I was wondering if I’d get a Traffic Asshole before the Thanksgiving holiday, and sure enough, society came through for me.

Behold: A double-long dump truck doing 20 miles an hour in the fast lane!

He stayed in the fast lane for probably five miles. Traffic was backed up way beyond that even. Once you got past him - smooth sailing.

Thank you, Traffic Asshole, for a nice commute just before the holidays.

Well, I knew my good mood couldn’t last forever, and after Sunday’s beating, it didn’t have much left to it. Today pretty much killed it off.

I’ve fought with things pretty much all day long to get them to work correctly. I mean, everything down to the weather was against me.

I went during lunch to UPS my PS2 to Sony. It was clear when I looked out the window then it started raining buckets as soon as I stepped out the door. I got to the UPS place and stood in this ridiculous line for like 20 minutes, then as soon as I was done, the rain stopped. Fucking figures.

Our marketing department pisses me off, too. We recently put out a press release telling people at the bottom of the release to “go request such-and-such whitepaper at the web site.” Prior to release, I informed the marketers that we don’t have anywhere for people to request such things. Do I need to create something? “No, they’ll just email us.” Are you sure? I mean, people see something like that, and they want a form. “No, don’t worry about it. They’ll just email us.” Fine.

The request came in today - around a week later - that they need a form for this whitepaper thing. Except now it’s a last minute emergency instead of something I could actually have taken some good time with and made extensible and functional. Thanks for the forethought, guys! Everything with marketing is always a fucking fire drill. One would think that, as capable humans, they’d learn by now. Maybe I’m overestimating their abilities. After all, these are the people who gave the graphic designer full credit for the web site I built.

I woke up Saturday morning around 8:00a and finished reading my book, Artemis Fowl, while lying in bed. Excellent book, and it put me in a reasonably good mood.

Around 9:00a or so, I decided it was time to call Sony regarding my Playstation 2 issues. I steeled myself for a long fight on the phone, getting ready to sit on hold and be transferred from person to person while they tried to stall me long enough to give up. I prepared my soul for the endless ridiculous troubleshooting steps that they’d send me through repeatedly. Then I dialed.

I didn’t wait on hold at all. I got straight through to a technician, Michael. Michael asked me a couple of fairly simple questions regarding the problem I was seeing and the steps I’d already taken to solve it. After around three minutes of answering questions, he offered me a “waived fee” (reads: free!) repair. No fight, no hassle, no hold time, no transfers.

Holy shit.

He told me he’d email me the information to send in with my PS2 to the repair facility. I thanked him and hung up. Sure enough, the info I needed was in my inbox this morning. If this all goes well, I’m going to fill out a positive feedback form for these guys. That just rocks.

Got my chores done reasonably quickly and had some time to just sit down and relax. Watched a little TV. That sort of thing. Honestly, I don’t remember a lot of what went on because I was feeling generally good and overall just relaxed.

Saturday night Jenn and I went to see Elf. That movie was too funny. I love Will Ferrell anyway, but in this he was too much. I laughed totally hard and felt completely justified in spending my $8 to see it. I’ll be getting it when it comes out on DVD and will add it to my standard holiday rotation.

Sunday…

Ugh.

I don’t have a lot of Good Days, so I revelled in Saturday’s glory. Everything about Saturday rocked. I was in a good mood all day long, things generally went my way, I didn’t have to stress about things or feel like I needed to fight people to get things done. It was great.

Sunday, on the other hand, I could probably have done without. I ended up going to the mall to the local Cost Plus World Market to pick up some spices I wasn’t able to get at the grocery store. Of course, they were understaffed at the checkout line and I got behind two people buying 20+ glass items, each of which had to be individually hand-wrapped and packaged… It took me like an hour to buy three packets of spices.

My parents each called me to “helpfully” inform me that, even though they’re not moving anywhere for months, they drug down 12 boxes of schoolwork from the attic that I have to go through. Normally I’d say “pitch it all” but it’s not just mine - it’s mixed in with my sisters’ stuff. And I’d like to have my trophies and things, so I guess I’ll be going through boxes this weekend, exactly what I wanted to do.

Which got me stewing over the upcoming holiday weekend.

I hate holiday weekends. Why? Because they’re not restful. All holidays do for me is generate stress and irritibility.

I don’t like turkey. I don’t like ham. Don’t ask me why, I just don’t. Weird? Maybe, but I’m sure you can think of a few foods you’re not too partial to, also. But you know what holiday “feasts” consist of? You guessed it. We had lobster one year. That was great. I remember a year we had Chinese food, too, and that was really cool. The rest of the time, ugh. (Luckily, Jenn’s family is eating long before mine, and Jenn’s family is going to an all you can eat buffet - anything you want. That’s perfect as far as I’m concerned. I’ll fill up there and then just “make an appearance” at my family’s dinner.)

I don’t like family gatherings. I don’t really have anything to say to people. Folks ask me what I’ve been doing at work, but there’s no point in trying to explain it because the people at work don’t understand what I do. All that ends up doing is causing a glazed look on whoever I’m talking to, which further irritates me.

I don’t like the lack of coordination and scheduling. I don’t like driving all over hell and back trying to make it to everyone’s house because everyone wants to “see me.”

What the holiday ends up being is less a holiday and more a “try to please everyone else” fest. Fuck that shit. I’m going to fucking snap one of these years and then… well, just you wait. They’ll be talking about it for generations to come.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is - I have a four day weekend coming that I was hoping was going to be one day of hectic shit and three days of rest and relaxation. Instead I’ve got one day of hectic shit, one day of going through boxes of shit, and two days of trying to calm down and chill out before Monday shows up again to piss me off. What a waste of paid time off. I should have just opted to work through it so I’d have an excuse to not have to deal with any of it. At least I’d be able to get something done in the office with no one there.

I was looking at my blog this morning and I realized that there’s still a lot of work to do. I have some keen ideas for fixing it up a bit that, pending on how much time I get this weekend, I may get around to doing. Then again, I may save it for next weekend when Jenn’s at work so I can actually concentrate on it.

Things I want to do include: Get rid of the huge list of “date” links along the side navbar. That’s nuts.

Make the templates a little more standardized by using includes rather than having the template physically on every single page. That might not make sense to the non-technical, but basically, I want to maintain my template in one spot, not on each page. Easier to update, right?

Fix the TrackBack thing. It doesn’t seem to want to put the TrackBack URL in there.

Fix the admin interface so entering entries with formatting is a little easier. Greymatter had a much better interface so I’ll probably just rip off some of the Javascript from there and integrate it into the pMachine interface.

Fix the little blurb things (see just below this entry) so that if I make them links to stuff on Amazon, you can mouseover the link and see a picture of what I’m talking about. Sort of like a picture tooltip.

Put my Amazon, BlogSnob, and AllPosters affiliate stuff back on the site. It may not actually generate any revenue, but they make it look special.

Put my junk store, wish list, and sites-to-visit links back up. Almost more for my convenience than for yours, since you cheap-asses never seem to buy me anything, nor do you buy anything from me.

See if I can somehow get the center column to dynamically size itself so those with higher resolutions on their monitors can fit more on the screen. I had it working this way before, but for some reason it broke, so I took it out.

Change my “about” and resume pages over to PHP to take advantage of the new template.

Fix the little butterfly in the top corner of the page so clicking it takes you to the home page.

Lose the calendar in the left bar. Is that really any help to anyone?

Update my terribly out of date “about” page.

Fix the entries on the blog that have pictures. The images need to move to the pMachine “upload” directory and the location in the entry needs to be changed. Also, the “pop-up” window functionality for images has been lost in the move to pMachine so I need to build that back up again and put it back in the appropriate entries.

Fix entries that link to other entries so they don’t link into Greymatter.

I think that’s it. At least for now.

In other news, I’m stewing a little over the whole Playstation 2 debacle. I’m really hoping I don’t run into trouble when I call them Saturday (and I know I’m going to end up calling them). Maybe just this once things can work out right the first time around? Stay tuned…

After badgering my boss (Greg - I’ll name him by name this time because he’s been bitching about how I refer to him here like he’s two different people) to try Time Crisis 3 out on his PS2 for a couple of days, he finally did and called me up last night to tell me that…

It worked.

So it’s not a problem with the game at all, but, rather, a problem with my Playstation 2, which I had a feeling was the case.

The thing is, I’m not at all comfortable with cracking that thing open to fix it, clean it, or what have you. I found all sorts of guides telling me how to fix it, ranging from a simple cleaning to adjusting gears to messing with the laser voltage, but none of them really made me keen on dealing with this thing.

Then I found that there’s a class action lawsuit against Sony for exactly this reason (official site here). Turns out, you can get a free repair from Sony if you call them and complain about it. I think I’m going to try that out before I commit to cracking it open or doing anything rash.

The more I read about it, the more irritated I get. This seems like a vastly common issue. Makes me wonder if Sony engineered them poorly specifically to get consumers to buy more units.