I'm listening to Strikeforce: Diablo's the Albatross and the Architect, which I haven't thought about in years. It's probably been like, 8 or 9 years since I rocked this album. Back then, I was living in shitty out-west apartments, driving a Toyota Celica, playing in a band, in my sophomore year of college, breaking up with my longest-term girlfriend, and just starting what would become the job I am doing now. Little did I know, accepting that internship because I needed a job and cash would

After re-reading my last journal entry, man. This year has sucked. Shit was bleak. And it all culminated into a terrible, awful week. A got into CRNA school and I was so, so happy for her. But that was where the happy times ended. We went out to celebrate, but I had a feeling I should set up the dog cam, because I was worried that the dog had been barking when we'd leave again. No sooner had we got to the restaurant 3 blocks away than he started backing. I sprinted home to stop him, but that

I think 2014 is going to go down as the year of nostalgia.

Looking back on my post from 2010, Life is Hard, I couldn't help but smile given what I know now, four years later. First of all, it's hard to believe it's been four years since I wrote that. Time has flown, partly for the better, partly for the worse. I'm no stranger to self-help/self-improvement. And since 2010, I've been writing out goals and plans for the year. Sometimes, you can't quite knock out a year's worth of resolutions

For fuck's sake. After about six months of getting overage notifications from Cox and being completely baffled at what was causing it, I finally figured it out. My computer was a red herring. I had Splunk set up monitoring logs, usage, watching Wireshark to see what was going on with my packets. Nothing pointed to a crazy process sucking down fatty packets. Then I started watching the lights on my router. I noticed when I disabled my WiFi on my computer, the little "i" icon was still flashing

In my last entry entitled Cox Can Throttle My Cock, I mentioned how Cox was throttling my internet. Well, it turns out, they may be within their rights to, because it seems as though there's a rogue data sucker somewhere on my machine. Looking at my data usage, it was off the charts. Something like 30 - 60 GB per day. I don't even think I can find 10 GB of crap to download per day, let alone 6 times that. So, I went away on vacation for a while and unplugged my machine to verify that usage we

I'm not sure exactly what that means, but Cox has been throttling me. These motherfuckers. I've been noticing some horrible network performance every now and then so I busted out WireShark to see what the deal was. I was seeing an extraordinary amount of RSTs and out of order data. I had just bought a new router too, so I confirmed that wasn't the problem and pinged my gateway server. That was fine too. Eventually, I tried resetting my modem and that seemed to fix the problem temporarily, but

Last night I finally got some time to myself. I was having a bit of a nervous breakdown because I feel like I have no free time anymore. The girlfriend has been occupying almost all of it. She worked last night so I finally got a moment to chill out. It looks like I'll get some more time this week to myself as well. I'm trying not to freak out and bail like my instincts are telling me, but I'm going to need a little more me-time to even things out. It's been a little much lately.

Some updates on things!

Operation: Moneybags is proceeding in the right direction. I am getting a decent tax return, proportional to the increase in money I made last year. I don't know my bonus size at the moment. Probably won't have that until later. I hope hope HOPE it's not less than last year. As long as it's the same (or more!) than last year, I'm good. I hate speculating on my bonus though because it's like counting your chickens before they're even eggs.

It's been a while since I've staged an Op, but after checking my bank account, TODAY IS THE DAY.

It's not even the third week of the month and I'm broke. I still have two and a half weeks to get through until payday. I'm banking on getting my tax return in pretty quick, but I'm still waiting on my W-2s. This is beyond frustrating. It's unnerving. How did I spend so much in so little time?

Well, it's 2013, the start of a new year. It's probably a little late to do a year-in-review, but why not.

What I accomplished in 2012: