bobafred

My car is getting a new transmission and the best part is that it’s completely covered by the warranty. Thanks Honda.

Ok, so the real best part is that they rented me a Chevy Aveo for a few days. It’s tiny.

Friday night was spent with two of my three favorite ladies (mom was busy) at the Tabernacle enjoying the awesome rockingness that is the Deftones. I’ve mentioned it before, but the Deftones are definitely my current favorite band. The Fall of Troy opened.

The show was great. They opened with Korea, which is one of my favorites from White Pony, and continued to rock from there. I was a little surprised that they played Back to School (Mini Maggit), because I’ve always read that they’re not totally in love with how the song came about, but it’s pretty great, so I’m glad they did. They also got in crowd favorites: Change (In the House of Flies), Passenger, Hole in The Earth, etc. Also, I don’t remember them playing anything from the self-titled album. To close, they started to play 7 Words, but then halfway through broke into Weezer’s Say It Ain’t So with the guitarist/vocalist from The Fall of Troy. It was pretty awesome. They then finished out 7 Words and called it a night.

This is the second time I’ve seen the Deftones live, and I have to say that they were both excellent shows. I think that the set from the last time was better, but both were well worth the price of admission. Also, Lori bought me a t-shirt. I love t-shirts.

Photos.
Korea video.

Lori and I took a few days off to head down to Miami Beach. It was fun. Originally the trip was planned by Dave and Lori, and I attached myself to their plans, but Dave had to cancel at the last minute because of things. We missed him and his love of frozen drinks very much.

My main goal for the trip was to relax, which we completely accomplished. Aside from a fancy dinner one night, we didn’t really make any plans to do things before we left. The days consisted of walking around and hitting the beach. And the evenings consisted of walking around and hitting dinner. Neither of us are really clubby people, so we avoided that whole scene entirely.

Instead we found Mac’s Club Deuce, which was sort of like The Highlander. We met a nice local named Leo there that told us about the best place for dinner on 39th and Collins where, if we were lucky, we could find some free parking even though we were without a car. He told us about his first marriage and his three kids and how he met his current ‘old lady’ on a drywalling job. He also said that I should treat Lori well, which I do, because he could tell she was an amazing girl. which she is. By the end of our conversation, he told me to ‘get the fuck out of here’ and take Lori to get dinner at the nice place on 39th and Collins. It’s the first time someone has told me to ‘get the fuck out of here’ in a nice way.

While I wouldn’t consider myself a beach person, I did enjoy our beach time. And I’m not just saying that because it was a topless beach. The water was pretty cool, which felt nice after sitting in the hot sun. We managed to avoid most of the rain and get two solid beach trips in. Also, I didn’t get burned, which is awesome. Did I mention topless?

On Friday night we went to Puerto Sagua for some great Cuban food. I had the roasted chicken with black beans and rice. It was so good. I loved the atmosphere of the place. Plus, dinner for two in South Beach for $25 is a steal.

Aside from a weird stomach thing that we both seemed to share throughout the week, I had a great time. It was nice to get out of Atlanta for a few days.

Photos here.

After discussing some Linux things with Dave this weekend and being without my webserver for the past few weeks, I realized that I missed having a Linux box to mess around with. Then I remembered that I had a Fedora partition that I hardly ever used. It was pretty outdated, though, so I figured a fresh install would be best.

I decided to go with Ubuntu, which seems to be the favorite Linux flavor amongst the nerds currently. The installation process was the easiest Linux install I’ve ever done, which was nice. With the latest versions, the desktop install CD is actually a Live CD, so you can explore Ubuntu a bit without doing any install at all. Once you’re ready to go, launch the install process right from the desktop. The only sort of advanced thing I had to do was to manually partition the hard drive, because I wanted to preserve my NTFS partitions. Other than that, cake.

Dave completely ditched Windows back in February, but I decided to keep my XP partitions intact. Right out of the install, I was able to access the NTFS partitions without any problems. This allowed me to access all my mp3s and photos and such without days of copying things around. I’m a fan of that. So far, things have gone pretty smoothly.

As of now, I’ll be using Linux as my primary OS. Should be fun.

Last night I had a dream about ants that when they bite you, give you poison ivy. Poison Ivy Ants! Freaky. I haven’t had any run-ins with ants or poison ivy in a long time, so I’m not exactly sure where this came from. There was a pretty gigantic swarm of bees outside work yesterday, so that could have something to do with it. And, I’m highly highly allergic to poison ivy, so maybe that fear lives in my brain all the time.

Or it could have just been totally random. Whatever the reason, it freaked my shit out. I remember being afraid to fall asleep in the dream because I might get bit by a Poison Ivy Ant. Also, thinking how does one avoid Poison Ivy Ants in general. Like they would chase me and over power me and bite me and give me poison ivy.

Thankfully, I survived the Poison Ivy Ants so that I could share the experience with you.

Me and Brian
Originally uploaded by mingaling.

I’m pretty happy currently.

I’d go as far as to say that if you actually know me, and you’re reading this, then I’ve never been as happy as I currently am in the time you’ve known me.

Sure a lot (most) of it has to do with a certain someone, but there are other things too. Like an awesome job that challenges my brain and is actually fun. And great family and friends both here in the ATL and far-ish away.

Yes. Things are great. I’m very lucky.