e. t. a.

i finally got my motorcycle back. (thursday evening.) yea! man, it’s nice to have it back. it’s so nice being able to switch vehicles around and not be stuck with just one type. now i can take my bel-air somewhere.
friday evening was the monthly geek gathering. it was at tropioca. apparently someone had thrown a few rocks through their windows. that sucks. it was a decent turnout.
saturday i spent a couple of hours searching online for iphone 3g cases. i found a bunch of mediocre stuff, and a few cool things. belkin has a kind of cool silicone sleeve design, but they’re way too easy to procure. xskn has some nice colors and designs in their exo line. there are also a few reseller/wholesale sites with some interesting stuff (and/or cheap wares), for example: handhelditems and sourcingmap and cases.com (i almost bought one of the bj rubberskin cases). or if expensive leather with sleek design is more your style, try vaja.
but finally — on page 13 of the google results — my search bore fruit. i placed an order and they dropped it in first class mail on sunday. hopefully i’ll get it in two or three days. once i’ve received it and tried it out and can comment on it, i’ll put a link up. until then, you’ll just have to wonder what kind of incredibly unique and cool looking case i might have found.
after doing my case searching, i went and ate at dairy queen. every now and then my small town genes call out for a trip to a dairy queen. the plan was to eat and then catch the dark knight at the imax, but the shows were all sold out. i’m glad i didn’t buy my tickets in advance, because i hate waiting in line, then sitting in the corner of some packed theater. oh well, maybe some other time.
saturday evening i headed over to the potts. i ate supper with them and we watched saturday night live. it’d been some time since i’d been out to their house. (driving out there in the pickup isn’t much fun as far as cost goes. plus i just don’t really like driving very far unless i’m going on an actual trip somewhere.)
sunday i spent a fair bit of time playing with adium. (i’d downloaded it in the past, but never really played around with it that much.) it’s a really nice im client for the mac. holy moly, is it customizable. you can get almost any look and style you want. but the other best part is i now have all of my various im accounts (aol, msn, google talk, jabber, .mac) consolidated into one interface. (yeah, yeah, it’s nothing new. i just never got around to using a good all-in-one before.) one thing i like about pidgin on linux is that the log format is just good ol’ html. adium uses xml. i’ll look more into using adium logs outside their chat transcription viewer in the near future. (as a bonus, it’d be nice if adium’s sip/simple protocol could do ms lcs. but i don’t think it currently can.)
sunday evening i met up with sara epp at star pizza. she’s in town doing interviews and such for teaching jobs. it’d been some time since i’d seen her. she and eric moved away from houston a few years ago.
in other news, i finally managed to break the netflix logjam. i now have new movies to watch again.
monday i was planning to burn some personal time at work as i was about to lose it, but then they decided to let me go anyway so i could do ride-through support for tropical storm/hurricane eduardo. so i decided to take a leisurely lunch at brasil, and met up with the hot russian chick who is no longer from work. when we were close to done, i looked up and who do i see walking into the place? tamara. my ex. i don’t think i would have recognized her, except i noticed her tattoos. not that she seemed to have a different look exactly, other than being very skinny. honestly, i’m surprised it took this long to see her somewhere. we never made eye contact and i pretty much avoided trying to, but i was trapped in the rear courtyard. she walked over and sat down at a table, and then the hrc(nlfw) and i got up and walked out.
it was kind of interesting monitoring my emotional response(s) during the moment and afterward. mostly i was just struck with a feeling of being trapped and not wanting to be there. i wanted to avoid having to have some kind of interaction with her. once i had left brasil, my emotions were more mixed. but the strongest one i think was a feeling of being annoyed at her for doing what she did to me. i’m not going to say there were no thoughts or feelings about the positive aspects of our past, but i think mostly i’m cognitively aware that that tamara is long dead. i think that’s sad, but such is life.
it also just happened to work out that it was the day before the anniversary of the official day of our divorce. 3 years. which means today is also the 2nd anniversary of me owning my ’65 ford f-100. i prefer thinking about my truck.
monday evening i met up with a co-worker at the house of pies for supper, then we met up again at the datacenter. he brought his playstation 3 and rock band gear, so mostly we just played rock band and goofed around. eduardo turned out to be a dud. i fell asleep around 3:45am, then they let us go around 6:30am. i came home and went to sleep, but i spent most of today being tired a lot.
monday and today i’d thought i would take the bel-air to get work done since i was free during the middle of the day, but it didn’t happen either day. but it should happen sometime in the near future hopefully.

5 comments on “e. t. a.”

  1. wow. A tamara-siting. Tough. Remember that guy I told you about that I used to work with who left in a cloud of mystery? I find out a year later that he had been a woman everywhere except at work. I knew something wasn’t quite right about him/her, but I wasn’t sure what it was (well… there were many things wrong about him — not the least of which was claiming to be a C programmer and not understanding pointers at all ). Anyway… how does this relate to your post? Glad you asked. One day I was at my favorite coffee shop in Austin and looked up and thought I saw her/him. It felt like someone shoved an ice pick in my gut. I was really annoyed because I was writing code for a class I was taking for my Master’s (another pain fest) and didn’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to deal with it all at once. anyway… turned out to really be a her and not a her/him. But I’m thinking my reaction perhaps (well… minus the drastic sense of loss) might approximate what you felt. then again, maybe it’s totally different!

  2. You’re using Adium now? I use Adium. I don’t like it. Stupid duck. Is this what is behind all of your weird status messages lately? Interesting.
    Why do you keep calling the rain storm we had Eduardo? You act like Edouard is an uncommon spelling or something. o.O

  3. what’s wrong with adium? and it’s “behind” the status messages as in i’m using it — but most of them i ported over from ichat, and none of the adium defaults are weird, so i wouldn’t say it’s adium’s fault.
    i apologize to “edouard”. no wonder it was a dud of a storm, what with a name like that. it’s like the people naming the hurricanes just don’t care anymore.
    ash: it was sort of surreal, more than painful. there is a cognitive dissonance in seeing her body (such as it is) and realizing it is inhabited by someone else. that’s the best way to describe the way it feels in my head. any feelings of sadness or loss or longing are for someone else. i mostly just dislike the entity that is now occupying her body. there is nothing i can do to make the tamara i loved exist again, she killed her and took her place.

  4. I don’t know exactly *why* I don’t like Adium – I just find it to be aesthetically subpar I suppose. I LOVED Trillian … Adium is just way grodier than Trillian basically. 😛
    At least to me.
    I think having a discussion about the name of this hurricane is completely called for. What is UP with that? After seeing that name be passed around excessively last weekend not once did anyone question it. People really DON’T care anymore! *cry*

  5. what part(s) of it are aesthetically subpar? if you mean the list of users or the message windows or the sounds, then i have a difficult time sympathizing too much: adiumxtras.com has hundreds of themes for icons, sounds, status list, messaging windows, etc. plus you can tweak all kinds of stuff (font, spacing, color, opacity, etc.) through the preferences. and if you really care, you can edit the xml of the styles by hand.
    i see on adiumxtras.com someone has the trillian sounds, emoticons, and dock icons available for download. it doesn’t appear anyone has made a port they specifically said looks like trillian though.

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