Aftermath

Anyone know who knocked a hole in the bathroom wall?
I don’t think it was me. Nothing hurts bad enough for me to think I did it and plus I don’t think I would have tried to hide it from myself with a towel.

I’ll post about the actual party later. Once I’ve slept. I want to sleep so bad.

DreamBlog

I honestly don’t know how you are going to make it through your hum-drum day without hearing about my dreams from last night and I’m not one to hold out on the goods so here you go.

Last night seemed to be mostly good dreams. One thing I should mention real quick is that I dream every night. I always have. I dream like a motherfucker. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t wake up having had a full night of adventures.

Okay, so last night I was entered into a karate contest. It seemed like instead of real martial arts it was more like how much you could look and act like a movie karate guy. So that’s what I did. I did like this long routine that looked pretty badass and the judges scored me and I went back to my seat. There were like 700 people there so it took forever. So anyway, when we’re done they announce the winners. There’s this platform where the top three winners are supposed to stand and it’s about 3 feet off the ground. So, they announce third place and the guy runs out of the crowd and leaps up onto the platform all cool like and everyone cheers. Second place does a similar stunt. They announce first place and lo-and-behold it’s me. So I run up, misjudge a step and end up crawling up the side of the platform with no grace or style and everyone groans. So then I’m sitting in the bed of Keaton’s truck with him and Courtney and Courtney is like “You are never gonna get laid doing shit like that.”

The end.

She’s probably right. I need to practice my karate.

You Been to Willow Lake?

Last night as I was falling asleep, preparing for another rousing night of disaster nightmares I began to reminisce a little bit about how much I enjoyed my time on Siren Isle. And then I sort of, you know, remembered that Siren Isle is a made up place in an online game called EverQuest. But for a minute there I thought “Man, it was really peaceful there on Siren Isle and you could just watch the ships sail by and listen to the waves lapping at the shore. I should go back.”

It’s the little things like this that make me question my sanity on a daily basis.

That said, the years I spent playing EverQuest from about 1999 to 2002 or so made a pretty deep impact. I think if you spend that much time doing anything it’s going to leave a mark, or at least that’s what I tell myself. We’re talking 8+ hours a day for years at a time. Yea, it’s a game and it’s fantasy and all that but it’s still a real amount of time doing some kind of task.
Anyway, there’s lots of things that remind me of the parts of EverQuest I spent a lot of time in. Especially music. I’ve talked on this blog many times about how important music is to me, and I definitely associate parts of my life and different experiences with what music I was listening to at the time. One of the most powerful is Mr. Bungle. If I listen to anything by Mr. Bungle I get serious flashbacks to my first apartment and powerleveling my EverQuest character Dunlain by making and selling Tumpy Tonics.

And the disaster nightmares bit? For some reason for the last three nights I’ve had these nightmares about disasters happening to me. Sunday night I was driving my RX-8 down Main Street in my old home town of Mantua, NJ and the front window started fogging up. It got worse and worse and no matter what I did it kept fogging. And then all the other windows did. So I turned on my hazards and tried to pull over and someone plowed into me doing something like mach 3.

Tuesday night I was in a giant train wreck.

And last night was the best. I was in a huge auditorium to see Nine Inch Nails. It looked like a really large high school auditorium. So Trent comes out and the lights go down. He has these two giant bass drums on the floor and he has these big sticks he starts hitting them with. For some reason I had planned to play along so in the aisle in front of me I had my own bass drums and giant sticks. So a few minutes into the song someone to the right screams “Fire!” and everyone panics. While everyone is running for the fire exits a bunch of people trip over my drums. Aside from the doors being stuck for a minute everyone makes it out okay.

Tonight I’m hoping for something space related. I love space.

Network Backup

Alright, I know there are some geeks out there reading this. I’m looking for opinions on cross platform network backup. My requirements are that I be able to backup Linux, Windows and Mac OS X machines across the network and that I can back up to a set of files on a firewire drive. I also want history, not just a current copy. And incremental backups.

I currently use Dantz Retrospect and while it does the job it’s one of the most horrible user experiences that I’ve ever had, and recently it’s been crashing.

I while back I decided I would write the One Backup Application and all would be well. I decided to do it in Java because then it would be very easy to have the client be portable to almost any OS. Some bugs in the JVM on Windows eventually pissed me off enough to stop me from doing it but I am considering starting the project up again.

Are there better options? I’m willing to pay, or at least steal.

Leave a comment, or drop me a line.

Busy, Buzzy

Busy and fun. Buzz and drone.

Heh.

So Thursday Adam and JoLynn came over for some down home Dungeons and Dragons: Heros on the XBox. It was supposed to be Adam and I’s “gaming night”, which we try to do pretty often but JoLynn was bored and decided to join us. That happens sometimes and she’ll usually sit on the loveseat, get plastered and talk on IRC. Not so this night! Turns out she’s a natural when it comes to setting people on fire and stealing all the gold in the entire friggin’ dungeon. Sheesh!

So then Friday we’re trying to figure out something to do that doesn’t involve pigging out and drinking cause we’re all trying to lose weight and we end up playing D&D again and drinking down cheap, old wine. When I say old I don’t mean, like, 1827. I’m talking May. We also spent a lot of time quietly starving, or in my case not so quietly. I mentioned pizza about every 3 minutes.

So then Saturday we figured it was probably time to get out of the damn house and we finally, after many months of saying we were gonna, went roller skating! We went to Skate World right down the street from my house and it was a blast. At least, for me. It’s probably been… oh, about 18 years since I’ve roller skated but I picked it right back up pretty quick. I used to skate embarrassingly often. So I had fun. JoLynn had fun too, she did pretty well and got better as the evening progressed. Adam pretty much broke his body in half as soon as he hit the rink and ended up sitting most of it out. Whattayagonnado?

So then it was 75th Street Brewery for some pretzels and very few beers. I had one beer, if you can imagine. I was still stuffed from dinner and wanted to try to be good, at least a little.

Rich Hill had been telling me to come check out his band at Davey’s Saturday so I could vote for them in Club Wars. Round about 10pm I decided I was down for it and convinced Adam and JoLynn to join me. We met up with Charles after a while and got our rock on.

The Duo Trio is kinda funky, jazzy, reggae rock type stuff. Hard to describe. I’d probably say the closest thing I’ve heard is some older 311 stuff. Very good and very fun to listen to. We also listened to a couple of other mediocre bands. Ares to the 9th started off very strong with a badass bass player and Tool like tunes but quickly turned into boring. We eventually bailed after their set. Unfortunately The Duo Trio didn’t win. Ares to the 9th did. Ah well.

And to wrap it up, today we ventured out to Powell Gardens. Adam and JoLynn are planning to be married in the chapel there (see PhotoBlog) and wanted to check it out. Plus it’s always nice to visit the Garden’s anyway. Today it was cold as… a very cold thing, so we didn’t stick around for very long but the chapel was beautiful and if we hadn’t noticed a rogue motion sensor in there someone might have found me camping out in there on stormy nights. It’s a huge, triangular building on a small lake with a great view and is almost completely glass. It’s really awesome. Adam will probably have some better pictures of it up soon.

Capped things off with a little more D&D and now it’s time to prep for the long, boring week. At least I have something to look forward to:

Dick Dale baby, Dick Dale. Back in town on Sunday. Be there or be square.

Don’t Panic!

Okay, yes, I KNOW there is a banner ad down there. It’s just an experiment. I am doing some work relating to affiliate marketing programs and I’m just using the tools at my disposal. I am not trying to make money off of you guys. Settle down. Seriously. It’s not for real.

Really.

PhotoBlog

I moved all my old PhotoBlog images into a sub-gallery in the PhotoBlog gallery called Archived Photo Blog cause that pages was getting absurdly long. So, if you are missing the old stuff just click PhotoBlog and then click Archived Photo Blog. It’ll hang down near the bottom, I think.

Not much else to report. I’m still trying to grow back my face. It’s taking too long.

Missing: My Face

Wow. For a while now I have been wanting to shave my goatee and mustache to see what my face looked like again. It’s been almost a year since I’ve shaved. So tonight I decided to do it. And now I’d like it back please. I don’t know me!

I’m gonna be a Grizzly Adams looking motherfucker for the next week or so…

Thousand Year Orange Juice

Man, it’s been a busy bunch of days. So much to tell so let’s start with Thursday. Thursday I worked a normal day and then headed off to Scotty’s for the Fazed Party Pre-Party Party. We hung around on Scott’s balcony while Fazers slowly trickled in and spent some time meeting people. There were Jello shots, lots of beer and tons of pizza so everyone pretty much got tanked while we waited for everyone to arrive. Once they did we all headed off to the haunted houses under the 12th street bridge for some getting scared.

The haunted houses seemed a lot less scary this year than last. Probably because people were lit and being silly, which was cool, and because we had such a large group. It was still a lot of fun but not scary. I called it a pretty early night cause I had to work in the morning and I was fighting off a nasty cold.

So Friday I ended up calling out of work cause I woke up feeling like hell. I slept for most of the day and eventually headed down to the party suite at the Fairmont to get the Fazed party really going. Friday night kicked it hard core, and kicked me down pretty hard core. I only lasted till about 12:30 before everything caught up with me and I passed out. Ended up sleeping the night away and most of the morning. I did get to meet a ton of great Fazers and caught up with some of the folks I’ve met before.

Saturday was the great scavenger hunt and it was a ton of fun. I was the team leader for Team Awesome and we had a great time. We made plenty of people, strangers and ourselves, uncomfortable and pushed all kinds of buttons. And Casie got to try on a $174,200 diamond ring. Ouch.

Soon it was time for more party suite madness and everyone slowly made their way back there. It took longer to get things rolling this time but by midnight the party was in full, full swing. We had one noise complaint during the scavenger hunt awards ceremony but aside from that the Fairmont handled us pretty well. Things wrapped up at something absurd like 6:30am. In between was inflatable light sabers, the shocker game, the great pumpkin hunt, lots of clothes sharing, bed acrobatics, early morning Panchos and me getting my head smacked into the wall. Hard.
Lots of other stuff too, but those are the bits I remember.

Sunday people started heading back to their homes and the party was over. A small group of us hit up some First Watch and said our goodbyes. I went to bed for a few hours and then spent a few hours working on a Yahoo Personals profile. It worked for some of my friends, so maybe it’ll work for me. It’s been almost a year since Kelly and I broke up and while there’s been some interests in the time since there hasn’t been anything serious. No matter how much I wish there had been. So I’ll be entering the wide, wonderful world of dating. Should be exciting, and terrifying. I’ve pretty much had a steady girlfriend my entire life, so I feel a bit unprepared for this. Maybe that’s good.

This morning I got some orange juice out of the vending machine at work and it looked kinda weird. Not so much orange, but pus colored. So I checked the expiration date before I dumped it in my belly and it said “JAN 3005”.
Thousand Year Orange Juice.

All the photos from the weekend are available at Fazed Party on Flickr. Yea, I know that I should keep my clothes on in public. I don’t know what my problem is.