[Days Until Vegas: 14]

I pre-ordered my copy of Real Genius yesterday. I’m stoked. Jenn doesn’t understand why I’m so all over this thing. I asked her what she thought of the movie. “It was okay, but I didn’t think it was as great as you did,” she said.

Great? I think this was one of the defining movies of my very being. I wanted to be Chris Knight (Val Kilmer). I still want to be Chris Knight. Watching Real Genius gives me the warm fuzzies as I relive all the good memories associated with that time in my life. I guess I just sort of assumed it was that way for everyone. Maybe just not with this movie.

(Oh, and I’m still irritated the soundtrack for this isn’t out.)

Anyway…

My friend Mike quit smoking recently. Or, at least, has begun the attempt to quit smoking. I think that’s cool. Smoking, while socially acceptable, is probably one of the nastiest habits ever. I would almost rather deal with an alcoholic than a smoker; I can smell the smoker from further away than I can smell an alcoholic (yes, even the really drunk ones), and I’m not allergic and stuffed up when I sit next to an alcoholic, whereas the smoker really gets to me. So I’m really happy for him that he’s on the patch and giving it an earnest try. I hope it works for him.

I have a couple of tiny rock chips on the side of my car (probably 1mm diameter) so I bought a bottle of touch-up paint. The thing is, I’m scared to death I’m gonna mess it up. If there’s a way to screw this up, I’ll find it, so I’m sort of stressing about it. As it is, I’m going to have to go get a smaller paintbrush because the one in the cap of the bottle is too big. I’ll probably do that this weekend - wash the car, do the touch-up, wait for it to dry, and wax the whole thing. My car is in desperate need for some love.

This past Friday was the series finale of Lexx, one of my favorite shows. I am sorry to see it go, but then, I’d rather have it go out on a high note, when it’s still good, then to languish in mediocrity and die miserably like some other shows I know.

It was my donut day today at work, so I got the donuts, then noticed that Haggen carries POG. Yay, me! So I picked some of that up because I haven’t had it since I was in Maui, several years ago. Tasty!

For the geeks out there: I hate Active Directory. Absolutely hate it. It could have been as simple as LDAP, but instead, Microsoft made it x-times more complex (by adding “features”) so now it’s a bitch to program against, at least for me. The current thorn in my side revolves around the fact that somehow our Active Directory server won’t let me list the groups a given user is a member of. Interesting, since that worked last week. Of course, nobody’s changed anything, at least according to the folks who maintain it, so I’ve got a support call in to Microsoft to see if they can figure it out. And just so ya know, if you put a call in to Microsoft, unless you mark it as Urgent!!! (yes, with three exclamation points minimum), they take their own sweet time about it.

[Days Until Vegas: 18]

I got my dance pad in the mail on Tuesday and tried ol’ DDR out using that instead of the standard controller.

Man, have I got the mad dancin’ skillz!

Actually, to be totally honest, I barely made it through the tutorial. I’m able to do a couple of the songs, but I really need to practice in order to get, well, coordinated. While “dancing” (and I put “dancing” in quotes because that’s pretty much what I’m doing), I noticed a couple of things:

• You pay extra money for a hard dance pad for a reason. The soft ones, while affordable, do slide around a bit. I may have to make a more solid base for mine and somehow anchor it down.
• I am so out of shape, it’s utterly pathetic. I break a sweat doing a simple two-step. Just pathetic.

It’s a lot of fun, though. I can see how I could get addicted to it pretty quickly. I should probably finish up Grand Theft Auto 3 and Rez before going too far with DDR.

In other news…

The Alias site on ABC.com has some cool new wallpapers you can download for your computer. I’m stoked they finally have one with Jennifer Garner in the blue rubber dress she wore in the episode she went to Russia. I think that’s my favorite outfit she’s worn on that show, though I can’t really complain about anything else she’s worn. She’s a hottie, regardless. This one just makes me feel like rubber dresses should be a more commonly worn item of apparel.

Then again, there are lots of folks who definitely don’t need to be wearing anything rubber.

I went to the doctor yesterday and got some samples of Allegra. You only take one a day, and I’m still on my first one that I took yesterday around noon. So far, it’s okay… I suppose I was hoping to be totally cleared up, but what I’ve got going now is more of a “not-really-congested-but-still-a-tad-runny” situation. I go to an allergy specialist next Wednesday to see if I can get something better. I like the idea of the allergy shot, but I’m deathly afraid of needles. Also, I remember my dad having to give himself shots, so that’s totally out of the question for me. I don’t like receiving shots, so there’s no way I’m giving it to myself. Unless it’s, like, an injection gun of some nature. I’m not worried so much about the pain as I am about the needle part.

Finally, tomorrow is (what they bill as) the series finale of Lexx. I’m sorry to see it go, but better go out at the height of the show than wait for it to get lame. This will also free up some TV watching time that I can allocate to something else.

Cold coffee (not iced, just plain cold) has to be one of the grossest things ever. I see now why they sell those mug warmer things that you can plug in to keep your coffee hot.

I tried to schedule an oil change for my car this weekend, but the dealership is all booked up so I gotta wait until next weekend. Figures. They do have little things of touch-up paint, though, for $5, so I will probably pick one of those up this weekend so I can fix a couple little rock chips I’ve got on the rear of the car.

[Days Until Vegas: 21]

Not to sound like a whiny grandmother, but my sinuses have been acting up something awful lately. I’ve noticed it slowly getting worse over the last couple of years and I’ve turned into an antihistamine junkie, which I’m sure is damaging my liver or some other critical organ, so I’ve made a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday to get some Allegra-D or something similar that might be able to relieve this trauma.

My copy of Dance Dance Revolution came in the mail yesterday. The dance pad should be here today or tomorrow. Admittedly, I was skeptical about the idea of a dancing game. I’ve seen clips of games like PaRappa the Rapper and such, and the whole concept sounded, well, stupid. Hit the buttons with the beat of the music? Puh-leeze. But I put DDR into the PS2 and fired it up… and surprisingly, it’s a lot of fun, even with the standard game controller. I can see how it could be addictive. The music’s pretty cool, too, and I thought it was really going to suck. I’m looking forward to the dance pad now to see how much more difficult it is. Considering I was having a hard time just keeping up with the buttons I can only imagine the terror I’m going to bring into the apartment when I bust out my oh-so-coordinated dance skillz. I suppose practice makes perfect.

That all said, I am not going out to get Mr. Mosquito or any of the other “fascinating” life-fantasy games the Japanese people come up with. I have my limits.

In other news, and it’s not so much news as a general realization I’ve made and feel like sharing, I have gotten to a point in my career where I am unable to explain what I am currently working on to anyone except other application developers in my boat. That’s a little disheartening, to be honest, since I find it nice to share work-related joys and pains with others. If other folks don’t get it, the sharing becomes sort of moot; it takes the punch out of a story if you have to explain the details you figure are common knowledge (at least in your own circles). I’ve even gotten past the point where I can adequately explain what I’m doing or how it works to my boss; he’s a web developer like myself, but more into the administrative side of things, so when I get into XML and Web Services and such, I just get a blank look…

Another poor segue: I think I want a SoundBug. It’s this cool device that you can affix to any hard surface and turn that surface into a speaker. Connect two together - stereo. Apparently, it sounds a lot like notebook computer speakers, which isn’t too bad. The novelty of the whole thing is really what gets me. The only thing stopping me is they’re $50. Each. I really don’t have that kind of disposable income, especially after my DDR investment. I guess we’ll see.

Fucking Lattice Semiconductor took a nosedive today, closing down $4.31. Normally I don’t care a whole lot about that, but Lattice happens to be one of the two companies I hold stock in. I was hoping they’d come out of the slump so my purchase of my stock options might not be in utter vain, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, I will probably have to write these assholes off as a loss, which means I’m totally screwed since I don’t have a house and don’t have enough stuff to deduct to really make any use of losses.

The long and the short of it is, these bitches won’t come out of donkey-suck land any time soon, I’m thinking, since I sold half my stupid options to buy the other half of my stupid options back when they were at $29. What the hell am I supposed to do with it at fucking $12?