all kinds of good stuff came out today…
Half-Life 2 - picked that up at lunch today. collector's edition. yeah, i wanted that t-shirt. 
Need for Speed Underground 2 - thought about it. i figure i can wait on it since i barely touched Sims 2, GTA: SA, and EQ2 has been taking a good amount of my gaming time. and now with HL2, who knows
Pearl Jam, rearviewmirror - i'm not a fan of “Best Of” albums, but c'mon.. it's a new PJ release. i haven't really had a chance to listen to the new remixes. i just hope the version of Jeremy is the one that the radio stations used to play, i really dug the different background vocals towards the end of the song, and also hope it plays all the way through, unlike the single.
oh yeah… uploaded Holiday Havoc pics from Sunday up to my gallery. except for what happened afterwards.. and yesterday, and today i guess… that sucked. 
yep i'm still alive.
so much has happened since i last posted on here.
i think…?
umm, well last week i moved into this house with 4 of my coworkers and one of their GFs. it's effin' huge and i'm loving it here. much much much closer to work and in a better neighborhood to boot. i'll try to take some pics of the new digs and put them up on my site, which is another thing i need to update. it's still sitting at rustedmind.net even though i've had a dedicated server for underactive.net for awhile now.
my last post talked about APC's “The Outsider” which i have never been able to listen to since i saw that craptacular video for it. well i think someone heard me because there's a newer version of the song on the Resident Evil soundtrack and i can now listen to it again without having to associate it with, i dunno, what's the word i'm looking for.. shit.
work is keeping me very busy. currently have my hands full with the upcoming “expansion” to the game and it's repackaging. exciting times and hope it keeps the game alive for a bit longer.
i took wednesday off so i could go see the Distillers / Pixies show up in LA. good show although it was kinda weird seeing them from so far back. but hey i'll take it. i haven't seen them play since may so i'll take what i can get! let me go on the record and say that Crystal has the hardest butt i've ever put my hands on. i had to grab it a few more times just to make sure. 
anyways yeah.. good times and looking forward to the next show.
i think that's all for now. i really need to get a light. it's dark in this room of mine… *trips over random cables*
oh yeah… happy now, Tracy??! 
ahh i feel like such a bum right now. it's a little after 1pm, and i just woke up a few minutes ago. i feel kinda slacker-shitty but it's been at least a month since i was able to sleep in like this. i needed the extra rest.
been playing a lot of FarCry lately. it looks so good on my new system. oh yeah, i got a new computer. well, most of it is new. the only parts left from my old system are the DVD-RW and CD-RW drives, floppy drive and power supply. it all started when my old system started behaving really strange with my games — random polygons appearing, sound loops in the wrong parts, freezing. i checked my RAM and that was good to go, so i thought it was the video card that went bad. so i went out and bought an ATI Radeo 9800 Pro. installed it, tried out some games and bencmarks. no more polygons but it would still freeze. the motherboard was next on my list of things to replace, and since i just went all out with the 9800, i wasn't going to skimp here. i ended up with an IC7-MAX3, with a 3.0G Pentium 4 (not the Prescott core), with 2 512MB sticks of Corsair RAM. got it all installed and i was in business. no more freezing problems. however, there were some occasional stuttering problems, both in game and just messing around with windows. one of my hard drives woule make this really high pitched grinding noise whenever it was doing something, which is not good and most likely the cause my last problem. soo, i bought a pair of Western Digital 80G SATA drives, and i installed them in a RAID 0 configuration. no more problems anymore. hooray! this system starts up so damn fast now — that windows XP startup screen only appears for about 1 second, and after that i'm in. sick! btw, this all happened over the course of 2 months — i'm not mr. moneybags or anything.
so anyways, back to playing some more FarCry and being a slacker…
it hurts to see a good friend down. she's been on my mind pretty much all day. she just recently got her heart broken and hasn't been the same person since. i know that she's going through all kinds of emotions right now — a rollercoaster between sadness and rage. i spoke to her earlier today and we made plans to hang out but then later she sent me a text message saying she wasn't feeling well and wanted to be alone. totally understandable, but i just wanted to be there for her. and that was the last i heard from her. i sent her another msg a few hours ago, because i was getting paranoid and worried. she popped into AIM after that and i said “hey” but got no reply, and she signed off shortly after that.
**depression**
at least i know she's okay, but dammit i feel so helpless! i really really wish there was something i could do or say, but i can't get past these walls she's putting up. she's probably thinking she's nobody special and not worth losing sleep over but she couldn't be further from the truth. without even realizing it, she's had a part in making me a better and happier person. i'm not as afraid to take some time off and make plans to have some fun and loosen up. heh, i'm slowly but surely whittling away at the 100+ hours of PTO time i still have. she has taught me ways to relieve stress at work which has saved me many times over *wink*. she introduced me to all kinds of kick ass new music just when i was starting to lose faith. she was always there for me to pick me up when i was feeling down, sick, stressed, angry, and we've shared plenty of good laughs at Bozo's expense too.
to my friend: i feel like i owe you soooo much, and i want to be there for you too. i want to see you smile again! much <3, eric
i've been in a real geeky mood lately… started over the weekend when i setup an account on my server for Heather to host her stuff (her former-roommate deleted her account from his server without warning. asshat!). started tinkering around and accidentally deleted webmin from the root home directory. who knows why my webhost installed it there. so after i was told by their tech support that restoring it would require an entire server reset (loss of files, users, databases, etc), i decided to do it myself — and i did it the right way. also tried to install webalizer on my server but was not as successful. something is up with their system in that it won't run certain binaries. weirdness. learned a lot about FreeBSD along the way.
last night i wiped my desktop computer's hard drive clean since XP was becoming too cluttered, and my linux install was horribly out of date. so i reinstalled XP, and after 10000000 security updates and reboots, i started to install Gentoo. the install process is sooo painless now, with the user install docs online, and especially with the genkernel tool (automates setting up the kernel config), there is no reason for everyone to not give it a try. i felt really adventurous and decided to go with kernel 2.6. i'm still installing X and Gnome right now, but i must say that it already “feels” faster, if that makes any sense. if all goes well, i'll eventually upgrade my laptop to run kernel 2.6.
saturday was valentine's day… i usually have bad luck with this holiday, and it sucks even more when you're single. thought it was gonna be depressing this year but i got to hang out with Heather. yeah, we're just friends but still it was nice to be with someone i care about. we met up in the afternoon at hillcrest and walked around for a bit. hit the newstands looking for a copy of The Face for one of her friends. checked out a record store and then hit a shoe store to check out some chuckage. got some good coffee at this place called The Living Room. i was my usual clutzy self and managed to spill this little leftover sample of Heather's frap all over myself, while trying to coax it to come out of the tiny plastic cup. then we went back to her old place and moved her stuff out. tried to figure out what to do with her cat. and getting her into the carrier was all good times. she escaped once and we had to resort to securing the door with CAT 5 cable (ironic, isn't it?) the second time around. after we packed up all her stuff we went to her parents house to drop it all off so she could sort it out later, including the cat (which will have a new home soon). while we were there, we moved her bed out so she could have something to sleep on at her new place. also met her mom and one of her sisters (i can't believe Heather is the oldest sister!). after we secured her bed into my truck, we drove over to her new place, and made one last drop. nice digs. met up with her new roommate Mike and then we all had dinner at Chili's. so that was my V day… probably one of the most productive i've ever had!
today turned out to be much better than i thought, making up for the extremely grumpy mood that i was in yesterday (maybe i'll post the details about it later, since talking about it would probably infuriate me again. heh). today was my birthday, but didn't announce it or anything, since the thought of turning my current age depresses the hell outta me and didn't really think i needed to be reminded. so i get my first bday greeting via email from Bianca, bless her sweet soul. was just a short but sweet message, and made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. after the first break, Fritchoff came by and gave me a ninja bday greeting as he passed by and asked if i was going out to lunch. lunch comes around and a group of us go to Red Robin and they treat me. tasty tasty treats. i'm definitely going back for more. we were 5 minutes late coming back, but it's okay. the QA supervisor drove so we could blame him. heh. after that the hardest part of the day was trying to get work done while trying to overcome a massive case of food coma from all the food i had. stuffed! so anyways, yeah, got a few more bday wishes. i love the fact that some people think i'm still in my 20s. early 20s even. i'm not a glory hunter, so i didn't announce my bday, which made those greets i got more genuine in my eyes. especially from people i didn't expect to hear from. i felt the love today, so thanks everyone! <3
here's to hoping my bday wish comes true…
woke up this morning feeling pretty shitty. i thought it was gonna pass but soon realized that i think i'm starting to come down with something. my throat feels just a little bit scratchy like it's gonna be full on sore tomorrow and started to get a runny nose. bleh. on top of that, my year old monthly contacts were bugging and was just hard to do any computer work. many thanks to Heather for coming by to rescue me and give me some dayquil pills and a bottle of opti-free. ^_^ definitely helped me stick it thru the rest of the work day.
and now, i must crash… *falls face down onto bed*
http://rustedmind.net/stuff/lj/so_true.png
- for once i would like to drive to work without getting stuck behind or having to drive around a dump truck, freight truck, gravel truck, tow truck, cement truck, or any other kind of semi. why SOE is located in the middle of an industrial area? christ…
- as of today, i find cake to be hysterically funny
- 11 of us from work celebrated a coworker's birthday at PF Changs. tasty tasty treats. chinese food always means plenty of leftovers. too bad nobody bothered to pick up our boxes of leftovers. D'OH (being 30 minutes late and rushing to get back to work prolly didn't help either)
- things were rockin for most of the day, then i got a personal email that fucked with my emotions, which was probably visible to everyone nearby. took a while to make sense of it all and deal with it. i'm good now
last but not least:
- wet oven mitts don't really work all too great… goddammit that hurt