All signs point to this being as silly as all get-out, but you know what? I don’t care. Go forth and play with it, and if you come up with any spiffy ones save ‘em and post ‘em, or email ‘em to me and I’ll post ‘em myself. Hah!
Month: April 2004
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Can you beep me now? Good.
So I went out to dinner with Lil’ last night. That was a lot of fun, as it always is, but that’s not what this post is about. See, when she arrived at the office to pick me up she sent my phone a text message to let me know she was “Here.”
I’ve been getting a repeat of that “Here” message every hour since. Apparently, Verizon’s SMS delivery system has gone utterly insane and thinks I haven’t “picked up” my message, or something. Argh.
And when I say every hour, I mean every single hour, all night long. So my phone beeped to let me know a message had arrived, then gave me the nagging “c’mon, pick up yer damned message” beep every couple of minutes after. This woke me up all damned night. Maybe I’m overtrained, but usually when I get an SMS in the middle of the night it means one of my servers has gone wonky at the office, so I can’t just ignore it. Besides… the beeps are annoying. Every hour I rolled out of bed, grabbed my phone, turned on the backlight so I could see the message, grunted in disgust, deleted the message, turned off the backlight, put down the phone and rolled back into bed.
So here I am, not yet having had a decent night’s sleep. Today should be fun fun fun, eh?
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Remember me to Dave!
Because Mari is the coolest…
Post a memory that you have of me in the comments and then copy this to your journal/blog/Thingie.
(Title stolen from a George Carlin routine. Please, someone, anyone, buy me some George Carlin albums. Thanks.)
(Entry filed under “Surveys” because I couldn’t think of a more appropriate heading. Consistency is the defense of a small mind.)
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Sakura-Con ‘04
I’m not really up for coherence tonight (and I hear all half-dozen of my regular readers asking, “This is different from normal exactly how?”) but here’s a few tidbits of amusement from my second anime convention weekend experience:
- If you’re going from Portland to Seattle and you don’t drive, take Amtrak. Seriously. It’s comfy, relatively quiet, and your fellow passengers are several cuts above the riffraff you get on an average Greydoggie run.
- Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s something damned nifty about sharing a hotel room with just a significant other and nobody else. Yeah.
- The AMV contest Friday evening fired up my enthusiasm to make videos again. I saw a truly kick-ass action video, two great comedy videos and a few side-splittingly funny parody trailers. Hmm, that’s not a bad idea… I haven’t done one of those yet…
- Trying to fill a minor, if useful, staff function when you’ve got a head cold is difficult at best. Let’s hear it for antihistamines and decongestants!
- Some girls just should not wear fishnets. Sorry, but it’s true.
- Some boys just should not wear fishnets. Period.
- In an alternate universe, I’d probably dress up as an anime character at a convention. This alternate universe would be one in which I possessed a whole lot more money and something resembling style and/or flair.
- Speaking of cosplay, I managed to avoid catching a glimpse of Man-Faye. I count this as one of the many not-so-minor blessings from this past weekend.
- I went up with a spending budget for nifty trinkets. I came back having spent it on foodstuffs. I’m not entirely certain how that happened. Then again, almost nothing I saw at the merchandising booths grabbed my attention. Those objects that did were simply out of my affordable price range or were of the “I don’t really need it” variety. Take the Onegai Twins poster set, for instance, or the Fullmetal Alchemist art book… okay, so I’m still sort of agonizing over that one…
- If I ever do the “photo monkey” gig again, I will get my hands on a better camera. Argh. ‘Nuff said.
- My phone was frequently out of service. Near as I can tell, the Hilton considers blocking cellphone reception to be an added feature of one’s stay. Le sigh. If you tried to call and I didn’t answer, now you know why.
- Did I have fun? Yes, I had fun. Am I glad I went? You bet I am. Will I go next year? Um… ask me again in a few months.
So there you have it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to download more AMVs and kick back to relax for one last evening before getting up for work in the morning…
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Can my vacation start, now?
It took me until 12:30am to get to bed, in large part because I forgot about the need to reformat and reinstall the laptop, and in small part because of the need to do laundry so I could actually finish packing.
It took me almost five full minutes to get my brain working when, at 3:30am, the overnight guy at work called to tell me the email server had kicked everybody off. (And by “everybody” I mean “him and the one other guy who was there.” But you get the idea.) We’re having That Damned Email Server Problem again. The late night I put in on Tuesday was a complete waste of time (and money spent buying a network card and having it Fred-X‘d to me).
It took another twenty-five minutes to walk him through the entire procedure of gracefully exiting everything on the server and then bringing it back online again.
It took about another half-hour to get back to a nervous, fitful sleep.
My alarm went off at 6:30am. I start my vacation today, one way or another. Here’s hoping I’m coherent enough not to do anything boneheaded between now and, oh, my next chance to get some sleep.
See you Monday night, folks…
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Why now, o cursed immune system?
Back when I worked at my old job as a mail clerk and package shipper, I got sick constantly. I knew then that the job was just a bit too much for me to deal with… but hey, what’s wrong with working open to close, Monday through Saturday? Right?
Since I got this new job about six years ago, I haven’t really been sick that often. I get the occasional cold, and I’ve had the flu only a couple of times. So why, now, does my body have to betray me in the days before I leave for Sakura-Con?
Yep. I’ve got a sore throat, the telltale swollen glands, and a moderately unpleasant little cough that won’t quite go away. Lovely, just frelling lovely. I leave tomorrow morning for five days in Seattle with a few thousand anime fans and my girlfriend. This is gonna be a blast…