Gnurple dot Net

So things have been crazy-busy for me in the last little while, and all in a good way. So that I may look back at these blogs years from now and reminisce, here’s one of my usual point-form-ish diary-type entries, complete with verbose and tedious expansions on stuff that nobody but me thinks is interesting.

CHRISTMAS

* Mom arrived in Ottawa 4hrs late due to goofs with Air Canada;
* After grabbing lunch we drove on down to my sister’s new place in Chelmsford for Christmas;
* On arrival in Chelmsford, discovered that there is in fact a piece of luggage I forgot to pick up from the carousel in Ottawa. Naturally that was the one that had food in it. Perogies. With sauerkraut;
* To keep this entry from being a million pages long, let me just say that I spent pretty much every evening on the phone ’til oh-dark-thirty talking to my favourite blue devil, who lives in Kingston, and enjoying every minute of it;
* Also pretty much every evening involved either rum-nog, rum ‘n’ cokes, or some combination thereof, including decorating-the-tree night:

This Year’s Tree

* My favourite blue devil left me a note saying she’d be on the air at midnight on Christmas day so as it turns out the first thing I did for Christmas was listen to my girlfriend in the next country over. The second thing I did was call her up and tie up the station’s request line for the next hour and a half (after which we tied up our home phones for even longer). I can think of worse Christmas presents but it’s hard to think of better;
* Aunt and uncle from Maryland show up for a couple of days of visiting;
* Earlier in Ottawa I had mangled my muffler a little by whacking the tailpipe on some snow. This caused a leak in a gasket to form which made for a louder than normal car. After a bit of crawling around and calling mechanics and arranging transportation I managed to get it fixed up (plus yummy breakfast and wandering ’round sis’s old digs with my aunt and uncle from Marlyand);

* I’ll just get all the heli stuff out of the way now by saying I spent a few hours over the holidays tuning my new heli up, and while there were a couple of days that were flightworthy on my old heli, one fine (very calm) day I actually got the new heli up off the ground for a few minutes;

* Saw March of the Penguins one evening, and later on saw the movie Happy Feet in theatres. I highly recommend seeing these in this order, Happy Feet makes a bit more sense with the background given by MotP;
* Friends J & D who used to be Bostonians but now hail from the west coast stopped by for an afternoon involving fun and more than a few snowballs;

NEW YEAR’S

* On the morning of the 31st I drove off to Kingston so as to spend the new year with someone special;
* After making it to the New Year’s party, er, fashionably late, had lots of fun and met some pretty cool people;
* Met up with new friends for first brunch of the year, to which we were surprisingly on time;
* Discovered new pastime which we shall call “Watching Stuff[tm]” - and was introduced to some pretty cool shows: Doctor Who (the latest version) and IT Crowd. As it turns out, Watching Stuff[tm] is more fun than it sounds;
* Returned to Ottawa on the morning of Tuesday the 2nd, just in time for work;

WEEK 1

* Went to the Corel CentreScotiabank Place to watch the Sens have a helping of Buffalo wings and earn everybody there some free pizza;
* Spent a couple of evenings helping friends renovate their (old) house;
* Discovered that brass and other weak-kneed metal screws are my nemesis;
* Got many much good use out of my IRC server most evenings;
* On Friday afternoon, went to Fitness Depot to research exercise equipment;
* On Saturday afternoon, bought a new weight machine along with good friend P; having seen what’s available at regular stores I can definitively say we got a good deal on some high quality equipment;

* On Saturday evening, drove to Kingston;
* Experienced a pretty awesome breakfast brunch afternoon-type meal;
* Practised new hobby of Watching Stuff[tm] watching MotP with MFBD (we somehow ran out of time so couldn’t see Happy Feet;
* Intro to Venture Bros. and also Robot Chicken which is what they watch on TV in Awesomeland;
* Checked out the Kingston harborfront, complete with triangles and the source of all weirdness in Kingston;
* Went to a place called Raxx for pool and good times;
* Returned to Ottawa on Monday morning just in time for work;

WEEK 2

* Installed Asterisk PBX on my server at home;
* Tried out a few different linux softphones. As it turns out if one were to take a big cauldron and mix all the available linux softphones together, one would end up with a decent product. Also learned that the same pretty much goes for Windows softphones, too;
* I’ll just summarize my evenings for this week with the fact that we stress-tested my Asterisk server to the best of our abilities. Discovered that the softphones tend to have an ever-increasing latency which becomes apparent after 10 or 15 minutes, and annoying after about an hour. Nothing hanging up and calling back once or twice an evening doesn’t fix, and no long distance charges is nice in any event;
* Unboxed the exercise equipment, all five boxes of solid metal exercising goodnees;
* Did more work with friends P & M on their house;
* My mom came back from her Christmas vacationing in Chelmsford by way of Ottawa. I met her at the airport, hung out with her for the day, and got her back on her way to Winnipeg - we strolled up to the gate *just* as the attendant was announcing pre-boarding on the P.A. system;
* Ordered some Barenaked Ladies tickets for their February Ottawa concert. BNL is my favourite band in the whole wide world so it oughta be fun, especially if my favourite blue devil in the whole wide world can make it;
* My sister got me an awesome sweater for Christmas. It is very geeky and designed to accomodate music players, cell phones, PDAs and other gadgets with wiring conduits for earphones, etc. It was so cool I ordered a vest by the same company, for when summer comes and it’s too warm for sweaters;
* The vest arrived but I got heavily beaten up by CCRA and UPS with customs and brokerage fees;
* I ordered all the equipment I need to give my Asterisk box a link to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and to convert my wireless POTS phone into a VoIP phone;

Now it’s Saturday evening at the end of Week 2, and just about time for me to get on the road for Kingston. The only thing more fun than ending the week with my favourite blue devil is starting the next week with her.

I apologize for the complete and utter lack of creativity in this post. It’s a pure diary entry with none of the fun and silliness we’ve come to expect. AZROLB hang their heads in shame. I hope that the next post will have more entertaining stuff. In the meantime here’s a picture of a Lotus we came across on our way down to Baltimore in May last year.

Is it a plague?

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