Mike's Weblog :: Mike Neir's Page

After a couple of fun and enjoyable Thanksgiving celebrations, I've dropped back into my funk. I've seen tons of theories on how our body and personality goes through cycles of various lengths, so I figure I must be at the ass-end of all of my cycles right now. I'm tired, cranky, and have like, zero patience. These things are all great traits to posess when you're dealing with less than patient customers, which are often less than technically competent as well. It's also detrimental when you have a puppy that's following you around like, well, a puppy, constantly craving attention. I've never dealt well with 'clingy' things, be it people, animals, or objects. I need space, especially when I'm in moods like this. Having a dog yapping for attention every two minutes defintely doesn't bode well for my space requirement. It also doesn't help when you're greeted to a ringing phone the instant you clock in on a monday morning, with a person complaining about your personal workplace nemesis - email problems. Yes, email is nice and convenient, but people, please realize that you can live for a few hours without email. The first email call was bad enough, but the next two calls in a row were both about email. The other ten or so calls about email totally pissed me off, and that mood didn't really lift until this afternoon. Grr.

Not much else to talk about... I've beat Half-Life 2 a couple of times, and the ending is kinda of anti-climactic. I've been renewing my relationship with Counter-Strike though, which is good and bad. I was pretty much addicted to CS for a long time, and only since I've moved up to Lansing have I really stopped playing it. Well, the newest version of CS based on the Source (HL2) engine, and it's really sweet, so I'm playing again. Oh well. The fact that I need to set up my laptop to play keeps me from playing too often. I'm also trying to quit Mountain Dew again. I kicked that habit for a few months last summer, but then I worked my first midnight shift. My triumph turned to tragedy and I had relapse. Hopefully I can kick it again. I've been clean for two days!

My dad sent me this image the other day, and I had a good laugh over it. Hopefully you will too.

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economially feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

In short, it was brief. I took a couple days off work so I could head up north with my sister and a few of our cousins. It started off well, although a bit on the chilly side.

I slept until noon on thursday, which was a welcome change from 6am. It was just David, Marty, my sister and myself there, and we had fun swimming in the waves that the wind was kicking up. Kinda neat how something so simple could be so fun. Beth and Carl got there thursday night, and we took our liberties in the beer consumption.

Friday was a bit colder, so swimming became much more of a chore. The water was fine, but the combination of wind and cold air made the body pretty cold. So instead of being outside, we all crowded around inside and had more beer! Oh darn. Carl's friend Ethan came up friday night, and was followed by Steve and Brandy. The beer consumption continuted unabated. Ethan and I had each brought up guitars, so we jammed a bit. It was cool. Ethan is pretty damn good. We're kind of opposites in the way we learned things... I learn whole songs and play them, but I'm pretty weak when it comes to improvising and making up my own stuff. He does just the opposite - he learned all the scales and plays mostly improvosational stuff, and he's quite good. Jamming was fun.

Saturday morning we got the bad news that Dickens had died. Stacey was pretty indecisive about heading home, but I knew that it was the right thing to do. We packed up shop pretty quickly and headed home. When we got home, we buried Dickens in the back yard next to where we buried all of our other pets. He was such a big dog that it took both my dad and I along with a neighbor to get him situated in the hole we dug. My mom was a wreck. She loves her dogs almost as she loves the rest of us, so seeing Dickens go so early really hurt her deeply. The rest of us were quite sad too... Even dad, whose interactions with Dickens mostly ranged from tripping over him to yelling at him for begging at the dinner table, was affected. It was a sad day. :(

I spent most of sunday installing Gentoo on my main workstation. I'm trying to sever my link with Windows as much as possible. I also started coming down with a cold sunday, which added more suck to a sucky weekend.

I spent most of monday finishing up the Gentoo install and migrating stuff over from Outlook and the like. Getting all of my stuff migrated will likely take a while, but I got some of it done. I have to say that Linux is pretty sexy on a dual CPU/dual monitor system. Lots of coolness. There are a couple issues I still need to work out with the hardware config, but for the most part, it's up and running.

Today was a rude awakening after my 5 days of not working. 6AM came quite early, but I felt like I the cold that was coming on was getting beaten back by immune system. I went into work and it took me a while to remember what I was supposed to be doing, even though it had only been 5 days. It came back to me after a few stupid phone calls. I was going to do some more stuff with the Gentoo install tonight, but instead Matt sucked me into playing CounterStrike. Oh well, Gentoo's not going anywhere.

Well, the past couple days have been quite boring and uneventful, as the last few months have been for the most part. Yesterday was busy at work, which is unusual for a friday. It probably just seemed more busy since the crew was lighter than usual. Whatever the reason, I noticed I answered more calls. Also, I seemed to get all the lame customers from hell asking stupid questions about stuff we're really not supposed to worry about (i.e. how to design their websites), but they never took the hint to just bugger off. Argh.

Today has been pretty slow too... I played CS with Matt for a couple hours today... We always seem to find a way to own the servers we play in... maybe it's just because we've both played for a long time, and pick easy servers... heheh.. I might do some website stuff tonight since I'm bored, but then again, I may not.

The title says it all.... Didn't do much of anything today. I messed around on the computer most of the day, and doodled with the guitar a bit too. Played some counterstrike with Matt, and newbs fell at our feet. It was kinda cold all day, so I wasn't totally geeked about doing anything outside. One thing that the cool weather aided with was a project dad has been meaning to complete - send another signal cable from the satellite dish to the kitchen, so we can use our second satellite reciever. This led my dad and I both having to climb in to the attic sections of the house (our house has two attics, loosely connected by about a square-foot sized gap), amd running the cable. Fun stuff. My arms are all itchy from the insulation. Yay.

I'm debating on wether to go into work tomorrow... I'm definitely going in on monday, so I can get the double time. I'm going to cedar point with some of the guys on friday, so I don't want to miss out on the chance to keep my paycheck where it should be.

It has been a while.... Not too much going on lately. I worked on a project for work yesterday, and I got it working pretty well. It should make it a bit easier to keep tabs on the servers, and shouldn't be too tough to set up. Today I was pretty unproductive... basically just sat around chatting on IRC and playing CounterStrike... but then again, what else are weekends for??

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