Saturday spent in "training" and team building bullshit without pay. Three days of the week spent in training for something that the boss is so giddy over he couldn't shut up long enough to let the official trainer speak. Two days staying up way too late trying to get my video game console to work after it's automagical online update so my wife could play her game. And one day with no boss and Zippy being Zippy sitting here in front of me.

Sooner or later something's going to break.

QUESTION: How do you make a video game console totally unusable?

ANSWER: Connect it to the internet. And while you're at it, put Microsoft in charge of making the updates it automatically downloads when it boots up.

Wouldn't be so frustrating if it wasn't working perfectly before the update. Oh, I have it working now, but it caused a cascading effect through my home network. Every piece of gear from wireless repeaters to router to DSL modem had to be updated before it could play online games again after the "update," which, as far as I can tell, consists of a "let's rip off Nintendo's new look and feel" move and not much more.

Oh, but at least we can watch crap-tacular super-compressed Netflix movies on the big screen now instead of on the computer, if we want to have the console locked up and unusable for a little over an hour as it tries to cache enough to play it for five minutes. So that's pretty cool.

POSITIVE PROGRESS: A test version of the FunZone internal website is now running on FreeBSD on my craptop.

QUESTION: How do you make the FunZone run ten-beeeeeeellion times faster than normal?

ANSWER: Move it from the olden-days server running SuSE Beagle and ZendServices FucksYou Linux 10.something to a super-old craptop running a super clean FreeBSD 7.0 install. That's how. Can't wait to see this bitch on that server hardware I'm supposed to be getting next week. WOO!

Sometimes, I can almost remember what it was like to look at computers with a sense of wow and fun. Almost.

Anybody using Symfony? Thinking of trying that out at home a little just to see what it's capable of. Or not if I don't even have time to do a straight update of my current site. Bleh.

Really seriously missing the bike yesterday. I swear I could feel the corners on the way home last night. The lean, the rush of seeing the ground come up beside you as you lay over, then seeing the horizon come back straight in front of you. I miss it. A lot.

Mrs. NFB thinks I'm insane. Then her brother told a story about one of his coworkers who has his bike stored at his parents because they have a nice garage. He called them while Mrs. NFB's brother was there and asked, "how's my baby?" They said good, they put a blanket over it to keep the dust off. He asked, "are you talking with her? Keeping her company? Making her comfortable?"

I'm not quite that nuts.

Should make my way out to do the final polishing on the bike on Monday, which I took off, and then cover her and let her rest until spring.

It'll be hard to not go for a spin, but the fact it's down a muddy gravel road right now will help curtail the urge some.

Zippy just crossed a new line in the sand I didn't even know existed. He just accused giggles, dynamic sales coordination chick, of using one of the shop floor's logins on the 400. The conversation was so dumb to overhear I think it may have scrambled my brains. Those two together are a think-tank of epic proportions. They could make Washington look sane and intelligent. Holy hell.

I gotta go. Something about that conversation brought on a big urge to go poop. Mental laxative? Sure, why not. Wouldn't be the dumbest thing to happen here.