Had a semi stressful work day. Not because the work was so hard (although I ironed out a lot of bugs) but because I was trying to wrap up any lose ends before Vegas. We went to lunch at Anchor Bar today and I ate mild chickenwings - basically with no sauce. It was pretty good, better than I remembered anchor bar being. It makes me wonder if I just didn't like their hotsauce. We went because our new co-worker just moved to Buffalo for the job at Roswell and had never tried it.

Afterwards, I worked out so hard at the gym. It feels good. According to their much more accuratre looking scale I weigh 158 which is much better than the 153 I weigh on my scale at home.

On a side note, Holy crap, Apple is worth more than google today. I can't believe this - I saw it on macrumors:

- Microsoft (MSFT) - $255,648,204,000
- IBM (IBM) - $169,964,678,000
- Apple (AAPL) - $157,012,662,240
- Google (GOOG) - $156,392,862,560
- Cisco (CSCO) - $142,125,692,160
- Intel (INTC) - $135,658,860,000
- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) - $111,866,423,760
- Nokia (NOK) - $97,746,699,520
- Research In Motion (RIMM) - $71,143,935,000
- Disney (DIS) - $59,257,501,500
- Dell (DELL) - $50,483,256,060

(e:lilho) and I cooked a whole fish for lunch as practice for my
upcoming fishing trip in Utah. At first she thought it would be gross
but once it was cooked we devoured the yumminess that was Mr. Fishy.
Beware of bones.

(e:lilho) and (e:tina) went to the galleria yesterday and (e:lilho) found a
candy grill, not the weber/hibachi kind either. Who would have
thought. Imagine being the person who makes candy grill's for
americans. What do they think of us.

Food
Wow another boring no picture food journal. At Saigon Cafe I had the yellow curry and it had mango in it. I did not get allergic, that makes sense to me as it was cooked. I think it was the first time I enjoyed mango. I was so unsure of it at first I thought it was pineapple and then I thought it was peach.

Work
Lots of work on the wikimedia plugins. I really don't like the way the system is written. I guess that is what you get with open source. It works great and it is very extensible so there is that. Some of my problems with it are limitations of the language, others are the way it was programmed.

I am nervous about going on vacation. I run so many things, I hope nothing breaks as no one really has time to train on being my fill in. Hopefully, I think everyone knows some piece of the puzzle and most things should really be self sufficient at this point.

I also have so many exciting projects I am working on that it is hard to put them down and just vacation. Luckily, we will be camping in the middle of the desert so I really don't have a choice.

Gym
Today in the sauna there was a hot guy that reminded me of Jean Luke Piccard. I was very jealous, I wish I looked like JLP.

dinner
We had some people over for dinner last night. I wanted to have a party when thinking about it last week but then after the disaster the night before, we had just a small dinner gathering. Sorry peeps.

Everyone was hung over all day, till like dinner time - accept me because I didn't drink - thanks Crohns! By the time I got everyone motivated to prepare we had like an hour left before dinner started.

Ribs, chicken sausage, italian sausage, hamburgers, portabello mushroom. Sides: string beans, smashed red potatoes, fried cauliflower and onion and red pepers saueed. I made (e:lilho) snap and clean like 500 string beans while she was hung over. They were the nicest string beans I ever saw - local produce - picked them up at the coop. Go get them while they are still there near the entrance on the left.

No pictures but it was all delicious. For some reason I was so undermotivated yesterday with pictures. (e:libertad) did most of the grilling. It is nice to have a capable "brother in law" to make up for my helpless, incapable brother. While we were grilling it actually started hailing.

games
Afterwards we played charades. We put all the words in a bucket and then you had to pick out a word and act it out on the stairs in the foyer. I think it is the first time we used the foyer as a gathering hall. It worked great for that game.

The first time I went I picked one out of the bucket thinking, "great this is going to be a movie star I know nothing about" and instead I got bukakke (WIKIPEDIA - Bukkake). All the women had no idea what this was, and every guy, regardless of sexual orientation, knew what it was, lol. I guess that says something about internet porn and gender. By the way in my research I learned it comes from the verb bukkakeru, meaning to dash or splash. The following two links are not work friendly. This research also lead to the discovery that there is a wikipedia pornography portal and a wikipedia nudity portal

At the later I found this quote, which I wanted to save an tell Dave next time I see him at the hospital.

The best thing to do would be to designate everywhere as clothing optional, and we could leave little fenced in areas for the prudes to prance around in. Call them "Prudist Camps". They could peer out of their fences and indulge in their offensive "I'm offended" behaviour whenever they saw a natural person walk by, without bothering the rest of us.

I think after that people played video games.

Allergies
I fell asleep early again. I am so allergic this time of year and sleeping is the only time it stops. I think I am allergic to hair products the most after rabbits, cats, and mold. I can't wait to go to vegas soon and get away from the allergens.

All night I waited to write my 3000th journal entry and I felt pressure to decide what it was. I had all these ideas about writing about the significance of estrip in my life, etc. But then I decided I should save that for 5000. I kept putting everything off.

Then I saw this: Jessica and Jacob Sanchez are friend - and it gave me something to write about.



(e:lilho) has arrived in Buffalo and partying began for the not Crohnsies.

I went to sleep at like midnight because I am old and tired.

Now its 5am+ and everyone is home. Luckily, I am not even tired because of my nap.

Tip of the day: Don't drink sherry it makes you a mean.

Speaking of new beginnings
The last tenant is gone downstairs at the rental property which means after 3 years of owning it I can finally get in there and start some rennovations!

I just spent about 2 hours trying to pay our (e:strip) verizon FIOS bill enews,45145 for the server before the deadline. Seriously, I am not aggerating. (e:terry) also spent over an hour this morning. I have been transfered 11 times and each person acts like I am so crazy that I have FIOS but no verizon phone number. It's like they can't possibly beleiev it could be true.

The online system refuses to accept my account number. The account number on my bill doesn't match the one in the sample picture. Some of the agents can bring my account up, about half of them can't. The last one beofre this current transfer insisted that he could not look up the account by account number but would have to have a phone number.

I really don't have one - now I am back on hold for about 30 minutes. Fun.

it is just like the Time warner commercial where the guy can't figure out his verizon bill and asks the little red head kid named morton who also can't figure it out.

Shouldn't companies make it easy to pay a bill online?

P.S. Thanks everyone for not contributing. minus (e:tinypliny) and (e:museumchick)

Finally, I got in!

Everyone keeps asking me, so here she is: baby Fern.

Does anyone really need their web browser to do more. I think it sounds like a big mess. I was reading the article about how Mozilla is thinking about integrating IM/twitter etc with the browser and while I think it is neat to be able to surf togteher or whatever they are envisioning, what is the problem with having two apps running?

It seems there is this trend to start moving all sorts of other non-browser services into the browser. I keep reading all about the furure of the social browser and frankly I am not so into it.

To me it sounds like the old AOL paradigm with everything roled up into one package. Granted, they would surely integrate it better.

I actually prefer having separate apps in other arenas too. I am really getting kind of sick of huge scale applciations that try and do everything. A perfect example is the IDE eclipse. I love it, I use it everyday and for 90% of all programming tasks it does exactly what I need. However, the database management plugins are no where near as good as SQL Developer (oracle), Entereprise manage (MSSQL) or any of the mysql GUIs. Frankly, for mysql I just prefer the command line. But really I would rather have a separate app for the database management because a lot of times it hangs when using eclipse and then I risk damaging or losing all the code /projects I have open. I just hate having to wait while it thinks or suffer when it crashes. I would rather let the database management program think and switch back to eclipse to continue programming.

Same for my browser and IM.

I missed the gym because of the rain storm;(

For dinner I decided to made broiled calamari. When I opened the package I couldn't believe how big they were. Look at it compared to my finger. Same brand as usual just supersized for some reason, yum.



My stomach is really sick today, damn crohns. I have a big presentation tomorrow about the direction I am taking things with my new job.

Oh and (e:lilho) arrives tomorrow, whoohoo!

I was trying to figure out how many days I need to take off for vegas 15-25th + 1 day recovery 26th. And I was worried because its like 8 days and I didn't know if I had that many, then I looked at my pay stub and I have like 23 days of vacation time. I guess I haven't gone on vacation in so long, holy crap. I can't wait to go back to the grand canyon.