There I go, not updating my web page in a month again. I think I actually have a valid reason this time, though. I got the job that I was interviewing for with Kiva. I'm now a Network Administrator. Full time and all the jazz. I'm very glad not to be sitting on my ass in tech support anymore. Over here, my brain gets filled up daily. I like that. I've learned lots about routers, T1s, IPs, and the way everything's put together. It's challenging, with is a Very Good Thing(tm).

Our band lost a bass player. That's not cool at all. In fact, it's lame. So, we're looking for a decent bass player who's just out to have fun. It this matches you, send me an e-mail and we'll give it a shot. We pretty much straight up rock. We're working up a repetoire of covers at the moment, with a few originals mixed in there. There will certainly be more original material on the way, but we're working toward that.

Had a LAN party last week. Got 8 people crammed into my little house, and it was a blast. There's was plenty of competition for Half-Life and Counterstrike, but not nearly enough shit talking. I think I'll start having LAN parties on a more-than-annual basis.

My piano is moved into my living room now. That was an adventure. But I've broken out the old piano lesson books, and if I can get motivated, I'll go through them and try to learn to play again.

Who is this doing this synthetic type of outer space psycadelic funky? At least, that's what it sounds like to me.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty busy. Lots of frisbee, lots of Magic. Went to Culture Shock on Saturday and listened to some good music. Actually, there was a lot of bad music too, like Wesley.

I'm interviewing for another job within Kiva. Ed from the network department is leaving, and I'd really like to get in there. There's plenty to learn, and I'd be able to do some coding. It sounds like a lot of fun.

I got an e-mail from Rynice this weekend. I didn't realize she was in town, so I took a while to figure out a response and missed seeing her. I'm hopeful that something may turn out from this, but I really don't know what she wants. Maybe I'm confused. Or maybe I'm just not good at figuring out girls. Girls are weird.

I broke down and bought some Magic cards recently. This hobby is going to be decidedly more expensive than I'd like. I think me and a few friends might go in on a box to save some money instead of buying them per pack. I'll have to go e-bay'ing. Is that a word?

I've been bad, not updating my web page in a month. Bad Josh, bad. Anybody got a rolled up newspaper?

I bought a CD player for my car a few days ago. I took the car in yesterday for the free install, and they couldn't make it work. Damnit!! The installer says there's an amp somewhere in the car that the head unit runs through, so there's only 5 wires coming back to the unit instead of 8. So now, I either do without a CD player or I run wires from each speaker myself. I can't go without music forever. I can't be sexy riding with the top down and no music playing.

I tried having a BBQ/party last night, expecting about 8 or so people to show. I got 3. Oh well, at least it motivated me to clean my house.

Yeast?

Must... have... caffine...

I've been thinking about my job lately. I'm growing tired of being a lackey in a tech support department. I've learned quite a bit since I started about a year and a half ago, but the pace of learning has slowed greatly. I started fairly wet behind the ears when it came to Linux, but I've picked up on a lot of sysadmin type tasks and a little Perl programming. I even got a taste of real sysadmining the other day. One of the servers at Kiva had a catastophe, and since I was in the area, I got to hang around and watch.

I'd really like to find someplace that will be able to offer some training in the sysadmin area. I'm sure there would be a lot of work to do on my own, but I learn best when I can put what I learn to use immediately and see the results. Sort of that "hands on" approach.

If anybody knows of a place that would seem suiting, e-mail me.

Been a little too long since my last entry. I guess everyone says that kind of thing when they haven't updated in a while. Isn't that stupid?

Team Jackie has been declared the champion of the first Winter League session. We ended up 3-1, with a narrow win on the last game. It feels good to win. I needed that. Next session starts tomorrow night; I hope my team doesn't suck.

Valentine's Day really blows sheep when you don't have your own personal Valentine. I didn't even get a Valentine card. I hate those stupid lovey days. Today is a much cooler day, though. It's "Super Badass Day of Love". None of that mushy shit; it's all about the lovin'. Kudos to Amy for creating a better holiday. Now if only I was getting some lovin'...

The band thing is working out pretty nicely so far. It's a lot of fun to sit and jam with some friends. I still feel that I suck, but if I get my ass in gear and practice, I think I'll be able to keep up. We're playing some bad 80's music like Jesse's Girl and 867-5309, and some cool stuff too like European Swallow from The Refreshments.

I finally have a roommate. Perhaps I'll be able to afford food now. It's nice to have someone else to keep the dog in line, too.

Team Jackie is now 2-1, which means we've got a shot at the title! But we've got to beat the team who beat the team who beat us. That'll be a tough one.

I've got some folks coming over tonight to play some music and see if we can cooperate into a band. It sounds like a lot of fun, and I've been wanting to get back into music a bit more, and the people are good folk too. I must admit that I have to question my talent on the drums though; I'm not sure if I've got what it takes to keep up. My repetoire is quite limited, which is a bit intimidating, especially since I don't have much experience jamming with others. We'll see how it goes, though. It may just turn out to be pretty damned nifty.

Wow, Kiva just hired a girl to the tech support department. I've been here almost a year and a half, and this is only the second female in the department during my tenure. I wonder how this will affect dickrot.com...

Team Jackie played its first league frisbee game last night. And lost. Damn it. I think we were down by two in the end, which makes me feel really bad because I was scored on twice. And today I feel completely beat up. I need to start some sort of exercising regiment just to be able to play ultimate frisbee once a week. Gotta lose the gut.

Yet another Kentucky trip has past. The time was past mostly with playing Magic: The Gathering, cooking, watching movies, and shooting guns. Oh what fun. If only I had a personal guest to accompany me...

Winter League Frisbee started last week. Luckily, our team was the bye team, so I didn't have to miss our first game. I'm so out of practice, though. And I'm sure I won't be able to keep up running-wise. I need to start running stairs and getting my body used to physical activity again. I long for the days of when I was twelve, and could play all day without tiring. Why could I then run the mile in the top quarter of P.E. class, but now I have a beer gut and can barely walk a mile? Geez.

La la la. I'm a sheep. I stand around and graze, aimlessly wandering, and being herded by dogs. Baa. I'm shaved against my will, now cold, and led back to the pasture of other meandering, stupid animals. I should jump the fence.

In other news, I'm gearing up for yet another Kentucky trip. It's really the only thing I have to look forward to for a while. Well, that and my Magnolia DVD should be coming next week.

Had a visit from my old pal James this past weekend. I got a surprising phone call at 1am explaining that he'd be here the next day. That made for a fun time, and got me out of the house. Looks like I might have a new roommate if all goes well. Yay, I can afford insurance and food again. :)

Happy new millennium. Yes, the real friggin' millennium. Not that imposter that we had last year. I swear, if I see one more commercial advertising a "Sale of the Millennuim" I'm going to chew apart a beanie baby.

In other news, I meant to do a little party hopping and track down Jon Buchanan. I stopped by for a bit, but he was still on his way there. I ended up spending the last few precious hours of the year breaking into apartment rooms and the few of the new year visiting the VP and Denny's.

My friend Joy finally came back to Bton this weekend, but I haven't had the chance to visit with her yet. A few more folks are returning to Collins tomorrow, so my life will once again be filled with friends. Yay! I can't wait to go sledding.

I've integrated a little PHP into PlanetWetDog, only for the "include" funtionality. It makes using the exact same navigation bar much easier. I'm still working with MySQL stuff. I can work with it quite easily from a shell standpoint, but I've still got a lot to learn about using it with the Perl DBI.

Got a bit of cash for the holiday, but it's all going to be gone soon. My drumset made up the majority of my gifts, but I got some snazzy clothes and stuff, too.

I've been working a bit with MySQL, although not as much as I'd like. I'm eventually going to have all these journal entries stored in the database so they can be pulled up dynamically, and I won't have to edit the HTML each time I want to add something. Gonna make a nifty little submition system and everything.

Wow, there's a lot of snow out there. I'm really hoping for a county snow emergency.

It's finals week here for all the University students, which means I'll have no friends to visit come next week. Oh whoa is me. I'm such a loser. I quit college, but that's still where I hang out. I guess I'll just have to give my e-mail account a run for it's money to try and keep in touch with everyone so I don't go insane and start shooting people from lack of contact.

Been a boring time. The only thing exciting to happen is the arrival of my first eBay package. It's a cologne that contains pheremones to attract women. Hehe, yeah, I know, it's a scam, but it does smell really good.

Whew, what a busy time. I took off for Kenucky on Friday with some friends and spent the weekend in a lakehouse. It's the second time we've been down there, and it's always so relaxing. The first night, we watched a movie and had some drinks, and basically just vegitated. I learned (sort of) how to play Magic: The Gathering; that was reasonably entertaining. The next morning (er, afternoon), Tad and I decided to go swimming while it was snowing. Brr. We charged in from the shore, got submersed, and charged back out. My entire body was numb before I reached the door. The hot shower afterwards has never felt better. Now I know what hypothermia feels like. Katie and Jeremia showed up on Sat evening and joined us in our fondue dinner. Sunday, we packed up and left, as disheartening as it was.

And then comes Monday... I got a lot of stuff done at work on Mon. I think the relaxing weekend is reason; I was rested and ready to go.

And tonight, I'm going to Indy to pick up my new drumset!! Yay!

I've been doing some eBay bidding the last couple of days. I want to get back to some classic gaming, so I'm bidding on a system I used to have when I was younger: the Sega Game Gear. This thing whoops all over the game boy; it's color, it's backlit, and there are a bunch of games from back in the day that I want to get my hands on. The one I'm winning so far has a travel case, a few games, and the battery pack. I'm trying to get ahold of Dragon Crystal, too. It was the only role playing game I had for the system, and I never quite beat it.

I should have a drum set coming, too. I've got a 6 piece kit on hold in Indy, and my Mom's paying most of it as my holiday gift. I've got to chip in some, but for the kit I'm getting, that's fine.

Thanksgiving is over, and all my leftovers have already been eaten. The event was pretty, er, uneventful. I did have one nifty observation this week, though. I found it quite interesting to see four generations of one family sitting in a room together. Every one of them was beaming with pride, which is something I hadn't seen in a while. This was the first holiday that my cousin's baby has been around for, and seeing him sit on his great-grandfather's (my gradfather's) lap was, for lack of a better word, cute. Just as it seemed the family was wilting away, there are new members. It's a rather comforting thought.

Today is payday. And what a payday it is. The people upstairs are smiling on me. No, not your false gods, but the people who own the company that I work for. Every Thanksgiving, they give out a $15 turkey bonus on all the paychecks. This led me to a theory. For every hour I worked and got my regular wage, the government bastards took out a chunk for taxes. The turkey, however, is not applied to those taxes, and therefore the government can't make money off the turkey. So here's my theory: if the company were to pay the employees in "turkey bonuses" instead of the regular wage, the government wouldn't get a dime.

Life has been quite boring the past couple of weeks. Pretty much everyday has consisted of going to work, going home, surfing the Internet, going to bed. Rinse, repeat.

The only accomplishments I've made have been installing a 30 gig HD to my Linux box, on which I've put all my mp3s and movies, and pirating cable television from our neighbors. That, at least, was a real accomplishment.

At work, I've been trying to make a script that takes a web form, e-mails the information to the appropriate people, and injects that information, via a format, to a printer. I can't imaging the e-mail side of that would be too hard; Mail::Send looks pretty straight forward. But sending it to a specific printer may prove impossible without writing a file, printing that, then removing the file. If anyone has some great advice on how to do that, send me an e-mail.

Finally made it to the Apprentice level on Advogato. Guess that means I better do some coding, huh?

Got quite a bit done on Dickrot today. Registered the domain, made a few content updates, but I've still got a lot to do even with the HTML and content before I can start writing a backend for updates. Suso is going to host it for us, and I'm hoping he'll be able to lend us coding and structure ideas when we fall short.

Halloween! Candy! Frisbee night! Johnny Socko!

Yay! I finally got the borders working! Damn things took me at least a week to figure out. I hate embedding tables; it gets so messy. But it can look really nifty. Of course, it makes updating a bitch, so I'm gonna have to bump writing a backend for this thing up a few notches on the priority list.

I really like Halloween. How many times a year can you go door to door and get free food by just holding out a bag? Ok, and not get really stupid looks. I'm going as a Biker this year. No, not a mountain biker, a hog biker. My dad is lending me a bunch of his old Harley gear. I've even got leather pants (grr!) and a do-rag.

Shit! I just remembered I'm supposed to have a side dish prepared for a pitch-in lunch at work tomorrow. Well, off to the store for baking supplies...

Things are slowly coming along. I'm splitting my time between PlanetWetDog and Dickrot. Dickrot is to be the unofficial techsupport website. If the sysguys get systhug, we need our share, too!

Maybe what I need are advertisements. That would sure make the site look snazzy. And make some money.

Here's a new design to keep everyone quasi-interested. I desperately need content, so if anyone has anything of interest that they think should go up here, there's an e-mail link on the left. My goal is to post programs that I'm working on, and provide a resource for open-source type folks, but again, I need content for that. Maybe if I get the motivation, I'll turn it into something really big.