I will never understand the traffic on the west side of Portland. It seems that no matter what time of day it is, it’s rush hour on the West Side. I’d blame it on the weather, but that wouldn’t make any sense because the thought pattern of the average West Side driver would be “Oh, my, it’s raining out! Better slow down!” and “Oh, my, it’s sunny out! Better slow down!” It makes no sense. I could go further with a discussion of how to merge onto the freeway, but I’ve already done that once before, so I don’t think I need to go into it again.

The reason I bring it up is because yesterday it took me well over an hour to get home and I only live 15 miles from work. That means that, basically, I travelled an average of 15 miles per hour. I could technically have driven home in first fucking gear and it would have gotten me there in the same amount of time. No sense whatsoever.

I’m starting to think the West Side city planners don’t actually reside on the West Side. They screwed everything up as a big joke on the poor souls who have to commute that direction every day. It used to be where the traffic going into Portland in the morning and leaving at night was way worse than the traffic travelling in the opposite direction. Not so anymore; now it’s all just terrible.

The Oregon Department of Transportation has a series of traffic cameras that allow you to see what’s going on. Here’s the series that defines my commute. Check it out in the morning and the evening; you’ll see what I mean.

On another note, my copy of Real Genius should be here today, or maybe tomorrow. That shipped with Lexx Series 3 Vol. 1, Lexx Series 3 Vol. 2, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2. I’m stoked for that stuff to get here. I haven’t seen Real Genius forever. I’ll have to bring it and play it at work.

Speaking of DVDs, I’m a little irritated that they haven’t put the movie Electric Dreams out on DVD yet. It’s out of print on video, too (you can buy it for like $75 in some places, but give me a break). The soundtrack was good on that one, too. Highly recommendable.

Jenn’s a little pissed that the new Grand Theft Auto: Vice City game is coming out. Sorry, baby. Some things just have to happen, you know? :)

I’m noticing that there are a lot of cool games out, or coming out, that I’m going to have to get. First and foremost, the latest and greatest installment of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I got an email notification that it’ll be out on October 22, 2002. Woohoo! There’s not a whole lot of info on it, but you can read the news release on it. I’ll definitely be picking that one up, if it’s even half as good as GTA3.

Let’s see… Last night I finished Spy Hunter, which was quite the ordeal. I’d been playing it off and on for several months, and not being terribly great at games in general, this one gave me some trouble. But I’ve been getting better lately, so I was finally able to finish all the missions on this thing. I highly recommend it - it’s everything Spy Hunter should be.

Next on the list to work on is Devil May Cry. That’s another one that’s pretty difficult for the less than coordinated moi, so I anticipate spending some “quality time” working with it.

Other games that I’m going to have to pick up for my PS2 soon/when they come out:

• Shinobi
• Auto Modellista
• Wipeout Fusion

And, last but not least, for the XBox at work, the next must-buy is Dead or Alive Extreme Volleyball. Featuring your favorite ladies from the fighting games DOA2: Hardcore and DOA3, you get to play a bit of beach volleyball and enjoy the high kicks. I’ve only seen the intro trailer for it, but it looks so cheesy (with just the right T&A factor) that I can’t NOT get it.

In other news…

Jenn and I watched that American Idol show last night, and… wow. I mean, some of the people were legitimately good, but others were so utterly horrible that I wonder why they would even bother showing up on the thing. Did they actually think they could make it? Watching these people is like watching a train wreck - horrible, yet you can’t take your eyes off it. And one of the judges, Simon Cowell (who I’d never heard of before in my life), is sort of like Judge Judy - brutal, yet totally right.

While waiting for this program I’m writing to run a few test iterations, I started to sort of re-read a few of the blog entries that I’ve got up here and began to think - you know, unless you’re related to me or know me in some form, this stuff won’t really matter to you. The context is lacking.

That’s pretty much what it says in the Libertarian Blog Manifesto. (Granted, it’s got a little more politically-related propaganda strewn about in there, but, pretty much, that’s the sum of it.) I tend to agree - if you don’t know me, you probably won’t care for what’s going on around here, as is evidenced by the negative “karma” rating that most of my entries get.

Unless you decide to take the time to read up on this stuff and get to know me. Then it’ll all make hella more sense and you might enjoy it.

At the same time, the whole reason I’ve got this thing going on is so I can keep folks updated about me without having to write 30,000 emails every day with the same thing in every one of them. And, frankly, if you don’t like it, tough crap.

Now, that said, if y’all wanna hear about something, I’d be more than happy to write somethin’ up. But no one leaves comments or anything saying one way or the other, so I’ll just plod along and do my thang until such time arises.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

After a long, long, LONG week, Jenn and I have finally finished redoing the living room, at least as best we can without buying all new furniture. The room seems so much bigger since we moved things around, and it has a lot more personality with the paint. Moving the TV and stereo equipment paid off in that it’s a lot cleaner looking (and the cord management behind it is way better) but it was a huge pain in the ass.

Today is having trouble getting started for me. I woke up and totally just drug ass out of bed. Normally I wake up in the shower; today I nearly fell asleep. I’m still pretty tired. I went out to get my monthly Cup Of Coffee from the air pots outside my cube… and they were empty. That’s pretty much a microcosm for my day thus far.

On the other hand, the project I’m working on at work is coming along splendidly (it’s a content replication service for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, if you care), especially since I just got in touch with developer support over there to answer some questions that don’t get answered in the all-too-meager SDK documentation.

I have to go to Fred Meyer today to get a couple of new frames for pictures that go in our new living room. The frames we have, well, suck. So new frames will fix the fact that the old, sucky frames don’t go well in the “Children Of The Revolution” French theme we have going.

While I’m there, I may listen to the new self-titled Dirty Vegas album. CDNow (who sucks; don’t ever buy anything from them) said it would have “appeal [to] the musically unadventurous,” which is probably me, but then, I never seem to like the stuff they say is all revolutionary and shit.

Speaking of “revolutionary” music I don’t dig, I watched the MTV Movie Awards last night and saw The White Stripes perform. I’ll be damned if I could understand a single word from the song they played. It had sort of a British punk feel to it, at least I thought so, and I could see that if they cleaned it up just a tad I might be into it given the right mood. The simple, retro-ish style they had sort of appealed to me. I dunno.

On the other hand, I thought that Kelly Osbourne’s musical debut singing “Papa Don’t Preach” was pretty decent. She has an okay voice, but no real stage presence to speak of. I think if she worked at it a bit more, she could go somewhere. That’ll be on the Osbourne Family Album, coming out June 11. Yes, I’ll probably end up getting that.

Quite the weekend.

Saturday was errand day. The usual vacuuming, shopping, and so forth. Lame.

I did, however, buy the Cake album, Comfort Eagle. Something about Cake just rules; the way the lyrics have a certain cadence and a… deliberate meaning. Very cool. Besides, I heard the title track on 94.7 FM on Friday on the way home, and couldn’t get it out of my head.

So that was Saturday.

Sunday, however, was another issue entirely.

Woke up Sunday really too early. I think it was like 6:30a. Took a shower and decided that it was time to rearrange the living room.

After Jenn and I really started looking at it, we realized that simply moving the furniture around was not going to suffice. We wanted the room to have a sort of French feel to it, to go along with the Moulin Rouge! posters we have in there. After checking with the apartment manager, we decided we needed to paint the front room. (The manager was actually pretty stoked to see what it was going to look like when we finished. She likes the art in there already.)

Hit the local Home Depot and found some beautiful Ralph Lauren paint (and, of course, tinted primer) in “Cobalt” (blue) and “Donegal Tweed” (pale yellow). Got all the brushes and crap to paint with, borrowed the rest of the stuff from my mom, and home we went, ready to paint.

Started moving things around, getting them out of the way, and taping things off around, oh, 2:00p. By 9:00p we had finished the yellow wall (two coats) and had covered the blue wall (which is about twice the size of the yellow wall) in the blue primer. After that, it was time to quit for the night. It bothers me that it’s not done yet, but we’ll hopefully finish it up tonight and do any little touch-up work on the corners and stuff. Then we can start putting the room back together. It’s starting to really take shape, though, and I love the dimension that the blue gives the room.

Now we have to find a decent bookcase to store all the DVDs and videos in and some nicer endtables. Then the room will be pretty well done and we can start the next one.