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October 28, 2002

Slow week

October 23, 2002

Damn Cat

I woke up at 4am for the second night in a row, which, granted is probably partly the fault of my cat, and partly the fault of my going to bed a little earlier.

Not that I mind getting up early, since my alarm is now set for 5am, and I've been getting to work no later than 6:30.

This morning, I didn't want to get up at 4, so I tried to sleep a bit more... I drifted in and out of dreamworld till about quarter-of 5, when Ziggy decided it was playtime. And when your cat decides it's playtime, it's time to get up so he doesn't bounce up and down all over your partner, meowing loudly in their ears.

What I woke up to frankly made me want to crawl back under the covers and pretend I'd never woken up. The folks on the message boards over at one of my other sites decided it was time (again) to start another war, albeit a conversational confrontation and not an all-out 'My dad can beat up your dad' sort of thing. But it's close.

I hadn't been following it, (bad webmaster) since the message thread didnt involve me. This morning, I got an email from a friend who was personally offended and who (again) wanted the person banned (again). Although I don't agree fully, I do agree that something needed to be said, and it was, sometime last night around 8, by one of the other board admins.

Basically, he had the good sense to say (paraphrasing) 'If you want to play, play nice. We all disagree on a lot of things and we don't give a crap about those. Have the common sense to ignore it, and move on.'

Or at least that's what I got out of it, and I matter because I run the site.

Once upon the time, somebody took something the wrong way and it got out of hand. Then, the next time something was said, much later, the same people got up in arms, again for the wrong reasons.

Am I thicker skinned? Why are these people so goddamn offended? The words "gay" and "fag" were used, not as hateful words but in the context of "pop music is gay" and "those fags in Limp Bizkit"... The one person who made the limp B comment was simply stating his dislike of limp B, and perhaps made the wrong word choice. Admittedly, he may be against homosexuality, but as a coworker (at one time) he didn't vocalize it. The other was making an off-the-cuff comment implying that pop music is silly-stupid. But I think perhaps the homosexual meanning of the word was accurate, but that's not the point.

The limp B commenter got slammed for making the comment, and then slammed the gay-pop commenter for making a similar strike. And then all hell broke loose.

Limp B commenter may be an instigator but it doesnt mean he should be banned from commenting.

Am I wrong?

October 22, 2002

Two for Tuesday

It's a "<A HREF="http://www.daniasdailies.com/archives/000024.html#000024" target="_blank">Two For Tuesday</A>":

<I>1. Tell us about your first time you ever kissed someone. &#91;...&#93; You know you want to tell everyone.</I>

My first kiss... hm. I'd say it was my high school girlfriend, Shawn. Yes, high school. Senior year, even. Remember, I was a scary four-eyed, pizza-faced kid with braces for most of my early teens. After that I was just a farm-boy nerd. If I remember, it wasn't a good kiss... sorta sloppy (on her part).

<I>2. This one was sort of a toss up. So we'll leave it to your first job. &#91;...&#93; We have all had those first jobs that we're not proud of, so it's time for everyone to fess up!</I>

My first real job (non-yardwork) was working at the nearest McDonalds, 30 miles from home. I couldn't drive till I was a senior in high school (I was young), so I didn't get the job till after graduation. Why didn't I work somewhere closer? That's a longer, more involved story. Suffice it to say that in my small town, I was an outcast. So, McDonalds (and Hardees, concurrently) were my first jobs.

October 20, 2002

Slacking

October 17, 2002

Tidbits

So, I've been scanning the net for upgrades and add-ons to my MacOS X iBook, when I came across the following today: Mac Toters Push Wireless Bounds

Interesting... Not useful to me now, but maybe in the future.

Lots more to come, when I finally get a chance to perform some further updates to the laptop.

October 16, 2002

Meetdown.

Well, strike out on one <A HREF="http://blog.meetup.com/?country=1000&setLocale=0&localeId=&zip=43215&=continue">Meetup.</A> <A HREF="http://www.naladahc.com">Nala</A> and I were <A HREF="http://columbus.citysearch.com/profile/7852253/">there</A>... till just now.

Had dinner out with my folks, at which I got yelled at for not inviting him. Yes, my parents actually were quite upset that I didn't invite him along.

<B>Me:</B> I didnt know to invite him! You didnt say!

<B>Mom:</B> Every time, from now on, if we invite you, he's invited too. Unless we say otherwise.

Can you say weird? Who knew they'd be this ok with the whole thing?

October 15, 2002

Strange Memories

When I got up this morning, I was thinking about my grandma, and how we used to go toy shopping (window shopping of course). I remember her, several times, threatening to buy me a Barbie doll if I misbehaved. I remember being so worried she would carry out her threat. I wanted Stompers and Tonka Trucks. And later, Transformers and GI Joe. Once in a while I got a Stomper. Got lots of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. Had one Tonka dumptruck (die cast). But we were so poor all I got were the generic Transformers rip-offs, the K-bots (K-Mart).

Ah, memories.

October 14, 2002

Ikea!

So, I finally made my first trip to Ikea yesterday, with our friend Dan, and I only spent $65. However, I very well could've spent hundreds.

The drive to Pittsburgh was uneventful, as expected, and traffic was moving quite fast despite the rain.

We got to the store around 12:30 and headed straight for the restaurant. Mmmm, Swedish meatballs...

We spent a total of 4 hours shopping, despite the unpleasantness of seeing my ex-mother-in-law and literally bumping into her twice. She didnt verbally acknowledge me, but she did see me and recognize me for sure. At one point, after feeling followed, I leaned over to Dan and explained what was happenning, in a soft voice. 'That is her, I'm sure of it!' <I>Well, do you think she recognized you?</I> 'I'm not sure. I hope not.' Turned the corner and WHAM, there's Bonnie staring me in the face. I smiled politely and moved on.

This happened not once but TWICE, and not including the two other times she just sort of hovered nearby.

Unsettling when you think you're being followed by your ex-mother-in-law.

But, I managed to only spend small amounts of money, and get some accessories to fix up the front room... whenever Naladahc gets his books organized.

Filled with hate

Hate my class. Hate my class. Hate my class.

October 11, 2002

What's with the forced kid-ification?

Treating valued customers like "stupid endusers" seems to be Microsoft's goal in their newest desktop operating system.

I just completed a rebuild of my desktop machine at work, a p3-500 Gateway with 192M of RAM. The OS/App partition is 6GB, just to give you an idea of what I'm dealing with.

My first annoyance was with the sheer size of the OS install -- almost 3GB! When space is at a premium, this is NOT the OS for you. When I got the OS installed, then come the 18MB of security updates, which I had to download onto my (presumably) unsecure box.

Next, since my business relies heavily on Outlook as an email/Exchange server client, I installed that. Guess what... OUTLOOK XP uses MS Messenger. What?? What if I dont want it to? Oh wait, I have to go in and turn that off somewhere. Fun.

But Outlook's not the only thing that uses it. So does IE. Oh, and every time you boot up, if you havent attached a Passport to your system, it asks you. Screw that, I say, someone out there has to have been upset enough to find a workaround... Thank you techtv.com for the answers!

Another annoyance of Outlook (and it tells you, very proudly, that it did this...) is the stripping out of "Additional linefeeds" from incoming email.

Back to WinXP itself.. does anybody else find those little animations and fade-in/fade-outs annoying? How about the Autoplay of CD's ("what should I do with these media files?") Glad I could shut Autoplay off in the properties of the cd-rom drive.

I did manage to get rid of the kiddyland look and feel of XP, but only by visiting themexp.com. I highly recommend it.

One last annoyance: Visual Studio dotNET. What a piece of crap installer. 5 disks (it used all 5) and all I really wanted was the development environment itself. I didnt need the c#, c++, and visual basic tools. But, I had to install at least one to get the dev env.

That's enough griping about that. Now back to fun with Access reports.

October 10, 2002

Everything affects everything...

Everything in my life is so interdependent. If I didn't take this job at OSU, I wouldn't be able to afford school. If I want to have time to study, I dont have time for overtime. If I flunk class or am forced to withdraw because my grades slip, I have to pay for it. Frustrations from work and school add up to frustrations at home, and whether they're directed at myself or work or school, inadvertently they get taken out on Nala.

That makes me sad.

All I want to do is DO MY JOB, TAKE ONE CLASS, and be able to MAKE DINNER ONCE A WEEK. Downtime is at a premium.

And then add being sick on top of all that and you've got my life right now.

No time for failure, but no time to make things work.

Hellspawn Strikes Again!

oh cruel fate, thy name is Hellspawn. i goofed on a report (in one column, completely unnecessary) and all hell broke loose. therefore, i have less study time for my LAB which is like 7% of my grade. i shouldve been home by now.

the mistake is clearly my fault, but nobody checked the numbers, and she (Hellspawn) got a bad report delivered.

i've spent ALL DAY rebuilding my computer. ALL DAY. and now i'm stuck here till god knows when.

so much for cooking dinner.

October 9, 2002

WinXP stuff

Holy crap. It's been a long day. Killer headaches, dead cd-rom drives, and weird file appearances, which caused a rebuild in WinXP.

And the site revision is almost done. I swear.

Something Weird this Way Installs

"What the f***!?" I shouted. All of my free hard drive space was now taken up by megabytes upon megabytes of information from other network drives.

No, I didnt have a virus. No, no trojans, and no hacker activity.

What the hell was going on?

I immediately unplugged my box from the network, did another virus scan, looked for any weird activity in the last couple days. Seeing nothing, I thought "Better safe than sorry" and decided to reinstall.

Well, not just a reinstall. An upgrade. Win2k Pro to WinXP Pro. Office 2K Pro to Office XP Pro. Visual Studio .NET and Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks MX and Freehand 10. SQL 2k tools. And, if I had it, Photoshop 7.

And, while I'm at it, I think I'll install some other tools, like a personal firewall (just in case) and maybe some monitoring/lockdown tools.

What the hell.

October 8, 2002

Blah. Sick.

Har hardee har har.

Happy Tuesday. I'm getting ill, I'm sure of it, but so far my body is fighting it.

I have so much crap to do at home, but soon, laundry won't be part of it. I think hanging curtain rods (and curtains) in the guest room, ditching the futon frame, and adding those shelves above the windows in the office should be my next order of business.

And then, moving those wire shelves into my closet so I can pitch the crates.

And then, and then, and then...

October 7, 2002

Archives

I got the journal archive page sort of working... It displays the current month's archives. Tonight I suppose I can add in the others. I really should convert them all to Movable Type, I suppose. But, really, I like that feeling of freedom I get from not using someone else's tools for everything.

And, I dug out an old design that I may or may not implement this week.

October 6, 2002

Sick again

And now, of course, I'm getting <A HREF="http://www.naladahc.com/">his</A> cold. UGH.

October 1, 2002

Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary, <A HREF="http://www.naladahc.com">Nala</A>.

Unfortunately for me, I'm not feeling well, have a killer headache, and about 2 hours worth of homework to do.

Today was not the best day to hold an anniversary.

So, maybe someday soon I'll slow down enough for it to be.

How to Infuriate, revisited

Subordinate lackey finally started using her network share, but not until a day after we'd provided a directory there for her to use (she didnt know how to create a folder). She uploaded the file and changed the name of the directory... Lord only knows why. It seemed like she was doing it to spite us.

So, I open the file that is in said directory, and it is NOTHING like it should be (no surprise there). I only hope it's something I can easily fix (and she won't overwrite.)

Of course, by the end of the week, the information this work will provide will be no longer needed until 10 weeks from now.