As you might gander from the timing of this post, I have successfully concluded the connection of Club Todder to the Internet. Oh my God, what have we done?

This was a fun experience. It involved:

1. Me getting home from work and deciding, “Yes, it’s time to rearrange the apartment.” Yeah, we’ve been here 10 days. Somewhere, all my former roommates are laughing.

2. Me deciding to take a nap so that I would be well-rested in the event I had to be up all night getting this friggin’ network going.

3. Me, half-awake, answering my cell phone. It was Todder. He is lonely as hell down there in Demonopolis, knowing that he’s about to come back to the wonderful clime of Huntsville, where his friends all eagerly await his return and fear that copperheads will kill him before it’s over with. [You're a braver man than I, Todd. I think I'd've "forgotten" the algae-killer stuff after #18 and #19 came in quick succession.] The count of copperheads Todd’s killed this summer is 20. In total, counting those of us who have visited Club Todder South, is 27, and that doesn’t count the two snakes Ant-Dawg should have killed if he’d had the same hair trigger I had [or if I'd bummed a shotgun from Todd before midnight Saturday].

4. Me, frustrated, trying to get my fscking network card working.

5. Me, surprised when Jeff called to see how things were going. Me, grateful when Jeff said, “Sure, I’ll be up,” when I asked if I could bring the router/firewall box over.

6. Me, blonde, missing three turns on the way to the Geek Country Estate.

7. We, Jeff and I, having fun being geekish and exploring the fun of the D-Link DI-704 box. =) She, Amy, blithely ignoring her husband and his friend.

8. Me, sitting on hold for half of the evening with Knology once Jeff found the MAC address of the box.

9. Me, thanking Jeff profusely for being his geeky self.

10. Me, pissed at the lack of signs on Rideout Road^W^WResearch Park Boulevard that don’t tell you that the on-ramps to I-565 Eastbound are closed for repaving tonight.

11. Me, taking Old Madison Pike instead of Bradford to get home, thereby wasting yet another five minutes.

12. Me, fairly sprinting into Club Todder while I tried not to drop the Precious Dear Router.

13. Me, slipping into Blaker’s room to connect his laptop to ClubTodder.net.

14. Me, typing this silly little post that I dearly hope will cause some of you to laugh.

15. Me, trying to decide what pr0n site to leave up on Blaker’s computer when I finish this post, or whether to simply leave it on NHL.com.

16. Me, wondering whether Blaker tried out for UAH’s hockey team today, and if he did, hoping like hell he made it.

Well, after checking with Jeff this morning, my plans for getting the ClubTodder.net network up and running will be alive soon enough. All I have to do is give Knology the MAC address of the new router, than bada-boom, bada-bing, we’re UP. So I’ll get home from work tonight and start the big move…including moving the cable modem and firewall-to-be back to my room. I figure the network will be easier to work from back there because of how my room will be organized, and given that few people other than myself will ever be back there, there’s little chance that it will be monkeyed with…

Okay, you would have seen this last night if I had gotten the cable internet connection working yet. I haven’t, for a variety of reasons. However, I will endeavor to get those going tonight. Found out my new computer has a fried motherboard; have to see if I still have the receipt, etc. from that endeavor. I’ll probably buy a new motherboard anyway, since it just makes sense to do so and get started building the multimedia box for Club Todder.

Speaking of the absent third resident of Club Todder [not a third wheel!], I am happy to report that Todd is fat, dumb, and happy down in Catfishland, and desires to be home here in Huntsville forthwith. In the meantime, he takes great pleasure in Anthony and I visiting and killing copperheads in the dark. “I kill snakes–I kill ‘em!”

Back to work-type stuff. This is the happiest and most relaxed I’ve been on a Monday in at least a year.

Yes, I will be leaving tonight to go visit the Todder. I don’t know quite when yet, but we won’t be back until Sunday. If we’re leaving later tonight, I think I’m going to get the beginnings of clubtodder.com’s home network put together. [Hmmmm...I should probably get clubtodder.net and make that be the network home. Hmmmmm...] Anyway, I’m off for the next couple of days, and I still don’t have ‘net access at home, so for all of you wondering, “Just where the heck is Geof?”–now you know.

Ugh. As if the naming of various sports stadia after corporations wasn’t bad enough, this couple seeks to have a corporate name for their child. How utterly ridiculous is that?

Unfortunately, someone has my TOTK.com address in their address book. That person is infected by the SirCam virus. TOTK.com forwards my mail to my SpamCop account, which filters my mail. However, even if I delete the mail, I get charged for the use of the filtering. As SirCam mails are large, I’m getting huge swaths of my SpamCop account zapped by this one In-duh-vidual.

Now I have to see if I can just blanket delete all mail from that luser and keep my money intact!

“M4d pr0pz” to Jess, Gareth, and Kat for devising Amy and Jeff’s anniversary dinner. The only role I had in this little adventure was being the one with the steel-trap mind who remembers when anniversaries are. =) I held a small amount of trepidation for our evil plan, but it would appear that they both enjoyed it, even if Amy did slap the fire out of me as I walked past her on the way to the wondergeek apartment.

They had fun and got a good memory. Mission accomplished.

Happy Anniversary, Jeff and Amy! Three down and who knows how many to go!

…that both PJ and Gricelda have lived through their first month of marriage. I talked to her in person for about 45 minutes yesterday at UAH, and I just got off the phone with PJ. Those of you who had “less than one month” in the “When will Gricelda|PJ snap and shoot PJ|Gricelda?” pool just lost. Sorry.

Ever had one of those days where you just sit back and admire your friends’ handiwork? Today is one of those days for me. =)

Go take you a gander at Wondergeeks. We’re all now in syndication at the Great Portal de Wondergeeks. Heh. Beats loading everyone’s page to check for new entries.

So hey, yo, we’re going to do something like this with clubtodder.com [although CT has many more plans]. If you’ve got ideas for things we should do with the CT Web site, you got comment space below, yo. [I added the ability to comment on all posts back to IJSM. Might as well let you rant back at me.]

The only bad thing about getting up at 5:15–other than your friends questioning your sanity–is that your body’s ready for lunch at 9:30. =)

Two work days in the new digs, two work days at work right before 7:00 a.m. I think I’m going to check weather.com and see if hell has frozen over yet…

My day is a little sadder now that I have found that Eudora Welty has died. She is indeed an amazing woman, and I consider her writing to be more true to the ethos of Mississippi than William Faulkner’s. Unlike Faulkner, she saw no higher purpose in her characters, no miserable lives lived in the debt of the sins of the forefathers. No, it was enough to just write about what was happening now and leave history to the historians…

Well, the fecal matter has hit the air circulation device. I fear that I am entrapped in it this time. It’s not of my doing, but I will be involved at some point–of this I am sure. I’ll let it wait to hit the papers before I talk about it…

I awoke this morning at 5:15 to the sound of my alarm clock. I am unused to a mostly-silent bedroom at home; however, my TV currently lives in the main room of Club Todder, and it will probably remain there for some time. I am a social creature, and I crave being out there as opposed to back there in my bedroom. Besides, it is a tad small.

Man, it was hard to focus this morning. I sat down for my morning conversation with God–something that I’m sad to report I haven’t been faithful in maintaining–and the various concerns and noises of my sleep-addled brain made focus on a two-way discussion with God nearly impossible. By the time I felt as if I’d finally said my piece, gotten some peace, and asked for the one thing I knew I’d need today–FOCUS–it was 5:45.

It hasn’t gotten much quieter this morning inside my head, but hopefully it soon will. It was rather fun to stride in to work before 7:00 a.m. I could get used to this–and the morning view from the mountain: breathtaking.

Damn. We got it moved.

Thanks in no particular order to Amy, Jeff, Kat, Sean, David, and Scott, who helped me move in record time. We have all the big furniture in the new digs; because my bedroom is so small–my granddaddy would say, “You can’t sling a dead cat in here without hittin’ somethin’!”–half of my furniture is in the living room. However, this was part of the plan anyway for a temporary basis until we all three get moved into Club Todder.

All I want now that I have consumed one 32-oz Gatorade and am eyeing the second is a shower, clean clothes, and a margarita from Rosie’s. I am to meet Brian and Suzan for the first time this evening…Amy fears Brian, Sean, and I being in the same place at once. Heh.

…is tomorrow. It doesn’t seem quite real to me.

You can consider it very likely that you won’t hear from me until next week. Knology will be providing the cable modem access for Club Todder, but to tell the truth, I don’t know that I’ll set it up this weekend or not. The cable guy is scheduled to come to the new place late Saturday afternoon, so I have to wait on him to get there.

Moving should go pretty quickly: we have my truck, David’s truck, and Kat’s dad’s behemoth diesel with a lift. [I have to be even nicer than normal to Kat for this. All this, and she fixes my computer, too.]

I figure we’ll have the big stuff moved by noon, at which point we’ll break for lunch and probably crack open a few brews to celebrate the big part of the move being over. I can move my own small stuff and clothes very easily, and heck, I have two weeks to do so. I want to go through things pretty carefully and make a conscious [take|ditch|donate] decision on everything I bring in to the new place. I thought I would do that last time, and you know, all I succeeded in doing was waiting until the last minute and keeping a bunch of stuff I didn’t need. Typical of the IJSM Headmaster. =)

Okay, so after I bitched yesterday about hating email, I got all sorts of interesting variances on that theme.

One of the people I’d had email issues with–that were all my fault, really–emailed me and was like, “Are we cool, dude?” I assured him that we were. My frustration in all areas bled through to other places yesterday, which isn’t really fair.

My main frustration is with my my employer. We just changed company presidents. I think the new guy will be better, but I never like being around for corporate shakeups. [Is it any wonder I'll be leaving the business world?] I think our new man is going to be good for the company–he used to command the big command at Redstone Arsenal here in Huntsville. Still, I’m just wary, making the repeated joke that the all-hands meeting we have in the morning will start with, “You’re all fired!” [I make jokes when under stress. It's not as satisfying as screaming, but people accept it better.]

The other big frustration I had via email yesterday was solved by…lots more email, most filled with support and sympathy for a shared situation. Heck, I even got a phone call from one of the people in the group, someone who’s always given me a hard time. I guess I never understood why she did that, other than the fact that her relationship to me in that group guarantees it. [I hate to be so vague here, but I'm not wanting to tear these individuals down personally. I've done that here before, and it's spiteful, so I'm trying not to do it again.]

I guess I’m still amazed that people care and words mean something. The thought I had after finishing yesterday’s entry was that, like television, this is just a medium: it is neither rare or well done.

I don’t know. But I got elected Chief Justice of the UAH SGA Judicial Council.

Uh-oh. Someone went out and decided I was fit to lead again. Their mistake, not mine…=)

Hey, Todd, Blake? Y’all better be good roommates [and I expect you to be], because I don’t want to move for at least two years. =)

Ahhh, the joys of moving.

My new landlord had to move us–evidently the folks in the first apartment roughed it up a bit–to a new apartment. This necessitated much phone calling to those who already knew of the switch. However, I now have it all done.

Made for a fun morning, though. If the phone trail’s this bad, I hate to think what the move’s going to be like. But I blessedly have wonderful friends to help me move.

Heh. We are less than a week from moving into Club Todder. =)

It was good to have Todd come up and visit yesterday. He needed the heck out of Demopolis for a while–ever since he and the ASCE Concrete Canoe folks had gotten back from San Diego, he’s worked every day at his dad’s catfish farm. Getting back to Huntsvegas was good for him, I think, and I know I enjoyed having the ugly fool around. =)

We’re working on the plans to get Club Todder up and running. Yes, I have purchased the ClubTodder.com domain–it’s a joke from back when Todd used to have his mom’s house out in Harvest and we set up a couple fun parties out there. We could go from the way the house normally looked to “Club Todder” in about two hours.

I think the most fun I had yesterday was watching Todd, Blake, and Anthony in a pickup hockey game at the Iceplex. Blake’s getting damned good at being a goalie on ice with his regular time…I hope he makes UAH’s team. That would rule. Todd looked like crap his first few shifts, but he got his legs back under him and started to play decently well. Damn, Anthony’s fast on skates, even if he can’t put the puck in the net. I know he’s frustrated with hitting the crossbar on the one open shot he had on Blake.

This is infectious enough to make me want to play. I gotta shed some poundage first, but it will be worth it.

I’m so going to enjoy living with these two yahoos. We’re not typical college guys–sure, we like to party, but we’re not going to have a crappy looking apartment. We even are working on the Damn Rules of Club Todder. Rule #1: Keep your mess in your room. Rule #2: No female spends consecutive nights at Club Todder. Rule #3: No smoking.

We’ve got more–from the serious to the silly. So in the meantime, I plan and plot and await the move. Living here by UAH has been fun, but I yearn to move up on the mountain soon.

Phone service move planned: CHECK.
Cable service move planned: CHECK.

I will call Huntsville Utilities Monday to get that move planned; that’s the last of them, other than calling my long-distance provider. So I have that and then of course just the fun of packing it all. I start this weekend with throwing out everything I can lay my hands on that doesn’t need to move to the new digs.

Okay, I’ve discussed panentheism before. The following is excerpted from an email I sent someone this morning [I'm withholding the addressee's name intentionally and for my own reasons], but I think it’s worth a read. This is the closest I’ve come to a good case for what I believe–words too often muddy the water.

(more…)

Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus did a much better job of chronicling the All-Star Game than I would have.

For all of you out there thinking that Cal got a grooved pitch from Chan Ho Park: get a grip on reality. Bobby V and Piazza figured Cal was going to be overwhelmed by the fan attention, and tossing a nice one over the plate is an easy strike if you’re trying to win. But I guess Bobby forgot his baseball history, as Cal hit homers in 2,129, 2,130, and 2,131 of his games-played streak. Cal Ripken, Jr. just does not let external pressure bother him.

But I do wish he’d had a few more pitches in that at-bat and in the game. We could have seen all of his batting stances…=)