Kitkowskiland!

Got back from MACE, a three day convention in High Point. I had a blast. More on that in a later post.

Orie gets back from Japan tomorrow night after having left for six weeks (wedding, family stuff to take care of, etc). She will hopefully be bringing back about four hundred pounds of Japanese manga. Plus some new Japanese RPGs.

This is my first blog post written from my new PC. After carefully considering all options and support models, I went for a higher-end Dell. So far: Slick. Only took me a few hours to get rid of most of the crap, and install all my Japanese widgets and haxxor apps.

I just burned my cardio and yoga DVDs onto this thing so that I can do that from work in the gym at lunch. I’m going to be a gym-going fiend, between the DVDs, Yourself! Fitness, and I’m even thinking of throwing a DDR pad in the corner of the gym so that I can do Stepmania at lunch. We’ll see.

Doing the last bit of cleanup before Orie gets home. It’s relatively clean, except for my new upstairs Ikea work-table, which looks like a bomb of dice, DVDs and books hit it.

I’m no longer drinking coffee like I used to. I’m pretty much off of High Caffeine Items entirely except for a cup of coffee every now and then, and the random (used to be daily) Red Bull.  I’ve been into Yerba Mate on and off for a bit now, and I’ve been digging into Y.M. teas and other regular teas; regular teas too have caffeine in them, but not nearly as much.

I’ve been having weird dreams that I go back in time into my own body 3-5 years back, and am totally disoriented by the fact that what I did at work and the like for a routine I’ve since totally forgotten (tools, passwords, processes, names of people, etc).

I’m kinda curious how Oblivion would run on this Laptop…

Also, anyone know what The Good Freeware Antivirus software is these days?

I tend not to drop posts for small beans, but this was too funny not to share.  Was chatting with my buddy Travis about making some returns to Best Buy on “Black Friday” (the day of shopping after Thanksgiving, which is traditionally a day that I either Work, or avoid leaving the house entirely), which is having their annual “Morning-to-Noon Sale which is so good that you’ll get in a fistfight to grab that last Blu-Ray player or Nintendo Wii” Sale. Best Buy is conveniently open that day from 5AM so that it’s easier for the ambulances to come through if needed.

And Travis said:

“Travis: i’m not afraid of Black Friday. it’s like the american version of the Running of the Bulls”

We don’t have culture, but man we have our Shopping Traditions!

-Andy

F: “Hi, we’re going to deliver your table this Saturday at 7:00PM”
A: “Awesome!  Will the fact that I’m not going to be there be a problem?” (At this point I was just f—ing with them, I know they come in and set it up and do the whole thing, so there’s no way it’ll work)
F: “Uh… Well, looks like the next time we’ll be out there is sometime between November 20th and December 2nd.  Will you be home then?”
A: (thinks about the fact that this is a two week range) “Uh, I think so”.
F: “OK, someone will call you back then to schedule a new delivery.”

Still not holding my breath on this. The last two times they were missing parts (the same parts), we’ll see about this time around. I’m not angry or frustrated or anything, because you get what you pay for: Extremely high-quality human-made furniture from FLS at “Cost plus a Few Bucks” price. It’s a great place and they really treat you right, and the furniture commonly arrives for most people within 3-6 months… they just need to do a slightly better job of meeting customer expectations.

Anyway, hopefully we’ll see it in before Presents Day.

Also, I was having an AWESOME case of buyer’s regret recently. I purchased a really slick as hell laptop for $1600 (list price before discounts was like $2100), and it’s basically going to be my primary work machine: Dual Core 2.0Ghz Pentium 4mb cache, 2 Gigs of memory, 7200RPM 100gb HD, 15.4 Cinema-style display (which I like more than “square” for the work I do) with ultra-high quality screen, yadda yadda yadda.  My budget plans were $1000-1400, so I went over a bit, a lot even. Last time I had buyer’s regret like this was, thinking hard on it, almost exactly 10 years ago when I bought a laptop right before I went to Japan (Intel P2, 128 Hard Megs of RAM, 3 GB hard disk for all storage needs, etc) and that was like $2500 or something IIRC.

Anyway, I got this monstered out because for the work-work that I do (the tech side, not the web/translation/writing and hobby stuff) I basically need it to run VMWare with like 4 concurrent OSes running at the same time (the native Win XP Pro, plus 1 RH Linux server, 2 Windows 2003 Enterprise servers, and 1 Ubuntu host), so we’ll see if it can handle this load.

The sad thing is that the laptop should arrive before the table.

Also in the news, Orie gets back next Wednesday. Also, this weekend I will go to the MACE convention over in High Point. Literally the night they were set to deliver my table, I won’t be at home but I’ll be like 5 minutes away from FLS. Irony. Anyway, the saga continues.

-Andy