Z.Monkey’s Blog

So I figured out how to make your comments show up.  Yeah!  Life is study!

I scored another goal at our hockey game last night (3 on the season).  It was almost a set play; I won the faceoff to Heidi, who passed it back to the D (Matt), while I charged the net.  Matt took the shot, which richocheted to me and I shot it far post.  But we ended up losing 2-1 in a back and forth game.  At least I don’t have to take another week off before the next game, though I’m not really looking forward to play Red again.
It’s now about to rain on my bike.  Stupid (needed) rain.

So I was hoping that France would beat Italy today but this did not happen.  France dominated Italy it just could not find the back of the net.  Even a man down (after the headbutt) they controlled the ball and put shots on goal.  Then there was the shoot out.  Sigh.  Neither of the goalies made one save.  Can’t they play until one team drops

Now we are watching the tour highlights on CBS, but I really have not watched much cycling since Comcast decided to turn off our free cable.  A la carte cable?  Please?  Stupid monopolies.  I thought they were illegal in this country.

The website has not gotten any better this week.  And I still don’t think anyone knows that I am posting here, even though I posted here that I was.  Or maybe I just haven’t said anything entertaining.  Most people probably don’t care what I do with this site.

I just finished a book about the filling of back bay (Boston’s Back Bay: The Story of America’s Greatest Nineteenth-Century Landfill).  Interesting factoid: Storrow Dr. is named after someone whose wife fought against it being built.  The book had a lot of interesting information (see previous sentence) but I can’t say it was well written.  The authors seemed to jump from topic to topic without nice transitions, but if you are interested in the history of Boston it is a good read… and quick.  Now I will read a trash fantasy novel.  (Is Fantasy/Sci-Fi the male Romance novel?)

Speaking of bad transitions, how did you like this post?

So I finished the last supervising class (the one I told you about before. I setup trackbacks to them but I’m not really sure what that does). The morning of the last session we had presentations on the FMLA and the ADA. I pretty sure the most useful thing I found out was that voyeurism, pyromania and kleptomania are not recognized disabilities. Now I can finally fire that pervert without worries. After a fairly nice lunch we were all required to make a 3 minute presentation. I panicked and brought mine to an abrupt end, fleeing the stage in tears. Sigh. You’d think I’d have gotten better at that sort of thing. It all ended with an awkward hug, which was given to me (and everyone else) by the lead presenter when we were presented with our certificates. As a plus I was rewarded with a nice new mug (picture below). After my ride in I rewarded myself with a nice warm mug of freshly made (bad) coffee topped with excessive amounts of whipped cream. Ah.

Now, I ended up riding my bike into work today because we needed to get the wire that connects the gas tank cover (in the back of the car) to the lever (in the front of the car) replaced or fixed. (This will probably take the mechanics 30 or possibly 45 seconds to do and we’ll probably get charged for 2 hours of work) I packed up a bag and had a nice slow ride in. The weather was gorgeous. I mean really nice. Well the only issue is that I forgot my god damned sandals at home! Now I get to sit around until the guy with the bag full of sandals shows up to work. I figure I can buy a pair off of him and leave them in my office for emergencies.

I’m glad that I did not buy MLBTV as it would have been a waste of $80. We get just basic (really basic) cable because we don’t feel that spending $40 more dollars a month for shit we wont watch just to get NESN, ESPN, and a few others is worth while. I had thought about picking up MLBTV and some hardware and just stream the games to our TV from the Internet via our computer. Problem solved! Money saved! We never ended up doing this (because I’m lazy) and it turns out that’s a good thing because I’m in the home market of the Red Sox and MLBTV would have blacked out all Red Sox games. MLB you are dumb fucks.

Ah, my sandal dealer has arrived. Now my day can begin.

[I’m glad I saved this post in a text doc as Eponym decided not to save my post. Jerks.]

How about a summary of what’s happened to me lately. I apologize in advance for any bad grammar you may see.

Saturday: Fussball. Went for a run in the rain and then some other stuff. I’m not sure what.

Sunday: Fussball, then over to Jeff and Jared’s to drop off a lasagna, then hung out in front of the coffee shop reading and listening to all the fuck faces driving around (but only after we watch Ortiz’s walk-off homer). I’m still amazed about how many people like yelling at pedestrians while driving in their automobiles. Would you say that if you were walking past me? If not then you should shut the fuck up. Then back to Jefred’s (Jarf’s?) place for some lasagna and some baseball watching… there being a doubleheader on. Then back home.

Monday: Went to work but was able to ‘watch’ the US v. Czech Rep. game with the MatchCast thing (found on the yahoo worldcup site). Work was kind of (mostly) a pain but I made it through til 4:45 when Jared picked me up and we had PBR’s and Dublin nachos for dinner (thank you Pabst for validating me… you don’t know how good it makes me feel). It was kind of romantic. This was followed by Softball. Well, sort of. We had batting practice but then only one guy from the other team showed up so we split our team in two and scrimmaged for little bit. Fun but not as fun as a actual game would have been. Then back home to watch Jeopardy and consume fluids, then a short trip to the library to pick up a book (just some tripe, but I’m thinking of reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ next (translated version). Anyone read it?) on the way to the Arena. Hockey.

Hockey is fun. I ended up only playing center for one or two shifts (my face-offs are better) then got relegated to left wing where I was thoroughly unproductive; only two goals! Jared being the cause of both of these (to give props where props are due). Plus I had some really good passes to spring Jamie and had a couple of other scoring chances. Yeah! We ended up winning 3-0 with Jeff scoring our other goal. He put it in and was so surprised he took out the net; I thought he hurt himself but he’s okay. After the game it was off to the smoke-free (yeah) Barley Pub for a celebratory beers. I only had a 7-Up because a stick to my throat towards the end of the game had made it difficult for me to breath and painful to swallow, plus a little woozy. Finally we went home and I was forced to take a shower because I smelled like dead.

Tuesday: Woke up and did a little reading, took a shower and got dress. Jumped online to check my email and check out what time the train was leaving for Boston and get my reservation number. Lucky me, I missed my train. Fucking waste of $30. I hate it when I ‘m stupid. I ended up driving down to Revere and taking the Blue Line into Boston. Why was I going down to Boston? Well, I had an interview. Which reminds me my phone is in silent mode. I got down there a bit early so I walked around and found a pub that was showing the world cup (and full of Europeans, Brazilians and Japanese, which made lunch more interesting). The food was really good too and it only hurt a little bit to eat it! After that it was off to the interview, which I think went well. The build is beautiful, the people are nice, it’s in a really nice location (right next to the Fenway) and it would give me a really nice thing to put on my resume (plus they’d pay me more than $13/hr). If I do get offered it’ll be difficult to say no, though it will fuck up thing at my current job quite a bit. Then I went back home but first a rant:

Ahem. Fuck the MBTA. They forced me to buy a ‘CharlesTicket’ (minimum $5) to get on the T at Wonderland. But not one stop on the Green line between Hynes and Gov’t Center accepted the so called ‘CharlesTicket’ (I stopped at everyone) so I was forced to buy a token (after walking like 30 feet to find the nearest ATM). Bastards. There were several people standing next to the sign saying ‘This stop does not accept ‘CharlesTickets” holding tickets and looking confused, couldn’t they tell us ‘If you buy this ticket you will be fucked later. We hope you come back to Boston so you can use up the money we forced you to put on this ticket’. In case you were wondering I looked angry.

There were cows all over Boston for some reason (Merrill Lynch?). This was my favorite one:

Wednesday: What? It just started! Crap.

[Update] - Found out why there are cows. It’s a Jimmy Fund thing. There will be an auction in September if you want to buy me that COW!

I was reading through some news this morning and I can across this article on a new type of battery that will possibly recharge in seconds and never have to be replaced. This is good because it means that more people could end up using them and stop throwing away all those heavy metals (disposable batteries). Plus I could recharge my DS in seconds. Woo! I wonder if the weigh will be comparable?

I sent this link to Ack over google chat but forgot to post it yesterday. I is nice of google to save our conversation… or is it? If you like Hockey I’d recommend clicking on the link (and watching November, January, and February).

It is almost the weekend and I am excited for it once again.

Alrighty, so Heidi is out tutoring and I should be watch Hockey/Baseball* but I decided to play around with what I was working on at work. Loser, right? Well, I have an interview on Tuesday at a place that (I think) is wicked cool (I’d link but I’m too lazy and there is something to be said about privacy (at least from your employers)) and I want to finish up a project that I am working on to show them that I do good work. Perhaps when I finish up with it I’ll show everyone (I cannot right now because it is hidden away on our development server). Look it says ‘Loading…’! Ah. Javascript and DOM are cool.

That reminds me I need to respond to Ack’s comment. ‘Ass, but you are right. I’m drinking and working right now and it’s pretty okay.’

The horror! There is a Prairie Home Companion movie coming out. Glarhffffdle. If there is a movie I never want to see it is that. I’d watch anything else to get out of that (assuming I could not get away with murdering the person try to force me into the movie theater).

*The Redsox Yankees game has been rained out.

For some reason my head and ear ache this morning (my right if you must know). I’ve drank some water and taken some Advil but to no avail. Normally, I’d say ‘fine, I’ll just struggle through today, go home and be a bum tonight’ but we have another softball game tonight, so I guess I need to suck it up and try not to feel crappy. Last night’s hockey game was a little rough, but hopefully our team will figure out how to play together and everything will end up okay. The score was 4-1 them. I had a pretty good game but I don’t I was getting back fast enough helping out the D.. Skate harder! Someone had their first goal last night but I will not say who (don’t want to steal any thunder!).

I’m going to try to have a positive attitude today. I think there is something in ‘pretending everything is okay makes everything okay’ idea. Stupid work. Great off to a great start!

What does that mean? Is anyone there? So some good news and some bad.

1. I just got a job offer.
2. The pay was only $13/hr plus benefits. (I might as well teach school.)
3. Hockey starts on Monday (Grue is playing in place of Ack ).
4. Softball started yesterday (we won).
5. Our centerfielder has moved to D.C.
6. I have an interview at a very cool place.
7. It’s only a part-time job (20hrs/wk).
8. I’ve starting using excessive amount of emoticons.
9. Store 24 has lost power and I don’t have cash to buy beer.

Enough of that. This is a small computer. At work I’ve been playing with PHP, SQL, Javascript, XML and XSLT to create something that probably doesn’t need to be done (or if it does it should probably be done in a way other than how I’m doing it, so that everything is more modular). I have pretty much no idea what I am doing but I figure you have to learn some way. And, besides, I may end up needing these skills in some future job (or if I end up making my own site… assuming my hiatus has not chased all my fans away). Maybe I should start posting useful or interesting stuff I find? But who would care besides me? I could probably use something like del.icio.us (or better yet del.icio.us direc.tor as it is faster cooler somethinger). I have no idea.

It kind of stinks that the projects I’ve been working on for years (on and off) at the Lab are pretty much done or are going to be replaced, so there is no reason to keep working on them. I need to work on projects. I need to make things work better. I am just having a problem caring right now (damn you Ack and your leaving). I’m sure it’ll pass… but I want to move on. I hope the interview I have goes well (though me working in Boston could be problematic, but it is a good opportunity… time will tell). I’ll stop now as I have nothing else to add.

So apparently people are reading this thing a lot, which is kind of sad since I haven’t really written much lately. It turns out that eponym has a bandwidth limitation of 100Mb per month. If you reach that point you have to pay them money or your site goes bye-bye (til the end of the month). I was at 85Mb yesterday and I’m now at 95Mb so you may end up not seeing this a bit. I may end up paying the money as this is a hobby of mine (if you can call it that). Also if you want to help start using RSS feeds to check to see if I’ve posted. They use up a lot less bandwidth and end up being easier for you as you don’t have to keep checking the page. Google and Microsoft have them built into their ‘homepage’ things. All you have to do is sign up for their free email service. (There is also this thing but I don’t really like it.) I’m currently trying to build and create an install for a set of programs I (and others) made. I’m typing this between crashes… awesome!

I’m looking forward to this weekend. There is the Redhook race where the first 100 finishers get a beer (that’s a lie, everyone does). Then there is the nothing, the eating, the drinking, the hockeying (?), flogging (if the course is no longer part of the Bellamy), and (most exciting of all) the no working. Ha! Unfortunately, Eric will be leaving next week so we are going to try and send him away happy hoping he’ll never come back not sad? We’ll take donations.

I made up shirts for our softball team here at work. If you want a look at the design click here. That’s all for now… I hope you all get to read this. And remember, don’t be a dick, don’t refresh!

We went out to the camp this weekend to relax and do nothing but read, play the DS, drink, eat and perhap hike. Little did we know that the whole place was full of ticks. We had to check each other every time we went out to make sure they weren’t any on us. I think I brought in at least one every time I went out. It was relaxing though. It is good to get away from everything once and a while, plus we timed it so that we didn’t have to help Maletas move his shit. Ha. Tomorrow the Yanks will lose to the Sox so I’ll probably be over at his new place to watch his new roommate’s new TV.

Now I go and apply for jobs. Sigh.

Ticks are gross… though not a gross as slugs. [shudder]
How can such a lovable guy give you lime disease? Spoon!