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May 2006 Archive
Monday, May 22, 2006
[Comments: 0] 3:00 AM - poultry-robotics
The marvelous invention called the TiVo randomly recorded a few episodes of a 15 minute show on Cartoon Network called Robot Chicken. It's part of the current Adult Swim lineup, and was created by a goofy guy named Seth Green.
After watching a couple episodes of this show, Karl and I decided to have the TiVo record it regularly. It's a stop-motion animation show which uses a mixture of claymation, action figures, and other creatively designed characters, often revisiting (and horribly twisting) childhood cartoons, TV shows, and movies, as well as a few things that are just purely random. They often seem to get people to voice themselves, which just makes it more enjoyable... It's a very funny show most of the time, so I recommend checking it out. :)
Sunday, May 21, 2006
[Comments: 0] 11:24 PM - sentence-resequencing
I was just in Dominick's today, and while I was waiting on line to check out, I saw this:
It looks like someone wasn't paying enough attention when they put up the individual pieces of the sign... :)
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
[Comments: 1] 12:51 AM - graduation-congratulations
My sister, Alli, graduated on Saturday from the College of St. Rose in Albany, NY. The graduation ceremony was held in the Empire State Plaza, and it was beautifully done. The speaker was Joseph J. Plumeri, CEO of Willis Group Holdings was amazing. He was extremely animated, had some great stories to tell and his words of encouragement were to "play in traffic," to take risks and follow dreams. He was emotional, and it was clear that he was a genuine believer in everything he had to say. To top things off, he offered a donation of $100,000 during his speech to the school... to honor a baseball coach that had recently passed and his own father's dreams.
I have to, of course, congratulate my sister on getting through the tasks she had before her, especially at a school where she certainly wasn't always a happy camper. She came away with her Education degree and I'm very proud of her. :)
The only part of the ceremony that bothered me was the Bishop that performed the benediction. He took an unreasonably long moment to preach to the kids a reverse message from that of Plumeri, to be cautious and avoid risks, and followed it up with a warning not to the graduates not to be tempted to stray away from God. I felt that sermon was unacceptable at a graduation cermony, so I was mildly annoyed. Aside from that it was a wonderful ceremony and I'm glad that I was able to take the time off to go celebrate with my sister.
Following that, we moved my sister back home, and on Sunday we celebrated Mother's Day with brunch at the 56th Fighter Group restaurant, which is somewhat of a tradition.
I did some regular maintenance on the computers around here while I was around, and set up my mom's hard drives in RAID, so that she doesn't have to worry about the data loss she suffered when her drive failed a couple weeks ago. We tried to do the same with my dad's computer, but there were complications, which I believe were due to the fact that Maxtor significantly changed the specifications of a matched hard drive model, making it smaller and unable to be smoothly replicated. Instead, I set him up with some backup scripts to back some files up to the other hard drive regularly.
My dad helped me finally take care of my car insurance. I now have a new policy with Geico which is definitely reasonable, and is effective Wednesday, so now I'm pretty much paying for everything I use myself, which is sort of a good feeling.
I'm leaving Long Island at 3:25 PM today, back to Midway airport. I should land around 4:40 PM and hopefully will be back to my apartment by 5:30 or so. Then, it'll be time to catch up on what's happened over the weekend and get back to work.
Thursday, May 4, 2006
[Comments: 0] 3:53 AM - daytime-really-does-exist
As of Monday, I started a new shift. I now work 1 PM to 9 PM. This is one hour later than originally expected, but it gives me overlap with our new technician, which has the potential to be useful.
I like the prospect of waking up when it's still going to be light out for a long while and the fact that after 9 PM, I don't have to answer the phone if it rings, nor watch support too closely. I do watch it anyway (though not as consistently), partially out of habit and partially to make sure that Curt doesn't need a hand with anything he's never dealt with before.
The previous night, I had a server maintenance project to work on, so I ended up having to be at the datacenter from 4 AM to 7 AM, which was somewhat annoying, and screwed up my sleep, but I should be able to work back into schedule tonight, sleeping from 4 AM to around noon. My main plan is to try to get to bed between 3 and 4 every weekday night from now on, and get up no later than noon.
I'm about to head to bed now, as soon as my laundry is out of the drier, which is fixed, by the way. The maintenance guy came to take a look at it and repaired the control mechanism, however the washing machine didn't fill up all the way, so I might put in another call later when I get up to have them take a look at that again.
It is on my schedule that I will be headed back to Long Island on May 11th for a visit with my family, to celebrate my sister's college graduation and Mother's Day.... and of course do some scheduled maintenance on the family computers. :)
I do love Southwest Airlines, though... 40 bucks each way.
