Not too much going on right now. I like the new job, it’s nice to work in a startup environment and feel useful again. Also just having a job in general makes me really appreciate my free time. Being able to commute into work with Tracy is nice.

I have this problem with my server where I can’t edit my password file, so at some point soon I need to rebuild it. It’s kind of annoying and its going to be a huge pain in the ass, but it needs to be done.

Blizzard announced their new new console game Starcraft: Ghost. I think that may finally get me to buy a console machine. Especially if they are able to come out with a new XBox that has the real home entertainment center features like Personal Video Recorder(PVR aka tivo-like) functionality. Even Starwars: Galaxies will come out on a console or two of some sort. But I’m not sure how well its going to do there.

I had this thought. What consumers need for their home electronics is a truly universal remote control. What about something like a bluetooth or Wi-Fi device that can talk to all sorts of consumer electronics devices instead of the standard infrared interface, it’d be even better if it had a nice programming interface as well. I have just 2 remotes and that’s actually very good because I have a DirectTivo which understands cable, tivo, and when i set it up, I was able to program it to control my Toshiba TV which is quite a cool feature, and I have a separate DVD player remote. But I’ve seen people with 6-8+ remotes and it’s damn confusing to find and manage all of them. I could have a remote control that could turn down my stereo, or tivo tonight’s episode of ER without using infrared. It’d be better if I could also log on to my home machine and have it do the same things as well. Giving consumer electronics devices IP addresses opens up a lot of fun possibilities. Of course the problem with this plan is that you need all the hardware manufacturers to implement features to do this, but still.

Its sad that I haven’t been able to put in more than one entry in the 6 weeks that I have been unemployed. But my drought is over. I am going to be employed and I’m writing an entry right right now. I have accepted a position at Avasta an application services management company. I can tell you more about it, but it’s probably easier for you to go to the site. The one sentence summary is that they are an operations company that makes sure your application whether its Siebel or Oracle Financials or a similar package has the 24×7 uptime it needs.

So what did I do during my unemployed break? I sat on my ass in a big way. Tracy’s parents were here for two weeks, and I played a lot of poker and War3 and CS. I am actually pretty sick of war3 now and I think I’m pretty much done playing it. It just doesn’t have the depth that starcraft did, but I guess this is something that everyone has known about. Oh well, what can you do, wait for an expansion I guess. What else did I do? not a lot, pretty sad eh?

Oh my god did Michigan get lucky this weekend in their season opening football game against Washington. What a stunner. Our kicker goes 0-2 from 36 and 42 yards, and then a different kicker misses from 27 yards, but finally the bring the original kicker comes back and hits the game winning 44 yarder as time expires. The mistakes were everywhere, but Michigan came out on top. Whew.