Not much is going on today at the office; the CEO and top V.P. are both out today, I’m actually not receiving a massive influx of new work to do, and so far things have been pretty good. Things have also been pretty boring. Plus, between noon and 1:00 in the afternoon is when everybody goes to lunch, except me—I usually take lunch at 1:00. So there’s practically nobody here right now. Thought I’d post something random in the meantime.

Back in the olden, golden days of Oddball, every entry was random. Just about everything I said was totally off-the-cuff, little of it made any sense, and next to none of it was relevant to current events. Thus you can’t get much of a clue about what was going on in the world during the time of my writings, only what was going on in my crazy old head at that precise moment. As I’ve started to make a return to that sort of style in the new and improved INTARWEB edition of the Oddball Update, the “Entry Title” field no longer seems to be relevant. I mean, what is this entry about? I don’t even know. I’m just writing stuff. By the time I get done I might fill in a title, but what I used to do on the old OU entries was just type in something totally ridiculous that made no sense, so the Title field ended up being like the “crazy-dippin’ wackjob punch line of the day.” I’m considering going back to that. Opinions?

I found out something interesting the other day, quite by accident. The neighbor across the street asked me to stop by and help fix something with her garage door, and when I went into the garage, I felt something strange—cool air. To my utter surprise, the woman’s garage was air-conditioned. She has the same model home as us, so I asked her, how did she get that done? Apparently, the ductwork for garage A/C is pre-designed into the house and it’s a very simple matter to open it up…a couple hundred dollars’ worth of work, is about all. All this time and I never knew that! This is something I’m definitely having done to our place. It’ll make it so much more…pleasant to work on the cars out there. Especially when polishing the finish.

Well, tonight I’m finally going to bite the bullet and watch the episode of Enterprise that’s been waiting for me on the TiVo hard drive since last Friday. It’s “Storm Front, Part II,” the conclusion to the epic cliffhanger whose plot reminded me of rhinoceros fecal matter. ENT has a new writer this season, who we lovingly refer to as MANNY COTO, and he’s wowed us with all the grace and glory of the worst of Bermaga’s tepid Voyager scripts, so suffice it to say, the man’s not made much of an impression. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt, though. After all, it was Bermaga themselves who opened the door to this stupid “AlieNazis!” crap at the end of season three, so obviously MANNY COTO had to do something with that dreck. And do something he did…with about as much apathy as possible, it seems. Well, in another week or two it’ll be Brent Spiner time (hmm; “Brent Spiner Time” sounds like it could be a really awful MSNBC talk show, doesn’t it?). Maybe that will be more entertaining. Although at this point we’re all just filing our nails until next May when ENT goes on permanent hiatus. That’s network for “canned.”

Even here at the office, I’m listening to that damnable Deus Ex 2 soundtrack again. And yes, I’m also still listening to the China Dolls. I need to get more of their CDs. Speaking of CDs, I really want my damn Knight Rider soundtrack album, the one that was shipped out last Friday as I mentioned here. It wasn’t in the mail yesterday, much to my extreme disappointment, so I’m eagerly awaiting this evening’s mail check.

Went to EB Games on my lunch break yesterday and preordered Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Half-Life 2 (the collector’s edition). GTA:SA is out next week, and looks to be a spanking good time. PlayStation2 only, as usual, at least to begin with. I’ve been reading Gamespot’s weekly GTA:SA updates this morning and the game looks amazing. So many little nuances have been added…cars get dirty and rust over time; you can add custom rims/spoilers/stereos/paint/nitrous to your vehicle; your character’s weight and food intake need to be managed; you can customize your clothing, hairdo and tattoos; you can rob houses to make money; there’s an improved melee combat system based on the one Rockstar developed for Manhunt; and perhaps my favorite little gimmick of all: When you carjack people, it’s no longer just a simple move, now it’s almost a minigame. Some people don’t take lightly to being jacked, so you can jack them in the face, or bash their head repeatedly against the dashboard, or whatever you need to do to get them to relinquish control of their car. Fun times!

I really, really need to finish uploading the pictures from our Thailand trip to the OU Photo Gallery. A friend at work gave me this nifty batch-resizer for JPEGs which maintains the EXIF data in the file, which is awesome, but I keep changing my mind about how I want the files formatted, so I keep running it over and over and never finishing. First I want 1024×768, then 800×600, then 1024×768 again. Then the disk space becomes an issue, then I want a watermark, then I want a different naming convention. Aggghh! Too many options. This is one of those “shut up and dance” moments where you gotta just make a choice and get on with your life, I think.

Hey, sweetness…Sparse just gave my friend Pooch and I posting rights over at his site. NOW I CAN WREAK HAVOC ON SPARSE’S SITE ALSO. Hah. Just kidding, obviously. But cross-posting stuff about games or other miscellany might be fun from time to time.

Barf. It’s 12:40 p.m. now. I’d like that to be 5:40 p.m. so I could leave. Guess I’ll have to busy myself with some more actual work this afternoon, but that’s better actually, because otherwise time just passes too slowly.

My wife and I got all excited last night (quite abruptly, really) about the prospect of buying a new home; that is, doing a possible upgrade to a new property. Real estate investments are huge down here, so we could make a lot of money by selling our current house. Enough to get us into a somewhat nicer place, even. After going down this road at about 100 miles an hour for a time, we’ve decided to back off and think a bit more rationally…but we’re still planning to visit a nearby model community to see what their homes are like. I’m beginning to think that the best option might be to procure a lot and then have a custom home built on it, but that sounds like an awful lot of work…enough to make me want to suddenly revert back to simpler thoughts of Star Trek and video games. Ahh, what every growing nerd needs.

Yessir, we are now entering the holiday season of much gaming goodness. First we have GTA: San Andreas on the 26th, then Halo 2 on November 9th, and then Half-Life 2 on November 16th. Of course, the Halo and HL2 fans are at each other’s throats over whose release is going to cause the bigger splash in the gaming community. I just read the other day that Halo 2 has set an entertainment industry record with 1.5 million preorders nationwide. I mean, 1.5 million preorders? Good Christ. Yeah, I’m one of them, and I’ve had mine since last December…what’s your point?

The next time I take a trip to Michigan, I want to work on getting the old ‘79 Trans Am out of hibernation. The problem is, it was put into hibernation without much fanfare, and as such no prep work was done to ensure its continued vitality in the years ahead. The car hasn’t been started in four years, and it’s still got oil and gasoline in it that’s even older than that. Not good, not good. What’s worse is the list of tasks I’m going to need to complete, based on advice I’ve culled from various second-gen Trans Am forums. To include:

• Fresh battery
• Fresh fluids and filters, including oil, fuel, tranny, rear gear
• New engine seals and gaskets
• Complete brake job; may need new lines
• Drop fuel tank; flush and sanitize tank and fuel system
• Complete carb rebuild may be necessary
• Probably needs four new tires after sitting on them all this time
• Pull off all intake hoses and make sure no rats’ nests or spider eggs are about to be sucked into the engine when it eventually does start
• Who the hell knows what else

Suddenly, resurrecting this grand old machine just turned into a major money pit. I’m crushed, because this is money I can’t exactly just pull out of my ass, and because I don’t live in Michigan anymore, I have no idea how I’m going to make it all happen. I can only visit around once a year if I’m lucky, and even then, it’s not for very long. But in the end I will be very, very upset if this car rots away to hell, and I don’t care what it takes, I’m not going to allow it. Granted, it’s in pretty damn good shape considering, and isn’t going to need a major restoration or anything, but it’s still been deteriorating for a while and there could be internal damage the likes of which still needs to be identified. At this point I’m not really even sure how to start, so I feel kinda like just sitting in the corner and staring at the problem in the hopes that it will solve itself. Of course that never works…

Anyway, it’s lunch time for me, so I’m outta here. Buh-bye.