Weekend

I had a pretty fun weekend. Friday I went to a happy hour, drank beer and watched the Sox game. I'm not a huge Sox fan, but I'm happy to see a Chicago team in the running. Being that I live on the North Side, this is Cubs territory. There's not a ton of excitement, given the significance of the situation (I live across the street from a few bars, so I have a good indicator outside my windows). I can't help but wonder how nuts this place would be if it were the Cubs. I guess I should ask someone who lived here last year.

After sleeping in on Saturday, I took a walk down to the Old Town School of Folk Music and picked up some fresh strings for the guitar. I'd had the last set since I got the guitar in December '04. So I walked back home, changed the strings (broke the high E in the process...damnit...good thing I bought two packs), and decided that I had to do something outdoors since it was so perfect outside.

I took a walk toward the lake, stopped in at a sushi place and had a bargain lunch special. The rolls were good, the fish was so-so, but all in all it was a very tasty late lunch. I then continued on to the lakefront and plopped myself down on the rocks at the shore and read for about an hour. The crashing waves...the sun...the breeze...the peace...it was almost like vacation (almost).

After that, I went to 3 Penny Cinema and watched The Aristocrats. The Aristocrats is a documentary about a sort of inside joke in the comedy industry. The joke is simple: "A family walks into a talent agent's office and says, 'we have a great act for you!' 'Let me see it,' says the talent agent." At this point the comic telling the joke improvises the most filthy, vile, incestuous, scatological act he can imagine. "'Wow,' says the talent agent, 'what do you call that?' 'The Aristocrats.'" (Watch South Park perform the joke for a prototypical example.) The movie is worth seeing, but (as I was previously warned) it suffers from very distracting editing. As for the cinema, it's a small, two screen theater that still only costs $6.50 for a ticket. Plus I live about 1.5 blocks away. Good enough.

Sunday started with me going to my guitar class at Old Town School, as usual. Then I decided to go for a run. I don't think I've run for much beyond two miles since track in high school, but today I decided to push it. (In fact, in March 2004, 2 miles was an accomplishment.) I ran almost four miles and felt great. I don't know what got into me. Maybe it's my soggy belly, or maybe it was seeing all those fit, trim people with their LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon t-shirts walking around town recently, or maybe the trouble I've been having falling asleep the last few weeks. Whatever it was, I ran about twice as far as I have in probably five years. My route: up to Fullerton, over to the lake, south along the lake to North, stop to stretch, cross over Lake Shore Drive, run back up to Fullerton, back to home. It felt great! Maybe I can make longer runs more regular.

I did some laundry after that, and have been watching some baseball this evening while diddling around on the computer. I'm experimenting with running Virtual Server 2005 on my Media Center, with Server 2003 running in a virtual instance. I want Server 2003 somewhere (mainly for IIS6 and multiple concurrent remote desktop connections), but I don't want extra hardware. My Media Center Box has plenty of oomph (though it needs a pinch more RAM). I'm frustrated by XP's limitation of only one interactive user at any given time. Two people can be logged in at any given time, but only one can be interactive. In other words, I can't remote desktop into my Media Center box and do work while at the same time playing music with the account logged into the console (hooked up to the TV). Another frustration I'm having is that I don't have a "home" computer anywhere. Every time I get a new laptop issued by work, I transfer my primary operations there, since I already have too many computers. But I'm thinking I can set up a "home base" in this virtual instance. Remote desktop in and I'm home. It won't work for things that need to be on hardware (DirectX, for example), but being able to leave MSN Messenger or AIM signed in somewhere (given that I can't sign in at work) might be cool. More to come.