Niiko

Winter Classic.

2009-01-02T03:08:50Z

I got to work the Winter Classic today. It was cold, but no worse than opening day, or a night game in April. It was exciting, the game could have gone better, but I had a lot of fun for most of the day.

The facilities are not made for a sport where 90% of the fan base tries to go to the bathroom at the same time though, so that got frustrating and I spent way more time than I wanted too trying to instruct people on the difference between the door labled in and exit at the bathroom.

All in all fun, worth the lack of sleep and laying off of any major partying on NYE.

I got a few pictures with my phone before people filed in and I had to actually pretend like i was doing stuff. It takes pretty good pictures I think.

qzarian @ 2008-12-26T14:14:00

2008-12-26T20:28:12Z

Merry Christmas.

Still here, doin alright for the most part. Not much new going on really. New place is fine, family is fine. Still no car. Few things coming up for working for the Cubs, so that'll be nice. Convention in a few weeks and Winter Classic in a few days. Was supposed to work tomorrow morning watching the door while the crew worked, but they finished early so I don't need to go in.

Christmas was good. Time with family is always nice. My cousin and her husband who are about 5 years older than me or so just had their first kid a few days before my birthday, so he's 3+ weeks old. Got to meet him at Christmas. Pretty light Christmas.. Gifts I gave went over well, stuff I got was all nice and wanted and not much to say other than that.

I got the new G1 google phone. It's awesome. I got it for work we're developing some software for it in between other projects. Fun stuff. Also been setting up a web server deal. Some new territory, not as familiar with all the stuff it makes it tough. Anyway, back to figuring that out.

qzarian @ 2008-10-28T08:19:00

2008-10-28T15:21:42Z

Busy weekend this week. Had to go back to LaCross Wisconsin and drag my car back with one of those Uhaul car dollies. Dad and I drove up to the Dells Friday night, spent some time at the casino there, got a room and drove the rest of the way Saturday morning. Long day lots of driving. Sunday moved to my new apartment. All that after a full week of going to the gym. I hadn't been to a full week of Jujitsu classes since I started there. At first I didn't feel going to the Intermediate classes and then baseball season took up a lot of my time. Now, less excuses. Plus the big regional tournament NAGA is coming up in a few weeks. I haven't signed up yet but most likely I'll be going, so not only do I need the practice/conditioning, but it'd be nice to be able to enter the lighter weight class which means I need to drop a little weight. Not all that hard, the only real difficulty is weekends. Still if I can lose five or six I can drift the rest in water weight no problem. (theoretically I could drop it all in water weight but that's no fun and I'm not all that serious about it).

Halloween this weekend. Fun stuff. May have people over to go out Friday night, and I think someone is having a party Saturday. Still no costume yet, but I'll be able to throw something together easy enough I imagine.

Not much else going on. Work is slow. Went to a concert with Shane last night. Some band called Of Montreal. That's basically how it works Shane wants to see random Indy band in the city. I live in the city so I go too. They were good and the crowd wasn't too annoying. Security had to push past a few time to take out people smoking up, made me sympathize with the security guys. Some of them actually work at the ball park too, I usually see a few of them going to local shows. If I wanted to put in the time I could do that too but meh, I'd have to see more shows that I don't really care about than shows I wanted to see, it probably wouldn't be worth it.

Random poetry guy was there, he seems to be at all the shows we go too causing much speculation (well, a little speculation anyway) between Shane and I what he really does, and why other people cheer for him. They ended the show covering Smells like Teen Spirit. It was fun and a good cover. (not that Nirvana is all that particularly hard to cover or anything but still). So... apparently today is side comment in parentheses day.

Oh well back to work. Fun night of unpacking later.. woo hoo.

Ugh

2008-10-17T21:17:59Z

Last weekend I was in Minnesota visiting the peoples up that way. Good times as always. Sunday comes and I have to work Monday so after the epic fail that was the Bears game I get in the car and head home. It's not that bad, about 400 miles or so I usually do it in about six hours. 34+ hours later I got home... well to my parents house anyway. Sans car.

Just after crossing into Wisconsin motor got loud, then very quiet as I coasted to a stop. Cop came, tow truck came. It was about 7 ish by then. Yeah not much open in semi-rural Wisconsin at 7 on a Sunday. Too far/late to get a ride from anyone at home as I was still about four hours away so I stayed at the local AmericInn. Next morning the garage still couldn't get to my car, so after a nice hour and a half walk over to the garage, I had it towed to the Toyota dealership in LaCross (ten miles further from home). I remembered the car was certified pre-owned when I bought it and I had paid for platinum coverage or some such, that had to help me out right? Not so much. I need a new engine for my car. Apparently that's not part of my 6 year 100000 mile warranty. My dad spent his evening driving out to get me after he got off work Monday evening. I spent the day watching sports center and playing pool at a hooters.

Since the car isn't even paid off yet, I can't just get a new one so next weekend we get to drive up there and drag the car back. It's not the best time to be borrowing money and all and I don't have several thousand dollars cash to have the engine bought and put in. So no car for me for the next few months anyway. For my normal everyday life I don't really need it, I take public transportation everywhere anyway but yeah still kinda sucks. It's a good time not to drive I suppose, parking in the winter is less fun than normal. meh

Part of the reason it's hard to come up with the cash is I'm moving at the end of the month. A new place, with a bedroom and all. So I have the whole rent/security deposit all tied up as well. Hopefully after the holidays/tax return I can get my car back, until not it'll sit in the driveway at Mom and Dad's.

After the crash and burn of the Chicago National League team that I work for, we had our end of season party last night. Open bar from four till seven. That group can do a lot of damage to any bar in that time frame much less where the company is picking up the check. I'm not a big fan of drinking on work nights, but that was a much needed break after the last week. I get to take the train home to see mom and dad for the weekend, and go play cards with the guys. Yay.

qzarian @ 2008-08-07T14:28:00

2008-08-07T20:15:14Z

Bears preseason football starts today. How is that possible? There is no way it should be time for football to start already. It comes on a good day, as there is no Cubs game tonight so I don't have anything to watch this evening but still regular season one month off. Olympics started too. Not super excited or really even interested in them, but I'll probably check out the Judo and Wrestling coverage, as it looks like you can see some of that online which is cool.

This week has been pretty rough sleep wise. I started coming in an hour earlier to make up for Joe not being here any more. I've been going to bed earlier, or so I thought but apparently not enough, because I've been dead all week. So much so that I've not worked out, which is bad but still. So sleepy. Tornado weather at the ball park delaying the game 3 hours or so Monday night didn't help any I'm sure, since it was pushing 1am by the time I did go to sleep. It does give some bright side to the otherwise terrible game Saturday that starts at 2:55, meaning I can sleep in. Otherwise really fox afternoon games are brutal and shouldn't happen any more, and then a 7:00 game for Sunday night baseball. Which is nice because I can go out Saturday night and come home Sunday with enough time to park and do stuff before work.

Horseshoe has done renovations or something and is reopening it's casino in Hammond. It's supposed to have a fairly nice poker room. It's a little closer than the one I occasionally go to in East Chicago or Gary so I may have to check that out one of these days. Like next week when I finally get a weekend off, and also get paid by both jobs. How's that for timing. In fact, that's the third Friday of the month I'll have to move my car for parking that week too. Yeah I'll be there. Playing live is way different than playing online. Live players are just So bad. Sounds like a good plan.

Cubs, work, water.

2008-08-01T19:43:06Z

Busy week or so. Cubs are playing great ball all of a sudden, right in time. It's exciting. They're coming home for a big 9 game home stand, of which I work 5 games. With last weekends games that makes 3 weekends in a row of working, but oh well. Tuesday there was a minor league game at the ball park, which was pretty cool. It did show me that if I didn't like the team so much I wouldn't be working there though. It's a lot more of a job when you don't care what's going on on the field heh.

Some changes at the real job as well. Joe the other guy I work with was let go, so I'm back to answering phones as well as programing. For the time being anyway till they replace him. It isn't a huge deal, I was doing most of the actual work to fix problems anyway but yeah not optimal. I did get a fairly respectable raise as well though. I probably Could get more by going elsewhere, but not enough to give up the intangibles of working here (such as generally flexible schedule, lax dress code stuff like that), and put up with the hassle of looking for and changing jobs for the time being. It also means I'll definitely be moving when my lease is up to a place with a bedroom.. and probably parking. So that's a bonus. I've also been working on some pretty cool things, and fixing some problems we've had in the past so definitely is good in that respect.

I hadn't been to the gym in a week or so before last night, I took Monday off for various reasons mainly laziness and wanting to watch the Cubs Brewers game, and I wasn't feeling all that up to going last night either, but I did and I'm glad.

As a quick aside I have the Cubs game on the MLB audio feed and Wayne Messmer did the Anthem. I think he's probably my favorite Anthem singer ever.

Anyway I got to the gym early and Dino the head instructor was doing some rolling with one of the guys. It's just amazing to watch. Being from a wrestling back ground it's a lot different watching Jiu jitsu. Wrestling has a lot of force and effort and such. There is technique involved but if you have a guy with a significant size advantage, and similar skill the bigger guy wins nearly all of the time. Not so in Jitz. Good jiu jitsu guys are very smooth and calm and almost effortless. Watching it reminds me of a Bruce Lee quote, which thinking about it I looked up.

"Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend."

I watched for a bit as I stretched then one of the older (actually, I don't know his age it's not significantly different than me anyway, but for some reason I think of the more experienced guys as 'older' then again I assume most people are older than me for whatever reason) guys who is pretty much the same size as me and has been training for 3 or 4 years asked if I wanted to roll a bit to warm up since we still had fifteen minutes till class started. That by itself is pretty cool since most of the time the really experienced guys wouldn't go out of their way to roll with a completely new person, so I'm at least not completely terrible anymore. So we did, not going too hard but it was still rather productive and I worked really hard on taking my time and emulating Dino and the water. He submitted me a few times but I almost got him in an arm bar but I was a tad sloppy and he was able to get out of it. It was a good roll over all, even if I did start class tired already heh.

I've yet to be able to tap anyone with more experience than me. I had one of the guys who sometimes runs class when Dino's busy. I had a shoulder lock locked in and had started to crank it slowly not wanting to hurt him and the round ended before I got him to the point of tapping. I think he was almost as excited/disappointed for me as I was. Nearly all the guys in our gym are really cool like that. Then class started and I worked with a guy who doesn't train jitz as often so I was able to kind of help him through moves some.

I'm improving at any rate. I can hold my own if not completely beat people with less or similar amounts of experience. I still gas fairly early and need to get stronger but that's just a matter of time and effort. All in all really enjoy it. Of course after a good class yesterday I wanna go again and there aren't any classes I can make it too till Tuesday due to my Cubs schedule, go figure.

qzarian @ 2008-07-17T13:39:00

2008-07-17T19:43:50Z

All Star Break. Seems so long this year, I'm ready for more baseball. The game was pretty good. It was one of the first ASG I watched with a lot of interest. Cubs start back at it tomorrow on the road. It's nice I get a weekend off. Last weekend I was at the games and the club made some changes on how they do day of game tickets so I was working early helping with that. I haven't volunteered for stuff like that in a few years, I don't need the extra hours specifically and it's a lot more like work than the regular game, but my boss asked me to come in so I did. The new rule is if you buy a day of game ticket, either one released that day, or a standing room only ticket, you have to go immediately into the ball park, and they'll only sell one a person. This pretty much makes it impossible for scalpers to get the tickets they sell all day. That makes it pretty much awesome. I had one of the main guys try and bribe me after most of the crowds were inside, and asked why we don't just take a little money to leave him alone. I told him I had a little thing called integrity and asked him to walk across the street again. Heh.

The Blackhawks confirmed they're going to host the Red Wings in the Winter Classic outdoors playing at Wrigley. That probably means I get to work the game. It's going to be cold, fun, and probably hungover since it's New Years Day. Fun stuff.

We've been sparing a lot this week in Jitz. Mostly because Dino (the coach) is in Cali to corner one of his fighters in the fight card coming up this weekend, which by it self is pretty cool. Doing better. Most of the guys there have more experience than I do, so I almost never can submit anyone, but I can manage to improve my position a lot, and get beat on less often, so that's a step in the right direction. I can usually beat the guys with similar experience, so I'm happy with that. I was doing a lot better a few weeks ago, but then I missed a little while, about two weeks, being out of town and such and yeah that didn't help the conditioning at all.

I have a class tonight I'd usually go to, but probably not tonight. I had to drive to work which means I wanna get out early and beat traffic/find parking. It's street cleaning week so it was move my car or pay 50 ticket. Twenty dollars to park downtown in a garage is less than 50 to leave it on the street so I moved it. Now I just gotta find a place that was cleaned today so I don't have to worry about it tomorrow. My next place will hopefully have better parking/a parking spot. Speaking of new places, seems like everyone I know is moving into their own place. I'm just not there yet. It'd be nice, then again I donno, I don't think I'd be all that good at taking care of a place by myself.

I'm outta books to read again. I devoured that last series pretty quickly. I've been playing Puzzle Quest on my DS on the bus. What can I say I'm a dork. It's fun.

qzarian @ 2008-07-07T17:01:00

2008-07-07T22:43:46Z

SO, I've had enough driving for a while. Not so much the act of driving, but putting up with everyone else who is also driving. Two weeks ago we drove to the family reunion in Montana. Rented a big ol minivan. Dad and I did all the driving, well he did a large chunk of it and I took over while he napped. Still 20ish hours each way.

This last weekend I went out to Minnesota. It's about 400 miles or so. It took 7 hours there and 8+ home. It usually doesn't take that long. I don't know what it is but Wisconsin, I'm sure it happens other places too, but I almost always run into it on WI, has points in the interstate where everyone stops. There isn't an accident, or construction, or a lane reduction or even vehicle broken down or pulled over ... just people stopped. Seriously.. if there is no outside reason for there to be a parking lot in a 65mph speed limit then everyone should be able to go in the forward direction.

The weekend was fun though. Celebrating the Fourth of July in a state that it's legal to buy and blow things up with fireworks is a pretty good thing. Apparently MN has some rules that are a little stricter than Wisconsin but yeah, still some good stuff.

Ugh anyway.. home, back to work.. yay work....... right.

I got a call from Dad while I was driving home and he was asking if I was going to stop by the house to meet the new dog. This was news to me as no one said they were getting another dog, but apparently they did. His co worker had to get rid of their pug due to changing living situations so yeah. I'll have to stop by next weekend. luckily Saturday's game is an early one so that works out. Should be a good time. Always enjoy animals. Animals and little kids love me after all.

Almost time to go get killed at Jitz. I'd actually been doing well the last few weeks, but two weeks off by it self is going to pretty much kick my ass, not to mention you know, the guys attempting to choke me or bend limbs in sub optimal directions. Good times.

qzarian @ 2008-06-16T13:59:00

2008-06-16T22:00:17Z

Yesterday we all got up early and took Dad fishing. Pretty much every vacation my family ever took was a camping trip. We didn't get to do much fishing before typhoon style storms hit. We literally went from the sun starting to peek through the clouds, to lightning, thunder and rain coming in sideways in the span of twenty five minutes. We'll get some time to fish when we go to Montana at the end of the month for the family reunion though, so it'll work out. Half the fun for him is getting the gear out and playing with it anyway. We went home, got Mom outta bed and got breakfast.

TJ came back to the states last week too so we got to hang out and play cards for the first time this year pretty much on Friday. He was in Thailand for the last six months or so for his job. We stayed up pretty much all night playing cards. Good times.

Over all good weekend, but not much sleep. Add to that having to come in early this morning and I'm flagging some. Plus the Cubs and the Sox play next weekend, so I'm working all next weekend so not much catchup there. Cubs Sox is always a very busy weekend. Sunday is a night game though, so I can sleep in. Night games during the weekend can get ugly.

Weekend after that family reunion.

It's world series of poker time again. Another year I won't be going. Not that big a deal, it's not like I made an effort to qualify but one year I'd really like to go though. What is pretty cool though is that ESPN has been broadcasting some of the final tables live. Daniel Negreanu, one of my favorite players and the owner of the poker website I spend time on won a bracelet last week and getting to watch that was pretty cool. Unlike watching poker on tv they obviously don't show the cards, because it's live and could still effect things some how. It gives a different look for studying things. He's in another tonight if I get back from Jitz in time I'm probably going to check it out some.

Random stuff

2008-06-06T22:11:36Z

For the first time in a while I have a weekend off. Well the weekend of the wedding I was technically off, but this weekend I don't have Anything to do. I'll get to sleep in and such. Next weekend as well, as the Cubs have a weird 3 game mid week homestand and then go back out of town. It's rare to have back to back weekends off where the team is out of town. I've had to get up early to work a few days this week, so it's definitely a welcome break.

I'll go home and see mom and dad tomorrow. I need an oil change, and we'll probably go to the bar, or Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the UFC pay per view in the evening but no plans tonight. Was considering driving out to the boat to play some cards, but that's usually a late night and yeah between early days at work this week and west coast baseball games that's probably not going to happen.

I've been reading the Vampire Earth series by EE Knight lately. I'm about 100 pages into the third book. They're pretty good. It's a dystopia/fantasy type story, I like it.

There is a Whole Foods near my apartment. I recently went in there because it's on the way home from the ball park, as opposed to the Jewel, which isn't far either, but isn't on the direct route, and while I don't mind walking a few blocks, doing it with multiple bags of groceries gets old. Anyway I don't eat all that much stuff these days. My dinners basically consist of sandwiches almost exclusively. It works for me. Every time I go into Whole foods though I just feel outta place. I keep waiting for an employee to come up and act like I'm lost or that I walked in to the wrong store. I donno, I guess it's kinda trendy and organic and healthy and what not and I really don't care about any of that I just need some lunch meat and I like the mac and cheese at the hot bar.

Anyway, finally done with reports and such. It's been a long day time to go home.

qzarian @ 2008-06-04T16:20:00

2008-06-04T21:25:33Z

I have to do some stuff for this old system we have. No one here has hardly any experience, and there is almost no reference to what some of the data in the tables and stuff are. I gotta write a fairly decently complicated query to extract data for a report we need. Not all that hard, but the database is somewhat convoluted to begin with. In theory I understand why they did it like they did, and it's all pretty and normalized to some degree that's important I'm sure (I was terrible at that part of my db classes). All of this would be fine, but I keep messing things up because the table that holds the order movements.. is spelled order mouvements... why!! who spells movements like that... grr.. seriously .. Is that some strange British/Canadian color colour thing? It's driving me nuts.

Not Dead!

2008-05-28T19:33:22Z

Guess what.. Not dead. I know I know hard to determine that's the case when someone doesn't update for something like 15 months, but yeah still here. I actually pretty much check the page every day or so, just haven't updated... in well pretty much forever. 68 weeks it says there. There really wasn't a reason to stop posting either.. just kinda happened. Seems like as good a time as any to fix that.

Anyway,

I live by myself now. In a fairly crummy studio apartment. This apartment however is in a great location. A block or so from the lake, and 3 blocks from the ball park. Finding parking for my car sucks, but since I take the express bus to work every morning, and there is both a jewel and a whole foods within 2 blocks of where I live I only drive to go visit people back in the suburbs (or Minnisota) every once and a while. I don't mind living alone really. It's different, but it kinda fits me most of the time. The only real downside is with no one else around I don't clean up after my self nearly enough... I'm kinda messy. My lease actually had just ended at the beginning of this month, and I signed on for another 6, mostly due to not wanting to deal with moving out/finding a new place, but also because it's nice to stay where I'm at while baseball is in season still. Maybe I'll relocate (though not all that far still) in October or so.

I still work at Wrigley doing night and weekend games. I'll be 18 games into my 52 game schedule after tonight. I'm pretty much exclusively a section chief these days, which makes me basically half a step down from a supervisor. It's not a huge deal, most of the security staff are section chiefs are after a year or two, but it makes the job better. Less standing around more being mobile and able to see the games. When I'm dealing with people that is, which happens a lot too.

I'm also still employed at ECI. I do some trader support still, but mostly I do development now. Well, troubleshooting and bug fixing more often than actual software enhancements and feature additions, but still, programing at least. Jobs kinda gone down hill but I'm getting back into what I wanted to do when I started going to school for this, and I'm building good experience working on important stuff at this point so I don't have a lot of complaints. Plus I don't have to dress up for work and my hours are fairly flexible, allowing me to continue with Wrigley and some other things, which are also bonuses.

One of the major things recently to happen was I joined a gym. Not a normal gym, I've been trying to make myself go to one of them pretty much since I got outta high school, but a fight gym. Since about December I've been training in Brazilian jujitsu. For those who don't know BJJ is a fighting style mostly on the ground depending on chokes and joint locks to gain submissions. I initially chose the style because having wrestling experience I figured it'd carry over a little bit. In some ways it has, in others I've found my wrestling instincts working against me. Still it's a lot of fun. The gym teaches several other styles of fighting as well, though I haven't branched out and taken any of them yet.

A lot of the classes are geared towards self defense, or Mixed Martial Arts (UFC fighting). I donno if I'll ever go that far with it, (even to an amateur level, I think it's fairly obvious I won't ever be a professional cage fighter). When I signed up one of the selling points of BJJ over other arts is being able to compete without getting punched in the face. Another part says that someday I'd like to try it. In the end it'll come down to how well I learn the striking I suppose. I did compete in a submission grappling tournament a month ago and went 2 and 2. Not terrible for my first effort, and my two losses were more due to my lack of strength/conditioning than my lack of skill. All in all I enjoy it, I've been losing weight and getting into better shape, and unlike a regular gym which I can't motivate myself to go to, having a coach and other people in the classes makes it fairly easy to go to. Most days I look forward to going and working out. I'm getting to the point where I can not only beat people with similar experience levels as me (I'd been doing that pretty much since I started with the wrestling advantage I have) but a number of similarly size guys with more experience I've been holding my own with the last few times we've sparred. It's exciting, and nice to go through a session where I don't gotta tap every few minutes heh. Plus I come home from class with a nice collection of scrapes and bruises. I know that doesn't' sound like a plus, but it gives me a feeling of accomplishment. Yeah I know I'm pretty weird.

I still play a lot of poker. Not so much since baseball started, but still a good bit. I ran pretty well the first few months of the season, destroying the field in my poker forum's mixed game league. The best part about it was this group plays poker all the time so these were legitimate wins against good players. Plus I won a nice set of chips for my efforts, so that was a good time too.

So yeah. That's a lot of it anyway. I'm sure I'll come up with other stuff assuming I get back onto a semi regular updating pattern.

qzarian @ 2007-01-26T14:58:00

2007-01-26T21:35:21Z

Day 11.

The company I work for now, before I started here, acquired a second system, that does other trading things. It's pretty decent, and there is use and a market to keep the two systems. The back end of the system we acquired however, is terrible so they've been trying to integrate the two since we got it. This is not easy and has since gone well over any initial estimated time table. Anyway the bosses decided we were going into rush full out work mode. We worked all last weekend, well both days anyway and are supposed to do so again this weekend. It sucks.

I was supposed to work last weekend anyway at the cubs convention, so I missed out on most of that. A bright note was that having to get up anyway at an unnatural hour on a Sunday (ie 7ish when a natural time to wake up on a day of is noonish) I was awake in time to go to my local target and wait in line to purchase a Wii. I wasn't able to get extra Remotes or numchucks, but still I got one. Awesome.

Anyway back to work, well not literally but as a subject of conversation. Initially I was just doing support/operations stuff. Then I got some little basic operational tools to develop. An app to get stuff into the system and whatnot. Then I started making a monitoring app to keep track of who was logged on and that all the appropriate systems were connected and functional and whatnot, and then I got moved to working on rewriting one of the client applications. It's different, and a little scary, I worked on the client App for Risk but I never had to build one. This isnt' even from scratch I pretty much copied the design from the exisiting device but it's overly complicated and it's much easier to rebuild then to try and learn how it works and then retrofit it to the new system.. Either way its a step in the right direction and will hopefully give me some leverage for some stuff after we finish the project up.

Oh yeah Super Bowl. I was four last time we went to the Super Bowl. We were planning on renting an RV and road tripping down there to tailgate. They banned tailgating. Gay. It works out as I would most likely be here anyway, but yeah, it woulda been a hell of a trip. Instead we're talking about renting out a hall/bar or something but still.. road trips in RVs sounds like a blast. Either way, Super Bowl.

The government is cracking down on online poker. It sucks, and really is very shortsighted as it would seem it would be a great source of taxable income, like the lottery and so forth. That's probably how it'll end up working too but in the mean time it sucks. Maybe one of these days I'll take a ride out to the boat to get my fix. hmm

TJ pretty much decided he doesn't want to rent anymore and plans to move back home and start looking for places at the end of our lease. That's pretty much the last thing I want to do, move back home that is, so It looks like I'm in the market for a one bedroom/studio, or perhaps a roommate. I'd probably have to move either north a bit more, west more towards the blue line, or to the south side (least interesting). Probably north is the way to go. still have a few months to figure it out.

qzarian @ 2006-12-14T11:35:00

2006-12-14T19:35:23Z

Well, I stepped out of the house this morning... earlier than I should ever Have to get up, but I'm fairly awake, and it's not too cold, at least compared to the week before, and I turn on the ol' IPod. (Which, is really not old as all seeing how I got it a week or so ago) The play list was over so I shuffled all the songs and hit play. First song is Closing Time. For some reason I immediately thought of a drunken huddle including Jim, Brian... Rob I think, and maybe some random girl who I seem to remember doing shots with, singing that song at a bar ( Brothers?) in Champaign as they tried to kick us out, well most of us were singing that song someone was trying to transition to Greenday's Time of Your Life. Then five dollar pizzas... waking up Shane at 2:30 under the guise of bringing him 5$ pizza, but really because he didn't hang out with us and the need to use his bathroom. Sitting on and breaking his box. Finally Brian climbing into, and possibly falling out of, a tree. That was a fun night.

I don't know why I thought of that this morning, I've heard that song plenty of times since then, but it was an amusing start to the day.

Not much other than that. Well, I suppose there is but I gotta get back to work so maybe later

qzarian @ 2006-12-01T14:33:00

2006-12-01T22:33:41Z

It's been a long week. Since Friday of last week I've been doing the operations work pretty much solo. Kevin my boss/operations manager went to Cancun.. I had guys help out, but I've been stuck in the office from opening at 7am til the last of the reports go out around 5. On top of that it can get pretty stressful. Our clients are traders. Traders who are risking sums of money greater than the total sum of money I've ever had any part of. And they only call up here when they need things, which usually means somethings wrong, which means they're none to happy. LIke I said it's been a long week. (and yes, or clientle at RISC were also traders, but it was a smaller base, and by the time I Was doing this I was a lot more knowledgable on our system. ) I had one major glitch in dealing with all this. It wasn't good, and was totally my fault and cost the company money. It was, however, also received about as well as something like that could have been, which I guess is a good sign.

When I left Risc Jesse, the owner/boss, pretty much said he wasn't going to run the system anymore. One of the clients decided to buy it off him. They're contacting me for consulting work in regards to it. Extra money would be nice, but I didn't perticularly enjoy working with the software, and I don't know how much more time I want to spend doing stuff like that. Guess we'll see, right now it's just supposed to be on a temporary basis while I help them learn the system, so that's ok so far.

I think I'm going to get a Christmas tree for the apartment. It's a pretty big investment, as I have no christmas stuff to speak of of my own, but still.. I want one. We put up ours last Sunday. Went home, watched the Bears choke, ate some 'fried' (really baked) chicken, did a christmas tree. Good times.

Thanksgiving was pretty good. Pretty much a lot of the usual. Left early and went with Bryan to go see a movie. It had been a long time since we'd gotten to hang out and the Tenatious D movie had come out, and he's a fan so yeah. It was ok, there were funny parts. The only thing about Thanksgiving is that it's also time for Chrismas/Birthday lists to be given out. I've never been a fan of lists. Well, at least for some time I haven't. Especially now where I can pretty much go out and get something if I want it bad enough, (see FFXII and GUitar hero II in the last post) ::shrug:: the physical possession thing isn't that big of a deal anymore. Sure, I like to get stuff, but having a list, and pretty much knowing what on there I'm going to get kinda takes some of the surprise/fun out of it. I like the unexpected stuff better I guys.

Oh, it went from very nice, to pretty shitty very fast. That wasn't good.

Guitar Hero II kicks so much more ass in two player mode, I brought it home a few weekends ago and was supposed to go do errands and stuff but instead spent the day rocking out with the family. good times.

anyway, there could be more, but time to run late reports and get on the train.

qzarian @ 2006-11-22T22:13:00

2006-11-23T06:13:28Z

Comment and I'll give you a letter; then you have to list 10 things you love that begin with that letter. Afterwards, post this in your journal, and give out some letters of your own.

I was assigned the letter "M" from Maggilicious, who also said I had to do it and couldn't qubble.

1: Meat. It's good. Grill it.. put it in stuff, on stuff.. like pizza.. cold with cheese and bread. Meat is good. Beef, Pork, Chicken... it's all good.

2. Music. most music really.

3. Money. Well, I don't really care so much about the money, but having enough to buy what I need/want is pretty nice.

4. Mozzarella. Cheese is good. it goes on many good things.

5. Mom self explanitory. corny, maybe but also true and 10 is a lot... kinda

6. Mom's Cooking. Mmmm yeah there are a lot of food items on here.. I'm a big guy.

7. Micro limit poker. enjoy myself, pass the time, little risk, ltos of bad players.

8. Movies. Going to, renting.. I like movies

9. Mythbusters. Also good stuff.

10. Mickey's. it's a beer/malt liquor. IT's also good.

qzarian @ 2006-11-16T14:42:00

2006-11-16T22:42:06Z

Ok, so I'm like a little kid. Except I have expendable income. FFXII came out Halloween. I made a beeline to Game stop on the way home from work (it's about a block and a half from the apartment) get in line hoping it's not sold out. I'm not the only person in there. The guy at the counter asks if anyone doesn't have a preorder ticket. I didn't he looked and says, "Well you can't by the regular FFXII... We only have spare Collectors editions in stock.. "It's... (some amount I wasn't paying attention too because I was already handing him my card) more." A week, or maybe two later Guitar Hero II Came out. I had been in Best Buy the weekend before getting my mom a cd player for her car. It was her birthday. Bryan 'borrowed' her car and we had it installed. Good times. Anyway, they had the demo version out, we rocked out a bit, it was fun. I got home from the gym the day it was released and TJ was going to best buy.. (which is also, a block and a half or so from the apartment) Now, going into best buy has always been an expensive venture for me. If I get out with just a CD or DVD it's a successfully cheap trip. I had talked myself out of going to get guitar hero two. I didn't even have as much time as I wanted to devote to FFXII I didn't need a second game.... TJ was getting whatever, I forget, and I sat and played some STP, and yeah I walked out with Guitar Hero II.

Both games are definitely worth it. FFXII made some fairly major changes to the combat system, but after playing through the first handful of major battles the important stuff really isn't all that different, and when you're in the thick of something major has much the same feel to it anyway. The other thing that changes from game to game, the class change/power learning system is kind of an offshoot of the grid layout from FFX, but everyone starts in basically the same initial place and you can advance them how you like from there, at least from what I've seen thus far, there may be characters further down the road that're different.

Guitar Hero II is much the same, and the changes are all for the better. Plus from what I saw in the store two player mode is a lot more fun.

My body hates me right now. I got out of work early last Monday, and having nothing to do decided to try and get back into working out again. The Gym is a block from my house, there were no excuses why I shouldn't be going regularly. After working out on monday I weighed myself on the scale, and topped out higher than I've ever done, that was a little depressing. I went Monday through Thursday and took the weekend off.. (ok so I told my self at some point that I was going to go each day that weekend, and then at least one day that weekend, yeah I didn't go at all) Still I got home from work and went again Monday and all was well. Tj came with, we did a chest workout. I was tired after, and disappointed in how weak I was, but otherwise not too bad. Did mostly running/abs the next day then yesterday I got a text on the way home TJ was on the train behind me and was going to do a leg workout. Legs are a pretty easy group to skip usually but going with someone is good and so I tagged a long and did the workout with him and his buddy Ryan. I had dreams last night that I was back in double sessions for football. Seriously ow..

In high school we did weight tests during the season to track improvement and such. One was the squat test, seeing how many times you could squat 250 rep it on bench and so forth. I was never that great in the weight room, but I did somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 or so on the squat test, and then went and ran the quarter mile shortly after. Last night we did a 12,10,8,6,12 set, at no where near the weight, with breaks in the middle and my legs almost gave out on me walking down the stairs. My high school self is simultaneously laughing at and weeping for his nearly 25 year old counterpart. Oh well, nothing comes easily.

I got a development project to start on at work now. I rarely had new applications to develop with Risc it was just maintaining/updating existing stuff. It's a pretty big part of the system integration that the company is working on now too so it's pretty cool. I gotta finish reports and such and go home/force myself back to the gym so it'll have to wait.

qzarian @ 2006-11-03T14:28:00

2006-11-03T22:28:58Z

Bethy did some thing where she listed Six random facts about herself and then had to tag people after. She picked me. I think it was out of spite because I wouldn't captain the team for TDL this season ;). Anyway I didn't copy it down but I'll do it anyway.

1. I wrestled in high school. People know that, I wrestled for a high school that had a very good program and several guys who contended for state titles in my weight classes. Had I gone to a different school, I might have been a pretty decent varsity wrestler (of course without training day in and day out against said guys I was behind I wouldn't have been as good) but I stayed mainly JV, I have two notable things though. These might get split two to facts if I can't come up with six. I hold(or held I donno) the schools record for the fastest pin at 4 seconds into a match. we shook hands, ref blew the whistle, I stepped in and bear hugged the kid straight to his back for the pin.
I am also 7-0 with seven pins in matches which I threw up before hand.

2. When I was little what I wanted to be when I grew up in order went somewhat like this. Fireman, (seems like most little kids have this dream at some point), Guy who makes sky scrapers ( I was going to make one and let my mom live on the top floor) guy who jumps out of airplanes, guy who makes video games. This somewhat started round about second grade or so, originally just being drawing pictures/writing ideas. I later started writing (well copying from books) games to an old Apple IIe. I kinda stopped looking for jobs I wanted to do when I grew up there.

3. Another when I was young story. At a family BBQ, when I was five or so, I sprayed down my entire family with the garden hose. Grandma, Great Grandma, Aunts, Uncles cousins. No one was safe. This ended with various family members yelling 'commere you little shit' and chasing me as I laughed and ran. Without fail this will be brought up every major gathering of my dads side of the family.

4. I've helped coach little kids Wrestling, Football, and Baseball on teams my brother has played on. I could he happy doing something that included that for a living, and have considered going into teaching for the express purpose of also being able to coach. I've also considered looking into volunteering at whatever local team, and have thought about taking the IHSA referee test to do that.

5. Having unread messages in my mailbox drives me nuts, also things flashing in my task bar.

6. Up until last summer when I got an eye infection so bad I was unable to open my eye in the light I had never called in to work to take an unscheduled day off. This included nearly four years at UPS, two and a half seasons with the Cubs, Six months at Kraft and four at RISC. Before that I never had regular hours and always worked odd jobs (paperboy/golf caddy). One day off in six years isn't too bad.

This would be where I pass this duty on to other people, but since I didn't copy it I won't do that.. people should do the same for the hell of it though.

qzarian @ 2006-10-30T12:26:00

2006-10-30T21:06:22Z

So.. I got a new job. It's not that incredibly different than my old job. In fact it's in the same building. Doing most of what I was doing before, though more of the customer service and less of the developing, for now at least. It's not even really that much more money then what I was making at RISC, though I'm salaried now, which helps since business was slow at Risc and it was costing me hours.

The new place is nice, more organized in a business sense. More people here too. I will be doing some development on the side of my support/customer service role, and someday could be moved to full time development. All in all it was a good move for everyone really. Jesse (the guy who was running RISC) didn't enjoy dealing with the software business really, and is going to move on. ECI (the company I work for now) may even decide to buy out the RISC system and add it to it's list of services. I'm working longer hours now, earlier and later, but that's going to get adjusted a little as I get settled in better. I'm also going to be backing up the hardware/networking guy, which really isn't my strong suit either, but since I was pretty much the only one doing that at Risc too, and now I'll have someone showing me what needs to be done this isn't a big deal either.

Apartment is pretty good still. Not a lot going on there. Family is doing alright, though they apparently have to replace the roof of the house, so that's the suck. Bryan is taking classes at COD and has decided to go into law enforcement, which is better than what he had planned previously which was nothing. He doesn't like the community college atmosphere though and has plans to try and transfer out.

Mom's birthday is next Saturday, so I'll be going home for that. The day after that the Bears play Miami and I'm taking my dad. It should be a good time. In order to get the extra tickets to a few of the games, we had to give up others though, so I didn't get to see Sundays game from my seats in the north endzone. Kind of sucked, we'd been to every home game this season so far, but oh well it'll be fun going with dad. He's planning on staying Saturday night at the apartment so we can get a fresh start with tailgating... hopefully it's as nice next week as it is today, because it's pretty awesome outside.

( transitions are for suckers )

When I started out playing poker, I didn't really keep track of how much I loaded up to the site. I've played on a number of different sites now, so I can make a rough estimate on the amount I've deposited all time, but it's not that important really, it was always disposable income. Either way, I can say pretty positively that I'm a winning player now. I had to cash out money from a few of the sites I play at, and it was definately more than I've had to ever put in. Congress passed the Safe Ports Act. They tacked on a rider that says it's illegal for US banks to accept transfers from off shore gambling sites. Instead of dealing with these regulations, most of the sites have jsut banned US customers from playing at their site. So that sucks. Thanks alot Bill Frist, effer.

So what else. Halloween tomorrow. I love Halloween. Oddly enough I don't ever really do anything for halloween anymore, we went Bowling saturday, which was fun but not really a halloween thing. I live in a coach house behind a gated brown stone building, so chances are slim we get any kids over, but I aughta pick up a bag or two of candy just in case. Of course most likely that means I'll have a bag or two of candy to eat.. and I will, which also kinda sucks, but such is life heh.

It's hot up here today. but luckly slow so that's nice at least.

Payday tomorrow. Payday is always nice.

qzarian @ 2006-10-22T02:10:00

2006-10-22T07:22:44Z

I've been meaning to update for real, but here, this is awesome.

http://tvlinks.50webs.com/My%20Name%20Is%20Earl_links.html

qzarian @ 2006-09-13T13:49:00

2006-09-13T18:50:32Z

I just blew Ramen noodles out my nose. That is all.

qzarian @ 2006-08-17T14:49:00

2006-08-17T19:55:32Z

My computer is still down for the count. I went out and got a USB keyboard for the tablet I'm using so at least I don't have to manually peck out every letter to type, but things are not looking good.

I get an error then a physical memory dump just after the windows logon screen. I tried booting from a windows CD to either reinstall, or repair the installation but I get another error after things load for a while, and I never get to the Windows setup screen. This pretty much makes me think the hard drive is fucked. How this happened, when it worked fine before I left, and sat there , not only shut off, but without power for a week, is a good question. So my thought now is get a new hard drive, swap out the old on, install windows, and then try setting up the old one as a slave drive in an attempt to save any data on it. I donno. pretty much sucks though.

qzarian @ 2006-08-15T00:56:00

2006-08-15T08:03:06Z

home safe. get here computer ha corrupt regestry won't load. tablet = slow typing. can't sleep. this week officially sucks, and it'sonly tuesday.. and i was on vacation... good start. fuck

last week was great at least can we do that over?

qzarian @ 2006-08-09T10:58:00

2006-08-09T18:03:47Z

LAX has internet terminals. I had an hour stopover... ( Would have been nice to have a direct flight, or a meanigfulstay but anyway) off to SAC in 45 minutes. Id seriously need to be a millionair to survive if the internet was really $.25 a minute.

first flight wasm't bad.

the M and N keys are switched around on this keyboard. also i can't find a place here to buya pepsi... wtf..

qzarian @ 2006-08-04T14:18:00

2006-08-04T20:14:43Z

I was told updating is in order.

But what to update about, that's generally the problem.

I took Bryan and Jason to Warped Tour this past weekend. That's what I got them for graduation. They took the train out Saturday to spend the night, we had pizza and watched movies and generally just hung out. Then we drove out to Tinley park to see the show on Sunday. It was 80million degrees. But the music was good, though Bryan got kicked in the head when NOFX was on stage, and almost passed out so we had to bail early. Luckly he was smart enough to know that he had to go and got out of the mass of people and then I finally found Jason and met him off to the side. Bryan's short, and that doesn't help in that kinda pit situation. The other band I wanted to see there Less than Jake, we missed most of getting held up at one of the other stages. Still, good times had by all and at least I hope, it turned out to be a better present than if I'd just given them the cash it cost to go.

WSOP main event is going on right now. 8776 players entered this year. The winner gets 12million for his 10000 investment. Top ten percent cash, they'll get to that today. THey started the day with.. 1200 or so. The final table will be Thursday I believe. Someday I'll be good enough to win entry into the WSOP. Maybe not the main event, but one of the tournaments. They had a HORSE tournament which looked awesome, though would be impossibly hard to win with all the pros that played it. (HORSE is a mixed game of Holdem, Omaha, Razz, Stud, and then eight or better, in other words you play a different game every hour or so) I've been broadening my horizons and working on my non holdem games, sometimes playing the same thing constantly gets boring and all.

Almost time to go, but I had one little amusing thing. The light switches in the office building here, are all about hip level. Seriously they're about where the doorknobs are. I didn't notice this till I'd been here a year or so, but I find it very unusual. Arn't light switches usually about shoulder level.. ish? If in any combination I was a little taller or they were a little lower I'd have to Reach Down to flip them. Also they're in the hall.. seems unusual to have switches exposed in the hall you'd expect them to be controlled by a master box somewhere. I can only assume these switches are for turning the lights on and off, and not for throwing light switch raves.

Anyway, weekend, then two day week, then 6 day vacation.. although I work through the weekend... and meh I didn't realize before I have stop overs going there, I thought the stopover was only coming home. Still, Soon!