My weekend was totally crazy. Liz wasn’t around for part of it, she was at a convention downstate. After getting out of work on Friday, I did my laundry, caught up on some TV, then went right to bed so I could go back into work on Saturday. After that, Liz was home so we got some food, then went off to a karaoke bar with a bunch of my coworkers for a birthday bash. I share a birthday with one of them too, so it made the night even more awesome. Lots of good times proceeded. Sunday morning we woke up somewhat early so we could head out to Rochester, because Jouva’s visiting a friend there and we wanted to see him. Got to visit this awesome little trinket shop, played Extreme on a 100% legit Japanese cab which still had all the cardboard attractors around the monitor, and played a round of Munchkin (which is my absolute favorite card game btw). Drove back home later in the afternoon to catch dinner at my parents, then stayed up late to finish my homework.

After all that, I’m working 10-7:30 shifts at work due to the head engineer being out of the office for the week, which meant me getting up early Monday morning. Not fun. Lots of good stuff happening there though; figuring out solutions for some problems, making everyone’s lives easier, and just overall having fun there. I just don’t like coming home to an empty apartment.

No plans at all for this weekend, I’m stoked. It’s been a while since that’s happened.

I’m pretty stoked about this project, not only because it’s giving me a chance to prove myself to a bunch of experienced engineers who’ve been in the field for 15+ years, but also because I get to work with my favorite software of choice.

This job gets better every day.

Today I imaged over a hundred thumbdrives, labeled them (until the labeler ran out of tape), moved hundreds of gigabytes of images from server to server, and other random stuff for my coworkers.

Went to the gym after work, too. I’m enjoying working out after hours, I still have a lot of energy in me and this is a good way to use it. Been trying to eat healthier, too. Let’s hope my health regime bears fruit.

Heading out to VA for a weekend to play Empress. I’m pretty excited. Get to meet a lot of people I only know through the internets, and see some old faces from my DDR tournament days. Greg’s awesome for letting me crash at his spot and helping me with transportation to/from the airport. Liz is all sad I’m going to be gone for *gasp* two days. I think she’ll survive.

Time to catch up on some primetime TV.

Kat and her bf, Kelly and her bf, Mike, Adrian… good times. Brian was there too, and Zack(?!). Haven’t seen him since he quit. Having an order of 8 Irish car bombs was pretty epic.

Saw a pretty good band at the Half Penny, and did a good share of drinking. Apparently I hold my liquor pretty well. That last Jack & Coke was pretty hard.

Not sure if we’re doing it again next weekend, but I sure hope so. A fight almost broke out outside of Blue Tusk and then Mike shows up out of nowhere (he left to go to a different bar) and broke it up. What a way to end the night =)

Finished my Statistics class earlier today, so that’s out of the way. Got one more class to take care of for the semester, which shouldn’t be anything too difficult. I glanced over the final project and it looks like complete cake. Spent the morning at work, where I found out what my new proposed job position is. Check this out: Production Engineer. Me? An ENGINEER? While I don’t think my work responsibilities entitle me to that, I’ll take it. If anything it’ll be amusing telling people that I’m an engineer. Engineers always sound like important people.

Got an essay to write tomorrow, and the apartment needs a cleaning. Not sure what else is in store.

She hasn’t gone psychotic on me yet. Either I must be doing something right or she just hasn’t wised up yet.

SuperNOVA 2 is finally in town, about 10 minutes from me. I’m a fan of the songlist so far, and the charts I played were pretty fun. Of course the machine has been in operation for less than 48 hours and the 2P up arrow is already busted, so I couldn’t enter in the unlock codes.

Had a knack for running into coworkers outside of work today, too. Saw Adrian in a clothing store Liz and I stopped into, and then Essad was with a date when Liz and I went to go see Madagascar 2. Amazing movie by the way, go see it if you want a lot of laughs.

Aside from all that I’m working overtime nearly every day, on top of coming on on Saturday mornings. I’m pushing for a new job position and soon enough the extra hours will pay off. As a sacrifice I don’t spend as much time here at the apartment as I’d want to. Things will work themselves out, I’m sure.

School’s been alright. Not a fan of Statistics but I’m surviving.

Adobe Flash has been broken on my distro for about 2 weeks now. It’s pretty sweet, I can’t waste time with YouTube. I had to hack my way around to get the 32-bit app working in my 64-bit distro, but then it magically… just… stopped working. I completely removed it and then re-added it, but no dice. I just get a white space where the content should be. about:plugins shows it’s loaded, and flash-based sites aren’t tossing me an error, nothing just loads.

Looks like my wireless mouse just died too… computers seem to hate me lately. At least I got an Atheros chip from work, to replace my crappy Broadcom.

The girl: Amazing as always. We spent last weekend at her parents’ house for her dad’s 50th birthday. Fun times. I helped her dad cut down trees in the front yard and move some huge furnace into the basement of an apartment complex he runs outside of town. It’s fun doing small projects like this. Liz’s family is always fun to hang around.

Being on the same shift is absolutely awesome. Whenever we’re not at work we’re together, even if we’re not doing the same thing. I’ve been spending time playing through Earthbound in anticipation of the Mother 3 translation (which is nearly finished) and Liz will sit right next to me either watching some downloaded TV shows or cruising the LJ communities and Japanese shops for lolita stuff. She cooks meals for me, and I’ll clean up afterwards. We have some common TV shows we like to keep up on too, so that’s always fun.

Work: frustrating at times, especially when supervisors clash over my priorities. I do a lot of extra work that isn’t quite related to my assigned position, but I do it because I’m one of the few that possesses the knowledge. So when I go back to my assigned job, it’s almost like they’re looking for reasons to go after me. It’s silly. And the scary part about that is that the upper management kinda just… doesn’t care. I do the extra work that will no doubt benefit the company in the long run, so that’s what matters to them. This small stuff the supervisors chase me down for is the last thing they worry about.

As I write this now I’m researching things for work. I was there for almost 12 hours today, and I’ll probably pull another 12 tomorrow. It’s crazy. I love solving problems and tweaking the system. I’m sure it will pay off after this project gets finished. There’s been talks of me moving to another department… which I would gladly take.

Internets: Nothing’s really changed. Still got the same servers, the ROM site hasn’t changed really and I just haven’t mustered up the effort to finish the GBA set that *needs* to be finished. I’ll get to it. I need to work on the tracker too… but once again, just finding the time and effort for it. I wish there were two of me. That would be much easier.

School: Eh, it’s school. Taking statistics and some risk management course. Boooooring.

Guess that sums things up. See everyone again in a month haha.

Aside from the move, Liz and I had a pretty decent weekend. Did some shopping Saturday night, then watched some epicly bad horror movie. Sunday we did more cleaning + moving around, and other shopping.

Today I started second shift. It felt awesome being able to sleep in late. Woke up around 10:30, got my hair cut, washed and waxed the car, went out for Indian with Liz, and then we went for ice cream. By the time we were done with that, I still had over an hour until my shift started. I’m already loving this schedule.

The night shift is pretty bare-bones right now. I trained 3 people who are computer literate (which makes my life much easier) and have enough of a brain to follow printed directions. Trust me, some of the people who land a job there don’t have a clue what they’re doing. But these guys do. I showed them what they needed to do, gave them printed directions, and by the end of the night they were ace. I was able to focus on my normal job too, with limited interruptions. I checked on them frequently to see if they had any questions, and did my best to help them with any problems. It worked out pretty well. In a week they’ll be on their own, I’m betting.

I had a week of vacation from my classes last week and they started up again this week. I’m really not looking forward to 11 weeks of Statistics, but oh well. It’ll be interesting to see how I’ll submit work over the internet.

Liz’s schedule changed a bit today so she won’t be home until 2:30. Gives me a little time here by myself, to which I’ll probably just putz around or maybe pop in a movie. Got a DVD of A Man Apart starring Vin Diesel. But after seeing Babylon AD last weekend I’m kinda afraid to see this.

Well, moving in with Liz on Saturday afternoon makes up for it. Just a bit. *wink* I’ve packed a bunch of stuff, threw even more away, and fought allergies throughout it all the entire time.

Liz and I spent some time at the mall (well, 3 trips worth actually), mostly because Saturday was busy as hell there during the day and after we saw Roller Derby downtown we decided to catch Tropic Thunder. Awesome movie. I wasn’t expecting much out of it, so I was thoroughly pleased. Most comedies these days are just filled with stupid toilet humor, not really my bag. TT was done really well though.

We also had a meal at the awesome Vegan restaurant downtown, where I proceeded to make fun of the PETA flyers they had there. Ever wonder why all their photos are taken in the middle of the night? Maybe it’s because they break into farms illegally and then doctor them up afterwards? Maybe one should take into account that PETA kills more animals than it adopts out. I’m sorry, but animal rights activists amuse me greatly.

Sunday we went back to the mall to finish up some shopping since Saturday was way too effin’ busy, and then went for a walk in the park. The weather was absolutely beautiful for it. Headed back to the apartment and laid back watching Hot Fuzz which was absolutely amazing. Can’t believe it took me this long to see it. And I’m sure demi’s going to kill me for that statement

Came home from work today to see my sister making margaritas. Since my mother claims they’re “too strong” I now have two of them.

Trying to spend my spare time doing more productive things, since I’m working 10 hour days and I don’t get much free time to myself. I updated my ROM site with an updated MAME set and I’m hard at work at fixing the GBA ROMs. It’s just time-consuming. Still looking for a host that offers 100mbit unmetered at a decent price. School’s keeping me busy still, too.

Installed VirtualBox, and put a copy of XP inside it with a copy of Office. Now I can do my schoolwork from my laptop without needing to VNC to my Windows box. My online classes are weird and nothing works right in Firefox. I didn’t want to try and Wine a copy of IE either. Office 2003 wasn’t working last I tried, maybe it’s been fixed since 1.0? Either way, Office and IE are a must for my classes.

720p x264 files play beautifully. The quality is amazing. Downloaded a sample of Matrix Revolutions to make sure. Didn’t feel like wasting time on a 4 gig mkv to find out it would be choppy.

Just need an external HDD enclosure and I have to shuffle some data around, and I’ll be set. Probably getting one this weekend.

In other news, I’m working 10 hour shifts all next week. 6-4:30. Not really looking forward to it.