A couple things I find somewhat amusing:

• I write a detailed list of my future plans and get no commentary or feedback (which is fine), but then I write about the weather and generate a significant, interesting discussion.
• I finally upgraded to FreeBSD 5.3 last night (after compiling it earlier this week). When my system came back up, I was getting pings between my box and my cable modem (which are directly connected with a cable) of greater than 50 seconds. I think that it would have been even longer if I kept on trying the pinging. I was getting “watchdog timeout” errors on my console too. Apparently, there was some sort of device conflict or something with my network card. (I added hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" to the end of my /boot/device.hints to fix it, in case anyone else is having similar problems.)

The National Weather Service has issued a High Wind Warning for Southern Worcester County. (Note: link is for current weather info, so if you click it tomorrow, the same info likely won’t be there.)

Power outages are expected to increase late today from the Hartford Springfield region to near Worcester and Providence as well as the high terrain near the blue hills southwest of Boston.

So here’s a friendly reminder: Save Early, and Save Often.

I just setup Cyrus IMAP on my FreeBSD box, so I can do server-side mail folders and Sieve filtering on my personal mail server at home (cooper.homedns.org). I figure that I’ll have to move all my mailing activities here once I manage to finish my schooling at WPI in a few weeks. In addition, I’m currently compiling the FreeBSD 5.3 kernel so I can upgrade to it this week. I’m a happy geek :).

• Tomorrow (Thanksgiving): Go to my grandma’s on my mom’s side for Traditional Thanksgiving Dinner for lunch.
• Tomorrow evening and night: Go to Jessi’s parents’ place for supper (which may not be much, depending on how hungry we are). Stay there overnight.
• Friday: I go to work from Jessi’s parents’, while Jessi stays there baking Christmas Goodies. I return from work to Jessi’s parents’, we have supper there, and we return home.
• Saturday: We go to a party for lunch with my dad’s side of the family. In the evening, we go to a Glad Christmas Concert. Glad is an amazing a capella group. People are welcome to join us; I can get tickets if people want to come.
• December 3, 2004: I run my Magic: the Gathering Unhinged Sealed Deck event at WPI Wedge Gaming. Anyone with even a passing interest in the game should come.
• December 16, 2004: I run a Magic Standard Constructed tournament at a nice place called Card Stop in Dudley. This also happens to be my last day of my last class to get my Master’s degree.
• December 23, 2004 (at noon) through January 2, 2005: I’ll be on vacation from work. During this time, we plan to go to Camden to spend Christmas with Jessi’s grandmothers. We’ll probably also be going to the annual New Year’s party at my aunt & uncle’s huge place in Middlefield (we’re assuming that they have it this year as usual).
• January 7, 2005: Xbox party at ‘s place!
• January 22–23, 2005: Attend the Betrayers of Kamigawa Magic set prerelease. I’ll probably be judging again, and may try for my level 2 (Area Judge) certification (I’m currently a level 1 Local Judge). (Those particularly interested may want to see the level descriptions.)
• February 5–6, 2005: Attend the Magic Grand Prix Boston. I’ll probably be going as a Judge, as the Extended format uses cards from sets I don’t have much of, and I’m not that great at Constructed anyway. And, I like judging. It’ll be neat to judge a higher-level event like this.
• February 10, 2005 (and following?): I received notice in the mail today that I have Jury Duty on this date.
• May 21, 2005: WPI Commencement Day, which I’m currently planning on attending even though I get my degree in January.
• This summer (July or August, maybe?): Move into new house!

Time in our schedule gets allocated quickly, so if you want us to attend something it’s best to give us as much notice as possible.

So, I got good news from the bank yesterday: They’ll be happy to give us a loan. In fact, they’d be okay with loaning $100,000 more than we think we need right now. They just need two things from us before we sign:

1. The value of the land. This may be difficult to know for sure, since the land was a gift and not sold. We may just give them a random guess and hope that they’re happy with it.
2. How much the house will cost. We’re currently anxiously awaiting word from our builder on that (as well as when he’ll start drilling the well).

So, things are going quite well. We got blueprints a few weeks back, but I didn’t post them since we don’t have them in digital form since we don’t have a scanner and they’re on much-larger-than-normal sheets of paper. Does anyone have a scanner that could scan tabloid-sized-or-larger sheets of paper? (At the moment, the bank has our copy, but we should be getting them back at some point… And there are more copies at my parents’ house.)

Yesterday, we attended the Magic Unhinged release tournament at That’s Entertainment. Unhinged is a wacky and funny set. (“I attack you for three… and a half!” is just the beginning.) I did fairly evenly, as I tend to do, going 2-2-1. Jessi, on the other hand, did amazingly well, doing 4-0-1 in the swiss rounds, her draw being with me. She didn’t do so well in the elimination rounds, but she still ended up in 4th place out of the 32 players there.

Today I discovered this IE bug. Luckily, that site documents it and includes an odd workaround.

But the best part is that it includes this cynical and accurate quote: Why is this happening? Don’t ask such silly questions! This is IE, remember? Conformance with the specs is only to be hoped for, not expected.

Update: And then, I spent a lot of time dealing with this IE bug. Why is IE still so broken?

People who are interested are invited to a Halo 2 impromptu fragfest tomorrow at my parents’ house. They have both room for us and largely-sized televisions. We’ll probably be there starting at about 10 in the morning or so until we get tired.

Well, it’s now officially Winter. It’s the first snowfall of the season, and there’s already some accumulation on the ground.

I must concur with the rest of the world that Halo 2 is just completely awesome. It’s just a very well-done video game.

Microsoft must be happy, too… 2.4 million copies on Day 1, with $125,000,000 in sales… And that’s not counting people like me, who aren’t quite as hard-core Halo fanatics and waited until the second day to buy it.