Holiday mall hours suck. A lot. Really.

But anyways, Saturday was a little get-together at the mall to celebrate Alison's birthday. I don't think I had seen her since the Ocean City trip. Even her hair was a different color. x_x Oh well... in an lame attempt at a last-minute present, I went down to Suncoast (with Chris and Brice tagging along) and ended up grabbing an "atashi" (Chobits) plushie and a bag of Hello Kitty "kawaii cookies" for her. Even though I have no idea what those cookies taste like. Since I had to get my discount, I ended up waiting for a manager to get free, then took up his time when he called over to my store to verify that I still worked there, since I had neglected to bring a paystub with me. All was good, though, even if Jon (who answered said phone call) told me later that he was tempted to say he had no idea who I was. x_x

We all had the dinner gathering at Bennigans, probably violating a few fire codes in the process. People kept coming and adding to the already over-the-table's-capacity group. We all gave Alison her presents, did the obligatory weird picture thing (hopefully I'll be able to update the gallery before I leave tomorrow), selected our Secret Santa targets for the year, and had the waiters do the embarrassing birthday song parade thing they love to do. Alison and Kevin needed to go home right after dinner, but most of the rest of us ended up at the Pak house watching either the TV (Family Guy, then Monsters Inc. all recorded on their PVR) or Chris play Wolfenstein. o.O I left before they finished the movie, since it was getting rather late at that point and the others were leaving anyways. (I have a tendency of leaving with the crowd, I guess.)

Naturally, got home and didn't get much sleep at all, since mashadar was about to leave for about a week and we decided to try and catch up on Bottle Fairy before he left. Luckily, we finished both eps that night (though it was afternoon for him). But it also meant I didn't get to sleep until around 9am. Naturally, my sleep schedule is still screwed up thanks to that. (As evidenced by the fact that I'm writing this entry NOW of all times.)

There were indeed plans on Sunday, kind of. Cristina and Adam were visiting from NJ and birthday plans were made, with an open invitation for after 5pm at their place. After visiting Josh and taking care of a few things, I got there at around 7pm to find Cristina and Adam weren't even there, nor did anyone else come. They had apparently just stepped out to eat as no one had come, so I waited inside, and set up pop'n 8 with Adam's ASC. (Maybe I should have brought my ASC too, but I'm not sure if the Tenicila house could have contained the both of them.)

Ms. Tenicila called John over, and Cristina and Adam returned. I also called Hanna, and gave the phone to Cristina, as apparently they were all eating dinner together. Eventually, that entire group (Hanna, Kevin, Billy, Clara, etc) came over too. They stayed until around 10 or 11, and John and I stayed until closer to 1. o.O Learned that the reverse-boost mod in DDR is made easier if you use sudden and/or solo with it. Also learned that playing R5 another in IIDX with a pop'n ASC is a very bad idea. It sounded very much like a woodpecker on speed was trying to tunnel through the house. x_x

So yeah, I got home, did some more stuff, slept, etc. Wanted to do a post office /food run before work, but didn't get up in time to get ready, and left. Even worse, found out that I was scheduled for 3:00 and not 3:30, so I ended up 20 minutes late. Urgh.

Same pattern next day. My LD of On Your Mark came in, which woke me up at about 1:40. Went back to sleep until around 3:40, and once again didn't have enough time for a post office run getting up that late. Got to work late again, by 10 minutes. I swear there's some cosmic rule that I can never arrive to work on time no matter how early I leave.

Also did something strange and unexpected - I went and purchased one of the used Dreamcast bundles at Gamestop. Also ended up getting an extra controller, VMU, and 3rd party memcard for free with it, thanks to a slightly botched trade-in. Naturally, I have no games for it, and I need to go find an S-Video cable somehow.

Of course, it would be great if it actually outputted any video or audio. After cleaning it up, I plugged it in, and it seemed to work fine except for it not outputting anything at all. It was like nothing was plugged in at all. The DC's behavior seems to strongly suggest it's just a faulty cable, so I'm hoping it's not the DC itself that's defective. It'll be kinda hard to replace it if it is...

Sleep is good. Would be better if it was at anything resembling normal hours.

Site updates: Movable Type version upgrade will have to wait until I actually get some sleep, but I should get that done before I leave. Grabbed the new XML template finally (we're up to RSS version 2.0 now), so now the standard XML feed (as well as the LJ feed) have been upgraded to the newer spec. Killed the link to index.rdf (as I'm not sure if anything really uses that), but it will still be kept up to date as RSS 1.0.