Was out of town on vacation two weeks ago, spent last week recovering and three weeks ago preparing. Sounds like so much just to drive 14 hours to Ohio and be a geek for a week. Ah well...
Had a blast, even moreso than last year. Met some great people, saw some old friends, played some great games.
And even better, my sister had her podling while I was out there! It wasn't good that I missed it, but it was good that it happened, see... (so critical, damn).
Bouncing Baby Boy Tucker MacInnes Reinhard was born in the wee hours of April 12th, which also happens to be my birthday. This coincidence of events was predicted by me months ago (mostly because I didn't want to increase the number of dates I'd have to remember; hey, I'm a lazy bugger).
It was the best birthday I've had in years. I got to see the tyke the day after I got back, and he's just adorable. Looks a helluvalot like the baby from Ice Age (I just saw that), actually. I'm pretty psyched to be an uncle. Looking forward to spoiling the boy and making his parent's lives that much harder, warping his mind, etc. All the things a good uncle is supposed to do.
My sister is doing fine, healthy, as is the lad, and my harried brother-in-law is also doing well. He's having a hard time of it though, because his sister just gave birth not long before (to her third child, I believe), and things are not going so well. I don't know a lot of the details (not something I want to ask about, it is likely a painful subject), but I am certainly rooting for them, and wish them well.
Having settled back in, I also continued my social branching-out this evening, but I'll handle that in a separate entry...
Got me my first digital camera on sunday, and I've been playing with it, taking pointless pictures of my car, my cube, the drive to my office... Yeah, it's sad, I know. What's sadder is that I'll likely post a few of them somewhere, if I can get the time before I go on my trip.
Yeah, I'm going on a long trip starting this weekend, driving to Ohio, land of... I dunno, boredom? Eh, I'll have fun though. It's a gathering of friends. Should be a blast.
And in preparation for the trip, I poured a bunch of money into my baby, my car. She's got new tires (her first new ones since she came off the line), a tune-up and I had her detailed.
All sparkly-clean! Although the pessimist in me notes that the many scratches on her are now far more visible, but ah, screw it.
And that's why I took pictures of the car. It likely won't ever look this nice again.
Oh, and I changed around the webcomics links on the left a bit. Took out User Friendly (honestly, this thing just hasn't made me laugh in over a year) and added in "Queen of Wands". It's not new to the net. In fact, it's apparently pretty popular and I'm just a Seamus-come-lately to it, but it's still hilarious. Definitely my sense of humour.
I've always been a bit leery of dnsbl's (DNS-based Blocking Lists), as they tend to take a very aggressive, baby with the bathwater approach to preventing spam, but have always considered them a necessary evil in the fight against spam (I HATE SPAM!).
My mind is changing now though, for the worse.
The fucking moron(s?) at SORBS decided on friday or so to just add pretty much the entire /16 the ISP I work at runs on to their blocking list because much of the rdns for the IPs contains the word "PPP".
PPP DOES NOT MEAN DYNAMIC, DIPSHIT! It's a fucking encapsulation protocol that has the benefit of being open and standards-based and highly flexible. Having PPP on a circuit has NOTHING to do with whether an IP on that circuit is dynamic or nut.
But no, instead of investigating and doing some due diligence, this nimrod just decides, "Heck, let's make it so none of the 65,000 IP addresses in this block can send email to anyone using my list... yeah... I'm so smart!"
Dipshit. Respond to your fucking support emails already...
I'm going to leave the appearance like this for awhile. It's about what I was looking for, to be honest. I'd ask anyone reading this to feel free to comment on the colour scheme, but I already know my opinion of it, so...
Sorry, this thing looks like crap right now. I know nothing about Style Sheets and I want to change the look of the blog (I hate white-backgrounded webpages), so I'm playing with it. It should settle down in a few days, once I get it to how I want it to look (probably a similar colour-scheme to my website).