt and Space: Above & Beyond.

So much better than laundry, cleaning, or all sorts of chores. Did some more work on look and feel for the wiki, which I'm calling Memex. I think a roll out will happen sooner, rather than later. I thought about going CSS, and then redoing Daily Dose, but I've decided against it (CSS has trouble with footers). Recording Lost and Alias last night did not pick up any of those weather notices, I think, which is a pretty cool thing for HD. Headed to Duke of Perth tonight. Might see D.E.B.S. tonight, although Steamboy is also showing at the Landmark's Century Centre Cinema. That's mighty tempting.

Memex is live. It's a work in progress though, so stuff gets filled in as time goes on, and I get around to it. D.E.B.S. was a lot better than I expected, which isn't saying much, but I was entertained. Indian food with Tracy tonight, party for Bryan, headed out to Woodstock tomorrow for my Godson's first birthday. Gonna try and see Steamboy and Oldboy on Sunday. Oh, and Happy April Fool's Day. And to put a damper on the weekend, Sunday got to spring those clocks ahead 1 hour.

Friday night Tracy and I went for Mexican instead, headed over to Cesar's, then over to Bryan's. Played some Catch Phrase and watched some Beer Pong. Saturday headed out to Woodstock, going through Lake in the Hills to get there. Brought my Dad's new iMac home and set it up. Very nice machine. Looks great too. Watched the Illinois game over dinner from Chop Suey Hut before heading back in to the city. Sunday did 6 loads of laundry. Been a long time coming. Also watched some Dark Angel and started ripping more DVDs for use with the Roku Photobridge. I also created some applications to more easily view TV Shows. Having DVDs available instantaneously is pretty cool. And a new site I've been reading that's really funny, The Impulsive Buy.

Forgot to mention, Tracy took me to a concert last night at the Metro, Ray LaMontagne. He was pretty good. I'll be picking up his album shortly. Also his opening act, Missy Higgins, was awesome. Australian singer songwriter. Very good. Very new. I'll definitely be picking up her stuff as well. Amen for the iTunes Music Store. I've got a 20% coupon that expires today for Express. So, gotta use that. Also, since I'll be in that area, I'll try and stop by the New Balance store to pick up a new pair of running shoes, for use the next time I go to the gym, whenever that might be. Tomorrow might be headed out to Homer Glen for some suburb fun. Thursday, might have to go to the Duke of Perth, just because it seems like a good weekly tradition to have.

Sleeping is so good. So good. Got a pair of pants at Express. That's all. Replaced my running shoes, which is good. Finished off the ham from Easter, well, the part that isn't in the freezer. Which is a good thing, cause I'm tired of ham. Had an odd craving for apple juice last night. Well, maybe not too odd. Going to Hollywood Boulevard with Tracy tonight. Should be fun.

Hollywood Boulevard is pretty cool, eating and drinking at the movie theater? Genius. Watched Sin City. Great movie. Listened a bit to Missy Higgins in the car. She was much better, to me, live, when it was just her and the keyboard or the guitar, with no backing vocals, drums, or violins. But that's just me. Headed to the Duke of Perth tonight, since it is Thursday, and maybe a movie after. Looking forward to a quiet Friday night tomorrow, and headed out to Woodstock with Tracy on Saturday. My Mom flies back in from the Philippines today. Here's hoping she brought back a giant wooden cutlery.

I think Duke of Perth on Thursdays is going to be a regular occurrence. It's nice there. And it's close to home. So, didn't get to see Steamboy, which is a problem since it's no longer playing at the Landmark. Oh well. I did sneak in another episode of Dark Angel last night, and then finally set up my remote control to work with the DVD changer and made put the more frequently used components in more available spaces. Much better. Just have to work on the macros, that's all. I think I'm gonna start working on moving furniture around tonight, which should be exciting, tiring, and maybe a little annoying. 1st step? Move the home theater.

Started moving things around at home. TV's in the living room. And that's about it. Tracy helped a bit Friday night, then we watched Real Genius. Got myself a haircut from my hometown barber. Showed off Woodstock. Got to walk around my old high school and junior high as well. Also jetted up to Lake Geneva for a bit. Think I've figured out a decorating scheme to try, gonna involve getting actual artwork to hang on the walls. Oh, tried a new crepe place that opened near the courthouse on The Square, La Petite Creperie. In Woodstock. Did some shopping in various places on the drive back in. Had a craving for Steak Frites, which gives a little hint to the decorating scheme. Watched Arrested Development, Desperate Housewives, and Grey's Anatomy. Sunday nights are busy TV nights. Don't think I have anything planned for the week. Except to finish moving furniture around.

I got plenty of sleep, but I'm still tired. Go figure. Did nothing yesterday. Nice and quiet. In random web news, Veronica Mars got picked up for a 2nd season, I found out who died on Lost because of a blurb on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, I guess I should try and watch some of those episodes. Tiger got announced today, I already put my Family Pack order in. Now the question is if I should work on updating the Cube to be the home server before or after Tiger gets here.

Last night did my home exercises, ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut, watched Scrubs and an episode of Dark Angel. The one productive thing I did was setup a gmail account to archive all my mail. Well, my future mail anyway. Basically, all my email gets copied and forwarded to a gmail account. I still get and process it at home. I knew those 50 invites were useful for something. Now, I just have to process the rest of my archived email up to the gmail archive account, which should be interesting, since it goes back 8 or so years. Wow. Made it to the gym again this morning. Hanging out with Tracy on Thursday. I really should be moving stuff around, but I'm waiting for after tonight, since I'm recording Lost and Alias. So this weekend I should be able to take down the computers and move the computer desk.

Finally got around to moving the rest of the furniture to different places last night. Of course, I didn't start until 10:30pm. This was after I realized that Oxygen didn't record Lost and Alias. Ugh. Wish I had a TiVo, or something like it, instead of my half-assed setup. Anyway, I managed to get the new episode of Alias about 2 hours after it aired, and Lost was a repeat, so no loss there. Ha. I with I could also record Jack & Bobby, because that show is just awesome. Anyway, almost broke a mirror while moving stuff around, I've still got lots of things to put away and organize, like the return of the Data Center. I'm headed out to Hollywood Boulevard again tonight with Tracy. Hopefully better on a Thursday. I also think I'm finally gonna try and finish up that digital photo frame I've been working on.

Watched Guess Who last night. Listened to Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American and Avril Lavigne' Let Go. What does that tell you? I like pop culture. I admit it. I like Top 40. I like mainstream humor. And there's nothing wrong with it. There, step 1. Looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. But I do have to get rid of my old electronics at a recyling thing (pdf). Finally. And having a friend working for Apple is great. Everyone should get one. Birthday party to go to tomorrow night. I think that's it.

Good weekend. Friday did some grocery shopping, basically snacking foods, that was after going to the gym for a run. Saturday changed the url scheme for Memex, much prettier now. Finally got rid of my old computer stuff at the City of Chicago recycling thing, which was really well organized. Went over to the Russells, brought over some of my mom's Sweet and Sour Meatballs. Nice lazy Sunday with Tracy, brunch at Nookies Tree, some napping, and some grilling out at her place along with the standard Sunday night television, all in HD, all via their new Comcast DVR. So jealous. I do have to call RCN though and ask if HD's available now.

Puck's good. Running fine. Watched a couple more episodes of Dark Angel while working on the digital picture frame. Would be nice to have a jigsaw. Tried to finish off some more ice cream, trying to clean out the freezer. Decided to go running outside this morning, so instead of the treadmill, I ventured down to Diversey. Was a whole lot harder than then treadmill. Go figure.

Got some wood glue yesterday and put together the backing box for my digital picture frame. Next step is mounting the laptop inside it. I finished cutting up the back cover piece, using a Dremel Tool isn't the best way to make long cuts, but it works. Finished up the first season of Dark Angel. I noticed a couple similarities to early seasons of Alias, like taking down the big bad that sort of formed the origin of the main character, bad guys switching sides, main characters thought dead but actually alive. Good stuff though. Used iChat for the first time last night with my brother. They've switched over to Apple powerbooks, although Nicole's seems to be a lemon, which is never good. Oh, and I fixed up the Roku Photobridge to mount nfs shares of dvds and tv shows on boot. Headed to Greektown for dinner with Tracy tonight.

Ended up at Pegasus for dinner last night. Not bad. Got a tour of UIC, well, the parts Tracy's familiar with. It got cold enough to wear a hat, which I like. Hitting up the Duke of Perth, Whitney's in town, joining the usual crew. Definitely running out of space because of all the tv show downloading over bittorrent that I'm doing. Currently working on Robot Chicken and The Thirsty Traveler. Probably making a cheesecake and an apple pie this weekend. Also should get around to fixing up the Data Center. RCN is supposedly finally rolling out HDTV, but no DVR for a couple months. Hmmm. What to do, what to do.

Ah, the weekend. Right around the corner, mere hours away. Gonna try and do some laundry]4 tonight, been meaning to for a while. Duke of Perth was good last night, the shepherds pie was great, and seeing Bjorn again was good, along with Whitney, Tony and Russell. I'm getting tempted to call in and try and get RCN HDTV, but I'm still wavering. Probably try and finish up the digital photo frame sometime this weekend, and might even do some painting, of walls, and probably some baking. You know, exciting stuff.

Did some laundry Friday night. Finally. Got plenty of shirts to iron. Maybe I'll do that tonight. Also, new firmware came out for the Roku Photobridge, so installed that. Also figured out that antenna-out on an EyeTV 500 means cable-in, so I finally got that working with HDTV over cable. Which is good. Except that there's no UPN in HD over cable. Weird. Which means I still have to have an antenna to get Veronica Mars. Oh well. Also means I'll be recording anything and everything I can, which means my hard drive usage will go through the roof. Managed to watch Entourage over Saturday and Sunday. Tracy came over and helped to pick out colors to paint my walls. Interesting effects when dealing with lighting of the living room, how colors look when the blinds are open, which doesn't happen too often, how they look with just the lamps on, and how it looks when the light's off with just the TV on. I'll provide some colors when I finally settle down and pick some. Waking up this morning and checking the paint sample on the wall, well, it made me think twice. Tried to make an apple pie, not too successful. Sunday went up to Old Orchard to see Bryan on his first day. He definitely looks like he belongs in an Apple Store. Went and saw Fever Pitch at the River East and dinner at PJ Clarke's.

Sue me. I missed a day. Monday night made a cappuccino cheesecake, worked a little bit on the digital photo frame. Last night went to a Cubs game with Tracy and the Russells. Great seats, courtesy of my dad. Tonight going to see Oldboy with pre movie dinner at Duke of Perth. Wow, even with a missed day, this is a really short entry. Working on editing out the rest of my commercials on my Veronica Mars records. Just found out they'll be replaying the first season of Lost this summer, which means I do get to catch up on my missing HD recorded episodes. Sweet. Hopefully, they'll do the same for Jack & Bobby.

Hmm, php stopped working for a bit there. Thanks to all the people that let me know, which was 0. Thanks. Anyway, got me started thinking on having a backup somehow, like maybe using Movable Type as an alternative, but still pulling from the same database backend, since MT writes out static HTML instead of dynamic php. Something to think about. I still have to get font sizes to match up between this and the Memex. Didn't see Oldboy last night, seeing it tonight instead, last showing. Getting Cold Stone Creamery to catch up with Katie Kelly beforehand. Bryan and Kevin came over and we watched Eurotrip instead. Headed out to the Old Orchard Apple Store for the Tiger launch event tomorrow. Exciting.

Really. The stuff that springs from the minds of some people. Oldboy. Good, as in well made, but damn. Ugh. Moving on. Need to get some more wood to better make a frame for the digital photo frame. Tiger day. No idea when I'm going to get around to installing it. Gonna try and finally get out, get some paints, and start painting this weekend. Otherwise, nada.

Weekend just wasn't long enough. At least there's a 3 day weekend sometime in my future. Not soon enough. Friday night Tiger Launch was interesting. Long line. Dinner at Johnny Rockets and watched xXx - State of the Union before finally walking in and hanging out in the Apple Store. Apple's HD Gallery makes it really tempting to upgrade to a G5 or better, since my current desktop only gets 12fps on 720p material. Disappointing. But a nice new dual 2.7 G5 with 23" display? That'd rock. Saturday nice and quiet, starting to watch 2nd season of Dark Angel. That and Alias, so similar, strong female main character who kicks ass, sort of a genetic chosen one aspect, secret organizations over generations. It's good. Sunday made it out to Piece for dinner with Bryan and Russell and the Blanchet-Ruths, and then a quick jet downtown to see Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Looks like a nice quiet Monday night. I did manage to go swimming this morning, first time back since, well, I think, middle of March. Wow. I'm gonna try and get back on the exercise horse. Tough though.

Exercise does a body good. Running this morning. Dark Angel and a Gyro Special last night for dinner. Headed out to see Tracy tonight. Otherwise, holding pattern for any plans I have. Thought about trying track workouts again, when the weather's nicer. My copy of Tiger finally shipped. Getting itchy for a big purchase, or something. Must be spring. I think this is the season I really start wanting to spend some money.

Would you believe it? I chose swimming. Who am I? Sleepy, that's who I am. Saw A Lot Like Love with Tracy last night after dinner at Bennigan's. Ordered way too much food. Traffic was really light heading down there from Evanston. Making dinner for her tonight. Created even more space for HD recordings. Who knew commercials take up so much space? Oh, and I'd like to thank whoever bought Dark Angel Season 1 through my Amazon Associate's link. I guess that makes me a professional blogger now? Ha. Beach starts up tomorrow. Hmmmm. My copy of Tiger is in the city. Now I just have to get to it somehow. Or, it has to get to me somehow. And my ankle's bugging me again. 9 months later. Wow. Maybe I really did do something bad to it.

Dinner was good, but I've got to let it cook longer, or something. The beef in the Boeuf Bourguignon was a little too tough. Wine was good though, a little strong though. Skipped on on exercise this morning, thinking I'll be going to beach tonight. We'll see if that actually happens. If I do go, it'll probably end up being a pretty big affair, dinner and drinks afterwards. I might make it, but I'll try and ride my bike down. Plans are up in the air for tomorrow.

Beach was fun yesterday. I think I might be looking forward to it all summer long. Also nice to not be in any sort of administrative capacity for it. Very nice. Thanks to Tony for taking control of the whole shebang. Finally ordered RCN HDTV. That's coming Monday. HBO and Showtime, Mach 10, digital cable. All good things. Probably gonna start losing sleep, even more so than before. And on top of that, I finally got Tiger installed on Aluminum. Rawwwrrrrr. It's awesome. I didn't think it'd be as cool as it is. Dashboard rocks. I get the nice ripple effect. RSS ScreenSaver works great. Quartz Composer looks incredible. Lots and lots of eye candy. Shibby. First thing installed? Sidetrack. Just have to test EyeTV 500 with it, and then I can install it on Oxygen. Just wouldn't want to miss out on any TV shows I'm recording.

Half day as I head back to wait for the RCN guy to install HDTV. Yeah. Very exciting. Very exciting. Weekend was good. Friday night headed over to the MCA for First Fridays. Tried using dodgeball.com but the MCA wasn't listed. Saturday went down to the Magnificent Mile to do some window shopping before heading out to Hoffman Estates for a little party at Tracy's uncle's. Great food. Sunday headed out to Woodstock for Mother's Day, picked up a cake from Lutz Continental Cafe, which was awesome, covered in real whipped cream that wasn't too sweet or sugary. Had steak, took a long nap. I cleaned up a bit in preparation for this afternoon, organizing cables and stuff. Missed recording Jack & Bobby and Grey's Anatomy since I forgot that Oxygen can't really boot up off the RAID startup, unless it gets picked as a Startup Disk. I'll probably unRAID them when I upgrade to Tiger.

HDTV is awesome. Now that I have the means, I just wish there was more to watch. Or that I had a DVR. Watched The Rundown in HD last night. Good stuff. It's hard going back to just regular cable. One of the better things to watch? ESPN's SportsCenter. That's some good stuff. End of the season for Veronica Mars tonight. Probably means I should get around to watching them all soon. I wonder if they're gonna rerun them at all? Would be nice to get the last couple ones I'm missing in HD. I also upgraded my cable modem to Mach 10. Can't say I've actually noticed though. I'll have to find something big to download. Oh, I think I forgot to mention that I'm reading Snow Crash. Which is starting to remind me of Neuromancer, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Dark Angel, and who knows what else. It's good. I got linked to in the Roku Forums for my nfs mount scripts, which is cool. And I still don't know who bought Dark Angel from my link. Thanks again, but I'm still curious. So let me know who it was, please?

Watched TV last night, what else. Gilmore Girls and One Tree Hill. Looked good, but not that good. The best thing on HD last night? The Cubs game on Comcast Sports. That looked amazing. Being able to see the fans in the stands behind the batter, drinking their beer, eating their hot dogs, it's amazing. Editing out commercials on Veronica Mars's Season Finale was a little difficult trying not to see anything to give it away. But I managed. I'm only missing the 2nd episode. That's all. New version of EyeTV came out yesterday too, Tiger compatible. I'll install it after tonight's Lost and Alias get recorded. Didn't want to screw that up. Going to Brasserie Jo with Tracy tonight. Should be good. Looking forward to getting a French 75.

Yum, Steak Frites. Dinner was good last night. Finished the evening off with a viewing of Amélie. I'm definitely passing on beach tonight. Just no thanks. Probably end up just watching a whole lot of TV instead. Maybe get around to cleaning up the Data Center. Chicago's great though. I don't see enough of the city proper anymore. Tall buildings, bright lights, big city, all that jazz.

Right? Friday the 13th? Anyway, nice quiet night at home last night. Watched Paycheck on Showtime in HD. Very nice. I was really tired yesterday, not sure why. Did some grocery shopping, while hungry, which is never good. Impulse buys: Salt and Vinegar Pringles, Jell-O Pudding, both Tapioca and Chocolate and Vanilla swirl, chicken breasts. Fairly odd collection of things, I'd say. Oh, and a six pack of individual servings of orange juice. Headed out to Woodstock tomorrow, need a haircut. Otherwise, not much planned for the weekend.

Quiet nights all weekend long. Friday night Tracy made dinner, including Bacon wrapped Dates as an appetizer. I drank a couple beers, on an empty stomach, and had to call it an early night. Saturday ran out to Woodstock, got my replacement license plate ordered, a haircut, and some smiley face cookies from Swiss Maid Bakery. Also got a metal net for the basketball hoop in Woodstock. That sound a ball makes when it goes through a hoop with a metal net? Amazing. Came back in, since the parents had a wedding to go to, watched a bunch of movies, did some laundry. Road Trip was alright, but I like Overnight Delivery much better. Shrek 2 was good, but not good enough to own. A Cinderella Story was on HBO HD, so I had to watch it. And that was standard fare. Also started working on replacing Xenon with Argon, what I'm now calling the Cube. Not that easy. Currently stuck on trying to be my own Certificate Authority to set up secure SMTP and IMAP access. Sunday Russell came over, watched Summer Catch, Quick and the Dead. I finally picked up the glass and matte for the digital picture frame. Headed out to see Tracy tonight.

Hmm, PS3 announced. Not till next June. Oh well. Went to Hooters for the first time last night. Wings are good. Got another sweatshirt, grey this time. I like them better as spring or fall coats. I forgot to mention I looked at Carhartt stuff at Blaine's Farm & Fleet in Woodstock over the weekend, looking for a jacket. I like worker wear. I don't think high style is for me, so I'll try and go more towards blue collar stuff. Watched According to Spencer last night instead of going to bed after driving back in to the city. Reason why I shouldn't have subscribed to premium channels. Going to see Kicking & Screaming tomorrow night, which is just funny because Kicking and Screaming was on over the weekend. My Xenon to Argon conversion will probably take place on June 1. That's when I usually archive my email, so that's a good as time as any. Switching to Cyrus for IMAP will make things interesting, that's for sure.

Surprise beach session last night. Fun. I really do enjoy playing ultimate on the beach. Still haven't played on grass yet. Not sure if I will again. I think I'll just leave it up in the air. I definitely like riding my bike around, easy to get to the Lincoln Park area and stuff, but my bike does need a checkup. Catchup Dinner with Leah last night after beach at Sai Cafe. Movie with friends tonight. Nothing planned yet for the weekend. Yet being the key word.

Should have dressed up as Mike Ditka for the movie last night. Would have been great to poke a little fun at all the people lined up to see Episode III. Stormtroopers, Jedi, even a Aayla Secura, some Boba Fetts. Crazy. Dinner afterwards with Tracy at Grand Lux Cafe. Finally got a slice of White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle Cheesecake. Making dinner tonight for Tracy, Ryan and Lisa: the Lemon Chicken meal.

Dinner last night was good. Actually, you know what? Felt a little grown up. Friends (a couple) come over to have dinner with my girlfriend and I. Definitely seems a little grown up. Go figure. I think I might be coming down with something. Flu maybe? Looking forward to sleeping a lot. Don't think I actually have anything on the schedule, well, there's the Northwestern Old vs. Young game on Sunday. Who knows if I'll actually go to that. It's on grass, so, I have to think about it.

Took a half sick day on Friday. Went home and slept. Good to sleep. More sleeping on Saturday. Felt much better. Watched a bunch of movies, Bruce Almighty, Cheaper by the Dozen, Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason, Sideways and Spanglish. My pick of the 5? Spanglish, hands down. Tracy came over and kept me company on the couch. We also ventured outside a bit for a walk, and some shopping on Sunday. Picked up some wine. I think I want to keep at least some wine in the house at all time. Not become a connoisseur or anything, but just have something on hand. Finally got some red wine glasses. Going to a Knife Skills class at The Chopping Block tomorrow. Wednesday going to a little get together to see Leo and Stacy before they leave the city. Otherwise, no other plans for the week. After Wednesday, no more new TV for a while, as Lost and Alias finishes their seasons. Means I'll have time to edit out the commercials and sit down for a spell and watch the seasons. Although, some are starting over so I'll be able to capture some of it again. So when they come out on DVD, do I throw away the HD captures? Good question.

The Xenon-Argon replacement isn't going too well. Trying to get Cyrus compiled under Tiger Client is difficult. I thought it was preinstalled, but that's just Postfix. I could just use Postfix Enabler, but I feel like that's cheating. What is also cheating is getting Tiger Server. Which is tempting. And now, another option, is installing Debian on it, and not really going all Mac OS X. Which would be disappointing, but the easiest. Choices, choices. Dinner with Tracy's parents last night at Joe's Crab Shack. Haven't had crab legs in a long time. They're alot of work. Got some Krispy Kremes on the way back in. My first time driving back in to the city, which is impressive. But oh so good. Slept with my window open last night. Also very good. It's been way to hot in the condo lately. Busy week shaping up though. Class tonight, Leo's tomorrow, probably Beach on Thursday, KK and Sally are having a shindig on Friday. Hanging with some out of town friends on Saturday. Sunday heading out to Woodstock with some friends. Busy.

Weird. abando.com was unavailable for a little bit this afternoon. Not just mine though, Prohosting was unavailable. Anyone I knew on with Prohosting was unreachable. Again, it's times like these that I think about co-location but then again, if whatever it was affected a data center, wouldn't matter if it was my machine in the data center or someone else's, it's still unavailable. Knife Skills was good last night, learned some stuff, definitely. Didn't buy anything though. Just heard about ZabaSearch. That's just scary.

Not much to report. Driving down to Hyde Park was interesting, because I can't remember the last time I went down there. Roads all looked nice and done. I spent a whole lot of time down there, like 2 years, not to mention all the other time driving down for ultimate related things. And now? Hard time remembering which streets are one way which way and stuff. Crazy. Probably headed to Beach tonight. I'm getting interested in Touring Bikes. One of those things I've always been interested, but never got around to actually looking stuff up. Expensive, as are any and all things I get into.

Three day weekend. Sweet. Beach was fun last night, lots of people. I was a little out of it. Tired. Premium channels are starting to get the better of me. Watched Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines last night instead of sleeping. Ate whatever I could get my hands on at home. Putting vodka in a watermelon isn't easy. Might have to try something to get it to work right. Looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. Heading over to KK and Sally's tonight for their housewarming. Friends coming out to Woodstock on Sunday. Hanging with the boys on Monday.

Weekend was good. Ran some errands before showing up to KK and Sally's. Watched a bunch of movies on Saturday. Picked up some Sake and a nice Muscat. I'm sort of jumping into the wine thing, kind of jumping, since it's mostly dessert wines, nothing like a true red or something, but trying to watch Simply Wine and The Thirsty Traveler. Sunday some people came out to Woodstock where my mom fed us all. A little chilly, but still, pretty nice. Made a quick trip out to see Tracy on the way back in, bringing some of my mom's food to her, since she couldn't make it to Woodstock. Managed to see the first episode of Grey's Anatomy, which was really good, and I realized that it went downhill after that. Which was too bad. I did catch Nid de guepes on Showtime. The movie's really good, a french version of Assault on Precinct 13. Watched more movies on Monday, finally watching The Godfather with Russell and Bryan and Whitney. Lots of TV. I did get some swimming in this morning. Guy next to me was doing a whole lot of splashing. Kind of annoying. Plans for the week? Weber Grill Restaurant on Wednesday, Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith on Thursday, finally, and mall and a movie on Friday. Oh, and Keyhole? Really fun. Amazing. Reminds me of Earth software from Snow Crash.

So, I'm liking premium channels. I watched Man on Fire last night. It was really good. It was widescreen, in HD, with Dolby Digital 5.1. Maybe I would have rented it, maybe I would have borrowed it, but it was on. And like last Sunday, catching Nid de guepes, that's a movie I would have never rented or seen. And Committed, but that was on IFC. But still, I like that I can catch something I haven't seen, or heard, or even wanted to watch. I even like the idea of scheduling around a broadcast, and not being able to pause to go to the bathroom. It's more like a movie going experience. Anyway, did some more swimming. Trying to get better at breathing to both sides. However, my right shoulder is bugging me a bit, not when swimming, but just around. Hurts to lift above my head. Oh well.

Had a Strip Steak last night. With wood roasted mushrooms. Yummy. I also liked the Weber Backyard Brew. Good summer beer. Having the windows open at my place cools it down, considerably. Didn't go swimming this morning, went running instead, pool was all full when I showed up. Already starting to make some plans for the summer, maybe a short vacation, some outdoor festivals, some outdoor activities.

Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith was great. Fabulous. I really liked it. Tracy and I had to watch Star Wars IV A New Hope afterwards, to help fill in. But great. Trailers were good too, and why are they called trailers if they show up before the movie? Definite big budget blockbusters ready for the summer. Tracy was kind enough to bring some White Castle back to my place for a quick snack before the movie. Afterwards, we cracked open a bottle of Ice Wine, which goes pretty good with Haagen-Daz Chocolate. No exercise this morning. Hanging out at Old Orchard tonight.

Ugh. So Apple is gonna do it, switch to Intel, more thoughts at WWDC 2005. Ugh. I don't know what the fallout's gonna be on this one, but I'll wait and see. It definitely changes my purchase schedule: I was thinking of getting a new machine sometime within the next year, but that now no longer looks to be the case. Crazy. Definitely thinking different. One good thing, I guess, or maybe not, but according to this CNET article, Mac OS X for Intel will only run on Apple machines. You will probably be able to run Windows on Apple machines though. Weird. Crazy weird. But enough about that. Recapping the weekend, which was actually pretty busy. Friday night watched Lords of Dogtown in a bad theater with a bunch of high school kids and younger. Did get some Raisinets finally. Saturday, Tracy and I went up to see the Chicago Botanical Gardens. Nice, not so much blooming, but still pretty nice. Lots of walking. Stopped by Evanston on the way down, caught Madagascar and dinner at Vive La Crepe. Noticed that the projection was off, overscanned, with about a foot overlap onto the black framing curtain all around. Annoying. Sunday we went to the Park West Antiques Fair, one of any number of street fairs I'll probably be going to this summer. So I spent a fair amount of time actually outside this weekend. Which was pretty crazy. And lots of walking. And my bum ankle's paying for it. Try and do some laundry tonight, started reading Neuromancer.

Laundry. Finally cleaning up the Data Center. Installing Tiger on Oxygen. Exciting stuff last night. But it was good to get some things out of the way. It's nice having a pretty fresh machine to work with. I'll try and keep all the machines, Oxygen, Aluminum, and Argon in roughly the same shape, same apps, same configs. Hopefully. But I think I'm gonna try and finally start some programming. We'll see. I've definitely said that before. And now with MacTels on the horizon, a 2 year horizon, I've got to start wondering if I'm gonna upgrade or not. I'm still using a machine that's roughly 5 years old. Should I try and upgrade it again? Should I look for a nice used G5? Should I not bother, which actually makes the most sense, since I'm barely using the processing power now. Just looking for more stuff to buy, more money to spend.

Played some putt-putt, or, mini golf with Tracy last night. Place we went to, White Mountain Recreation Center, was just okay. No clown. No windmill. No flashing lights. Need to find one of those places. One of those places with go-karts too. And an arcade. With soft serve ice cream. Also got iSync properly working, I think, last night. There's some nagging issues, probably with syncing Tiger and Panther machines to the same .Mac account. I'll try and take care of that tonight. Oh, did I mention I won the lottery? Yup, a whopping $25.50. Sweet.

Got myself a new cell phone, Sony Ericsson K750i. It's pretty sweet. Can't get T-Zones to work on it yet, but I'm working on it. It looks fancy. Looking back, I apparently have a 3 year cycle to getting new cell phones, so I'm close to being on time, but maybe 5 months early. This also means I won't be carrying around a camera anymore, because the phone is the camera! 2MP, wherever I go. It's not fast, and not superb, but it works. Chilled at home last night, watched some TV. Might end up being a pretty late night at work tonight, we'll see.

I also got a new pair of shoes, Merrell Primo Breeze II. Tracy dropped by last night after dinner with some friends to say hello. That was nice. Headed out to see her tonight, catch Mr. & Mrs. Smith, probably some dinner. I'm definitely watching too much TV. Ended up sleeping on the couch last night. And to think I want to get a couple more premium channels because I want more HD. And I've got all those DVDs sitting on the floor in front of the TV. Ugh. I might have a problem. When's the intervention?

Can't believe it's June 13th already. Impressive how fast time goes by. Weekend wasn't too shabby. Saw Mr. & Mrs. Smith out at the Woodridge 18, where you can get a funnel cake instead of popcorn. That's cool. Movie's really good too. Tracy and I got some ice cream from Baskin-Robbins, a 24 hour place, only place that still seemed open. The Dairy Queen across the street was closed already. Saturday cleaned up a little before heading over to Bucktown to hang with Russell for a bit. Lunch at Silver Cloud, some MLS and playing with Marla. Tracy and I went to dinner at Cornelia's Roosterant which is, in my opinion, pretty cool because they started having a piano bar. Sunday, lots of TV and lots of napping. Did some grocery shopping, I'm gonna try and cook some dinner this week. Already started the marinated salmon fillets. I'll even try and cook some rice too. Managed to go swimming this morning. Early too. Decided to go when I woke up at 5:36am, which time I seem to wake up at, except I usually just go back to bed then hit the snooze repeatedly.

Took one yesterday. Another one of those one day flu types of things. That's twice now in a month or so. Hmmm, and all after I got digital cable and HDTV? Correlation? Yeah, probably. I wasn't getting a whole lot of sleep the past couple of weeks, watching anything and everything. Maybe being bitten twice by some bug means I should stop with the late nights. We'll see, as always. I did manage to watch a whole lot of TV though, but since it was in the middle of the day it wasn't so bad. I did get to see Ed for the first time in a long time, and that's a great show. Also Dead Like Me, great canceled show on Showtime. Finally got to watch Great Chefs of the World, my favorite cooking show ever. Also watched a couple movies, Une femme de menage and 50 First Dates, both slightly sad romantic comedies. Also cooked up some egg sandwiches for breakfast/lunch. But all that couch time did some good, and I returned to work today. Heading over to Las Tablas for dinner tonight. Finally got a UK to US plug adapter for my cell phone charger, which is good. Moved a bigger hard drive to Argon for server usage. Updated the loaner iBook to Tiger.

After all that time away from Las Tablas, I thought it'd be great, fabulous, and everything I'd remembered and more. But it wasn't. The plantains and cheese appetizer was great, and the carne asada was also fabulous, but Tracy and I split the Picada Columbia, and everything else was just okay. Definitely have to just stick to the meat and bananas next time. Lake View South is a pretty nice neighborhood, it seems anyway. Lots of nice single family homes down Wellington. Dropped off a loaner iBook for the Russells. Dropped by to try and pick up some software and pay Bryan, but no one was home. I'm definitely dressed better for the weather today, got a sweatshirt, socks and shoes. Much better. Also ended up driving in to work after making myself an egg sandwich and a latte for breakfast. Don't even think I turned the TV on yesterday. Impressive. Updated my cell phone firmware yesterday as well. Pretty easy, except for popup blocking and running downloaded code issues. Security and usability. Ugh. Give and take.

Whoops, no update on Friday. Pretty easy day though. Got lunch with Bryan at Buffalo Joe's, yum, went and saw Batman Begins. Got some Ho Ho's. When did they start coming 3 to a pack? Started playing a mini golf game on my cell phone. Also started listening to the radio on my cell phone too. It's awesome. Headed out to Woodstock on Saturday, stopped to pick up an iSight for a Father's Day gift, figured out that it doesn't work over DirecWay. Went out to Tracy's on Sunday, got some Dairy Queen and watched After the Sunset. Hmm, such a short update for what seemed like a pretty long weekend.

Let's see, 40 minutes on the way to work, 40 minutes downtown, 50 minutes back up, 110 minutes out to the burbs, 50 minutes back in. What's that equal up to? 4 hrs, 50 minutes. That's how much time I spent in a car yesterday. I was awake for 18 hours. Huh. That's a long time. Anyway, went bowling yesterday with Tracy. That was fun. It was Quarter-Mania at Orland Bowl. 25¢ per game. $5 cover. $2.50 shoe rental. Lots of fun. I might actually be sore because of it. Now I think is to try and find someplace to play horseshoes or pick up a horseshoe set up myself.

Another reason to look forward to working downtown again: Millennium Park. Oh, in case I haven't mentioned it before, my company is moving offices to downtown, 101 N. Wacker, this weekend. Which is great. While I'll miss Evanston, and the quiet, the reverse commute, I'm looking forward to more eating establishments, easier time seeing friends, and just time in the big city. And Millennium Park. Went there last night with Tracy. Really nice. I'll definitely be packing a backpack every day with a blanket to chill on and a towel in case I feel like frolicking in the fountains. Also, The Green at Grant Park is a great little restaurant and putting green that's actually pretty difficult. No clowns or windmills here, just straight up putting. Fun though. Going to see Batman Begins again tonight, this time with Tracy. Get to grab another funnel cake.

So T-Mobile had a huge north shore outage in Chicago yesterday. I didn't have service for pretty much the entire afternoon. So that's a little scary. Makes me think I should get some pay per use plan on Cingular just in case this happens again and I need to use my phone in an emergency. Makes me happy I'm on GSM networks with SIM cards. Just that easy to switch networks. Anyway, I get home from Batman Begins and funnel cake and I do some email checking and ripping of the soundtracks to 10 Things I Hate About You and Eurotrip and my cable modem goes out. Ugh. How reliant am I on networks? Crazy. But it was fine this morning. And the cell phone works fine. Might try and head to beach tonight.

Market Track's moving today, so that's pretty much it. Beach yesterday was fun. Lots of people, didn't have to play too much, so that was good. Not sure what the weekend holds in store for me, depends on work. Could hang out in Bucktown, go out to Woodstock, hang out with my parents since it's my mom's birthday on Sunday. Just wait and see I guess.

Been a long weekend. Worked a lot, didn't get too much sleep, but got Market Track successfully moved in to 101 N. Wacker. Missed out on some fun all around. Oh well. Heading downtown if fun. If a little strange, well, different anyway. It's nice. I've got a window now. Have to find all the new places to eat, get lunch with friends who work down here, do things after work round here. Should make for a better social life, less time on my couch in front of my TV. I'm guessing. Maybe. Again, we'll see. Supposed to head over to the Taste of Chicago tonight with Tracy. Will be my first time. Otherwise, not much planned for the week yet.

Taste of Chicago was pretty good. Had some curry fries, some curry goat, some Indian cheese stuff with peas. Didn't eat too much, couldn't eat that much. Apparently my stomach's gotten a bit smaller, or something. I definitely feel like I still haven't caught up on sleep yet, but I'm not doing too bad in terms of hours right now, just a bad weekend and I guess I haven't recovered from it yet. Headed out to the burbs tonight to see Tracy. Found out that I work a couple blocks from Perry's Deli, which is a pretty big deal. Also, drove in to work today, it was really quick. Also dressed up a bit, cause I felt a little underdressed coming in to work yesterday, not necessarily my co-workers, but working downtown.

Long weekend is right around the corner. Also playing on grass for the first time since, well, January. That's right, I'm going to Mars this weekend with Tea & Strumpets, in what will hopefully be my last ever grass tournament. Maybe this time I'll mean it. It should be fun, I just hope my body can keep up, well, how about just last through the weekend. So that means I have to do laundry tonight, it's been a while. Last night got some good BBQ from Mindy's and a brownie sundae from Oberweis and watched A Day Without a Mexican, which was interesting, but not that good. One of the actresses, Maureen Flannigan, looks like Kristen Bell's mom or older sister, or just like an older version. Going to watch Dawn of the Dead, the 2004 remake, in preparation for Land of the Dead viewing sometime with Tracy. Otherwise, I'm really excited to be closer to the big Harold Washington Library Center. Might mean I'll actually read a new book or two. Also, Google Earth is amazing. Absolutely amazing. Seriously. Go, download it now and play with it, if you can, if you're on a decent Windows machine. So worth it. Wow.

I'm not getting enough sleep again. I really need to start getting more sleep. It's not healthy. I'm probably gonna get sick again. I just know it. Watched Dawn of the Dead last night. Pretty good. One of the characters reminds me of Pepe. Did a couple loads of laundry, nothing too exciting. Going to watch Land of the Dead tonight.

Could have definitely had one of those really bad moments if I hadn't checked my flight info to Pittsburgh today. Guess I'm flying out of Midway, not O'Hare. Should have figured since I'm flying Southwest, but I was gonna just hop on the Blue Line after work today. Now it's just a couple blocks to the Orange Line instead. Sweet. Took the bus in to work today. Got the last in the pack, so I had a seat no problem. Really easy. From right in front of my building to 3 blocks away from work. I'll probably be taking it more often. Also, since I'm headed to Pittsburgh tonight, fitting that I watched Land of the Dead, which is set in Pittsburgh. Funny. Dinner at Emilio's last night after the movie. First time after walking by it so many times going to River East. So I'm out of town, for the 5th year in a row, on July 4th weekend. I'll be back on the 5th.

Back. Mars was great. Good time. Fun people. I'll admit that it was fun to play, a little bit on grass, especially after I cut my toenails, but still, I'm glad to be done with it. Grass Ultimate that is. My flight out got delayed a little bit on Friday, but otherwise no problems. Showed up extra early Saturday morning, wasting a first round bye due to none of us actually reading Bryan's detail email. We went 1-2 on Saturday. Played some Beer Schtick. Went to Church Brew Works. Great food. As usual. Got to meet Akira's girlfriend, Aimee Eggler, with whom I will be playing at Sandblast with in a couple weeks. She seems pretty cool. I'll have a better idea after playing in a tourney with her without Akira. Also got to meet Josh and Gwen's baby, Lila. Cute as a button. Went 2-1 on Sunday. More Beer Schtick. Played some dodgeball at the Duck X-ing Feature Game halftime. Last one on my side to get hit, after being saved twice by the medic. Some pool time, some margaritas at Don Pablo's. Monday made it to the B-Bracket finals against Seven Sages. Lost. Said goodbyes, got some Wendy's, got a room, Mina and Carl showered before I brought them to the airport, got lost on the way back, watched some TV. Tuesday finished up The Da Vinci Code, flew back to Chicago, watched some more TV for the afternoon. Took a nice nap with Tracy, made some Lemon Chicken and watched Entourage via On Demand. Not a bad weekend. Might go see War of the Worlds tonight.

Having some connection problems between home and work, so email is sporadic, and updating is little harder than it usually is. Just a notice, that's all. Didn't go to a movie, had to find Tracy's cell phone instead. Got some wine at Kafka Wine Co and brought it to the Casbah Cafe for dinner. Not bad. Too much appetizers and wine to enjoy dinner though. Pretty nice and quiet and laid back evening. Took the bus down again this morning, it rocks. 25 minutes or so. Very nice. One of these days I'll have to try it going back up too. Besides that, headed to beach tonight.

Might actually be headed home tonight instead of tomorrow. Played Schtick instead of ultimate last night at the beach, since there was ~30 people there. Fun, but completely different when played without a beer in hand and running. I'm looking to pick up some horseshoes out in Woodstock for a side game to beach. Also, walked over to Millennium Park at lunch yesterday. Not that far, and I also walked by the Daley Plaza Farmers' Market. I'll have to hit that up some Thursday.

Pretty good summer weekend. Went out to Woodstock, got myself a haircut, finally, got Horseshoes and Bocce for those days when there are too many people at beach. Went with Tracy to Lisa's mom's house for a dip in their pool. Ended up going to see War of the Worlds too. I liked it, but I'm tired with the limited character view of world ending events. Sunday slept a lot, got lunch at Nookies Tree, went to mass, stopped at the Gap on the way home, and headed back out to Homer Glen to drop Tracy off. A nice quiet night watching The Mummy Returns and other stuff on cable and eating leftovers. Nice. Gonna try and catch up on Entourage on Tuesday.

As you might have noticed, I've added a Flickr photostream to the sidebar. Why? Because I can. Also, with my new cell phone, I'm able to take pictures, send an email to Flickr, which then automagically get pulled through javascript onto this website. Pretty cool. Which hopefully means I'll get better at taking pictures and posting more of them. Also downloaded the newest version of iSync, which properly supports my phone. Which is good. No more hacks there. Anyway, didn't work out last night like I'd hoped, instead had dinner with Bryan at Silver Cloud, which wasn't a part of dodgeball.com last night, so I couldn't use it then. Also got to see Akira, Remy, and Katie Kelly, since I was in the neighborhood, or they were. Finally picked up my copy of Mac OS X Server, don't know when I'll get a chance to play with it. Headed out to Homer Glen tonight.

I know I need to work out, go for a swim, run, do something tonight, but I also want to install Mac OS X Server and start playing with that. And then there's my brother's old laptop that he shipped out to me that I'll probably want to play with as well. And I should get to bed early, at least try, again. I should also drink more water, eat healthier, and a bunch of other stuff too. Last night just ran some errands with Tracy, got to see Oxyclean work (not on an informercial, but in real life), dinner with the family. It was again, really nice. Tomorrow is dinner at Charlie Trotter's, this weekend is Sandblast. Should be fun.

Swimming was good yesterday. Definitely hurt a little to start up again, but then started cruising. Very nice. Still don't know why my right shoulder is bugging me, still. But it goes away, or I just stop noticing it after a while. Didn't notice it at all at Mars, so it can't be that bad. Got another computer yesterday, a Fujitsu Lifebook P1120. It was my brother's old computer as a resident. It's a mini. I'll probably end up putting a bluetooth card in it so I can use my cell phone to get online, and then carry it around with me everywhere. It's not quite half as big as my powerbook, but probably half as heavy. And it's definitely slower. And it runs Windows. I'm sure it will come in handy. Otherwise, not much. I've got to definitely try and keep up the swimming.

So that pretty much sums up dinner last night at Charlie Trotter's. Follow the link for more details. Felt nice to dress up though. Found out one of my favorite Italian Ice places moved off of Armitage. I've got to track them down now. Or try and new place. One or the other. Made a stop at the Library today, picked up some books. Looking forward to Islands in the Net. Sandblast this weekend. Oh, and I got a flash for my cell phone, which now makes it much more usable.

Sandblast was, well, a blast. A little bit sandy too. The beach actually got a little too hot to walk on barefoot, which I don't remember from previous Sandblasts. Tea & Strumpets finished 10th, forfeiting the 9th place game. Good times though. Got Woo Chon on Saturday night, thanks to Mina for the ordering. Also got to play some horseshoes, since I brought my set to the beach. Fun. Sunday just chilled at home, way too tired and sore to do anything. Ended up drinking some Coronas and watching Entourage. I got way too excited at Entourage, but it's a great show, and I like rooting for those guys. Might go see The Wedding Crashers tonight, probably going to Duke of Perth tomorrow. Still need to do some laundry.

So getting to River East is super easy for me from work, hop on the #124 Navy Pier a block away and get dropped off at the corner of the movie theater. Easy. Really easy. And like 15 minutes. Sweet. Good to know for the future. Wedding Crashers is funny. While I didn't cry, like the guy next to me, I still thought it was pretty funny. Dinner afterwards at Goose Island on Clybourn. Good food. Went with the BRs and Bryan and Russell showed up for dinner. Trying to hydrate today. Haven't felt all that great the last couple of days, I don't think I drank enough water after playing last weekend. So I'm working on it now. The Duke is postponed till at least Thursday. Which means I might be able to see The Day After Tomorrow on HBO tonight, if I decide to, and not do laundry, which i still need to do.

So no laundry last night, but definitely tonight. I got a reuben from Samuel's Deli and watched The Day After Tomorrow instead. It was in HD, and not too bad. I also got a Bluetooth PDA and PC Adapter Combo Card for Hydrogen and started setting that up. Works great, but not completely intuitive under XP to get it set up. Definitely not as easy as OS X, that's for sure. But I ordered it from Mwave, which actually still lists it as not being shipped. Crazy. Fast. Nice. I love the internet. So now I've got a super small laptop that I can carry with me everywhere and I can usually be connected anywhere as well. Sweet. So besides laundry, I've definitely got to pick up after myself too, as home is pretty messy right now. Oh, have I mentioned I'm going to Las Vegas the weekend after next? And they're in the middle of a heat wave, too: 116° F at the airport last week. Nice.

So I admit it, I buy bags of premade salad from Jewel. It's easy. I like the Caesar salads I think from Dole. And a bag makes a decent meal. So I had one of those, with anchovies, and broiled up some herb and olive oil chicken slices, and a failed attempt at garlic bread. Total cost? Maybe $10. But good and healthy and really easy. Makes me happy. I also finally did laundry last night. I did manage to get the blue out of one of my dress shirts, but the other t-shirt and polo still remain a nice stained blue. I also cleaned up a bit finally, so I can actually walk by the entrace closet without picking my spots. Next up, the couch/coffee table, or, where I spend all my time these days. Headed to the Duke of Perth tonight, finally, round 7pm. Making dinner for Tracy tomorrow night, gonna try Bryan's recipe for Bourbon Pork Tenderloin, so I'll try and pick the stuff up tonight and start the marination. Ha, marination. Sounds like a very enthusiastic fan base.

Work then friends. First at Rivers after work, a couple of Coronas, and then up to the Duke for dinner and a Tennants. Good stuff. Saw my first RAZR up close. Those things are tiny. Dogsitting Marla this weekend. Tracy's coming over tonight. And that's about it. Think I'm gonna see all the Star Wars: Clone Wars episodes, a special episode of MacGyver, Robot Jox, all of which was thoughtfully recorded by Russell on his DVR. Gives me plenty of couch time.

So Tracy and I are headed to Las Vegas this weekend, and instead of a nice 3 day weekend as we thought we'd book, we're actually only gone till Saturday. Ugh. Stupid. Times like this that I wish I'd used a travel agent instead of relying on myself to get dates right. Ugh. I think I've done this before with hotel rooms too. Ugh. Anyway, just gonna be a short trip, which actually might be a good thing since DefCon is this weekend, and trying to leave on Sunday could be just as bad as trying to leave the Sunday of CES. Anyway, dogsitting Marla was good. She was definitely a bit lower key this time, just lots of sleeping. People came over Saturday night, Bryan BBQ'd, good stuff. Sunday was hot. Watched Torque and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, even though they aren't very good, I sat and watched them anyway. I did get around to finally installing Mac OS X Server, but haven't done any configuring yet. Might get around to finally installing OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT54G. We'll see.

Couldn't get around to doing much of anything productive last night. So I finally watched Surviving Christmas, which wasn't too bad, and the latest episode of Entourage, which I think in the most recent Entertainment Weekly is described as a West Coast male version of Sex and the City. Which is kind of true, except all the characters, well, except Charlotte, had real jobs compared to the hanger-ons in Entourage. Anyway, doesn't make me not like it. And it keeps me wanting more, and I keep hating it when an episode ends. So enough of the Entourage love. I've really only got one working air conditioner, so I should probably get around to getting the rest of them fixed. Still got 3 books to read before I need to return them to the library by next Friday. And I haven't gone swimming in a couple weeks. So what else is new?

So I watched Super Size Me last night. First thing I did this morning? Went to McDonald's and got a McGriddle. Guess what I'm gonna do soon? Go get a Big Mac, maybe some Chicken McNuggets. Watching that documentary actually made me want McDonald's even more. So I'm going for it. Which would mark the 3rd time this week I've gone there for a meal. And it's only Wednesday. You know what? I need to start exercising again. I glanced over a photo of myself from a couple years ago, and man, I was svelte. Guess 2 years off an ultimate season will do that to a body, but still. You know what it's going to take? I have no idea. Exercising for exercise is a whole lot different that playing ultimate. I knew this when I stopped playing, but I guess it never really hit me until the movie and the photo. Photographic evidence of change. Ugh. Will I get off my ass and go exercise? Sure, starting next week. Always.

A sad note: my grandmother passed away yesterday or today, depending on the time zone, surrounded by her children who had come home to care for her. She was 90. She had been in the hospital for the last few weeks, and had recovered enough to get transferred home, where she soon passed on. She is loved, and will be missed.

Leaving tonight. Packed last night. Went looking for a nice summer blazer last night, couldn't find one I liked. Maybe I'll pick one up someday, maybe not. We'll see. Coincidentally, the Simply Wine episode on last night was about Vegas. Sweet. And featured Aureole! And really expensive bottles of wine! Right. I like high class, but not that high class. Some plans for the weekend: brunch at some buffet, gondola ride at the Venetian, dinner at Aureole, watching "O", maybe doing a little shopping, maybe doing a little gambling. Hopefully it won't be oppresively hot out, nor will it rain or something.

Yeah, that's right, stealing titles from Counting Crows albums. Whatever. Vegas was fun, if a little short and a little long at the same time. Some quick highlights: brunch at the Bellagio buffet, lots of random pictures, gondola ride at the Venetian, cheap ass Bellinis served in plastic cups from an icee vending machine, seeing Flippy at the Harrah's Carnivale Court (he was a competitor at the Legends of Bartending as seen on the Discovery Channel or Travel or Learning, one of those), wine list on a tablet pc at Auerole, "O" from a center spot, watching Tracy get to spin the wheel playing slots and winning at the Flamingo, drinking a too large margarita while losing at slots at the Monte Carlo, being woken up by a couple having a very loud fight in a room nearby, lunch at the Nine Fine Irishmen with a great cheese and fruit plate, and an hour delayed takeoff and only 15 minute delayed landing return flight. And very very hot. No good being in the sun. Oh, and it got way too busy on Saturday, like crazy busy, not fun to be around busy. So Sunday Tracy and I went to the Wicker Park Farmers Market, ended up going through the Wicker Park Street Festival, got myself a corndog, went to see The Island with the Russells, made some pork chops with some apples and shallots from the farmers market, actually used a microwave to cook potatoes (my first time!), watched some Entourage. Not a bad long weekend. Now, got to save some money back up, after spending a little too freely over the summer. And it's also August. Wow. Already.

Figured out why I couldn't ssh home from work: work domain name wasn't resolving. So I'm back in business. Which is good. I've also started playing with Cygwin on my little guy, Hydrogen, seems to work pretty well. It was either that or try and figure out a way to dual boot into Linux, which I didn't feel like trying. So now I've got to remember how to sync up data across multiple platforms again. Ugh. Had some leftovers last night, watched some Dark Angel, upgraded my Debian install on Xenon to 3.1 sarge, uninstalled a bunch of stuff as well. So now that some of my computer systems are getting up to speed, lets see how I do with the rest of my physical systems. I did manage to do an ab workout this morning. We'll see if I can keep that up, just like my swimming.

Finally got around to doing some tweaks to the site. For myself, added edit links to posts if I'm logged in as the administrator. Will make it easy to update old posts to use the Memex. For Akira, I added an option to view archives reverse chronologically, for whatever reason he wanted them. And I added the Flickr photostream to the Memex. Fairly productive. Also managed to go swimming last night. Right around the tail end of my swim, the pool suddenly got very busy, like 7 people? or even 9 at one point, although a couple were just waiting for an open lane. This was in a 4 lane pool. Crazy. But my shoulder hurts and my ankle hurts too, as I whine a little bit more, but I maybe have to try out the stationary bike to see if I don't ache after that. Would be nice. Headed out to see Tracy tonight. Mom comes back from the Philippines today.

Just chilled with Tracy last night. Had some Jewel Rotisserie Chicken, always good. Watched some Sex and the City. Really tired. Like really tired. Apparently exercise just tuckers me out. Might try and hit beach tonight, might end up going to the Duke, might stay at work late, who knows. Probably headed out to Woodstock tomorrow night, try out my parents new fixed wireless broadband connection, see if iChat works with iSight with my brother. Just trying to stay a little bit healthy, or at least, healthier. It's hard though. Oh, and it's really popular, or getting there, or maybe it isn't, and was just a flash in the pan, but try out MegaManEffect if you have a mac. It's wicked cool but useless.

Daily Dose has some new features. Entry titles are now clickable links, which makes it easy if anyone actually wants to direct link to a specific day. Month and year in an entry's date is now a link to the respective archives. Archive navigation is now available, so browse by year, month, or same month in different years. Next up is navigation daily, between day to day, or same day in different years. Maybe I'll even get around to adding accounts and commenting. Either that or a forum. Damn, remember the Union Crew website? That had a forum. Anyway, I'm really liking Hydrogen now. The touchscreen is great. It's gotten to the point when I'm on Aluminum I was touching the screen to select something, not realizing it didn't have a touch screen. Got an all day battery for it, so I can use it all the time now. Only bad thing is, I use Windows XP at work, and now on a computer that I can have with me at all times, and I don't really sit down at Oxygen all that much, so my Mac OS X use is dropping dramatically. Not really happy about that, but Apple doesn't make a 2 lbs. mini notebook, so what can you do?

Finally cleaned up a bit at home. Threw out some boxes, fake trees, stuff like that. I think it's time to finally really clean house, and stop hoarding stuff that might come in handy sometime in the future. Woodstock was good, definitely good to see my mom, who's doing pretty well. Managed to get a haircut, use my parents fast internet connection, and added the same day different year navigation here as well, which is pretty cool. Means I get to play that game where I can say what I was doing a year ago today, or 2 years, or 3 even. I also came up with something to show date related musings for entries, but right now that's only for myself, I may make it available to the public eventually. Ended up over at Tracy's for the rest of the weekend, which was nice. Watched March of the Penguins. Had some prime rib at Fox's Restaurant & Pub. Helped her out with a BBQ at her place on Sunday with the Russells and Lisa & Ryan. Really need to do laundry again. Oh, and bringing my car in for an oil change tomorrow, which reminds me that I finally attached my replacement license plate to my front bumper. I ended up using anchor screws, which seems to work pretty well.

Definitely took the long way to work this morning. I had to bring my car in for service, so I went up to Evanston, then took the Purple Line back down to work. And I'll have to do the reverse to pick it up. Crazy. It actually wasn't that bad though. Watched Weeds and Entourage last night. Very funny. Entourage might be getting a little too sappy, however, Emmanuelle Chriqui joined the cast, which is great. Also snuck in a viewing of Dark Angel too. Still got a whole lot of things on my plate, things I've put off, things I need to take care of. Eventually.

Sweet. Daily Dose, Memex, and the Gallery are all finally sharing stylesheets and functions and that menu on the left. Headers and footers are still kind of specific to the applications, and I'll put that off to the future. Which means that they all should look the same, same size fonts, colors, and so on. Which is good. Nothing like a little uniformity. So I'm headed to Ravinia with Tracy tonight, to see Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright, which should be fun, but I wanted to pick up a picnic basket type thing with spots for wine bottles. And since I had Puck up in Evanston getting checked out, A-OK by the way, I just jetted over to Old Orchard after picking it up. And since I was there, I dropped in to see if Bryan was working. And he was. So got to chat with him for a bit, after of course, walking around looking for the out of season picnic storage devices which I ended up finally finding a backpack version at Brookstone. And then I did laundry when I got home.

Went and saw Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright at Ravinia. Sold out show and all the crap that goes along with that. But still, a good time. And I really like Ravinia. I'd like to go back, at least one more time this season. Anyway, not going on a whole lot of sleep right now. I did manage to fix the Memex function include issue. Would have been nice if someone told me about it. Also, did some more consolidation for web site code. Added some things to make it easier to turn certain parts on and off, like the Flickr photostream, say, when Flickr's being slow. Which actually might pave the way for user accounts and customization. We'll see about that though. It'll be nice to actually sleep tonight.

Got a nice long night of sleep last night, looking forward to another one tonight. Ended up working late, and then headed over to Duke of Perth with Tracy. Plans for the weekend? Probably a movie tomorrow, but otherwise, sleeping, maybe some home computer administrative stuff. That's about it. No big plans.

Did a lot of home administrative stuff over the weekend. Also watched a lot of TV and movies. Finished up Dark Angel, and it really is too bad they didn't finish that off, would have been nice to get a wrap up not in novel form. Also watched Sky High (good) and Kung Fu Hustle with Bryan on Saturday, Spider-Man 2 and bits of other things on Sunday. I finally swapped out Xenon with the WRT54G, which noticeably sped up my web browsing experience. Next step is to finally setup Argon to take over mail hosting services. Which would then mean I could retire Xenon. I do realize that I should get a PC at home that can run XP Pro, so checking in on work stuff could be a whole lot easier. Now it's a matter of trying to pick one out. I mean, I could just go for cheapest, but then, that goes against my nature, and I'm looking at small form factors, but those can get a little expensive if you go current or future proof tech, so I'm still not sure which way I'm gonna go on it. I did get to try out Ubuntu on an old PC that I got from work, which is pretty cool. Starting up a PC from a Live CD is really cool. Might go watch Dukes of Hazzard tonight.

So I read del.icio.us popular feed, and I've noticed recently that there's a large number of css and web development related links. It might have always been that way, I'm not sure, and this might be something I'm just now noticing, but that sort of skews how popular a shared bookmark list can be, right? Anyway, working lots, but got plans with Tracy for tomorrow and Thursday. Still need to call my brother, but it's always hard with the 2 hour time difference, at least for me. I don't want to call too early. I've also got some cleaning to do. Seriously. I'm also chomping at the bit. For what? I'm not so sure. But definitely chomping.

So I wanted to write today's entry after I found out if I had to go in for jury duty tomorrow. And I don't, but after I found out I went out and saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Tracy. What a weird movie. Well, what a weird character. But still, pretty good. Odd being the only person laughing in a theater. Definitely want to get some candy tomorrow. I'm actually typing up this entry on Hydrogen via Cygwin, which is pretty cool. But it's hard to keep config files and personal scripts the same over different computers. I need to figure out rsync better, along with getting Argon up and running with maybe portable home directories, which would help on the Macs anyway. On another note, one of my best friends from high school, James Kennedy got shipped off to Iraq today for a year. Suddenly it got a whole lot more real for me. Best of luck to him and his unit, and they're in my prayers.

So if I update late the previous day, I don't have anything to write the next day, unless I wait until a similar time in order to capture anything and everything that occurred in the roughly 24 hours since the last update. Anyway, I thought oatmeal was supposed to be filling, after a bowl this morning I had to get an egg sandwich 3 hours later. What's up with that? Maybe it's the fact I actually exercised this morning, I tried out a stationary bike. Not much of a workout though, but my ankle didn't feel too bad, but then my left knee felt a little weird. Man, it'd be nice if I wasn't such a weakling, I'd just suck it up and go running, but I shouldn't have to do that. Stupid body.

Tracy and I went to Marche last night for dinner, thinking of partaking in the Dine Out benefit, but Marche isn't doing it until next week, and we realized that it's a prix-fixe menu, which would be alright, but I like a little more choice when I'm not going to a top tier restaurant. Anyway, I felt like I was in Sex and the City, just way too hip for me. Food was alright, but I'd rather go to Brasserie Jo. Gonna go watch The Dukes of Hazzard tonight, got some plans with Tracy this weekend, and might see the parents. Otherwise, not too much going on. Oh, and for some reason my RCN subscription changed from Showtime to Cinemax. I'll have to call to get that squared away, and then also see if I can get a HD DVR.

Pretty full weekend. The Dukes of Hazzard viewing on Friday, not so good. Dinner at Chicago Firehouse, pretty good. Walking home when you really have to go to the bathroom, not so good. Lunch at the New China Buffet, pretty good. Grant Park Music Festival with Joe Mantegna, pretty good. Navy Pier fireworks, pretty good. Pastrami reubens from Samuel's Deli, really good. Entourage, really good. Tracy, really good. Going bowling tonight. Should be fun.

I think updates will be coming later, probably more at night, so don't expect them during the day at all. Bowling was alright, only got really going after the 3rd game, but got too tired to play anymore. Dinner at The Patio, yum, ribs and chicken. Currently chowing down on a nice bagged Caesar salad with anchovies and chicken. Gonna finish up with some Krispy Kreme and Mini Chips Ahoy. And watching Aliens vs. Predator. Going to finally see Fantastic Four tomorrow night. Oh, brought out the iPod yesterday during the drive, pretty much to listen to some Ray Charles. Good stuff.

Can't believe I missed a day. Or a couple. Crazy. Work that is. So last night Tracy and I wanted to see Fantastic Four, but it has like 1 showing in the afternoons during the weekdays at River East, so instead, we saw The 40 Year Old Virgin. Genius. Sheer genius. Good times. Then dinner at Dick's Last Resort. Not so good. Alright. But fairly skimpy menu. So I guess I didn't miss a day, since I updated so late on Tuesday. Weird. Anyway, having an exit interview dinner with Leah at Sai tonight. Is it bad to call it that? Not sure, but it's more like a good bye dinner. Got a decent amount of sleep last night, could definitely still use a bit more. Other random stuff, started using public key authentication, which is alright.

Working. Working. And working. Been busy. Sushi was good on Thursday with Leah. Dinner with the parents last night was good as well at Joy's Noodles. And breakfast with them this morning, too. Did some cleaning up as a family after iChatting with Al and Nicole. It's pretty cool. Finally got around to installing Ubuntu, so now I have a nice desktop Linux box. What for? I haven't the faintest idea. Definitely need to get a Windows box for home though. RDC just doesn't cut it, and Hydrogen is just too small and too much of a hassle to get setup with an external monitor. I'm finally looking into getting working air conditioners at home. And I actually opened up the blinds to let a little daylight in. Really different when that happens. Got a coworker's wedding to go to in a little bit. Some sort of moving watching tomorrow. And then back to work. Crazy.

All over the place. Seriously. Wedding was fun, as in lots-o-fun. Snuck in a visit to Nevin's for some curry fries before the reception. Pretty lazy Sunday morning, nice nap time, and then we headed out, picked me up a new shirt and time from Marshall Fields, then walked out to Navy Pier to check it out and have some dinner. Missed Entourage, which finally gave me enough impetus to order up an RCN HD DVR, finally. Did I fail to mention that Nicole got Lasik? or maybe it was Lasek? I didn't even know there was a difference. Anyway, probably, well, required to do some laundry tonight. Long time coming.

No laundry last night, no matter how much I needed to do it. Instead, I watched I, Robot, since I've been trying to catch that for a while. And after Sunday, I won't have to try and catch it, since that's when I'll be getting my DVR. I really wonder how much it's going to change my TV watching habits, my wandering round channels, hoping to stumble upon something new or interesting or good. Oh well. Trying to keep up with the little things, the other chores that need to get done. Finally brought down the winter comforter to be dry cleaned, along with my suits, which have been needing a cleaning, but since I don't wear them very often, it's got to build up. Can't believe September's right around the corner. Crazy. Headed over to Lisa and Ryan's tonight for dinner. Try and do laundry tomorrow night.

Monday on the way home from work, since there was a Cubs night game, I walked from Belmont. So I stopped in at Kafka Wine Co and picked up a 2003 Fat Bastard Shiraz. Last night, headed over to dinner at the future Cases, I stopped at Just Grapes, between work and my parking lot, and picked up a Pinot Noir and a Pinot Gris, details when I find the receipt. Having 2 nice, fairly accessible wine places close to work and live? And me getting older? Seems like a bad combination. And I'm gonna try and keep track of wines, just so I know. It was nice playing with cats last night at Ryan and Lisa's, Honey and Hobbes. Made the drive to Oak Park straight over on Washington. Definitely not a drive I'm used to making, that's for sure. Really gonna do laundry tonight. Might be headed over to the Duke tomorrow with Russell, headed out to Woodstock for some tech support on Saturday. No plans yet for Friday, but something with Tracy. Sunday getting a DVR, so I'll definitely be playing with that.

Okay, so again, no laundry. Bad, I know. Really starting to dig into the bottom of the drawers now. But I did watch Miracle last night, while waiting for the laundry room to open up. I don't remember the last time I got that into a movie, that I was that involved. I was on the edge of the couch, leaning in, at one point I even was on my knees, leaning on the coffee table, wringing my hands. Been a while since a movie's been that good for me. I never even whipped out a laptop to start browsing or looking stuff up about the movie. It was that gripping. Speaking of computers, well, networks anyway, RCN seems to be doing some maintenance work, so my network connection is done at home at the moment. Went down at 7:24 or so this morning. Just about the time I decided to check the news sites. We'll see if it comes back up anytime soon.

Three day weekend coming up. Kind of a pleasant surprise, cause I always seem to forget about it. Going to the Hot House tonight to check out some jazz with Tracy after going to the Butcher's Dog for dinner. Headed out to Woodstock tomorrow, back in on Sunday, not sure what to do on Monday. Still haven't done laundry, and I'm now gonna do it in Woodstock instead. Just found out that the Jimmy Buffet concert at Wrigley Field is happening this weekend. Should make it very annoying to get around. Ugh. What would Lakeview and Wrigleyville be like if the Cubbies weren't around anymore? As nice? Not as crowded? Boy, plans change. Realized that the Chicago Jazz Festival is going on, so that's free jazz instead of pay for jazz, and getting Indian food at the India House instead of pub grub.

My Uncle Lito passed away today. He was a loving husband, a great uncle, actually, my mom's cousin, which I think made him my first cousin, once removed. He was a great architect and just all around artist. He was also my godfather. He was always tinkering, always tweaking, his home. It was great going to see them on holidays, they lived in Elk Grove Village. He leaves behind my Auntie Luz. But almost every time we went over, something was different, new AV setup, different kitchen, new walkaround deck, different and new decorations. And paintings. He also did some paintings. I think we still have a watercolor of his hanging out in Woodstock. And all the projects he helped with over the years, I think he helped make our deck out in Woodstock, help put up all sorts of things in the basement, including my pseudo home theater. He was a great guy. Quiet, like me. Lefty, like me too. One of the few lefties in the family. Like me. Very caring. Very loving. Very dependable. And smart. He fell down 7 steps Saturday night. Fairly massive head trauma. Was in a coma. Pupilary reflex was nonexistant, for those that know. Life support was removed this morning. Wake is Sunday, funeral on Monday. He was 67. He will be missed.

So that was my weekend. Well, the majority of the weekend. Friday, went to the Chicago Jazz Festival and dinner at India House with Tracy. That was so long ago. Saturday, got my internet connection fixed, went home, went to a Filipino party at a Chinese buffet, did a little shopping with my mom, went to mass, went to another Filipino party, a baby shower at someone's house. Got to play a little with my godson. Fixed my dad's email problem, used iSight to have a video chat with Al and Nicole. Then my mom got the call, and we went to Alexian Brothers Medical Center. Back to Woodstock, back in to Chicago for the DVR install, then back out to the hospital, picking up Al at O'Hare along the way. Then back out to Woodstock. Back to the hospital, then Auntie Luz's for a while. Dinner at Todai. Then back in the city. First program recorded with the DVR? The Bourne Supremacy. But for some reason I lost the HD Tier, ESPNHD, Discovery HD and stuff, so I tried to get it refreshed, and now I've lost all digital channels, like IFC and Sundance. But the premium stuff still works, so recorded and watched 13 Going On 30. I've now got True Lies, Cellular, and Bookies in HD recorded. Went out and watched The Fantastic Four tonight. Just needed to go and vege and just not think or talk or anything. Oh, I forgot to mention, Tracy went down to Baton Rouge to voluteer for CVS. Which is awesome. She left Sunday. I pick her up on Saturday. So life's, well, just a little bit, well, to be honest, like life. This is it. Real, dirty, gritty, and true. Life is short. Life is a gift. Enjoy it.

It's odd, dealing with a family death, yet still living life. Apple released some collaboration with Motorola for an iTunes Phone. I only wish they'd release iTunes for any cell phone, maybe as a Java app, or something else. Would be nice is all. iPod nano (http://www.apple.com/ipodnano) also got released. It's .4" shorter, .2" narrower, and .53" thinner than my cell phone, which I was planning on using as my music player, as soon as I get around to getting a decent sized Memory Stick Duo Pro. Not sure if I want to carry around both, or if I even need to. But the black one would definitely match my phone, that's for sure. Have a definite urge to spend some money, buy something, do something though. Restlessness I guess.

My cable has issues. I'm currently not getting any digital, HD Tier, or HBO programming, all of which was working before I got my DVR, which is fabulous by the way. I watched Cellular last night, which I think was recorded, oh, sometime in the wee morning over the weekend. I've got like 3 movies each day for the next couple days getting queued up as well. Definitely catching up on all the movies I've maybe just had an inkling to see, but never got around to it. Picked up another bottle of wine on the way home yesterday from the Kafka Wine Co. A Malbec. Tracy seems to like those.

The boys came over last night, watched some football, a little bit of Bookies as well. I made some macaroni and beef something or other, which turned out pretty good. Scheduled an appointment with RCN for next Tuesday to try and fix my DVR. Have I mentioned that it's got a much better channel guide? That you can navigate within the guide by your favorite channels? That HD seems to look better, and analog/standard seems to look worse? Headed out to Naperville tomorrow, watch a bit of Chicago Heavyweight Champtionships. Picking up Tracy from the airport tomorrow night. Got the wake on Sunday, funeral on Monday. Nothing else planned.

Wake, Funeral, Memorial Services, all went well this weekend. For those that knew my uncle, it fits that everything went so smoothly. I got to wear a barong tagalog as a pallbearer. Made me look, well, very filipino. Tried to watch a bunch of movies off the DVR, since it got replaced today. Ended up watching Major League, Collateral, and Wimbledon. And now I've got all my channels back. So that's good. I've got all sorts of stuff to record now. Working pretty much the rest of the week. A couple different possibilities for Saturday night, we'll see what actually pans out.

That's right, I'm now syndicated. Since Google opened up their blog search, I decided to quickly hack together an RSS feed for myself, so that I too can be Google Blog Searched. So that's available at the bottom. Just should be the 7 most recent posts. I figured 7's a good number. Got to see Tracy last night, which was a treat. Now she's working nights until Saturday. Otherwise, tried to find all sorts of things to record on the now working DVR. I might have to look into pulling things off the DVR to Oxygen via firewire, but I'll probably just end up sitting around watching TV.

More steps into the weblog present: I added pings to Technorati and Weblogs.com and Ping-O-Matic. Which means, when I update this site, it lets all those other sites know, which means more people and services should know that the page has been updated. Actually, this was done to try and get this included in the Google Blog Search sooner. We'll see if it actually works. So besides an RSS feed, and blog pings, what's next? Comments? Membership? The sky's the limit I guess. Finally made it over to the Library after work yesterday, and started reading Ender's Shadow. Watched a couple episodes of The Thirsty Traveler and Simply Wine and part of Shaun of the Dead with running and having some poached fish with mashed potatoes for dinner. I think I forgot to put The O.C. on the DVR this morning, which kind of defeats the purpose. Oh, I also picked up a couple more bottles of wine on the way home, again from Kafka Wine Co. Might be time for me to get a small wine rack or something. Headed out to Piece tonight with Russell.

You can now find this via Google's blog search. Sweet. Will this mean more page views? Maybe. Do I care? I guess. I mean, I did do all that work, all so that I'm more accessible to Google. I think the next update to this site should be a change to CSS instead of tables. Ended up watching Sky High last night after Piece, still good in the second viewing. I've got lots of TV to watch, thanks to the DVR. And I've got to get more picky about what I record, cause 4 days later I'm already running out of space. But I've already tagged Arrested Development and Kitchen Confidential for series recording. It doesn't look like I'll be saving entire seasons to watch at once, that's for sure. I think I'll try and get The Terminal and Kill Bill Vol. 2 off the list tonight. Gmail has stopped working via my cell phone, so I set up T-Mobile email, which seems to do okay. Weird though.

So this weekend in Chicago? Busy. Not me being busy, but the city. Cubs have home games today, tomorrow, and Sunday. Bears home opener on Sunday. Celtic Fest Saturday and Sunday downtown. And there's a 20th anniversary Farm Aid concert in Tinley Park on Sunday. Wine Crush (http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/36970,0,6766046.event?coll=mmx-home_top_hedsh2o) On Saturday. Okay, maybe that last one won't be so big, but the rest? Crazy. Not sure how much driving I'm gonna want to be doing this weekend.

Weekend seems to have blown right by. To the point that I'm having trouble remembering what I ended up doing. Friday night, went running again, and watched either The Terminal or Kill Bill Vol. 2. The other one I watched Saturday morning. I also ended up making one of those Spanish tapas things, the potato onion omelette quiche thing. It was much better cold. Tracy and I then went to the Old Town Wine Crush, tasted some wine, got some fried cheese and olives, then walked on over to Tsunami for dinner. Got me a sake flight, yum. I actually might be tired of sushi. I may just need to take a break for a while. Then we stopped off at The Zebra Lounge, a tiny little piano bar that seems to be part of an apartment building. It's great. I really like it. Traded drinks with Tracy after she realized that she doesn't like dirty martinis. Sunday went out to Woodfield and had lunch with a couple of Tracy's friends, then did some window shopping. Finally saw and touched an iPod nano. They really are tiny. And they little section that had them always had people crowded around. Crazy. Watched Shark Tale, finally caught the last couple of episodes of Entourage, and a little more of the Fine Living Channel. And I think that's it for the weekend, and I don't think I missed anything. I just heard some good news, that Darwin's is open again, and I'll try and get out there this week.

So Downers Grove is a pretty nice town. Tracy and I went there for dinner at Ballyboyle, a nice Irish pub. Shepard's Pie was great. As was the beer. Then we got some ice cream from Every Day's a Sundae. Another great place. But it was nice to walk around a quiet downtown with a lot of stores and stuff, better than Woodstock. And pretty good Metra service into downtown. Rather interesting. And some nice looking houses. Headed out to Jin Ju tonight. That should be good.

Wow, that title works on a bunch of different levels. Lost a day posting. Whoops. Anyway, Tuesday night went to Jin Ju, great food, as usual. Took a short walk around Andersonville, another nice place. Ended up watching Gilmore Girls and Arrested Development. Only had like 1/3 of a bottle of soju at dinner, but now I've got some in my fridge, which is cool. Wednesday made my return to Darwin's. Felt like coming home, and felt like it was never gone. Next time I won't drive. Probably headed back on Friday. Tonight I'm hitting up Piece for the second week in a row, this time to see Lystra's Silence, Bryan's brother's band. They're driving through tonight. So Lost started up again last night, and I still haven't finished last season yet. Ugh. And I tried and failed and then hacked my way around updating my firmware on my cell phone last night, mainly to get decent video bitrate back, and ended up losing all my settings. Numbers and calendar stuff was easy thanks to iSync, but everything else? Ugh. Besides that, I've gone out every night since last Saturday. That might be a bit much. Especially when, wait for it, I have laundry to do. Ugh. Oh well.

Got a reminder yesterday that there's a 10 year high school reunion type function going on next Friday. I should probably go. Probably. Hopefully headed to Darwin's tonight. Might be headed out to John Barleycorn with some of Tracy's friends on Saturday night. Ended up sleeping instead of laundry last night. Found a bookmark in the borrowed The Bourne Identity that I'm reading from the library, that was a little odd. Weather's nice and cool. Better suited for me. Another trafficky weekend in Chicago, Bears and Cubs both have home games. Again.

It was good. Pretty much caught up on sleep this weekend. That does not mean I can get by with 6 or so hours a night during the week. Another fairly active weekend. Friday night did make it out to Darwin's, again. The Ephemere is a pretty fruity beer, very light. Saturday had lunch at Clarke's, while watching kids get soaked waiting for a show at The Bottom Lounge. Then went to try and look at new cell phones for Tracy at My Guys Wireless on Southport, but it's actually gone. That was after stopping to get some ice cream from Australian Homemade. Found out there's a Dairy Queen on Southport and Grace, which makes me happy. Also stumbled upon Alta Vista Terrace, a short street of townhouses that looks very european. It's pretty cool. After some TV time, went to John Barleycorn to meet up with some pharmacists. Got the drink and the dance on. Had my first Jager Bomb. Sunday, went and saw Just Like Heaven, dinner at Socca, which was actually really good, and finished the night with some more TV, season premiere night and all. I'm definitely headed out to Woodstock for that 10 Year gathering reunion thing on Friday. Other than that, nothing planned for the week.

Yup. I'm a watcher. There's no denying that. I tried to. Last season, quitting on shows halfway through. I still have the entire season 4 of Alias to watch, even as I record the current season. I still have the last half seasons of Veronica Mars and Lost left. I needed to make some more room on Oxygen to record the new Veronica Mars stuff, which moved to Wednesdays and is also being repeated on Sunday nights, so I needed to decommercialize and move the Alias and Lost episodes to another disk. That takes a while. I just realized that I could also record Everybody Loves Chris, since I don't want to do it in non-HD. So besides the old stuff, I just watched Kitchen Confidential and My Name Is Earl. Both solid. I like both. I just like TV. I also ended up watching Taxi (not so good) and Flight of the Phoenix (alright), so I've freed up some more space. I've definitely got way too much getting DVR'd. But I was able to finally do some laundry last night. So it's getting to be October. New seasons, all around.

Worked out last night. That was good. Feeling better. Not that I was feeling bad before. But I've mentioned it before, sound body, sound mind. Or something like that. Anyway, watched more TV last night, Las Vegas and My Name Is Earl. And that would be it. Got a cell phone off eBay, a Nokia 8890. Got a good deal on it, Tracy might end up using it, except that it's really old. The screen on it, well, it's not so good. And it's roughly the same size as my Sony Ericsson K750i, but with a screen that's half as big and displays roughly 262,143 fewer colors. But it looks pretty cool. Too bad the Nokia 8801 is way too expensive. That'd be a pretty nice looking phone. I shouldn't need a new one for at least a couple of years.

So I went to check the weather this morning on Oxygen using Dashboard and while there, I noticed that my recording of Veronica Mars 2nd season opener had a running time of 0 minutes. So I try and open it up, and it freezes. Fine, I'll do a reset, walk away, get ready for work. Come back, it's on the grey Apple screen with the spinner. So I power it down, unplug and replug, and try again. Sweet. This time into Open Firmware. Complaining about some USB issues. So I unplug the hub I was using. Reset again. Grey Apple spinner. At this point, I do a hard shutdown and walk away. I'll try again later, and I'm guessing it should be alright, if not I'll try the usual, zapping PRAM, unplugging PCI cards, and so on, and so forth. And if that doesn't work, I'm not sure what I'll do. I've still got a ton of HD material off the EyeTV, and serving it up shouldn't be a problem, but the editing of newly recorded stuff? That's a whole different issue. Might be time for me to just not have a desktop.

Wow, so September's come and gone. October's right around the corner. It feels like fall. Nice. Oxygen still down and out, although I got the prohibition sign on the gray startup screen this morning. I haven't actually tried to troubleshoot it yet. So got that reunion thingie tonight. I imagine we're only staying for the football game, since Tracy has to work tomorrow. So it'll be a quick jaunt out and back. Cafe Laguardia was really good last night. The food reminded both of us of Filipino food. Just like home. And the Mojitos were quite good. Just another reason I'm living in the wrong neighborhood. I also got to have lunch with Tracy, she came in to the city, which was cool. I believe, she's the first person I've had lunch with in the city besides coworkers. Might head out and watch either Mirrormask or Green Street Hooligans tomorrow with Russell, or just watch some football, or watch both, or find myself at Darwin's, since it's been a whole week since my last time. Definitely try and get Oxygen back up and running, so I try and squeeze out the rest of Lost and Veronica Mars so I can watch the new stuff, and maybe try and get Alias out of the way as well. But that's just a tall order. I really wish I got to have another viewing of Beautiful Girls before tonight.

Wow, that works on a bunch of different levels. So my attempt at getting to the 10 year high school reunion was, admittedly, pretty weak, but I did show up. Drove out last night, showed up at the game around 8:15pm, stayed till about 8:40 or so, didn't seen anyone I knew or remembered, so we left and got some food from the Jailhouse Restaurant on The Square before jetting back into the city. Oh well, maybe the official reunion, if it happens, I could be on time for, or actually have a phone number on me of someone who might be there. Saturday, woke up with Tracy who's working the weekend, and stayed up to watch TV and try and fix Oxygen. All the repeated resets and hard power downs didn't do good stuff, so the disk had some serious volume errors. I still don't know what might be wrong with the machine itself. Kernel was loading, but choking at some point, but I haven't tried a boot CD yet, but there's some other things I'd be willing to try. I'm just hoping I can get pictures and music off it. And I'll start serious backup methods. At least I've got an off site email backup with gmail.

So I think Oxygen is down for the count. Or at least down enough that I don't want to bother with trying to figure out a way around it. I think there's definitely something wrong with the USB ports on the motherboard, which makes me think the motherboard might be on it's last legs. So instead of continuing to use it, expecting a failure, I'm just gonna retire it. Which means, no more EyeTV recording, well, editing, which means no recording. And I already missed the first episode of Veronica Mars this season, so that might be a lost cause as well. Which got me thinking that I might not try to even bother watching Lost and Alias and Veronica Mars because of the serialized nature of those shows and the failures of technology to record them for future viewing. Which is sad, since they are some of the best looking shows in HD. I think I successfully recovered the hard drive, which is good, and got my iPhoto library copied over. I'd like to get my iTunes library too, but not as important. Also, not sure if I'm going to stick with just Aluminum or look into getting a Mac mini. So on top of that, RCN's programming guide wasn't being downloaded yesterday, so I couldn't see what was on, and returned to just flipping through channels. Which is how I came across Shall We Dance, because it was filmed in Chicago and there was a scene on the El and I just had to watch after that. Good news is that the guide data seemed to be populating this morning, at least channel names and time lengths of shows. We'll see. Almost makes me want to go back to watching DVDs.

At least the programming guide is back from RCN. That's something to be happy about. Apple Remote Desktop arrived yesterday as well. Which means troubleshooting for my family will be a whole lot easier. Otherwise, watching a lot of TV. Hard not to. So easy. And it's right there. Making vacation plans for November. Looks like Panama City. Should be fun. Finally going to Darwin's tonight, catching up with Katie Kelly. Possible Serenity viewing either tonight or Thursday, some baking on Friday, a visit to a pumpkin farm on Saturday, some house lounging on Sunday due to the Chicago Marathon. Also I haven't really been filling out the Memex lately. Getting lazy.

I really like Darwin's. I also seem to like Turbodog. Yum. Was there last night for 3 1/2 hours. Good time. Seriously. I really like that place. Too bad it's across town. Too bad there isn't something like it in my hood. I've sort of started working on a table-less layout of this site, and making sure it validates. Would be nice to roll that out at some point, along with upgrading the Gallery. Put that on my plate. Headed out to maybe have the last grill session of the season out at Tracy's. It's been really hot lately. Kind of annoying. I guess nothing exciting happening. Running out of things to write about. Quick shout out to Whitney who's headed to UPA Club Championships with Mischief, Congrats. Funny, played against Mischief once upon a time back with Kaze. Oh, those were the days. I also started reading RSD again, for whatever reason. Some of it's still the same old same old. Some things just don't change.

Had a nice family dinner last night, with Tracy's parents, not mine. Steak, sweet potatoes, some acorn squash (which wasn't made all that well, need to figure out something there), some mango, cucumber salad, a refreshing smoothie by her mom, and some caramel apples. Pretty good. Nice and quiet. Got to sit outside for a bit, curled up in a blanket, on a park bench. Nice and quiet. Relaxing. CLR is pretty cool, finally cleaned out the shower head that was spraying all over the place. Headed over to Darwin's, again, tonight before a viewing of Serenity. Reading bits and pieces about Lost makes me want to watch, but I'd be so lost, ha, but I would be.

Just drank beer at Darwin's, and didn't end up at a movie. Good though, needed to sleep. My glasses broke last night, the other temple. I had to look up what that part of the frame was called. That means both temples have broken now, and are held together by Super Glue. Feels like October, wondering if there's going to be an October Surprise. I like the much cooler weather. I'm looking forward to hot chocolate with whip cream and marshmallows. I'm looking forward to knit caps, cuddling on couches under blankets with the howling wind and a good movie on. I'm looking forward to say, probably the next 3 weeks or so before it becomes unbearably cold. Headed out to a pumpkin farm tomorrow with Tracy, should be fun. Staying in on Sunday because of the Chicago Marathon.

Pretty lazy weekend. No idea what I did Friday night. Probably just watched TV. Saturday headed out to Bengtson's Pumpkin Farm to try and find a pumpkin to carve for Tracy. Found a nice 23 lb'er. Also did the fun pumpkin farm stuff, watched the pig races, had some BBQ and chili, a taffy apple. Good, wholesome fun. Did some shopping at Orland Square as well. Watched the asparagus battle of Iron Chef America, which gave me cravings for asparagus and Kobe beef tartare. Also made me realize that I really need to go to Masaharu Morimoto's restaurant, which is in Philly. Drank a little too much Sunday morning after opening a bottle of Champagne, and proceeded to pretty much sleep the day away. We did eventually get out for dinner at Yoshi's Cafe, which did have really good Wagyu beef, still not satisfied my craving. My brother and sister-in-law is coming to town in a couple of weeks, so that's pretty cool. Apple announcement on Wednesday. Should be interesting. Also, Central Regionals was this weekend, and I've suddenly restarted taking an interest in Ultimate again, and it was odd to see that there will be no Chicago teams at the Club Championships this year. Weird. Odd. Scary even.

So I recorded and watched How I Met Your Mother again last night. Even after I recorded and watched it last week. Even after I thought it wasn't that good, and decided to watch it again. I even have it as a series recording. Why? I'm not sure. It's not that funny. Makes me miss Scrubs. When's that coming back? I randomly flipped on a movie yesterday that had that guy from 100 Girls and Rachel Leigh Cook, now a star on Las Vegas. Why is it that certain actors will always be a certain character? Like Rachel is Josie. That guy from 100 Girls is always that guy. I think Chevy Chase is always Fletch for me. But actors like Mel Gibson? A little harder to pin down to just one role. Anyway, if I see an actor I've liked in a previous role, I'll watch the movie, if at least for a little bit. I guess I'm hoping that I'll continue to like them as a different character. Anyway, updates on Oxygen, well, the hard drive anyway: I think I'm going to have to a reinstall to get it work again as a system disc, but I think I got all my music and pictures off it, so that's good. Just need to make sure I can get all my Documents off as well.

Tracy got an iPod nano (White 4GB) yesterday. Sweet little bugger. It's tiny. And great. I started ripping some of her music to put on it, which means I'm getting even more music. Also managed to sync up some pictures too, and the photo capability of the nano is incredible. Very nice. And so tiny. So tempting. I'm happy that there weren't any problems, and it works and the screen didn't crack and it didn't have to be reset and it came charged. Just a great little product. Of course, Apple has some sort of announcement today, 12pm CST, so who knows what I'm gonna buy next from them. The only problem for me is how I'm going to find out what the event is about. I used IRC for a couple MacWorlds, but it hasn't been available recently. Most of the usual websites are gonna get slammed, as usual, so it'd be nice to have something that not a lot of people know about. And I'm going out to lunch with co-workers, so I won't even be able to see it real-time. Anyway, headed to Darwin's tonight, Sally's birthday. And my take on One More Thing (October 12, 2005).

Hung out with some Mr. Briefcaseers last night at Darwin's. I also got to try out their WiFi access, which works well. Pretty sweet, drinking beer, web surfing. Not a bad way to spend an evening, well, the early evening. Finally made the BR brothers watch The Tao of Pong. Finally. And then I took it back. And now it's the day after the Apple video iPod announcement, and well, I'm still intrigued by it. But more so I'm gonna try and get stuff onto my cell phone instead. And wait for the widescreen version that's going to come out eventually. Actually, I'm more excited about the future home theater mac using Front Row to buy and download TV shows and movies with decent resolution. Would I then get rid of cable? Probably not. Well, maybe. Is there anything that I watch that is worth seeing live? Life on demand. It's coming.

So, like Bryan and Jessica Jenkins have told me, go see Serenity. Now. Well, soon anyway. It's really really good. Really good. It's weird how much I enjoyed it. Not sure if it's completely objective though, since friends liked it so much, and how much I'm supposed to like it, and the idea behind it. I mean, a serious underdog. A cancelled tv show gets greenlit into a big budget movie? I'm rooting for it on that fact alone. But still, I liked it. You're pretty much just dropped into a story line, picking things up here and there, and I had no problems with it. I want to see more of that world, which is why I just ordered Firefly. I just bought the whole story, the worlds, the environment. It's great. Anyway, enough raving. Silver Cloud was good last night. Their marinated pork chops? Wow. And then Russell and I stopped in at Darwin's since we had the time, and got a round on the house. Probably because Russell goes more than I and was probably recognized, but still, it's been open for what, all of a month? I think I've been at least once a week since it opened. Seriously. I love that place.

Not sure if it's just that it's Monday or what, but I'm not feeling that good. Flu like soreness. Not a good sign. Hopefully it will pass. Watched a bunch of movies over the weekend, notable ones include Crime Spree and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. Made some Swedish Meatballs, I did, not my mom. Went up to Northbrook, took a look around their Apple Store, got a crepe from Magic Pan. Really nice shopping mall. They had a Nokia little kiosk. Got to see some of their fashion oriented phones, none of which I was impressed with. Went to KK's pseudo going away party, did some Halloween costume shopping, dinner at the Tapas place around the corner. Also finally made the Cappuccino Tarts for Tracy. And every time I do some baking, I make a huge mess.

So that flu like soreness? Isolated to my right shoulder. Not sure what the deal is, but it is pretty annoying. Actually woke me up this morning. Probably not a good sign, but then again, doesn't seem like anything to get worried about. I wanted to do laundry last night, but Mondays are busy days in the laundry room. Instead I watched the usual Monday night TV, and also tuned in for Out of Practice, which I watched based on Orson Scott Card's suggestion (http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2005-09-25.shtml). Pretty good. Definitely good cast. Definitely wish I could get Cupid on DVD. I think I neglected to mention that I got a 1 GB Memory Stick Pro Duo for my phone. Got a good deal or something, but I've put some music on it, and I'll see how it works in the car on the way out to the burbs tonight. I've still got 3 library books out, well, maybe 2 weeks overdue at this point. Whoops.

Working. Crazy I know. Anyway, had a craving for prime rib so went to Fox's Restaurant & Pub out in Orland Park, where I had it before, but they were all out. That's so disappointing. Anyway, gave Tracy my old iRock FM Transmitter for use with her iPod nano. I had completely forgotten about that thing. It's gotta be 3 years old at least. Another Apple announcement today, dual core Powermacs, which look impressive, some other random stuff, and Aperture. The Powermacs seem great, with PCI-Express across the board. Stuff I was waiting for. And my old desktop just died. Interesting. And I've been waiting for something a little future proof from Apple before upgrading. And with that big Memory Stick for my cell phone, I could actually catch up on some TV if I could transcode it for the phone. Hmmmm. But now I'm thinking I want home theater computers for desktops instead. Shuttle XPC M1000 looks pretty sweet. Has composite outputs so I could use it with my tv. Now only if it was a Mac. But hooking a computer up to a HDTV, well, that's a good enough resolution for me. And then I could do something else with the Data Center. Anywho, I'm headed to Darwin's, no surprise there, for dinner with Tracy and meet up with Whitney (in town for a bit) and others for drinks. And I'm really doing laundry tomorrow. Oh, and that whole sore shoulder thing? 2 things about that.

1. Drugs are amazing. Seriously. I took some Aleve after it got really bad, and I felt fine. Seriously. From being close to worthless to being great. Drugs are amazing.
2. I'm perfectly fine today. I did wake up with a completely numb left arm (like it was still sleeping). But I'm fine now. I did have a Vitamin Water yesterday and I took my Centrum this morning. I'm guessing I was deficient.

Getting crazy busy at work. Q4. Busy time for ads. Anyway, Darwin's as usual was alright. Maybe should start shooting for Tuesdays or Thursdays instead of Wednesdays. Anyway, they've got a couple new things coming out tonight for the menu, and surprise surprise, I probably won't be there until next week at the earliest. Go figure. But it's my neighborhood bar, even though it's not my neighborhood. Got to see Bjorn and Whitney last night. Otherwise a pretty quiet night. I finally returned some overdue library books. I think I'm gonna take a little reading break, we'll see how long that lasts. Maybe more staring out the window. Laundry tonight, even if it means sitting there and waiting for machines to open up. Besides that, Al and Nicole are coming in tomorrow for a handful of days. It'll be good to see them. And they get to meet Tracy and Tracy gets to meet them. Should be good. Fun, too. Really starting to warm up to the idea of a home theater computer system. Really warming up to it. I'm just saying.

Brother's coming to town. Should be fun. Pretty much spending the weekend with the family. Hopefully will be fun for Tracy too, since I'm dragging her along. Tonight Tracy and I are hitting up Wildfire, since I tried to get the family reservations for tomorrow night, but no deal, but was able to sneak in a party of two for this evening. So consider it a scouting mission. Instead, the family's having dinner at Maggiano's Little Italy in Schaumburg. Should be good. Otherwise, gonna be a full house in Woodstock. Also should give me a chance to try out ARD, since I've been having issues with it across the internet, I'll be able to actually see if it works across the room. Besides that, I finally got laundry done. It's pretty annoying that I think someone managed to take up 6 dryers all by themselves. Seriously. You need that many? I can't wait until I have a washer/dryer in-home. Even if I can only do one load at a time, I could do a load every week. I'm just saying. I also could really use some sleep. I'm averaging around 6.5 or so for the last week. Not so good. Just seems so hard when I've got stuff on the DVR and all the Lost and Alias still on there since I haven't watched last seasons which are sitting on hard drives. One of these days, I'll have to have a Lost/Alias-fest and plow through what I have. Like that's ever going to happen.

Dinner Friday at Wildfire was pretty good. I liked the place. Nice vibe. Then visited with my brother and sister-in-law when they finally got in. Drove Nicole up to an interview at Evanston Hospital, hung out with my brother in the meantime, got caught up. Lunch with the family, then out to my Auntie Luz's place for church and dinner at Todai. Got to play with the new iPod. Screen's awesome, didn't get too much time to play with it, but it does look odd, out of proportion with such a big screen and little scroll wheel. Oh, and took a quick peek at Photo Booth, which is pretty fun. Didn't get a change to look at Front Row though. Maybe next time. Finally got ARD working, late that night, you have to allow VNC through the firewall in addition to ARD, which isn't completely intuitive. But then again, ARD is an admin product. But totally cool. I can now provide support to my parents from the comfort of my own home. Sunday went for brunch at Port Edwards then some shopping at Spring Hill Mall. And then headed back into the city the long way, stopping off to get Papa John's in Evanston and Harp to make our own Black and Tans. And then we watched the White Sox (http://chicago.whitesox.mlb.com) beat the Astros (http://houston.astros.mlb.com). But Tracy has now met the rest of my family and it went great. Good times.

So I might have a slight problem when it comes to HDTV. I did find a new show on HDNet, Nothing But Trailers. HD Trailers for 30 minutes. Gotta admit that's pretty cool. Almost make any more look good enough to watch. I'm also continuing to stockpile Lost and Alias, but good news, I got last seasons for both on DVD, which means I should finally be able to watch through them, and then plow through this seasons one of these days. But yes, I watch a lot of TV. Also figured out how to set up Virtual Host Names for web development. That's a good thing to know. Also picked Desktastic for a screen writing program for use with ARD. It will allow me to draw on the screen like John Madden. This would come in handy when providing tutorials to my parents. All good things.

What's it called when you're on a bandwagon but begrudgingly? I stayed up until the end of the White Sox game last night, not because it was necessarily a good game, there was some tension involved, but I felt like I just had to watch it play itself out. I just wanted it to end, either side winning, just wanted it to end. And I'm not even a baseball fan! But I am from Chicago, so I feel obligated to pay attention. Anyway, I'll keep watching, because I'm a Chicagoan. Otherwise, Darwin's was good as usual, but I wasn't too big a fan of the Wasabi Pumpkin/Corn Dogs. Rather odd for me even. Waiting was pretty funny, not like a couple other movies from this past year. Kind of felt like one of those TBS Saturday afternoon movies.

So there's that scene in Anchorman, when someone puts the question mark on the teleprompter, and Ron, that funny guy Ron, he ends the newscast, "I'm Ron Burgandy?". That's what I feel like. White Sox? World Series Champs? Really? And yes, I did watch last night. Finally, a pitcher's duel. Like it was supposed to be. Anyway, I got a new hard drive for Aluminum, since it's now going to be my main and pretty much only machine, I need to be able to carry around everything, including music. So that's always fun, taking apart a Powerbook when I shouldn't be, but thanks to PBFixit, it's super easy. I also set up my printer off the Airport Express in the living room. Definitely turning the couch/coffee table into my new data center. I also did a bad thing and downloaded and took a peek at the hacked version of Front Row floating around. In my first run at it, looks pretty cool, but didn't mess with it too much. Also, Salling Clicker is completely awesome with the new version released that supports the K750. It's great. Other cell phone news, T-Mobile switched over voice mail systems, the most important thing being I no longer get SMS for voice mail, rather I get an indicator. It's nice.

Not a bad week. Can't remember much though. Haven't been getting a whole lot of sleep. Monday watched TV, Tuesday at Darwin's, Wednesday and Thursday out in the burbs, and Friday back to Bucktown. I guess I'm not spending that much time at home, which might mean why I'm staying up so late trying to spend time at home while I'm awake. I've started buying some DVDs again, but only TV Shows. I've started reading Mobile Suit Gundam, which I remembered from my youth, and my youth now describes when I was 14. Which was 14 years ago. Which was 1990. Wow. Anyway, White Sox rally in the Loop today. I haven't decided whether or not I'm gonna head out. Headed out to Blue Fin to catch up with AJ tonight. Maybe some drinking/hanging with the boys as well. Tomorrow headed out to some financial dinner something or other with Lisa and Ryan and Tracy at Weber Grill in Lombard before going over to their place for a Halloween party. For which I need to complete my costume, which involves some painting. Try and get to that tonight. Got nothing for Sunday planned, and hopefully that will involve a lot of sleeping.

Yup, got a cold coming on, or currently have one on. Head cold, sinuses full of mucus, that sort of thing. Waiting for it all to drain. Not so pleasant. Anyway, weekend was pretty good. Got my drink on Friday night, getting a bottle of sake at Blue Fin, fully expecting a tiny bottle like Sai Cafe, but instead get this huge wine bottle sized portion. So I almost polish the whole thing off by myself. And then I fall asleep on Bryan-Tony-Carlo's couch before heading home. Anyway, good to catch up with AJ. Saturday, painted the bottle for Tracy and my Halloween costume before heading out for some grub. No powerpoint presentations, just some conversation and some food. Then I went looking for a cheap polyester blue tie to complete my costume, but come up empty, ended up going with some kids prep navy satin shiny one. We watched Shaun of the Dead before heading over to Lisa and Ryan's dressed as: Major Nelson and Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie. Tony had a nice Fox special costume, when animals attack, Sally was a pretty authentic Wednesday, and Carlo, well, he came as an architectural movement. Lisa and Ryan did up their basement really well, did a really good job with decorations and stuff. Impressive. Tracy and I picked up some gyros on the way home for some grub, and we had a nice lazy Sunday, which was good since I was definitely not feeling so hot. Actually, we finally started watching the first season of Lost, getting about halfway through. Hopefully I can shake this head cold thingie, and soon. At least it's not the flu or something.

Drinking lots of liquid, and none of the alcoholic kind, well, that helps. Wasn't feeling too hot last night, but drank water, orange juice, and a couple mugs of chicken broth (I wanted something hot but not caffeinated). Just sat around, watched some TV, tried to go to bed early. So no real updates. Just trying to get better. Random note, I like to use Google as my spell checker. Weather's gonna get freaky, supposed to shoot up to 70 or so on Thursday. Love Chicago weather. I've got to find my lost Tiger install DVD, should be around here somewhere, since I've got some machines to update. And it's November. Didn't make any progress on the Lost DVDs, but I'll get to that the next couple of nights.

Head cold schmead cold. Ugh. Wish my sinuses would just drain out, or I could stick a giant needle and suck all the mucus out, or take a magic drug that would make it all disappear and prevent it from reappearing, you know, like a magic get healthy drug. Oh well. I'll keep complaining. Watched more Lost last night. I'm now at episode 15 I think. Good stuff. Makes me wonder if J. J. Abrams should make another show called Found. I've got possible jury duty tomorrow, have to call tonight to figure that out. Otherwise, just drinking liquids and sitting a lot. Oh, and having TNT HD rocks. It means I get more NBA in HD. Always a good thing.

Jury duty. That's right. All day. So won't talk about that until I'm done here. Last night watched a couple more episodes of Lost. Completely forgot to watch One Tree Hill or My Name Is Earl and The Office from the previous night. Which means I'm seriously running out of space on the DVR. Finished up Mobile Suit Gundam. Headed out to the burbs today to see Tracy, the only time this week. There are pictures available from our Halloween costumes, which I'll eventually get up here, sometime. I also did find my Tiger Install DVD, which is good, and finally got around to updating Neon. I should definitely start looking into actually using all these computers throughout my place. Feeling better, definitely on the tail end of the head cold.

Did my jury duty. Won't have to do that for a year. Not a bad day, got some reading done, did a little laptop work. Traffic was really bad heading out to the burbs, and I even left at 4pm. Took me 1:15 to get out there, from downtown. Crazy. Stupid gapers delay. But it was interesting to be going down the Stevenson Expressway with absolutely no cars going the other way. I'm guessing that's what it would be like during evacuations. Had a nice dinner with the Argaos, and watched some Arrested Development while Tracy found more songs to put on her iPod. Not sure what the weekend holds for me yet. Might head out to Woodstock, might stick around and try and make some headway on my projects (I was going to say unfinished projects, but since that pretty much applies to all of them, kind of unnecessary).

Yes. I have one. I watch too much TV. I pretty much sat on the couch all weekend watching TV. I started plowing through Alias:Season 4. I watched Blade: Trinity and Mean Girls on Sunday just because it was on. I'm not sure exactly how many episodes I got through of Alias, but it was a lot. A couple things about watching TV on DVD, I wish the Play All would skip over opening credits after the first one on a disc. Wouldn't be that hard, would it? I actually wouldn't know at all, haven't authored a DVD ever in my life. But I'm trying to get through Season 4 so I can watch and delete Season 5 off the DVR. It's just taking up space. And I'm running out of space. I did manage to get up off the couch and go to a Pie Party, which was interesting and fun. But otherwise, a whole lot of couch time. I also tried getting more cover art into iTunes. Makes things look prettier on iPod nanos. Watching MNF tonight with friends. Got an interview Wednesday for a part time seasonal gig at the Apple Store at Old Orchard (weekends only). And headed to Panama City, FL for a really long weekend on Thursday with Tracy and the gang. A couple things I forgot to mention. First, if you have a Java capable phone with a good data plan, get Google Local Mobile (http://www.google.com/glm) for cell phones. I use it with my cell phone, and it's amazing. Absolutely amazing. Oh, and I got Krispy Kreme for breakfast this morning, and the store down at 175 W. Jackson was absolutely empty at 8am. The Dunkin Donuts across the street? Packed. Not a good sign at all.

Haven't had that many people in my house in a long time. Good time though, kind of a disappointing game though. Not too exciting. I did force myself to clean up a little before people came over. Worked out well. Also managed to order up some pizza before anyone showed up, which I think was the better move. Gotta do some laundry tonight, especially since I'm going on vacation. And watched another episode of Alias after the game last night, which puts me halfway through the season, and then I got caught watching An Evening with Kevin Smith. Damn he's a funny guy. Seriously. Really funny. Had me laughing out loud funny. Especially when the audience doesn't get one of his comments. It's amusing. I had to turn the TV off before it finished, cause I just couldn't stay up till 2:45 finishing it. But Eric, you have a DVR, you might be saying. And to that I have no answer. I'm sitting at 70% full of Alias and Lost current seasons, and November sweeps arriving, and I'm leaving for vacation for a week. Which basically means I'll be skipping a bunch of stuff for the next two weeks. Not good at all.

Need sleep badly. It's bad when you can feel your body breaking down because of the lack of sleep. Really bad. I can just feel it. And it's not good. So I'm hoping I get lots of sleep on this vacation. Should be fun. But before that I've got to finish up another day of work, a part time job interview at Apple Store Old Orchard, and staying out at Tracy's. We're getting dropped off and picked up by her parents at the airport, which comes in handy when we have to be there really early in the morning. Makes sense in terms of cars, too, since there's no worry about my car getting a ticket in their driveway and I don't have to pay for parking. Otherwise, wish I could be watching even more TV. Alias Season 4 is definitely picking up, and I really want to figure out what happens, and I've getting tempted to read episode guides to find out. But I'll hold off. Otherwise, doubtful for any updates before next Tuesday, but I'll try and post pictures to my Flickr account.

Back from Panama City Beach, which is where we actually were. Good time. It was a couples vacation, 3 couples, Lisa and Ryan, April and Scott, Tracy and Eric. Good times. The only problem, I don't exactly remember what we did when, but I'll try anyway. No problems getting in on Thursday, flights were on time, tiny airport at Panama City, easy getting to the condo. Nice place. Oh, and I rented us a minivan, which was white, but was a little SUVish, a Chevy Uplander. It had a DVD player for the kids in the backseat, which never got used. Got to drive around and do some recon before anyway else pulled in, got some blue crabs for dinner, which was great. Finally tried out Steel Reserve, good stuff, somehow ended up in a pool later that night. Friday, not sure, but picked up April and Scott from the airport. I think there was beach time, and ended up at Hooters for dinner. Ended up being a pretty quiet night. Saturday was some indoor time, got some breakfast I think, or maybe that was Sunday, but tried to head out to Seaside, where they supposedly filmed The Truman Show, but ended up in Destin and had dinner and some drinks out there before heading back and trying to go clubbing at Spinnaker after playing some Mallet's Mallet. The club ended up being a bit of a bust. Sunday, a nice lazy day, watching Meet the Fockers, Napoleon Dynamite later that night after watching the sunset with wine, dinner at a Brazilian churrascaria and ice cream for dessert. Monday brought April and Scott out to the airport, finally made it to Seaside, walked around a bit, lunched at Cafe Spiaggia, then did some shopping at the factory outlets in Destin. Ryan made a quick little meal out of crab for us, and we settled in for a night of Hoopla, a Cranium variant. Good times. Tuesday spent a little time at the beach, finally made it into the water, tiring, played catch with a plastic bowl top, and started the long trip home. Got delayed overall about an hour. Got to sleep in pretty much every day, which was good, since I needed that. Got a little sun. Definitely got to relax. My first couples vacation turned out pretty good. Only thing, a spring break town in November pretty much shuts down. Bunch of places were closed for the season (like Papa John's) and there was a ton of new construction for condos and such. Not much in the way of radio stations. Also was a designated driver for pretty much the entire trip. But good. Probably going to be going on couples vacations in the future. But, back to the grind. Dogsitting Marla this weekend. And that's about it for the plans.

Well, specifically, not picked up. Arrested Development and Kitchen Confidential. Two really good shows. I wonder why I never watched AD before this year. It's really good. As for Kitchen, I hope it moves to the Food Network. It would be like Tilt being on ESPN. But besides that, not much. Picked up some Toaster Strudel for breakfast while looking for canned crab meat at Treasure Island. Finally got my Funyuns along with PBJ and chicken soup for dinner. Good, wholesome, wintery night meal. I got the craving since I walked home through a flurry. Oh, I forgot to mention that it's really cold out. Feels like winter. And the sucky part? It's not really winter. It's not below 0 yet. It's just the start. Also, just realized that Wicked must have extended it's run, since I thought it was ending around Thanksgiving but now runs through April 30. So I got Tracy tickets for her birthday, of course, they aren't until February 2, but still. Buying tickets 3 months in advance is a whole lot cheaper than the alternative. Even through Ticketmaster. Headed out with the boys tonight, maybe Duke of Perth, maybe a movie, we'll see.

Duke of Perth was good. As always. Such a great place. Good to see Russell and Whitney. Dogsitting for Marla this weekend, so I'll be in Bucktown. Making dinner with Tracy tonight, probably tomorrow night too. Hopefully getting lots of sleep. And also hopefully catching up completely on Lost and Alias, at least up to this year's season. Too bad I'm not completely in the dark on both of them, as some of the stuff that you just can't notice from commercials or headlines or websites, well, some of that stuff would have been surprising. Oh well.

Dogsitting Marla was good. She definitely missed her owners though. I just couldn't satisfy. Made dinner Friday night with Tracy, she had a craving for an Insalata Caprese and Potatoes Deluxe so we made that with bacon wrapped pork chops. Bacon is a bit of an insulator. We watched and finished off season 1 of Lost which means we can start plowing through the season 2 episodes on my DVR. I also finished off season 4 of Alias, so I started to do the same with season 5 on the DVR. I think I watch too much TV. I had to take some series off the scheduled recordings to make sure I had space for Lost and Alias, and well, I think I'll keep them off. So off my TV island is Everwood, One Tree Hill, The O.C.. I'll keep the sitcoms, since they're short. Hopefully this will open up some space for movies, since National Treasure was on Starz last night. Besides that, I got a seasonal part time job as a mac specialist at the Apple Store Old Orchard. I'll have to find out how that will affect any writing here. But just weekends through the holidays. I'm doing it for a little extra cash and to finally just work for Apple. Hopefully this is okay to say, but their job offer folder and paperwork is typical of Apple: high quality, understandable, just great. I'd have to say the most readable, understandable legalese I've read. So I had an intro and training Sunday night. First day is this Saturday. Should be fun and interesting. Oh, and it's Tracy's birthday today, so a happy birthday to her.

Went to visit Tracy last night at her place of employment, CVS in Calumet City. Didn't take too long to get there, and it's a pretty nice store. It was her birthday, and she was working, and it ended up being a pretty slow night for her, so I got to hang with her for a bit. I'll see her and her family Wednesday night for a little pre Thanksgiving meal before heading out to Woodstock for the big meal. Watched another episode of Alias and How I Met Your Mother. It's getting dry out. Should be drinking more water.

Finally all caught up on Season 5 of Alias. I'm just not buying into this season though. Probably just the idea of the changing of the guard, new faces, different conspiracy. I'm thinking they should have just done what Felicity did, ended after 4 years. They could have wrapped up a conspiracy, had a huge series ender, then started fresh, same concept, but new people, new direction. Oh well. Can't believe that it's in the 5th season though. Long time. Also watched an episode of My Name Is Earl. It's not laugh out loud funny, well, maybe it is, but it's definitely quirky humor. For me, it's surreal humor. Also caught the last half or so of National Treasure. Good clean fun there. I also moved some furniture around, just the bedroom for now. I'll have to clean out the Data Center before anything else moves, since there's so much crap in there. And I figured out that Calcium takes Airport Express and not just plain Airport. So that's more stuff I need to get. Headed out to Tracy's tonight for a pre Thanksgiving dinner and then out to Woodstock for the big day tomorrow, and back in to the city since I have to work on Friday. So after catching up on Alias, my DVR's down to under 50% utilization. Nothing but Lost on it now.

Odd how much hotter it gets indoors the colder it gets outdoors. Got to meet the last remaining brother in Tracy's family Wednesday night. Made the drive out to Woodstock while using Aluminum to listen to holiday music. That was pretty sweet. Makes me think of putting a mac mini with a small touch screen for in car music. Just infinitely more customizable compared to an iPod. Good food by my mom for Thanksgiving, except she tried a handful of new recipes, which were all pretty good, except for the dressing, not a fan of the dressing. But it was a little sad to not have certain traditions, like meatballs and chicken wings for appetizers, and pumpkin bars for dessert. But still, very good. Got a chance to iChat with my brother, got to sleep in which was needed, and got to play with my godson. Traffic was bad coming back in to the city last night though, because people don't seem to understand what iPass only lanes are. First day at the Apple Store tomorrow, should be good.

Working on the weekends. Actually, I like working retail. At least at Apple. Go figure. I think that's all I can say. Otherwise, did a bit of clean up around the house Friday night, which is good, just baby steps. Started watching the second season of Lost with Tracy on Saturday night. Good stuff. Sunday night did my first ever multi person video iChat with my family. That was pretty cool. I made my parents host because I think I had issues being behind a firewall. I'm not sure of course, but it worked when they did it. Pretty sweet, except the quality isn't great. There's probably a bunch of settings in there that I need to work with. Probably some more info I need to verify. But still, pretty sweet. Actually, more along the lines of awesome. Headed out to see Tracy tonight and go out, to a movie, which haven't happened in a while. Going to see Just Friends. That Ryan Reynolds, he's a funny guy.

Just Friends was pretty funny, in spots. It did, however, take place in my timeframe though, which was odd. Graduation from high school in 1995. And a then and now type of situation. And my then and now isn't quite so drastic. Got to play a little bit with Tracy's new RAZR. Interface is so completely different than my cell phone, but then again, I've only had a Qualcomm before switching over to Sony Ericsson. But managed to send over some ringtones over bluetooth, both from my phone and Aluminum. Pretty sweet. I didn't know RAZRs were supported by iSync. Got a decent amount of sleep. I know it's bad when 6 hours is considered a decent amount. I forgot to mention I'm totally on a holiday music kick. From the computer, on the iPod, on the radio via 93.9 The Lite, which switches to an all holiday music format for the season, I'm all about the Christmas music.

Amazing the things that happen on the internet. Seriously. Anyway, caught up on some recorded TV last night. I'm almost ready to write off Out of Practice, it just isn't that funny. How I Met Your Mother on the other hand, well, it's rising on the charts. Funny. Out loud funny. "But what about the pineapple?". Funny. Las Vegas continues to entertain as well as Grey's Anatomy. And I'm down to 44% space taken on the DVR. Sweet. Did a little bit of reorganizing of my backups of Aluminum using Backup. It's pretty sweet. Makes it super easy. Also decided to do a little inventory of hard drives. Need to reorganize, especially since I got rid of those Eye TV 500 recorded seasons from last year, tends to open up the amount of available space. So now I just need to figure out how best to set things up. And Nitrogen rocks. G5s rock. So much better then all the 1 GHz G4s I have hanging out. My computing experience at home has been so 2003.

Wow. Last month. December. 31 short days until 2006. That's a little crazy to think about. I guess I'm starting some New Year's resolutions early, which I like to do, it beats out any rush. But I started cleaning out the data center. I've got a whole big box of dead tech, stuff I don't use, but can't bring myself to throw out, thinking that someday I might be able to cannabalize it for parts or something. I also had a bunch of old boxes of tech things I never threw away, like the original iPod box. Used to be silver. And the same size as an iSight box. Actually, I wonder if they are the same size? Also managed to free up some drawer space in crafts closet. I'm contemplating trying my hand at a podcast, well, more along the lines of just speaking my musings, because I tend to think some of them sound pretty good if read out loud. But that would be just for me, so maybe not.

Sort of working two jobs this weekend. I'm on call for Market Track, and working nights at Apple Store Old Orchard. Sweet. Hopefully nothing will go wrong at the former, and I can catch up on sleep and finish up organizing the data center. Was out in the 'burbs last night with Tracy. She's got curls. I'll post a picture once I get a decent one of her. She looks good. Different. But good. We went to Champps for dinner and wandered around Target for a bit. Then we updated her iPod nano. Coolest thing which probably has been around in iPod technology for a while, but smart playlists work with live updating on the nano. That's really cool. Should make it easy for her to weed out the songs she doesn't like. Cause 4 GB isn't that big. Market Track Holiday party this evening. Gonna try and head out to Bandera for dinner afterwards. And sleeping. That'll be good.

Worked nights at the Apple Store due to being on call for my other job. Means I got to close, which isn't too bad. I kind of like it. Otherwise, got to spend a little time with Tracy Friday night, but called it an early night. Saturday watched some TV before heading in to work, and the same thing on Sunday. Fairly uneventful. I did get Nitrogen hooked up to the Eye TV 500 and after doing a scan on cable channels, I've got a ton that come in, which is impressive. So I tried out using the iMac G5 as a TV, and it's great. I think I'm going to move it into the bedroom, so I can actually watch TV in bed, movies too, so now I'm looking into 5.1 speaker systems with built in Dolby Digital decoders. I think the Logitech Z-5500 Digital is the winner there. Also means a slight change in furniture arrangement. It's cold out. And that's all for me. I did forget to mention at least one laugh out loud TV ad I saw recently. It's the one where some guys talk him into a pickup game which he then absolutely controls and destroys the ordinary guys, and after the game, shuffles over to the bench and takes off the jersey revealing a weight vest. Laught out loud funny.

Really need to sleep more. But there's always something that can be done, some tweaking, some modifying, some editing. There are always things on list that remain undone. And I'm still fighting the battle between sleeping and doing something. I should have chosen sleep last night. Instead, I spent an extra 30 minutes or so trying to figure out which channels the Eye TV 500 picks up from cable, since it doesn't pick up that info from the stream. Should have just slept. But got to hang out with Russell and Bryan. Been a while. Went to Fox & Obel for a snack and then watched Aeon Flux. Not a bad movie. Great premise, but the scientist in me had some issues with the resolution. And of course, the fight scenes were filmed all close up and jarring, so couldn't quite see what was going on. I guess I should give up on the hope of seeing US action movies where I can see all the action.

Caught up a little on the recorded TV Shows. Grey's Anatomy was alright. I definitely feel like George is getting the short shrift. Then Las Vegas which was bad because someone at NBC Chicago forgot to flip the switch to broadcast in HD so I got stuff with SD widescreen. But Arrested Development was great, too bad Charlize Theron finished her run, and I'm a little disappointed Dave Thomas didn't get more to do. And the crown of the evening was watching Kitchen Confidential. Seriously. Right up there with How I Met Your Mother for best new show for me. Funny funny stuff. I love the cast. The quick and quippy one liners. It's just funny. And it'll be gone soon. I really hope some other network, COUGH Food Network COUGH, picks it up. Really. I just browsed the official message board and a bunch of food service people have posted that it's a show they watch, for them, by them. Besides that I moved some furniture around again, moved Nitrogen into the bedroom. Not sure if it's gonna stay. Realized I have 3 Apple portable power adapters. No idea why.

Took the bus home from work the last couple of days. Why? Besides staying late at work so that traffic wasn't that bad, it was really cold. The El drops me off 4 or so blocks from home. The bus? In front of my building. It was all about minimizing time spent outside. And this time I had a good reason. It's cold out. Anyway, watched My Name is Earl and The Office last night. Not bad. Good, but no laugh out loud moments. Watched a bit of TV on the iMac in the bedroom. Fan's kind of loud though. Might be more interested in picking up an iPod since I can easily record then transcode a show to iPod format with Eye TV. And Christmas is coming up... Having the Cases over for dinner tomorrow. Brought Puck in for a checkup, took the Metra down and probably end up taking it up. Easy schmeasy.

Snow. Lots of it. Fun. So took the Metra back up to E-Town, but ended up on an express, so had to backtrack from Davis down to Main via the Purple Line and then picked my car up. No problems with Puck. Then I decided to drop by the Apple Store to see what my weekend schedule was. Not up yet. So I drove home via 41. Nice and slow going. But fun. I like driving in weather like this. Slow, a little slippery, but fun. Wish I found a big empty parking lot to do some donuts in. Anyway, things I noticed driving home, a handful of just parked cars on the road. No hazards. Noone inside. Just sitting there. In the left lane of a two lane road. Requiring traffic to go around. At least 3 on the way home. Weird. And the other thing I noticed? A Mercedes-Benz, stuck on Inner Lake Shore, not in a snow bank, just spinning tires in the snow that was on the road. That everyone else was driving through no problem. That was funny. And one last thing I noticed? SUV pulls out in front of me and just spins the tires. Doesn't seem to take the foot off the pedal. Just seemed like the driver had no idea what to do if they lose traction, just to keep putting on the gas. Anyway, watched Alias last night too. Just a funny funny episode. Little disappointing with Jack though. Cleaned a bunch this morning, since Tracy and I are having the Cases and the Russells over for dinner tonight.

Starting this week I'm gonna try and start waking up earlier and going to bed earlier. After that happens, I'll actually try going to the gym in the mornings too. Don't want to try too much right away, wouldn't want to get sick, since it is the season. Dinner Party on Friday night went well, even if it was without dessert. Mimosa cravings led to Black Velvets which are really tasty. Good time just around the dinner table. Saturday had lunch with my parents, big thanks to them for all they've done. Then work up at Old Orchard, and Tracy came with to do some Christmas shopping of her own. Which means I got to meet her for my food break. Had a Black and Tan when I got home, just a craving. Not sure why I consider Guinness a winter beer. Just makes me think of fireplaces. Sunday, more work, and started watching Veronica Mars Season 1 on DVD. Doesn't seem to pull me in as much as Alias or Lost did on DVD. But I'm still pushing through previously viewed episodes. A piece of home theater equipment broke down on me though, the component video switcher doesn't seem to be working anymore, which means I had to rework the connections. I think I might finally take out the VCR which seems a little pointless to have now.

Finally got a haircut last night. Tracy apparently had had enough, and we stopped at Supercuts before dinner at Harrigan's Brewery Company. So that's good. Dinner was also good, we shared a beer flight. I guess I just like stouts now. Also decided that Tracy should just have her own account on Aluminum so that she can have her own iTunes playlists for syncing with her iPod nano. So, moved all the music files over to the shared user folder, put proper permissions for a group we're both in, and some perl magic to change file locations in the XML file and some time to rebuild the library, and presto, two separate iTunes libraries with the same set of music files. Oh, probably should turn off letting iTunes organize the music folder, cause then files could be lost between the two. Anyway, it should work until she gets her own machine.

Nice quiet night at home last night. Finally got around to making that Beef & Guinness Stew, but that took too long for dinner so made fried rice instead. The whole new iTunes setup worked like a charm. Which is good. Watched some Arrested Development. Watched a little bit of Day After Tomorrow. Pretty quiet. Had some trouble again pouring a Black and Tan. Not sure what the deal is with that. Supposed to snow again today, but now they're thinking otherwise. Nothing else planned for the evening. Probably headed out tomorrow night with Russell to see Good Night, and Good Luck.

Installed an internal Bluetooth card in Nitrogen last night. iMac G5s were made for Bluetooth. It looks so great with no wires. And now I'm thinking of keeping Nitrogen in the bedroom since I'm no longer bound by wires at the foot of the bed because of the keyboard. Like this morning, I reach over to the nighstand, flip on the Bluetooth mouse, wake up the computer, and SportsCenter is on. It's great. Granted, I'm not sure exactly where to put the antenna, so it's just routed next to the airport antenna, which is probably a bad thing. I forgot to mention that I watched the 720p HD trailers for Poseidon and The Da Vinci Code on the iMac. Sweet. Anyway, caught up a little on my TV watching and had some leftovers for dinner. Finally came up with a design scheme for the web site I'm building for my dad. Links when I'm done with it. So after finally coming up with a design, it's just the nitty gritty detail work that's left. Oh, and probably going to Piece for their New Year's Eve party.

Trying something new. Good Night, and Good Luck was pretty good last night. And while I might knock it and the Landmark as artsy-fartsy intellectual, it's good stuff. And maybe my long self imposed hiatus from the indie film arena will end. Probably. Ended up at a busier Thursday at Duke of Perth than Russell and I have seen in a while. Looked up some info on Christmas presents, having to decide between walking up to a brick and mortar store or ordering online. It's starting to get to the point that shipping and handling might make up the difference in savings. Not to mention the ease of return policies. Anyway, working as usually at the Apple Store this weekend, got a holiday party thrown by some of Tracy's friends at the Brownstone Tavern & Grill Saturday night, and going to see Ryan perform at Comedy Sportz on Sunday.

Not a bad weekend. Tried to catch up on sleep. Did okay except for Saturday night. Finally got around to doing a full backup of my music on Friday night. Also scanned all my DVD covers using an iSight and Delicious Library. Awesome. That was after picking up Tracy's Christmas present (Bluetooth headset). Don't worry, we exchanged gifts on Saturday, since my gift (A nice framed French ad print from Art.com) got delivered Friday night. So that just needs to get hung up, not sure where yet though. Had brunch on Saturday at HB which was pretty good. Saturday night headed out to that holiday party, which was pretty fun, except that it was freezing out, and I had to open the next day. So not much sleep, and probably a bit of a hangover, I made it to work. Then got to see Ryan's improv class perform on Sunday after work, and we all got dinner at Durkin's around the corner. I think I need to do some laundry, and I need to start the exercising again.

Tuesday. Huh. Should have done laundry last night, need to. But laundry room was full between 7-8 and I really didn't want to stay up too much later than 10. But it ended up that I stayed up really late anyway. I was definitely really really tired. Way too tired. And I was worried I might be coming down with something. Maybe a cold, maybe the flu. I did finish up watching Going the Distance, a Canadian Road Trip. It's still freezing. Oh, and my favorite pair of jeans died on me. Finally ripped. Got to replace those.

Watched Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire yesterday. I thought it was pretty good, but some of the criticism that I've heard, that Dumbledor's character is out of place I find true. I do miss a bunch of the subplots, which means I'll try and read the series again soon. Otherwise, found out my schedule for the weekend, which is just working the day on Christmas Eve, which is good, because I then don't have anything to do the day after Christmas. Much needed and desired day off from any type of work. And hey, Christmas is right around the corner.

Got some sleep on last night. Serious sleep on. Asleep before 10. It was awesome. Wish I could accomplish that every night. Finished off some leftovers for dinner. Got another salad from Cosi for lunch. Trying out eating healthier foods. Figure it's about time. Trying out various fruit parfaits. I like the one from Corner Bakery, but not so much the one from Cosi. Not sure what other places I've left to try for breakfast. Hard to believe Christmas is in a couple of days. Headed out for dinner with Tracy and her brother tonight. After working tomorrow headed out to the Walls for Christmas Eve and then spending the night out in Woodstock. I think going to Auntie Luz's for Christmas Day, and then probably back into the city. Tried to do laundry last night, but the laundry room was surprisingly busy. Times like this I really wish I had a washer/dryer in unit.

Friday night headed out with Tracy and her siblings for a holiday dinner at the Canoe Club. Good stuff. Watched a little bit of Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place on DVD (another Christmas present). Work wasn't too bad on Saturday, definitely still a little busy. Went to the Walls for Christmas Eve dinner, an old co-family tradition, and got to see Jason and Chris, both of whom I haven't seen in a pretty long time. Good to see them. Just good all around. We then made it to midnight mass at St. Mary. Got to sleep in on Christmas Day before heading out to Auntie Letty's for food and family. Then back into the city for more food and some couch time with Tracy, watching The 40 Year Old Virgin and a couple episodes of Lost (now only 2 episodes behind). Didn't get to sleep in yesterday, ended up doing some work for work since I was on call. Watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Aviator, and started Spartan before heading out early to get dinner by Tracy. Watched some more Two Guys and a Girl before heading back in for an early night. So still got lots of stuff to do, not too much time to do it, and back at work.

Not too much going on. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it, but this is the first time in 5-6 years that I've been around Chicago for the holidays. It's weird. Not a whole lot of cars tooling around. Traffic is pretty much non-existent on the way in to work. Another odd thing about this holiday season: bad weather. As in bad holiday weather. Rain and mist and fog between Christmas and New Year's? Not right. No white christmas. No snow. Just not very cheery at all. Anyway, had a craving for baked beans last night, so satisfied that for dinner. Actually did some exercising as well last night. Gotta start somewhere. And I've started filling out the Memex again, specifially those items that are linked to that haven't been created yet. And of course, it gets me thinking about trying to engineer a new version myself, just so that I can add object typing. Would make it easier to pull relevant information out. For example, if I could create a Person object that would have address information, it would be arbitrary to create a script to pull that info out for me. Anyway, add that to the list of projects that I'll never get accomplished.

Week's almost done. And then another 4 day work week after this one. Very nice. Got 3 shadow boxes from Marshall Fields last night, 90% off, so I just had to get them. Not sure what to use them for, or where to put them, since they're kind of deep. Can't really just put them on any wall, cause they'd stick out too far. Tracy and I had dinner at Cosi. We actually got served, by a waitress, which I didn't know happened at Cosi. Got the Italiano (which I'd link to if the Cosi site wasn't just a big flash file). Had a craving for Mrs. Fields cookies, but never got around to satisfying that. Really need a charcoal grey sweater since I never replaced the one I left on the bus so long ago. Forgot to mention yesterday the other thing that bugs me about the holidays: the ending of all things Christmas immediately after the day. No music, the decorations start coming down, all of it. Basically I just miss the Christmas music. Oh well, just have to wait until next Halloween or shortly thereafter. And since the New Year is upon us, I really need to figure out how to get OS X Server up and running with email so I can start using Mail.app instead of mutt. Figure it'll be 2006, so it's about time.

Most likely the last post in 2005. Retrospective? Maybe. Watched D.E.B.S. and Mr. 3000 with Russell last night, getting gyros from Express Carry Out around the corner. Finally finished up Wicked. Working at the Apple Store this weekend. Going to Piece for New Year's Eve. College football at my place on Monday when Notre Dame takes on Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl. And that pretty much wraps it up.