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Friday, March 14 2008, 7:46 PM

I sure love me some vacation. I've been taking it nice and easy throughout the week, with only a meager amount of annoying things present. It's very nice.

I spent the past weekend down in Indianapolis with Andre, Chris, Darin, Guy, Guy's son Leo, and Andre's Indianapolis crew. It was a great time. We made pretty good time getting down there, and wasted little time before heading out for some drinking fun. One of the bars not too far from Andre's place has a pretty nice selection of beer on tap (50 different beers), and we made it our goal that night to try each one. We had ten guys total, and we split one pint worth of each beer up so that each guy got his fair share. It ended up being roughly 1-2 shots worth of each kind of beer. We tore through all the different beers in roughly 2.5 hours, which really isn't that bad. That was plenty enough for us old folk, so we headed back to Andre's after a side trip to McDonald's. We all took great pleasure in teaching Leo the 'real' name for McDonalds - "Dirty Ron's". Hopefully he uses that term frequently.

Saturday was another drinking day. Andre had a bunch of his buddies over for beer, grilling, and drinking games. The main attraction was a beirut tourney. We had enough guys for 6 teams, which is just right really. Andre and I lost our first game, but tore through the losers bracket, winning our way to the finals. We ended up losing to Darin's team, but it was a strong showing. The day took a nasty turn when Guy stepped on a water pipe in Andre's closet while fishing for the controls on a receiver buried therein, and broke it. Water was spraying everywhere, which necessitated a trip under the house for Andre to shut down the water inlet. It made quite a mess, and Andre was not too pleased. We tried to keep the spirit alive, but having to go to the bathroom outside seemed to dampen everyone's sprits.

Sunday was rather abbreviated. Since none of us could take showers, we decided to get on the road pretty early. While we were packing up, Andre's uncle-in-law (a plumber) came by to help Andre get his water system squared away. We got news later in the day that Andre got everything fixed, which made Guy feel better.

I've been pretty worthless since I got back into town... perfect for vacation. I've been doing a whole lot of nothing, with a few bits and pieces of responsibility mixed in. I cleaned my kitchen pretty thoroughly yesterday, which amounted to one of the ten or so things I have on my cleaning list for the week. Hopefully I'll get to the rest of them before I have to head back to work. The kitchen was the worst part though, by far. It really needed the cleaning.

beirut indianapolis vacation

Wednesday, March 05 2008, 1:02 AM

I've been pretty occupied with work lately. I've been busy putting the finishing touches on a project that will be unleashed on the masses within the next week or two. I put in a lot of hours trying to meet a deadline that ended up being meaningless because others involved went on vacation before finishing their parts. That's fine though. It gives me more time to solidify my end of things, which is never a bad thing.

Also in the work front, I've been given what most would consider a pretty significant promotion. I've been made the head of new department that, for all intents and purposes, is a R&D group primarily focused on bringing innovative products and services to the customers. I'm the only member of the group right now, but others will start filling in sooner rather than later. This role also puts me in a position where I'll be (along with another senior member of the company) overseeing the progress and direction of most (if not all) projects, company-wide. In ways, it's a pretty big change from my previous role of hiding in the shadows and making things happen, but at the same time, it's really not. I'll still be making things happen that most people aren't even aware of, but I'll also be someone's boss. That's definitely a first for me. If anyone's got any helpful advice, be sure to share.

In other news, I'll be taking a well-deserved vacation starting this coming friday. Chris and Darin have somehow found a way to free themselves from their better halves for the weekend, so we're headed down to Andre's for the weekend for some old school debauchery. It sounds like Andre has a full itinerary planned for us, and judging by the list of things I saw yesterday morning, we'll be lucky if we make it out alive. I await the challenge. My liver, however, would be wise to prepare its defenses while it has the opportunity.

indianapolis vacation work

Saturday, November 11 2006, 2:02 AM

It seems that I don't ever take the time to post anymore. I'm sitting here on the floor in this hallway of a hotel in Indianapolis typing this because I'm bored out of my mind, and Bob is asleep already in the hotel room. Since I'm not tired, I'm out here.

I'm down here for my buddy Andre's wedding. It rained like crazy coming down here, and there were some wind gusts that probably could have blown me off the road if I wasn't paying attention. Good thing I got the new wipers on my car the other day...

Now onto news... First off, I came up with names for my cats. I liked my dad's suggestion of Marshall for the black cat, since he's always sleeping up on my Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet. Running with the cool guitar equipment names, I called the gray cat Mesa, in honor of Mesa amplification. Now I have to get used to calling the cats by those names.

I also had a follow-up appointment with Dr. Doshi on Wednesday. He said everything was looking good, and my vision tests showed I was seeing a "fuzzy 20/20" with my righteye, which is pretty damned good. I guess that equates to being able to see the 20/20 line with significant effort, as opposed to seeing it at a quick glance. I don't ever remember seeing 20/20 with my right eye even before the problems started occuring, so that's something to be happy about. In a related note, I was able to get a pretty good sampling of night-time driving this evening with the associated headlight glare. It still gives me problems, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as it was.

cats friends indianapolis righteye roadtrips

Wednesday, September 06 2006, 11:13 AM

I had a good holiday weekend. I took it easy friday night, and just hung about in the apartment. Saturday afternoon I headed down to Andre's in Indianapolis. He was having a get-together for the holiday weekend, and probably his last before he bows out of bachelor-dom officially. We took it easy Saturday night and played some pool and watched football while enjoying some tasty cold keg-dispensed beverages.

Sunday was party day, and we didn't waste any time, from my perspective anyway. I woke up at my customary 11-something AM, and beers were being dispensed in the 1pm hour. People started showing up around 3pm, and much merryment ensued. Lawn games were played, food was grilled, and good times were had. Also, thanks to some drinking game horseplay and hijinks, I can now truthfully say that I've had a beer poured on my head by an attractive girl, if that's ever a good thing.

In other news, the Gentoo install on my workstation is complete for the most part. I've still got some configuration to dink with, but that's best done for times of boredom. The X configuration I had working flawlessly before the reinstall full-out hardware lockups with the new install, so I had to start fresh. Not a horrible thing, but annoying. I've yet to get all the fun hardware acceleration working, so I'm stuck with slow-rendering graphics for the time being.

I'm also thinking that I need to make some time to try to take apart The Bolt and do some maintenance on it. After a few years of playing, the finish I put on the neck has started to get tacky and it has been rubbing away when I play it. There's a pretty good hole in the finish down near the end of the neck. I guess that's what I get for using plain furniture-grade varnish. Thing is, I doubt I'll be able to strip the finish that's there properly, so I may end up having to buy a new neck altogether and starting the process anew. I also want to redo the electronics in the guitar as well. It's only been running with one pickup for a while now, and I'd like to remedy that. I like the feeling of the Bolt a lot more than I do my Strat, but its tone is very one-dimensional with only one pickup.

friends gentoo guitar indianapolis linux roadtrips

Sunday, March 05 2006, 11:41 PM

I suppose I'm well overdue for a post, considering that it's been almost a month. I would say that I haven't been up to much, which was my standard M.O. for a while, but I don't think that's been the case lately.

First off, my eye still sucks. I had an appointment with the cataract specialist a week or so ago. He didn't tell me much I hadn't yet heard, but the ball is rolling now. I have a mild cataract in my right eye, which doesn't sound that bad, but it will continue to get worse as time progresses. As a result, I'm going to have it removed. This will likely be some time in May, but the time isn't set yet.

I learned some more details about the aftermath of the procedure as well. Once my natural lens has been removed and replaced with an artificial lens, I will lose the ability to focus up close with my right eye, so I'll need to wear reading glasses in order for my right eye to be useful for any kind of detailed vision. I'm just hoping that removing the cataract will help restore some of the clarity I had before, even if there are floaters. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I've also been on the road a bit over the past month. A couple weekends back, I went down to Indianapolis with the crew to visit Andre and celebrate his engagement. Congrats big man! As always, his party was a blast, with much drunken merryment being had by all.

This weekend we all met up down in Cincinnati for Jon's birthday. It was also a great time. We hit up Skyline chili and had some cheese-laden dirty eats. After that, the 5 guys (Jon, Andre, Chris, Darin, and myself) reverted back to the 5th grade and played some street football. It was a ton of fun, even if it highlighted how out of shape we all are. After we caught our breath, we headed down to the Hofbrauhaus in Newport, Kentucky. The beer was flowing, and we had a great time. We will definitely have to go back there again. After our beer, we headed over to the Rock Bottom brewery and had some delicious food and drink. I think it was all too much for me really, and I ended up passing out on Jon's couch by midnight or so, while everyone else was playing pictionary and other board games. The rest of the crew rousted early... far too early for my liking, but there wasn't much I could do. Oh well I guess.

cincinnati friends indianapolis righteye roadtrips

Thursday, August 05 2004, 10:28 PM

It's been a while since my latest "real" post, which is mostly because I've been in the process of moving to the new place and getting settled into it. Well, I'm moved and mostly settled in, and so far it's pretty sweet. My room is significantly smaller than the room at the other place, but that's no big deal. I'm good at compacting all of my belongings into a small area, so no worries there. The main portion of the house is pretty much set as well, but Greg and Carl are still moving their stuff into place.

Last weekend I was down in Indianapolis for another one of Andre's shindigs, and it was a blast. We went out on the town friday night for some debauchery, and then closed the night off with some Jimmy Johns. Jon and I were masters of beirut on saturday, playing 12 games and only losing 2. We were both in rare form, and it was great. We both paid for it the next day though. I felt like ass for most of the day, although not as bad as I felt as a result of the first indy trip, where I could barely sit upright without being nauseous.

I bought Doom 3 yesterday... I don't want to sound too much like a fanboy here, but the game is fucking sweet. The lighting is simply amazing, the graphics are crisp and lifelike, and overall the game is straight-up scary. I've caught myself hopping out of the chair a few times when some piece of evil sneaks up on me and starts attacking. Crazy shit. If you've got a decent computer, check this one out.

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Monday, March 29 2004, 10:35 PM

The pictures from the Indy trip the other weekend have been uploaded, and I finished out commenting on the pre-existing pics that hadn't been labelled yet. Exciting.

indianapolis roadtrips siteupdates

Wednesday, March 24 2004, 11:00 PM

This past weekend marked my third jaunt down to Indianapolis to visit Andre, and it was also the third such trip where I was totally plastered for a good portion of the weekend... :) I went down with Darin and Lisa... Jon was supposed to go, but his grandfather died and he was obligated to go to the funeral in Iowa. That's the second time in a row his plans to go to Indy have been foiled by uncontrollable circumstances... the first was Michelle telling him that he couldn't go... :)

Friday evening was dubbed the bar night, and bar night it became. Andre started off the night claiming that he would be the DD, but that didn't last very long. Lisa wasn't feeling so good, so she volunteered to drive, and Andre went with it. Heck, we all went with it. We hit a few local bars and the local BW3s, and closed out the evening with some obligatory eats from the omnipresent Jimmy Johns. It was wonderful.

Saturday morning started out much worse than friday night left off... after I woke up and took a shower, I went to gather my carry-everywhere things to put them in my pockets, such is my morning ritual, but I couldn't find my wallet. I looked all over the room, pulled everything out of my suitcase and laptop bag, but couldn't find anything. We looked all around the house and in Andre's car, but couldn't find anything. I looked around for a good two hours, and found nothing. We called all the places that we went to see if they had any wallets turned in, but nothing turned up. We called the police for that area to see if they had anything turned in. Nothing. We even went back to the bars to retrace our steps on the shred of a chance that it might be laying around somewhere. Well, it wasn't. We got back, and out of sheer desperation I started rifling through my stuff again, when I finally stumbled accross my clever drunken hiding spot. I had apparently thought it was a brilliant idea to jam my wallet into the handle of my suitcase in my drunken stupor. I felt pretty stupid, but incredibly relieved. I was about a half hour away from calling in to cancel my credit and debit cards. That would have been a large pain in my ass.

Other than the wallet fiasco, saturday was sweet. Andre gave us a little tour of Klipsch and some of their audio development facilities. Very cool stuff. I couldn't get over the fact that there were speakers literally everywhere. Some guys had like 30 speakers just laying on their desks in their cubicles. Definitely a paradise for an audiophile. Andre showed us some of the listening rooms, which were basically larger rooms with a couch in the middle and speakers all over the place. Some were treated with foam on the walls to cut down on the reverberations, and some weren't. We also got to experience a full sized anechoic chamber, which was very cool. It's very strange to talk and hear nothing of your own voice except the stuff that makes it to your ears by going through your head. All in all, that tour was very cool. I got a couple pictures of the experience, but not too many because I didn't want to get Andre in trouble or anything.

The rest of saturday was spent drinking and BBQ'ing... it was rainy earlier in the day, but later on in the afternoon the skies lightened and it became pretty warm, about 60, but with a bit of a breeze. Perfect weather for the cookout Andre was hoping wouldn't get rained out. There was a modest number of people that showed up, and we enjoyed the essential warm weather B's - Beer, Brats, Burgers, and Beans. And other stuff. Andre had whipped up some industrial sized vats of macaroni salad and potato salad, and we gorged on that pretty heavily. Many games of pool and darts were played while I wrestled with the music setup. We had my laptop playing music over Andre's wireless network from his computer through his amp in his pool table room, but the connection kept flaking out and made the music skip. Stupid technology. Oh well I guess. After most of the guests had departed, one of the guys from a hockey team Andre plays on showed up, and we ended up talking music and guitar for like 2 hours. It was pretty cool.

Sunday was prety much recovery day. Darin, Lisa, and I helped Andre clean up his place, and then we packed up and left. The trip home was uneventful. All in all, it was a sweet weekend.

Photos will be up in the gallery sooner or later.

indianapolis ramblings roadtrips

Friday, January 02 2004, 11:41 PM

I just got back from a three day swing down along with Jonny T to Andre's place in Indinapolis celebrating the new year, and his new house. The new years festivities were a lot of fun. There were quite a few people there, and the guy to girl ratio was actually quite excellent... I think there actually may have been more gals there than guys! Way to go Andre! Many games of darts and pool were had by all while waiting for the ball to drop. It was a lot of fun. Most of the people hung out until after the ball dropped, but after that, the crowd fizzled quickly. After the non-phil crowd left, we chilled out and watched a movie and caught up some. It was rad.

The next day was pretty relaxed. We all bummed around Dre's place running after Leo (Guy and Ana's 1 year old boy) and keeping him occupied. He's a handful! He very much seems to like going back behind entertainment centers and pulling on wires... something that will probably get him in trouble some day. After we were all sufficiently hungry, we decided to head into Indy and grab some food at Hooters. Ana had never been there and wanted to go for some reason, and I had absolutely no aversion to watching football on the big screen with scantily clad waitresses and chicken wings abound. After we had sufficiently gorged both our stomachs and eyes we headed back to Andre's place. We had originally made some tenative plans to hang out with some of Andre's lady friends and head to a karaoke establishment for some beers and songs, but that feel through. Such a shame. Andre's lady friend Susan was quite the doll... ;) Well, I'm sure she still is... anyway, I digress. We just ended up watching football and a couple of movies on Andre's couch, and then calling it a night.

Today was really laid back... we just lounged about and played GTA3 on the PS2. Seems that I have a knack for beating up cops and stealing their guns in that game. I guess we all left around 4pm, and Jon and I got back to Lansing around 8pm if I remember right.

Photos are up in the photo gallery... go digital camera!

indianapolis roadtrips

Saturday, April 05 2003, 1:17 PM

Darin got the pictures for the Indy trip developed, and I scanned them up and put them in the pictures section...

indianapolis roadtrips siteupdates

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