Not a all encompassing post tonight, I’m just pleased is all so I thought I would write a quickie. I went down to Scheels to look at some treadmills since mine is noisy and sucks. They were nice but too expensive. Maybe I’ll look on Craigslist for a nice one that is gathering dust. Anyway I looked in the clearance shoes and what do you know? They actually have the brand of running shoe that I wear and in my size too! And what’s this? Buy one pair and get another for half off? Sweet! They had 2 pairs of what I wear. Since the damn shoes retail for $120 and they were on sale for $100 if I got them both it would cost me $75 a pair (average). A savings of $45 a pair! Not bad, I don’t need new shoes yet but that’s a good deal and there’s never any deals when I do need new shoes. Anyway I took them through the checkout along with a new balaclava for when I’m freezing my balls off at work and they rang up for full price and I was like nonononono. These are on clearance, see? And this one is supposed to be half off too. She was like sorry and pushed a bunch of buttons and the total was then more in the range where it should have been but I didn’t really pay attention that close. When I went to enter it in the computer later I noticed that she priced both pairs at $50 a piece instead of only one! I ended up saving like $150 bucks total over the full price so… Sweet! I need to run more so I can actually use them now.

Another good thing is that the door on my truck is magically latching and closing again on its own after being broken for ohhhh… 2 or 3 years? I still need a whole new door but it kinda works sorta which is good news. I just need to string together 2 or 3 good days like this and I could really have something!

(Read on …)

The Huskers really didn’t play all that well but managed to knock Colorado out of bowl contention with an exciting end to the game to finish the regular season with an 8-4 record and the inside track to a New Years Day bowl game against most likely Florida St. or Georgia Tech. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t really believe that at the end of the year we would have the possibility of finishing with 9 wins and really only being completely out of 2 games the whole season with the lack of talent that was on the team. I mean seriously… how many white, walk ons with Irish names from western Nebraska can you start on defense and still win games? Apparently quite a few. Anyway I think they are on the right track again. I almost want to go to the bowl game but Florida is a long ass way to go.

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. Personally, I didn’t do anything at all since I had Thanksgiving at my Mom and Dad’s house a couple weeks ago. It’s the holiday season again. I don’t really care for it all that much, it kind of depresses me because it reminds me that I’m still single. It never ceases to amaze me how I’ve got things in my life pretty much handled except for when it comes to my love life. In that part I seem to be completely inept and unable to get it together. For the most part I have been able to just turn it off and become dead inside. Everything is a shade of gray and the days, weeks and months just blend together. Every once and a while someone will come along out of the blue and everything goes from gray to technicolor and the world seems completely different for a while until without fail it doesn’t work out and everything goes back to being gray again. Only then it seems worse after seeing the world in color for a while. Damn I’m tired of gray… Oh well, keep plugging along I guess. Such is life.

I ran another 5k last weekend right by my house so it was convenient. It was technically warmer than the one I ran with Joe in Elkhorn the week before but it didn’t feel like it because of the long walk to get to the starting line and the wait for the start. By the time the race started I was completely frozen and miserable. Here is a link to the results (there’s a 2 page pdf file, I didn’t come in next to last), and here is a link to all the data. I’ve got this weekend off and then one more race next weekend for the last race of the year. Joe is coming down from Omaha for that one since I have traveled for 3 of them that he wanted to do. I’ve committed myself to going out and running every day no matter what though since I’ve been slacking a little lately.

School is going well. I was having some issues at the beginning of this class as to what the teacher was looking for but I’m pretty much all dialed in now. I’ll be glad when this class is over though since I’m not really interested in the material. Next semester I get to take a Earth Science class instead of all this business crap so that will be nice change up before following it with… Statistics. Yuck. After that I can take Physics I and II though which will be cool. I enjoy science classes so that helps. My work is dragging their feet on the reimbursement though which is pissing me off. I turned the paperwork in a month ago and there’s still no money which is really irritating me because $505 bucks isn’t chicken poop.

I’ve decided to grow my hair out a little bit. I’ve had my hair really short for so long and I kind of want something new. Not real long or anything, something mid length. I don’t know, I guess I’ll look around for a style that I like in spring after going shaggy over the winter or something.

Wow that was memorizing literary genius right there… I don’t know why anyone reads this stuff. That’s all for today, I have a giant book to read and a paper to write before Sunday at midnight so I guess I’ll work on that.

Other than my investment portfolio being down 52.42% on the year I haven’t really been affected by the credit crunch and downturn in the economy all that much. That is until today when I got a notice that one of my credit cards was canceled for no reason effective immediately. Little glimpse into the future of the consumer credit card industry being the next bubble to burst maybe? Anyway I’m in good shape with absolutely no debt and the investment thing really doesn’t hurt me other than giving me heartburn since I’m in it for the long term. I’ve stopped adding more money into it other than the 401k and Roth even though conventional wisdom says now is the time to buy for huge future gains. I just can’t stomach it right now though even though I will probably regret it in a few years when I look at the charts of stocks jumping back up and think about how much I could have made. I feel better keeping it in cash. Speaking of cash I got another raise. It’s actually a couple months late so I will be getting back pay for it next week on payday. Since I will be getting my school reimbursement on the same check you can be sure that I am going to get absolutely bent over on taxes. Hooray! More taxes on top of the 27.37% of every dollar I have spent so far this year. Tracking every penny in Quicken gives you depressing stats like that and the 52% portfolio number. Interesting stuff but not for the faint of heart I guess.

Other than that I don’t have much. My computer geek technical side was stimulated this week when I set up a “promiscuous router” to boost the wireless internet signal here at work since it was cutting out all the time. Promiscuous Router is a pretty good band name. Anyway, you take the thing with you and plug it in wherever you are and it seeks out unprotected wireless network signals, attempts to connect to the strongest one, tests for internet connectivity until it finds one that has access, and attempts to reconnect to the strongest open access point with internet access afterward if you get disconnected. You then connect your computer wirelessly to the box using a separate encrypted SSID on your own private network. Basically it’s like having a cable modem connected to a wireless router without having to actually have the cable modem. It took a lot of tinkering to get it working reliably but now that I know how to set things up it’s running like a champ. The only issue is you need to use it in a densely populated area with lots of wireless routers around if it’s going to be of any real use. Actually you only need one open access point in range for it to work but I wouldn’t rely on that for all my internet access. If I didn’t need reliable internet at home for my Slingbox I could most likely ditch the cable modem and it’s bill since I live in an apartment building and there are four unprotected access points in range. Four sounds like enough redundancy to me. Well I’m sure I’ve bored my 6-10 daily readers to death with all this interesting networking talk but hey it’s all I’ve got today. It was a nice tinkering exercise that reminded me of why I wanted to make computers a career 8-10 years ago. Then I remembered all the leeches that come out of the woodwork wanting you to fix their stuff for free without even a thank you which made me not want to make it a career. Now I pump gas for a living!