Within Rafael

Me via Flickr

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:46:35 GMT

morgan posted answers to a set of questions, based on Flickr results, and it came out pretty fucking awesome. Here's my attempt, although it's not as visually stunning as her's! :(

1. rafael, 2. Who called me chicken?, 3. Nice Dig!, 4. . dreaming, 5. Keira_Knightley_arthur4, 6. All a Blur, 7. Future and the past, 8. 4 New Flavoured Ice Cream Plush Toys from Chocolate Log, 9. untitled developer still life, 10. Manchester UK Flickr Meet..XII..14 Sep 2008, 11. Synchronicity, 12. DSC_3998

Microphone battle.

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 01:53:47 GMT

morgan got her microphone somewhat working this evening. Hahaha, she's so cute. Maybe it'll work better if she recompiles her kernels or something...

Hilarious little phrases

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:31:37 GMT

Corporate environments are perfect for unproductive email transmission. Today, a piece of junk mail landed in my lap with some admittedly hilarious quotes:

My tire was thumping.
I thought it was flat
When I looked at the tire...
I noticed your cat.
Sorry!

Heard your wife left you,
How upset you must be.
But don't fret about it...
She moved in with me.

Looking back over the years
that we've been together,
I can't help but wonder...
'What the hell was I thinking?'

Congratulations on your wedding day!
Too bad no one likes your husband.

How could two people as beautiful as you
Have such an ugly baby?

I've always wanted to have
someone to hold,
someone to love.
After having met you ..
I've changed my mind.

I must admit, you brought Religion into my life.
I never believed in Hell until I met you.

As the days go by, I think of how lucky I am...
That you're not here to ruin it for me..

Congratulations on your promotion.
Before you go...
Would you like to take this knife out of my back?
You'll probably need it again.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Dad!
(Available only in Tennessee , Kentucky , Arkansas , West Virginia & of course Chunchula )

Happy birthday! You look great for your age.
Almost Lifelike!

When we were together,
you always said you'd die for me.
Now that we've broken up,
I think it's time you kept your promise.

We have been friends for a very long time .
let's say we stop?

I'm so miserable without you
it's almost like you're here.

Congratulations on your new bundle of joy.
Did you ever find out who the father was?

Your friends and I wanted to do
something special for your birthday..
So we're having you put to sleep.

So your daughter's a hooker,
and it spoiled your day.
Look at the bright side,
it's really good pay.

Hic. We played tonight. Hic.

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:49:23 GMT

Morgan and I got so wasted tonight, we a) looked like Orcs afterwards and
b) I passed out and was stripped down to my underwear. What the hell...

End of WoW weekend, normal life resumes

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 05:40:18 GMT

morgan and I just finished up another round of WoW. It was fun, but not as fun as it was Friday/Saturday. I fucked up royally and had to run to 100 different people across the map to turn in quests, which just burnt me out.

Sadly, time for a normal work week. Sometimes I wish my blog brought in enough revenue for me to stop working for a while. Blahhh.

Here are some pictures from this weekend!

Morgan and I just woke up, waiting for breakfast to finish cooking...

Morgan and I having a chat about potions and explosives...

No comment.

WoW, really? 4am?

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:09:37 GMT

Friday was an easy day at work, we went off-site to a customer meeting and got yelled at. Serves our management right, to be honest. After that, everyone was pretty much unmotivated and left for home. Hopefully management gets off their arse and does something about the 26+ pages of discrepancies they reported throughout the year. If my manager quits, I want to take his job and straighten this crap out...

Anyway, being so busy, morgan and I didn't really have time until Friday to actually relax and hang out. It was painful to wait. We agreed to a 'date' at 930pm and we were both very prompt. We fired up WoW and went around kicking everyone's arse who needed it, leveling up both of our characters to 10. Before we knew it, it was 4am. Whoops, time flies when you're having fun. Especially when you're playing with someone special. <3

I'm going down the engineer route w/ mining abilities and so far I can't build anything spectacular. morgan has already made me some kick ass potions and all I can give her in return is dynomite. Typical guy, eh? :P

Oh, if you're curious about that Murloc with some kind of annonying electrical ability? Yeah, he's was pwn'd.

I tried WoW, and I liked it (Kate inspired)

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:24:44 GMT

So as a result of not listening to morgan, I downloaded the en-GB locale of World of Warcraft, instead of en-US. Serves me right for not listening to teh geek girl... iojasfioasjdfioasdf!

Thankfully, after installing and applying ~~100~~ 3 patches, it worked just fine with her custom server. The initial learning curve was a bit steep, but the UI and hotkeys all seem to resemble the typical Blizzard game. Being a Diablo fan, everything just clicked into place nicely. I'm very surprised and can't wait to play again (we're playing as undead mages)!

Okay, back to keeping an eye on the Woot-off @ woot.com and chatting with morgan. Oh and work, yeah. That too. Cough.

Weekend summary, busted on Gaia Online

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:24:27 GMT

This weekend was quite fun actually. Everything I planned to do, of course, didn't happen. But that's the fun of weekends.

morgan, with her farm of servers, set up a dedicated Counter-Strike server so we can level up from noob to sorta-noob. While she did all the hard work, I was there for moral support, haha. Although he probably won't admit it, I spoke with jimmy and we're bffs now. Shh, don't tell Morgan.

I always saw the spam ads for Gaia Online, but never thought I'd try it. morgan messaged me about it on Sunday and we went ahead and registered up, 400 gold yes! I'll try anything once, so why not? What a piece of crap. Nevertheless, we had our... "fun" with it and logged off. She has the incriminating evidence in her Scribbld post, if you're interested.

I woke up late this morning and got to work around 10:20am, oops. Although I know my manager doesn't particularly like me strolling in at these late morning hours, he has no choice but to keep his pie hole shut. They can't fire me -- I'm the only real developer here.

Just finished updating my time card, and wrapped up a project at work. I'm re-downloading WoW, en-US this time, to jump on Morgan's custom legit (cough) server. I'm interested to see what all the hype is about. Thankfully, I'm not Mr. Jerko anymore, otherwise this would be awkward.

Running to Harris Teeter to grab a sandwich.

Part 1: Not enough time in the day

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:40:05 GMT

Like morgan, I've been super incredibly busy with things spanning from my blog, emails, customer issues, engineer support, software development, and people trying to hire me for other stupid jobs. I like being busy, because it keeps my mind off other depressing matters, but this level of busy is just fucking unhealthy.

Anyway, I found these cookies at Giant Foods and other stores like Bloom (previously Food Lion) that look cheap and disgusting. They're labeled "deliciously moist" so I figured they'd be hard as a rock... but I bought them anyway and... they're the best sugar cookies I've ever had in my life. They're soooo soft. I'll get a picture next time so you all can flock out and get them. They tend to be slightly pricey (~$5.00) but for a dozen, they're worth it. For extra orgasms, put it in the microwave for 10 seconds. Trust me.

I can't even finish this post, people keep bothering. Look for part two tonight!

Weekend nears its end

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:59:40 GMT

Been a busy weekend.

Friday, a few co-workers and I went out to celebrate a birthday. Went from about 4pm to 11pm, oops. We had drinks, pool, and fun. morgan and I sent some emails back and forth, but she had to jump off to prepare for a local horse show of sorts.

Saturday was recoup. day, but that got interrupted by the mother. She wanted me to drive her all over the place in preparation for her travel on Sunday to New York to some funeral. Don't know or care about the details. While she was getting her hair done, I went over to BestBuy and pre-ordered Fallout 3. Also had a chat with a cutey at the register... but I promptly left. It dawned on me she's probably 15. LOL.

Late night Saturday I received some tidbits from morgan on her performance at the show so far. She managed to rake in places ranging from several 1st's to a 4th, which is pretty fucking impressive in my books. We chatted for like 30 seconds before I let her go sleep -- I think she was sleep-chatting!

I also spent most of Saturday night debugging a new issue that came up with iTunes 8 and Windows Vista computers. Apple deployed a newer USB filter driver that seems to have caused a shitstorm. They rolled back the driver and quietly re-released iTunes 8, but a friend and I are trying to track down why it's crashing machines.

Sunday (today), isquiet so far. Parents left to New York for two nights while I take care of the dogs and sister. I spent a good chunk of time doing some work to make up hours that I've been dragging ass @ work. Just going to relax and prepare to speak to manager about going to PDC in late October because I may have secured a method to get out there. I'm excited. I need the time off.

Cute!

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:52:51 GMT

I think this is a rabbit, but I'm not sure... I had a long post but I hit spell check, it errored, then I lost everything... so I'm not in the mood to retype it.

Busy bee.

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:28:19 GMT

I haven't updated in a while, oops. Lets see...

Waggener Edstrom hasn't responded at all to my requests for Microsoft press-passes this year. As a result, I won't be flying out to the usual Microsoft conferences. It's a huge let down because these are the one times where I usually go out and actually have some fun. Fuck the Wagg'Ed team for accepting some no-name bloggers over me. Grrrrrrr.

I picked up Spore (super pricey edition) which is very deep and fun to play. I'm in total agreement with morgan that I wish the cell stage was longer... it's beautiful, just like the art book it comes with. Can't wait for Fallout 3 now!

My sister's birthday is the 30th. She draws like a super star, so I'm thinking of spending some clams on those drawing tablets for PC, but a real nice one that has the screen on the tablet. Unless it's like 1mil dollars. I need to price them first...

~~I received a package of undies from morgan today and they are awesome! I love the little heart shapes!~~

Work and life in general is progressing, I suppose. Nothing to write home about. I'll try to keep up this time, just been so busy with work, blog, emails, Facebook, and now Morgan's new hot-shit forums (http://discuss.tehgeekgirl.com)!

Oh, and I got cake batter and chunky monkey ice creams! Woot!

Okay, time to drive fast in the rain.

Friday is near, oh no.

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:11:42 GMT

This week went by fast -- pretty uneventful stuff.

Spore goes retail Sunday, so I'll be sure to pick up my pre-order at BestBuy. Tomorrow is a co-workers birthday, so we're taking the person to lunch at this local fire-oven pizza place. It's an amazing place with real local+organic-only ingredients. Yum.

Have no plans for the weekend, nothing new there. By now you should be noticing a pattern...

I think morgan 's boyfriend is back today, so that's great news for her. Hope she's much happier now as I think she's been kind of down the past few days.

Debian, Scribbld, and fucked Internets

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 05:17:29 GMT

morgan just finished walking me through step-by-step installing LiveJournal on a Debian virtualized box (VMware). Yes, it was as hot as it sounds (at least from my point of view). Haha.

Anyway, I wanted to have a development server to play with Scribbld code on, maybe a sign of 2.0 to come? At least it'll let me work on some fucked up CSS/HTML code that's been bugging the hell out of me.

As soon as we finished up, I lost access to my withinwindows.com, withinnetwork.com, and hotfixr.com domains. Mostly everyone can still access them, but I can't. I'm fucking irate. I'm ready to kill that little fucker of a high school drop-out that tripped over some cords at the data center I'm hosted at. !@#$%^&*().

Apologies for my language.

Probably the best fucking cereal, ever.

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 18:37:22 GMT

This morning, I couldn't make exactly what I wanted (eggs, sourdough toast, strawberries, etc.) so I resorted to a cereal I purchased last week.

I can't get enough of it, it's fucking awesome.

It has an organic blend of toffee, almonds, corn flakes, and is apparently made with bananas although I don't pick that up. Even though I've been growing an intolerance to 2% milk, I put myself through the suffering anyway. It's worth it.

Sadly, this is a Target exclusive brand. I'll need to find the closest Target because I see more of these in my future. They have a slew of other mixes that look just as orgasmic, so I'll have to try them.

Who said healthy foods can't be tasty? I'm sure I'll find out 5 years from now that it causes testicular cancer and made me infertile.

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:50:39 GMT

I was kindly invited by Learning Tree International to sit through one of their new beta courses for free, as long as I provide verbose feedback and such. Of course I took the offer (the cookies here rock). One of the interesting set ups here is the lunch. You run downstairs, fill out a request, and like magic it appears around lunch time.

Looking at the choices, pizza immediately won me over. Shortly after submitting my request, I fired up the laptop and started chatting to morgan. Of course, I told her I got some pizza from UNOs and she started abusively yelled at me. As a guy, I of course ignored her advice. Oops. <3

After arriving home yesterday, my stomach started rumbling and well.. let's just say I've been on the toilet since this morning. Fuck UNOs.

Mmm, cookies

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:41:39 GMT

I just got back from Lake Anna, some lake that feeds a local nuclear reactor... No, I'm not kidding. My manager's boss had a friend that let us (coworkers, myself, father, etc.) borrow some equipment (e.g. jet skis, tubes, etc.) to play with. And there I was thinking we were going to build sand castles :(.

I quickly hid my plastic bucket and shovel though. No one noticed.

Unfortunately, this place did not have Internets or cellular service, although it's odd my Mini Cooper's SIRIUS radio worked beautifully... Being detached from Mobile Facebook, I didn't get morgan 's messages until now! I'm sooo relieved she liked the cookies -- I was worried because guys have a track record for screwing shit up. Picture below.

Oreo cookies, dipped in various chocolates, with sugary designs and sprinkles.
Oh, and a just a dash of sugar.

EDIT: I'm trying to chat to morgan now but I think her Internets are failing again. Probably all that Mac shit on her network! :D *runs*

Happy Birthday Morgan!

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:11:28 GMT

Morgan's Birthday Prezzie!

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:47:16 GMT

I successfully sold morgan on the idea of letting me mail her a little something to celebrate her birthday. It's the least I can do for one of my favorite friends. Regardless of how crappy I feel, she's always there to brighten my day.

I reassured her there are no sea monkeys, alligators, or anything alive (that I know of) and that it's edible. Oh, and it's not ~~planet~~ plant related. Hope she likes it, I can't wait until Friday!

Case of the Mondays, Birthdays

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:11:18 GMT

My original plan last night was to go to bed at a semi-decent time, and I was on my way... until a friend of mine started sending me messages on Facebook. It was fun, but she fell asleep slightly before I did, so I won 100 free internets. Sadly I didn't go to bed until 4am. Oops...

This is the week of birthdays apparently -- Maarten's is today and morgan 's is Friday. I have both of their gifts picked out (not purchased though), thankfully, but the hard part is going to be convincing Morgan that I need her mailing address... and that I'm not some kind of stalker that'll peek through her window. I'd totally understand if she was reluctant to give that information up though. We'll see.

The world, through Morgan's eyes

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:21:29 GMT

(click to magically enlarge)

Happy hour, DRM status, non-existent weekend plans, etc.

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 04:57:59 GMT

Sometimes I'd rather be behind a monitor, figuring out the internal mechanisms of Microsoft Windows but... today, I enjoyed a happy hour with some co-workers. Had a few drinks, hit some pool, and watched some ~~jailbait~~ Olympic action too. Happy hours are good temporary distractions for how boring and uneventful your life may be, trust me on that one.

I dicked around with Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Media Center in VMware, but it started complaining about missing files, components, etc. I think it's really just bitching because VMware can't emulate or provide pass-through for complex graphic operations (like displaying video). I'll disassemble it later and figure it out but in the mean time I'm going to try some alternate approaches tomorrow while morgan and jimmy fix up (read: explode) their Scribbld network! Maybe I'll just copy the raw WMV files and let Media Player handling licensing? We'll see.

Other than the above, I don't have plans on the weekend -- don't usually do anyway. I'll hang out indoors, catch up on sleep, work on the above, and probably play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. until I get dizzy, due to the headbob effects, to keep occupied. There's nothing around here I'd venture outdoors for and I'm not the go-to-the-bar-and-try-to-pick-up-a-girl type.

Oh, and Tom @ Neowin shot me a note stating Windows Media Center "Fiji" leaked onto the Internet. Raise your hand if you give a shit! I didn't think so. Screw Windows Media Center, I'm waiting for my Popcorn Hour device to arrive so I can connect it to my HP MediaSmart NAS! >> http://www.popcornhour.com/ <<

Bed now.

Note to self: Need a picture of myself for magazine interview asap, grrr.

IT and email hell, weekend news, work work work

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:43:45 GMT

This morning, I fired up Outlook 2007 (I prefer Thunderbird but that's another story) and started going through my seventeen billion non-spam emails. While replying to a customer, I received this error.

Oh okay. Thanks Microsoft. I'll go looking for the dialog now, k?

Microsoft software tends to amaze me sometimes. To be fair, I did find the dialog. It was the dialog asking for my PIN to authenticate with my common access card (CAC) but shesh. As a developer, I find this shit embarrassing.

So in other news... morgan and I woke up late. It's funny because I woke up and felt as if I was up until 3am drinking and talking shit... well upon reflection I guess we did, minus the drinking... I am on a mission today to unDRM a bunch of Olympic coverage, we'll see how that goes.

Manager is annoying me today with his 25098230948524 questions. Usually it's limited to about 500, but today it's annonyingly excessive. Not sure why, but I think one day I'm going to bring a flash grenade into the office...

Play > Work, VBscript sucks #1

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:51:14 GMT

At work, I've been assigned to a project that requires me to wake up in the morning, come into work, work on WSF security scripts, then go home. Did you know VBscript doesn't have a simple fucking ternary operator?

C/C++ Example: raf == 1337 ? yes : no
Shitty VBscript Example: If raf = 1337 Then yes Else no

/slaps VBscript

Thankfully, today I spent most of the day jabbering and laughing my ass off (literally?) with Mac-geek morgan. Despite being a complete opposite, in terms of Fortune 500 company loyalty (Apple vs. Microsoft), she's awesomelicious! Fuck you, it is too a word.

Met up with the How-To Geek for dinner today, had a nice chat about how Chris Pirillo is a moron and how we'll rule the world (one day), if we don't destroy it first with our oil drilling and discarded bubble gum.

Tomorrow will be happy hour day with some folks in the office at the local pool hall. The tables and cue sticks suck majorly there, but it's fun for a while. Note to self: I must remember to get money from the bank as my credit card is acting wonky.