Looks like I’ve got a long weekend – no work on Monday in celebration of the 4th.  I’m thrilled.  I need some time off after the last week or two…  And next weekend (11th/12th) is going to be spent at work.  Best of all is the fact that we’ve got nothing crazy planned for this weekend…  Not having any parties, not inviting folks over, no major projects, no working for free…  Just a nice, relaxing, long weekend.

Speaking of plans, however, we are planning a vacation for August.  We’re planning on heading out to the Thousand Islands area of New York.  We’re planning on going during their “pirate days” event…  Looks like a lot of fun.  We’ll take a couple boat tours, tour a couple castles, do piratical stuff, and just basically not worry about work for a while.  Sounds great!

EVE is kind of on autopilot for now…  With my folks up for a few days, and then the travel for work, I haven’t been logging in a whole lot.  I set shield management V training, which is going to take about two weeks to train.  I’ve poked my head in a couple times, run some missions here and there, but that’s about it.

It looks like my alliance is declaring war on someone.  I’m not entirely sure who or why…  That information isn’t very readily available on the boards and I haven’t been in-game enough to figure it out.  Looks like it is basically just to give our PvPers something to shoot at…  But I might be misunderstanding.  Maybe there’s some contested territory or something.

It seems weird to be on the giving end of a wardec, rather than the receiving end.  Seems to be weird talking about actually intentionally declaring war on someone.  Back in EVE University, wars were always done to us, and they were a thing to be avoided.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself during the wardec…  There’s no talk of a lockdown or anything like that, so I suppose I could continue mining/missioning/ratting…  But that seems unsafe.  Maybe I’ll grab a frigate and go looking for trouble instead.

I just purchased Overlord II on Steam last night.  I was waiting for a .torrent to show up on ThePirateBay, but it just wasn’t happening.  And, honestly, I figured I’d wind up purchasing it eventually anyway…  I thoroughly enjoyed the original game and wanted to support the developers.  I just wanted a better taste of the gameplay than that short little demo, and I didn’t have the cash handy.

Well, I came up with the cash, and I got tired of waiting for a download, so I bought it.

Terrific game.  Basically the same gameplay as the original, just tweaked and improved a bit.  Better graphics, more detail everywhere…  More things for your minions to interact with in the environment…  A bigger stronghold…  More of a storyline going on…  Better in every way so far.

I’ve run into an odd issue with my Vista install at home…

I installed Vista SP2 here at work.  I like to keep up-to-date so I know what kind of issues to expect from clients.  And SP2 installed just fine.  In fact, I believe my computer at work is running better with SP2 installed.

So, after a couple weeks of testing, I decided it was safe to install the service pack at home.

Unfortunately, my home computer won’t take the service pack.

If I let Windows Update try to install it, the update just fails with no clear indication of the problem.

If I download the service pack and manually install it, I’m told that I need to install SP1 first.

If I look at my computer information, it indicates that I’m running SP1.  But if I check in Programs & Features, SP1 is not listed as an installed update.

And if I try to install SP1 I’m told that it is already installed.

Long couple of days…

Left the house at 6:30 on Tuesday.  It was supposed to be about a five-hour drive, and we should have arrived around noon.  We made a few wrong turns along the way though, and didn’t get to Ithaca until 1:30 in the afternoon.

The work in Ithaca went quick enough…  Just had to set up their router, connect back to the home office, and run a couple network lines.  We got out of there at about 3:00 PM.

Unfortunately we were a little too late to do anything useful in the Syracuse location on Tuesday – they all went home at 4:00 PM.  So we had dinner and then found a hotel for the night.

The hotel was not very nice…  There was something crusty on the comforter, a lovely view of dumpsters from the window, and an ant or two crawling around the bathroom.

The next morning we took care of the Syracuse location…  There wasn’t much to do there – it was mostly a site survey.  Most of their problems stem from the fact that they’ve only got 512 Kbps of bandwidth, and they’re trying to work over a VPN.  I think things will be much better once we get them some more bandwidth.

Then we went over to the Utica location and got their terminal server set up.  Another quick and easy visit.

And, at last, we headed back home.  Actually, I was walking through my door at about 4:00 PM – not too bad at all.

So, I made it through today.  There were times when I wasn’t sure I would…  But I did.  Didn’t kill anyone, didn’t get locked up.  I’d say that’s an accomplishment.

Unfortunately, I’ve got to be on the road for Ithaca at 6:30 tomorrow morning.

We’re going to drive out there and install a VPN router…  Only one though, because the second site isn’t ready yet.  They don’t even have electricity at the second site yet.

And then we’ve got to visit the Utica offices to set up a terminal server…

And we’ve got to visit the Syracuse offices to do a site survey and take care of whatever odd things might pop up by the time we get there…

All of which is probably going to take more than just the one day, so we’ve booked a couple hotel rooms and we’ll be spending the night somewhere out in the Utica/Syracuse/Ithaca region tomorrow night.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’m looking forward to the next couple of days…

And I don’t even get the satisfaction of knowing the work is done and out of the way.  That second location in Ithaca is going to have to be set up eventually.  Which means I’m going to wind up going back out there at some point.

I do not want to be at work today.

It’s been a hectic weekend and I’m pretty worn-out from everything.  I was sleeping very well this morning and did not want to get out of bed.  It’s overcast and raining, and I’d much rather be listening to the rain in bed with my wife.

My stomach is upset.  I’ve been eating crap for several days now and my stomach is a roiling cauldron of acid.

I’ve got a meeting this morning, that I’m not prepared for.  Not entirely certain what is going to be discussed…  Not entirely certain what questions I’m supposed to be answering…

I’ve also got a list of things that broke last week when I was out…  And I’m the only person that can fix them…  So they’ve been broken for a few days now…

And tomorrow I’m supposed to head out to Syracuse/Utica/Ithaca for a couple days.  Assuming, of course, that everything is ready for us.  They were supposed to be running network lines to two seperate locations…  And we were supposed to be getting two static IP addresses…  And we were supposed to get a phone call with the addressing information last week, but we haven’t gotten that call yet.  So I don’t know if the lines have been run or not, or whether they’re active, or anything.  And I’m not sure which I should be hoping for…  I don’t know if I’d rather re-schedule this visit to a better time, or just get it over with.