It’s my first night of my two week stint as the graveyard operator, and boy am I bored.

It’s been a while since I’ve done this shift. Since I’m unable to drive due to the damn medications I’m taking (I haven’t driven since September, 2003), they pulled me off the graveyard rotation. With the advent of me getting a laptop and a VPN connection combined with the hosts file from hell… I’m now able to get in from home and monitor every system at work.

So… I’m sitting here doing operator duties in the middle of the night.

We had hoped that they could hire someone else to do this, as we’re pretty much all Sr. Engineers and therefore kinda expensive for duties like this, but with the budget the way it is, it doesn’t look like we’ll ever be able to hire an operator.

Hopefully, having all this free time will encourage my creative side… as I have plenty of time during the night to think my own special brand of weird and bizarre thoughts. Last time I worked graveyard, I came up with this little diddy (which reminds me… I need to create that as a poster for sale at the wwbd house of style (aka: my crappy online store which I make 0% profit from).

I don’t really have much other news at the moment. My wife has recovered from her surgery enough to drive again and I’m still waiting to find out when my pre-surgery appointment is. I’ll keep you up to date (like you really care).

And finally… apparently there’s been a problem with the website loading as of late. It’s taken up to 60 seconds for the sidebar to come up. A big thanks to Eve for pointing it out. I’ve found the issue and corrected it (I hope)! Let me know if there’s any other problems.

I went to the SMo-g on Saturday (see post below).

There were a few people there (60ish computers and about 80 bodies) and it had the potential for fun… but it was actually pretty boring.

There were very few servers running games and most everyone was just sitting there watching movies or playing solo. They did do a few fun things though, so it wasn’t a total loss.

A competition called “eyes and drivers” was an exercise in frustration. It’s a two round 1:1 death match in Classic Unreal Tournament and requires 2 – 2 man teams. The hitch is this: the person on the controls is blindfolded and the other person on their team is their eyes, giving directions.

All you could hear is “LEFT, LEFT, LEFT, RIGHT, RIGHT, FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” from throughout the room.

I’m pretty sure that the team we were against was peeking. The final score after the first round was 11 – 2 (we lost). Several times, the walked in the room and just blasted us with the first shot (luck, my ass!). We did better on the second round where I was playing and my son was my eyes. It finished at 5 – 9 (and there wasn’t nearly as many one shot kills).

We left at 7:30 in the morning, though we could have left at 11:00 at night (as there really weren’t any games after that). My son and I tried to entertain each other by playing against one another, but we couldn’t get anyone else to join us.

I told my wife that I’d go again, but only if I could round up a crew from the old BYOD parties to go with me. We’d show them what the hell a real lan party was!

Oh… and on a totally unrelated note: I start the graveyard shift tonight at 2 am PST. I’ll pry fire up the webcam for the first time in months. Tune on and watch if you’re awake (and bored outa your skull… because I’m pry not gonna be all that entertaining).

My son asked me a question last night. He wanted to know if we could do one last “blow out” before my surgery. Something fun and wild, since I’ll pretty much be on my back for a while after I get cut.

“What the hell, why not” I replied.

We’re attempting to go to the SMo-g hosted by spoklan.net. What’s a “SMo-g” you ask? I’ll tell you…

It’s 60 people with their computers linked together playing games against each other. Much like my old lan parties (wich you can see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here… I used to have a lot of free time) there will be lots of people and plenty of gaming action.

There’s a catch though. This one costs money, and there is limited seating. I guess I should have checked how many slots were open before I paid via paypal. I looks like there’s only one seat left, and I registered and paid for 2. Hopefully it will all work out (read: someone won’t show up).

The games begin on Saturday at noon and finish on Sunday at noon. 24 hours of hot-hot frag action! I just hope I’m physically up to it!

I’ll bring the digital camera and take a few pics to share (if we get in).

In other news… my home PC was being an absolute bitch last night. I did the windows update thing and then rebooted. During the boot, I noticed that I was only showing 512mb of ram (I have a full gig). Then, I went all BSOD and life turned a little sour.

I pulled out one stick of RAM to see which one was bad (pull one out, boot, swap sticks, boot again). Pulling out one stick and firing it up still showed 512mb of RAM. Logic says the other stick is bad. I swap sticks and hit the power button… and get a big old pile of nothing. This confirms my suspicions.

I swap the ram around again… and get nothing. Hmmm… curious.

Now, no matter what I put in my machine, and no matter which slot I put it in… nothing happens. I put both sticks in my sons machine and viola! Both are good.

Crap… bad motherboard = cranky me.

I figured that I’d just let it sit and worry about it today, but my brother-in-law, David, suggested that I clear the CMOS by moving the jumper. I did it and what do you know… everything works again.

I guess the CMOS just got all screwed up or somethin’. I didn’t really want to replace the board, as I run an IDE RAID array, and finding another IDE RAID board is a little hard now (they’ve all gone to SATA). Life is once again good.

One last note: Don’t forget to check out the WWBD Big Red Head Forum. It’s been kinda dead in there for the past couple weeks. Join up today and entertain me. DO IT NOW!!!

Running a blog makes my life easier. No longer do I have to hand code all the html for each page, rather, I simply type into an application on my pc and it sends the post up. It also allows for people like you to post comments on the page, telling me what you do and don’t like.

Unfortuantely… spammers come along and blast you in your comments section with links to porn, viagra, and all the other usless crap.

Today, I had to remove 35 comments left by a spammer. All of them point to porn.

Luckily, I have MT-Blacklist installed on my site. If you run movable type 2.6 or higher… you need this!

You’ll also need the latest and greatest list of known spammers. You can find mine here (and it’s currently about as updated as it can get).

MT-Blacklist will stop posts containing anything found in it’s list from making it to your website, and adding new filter words is easy. If you run MT, get it today!

Yet another corporatized holiday has come and gone.

I did the usual… boiled eggs, made baskets for the kids, the big Easter^tm dinner, etc..

Usually, my wife does a lot of this, but since she’s currently down for the count, I’m the man. I spent about $100 at Wall*Mart on the baskets of sugar coated crap (can you say “spoiled rotten bastards”?). I also went to Cosco and picked up the fixings for the dinner. A nice 10 pound spiral cut ham with all the fixings.

It was very tasty… and for once, the damn dog didn’t steal the ham.

Of course, all that activity has thrown my back out pretty bad. I’ve been doing the whole rock star routine today (wake up, take a hand full of pills, repeat as necessary). Tomorrow probably won’t be much better.

At least I’m getting my surgery soon (27 days).

On a side note… I’m going to begin a revamp of the dump soon, so the site will change in it’s appearance and functionality. I can guarantee that I’ll break at least one thing, so bear with me till the redesign is completed.