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Jan. 4th, 2012 @ 06:06 pm The Amazingly Delayed Promised Update
Yowzers! My last update was Nov 4th! I just keep getting worst at worst on this entire LJ thing.

So 2 months have passed. What all has happened?

[info]ziggy_san visited me in Boston in mid November. [info]fearandloafing visited for Thanksgiving. He's now stationed in Hawaii now. I'm really glad I got to see Rob before he was stationed so far away. I used to write far, far more detailed stuff about visits like this. It's been too long, and I forgot it all. Furthermore, I've become more and more lazy when it comes to these things. My apologies! :{ They were awesome visits, though. Just trust me.

Late November, I find out that I had to take 4 MS Exams before Jan 1st. I barely manage to be able to do so. It was Hell having to cram for 4 exams in the space of one month. The only reason I was able to do so is because I already knew the material for one exam and I picked an easy 3rd exam on purpose. Until MS releases their Windows 8 series of exams, I'm pretty much done with MS exams. Now it's on to Ciscoland to obtain my CCNP before all work I did almost 3 years ago expires on me. I'm basically relearning Cisco from the ground up. Since I don't work in the field, it's like re-learning math after not having had to use it for years. I'm sure I can do it, but I'll have to devote time to it every weekend. My deadline for taking the exam is the end of March.

From Dec 21st to Dec 30th, I did my normal WV Christmas holiday jazz. While I was in town, my group of friends and I played a bunch of kickass new board games!

Shadow Hunters is like Bang!, but better. I seriously have issues going back to Bang! now. The advantages are numerous. The removal of the sheriff role makes everyones role hidden. The green card deck lets you force information from other players about who they are. It's also a simpler game now, where as Bang! has complicated with expansion after expansion. It's a blast. I had to jump through a lot of hoops in order to get Shadow Hunters, but it was well worth it. If you like Bang!, you simply *have* to try Shadow Hunters. I know you think it can't get any better than Bang!, but it does, and you won't be the same afterwards.

7 Wonders is a civilization card game. It's pretty good, and the non-aggressive nature of the game makes it good for players who don't fare well in competitive gaming. I bought the Leaders expansion as well, but we never got around to actually playing it.

SmallWorld Underground is a better SmallWorld. If you don't own SmallWorld, I'd skip the original and go straight for Underground. The new features in Underground really add to the game and its competitive nature.

I hung out at the new Charleston area club called Atmosphere a couple nights while I was in. I'm so happy that Charleston has a decent play for gay nightlife now. It really drove me crazy how awful the nightlife was when I was in my early to mid 20s. It's a fairly young crowd, too! ( me likey! ;) )

As always, I played some more DDR while I was in. My DDR shoes sadly need to be retired. There is hardly any tred left on those shoes.

I'm currently playing Mass Effect 2. It's every bit as good as I thought it was going to be. I might have to play through it twice in order do to a renegade run after I'm done with my paragon game.

Good news! I finally solved my credit problems! It took over 2 freaking months of pestering, but I managed to get all of the old medical bills removed from my credit history. I did a test today by applying for an AMEX card that I was denied for previously, but I have all the paperwork verifying that it was removed. I have 4 local banks picked out as possibilities for my mortgage. I'm hoping to get pre-approval by early next week. After that, it's time to seriously begin condo / house hunting!

I picked up a couple games during this years Steam sale. Duke Nukem Forever, Batman Arkham Asylum, and Worms Reloaded. I'm playing DNF just to see the end of the 12 year saga. It's honestly not that great of a game. Batman is terrific, so its next on my gaming list after ME2 and Deus Ex. Worms Reloaded is for multiplayer play with my friends. I also bought a bunch of indie bundles really cheap. It's awesome picking up like 5+ games for around $4. Especially when one of the games is Binding of Isaac. That game alone is worth the asking price of $5.

Still figuring out what the heck I really want in a relationship. It's very much a learning experience figuring it all out. Honestly, I'm sorta fine without one. I really value my independence.

My friend James is visiting Boston on Jan 12th. He'll be staying a week, so that'll be a fun visit as well. Always something interesting going on with me!

Ok, that's a fairly sizable update. Time to go grocery shopping.
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Dec. 12th, 2011 @ 10:39 am Big update coming once I'm on XMas break
That's a promise. Things have been crazy. Just don't have time for a proper update now.
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Nov. 4th, 2011 @ 06:08 pm Long overdue update / NYC trip / etc.
Hey LJ! I'm actually writing in you! I don't know if anyone will actually read this! LJ isn't exactly that popular anymore. I think MySpace might have more fans still reading. I kind of like it that way, though. Much more private than "tell the world" Facebook. Hey, it's been awhile! What's happening, you ask?

Let's see. I played a pretty sweet iOS / Android game called GameDevStory. It's a game development simulator. It's pretty simplistic, but it's a Hell of a lot of fun simulating game development. I'd love a bigger, more featured version of this game. I blew a good 6-8 hours playing this.

Battlefield 3 beta has come and gone. I did not purchase the final product. The game is actually outstanding, but I need to hold off on game purchases for now. I have way too much shit to do to get too distracted by video games.

PAX East 2012 registration went live! I've registered, and you should, too! Passes sold out really quickly last year. Don't expect to buy a pass the day of the convention.

I'm all done with my first-time home buyers classes! I've been stuck in the home buying process, though. An old medical screwup on my credit report still needs to be fixed because I can get a mortgage. I'm working on fixing it, but it's taking forever. I can't move forward without a mortgage. ( obviously )

I'm back from my NYC Trip! It went pretty darned well!

NYC TRIP
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* Took the BoltBus up and back to NYC. The trip to NYC only took 3 1/2 hours. The trip back ended up taking 5 1/2 hours. Getting stuck in NYC rush hour traffic is a freaking nightmare. I also hate the fact that BoltBus stops at Arby's. That's not exactly vegetarian friendly.
* The first day, I spent the night with my old roommate / awesome friend Andrew. I can crash at his place whenever I want to visit NYC! Which is pretty cool seeing as a Boltbus ticket is about $30 roundtrip. The tricky part is finding enough time off to actually make the visit.
* Met my Mom at LGA. She missed the flight she was initially supposed to be on, but I guess she had enough tearworks in her to get a flight rescheduled. We stayed at the Country Inn and Suites in Queensboro. It was a good compromise on quality / price / convienance. I just loathed the terrible hotel Internet speeds.
* A snowstorm hit on Saturday. It was pretty bad. Luckily we had a play to go to, so we didn't have to waste a day of touring during crappy weather.
* We wandered into Bloomingdales for a bit during the storm. We looked at the prices and quickly decided to freeze our *sses off elsewhere.
* We attended the Broadway play, "Relatively Speaking". It's really 3 mini plays in one. The 2nd play seemed to be the strongest one to me and my Mom. I was amazed at the detail and lighting the entire time. I guess that's what you get with high-end plays.
* Daily Show was great! Jon Stewart is pretty much as you expect him to be. It was a lot of wait for a very short show, though. Worth doing none-the-less.
* Colbert Report was *amazing*! Yo-Yo Ma was the guest that night, and we had awesomely close seats to Goat Rodeo's performance! Stephen Colbert has an OOC Q&A with the audience before the show. I must say, I like OOC Colbert far more than I like IC Colbert. I think he's doing himself a disservice by not just being himself on TV. He's freaking hysterical OOC.
* Mom got tickets for Anderson Cooper's new talk show. The set for that show is really spectacular. It has a great view of Central Park. The show itself was pretty alright. I'm just not much of a talk show type of person. I'd much rather be watching Anderson Cooper 360 instead.
* We made a couple of stops by Occupy Wall Street. I was mainly an observer, but Mom got back in touch with her 1970s protesting roots. Everyone was behaving orderly and it was very peaceful protest.
* I picked myself up a set of winter boots at Century 21. Century 21 is a neat discount store in NYC that carries very high end brands at discounted prices. I wish we had one in Boston.
* The NYC public transit system is gargantuan. In many ways, it puts the Boston public transit system to shame. The subway coverage alone is something monumental. I wish the MBTA would keep expanding as to cover more and more areas around Boston. All wasn't to be admired, however. The system, while dwarfing the Boston system, seemed out of date in many ways. The turnstiles are old, the cards are the old slider cards, and there is little to no tracking of NYC buses.
* Furthermore, NYC is a good bit dirtier than Boston in general. When I returned up north, I was so happy to be in a nice, clean place again. I understand that maintaining the city is much more difficult due to population and size, but it still needs to be done.
* We ate out really well for dinner each night in NYC. I used a Restaurant.com coupon each time. No need to go totally broke when eating fancy.
* I really need to go back without Mom. I really wanted to go out at night on that weekend, but alas, I'm not going anywhere with my Mum around me. I guess I'll have to save that for next time.
* All said, it was a great trip! I could see myself living in NYC under different circumstance, but I'm very happy with my home in Boston. I'd easily rate NYC well over cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore. DC is a harder comparison due to how much cleaner it is. Then again, DC has a whole different slew of issues of its own. It's a great city, and I'll be returning to visit again at some point!


My normal West Virginia Christmas vacation is scheduled for December 21st - December 30th.
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Sep. 20th, 2011 @ 06:30 pm Go figure

So apparently I've been looking at housing stuff long enough now that somehow Home Depot and Lowes have both decided they might see lots of money from me here soon. Plenty of junk in my snail mail these days.

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Sep. 18th, 2011 @ 08:51 pm Broken dreams at bargain prices

Like most other home buyers on the market, I'm looking for possible deals on short sales and foreclosures. Since my budget is already extremely tight, the reduced price might give me the little bit of extra buying power I need. I do have to admit, though, that it feels a little awkward shopping through the broken dreams of others. Short sales may even be more awkward given that I work with the person who is being forced into the short sale.

There aren't too many short sales in the areas I'm looking, so this could be a non-issue. I'd still buy a short sale home, though. Nothing I do does anything for former owner's shattered dreams.

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Sep. 18th, 2011 @ 06:37 pm Preparation for home buying
House Hunting

I've been spending way too much time on sites like Zillow browsing the real estate market. I've been attending a first time home buyers class every Wednesday. I'm meeting with a potential buyer agent this Friday. I'm meeting with a potential mortgage broker next week.

Looking to buy a place is like looking for a rental, except that once you buy you're stuck with it for a very extended period of time. Furthermore, you won't get first time home buyer benefits next time around. This makes the process of finding a place that much more difficult. Factor this in with the fact that I want a place in some fairly well-to-do neighborhoods that can be fairly pricey. Places that very rarely have short sales and almost never have foreclosures. Places where prices make you wonder if the housing market ever went down in the first place.

I qualify for the Massachusetts Soft Second loan program, so hopefully that will help me a little financially. I'm trying to get something that I can both afford and that will be useful to live in for the next 10 or so years.

The entire process is -
  • Exciting - At the end of this entire process, I'll own the property I live in. No more dealing with crappy landlords. I can actually make improvements to the place I buy. I can paint the wall any damned color I want the wall to be. Work I put into my house will benefit me later when I sell it. I know owning a house isn't all sunshine and rainbows, but IMHO its a hell of a lot better than renting. Especially for someone like me who has chosen exactly where to settle down for a giant chunk of his life.

  • Depressing - If there was ever anything that put you in your economic class, it's house buying. It's very frustrating seeing the outrageous prices in certain nice neighborhoods you'd like to live in. Compromise seems to be the name of the game. I can't have exactly what I want. That's for people with far deeper pockets than me.

  • Time Consuming - I haven't even gone to physically look at places yet and it's a giant hassle. As the first paragraph of my post make clear, I've been spending more than a little time trying to get this right. The next couple of months will determine a lot about my next decade or so. So I'm trying to put in the necessary work in and get it right the first time.

I have other things I need to be doing, so balancing this with the rest of my life is a massive pain in the rear. Maybe if I get this right, I can go a long time before thinking about buying another place again? That'd be nice. I really dislike the entire process of shopping for places to rent / buy.

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NYC Trip

My Mother and I have a trip to NYC planned for late Oct / early Nov. We're going to see The Daily Show and The Colbert Report while we are there. Mom also wants to see some Broadway play while we are in the area. I'm sure we'll also be eating out at nice places and doing touristy things. It should be a fun little vacation.
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Aug. 22nd, 2011 @ 10:08 pm Gah
The longer I search for a home, the more I end up saying, "This is out of my budget." Darn it, these things are freaking expensive.
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Aug. 1st, 2011 @ 01:38 pm WV trip recap
It's been about a week and a half since I got back from my trip to WV. For the most part, it's the same old story as every other visit I've made. I get to see my family again, which is nice, but after about a week I've had my fill of them. My grandparents are hanging in there, but everytime I visit them I wonder if it will be the last time I see them. In an effort to be a good elder brother, I setup a PC for my sister and gave my brother my old laptop. I updated all of my old CRT-era PCs which inhabit my old home. They are just Athlon XPs, but they're fine for Ubuntu and simple web browsing / document editing / e-mail.

For the most part, I just hung out and did whatever I wanted to do while I was there. It's a very odd feeling, though. It's like stepping into my old life circa 2006 everytime I visit there. The longer I've been away from WV, the more odd it feels to go back to that life. It's certainly not how I prefer to live. It is slower, though. A week at that slow pace can actually be somewhat refreshing.

Not all is well in the land of Coalzeroth. The recession has obviously struck the old malls of WV fairly hard. Both Town Center and Huntington Mall looked depressed as I walked through them this time around. Only Corridor G seems to be doing well these days. Though for the most part there were store closings, I did see some interesting new venues open up in the Charleston area. Atmosphere is a nice little gay nightclub that has stolen away a vast majority of the gay scene from the crappy converted funeral home known as Broadway. I was so pleasantly surprised to see it when I came into town. I dropped by there on a Saturday night to check the place out. I liked everything about the place except for the music. In fact, for some reason, all clubs in the south have shitty music. There was a car vandalisation that night, which didn't surprise me since the club is located in WV.

Right beside Atmosphere is Slyce, a pizza restaurant, owned by the same owners as Atmosphere. Slyce is open until 4am every night of the week. To be open until 4am every night of the week in Charleston, WV is unheard of. Both of Atmosphere and Slyce are welcome additions to a city that desperately needs something to make youth not flee for other bigger metros. A second pizza restaurant, Pies and Pints, reminds me of most semi-trendy metro pizza places. They specialize in interesting combination pizzas along with lots of booze to go with it. It seemed like a cool place to eat and hang out as well, but obviously the pizza place with the gay crowd would win out in my book.

I did the traditional board and LAN gaming with my friends. I think this will be the last time we do LAN gaming. The board games seem to work better for us. We saw Harry Potter 7 Part 2 while I was in town. It was an acceptable ending to the long series of movies. I didn't think it was fantastic, but I didn't think it was the best thing I'd ever seen, either.

So WV is pretty much the same as it always is. The new gay nightclub is pretty awesome given the area its in. I'm fairly loyal to Boston at this point, though. In fact, I think we're creeping closer and closer to condo shopping time. I've only just begun the process of finding a condo, but I've seen enough to know that I'm going to pay a ton of money for whatever I end up purchasing. The housing crisis apparently hasn't hurt Boston area prices that much.
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Jun. 30th, 2011 @ 01:48 pm Ex-cellent
Having to reduce font size on my resume as I add certifications to keep it under a page. I can remember back in 2006 when I was desperately trying to fill up a single page with whatever I could think of. Now it's 2011 and I'm in the exact reverse situation. This is a good thing!
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Jun. 18th, 2011 @ 01:28 am Finishing up over 100+ Windows 7 migrations
I've been replacing and upgrading machines to Windows 7 since late last year. I automated a significant portion of the process, but there is enough custom data that requires manual intervention that I still need to spend some time per install making sure everything goes properly. Now it's the middle of 2011 and I'm finishing up the last few migrations that need to occur.

I still have a to-do list that spans multiple pages, but at least I've blown away all those old XP installs and rid myself of the older Pentium 4 systems. Next time around with Windows 8, I hope to have a much more streamlined upgrade process. Furthermore, since the upgrade from 7 -> 8 won't be as urgent as the upgrade from XP -> 7, it may be possible to only upgrade users who are getting their machines replaced. I guess it will depend on whether there is some feature in 8 that merits me rushing out the upgrade and ensuring nobody is still running 7.

I won't be resting in the meantime, but hopefully now I will be working a bit more on the server side and less directly with each client machine. MDT 2012 and SCCM 2012 are due late 2011, and I plan on upgrading both when the upgrades come out. I plan on hitting the Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 study material as soon as its released. Our VMWare infrastructure still needs work, the Print server needs to be made redundant and then put into use, and once the central IT Sharepoint server is up and running, I'm going to do a massive conversion of our Tech Support library to Sharepoint. That's not even including setting up our Sharepoint site structure and presenting it to the department to try to get them to use it. I also need to eventually redo our mobile plan, which is currently mostly Blackberry.

Plenty of busy coming up.

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I'm starting to realize that Core 2s are now not considered fast anymore. Wow it seems like not that long ago when I was jealous of my roommates E6700. Of course, I have a Phenom II, which is faster than that, but still it doesn't seem like that long ago. Of course, back then an 8800 GTS was all you ever needed. Ditched that for a GTX 460 awhile back and I've been quite happy with the upgrade.
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