FREEDOOOOOOOOM!

After three years of working for the most anti-employee and self centered company that I've worked for in my ten years as a professional IT/IS person, I've finally landed a new job! I will be in a similiar role to what I have always been, which is a programmer, help desk person, and all-around-IT-guy (servers, workstations, T1, VPN, firewalls, etc). The only differences will be two things:

• It involves some travel (Houston, Norfolk, UK, Ireland)
• I have the word "manager" in my title

A few words of advice for "little Napoleon's" out there running companies: don't expect quality employees to stick around when you have such draconian policies in place like no tuition/educational reimbursements, no formal reviews, no cost of living wage increases, no bonuses, nepotism taking precedence over qualified personnel, deciding to institute an all-employee uniform policy (and making the employees pay for the uniforms). This isn't 1960. Get with the times.

Zoo and stuff

This past weekend I went to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and snapped some shots with my digital camera. For those visually challenged, the picture on the right is of a bear. That place has changed alot since the last time I was there (which I can't even remember when that was). Monkey Island is still there! :) I thought these little guys were pretty cool (I forgot their exact name though).

I also went to the July 4th fireworks display at Tri-C this past weekend. Meh. At least the fireworks at Edgewater are synched up to music (at least they used to be?), and you know when they're actually done. At least two or three times during the Tri-C set we thought "ok, that must have been the finale". That isn't saying that what we were watching was utterly spectacular or anything, but more there'd be several fireworks going off at once, then a long pause before anything else was set off. Maybe fireworks in general just bore me anymore?

Email!

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More power to ya

So you get dumped. What to do with all your new found discretionary cash? Upgrade your computer of course! After much teeth nashing and enough four letter words to fill an encyclopedia set, I'm posting this from my new PC, composed of:

• Thermaltake VA8000 Armor Chassis
• DFI Lanparty Nforce4 Ultra-D Motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Processor
• ATI X800XL 256MB PCIe Video Card
• Western Digital 74GB 10000RPM SATA Raptor Drive
• Western Digital 200GB 7200RPM PATA Drive
• NEC Dual Layer DVD Burner
• Mitsumi Black Floppy Drive
• Generic MultiFormat Media Reader

New Year!

Got back from Niagara Falls a week or so ago. My advice is this: DON'T GO. The exchange rate is HORRIBLE. My hotel room bill was $380 Canadian, and when it was converted to US, it was $322. Get the picture? At least I got some cool pictures out of it, like the one on the right. p.s. we stayed at the Niagara Hilton this time. I definitely liked the Embassy Suites better. Next time we're gonna try the Marriott.

Some people have said "dude that torrent site you linked to below doesn't work. Well you're right, but there are still plenty of other torrent sites out there, like this one.

This Christmas sucks

So yah... two weeks until Christmas. My power window on my car goes out, and I need a transmission fluid change. $600 bill. Sweet. Then I get pseudo-quasi-maybe-dumped. Then to top it all off my car shuts itself off while driving on I-90 yesterday (for no apparent reason). Can a brutha get some snow so that it at least feels like Christmas? At least a new toy is on it's way to work to amuse me.

Favorite software of the month:

• BitTornado - Mmmm, for free file goodness. I use it with this site.
• FxCop - FxCop is a code analysis tool that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to the Microsoft .NET Framework Design Guidelines. It uses reflection, MSIL parsing, and callgraph analysis to inspect assemblies for more than 200 defects.

New toys

I picked up one of those newfangled reduced size SCPH-70000 PS2s today. Total cost to me: ~$24. Electronic's Boutique traded in my old PS2 for $100, then accepted 5 games at $10 each in trade.. basically making the new PS2 "free" for me, save for the $11 in tax. To get the games to trade-in, I simply bought some crappy $2.99 titles from GameStop. Woohoo! I don't actually get the new PS2 until later in the week because of a shortage, but I can live without it for a few days.