Author: Andy Scheffler

Friendster is addicting. I just want to add more and more people as friends, so I can look more and more profiles. (Including a few people who I know are in there, but I can’t look at yet, but don’t know well enough anymore to consider “friends”.)

But anyway. Yesterday was a relaxing “watch a bunch of my favorite movies” day, even though I should have been straightening and cleaning the house for the party next weekend. I got to a lot of it today, though. The pies are mostly eaten (thankfully), and not as much by me as they could have been.

Operation “cut the plastic no-slip mat with a hacksaw and stick it to the bottom of the Cobalt Flux pad” was a horrible failure. I got to play with tools, yes, but it made the pad rock and tilt too much for it to be stable, even if it didn’t slide. I’ve been getting back into the groove of DDR, I’m back to being able to handle 8-foot songs, and most of the 9-foot songs as well (except the ones that really try my endurance). Looking at the 10-footers, though, it seems impossible that I’d ever be able to do them without first losing 50 pounds… I just can’t move and twist and turn that way while I’m moving this much weight around…. And I still have yet to AAA a song (any song, even the simple ones). I’ve gotten one Great and the rest all Perfects many times now… very frustrating.

So, it looks like I’m probably going to Indiana for Labor Day weekend for my Grandma’s 90th birthday party. I just need to figure out a) when and where I’m flying out of and b) how I’m going to get whichever airport I choose.

There are still the better parts of three pies in this house. *sigh* I was never good with temptation…

I’ve been getting some new toys recently. On Friday, I got the Cobalt Flux pad that I ordered way back when. It works really well, it just slides ever so slightly on the carpet. I’ll have to figure out a way to fix that.

The other toy I just got today is an iSight. It’s really keen. It’s tiny and light and fits right on my laptop. I’ve tried one video/video chat in iChat AV so far. It looked pretty blocky, but it was definitely cool.

Today was a big “catch up on errands that I’ve been putting off for a while” day. First, I finally picked up the certified letter from the post office that contains the title to my car, and the necessary paperwork to finish the transfer (which I have to turn in to the AAA on Monday). Next, I dropped off two cable boxes at the Comcast office, one of which we were getting charged $7 a month extra because they reduced what our package included a few months ago.

After that, I wandered down to Bank of America, where I did something I’ve been meaning to for a long time: I opened a savings account. It was a bit complicated, because my home branch is in Southern California, not Northern California, but if it had been anything else, I would have had to close my checking account and open a new one.

After that, I got my car washed… it really needed it. Then it was off to Bed Bath and Beyond, where I bought a few things that were needed (including guest bath towels). I had lunch at Quizno’s, and then rented Phone Booth at Blockbuster and headed home.

I didn’t make it to the barber or the grocery… the grocery will definitely be tomorrow, but I think the barber’s closed on Sunday… or is it?

Well, duh!

Friday was a nice relaxing day, finished up SG-1 Season 3 and watched a MST3K episode (The Skydivers). emerson85 showed up, he was staying with me for part of the weekend.

Saturday was the Anti-AX BBQ, for those of us who were passively protesting not going to AX, or something like that. I’ll have pictures up later.. probably tomorrow, including some character shots taken by meowa. We watched a few movies, including Charlie’s Angels 2, which was just about the worst movie I’ve seen in a while, I actually found myself comparing it to The Skydivers, the MST3K movie I saw the day before. It was that bad.

Today was the semi-annual Netrunner day. I picked cattekin up and drove up to Moss Beach again. I did better than usual, although the highlight of the day had to be one of Mark’s kids saying to me “you’ve got a big tummy.” Ah, out of the mouths of babes.

In my playing with Friendster, I’ve discovered another phenomenon… I was looking through the Gallery, when I saw someone who looked familiar (and had a familiar name), but was using glamour shots for her photos, so I couldn’t be sure. She was someone who worked in the computer centers at Berkeley at the same time as me. Well, sure enough, one of her friends was someone else who worked with us (whom I couldn’t actually look at his profile because he was too far away in the network.) So now, we have people who I used to know but don’t anymore… but who are only three degrees of separation from me.

There’s also a few people I know are in there, but don’t know enough to call a “friend” and aren’t in my network… if I were to “friend” them, it would open up another huge chunk of the network…

Note on the current music: Time from hearing on radio for the first time to purchase in the iTunes Apple Music Store… ten minutes.

Friendster is amusing. I remember the first time that I found a person that I had connections to through two completely different ways… now I’m finding that as the network of friends becomes more and more complete, such a thing is very commonplace. Six degrees-of-separation loops are nothing to write home about… five may be interesting, and four and three are the interesting ones… (a three degree loop is a friend of a friend who happens to know two different friends… unless the two friends don’t know each other, it’s not that interesting.

I want the weekend to start. This is how bored I am… I should be working, but I can’t keep my mind on PHP right now…

“Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”

An adventure in corporate miscommunication

I finally found my OS 10.2 disks. I had bought them back in August when it first came out, when I was in New York for AXNY, but only got to install them on my laptop, and never got to install it on the Cube. Well, I knew it had to be in with my AXNY stuff somewhere, but I could never find it. Yesterday, when I was cleaning my room and going through stuff to either throw away or move into boxes, I found the little slipcase with the two CDs in it. Hooray!

The reason for the cleaning was to try and make room for the old TV in my room, so I can set it up for DDR down there and not have my DDR activities restricted by who’s watching TV. Once I get that set up, and I get my Cobalt Flux pad (which is still “Pending”… I assume they make them to order so it takes a while… a bit longer and I’ll have to ping them) I should set up a regular exercise schedule…

The reason the TV can go into my room, is that there is a new TV to replace it in the office, courtesy of desslok, who just moved in over the weekend.

I just got a cdjapan order of about seven CDs… working through it, rating everything… oh and working. Stupid project from hell heck is taking up waaaay too much of my time recently.

So, I just had yet another friendster request (hi, Ryan!) and after I added him, I went to his profile page. The database hadn’t updated its connection lists, so I couldn’t click on any of his twenty or so friends, except for four. The odd thing is, those four friends were already in my network. Two of which were through someone that doesn’t surprise me, but one of which was through my coworkers.

Small small world.

An amusing story from today’s BBQ… Lynda was inside the house watching TV, and we needed to get ahold of her, so Dana hopped onto IRC on his laptop outside and joined the channel… “PTG: Your burger is ready!”

Yes, we’re very lazy people.