Friday and the weekend

It's the end of week again...yay! It's always a nice feeling to come to the end of the week and start the weekend. Also the weather is starting to finally cool down here, and that's always a good sign that fall (and my birthday) are right around the corner.

On a very positive note, Carl is now out of the bathroom and roaming around the house, just like he loves. He seems to be doing quite well and, especially now, he seems quite happy.

Oh yeah, if you haven't seen this yet you should totally check out Evernote:

It's a really cool virtual notebook. The really nice part is that if you install Evernote on multiple systems you can sync your "notebook" up and have your notes wherever you go (they also have a mobile version also.) How sick is that? Other great thing is that's it's free (always awesome.)

Ok, that's it for now, more later.

~C

Quick cat update

So I think I've mentioned before that our cat Carl was in the hospital on Friday with a puking problem. The vet preformed surgery on Friday and then Amy brought him home Friday night and we turned the office of our house into a cat hospital. Luckily that was only for one night and this morning he moved into the bathroom where he could still be isolated, but didn't need to restricted in his movements.

He seems to be doing better though. Amy currently has him on some good pain killers so he's a pretty happy guy. Just laying on the floor all stretched out...it's actually pretty cute to see.

Anyway, on the college football front, VT managed to pull a win out today @ UNC so that was a nice treat and it looks like the Cinderella team ECU finally put their magical season to an end when they lost to NC State today...now hopefully they can regroup and beat-up on UVA next weekend (hehe).

Ok, that's it from me, off to bed.

~C

Bioshock

So last night I finally beat Bioshock....yay! I got the "bad" ending since I had harvested most of the little sisters and only towards the very end when Tannenbaum gave her plee of mercy for the little sisters (plus I had some 1500 + Adam) did I stop harvesting the little sisters. Guess it was too little too late hu? Oh well, it's still a nice feeling to have beat that game.

Some of the Plasmids you can get are really cool though. Incenrate 3 is the best thing in the world...nothing says lovin' like being able to use an electro bolt to disable a camera or turret, and then use Incenrate 3 to blow the thing sky high, it's a great feeling.

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about here's the ending that I got:



Now, if you're a good person and save all the little sisters here's the end you'll get:



Yeah, it's a pretty cool game. Now maybe I can a bit more into TF2 again (since it's been a while since I've played.) Also looking forward to playing NCAA 2009 for Wii and getting though my first season. I'm playing as VT and only have one loss so far, so I'm doing pretty good. I also think I may land a top tier QB recruit which would be awesome!

Ok, that's it for now.

~C

Vacation Days

Vacation's a great time...since Wednesday I've been on vacation and it's awesome. Believe it or not I've actually been pretty productive this vacation too.

One of our cat's, Carl, has been pretty sick so that's sucked a lot and I've been pretty busy running back between the Vet and home to make sure Carl has everything he needs, and then trying to get some other things done that I've been meaning to do for months. It is a nice feeling to get some stuff done though.

On a more fun note, last Sunday Amy and I went and saw Jeff Dunham...the ventriloquist who has all the different puppets...it was really freakin' funny. There was this opening act buy a guy named "Guitar Guy" he was really good too.

Here's a video of him:



Also here's a video of Jeff Dunham:



and one more note, I did manage to score Elton John tickets which will be an awesome show! I can't wait.

Anyway, watching South Park the movie right now, so more later

~C

End of week

So the week comes to an end (yay). It always feels nice when Friday comes around. You don't have any work plans for the next day, you can stay up as late as you want playing games (ok, so at least I can stay up late playing games) since you know you don't have to wake up early the next morning for work.

It's just a nice feeling...

On another front, Elton John tickets go on sale for his concert in Charlottesville tomorrow morning @ 10 am. It seems the whole of Charlottesville is up in arms about this concert. All the major music communities can't shut-up about Elton John. Mind you, I'm one of those people who will be up bright and early tomorrow morning to try and get tickets online, so I guess I really don't have much room to talk. It should be a good concert though, I mean, it's freakin' Elton John...can't really go wrong with that.

So I guess I really haven't talked that much about gaming, and since I'm a basically a hard-core gamer at heart now would be a good time to talk about it...

My current games include: Diablo II (can't get of enough of the main reason why my college GPA suffered), Battlefield 2, NCAA 2009 (for Wii), Dawn of War: Soulstorm, StarCraft (gotta get ready for SC II when Blizzard gets their crap together and releases the game), Bioshock, and of course TF2 (if you don't know what this means...go find out...now...go on....I'll wait.)

So yeah, I guess I'm more of an RTS junky, I really enjoy them...I know here comes the comments of how great Supreme Commander is, and I have the game and have played it, but for some reason I just don't find it awesome as something like SoulStorm or StarCraft. I've also really come to love FPS game as I get better at them. I've been playing FPS since Quake and Doom back in the day, but something about RTS games just talks to me...no idea...I guess it's the fact that RTS games takes some more building and planning, and you actually know, going into the game, that you'll get some real play time and not just 3 seconds of being alive until the guy who is l337 comes and frags you from behind.

The last game I tried is Warmonger. If you haven't tried it make sure you're system can launch nuclear missiles with ease, cause about the level of computer power required to run this game. I really don't have a crappy system, first gen Intel dual core processor 2.86 Ghz, 3 GB RAM, Nvidia 7800 video card...by no means anything crappy, but this game brings my system literally to it's knees...even on the lowest settings, it still is super jerky and plays really poorly. I don't know, maybe my system is now out of date? Just seemed strange, especially since I can still run games like Bioshock with no effort from my system...oh well, I guess if I can't play a random online free game, I'll be OK.

Ok, I think that's it for tonight...I'll let you know if I manage to score Elton John tickets!

Fingers and Bones

So about 3 weeks ago, I get this growth on my left middle finger. It kind of kept growing and then, being the super intelligent person I am, I was picking at it one day, and it started bleeding. It really did not bother me too much, but then after about 20 minutes it still had not stopped bleeding. Realizing this maybe a problem, the next day I called the doctor and he scheduled to see me that day.

I show up to the doctor and he does what any normal doctor would do for something that looks like a wart, he assumed it was a wart and used a freezing liquid to freeze it. He told me if had not fallen off in a week, that I should give him a call. Well, at the end of one week, not only had the growth not fallen off, but it was actually still bleeding...hmmmm...this can't be good. So I called the doctor again, talked to him for a few minutes, and he promptly referred me to a dermatologist.

Upon arrival at the dermatologists office they took me into a room where the doctor took a look and present me with 3 options:

1) Do nothing and come back in a couple of weeks
2) Shave the top of the growth off as a sample and test that
3) Dig down very deep and get the whole thing for sure

So, at this point I should probably mention when it comes to hacking up my body, I'm pretty much a wuss...as most people are...I'm really not a fan of people slicing things off of my body, much less digging deep into my finger. Well, I chose option 2 and it was off to the races. I'll omit all the bloody details here for the sake of you the reader, but suffice to say it was pretty much the grossest thing I've ever seen.

Now here I am, about 2 days into it, the doctor told me I'd have to keep this thing covered for 4-6 weeks and it hurts if I even think about touching it. The best part of the whole thing was that the best explanation the doctor could give me as to why this growth happened...no idea...awesome!

Oh well, it is feeling a bit better and at least I don't have a growth on my finger, so I guess it's all for the better in the end.

Ok, on to the other part of this blog post...Bones!

This is by far one of the greatest shows on TV, the writers of this show seem to have landed on a good mix of individual character development along with many excellent stand alone plots that even the most casual view could pick up the full story line with very little problems.

Well, I think that's about it for the evening.

~C

Done with work

Another day comes to an end, and we get through dreaded Wednesday, or in corporate speak "Hump Day."

Have you ever noticed how only the executives really try and use, as I call it, corporate speak...you know what it is and guaranteed if you've work for any company, big or small, you've heard it. The boss comes around talking about "Wrapping his mind around a project" or "locking and reloading" on a given situation. I'd really like to know who came up with these completely idiotic sayings and then how do corporate execs manage to instantly pick-up on this vocabulary.

Is there a book for this that gets handed to you when you become an exec? If so, I really wish I could find my companies stash of those and trash them, just so I wouldn't have to go into one more "brainstorming" session...which I'm pretty sure means "I have no idea what we're talking about but I'm hoping in the context of this meeting I'll figure it out."

Oh well, at least tomorrow is Thursday and then comes the best day in the week, FRIDAY...the day we all live for....

~C

A bit about me

Hello....

So it seems you have stumbled into my little corner of the blogging world. Well, I guess introductions are in order then. My name is Charlie and I'm the Systems Administrator for a company called Blue Ridge Numerics, Inc. (http://www.cfdesign.com.)

In my free time (if you couldn't guess by the blog title) I'm an avid gamer, mostly of the PC genre, but also enjoy the occasional board game (Settlers of Katan), or playing the Nintendo Wii that my wife Amy managed to score for us.

Well, I think that's about it now, I'm sure I'll post more later.