Happy New Year's!
January 01, 2008

I just wanted to wish a happy 2008 to everyone!
This little guy baked us New Year's Cookies... but James turned into 7lbs of Chocolate Pudding!

Merry Christmas!
December 24, 2007

Turkey Day Survival
November 23, 2007

Yet another Thanksgiving down. This one was particularly brutal thanks to Emily having agreed to take care of her brother's toddling-baby and two children. Oh the terror. The Wii was toppled by the aggressive child and the papercraft Weighted Companion Cube that Draz made was demolished by the toddler. Note to self: No babbies in the office. I am truly sorry for the lots of the Weighted Companion Cube, but sowain staine mother. Thankfully it's all over now - there. I have given thanks.

Mike has also gotten me to start playing Dungeons and Dragons: Online and I'm enjoying it so far. We played together on Wed. night until my character reached 2nd level. Sadly, we both had to go to bed. So I've been solo'ing my character for awhile and I'm almost third level. I'll probably try grouping tonight and see how that goes.

Oh well, off to work now. Hopefully you all had a good turkey day!

Avast! It Be Talk Like a Pirate Day! Argh!
September 19, 2007

It's time to get those ramshackle *IAA execs in a twist. Today is talk like a pirate day! You can easily celebrate this holiday from your cubicle by simply uttering "Argh" every five seconds. People will even think that you're incredibly busy!

Don't forget, by celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day - you're not only supporting Pastafarianism, but you're also helping to fight global warming! So, do your part and celebrate heartily!

Happy Sysadmin Day!
July 27, 2007

Today is Systems Administrator Appreciation Day! It's a day to give thanks to your humble, or sometimes not so humble, systems administrator[s]. We work hard and diligently to ensure that all of our users have access to the resources that they need to get through the day. We're the ones keeping your Internets unclogged, keeping your mail working, making sure that Google doesn't suddenly poof in a puff of clustered-hard-disk failure and keeping your business-critical networking infrastructures working flawlessly.

So, everyone take a minute to thank the person most directly responsible for maintaining your systems. Buy them a nice root beer or a round of pizza - celebrate the guys keeping your business alive in the Internet age!

For me, I want to give a big thank you out to the admins over at Citescape for keeping our Internets up and running smoothly as well as all of the extra support that they've provided over the last year or so. I'd also like to give a nice shout-out to the admins over at ipHouse for keeping their network infrastructure rock-solid allowing us to run our web-app without any issues.

Happy President's Day!
February 19, 2007

Happy President's Day everyone! I'm celebrating by studying for my FIRE exam this afternoon. Oh joy of joys!

What the Hell Tiger?
November 24, 2006

So, I'm doing a little Black Friday ad browsing and I surf on over to Tiger Direct's website hoping to find some stuff that isn't sold out. Now, Tiger Direct has historically bad pricing and hardware quality... but this takes the cake for crazy marketing.

AMD Athlon 64 FX Dual Core w/ Fan & FREE Far Cry Game [source]

Now, Far Cry is game that's somewhere around five years old. It doesn't even run correctly on modern nVidia cards - but here it's being touted as an amazing dealbreaker to get for free! Considering that the price of the product is around $600... I don't believe that something so small as a five year old game could even be fathomed to break the deal.

Hah, Tiger Direct - you make me laugh.

Happy Thanksgiving!
November 23, 2006

It is Thanksgiving! Day of great consumption of mass quantities of food. I was originally going to say "mass quantities of food and family", but cannibalism is wrong umkay?

Of course /b/ decided that it was not good enough that it was both Thanksgiving and Literthursday... it has been rebranded as Catsgiving! Thus, MORE CATS!

Happy Thanksgiving!
November 22, 2006

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! It's a holiday about filling yourself to the brim with the beautiful harvest of the season. While America doesn't really have seasonal food anymore (I want the produce section to change damnit!) - we still celebrate with the traditional turkey, sweet potatoes and green beans. So guys... what are you doing for Thanksgiving? Hanging out with the family? Meeting with your parents? Making a gigantic dinner? Or warming up some Stoufer's Turkey dinners? Do tell!

Me? I'll be hanging out w/ Emily's parents in the morning for a visit to Palmer (a small town, one restaurant, one bar and one church. Oddly enough, it has the best prime rib in the reachable St. Cloud area). Then I'll be heading over to my parents' for my Dad's scrumptious cooking. Yes, he's more of a foodie than me.

Then I'll be heading home to configure one of my local machines as an OSX based server. I tire of having my files spread across three hard disks on an aging Athlon 700 with a shiny new Celery 2.1Ghz(or so) Dell sitting around doing nothing but wishing for a new monitor. The solution? Try to get OSX to support RAID! Oh... erm... you know... this is a friend of mine that I'm fantasizing about. You can't run OSX on hardware that costs less than 2 grand... no-siree-bob... too much hassle, nobody would do it. That's why Apple doesn't sell OSX86!

Birthday!
October 14, 2006

Well, yesterday was my birthday - hence no updates. I was quite busy and well entertained! There was McDonald's breakfast delivered by my wife, lunch at Mongo's with some friends, tasty lobster dinner (w/ teryaki wings) at my parents' and top shelf liquor provided by my wife. All 'round good fun.

Happy 4th!
July 03, 2006

I probably won't be posting again until Wed., since it's coming up on the 4^th here and I'll probably be doing holiday like things. Emily and I will probably spend the day split between our families, eating mass quantities of seared meats and blowing things up with Chinese inventions.

How will everyone else be spending their 4^th?