After my attempts to work out last week were foiled by office trouble, I was finally able to make it back to the dojo tonight.

led us through a very basics intensive class, the difficulty of which was compounded by the fact that it was 90 degrees in there and it felt like all the oxygen in the room was used up after the first ten minutes of class.

During the second class, we ran through the Shodan test for Raleigh. He came out to demonstrate a few of the combinations and he was looking pretty sharp. I think if he performs like that on the exam he’ll do fine.

We also got a little bit of time to dogpile on Raleigh in the form of Shodan style one time attack. It was fun, everybody got a chance to do each of the techniques. After class Mike and I did some slow sparring for a few minutes, however we had a pretty nasty front kick to knee collision that ended things pretty early.

Everyone walked away in one piece… its really good to be working out again.

This weekend my good buddy Wilson was describing to me the merits of World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment. I’ve been in the market for a good game for quite some time, and this seemed to scratch the roleplaying itch as well.

I know that games like this are major trouble for sucking up vast amounts of life from the space surrounding the computer that they are installed on. This fact, coupled with the $13.95/month charge to use the game servers to play allowed me to successfully resist the urge to start something horribly addicting.

I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist if it had been free to play, but I can’t justify $35 for the game + $14/month of gameplay. I’ve been down that path once before… Gemstone was a harsh mistress.

I miss that game sometimes, but the hours and hours of gameplay for very little satisfaction/progress wasn’t really worth the immersion that it provided. And the $20/month for a text based roleplaying game really sucked.

What happened to the days of buying a game for one price and getting to play it for eternity?

And they’re strangely beautiful.

I’m amazed at the fact that they shoot these probes out there with one megapixel cameras and almost ten years later they send back such good quality shots. A physics major friend of mine explained to me that the vacuum of space affords much sharper shots because lack of interference by pesky things like atmospheres. That, and NASA’s site says that these images are filtered and processed in order to recompose the images from the transmitted data.

Knowing what I know about satellite communication, I can’t imagine how long it takes to transmit this stuff forward and back. Yikes.

Upon returning from my buddies wedding last night, I found out that our production database had come back up.

I got on the system and found that Matt was on watching the systems. It appears that the 105,000 message backlog mapped to around 185,000 objects to store in the database. We started processing full time at 12:30 pm and we had all pending backlogged messages and the incoming normal traffic processed by 10 am Sunday morning.

To me, that spells major victory. A backlog of that size would’ve taken AT LEAST a week to feed through manually. We have a few exceptions that occurred that we need to investigate, but I think by and large we really pulled off a touchdown this weekend.

Oh, and don’t worry , we’ve got detailed logs so you can satisfy your statistics hunger to help us figure out exactly what throughput that yields.

Its official… I’ve been the worst Nidan ever this week.

Because of an overly bad work situation and a Saturday wedding in Springfield, I wasn’t able to work out at all this week. I intend to come back with guns a-blazin’ on Monday and work out as much as possible for the rest of the week.

This morning I had every intention of working out, however when the alarm went off I couldn’t bring myself to reset it so I ended up sleeping until 10:30. A quick shower later, we were on the road to Springfield to the nuptials of my good buddy Mike and his new wife Anne. We ended up leaving a bit early from the reception due to the drive, but I got the chance to see many of my college friends that I haven’t hung out with in a long time.

I was quite suprised to see my drinking buddies Asian Dan and Chris Demotroupolis… Dan got engaged and Chris got married and already has a kid. Time sure flies after college ends. I finally got to meet ‘s better half, she seems pretty fun. I got the chance to hang out with Mike’s brother Eric, who lived on my floor at college for two years. It was really good to see him again as well.

After we came back from Springfield, and her fiance stayed around awhile and had some pizza. We’ve gotta make a weekend trip down to see them, which puts us in the same town as . So the trip will serve dual purpose. 🙂

Promise Me….
1. Reply with your name and I’ll respond with something random about you.
2. I’ll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I’ll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
4. I’ll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I’ll tell you my first memory of you.
6. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I’ll ask you something that I’ve always wondered about you.
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal.

This week was a long one. Between the neverending outages that we’re suffering and the gigantic ass backlog of data that we’ve got to process through, its been a pretty tiring wait for this week to get over.

Fortunately, the rays of hope broke for us yesterday and into today… we got the go ahead to use our new system (the better one, sorry Crary) to blow through the giant backlog of data. It should get things done MUCH faster and then we’ll be back up to speed. Also, we got the final tasks complete that were holding us back from moving out to production, so we’re cleared for launch next weekend.

Tomorrow is the wedding of Mike Mitchelle, one of my good friends from college. We’ll be travelling to Springfield for most of the day, but I’m tentatively planning to work out tomorrow morning. We’ll see if I actually am able to drag myself out of bed.

The system is *still* down.

Tasha and I got our hair cut tonight since my sister was available, then we made our first attempt at cracking Famous Dave’s corn muffin recipe. They are very good, but we have two and a half dozen of them. They will be accompanying me to work tomorrow if I can find something to carry them in.

We have figured out a way to not require us to be available for very long after the system comes back up, so I will be able to work out on Saturday. I’m really going to need it by then, so I’m pretty excited about that.

Wow. The Shark Storage just went down AGAIN. We’re going on 29 hours of outage here… I’m going to stay up a few hours more before I try to sleep a little, but damn… IBM had better get their shit together soon.

UPDATE: OK, its getting close to 1 am. The current update says that Shark is still down and its something new this time, so they’re still screwed. The next update will be at 3 am, so I’m going to try to cop a few Z’s before then.

I gotta put this out there… WHO BOUGHT THIS FOURTEEN INCH LONG TURD FROM IBM???!?

When I was transitioning between Supernerd and regular old mild mannered Josh Dalcher tonight, I noticed that my blue pants have a 2″ long threadbare spot on them under the left back pocket!

I can’t remember the last time I wore out a pair of pants! I guess I’ll need to make a trip to the local Mens Warehouse pretty soon and exercise that discount card they gave me when I rented a tux fro my sisters wedding…