It has been a while since I picked up a good book. I had a favorite author Jefferson Scott - who I was nice enough to email back and forth with once - his first books that caught my eye were the Ethan Hamilton stories, namely the progression from Virtually Eliminated (going to read it again soon) - but the stories are wonderfully written, and not just some “magical computer terms” like the movie Hackers “let’s hack a gibson!” and no spray painted Apple laptops, simple, true, accurate goodies - but the stories tied in Faith to the whole story, tied it into the job, the walk, the day-to-day of the character’s life. Amazing Stories.
Then yet again, he wrote the Operation Firebrand series - yowza! I could put those down, as I heard one was released, I was at Barnes and Noble or CBD placing and order to get it to me, sadly I found myself done in a night. LoL - Re-Read them again this past year in under 3 days - the stories are about a miltary unit that uses non-lethal weapons to carry out, how should I put it, Extreme Missionary Field Work but again very accurate, visual books, that in some cases even with just the people you meet in the story, brought tears to my eyes.
Sadly, no other books of the Fiction variety have come from him lately, and who knows maybe one day they will, but I have said all this for two reasons:
Mr. Scott - I love your books, today as much as I did when I bought them, a massive blessing to me!
I need more books!
I find myself constantly in front of the computer anymore, with a day-job and a business of my own which keep me busy, a book to burry my head in would be good for a change. I have found some other Christian writers who do decent fiction, but I want fiction, I deal with Real Life enough as is, a blip off the radar from PHP/dBase/MySQL/How-to books, would be a great relief.
So if you have a thought or two, post your suggestions in the comments either here or on Xanga, and let me know if you have ANY sort of suggestion, even Non-Fiction suggestions are allowed, but again a little escape from reality would do me good
That’s it for tonight, I am off to see what these 24 emails are then hopefully passout! Have a blessed Sunday!
So tonight we had Christmas Eve at Michael’s parents house, it was good fun - good food, good pie, good dogs so a fun evening, I’d post more, but it’s been a long two days, and I am going to go mindlessly go and finish my mom’s gifts up, for whatever reason I am still not 100% sleepy, so I am going to finish my last 9 then try sleep again.
So a busy night. After my internet went out this afternoon, I gave up and just loafed, which means of course more work today, but hey what can you do when they are doing “brief work” on your line that lasts for 4 hours. LoL. So then I hung out with my sister and brother in law here, my packages came… one was pretty obvious that they figured out, the new 26inch LCD TV for the bedroom, the other ones weren’t so easy. I picked up a Xbox360, a Video card and a TV Tuner for the AMD rig, going to build a nice little Vista rig to do media, I got a good card, linux compatible if I get bored, but I want to link vista up with the 360, so we’ll see how that goes.
So I got things setup, signed up for live, then of course it was Nacho time. Tasty. Fun. Exhausting. We played GH3, Rock Band, and just hung out and munched on some grindage (buuuudy!) - twas fun, left around 11:30, but a good nice, relaxing, fun evening - good friends, some I hadn’t seen in a while, Rock Band was new and fun, but not really my cup of tea.
So that leads me up to now, Money issues, only partial payment from the kMan is expected, which made me sad - he had said he’d adjust his budget to accommodate, but I guess he too is having the money flow problems - then one of my big accounts had their card fail, so not sure what’s up there, but I contacted em, and I was assured one way or another it’d be fixed up, so really, nothing to worry about, especially if I go check my Mail and there is a nice pile of checks, which I am hoping for - but all in all, I hope I don’t have to fidget funds again.
I am now waiting for Vista to install, my copy hasn’t really done much, ran it on Parallels but really not much in the realm of speed - so I am hoping as a stand-alone media rig, it’ll do nicely, be able to record some TV, and since most of the shows I watch aren’t in HD to begin with, no major loss, probably just ditch HD cable here at the first of the year, and build a home-brew DVR for the house. So pretty excited, it’s at 40% extracting, and it’s being navigated with my old Apple Keyboard (tee-hee) - so good stuff indeed.
Anywhoo - back to it, need to go over some of my nightlies, have a meeting with the kMan around lunch to get a check, maybe even sneak in some sleep here somewhere, not sure where - but somewhere, and soon I hope so I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, pictures coming soon!
So the first 2 invoices went out this morning for TN - two of the largest invoices by far as they are two server customers, so needless to say, very excited! but it’s also good to see the system is performing just as it should, one of the two doesn’t have a card on file, but I hope to solve that later today - but all in all, I hope to use a good portion of the day to really push harder on the migration and audit, I’d love to have it completely done by the end of the month, but from the current rate, it may be a little into next, but not going to let that discourage me.
Tuesday was fun, got to bed in the early AM, was waking up in the afternoon and got a call from my good buddy Dan, we talked shop a bit, then I got the call from my sister a hour or so later, and she wanted to know if I could help Michael goto Costco to get their new TV, so I loaded up myself in the truck and headed that way, we had some fun times as they gave us the wrong TV and over charged, then they had to figure out what was what, but in the end got the right TV and a cash refund - but we got it setup, and for my help I got a Pizza & Potato Wedges - I know I know, not the health kick I was hoping for, but it was awesome good So then we proceeded to watch Heroes on their new TV as we ate, and then as that wrapped up, I headed home across town. A good day! I came home full of pizza, and feeling good, I laid down, and then woke up around 2am, and I have been up for a while.
All in all today is Bank day, I have a check here, I need to do a run to the office to check for Checks there, and see if I can get the last $75 of a invoice from the kMan, hopefully checks came in, but then it’s off to the bank one way or another, I hope to get things deposited and good to go, just seems income isn’t really the issue, it’s the time frame it comes in lol - had a customer 22 days overdue in his invoice, so I think I may need to start a late-fee policy, never had to before, but I guess times change.
Anywhoo - nearly 4am now, and I am craving breakfast, I am thinking of taking the ol Moleskine, hopping into the car and going for a early breakfast at Denny’s - Biscuits and Gravy sound really good, or maybe some french toast… hrm… tasty. But none the less, a big day ahead, with a nice break in the middle for the bank, and who knows, maybe I’l convince Dan to have lunch (I love you Dan) - but I hope you all have a great Fake Friday!
So I wrote this big blog a minute ago, had it all written up, and then I highlighted it all, and started typing this, it was just something I needed to write out, to re-read, and just nod my head and go “Yup” - for the first time in over a year, probably more like 2 years, I feel right - granted exhausted, emotionally shot, and out of clean clothes - BUT - I am excited. I am excited about projects, I am excited about finding a Church, I am excited about being excited!
I’m tired of life beating me down, of things being complicated, and I know at some level… yeah that’s how life is, but some things I just stopped caring about, I let things slip because it’d take a lot of work to fix them, but not anymore, I am jazzed, I had my Monday night unwind which consists of watching Chuck, Heroes, and Journeyman - all wonderful shows, and I just left them feeling what I have felt since last Friday, alive.
I know, my blog is a collection of what some would probably classify as a madman, but thats why it’s here, to unwind, to write a 2 page blog then just wipe it away to simplify it to this, I am blessed. Even when it all sucks, even when I can’t find which way is up, I am blessed - Good Friends, Amazing Family, who knows, maybe even one day soon a nice special gal, but let’s not rush anything one step at a time. I feel like I have direction, I have been working on billing today between a brief nap, and also working on some various server bits as I mentioned in my last post - I just feel excited, alive, ready to go - and I am hoping to push on, to make efforts, to grow.
And that’s all I really had to say. I hope everyone has a good Wednesday, I know I am thus far, and I am more or less doing data entry! How can that be fun?! Take care all. More later.
As a random note, I really enjoy blogging from Textmate - it’s a awesome text editor, and the bonus bundles add some wonderful functionality, the blogging is awesome, let’s me manage all my blogs, a familiar markup, good times - but on with the blog!
A good end to the week if I do say so myself, it was busy, it was crazy, and I by no means got done all the things I had hoped to get done, but such is life, and it goes on! Monday I plan to get TN moving more forward, maybe some work over the weekend on content, plus I hope to have some of the new Exchange services up and running soon for public sign-up, as well as the new interface for the anti-spam tool, the PHP front end is coming along, going to convert some of the code to PHP5 to streamline some things, but all in all, it’s a wonderful little setup, just need to spend some time on the design.
Got to goto the movies tonight with Sis and Bro-in-law, my cousin, and my friend - it was a hilarious movie Balls of Fury good laughs, got to come home to more wonderful billing system happenings, which was a nice thing to see, happy the new system is kicking butt and taking names, I hope to deploy it on TN this next week with it’s site revamp - and slowly, 100% phase out ItsMyBill & MyTroubleTicket - though long-term I may bring MTT back as a system for reselling white-label tech support for hosting companies, as I do work for a few, might be a nice service to offer.
I picked up a shirt tonight for $10! Very excited:
It’s a fun design, and for $10 I couldn’t say no, as I am slowly having clothing fall apart, need some new shorts soon too, so time to build up the clothing budget again, I figure on most of these shirts that last over 3 years are good shirts pretty nice though, I picked it up via Woot.com’s Shirt Woot - got the RSS feed for it now next to the normal Woot - hopefully over the next few months I can snag a few cool designs.
All in all, I survived this week, been a lot going on in my ol head, money has been tight, making some cutbacks till things level out with re-structuring hosting/billing - but when that is done, just the re-structure alone is going to add $250 roughly to my monthly budget, just the joy of lowering costs, and if I can close a few partnerships for things like Domains/SSL - I can increase profit margins a bit, but at the same time lower costs a little for customers.
So there it is - here’s to hoping for a semi-relaxing weekend, and if at all possible, a productive week to follow. Night folks.
As many of you know I don’t drink, so I must preface this with the fact that the “Fosters” is not Australian for Beer, it’s Australian for “My Friends” they were in town, and had some kid-free time (not that I’d of minded seeing em! One is my redheaded sister! GO REDHEADS!) - so we met up at Baskin Robins for some ice cream and some hanging out - and it was lovely - got to catch up, they moved up north about 2hrs and I haven’t seen them since the move and before, life had got a tad crazy, but it was nice!
Sad to see them go, but they had to run out before all places closed and pick up some assorted goodies that they forgot to pack (no toothbrush!) so they headed off, vowing to return, but who knows, I may try to make it up for a visit one of these days, it’s no different than a trip to visit Ron, 2 hrs north vs. 2 hrs west - so time will tell.
I am going to try to hit church tomorrow, it’s my goal - and maybe that’s why my ice cream order turned out to be a Oreo Espresso sundae - I am not a coffee person, but coffee does make me tired, and I must say the ol eyes are a little heavy right now! But a fun evening, a semi-productive day, I need to go swap some laundry around and get that train going again, but I am hoping that by tomorrow I’ll have at least my couch back! I still need to pick up some file boxes from Office Max tomorrow, hoping there is an ad in the paper in the AM.
but again very accurate, visual books, that in some cases even with just the people you meet in the story, brought tears to my eyes.
so a fun evening, I’d post more, but it’s been a long two days, and I am going to go mindlessly go and finish my mom’s gifts up, for whatever reason I am still not 100% sleepy, so I am going to finish my last 9 then try sleep again.
