| 2005-10-22 11:04:59 606 Ok, now that I am not so mad at the Abbey, I want to say that Scott did a wonderful job as Alumni Secretary getting the dinner together without much time on a weekend where everyone has stuff to do. However the Abbey still sucks and I will never spend another dollar there ever again. |
| 2005-10-21 23:54:16 605 If you want bad service go to Rosey Baby. If you want the worst service imaginable, go to the Abbey. The Abbey is a scourge against all that is good in eating out in Starkville. Emily and I got there at 9:00ish because the fraternity had a reservation for 30 people. Jimmy was the only one there when we got there because everyone else was running a bit late from the choir concert. There were no tables for us even though we had a reservation. At 9:15ish people started showing up from the concert and there were still no tables. At about 9:35 we were finally seated. Of course they seated us all around the place so there were four different tables. Sadly this was the best part of the evening as our drink orders went pretty well. Then around 10:00 our waiter finally got around to taking our orders. By this point the last table of random people after us were seated. So then we waited. And we waited. And we asked for breadsticks. And waited some more. At about 10:30 we finally got some breadsticks. And my water glass was empty. And then we waited. At about 10:50, those random people who were seated after us were leaving after finishing their entire meals. They all had entrees. This brings up the interesting point that at our table of ten, Jimmy had ordered a medium steak, half had ordered deserts and the others got appetizers. So we have a flip flip it is done steak, some break them out of the refrigerator desserts, and a few dunk them in boiling oil appetizers. That is it. By 11:00 the guys at the other tables were nearly done with their food and the desserts were finally brought to our table. It was 11:05 when our appetizers and Jimmy's steak were brought out. Emily immediately asked for our checks. By the time we were done with the food the check came. I paid, left about a ~12% tip (Emily won't let me tip poorly since her stint at waitressing), and got out of Dodge. In five+ years in Starkville, the Abbey has granted me the worst dining experience possible. I mean, Rosey Baby is sometimes awful, but at least they have Abita on tap for cheap. All the Abbey has is crappy wannabe German entrees. My order tonight was so simple, just a freaking appetizer sampler. They did not even have the cheese sticks for it and we had to make substitutions. This time the Abbey gets a -1000 out of 10 so all time for me the Abbey grants a score of -994 and that is bad. All I can hope for now is that this bad service there will be experienced by many and be the kiss of death for the Abbey just like it was for Chalmers and the other businesses in that location. Yeah this post is obviously a rant, but the Abbey sucks and is the worst restaurant in Starkville that you can possibly go to. |
| 2005-10-18 21:45:34 604 What constitutes an offer? Millsaps is offering 100 gallons of gas for any purchase in a TV ad that I have seen several times; twice tonight on FX. There is no disclaimer, however only vehicles are shown in the screens. Does this mean if I go buy a spark plug from the service center I am entitled to 100 gallons of gas? "Any purchase" really seems like a consumer buying any item they have.... |
| 2005-10-16 21:20:37 603 Wow, post 600 and I wasted it talking about el-lamo bikeo. Sorry Emily, I love you too :) |
| 2005-10-16 21:19:35 602 681.2 on the odometer so a mere 57.8 miles last week. I would have had more but when I left to go riding Friday afternoon in my sexy spandex and as I tried to clip in, realized my right pedal was screwed up. The pivot for the clip is a thin piece of steel that runs through the pedal. One end was hanging out slightly so it does not pivot correctly. My hammer could not fix it either. So now I am going to find some used Look pedals on ebay before I will be able to clip in again. I could go for the 90 gram titanium carbon ones but they would cost more than I bought the bike for... |
| 2005-10-14 20:52:11 601 Today's Math Problem: If a 750mL of Jim Beam is ~$13.00 and a 1.75L is $17.19, is it a better deal to buy the 1.75? Answer: What a value! Especially if you are shopping at Bulldog Package. The Deathray Davies' video for Clock in Now is great. Note to Green Day and Kanye West: anti George Bush is like busted as Radiohead had you beat way back in 2003 with Hail to the Thief. |
| 2005-10-14 15:50:07 600 Does the MSU police department even give speeding tickets? The nice little speed display that lets you know how fast you are going is cute, but it just makes people go faster. I was going up Barr this morning just past the stadium at about 22MPH and almost got run over by an old man passing me going 30MPH over a hill through a curve with crosswalks. Of course I beat him around the chapel and I took a leisurely stop at the stop sign in front of him. Now that I know the MSU police number, 2121, I am going to get some info and call them... |
| 2005-10-13 15:46:37 599 There was a bit of downtime today as I am trying to get Open-Xchange to run correctly. Of course it it a masked ebuild in Tomcat to emerge sucked. Had to do it though because it was a dependancy for Open-Xchange and had a bunch of Java downloads that I had to manually get from Sun. Turns out that I have something set wrong and the Open-Xchange ebuild would not work quite correctly. Basically the ./configure takes in --with-jsdkjar= with a completely incorrect value. The fix is to go here in the ebuild: myconf="${myconf} --with-jsdkjar=${TOMCAT_DIR}/common/lib/servlet-api.jar" Cheat and replace the variable for the Tomcat directory with the correct location: myconf="${myconf} --with-jsdkjar=/usr/share/tomcat-5/common/lib/servlet-api.jar" And that is that. Also it turns out that the configs for Apache have been moved around and changed in /etc/apache2. It took a while but I finally figured out that to change the DocumentRoot to where I needed it could only be done in /etc/apache2/modules.d/41_mod_ssl.default-vhost.conf If ever there was an intuitive location, that is it! Sadly I still do not have Open-Xchange running correctly just yet either.... |
| 2005-10-11 23:40:48 598 Join the Great Debate! |
| 2005-10-11 22:39:47 597 So I am installing open-xchange now and its many many dependencies. It is likely to break mysql. I made a backup of the sessernet database before I started but I am not sure about the wiki. But no one cares about the wiki anyway so it does not matter. Of course the only reason I am installing open-xchange is that Emily and I can keep a calendar in Sunbird and sync it together. Little goal for lots of work. That is how I operate. |
| 2005-10-09 23:12:51 596 Emily and I went to The Abbey Friday night. We had to wait in the front for a bit for someone to come from the back and seat us. Emily attributed that to the fact that there was no hostess. It was obvious that there had been some nice interior decorating. Sadly they forgot the important detail of sound dampening. The place might have had 1/3 of the tables full but sounded like the football game was going on. Our waiter was really good though. I got the bratwurst plate and Emily some kind of chicken parmesan. Sadly the breadsticks at the beginning of the meal were the best part of it because they were full of mozzarella. The Ceasar salads were good ole plain jane salads. Emily's chicken parmesan was just that, a small bit of chicken floating in a sea of cheese. That was it, for $15. My bratwurst plate consisted of two tiny brats, a smidgen of mushroom sauce over them, some undercooked sliced potatoes, and some interesting cabbage. The Abbey (out of 10) Free Bread 10 Service 9.9 Acoustics 1 Food 2 Overall 6 (Emily and I had a good time yelling at each other over the noise) 623.4 on the odometer. Makes 55.2 miles this week. |
| 2005-10-05 23:07:37 595 Carl, next door Carl is a chicken from the future!! -- Shake Cartoons are so pretty on 32 inches. |
| 2005-10-03 22:42:52 594 Today was fun. 13.6 on the bike, a couple games of wally ball, and I ran a 7:26 mile on the Sanderson track. Ran the first two laps in :45 a piece, and slowed down for the rest. I almost lost count so did not push the last lap until the last few feet. Here is to being able to walk tomorrow... MUW is out of the stone ages and Emily finally has a facebook.com profile. So that means I have a relationship with a real person. Yay. And now Henderson has it too so David has a profile. |
| 2005-10-03 07:42:57 593 I got new parts in on Friday for the bike so I worked on and off all weekend to finish it. Routing cables and adjusting deraileurs is time consuming. Anyway Jeremy cooked several varieties of wings at the Berryhill's Friday night and it was a load of fun. Then Emily, Nathan, and I went to the Boar's Head for a bit. I got up early Saturday and ran errands to get random supplies from Lowes. Walked to the game around 12:30ish and Renee Davis showed up with Brumfield and sat with us. We looked like we had a chance in the first half of the first quarter but then it went downhill quick. Near the end of the 3rd Emily left to go deliver a paper she had written. Marlana came and sat with us too, I had not seen her and Renee together since 2001. Sadly we lost the game. Even more sad is that since I left the band, I think the only other game I have seen 0:00 on the clock was when we beat Florida last year. After a while Emily, Cory, and I went and ate at Mugshot's. The service was like Rosey Baby's, non-existant. But we had the time to sit there so I did not mind. Sadly when I got back to the apartment, I started working on the bike. Sunday we had kids church and then when I got home I finished the bike for the most part. I rode it to the proby meeting and gave Lee most of his notebook stuff. Then before church, we met Emily's parents at Oby's and ate. Emily and I watched the late showing of Corpse Bride. It was pretty good. We were almost going to be the only two watching it until two more couples showed up. 568.2 on the odometer so that makes 55.8 miles last week. That was straight commuting as I took it easy and did not do any extra riding. Strangely enough I had some weight just evaporate somehow and I am under 215 for the first time since 2001. |
| 2005-09-28 20:40:12 592 The other day I figured out that www.sesser.net had an old DNS record and was pointing to nowhere. Fixed that and my traffic has started to grow. Luckily sesser.net was always working. |
| 2005-09-27 22:52:41 591 My 32" Wega will be here in 5 to 11 days. Yay!! |
| 2005-09-26 09:04:15 590 512.4 on the odometer so that makes 63.8 miles last week. A little while ago I got a call from Teresa. Turns out we are supposed to be on campus working. Somehow. |
| 2005-09-25 23:01:47 589 So Russ came by here and we headed into campus on University. Cops would not let us go straight by the stadium four way stop so we had to turn left and managed to head towards the Sanderson and get to Butler the back way. There were a parts trees down. From Butler we could only see a few trees down to the east. The magnetic locks would not disengage from Russ's key, but the manual locks in the fire escapes worked fine. The UPS's in the server room were complaining about the lack of power and Russ got everything shut down that was still up which wasn't much. From there we headed off down Lee until we saw this mess. Hooked a right at Campus Book Mart and made it through that neighborhood almost to Old Mayhew. We got close and had to turn around because of electrical work. The nearest side of Cantaberry to campus was torn up but Chris Vance's side had very little damage. Emily's apartment was barely 100 yards away from the destruction but did not have any. Chris Vance came with us with his super rubber boots. We wanted to get to the back side of campus but knew that the cops would have campus blocked off, so we headed toward Blackjack. According to Russ, it was possible to get there from the golf course but we could not figure out how. So we came back to Bardwell and crossed to Blackjack. The end of President's Circle on Blackjack was not blocked so we went in that way. It looks like half of the trees on campus are down. Almost all of the pictures I took are so blurry but here is a good one from across the street from the Union. The back of the Perry is missing bricks and the Lloyd-Rick's annex is missing some roof. The sirens started going off again and the wind picked up a lot so we went back into Butler. After a bit things calmed back down and the siren went off. We headed back toward University Hills to see if we could see if Russ's student worker Casey was ok. The trailers next to Casey's were destroyed but his seems to have maybe only moved a few inches and have the skirting blown from the bottom. The cops were only letting a few people go to the torn up trailers at a time. We headed back up to the front and saw Beef's trailer. It had moved about 30 feet from its blocks, good thing EC took a while today or he would have been there. Beef's neighbor was not so lucky. Even worse he was in there when it went down the hill. When Beef got home he heard him yelling so he went down the hill and pulled him out of the wreckage and took him to the hospital. I found this out while we were at the trailer because the guy's dad showed up and told us. Beef's trailer became a weapon and attacked his neighbor's poor defenseless truck. From there we dropped Chris Vance back off and made another loop through campus from the entrance near the Sanderson. There were some streetlights on and emergency lights were on in buildings. Then he dropped me back off at my apartment. After a while I decided to go to the old Food Max and get some groceries and just happened to run into Beef. He was fine. Everyone keeps calling his cell phone and the outer display does not work so there is no caller id. He is going to stay with someone from his church and his landlord has another place that he will be able to rent. So as it is now, there are no classes until 1:00 PM tomorrow. Non essential staff are not supposed to be on campus until about noon so I don't know what time I will go to work. Russ called a little while ago and said that the power is on in Butler so he was going to turn the servers back on. |
| 2005-09-25 16:24:37 588 University Hills got it bad. Russ is coming by to pick me up so we can go to Butler and get his servers shut down. |
| 2005-09-25 16:13:37 587 The sirens just came back on. The word is that the annex is messed up, the forestry buildings roof is shredded, lots of trees and utility poles are down on campus. According to the TV the north end of campus is bad. Windows out of the dorms. Police are out everywhere. Tornado in Webster County right now and one near Pheba. |
| 2005-09-25 15:04:51 586 The tornado sirens are still going off. We just had EC at my apartment and the guys were heading to campus for the Proby meeting. Scott called and said that the Lloyd-Ricks Annex is missing its roof and there are several trees down... |
| 2005-09-24 22:06:30 585 It has been a weekend so far. Had Kids Crusade to help with after work on Friday. It actually went very well. Then last night was Bulldog Bash and we were up for a while. Today was even more Kids Crusade and running errands. Was lazy tonight and watched the game on TV and avoided the rain. We did much better than we should have against a top ten team. Hopefully this trend will continue. Tomorrow is the conclusion of Kids Crusade, then there will be EC and maybe even helping Russ pull some carpet up. |
| 2005-09-21 20:49:17 584 If I was in charge, I would be making a margarita out of Rita and dumping every piece of ice available into the Gulf. Cool it down a few degrees and maybe it would not be as bad. It is like as plausible as building the "Great Atlantic Hurricane Wall" that will be held up by skyhooks and space towers. All I have to say is go buy gas now because this one might really make the $4 spike a reality. Last time I filled up was on September 2 and I still have a bit more than half a tank. |
| 2005-09-20 19:22:30 583 Wal-Mart is evil! It is entering the banking industry right now! It is just a matter of time until you deposit your paycheck and get a Wal-Mart giftcard. But it is not a giftcard, it is an RFID implant in your hand! (Queue the evil Walton laughter...) |
| 2005-09-19 07:51:19 582 448.6 on the odometer so 57.2 last week. Plus some undocumented miles on the work Trek. Plus too many miles in canoe. My left arm still hurts from the canoe. |
| 2005-09-18 15:13:41 581 This weekend has been a good one. Emily and I went to a birthday party at TJ's and had a really good time even though we felt old. On Saturday we went canoing near Caldonia. I got burned on my face and knees and was so sore this morning I could barely walk. Beat Tulane! Yay! |
| 2005-09-16 17:34:35 580 I think Jimmy has beat us all by leaving the air "on" instead of on "auto" and racking up a $240 electic bill. I was worried about mine; in the first 22 days I racked up a $115 bill so I was expecting to get a $180ish bill this time. Luckily it is only $130 for 32 days. Bumping the air up 5 degrees during the day and making sure it is on auto has been making a big difference. |
| 2005-09-15 21:54:26 579 So according to the illustrious Chris Brumfield, last night was Roxy's last night of existance. Today when I rode by it looked like everything was being moved out. Roxy's was an awesome place; they actually had most of the Abita beers on tap. Hopefully it will open under some new name soon because Rosey Baby sucks and it is the only other place in town with Abita on tap. At least Mugshots has New Castle on tap but it is a freaking walk. Dave's is kinda close but we have not been there since I moved into the new apartment. Better than dead cats, if someone could turn poop into gas they would be rich beyond all imagination. "And we are going to put a happy little bush down in this corner." |
| 2005-09-15 21:38:40 578 Muncie lives!!! I saw him for the first time since W day. |
| 2005-09-15 08:16:31 577 Fuel made from dead cats is the wave of the future. |
