June 2008


St. Louis Slim and Pappy Van Winkle

Nothing of circumstance happened this weekend so I’m skipping it. Work was a bit of a downer today as it has been with increasing frequency of late. When I got home I learned that the DVD drive I ordered for my new toy was shipped to the wrong address, an address which was listed on my ebay account and appeared as my Paypal confirmed address in the email receipt even though it certainly is not. It sucks not only because I’ll likely have to pay the inflated shipping charges twice but I’m still unable to play with my new gadget.After work while I was at the grocery store with Dad I got a call from Patrick who told me he and a couple people were going out to Frenchman sometime tonight. Going out on Monday night is a bit odd but it’s David’s 21st birthday. At ten I had to call him because I hadn’t heard what, if anything was going on. I got a cab downtown and arrived at d.b.a. at about 10:45. Andrey, David and Patrick were already out and about and got there not long after I did. Some local act I’d never heard of called St. Louis Slim was playing. I didn’t recognize the band leader but there were a few familiar musicians in the band I’ve seen play with other acts. I had my good camera with me by request this evening which became a primary source of amusement after we found a place to sit.After a few rounds and perhaps an hour and a half, designated driver Andrey drove us back to his place after stopping at Rally’s for some much needed solid food. While we were there, Andrey showed us his model car collection he was parting with through Craigslist. I called at cab at about 2:15 and got home not long before three.

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June 16-26

Over the past ten days there have been a couple occasions that just barely justified their own entries but I never got around to it… not enough time on my laptop I guess. I finished MGS4 last week, an absolutely epic work. I also completed a substantial update to the VAIO wallpapers page on my website with 21 “new” items. Last Friday, I went out to dinner (after eating at home) with Andrey and Patrick at Nine Roses in Gretna. We all had some kind of Vietnamese soup that was perfectly decent.This past weekend, Aunt Lauren and her daughter Arien came to New Orleans from Florida to visit for a few days. They’ve been staying with us since Sunday. I have wanted to play with my new VAIO recently but I am still waiting on an external DVD drive so I can reinstall Windows on the new hard drive I bought for the notebook. Yesterday, the replacement keyboard and extra RAM arrived. The keyboard was somewhat dirty and used so I cleaned it up and swapped out some of the keys from the old one which were in better shape, a somewhat delicate operation.

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Week of June 9

For the most part there were no major upheavals at work this week. Dad did have me redesign the initial evaluation form but we have yet to implement it. On Thursday after work I picked up my preordered copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. Like everybody else, I am in awe of this masterpiece of a game. Gameplay, story, graphics, sound… all remarkably polished. A lot of the reviews already online say raises, if not obliterates the bar.When I wasn’t playing MGS4, I was probably online reading about Sony’s old VAIO Picturebook line. I won a PCG-C1MVP on eBay this weekend and I’ll be fooling with it in the coming weeks as a pet project. I’ve also already bought a couple things I’ll need to upgrade it.

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Weekend

I spent a lot of time at home this weekend, mostly in front of the Playstation with Metal Gear Solid 2. I preordered MGS4 at Gamestop on the way home from church Sunday. On Saturday I went with Mom shopping for paint. Sunday night, a botched boot time Diskeeper operation screwed the boot sector of the OS drive on my desktop. After some simple remedies failed I opted to just format the drive and reinstall Windows rather than continue to fight with it. I am diligent about backing things up but I did lose seven months worth of Trillian chat logs. By the time I went to bed that night I had the computer largely restored, but I’ll be reinstalling programs periodically for a couple weeks. This incident got me thinking about doing weekly backups of my OS drive in addition to all my media which is multiply mirrored. That way I could bounce back from a goof like this with only minimal hassle.

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Week of June 2

There hasn’t been a great deal going on this week. There’s been nothing especially unusual about work. I’ve spent some of my spare time playing Metal Gear Solid 2 in anticipation of the upcoming MGS4 release. I’ve never played any of the games before but I did spend a good deal of time watching Jeff play them.

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The Courtyard Kings

I got up a little too late to go to church this morning. I spent a good portion of the afternoon playing both Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2. I plan on buying the new game when it comes out and wanted to familiarize myself with past iterations first.Later this evening I went to the Hookah Cafe with Andrey, Patrick and David. We were to meet at nine but I didn’t get there until almost 9:30. A live band was there this evening, The Courtyard Kings. The acoustic music was good but didn’t exactly fit the style of the place. I saw Patrick was drinking a cerveza Pacifico Clara and decided to try that, which was quite good. A good portion of the conversation this evening actually related to video games.We called it a night around 12 because Patrick had to be home by 12:30. I had no trouble getting a cab home. Before bed this evening I got this entry typed.

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