Within Rafael

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.