Yes, It Hurts

Okay, so the Red Sox won the World Series. As a Yankee fan, yes I'm distraught. But I'm not ready to blow my brains out or anything.

So all you Red Sox fans can quit calling me/e-mailing me to ask me how I feel. Let's just say I'll feel better when we come back next season with better pitching and maybe Carlos Beltran to boot.

For those Red Sox fans who continue to rub it in, I offer the following:

• I hate Jason Varitek. Varitek sounds more like a Canadian snowboard company than the name of an American baseball player.
• I hate Johnny Damon. Mostly because the "dirtbag look" went out with the 1991 Phillies. John Kruk, Darren Daulton and Lenny Dykstra could pull it off. Damon can't.
• I hate David Ortiz. I have a friend named David Ortiz who doesn't follow baseball, and he's probably running around at work wondering why everyone's giving him dirty looks.
• I hate Curt Schilling. Jeter should have bunted.
• I hate Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez. There's a Supercuts right down the street, guys.
• I hate Bill Mueller. Most people would pronounce that "Myoo-lur" but he has to be oh so frickin' special.
• I hate Tim Wakefield. The worst knuckleballer since, what, the Neikro Brothers?
• I hate Trot Nixon. He shares a first name with a synonym for The Hershey Squirts and a last name with a crooked president. What's to like?

Elevator Etiquette Lesson

Many of the folks who use the elevator in my building need to be flogged. Some representatives:

• The Lazy Ass - Uses the elevator to go down a single floor, despite the presence of a well-marked stairwell. Believe it or not, when I was at Y&R, they used to have to post a sign near all the elevators that said "If you are going up one floor or down two floors, please use the stairs."
• The Exasperated Scatterbrain - Okay, so I'm riding the elevator up to my 10th floor office from the ground floor. Said idiot gets on at 7, walks over to the buttons and repeatedly taps 1, but the button doesn't light. Upon realizing that the elevator isn't going to go down until it's finished going up, said scatterbrain releases an audible sigh, as if it's my fault that the elevator has to go all the way up to 10 instead of taking them right to their floor. Pay attention to the little arrows, schmuck. If they're pointing up and you want to go down, don't get on.
• The Gate Guy - There's a floor in this building where they have a metal gate covering the elevator entrance, and getting in involves punching in a code. I wish someone would just open the gate in the morning and leave the frickin' thing open. Instead, when the Gate Guy rides up with us, we have to sit there and wait while he jams the door open with his foot, punches in his PIN (invariably getting it wrong) and swings the metal door open.
• Multiple Floors Guy - This guy sucks, plain and simple. He's carrying about 10 bags of delivery Chinese food. He stops on 2, gets out halfway, jamming his foot in the door to keep the elevator from moving on, and gets the secretary just outside the door to sign for/pay for the food while the rest of us wait. Then he rides up another floor with us. Lather, rinse repeat. So many times, I've been tempted to kick his foot out of the way so the doors will close.
• Paranoid Pregnant Women - There's some sort of OB/GYN somewhere in the building, and there are always all these pregnant women going up and coming down. For some reason, many of them are seriously paranoid about being in the elevator alone with a man. I've received the most suspicious elevator glances from some of these women. And, as far as I know, I don't look like a potential rapist or mentally unstable weirdo. What gives?
• "Oops" Lady - There's this lady who just started working in the building, and she keeps getting into the elevator, punching 8 and then going "Oops. That was my old floor at my old building." And then she goes to 4. Grrr...
• The Linebacker - There are certain people who just can't seem to wait until everyone is out of the elevator when it gets to the lobby. They're in such a rush that they need to charge headlong into the elevator regardless of how many people (including pregnant women) need to get out first. And then they act all pissed off when people give them dirty looks or hold them up a few seconds when they're trying to exit.

Some of these might seem anal, but there's only one elevator in the building and sometimes it takes forever to get to me. (Like when I'm late for a conference call.)

I Love/Hate Stephen King

...and not just because he's a Red Sox fan.

In 1982, Stephen King published the first book of what was supposed to be The Dark Tower Trilogy - The Gunslinger. My mom picked up this book at the bookstore and brought it home to me. I eagerly devoured it. King took a break and in 1987, The Drawing of the Three came out, which Mom again purchased for me, and I ate it up.

Then King took another break. In 1992, The Waste Lands came out, and I bought what I thought was the last book in the series, only to find out that Roland the Gunslinger hadn't yet even come close to finding The Dark Tower, and it looked like such a thing would never happen.

In Penn Station last year, I saw the next book in the series, Wizard and Glass. Since I was in need of a book to read, I bought the damned thing and when I finished it, Roland and his compatriots still seemed light years away from The Dark Tower.

Last week, I swing by Penn Books again and see a new hardcover: The Dark Tower. I look inside the front flap and King himself tells me this is the last book in the series. I look inside the other flap and find out that he's published two other books in between Wizard and Glass and the one I'm holding in my hand. Plus, the one I'm holding in my hand is Atlas Shrugged size and printed in that huge type my mom is so fond of.

Yesterday, I returned to Penn Books with only five minutes to buy the book and get on the train. I read the first hundred pages last night and am still riveted. And this morning, I find myself on Amazon.com, ordering Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah, just so I can get the complete story on Roland the Gunslinger and what the frick has happened to him since 1982.

This is why I love/hate Stephen King. And it's yet another reason I hope his beloved Red Sox lose the frickin' World Series.

The Week Where Nothing Worked The Way It Was Supposed To

This past week has been crazy. (Thus the lack of posts here.) Let's call it The Week Where Nothing Worked The Way It Was Supposed To.

I was supposed to be out of the office on Friday, leaving in the afternoon to go camping with Craig, Jen and Kayla. Unfortunately, client work just blew up in my face and I ended up having to cancel. Actually, this was probably for the best, as my family and I had a lot of work to do around the house.

Over the weekend, I installed my new sound card, a SoundBlaster Audigy ZS 2 Platinum. It's a great card. I just wish I had taken a look at my PC before I went and ordered one with my Amex reward points. Turns out I needed to sacrifice one of my CD-ROM drives to make room on the front panel for the I/O box. On top of that, I needed to clear two card slots, one for the card and one for the joystick port. I ended up sacrificing my NIC card because I'm on wireless anyway.

To go with the new sound card, I needed some 7.1 speakers. I'm not the type to want to go out and blow $400 on the Gigaworks series, so I was looking for a store that actually carried the Inspire 7.1 system ($99).

I reserved a set at CompUSA here in the city and was all set to go get it when the phone rang. It was someone in customer service who let me know that the speakers I had reserved for store pickup online were no longer available. Of course, I launched into the standard Seinfeld routine - "You can take a reservation, but can you keep a reservation?"

Turns out that I couldn't find the speakers at any other store in the city, so I tried Long Island. The Hauppauge CompUSA had them, thankfully. The speakers are awesome, the sound card is better, and I recommend them highly.

Over the weekend, I was reading the sound card documentation and found out that there was a version of Cubasis included with the card. So I dug around in my collection of wires and cables and dug out two MIDI cables, a microphone and some other stuff for digital recording. The software works great - I just wish I could say the same for my keyboard. My Yamaha EX-5 is less than 3 years old and for some reason, I'm running into problems with some of the buttons jamming up. Could be the dust in my room from all the sanding we've been doing in the hallways and rooms downstairs. I didn't have the energy to take the synth apart and see what was causing the trouble.

Speaking of trouble, I've been trying to cover up a hole in the sheetrock in the hallway. When we took the wallpaper down, I discovered a hole behind the wallpaper that my sister had punched years ago. Of course it needed patching, but it was too big for a simple patch, so I needed some sheet rock. Wouldn't ya know it - the guy from Home Depot gave me a piece of 5/8" when I asked for 1/2". So I got the patch in and it was bulging out from the wall. Thankfully, Kim and Rob picked up a few pieces of 1/2" on the way home, so I've begun the seemingly endless process of patching, spackling and sanding. It's pretty flat right now, but I need to do some more sanding when I get home.

This weekend also was a big weekend for getting the home network set up. Last week, I had moved the router and set up two computers in the corner of my basement. Over the weekend, I installed SuSE Linux 9.1 on one of the machines. I want to create a development environment where I can work on database-driven applications with PHP4, Apache and MySQL. I got MySQL running fine, but SuSE comes with Apache2. The configuration engine claims PHP is running as a module, but I can't get PHP code to render in the browser. Additionally, I can't figure out how to configure PHP and Apache2 so that it will work with MySQL. If there are any Linux geeks out there who want to give me a hand with this, please e-mail me. The last time I worked with Linux, it was simply command-line stuff and there really wasn't a GUI involved, so all I know is a bunch of basic shell commands. I'm not used to this stuff, plus I understand there are a bunch of issues with Apache2 and PHP that are somewhat tough to deal with. Help!

All of this, plus my 'vette is in the shop. The steering column locked up last week in the parking lot at the train station and the damn thing needed to be towed to the dealership. They fixed the steering column, but noticed a leak in the rear differential, which necessitated removing the transmission to get at the rear diff. This is going to run into the thousands, so I'm not looking forward to the final bill. And there's only 37K miles on the car.

Doesn't anything work like it's supposed to anymore?