Just got back from seeing The Generals Daughter. My quicky review is as follows:

The General's Daughter was good I thought. The relationship between Travolta and Stowe was a little corny. Haven't we gotten over the "paired up man and his X-gf" senarios? At least they didn't end it with something hugely corny like them getting back togeather or saying "why don't we give it another shot" or something. K had issues with the dialoge between the two... as rape/murder investigators you shouldn't be so flippant etc. I didn't mind it so much, I thought Travolta had some great lines and the zingers he put in there were just him being him I thought. The story was disturbing I thought, as any movie about a gang rape will be. Great plot twists and turns, and you don't know whodunnit till right at the end (many many false endings here, I loved that!). I don't think it was as great as say The Professional or something like that, but a good movie nontheless, if you can handle the subject matter. I did feel like heckling a few times though, but feared the wrath of the Big Guy Beside Me(tm).

Sillz made it here safe and alive, and Kethryvis made it home, also safe and alive. Too bad they did it 4 days apart :) Oh well, there is a big "meet the tim tam" BBQ that Iambe's holding in a week and a half or so and she's going to try to make it back (Keth that is) for that. I hope she does, she seems to really miss Canada (and who can blame her!). Course, they are making Noah's Ark jokes on the radio, so I hope that the crappy weather (it was raining very hard today in Vancouver, but not here thank the $DEITY) is gone by the time she gets up here. We took Sillz to see Real Snow(tm) last week and she was thrilled! Course, the snow was more like ice from a bunch left by the side of the road by the snowplow up at Cyprus. Old crusty snow. Hopefully we'll get her up to some real good stuff soon though.

Canada Day! Thursday's a holiday! Yay! Course this means I have time to do things like get the car fixed, insured, pay BCMed, etc. The pile of Stuff To Take My Money(tm) hasn't decreased much lately unfortunatly. Oh well... the thing that sucks is my trip to San Jose / LA is kinda based off of my 2nd bank account (the super secret put-only-money-in one) and that's going to go mostly toward car insurance (as my main account is around $30 now I think). Things seem to be going to be going a lot better at work though, so I will be coming down. Be sure of that. There is far too much down there to see and experience for me to miss out, no matter what :)

I'd hate to dissapoint the lasses from far away lands you see.

Oh, and this entry is being done in EMACS (for win32 (stuck here doing docs) no less). So to all those who mock me for trying to learn something new: :P~ PPPPPPPPPHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!

Tis a darn powerful little program anyway, "OS with a good editor built in" jokes aside.

06/26/99

Well, a bunch of stuff has happened lately, but lets start with just today. My plans of a nice, relaxing sleep after taking Sillz around Vancouver last night were foiled by a call from Iambe (who is forgiven) and then a call from outside from roomiewife of "alan get out here!". The stray cat (mentioned earlier) was out there again and it's eye was looking really bad. So I figured why not and took it inside, called and made an appointment for the vet, and with the help of Iambe, wandered out to the hospital. The cat was mondo-mellow. Amazingly so. Hell, at one point it was sleeping at my feet in the car! Anyway, $100, some shots and eyedrops later and I've adopted "Rex". Now the cat is sleeping in the chair (the significance to this being there is a party going on here right now (roomie's birthday)) and Corny is .... uhmm... somewhere else. Probably hiding under the bed. They get along quite well, some hissing and play fighting (well, Rex chasing Corny anyway) but other than that no real aggression. So now I'm going to wait for roomie and his friends to go to the strip club so I can veg in front of the TV, find Corny, and relax a little.

In between now and the vet, Iambe came over and we vegged a little and watched The Professional. I love the movie, she loved it to, but it played with her mind :-) Just as the movie was finishing roomiewife and a friend came in and we talked for a while. I never realized before how different my world and theirs was. I spend time with a friend and a great movie, watching it with an intellectual eye, and then we talk to the "other world" and we talk about people beating each other up with baseball bats and shovels. Hmm.....

06/19/99

Happy 1 day belated birthday to Darren!

The party last night was great... K and Iambe's parents house is awsome, and there was enough food and drink there to feed an army... and enough singing to fill a opera.

Gak. I have to get out and excersie again. With Keth here I haven't ran or worked out since the weekend. I am missing a day of climbing for a day of Tour Guiding (not such a bad thing) as we're heding around Vancouver and then up to Squamish and Whistler (not to climb though :( ). Keth will soon see the wonderous city that is ours, and if she was impressed by the (boring, mundane) drive from Vancouver to Abbotsford, I imagine she'll have a hernia of some sort on the trip up the Sea to SKy highway (not the best picture I know, but a good idea about what it's like).

06/18/99

2am
No strange dreams last night. Course, I only had 3 or 4 hours to sleep in, so that is to be expected I suppose. The last week has had me going to bed around 3 or 4am... not good I know, but it seems that my 'just one more check of email' or 'just finish this letter' turns into a long drawn out (but enjoyable, or I wouldn't do it) process.

I was cleaning my desk tonight looking for some notes with which to do some more writing with. I found a bunch of stuff I had to add to my "Stuff to Pay when I have Money" pile. Car insurance... photo radar ticket... cell phone bill... ick ick ick! My desk is far cleaner now, my microphone has surfaced again, and my Tux and Penguin (with a heart saying "Love Stinks") have a clean place to sit on my desk.

Keth is enjoying her visit I think. She went horseback riding with Illiad and Celt yesturday (well, wednesday) and had an absolute blast. She was sore as hell after though (heheheheh). I had to work so missed out on the horse fun, but next time I'll go! I have to become a horseriding god as soon as I become a rollerblading god you see. Anyway, we vegged today, and didn't leave the house much. Well, I worked all day (and wrote some great code for our console interface to our dynamic firewall generator) and she irced and surfed from the couch. Of course, this is a holiday, and that's what you are supposed to do!

Tomorrow night is the birthday party of the Son of God over at Iambe's place. Should be a good time, a combo LAN party and normal party. I'm not sure how I'll fit in there... while I like people and all, I also like LANing, and I'm not sure which half of the house I'll be in. I have a feeling it might be in the LAN party room, hanging with 2 or 3 other geeks. Darren of course has to be the social butterfly, it being his birthday and all. He should have fun though.

I hope this is better than the last party I went to. It was last saturday at a friend from high school's place. I took a friend of a friend there, and when I picked her up she gave me a big kiss on the lips and said "I am SO drunk". I figured this was ok as she'd be ahead of the game and not need to drink at the party to have a good time and could just relax and have fun. 5 min later she puked all down the outside of the car. 5 min later she did the same thing again, each time appologizing (lucky she got her head out the window) and saying she was ok and still wanted to go to the party. We stopped at a gas station and she cleaned herself up and I hosed down my poor car. We headed out again toward maple ridge, party bound. 5 min later she asked me to pull over and spent the next 20 min (!!) with her head hanging out the open door puking her guts out. Ya, drinking is cool.... really. After she fell asleep kinda I took her home. Yea, fun fun fun. When I finally made it said party it seems that everyone knew about it, and I helped Jason keep people away who were looking for trouble or who weren't invited. Course, that meant I got to hang out at the end of the driveway with the 4 or 5 people I knew there. It was a huge party too, a DJ, tarps and couchs and a really great set up, and lots of people. I had a good time.

When I told my non-high school friends about this they sort of scoffed and said I would have had a much better time if I had stayed at the previous engagement I was at (which was fun I admit). However, this was a different type of thing. This was my need to go out and be a carefree high school kid again. To let go the social encomberances I had found in my "grown up" life and to just let go in a way that is hard to do around adults (sounds kinda strange huh?). In a way it was me revisiting another lifestyle that I used to live, and in a way still live. I have a grownup life and attitude I hold around people who are important, the boss, the cartoonist, the cartoonist's people... I have my own life, my private life where I sit in front of a computer at 2am, typing my thoughts onto a page somewhere in the Internet, or sitting in front of a pad of paper waiting for words to come to me. And I have my old life, my life from high school, where you greet people with a "hey dude, how the fuck are you, you still doing that chick I saw you with last month" and you don't care if you get drunk and knock your beer into the gravel.

We all have these lives I think whether we admit it or not. Some have more, some have less, some have more diverse and more closely knit lives than others, but we all have them, separate them, and get them all to grow in their own ways. It is because of this that makes us who we are. These different realities we live in each contribute to some part of what we call "us" (well, I would call it "me" but you know what I mean).

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to introduce the part of me that wants to sleep in a warm bed for the next 6.5 hours.

06/16/99

First, before I forget... I had 2 very rememberable dreams last night. In one I was in a supermarket or school, drinking a coke. I finished the coke and decided to check the top to see if I'd won anything (a couple of days ago I won a free 600ml one). After careful examination of the top, I had won $6,000! Wow. After showing this to my friends who were with me, I took it somewhere to get it validated and pick up my winnings (my thoughts were 'I have no more money problems!'). When I got to the cashier person, or whoever I had to go to, I looked at the bottle top again and discovered I had wiped the text with the $6,000 on it off and underneath there was an "invalid" message (for people who scrape their winning bottlecap too much I guess). I was quite saddened by this.

The next dream was the first of it's kind for me. A falling dream. I was in my friends car with my friend, and we were going to drive somewhere. But for some reason we couldn't see out the front windshield. Anyway, he was driving and started off and went forwards instead of backwards and drove off the parking lot and down the enbankment.... unfortunately the embankment led to a very steep ridge or something, and the car got airborn, going down very fast. Imagine travel, in the air, at about a 45 degree angle downwards over what seemed to be the edge of a lake with dead trees and stuff poking up towards you. Scary stuff. Somehow we got ejected from the car and ended up flying through the air, knowing that I had only a few seconds to live. I remember a lot of things going through my brain at that moment, along with the though "shouldn't this be over by now?". I guess at that point my brain overloaded and I woke up, still half asleep being very happy that it was only a dream. This happened right at 8am too, with only a few min before the alarm clock went off.

So what else other than wacky dreams. Well, a friend of mine from California is up for the week to visit Illiad, Iambe, myself and the other ufies around here (including the son of god).

Hmm... oh yea, and I have to work. So I'll leave things at that as I head off to fix mail problems at one of our clients sites.

06/11/99

Finally I have my CIV:ctp. Took long enough.

06/08/99

Huge surprise. UPS screwed up again. They didn't have the unit number. So much for Peter's personal assurance that it would be delivered today. So much for Mandy's personal assurance that it would be delivered today. I'm not impressed, and UPS better pucker up and kiss my ass for forgivness. I plan to take this up with whomever is above my dear, dear friend Peter (whom was very good dealing with an irate customer pissed as hell over something that wasn't his fault) and raise hell. I'm going to be making an official timeline thing at http://arcterex.ufies.org/rants/ups.html. Going to call again tomorrow morning to get their records of my tracking number. And if my package is not delivered tomorrow (there is a chance no one will be in the office) I will not take "it'll be there tomorrow" as an answer.

06/07/99

Guess what. UPS, my favorite courier company screwed up yet again. Huge surprise there. Just like my huge surprise when I called to find the status of my package and discovered that the unit number of my office (which I had given them TWICE) had gone missing, and that the driver had left a 'need unit #' note.

So I called, bitched to Mandy, then talked to a manager (Peter, 1-800-PICK-UPS extension 2341) and explained again, and of course he couldn't give me any explanation as to why it should take 5-10 phone calls and 5 or whatever delivery attempts and 2 [deleted] weeks to get a package from burnaby to me.

Lets just say that if it's not here at the office tomorrow (as I have both Peter's and Mandy's personal (whee) assurance it will be) Peter will be hand delivering it to me, and then will be cleaning my car tires with his tounge if I deem he should. Simply un-acceptable. And UPS will be hearing about this in the most strongly worded language that I can muster.

To my buddy whom I was out till midnight with talking about love, the internet, and women in general, good luck dude. I was actually going to write an essay on love and romance over the internet, and how it happens and if it works or not. Just a matter of time. Good luck. (of course, who needs luck when you can send a poem like this to the lady on the recieving end of your affections <g>).

06/04/99

So when I called them on wednesday, and spent a half hour on the phone with some lady at the UPS office, giving them the new address to take the package to (for the second time), it apparetnly didn't get into the system. And when I was given the assurance that the package would be delivered the next day, they didn't really mean that did they?

So as you can guess, I recieved no package yesturday. I called UP-fscking-S this morning and asked about it, and the lady (Janine) gave me the "you'll have to give me the address again sir" routine, as she showed no such address in the system. Nor did the confirmation # (given to me as proof that changes etc went through) yeild anything in their system. Take a wild guess how long it'll be until they can get the package out? That's right, you guessed it, Monday. Am I going to be at home then? NO. Is there going to be someone in the office then? NO. So if they actually get off their lazy, incompetant ASSES and actually get my package to an address, there will be no one there.

Please note, this has (or will have) taken over a week from the first time that a single, tiny package showed up at my building to the time it's actually in my hands. I'm sorry, but that's beyond ridiculous, it's insane. I think I'm going to go and pick up the package myself after work at the office in Anisis Island. At least then I don't have to worry about a bunch of idiots trying to figure out how to do a simple fucking address change.

(I vote for a boycott).

Later
Oh wait, they close at 5... that does me no good. Gads....

06/02/99

Later...
By the way, I really, really hate UPS. Let me explain why... I ordered Civ:CTP from Loki a couple of weeks ago. It arrived at my house last Thursday around noon (I didn't know this), and I got a call that night saying "what is your buzzer #?" (I guess that looking on the waybill and looking on the board for my last name was too hard for them). Anyway, I gave it to them, and was told to expect the package before 5 Friday. Fine, no problem whatsoever. So I call them at 5 on Friday saying "where is my package?". I'm told that they don't have the buzzer # and can't deliver it. groan. So I give them the buzzer # again to make sure that it arrives on my doorstep on Monday. Now, while I had been working that week at home I wasn't sure if I would be at the office or not so I asked if I could change the destination address when I find out monday morning. I'm told sure, no problem.

I work at the office monday, waiting for my package. It doesn't arrive. I call that night, wondering where it is, and I'm told that address changes take 24-48 hours to take effect. ARGH! Ok, no problem, I'm told to expect the package by Tuesday most likely, or Wednesday night for sure. It's now 1pm on Wednesday, and I call again to make sure that I'll get it today, and to check their "up to the minute" tracking.

When I call at lunch I'm told that there is no destination address. WTF? Apparently when I gave the lady my workaddress to send it to she didn't actually enter it into the system, and the package (containing my Civ:CTP in case you'd forgotten) was sitting in the Vancouver UPS office because they don't know what to do with it (even though my work # was attached to the shipping number). So I gave the UPS peon my work address again and was told that they'd fax the information out to the office right away, and it "would" be delivered tomorrow by 5pm.

All I can say is "it better be."

Another semi-exciting day in the life of me(tm). Spent today upgrading some of our clients. That went quite well, with only a couple of little gotchas that we hadn't encountered in the office (which were promply fixed). A bit of coding in deep hack mode getting an online business searching thingy going and it was 6pm! Yay! time to go... eerhm... well, close down my work telnet sessions anyway. Sometimes working at home doens't have the thrill of leaving work that working in the office does (note to boss if you're reading this: this doesn't mean I don't like working at home ok?).

Went out with Iambe and a friend who is out from Alberta Pommie. He took us out to dinner (!!) and we all caught up and generally had a good time just getting oot and aboot. Came home, worked out (go forearms go!) and then (as in now) finished up some email/stuff that had to be done before going to do that sleep thing that my bed keeps telling me to come over and do. Tomorrow I get to go to the office and then sometime (maybe) go into vancouver (to do more upgrades? your guess is as good as mine). The good news is that the business stuffs that the boss-person has been working on is pretty much done and we'll all be getting a real salary again! whoho! good boss... gooooooood boss....

A black cat has been hanging around outside lately. I went out to say hi to it the other day and it's not in all that good shape :( One eye is all puffy and gooped shut and it's got some old scars and nicks. I'm pretty sure it's not a neighbor cat that's wandered over for mooching of love food. If it is I plan to have words with that neighbor about their treatment of their pets (grrrrr). I cleaned it's eye a bit with a cloth (must get some polysporin (sp?)) and fed it and petted it. It's very friendly. Not the most beautiful of cats (pure black, nicks and cuts, generally dirty...) but a very friendly one. Maybe abandoned by people moving or something. Since I'll be moving out of here in the next 6 months or so (with roomiewife having a kid and all they'll need all the room they can get, and I don't want to be here with a screaming kid at 3am), maybe I'll take the cat with me. I left a note on the building bulliten board for the owner to call me, in case it's lost or something, but I don't thin it has an owner. Of course, I'll have to get it to the vet, get it all cleaned up and have it's shots etc, and hope that it and corny like each other... Hopefully if I get a basement suite (with an ADSL connection of course) there'll be a backyard for the cats to go into. Finally corny'll have some new stuff to explore (though I worry about him and roads and cars, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it).

Oh, and contratulations Iambe on your new job, even if it is with bleah realtors!