Viking Pirate Enterprises

It’s finally snowing. There’s not much, but it’s enough to cover everything in a thin layer of white. This town always looks better when snow-covered, especially when no one else is around, as happens at 4AM. When I was out walking, I think I saw only two cars out, plus heard a snow plow plowing streets to the North of me which I didn’t see. I also enjoyed the opportunity to be the first to leave footprints on the snow-covered sidewalks.

This first snow also gave me the opportunity to continue a four-year old ritual I have. The primary component in this ritual involves wearing my kilt. While one might think that this would cause me to get cold when walking around outside, it doesn’t. Due to the clouds and snow and lack of wind, its relatively warm outside (30° as opposed to the 14° wind chill two nights ago). Unfortunately, there isn’t enough snow on the ground yet for snow Scotsmen.

I haven’t heard Craig’s opinion on the snow, but Jason’s complaining about it and Nick and Mike (who took the above picture) both are talking about doing doughnuts in it. Before Josh left about 2AM, he made a miniature snowman (about 8 inches tall) complete with arms made from the tines of a plastic fork. It’s currently sitting in the freezer here at work.

Tags: De-gimpfying Myself, Indiana Weather, Workin For the Weekend, Whenever That Is by The VP
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So I’ve managed to get WordPress working again on this blog, so there should hopefully be more regular posts from me now.

While not the best way to break my hiatus, I’m going to do so with the following snippet of a chat that was sent to our staff mailing list by one of my coworkers:

Nate: Hello, how may I assist you?
fred: I want to chat with the girl in the picture
Nate: So do I. Is there anything I can assist you with?
fred: https://server.iad.liveperson.net/hc/5213942/ ?cmd=repstate&site=5213942&&ver=1&category=en;woman;5
fred: no, have a nice day

In other work-related news, we’ve finally got a fourth night guy (who should hopefully stick around longer than the fourth night guy we had the last time I made a post like this), meaning that starting 1 April, I’ll have two nights off a week again. Even better is that they’re two nights off in a row: Thursday night/Friday morning and Friday night/Saturday morning. This means I’ll have more opportunities to actually go places if I wanted to, or at least to feel like I actually have some time off. With the current one night off a week, by the time I’m actually rested from the previous week, it’s time to go back to work.

Tags: Workin For the Weekend, Whenever That Is by The VP
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The following bounce message appeared in a ticket I was working on last night:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

[accounnameremoved]@gmail.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Mail quota exceeded

This is the first proof I’ve ever had that people are capable of filling gmail accounts. The last I checked, my own primary gmail account contains just over 1k messages, and has used about a third of my 2800MB quota. I don’t know if this account has the same quota or not, but, even if it’s less, this is still impressive in a highly geeky way.

Tags: Workin For the Weekend, Whenever That Is by The VP
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Well, the holidays are officially over, and everything is returning to normal. Apart from doing a bit more driving and spending more money than I would have preferred, they weren’t too bad this year. Highlights included visits to both my mom’s house and to Dad and Irene’s, including home cooked meals at both, as well as the Cousins’ Christmas in Peoria, which involved spending time with my nieces.

A couple New Year’s resolutions:

1. Lose weight. I know this is one of those clichéd ones, but, for the sake of my future health, I think it’s necessary. This will also help with my back problems, which brings us to:
2. Fix what ails me. I really need to get my back taken care of, or at least under control. While I can live with it as it is right now, it’s causing me problems sleeping which affects everything else I do. I also need to finally get my toe fixed.
3. Save more, spend less. I’ve got a number of potential large purchases coming up this year, including needing a new vehicle since I don’t think Kato will last as a primary car for another 12 months, and I’ll need money for them. This means I really need to try to cut back on any non-essential spending. In addition, I need to get all the bills that I owe paid off, to try to rebuild my credit in preparation for these purchases.

Those are the big three. I’d also like to try to travel this year if my finances will permit me. It’s been nearly six years since I’ve last been on a plane, and almost as long, not counting the three day excursion to Sault St. Marie, since I’ve been out of the Midwest. I’m also going to try to update this blog more often.
Theoretically my work will be rearranging our pay scales in the coming weeks, meaning a raise for me. If this money can all be devoted to paying off bills or put into savings, this will help with goal three. However, I don’t know when this will actually happen as Dave hasn’t announced it to the company yet: I only know of it because of an IM conversation I had with him.

It’s currently less than 30° outside, and really windy, so we might have a chance of actually getting a winter this year. Alternately, all this wind could bring us warmer air. I’d prefer the former, as we’ve not had any snow worth mentioning so far.

Tags: Indiana Weather, The Nelson Family Bush, Workin For the Weekend, Whenever That Is by The VP
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We got snow here Wednesday night/Thursday morning, and, for the first time this year, it was enough to stick. It’s only a couple inches, but it helps make the city look more like December. What also helps is the temperatures in the thirties and below every time I’ve left the apartment recently.

I found out at approximately 1:00 AM this morning that Chris, the fourth night guy, decided he couldn’t cut it and quit without any prior notice. This means that I’m back to working six nights a week, with the short night Monday night instead of Thursday night. This isn’t a problem, except that I was counting on having the Monday night of Christmas off to spend with my family. Fortunately, as I only work three hours and it’s Christmas so we shouldn’t be that busy, Dave’s stated that I can basically skip work that night.

Apart from finding coverage for work, our Christmas plans are starting to shape up nicely. Tentatively, we’ll be here until the morning of the 22nd, then up to Chicago to visit my mom on the 22nd and 23rd. From there we’re taking Gary down to my dad’s on the 23rd, then I get to come back here for an additional night of working. Then Christmas Eve and Christmas day are at my dad’s, with the 26th finding us heading to Columbus, IN, to visit Angela’s family. The evening/night of the 26th we’re driving to Peoria for a family get together on the 27th, then back here in time for work that night. While it sounds like a lot of driving, it’s kinda necessary to see everyone that needs to be seen, and better than going to Arkansas like last year.

On the subject of Holidays: Thanksgiving went pretty well. Angela and I drove up to Chicago Thursday morning to have dinner with my mom, her boyfriend Cary, and my younger brother Gary. Most of the cooking was done when we got there, but we were just in time to help Gary with the turkey. The particular recipe my mom was using included buttering the turkey, then inserting butter under the skin between the skin and the meat of the bird, most likely as a substitute to basting. It turned out really well, but the actual application of butter betwixt bird and skin was a rather interesting operation, and prompted many jokes not appropriate for mixed company.

Tags: Chef Jeff, Indiana Weather, The Nelson Family Bush, Workin For the Weekend, Whenever That Is by The VP
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We started a new schedule at work last night, as we’ve hired more people. While mine doesn’t change a whole lot (still working nights, still midnight to 8AM), we’ve gained two night people (or gained one and replaced one) so I now get two nights off a week. They’re Friday night and Monday night, which isn’t the greatest combination, but at least it’s something.

Also, one of the two new night guys (Chris, who’s replacing Max) also happens to be my next door neighbor. This means that this one entire corner of the building, for three of the four floors, is associated with TS.

In other news, I tried out my bread machine for the first time yesterday. I’ve had it for about a year (got it from my mom since she wasn’t using it) and am just now learning how to work it. I only made a loaf of basic white bread so I could figure out basically how it works, but it was pretty good. Plus, it’s fun having an apartment that smells like fresh-baked bread. I’ve got a book of bread machine bread recipes, which I’ve been skimming through since this loaf turned out a success, trying to decide what to make next.

For those of you who don’t know, I have a really cheap laptop. Said laptop was given to me by my last boss, as it was otherwise going to get scrapped. When I got it, it was running Windows 95, which had to be wiped, anyway, to remove any material related to said previous job. Since the laptop’s 5GB harddrive and 64MB ram weren’t sufficient to update it to Windows XP (the main reason it was being scrapped) I just installed DOS on it and dubbed it the DosTop. While there’s not a whole lot one can do with a laptop running only dos, it was perfect for playing old dos games, like Monkey Island. Two days ago, during a conversation with one of my coworkers, I remarked that I’d put Linux on my dostop instead of there was anyway to still run my dos games. As it turns out, there’s a software package called DosBox that was designed for exactly that purpose. So, as of last night, the DosTop is now a NixTop, running Damn Small Linux because the 64MB ram wasn’t enough to run Fedora. I’ve not gotten a change to play around with it much or install DosBox, but the major step of swapping operating systems has been completed.

Tags: Chef Jeff, The Penguin Commands You, Workin For the Weekend, Whenever That Is by The VP
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My current schedule at work has me working midnight til 8 am five days a week, with Friday night completely off and only working Midnight til 3 on Thursday night/Friday morning.  I like the bonus three hours of overtime a week, but it makes Thursday nights kinda weird.  Angela’s working so I can’t spend time with her, and I always like if I go to sleep when I get home at 3, than I’ll end up waking Ang up too early when I get up.  Her schedule has her get off work at 7:15, meaning, if she can actually leave on time and the trolly’s on time, she’s home at 7:45/8.  This would put her going to bed roughly five hours after I’ve gone to sleep.  If I actually manage to get a full eight hours sleep, I’m waking up only three hours after she’s gone to bed, and risk waking her up then.

So this leaves me trying to figure out what to do for three-four hours or so.  Sometimes I go visit Angela at work (depending on how lazy I am) but there’s a limit to how much sitting around in the office at Shreve I can take (sorry Ang, I know it’s even worse for you).  Video games are good, but certain people kinda like it when I talk to them sometimes, so I usually end up reading or surfing random websites.  There’s nothing wrong with this, I just feel like I could maybe be better using the time.

Tags: Workin For the Weekend, Whenever That Is by The VP
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