Well, traffic was light, well, almost non-existant, and since I couldn't take the 135 (not running because it's a holiday schedule), I walked down to Belmont to hop on the Brown Line. Anyway, tough being the only IT guy at work. Weekend was pretty busy, again, but with a fair amount of downtime. Friday night Tracy and I went to the Chicago SummerDance Festival, but that was too busy, like packed busy, so we watched from the edges before walking through the Taste of Chicago. We ended up at Hackney's Printers' Row instead of the Custom House, which seemed a little too fancy. Saturday cleaned a bit in preparation for new appliances, which got delivered and installed. Best new things? Air conditioners have remote controls, timers, and thermostats. Microwave has a turntable. First time I've had a microwave with a turntable. And the dishwasher door doesn't scrape against the wall when opening or closing. Pretty nice. So, with working AC units, have to find a time to finish painting, and then after that get the carpets shampooed. After that we wandered down Broadway for some shopping. I managed to finally get an under the cupboard wine glass rack. Dinner with my parents that night along with some family friends. Watched some Entourage as well. Don't like that Dom guy at all. And what happened to Sloan? Sunday after church drove out to the Naperville Rib Fest, afternoon naps, and leftovers for dinner while watching Underclassman. On the computer front, managed to get Portable Home Directories working on Aluminum, which I rebuilt, so now it's a matter of picking and choosing what goes back on.

Hard to believe it's already July. Monday night made some beef wellington type things with mushrooms and scallops. Tracy and I tried to watch the fireworks by heading out to the lake, but the trees got in the way. Next year should try from the rooftop deck, or stake out a good spot on the point around Belmont harbor. Tuesday, did 4 loads of laundry, watched The Jacket, lunch with Russell at Melrose Diner, watched the Germany-Italy World Cup Semi, watched Payback, tried to fix iSync issues with the rebuilt Aluminum. Need to figure out how I want to organize my Documents folder. Tonight headed to Taste of Chicago with Tracy. Definitely nice having real air conditioners again, as Russell can attend to. Just wish they had real thermostats that turned off the units, instead of just stopping the condenser. Oh well.

Apparently, I should be checking my mail all the time. I had set up direct debit for my condo assessment fees, but I believe at some point in the last 6 months, something changed, and I haven't been paying my assessment fees, or they haven't been withdrawing my assessment fees. And I was wondering how I was getting all this money in my checking account. But I had no idea, since I'm of the set it up, forget it type of guy. Until today that is. I finally head over to the post office to pick up some mail that has a return receipt required, and when I get it I think it's really stupid because it's from my building. But when I open it and see that it's about my non payment, I guess it makes sense that they'd require a return receipt. But still, couldn't they have slipped it under my door? Or called me down to sign for it at the front desk? Instead of having to drive down the street to the post office to get it? Really? But now I guess I need to open my bills all the time now. Go figure. Probably should have been doing that all along, instead of letting it pile up on the kitchen counter. Anyway, Taste of Chicago was alright last night, really busy, but not too hot, which was nice, actually it got kind of chilly as the sun went down. Nothing too special to write home about though. Headed out to Tracy's tonight, do a little work to see if we can get iChat up and running. Oh, and my condo building also finally has a newsletter, in which I've learned that we're switching cable providers, so come October, goodbye to RCN and hello to Innovation Installations Inc. I don't think the company actually exists, and the name seems a little sketchy to me, since the assessment checks are supposed to go to an office on 58 Innovation Way, but we'll be getting satellite service through Dish Network. This, in a word, is awesome. Their HD lineup is pretty stellar, and looks like all the locals, including UPN, is available, although with the CW coming up this fall, not sure if that's going to be an issue. And supposedly faster internet connections. All good things. Hopefully. If I pay my assessment fees.

Did some work on Aluminum last night, trying to get it back to webdev status, php, mysql, restoring my databases. All those fancy tools? Just use the command line mysql to load up the backup from phpmyadmin. Otherwise, just an average night on Tracy's couch. Going to get the assessment fee thing taken care of. That's not a problem. Brought Puck for an oil change, but probably won't pick it up till tomorrow, on the way out to Woodstock. Cause that's when my parents are meeting Tracy's parents for the first time. Should be exciting. Wedding planning starts in earnest now. Aside from that, nothing else planned for the weekend.

Well, the parents met on Saturday and seemed to hit it off pretty well. So that's good. Can take a sigh of relief. Not that I was worried, but it's nice that they've finally met and it went well. Even got some preliminary details hammered out. Probably south, southwest burbs, around Lemont, probably getting married at St. Alphonsus, reception looks like it'll be at a country club round those parts. Anyway, Friday night did some exercising, watched Primer, finally figured out how to use my Gallery for the side bar images, so goodbye to Flickr. Saturday, went and picked up Puck and drove out to Woodstock. Chipped around the house with those whiffle golf balls waiting for the Argaos to show up. Then lunch, lots of talking, more golf around the house with Tracy, then doggie bags and heading back into the city. Started looking at wedding songs. Sunday watched Finding Neverland, drove out to Oakbrook Terrace looking at possible reception places, like Drury Lane, Wyndham Drake, and others, then heading down to Tracy's neck of the woods taking a peek at Ruffled Feathers. Then we hit some balls at Mid Iron before dinner at Chili's. I did managed to get ahold of a couple of balls, sending them over 200 yds. That was awesome. Tried to fix an issue with tMac where it doesn't wake from sleep, which I thought I fixed by trashing the EnergySaver prefs, but it seemed to be a problem again after I left. Might try and play some tennis tonight. Oh, and got my assessment fee issue all taken care of this morning.

No tennis yesterday, didn't think the court was lit. Instead, Tracy showed me some work she did with Garage Band. Also, tMac is still not waking from sleep, and actually it shuts off during sleep, which is odd. Anyway, we went out for pizza instead of exercising, and I had a Capri Sun to drink. Watched some Food Network. Got gas and a car wash before heading home. Decided to watch The Longest Yard to make some space on the DVR. Alarm didn't go off this morning, or I turned it off while sleeping, so was late for work. And then getting some food for lunch my umbrella broke. Annoying. Just one of those days I guess.

Tracy and I managed to play some tennis on some slightly wet in spots courts yesterday. Tiring, yes. My New Balance 991s aren't very good for tennis. Keep forgetting that I have a pair of Adidas Sambas that I could use, or should use. Pretty good workout, especially since all the muscles for stopping and starting and sprinting and juking and jiving, well, those haven't been used since Paganello. Definitely felt it afterwards, especially the left knee. Keep hitting it high. No idea how to fix it. Can't serve to save my life, either. Leftovers for dinner. Watched an episode of Entourage. Oh, and the only part of the CTA fire that affected me yesterday was that bus traffic was slow getting out of the loop.

So, some work factors might be pushing me over the edge in getting a MacBook. And I just found out that Other World Computing has started selling 160 GB 2.5" SATA drives. Great. Like I need to spend more money. Tempting though. Very tempting. Like walk into a store tempting. And the Nike iPod thing got released today. Interesting. Anyway, caught up with AJ last night at dinner at Kamehachi. Fish was okay. Sake was great. Yum, sake. Boys are coming over tonight to spend some time in the Fortress of Solitude, which I guess is available for a limited time only now. Makes me think of having a last hurrah poker night maybe. Just for grins. Chicago weather has been pretty crazy, as usual, from the hot and balmy to the imitations of Frisco last night. Plans for the weekend are shaping up, looking at a couple more country clubs, playing some tennis, might even be hitting the links for the first time ever in my life. That'll be interesting.

Went back to the vault last night having Russell and Bryan over for a movie and chinese takeout. That definitely takes me back a couple years. Food from Canton Express, nice and quick. I guess it's been a while since I've used the credit card, cause I didn't remember the first four numbers. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Good because I'm not using it, or bad because the memory is going. Oh well. Still hoping to get phpBB up and running, and hopefully crossposting doses and musings to it, including all the old stuff too. That'll be interesting. Just don't wanna have to deal with bots and spam on the forum, that's all. Been reading up on NBA summer leagues, not sure why. Never have before. Interesting to see how all these draft picks are doing. Fairly entertaining.

Friday night did some running, ate some leftovers, watched The Brothers Grimm. Saturday went out with Tracy looking for possible reception locations. Cog Hill Country Club, no go. Bolingbrook Country Club, a definite possibility. Seven Bridges Country Club, great location but too small. Bobak's Signature Events, big enough, but too conferency. White Eagle Country Club, poorly laid out ballroom. Then we got some Cold Stone, who is now selling milkshakes, and I've now decided to move on past cake batter onto something else. Then we saw Superman Returns in IMAX 3-D. Pretty cool. Great movie, the 3-Dish stuff was good, but not necessary. Great movie. Made some chicken Adobo for the first time for dinner when we got back. Super easy, and I'll be making more of it in the future. Sunday a pretty lazy day with just dinner at Angelina Ristorante after mass and some shopping. Definitely hot out, and I'm really glad I finally got new air conditioners that work. It's great to come home to a cool house that hasn't been cold all day wasting electricity.

Well, maybe, not so much, but definitely feeling, well, off. Wanted to go running last night but ended up on the couch. Issues with public transportation. 135 broke down in the morning on Roscoe, so I walked over to the Belmont stop to catch the Brown Line. Always nice to have working air conditioning. Then on the way home, took the el again, and watched an empty Purple Line follow a packed Purple Line. Crazy. And then the 135 this morning didn't have working air conditioning. I should just take the el on the really hot days. Anyway, stopped off at Radio Shack to get some contact cleaner to get my joystick working again on my cell phone. Kind of worked, as pressing down functions, but now moving right just selects instead. Ugh. Oh, and I picked up contact cleaner and lubrication, when I just needed contact cleaner, which apparently is sold more as an automotive product than an electronics product. Started watching Melinda and Melinda last night, which is pretty good. Tons of recognizable actors in that. And pretty good too. Tracy's going to take a look at Odyssey Country Club as another possible reception place today. I've got access to an EDGE pc card from work that I want to try out, but I'm worried that it's locked to AT&T Wireless/Cingular. Headed over to Bucktown tonight for movie in the park, where Whitney will be making an appearance, supposedly. Oh, and I've decided not to set up phpBB here, that's never been what the site was about, so why change now?

Really starting to crave a MacBook. Anyway, out in Bucktown last night, dinner with the Russells and Whitney. Then we rolled over to Churchill Park, next to the dog park, for Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Beautiful night out, got a little chilly, but I was able to wrap myself up in a blanket. Good to get out on the Russells' deck as well. It's nice up there. Also really good to see Marla. She looked good. Looking forward to dogsitting in August. Anyway, looks like I'll be getting soaked on my way home tonight, that won't be too much fun. I was thinking of stopping by the North Michigan Ave. Apple Store to play with the MacBooks some more, but now, I might just want to get home. Oh, finally checked my lottery tickets that I've been accumulating. I won! $12. Yay. Yippee. Anyway, I think Tracy and I have reserved the Bolingbrook Country Club for May 12 of next year for the reception. Still have to square away a church, but hopefully that won't be a problem. I did manage to look up previous years' weather on that day, kind of went hight 70's, mid 50's, mid 50's, high 70's, mid 50's, mid 50's. Not sure what the trend is for next year though. Really want a MacBook.

So, my K750i's joystick has been on the fritz for a while. Down stopped working, then after trying to clean it on Tuesday, right stopped working. Made me think about getting a K800i real soon now, instead of waiting for the K790a. But instead, I'm getting parts and going to try and fix the phone myself. If all else fails, I can just go back to my t68i until I order, probably, the K800i. But just have no idea when the K790a would be released. It's annoying, not knowing when I can buy something new. Also, I'll be getting a MacBook soon enough, as things have fallen into place as such. Hopefully anyway. Watched Shooting Gallery, well, had it on in the background as I tried to get mail services up and running on Argon. Which I did, kind of. Still not sure how fetchmail's going to work into the equation, oh, and my listservs are inactive for the time being as I figure it out. Managed to hang out with Tracy a bit before bedtime, and we watched a couple episodes of The Hills. Seriously. Why? I don't know. Really, why? I don't know. It's so bad. Really bad, but I couldn't turn away. Ugh.

Well, a MacBook is definitely in my future, near future, so that's cool. Might be selling Aluminum, not sure where or how, but if anyone's in the market for a 2003 12" Powerbook? I've got like 3 extra power adapters for it too. Anyway, might hand it off to Tracy. She made dinner last night, which was pretty cool, cause I just got home from work, and there was goulash on the stove. Sweet. Of course, I had to make dessert, so whipped together some tarts for the first time, since, October 15 of last year. Long time between tart making. I had to look that up in my archives, which reminds me that I want to implement url rewrites for better reading archive links, so hopefully stuff like eric.abando.com/2005/10 will actually go to October 2005. We'll see if that happens sooner or later. Taking the bus home definitely takes about an hour, which can get kind of annoying. Contemplating casual ultimate happy hour, but as of this minute, I'm leaning against it. Maybe next week. Definitely got to get some exercise and some laundry in this weekend.

Funny looking word. Anyway, that was me for the weekend. Lots of couch time, but then, with a couch like mine, do you really need to be anywhere else? Except that the weather was supposedly awesome out. Great. The big project completed over the weekend was getting email set up on Argon. It's pretty cool. Via IMAP, I can get all my email, which means I get to use Mail.app, which I'm pretty excited about. Still have to figure out SMTP though, since I'm pretty sure spam filters don't like emails sent out from an ISP user's machine (and that's Internet Service Provider, not Integrated Science Program). That also means I turned off Xenon, which is great. No more hard drive whine. I probably should have recorded uptime though, cause that guy just kept going and going. So the data center's pretty quiet now. I was thinking I should try and get a bigger hard drive in Argon, but I've got that firewire drive bay just hanging out, so I should just use that. I've also started importing my email archives to Mail.app, which should be an interesting exercise, considering my email goes back to '98. Just fun to have in a format that's easily searchable. Importing is a long process though. And Mail.app crashes more than I think is good. No listserving though. Not anymore. I should probably let the lists know, but nothing good's been going through there as of late, so maybe not. MacBook should be showing up on Friday, so that's something to look forward to. Especially to see if having a portable home directory has worked, which means I won't have to copy anything over by hand, which would be awesome. RAM and Hard Drive got delivered today, as Other World Computing continues to be awesome. Cleared out the DVR, watched The Interpreter (thriller that Sean Penn just had to be in), The Cave which was pretty good, but had a bad copy so ended up watching it almost live on Saturday, Memron which was interesting and background noise while working, and Rebound which was actually pretty good. Did some laundry too on Saturday. Sunday went out to the burbs for lunch with the Abandos and Argaos, (including Tracy's brother, Gabe, and sister-in-law Sanya, but not Tracy), at the Bolingbrook Country Club, which passed muster. Put a deposit down. Checked out the church where the ceremony will most likely take place, before heading back into the city for church of my own. Put some chicken and pork in Adobo marinade, and ended up watching White Girls.

Wow, look at that, click on July, or 2006, and it's a pretty way of getting to the archives. And surprisingly, not that hard to implement. mod_rewrite works wonders. The next step is to add individual days, so you someday in the future I'll be able to get to a particular day by using /archives/2006/02/17 for example. That'll be nice. So that was my evening last night. Did that while watching Proof, a pretty good movie about sanity and genius set at the University of Chicago. Pretty good view of the city, not anything too outrageous in terms of going down one street and ending up in another part of town in the movie. My only problem is them going down 55 to get to O'Hare, but that's not too shocking I guess, people might actually do that. Anything else? No, not really. Oh, I keep forgetting that my K750i is in pieces, waiting for a new joystiq and buttons, so I'm back to using the t68i, which actually works ok. But I do miss having a camera, nice screen, and more responsive UI.

Spent most of the evening last night adding keywords in iPhoto. I know, exciting, but I want to get it done before the MacBook gets here, because Keyword Assistant isn't a universal binary yet. Although, that's assuming iPhoto runs faster on my Powerbook than it does under Rosetta on the MacBook. Hmmm, good question. I did make some more Adobo last night, and when I left this morning the living room/kitchen still had the nice odor of garlic. I think that's why I wasn't cooking Adobo before. This time the sauce was pretty weak, too much meat and not enough, well, everything else. I'll keep trying until I get it right. Or consistent. One or the other. I did all that while What Women Want was playing in the background. Always a good movie. Just love the stuff filmed in Chicago. Always makes me happy to see. I think I'm headed to dinner with Tracy and Lisa and Ryan tonight, with the Cases back from Africa. Oh, and finally fixed an error when searching Musings and nothing matched. Funny how I didn't take care of that before. Funny how that doesn't show my programming skills all that well.

My K750i is put back together and working. That makes me happy. I got spoiled with big bright color screens and responsive UI. Probably means me getting a K790a is pushed out to the far future, as opposed to the near future. You know what else makes me happy, getting to see Tracy last night. It's been like 6 days since I saw her last, since she's been working nights and last weekend. We went to dinner with the Cases as Tilli's, a hip place in Lincoln Park. Not bad. Had to do some cleaning at home, more like rearranging of things again. Getting more boxes delivered, but not opening any of them until they all get here. That'll be exciting. I really wonder how much of a difference it's gonna be, from a 1 GHz G4 to a 2.0 GHz Core Duo. Also had some work issues to deal with and check on. As was bound to happen when the bosses go on vacation.

Got my MacBook yesterday. Pretty sweet. Haven't really done much with it yet. Just took some unboxing pictures, like everyone else out there, but when I tried using my cell phone to post the pictures, I remembered that I hadn't set up procmail on Argon yet. Which means no processing of photos sent by email. Whoops. I'll have to get on that. So, nice machine. Just letting it charge. Don't know when I'll find some free time to actually play with it some more though. Still have to upgrade the RAM and hard drive, which are both sitting in a box next to it in the data center. But just adding Argon as an LDAP authentication service, just a couple steps, and I was logging in as me, with all my documents, programs, and preferences. I do have to install some stuff though, like Quicksilver, but everything else is there. Awesome. And super simple. Anyway, I don't have time for it yet because we had to start prepping for Lisa and Ryan's going away party, kind of, at my place tonight. Tracy made a menu, we went grocery shopping, for at least the stuff we could get at Jewel, and I made Sweet and Sour Meatballs last night. Anyway, should be good. Also this weekend we're gonna try and hit up the Green City Market and Venetian Night, both of which would be first times for me.

Party on Friday night went pretty well. I think we had enough food for the handful of people that showed up. Didn't bring any food up to the sun deck, but we did eventually make it up there. Pretty nice, brought up speakers and a cooler. Saturday wandered over to Pick Me Up with Tracy, and Lisa and Ryan, who were houseguests, as they're in-between residences, sort of on their way east to Maryland. After a brief respite in air conditioning, we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest down at River East. I was disappointed with it. Doesn't make sense to me that it would make more than Spider-man in opening weekend. Just odd. It's also definitely the second of three, which means there ain't a whole lot of closure. Tracy and I then wandered downtown to wait for Venetian Night to start. We had an early dinner at Lizzie McNeill's Irish Pub, off the river. Who knew bees liked bacon? Anyway, we did some more walking around, looking at all the housing that's way too expensive, before heading down to find a spot to sit. Everyone else seemed pretty well organized for the festivities, while we only had the shirts on our backs, no blankets, no chairs, no picnic food. Didn't actually see many boats, but had a great view for the fireworks. Took the long way home, stopping at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers for a bathroom break and way too expensive cocktails. So much for my idea of hotel bar hopping. Sunday we eventually made it out to Lisa's Mom's house in Minooka, since they have a pool, for some swimming. We stopped at Oakbrook Center on the way out so Tracy could get a new swimsuit. Got to play some pool volleyball, which was fun. But that definitely tuckered me out, and I'm actually sore today. So that didn't leave any time to work on the new MacBook, which will probably happen some time this week and I'll end up staying up way too late playing with it. Can't change the inevitable.