Preliminary examination reveals that my hour of work this evening has paid off; the Lounge appears to be running well on the new server, and at this very moment, the content collective database is being copied. A fairly smooth transition, now that I've finally gotten around putting a little time into it.

(But this little exercise reveals and highlights once again what a kludged together mess my website(s) have evolved into. Burn it all to the ground and start from scratch, I say! Yeah, like that will ever happen.)

I've also taken this opportunity to back chatter and the collective up to argo. (This theoretically should be happening regularly anyway, but it stopped happening when I moved out of my apartment and wasn't sure where Argo would live next. Well, and for a while before that, Argo was the primary host serving all these things, but anyway...)

Last week, lots of stuff happened. So much so that I didn't really have much time to be writing on the web. But now, a brief summary, picking up from where I left off with the last big rambling on Saturday night.

Sunday. Basicly hung out around with bouncing and mom until I went to work in the afternoon. In the evening, I managed to get off work slightly early (meaning an hour before midnight), and visited the scottgalvin.com revolving door potluck. I brought along the remainder of my frozen steak, and a bunch of DVDs. When I arrived, bouncing was already on the scene. In fact, he was just leaving, but decided to stick around I arrived and followed him to the house.

In the luxurious house, there were an assortment of high school guys hanging out. (In a most amusing twist, it had been the high schoolers that brought the alcoholic beverages to the gathering.) We hung out at the large residence, scottgalvin.com showed me grand theft auto, we grilled a bunch of cow meat outside in the middle of the night (yum), and watched Requiem for a Dream.

(That was the last movie I expected people to want to see at this merry gathering, but for some reason, it had ended up in the pile I brought, and one of the high school kids jumped on it and said, "This movie is awesome!" Since nobody else had any strong convictions, we watched it in its disturbingly downward spiraling entirity.)

At around 0300 I returned to the location provisionally known as "home" to sleep the remainder of the night.

Monday. Awoke and went to work at 11:30. Midway through the day, got called upstairs to the store manager's office. (My initial instinctive reaction: Uh oh. Something must be wrong. They must have something incriminating (I couldn't imagine what), and I'm either going to get reprimanded or fired..) Luckily, it turned out the be slightly more pleasant.

I had gotten my first "real" mystery shop by an outside contracting firm (apparently, the ones I got before were just in-house tests), and gotten 100% in all categories. As a reward for this achievement, I recieved a star to go on my badge, a dollar coin, and a dollar off my next purchase. Yipee.

My slightly more cynical, spoiled ex-dot-com programmer half is tempted to say, "If I'm such a great employee, how 'bout actually paying me enough so I can rent an apartment of my own again, instead of just a measly token dollar for the candy machine?"

OTOH, it was a nice gesture, so I did my best to appreciate it in the spirit it was given.

During one of my breaks, I made a brief trip to CompUSA (conveniently located across the parking lot). During my lunch, I made a surgical strike to Target. Last minute Christmas shopping between the cracks, the way it was mean to be.

After work, at 2000, I once again journied to the land of scottgalvin.com. On the way, I picked up bouncing. I also decided to bring along a few products from my place of work. We dined on sandwiches that night. :)

At the temporary scottgalvin.com residence, Jaeger, Kiesa, and Peter were in attendance. When bouncing and I arrived, they were touring the facilities.

Since Jaeger and scottgalvin.com had initiated the buildmeasite server switchover earlier that day, throughout the evening scott was receiviing tech support calls from customers whose websites had broken. Doh. (This is where I wonder how "that thing" ever managed to make it past QA. Then I remember that we have neither a QA department, nor a QA process, either formalized or otherwise. At that point, it all begins to make a strange sort of sense.)

Jaeger attempted to hack fixes to the problems that were found, as scott and I meandered around mostly looking over his shoulder. You know it's bad when you hear the words, "Um, I guess we need that feature, don't we?"

Oh, and along the way, we also discovered that Windows XP (it happened to be installed on the PC at the residence) has an even more oddly obscure way of switching the keyboard to Dvorak than previous Windows versions. Go figure.

In the movie department, Peter put on MIB II, a netflix movie Jaeger had brought to the gathering. I alternated between watching it and checking out the buildmeasite mayhem.

Afterwards, we used an ever-evolving decide-while-it-happens voting scheme to choose the next movie. Ironically, in this system, by abstaining from voting, Kiesa became qualified to unilaterally pick a movie from the eligible candidates. (Don't ask.) She picked Panic Room, another netflix movie.

Though I had seen it during the theatrical run, watching it again was most excellent. Heart-pounding David Fincher intensity at its best.

After this, in the spirit of the holiday season, I proposed that we watch Mr Hanky The Christmas Poo to usher in Christmas Eve. And so we did. (I think I've seen that episode a few too many times by now.)

After the viewings, scottgalvin.com entertained the masses by teaching the dogs, Emmit and Brady, to carry pepsi bottles in their mouths and balance remote controls on their heads.

bouncing decided to stay in the scottgalvin.com house in the spare bedroom. Since I needed to get to work in the morning, I decided it would be easier to make part of the trip before sleeping than after. I departed at around 0330.

On the way home, I got a simultanious dose of awful luck and good luck. I hit a speed trap on I-70, going far faster than the law allows. (Hey, it was the middle of the night, and there was nobody on the road.) I theorize that even though I am male, I may somehow possess some degree of law enforcement officer charm. (Would that be a special ability?) He gave me a warning, said he wouldn't write a ticket this time "because it's Christmas eve", and said to slow down.

Tuesday. Christmas Eve. Worked from 1130 until 2000. The store closed at 1900, to remain closed all day on Christmas (the one and only day of the year when King Soopers is closed throughout the day). After about 1930, in the big huge building with absolutely no customers, it started to become genuinely spooky. Me and the other closing guy wrapped things up as fast as we could, and got out at 2010.

I returned home, having procured a trunkload of presents for other family members. Somehow, I had managed to get the Christmas shopping done during breaks and lunches. Earlier in the day, I had said I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to finish it all on time. Mom suggested that we might delay the opening of presents until Friday. I didn't like this idea, because I liked to have Christmas on Christmas, but I reluctantly accepted it, since I was the one who was having trouble staying on schedule.

I came home with presents, thinking that because I had been the reason for the delay, we would go ahead and open them on time. Well, it turned out some other people in the family were behind schedule too. But I had worked so hard to get everything on time, that I gave them the gifts I had bought anyway. And so, it turned out that present opening was spread over the course of 3 (or 4) days. Welcome to our family.

On Christmas Eve, I convinced the other members of the family that it would be a good idea for them to watch Waking Life. (Everyone with any appreciation whatsoever for good art should watch that movie.) Since the movie is made by a filmmaker local to the Austin area (near San Antonio), bouncing actually recognized one person in the credits as a musician he had seen play live in person. Unbelievable. He also recognized a few of the locations.

Wednesday. On Christmas Day, we went skiing. I thought it a most odd time, but it was the only day that all of the following conditions were met: (1) bouncing was in town, (2) I was not working, and (3) a day that qualified for discount tickets obtained through my mom's company.

And so, the four of us -- mom, dad, bouncing, and myself -- got up early in the morning and went up to Copper Mountain. Skiing turned out to be most enjoyable. Lines weren't bad at all, and the snow was good. I was slightly peeved that I had managed to lose my goggles and gloves in an unknown box during the move. (I knew exactly where they had been in the Castle Lair, and I must have packed them somewhere, but I could not find them anywhere.) But I managed to get by, and had lots of fun.

Thursday. Back to work. 1430-2300 shift. If one counts number of days I worked between the previous Thursday, December 19, and December 26, I worked 7 days out of that 8 day range. (The only day off being Christmas when the store was closed.) And I'm considered a part time employee! Eeek. The scheduling during that period happened to suck royally, making me seriously think it might be a good idea to seek future employment elsewhere. (Reactionary thinking, I know, but I can't help it.)

Fortunately, I managed to trade my morning shift on Sunday the 29th (i.e. today) with a coworker, so I was able to go to the airport in the morning with bouncing for his departure, and work in the afternoon.

Friday and Saturday I had off work. Friday, I troubleshooted a few buildmeasite problems with scottgalvin.com. bouncing went to the store to get his film developed and did some last minute post-christmas shopping. We met mom for lunch. (Unluckily, she had to work on the day I had off. sigh.)

In the evening, bouncing showed us many pictures he had taken from the past several months. (Some of them again lead me to think that it would really be a good idea for me to finish writing the last few portions of a much-delayed multi-part epic. It seems to be turning into a lifelong project. He's only been in San Antonio since earlier today, and he's already got them up on his website. Crazy bastard.)

Saturday. bouncing came up with this nutty idea that we all rent bicycles and ride around the city of Boulder. Everyone in the family was agreeable, and so... we did! It was enjoyable, but it left me with a sore butt. (I haven't ridden a bike in a long while.)

Sunday. In the morning, we took bouncing to the airport. Back to San Antonio with him.

Afternoon, I went to work at 1330.

Before work, feeling a sudden wave of post-holiday blues, I went to the Black and Read store on Wadsworth to browse.

I now find myself beginning to become immersed in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Well, the first chapter was extremely interesting, anyhow. Blame it on the bookstore. I paid $1.50 for a used paperback copy. (Cover price: $1.95. 60's vintage.)

Alrighty. I'm tired. But now, I'm mostly caught up on documenting my ever-strange life.

I think I'll see if I can tweak the collective into working before I head off to bed.