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!

Game night is on this week. We will have sandwiches.

Big meeting Monday night. Wish us luck.

Anyone have a PCI video card I could borrow? I think my new motherboard defaulted to PCI video input, but all I have is PCI 2.0 x16 card (I have a geforce 8800 GT) and AGP cards. Unfortunately my motherboard only has slots for PCI and PCIe (those tiny little slots), but none for AGP.

I guess it could also be that my video card is dead, so it may be helpful to test a second PCIe 2.0 x16 video card too. Anyone have one of those lying around too?

Either my problem is a video card/video card setting, or my motherboard is DOA. Fun times!

I sold Duckie in 5 hours on craigslist. May he be successfully repaired and find a new forever home.

As a reminder, board game night is on Thursday this week. I've gotten a request to play Battlestar Galactica again, so it looks like we will play that again. It's a great game, and should go much faster now that we know what the heck we are doing...

Throughout grad school, it was a running joke with Natalie and me that while we owned three or four computers, only two were ever working at a given time. During our four years in Boston, the following events occured (in roughly chronological order):

- My laptop broke (one of my Best Buy "repair" stories. After a couple months trying to "repair" it, they gave me a new laptop.)
- Natalie's desktop broke (fatal, unfixable).
- My MythTV box broke (fatal)
- New Shuttle MythTV box broke (turned into a desktop... I think the TV tuner died)
- Shuttle dies (fatal... used hard drive as part of a new desktop build)
- Big laptop (the Best Buy replacement) dies (had to put in a new inverter)
- Little laptop dies (hard drive death... rebuilt with new hard drive)

Since moving to Portland last year:In the last month:
- Little laptop dies again (can't power anymore, AC input dead)
- Big laptop dies last week (fatal software failure? No more internet, had to re-install windows)

And then, this morning, I wake up to discover that my DESKTOP is now dead. I push power and NOTHING comes up on the screen. After debugging, it looks like the motherboard is fried. So now I get to build a new computer (again)!

Also, I own two cars (one with 228k miles, the other with 145k). Last month I had to spend $400 to repair my (228k) minivan, which had a broken radiator fan. And then last week, our commuter car completely dies. So in the last month, I've had two major car failures, and two three major computer failures!

I'm not trying to be a drama queen or anything, it's just odd how these things are all happening at the same time. It is partly explainable, as in order to save money Nat and I use things until they are absolutely dead. This results in our stuff being much older and generally more likely to break down. Why buy a new car when the duct tapped one still runs? Why buy a new computer when you can use scavenged parts to make one? This philosophy has generally worked out for us, as while I've had the many computer failures listed above, when the problems have been fixable I've often been able to do it rather cheaply (e.g. the inverter was like $25, a new hard drive was $100, etc, which is much cheaper than buying two new laptops).

But tonight I'll be buying parts on New Egg to build a new computer which will use a scavenged hard drive, video card and DVD player from my now dead computer. I guess it's time for me to enter the multi-core era of desktop computing.

Game night is on this week. However, as an FYI we aren't doing food this week. If someone is interested in coordinating food, they are more than welcome to, but I think we'll be taking a few weeks off from food. We've had to absorb the cost of food for a few weeks now, due to a lower number of people showing up than we had expected (e.g. two weeks ago: one person; last week: zero). We totally understand that people can't come every week due to prior commitments and last minute changes of plans. But the logistics of guessing how many people will show up in a given week, and planning food around that, is dragging on us, so we're taking a break while we figure out a better way to manage food.

I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty for not coming on any given week, so please don't be upset or sad if you haven't been able to make it recently. We truly understand that people can't come every week, and I enjoy board game night regardless of how many people show up. The issue isn't that we can't get the same number of people each week, it's that I'm not good at managing food for a dynamic number of people. We just need to figure out how to make food work in a manner that makes sense. Let me know if you have any ideas.