Ok, so it's been over a week now...

Yeah... I had been doing so good... And what happens? I slip right back into my slump of ignoring the blog... I don't know... I guess I'm just not cut out for daily updates of my blog! Anyway....

LCD's!!!
Well, I finally got something really cool from work just a few days ago... As I mentioned in my previous post we recently closed down a whole office because of lack of business/productivity/whatever I'm not in managment so I don't really know why exactly... But anway, the point is apparently if you're the type of company that actually purchases computer equipent instead of just renting it you end up having a whole crap load of the stuff left over after you close an office... So what did my company decide to do? Well for starters the director of IT is letting us borrow LCD monitors while we still work at there... So at least until I decide to go somewhere else, I've got two fairly nice 17" LG monitors. Unfortunetly they don't have DVI connectors, so while the picture is much better than CRT's, it's still not quite as crisp as it could be. But I guess that'll be the extent of my complaining, because it's pretty sweet to have 2 LCD montors sitting on my desk at home instead of to HUGENORMOUS regular monitors measureing 19 & 17 inches. I've already put the extra desk space to good use and cleaned things up quite a bit.

So is there a downside to this? Well technically yeah... Right now of I have those two "HUGENORMOUS" CRT monitors sitting on the floor of my room which is fustrating me to no end. Right now I'm not excatly sure what to do with them... I can't get rid of them because I'd be pretty screwed the day I decide to leave my current job.. So I'll figure something out. Right now I'm thinking about letting my parents use the 17", because it might fit for the downstairs computer. They have a pretty nifty corner desk set up for the computer (that I and my dad put together) which gives them tons of desk space. However we got it back in 1995 when I bought my packardbell computer, (or mabe a little before then?) At any rate, 14" monitors were what was envouge at the time, so that's what it was designed for. I'm not sure that you could fit a 17" there, but I'm sure going to try.

Well, other than that not a whole lot is new right now... I did find out a few days ago that the reason why I had been feeling sick ever since leaving my parents home was because I had a nifty little sinus infection! Hooray :P I'm still on antibiotics, but I do feel quite a bit better now. The saddest part of being sick? I'm forced to abstain from beer, and the new world tour over at the winking lizard just started :(

Two nights in a row!

Wow!! Two nights in a row I'm updating my blog! This is amazing! Totally amazing! Break open the champaign, I beleive that indeed it is a new worlds record!!! At least I get one for something!! ha ha. Well, as it turns out I do have something pretty big to talk about, my review was today and it actually was quite the supprise!

Dum dum duuuuuuum... The review!
Well, for those of you who might read this and never worked at my company we get our performance reviews annually followed by a raise. Last years was pretty eh... They talked about all my strengths as a programmer, then mentioned how I got saddled with all the crap projects that were around when I first got hired (customer maintenance, our order entry system and bunches of other related things) and managed to make them work pretty well. They did however say that I didn't pay attention to detail as my negative point (much less amusing than The Bear's bad attitude). All said and done I walked away with a rather blah 6.5% (or so) raise. Please note, that this is when our company was growing like there was no tomorrow due to a certain new account we got.

Well, this year I was expecting more of the same basically... They'd mention how I did lots of neat things and such, then say that either I still didn't pay attention to detail or *gasp* that *I* had a bad attidude (early last year I had a talk about my tude with the assistant manager). Well, the review its self was about half an hour, they did mention customer maintenance yet again and other such things but no negatives. But here's the real shocker, they "hinted" that they were going to try and get me double my last raise plus a little extra, so for arguments sake 13%. And this when we found out that our "new" customer from last year wasn't going to do quite as much business with us as we thought and we're in the process of finding new work to keep things running. So, I guess it was a nice review all in all, I'm certianly not going to quit straight off.. But I'm still not 100% certain about the situation there. Currently in my dept we're working very hard on new order entry systems to get more customers on board, but from what I can see we're not getting the big customers we need to sustain the growth we experienced last year. So I guess unless we come up with enough work for the rest of the company to do I'd imagine this year will bring the happyness of downsizing. Oh well, we'll see what happens... After all, while I never thought I'd say this, my company actually does have a mostly compitant IT staff, so the tech side should run smoothly.

In other news...
Just before christmas break, I got onto a huge Commodore 64 kick! So I did what I always do in such situations, I turned to ebay and started purchasing hardware! So far I have the C64 console (keyboard) it's self, and the 1541 floppy drive (oh yeah, the beast!) The floppy turned out to be the best find, turns out the auction conviniantly ended right when I was going up to detroit to visit everyone, and it just so happens that the guy selling it lived in Mt. Clemens!!! So I was able to for go the cost and inconviniance of shipping, and just pick the drive up at the guys place of business! Rock on! In addition to the hardware, I also picked up a copy of the GEOS graphical OS for the C64. Version 1.5, I hope to get a mouse soon and fire that bad boy up! Back when my family had our original C64 we never did anything productive with it, just games for my brother and I, so it'll be interesting to put the system to some use.

Now I know what you're thinking, the C64 can't be that useful of a system today... I mean I seriously doubt any Word Processor for it would be able to spell check (or at least do so with the vocabulary and accuracy of today's software) with only 64K of memory to work with... And I tend to agree, trying to use the C64 as a real desktop would end up making the thing a nifty toy for only a short time (sorry, not getting rid of my dual CRT's!) That's why I'm investing in some programming books and such, so I can turn the C64 into a useful tool. Specifically right now I'm looking for a particular book that explained how to do all sorts of things with the system, like turn it into a home security system. So that's my ultimate goal here, to turn the C64 into something like that, in fact, home security sounds really fun. So I'm currently looking for that book and I'm totally going to turn my C64 into an alarm system... It should be alot of fun!

Well, that's all for now! C-y'all later!

Wow, it's been a long time again

Sorry for the long time between update (to the three or so people who read this ;) ), but I guess I just kind of forgot about the blog. But I'm back, better, stronger and faster than before! So here's what I've been doing for the past few months...

Amanda
Well, I finally asked for her phone number just today... But unfortunately for me, she does have a boyfriend, I did get the so :(. But on the good news front, she did give me the phone number and it does look real, so maybe I'll get to hang out with her some time. That'd be pretty cool, I'm pretty sure that Amanda would be a great person to chill with, so yay! :)

Jacket
Sort of related to the above, I did finally get my winking lizard tour jacket, and I'm gearing up for the next tour. It should be fun, there's a swipe card this time, so I can go to any lizard and get beers marked off. The jacket they have in the menu looks pretty sweet, it's button down this time around. I'll have to be careful about the size this time though. Last time I got a large and it was a tad bigger than expected.

Lottery
OMG, I finally have the perfect plan to make a billion dollars!!!!!! Currently I'm working on a program that will allow me to predict the next mega millions lottery number ;) (yes I know this is impossible, just play along with me here). You see, if you go to the web site http://www.megamillions.com/ you can download all of the winning mega millions lottery numbers for the past 10 years. So what I plan to do (and am already about done with) is write a program which takes the 900 or so number contained in the file, then calculates the most likely winning numbers for the next drawing. I'll have to brush up on my stats and probability, but I figure I should be a billionaire by about march.

Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was pretty fun! I went home to go visit the family, and did the family thing of course. As it turns out however, a friend of a friend of my mom's son just recently came to Detroit from Lima Peru to do his residency to become a dr (he's becoming rich the hard way). Because he doesn't have family there, he came over to our place for thanksgiving. He's a really cool guy, really outgoing so we had a blast. Then as a special treat I opened up two Thomas Hardy's Ales for us, one was a vintage 1995. They were both great, of course the 1995 was the best by far! I"m going to have to get more of that :)

Christmas
I took a really long vacation for Christmas, from Dec 23rd to Jan 3rd. This was because I still had that much vacation time left and unfortunately my company has the ever so pleasant policy of "use it or lose it" :P So I figured, what the hell, I might as well take a nice vacation for the holidays. While I was there I got together with Will, Greg and amazingly enough Steve whom I have not seen since he got married Nov 04. It was great to be able to catch up with everyone that I hadn’t seen in forever, and go out to the bars there with everyone too (of course).
As far as Christmas gifts, I got a whole bunch of clothing, and a monopoly set. The monopoly set turned out to be the best gift, my dad, Franco (the guy that visited us for Thanksgiving and x-mas day) and my self played a game. I think I would have ended up losing to Franco in the end, but we didn't find out 'cause he had to leave before we could finish. For new years I went to a party in Detroit with my sister, one of her boyfriends buddy rented out a really nice flat where we got together and had a good time. I ended up calling a whole bunch of my buddies while I was there for the drunk new years dialing tradition ;) It was great!

Well, that's about all for now. I'm going to try and make it not so long till I update the blog next, I definitely need to get more atom films videos on here so maybe I'll do that next :)