merriment

Christmas today. Among other things I got the entire set of Northern Exposure, a TV show I've vaguely heard good things about but I've been oblivious of it until now. Checking that out should be neat, especially with normal TV running completely on empty now - no Heroes, no Top Gear, no QI, nothing. Tomorrow will be Lansing for Christmas with grandparents. I haven't been up there in a long time, and I've not really been out and about since I got back except for a pizza run.

With Christmas festivities almost over I can try and concentrate on making the most out of being in Michigan. Unfortunately I caught a minor cold en route, so I have been a little out of it since I got back.

where will you be when this is through

Much quieter today with no family xmas events. I even managed to divert the CTS for the purpose of going to Gregg's for lunch. I am trying to pull down the last Top Gear of the series but the time zone difference is not as favorable here. I dug around my local book collection and found Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not great. My family has finished wrapping presents but we still have to wait another stinking day until we can unwrap them.

I'm sad I'm going to be missing the Detroit auto show because they will have both a Corvette ZR1 and an R8 convertible. Audi might also bring a V10 R8 if they can figure out how to make one that doesn't burst into flames. My extended family is praising the virtues of upcoming 'clean diesels' but I still have my heart set on the last bastions of petrol, before the new MPG laws ruin anything interesting.

I am continuing to apply labels to the archives as I see fit. It's somewhat bizarre because for the most part I am going backwards, so a post about 'went to see the Hard Lessons' is followed by 'Hard Lessons in one week!'. A minor disclaimer is that I am also engaging in some limited revisionist history, mostly tweaking hindsightedly stupid lines and removing italics applied for similarity to Tycho's writing style.

I also ran this URL through a blog readability tester and I've apparently been upgraded from high school to genius, despite my continuing to rant about cars and technology as usual.

if all goes as planned

Travel day today. I expected things to be crazy getting to the airport but it was only usual work traffic. Southwest has changed their boarding system and I like it, although I would have gotten even better priority if the network at work had not been in the process of crashing when I was trying to check in. The first leg of my journey was from PDX to Kansas City. For some reason I picked a window seat that had no window, so I got to stare at the wall for three hours. I discovered Kansas City has an inane system where every five gates gets their own security zone, so I had to go back through security. They had some Jags littered about the place, I was hoping to see an XF but they were just XJs. The next flight was a hop to Chicago, which apparently was besieged by advisory-level fog but we got in and out with no issue. I didn't even get off the plane because it continued straight on to Detroit.

template

More screwing around, this time I upgraded the template that governs this site. I have no idea if that actually did anything.

Still working on the labelling. I have 344 posts to get through. I was also going for a couple more achievements in Orange Box.

Last.fm is gone now.

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.