Didn't do a whole hell of a lot this weekend. Sloth, thy name is Fedward.

Let's see, in something resembling reverse chronological order:

Tonight was, indeed, as Tom Shales predicted, a great night of teevee. I don't get HBO, so I have never seen the Sopranos and didn't see it tonight, but the FOX lineup was great tonight (including a brilliant King of the Hill, a hell of a Simpsons, and an excellent Malcolm), and then I was torn between watching an episode of the X-Files written(!) and directed (!!) by Gillian Anderson, and the live(!!!) presentation of Fail Safe on CBS. I opted for live, figuring that the X-Files would possibly be lame, and would definitely be repeated soon enough.

So Fail Safe was pretty good. There was a bit of dead air at one scene change, and I found myself watching the credits to see who stage managed (there were eight stage managers, they were all credited with the same title, but listed in a manner that hinted at hierarchy) since they'd done a good job. The show had some weird technical things, like what I'm sure were color cameras forced against their will into black and white and not doing it all that well, and what I'm sure were rather thorny lighting issues, but it worked pretty well. It'd been long enough since I read the book that I had forgotten how it ended. Or maybe they changed the ending for teevee. It was, nonetheless, entertaining. Which is all you can really expect of teevee when you think of it. It's interesting that the same network that had the balls to produce a live two-hour movie is also doing a miniseries called, and I am Not Making This Up, Jesus. I shudder to think.

Currently sort of watching the A & F (er, E) Biography on Monty Python, which is appropriately silly. They almost named the show Arthur Megaphone's Cheap Show. Heh.

Before that, I meant to do some house cleaning and laundry, and go get some groceries and more laundry detergent. Didn't. Made a late breakfast of breakfast burritos (no slice of melon in the end), took a shower, and then mucked around with the computers pretty much all day. Need to get DNS set up, get the domains ported over, set up qmail, and do all that other stuff. But that's good for a later date.

Got up this morning thinking I'd go install that new SCSI card into the linux box. Except I didn't buy the SCSI card in a store, I ordered it from Outpost, and I don't have it yet. Duh. So I just played around with other stuff.

Last night picked up Amanda and went out to Micro Center to buy a SCSI card, but didn't get one because the one that was $52 at Outpost was $60, and they had others, and it suddenly occurred to me that if I wanted to put a CD burner in the machine that I might want a different card than the $52 one. We looked at some of the laptops, and I noticed on the new little Sony with the camera built in that somebody had left pictures of themselves, faces wondrous in proximity to the camera, there for other people to see (I don't know if that was on purpose or not), so I contributed a rather strange face to the lot and Amanda took a picture of her hand blocking the camera, a la Sean Penn. Amanda and I left after spending no money and headed out to find dinner. We drove for a bit and ended up, rather by default, at the Silver Diner.

Now, the Silver Diner expresses just about everything that's wrong with "Diners" in the world today. It's not a diner, it's a metadiner. You can't go to Silver Diner without having its whole deeply-researched, focus-grouped, publicly-traded mediocrity shoved in your face. The food is seldom more than passable, the service is usually atrocious (last night was an exception in that regard), and you can almost guarantee that you'll end up with a coupon for a free meal the next time you're there, plus the 10 percent off your current tab, and possibly even a talk with the "manager." It got so bad at one point that my free meal ticket expired before I'd let myself go back there. In the months since I'd been back, the servers had all become "Associate Owners" (bully for them) and the menus had changed again, but the food was still passable. Except for the fries, which were just wrong. I sent back the ones that were on my plate (the waitress came by with a plate so I could clear them off, and laughed at my comment about not wanting to confuse the new, good fries with the old, bad fries) and got more fries which were at least hot, but not really much better.

Took Amanda back home, went back home to get on the net and read about SCSI stuff, finally ordering an Adaptec AHA-2930U for fifteen bucks less than it was at Micro Center, accounting for tax.

Saturday morning was spent waiting for the Covad guy to show up. Installation window was 8 to noon, but after Friday's debacle I called the dispatch number at 10 to find out if, indeed, a technician was really on his way. He really was, his name was Joe, he didn't get here until 12:15 (14th Street was closed for some reason, quite possibly Cherry Blossom stuff), and he liked Spike, who made an appearance on the windowsill since the window was open. It took an hour an a half, all but 10 minutes or so of which was spent trying to negotiate getting more cable through the tiny hole where the original phone cable had entered the apartment. That didn't work, so we ran the cable under the open window and closed the window on top of it. This perfectly matches the teevee and satellite cables coming in through the window in the other bedroom, above my bed. Once the cable was run, Joe plugged in the DSL router (suspecting it wouldn't work, as he hadn't heard any white noise when he "tested" the line, a rather dodgy looking endeavor involving putting one fingertip on the "live" wire and the opposite hand on some gadget he held to his ear), and it auto-configured. The network worked immediately. This rocked.

DSL kicks ass.

Friday night I didn't do much of anything. Watched a bit of teevee, played with linux on the laptop, reinstalling it again. Twice in one day. Urk. Watched Iron Chef, hit the website and found out that Kaga, or the actor who plays him, was the first Japanese Jesus. "This Iron Chef brought to you by ... Jesus!"

Friday I stayed home from work to get my DSL installed. The installation window was scheduled from noon to 5pm. At a quarter of five when I still hadn't heard a peep from Covad I called the dispatch number. I was on hold for ten minutes. The guy finally came back on, apologizing for the delay, and said he had some "bad news" to deliver. It seemed that the subcontract installation firm had dehired the technician scheduled to do my installation (among others that day, presumably) and hadn't bothered to alert Covad to that fact. They said they'd have another technician working in the area on Saturday, and he could be there any time that worked for me (or within their windows, which were 8-noon, noon-5, and 5-8 or something). I selected the morning window and proceeded to be grumpy. At least I'd gotten to sleep in and had managed to clean a little, getting all the dishes done and put away, and the getting kitchen counter cleared for the first time since I moved in.

Thursday night I installed the new network card I'd ordered for the gateway machine, and it worked immediately. Reconfigured the old card to talk to the DSL modem, set up the new one for the internal network, and found that the old SCSI card I had in that machine wouldn't work with the new network card in there. Tried to reconfigure that in sixteen different ways, but eventually gave up and caved into the idea of buying a new card. They're cheap. I can get an Adaptec for $52 at Outpost.

Earlier Thursday evening, we were at a happy hour at Bistro Bistro for yet another departing employee, and as I finished my second beer this chyk walks up to me (through our crowd) and presents me with a beer. She'd bought it for me. I didn't react terribly well, really, making some sort of shocked face that probably indicated immediate failure to her. She walked away, back to where she was seated at the bar with her friends, but at the behest of the crowd I was with (who, presumably have never had beers bought for them and wanted to live vicariously through me) I went to the bar and introduced myself. We talked for a bit where I continued to handle myself poorly (she's a professional ice skater(!) and I expressed not just disinterest in but disdain for the sport), but I still ended up with her email address. Go figure. She's planning on retiring from the touring business, so maybe she's just looking for either another contact in the area or maybe a reason to pick this place instead of any other. Well.

Saw High Fidelity Tuesday night with Nicole and Tino. It's great. I knew something like four people who are exactly like the character Dick, and both Tino and I fell out of our chairs at the same line about guys looking for deleted Smiths records, or original vinyl and not rereleases. Go see it.

The (truncated) work week was otherwise uneventful. Got back from Toronto Monday night after not even being asked for any proof of citizenship at the Customs checkpoint in Pearson (I told the guy my mom would kill me if she found out he didn't even ask, since I had made her go through the trouble of getting my birth certificate and scanning it so she could email it to me. He told me to tell her he'd asked. He was not impressed). Mom did not kill me, but she's still quite concerned that I could allow myself not only to lose my passport but to leave the country without it.

Had a great time in Toronto. Painted. Ate sushi for the first time. It wasn't bad, but didn't taste like anything except soy sauce and wasabi. Didn't hate it, but it wasn't anything I'd rush to go get more of. I was really grooving on the pickled ginger though. Met a great three legged cat (see same link). Bought a couple books. No shoes, no antihistamines this time. A break from tradition, I guess.

And now we're back to the last entry, and I'm going to call it a night.

(2000-04-10)