Shame

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I've been on a really embarrasing retro-metal kick lately, as you might have noticed by looking at my playlist or my Audioscrobbler profile. I've just found that it is very motivational listening to the driving beat of drums and guitars while coding. Plus, I half-watched that MTVIcon special with Metallica, which got me feeling all nostalgic and retro and stuff. I "found" a copy of their newest album yesterday, which is supposed to be all "back to their roots" and "heavy" and crap. Of course, there's nothing more pathetic than someone clinging to barely retro music.

Grrr.

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The connection at work is still completely fux0red... very frustrating. Other than that, everything is fun so far. Rode in again yesterday, and probably will do so again on Thursday, if the weather cooperates. Trying to get ready now for a database update for one of the clients, which involves loading a copy of their database, trying to figure out which of the scripts that were previously run were blown away when the client overwrote the test database with the production one, and what order they need to be run in. Whee! Update: Some guy from Nauticom was just here to replace the router, and so far everything seems to be working like it should. Fingers crossed.

Update to the Update: Nope. Still not working right.

Rich and bored

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Due to some fortuitous moves in the BS(BlogShares) funds over the last few days, my net worth is now hovering right around $2 million. Now that funds have been withdrawn, the moves in stocks are too low (or with too few shares available for purchase) to make any sort of large moves, so I have to think about what I want to do. There will be banks opening soon, which could be fun. I could also donate my money for some sort of contest. I could even try and sell my virtual cash for the real thing on ebay.

Connection Woes

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Alex Trebek: The answer is: "Unknown Socket Error"Sean Connery: You mother didn't have any suck it errors, Trebek! AT: That's "'Socket" error, not "Suck it" SC: Aaah, you're one of those nancy-pants network fairys, aren't ya?! AT: [sighs] Mr. Connery, if you don't know the answer I'll have to move on. SC: Perhaps you should talk to your mother about moving. She just laid there like Catherine Zeta-Jones suffering from nicotine deprevation.

Yeah, so... network connection has been extremely lame the last two days at work (as I'm sure my friends who keep seeing me pop on and off of AIM can attest to). They thought they had it fixed yesterday (bad cable), but the problem still seems to be lingering today.

The Matrix Reloaded

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I went to the 10 p.m. showing of Reloaded last night. Here's my observations from the night: * The movie started at 10, and when I called the theatre the day before, they told me that they would start letting people in the theatre at around 9:30. I figured getting there at 9:15 would suffice, but apparently people had been waiting since about _5:30_. Freaks. We still got good seats, tho. * There were two guys I saw that dressed up. One as Neo with a "Trenchcoat Mafia" leather duster, and the other guy was wearing a suit and looking like an agent (except that he had a double-breasted suit... ick).

Everything else contains spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, I wouldn't read any further. The fight scenes throughout the movie were pretty incredible, but I have to say I was dissapointed by the "Burly Brawl". The hype was that you wouldn't be able to tell which actors were CG, and which were real, but I think most of the time it was painfully obvious, especially with shots that were pulled pretty far back, or ones where the "camera" was whipping around the action. It certainly helps that both Neo and the Smiths wear sunglasses, because trying to create the eyes would make it look much more fake. Even still, some of the shots had the characters looking very blank, like a marble statue with sunglasses.

The freeway chase scene was pretty amazing, and The Twins were pretty neat characters, although you pretty much saw everything about them in the trailer. Maybe they'll be back for the next one.

I was amazed at how much the plot relied on elements from The Animatrix, especially since the DVD isn't out for another month. Luckily I _ahem_ "acquired" an advance copy. Especially The Final Flight of The Osiris, which as been dubbed "Matrix 1.5", the episodes are pretty key to explaining why things are how they are in Reloaded. The fact that they know the machines are tunneling to Zion isn't explained, and you don't even see the drilling machine until the very end. Also, the annoying kid that keeps pestering Neo shows up with *no* introduction, unless you've seen "A Kid's Story" on Animatrix and know that he basically _got himself_ out of the Matrix. I'm sure he'll be around a bit more in Revolutions. Jada Pinkett Smiff's character also was barely there, but I know she's the main character in the videogame. Harumph.

Neo flying was just a little bit too close to Superman, including the one fist out thing. When Trinity "died", the SLF(Special Lady Friend) said "if he flies backwards around the Earth a few times I'm going to laugh out loud".

Harold Perrineau was good, but a little bit too much comic-relief-ey.

There was a lot more cursing in this one. I didn't really care, I just noticed it, is all.

The whole scene with The Architect was interesting. The idea that this was the 6th iteration of Zion wasn't quite the mindfuck of the original concept of the Matrix, but it was close. In any case, I don't know how reviewers were able to say it was all action and no plot, because it definitely set up some interesting possibilities for the final movie.

I don't know how I feel about Neo's new ability to "EMP" Sentinels in the real world. His whole deal was that he was a hax0r that could manipulate the code of the Matrix, but this introduces a whole new level of diety to him.

The trailer for Revolutions at the end of the credits looked really cool. Especially the scene in the rain with Neo facing off against Smith, with *hundreds* of Smiths lining the sides of the street. Sort of the Old West showdown on the subway platform from the first movie taken to the extreme.

Holy Moley!

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About two years ago I had gone in to have a mole removed off of the front of my right hip. There wasn't anything in particular that was wrong with it that it needed to be removed, but it was rather large, and in a spot that was more likely to get irritated since I had started climbing, with wearing a harness or just hiking my leg way up. The way they remove them is sorta neat; they inject some lido/nova/whatever-caine into the mole itself, and some just underneath it. This serves to numb the area, and also to sort of puff up the skin under it, so they they can just sort of _peel_ it off with a pair of tweezers, and a little strategic cutting with the scapel here and there. While I was getting this one removed, my dermatologist did a once-over of my other moles, and didn't much like the look of a darker one on my chest. That one came off, too, and a good thing it did. The biopsy on that one came back "pre-cancerous", which is not really a bad thing, per se, but just meant that I needed to be vigilant about putting on the sunscreen, and watching out for any of my other moles to change shape/color/size drastically.

Finally got around to making my quote-unquote "yearly" appointment a few weeks ago, and went in this morning for my skin check. Everything looked ok, except for a large one on my back, that apparently was more than one color. A quick sting and some scraping later, and I'm minus a mole. It feels good to be keeping up with health things, and taking care of these sorts of issues before they become problems.

Also, I am in good company with mole removal. Yay Heather!

Guerrilla Marketing

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Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I got my first BlogShares advertisement last night. Someone gifted me 5 shares of a worthless stock last night, and the accompanying email said "I like the way you do business. South Dakota thanks you." Of course I had to go look and see what sort of porn ad-infested popup hell the site in question was. Strangely enough, it wasn't. I'm not quite sure what the point was (except maybe to drive traffic), but it was an interesting technique, to be sure. In other news, the SLF(Special Lady Friend) and I are going to see A Mighty Wind tonight. I thought Best In Show was one of the better movies I've seen, so I have high expectations for this one.

If I had a hammer...

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I work in a small building that looks like a dentist's office because, well, there's at least two dentists' offices in it, as well as the little software company that I'm now working for. Over the last 2 weeks or so, the roof has been in the process of being reshingled, which has been fun on many levels. We've had to dodge falling pieces of roof while getting from the building through the parking lot, as well as listen to the pneumatic hammers hissing and popping outside our 2nd floor window.

The culmination of this fun had to be earlier on this week, when it sounded like they were dropping 50 pound bags of cement mix onto the roof directly above our heads. Repeatedly. I'm not quite sure what they were doing, but it was loud and scary. I'll be happy when they're gone. It's hard enough to concentrate at work, harder still when you have to worry about some toolbelt-wearin' yahoo crashing through the ceiling and into your lap.

Ouch.

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Three times now, I've bought something in BlogShares to the tune of a couple of thousand dollars, and then the next morning I see it's worthless. Literally worthless. Sucks to have to continually make up that ground. I was up to about $130K yesterday, and now I'm back down to $80K or so. In other news, I had a decent workout at the gym last night, and I'll be heading to the Co-op tonight. I realized that while my 30-mile bike commute is keeping me fit, I'm not nearly as strong as I used to be climbing, so time to fix that. Tonight should be some bouldering, and then a campus session. If everything falls into place (especially with the weather), I'll be able to go bouldering at Cooper's Rock Saturday, and then hit the lead wall at the gym Sunday. Woo!

Jam-packed

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It certainly is an exciting day out there today. Let's run through it: * Today the weather was good enough (and I felt well enough) to ride in, and it was gorgeous. I made the 15 miles in just about an hour and 15 minutes, and it didn't feel hard at all. Last time I nearly collapsed when I got here, so this time I took it a little bit easier, worked on breathing, and had a wonderful trip in.

* One of my babies from the last job has launched. I'm pretty proud of this site; lots of fighting with creative to simplify the layout, and there's lots of neat .nizzle stuff going on with the product pages. (BTW, this is the client who's ramp I was prepared to "Jackass" on, and also the one that I was having all the "Poo" fun with)

* You would probably have to know Brian to find this as funny as I do, but suffice to say that he likes to give himself challenges, whether it's biking, climbing or computers. Here's what I think he'll probably do the _next_ time he has to install a new distro:

# Write the new Linux 3.0 kernel himself at home. Using vi. # Use very small magnets to align the 1s and 0s on the platters to create a bootstrap program to load Slackware. Off of a cassette tape drive. # Challenge Linus Torvalds to an Indian leg-wrestling match, and if Brian wins, he gets to change the name to "Brinux", and have Hemos and CmdrTaco come to his house and install it for him, while Brian sits back and uses CowboyNeal as a footrest.

* Mark Pilgrim can kick your ass. He's been on a tear lately: Dave Winer's upset about the "Winer Number"? POW! jwz doesn't like CSS(Cascading Style Sheets)? BIF! BAP! Tim Scarfe thinks Mark's CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) tabs are misguided? BLAM!
I can just picture his wife-to-be dragging him away from the computer, while his arms flail out towards the keyboard... "C'mon! Lemme at 'em!".

BlogShares = Holy Crap!

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The site just officially went live, and it's crazy! I thought I totally screwed up this morning and bought some available shares of Movable Type because I thought the game had already switched over. But then it hadn't! Ack! Thinking I was going to be stuck with shares that I couldn't unload (and only being left with a pitiful $1k-odd cash balance), I started poking around on the forums. I saw a post there that if there was an outstanding buy order for a stock, you didn't have to wait for the 6 hours! So, I dumped most of everything I had picked up (down to $14k cash from $19k last night, not horrible), and sat tight.

When the site came back up, I saw that I had around $29k cash?!?!? WTF? I guess they sold the stock for me at the going rate when the beta site went down. I tried to grab some of the better-performing (at least, they were in the beta test) stocks out there, and I think I did pretty well. I snagged some slashdot (already up 25%), some Blogdex (flat so far), and the best one, BlogShares itself (already almost doubled).