Well, so much for my attempt to go to bed early last night. I was up until my normal bed time with <lj user=missyanthrope> and <lj user=scotters83> helping me with a side project I decided to undertake yesterday. Then, as I was about to go to bed, a … situation… developed on #mortalkombat that irritated me and needed to be dealt with. *sigh* More and more I wonder why I bother. The stuff like E3 and Gamers Day is nice, but I end up stressing over some of the stuff that I have to deal with. It's really not all that fun sometimes.

Oh, well. At least it's a holiday weekend this weekend. I've got three days of nothing to worry about, and hopefully I can catch up on my sleep then. I'm hoping I can finish implementing my side project at that point, too. Mom and Aunt Norma will be coming back from Vegas tomorrow morning, too, and we'll be going to dinner straight from the airport. Dad and I just have to decide where we're going to eat tonight and tomorrow. I also need to get it set up where Aunt Norma can watch the Doctor Who episodes she missed.

Anyway, time for me to get my expense report filled out and turned in…. fun fun…

There is a poker game tonight, but I've just sent an email to the other guys involved that I wasn't feeling well and am going to have to bow out for tonight. This is mostly true; I just want to be able to get to bed early tonight, because I'm running on less sleep than usual and I'm feeling tired and out of it as a result. If I go to poker night I won't be in bed earlier than midnight. I'd just as soon try and get a full eight hours or more tonight.

Fortunately for me, my Jennings/Houma trip has been delayed for a couple of days. There's going to be a board meeting here on Wednesday, and the CIO wants me here that day just in case I'm going to be needed for network connectivity and the like. Fun… now I can plan my trip for Thursday and Friday instead. At least I won't have another long weekend where the first day back is spent traveling.

Oh, well… back to the grind…

With apologies to <lj user=jenndolari>…

… I've just found that there's nothing quite so stressing as doing phone support for a panicked corporate attorney who has people screaming at him (with his job being on the line as a result) and a daughter who's in the hospital.

I just hope for somewhere good for lunch so I can calm down a little.

Things are as the subject line says… or as near as, with the exception of the president of one of our operating units complaining that the new phone system is a "piece of shit" and the "worst phone system [he's] ever had to deal with". It all stems from one piece of functionality the old system had that the new one is currently lacking, and it's only his OU that wants/needs it. Otherwise, his opinion is definitely a minority opinion; personally, I love the new phone system, and a lot of us think the OLD system was the worst phone system we've ever had to deal with.

Other than having to fight with the POP3 mail server on the engineering fileserver yesterday, the upgrade from Red Hat Linux 8 to CentOS Enterprise Linux 4 went pretty smoothly. Now I just need to arrange my trip next week to Jennings and Houma to get the two RH8 boxes at those locations moved to CentOS EL 4. The main issue I'll have with those compared to the Cypress server is the fact that on the Cypress server, the data that needs to be kept was on a separate hard drive. In other words, I'll have to back up the data onto something else before I can do a wipe and reload. Bleh. Hopefully I can convince one of my coworkers to let me put a second hard drive in at least one of these machines.

Tonight will most likely be a poker night, as Anderson emailed the usual gang late yesterday afternoon to try and get a game together. As usual, I've got nothing planned for tonight, so I'm most likely in. Hopefully I can do better this week than I did at the last poker game. (I lost $42.50 at the last poker game.) Oh, well… as long as there are no stretches of Balls (three-card Guts, which I've stopped playing because of how brutal it gets) or 7-27 (which I absolutely hate), I should be fine.

Anyway, gotta run and fix a mysterious printer problem… fun…

Hrm.

I can't exactly say I'm having an exciting day right now. My main project right now consists of adding two new users to the network and setting up their account profiles so that they're ready to go once they log into the system for the first time. It's really not that much to do, really… just get it set up and let the sysadmin know the accounts are ready. Other than that, it's fairly slow right now. Oh, well… it could be worse. I could have absolutely nothing to do… heh.

Before I go any further, a quick hi to those people who are joining us from the link to <a href="http://www.dianto.org/blog">Sean MC's blog</a>; if you're easily bored, this may not be the place for you. Otherwise, welcome!

Okay, that said… Aunt Norma finally arrived last night. She's staying tonight, and tomorrow she and Mom will be going to Vegas. While I was gone at Los Angeles, two Doctor Who books she ordered for me arrived: "Winner Takes All" and "The Monsters Inside", which are both Ninth Doctor books. In addition, when she arrived, she brought with her the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie on DVD. :-) The only problem was that it was Region 2 and 4, which means it would only play on either region-free players or players made in the UK and Europe(?). So, I had to run it through DVD Decrypter and then burn it to a DVD-R in order for me to be able to watch it on my DVD players. I also supposedly have the final Eighth Doctor Doctor Who book on the way as well… unfortunately it wasn't released before Aunt Norma left for the States, but it should arrive at some point soon. Now, I just gotta return the favor: Aunt Norma missed Saturday's episode of Doctor Who, so I'm going to let her watch it on my computer system. It's not that big of a deal, really… I recorded the season finale of CSI: Miami for Mom on my TiVo anyway, so she needs to go in and see that too.

Bleh… need to go and do some printer troubleshooting… fun fun. Might as well sign off for now seeing as I don't know how long this will take. Oh, well…

There's nothing quite like time to kill when one has little to do. Right now I'm stuck out at the colocation, waiting for the obligatory traffic mess out at 610 and San Felipe to right itself before I dare venture home. I'll probably leave at around 6:30 PM… and be home in time to see Aunt Norma, who's in the country for a short bit.

Last Thursday, I got an email from an old friend. Actually, I probably would have received it sooner, but he sent it to my old ravenloft email address and got hit by my customized spam solution. (For those who never saw it, all mail to my ravenloft.net address gets bounced with a custom error message that says, "550 Recipient address rejected: Spam makes baby Jesus cry. If this is a legit email, send to…" etc.) Apparently he had dug up an old document he wrote back in 8th grade dealing with a bit of a… well, situation I had caused involving him and this one girl. I went by his site, read his blog and joined his forums, and for now… am just watching and observing. :-)

It's good to connect with old friends. The sad fact is, up until around high school, we had been a trio of best friends (including our other friend Kourt) who did a lot of fun and kinda weird stuff together. Then, during high school, I drifted away from them. Well, more like it was mutual drift, but looking back I don't blame them. In my freshman year and part of my sophomore year, I was something of a hateful asshole to those around me. I got better over time, but the drift still happened and I more or less disappeared from their circle of friends. I'd spoken to Sean since high school, of course, but never really kept up contact. That's part of the reason I'm kinda keeping back and keeping an eye on things… I'm actually hoping I can probably mend a few fences. One can never have too many friends, after all.

It's funny how some things change and how things stay the same. Sean and Kourt are both married now. Hell, Sean was apparently thinking of fatherhood recently (if you're reading this, Sean, I ain't stalking… just saw it in one of your blog entries referenced in a post to another friend). Meanwhile… things are exactly the same for me, more or less. Still single, still living at home, and still playing video games and messing around with computers. I guess the main difference for me is that I have a good job and could move out whenever I wanted to. Still, reading Sean's forum and whatnot, it gives me cause for reflection. Am I really as far along in my life as I want to be? Is there something more out there?

*shrug* I don't know. I guess for now, I'll just continue to take each day as it comes and see what happens. I'm not dissatisfied with my life, mind you. I just wonder what more could be out there, and what I've missed in my time.

(And if you've read this far, my apologies for boring you with this rare bout of self-contemplation. I'll return to the mundane details of my life, humorous anecdotes, and social commentary with the next few posts. :-) )