Author: Andy Scheffler

This is all you get until I get rested.

• 7 – Days that I was in Indianapolis.
• 1 – Days that I saw the sun in Indianapolis.
• 7.2 – Amount of rain, in inches, that Indianapolis received on September 1st, 2003.
• 108 – Years since the record for single-day rainfall stood before that day.
• 8 – Number of times I was referred to or addressed by my brother’s name by my relatives.
• 35 – Number of DVDs in the case I left on the plane.
• 800 – Approximate amount, in dollars, that DVDs would have cost to replace, had I not reclaimed them.
• 2 – Approximate amount, in dollars, that the stuff I did leave behind will cost to replace.
• 112 – SoBig “reflections”… “user not found” “mail undeliverable, etc.” in my inbox.
• 3780 – Spam messages caught by spamassassin while I was gone.
• 1539 – Amount of those that were SoBig viruses.

This may be one of the longest times I’ve gone without net access. Oh, they found my DVDs, but I haven’t picked them up yet.

There are many ways to ruin a vacation. Leaving a case full of DVDs on the plane is definitly one of them. I hope it was turned in. Argh!

I think that the same system that gave California lightning on Monday is dumping rain on Indiana right now. Lucky me, I get it twice.

It seems they now let you use your cell phones as soon as the plane has landed. Well, I’m now in Indianapolis.

I think I had this exact same snippet of conversation at least four times today:

Me: … blah blah blah I’ll be on vacation for a week.
Other Person: Oh, where are you going?
Me: Indiana.
Other Person: … Family?

I suppose to everyone else, there’s no other conceivable reason why anyone would voluntarily go to Indiana. I’m sort of glad I didn’t go to GenCon now, ’cause I would have had to explain it…

And I just found out that all of my flights are equipped with power plugs, so I can use my laptop free from the constraints of my battery life! Of course, they’re the cigarette lighter type, so I have to lug around my power inverter, instead of finally getting use out of the $40 airline power plug I bought for my laptop exactly a year ago for AXNY (wow, it’s been a year already?) but didn’t end up using because they didn’t have the plug…

Now that I’m in front of the PS2, here is the transcript of the BBS thread in .//MUTATION… heh heh heh.
minor spoilers, but not really

• I’ve gotten 112MB worth of Sobig emails in the last week, 1072 different messages. Those are just the direct emails, not counting the numerous bounces and “thanks for inquiring about our product” emails that I get from being the email in the From: address that hits a bad place on the internet. The bounces make it through my spam filter, unfortunately… well, some of them do. The viruses themselves get caught and sit in my caught spam folder, but they still are downloaded from the mail server, which is annoying because it chokes up the DSL…
• Back a few months ago, we were all playing Game of the Worlds (a.k.a. Simcountry). They decided they were going to reset the game, though and I lost interest. Well, the last of my three countries was just conquered today… huzzah.

In no particular order, a laundry list of stuff.

• Last night, as I was driving home, there was a crazy amount of lightning in the south sky. The strange thing was, even though some of the strikes were bright enough to illuminate the trees, I didn’t hear a single crack of thunder.
• For those of you who are IGN Insiders, you can take a peek at the video preview for the Nokia N-Gage. Not that I’m buying one, but the weird part is that one of the two Nokia reps was a former co-worker of mine. I thought she looked familiar in the video preview.
• Two of the last three nights, I’ve dreamt that I was going back to school… although in slightly different circumstances. One was me taking a full course-load while still working (echoes of bigdumbthing‘s past endeavors), and the other was me moving off to be a full time student. And in both cases, I was stuck in class, with no idea what the homework was, and I hadn’t done the reading…
• I was playing .//MUTATION the other day, and I read a “post” in the in-game “BBS” by a character named meowa. And of course, I laughed out loud so hard that Leon had to see what I was laughing at. There were two posts, I don’t remember the first, but the second one was “Common sense is overrated,” or something like that.
• I refuse to participate in the TV show meme. Partly out of the general hatred that I have for web-tests in general, and partly out of the fact that my username is mapped to Gary Coleman.
• So, I leave for Indiana in two days. curse is gonna be driving me to the airport bright and early on Thursday morning. Hopefully I won’t be too out of touch.
• Oh, and by the way, none of you got the reason why July 28th, 1991 was special. And only one of you tried.

This last week, I did three things for the first time:

1. I went wine tasting.

   My parents were in town, and they dragged me up to Santa Rosa, where I determined that I don’t like red wine, nor dry wine. I did buy two bottles of Korbel champagne, though. And I learned all about champagne and had family style Italian food and most importantly, didn’t get sunburned.

2. I went to a Giants game.

   I got off work early and took CalTrain into the city. I tried the garlic fries. It was a very close game, boring in the fact that there weren’t many hits. But it ended in a splash of glory as Bonds hit a home run into the drink in the bottom of the 10th. Go Giants, I guess. I’ve lived in the SF bay area for nine years now, and I still hadn’t gone to a baseball game. In fact, I hadn’t gone to a baseball game in 12 years. July 28, 1991 to be exact. Bonus points to anyone who knows why that date is famous, minus points if I’ve already mentioned the reason to you. No points for using search engines.

3. I returned an item to amazon.com.

   I’d known you can do it, but never had. I mistakenly ordered two of the single-disc versions of Farscape instead of the dual-disc versions. Stupid ADV! Get a better numbering scheme!

You can see pictures of the first two items. I’m sorry, but I didn’t take a picture of the amazon.com box that I mailed back.