Yeesh. I should admit (or I should probably not admit), that Sunday I was hung over most of the day. I got up at 10:30AM, my head hurt, so I went back to sleep until 12:30PM. I got up, ate some breakfast, and then, miraculously, my breakfast reappeared! I yooped up my expensive medication and I was fairly certain I couldn’t keep it down. I figure going off my medication once every 2 1/2 years probably isn’t that bad a record. I went back to sleep and got up at 7:30PM.

I figured out why I was so sick (besides being a lightweight) and I was going to produce some nice gifs of the formula I came up with, but I had some server problems this evening. People trying to reach my sister’s web site probably noticed. Anyway, here are my calculations:

3 pints of Bifrost Ale * (16 oz/pt) * (7.5% alc by vol) = 3.6 oz of alcohol

3 gin & tonics * 1 jigger/g&t & 1.5 oz/jigger * (40% alc by vol) = 1.8 oz of alcohol

So that means I had something like six gin and tonics! No wonder I was feeling messed up by my third pint. It was all an experiment to see if we could “drink a girl pretty” (it worked, by the way) but she wasn’t that bad looking to begin with. Neither of us talked to her, which is good because we probably would have been mumbling and telling her about how we liked to write programs or something.

I spent the whole day playing “Me and My Katamari” today and my thumbs hurt. When an old co-worker asked if I wanted to go and get a beer, I jumped at the chance. Well, I put a soft limit on 2 pints and I only went over by 1 pint (3 total). Unfortunately for me, the beers were Elysian Brewing’s Bifrost Ale and I am having a hard time typing right now. My cohort just broke up with his girlfriend and I was doing my best to keep him in the pub observing a woman playing pool. I use the term woman loosely, because I’m thinking that she was barely old enough to drink (or barely old enough to have a fake ID).

I guess I mentioned my thumbs hurt, so I’m going to see if the ceiling is spinning now. Like I told my old co-worker, “Tomorrow is Sunday.”

I don’t have many dreams I remember lately, but last night I had one. I was in the countryside somewhere, in a house by a rural highway, talking to someone who disappeared. I walked into a basement and into a house where my ex-girlfriend was standing there, just wearing a towel, and her hair was dyed blonde. I saw there were other women there, wearing pajamas. I’d stumbled into some sort of gathering. Somehow I ended up talking to a pair of gay men who were telling me about growing up near Klamath Falls, Oregon.

I don’t know what that meant, but I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately and first I was wondering why my ex had to weasel her way into my dream and wake me up. Then I remembered it was her birthday. Heh.

I left work a little early today to get my car checked by our local DEQ, and got home and TOOK A LONG NAP. Then I sat around watching TV and finding out that I’m really, really bad at “Me and My Katamari.” The King of all Cosmos keeps showing up and kicking my ass for having small and pathetic katamari.

So I’m off to play some more katamari before bed. I also wonder if I’ve had a date since my ex dumped me, the week before 9/11. (Yes, back in 2001.) Well, no matter. I’ll just roll up a big katamari and everything will be fine.

I wanted to kill someone and tell Megacorp to keep their frigging job today. Why? Because I’m “evaluating programs for analysis.” Sounds like crap, doesn’t it? The descriptions of the programs I’m supposed to be analyzing are even crappier. Look at this description that I did NOT MAKE UP:

… a software-based execution environment for service-oriented and transactional applications which provides application level fault tolerance (ensuring application reliability in spite of hardware, network or software failures), virtualizes the application layer/space and is scalable on-the-fly to hundreds of processors.

What in the hell does that mean? I had to read page after page of this sort of useless marketing fluff that did NOTHING to describe what programs did. And then the project lead came over and told me to DO A BETTER JOB OF ANALYSIS. Yeah, how do you analyze a “software-based execution environment for service-oriented and transactional applications”?

Lunch went real well, too. I forgot to bring my wallet so a friend lent me the money for a burger and fries, but then he bumped the table and dumped the fries on the ground. Good thing I wasn’t that hungry.

Well, I got a memory stick for my PSP but then I found out that my game started where I left off yesterday! My thumbs hurt already. Time to hit the hay instead of rolling up more inferior katamari. (I need help.)

The guys I usually eat lunch with all ditched me today. And I thought I’d go home early today because it is my birthday, but they scheduled a meeting for 3-4PM even though we just had one three days ago. I was found out during the meeting and they realized I wasn’t doing much and the project lead told me to hang around until he could give me some more stuff to do and that would be AFTER another meeting he was having. Can you imagine how much this threw off my Sony PSP buying frenzy? I wasn’t able to leave until much later than I had planned.

Well, I went driving around after work to Costco and Best Buy but didn’t get everything I needed! My friend Sun was worried that I was going to be sitting in the basement by myself, playing with my new PSP all night so she called my sister to foil my plans. I cut my buying spree short so I could go out to dinner with my sister (my brother-in-law bailed because it was getting a little late on a school night for him.)

See the cake my sister got me?

We had a nice dinner at the Industrial Cafe and Saloon where I had a ribeye steak because I could. Oh and I should thank people for the presents!

My sister and Carolyn got me that cool (but oddly complicated) Australian computer bag, my parents pitched in on the PSP, and Moonmoon in San Francisco sent me the Rice Krispie treats!

Back to the PSP story: I didn’t get a memory stick (necessary for saving games) and I wasn’t about to push that damn katamari around all night only to have to start over tomorrow. So the PSP is sitting quietly in the box and I still need to get a screen protector and the memory stick.

Thanks, everyone, for all the birthday wishes!

Remember when Dave the Trainer invited me to a club where he was spinning records? There was one other person from Megacorp there, and everybody asked me if i knew her. I finally talked to her and she works close to where I am. One floor down and just down the hall. I saw her today and said, “Hello <insert her name here>.”

And she said … “Do I know you?”

Hahahaha. You can’t make this stuff up.

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So, I asked several more friends about buying a PSP. Some of the conversations were funny. Like, “You’re a grown man who already owns a pink razr … you already have lost most of your cred for being a grown up adult male.”

Me (to friend in NYC)

Do you have a game console?

Female friend in NYC

No, because those things require HAND-EYE COORDINATION.

Woman at work

AND A PENIS

In any case, people asked me what my plans are for my birthday. Well, here’s what I’m doing after work.

1. Drive to Target (or EB Games).
2. Buy a PSP (and Katamari whatever-it-is).
3. Play Katamari whatever-it-is until my thumbs hurt.

What do you think?

I’ve figured out that some things that take my daily wonder-pill and turn it into a foaming mess that gives me sharp stomach pains. One of the things is to drink a glass of water with some orange pulp in it right after taking the pill. Another is to take it with cold water. But according to the call I got today, it’s working.

I was thinking I would buy myself a Sony PlayStation Portable for my birthday. One of my co-workers said, “A grown man should not be buying himself toys.” A woman at work agreed, but she also said she had no other suggestions. The co-worker suggested something that’s illegal in 49 states. So, any suggestions? And just so you know, I’m not buying any yarn.

My sister didn’t call at all today. She better hurry up because our dad isn’t getting any younger. He said, “We sent her off to Australia, even gave her some money, and she thinks she can get away with just sending two postcards? She’s been back for a week!” Well, she only sent one postcard (Carolyn sent two), but she’s only been back for a day. He’s not looking so peppy today, and it always worries me. He’ll be 90 in 28 days!

My sister got back from a trip to Australia and I should be happy that she called once. I was the only one around when she called, and a good daughter would have called again to talk to her parents after such a long trip. Unfortunately, she’s taken after my father and she can’t be bothered to phone during or after any traveling.

I didn’t do all that much today, either. Put my taxes in an envelope, got the gas mower going, mowed the lawn and some of the school yard, and that’s about it. I should have mowed more of the school yard (since I’m sick of looking at how long it’s getting) but I’ll probably be arrested for vandalism or something. No good deed goes unpunished.

Well, I forgot to post last night because I watched Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and it was so jumpy with weird encoding artifacts that it gave me motion sickness. It’s part of a trilogy with Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. I didn’t like it much. It was hard to follow and a Korean friend who saw it told me that understanding the Korean dialog didn’t help much. Today I watched Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and I still think Oldboy is the best of the bunch.

I also spent a lot of time catching up on the episodes of House and Dr. Who I’ve been sitting on. Now I just have a half-season of Prison Break and I should be all caught up. Maybe I should mail in my amended taxes, too.

Well, time to be on my best behavior. My sister is coming back from Australia tomorrow!

Even non-Mac people have heard of bootcamp by now. It lets you put WindowsXP on your beautiful Macintosh. And I did it. It’s pretty and all, but all I did was install a virus checker and then it was back to MacOS X for me. But it was kind of a pretty installation of WinXP.

But it was one of those days again. Not horrible, just kind of weird. Sorta like ordering a Lamb Burger, wondering why it tasted so normal, and then finding out that I got a hamburger. I’ve got nothing against hamburgers, so it wasn’t that bad. Now to figure out if I have anything I need to install on my MacBook Pro.

And with that, we begin the weeklong countdown to my birthday. I think I’ll celebrate today by going to sleep early. Wait, it’s already not early. Phooey.

Woo, so this Claritin stuff is supposed to be non-sedating, but I’m feeling loopy and my mouth is dry. Common and listed side-effects, too. This is all because I’m taking non-prescription antihistamines instead of the prescriptions stuff I prefer. I’d have to get an appointment with my doctor to get the Allegra or whatever it’s called and I have trouble scheduling an oil change. I don’t know what I’d have to do to see that guy.

Looks like Apple has released software to let you boot WinXP on my beeyooteeful MacBook Pro. Even my boss was telling me he thought it was a bad idea. When I thought about it, I realized that the only reason I ever boot up into Windows is to update Windows and the virus checker. Why would I need to do that on my Mac? Well, maybe I could use it to destroy my cell phone, but that seems silly as well. I think I’ll leave my Mac a Mac for now.

I wonder if the “I love Nerds” girl at the gym will be impressed with a photocopy of my MIT diploma. She’ll probably tell me she meant Nerds the candy rather than nerdy guys. I guess I’ll never know.

Honestly, what else would I talk about? Work? One of my co-workers is actually going to talk about what he does every day so he’s wondering how to get a disclaimer to stay at the top of his blog. I would rather talk obliquely about my job and not worry about it. I could also talk about what I do at home, which is usually just watching TV and playing around with my computer. Also uninteresting.

The only place I see some odd people I might be able to talk about is at the gym. For example, there was an attractive girl (who was probably young enough to be my kid) with a t-shirt that said, “I love nerds.” Well, I think it was false advertisement and she probably wouldn’t be all that impressed if I walked down there with my MIT diploma. MIT! HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW? (Sorry, that was rude.)

I also got into a discussion about sexuality and I think I came to the decision that you should do what you want. If you’re a guy and it makes you feel dirty to sleep with women because all you really want is a nice hairy-backed man, and you like feeling dirty when you’re doing naughty things, then do what you need to do (what that is, I don’t know because I just confused myself). If guys don’t do it for you (and they don’t do it for me, really) then go for women, no matter what your gender. Just make sure you’re all consenting adults. YOU HEAR THAT REPUBLICANS? CONSENTING ADULTS.

Great. I wonder how many people I alienated this time.