31 posts tagged “weekend”

This morning is one of the longest mornings ever because in an hour I get to leave work. And then 3 hours after that, my friend Wassy and I leave for Albany to catch a show on the Progressive Nation 2009 tour. As I mentioned earlier.

It felt a little weird last night since it didn't really seem like we were going to be going to a concert today, but here we are. I've got my ear plugs ready and the GPS all programmed and I'm ready to go. Just need to get out of work so I can run my errands and get everything all set for the trip out.

Didn't report much on the goings on of this weekend because it was a lot of relaxation. It was double XP weekend in City of Heroes so Wassy and I (Jay's been really tired recently so he excused himself from the festivities) did some CoH-ing. It got me more interested in playing the game so I've been dabbling back in from time to time since. We also did some Rock Band/Guitar Hero which has been a long time in coming. Nothing much interesting to the outside observer I suspect, but some much needed relaxation for me.

I hope to post again tomorrow with a ProgNation update.

It's Memorial Day weekend here in the United States which means a 3 day weekend for most working folks. Which includes me.

It's been another good weekend for me, and as per usual lately, I forgot to write about it. I'll try to get back into the habit of keeping this up to date again. I started doing it then the move happened and I didn't have time and I never got back into the habit... Ah well, time to start again.

Anyway, the Friday party was a success. Lots of relaxation type stuff happening when it was much needed. Some City of Villains being played, some Rock Band and Guitar Hero. And much unhealthy food and drink was consumed.

Which is why I decided that on Saturday, I'd head back to the gym to try to get a habit going again, especially now that I have my iPod Nano. I had a good workout but I realized that I would probably need to get an armband thingy. The Nano has the headphone jack on the bottom and it makes it hard to set it down on machines while I'm exercising.

After the Gym, most of the day was spent up in the office working on my C# programming. I ended up doing a lot of good work on FrostBot, my AI chatbot project. On sunday I actually got it talking...sort of. It needs some improvements, but it actually works!!

Returning to Saturday though, Guitar Hero: Metallica came in through GameFly...a game that I was waiting to play. Wassy and I played some of that in the evening. It's a very very good game. All the songs I played were fun, the atmosphere is awesome and it even has the orchestra in it! All together, I think I'll be buying it. I'll play it enough to make it worth while.

Oh yes, I also started restocking my 20 gallon fish tank on saturday. I went out fish browsing with the intent to research things out, but the fish store had 2 bleeding heart tetras in stock and I had a school that was severely lacking in members, so I bought them. They integrated well with the existing fish and now I have a little school of 4 tetras swimming around in there. I want to get one other school of stuff before I'm finished.

Sunday, aside from finishing off FrostBot, my friends and I wandered around in search of a good place to walk. We ended up stumbling upon a local town park that has a really cool nature trail that isn't too far away. Win! We'll be going back there for walking frequently through the summer I think. It's a nice walk through the woods and it even runs along a creek for a little ways. The creek has a ton of tires and crap it in it...but it's still a creek!

That's about it for the weekend. Like I said, I'll try to write more frequently if I can. Hopefully I can at least get back to at least a couple posts per day.

Last week was pretty darn crappy, so the arrival of the weekend was very welcome. A chance to catch my breath a bit and do a little relaxation (while still getting some work done) was needed.

The fun started on friday when Wassy hinted she was working on a little art related project for me. She had just gotten a set of Copic Sketch Markers and she wanted to try them out on something. So she took one of the sketches she had been working on for an upcoming piece for me (using the markers) and did a ink and marker test run with it. Of course she didn't tell me that right off the bat. Just hinted she was up to something and made me guess what it was. I'm really impressed by how it ended up looking using the markers. I'm looking forward to the full piece and to seeing more copic colored pieces in the future.

It's just really nice to have a crappy week end with a little gift artwork. I really appreciate it because she was extremely busy with her school work and other commissions, so to take that much time out of that stuff and work up something for me means an awful lot to me.

Techy paragraph time: I decided this weekend that I wanted to learn C# and .NET. I never really got around to looking at .NET seriously and C# seems to be in demand these days, so I figured it was time to update myself. If you're into software development it's really necessary to update your skillset every couple of years to keep up with the ever advancing march of technology. So I figure it's time to get on the bandwagon and check it out. Went out to the store and picked up a hefty book and I've been working my way through it pretty quickly. It's a cool language and I'm starting to see why people like using .NET so much.

In less techy news, my friends and I were going to have this braised chicken recipie and I was sent in search of the fresh vegetable type ingredients on friday evening. I had some trouble finding a chili pepper though. I've never had to go buy one, you see, and when I went to the store nothing was labled correctly. I ended up getting two peppers, neither of which ended up being the correct peppers. We had no idea what they were, so naturally, we made Jay try them out. He's got a high tolerance for spicy foods, so we figured this was the best option.

He took one bite out of the first pepper and was fine. Then one out of the second pepper and was fine again. And then...he took a second bite and dove for sink for a glass of water. It seems that this pepper was "really f'ing hot". I thought he was kidding for a second there, but then realized that his eyes were watering...oops. I do feel bad about it, but it was EXTREMELY entertaining. I need to bring more random peppers home sometime...

Overall, a very nice relaxing weekend.

Two basic things that are being mentioned today.

First off, the wine and chocolate festival that I went to on Saturday was very awesome. There was much sampling of wines, and a few new wineries discovered which is always good. Upstate New York has a thriving wine country which is handy for me since I enjoy a glass on occasion and there's a lot of good stuff being produced right in the area.

We ended up buying a bunch of bottles for future consumption. Lakeland Winery had some really awesome fruity wines. Especially a melon flavored one. And the other big find was Tickle Hill for their Peach Fuzz and Hector Nectar. And a bunch of other things too. I'm doing this from memory and I can't remember them all.

We also sampled the cheese, chocolate and olive oil/hot sauce booths. Found some really awesome champagne cheese which I was tempted to buy, along with some all natural fudge sauce and actual fudge which I REALLY wanted to buy. I managed to hold off because I knew that if I did actually buy it, it'd be gone in about 3 hours. Which would be ungood for me. I did get their card though, so I know where to go if I ever do want some for something.

Sunday was mostly spent relaxing and watching South Park. I made my chicken alfredo for dinner which went over really well. I'm still getting used to the stove so I had the sauce done a lot faster than the pasta, but I'll adjust that one and get it right the next time I do it.

Now for the second thing. We've got some impending staff reductions going on at work today. I hesitate to say this, but I'm not terribly worried for my job considering the big projects that I just started. But you never know with these things. I won't know much of anything until this afternoon and even then there's a company meeting tomorrow morning so it probably won't be totally over until then.

We'll see what happens...

Yesterday was fun. My friends and I, tired of winter, decided to take one of the few nice days to come our way in a long while to head outside and do some walking.

This weekend was pretty low key from the activities standpoint, but very nice and relaxing.

I, as usual, went over to do some hanging out with my friends this weekend. We wanted to get out and about a little bit so we decided to pay a visit over to the local art gallery and browse around for a bit. The last time I was there half the gallery was closed for renovation so it was nice being able to get into the places where I wasn't able to go before.

After that we wandered back to their place for some hanging out activities which were quite fun. We did some City of Heroes again, watched some TV...you know...basic friends hanging out sort of stuff.

Sunday was more of a working day. I got in some work with jQuery on Wassy's website doing some back end, administrative stuff to make the images in the gallery a little easier to manage. I really, really enjoy the way jQuery works. It makes Javascript stuff so easy to do and a lot more understandable for a Javascript newbie such as myself. Looking forward to playing with it more. I also did a little more C++ work and I'm starting to really itch for a simple yet expandable project for me to start poking at. I had the idea for an AIM chat bot type thing but I dunno if I'm nearly as interested in that right now as I was. We'll see what I do...

In any case, it feels good to be back doing more programming for fun.

Here in the US, Monday was president's day which means that some people have a 3 day weekend. And this year for some strange reason, I was one of those people. We usually don't get president's day off (at least I can't ever remember us getting it off) so I was a bit surprised when they came up with the holiday list this year.

So my 3 day weekend started by going out to the movies with my friends. We went off to see Coraline in 3D and it was very good. Excellent visual style, engaging story and very nice use of the 3D factor. There were no old people talking like the last couple movies which was a very, very good change of pace. And it was a nice non-thinking type movie after having the brain work overtime while watching Revolutionary Road and The Reader. Highly recommended.

I also received an omelet lesson on how to make them all fluffy and good. So that should help my breakfast for dinner aspirations.

Sunday was a half relaxing half working day where I did my chores and a little bit of C++ programming and then I did some relaxing City of Heroes playing. I also spent a good portion of the day watching episodes of Firefly on DVD. Wassy mentioned Sci-fi had Serenity on the other day which made me want to watch Firefly and Serenity again. Which I did.

Monday was intended to be a programming day but instead of working on C++ stuff like I had intended, I ended up spending a good portion of the day (while watching firefly) moving Wassy's website from one host to another. It took about 2 hours longer than I expected it to take, but it ended up all going smoothly in the end. After that I was pretty much programmed out, so I just relaxed for the rest of the evening.

Hoping I can get through another chapter in my C++ book this week and maybe get started on a small little project with practical applications.

First off, I do realize that I've been slacking off on the blog posting recently. I'm going to try to spend a little more time on it so I get more than 2 posts a week in...but we'll see how that goes.

Second, this weekend was very good on the scale of weekend goodness. It was double XP weekend in City of Heroes (meaning you leveled at twice the rate), so my friends and I had decided that we were going to meet up (meaning I went over to their apartment) and play together for a while, with chicken salsa tacos and some wine for good measure. It was just a really cool relaxing day.

In the afternoon we watched Atonement while Jay was taking a nap (he wasn't feeling good) and Wassy was working. I really enjoyed the movie, although I thought the middle section dragged a little bit on the first viewing. But the twist at the end shed new light on the entire story and I would like to see it again with that information in mind. After the movie, it was taco time and then we got into playing City of Heroes. The setup was a little cramped, with Jay at his desk and Wassy and I next to each other on the couch, using their coffee table (which folds out into a nice table for when you're sitting down on the couch) for our laptops. That setup went about as well as I expected (Wassy enjoys messing with people playing games, so there was lots of randomly pressed keys on my keyboard as the evening progressed), but no big deal, really. It was an extremely fun time and I hope we can do that again at some point in the future.

Sunday however, was a day of me struggling with Windows. I had put the beta of Windows 7 on my Macbook but, as I discovered Saturday, City of Heroes didn't really like it all that much...probably related to drivers. So I decided I would go back to XP. From not reading my XP install DVD (it's a long story, but basically because of how the macbook works, I have to burn a DVD with windows XP + a couple folders from my windows 98 CD so it sees it as an upgrade disc) to not being able to find my 98 CD so I could make another one and then having issues with video card drivers...what started as a project that was supposed to take a couple hours ended up taking most of the day.

Man, I hate windows sometimes.

This weekend was, on a whole...very good. And very snowy. We had two winter storms roll through the area this weekend. The first started on friday and made my drive home from work a little bit interesting. But it was made up for it later by the unveiling of my newest piece of artwork done by my friend (Wassy). I should get the print either end of this week or, more likely, beginning of next week and I really can't wait to see how that turned out. One of the coolest parts of it is that it's a digitally colored piece that doesn't have that overly digital look to it, and that usually translates really well when it gets printed. Really looking forward to seeing it, and I'm very thankful that she did it for me.

Saturday was going to be the day I went out to my friends for our regular weekend get-together deal but it ended up not happening so I spent the day basically screwing around. I'm nearing the end of my first playthrough of Chrono Trigger and I'm really enjoying it so far. I do think I will purchase it from gamefly so that I can keep my saved games for future playthroughs. There was also much gazing at the new art hotness through the day.

Sunday was snowstorm number 2. The plan was for me to head out for some hanging out with my friends in the afternoon once the worst of the storm had dumped it's stuff but due to some windshield wiper car related troubles they were having, I went out around 10 to help them fix the issue and provide some transportation for the purchasing of a new windshield wiper. That was kinda in the middle of the storm, but my Rogue handled the snow well (really, really like all wheel drive and traction control. Oh, and anti-lock breaks. How did I survive without you??) and I managed to get there with a delay of about 10-15 minutes.

After doing the shopping, the rest of the day was spent just hanging out. We watched some stuff on TV, I played a game of chess with Jay, had some spaghetti with a meat sauce... We also marveled at the total lack of quality of the people trying to clear snow from the parking lot. The worst bit was when they plowed half a sidewalk and left the gigantic pile of snow in the middle of it, blocking the rest of it. It was just a very good, very classic hanging out with your friends sort of day which is always welcome.

So all in all, on the weekend quality meter, I'd score this one as "very good"