I haven’t been too good about it thus far this weekend. I woke up at noon (and it was glorious!), then spent the intervening five hours doing stuff. That is, breakfasting, lunching, and running errands. All in all, not unproductive. In fact, I made a lovely pasta casserole type dish.

It’s fairly simple, but delivers a lot in the way of flavor and foodness. It’s comprised of rigatoni, alfredo sauce, ground beef, and some sweated veggies. Toss together in the way that seems most appropriate. For the veggies: I tossed about half a red onion (frenched), 3 carrots (sliced into discs, medium thickness), and a broccoli tree chopped into florets and the stock disc-ified in some olive oil and kosher salt over medium heat. Amazingly, it was ready as the pasta was finished cooking. Imagine that.

Of interesting note tonight, the Kings are playing in Philadelphia. For those not in the know, the Kings recently traded their marquee player in Chris Webber (and Matt Barnes and Michael Bradley) to the Sixers (Philly) for a trio of role-players in Corliss Williamson (former King), Brian Skinner, and Kenny Thomas. My prediction is that the game will be fundamentally simple as each team needs to gel with their new players. I expect the Sixers to win by about 8 to 12 points, owing to the fact Peja Stojakovic is still out.

It has been widely speculated that the trade had a great deal to do with the bad blood that purportedly existed between Peja and C-Webb. While each has denied such allegations, one wonders if this will cause Peja’s demands for a trade to come to an abrupt halt. The fact is that Peja now leads the Kings, and he will again be a force to be reckoned with when he returns from his injury. On the flip side of the coin, C-Webb and Allen Iverson are going to be their own force in the East. Should be fun to watch.

While I predict the Kings losing tonight, let me end this blurb with the phrase known to all Sacramentans: Go Kings! And now, on to compilers…

Got back from a trip to Sac. I’m afraid I told no one of my weekend appearance in the capital city. It was purely for mother’s day to show Mom how much I appreciate her mom-ness. Interesting drive.

The infamous sticker on the back of my car has finally come off. The adhesive failed.

My car needs a few things:
1) A wash.
2) Some plastic components.
3) An oil change.
4) Gas.

I’m presently looking for a place to live in or around Livermore. It looks like the good folks at work are able to extend my appointment and return me to full-time status for the summertime. Yay! In some ways, I never really stopped working for them. Granted, I’m currently on zero-time indeterminate status (“on leave”), but I still wear my .gov email address, frequently check the inbox, and keep up with the folks in the office. Cheers.

The Kings lost tonight in another nailbiter. They’re playing extreme streak. They feint-and-parry, then go for all out naptime, then bust out the wicked moves. It would be nice if it were more wicked moves and less naptime. I think the Kings are fully capable of winning the series, they just need to stop sucking at key moments. Peja was 2 of 5 from the charity stripe! That’s sad!

I go sleep now. Busy week. Need to get an early start to get everything nearer to done.

My classes are shaping up to be pretty cool this quarter. I think I might have reached that plateau where all my courses (nearly all, anyway) are in the upper division and therefore composed of more interesting material. I think the professors enjoy it more, too. I am not close to graduation per se, but I’m inching ever closer to it. I’m going to be a senior in 10 units and am close enough to taste my BSCSc.

The Kings have been sucking it up lately. That’s all I have to say about that.

Chris Webber has returned to the Sacramento lineup. Over the course of his career, he’s averaged 22 points, 10 boards, 5 assists, 1.5 steals, and 1.5 blocks per game. Granted, the Kings have been managing by substituting Brad Miller in for CWebb, but (I think) there is no way that the Kings can go without the defensive and offensive game that Webber brings to the Kings. In addition, Miller on the bench gives the Kings additional depth in the post as a respectable (All-Star, even) power forward and center. Coupled that with the a stellar point guard in Bobby Jackson, you’ve got two high quality guys to provide spark off the bench.

I personally don’t see the Kings going deep into the playoffs without Chris Webber. Realistically, you couldn’t have expected the Kings to go off and play spectacularly after reinserting their dusty forward back into the lineup! The first few games were luck, now it’s time for the Kings to really mend and gel. CWebb needs to get back to the top of his game, he needs to learn how to play with Brad Miller, and Bobby Jackson needs to get healthy.

Those three items combined, if in time for the post-season, make a championship caliber team. Will the Kings go all the way this year? Maybe. Do they need CWebb to do it, most probably.

—

As a note of disclaimer, I am not a basketball commentator. I know only the very basics of the game (ball goes in the orange ring, right?). I apologize for any mixups I may have made, especially in the area of basketball terminology. E-mail me corrections if necessary.

1) The Kings pulled off a gorgeous 99-83 victory over the Mavs to even their series 2-2.

2) A plate of fries at Margies is exactly that – a big honkin’ plate of fries. Gee gawds that was a lot of fries!

3) Job at PC/LAN is going really well. There are a lot of cool dude(ttes) there and I think it’ll turn out to be really fun. My primary function will be OS X imaging/ghosting or whatever you wanna call it.

4) My silly Logitech trackball died today. David-yo graciously looked at it and couldn’t figure out what the heck was killing it. To top it off, Best Buy was closed tonight at 20:15 which meant I have to wait until tomorrow. That probably means I won’t really get a jump on my Chess implementation until tomorrow also. Shit!

5) I’m changing my primary email address, effective immediately. The old dreamfire.net alias (if you know it) has been DISABLED. It bounces everything now and will for a good while to come. The current seanrees.com alias works and will for the forseeable future. The preferred alias (and my new reply-to) is sean (-at-) rees dot us. Trying to avoid the evil spam-bots.

6) I am up to my nose in work. 305, 215, and a GEOG paper due Wednesday. Just lovely.

7) I am now going to poke my head in at 61 to see if anything of interest is happening.

So far, all attempts have failed.

Even tonight he’s produced amazing quantities of pure bloggable gold! This includes the ‘oft underappreciated innuendelicious remarks and some rather unsavory comments (although very humorous) about a particular person we all know and love. His identity shall remain a secret.

Now a blog need not be updated often, but rather contain publically-revealable tidbits about your personality. Some people take it to extremes, and others just post random stuff.

Ashlee is in my 215 class. Ouch. This poses a bit of a conundrum to me – how should I react? Everytime I speak to her, my reaction changes. It’s either friendly, standoffish, or a combination of both with a streak of latent hostility. The latter is far more common and the least desirable, of course. Quite frankly, at this point, I can control my reaction. Half of me wants to be friendly and pretend like our friendship didn’t collapse under the weight of our collective emotions/egos. The other half says to ‘screw it. She doesn’t want to talk to me anyway – why should I care?’ Argharfunkel, blah.

Anyway, the Kings lost tonight against the Lakers. How sad. The series was split 2-2 this season.

While I have package management in my head, I want to make the point that I think that the FreeBSD ports collection offers the best blend of up-to-date super cool packages, with full source build system, the option to get a binary package, and the simplistic (yet easy) tools as in Solaris. Luck has it that you need not patch, just upgrade. Gentoo comes close – but I never got into the guts of ebuild/emerge system. apt comes close to the ports in coolness, but I feel it leaves far too much up to the maintainer and to the Debian project as a whole. You can build from source, it’s just not as easy.

…

Kings stomped on the Sixers tonight and finished this roadtrip 5-1. A lot of close wins, but wins none the less. 4 games left, 3 at home.

…

WebDAV, iCal, and Apache 2 = super sweet. Does anyone know of a ics/iCal/iCalendar PHP app that will process and do neat web calendar tricks?

My Trogdor tee-shirt came in, complete with a bucket of coasters and quick-remove tattoos.

Mom gave me her spare 45G drive over break. I figured there was something wrong – but all the SMART tests are checking out and the disk formatted OK. I had to remove the floppy drive (good riddance) to accomodate it in the last remaining 3.5″ bay.

I thought I had a lot of storage, but this bozo just got some new crappy hard drives with huge … caches.

I cleaned the shower today. Not to undercut David, who did a fine job, but the management (!= David) thinks that the black nasty goop that develops on the shower surface sticks to the soap scum on the bottom (unbeknownst to us – about the soap scum presence). Scrubbing bubbles all the way for soap scum removal.

The Kings lost rather depressingly last night in Detroit. They held a nice 21 point cushion throughout the game, but took a collective dump in the 4th quarter and let it slip away. It’s not going to affect the Kings’ overall standings this year or playoff seed (which … is roughly the same thing), but was depressing.

DirecTV is beautiful. Dad had satellite installed and finally got rid of the cable company. Why must they raise rates each time the Sacramento cable market changes hands? We are now quite happily internetted with DSL and televisioned with DirecTV. The builtin TiVo in the DirecTV receiver is highly awesome too. And all this comes at a cost savings of ~$20/mo.

My first-choice gas station was absolutely jam-packed or something today. Like a night-club in a city with an actual night-life. I had to go to backup station – which was not only 4c/gal cheaper, but empty. I haven’t filled gas at a non-first-choice station in about 3 years.

The bill for the last blurb was exactly $30.00 for a full fill.

Right now, I’m going to ask Billy Joe-t if he wants to go play racquetball tomorrow morning at about 8. His response will follow right here: “uhh, tomorrow morning?! I could conceivably go. Why?” He seems to think it (he) will “suck balls” because he’s “out of shape.” I can totally understand.

I need to buy a bike. Should I spend $200?