Lots of stuff to get through today, but due to the latest exciting virus that’s going around, I don’t have a lot of time to put it all in and integrate fancy segues and so forth. So it’ll be a little random, but that’s how it’s gotta be.

I have this thing for orange marmalade. I’m really not a peanut-butter-and-jelly kind of guy, but when you slap a little of that orange zestiness on some bread, I’m sucked in. It’s got a sort of bite to it, like it’s giving you attitude just for eating it. It makes me want more, regardless of whether I’m full or not.

Hung out with my friend Aaron this weekend. He’s moving down to San Diego, CA, this week, never to be heard from again by the likes of me. Apparently he’s roped himself a job of wondrous proportions, passing up a reasonable opportunity up here in Portland, OR, to move away from friends and family and live in the heat. (Actually, he has some family sort of close to there, I guess, but there’s a lot of prep work picking up and moving down there that I don’t know I’d be ready to undertake.) We wish him well in his endeavors, and will probably be visiting him come time for the next San Diego Comic Con.

In the meantime, he referred me to the place here in Portland at which he passed up an offer. It looked to me like it might be for a little more money than I’m getting now, but the [rather short] description I saw of the position looked like I might have a great deal less freedom and opportunity than I have in my current position. That scares me; I’ve always maintained “I’m not in it for the money,” and though more money than what I’m getting now would be very nice, I more than highly value the learning and implementation opportunities availed me by my current job.

Went to see Darkness Falls this weekend. After downloading the first ten minutes of it from Yahoo!, Jenn and I were totally sucked in. It ended up being rather enjoyable, if a bit predictable, and it maintained a good sense of humor throughout. I don’t know that I’ll be picking it up on DVD, but I don’t feel that my money was wasted at all.

Rented a couple movies this weekend (Barbershop, Soul Assassin), borrowed one from my parents (About A Boy) and bought one at Costco (Undercover Brother), but only ended up watching one (Barbershop).

Barbershop was okay. It wasn’t as funny as I had hoped it would be… or maybe I just missed something. I will admit that while I watched it I felt a little… uh… conspicuous being a caucasian… but I had a good time with it and loved the performance from Cedric the Entertainer.

On Saturday we went down to one of those storage places and got a 5’x5’ closet for $40/month. So far we’ve been able to move the bed out of the spare bedroom and several boxes of unused items into the closet. I’m really excited to be able to reclaim a little space around our apartment. I’m really feeling cramped and exceptionally frustrated with the current setup, necessitating change. The last thing we have to move into the closet is this stand-up display case I have a bunch of action figures stored in. The problem is, I can’t find the key to it. It used to be taped up on the top of the display case, but it’s not there now… so where is it? I’ve got a key on the ring of keys I have at work that I don’t know what goes to; I think I may have accidentally put it on there. I’ll take it home and check it out. If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll either hire a locksmith or get a lock pick kit. (There’s this Kwick Pick thing that I’m sort of interested in… maybe it’s time?)

My parents are thinking of going to Hawaii at the end of this summer. We were invited to go along, but it’s looking like it’ll cost around $2000 to go for a week (for both Jenn and I). That’s a little rich for my blood, so it’s not looking like it’s going to happen. Maybe I should look at the higher paying job after all…?

So Jenn and I were folding our clean laundry last night before bed. We had probably three big loads of stuff to put away and, lazy people that we are, we decided that it probably would be okay if we just did it later.

During the folding effort, though, I realized I didn’t have any clean socks. I proceeded to dump out the load of whites (one of the loads we had decided to do later) and fold it. Jenn was all, “What are you doing? We’re going to fold those later!” I told her I had no socks left. Her response: “Well, then, just dump the socks out of that load and fold those.”

How am I supposed to dump just the socks out of a load of laundry? That would mean I need to get some sort of sock colander that allows me to dump a whole load of laundry into it and have just the socks trickle through.

But since that wasn’t in the cards, we ended up just folding the whole load and calling it a day.

I was just at the local Haggen and bought a Nestle Crunch “Mocha” bar. I’d never had one before, so thought I would give it a shot.

Buying a bar with the word Mocha appended to the name sort of implies to me a coffee-esque flavor.

Not so.

After tasting it, I realized I had been duped - the only thing the bar resembled to mocha was the color. It was a nice creamy light-brown hue, the result of mixing white chocolate and milk chocolate. Sweet like nobody’s business, but not at all what I was expecting. Bastards.

After my dealings with the user yesterday and my general attitude towards things anyway, I drummed up some more shirts and goodies for folks to buy at my Junk Store. Now I offer shirts to help frustrated people like me show how they feel towards the user community. New offerings include the phrases “I Hate People” and “I’d like to help you, but not as much as I’d like not to.” Go! Buy! Wear!

I went to lunch at an all-you-can-eat Indian joint with my friend Aaron today. Now I’m burping this sort of off-flavor lamb curry substance. This stuff always comes back to get me. Tasty going down, harsh later on.

Microsoft finally got back to me regarding the memory leak support case I filed like seven months ago. I’ve now followed their suggestions to fix the issue and I’m running tests to see if it worked. So far? It still looks broken to me.

I’ve watched the new American Idol the past couple of nights and so far I’m pleased with how it’s turning out. I scream and cringe when the worst of the worst show up to audition, and I’m happy when they finally find someone halfway decent. I guess I’ll continue following it, at least until they eliminate all the people I like.

On the American Idol home page they have a contest where you can win a walk-on role in the upcoming Kelly Clarkson/Justin Guarini movie. I entered, you should too.

Meeting Gibson… that sounds sort of like the title for a play or an art film. But it’s not.

My friend Colin sent me an email a couple of days ago mentioning that William Gibson, author of the famed and revolutionary cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, will be visiting the local Powell’s City of Books on Sunday, February 9 at 7:30p to pimp his new book, Pattern Recognition.

I’m considering going, but last time I went to see someone at Powell’s (Bruce Campbell, for his autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor), I got there two hours early and the line filled the entire top floor, went down two flights of stairs, and filled half of the second floor. It was ridiculous. I can only imagine the sort of crowd that William Gibson will garner. That alone has me thinking that I probably won’t. I’m not much for standing in line for hours on end.

William Gibson has apparently started a blog this month, which I hope he keeps up because it could prove out very interesting. I shall have to keep tabs on that.

Annoying user story of the day: There’s this guy at work who seems to have an inordinate number of problems lately. He’s filed probably 10 help desk calls with us, and as it turns out several of those were redundant in nature. I mean, if you can’t access any network, chances are you won’t be able to access any web sites or other machines, right? Does that mean you should file a help desk ticket for each web site you can’t access? Probably not. This guy did, though. Love that.

So he files this help desk ticket because he doesn’t have a certain piece of software installed on his machine so certain things aren’t working properly. I’d handled a similar case earlier, so I sent him a step-by-step list of how to fix the problem and install the software to make things work. Later he calls me up and says he keeps getting these error messages when he tries to follow my instructions. He’s all, “I keep getting this error when I do the last part of step one.” So I ask him what exactly he’s done so far.

“Well, first I did step three. Then I went back and did part of step one, then step two, and now I’m finishing up step one.”

You know, I never realized that I would have to specify that you need to do the steps in the order specified by the numbers, but apparently that’s something I’ll have to communicate. Numbered steps just aren’t clear enough.