I just received confirmation from my bank that my car loan has been paid off and I'll be receiving the ownership papers in a week or so.
Also, on my way home, I lost power steering. Why is it that just when you pay something off it starts falling apart??
I just handed my taxes off to an accountant. Since they're not due until April 15th, if I owe the evil empire money I have plenty of time to plan for it. Since I've been married, I've had to pay every year.
Perhaps I'll be rewarded by doing them early this time…
Nah!
I have to backdate this because I don't usually post on weekends, Tera's birthday was yesterday (Jan 18). Happy birthday, Tera!
Today I watched Cinematic Titanic's Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, an Italian movie with cavemen, midgets, and a Frankenstein family. The movie was pretty terrible, but what can you expect? It was funny, though, and CT's "breast blimp" technology was funny. I cracked up at the "this was like my last day at MST" joke, though I'm not exactly sure who said it (Frank or J. Elvis, I think, but I can't be sure). Anyway, it's a great addition to the growing CT library. Keep on riffing, Joel and the gang!
Today a bunch of us from work walked over (some even drove) to MacKenzie River Pizza Co. (the only restaurant of its franchise not in Montana) for lunch.
I enjoyed the pizza, it was tasty, though certainly not the best pizza I've had (Giordano's takes that prize).
My only gripe was it took over 45 minutes to get a pizza out to us. We ended up being there nearly an hour and a half just for lunch. So while I'd recommend it as a nice, somewhat upscale place for a lunch, make sure you have plenty of spare time.
I just got my copy of Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks from Cinematic Titanic, I'll review it soon. I also just picked up Guitar Hero World Tour for the Wii. We've got a lot of entertainment to catch up on.
PS The autographed card was from TV's Frank this time!
Last Sunday night I watched a movie called MirrorMask. Although co-written by Neil Gaiman (of more recent Stardust fame), this movie was almost uncomfortably weird. It's about a 15 year old British carnie girl that likes to draw, and one day she gets sucked in to her drawings by an evil princess that forces her to trade places. She has to seek out the MirrorMask and use it to get back home. Meanwhile, the evil princess pretends to be her and ruins her life.
Today I spent most of my time writing code to access and modify several online databases that the original developer "hasn't had enough time to get to" despite the fact that the system he developed is being used now and needs to be supported. Fortunately for the company, I'm much better at keeping to my deadlines than he is, and I hacked out some ugly code that will work until he gets around to finishing his stuff.
In his defense, I believe he has several projects to work on simultaneously (we all do), but seriously, it took me longer to get up to speed on his database design than it did to write the stupid code. He should have been able to turn something out in maybe 2-3 hours. Why has it taken months??
Today is Richard Bartle's birthday (Wikipedia). You may or may not remember that he met Lorien and I in London and took us on a personal tour. We also saw the Doctor Who Exhibition together, and had fish and chips, and he introduced us to the gospel of mushy peas.
I just beat Guitar Hero 3 on medium difficulty on my Wii. Finally. My brother Wes came over, this was the first time I've played in a couple of months. I thought I'd give the final battle on medium difficulty another try. Somehow I got through it.
Excuse me, now I've got to find something to kick over.
Today I helped track down an evil bug in some software. We have an object that streams information out in newline-delimited text format which is then encrypted and sent to another program for decryption and analysis. The results are re-encrypted and returned. In a rare case, the information being returned was garbage. It turns out that an error message contained two newline characters which threw off the entire format. It was so obscure it took a couple of hours for us to find the problem.
Today is my brother Wesley's birthday. It's also my niece Lisette's birthday. Happy birthday, guys!
I saw this ad in my gmail account this morning:
It's bad enough to use them all over your own website, but to pay someone else to display them for you? I guess they have a surplus of apostrophes and needed to get rid of a few.
I drove to the post office today to send off some books. The entire city seems to be covered in ice. The parking lot of the post office has a four inch sheet of ice over it. I almost got stuck on just the flat surface. Most of the roads are covered in thick, bumpy ice, making driving really difficult and slow. Only one or two of the main arterials are clear of this mess. I hope the roads in Coeur d'Alene are better than they are here in Post Falls. They do seem to be better at plowing regularly over there.
We had five or so more inches of snow this morning when I woke up. I had to get up early and shovel the driveway so I could make my doctor's appointment at 8:30 this morning. The roads were horrendous, driving the 5 miles to Coeur d'Alene was a white-knuckled experience I'd not soon like to repeat.
The whole thing started with my regular blood donation. I've almost donated 3 gallons, but lately have been deferred repeatedly because my blood pressure has been too high. Since it's been relatively high (averaging 150/84) every time I check it, I made an appointment to see my doctor. He ordered up some blood work and an ultrasound because he thought my neck was a little swollen. Turns out I have an under active thyroid. I was a bit worried about the medication (especially the cost), but it's really not very expensive. In fact, it costs less for me to pay cash out of pocket for the medicine than it costs for my springtime allergy medicine even after my insurance covers 80% of it.
So here's to health in the new year!