This is ridiculous. There as been a buttload of potential content worth writing about over the past week, but I have found myself too busy / lazy / distracted to write any of it. Now it's Friday again, and I'm chillin for a bit. (And no, this is not some silly SNL skit. At least I hope not.)

A few minutes ago, I finally got around to transcribing the road rambling I scribbled a week ago on the way to San Antonio. But what of San Antonio itself?

"I went. I found picante sauce. I returned." --Bitscape, quoting himself again, like the silly, egotistical, self-effacing fool that he is. (or is not)

Actually, I started to write a rambling about this on Wednesday, but I got really bored and distracted in the middle, and didn't feel like submitting something half-written, so I didn't. But I did save it, so maybe I'll just paste what I did then in, and go from there....

<Sometime last Wednesday>

Land of the Picante sauce

So I'm finally getting around to typing a rambling about what happend while I was in San Antonio -- if I can remember it now, that is. Well, let's see...

Friday, around 1700 CDT, after many, many hours of driving through the state of Texas, I arrived in the legendary San Antonio. (That state is freakin huge! Looking at it on a map is one thing. Actually traveling in it is another. It must've been around 7 or 8 hours driving that day, since I started right up at 0630 on Tobias's clock MDT. Tobias's trip odometer revealed greater than 1000 miles had been traveled since leaving Denver, but I wasn't always sure I was going the right way and had turned around a few times. There were several segments where my routing was inefficient. Not bad, given that I had been traveling with no map, and discarded the crappy mapquest directions.)

As I drove down I-10 into the vicinity of the city, I used my handy dandy cell phone, which had recently re-entered a non-roaming service area (though not exactly a home area either) to dial mom's. She and dad had arrived a couple days earlier after attending their funeral in Oklahoma. She said that they and bouncing were visiting some sort of old mission building, and would meet me at the hotel, which she attempted to give directions to.

We arrived at the hotel almost simultaniously. After unloading Tobias, I felt the strong need to take a shower (both for my sake and everyone else's), so I I did so promptly.

For supper, we drove downtown, where bouncing showed us the marvelous Riverwalk. A naturally flowing river, channeled into cement canals through the middle of the city, it was lined with sidewalks, semi-tropical plants (well... they looked sort of tropical anyway), and various businesses, mostly restaurants. We ate at a delicious barbecue restaurant which bouncing recommended. After dinner, we walked up the riverwalk some more, and bouncing led us to various landmarks of the area.

Saturday, we went downtown again, where bouncing conveniently has a free parking pass (good for any 1 car at a time only; bouncing explained in detail the system's strict enforcement of his parking card, which has policies in place designed to prevent it from ever allowing more than 1 vehicle in at a time by tracking the entry and exit state.)

Downtown San Antonio could easily be described as one gigantic tourist trap. The riverwalk was just the beginning. Adjancent to it (and connected) is a big indoor mall, which not only contains a megaplex theater, but IMAX in addition to, and separate from, the normal mall megaplex. Across from that is the historical Alamo fortress.

We got tickets to the IMAX showing of the Alamo movie, which also included passes to the Texas Adventure exhibit across the street. The Texas Adventure explained the historical background leading up to the Battle of the Alamo, and projected midair 3d holographic images of the military generals and others involved in the battle. From my vantage point, I could see the RGB components being projected through some sort of image filtering system above the stage. I found the technology far more fascinating than the cheesy dialog uttered by the actors.

The Alamo IMAX movie was, well... I'll write up a movielog entry for it a little later.

We returned to bouncing's apartment in the evening, watched several Simpsons episodes (bouncing had acquired Season 1 on DVD), ate at Taco Cabana (a local fast food chain which bouncing recommended. "Taco Bell wishes it could be like this."), and then returned to the hotel.

Sunday, bouncing took us to The Tower restaurant for lunch. Circular in shape, it is the tallest building in town. From the top, you can pretty much see the entire city. At the top is a restaurant which slowly rotates, completing approximately 1 turn in the time it takes to order and eat a meal.

</Sometime last Wednesday>

Um... Hmmm... Yes, I think my favorite part of the whole trip was that Tower Restaurant. The view from up there is absolutely awesome! Food was really excellent too. (And quite cheap considering its location, at least by Colorado standards. According to bouncing, virtually all the restaurants in San Antonio are a notch down in price.)

Still Sunday afternoon. After wandering around downtown for a while longer, we journied to a grocery store, which bouncing said had an excellent selection of salsa. Indeed, he was correct. TONS of salsas, in all sorts of different flavors and varieties.

I grabbed a cart, started picking jars that looked promising, and soon had a nice stockpile. At the checkout line, my bill came to over $50. lol. But I now have a nicely stocked refrigerator here in the Lair.

Oh, and I also got a cookbook about making salsa, purchased on impulse in one of those tourist trap stores. I intend to use it to enhance my skills and knowledge, although I suspect I will have a difficult time beating the flavor in some of these jars I brought home. Absolutely delicious. The best salsa in the world.

On Monday, we went for lunch to Rudy's barbecue, famed for being the place where Doc Holiday cooked his famous bbq sauce. It was... delicous! (My mom used the word "uncouth" to describe the dining style.)

The ordering process goes something as follows: Wait through the line, pick up a crate tray, tell them what kind and how much meat you want (specified in pounds, or fractions thereof), the people pile freshly cooked meat into the tray, covered in a plastic wrap. Next to it, they throw a bunch of slices of white bread, plus whatever sides you want (mashed potatos and creamed corn were my choices). You then take your tray-crate, and sit at either an outdoor picnic table, or one of the indoor folding tables, cafeteria style. Grab a slice of bread, pull some of the bloody dead animal out of the pile to make a sandwich, douse it with the flavorful sauce, and enjoy! Yum yum yum.

Rudy's beats the pants off anything here in Colorado. Easily.

Um... let's see. Oh yes, we also stopped at the San Antonio Best Buy, where I became overly tempted by the $10-lower-than-Denver prices of their GameCube games. Bought a copy of Resident Evil. (That explains why there wasn't a rambling on Wednesday.) Also grabbed a dvd of The Others ($17 bucks for a double disc set, I am such a sucker), and a Linkin Park cd to listen to on the way home. (It's one band ClearChannel overplays that I actually like, despite the overplaying.) Eeek, what a splurge.

Monday afternoon, we went to the botanical gardens. Not my prefered stop, but everyone else wanted to go there. They did have some nice plants. Then again, so does the entire city of San Antonio. On the way there, bouncing pointed as we passed the central headquarters of all that is evil in radio.

(Speaking of Radio, San Antonio actually had some really decent stations. Surprising, given the above fact. They even have one station entirely devoted to high energy dance music, which we could really use here. But what's with crassly advertising $10 lapdances in the radio commercials? Holy crap, we ain't in Denver anymore. bouncing better behave himself, cause I'm not sure I would. ;)

Let's see... Monday night, we went to the Riverwalk again for one last time. That place is a total maze. bouncing seemed to know where he was going though.

Tuesday morning. Departure. Oddly enough, I was up early.

We ate breakfast with bouncing, and got underway at roughly 11:30 CDT. I rode in Tobias, while mom and dad took mom's car. I made a stop for ATM cash before leaving town, and then began the epic drive.

The night before, bouncing and I had discussed the theoretical possibility of completing the entire journey between San Antonio and Denver in 1 day's drive. bouncing contended that it would certainly be possible in theory, but he had never done it. I thought the challenge sounded good.

And so it was that even as my parents stopped to eat, and invited my to join them via cell phone, I declided, instead opting to drive on, and eat the leftovers I had in the back seet.

As noted in the previous rambling, I stopped only when absolutely necessary, either for gas or bladder (or both at the same time whenever possible).

I can't recount the playlist, because it was much more fragmented than the first part of the trip. Lot's of partial cds, or tuning in to various radio stations that came in and out of range along the way. But I do remember listening to Tori at twilight. Yep yep yep. Little Earthquakes all the way.

By the time I hit New Mexico (taking a more direct path than my haphazard southbound drive), darkness had fallen. I continued along 87, until finally hitting the I-25 intersection. From there, it was straight north until past midnight.

I think I started to go slightly insane toward the end. Bitscape, driving up through Denver, his head slightly off-kilter as the car zooms up the final stretch of highway. Tool's Lateralus blasts though Tobias's speakers, as Bitscape attempts to wave his free hand in time to the rhythms of the music, all the while thinking, "This stuff is fuckin brilliant!"

Yaaa. The end was near.

On Wednesday, which I had scheduled off work under the assumption that the return trip would take 2 days, I did pretty much nothing but recover. Well, I did try out the pool in my apartment complex for the first time, since it just opened for the summer. I was disappointed to discover, upon closer inspection, that the entire pool is extremely shallow. 4ft is the deepest portion. Sheeit, what a scam!

Thursday and Friday. Work. Despite being a 2 day week for me, it stands as a candidate for the most depressing week at this job, ever. Beginning with Thursday morning. Well, the work itself I was doing was actually kind of fun, but... Suck. Suck suck suck.

Yesterday, I decided that it was time to run my unspecified cron job. During lunch break, I called AT&T, and told them I wanted to cancel my cable subscription. I was told I needed to bring my box into their center for the cancellation order to take effect.

Motivated by the sudden thought that in the unfortunate event that I become the next casualty of the corporate chopping block, it is way past time for me to start reigning in spurious expenses NOW, I unplugged the cable box and brought it to their office immediately after work Thursday.

Heh. Read between the fuckin lines, people.

Halfway home, I realized that the remote was still sitting on the carseat. It was after 18:00, so their center would have closed. Oh well. Bring it in tomorrow.

I took Tobias to Boulder for a much much much needed bath. I used the high pressure sprayer to thwart the plans by millions of bugs who had made it their goal in death to permanently affix themselvs to Tobias's hull. Victory was mine in the end!

In another unplanned event, my dad called. He had recently become a subscriber to AT&t Digital Cable, and needed help setting up his computer. Since their technicians only support an OS whose name we will not speak at this time, and Yoshipond still had some old version of Red Hat installed, he asked if I could help set it up.

I assumed it would be an easy matter of running dhcpcd to grab an address and go. I assumed wrong. dhcpcd got an address alright, and everything appeared fine. An address, a route, and dns servers. But the router would NOT route tcp packets, or respend to pings.

But here's the wierd part: DNS queries would run just fine, even through external servers. But no tcp traffic or pings. I was mystified. (And no, it couldn't have been a firewall problem, because his kernel wasn't even compiled with ipchains/iptables support.)

I wondered if it could have had something to do with his ancient distro. Eventually I reluctantly decided to unplug Argo and bring it over to see if any further revelations could be gained. The same behavior persisted.

After a couple hours of fighting with it, I became quite certain that the problem was on the ISP router's end. But of course, their crappy idiot line would, in all probability, refuse to investigate errors on their end until an "approved" platform was running on the client, demonstratively proving that they need to fix something.

I told my dad there was nothing else I could do, brought Argo back home, plugged it in, and went to bed.

Today, I worked. During lunch, I made another run by the cable company, and returned the remote. The same clerk was there. On the contract when I started, it said I could have been billed (don't remember how much) for a missing remote, but judging by the look on her face, and the apparent lack of detailed inventory records, they wouldn't have had a clue it was missing. (Or whose box it was missing from, at any rate.) They seemed glad that I had brought it in though.

Well, now. We're up to now. :)

My apartment is an even bigger junkpile than ever. With various items from the trip still not put away, it's really starting to irritate me. The thought that I might invite a guest over tomorrow or Sunday is making me think I actually ought to do something about it. Hell, if it weren't for an occassional guest, my place would be an absolutely unsanitary dump. Sometimes, I think I ought to be more conscientious about keeping it clean on a regular basis, but... the motivation just isn't there. [sigh]

And now I'm thinking I might be tempted to take a trip to Club Onyx tonight. Hey, it's been nearly 2 weeks since I've been there! I'm due for some more. Music, dance, alcohol. Make an idiot of my freaky little self. Flirt with attractive members of the opposite sex (or try to).

Somewhere, the voice of yoda wafts up between the cracks of my brain. "Do, or do not. There is no try."

Yeah, whatever.

Oh, and at some point, it would be nice to get the Collective back online too, wouldn't it? I've been missing it lately.

On a related note, getting a distributed Content Solutions sharing architecture is also on the list. I've been thinking about possibilities, but haven't had time to dig in yet. Maybe a discussion in the next mass irc is called for?

Anyway, that's all I got for now. Consider this sufficient catch-up material. Signing off.