March...

So, some good news hits the plate.. Becky passed her veterinary tech national exam.. This was the one she was really worried about. She also took a state exam, but she hasn't got the results back yet. It is my understanding that the national exam holds more prestige, as you can be treated as a certified veterinary technician in any state. So that was real good news.. It means a good raise at work once she receives her certification card.

Lots of news I think.. Some I know I will forget... I am training up two of our IRR guys to take over the primary role of doing the Ghost'ing. One is almost trained up to the point where I believe he can produce good work. Training with the other one starts this week. I would say by the end of March, I should be working on my 3PM-11PM shift they want me on now. I know they had plans for this swap, but a lot of these plans were shot down when we got the new IRR guys, and we lost a couple of our 25Q's to outsites... Some temporary and some more permanent.

I keep getting packages.. I'm almost getting overwhelmed now.. I think my old IRR buddy has finally got back from his R&R, so I'm going to ship off his 4-5 boxes of Hickory Farms stuff this week. I have tons of beef jerky and random snacks now.

WOW! What actually prompted me to write this post.. I had the "click of death" going with my Seagate 1.5TB external.. Well, I was having problems getting a 830MB movie off.. I couldn't quite click through and copy it fast enough before it went into the clicking haitus .. so, I opened up a DOS prompt and typed in the exact copy command beforehand, and I copied it.. Woohoo, I decided to spend the last few moments browsing through the movies... It wasn't doing it.. So I decided to try copying another movie through the DOS prompt.. it worked! Wow.. I tried copying a movie through Windows Explorer to my desktop.. Still works. I don't know what the hell happened, but apparently the drive got stuck somewhere and I just possibly unjammed it? The drive is still shared to our LAN.. so I will let the random people grab their movies off it again. Good deal if this actually works again. I really wasn't looking forward to RMA'ing it and losing all this data. It will NOT be leaving my room! If people want movies, they can give their external to someone our LAN or me.

What else.. I ran into some old friends on Facebook.. one from old Wendy's and another Army guy from Korea.. Looks like he got the same letter back in September.. Man, they must've been yanking everyone. He didn't show up, I wouldn't expect him to.. He definitely disliked his job in the Army more than me.. lol. It's nice to see old faces on Facebook sometimes.

I've been playing GTA: San Andreas in Wine in OpenSUSE.. The OpenSUSE effort is still holding up strong.. almost 3 months now entirely in Linux. My only major gripe, that I will probably be ordering a pair to compensate for it.......... USB Headsets, do NOT work very well in Linux. I need to get some quality Plantronics/Creative 3.5mm jack headsets .. My onboard sound controller is picked up well and is using ALSA sound drivers, but the USB headsets are using OSS.. which only allows one application to use sound at a time.. How old school.. But anyways, the game is great....... I've played it on and off over the years, but I've never finished it.. Figured I might as well give it a whirl.. Nothing else here is occupying my time very well.

Our Fahaka Puffer, "Puffy", has been getting trained to eat clams instead of his usual nightcrawlers.. Puffers need tough stuff to chew on to keep their teeth grinded down over their life, or they'll get bucktooth billy going on and I will have to knock him out and clip his teeth.. which I REALLY don't want to do.. Becky is doing a great job training him.. She fools him by bringing the clam behind the nightcrawler container he is so used to seeing.. then drops the clam in.. he sucks the meat out and chews on the shell for awhile. We are currently only giving him a half-shell until he figures it out and gets used to it.. Then we'll try the whole shells, so he'll really have to crunch it up before he gets the meat.

Maybe more later.. getting tired.