So… at a small cafe in pacific heights today, sara and i saw mary mcdonnell having lunch. it was nice. i wanted so badly to be all fanboy, but i knew i’d just come across all weird. the friends we were with were all like “omigod it’s the president!”

(wow, this post is a lot longer than i had intended. i hope you enjoy it anyway.)

so kim and i and jared and kemer suffered an abortive attempt to snag a wii on saturday morning. as it turns out:

hot tip about ebgames getting wiis early != actual hot tip.

but sara got to play with the wii at friday’s holiday party (thanks, kurt!), and so around 9pm on saturday, we decided (after much debate about how we were definitely Not Too Old To Do This Kind Of Thing) to go crazy and camp out for a wii on sunday morning. we showed up at Toys’R'Expensive at about 10pm and got chased off by the security guard (long story). we went for coffee and donuts, sat in the car in the parking lot and watched DVDs until midnight, and then set up camp after the security guard left. we came prepared with many many layers of clothes, many many things to do, but we did not come prepared for idiots. we were first in line (a dubious honor), but the guy right behind us could NOT shut up, and the the word ‘confirmed’ must have been on the vocabulary list in his weekly ‘How To Talk Good’ class. 40 consoles were ‘confirmed’. his place in line was ‘confirmed’. his wife was #11 in line at target, that was also confirmed. i wanted to see if he could confirm my sleeping bag stuffed up his ass, but i was pretty cold at the time and needed the extra covering. his underdeveloped sense of humour (don’t ask for examples, as i can’t give them anymore — my ‘cringing’ muscles are now broken) and poor social skills just about sent sara and i over the edge. and his crazy wife, oh my god. this woman’s every other word was a conjugation of the term that denotes intercourse between two individuals. she was waiting in line just up the road at target, called him about every ten minutes to ask if they’d gotten vouchers yet. i shit you not. there’s more to that story, but you really just don’t want to know.

anyway.

so we sat in line, people trickled in to wait in small groups until about 3:30am, and then there were about 20 people. after that, people really started showing up, and the stupid level just continued to rise. jeff foxworthy’s mentally incapacitated and pulchritudinally challenged twin brother showed up, and demonstrated his lack of ability to go 10 minutes without a cigarette. he and confirmation guy became best buds, and they and about 5 other guys had the same conversation for the next five hours:

1. how many Wiis there were
2. the probability of getting a Wii tonight
3. boy, it was too bad they couldn’t go to work tomorrow because they’d be too busy playing with their Wiis, ha ha ha.
4. how many Wiis there were
5. when they would get their vouchers (6am).

lather, rinse, repeat until your ears bleed.

i managed to sleep from about 4-5 (yayy headphones), covered in lots of clothes and a sleeping bag. sara didn’t fare quite as well. we were both suffering from the aforementioned imbecilic auditory proximity, but i was better able to tune it out.

anyway, about 6am we got up and waited for the manager to come out and hand out vouchers. we should have just kept playing cards, because he didn’t come out until 7:30, but whatever. the time spent between 6am and 7:30 we mostly watched Captain Confirmation and his sidekicks race back and forth in front of the store windows, tracking every move the manager made to see if he was Actually Coming To The Door This Time. you know when you walk past someone’s house and they have a fence and a dog or two? and the dog keeps up with you as you go past, or if you turn around and go the other way? it was a lot like that, only with more drool.

we finally got our voucher, there were about 40 Wiis, maybe 60-70 people in line. when we actually got into the store (8am-ish, after some coffee and warming ourselves up at pavilions), everything went very smoothly. we got two more wiimotes and nunchucks for a total of three. behind the counter they had a literal PILE of extra Wiimotes and nunchucks, so if you guys have been looking for one, i would bet that they actually have a few left (you should probably call them first to make sure).

then we went home, hooked it up, and played until our elbows gave out. we went out to go see Agamemnon at 3pm with friends, and that’s when i was able to catch up on my sleep. idiots and their kin notwithstanding, it was fully worth the wait.

so yay! christmas wish fulfilled! i hope you all enjoyed my diatribe.

sara and i have been a little crazy! we took a day this past week and went to be audience members on the ellen show. it was nuts! Al Gore was supposed to be the big guest for that day — but they had already taped his segment a couple weeks ago :( however, we did get to see matthew fox from LOST, which was pretty cool.

SO

we’re here on day 12 of the ‘twelve days of giveaway’. we’d heard that the twelfth day is the Big One, and it’s sheer luck that we got in that day (another story for another time). we do some segments, and then the big moment comes and Ellen starts revealing the giveaways on the show: first thing she says is something about how we should pack our bags — and then reveals a GIANT piece of luggage. “Oh my,” I thought, “we’re travelling somewhere, aren’t we?”

and then she says how nice it is to keep in touch with each other, and then lifts another box, inside which is a samsung a900m, and *then* she tells us we get 6 months of free service! wheee!

so the crowd is pretty excited at this point, lots of screamin’ and shoutin’. the next thing that happens is that the music stage door slides open and in it is a platform with a bunch of people sitting in airplane seats, surrounded by flight attendants. that’s all set up to announce that in addition to the luggage and cell phones, we’re getting two round-trip tickets to cancun! and gosh, whatever could we do in cancun? well, i guess we could stay five days and four nights at this resort! each room is decked out (hell, each room has an ipod dock) in all the latest awesomeness. so you could say we’re a little stoked. we’re going to cancun on a free vacation! (well, minus taxes).

so this all sounds pretty awesome, right? yeah, well, it gets better. now i want you to remember: sara and i are each audience members at the show. can you do the math on that one? how many times do you think i’ll be going to cancun? (psst — the answer is not “once”)

check out the resort’s site… but you will very quickly tire of the graphic of the blond grabbing her own boob (though i can’t say it bothers me that much), since it keeps coming up all over the site.

so that’s our past couple days! we spent all last night moving our contact list from the old phone to the new ones. we could have done it over bluetooth, but i don’t have bluetooth on my computer (poor thing is so old it’s mostly made of wood, brass, and pistons), so we had to do it by hand… ugh! i’m going to buy an adapter though, so we can upload our own mp3 ringers and all that.

here’s the link to the giveaway page at the ellen show site. i don’t know how long it’ll be up there, but you can check it out.

today’s the holiday party at r&h — sara and i are bringing rum and the BEST eggnog in the universe and inviting a few people over to the groove lounge.

This is the first release of a widget I’ve written for wordpress. It’s nothing spectacular, it’s just a script that reads in lines from your fortune database and spits out a random one in your sidebar. I love the fortune program, and I’m just tickled to make it into a widget. Basically it does what you see in the header up at the top of this page (reload the page to make it change), but in a list item in the sidebar.

Requirements:

• A theme that supports widgets
• Henrik Aasted Sorenson’s fortune.php script
• a local install of the unix fortune program, or local access to the fortune database files.

instructions for installation and usage are in the downloadable file.

Download it now: .zip .tgz

well, now there’s no more lying if it was you.

you guys won’t see a lot of changes, but i’ve made a lot of behind-the-scenes changes today on this site and the embedded gallery (that’s the thing that shows the pretty pictures on this site). a lot to do with how outgoing mail is formed, since gmail was picking most of it up as spam and i’d never see it. so, that’s fixed. new user registrations and backup notifications will now arrive in my inbox, unmolested.

also, backups of the mysql backend are now scheduled daily, which is a load off my mind. i’m glad i did it, too, since i’m a farking moron and dropped the entire database earlier today, when i thought i was just dropping a table. oops. “oh yeah. hurts, don’t it? won’t do that no more.”

lastly-ish, i reworked the categories to be a little more useful. we’ll see how that goes.

back in college, i ran this cable radio station with my best friend dan. cable radio, as in the transmission was along the dorm’s cable lines and not over the airwaves. weird, huh? anyway, we had a lot of fun playing songs and cracking each other up late into the night. i’m pretty sure that no one ever listened to the station except for dan’s girlfriend, but it was fun anyway. this site is a lot like that. if you’re out there, hi. we’ll be broadcasting for the forseeable future, so stay tuned.

i’m mostly posting this so that i’ll remember it: you can now buy previously viewed movies from netflix, with hardcover case and jacket art, for wicked cheap ($5.99 in most cases). i think i know where a lot of my library will be coming from from now on.

how awesome is that? very.

i doodled this in about half an hour last night and tonight, wanting to play with my new pens that sara got me. i don’t have anything like full control over them yet, but i’m working on it. so — it’s been a couple years since i studied anatomy, so these hips are at the wrong angle and the hands aren’t resting quite right, but overall i like it. i can see a better version of it in my brain. :)  the rust is still there, but it’s starting to flake away.

it’s tuesday, and that’s crepes day! we all truck over to KC’s Crepes Cafe on Lincoln, just south of LMU. it’s a japanese-style crepes place run by a horde of japanese folks, including KC, all of whom are super-nice. their boba drinks are second only to the crepes. it’s an awesome one-two combo that is sure to give you food coma for at least a few hours of the afternoon.

i had the bbq chicken pizza crepe today. mmmmmm. i also love the chicken curry crepe (not on the menu anymore, but they’ll make it if you ask for it). and nothing beats the green tea latte boba, except maybe the passionfruit juice boba. :)

i’m going to go to sleep now…

so i said that i’d finished the marquee. i had. demons in the intertubes, however, prevented me from uploading (long story involving DHCP and a stupid way of keeping track of my internal addresses — now resolved) to share with… well, me, since this ‘blog’ is hardly public consumption. :) anyway.

work has been… interesting. a higher-up has announced that he’s leaving, causing a lot of rumour and consternation in amongst the masses. certainly doesn’t do much for the feeling of job security. scary, actually. i’ve never been worried about my job before, at least not here.

in other news, my friend jude has left for india for 6 months — i wish her well, but sara and i are going to miss her a lot. from what’ we’ve heard so far, it sounds like she’s already having a blast. good luck, jude!

okay, lots of massive animals to set up and prelight. back to work.