journal for 2003-10-11

scarlet letter

The Scarlet Letter is on TV. As I recall, it was the worst novel-to-movie adaptation I ever saw. I liked the book, and the movie was just atrocious in so many ways… I mean, Demi Moore for one! Worse, though, they have Chillingsworth hanging out with Indians and Hester owning a slave and masturbating with a taper candle. What the hell?

I happily turned it off as the credits ended and decided to write this. The credits said the movie was “freely adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Yeah.

working

This past week was goofy, workwise. On Tuesday we had some scheduled maintenance for some of the main servers, and I figured I’d use that time to re-install MS SQL. It had been giving me some trouble with replication and full-text indexing.

Unfortunately, it turned out that something really weirded out InstallShield several months ago, and programs have been installing their common files into home directories, which are mounted at login and not really persistent. That included services. Obviously, services that can’t find their files without an interactive login aren’t very useful.

Trevor and I managed to sort things out enough to get SQL installed, but the server is still wonky. We got the install working around two thirty or so, and after that I still had to install, upgrade, reattach databases, set permissions, and then do a bunch of lame finance-related stuff. I got out of there around 0400, so I took a few hours extra to sleep the next morning.

On one hand, I enjoy occasional bouts of “OMFG EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE!” On the other hand, I feel like nobody else has the same kind of genetic need for always-available services; this lends to my feeling of being on a totally different team, sometimes.

I took Friday off to help Gloria do her chores. One extra chore this week was taking the car to Saturn. It’s time to turn it in, and GM told us we’d need to get it looked out. Unfortunately, it turned out they were wrong, and we ended up getting routine maintenance on a car we will only have for a few more days. We had to pay for it, too.

play

dnd

I continue to work on my campaign. I don’t know, really, when it will get started. I was hoping that I’d be playing in a campaign by now, at least, but nothing has come together, yet. In the meantime, I’ve pored through the various monsterbooks and picked out some things from which to draw ideas. I started writing notes for the game’s first session, too, and I hope to have two or three sessions planned out before the first one starts—just in case I grossly underestimate the game’s speed.

joe

I picked up Viewtiful Joe. It’s really fun and it looks absolutely fantastic. I am, so far, getting the impression that it’s going to be a pretty short game. I’m doing alright at it, I think, but I also get the impression that it’s possible to be incredibly good at it. I’ll settle for just being able to get past Chapter Four.

shopping

My weight continues to hover around 190 pounds. I think it may just be that I need to cope with that for a while before my body is ready to continue shedding pounds. (It might be, instead, that I’ve begun slacking off. I suppose it’ll become clear eventually.) Even so, this means that since joining the gym I’ve lost about 45 pounds. That means that a lot of my clothes haven’t fit very well. Even the shorts that I bought months ago are pretty baggy, now.

I decided, this week, that I really wanted to get some new pants. I’ve mostly only been wearing my corduroy pants, lately. They have a 40” waist and a 30” inseam. On Friday afternoon we went to the mall and I bought three new pairs of pants with a 36” waist. I suspect, now, that I might’ve been able to get 34’s instead. I’m fine with the 36’s, though. I also discovered I’ve dropped two shirt sizes, from XL to medium. I figured that as long as I was going to get fitting pants, I should get some fitting shirts. I picked up a half-dozen different shirts and felt triumphant.

Then, today, we went back for more. I felt like six shirts just wasn’t enough to cover my bases, so I picked up six more. There was a serious clearance on linen button-downs, so I got a pile of those for nothing. Then I bought a suede jacket; I couldn’t stop myself!

It’s nice to be able to get clothes that fit well and look pretty good. I’m not big on fashion, but I do like to feel like I’m not totally ridiculous-looking, and I think my new clothes look good—especially the jacket. Hopefully I can contain any future desire to buy clothes for a while, though. I think I spent plenty.

I also got a haircut. I’ve spent half the day with that itchy feeling of tiny hairs stuck in my t-shirt. Fortunately, that will end when I go to bed. I think I’ll go to bed now.

Written on October 11, 2003