My outfit for Halloween. Walter Sobchak from ""
We got new desks. This doesn't sound like a big project, but it sure turned into one.
It started by cleaning out the existing office, both desks, all computers, all cables, etc etc. Then a good thorough vacuum and a deep steam clean.
With that finished, it was time to Paint. The walls were in crappy shape, so plugging holes, and a few coats of new grey/purple/blue paint and the walls looked great. Took the TV off the wall. Heather did most of the trim in a nice bright white.
It was about this time that Heather asked why we spent most of our time in the smallest room in the house. From there we decided to move the office into the guest room, and the guest room into the office.
Begin guest room clean out: Queen size Futon, Big overstuffed chair (this got shuffled not removed), dresser, tons and tons of junk. This all went into the old office. TV back up on the wall, but a different wall this time.
Then the new desks. These things came packed in the cardboard equivalent of Fort Knox. After hours of taking them out and breaking down boxes we were almost done. Setup desks, setup computers, shuffle things.
Unfortunately I didn't take before pictures of either room, but here are the in progress and after shots. Sorry for some odd shaped and blurry phone camera shots.
Just a post to say I'm apparently the worst blogger ever!
I have a bad case of gamer A.D.D. I tend to jump from game to game to game. I do have a love of MMOs though, and in the past 2 months I've played:
Aion
DDO
LoTRO
Allods (beta)
STO
Currently I'm playing STO, and it's fun. Space combat is satisfying, ground combat is simplistic but fun too. I don't think I'll be playing long honestly, apparently the leveling curve is very fast, and you run out of things to do quickly. I'm not a PVP'er most of the time, and apparently that is the End Game for STO.
It's all just a waiting game for FFXIV really though. That's the next great hope at the moment. We'll see I suppose. At least I have FFXIII in a couple weeks.
I just moved Occidere.com to a new host, hopefully there won't be any problems. I could also use a day or two of rest, I've now worked 11 days in a row, most of them for many many long hours (more than 8 or 9). Lots to do this upcoming weekend, but it will be nice to not be at work.
Edit: DNS is good now, yay.
Friday was awesome, there was a big ClamAV snafu which meant working until 8:30pm. I was going to explain, but my co-worker Harout did a full writeup over here: .
Saturday I didn't do much at all. Played Divinity 2 some, went to dinner. I did decide that dinner out in Annapolis is not worth it at all, everywhere had huge waits. Coconut Joes in Edgewater wins again. Good food, no wait.
Sunday was a "get things done day" with a smattering of Torchlight in between. Found an awesome "mod" manager for Torchlight called .
Cleaned the house as well, it needed it.
A few weeks ago, we took down one of our smoke detectors (because 3 is too many). We found that underneath that smoke detector was a breakout box for a light. Awesome we thought, lets get a light. So we did, and I installed it on Sunday. The fun part about this is that the light is not attached to a switch, it's on all the time. Think about that for a second...the foyer light inside the house is on all the time. Stupidity. For now, the wiring is not hooked up, and the light looks nice (though not providing any light).
Monday was an awesome day of Email issues at work. Apparently we have crossed over the "things work" threshold into "not enough resources" on our big ESX Server. Apparently when you send out thousands of list messages a day it can negatively impact performance. Apparently when your clients don't clean up their mail lists and you get thousands of bounce emails that then have to be scanned by spamassassin and clamav it can severely impact performance. It's meant that our "slow test of ESX Upgrades" has become a fast one. It has also meant I've spent the past 3 days setting up tons of crazy performance counters (iostat + awk madness) on a ton of mail servers. Kind of neat stuff actually. Plus we are going to be hooking up our ESX servers to a CORaid AoE array, which makes management a lot easier. All-in-all lots of stress, but with good results.
Tonight is Poker Night, which I am going to try to make. This weekend is another get shit done weekend, but I have Monday off, so that will help offset the feeling that I never get to rest. Sunday we are also going to see Avatar at an IMAX in 3D. Woop!
Finally home from vacation. So much to do around here. General cleanup is one thing, but we seem to be amassing crap, and it's so untidy lately (Thanks for keeping it clean Kyle). Hoping to do a little re-organizing today. Go back to one monitor on my desk. The 22" wide + 22" 4:3 is just too much for one desk, plus the 4:3 is kind of dying. Maybe I'll have time to setup my WD MyBook World Edition as a torrent server / backup NAS (see: ). We'll see. It is nice to be home, and to have non-satellite internet though. Also very glad it's trash night, because there is a ton of trash.
Also need to take care of some more estate stuff this week. Glad my boss is out, it will give me a little time at work to call all these companies that are only responsive during business hours (go figure).
This is my first post on my new blog. I'll probably ramble about tech, games, work, married life, my house, etc here.
Tonight is the last night of my Christmas vacation. Been in Colorado since last Friday. Let me tell you, it's cold out here. I've been near Gunnison, CO all week, did a little (very little) snowboarding. Overnight temps have been down around -10 farenheit. I've been smoking out front, and freezing. There are also a lot of foxes in this area, and they like the front porch too. You can see their tracks as they head up to it, hang out, and then leave. Makes late night smoking interesting at least.
I've been playing a lot of PSP games. Beat the first Star Ocean, almost done with the second as well. My game ADD seems to go away on vacation, probably due to lack of options.
Tonight I am staying up late, watching "Waiting", mostly because I'm tired of waking up way too early. Going to bed around 10PM means I get up around 4:30AM. Tomorrow we head back to Denver to fly back to BWI. Should get back home around 11PM.
Looking oddly forward to being back in Maryland.