World of Warcraft has stolen my soul. It’s like crack, but cheaper. It’s like buttery goodness without the calories. It’s like hot steamy sex without the psycho bitch. I play all the time. I’ve been trying to ween myself off of it a little, though, because staying up until 6am playing is bad for Body/Mind/Work/Store/Everything. I ran into Janora Curtis from highschool yesterday. I was walking out of my building and there she was – I said hey, she said hey, and that was that. I still haven’t spoken to Tabitha H itz, who works at the starbucks @ austin bluffs and academy. I think that’s because I don’t want to talk to her. On that note, there are other people who are bound to be here in town for the holiday season, who I really value and like quite a bit, but I’m unsure of how much I want to see them. I have like 6 people who fall into that category. :-/ Steve came down this weekend bearing gifts – so I now have a box at home! It’s job: play World of Warcraft. Crack, I tell you! Anyways, it’s pretty decent athlonXP 2GHz, 9700pro, 768mb ram. I’m really thinking about buying an LCD to match it, because the monitor on there sucks a LOT. So yea, new box & WoW. We went out and saw Ocean’s Twelve, it was decent – nothing outstanding, and a lot of twist in it. Keen pointed out the very good style of the movie, with a lot of “real world” filming – not so many closeups, a lot of off-screen banter, a lot of … wow, almost indy filming style. But I’m not a movie critic in any way, so don’t bother posting about what a twit I am. Craigalito swung by ONS today, while en route to pueblo for a funeral for this grandmother, in his new Saab. It’s a 97 (???) something or other. All I know is that it’s 1) wicked nice (leather, sunroof, the works) and 2) wicked fast. Good Pick. I’m already envious 🙂 Condolensces about the death, congrats on the car. Ok, so I’m standing out by Craig’s car and the manager for the 11th floor of the Alamo (where I work) comes out and is chatting with us. She asks for a boost onto the ledge right there so she doesn’t have to walk around. After looking at her with a blank stare for a second, she puts her leg up for the boost and I put my hands on her butt and give her boost. She says thanks and starts walking away, and the first thing I say is “WOW that was uncomfortable. And awkward.” She’s like 45 and a total country girl, so I’m sure she didn’t care but I felt kinda weirded out. LOL 😀 And the Techy Stuff. We’re turning up BGP4 tonight on a couple new links here at ONS, which is hawt but makes for a late night, and I’m thinking about buying a LCD. Oh, and a car? iunno.

I went out to dinner with Laura the other night – she was in town from Boulder for Thanksgiving. We had a pretty good time, even though our time was short because Chili’s closed hella early. It was nice seeing her again 🙂 I posted the full story of The Lucky Sacajawea over in the articles section. Little peice of trivia about ol’ randal 😀 My truck is having issues tonight. On the way to the store it started doing this funny shimmy-shake thing, where once every couple seconds it will stutter, almost like it’s running over a peice of wood. It’s extremely disturbing, and I’m afraid I’ll be buying another car soon. I posted some topics on some forums and newsgroups, and everybody says to replace the fuel filter & pump before I do anything drastic, then check catalytic converter, brakes and vacuum lines. Oy. I’ll post with what I find out when I jump under it tomorrow morning. [b]Update – 12/5/04 @ 2:12p[/b] – Well, I replaced the fuel & air filter with no luck. Tried to tune out the carb and noticed that the mixture adjustment screw is missing (!!!!). Argh. Anyways, I then replaced the fuel pump which helped a LOT, but I was still getting some bucking at ~2500rpm in 4th and 5th. So just for the sake of it, I replaced my distributor cap & rotor, spark plugs and spark plug wires. My old spark plugs made me want to cry, they were in /horrible/ shape. Anyways, those last few tweaks made it run pretty well – enough that I drove it to the store (~10 miles). It’s running horrendously rich though, so it’s either time to rebuild the carb / get a new one, or think about ditching it for a new car.

So today was Thanksgiving. I did absolutel nothing until about … oh … 11:30am, when I roused Keen, then he, I and Paulie headed to my Parents’ place to have TurkeyDay luvin. The food was good, the converastion was good, everything went really well. I’m pretty glad I got to see my Sis, and my Dad still rocks my socks, and everything went really well. Good Times. So then Keen and I got home and decided to go do a little *gulpgulp* if you know what i mean. SO we scoped out downtown while wearing our thanksgiving-attire-duds, and ended up at the Red Martini, nex tto RumBay. Lots of imbibing later, (three martinis!) I almost had enough liquid courage to speak to these two superhot, very tall, speaking some foreign language (german?), ladies, but eh, they left before the cougrage came to bare. So we finished our drinks and headed home. The REd Martini is expensive, at least on par with mm, wh’t it called with the blakc light. 15c! Yes. THey had some better tasting drinks, bu t I don’t think they are quite on par with 15c, but the environg ment is really good – gonna be a must-go-to for a while, especially because it invovles better than normal attire, meaning that very fewa skansk will make it in the door. Happy Late TUrkay Day everybody!

Ok, so I had the weirdest dream last night. It was in two parts, and both are really weird. Dunno. Ok, so I watched some of Full Metal Alchemist last night, and there’s this character in it whose name I do not know, but he wasn’t the metal suit of armor guy. Anyways, I was on a mountainside for some reason, and this guy was flying like a 747. He flew over the mountain and was going in to land, and as he was getting to land, he caught an updraft (or so I suppose) and he kinda popped up 50′ into the air, and then the whole airplane did a horizontal 360* turn (and I saw the guy in the cockpit) and then as he was plummeting down to the earth, all I could think was “well, I guess that’s the end of that.” The second dream is totally separate. For some reason I was in Army basic training, and somehow Lilly Radosevich was there too. Don’t ask me why – I don’t know. Anyways, we were doing basic training things like running. And running. And more running. And after a lot of PT-style things, eventually I was standing outside a tent, talking to my commanding officer, and Lilly comes up sobbing because she had been “DC’d” (decommissioned?) because she had failed her “Navigator’s Course” which apparently costed 19.99. Don’t ask me why I remember that too. Anyways, she’s sobbing and keeps talking about being “DC’d” over and over again. Then she kinda collapsed on to me, and as I held her up, I remember the CO giving me this “how dare you care/help” glare. That was the end. Pretty disturbing. I have no idea what to make of it. I very very rarely have dreams that I remember in the morning. Maybe it’s because Emily had mentioned Lilly on Friday? Or maybe just because I haven’t seen Lilly in forever, and I recall hearing something about the Radosevichs on the radio a while ago, but not every finding out what it was about. Google was no help, so I’d appreciate it if anybody has any heads up on that. The new job rocks my socks. I mean, think of all the neato things that you love about your job, then toss in the things you wish you had, and basically you have my job. It’s incredible. We moved the store to a new location on Oct 31st, and it’s going really well. Our advertising sprints haven’t hit yet, and I think as soon as they do we’ll be making some bank. *crosses fingers* You’ll notice some whiz-bang ads running around the site here and there. They exist because hosting isn’t free, especially since this website sucks down a shitton of bandwidth. I go through two separate ad agencies: Google Adsense and AdultFriendFinder affiliate program. Google Ads are everywhere, and AFF are only on pages that host boobies. Since November first, Adsense has turned $54.33 and AFF has turned $11.61. I run AFF because it’s against google’s terms of service to have their ads on pages that have boobies. AFF sucks, imo $.02. Emily & Ashleigh came over Friday night and we all got a little warmed up and had a good time. Even though I doubt either of you read, thanks for coming over. I’m sure I have other things to post about, but those are the things off the top of my head. [b]Update[/b]: Goddamn I love getting haircuts at Herb’s Barber Shop (yes, the place I talk about all the time). [b]Update 2[/b]: Yay, I just beat Half-Life 2. What a good game. 😀

I formatted my computer this afternoon; today was my last day with High Plains Internet, Inc. I’ve been employed there since January 17th, 2001 – a term of three years, eight months and twenty-nine days. Well served, I might add. Had an exit interview with Mike this afternoon, where we basically went over some basic day-to-day things, and then got down to business: what are the single best and worst things about HPI. Worst thing about HPI: management bullshit. Too much non-decisiveness, too much restriction on those who can produce, too much hmm & haa, not enough motivation and direction. The best thing about HPI – since the fateful blowout that occurred right after [L=http://rand0m.org/viewcomments.php?NewsID=407]this post[/L], the only thing that kept me there is my loyalty to my fellow coworkers. I know that Angelo, Sam & Jack would go to the mat for me in a heartbeat and that I would do the same for them; that kept us together and kept the company moving. It felt really weird packing up all my stuff. It was almost cinema material – me, standing there, alone in my office, packing things into a random paper bag. Picking up a hat and having the memories come rushing back. Changing my voicemail and thinking of all the friends and associates that have become a part of my life. Thinking of the kinky things that happened in my office and the wild quirks of my coworkers. And remembering the difficult and somber times that we endured. Picking up my coffee cup and thinking of how out of place it feels to be putting it in a bag instead of setting it on the desk where it resided. Thinking of how far I had helped take the company – from the basement of a shoe store, plagued with a spiraling income and even less customers, to a profitable business with an outstanding infrastructure housed on the cushy 11th floor of one of Colorado Springs’ only highrises. It has been a long, hard road and although there is a lot of road ahead, this is my stop. Opportunity is a wild beast. There was a lot of inertia that made want to stay where I was – security, power, ego. Unfortunately, that was a static inertia as I had already reached the ceiling of all the things HPI could offer me — with no room to grow in sight. It was very difficult to decide to move on to greener pastures. Extremely difficult. I can’t tell you how much time I spent thinking about it, how many of my friends, mentors and family I spoke to and consulted with about that decision. I can tell you, however, that there is only one thing you can do when opportunity rears its head in the form of risk & uncertainty: smile, cast aside your indecision and go for it.

So I just finished watching the [L=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134937,00.html]Presidential Debate, round 2[/L], or what I would like to refer to as “Nice Nice Time Is Over”. In NNTIO, Bush looked to come out a LOT more aggressively, incredibly so. He focused less on issues and more on disarming Kerry’s arguments and mounting his own offensives. I was glad to see less reiteration of tired rhetoric from Bush, and was even more pleased to see that the townhall approach fit him much better than the talk-head-asking-questions from the first debate. Kerry, on the other hand, tried to be aggressive but often had his feet yanked out from underneath him, especially RE: stem cell research and abortion – but maybe that’s because I’m conservative. Additionally, the only memorable pause/stutter of the NNTIO was Kerry’s. I definitely thought that Bush totally bowled (??) Kerry over with regard to the economy and jobs, but maybe that’s because I’m very in-tune with the fact that recession=debt+nojobs, and the best that can be done is to attempt recovery, which Bush has done quite admirably. Regardless of your political standing, you -have- to give Bush credit in that he came out looking 20 times the speaker and showman of the first debate while Kerry didn’t seem quite as polished. This coming week is my last one at HPI. I’m on a massive documentation kick that is horrifyingly large – it doesn’t include anything about basic how-to-admin-servers and covers only the complex how-stuff-works-and-interacts parts … and it’s approaching 30 pages of single-spaced, 10pt text. I found it quite odd that the [L=http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/10/09/fraternity.death.ap/index.html]death of a CU pledge[/L] hasn’t received much media attention (or that I haven’t been watching the news?).

So I watched the debates last night via Fox News’ [L=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134152,00.html]streaming video[/L] and it turned out exactly how I didn’t want it to turn out: Bush, though maintaining his position doggedly, was doing a fair amount of stumbling. I was hoping that he would have been a better speaker. Kerry, although a good speaker, still has his flip-flopness hanging over his shoulder, and looks menacing. I was really hoping that he would stop the smear campaign and instead focus on what -his- plans are, but I don’t get everything I want in life. [L=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134263,00.html]John Gibson’s article[/L] kinda hits it on the nose for me. When the intelligence and decision went to congress, Kerry was as pro-war as everybody else, and now it’s this huge debacle and he’s anti-war. Is he anti-war because it’s not a sterile operation, but instead a bloody one? WOw, I figured with him being this hardcore vet that he would understand that war is never pretty and that extremely difficult decisions have to be made and cannot wait for the polls. Granted Bush has his follies, and I was glad that he addressed some of them and admitted where mistakes were made — yet always maintained his non-waivering stance of finishing the job and keeping the vile people of the planet on their toes. I put in my two weeks notice to my day job yesterday at 5:00pm. I have been hired on at a colocation facility called [L=http://www.data102.com]Optimum Network Services[/L]. So, if you ever need some cheapo bandwidth, a managed facility, or somebody to be a kickass admin for your box, data102.com is the place to be. I haven’t spoken to my parents in ages – almost 4 months. Ack, how can I do that when they live less than 20 miles away? I’m going to schedule some family time with them next Sunday to talk about all the many things that have been going on as of late. I think it will be a good time 🙂 A couple other interesting things of note. I signed up for a Whole Life Insurance plan through Guardian Financial. I had never really heard about whole life insurance, but it’s dividends & returns are good (6-10%/yr), it has a very liberal liquidation policy and has total indemnity against life-altering things. Oh, and anonymous. It’s great, and I think it was a good idea to let somebody who knows a lot about money manage my funds, instead of me, joe-sixpack consumer. Also, I’m considering buying a house. No, not a grandiose, 3000sqft monster, but something small and kinda homey. Maybe something I can fixup then resell, dunno. I’m pretty sure I’m going to pay off a large chunk of my debt before I move forward on it, though. Regardless, pissing away the blingbling on rent is not the way to be doing things if I’m going to become financially secure. Been feeling kind of alone lately. It’s great having some super guy friends who I can talk about things with, but it’s nothing like having a warm-smell-good girl around to talk to and confide in. Aww, bachelorhood.