Whatever is cool with me.

In the 3 years since I moved to Kendallville, I have made several attempts to find a nice place to play paintball. Each and every one of those attempts failed. Miserably. Back home, I played paintball fairly regularly. I started playing paintball in the fourth grade and played at least once a month and sometimes more than once a month. There was a brief stint where I even played in a few tournaments. I didn’t win anything but I was in it for the sport, so just getting out and playing on a higher level made me feel good. The last 3 years, not so much. Any field I looked at was always outoors, and/or poorly regulated, over priced or all of the above. With such a crushing cosmic defeat I listed my gear for sale on numerous internet forums, classified sites,newspaper ads and took it to pro shops to off load it. I had accepted that I would never play paintball again.

If any other person were recanting this tale, this would mark the end but it’s me so naturally a top notch indoor arena opened 10 miles from my house. PaintballPlex opened up in Laotto where MotoPlex used to be. While we were on our way back from furniture shopping on Saturday Sarah, David, and I stopped in to check things out. They have a regulation size speedball field inside, they’re building a scenario field outside with the potential for another speedball field as well and they have a huge pro shop. The pro shop stocks tons of new and used gear and they have jerseys, masks, pants, guns and other accessories.

Anyway, the place has a really good vibe and I can’t wait to get back into playing. I used to release a lot of stress and really loosen up after a good solid afternoon of playing and not only that but it’s a killer work out. Running, sliding, ducking and maneuvering around bunkers can really take a lot out of a person even when games don’t last longer than 15 minutes. My problem is that paintball is and always has been an expensive hobby. It’s not that expensive once you have all the gear, but there is an initial sticker shock when buying the equipment. When I was a younger, single man dropping a few hundred dollars to gear up wasn’t so much an issue. Now, maybe it is. I don’t know. I’m married, buying a house, and I have some big plans for my house in the near future. Maybe it’s not the right time to get back into the game, but I definitely need to do something to get off my ass. I’ve been sedentary for way too long and I view this as a chance to get out and be active again.

Summer is here and I’ve been busy. What else is new? Right. Well, I’m settled in at the new job. I finally got my office unpacked in the new building and that’s a good thing. For weeks there were just stacks of boxes and people dropping of random documents. No end to the chaos was in sight. The server room is all tidied up too. Wait, no I take that back. It’s as tidy as it’s going to get. I don’t have any additional storage so the spare parts have to go in there but I have everything confined to a short run of shelves and a cabinet with locking doors so it doesn’t look terrible.

Last weekend we went back to Chicago, for four days. It was wonderful. We went to the Shedd Aquarium and we saw the all kinds of fish and reptiles, dolphins, penguins and all kinds of things that live in the water.  There were more people there than I remembered. Being around people tends to annoy me but more than that people make it difficult to get any good pictures so I refrained from even thinking about the camera. The aquarium is a wonderful place to go. The have a few marine life shows and there’s a tank that they even have a diver in who talks about various things.

Saturday I took Sarah and David along with our friend Kevin to the Taste of Chicago. Sarah’s cousin Paul and his friend Abby met us in the city and spent some time with us while we were at the Taste. It’s quite possible that we ate more food this year than in any previous year. For us going is a chance for us to eat all the great food that you can only get in Chicago, the stuff that isn’t available to us in Kendallville. Polka Sausage and Deli has the most amazing sausage and kraut w/mustard and Buona Beef is just to die for. If you ever have a chance to go to Billy Goat Tavern, then do it. Seriously. Saturday Night Live has even done a sketch about it, it’s so famous.

Speaking of food, dinner is ready. I’ll post more later.

The weather has finally leveled out. Finally! The temperature has been in the 60’s and even into the 70’s with no rain and it hasn’t even been freezing over night. Something really came over me this weekend I had a surge of energy and motivation over the weekend that really shocked me.

Saturday even with the threat of rain David and I hit Tin Cup mini-golf on the edge of town and really wore ourselves out. We started off with 18 holes of mini-golf followed by 80 pitches in the batting cages. We were really letting them rip in the 40 m.p.h cage. For some reason Davey seemed surprised that I was actually able to hit a baseball. I just proved that it’s easier to hit a real baseball than it is to hit one on the wii. After the cages we hit about 100 golf balls at the driving range, I managed to drive the balls about 150 yards out. David still needs to get some practice in, he seemed like he was having a hard time. We had a few bucks left when we were done at the driving range so we hit another 40 pitches each at the cages and called it a day. On the way back we took some Alleve to prevent the sore muscles we expected but I’m not sure how well it worked. Saturday was more of a workout than I’ve had in a while.

Sunday Sarah and I cleaned the bedroom, I cleaned the basement and then we went through all of our Summer, Spring, and Winter clothes and were able to pull out a lot of stuff that we don’t wear or doesn’t fit anymore. All the stuff we were getting rid of got folded up and bagged up so the next time there’s a good will or salvation army pickup or something we can take it to donate it. I think there’s probably 90lbs of clothes that have nothing wrong with them, it’s just stuff we outgrew or replaced with other clothes so some stuff didn’t make sense to keep. At any rate, the clothes will go to someone else that can use them and that is a good thing.

After getting all the cleaning done I got David and we went outside to stand up our archery target after the winter. The target was all dirty and the foliage had grown over the the pressure treated 4×4’s. The other stuff that wasn’t pressure treated needs to be replaced by now but that won’t take too much to get it done. My target bag is about obliterated. The harsh winter snow, the blowing winds and the torrential rains made the bag brittle and this tough stuff tears easier than paper now. David and I managed to put a few arrows through the bag before it just couldn’t handle any more. I put two bulls-eyes through the bag last night, intentionally so I’m pretty proud of myself.

I don’t normally talk much about work because, well I’m careful of what I say about all things work related. Let me preface what I’m about to write by saying I like my job. I like what I do and the people that I do it for. Recently my boss gave notice that he’s quitting. Great, good for him on to greener pastures. I wish him all the best. What’s got me down is the way the powers that be handled all the work he was doing. They passed it off to other departments. Sales/Marketing got the website work, other departments at other offices (which shall remain nameless) are handling the support of our ERP system. The only thing I got handed was dealing with the company cell phone accounts.

Ok, I really don’t know if I wanted all the extra work but it’s work that I expected to have to deal with. Granted there would be a learning curve for me with the ERP system but it’s a task I would have taken on. Let me be perfectly clear, there’s nothing wrong with anything that happened but I’ll say that I more or less feel like someone didn’t think I could do it all. I should be relieved but I’m not, I’m a glutton for punishment as they say. The other thing that had really occurred to me is, if all of the stuff my boss was doing could be so easily farmed out to other departments then why did I really need a boss? Did the IT department really need a director? Who knows. I’m certain there’s a few times in my history here that I was definitely glad I wasn’t him.

Friday is his last day and everyone is going to miss him. We’re having pizza for lunch so I hope they get one with pepperoni and pineapple.

Well this week was mid-terms. I did very well in both of my classes. I’m extremely proud of myself for the work I’m doing and being able to manage my job and my schooling at the same time. I can’t say that things are getting easier, I’m just getting better at handling everything.

The weather around here has been crap lately. It will snow for a day bringing us 7 inches of the white stuff then it will melt, then freeze again so we get to drive on a solid sheet of ice, and then we’ll get more snow. After a few repeating patterns of that the temperature will climb up to 55 degrees for a day causing people to lose their damned minds and start wearing shorts and sandals. Indiana seems to have issues with salting and plowing roads. I can’t figure out for the life of me why the roads aren’t cleared by the time I wake up in the morning. The state of Illinois has their act together. As soon as the weather man predicts snow there are trucks out with plows and they’re laying down salt. Indiana on the other hand would rather wait until the roads are completely treacherous to break out the plows then drag ass getting the roads cleared.

I hate driving around here.

Sunday was the day I turned another year older and possibly another year wiser. I spent the day around the house with my dear wife doing as little as possible. Most of my day was consumed by watching sci-fi reruns, on the couch in my sweats. I don’t think a geek could ask for more than that. I got a few presents and some money from Sarah’s mom, brother and grandparents and my dad and grandfather sent me birthday cards to let me know they care. That was nice of them. Sarah made me a really good chocolate cake. The Kevin’s wished me happy birthday via IM and text message since they couldn’t be here with me. I had a good birthday.

School has been taking a lot out of me. It’s not that it’s any harder than I remembered, it’s just that the school I’m going to now seems to require a lot more from you in order for you to pass a class. That makes it seem like the school I used to go to was in the business of getting as many people in and out and making as much money as possible in the process, but hey the truth hurts.

On that note, the online class that I’m taking isn’t difficult but it revolves around DOS and the command line which isn’t bad but the work we’re doing is just stupid. So far I’ve “learned” to use the command line to format and label a floppy as well as create, rename, and delete directories and subdirectories on said floppy via command line. Has anyone in the last 12 years used that out of necessity?

My at-school class is really challenging. There are a lot of protocols and standards to remember for the certification exam which means I have to remember a lot of things that don’t even get talked about after the certification exam. It was a slow start for me. Trying to motivate myself to remember all this stuff was a real effort but now that I’m 1/4 of the way through it I think I have my fortitude back. I know it won’t get any easier from here on out but I do hope that I start to have the same sense of determination that I used to have. The whole thing seems analogous to a boulder rolling down hill, I needed a little push to get going but I have the feeling I’ll pick up steam going forward.

My last post entailed the specs on my new laptop, getting the laptop was the easy part. Getting it ready to use was somewhat more difficult. Computers now-a-days come loaded with crap and my lappy was no exception. There was 60 days free of this and 90 days free of that and demo this and free some other stuff. Bottom line, I don’t care. I have my own stuff that needs to go on my computer and all the other stuff the manufacturer thought I’d appreciate is infringing on my space.

I knew I shoulda just wiped the hard drive and done a reformat but this laptop came with one of those recovery partitions and that never turns out well when you reinstall from one of those. You usually end up with all the OEM crap again.  The mere uninstalling of software took an hour, getting adjusted to Windows Vista and setting up the network took another hour or so including tweaking the display, kb, touch pad and power options. Now that I can actually use my computer I invested another hour or so of my time getting Trillian Astra, Sling player (for my Slingbox), AVG, and a few other things installed. I was smart enough to back up my firefox bookmarks and extensions to my server so that was another easy reload.

Everything runs pretty good, Vista just gets annoying because it hides things and changes the names of things you’ve known since Windows 95. In all honesty the one thing that works and surprised me was my VPN to the office. Our firewall uses it’s own VPN client and I had no idea how well it would work. Since it worked I managed to get some stuff done despite having tomorrow off.

I retired my old laptop this week… Well actually I just sold it to someone else but either way we have parted ways. My old lappy was awesome, I had it since 2003 when it was brand new. It cost me near 1700 dollars but it was a P4 2.4 Ghz proc, 15 inch screen and had 4 usb ports. It only had a 20 gig hard drive but back in ‘03 laptops didn’t have huge hard drives. Still it was good to me. I blogged from it, did school work, uploaded and downloaded and did the occasional bit of actual work on it. Old lappy even had an IR port on it that let me use my cell phones as modems for wireless internet, now that was some tech. It still ran Windows XP really well and was generally good for work type stuff but I need something more capable these days so it was time to replace old lappy with something new. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has a new propaganda piece I just read this morning masked as a children’s book about how to “help” your child understand having a server at the house. It mentions Windows Home server in there a few times and I think the phrase “I bet you want one.” more than once so if a kid does read this you’d most likely get asked about a server at least once. The whole idea is pretty over the top when you think about it but I thought the book was good for a laugh or two. Read the rest of this entry »