The food came, and it was different than any “Chinese” I’ve had in Lexington, and fantastic.  And for once, it was actually spicy.  I wouldn’t quite call it hot, but a comfortable medium.  My nose started to run just slightly, but my eyes were fine and I didn’t sweat.  I certainly didn’t start searching for a glass of milk, and that’s when I consider something truly hot.

Either way, I’ll be going back and looking for more menu items labeled with two tiny chile peppers, Panda’s sign for spicy!

Instead of telling you about, say, my wonderful experience playing Rock Band 2 lately, or the new Roku Netflix player I ordered, I will be telling you about the driver I was behind this morning.  He drove a pickup truck with lights mounted beneath his rear bumper.  I assume these light are for aiding vision when loading and unloading the bed of the truck in the dark.  And for that purpose I am confident they would suffice, even excel.  Considering the things were like flood lamps pointed backwards, I’m sure they would illuminate the area behind the truck quite well.

They also blind everyone behind the truck if the lights are left on while he travels around town.  Say it with me: Outstanding!

To top things off he was an aggressive driver, constantly gunning his engine to pass people and swerve in front of them.  I’m fairly sure I’m not the only person who hates this guy.

Oh well, maybe tomorrow will be more positive.

It took me a minute of clicking around and wondering what I had done wrong before I remembered that I had the Admin Menu Dropdown plugin installed.  Basically, it hid the normal WordPress menu and displayed a pretty, compact, dropdown version.  Well, it still his the menu after the upgrade, which is why I couldn’t find anything.  I disabled it, since the new default menu is much more functional than the 2.6 version.

Right now, my current project at work involves taking some incredibly crappy code and refactoring it so it’s only partially crappy.  Step two will be making it even less crappy.  So right now I am dealing with completely ridiculous code that looks like that line above.  Actually that line is one I encountered today.  This stuff is so bad it actually makes me laugh, just before I fight back the tears that come with the realization that I have to fix it.

I suppose the worst part is this crappy code is deployed in a production system now considered business critical with a few thousand active users.  It really is miraculous that it runs at all.  Quite scary.

Along comes Star Wars: Clone Wars, a feature-length animated film that resembles the animation style used in those Clone Wars shorts on Cartoon Network.  You know, the ones that weren’t half bad?  Well, let’s add to that formula.  Do these sound like good starting points: a Hutt-let (Jaba’s son), Jaba’s gay uncle (no, really), and a 12-year-old female padawan that whines more than Anakin?  Most people would read that list and either assume it was a joke, or react violently in protest.  Somehow, these ideas actually made it into the movie.

Terrible.  Horrible.  Painful.  The movie was wretched.  Clone Wars was easily one of the worst movies I have ever watched, and I have seen more movies than most.  And what’s worse is it’s based in one of my favorite “franchise universes.”  I’ve never been one of those elitest fans that hates the new trilogy just because it’s not the original.  They had their ups and downs, but all in all they were enjoyable movies.  But this…  This is inexcusable.  In fact, if I was in charge, I would punish the people responsible.  They should be banned from Hollywood and movie-making forever.

Maybe they should even be imprisoned.  Let’s face it, what they did was wrong.  Please, if you have not watched Clone Wars save yourself the agony and torture.  Trust me, you’ll watch the first 10 minutes and start to wonder if the movie will get any better.  I can tell you: it doesn’t.

Of course, I’ve been working at Lexmark as a “contract-to-hire contingent worker” for around five years now, so the whole thing is a bit anticlimactic.  After a few hours of orientation videos and paperwork, I’ll go back to my same desk, performing my same duties with the same co-workers and reporting to the same manager.

Yes, it’s all a bit ridiculous, but at this point I’m not complaining.  Now I just have to figure out what to do for the next hour since my start time today is a full hour after my usual time.

Several weeks ago Mia and I spent an afternoon hiking about four miles round-trip from the parking area near Clingman’s Dome to Andrew’s Bald.  The trail was beautiful, the weather was perfect, and the scenery was amazing.  After a recent rain, the air in the Smokies was relatively clear and many of the trees were in the middle elevations were still ablaze with color.  On the way back we took the “bypass” trail to avoid the crowds huffing and puffing up to the observation tower on Clingman’s Dome, and the walked the paved path back down.

It was here, at the end of our short hike, that I encountered a most peciluar situation.  As we came off the trail, I noticed a small crowd of people in one corner of the parking lot.  As we approached I assumed they were all crowded around a chipmunk or perhaps a squirrel.  It wouldn’t have surprised me; people who don’t get out into nature much do some very strange things.  But it wasn’t a chipmunk, it was a construction crew.  Yes, construction.  I’m not sure exactly what they were “constructing,” probably repairing some concrete or something.  The point is: who cares!  This crowd of 10 or 12 people were surrounded with some of the most stunning natural beauty the Eastern United States has to offer, and they were busy watching the Bobcat earth-mover shovel dirt. Granted, he was moving said earth on the side of a very steep hill, but trust me, it wasn’t that perilous.  I had just hiked down and then back up the same hill.

Aside from this sad sight, the day was wonderful.  We finished it off with a stop in Cade’s Cove, and then returned to our campsite in Elkmont campground.  If you’ve never been, Elkmont is probably the most beautiful large campground I’ve ever had the pleasure of camping in.  Sure, it’s almost always crowded, and the sites are a little close for my tastes (if I can see, hear or smell you, then you are too close), but when you sit down next to the babbling mountain stream you forget about everything around you.

But it’s worth it, because last night, when I played “Crazy Train” on Guitar Hero World Tour for the first time, life finally made sense.

So after three tries (three!) I successfully installed XP and the Dell specific drivers.  Then, I started the process of running Windows Update.  That was yesterday.  I’m now a few hours into today, and I’m not even close to finished.  And I’ve only rebooted a dozen times…

Remind me again why anyone wouled actually choose to run Windows?  Seriously…  Please, please, please, for the love of all that is holy and good, check out Ubuntu!