Fuzzy Couch

The blog what speaks for Guido, Troy, Ryan, Brett and Matt

Guido Strotheide | Troy Lowe | Ryan Seggelke | Brett Thomson | Matt Janet

Friday, December 31, 2004

FedEX fumbles again

Posted by Troy @ 8:44 PM

So I was expecting a new office chair today and FedEX had it "on the vehicle for delivery" at 6:29 a.m. I anticipated an on-time delivery only to be disappointed yet again by the sub-par shipper.

At exactly 7:59 p.m. (one minute before they stop making deliveries) the driver logs "delivery exception" into the system. What makes it worse, is the holiday weekend puts the next possible delivery date on Tuesday night! I'm so mad, and the customer service rep provided no solution beyond offering, in his most sympathetic voice, "sorry the guy didn't do his job"

I'm getting fed up with FedEx employees that don't do their job.

I've lived this long without the chair. It is the shipper's contentment with laziness and slacking standards that upsets me.

Monday, December 27, 2004

Penguin-enhanced, post-Christmas Fuzzycouch bonding

Posted by Troy and Guido @ 9:01 PM

We can write in the third person: Guido and Troy got together today and shared holiday stories, watched "Napoleon Dynamite" outtakes, Star Wars fan film, and took odd photos. They ate Jantina's fudge, Krispy Kreme donuts, pineapple pizza and assorted beverages (Guido's favorite food). Troy received, from Guido, a Timex Sinclair 1000 computer, full user manual, RAM pack and three casette programs.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Xmas

Posted by guido @ 10:26 AM

Mostly a reminder to myself:

acoustic guitar
coffee maker w/ thermal carafe, reusable filter
180° earmuffs
several Star Wars ornaments
comic book bags and boards
electronic measuring tape
Star Wars book (Bre)
gift certificate (Copper)
Simpsons desk calendar (Shirley)
Ale 8-1 (Shirley)

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Xmas wishes

Posted by guido @ 2:32 PM

HAPPY XMAS CARD by A. Skwish.

THIS are not for the weak of stomach. More HERE under "Kringles."

I was looking at the company Xmas card today and I found that of the 123 or so people who work at the same place I do, I don't know about 84 of them.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Geeked out my stats

Posted by Troy @ 11:36 PM

Check it
<--------

Under "troy's links" on the left I put my last 5 Halo 2 matches :)

I hacked up lastRSS.php (not pretty at all) to pull my Death/Kill ratio, team score, and the hyper link to the details from Bungie's RSS feed.

One thing that bugged was that the stats were all in a generic "description" tag. So I had to further parse and make sense of the data. What's worse, is they had silly formatting in the data fields, grrr.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

JJ-C for you and me

Posted by guido @ 8:29 AM

The Journal-Courier site is all up now at http://www.journal-courier.net. I'm still looking for all the bugs, but that's probably an neverending battle.

Played a little Speed Scrabble last night with Clay, Leslie, Julie and Bre over at Bre and Copper's. Bre drew me for Secret Santa and gave me a sweet book of Star Wars illustrations from Dark Horse. ... and I was told there are some Jones Sodas on the way, too.

The night before that (Monday) we were over at Clay and Leslie's for a little wedding party, since they just got married Wednesday. There was a pretty good turnout and pretty good punch.

Copper's on vacation this week and Larry's leaving after today, so I'm planning to be stressed out some more this week. Maybe I should just camp out under my desk for the duration.

Monday, December 20, 2004

'He's in the house, stupid'

Posted by guido @ 2:56 AM

One of my coworkers' relatives was killed about a week ago in Iraq. Peoria did this story.

We did a little gift shopping today then saw "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" (L.S.A.S.O.U.E.). I liked it quite a bit.

The most annoying thing about it is the same thing I didn't like about Harry Potter movies. The kids tend to not say anything about what they know. It's like in a slasher movie when you want to yell at the screen "He's in the house, stupid!"

Though a bit busy, overall it was a fun adventure and great looking. Not sickeningly sweet. I really like the look of the kids cast as Violet and Klaus Baudelaire and their costuming and such. And the animation at the end was really nice.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

Last work week before vacation!

Posted by Troy @ 4:19 PM

Jantina and I had a good time in Albuquerque this week. Now we are finalizing Christmas details! I have all of my shopping done, tonight we have a party, and then on the 24th we fly to Illinois to celebrate with family!

Friday, December 17, 2004

'FHA Hero'

Posted by guido @ 10:13 PM

Don't EVEN get me started about leotards...

Over the last week or so I got caught up on "Superman," "Superman/Batman," "X-Men," "X-Tatics," and various singles (such as "Y: The Last Man" and "Green Lantern: Rebirth").

New Journal-Courier site is accessible, but not always directly. Should be all up and ready over the weekend, I think.

I'm sure I'm gonna hit the 70-movie mark before the year's up. But will I pass it? I don't know. "Dawn of the Dead" made me pretty antsy last night. Horror and myself don't get along all that well.

I caught a couple recent episodes of "Justice League Unlimited" this week. The two I saw were written by or stories by J.M. DeMattis and Warren Ellis. Comic writers whose work I often enjoy. Both were pretty good. I don't think I could see the Warren Ellis-ness in his episode. Maybe a little bit.

Lenny Brisco T-shirts

Julie bought me a couple T's today. "FHA Hero" and "Mexican skeletons riding bicycles." Me likey.

The DSL is still working pretty well. It takes a surprisingly long time to connect when I do have to reconnect. I could probably use some suggestions on how to best set up the modem/router whatsit. I believe I turned its firewall on already and disabled the wireless feature (no hotspot at my house).

I haven't tried to hook all the phones back in since last Saturday. That's when I couldn't connect and ended up ripping all the lines out of the box. We just have the downstairs phones working right now.

Troy got the new lazer tag index page all plugged in.

A J.P. a day

Posted by guido @ 7:07 AM

Happy B-day to J.P. today, wherever you are these days. I haven't seen you on IM since you moved.

Belated Happy B-days to Josh (Dec. 5th) and Fuad (Nov. 4).

Thursday, December 16, 2004

I've been served

Posted by guido @ 7:55 AM

Yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo! I spent some time last night figuring out my new FTP settings and uploading some of the stuff that was on my old server space and fixing a few of the links. That was just the tip of the proverbial iceburg of links I have to find and fix, though. I have to scour fuzzycouch, here, and find any broken links and pics sometime.

Clay and Leslie got married yesterday, all secret-like. Bre, Copper and I tied cans to their bumper during the ceremony. Then we went to Don's for beers.

Monday, December 13, 2004

It's alive ... soon

Posted by guido @ 9:04 PM

It keeps getting changed on me, but I think the new site at work is going to go live this week. Frist it was going to be Wednesday, now it's Friday.

Looked into Dish Network again. Almost signed up for it with the free DVR, but I wasn't expecting or prepared for the local store's installation fees (though they explained them pretty well). So I guess we're probably sticking with the cable monopoly for now.

Lazerblogging

Posted by guido @ 3:12 PM

I spent some time building a Blogger template for The Unofficial Lazer Tag Home Page. Right now, the page it's hosted at blogspot -- http://lazertag.blogspot.com -- but soon it should move over to http://www.fuzzycouch.com/lazertag. And it should make posting whatever news brief items much quicker and easier.

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Downgrade

Posted by guido @ 2:44 PM

Suddenly couldn't connect to the 'Net all morning. I think it's something to do with my phone wiring. I finally disconnected most of the phone lines in the house and just had two lines connected. Then it started working again. -- But I want all my phones back. Grr.

Only Carlos and I showed up for Ultimate today. Of course it was cold and kinda wet. Probably more of that kinda turnout tomorrow.

I noticed the squirrels are still finding a way to get to the porch soffit. Darn.

I did get the Troy Spotting map updated last night.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Only partly dead

Posted by guido @ 9:58 PM

Picked up the car today. This part (below) rusted through and broke. Word is it's pretty common in Escorts. So now I have a nice, new one of these things I can't remember the name for.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Shoulda took that left turn at...

Posted by Troy @ 5:00 PM

Albuquerque, NM, is my destination tomorrow morning. I was planning on making the trip there next week, but recieved a message this afternoon requesting tomorrow in addition to next week. I rushed to book the travel and hotel, and now everything is set. I've never been there, plus it will give me a new western thumb-tac for the Troy Spotting Map.

Downtime accomplishments

Posted by Troy @ 3:33 PM

Last week my family was in town. They all went to church with me on Sunday, Mom made beef stroganoff for me, Emilie spent the night and played a bit of Halo 2, we ate at Seasons 52 on Tuesday, took Amie and Brent with us to Home Team on Friday, watched "Super Size Me" with Emilie, ate at P.F. Changs and Bahama Breeze, and lots of shopping!

We have all of our Christmas shopping done, wrapped, and shipped to Illinois ahead of us. (well, we'll still buy small stocking stuffers and such, but the main stuff is out of the way).

I managed to beat the campaign of Halo 2 last night, that was a bit disappointing (too short, and a cliffhanger).

FedEX

Posted by Troy @ 3:24 PM

Fed EX just isn't the star company they once were. I ordered a gig of RAM for my Sunblade yesterday from Crucial, paid the extra money to have it before noon, and here it is 4:30 p.m. and no RAM!

I planned on running a lab this afternoon, but without resources I'm out of luck.

My package has been in town and on a truck for delivery since 10:30 this morning. It is an hour drive from the airport to my place. You would think the premium paid for priority (declared as "before noon") would insure that they get delivered first.

Fed EX will not commit to anything other than "an attempt will be made to deliver it today."
They blame the weather, of course. Crucial did credit me the cost difference between priority and regular next day delivery. I suppose they will work out a credit with FedEX similarly.

Monday, December 06, 2004

Stumping squirrels

Posted by guido @ 9:52 PM

Dennis came over with his big saw-on-a-stick contraption, and we cut down a limb that extended over to my roof. I've been trying to discourage this family of squirrels that insist on living in my soffet, and it looks like cutting that limb may have helped. After we took it down, one of the squirrels came skittering down the power line and up the tree. It made its way directly to where the limb used to be and stopped in its tracks when it found no limb there. It looked around and seemed to be trying to figure out what it should do. SCORE!

I downloaded a couple music player programs, since I can't run iTunes on my machine like I want, and I found a couple that I sorta like -- MonkeyMedia and Quintessential Player. Neither is exactly what I want. MediaMonkey started skipping when Web pages would load and Quintessential Player's GUI would get messed up as I scrolled the window, though it has a nice iTunes-style skin.

If anyone has one they'd like to recommend, please do. I'm thinking about checking out Winamp again. I didn't really like it in the past, but I know it's popular for some reason. Maybe if used an iTunes skin on Winamp. I'll have to try it.

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Candlelight Processional

Posted by Troy @ 11:45 PM

Tonight we went to the Candlelight Processional at Epcot with our friends. It was a really great reading of the Christmas story by Jim Caviezel (played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ).

I dressed a little too warmly.. I remembered freezing in the past so this time I wore a sweatshirt and took a jacket, but didn't need it this year.

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Soldering on

Posted by guido @ 8:06 PM

I added some more movies to MY MOVIE LIST.

I tinkered with the phone lines in the house today and got all the upstairs phone jacks operational. I even had to solder a little bit. I figured out that one of the jacks upstairs was wired for a second line, which makes sense now that I think about it. So with a little rewiring I got that one working, too.

We've not really been able to hear or answer the phone from upstairs in quite a while. Pretty much most of the last four years. So at least we now have the option. Might have to pick up another Caller ID box, too, unless someone has an extra lying around that they want to send.

Ashley and Carlos picked up a new Star Wars T-shirt for me, since they were going over to Springfield anyway. On Monday, the woman working in the store said I should come back Tuesday because she wouldn't go in the back to get one in my size even though they were back there.

Speaking of that, here is the vinyl window sticker I picked up Monday.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

More pine

Posted by guido @ 1:41 AM

Mom sent a wreath for the front door in addition to the tree this year. Crazy time.

Seems like I spent most of the day tweaking the new Web site that's in the works at work instead of working on pages. It's an odd feeling, not working on pages after spending a shift at work.

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Not the tire

Posted by guido @ 7:02 AM

Well, my car problem wasn't a blown tire belt. Maybe it's a loose or broken shock? I'm having it looked at Thursday.

Did some more Xmas shopping Monday night. Picked up a Vader decal for the Honda.

Got talked into participating in the office Secret Santa gift exchange. I put some odd stuff on my wish list.

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Green pattern by Travis Beckham. Pink and blue patterns by (now defunct) Pixel Adventures.

LCHS song

"Lincoln, Lincoln, we are proud of you. Lincoln, Lincoln, we will e'er be true. Following the bright Golden Rule, we get things done without much ado. We're happy, we're snappy when we send our call. Lend your voices one and all. If dear old Abe were here I know just what he'd do; He'd say Lincoln, we're proud of you!"

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