failure is not an option. it's a requirement.
well, i’m home and thinking i’ll head to bed. i’ve got things to enter in ye olde blog, but for now i’ll go ahead and reveal my “major” purchase. yep, if you read the title of this post then you might have a good idea — it’s a black 1955 chevy bel air two-door hardtop. i stopped at the family place in art and took a couple of pics. so here you go:
i managed to get it and get it back to houston. and not hit any exotic animals.
wednesday we got out of work a couple of hours early, so i took the opportunity to drop by the bank and do some stuff related to my “major purchase”. afterward, a coworker and i went to a starbucks and sat and talked for a couple of hours — which was nice. then i went and did the radio show. i headed home, did some laundry, and hit the bed around 1am.
this morning i managed to drag myself out of bed around 6am. i finished packing and getting everything ready for my trip home, and headed down the highway. i stopped in colombus and filled up my gas tank. about 15 miles on the other side of colombus something very odd happened to me…
there was a lot of traffic on the highway, but at this point there was no one around me. i had just passed through a very small town and was just back up to highway speed when i saw something moving in the median to my left. (71 is a divided four lane with a wide ditch median at this point.) i looked over and saw there was some kind of animal coming onto my side of the road from the median. it was moving sort of slowly, but i was somewhat entranced by the oddity of seeing such an animal out on the highway. i was starting to slow down when it decided to run across the road. i hit the brakes harder and started veering to the right, thinking i could go past it, but then it took off like a shot and managed to get directly in front of me. i pushed the brakes hard and managed to get down to maybe 15 or 20 mph before i popped it. i was on the shoulder at this point. it flew off into the ditch on the side of the road and i came to a stop. at first i thought i’d just knocked it around, but then i looked back and there were a couple of pieces of my vehicle on the highway. some cars came by and drove over them. i soon realized my engine light was on, so i shut off the car. i got out and saw radiator fluid. i went around front and saw this:
friday night i had to work for maintenance, so i went into work after lunch. some people were having kind of weird problems with ftp and ssh. it sounded like a firewall or network issue, but eventually we determined dns was exhibiting some odd behaviour. i was trying to figure out what was going on for a few hours, then they contacted a brilliant guy they use as a contractor and he figured it out in about 15 minutes. granted, he got to get the information it had taken me/us a few hours to collect, but i hate it when i work diligently on something but can’t figure it out — and then someone else solves it quickly. one of the main things i’m taking away from the experience is to use dig when you’re trying to diagnose/troubleshoot dns issues. for whatever reason, i stuck to analyzing log files and using nslookup. i stayed for the downtime, although i did pretty much none of the stuff i’d planned because my brain and nerves were shot.
saturday i spent most of the day with the potts family. first i went around for an hour or two with sue and the kids, helping them take care of errands for the afternoon and evening event. which was the art crawl. jack had put the bohemian photography studio in it, so he was showing his work, along with a few other artists, and some bands were playing. i was there for basically the whole art crawl timeframe. one of the artists, whom i had met once before (but never seen his work), does really cool mixed media stuff. jack said he thought i’d like it, and he was right. it’s very detailed art work, along with collage and print, plus objects and texture (etched glass, lighting, shadow boxes, metalwork, etc.). really cool looking stuff. (it reminded me of some of dave mckean’s stuff.) i got to see a whole lot of people coming and going, plus a number of people came by and hung out that go to kaleo and/or know jack in other ways. after 7 hours of that, i was pretty ready to go home and decompress for awhile.
sunday morning i got up and decided i wanted to go to a movie. there were two movies out i was pretty interested in seeing, but the new coen brothers movie sounded a bit dark and violent, so i decided i’d see the other. i decided for sure once i saw it was a limited engagement playing only at river oaks. it was starting in 15 minutes, so i just got dressed and put on a cap and took off. the movie in question is before the devil knows you’re dead. it has philip seymour hoffman, ethan hawke, albert finney, marisa tomei, etc. i had, for some reason, been under the impression it was a black comedy. i was very, very wrong. it started off exciting enough, seeing marisa tomei mostly and completely naked for a few minutes. but the movie is basically a non-linear telling of people making bad decisions over and over and destroying their lives and the lives of those around them. it centers around a botched robbery, but the characters already have issues (some more than others) and they just spiral into a nosedive straight down the pit. i had bought some hot tea before the movie, but i completely forgot about it until the credits were rolling. so the movie was good — as in it was gripping and absorbing, and the acting was good — but i walked out feeling like i’d just been beat up by the offensive line of a football team. which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it’s just not exactly what you want to experience while still groggy from getting up. i won’t say it’s as emotionally traumatic as requiem for a dream, but it knocked me around. perhaps no country for old men would have been a better choice for an early movie after all (i’ll see it soon, probably).
after the movie i drove over to ikea and ate a late lunch, then had a meeting with jack and sue and emily. they’re trying to get some stuff worked out with the business and such, and i am trying to help in some way. while there, i looked around at coffee tables and candle-related items and other such things. but i ended up only buying a bed for my cat, lenin. hopefully she will like it and start using it, instead of leaving hair all over my bedspread and sheets.
from there i met jack at his office, then we went over to the warehouse live. i assisted jack in shooting mewithoutYou. i had to take my wallet chain off, and they were wanding at the door, so i had to hide all of my contraband. but we went in and jack set me up with a camera on a tripod and i took a bunch of pictures. i think some of mine even ended up looking pretty good. after that, we went back to jack’s office and i helped him do some stuff with his powermac g5 and leopard.
monday i made a pretty major purchase. it’s going to be complicating my thanksgiving weekend plans. i’ll be providing more information about that within a few days, i’m sure. if you listened to the radio show this evening, you’ve already heard me talk about it.
monday evening i attempted to install leopard on a new hard drive i had put into my powermac g5. the install never really started because the erase hung, so i gave up after a few hours and put the old hard drive back in. i’ll try again sometime later. tuesday evening i installed red hat enterprise linux 5.1 on four servers. they no longer appear to have the minimal install option (unless i missed it), which was nice in rhel 4. i was also confused by the fact that using the text install made me need 4 disks after i narrowed the install options, while using the gui install made me only need 2 disks with the same options checked. i opted to use the gui install.
well, gee. i’m still not feeling in the mood to write up all of my exciting raid-5 exploits. for fear they may continue happening. let’s just say a lot of my free time the last couple of weeks has been occupied with raid recoveries. somehow, they’ve all been successful. at some point luck has to run out.
besides doing lots of tech support outside of working hours, i haven’t done too much. last wednesday (nov 7th) was the last fundraising edition of technology bytes for that drive. they had been installing a new board since the weekend, and because of the way we do the phones (differently than almost all other shows there) they had to let us use the new board. so i was the very first person at kpft to use the new board live on-air for a show. it was funny because they were working on it while the show was going on, so as the show progressed the buttons and dials necessary to make things happen were changing. fortunately it went alright. wednesday the new board was in a stable configuration and it performed wonderfully.
tuesday i used a coupon at border’s to get a few cds. i could get the discount on up to 3. for some reason, i had the most difficult time finding a 3rd cd. i must have spent an hour browsing the cds before i found something that felt right. even then it wasn’t an “oh yeah! i must have that!” i also picked up a 4th cd because it was $7, but they ended up giving me the discount on it too. bonus! here’s what i got:
speaking of music, i managed to rip all of my country and blues cds onto my mac. (well, except most of the compilations.) along with some other stuff that is also ripped, i’ve filled up the 20-gig ipod. i guess once i start ripping the rest of my music, i’ll have to exclude stuff from the ipod…or get a bigger ipod.
related to the ripping, last weekend i bought a memorex optifix plus cd cleaner and repairing thing. i had a cd that wasn’t ripping and it had scratches on it. i got the clean/repair tool home and opened it up, and there was a bottle with whatever stuff they use to clean and smooth out the cd surface. it said to put three drops on the cd, no more. i took the lid off and squeezed and nothing happened. wondering if it was supposed to be a watery liquid, i pulled the dropper top off to look in the bottle. it was a lotion-like material inside. so i figured maybe i just wasn’t squeezing hard enough to push the thicker liquid through the dropper. i put it back together and squeezed harder. suddenly pretty much all of the contents in the bottle had blown all over the cd, the cleaner apparatus, and me. *sigh* i cleaned it up and used some of the material a few times to clean/repair the cd. and, of course, the cd still wouldn’t rip correctly. good times.
i ordered and got a mac “power” icon t-shirt from panic.com. it’ll be interesting to see if i get more comments on it than my other computer-themed t-shirts.
this last weekend i did a heck of a lot of laundry. i also picked up some cool skull and bones halloween candles from target for around 90 percent off. and i went by microcenter and used a coupon they sent to get a free 2 gig usb flash thumb drive. i ate at sylvia’s enchilada, which was wonderful (i hadn’t eaten there in some time). i had the “el paso”, which is three cheese or beef (i had beef) stacked enchiladas. and yes, i got the fried egg on top. delicious! saturday evening i hung out with sue at the potts house and we watched junebug. i thought it was going to be more of a comedy. it’s actually a kind of slow-paced, altish-feeling sort of film. it’s got some funny stuff in it, but i don’t think i’d even call it a black comedy. it’s kind of got the feeling of dropping you into the middle of a situation, then pulling you back out without really explaining or resolving a lot of things. maybe it’s a little bit schizophrenic in style and delivery. but overall i liked it.
i’ve also failed to mention that a few weeks ago i watched 2046. it’s a foreign film (asian), a little bit of sci-fi but mostly sort of film noir. (it flips between the future and early to mid 20th century.) visually it is quite arresting. the story seemed kind of sad because the characters never seem to really figure things out, they just go with how they are and what they know. but i guess that’s like real life usually, so it’s not a bad thing to portray it that way.
after a long time away from my logitech harmony remote, i finally spent a bit of time over the weekend doing some updates. my initial experience was sort of long and frustrating, so once i got it working right i didn’t really feel like messing with it. well, this time the experience was much better. i added two things to it. one is the ability for it to (with one button) set up my stereo to play music streaming from itunes via my airport express. the second is a one-button setting that turns on the tv, dish, and stereo, then sets the channel to one of the sirius satellite channels. it’s basically a quick way for me to click one button to listen to satellite radio. i also changed the main music button so when i press it sirius starts (instead of it going to the cd player).
well, after doing some work at jack’s (from my last entry, nov 1st), the next morning he phones and texts me around 8:45am sounding a bit frantic. somehow, the raid-5 system i’d set up on a linux box for him had simultaneously failed two disks — thus putting it in a non-recoverable broken state. a 1.5 terabyte raid volume isn’t something you want disappearing on you. i talked to him for awhile and said i’d look at it later or over the weekend, hung up, and went back to my training for work.
friday evening (nov 2nd) scott hatch (burnt toast vinyl – myspace / website) drove down from austin (he was in the middle of two weeks of training in austin) to hang out with the potts clan, and me. i was at the geek gathering that evening (which went okay), so jack and scott and emily met up with me at tropioca. jamie showed up and was going to see clouseaux at the continental club. we’d thought about going to the continental club, but ended up heading to the west alabama ice house instead.
at the ice house, i managed to run into some of the guys in todo moto. i’d first seen some of them at leon’s lounge back in early october. they ride around on mostly cafe racers, rat bikes, old stuff, frankenbikes, etc. and they looked like guys that would pull a knife on you if you made fun of their scooters. i knew i needed to meet them. : ) i spent a good while talking with one of the guys and he seemed pretty cool. he said they hang out at west alabama, so i’m guessing i’ll probably run into them some more.
from west alabama we headed over to the house of pies (where jamie joined back up with us). scott got an appetite for the house of pies from the last few times he’d been down this way a few years ago, so he was adamant that he be able to eat there. of course, they were out of bayou goo. gah. the night ended after the house of pies (at least for me).
saturday i got up and joined scott, jack, sue, and simcha for the saint arnold brewery tour. i managed to remember to take all of the extra wooden tokens i had laying around, but i once again forgot to take about 20 empty 6-pack containers. oh well, they were still out of beer glasses with their logo in black so i guess it didn’t really matter. i still managed to leave with more tokens (6) than they give out (4), but i did use all of the older ones i’d been holding onto.
i headed home and did some stuff around the house (like take a nap) while the others went by the house of pies, the menil cy twombly gallery, and the midtown spec’s. scott picked up a number of different kinds of beers that he thought i might like. mostly stuff that doesn’t taste much like “normal” beer. i tried three, one i liked, one was okay, and the other not so much. we had met back up at the bopho loft, so emily ordered some pizza from frank’s. i really like frank’s pzza. since i don’t hardly ever go downtown anymore, i rarely have it these days. eventually at some point i left and went back home.
sunday i met up with the potts clan, emily, and scott at le peep in rice village for brunch. i love their granola pancakes. after brunch i headed back home, where i did i don’t recall what for a couple of hours. that accomplished, i went over to the bopho loft to say goodbye to scott and to start trying to work on ye olde raid-5. (the story of which i’ll save for another post.)
okay, i got the pic of me (taken by chris) from chris and mary’s halloween party. here is a cropped version of it:
this evening after work i met up with jack and emily at pei wei, then i went over to jack’s office and reconfigured his network. i added in a new router he’d bought and modified his apple airport express stations. hopefully all is good there now.
i don’t know if you saw the news on this in the last couple of days:
“Microsoft Acquires Hospital IT Software From GCS” — InformationWeek
computer business review announced “Microsoft plans hospital software rollout after GCS buy”
and internetnews.com ran an article with the headline: “Welcome to Microsoft Medical Center”
something seemed unofficial about the name “microsoft medical center” to me though. a bit of sleuthing around online and a healthy dose of google-fu and i somehow managed to run across the splash screen of microsoft’s new hospital software. i’m not sure this has been actually released to the public, so i may have a scoop on my hands! without further ado, here it is:
in case you didn’t know it, Texas has a yom (year of manufacture) law. what that means is that if you have a vehicle older than 25 years, you can find Texas plates from that year and use them on your vehicle instead of the current plates.
after a few weeks of poking around on ebay and watching 1965 Texas plates sell, i finally managed to get a pair at a price i thought was only somewhat higher than i should be able to get them for. (of course, others sold for higher — so maybe my idea of what i should be able to get them for is off.) anyway, i got them in the mail a week or two after the auction ended. i didn’t buy unused ones, but these are in pretty good shape. (a cool thing about pre-1969 plates is they aren’t reflectorized, so you can strip and repaint them fairly easily — which i may do at some point.)
a few days later i took them down to the local tax office so the dmv could approve them (the condition, and that no one currently has the same plate id). that all went well, so i now have them on my ’65 ford f-100 instead of the generic modern plates.
monday after work i headed over to border’s to pick up some things that were on sale. here’s what i ended up getting:
all movies i’ve been meaning to buy, but just never got around to doing it. pretty cheap prices on all of them made me decide to go ahead.
i think that finishes off the cake cds i wasn’t in possession of.
after my purchase i headed over to crescent city beignets and read for awhile.
wednesday was the first of three fundraiser shows for the radio show. jay was out, and he and peter usually do the major pledge pitching, so it was up to barrett, dwight, and i to pick up some slack. i’m happy to say i think we did a good job, and we managed to go over our goal for the evening. yea! now next week we can go back to letting jay and peter do most of the pitching. : )
saturday night was chris and mary’s “time traveler” themed halloween party. originally it was dr. who based only, but that quickly expanded. i had mulled several possibilities: 12 monkeys, planet of the apes, 2001: a space odyssey, etc. i went to a few places and wasn’t satisfied with any of the outfits. mostly i didn’t want to wear a thin nylon drape of fabric as a costume. so at a target — which only had a few things left — i ran across a “politician” mask, which was supposed to be arnold schwarzenegger. and just like that, there it was…terminator. you see, it really doesn’t take much work for me to go as the terminator…i already have the outfit. leather jacket? check. black t-shirt? check. big black boots? check. dark shades? check. motorcycle? check. guns? check. i don’t have a pistol-grip shotgun, but we joked that i would have gotten stopped by the police driving down the street on my motorcycle with a shotgun — and when they came up and asked what the heck i was doing i would turn and look at them and after a few seconds go: “fsck you, 4sshole.” (that’ll make sense if you’ve seen the movie.) then we joked i’d be calling from jail for bail money, after getting tazed and/or shot. i wore the mask most of the time for the first half of the party and didn’t talk much at all…but that full head mask was freakin’ hot.
unfortunately, i didn’t find sarah connor. hhmmm…come to think of it, perhaps i should have gone as kyle reese instead…
thursday around 10pm brad texted me to see if i wanted to go to the continental club with him. i wasn’t too excited about the band playing, but i told him i’d ride with him and i’d eat at tacos-a-go-go or something. we met in front of poison girl, but decided to just go straight over then instead of going into poison girl. we got over to main and tacos-a-go-go and sig’s were closed. stupid weekday hours. so instead we went into the big top and listened to umbrella man some. they were intriguing. several people have told me i need to see them, but i don’t think i’d ever managed to do it. one of their normal guys was playing for billy joe shaver, but i liked what i heard. they were doing old western swing, old country, and tejano music. what a great mix! after an hour or two at the big top, we rode over to poison girl. we sat there for an hour or two and talked. later the tamale guy dropped by and we bought a dozen. man, those tamales are good. plus i hadn’t eaten since lunch and i had been drinking for two or three hours. (i know those are not good conditions for accurately judging tamales, but i’ve had them under more normal conditions as well and they were still good.) we left around 2am. i hit the bed around 3am.
the reason i was able to go out late on a thursday night without worrying about work the next morning is because i was coming in late since i was working friday night. except then my boss called me twice in the morning, around 9am and again around 9:30am. argh! so since i was awake anyway, i went ahead and went in. i had thought i would be done with work by 9pm or 10pm, but i ended up staying until about 11:30pm. i left and headed over to west alabama ice house for robb zipp’s 30th birthday festivities, but by the time i got there he was gone. so i bought a beer and sat down and tried to figure out what if anything i was going to do with the rest of the night. after about 20 minutes of sitting there never saying a word to anyone, a couple of guys rode up on bikes and one of them had recently done some work on his bike and had some bolts come loose on him. we talked for awhile, and eventually i went to the house and got a couple of pair of pliers for him to try and tighten the bolts with. we talked some more and traded cards. (turns out one of them knew barrett pretty well.) so even though it started off sucking, it ended on a good note.
saturday i got up and got a text message from brad asking if i was interested in having brunch with him. we met at an ihop near washington and i-10, then afterward we went riding up and down memorial and allen parkway. man, the weather has been awesome for riding most of the last couple of weeks.
i had been thinking about going to oni-con, but i never got in touch with barrett, and groovehouse said he was doing stuff in prep for the texans game the next day, so i ended up deciding to not go. sue called to see if i wanted to eat supper and watch the sugarland town square movie, but when i checked their website the movie wasn’t that night. soon after getting off the phone with her, amateria texted me about “astronomy day”. after her telling me about it, i thought sue might think her kids would enjoy going to that, so i called her and mentioned it. she was down with it, so i went over to their house and we went to the george observatory, located in brazos bend state park. it was pretty cool, but there were a lot of people there so i didn’t really do much looking through the telescopes or anything. it’d be cool to go back there sometime when there aren’t huge crowds. afterward, we went back to their house and watched snl.
when i went to leave, my headlight on my motorcycle didn’t come on. this is the second time that’s happened. although the other time was a week or two ago, and it was off for a couple of seconds and then came on by itself. this time it stayed off while i knocked on the headlight housing and moved the handlebars and such. eventually it came on when i honked the horn. i don’t know why it’s doing that, but i’m way overdue to take the bike in for maintenance work and such anyway, so maybe they can figure it out then.
today i got up and mostly sat around the house. i ended up watching the second half of the texans game. they were doing very poorly but i watched anyway. then in the fourth quarter suddenly the titans weren’t doing anything and the texans offense went crazy. they caught up in the last couple of minutes, kicked on onside kick, got it, and drove down and scored to take the lead with less than a minute left! they kicked off to the titans, then the titans drove down and kicked a field goal in the last seconds to win. *sigh* i hate the titans. stupid bud adams.
because i chose to watch the game, i didn’t make it to kymberlie’s pre-activity dinner at lupe tortilla. instead i ended up meeting them at verizon wireless theater. tonight was the final bout of the 2007 houston roller derby season. i did manage to see robb zipp during halftime and wish him a happy birthday. as usual, there were lots of cool looking alt girls. one girl in particular stood out — beautiful eyes, beautiful smile, beautiful body, beautiful thin gold wedding band. oh well, you lose some, you lose some more. that just means there’s still more money for me to use on weapons and vehicles, i guess.