The Zereps

Well, as you read in Candice’s post, we just got back from our vacation on Wednesday morning. We went to Paradise to visit Candy’s family for a couple days, and then headed to Sacramento to meet up with friends and family there. We were able to fit a lot of stuff into our trip and got to see more people that we had imagined it would be possible to see in the span of 5 days. (Although it’s never possible to see everybody, so we’re sorry if we missed you!) The trip back was an interesting one… Our flight on JetBlue left at 12:40am from Sacramento (3:40am EST.) On the plane, I promptly turned off my in-flight DirectTV, put in my earplugs, and placed my noise-cancelling headphones snugly on my ears; I was determined to get some sleep. And I did, just not very much–3 hours or so. Normally this wouldn’t be that much of a problem as one could just go home and take a nap, but not this time. I had to go straight to work. We landed at about 8:30am and I got to work about 10:30am (just a little late, but I made it.) It was very nice to see everybody and get back to the mothership for a spell but now it’s back to the grind.

I was walking home this evening after work and there was a smell in the air reminiscent of the late Egghead Software store–a now distinct software retailer (although it does still survive the Internet-age through Amazon’s egghead.com.) I have fond memories of shopping there when I was a kid/teenager. (The wikipedia article does not do it justice.) It was very odd to walk down the street and smell something that reminded me of a software store….

This is the kind of quality blogging you can only find at thezereps.com. Stay tuned for vacation details in the future when it’s not 12:15am and I’m not blogging in my boxers (good thing I turned the Jabba-Cam off!)  I see Candice has already written a great deal about our trip though.

yes sir, that’s right. we’re home now, and rested, i might add. that red-eye flight home really knocked us both out..but we are happy campers now, especially now that we have our little guy back! we really missed our jabba! a huge thanks to lorrie for letting jabba stay over for a couple days! 😀

well…hm…how to start…happy birthday to me, i guess, since it was my birthday present from eric. 😀 thanks man! 😀 first off, we got to sac really late so we spent the night at cindy’s then had breakfast and then got our rental car (thanks mammy!). we then drove to paradise to see my family for a few days. i made my birthday cake, which was a really yummy coconut cake. it pictures don’t do it justice, as usual. my family got me some presents, too, which i was excited about and happy with, since they were from my wishlist. 🙂 thank you! 🙂

we met up with darcy for a movie (‘v for vendetta’ – good, btw) and lunch at ‘burger hut’ in chico. yum! we spent a nice and relaxing couple days in paradise seeing my family, which was nice. 🙂 then we headed back to sac to see more friends and family.

while there we got to see some of eric’s family, including marc and shannon’s place. we had breakfast with kit and jakki at ‘fox and goose’, which was a yummy place that they had previously mentioned on their blog. then we had lunch with jon at ‘dos coyotes’ in the arden mall. then we had dinner with james/cheryl/amanda/ryan at ‘bj’s brewing company’. phew! that was a lot of eating out for one day! but SOO yummy! we left for the airport right after dinner at ‘bj’s’ and a quick stop at amanda and ryan’s cute little place. we were really happy to be able to see so many people while out in california. we weren’t sure if we would have time to meet anybody, let alone so many. that is why we kept our visit kinda hush-hush, we weren’t sure if we would be able to squeeze in so much, but we did and it was fun! 😀

i’d also like to thank every body for the very nice birthday presents! 😀

check out the new album!

where are we going? we’re not tellin’! (but maybe we’ll see you there. ;))

ugh. I had the worst time getting home today from work, and where better to openly complain about it then on my own personal blog!?  Apparently there was some sort of ‘signal malfunction’ and so the subway trains were only coming about 1/3 as frequently as they normally do. What this means is that not only is service slower, but there are 3 times the number of people cram-packed into the subway cars! Now, during rush hour, the trains are usually packed enough, but add this to the mix and you have yourself a very hot, stinky, packed-in-like-a-sardine-doesn’t-even-begin-to-describe-it situation.  Add on top of that a homeless person (God bless her) who hadn’t had a bath in months by the smell of it and you’re really starting to have a good time. At this point, I, like most other people in that particular car exited promptly at the next stop. I’m not sure if this was a very good move though, because I had to wait another 20 minutes to catch the next train coming by–which was also packed to the brim with evening commuters like myself trying to get out of Manhattan and back into Queens. And on top of all that, my cell phone died; this was unfortunate on two levels–for one, I can’t call and tell Candice why I’m so late, and two, I wasn’t able to listen to the MP3s on it (which recently happened to be the BBC radio-show version of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’) But then I have to think to myself, if these are the worst things I have to complain about right now, then life isn’t so bad after all.

Thanksgiving. In March? Yup. Well, that’s what it felt like anyway after Candice cooked dinner. We had mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, and Quorn ‘Turkey-style Roast.’ (.) What’s that, you may ask? It’s a ‘meat alternative’ that has a texture and taste almost exactly like turkey. As most of you know, I don’t eat meat. But for the first 20 or so years of my life, I did and I can hostestly say I can hardly tell the different between the Quorn roast and real Turkey. Suffice to say, it was a pretty good ‘thanksgiving’ meal.

What you all really wanted to hear about was taxes, right? Oh yeah. It’s that time again. Time to beat your head against the wall and navigate through hundreds of tiny boxes with indecipherable instructions (and that’s using tax preparation software!) Somehow in the ‘tax vortex’ Candice and I ended up withholding exactly the amount of tax that we owed, so our net federal return ended up being $0.04 (which the IRS kindly rounded down to $0.00.) Luckily, though, the State of New York was kind enough to give us back a couple hundred dollars we had ‘loaned’ them.

Here’s my latest installment… check it out here.

Well, we all know that computers don’t always do what we want or even expect them to do. Sometimes programs and even entire operating systems crash and burn right in the middle of doing something important. Here is my small tribute to software designers and the problems they cause (AND the ways they try to explain these problems to us, the lowly users.) Luckily in the past couple years things have gotten better and operating system stability has improved quite significantly (especially for Windows.) Most of these were taken during the 90s at some point, when Windows 98 was mainstream and could hardly stay running for more than an hour or two without crashing.
Click here to see the album: Computer Errors

(Also, see the video here of Windows crashing when Bill Gates was trying to show it off at a conference. Classic.)