October 9, 2008
The Dow Jones down another 670 points to close at under 9000 for the first time in…well, awhile. I went ahead and checked my 401(k) balance–which by my own admission doesn’t have that much in it, but I’ve still be afraid to look–and I’ve actually gained some value this year overall so far. Hmmm. Not much, like $50, but still very odd.
I think it might be time to start investing in soup. Soup’s a good investment. I wonder what the financial outlook on Campbell’s is?
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October 9, 2008
The other day I finally got my iPhone working with my work email, so now I can get all my email anywhere I have cell or wifi service. Whee. Actually, I’ve been somewhat looking forward to getting my work email accessible on my phone because, while possibly annoying, I can think of a number of times in which I either needed or wanted access to my work email. I can’t get my contacts from work, though, because by syncing contacts I would wipe out all the contacts currently on my phone. That’s a little annoying. I don’t necessarily need all my work contacts, but I can think of times it would be helpful, given that we have everyone’s office and mobile numbers associated with their contact. Eh. I carry a little wallet card distributed by work with everyone’s phone numbers on it, so if I could avoid carrying that anymore, I’d be happy.
On the bright side, the firm offered to start paying my phone bill now, given that I’m getting my work email on it. I’d have to move my number to their account, though, and while the offer is appreciated and I might end up taking them up on it in the end, I’m somewhat worried about moving my personal phone and my personal number to have the firm start paying for it. I mean…I feel somewhat unscrupulous having them pay my phone bill when it’s my personal phone, despite that I have the ability to get my work email on my phone now. Hmmm. This will require some pondering.
I’m the only one in IT herte at work today, as my manager is on vacation and my coworker is at a training session. The day will hopefully be slow and easy, but it didn’t get off to a great start. Let me sum up an email exchange I had this morning.
Them: “When I search for a certain matter, I can’t find it.”
Me: “I can’t seem to find it, either. I’ll look into it, but until then, run this query instead. I’m able to pull up all the matters with that number.”
Them: “I still can’t see the matter.”
Me: “That’s odd, let me connect and look at your screen. Go ahead and run this exact query while I connect.”
Them: “I still can’t see the matter.”
Me, now connected: “I can see your screen, and you’re NOT RUNNING THE QUERY.”
OK, so I said that last part out loud. When I tell someone to follow step 1, step 2, and step 3, if they do something different and instead start with step 4, don’t expect it to work. Aargh!
Hanne and I had a lovely time on Tuesday night, as we plopped ourselves in front of the TV with a fair amount of beer and watched the debate. Our consensus was that neither candidate really shined, but we had our respective objections to the non-answers that both candidates love to give. One more to go–shoudl be interesting.
Hmmm. Perhaps I should find something to do.
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September 30, 2008
It’s been, what? Weeks since I last wrote? I’m just lazy. I have no excuse. Mostly I’m just annoyed that I just haven’t wanted to take the time to sit down and write. Of course, to make matters worse this is a continuation of a saved draft, so that means that I managed to suck it up and started writing…and then stopped. Nice work, Andrew. Bravo.
This past weekend Hanne and I drove to Astoria and stayed a couple of nights, and though it wasn’t too far away, it was nice to get out of Portland for even just that brief amount of time. Sometimes I feel like we get in ruts too easily, and though we fall right back in afterward, it’s nice to break routine even briefly. Our destination was originally picked so that I could try the two brewpubs there in Astoria, but once I read about a brewfest taking place this past weekend, I knew it was fate that we should go then. We stayed in a nice bed and breakfast, and though the room left little maneuvering space for us, it sufficed as a place to leave our stuff while we explored the city. Oh, who am I kidding? We drank a lot and explored very little. The brewfest was nice, and there were some delicious beers. The whole thing was for charity, and local breweries donated 30 beers for the event. It was one of the better brewfests we’ve been to, if only because they had real pint glasses for us to use to sample the beer and the music, while a bit loud, was consistently good and audible in the entire area. The other breweries there in the city were solid, and we returned with four new pint glasses: two of the brewfest glasses, one from Fort George Brewing (which, by the way, had some excellent food), and one from Astoria Brewing Company to replace one my Dad bought me several years ago that mysteriously broke between his house and mine.
We also drove over to Fort Stevens State Park, which is at the mouth of the Columbia where it flows into the Pacific. You couldn’t exactly go right to the mouth, but we were able to see both river and ocean at the same time. Very nice. We didn’t make it across the 3.8 mile bridge that runs from Astoria into Washington across the Columbia, but we did note that there’s a yearly 10k run across it that might be fun to do one year. I know I’d drive back out to Astoria to run across that bridge.
Astoria itself is a very nice town. Small, but not too small, if you know what I mean. We didn’t do everything we wanted to do because Hanne wanted to get home and do some work, but even after a brewfest and two brewpubs (and a mediocre restaurant), she did relent and let me detour on the way home to go to a new McMenamins. That makes 49 for me, and that might put me over the top of my Dad’s count. This will require some comparison, I believe.
My college roommate Dan was here recently and stayed with Hanne and myself, and so we made sure to give him the Portland treatment. He’s been here before so we didn’t need to see the sights and explore too much of the city, but we did take him to a few restaurants that we like, ate a lot of good food, and drank a lot of good beer and wine. One night we cooked a grand old meal that included cheese and crackers before dinner along with a selection of fine beers, a nice meal, copious amounts of wine, and some enthusiastic Wii games that elft all three of us sore for a couple of days. Only one broken wine glass, too! Fortunately it was one of our crappy Wal-Mart glasses, and not our nice Crate & Barrel ones. As I said, enthusiastic Wii games and copious amounts of wine. That particular glass fell victim to one round of full body contact darts, which we invented that very night, believe it or not.
Hanne’s been very busy lately, both with classes as well as her internship with PacifiCorp that she started yesterday. She’ll only be working two days a week, but I think she’s enjoying having something other than schoolwork to do. Plus, that means she’ll have a bit of money coming in, which I know she’ll appreciate.
Last night Hanne and I went out to a local wine bar to take advantage of their “Mac & Malbec” special that ran through September: $5 mac & cheese, $3/glass-$11-bottle Malbec. The food was delicious, the wine was very nice, and we started talking about Thanksgiving. My Dad has the big kitchen and the dining room table, but I think Hanne and I are going to try and host Thanksgiving this year in our new apartment. It’s going to require some additional seating and using the leaf for my table–plus a pretty serious game of culinary Tetris–but I think we can pull it off. Our main concern has to do with the oven more than anything else, since it’s small and already required new baking sheets. I think it’s big enough for a turkey, though, and that gives me the perfect excuse to buy myself a nice roasting pan. Well, I have a nice roasting pan already, but I’m not sure that a turkey will fit in my 9″x13″ stainless steel job. Any excuse to buy new cookware is always appreciated.
Speaking of cookware, my birthday came and went, though with very little fanfare. I’ll get to the connection, don’t worry. Hanne had class until late that night, so I intended to celebrate on my own. My boss took me out for a beer, which turned into three beers and could have kept going on, but I intended to cook dinner for myself that evening. My evening’s meal consisted of a delicious ribeye steak topped with sauteed onion and garlic and the boiled-down marinade, oven roasted potatoes, and steamed broccoli. I had planned to drink a bottle of Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA while cooking dinner, a marvelous beer with 20% alcohol purchased especially for that very evening last October, carefully kept out of sunlight and direct heat, but in my rush to leave for work that morning I neglected to refrigerate it. Booo! I didn’t even make the mental connection until I had the glass in my hand and I was reaching for the bottle, which made me feel very silly. For some reason, my brain didn’t comprehend that I was leaning down to pick up a bottle that was room temperature. No worries, though–I had plenty of wine with my meal.
So, on to the cookware connection. Hanne’s gift to me was something that I’ve wanted for years but never taken the time to purchase–a morter and pestle. I remember wishing I had one back in college, and every time I’ve cooked pizza since then I’ve wished for one. Rosemary just doesn’t crumble very very when making pizza dough, and a morter and pstle works much better to crush it. I’m sure I can probably think up a lot of other uses, but she managed to read my mind. Again. I’d ask her how she does it, but no matter what level of telepathy I think she might have is offset by the reality that most of the time, I’m a pretty transparent guy and I tend to mention things like wanting a morter and pestle and forget about it later.
The rest of this week should be pretty low-key, which in my mind feels like things haven’t been recently. Soemtimes I feel like things really aren’t low-key unless I go into a week with no plans. I may end up doing a lot of things, but I feel less busy if I don’t have my week planned out ahead of me. This Thursday I plan on watching the Vice Presidential debate with some friends, consuming alcohol as we point and laugh at Joe “I like the taste of my feet which is why I stick them in my mouth so often” Biden and Sarah “I can see Russia from my house!” Palin. I’m not expecting a blowout or smackdown, but let’s just say that I would prefer if the debate ended with at least one clip that innundates YouTube and that the media plays endlessly, like the “You’re no Jack Kennedy” line from the ‘88 VP debates.
And with that morsel of excitement simmering for the next two days, I should probably get some work done. Break’s over.
Posted in Beer, Family, Food, General, Hanne No Comments »
September 11, 2008
The 10k Pints to Pasta race came and went, and I did better than I thought I would, but not nearly as good as two years ago when I last ran. I wouldn’t say I’m out of shape, just not in as good of shape. Carrying extra weight and running yes doesn’t help, but I still managed to come in just under my goal–I felt like if I could finish in an hour, I’d be satisfied. Well I crossed the finish line at 1:00:17, and I was annoyed that I’d come in 17 seconds late until I realized that I didn’t cross the starting line until nearly 1:30 after the start of the race. With 3500 or so runners, it takes a bit to get there. So, I ended up with a time of a little over 58 minutes, which I’m satisfied with. My time two years ago was just over 45 minutes, so I didn’t do too much worse–just a bit slower and more methodical.
I chose not to participate in the 18 mile “Tour de Lab” bike ride to the three Lucky Lab brewpub locations, though. I rode my bike to and from the race , and since the Hawthorne Bridge was closed all day on Sunday I had to go an extra couple miles out of my way each time. I ended up riding about 10 miles on my bike to get there and back, and I was absolutely wiped out afterwards. I don’t think I’ve ridden that slowly on my bike in years. I had originally made plans to have lunch with a couple of friends of mine from Seattle who came down to run in the race, but I had to bail on them after I got home because there was no way I was going out again. Nuh uh. Instead, I sat in a chair and alternated browsing the Internet and napping, pretty much until it was time for dinner.
Our upstairs neighbors asked if if they could split the cost of Internet with us and mooch off Hanne’s and my connection, and while I was initially skeptical about exposing my network to people I don’t really know all that well, after taking a few precautions regarding password protecting, I thought that perhaps splitting the cost might be a good idea. I even took the opportunity to upgrade the speed of our connection to compensate for the extra users and five-way cost split, which is something I’d wanted to do anyway, but Hanne was concerned about paying additional costs for bills as a student. I had a perfect excuse now! So now instead of a paltry 1.5 Mbps DSL connection, I have a much more mainstream 7 Mbps connection. I could probably go even faster if I did cable, but frankly, I just don’t wnat to have anything to do with Comcast. Qwest has served me well, and I don’t have to buy any additional equipment or change anything up–I did everything online and they just opened the Internet up a little more for us.
Once the speed boost went into effect, though, I started noticing that our connection was seriously dragging. Granted, I have a tendency sometimes to saturate the bandwidth as I’m downloading something, but it’s not for extended periods of time and it didn’t affect anyone except Hanne, who typically only browses, anyway. So, what to do? Knock on the door leading to upstairs and yell at them to stop whatever it was they’re doing? Nope. When people don’t hear anything, they think they’re getting away with it, and I don’t want to knock on the door every time my Internet connection slows down. Instead, I used my skills as a Network Support Technician and I simply guaranteed Hanne and myself a certain chunk of bandwidth to use at any given time. The way the connection works is that any one person can use as much or as little of the connection as their computer can possibly handle, and then when more than one person tries that, things slow down for everyone. I set aside a rule in my router to say that if the Internet connection is saturated by someone else, either Hanne’s or my computer are guaranteed to use up to the amount of our previous Internet connection speed, and the rest is available for everyone else to use. That’s only when the connection is busy, though, and so if no one else is using it, I or anyone else gets the full amount to themselves. I decided to be magnanimous about the amount set aside for my use, though–I had originally set it to be 75% of the connection, but I’m happy with my old speed back if it gets busy.
And sure, I could do this for everyone and make sure that everyone has a chunk of bandwidth set aside for them, but if the connection gets bogged down among the three people upstairs, I’ll let them sort out which one of them is hogging the connection. I felt this was a better option than simply degrading the connection for them. They are splitting the cost with me, even if I do own the equipment and have the know-how to make myself King of my connection.
Hanne takes off today for a weekend in Minnesota to see her college friends, and so I find myself without companionship for the next few days. Tomorrow after work I’m going to meet my Dad at the Bridgeport Brewpub for a couple of pints of their Hop Harvest fresh hop ale that’s debuting tomorrow, and then after that the weekend is pretty much on my own. I have a lot of stuff to do to prepare for Dan coming and staying with us next week, like organizing and cleaning, but that can’t possibly take up the whole weekend. Perhaps I shall find a game and play it until I can play no more, or cook myself a fine dinner and watch manly movies like Die Hard or Rambo.
Nah. I’ll probably end up doing a lot of cleaning, a lot of sitting around, and maybe watch one movie. Face it–I’m whipped.
Posted in Beer, Food, Geekery, General, Hanne, Movies, Running 1 Comment »
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