The Major

Author: FourMajor

  • The Only Good Thing About My New Jersey Trip

    New York City Skyline

  • A Bad Start to My Trip

    So I am on my first trip for GuardianEdge Technologies. They sent me to Jersey City, New Jersey.

    To start the trip off, the woman sitting across the aisle found everything possible to bitch about. First her audio jack wasn’t working, so the flight attendant asked me to switch with her because I wasn’t going to watch the movie. At least I got offered a free cocktail or snack, but I didn’t really want it anyway.

    As a side note, one thing I have noticed about being on a plane is that I get some of my best reading and thinking done on a plane.

    When I went to go pick up my rental car, I found that it hadn’t been payed for yet…so that meant $400 out of pocket probably until the end of the month. I barely have it right now too after my trip to Reno.

    And then I ordered room service because I was funungry. I got chicken teriyaki…honestly mostly for the rice. And I get a call saying they are out of rice. Who runs out of rice?

    The food comes…no knife, the sauce is salty, and the soda is warm. Not impressed with this particular $180/night hotel so far. However, the room is nice and at least this one has already been paid for.

    Here’s to hoping my trip will get better and I won’t have to work overtime Thursday and Friday.

  • Been Meaning to do That

    Finally got around to touching the Pacific Ocean yesterday.

  • More Food

    Wow…I sure am funungry. Someone want to drive to San Rafael and bring me a cheeseburger? What, 4:30am too early for you? I’ll remember this insult!

  • Virtual Cheese

    Share with me a piece of virtual cheese.

    Ah, one of my favorites – Asiago. They stopped selling it at my local grocery store of choice, so I guess it will be an extra luxury for me now since I will have to trek to the cheese store for it.

    Anyway, we are celebrating because I just got past a major “roadblock” in a project at work. There is still a lot of work to do on this project, but the rest is just mindless. Now all I have to do is hit a few keys, read a book for a minute, and repeat a few hundred times. This is definitely better than banging my head against the beast that is Novell.

  • Don’t Cheap Out on Me

    There are certain things that you should never cheap out on when buying computer hardware. Here is a list…hopefully it can save someone some of the pain I have gone through in my years of geekdom:

    • Power supply. Go with Antec, or if you don’t mind reading for a bit, head over to Tom’s Hardware and read one of their PSU reviews.
    • RAM. Skimp on other things and get lots of RAM (hopefully 2GB nowadays). You will need it. Also, go with a name brand: Crucial, Corsair (my fav), Kingston, Mushkin, or OCZ.
    • hard drive. Worry about brand before you worry about size. Definitely do get Western Digital (I don’t buy anything else), and definitely don’t get Hitachi. There aren’t many things worse than a dead hard drive.
    • KVM switch. Go with a Belkin, and don’t get one of their shabby ones. Bad KVM switches will annoy the hell out of you.

    On side note, my arms feel removed from my body. It is a very weird sensation. And for some reason I can still type correctly.

  • Best Broken Program Ever

    My IM client, gaim, recently stopped working. I tried a couple of things to fix it, but for about a week I hadn’t gotten around to really trying hard to fix it. And then I realized how nice it was to not be online all the time. People don’t get the impression that they can bug you about whatever they want, whenever they want. And I don’t feel obligated to sit down for 5 more minutes when I was just about to go do something else, just because someone IMed me.

    And then there is the whole concept that people know when you are and aren’t at the computer. I didn’t like that from a privacy standpoint. So I turned off “idle reporting” so people couldn’t tell if and for how long I had been idle.

    But when I did this, if I ever forgot to put up an away message, which sometimes happened, I would get a couple people accusing me of ignoring them. That irked me.

    So I won’t fix my IM client. I am just going to use Meebo whenever I want to chat. And I will sign off when I don’t feel like it anymore.

  • Iraq War Deaths Animation

    This flash animation just brought out a lot of emotions. Sadness and anger.

  • New Civic Si

    I have been having car problems recently, so I decided to treat myself to a new car. I’ve never actually bought a new car, only used. Anyway, I will spare you all the boring story. Here are the pictures of my new Honda Civic Si:

       

    197 horsepower. 0 – 60 in 6.9 seconds. Slalom as fast as the $86,000 Dodge Viper. Yay.

  • Answering the Phone

    In any job that I’ve had where I have to answer the phone with a customer on the other end, my “line” goes through my head when I hear the phone ring. Right now my line is, “GuardianEdge support, this is Stuart.” But every once in a while I hear myself thinking, “George’s Restaurant”. I really hope I don’t say that one day when I pick up.