travis' brain dump

oh man does today hurt… lol

i was up almost all night with a nice case of acid reflux… i’m glad these things have been tapering off, but i tell ya when i do get one, i’m ready to just hang myself in the stairway… lol however, i did get a ton of FFXI played last night, figured as long as I was up, why not do something entertaining.

pretty good party in the dunes last night (if you don’t play FFXI you may just want to skip ahead to the next section) which got me leveled pretty fast. props to chem and marsh for PL’n the party last night…. nothing like layin down the smack on things that would normally kill the crap out of you without any risk to yourself or your party. hookd level 16 last night, made a new friend (shout to Utopia) and hung out with Mike (Cludseph) for a while on there. Just how late did you stay up bro? LOL I bet he’s still asleep right now. It’s funny how this game is catching on with my friends like a fever… if everyone who wants in actually goes and gets it, we’ll be up to six of us playing this thing together… hey that’s a full party… c`mon slackers, go get your stuff so we can rampage! I’m goaling for lvl 18 tonight if possible… I’ve got to get on there and get some stuff done first though, headed back to Sandoria to take care of some things then I plan on returning to the confines of the dunes for the duration until I make level 20 and get my subjob quest completed. Then it’s on to Jueno for the chocobo! (i know Mike’s ready to get his thunderchicken too) ok, so enough FFXI talk… that was my geek moment for the morning…

so, since i was up all night, i feel like crap. tired, moody, blah blah – hopefully i don’t pass out. mark’s back! wooo! arwen was freaking goin nuts last night. i think she missed her buddy. daddy’s cool and all but when you’ve got someone who plays with you all day long and doesnt have to work when he’s home with you during the day you tend to lean towards the person who plays with ya when you’re 3. lol only a couple more weeks though until school starts. i talked to the school yesterday and they seemed optimistic about arwen making it in… that’s gonna rock if she does. keeping those fingers crossed! she really wants to start going… *sigh* i remember when i was that excited about school, those were the days. i just hope she stays excited… i got bored fast. third grade on was just a drag, lol.

work is going pretty good… we’re ramping up for hopefully a busy next year. we’ve got contracts sitting out there for all kinds of stuff. now we just wait for deployments of our partner’s products and then the fun begins. we’re looking to restructure a lot of things it appears. i got this list yesterday in a meeting with the president of the company and things appear that they are going to be really busy for me. that’s good though. the hardest thing is that we’re going to basically be restructuring some stuff and i need to come up with the battle plan for my department and what resources i’ll need to get things done. fun fun fun… (not being sarcastic, i’m actually looking forward to us operating like a somewhat normal company, haha) in other news… the upgrade to this server is going pretty good. i’ve been compiling the daemons on the new system for two days now… i made huge progress yesterday. we’re moving this webserver to FreeBSD 6.1 with a TON of new bells and whistles not to mention upgrades to apache and mysql. should be lots of fun. 🙂 there may be some downtime this week when we do fire it up, but it shouldn’t be down too long, maybe 30 minutes or so.

so myspace evidently ticked a few people off last week in addition to myself… ahh yes… so glad that my blogsite is on this server and not over there, lol… i need to go complete the deletion process of my old posts… i’ve just been slowly doing so for some unknown reason. they’re all here so its not like i’m losing anything, but all the same – its just weird. 🙂

well, i’ve got work to do so I better get to it. lunch is coming up but since I typed this out, i’ll work through it. lol not like I feel like driving anywhere.

laters

 

well another one down and another one to look forward to on the horizon…

this one didn’t go too bad at all… it started pretty good. I snagged Arwen and hit up Old Chicago to meet Kate and Andy for a little Friday unwind – hey, i got a minute to be social so I took advantage of it. It was great to just hang out for even an hour or so, so i’m not complaining one bit. It was good to just get out and Arwen and Kate had a blast coloring the whole time we were there. Andy and I just whined about our week so overall it turned out to be a good starter for the weekend. We finished up there with Arwen, Andy and I headed back up to my place to enjoy our usual Friday night routine… Sci-Fi Friday… which I might add had one of the best episodes of SG-1 I’ve seen in a very long time. (so sue us, we all get a kick outta the show) It was a calm and quiet evening for the most part as it was only myself and Andy once the kiddo was down for the night. Mark was off in Oregon enjoying the beaches in the Pacific Northwest, Mike was somewhere and all was otherwise quiet… Needless to say it ended up being an early night for me, which was nice all in all despite the fact I was hoping to score a babysitter to sneak out for the night for at least a couple hours… rumor had it something fun was going on and I wouldn’t have minded hitting it up, oh well maybe next time. I crashed out at about 10:30/11:00 which is a first for me in a long time on Fridays.

Saturday wasn’t too bad… aside from getting some work done to get started on the upgrade of this webserver that is hosting this wonderful blog site of mine, I successfully knocked out weed treating my yard, grocery shopping and misc errands and such… pretty productive. I also ended up watching Dylan (neighbor kid) who is 9 days older than Arwen. Those two are funny together… good thing they keep each other entertained pretty well, it made time to finish up a HUGE chunk of house work. It actually appears as though civilized people, albeit its just the two of us, live here. After Dylan left and Arwen was down for the night, I proceeded to play Final Fantasy XI until I nearly passed out at the keyboard… Mike can attest to that one… almost got the whole party killed in one battle due to lack of attention… haha called it at night at about 2-3am.

Today consisted of my usual routine, oddly i still got up by 10am, except I additionally ended up going over to Arwen’s grandparents (mother’s side) so that she could see the family over there. Got dinner as well, so thats a bonus. Although my stomach now churns at the thought that I ate Eggplant Parmesan it wasn’t bad at all… Finished up there and came home at about 9pm… Arwen in bed immediately! lol — I then proceeded to change my oil which was 1500 miles overdue… (4,000 miles) I felt so bad. I’m super religious about changing every 2500 miles due to my turbo, but I’m pleased to find that the oil was just dirty and was still quite good (despite being dirty) when I drained it. I know my car is QUITE grateful. I don’t usually do stuff like that on Sunday’s but this time I had to make an exception… it was the only free moment I’ve actually gotten to get it done. Everything else just crowded my schedule. Also Jesse came over and was working on his car, so why not knock out my stuff too while I’m out there with him… heh It worked out well. Ended up having a really good conversation with him about how relationships can be retarded but yet serve a very good purpose at times, or something to that effect. Back half of that was me giving him the lowdown on failures of my life and to run while he still can… haha jk…

eh, anyway its late and i’m a lil tired so i’m out. Gotta go check out another school in the morning before work.

later

so, does anyone else but me notice that myspace seems to be down about 20%-25% of the overall day on most days?

it’s not like my life depends on the site or anything, I just find it funny that these guys can’t keep their servers up for any length of time. If its not the main site, its the blog site, if its not the blog site its the mail site… i mean c`mon people. shouldn’t this be a lesson to you that Windows just can’t handle the load or that your code sucks?!

I think about every other day I log in and see a message like the following:

Latest Update: 08:59AM PST, Friday, July 28th.
hiya – your accounts are not deleted. we’re just moving some databases around to a new data center. we’re workin on things right now.

ok… so if its not a power outage or moving equipment its ‘ we’re doing some maintenance ‘

i know what some of you are thinking… “it’s a free service, don’t complain” but you have to understand it from my point of view. if that was my network or my servers and my downtime was anything remotely close to those guys… i’d be out of a job. I’d be out the door on my rear end for sure. so just what is the thinking over there one must ask? does the network operations guy not have any authority to come out and say ‘ this is not working folks, we need a new strategy to increase stability ‘ or do they like working all odd hours of the night because their stuff breaks constantly.

if I were myspace, i’d be embarassed.