What is the sound of one geek clapping?

After driving around in what was a thoroughly unsafe vehicle because my brakes were wearing low, I went to my friend Kayte’s place today to get them replaced. Kayte’s husband, Jim, is a mechanic, and has a pretty nice home garage set up, and he graciously offered to do the brakes for me.

So I drove down, we jacked up the car and took the wheels off, and took a look at the brakes. However, after working on them some, we looked at the rotors that I had and realized that I only had half of them. Not only that, but the half that we did have… didn’t fit.

So I called the local Pep Boys where I’d special-ordered them and spoke to somebody about it. They had it on record that I’d already picked them up, so i asked them to check their inventory and make sure, at which point they realized that they still had them (duh, since they weren’t in my possession) and I told them that I was coming to pick them up.

So Jim and I drove the 45 minutes to go pick them up, and brought the incorrect ones with us. They gave me the rotors they had in stock, we verified that they were the right size, and drove the 45 minutes back. Somehow, the idiot guy at the counter convinced me to test the rotors on the other wheels, even though I knew that the holes drilled into the rotors didn’t fit the wheels at all. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d returned them anyway, because they don’t carry rotors in stock, so I wouldn’t have been able to replace the other ones anyway.

So, the upside: I learned how to replace brakes on my car, and it’s easy as hell. The downside: I only got half of them done. It’s really not much of a downside, though, because it was the rear brakes that were the ones that really needed to be replaced anyway.

I am kind of pissed at the guys at Pep Boys, though, although they really don’t have much to be responsible for, since it was listed right there in the computer as a part that fit my car.

(Please excuse the pitiful pun of a subject title; I couldn’t think of anything wittier.)

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2, which has various security updates. I think I’m actually coming up with a neat method of keeping my custom functions without having to rewrite whole files, which is nice. Now if only I can figure out a way to make it so I don’t have to update ANY files to keep my custom stuff in there, it’d be perfect.

EDIT: Interesting… I think it may have reset my stylesheets on me. Testing…

George Washington… Come on, you can do it. You know you want to.

Looks like I’m not going to California after all, or at least not during this month. The person out in California who is responsible for contracting us is waffling on it and rather than negotiate and pressure her into getting a move on, my company is just going to put it off altogether.

So I guess the St. Patrick’s Day celebration is off. Why is it that the fates always do this kind of stuff and never the “we realized that we’ve been overcharging you for your health insurance so here’s $500” kind of stuff?

Was there ever a moment in your life when you realized that the innocence was gone?

It may be a little stupid due to the whole 30-day/31-day/28-day month thing, but tonight marks two full calendar months without a cigarette. It was officially eight weeks (56 days) on Monday night, but this is the numerical line of two months.

Time quit: 8 weeks, 3 days, 1 hour, 44 minutes
Cigarettes not smoked: 708 (My God, that’s insane!)
Money saved: $177.00

Well, not really.

However, I was approached by my boss today and was given the opportunity to go to California for work for a couple weeks. So starting sometime the second weekend of March, I’ll be flying out to San Diego for two weeks, heading back on the 27th.

Anybody in that area want to get together? The weekend of St. Patrick’s Day, I may be flying up to the Sacramento/San Francisco area to hang with some friends, too.

Man, talk about exciting!

If you haven’t seen the Saw movies… see them. Seriously.

That’s all.

Here it is, eight in the morning on a Monday and I feel like I had no weekend at all. Technically I did, but it was just one day. I worked until eleven Friday night, took Saturday off, and then worked ten hours on Sunday. It’s amazing how something like that will make you feel like you’re just working continuously with no break whatsoever, and it’s also amazing how absolutely cranky that can make you feel.

Oh well, at least I’m taking the liberty of going into work later today. Hell, I didn’t even get home until nine last night; I think it’s only fair that I wait at least twelve hours before leaving the apartment again.

I watched Elizabethtown tonight. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Especially at the beginning, it seemed like it was merely trying to play off of the mood and feeling of the opening of Garden State; it had that same quality of emptiness to it. I think, in fact, that it was supposed to have that quality to it.

But as the connection between Orlando Bloom’s and Kirsten Dunst’s characters began to gain depth, so too did the depth of the film. The idea of an unlikely relationship developing between two unlikely peopl, all with the backdrop of dealing with the death of a family member is just unbelievable enough to make it work. There was definitely a chemistry between the two characters and while it definitely had a romantic quality to it, it went beyond that, too. I think that’s what I liked about it.

Like all of Cameron Crowe’s films, the music played a huge part of the movie, and I really loved how the music (which was practically its own character at the end of the film) framed the action.

Ultimately, though, it was the characters and their relationships that drove the heart of this movie. It’s definitely worth a viewing.