First, the weekend. I didn’t do anything. No, really. On Saturday I started and finished a scenario in Heroes of Might and Magic IV. Unless you count making a top high score as an accomplishment, I accomplished nothing Saturday.

Sunday wasn’t much better. In the morning I started a brand new Assassin in Diablo II. By nightfall she was a level 21 in Act III and had points stored up in anticipation of hitting level 24 so she could start dumping points into her two main traps. Yes, I’m trying out a Trapper build. I’m astonished at how effective traps can be, especially compared to the cumbersome and somewhat buggy Martial Arts skills. (“What do you mean, I right-clicked on the monster and nothing happened… again? Argh! Stupid charge-release skills!”)

And then it was Monday, and while two days of hardcore gaming hadn’t entirely cured the anxieties of eleven straight days of work, it had numbed me to the point where I didn’t resist heading to the office. This is probably a good thing. I didn’t accomplish anything at work today, either, except resolve two stupid email-related problems.

You see, Lancelot has been replaced by Mass. (Yes, the box I had so much trouble with recently is now almost fully operational.) Today I intended to install Courier IMAP. I followed the instructions, installed the software, ran the start-up command as instructed… and could not log in from any machine at all. Argh!

Almost five hours of starting, restarting, reinstalling, poking, prodding and cussing finally led me to try the other startup script provided. Voila! Gee, it was so effing easy…

But wait, there’s more! After telling all of the other servers to start sending their little alerts and what-not to Mass, I realized that Mass was incapable of receiving email. “Huh?” It had worked before, and at first I was convinced that the firewall was screwing things up. No, of course not. See, had I thought at first to look at Qmail’s logs to see if it was detecting connection attempts, I’d have known that I’d broken one of the configuration files shortly after bringing email online. For the want of an ‘=’, the server was lost…

And that, folks, is how a guy like me blows an perfectly good eight-hour workday straight to hell. Sad, wot?

To highlight my utter sadness quotient, I was prodded into taking a 500-question purity test. (Look at Lil’s current NOTD; I’m too lazy to copy and paste linkage tonight.) My dear friends all scored in what we shall call the “lower half” of the percentile range. Not me, though.

I’m 69% pure.

On the one hand, “sixty-nine, dude!” On the other, how can my friends stand to be around someone so relatively square? It must be the power of contrast. That, or my stunning charm and personality.

No, that wasn’t meant as a joke, so you can stop laughing now. Thanks.

And now for more gaming fun. Alex and I spent a very enjoyable hour or two this evening playing Team Holomatch in Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. He and I put on our Johnny Bravo models and went around killing Gauron, Janeway, Seven of Nine and The Tick. Repeatedly. Much laughter ensued. Think of it as a father/son bonding experience. “Woo! You totally smacked that little fairy, didn’t you! Ah, that’s my boy. Hah! Did you see that shot? Damn, I’m good.”

Anyway, tomorrow evening I’m to spend the evening with Lilith, Geoffrey and whoever else happens to be at their place. I’m looking forward to it, oh yes indeed. Talk about incentive for peeling myself out of bed in the morning!

And that’s just about enough out of me for tonight. It’s amazing that I approached this entry expecting to only produce three or four paragraphs. This proves once again that I’m entirely too enamored of my own cleverness and the sound of my voice. Then again, if you weren’t just a bit impressed by it, you wouldn’t be reading this. If you don’t mind, I’ll go to bed smug now…