Between being deathly ill last week and the ownership transfer, our house has fallen into a deep pit of filth. Plus, we need to start conducting interviews on Tuesday night. As such, we were wondering if anyone else would like to host board game night. At a minimum, we can't provide food or a clean house. Let us know what you think.

Things have been busy for me recently, and I haven't made a real post on the blog in quite a while. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make the movie night at May's last night; I didn't get home from work until a little after 6, and then had to pick up a friend at the airport at 7:30, so I would have only been able to stop by for a couple minutes. But Happy (Belated) Birthday to Heidi!

One of my Boston friends is in town this week for a conference. He is sort of from my mold, where he has a PhD in Bioinformatics, but is also an entrepreneur and is interested in business. He also managed to snag himself a new iPhone last Friday, so we got to compare notes.

Speaking of the iPhone, I've really enjoyed it so far. My biggest complaint is battery life. Since I got it on Friday, I've had to re-charge the battery once each day. Hopefully this doesn't keep up, as during the work week I'm not using it nearly as often as I had.

Nat and I have new phone numbers too, so I'll be sending out an email to update everyone what it is. We'll keep our old numbers for a while, as part of a transition, but we figured we'd been in Oregon for a year already, it was time for an Oregon area code. That being said, aren't area code's kind of obsolete now? Why should anyone ever have to change their number? We did so for business reasons, but I know people who still have area codes from other parts of the country even though they haven't lived there for 5 or more years.

Anyway, I'm unsure as to the status of board game night next week. That will be Day 2 of our ownership, so I'm not sure how we'll feel.

Board game night is on this week, though as a heads up we will likely be canceling next week. We will have burritos for food.

I thought it was pretty good, but...

I don't see how it can be anything repetition from here. How many hot women can you have suffer from insanely rare problems inside of a week in a small population?

Here's hoping...

I found this on CNNSI.com of all places

We are going to have a stressful day at work tomorrow so we decided it's best to just cancel tomorrow night since we will be so cranky. But hopefully we'll see everyone next week! I think Adam will send out an email for those who don't read the blog, but please help spread the word.

Check out the fun puzzle here:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/06/03/a-curious-conversation/

I think I have it figured out, but wanted to let you guys look at it first before I posted it. I'll post in comments what I think the answer is and why.

Rock Band Party - June 20th
For those who read the blog, we are having a Rock Band party the 20th of this month. Like the last 2, it will be held at my co-worker Sara's house.

We will have a costume contest again. The costume can impersonate a famous musician or you can make your own unique costume. I will be sending out the official Socializr invite sometime in the next week or so when we have the details figured out.

For those of you in the Portland area that didn't get an invite the last 2 parties, just let me know at ophidiann At gmail d0t com. :)

Monkey Island
Two awesome announcements regarding Monkey Island have been made! First, they are bringing the first Monkey Island game to the PC and 360 back with updated graphics.

http://www.lucasarts.com/games/monkeyisland/

Then, Telltale games (who have been doing the Sam & Max games, the new Wallace and Gromit games, and StrongBad adventure games) are doing a new series of Monkey Island games!

http://www.telltalegames.com/monkeyisland

I've always loved the Monkey Island series and I believe Telltale has done a good job with the Sam & Max games (which I have). There are so few companies that do good adventure games nowadays... that it's always fun to see the old Lucasart adventure games comeback. Now they need to start a new set of Space Quest games!

About a month ago I posted some videos from the auto tune the news people. They had just started doing these videos, and at the time there were only two of them out. Since then, they've released three more, which I've posted below. I think they are hilarious, but have two general complaints: 1) often it is really hard to understand them the first time you hear the video. Only #2 and #4 have been rather easy to understand the first time, which may be why they are my favorites. I generally have to listen to them a couple times in a row. That being said, once I know what they are saying the videos are really funny (they post the lyrics on the sidebar of the youtube video page). 2) In most videos there is one part that is just really dumb. Except #4, which I like all of.

These two complaints do not prevent me from enjoying the videos. Right now, given my busy schedule, these are the only videos that I actively check for updates.

Anyway, here are the new videos:

Auto-tune the news: Obama Flashback

Auto-tune the news #3: Ron Paul

Auto-tune the news #4: Supreme court, spas and Biden. Probably my favorite overall right now.

I just need a place to vent and I don't want to make this sound like a "poor me" post because overall I do know that I'm a very lucky guy.

Work has just been crap the last 6 months or so. I can never seem to get close to catching up. As soon as I feel like I'm turning the corner and heading into a somewhat maintainable schedule some new emergency crops up that sucks up all my productive hours for the next few weeks and puts me further behind. I don't think I would mind as much if I knew that I could come in at a certain time and just leave at a certain time. But my schedule fluctuates from day to day. And it has been this way for the last 6 months. I feel like I can't really take a real vacation because it would just put be behind even more. I purposely try to cut myself off on the weekends but even then don't succeed.

The hard thing is, I know compared to what many people are going through right now in this economy I should feel lucky to be employed, to have a decent wage, to have mostly decent co-workers, and to be happy that I'm not shoveling crap. And despite this logical bit of information, I'm just sick of so many things:

- Big company politics
- Unnecessary and wasteful processes
- The pervasive attitude that IT can do nothing right
- The few morons that make life difficult for everyone
- Constrained resources to do everything that we were doing before and more
- The boring culture that comes with an engineering company

I think another major issue is, I just know I'm not passionate about most of the stuff I'm working on. I'm fine doing it, it's better than a LOT of jobs out there but it doesn't excite me. So generally, I just tell myself to shut up and just do it. At least I'm not doing tech support work. Or many other "office" jobs that would suck the living soul from me.

What makes it worse is that Jen is kind of going through the same thing right now. Her work is hard to predict with her schedule as well. And we both come home exhausted and never knowing if our weekends will involve us having to work or not. And we're both questioning what it is we really want to do professionally. Planning for the wedding is fun but also just another big thing on our plates to work through on top of the never-predictable onslaught of work.

I don't know what is right for Jen or myself. And given the economy, I'm very hesitant to move into anything new as my job is fairly secure. Same with Jen. But realistically speaking, I know I just need to sit down and figure it out. I think consulting or owning my own business sounds interesting but both of those have several big drawbacks. How does one figure what they want to do? I'm 28. Shouldn't I know my goals by now? I'm wasting valuable time not answering these questions sooner than later.

When I think about these things, and then eventually having kids and all, it makes me question myself too. If I can't handle the pressures of work now, what happens when I have work and kids? It is very strange because I think about all the good things going for me and I can't seem to get my mind to stop focusing on what I perceive as the crappy portions of work.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm depressed all the time or unhappy all the time. Overall, I'm happy. I just wish I could really figure out what to do about work. What to do about my future life and work. What to do about the crap that comes with every job. Perhaps I just need a new challenge... and I'm just bored with the same crap. Perhaps I am at the wrong company. Perhaps I'm in the wrong field completely. Perhaps... just perhaps... I should look into other career choices... like construction worker. Fuckin A!

In case you haven't seen it, this guy really makes me wish I had a cat.

Tuesday snuck up on me. Board game night is on tonight, please let me know if you plan on attending. We have stuff to make sandwiches again. I was going to cook the ham Goldie gave us for New Years, but the internet told me it was probably a bad idea and it looked a bit freezer burned. So sandwiches it is.

Here he is: Duckie. The person who bought him has fixed the head gasket and put him up for sale again. Ironically, Duckie is being sold for the exact same price that Nat and I paid 1.5 years and 20k miles ago.

A week ago I was talking about debugging my new motherboard, which was to be used in the building of a new computer to replace my dead computer. Turned out the motherboard was DOA. So I mailed it back to New Egg (they were really great about the return, btw, and gave me free shipping and no re-stocking fee) and bought a new motherboard at ENU. I would have just had the motherboard replaced, but it would have been two weeks before I would get the replacement, so I opted for a faster turnaround at a local business, even though it cost a few bucks more. As recommended by Goldie, ENU is off Cornelius Pass, out near Hillsboro.

Anyway, building the computer was MUCH easier with a working motherboard. Got everything put together and installed software today. I must say that it is absolutely wonderful to not only be using my giant widescreen monitor again, but have a dual monitor setup. I was feeling very claustrophobic on the laptop. The only disappointing thing about my replacement motherboard was that it didn't have any firewire ports. Not that I have any firewire devices, but a man can dream. Also, my microphone doesn't work very well in the new computer, so I haven't been able to use skype. It worked flawlessly in the old computer.

I have a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM, but I haven't really noticed any speed improvements yet. Granted, I'm primarily just using a browser and office right now, but think I expected things to be more zippy.

For the 3 people I know who might actually want to read the whole 9 pages about the history of graphics cards.

In other news, I'll be back in Portland in two weeks, from Monday thru Wednesday this time though. See you guys!