labels

I decided to break down and start filling in the labels section for all my posts. So far it seems the most applied tags are "gaming", "cars" and of course "rant". It's kind of an interesting undertaking because I have to go skim all my old posts, and this thing has been running for the entire duration of my Master's degree.

broken already

I've used last.fm for barely a day and it's already screwing up. It apparently doesn't understand the concept of soundtracks, so it says things like Solaris is a Latvian band. I also can't wait to see the charts when it learns I will pick a song and listen to it twenty times in a row while doing computer work.

(Update: I was listening to some Half-Life music and the Last.fm application told me that I was 'incorrect' in tagging it as Half-Life and I should 'do last.fm and myself a favor' and change the tag to whatever composer I've never heard of who wrote it. So I went on the wiki and told last.fm to bite me.)

I have a mere four days of work between now and Christmas break, but it's going to be hectic. The new networked manufacturing system is entering its validation phase which means I get to help test it on top of doing whatever it takes to make sure the line keeps running. I'm also apparently the only one who knows most of the new process to release material for shipment.

inspired and organic

I installed Last.fm. We'll see how long that lasts with everyone being able to see what weird music I listen to. Maybe someone will figure out where these titles come from.

and i need you to recover

My neighbors have started some kind of passive-aggressive battle amongst themselves over phone books. For some reason we get at least three different types of phone books and the last two put a big stack in the front lobby instead of distributing them properly. So someone left a note saying they shouldn't put garbage there, and then someone else wrote an annoyed note about how these are new phone books, and I haven't really been paying attention except when I got home from work today someone had left three phone books at my door, including the annoyed note. I don't know why these people think I am involved in their petty battle, as I don't care about them in general, but I might just throw all the phone books down the garbage chute if people can't resolve their phone book issues.

I finally finished Mass Effect after three weeks. All 1000 points. I think I'm taking a break from serious gaming now - although screwing around in TF2 is not out of the question.

I made some fudge for tomorrow's Christmas potluck lunch at work. Of course I couldn't do it without incident. Peanut butter fudge is the Alfa Romeo of food.

holiday season

Finally getting near the holidays. So far the only decorations I have is Christmas lights on the floor. It did actually snow yesterday - just barely, but still. I did find the two radio stations playing Christmas music, but shortly after I did one of them started playing Kenny G and the other went to a bunch of annoying ads so I had to turn it off.

it might change my memory

More new people at work. One started today who is in process/manufacturing and apparently he's into car stuff too, which I found out after lamenting that my Camaro will be difficult to get up and down the narrow back roads near Oswego Lake as it will be almost a foot wider than the Malibu.

MasterCard is running some contest where one prize is dual cars - one for you, one to give to someone else. The cool thing is it isn't prepicked, it's your choice, up to $70,000. That's an interesting problem. Obviously that isn't going to get you a Ferrari F430 or a DB9, at a price tag of around $170,000. The Camaro, besides not existing yet, is aiming more for the Mustang price range, so you wouldn't be taking full advantage of the win. What would be the best pick for 70 grand? Corvette?

I got Mass Effect this weekend. It's pretty cool. I haven't really played any RPGs other than Final Fantasy so it was interesting getting something different. Apparently it's the first part of a future trilogy - can you say timesink?

I had high hopes to get things in order today, and while I didn't get far for the most part I did mail my brother's birthday present. I also mailed back the mistaken Amazon.com package. It feels good to get that damned thing out of my life.

I finally got my webcomic shirt today some ten weeks after originally ordering it. They claimed they mailed it out over two weeks ago but it's clearly postmarked Wednesday. They just couldn't help being incompetent to the bitter end. And of course it's now too cold to show off my F15 shirt.

think of all the things we learned

Work is pushing hard to get this week's shipment out because of Thanksgiving, so they ran production all weekend. I wouldn't care except they wanted to have enough lead time for reworks so I had to come in on Saturday and Sunday for a few hours and process them. It wasn't a big deal but I am not exactly used to having to schedule around things on weekends.

When I wasn't at work this weekend I was trying out the last piece of Orange Box, Team Fortress 2. It was fun for a while but I think I've already hit the point where I've had enough.

I was almost set to go ahead and build a new computer but then it turns out Intel is launching a quad 45nm 2.5GHz processor in January, so I guess I'll put it off some more. That's unfortunate because my computer has really had about enough. I saw the new SimCity came out and even though it's probably been ruined I wanted to give it a shot, but my computer couldn't possibly handle it.

black and white picture of her on my wall

I have one achievement left in Beautiful Katamari (not counting the downloadable content that isn't available yet) which requires me to play 200 levels on normal. I've already cleared them all and gotten 100% collection so I didn't really have any reason to keep playing, but I started again anyway. I started playing the same level over and over and kept getting a little better each time, and as a result I also starting climbing the leaderboards. I finally got to 8th place out of about 3400. I'm pretty happy about cracking the top ten, even if it's just for one level.

I was hoping to get actual work done at work this week with my bosses out - hence no crazy meeting days - but for some reason a lot of component issues have been cropping up and as Component Quality Engineer I have to take part in them. The new manufacturing system is also taking up more time as it creeps closer to going live. So I've been quite busy just trying to hold down the status quo.

don't know where we're goin

Sunday night finds me trying to track down a flute concerto. I've had an mp3 for a while called Bach - Flute Concerto in G which I like quite a bit despite generally not taking to classical music. I've managed to further identify this track as the second movement of the work, but now I am trying to figure out who recorded this version because apparently just any version isn't good enough to make me happy. So now I am on Amazon.com hitting all the preview buttons and checking track lengths in hopes of finding the one I'm after. For example this French guy speeds it up to a point where the track is 7:09, when the one I like is 8:50. Someone else is 6:30.

Another interesting point is that it's not Bach Bach as I thought, but his son Bach.

And of course Amazon.com sees me doing these searches for more than thirty seconds so it fills everything on my front page with classical music items.

The upside of this quest is that it distracts me from the Top Gear torrent, which is on track to be done well before I intend to go to bed. This week's episode looks awesome.

My neighbors left more free stuff in the lobby this weekend, where I scored a USB floppy drive. Technology has reached a point where floppy disks are a novelty. Now that nobody has a disk drive I should start sending disks to people.

shallow water channel and tide

I called the university today to figure out why I haven't gotten my Master's diploma yet, and it turns out my advisor never submitted grades for the summer credits of my internship. He fixed that right away after I informed him, but that means I'm back to waiting.

Work has been pretty crazy lately, at least six meetings a day, so I can't get any actual work done anymore.

In other lame news the post office has apparently reneged on their agreement to deliver something I mailed, and my attempt to buy a t-shirt from a webcomic is caught in limbo with nobody on their end acknowledging my emails but happy to take my money.