A Web Site -- News Archives

I hate to have to repeat myself all the time: keep your complaining about the web site on the web site. As for the complaint actually posted where it should be, the pictures have been changed.

I see no one has a opinion they feel like sharing. That's fine, I'm trying to be open here, but let's face facts: opinions are like assholes. They all stink. Fortunately for me, this is my web site, and I can expose my stinky opinon all I want. Don't use the poll, I don't care. I only spent all afternoon stealing it. The topic would probably always be a "what sucks more" multiple-choice question anyway.

What I am waiting for is for one of my anti-war friends to post something in the Bitch Barn, but either all my friends are pro-war or the few liberals that can tolerate me are just not talking. I'm not talking about Kristan, either. Although I'm sure she thinks I am some sort of crazy conservative, she is at least willing to speak her mind even if she is wrong about me. My problem has always been a terrible inability to express my opinions properly, and I think she thinks I hate handicapped people.

I don't hate handicapped people, it's just that I think it is ludicrous to lump all people with some sort of disability into one large "you can park near the store" lump. Now, generally people who drive around with a disability sticker have trouble walking, but not all of them do. If I was wheelchair-bound and some guy with one arm got the last handicap-parking slot, I'd be mad. So maybe he would have trouble getting his groceries to his car, but probably less trouble than a wheelchair-bound person. It seems like this situation does not actually come up very often in the real world, so this was mostly an academic discussion of the principles and procedures behind handicap parking spaces. It also seems like my desire to have an intellectual discussion doesn't come up very often in other people, either.

I would also like to point out that just because I don't like to watch gay porn, it does not mean that I dislike gay men. I do make generalizations about people and things, however I don't automatically dislike people I have never met. I don't have to... usually they do something to piss me off pretty quickly. I don't particularly care what people do as long as it does not adversely affect me or other innocent people. By that principle, I don't care if two men go at it with some greasy, consensual anal sex, but I do have an issue with Saddam Hussein putting people feet-first into a wood-chipper.

Another Monday, whee. Today I am happily waiting for someone to give me control of my next project. I was scheduled to start this morning, however the actual work has not quite percolated through the bureaucratic layers yet. I should be working on some paperwork myself... but I'm not.

As per my usual complaint, I don't have much to talk about. I have had a total lack of interesting adventures lately. This blog would be immense if I had been writing it back in, say, 1995. I'm even under threat of, um, I'm not sure what, from Kristan if I talk too much about my computer. You will note that I still mention it, however I am at least keeping it in mind and not going on and on about it.

I assume that the general indifference to technology also extends to games. The general opinion of games ranges from something like "they are a decent diversion when there is nothing on TV" to "a person older than sixteen who plays video games is likely to kill me and eat my flesh". If I had not been exposed to this sort of unreasonable bias my whole life, you people would upset me. With more than a little irony, the people who are most offended by my desire and/or ability to play, for example, Grand Theft Auto III for three hours in a row, are themselves guilty of watching two football games in a row. I'm not sure how watching a football game is somehow better than playing a video game; maybe I'm just not getting it but just by the act of participating in the game, it seems like the video game would win. However that discussion would be like arguing with a Democrat or a chair. For the record, it's OK to dislike something for no reason, just don't pretend that you have a reason. That is very irritating to rational people. It makes us mad.

There are some people who aren't going to get it through no fault of their own. These poor people have no need of hobbies or diversions... or perhaps they are lucky, I don't know. Where ever your interests lie, do that, I say. I am probably as forgiving as I am because I have been persecuted for my hobby for my whole life, but I still think that tolerance is the way. I can't expect people to happily read about games when they have no interest in the technology behind them or in the enjoyment in playing them, so I'll keep that stuff away from all of you as well.

Of course this just means that I'm going to start talking about my friends and acquaintances more. If you think that I might me talking about you, I assure you I am. You really should set me straight.

Hooray for Kristan for using the Bitch Barn. If any of you are unclear, that is a perfectly valid way to get my attention and have your name on the front page. Let your narcissism run wild!

I ordered my power cable. It cost $11 with free shipping. I found it elsewhere for $7 but with around $5 for shipping, possibly more, I didn't go further into the order process. I just ordered it from newegg.com for $11 because they have always done a great job with my orders. I did manage to avoid ordering anything else.

Did some yard work today, before having to come in and watch yet another project go south. Karen and I planted three rose bushes, spread some fertilizer and fescue seed, and her dad did some pressure-washing on the house. We still have a long way to go as far as landscaping but this is a start.

Last night was pretty eventful. I went to see Old School last night with Karen, Kaley and Josh. I thought it was pretty good. It somehow seemed like a combination of Fight Club and Animal House, but in a good way. I got home early but we still didn't have time to eat a real dinner, which I was looking forward to more than the movie, honestly. Afterward we ordered a pizza.

Earlier, Karen had brought Kaley's dog, Penny, and Josh's dog, Astra, to our house because they stay at the office where Karen works. As soon as Karen opened the car door, they both take off into the woods. My dog, Zuby, stays put. She is a good dog. Anyway, Karen and Zuby go walking through the woods behind the house looking for them. Zuby has tracked those two before but was not able to follow the scent this time. Actually she had a hard time last time when I went looking for Astra, and this time it was wet and drizzly. They still have not come back; the four of us are patrolling the area when possible.

Even better, since I had to make some phone calls about work after I got home and we were late for the movie, when I set the house alarm I forgot to disable the motion detector. At some point Zuby got up and set it off, so my house had a visit from the local police while we were away. We found out about it on the way home when calling Karen's parents to see if they had found the dogs when her dad came by our house. He didn't see any dogs, just police.

I was actually glad to find out that the alarm system worked. With all of the DSL work that was done, I wasn't really sure about it. However, I got a Yelling® from Karen about that, wherein I discovered that I am causing her severe mental problems with my rampant stupidity. Honestly, I thought she was OK with my stupidity. I almost had to give up my new hard drive, however I was presented with a choice of punishment: return the disk or perform slave duties for a week. I chose slave duties, of course; no need to ponder that one. Slave duties naturally preclude game-playing, but I am specifically banned from playing games unless otherwise directed to... which means that I might play something but I have no idea what at this point. What will probably happen is that I will clean house and do laundry in addition to my normal duties. I think there is going to be some dog-pampering to make up for the intense trauma Zuby experienced. She did not say anything about beer, so I'm going to drop my the package store this afternoon.

The promised computer-talk is upon us, and this is a short warning for Kristan since she is allergic to electronics and the discussion of same. The news is that my new hard drive came in yesterday. The description said it would come "without power" but I was thinking "I already have a power supply". Silly me, they meant the cable, and the connector is different for the SATA drives. I knew I had two data cables but apparently my stockpile does not have a power cable. I am looking for a deal, particularly one with free shipping since I don't want to pay more for shipping than for the cable. I need a new fan for my GeForce4 anyway, so I am going to try to find a retailer that has both in stock.

I did a bit of cleanup, removing things that no one cared about. I also received a bit of groaning about the style of this web site. I'd like to point out there is a place for such bothersome whining: the Bitch Barn. Go on in with the other animals and make a stink.

As for the color scheme, I stopped working on the thingy to change the layout because no one seemed interested in it, plus it is hard and I have little time for such things. But let it not be said that I cannot be swayed by inane moaning. I do not plan on removing the style that I personally have come to like, but I'll be putting more effort into letting people choose their own layout. This is not extremely easy, thanks to unsupported XHTML standards, but I'll work on it.

What's up with the total disrespect for the Caption Contest? There's a monkey, for God's sake.

Hello. It's me again. What am I here to tell you? Just a few items. First of all, Kaley finished up classes tonight, from what I am told. I can't participate, but I'd be willing to bet someone will get tore up. Second, I'M SO DAMN TIRED IN THE BRAIN. Of course it is because I work too hard, so don't feel sorry for me. Just remember that fact in case you are talking to me and I do something strange or just seem extra-spacey. Not that any of you call me. Dammit. To be fair, I don't call you, but I still love you. Some of you.

A nice lead into my next topic, actually. I have recently resigned myself to the fact that certain people will not ever read this web site. Once I managed to get over the injury to my bloated ego, I realized that I have free reign to talk smack about these people. I mean with impunity. Even better, while these people never read my blabber, their better-halves do, at least occasionally. So, on with the show.

The primary offender in not reading my site is John Milton. Unfortunately no one besides Karen knows John Milton, so stories about him will, at best, be assumed to be exaggerations of another real person. Unlike the Easter Bunny, he is real, however much like the Easter Bunny, he does not report his earnings.

I'm tempted to write some intentionally mean stuff, but that would just be to get some action going on in the Forum. The stuff between Patrick and Karen is pretty good, but it's like watching snails race. Rather than conjure up stuff, I'll just try to be more, um... liberal in my reports. Not mean, just liberal. Not liberal like Ted Kennedy, either. My rambling should hopefully make sense, and I almost always write sober.

Of course I tell you all this and then follow it up with zippo. There's just not a lot that gets to my ears that is worth printing. I have friends who are new fathers, friends who are new illegitimate fathers, friends who are considering being fathers, friends who had things pierced, friends who are angry, friends who are happy, and even friends who would like to not see me use foul language on this web site. I just don't know if any of that is newsworthy. Dammit.

I don't have anything important to say, really, just hello. Of course, if you need something to take your mind off of the things you usually worry about, I have something really wacked-out for you to worry about. Have fun with that one. Unlike most of the off-the-wall conspiracy web sites, this one promises some preliminary results in 12 days.

In a momentary lapse of willpower, I ordered a new hard drive today. I'll tell you all about it after I get it installed.

I was notified of the CGI problem that affected the Forum and Caption Contest by Patrick, so he is the new Favorite Reader. I got many complaints about calling it a Reader of the Month, but no one had a good suggestion for a replacement, therefore I assume that they will all like this new name. Or shut up. Either way.

Since I have to work tonight, I am trying hard to slack off today. There are a few things I need to do, such as my taxes, but I don't think I want to work on that at my desk. Another thing is updating the site.

If I was able to write down things while driving, I'd have enough material to double this page. After I get into my chair I tend to forget about that stuff somewhere during the Morning Ritual. I have a lot of ideas on the way home, too, but as soon as I walk in the door I forget about everything during the Evening Ritual. Any free time is dedicated to playing games. Well, not all of it. Anyway, let's see if I can remember anything of import from the past few days.

I bought a slightly-irregular GeForce4 4200 Ti for $50 and installed it last week. It works great and my games are, of course, smoother. The irregular part is that the fan will make a strange sound, and at high volume. It did make that noise when I first installed it, however it stopped less than ten minutes afterward and has made only minor appearances since then. Now, my computer is not the quietest rig, thanks to the 80mm Delta fan, but the small fan on that GeForce4 was louder than that, plus it was nerve-grating. I did check to see if the fan was still rotating. I don't think I will tell the guy I bought it from that the noise has stopped, he might have seller's remorse.

Oh, yeah. I changed the Caption Contest picture. I am accepting picture submissions as well.

I thought today might be crappy, but things have taken a turn for the better after hearing Craig Kilborn's voicemail in which he cackles about being Coke's partner. Mostly, Coke is partnering with the NCAA and Craig is coming along for the free soda, but no matter the reasons, his voicemail was just the sort of wacky thing I needed to brighten my day.

The next voicemail was something about corporate security, so there goes that happy feeling.

In other areas to complain about, I worked most of Sunday and I will be working from 1900 to midnight this Tuesday night. I think if I can make it through April in one piece, I should be raking in the brownie points in a big way. I am even getting hopeful that I can exceed the standard rating level next year, but who knows?

Finally, I bought Dark Cloud 2 on Saturday. It is thoroughly excellent in the tradition of Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story. I would bet money it is the same set of people, or at least a decent quantity of the design talent.

I wish I had time to tell everyone about things. Not that things are particularly interesting, but you know how vain I am. Just lots of work, some play-time in Animal Crossing and Dungeon Siege, and an angry wife. She is not really angry since my job is pretty important, but she is missing the quality time.

Thanks to Carole Jarman for ordering her HTML book from my Amazon link. Karen could not believe someone would do that. I am starting to think my web site has BO or something.

Finally, a new picture in the Caption Contest. I just want you all to know that I put off working on my taxes to update this site. Total love, that's what I have for you.

I'd like to have some neat stuff to talk about, but I'm so into work I can't really think straight. I did luck out and had my Friday-night work moved to Wednesday night, and this Saturday I am going to my first opera showing: The Magic Flute. Otherwise, things are pretty uninteresting around here. Anyone who wants to come over and use my entertainment system is welcome; I have the three major consoles wired into a Dolby Digital receiver with Klipsch speakers and a 34" Toshiba 16:9 HDTV, and it's not getting the usage it deserves.

I am still waiting on a Serial ATA hard disk, so I can spare you all my tech babble for now. I will try to get angry about something today and complain vigorously about it, but I just want to go hide somewhere.

I made Kaley the Reader of the Month because I think she is mad at me. I realize that this attempt to gain favor is terribly obvious, but I don't care. So as of today, it's Kaley. Don't like it? Too bad.

The Caption Contest is really taking off. The reigning champ is Belkster, real name withheld because I respect that crap. He is hilarious, so go chime in with some crude comments. Be sure to get your smart-ass remarks in soon before the picture changes again. The newcomer KAM is making a strong showing. Will Belkster be able to fight off this new contender? How many more four-letter words will Patrick use? Be sure to check in later.

Today, my own dear wife finally noticed the Atlanta Travel Guide, and surprisingly she told me it was hilarious. I am extremely flattered, because if there is anyone that I like better than myself, it's my wife. I have sort of ignored that part for a bit, but I am thinking of some more material.

I have been playing more Camelot lately. I will spare you the details, and I'll write some stuff in the Games section soon enough.

Speaking of material, I need to come up with a gift for Kaley. In case you don't remember, Kaley is the wonderful person that brought me a mini-keg of Beck's. The place to put suggestions for gifts is The Forum. When thinking of a gift, think about what I should get someone whom I told I would be home all weekend, then magically forgot when John Milton called up and told me to come down for the weekend because Bill was coming to visit him. That was, obviously due to bad karma, the same weekend that my pipes froze. Anyway, I'm thinking concert tickets, but let me know what you all think because I'm an idiot.

Speaking of the Forum, it's looking more like a boxing match these days between Karen and Patrick. I'm not going to try to stop it, either, because it's pretty amusing. Karen thinks so, too, but mainly, as she says, because Patty makes more intelligent comments on the Forum than in person. Personally I think it's because he doesn't have any tact, and he doesn't want any. Feel free to add fuel to the fire. As long as I don't get in trouble, you'll not hear any complaints from me.

I have seen two episodes of Lupin the 3rd as of last night, and after just that I would rank it right behind Cowboy Bebop. The character design is definitely unique, and the one they are showing on Cartoon Network is old and rough, but it is very funny. I don't really know how the puns work in Japanese, but they work great in the translation.

From the "Atlanta Drivers are Jerks" department, I have an exciting item: I had to swerve a deadly pallet! The saga goes like this: I usually go home via Bankhead Highway, but if it is not during rush hour I will take I-20. Usually I manage to drive at least 65, and although traffic was heavy, especially for Presidents' Day, I was doing about that in the left lane behind a red pickup. It was getting dark, but lucky for me I have the eyes of an eagle... at least when I am wearing my glasses. So I see this pallet slip casually off of the dumb-ass' truck, sitting untied as it was on top of a pile of crap. Normally, people put their stuff on top of a pallet, but I'm sure this guy had a perfectly sound reason for what he did. He probably wanted the pallet to keep his junk from flying out. Too bad the laws of physics don't grade on a curve.

The next part was mostly exciting for me, since I was pretty sure I would run over the thing, blow a tire and then hit either the concrete divider or the bumperless 1987 Taurus on my right which was trying to prevent me from changing lanes. I was, thanks to my Andretti-like driving skill, able to smoothly avoid the pallet by inches as it slid down I-20 at something like 60mph, spraying orange sparks all over the place. I think the guy tailgating me also avoided it. I thought about somehow signaling the pallet-less simpleton, but decided that I didn't want to expend the effort making signals that would probably be misundestood. I have, of course, dodged the Reaper before, but it has been a long time... so it was pretty exciting.

Finally, there has been a request for more ranting and uncontrolled complaining. This was a direct request, and I am happy to oblige, except that I'm ignoring vital work just to type this out. However there are plenty of topics to bitch about, and just today I got some great material from some coworkers as we tried desperately to eat the cafeteria food. Look for that soon.

I finally have a few minutes to sit down and catch my breath, and here I am to tell you all about things that I care about. First off, congratulations to Shaun for becoming Reader of the Month. I don't think he even realized he did it, since he was sitting on my couch surfing the net on Karen's laptop and then says something like "So you are using Phoenix" or some such.

Like I sort of mentioned above, Shaun and Kristan came to visit all the way from Kansas City. They brought us some sunflower-related gifts as well. I'm not sure if we were good entertainers overall, but I did manage to entertain Shaun with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

I have been really busy lately and updating the site is hard to do. I am on call right now, so what is happening is that I have the same bunch of work to do but now I can't sleep. I'm still finding time to do those little weird things I like to do, such as install Perl on my laptop even though it's on our servers. I'd love to tell everyone about my wacky adventures, but they are only wacky to me, I think, and then there are so few of them lately. I think that if I can get through the middle of April, things might calm down a bit. Hard to say, though. Maybe I will remember to do my taxes by then.

Speaking of money, you might have noticed a new button in the menu. It is a PayPal button with which perhaps some person might simply give me money. I really don't have anything to offer in return, so just consider me to be like the vast numbers of welfare cases in this country, except that you can choose to have your money go to me rather than have the government steal it from you and distribute it irregardless of your wishes. Unfortunately the button does not work in Phoenix, since that browser doesn't support Secure HTTP. They have their reasons, and besides if you are using a free web browser then I don't feel that you would be sending me cash anyway. I did at least make it so you can see the button when using Phoenix.

If anyone actually followed my lead and downloaded Mozilla, you probably noticed that it is pretty big. I don't really need most of that stuff, particularly the resource-hogging. Someone mentioned Phoenix was better, so I downloaded it and have been using it most of the morning. It's pretty fast most of the time and my page looks fine in it, even the Japanese stuff.

Shaun and Kristan are arriving in Atlanta in about an hour or two. I'll be glad to see them, but since Karen made fun of me for not yet beating Metroid Prime, I will just have to spend most of the weekend playing it. It's a matter of honor at this point, and hopefully this shame will not get out to my hardcore gaming friends. Good thing they don't read my web site.

San Diego was very relaxing, but I am glad to be back. I suppose that I am just plain glad, after the short-but-great de-stressing I had. The 75-minute ride to work this morning hardly bothered me.

I downloaded Mozilla and have been viewing my web site with it. There is a distinct lack of the Technic font for some reason, but otherwise things look more-or-less fine. The menu is a bit squashed as well, but I can probably fix that easily.

My brother just came out and asked to be Reader of the Month. I'm glad that my readership is catching on to the way things work around here. Also, good job to everyone who is participating in the Caption Contest. Once I readjust to Eastern time, I'll change that picture.

I expected to be working my ass off right now, however due to a communication error I am waiting for someone to call me and tell me I can start working. Sounds great, however it just means that I'll be working into the evening. It also means that instead of exceeding the deadline by a little bit, we will be missing it by perhaps a couple of days. If I work long hours, that is.

I'm getting excited about going to San Diego, but I'm not excited about going through the airport. This is actually the first time I have flown since I got back from Scotland in mid-Spetember 2001, so I don't know what to expect. I suppose that since I don't look Arabic, I have a good chance of being "randomly selected" for some sort of body search. Too late to get a tan, but maybe I can put on a turban and cry "racial profiling" if they say anything to me.

I don't remember who the last person to mention the site was. Actually it was Karen, but if I let her play it would be unfair to the others.

I have been pretty busy at work lately, but it seems like I have gotten only a little work done. Probably because the stuff I have been working on has taken a lot of effort but produced very few bullet-points on my weekly reports. I have started putting a lot of effort into producing a good report lately, so even when I have absolutely nothing to do I should be able to come up with some sort of fluff.

That Caption Contest is really taking off. K says it is time to change the picture, and since it was her brainchild I have to go with her on this. I'm not seeing enough profanity, however she seems to be seeing too much. Either way, I'm glad for the traffic.

Last night I replaced by Epox 8KHA+ motherboard with a new ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. The move from the VIA 266A chipset to the Nvidia Nforce2 seems to have given me a speed boost, but it's not a huge one and I might just be imagining it because it was late. Besides being faster, the A7N8X Deluxe has some neat features, particularly Serial ATA RAID capability. Next month I'm going to try to obtain a Serial ATA hard disk and make use of that feature. First I need to figure out what is wrong with my USB. Probably just a driver issue since I had to do a repair-install of XP just to get the sucker to boot. I probably would not have had to do that if I had remembered to deinstall the VIA 4-in-1 drivers beforehand. Live and learn, you know.

Due to the amount of questions about the broken Caption Contest, which is working again, I'll wait to see who the last person this afternoon is that mentions my web site, and that person will be the Reader of the Month first thing tomorrow. Have fun!

I added a few comments to the Japanese page. Not as many as I would like but I have not been studying as fiercely as Karen.

Big thanks to Kaley for her gift: a mini-keg of Beck's! As soon as I start feeling better I'm going to get to work on drinking it.

Kaley actually became Reader of the Month yesterday but I totally forgot to change the text. Sorry KK!

Thanks to everyone for the comments on the house pictures. Sorry it took so long to get them posted.

Karen informed me yesterday that no one is concerned with my nerdy adventures and random blabbering, but despite that I am going to point out that I have finally figured out how to implement my menu idea using DHTML and JavaScript. I had to learn only a mercifully-small amount of JavaScript, and I am very grateful that the code I thought might work actually did work. Observe the basic way it works on the Version 6 page.

I altered the main page to show the picture above at about 0920 this morning, and I am hoping that I am going to get some emails about it. It almost went into the caption contest but Karen's idea was better: just put it on the main page with no explanation. While you are looking at it again, try buying something from Amazon through my link.

I also found out from Shaun that PHP doesn't do DHTML, so it's JavaScript for me. Learning another programming language is going to take some time. However, just this morning I decided on what I want to do with the menu, now all I have to do is figure out what part of the document tree to mangle and I will be most of the way there.

Kaley is back from Cali and I suppose she is going to wonder why the hell I have not been writing about her. I think I should see her this weekend so we can work out something for me to write up. She said that she bought me something while in San Diego or Francisco or whichever one she went to. Pretty sure it was San Diego. Anyway, she is supposed to bring it by this weekend.

Kaley is the nicest person you would ever want to meet. Not nice in the way that people are when they are so nice you just want them to get the hell away from you, but genuinely nice. She works and goes to school, being very busy all the time, but she still always has a big smile on her face when I see her. I think Karen and I are going to adopt her and have her move into our house.

I ordered a new mainboard yesterday, the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. I accidentally ordered the non-Deluxe one, but NewEgg is such a great vendor it took mere minutes to change the order. I have bought just about all of my recent equipment from them and highly recommend them for anyone who needs computers, whole or parts. They also sell a few other things, so check them out.

About the A7N8X Deluxe, you might have noticed that the Deluxe is the one with Serial ATA. I have no particular love of my SBLive sound card, but it works and I don't have much desire to change it, so what I am getting with the Deluxe is basically Serial ATA with RAID capability. There are not yet any SATA drives on the market, but the latest rumor is that Maxtor and Seagate will have them in February. Of course, the A7N8X uses Nvidia's Nforce2 chipset which is much faster and more feature-rich than anything else on the market. The Nforce2 only works for AMD processors.

I get occasional email from upgradesource.com on their sales and such. Normally this would be spam, but I let this one stay because it sometimes calls me back to looking at hardware for my PC. Today it let me know that Maxtor and Seagate Serial-ATA hard drives would be available in February. About damn time, so I think the first order of business is going to be obtaining a new Nforce2 mobo and one of these SATA disks. Probably Seagate simply because I used to send in Seagate drives for warranty work when I was at Dickens Data Systems and I am comfortable with Seagate. Supposing that the disks are actually available in February instead of delayed yet again, I need to go ahead and nab the mobo this month.

I find out today that my ISP supports PHP, so I am hoping that it might be easier to learn or use than JavaScript. I am not looking for something complicated, as far as I know, and I don't really want to learn this many languages. I probably should just rewrite the whole page in Perl but I'm clinging to the hope of an easy answer. I have only just started looking at PHP today, but I do have the feeling that JavaScript is going to be what I end up using, simply because of its ability to modify the HTML document directly. The Perl-CGI and PHP solutions both appear to require a page reload.

But you don't want to hear about that, you want to hear about the light I installed inside my GameBoy Advance. I think it went alright for a first effort, but there is some dust and slight bubble action underneath the film. While this does detract from the quality somewhat, it doesn't cause nearly as many problems as not being able to see the damn screen. Best of all, I can play Metroid Fusion without being in direct sunlight. I have another Afterburner and another GBA, so perhaps the second one will go better. If you are looking to get one, the price has dropped to $25. If you don't have a GBA but you want one so you can play Metroid Fusion or Tactics Ogre, order a GBA SP instead. It will be $99 and has a frontlight which is probably going to look better than anything you install yourself.

I'm not going to stop anyone from trying to mod their GBA, just know that you will need at least a soldering iron and something to cut up your GBA. I used the RTX and in hindsight I should have probably used the soldering gun, but that could have actually made a much bigger mess. You should also read the forums and use "the shower trick" to reduce the dust, otherwise it's bubbles for you.

The thing I left running all weekend seems to have had some sort of problem, so I'm doing it today instead of having it done for me when I came in. I'm not exactly sure what the deal was, but some static routes were missing from my server's route table. Oh well. I get to watch it as I try to figure out what, if anything, got done. From what I can see, nothing at all worked. Looks like I'll be working on it tonight.

During my 70-minute ride to the office this morning, I was thinking about my mistake. My mistake was in putting too much coffee in the basket. I had put in enough for six cups, and if I were just making coffee for Karen, I should have just put in enough for one cup since that is all she drinks. It would have been a waste if I didn't have some, so my plan to not have coffee in the morning fell apart due to weak will.

My will is pretty weak when the thing I am excercising it against is relatively unimportant, like the idea of getting to work before 0800. The main thing that getting to work at early would accomplish would be to give me more free time in some part of the day. That might sound fine, but there is very little to do with free time around here without looking like a slack-ass. On top of that, I have really gotten tired of surfing the internet every day. I've seen it all and there just isn't enough news generated during the fifteen hours I have been away from my desk to warrant so much viewing. I work on various side projects instead.

All that aside, I have some reason to leave the house at 0645, so I am still going to work on the motivation to do so. It would be fantastic if I could set the coffeemaker to produce mocha automatically, but that's not going to happen. Everyone knows the best way to avoid temptation is to actually avoid temptation, and having to make coffee every morning is not going to make it easy to avoid drinking the stuff. I'm not really myself in the morning, either, so it's all the worse when I transform into my surly alter-ego, Morning Gary. Karen does not like Morning Gary, and MG does not like anyone or anything. He has been very pleasant during the past few months, even though Morning Karen seems to try to intentionally anger him, or so MG says. He's holding up, but let's see what happens when his coffee is gone.

There actually is a Morning Karen, you just have to get up really early to see her. She disappears some time before lunch, but she is very pleasant.

In fact, it was my creative and intelligent other half that you have to thank for both the idea and the pictures featured in my new caption contest. As if you could have come this far and missed the link to it.

Left home before 0730 and arrived at 0845. Stinky. Of course, since I am not just exempt, I am salaried exempt, it hardly matters what time I get here most of the time. That also makes it harder to leave at times. Since I can't really do much about what goes on here at work, and I have to be here anyway, it seems like the only thing I can really do is whatever I can about the trip time. I am going to try my old method from before I got married: don't drink coffee until I get to work. Being addicted or dependent on caffeine, depending on whom you ask, it is a marvelous incentive to get in my truck and to the office as quickly as possible. Considering that Karen wakes me up at 0600, I should be able to leave the house by 0645 with no problem. Actually there is one slight problem: Karen has to have a mocha every morning (no whipped cream). This means that I will have to make coffee every morning, but not drink any. This will probably turn out like my smoking problem, minus the promise-to-never-do-it-again part.

Today there is another change in the Reader of The Month. Jim mentioned me seeing The Two Towers, and he would have only known that by reading this site. The thing is he let me know after 1600, and yesterday it was all I could do to keep from nodding off at my desk. I expect Kaley will mention the site quickly enough to reclaim the throne, but due to the understood rule about the reader mentioning my site without any prompting from me, it is hard to say with certainty who will be next.

Being early in the day I don't know what sort of things are in store for me, however if the first couple of calls are any indication, it will be mostly unproductive.

I got around to watching The Two Towers last night. It was great and visually more impressive than The Fellowship, particularly Gollum. Karen, who has just recently read the novels, thinks that it is very true to the book. I should read the books again, even if just to keep her from making fun of me.

There has been ongoing renovation of the restrooms in my building. The even floors were first and now they are working on the odd floors. Being on 5, I now have to go up or down to take care of business, and while that might be annoying, the real problem I have is that they went from three stalls to two. I don't really know whose bright idea that was. Probably the same guy that decided to put everything on an infrared sensor so that you can't manually flush. I'm sure that saves water but just today I saw some NASCAR-worthy skidmarks. I'm going to have to resume going out for lunch just so I can get some time to myself.

I have been tweaking my style sheet, in case you have not noticed. The changes are pretty subtle, so it's fine if you don't find them. As usual, I'm only testing with Internet Explorer, but since no one has complained about this site looking strange in their particular browser, I'm just going to keep doing what I have been doing.

A style sheet, for those who don't know but would like to, is a separate file which dictates what an HTML document such as this page should look like. If you would like to see what my style sheet looks like, click here to download it and use Notepad or another text editor to view it. If you are feeling extra-geeky you can view the source code of this page, probably under the View menu or you can do it with a right-click, and see how the HTML is written to specify the different styles to be applied to the various elements of the page.

So you might be wondering what this page would look like without a style sheet? Maybe not but I'm pretending you are. It should look like what a plain HTML document would look like when using the defaults of your browser. This is the no style version. Pretty plain, but I have to admit that it is fairly readable. It looks like that because almost all of the formatting information sits in one of two style sheets, style1.css and style2.css, with style2.css being the ugly one. The plain style is how your browser interprets HTML or XHTML as dictated by the standard set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium. HTML is actually part of XML these days, and XML is a subset of SGML which is what the government uses for structured documents.

OK, I apologize for the technical stuff. In other news, I turned thirty yesterday. They say you are as young as you feel, which is really what bothers me. Time to start eating right, cutting back on the booze, and so forth. A man needs one vice, however, so I really have to go with video games as my addiction. I have already stopped smoking, more or less, and the drinking is stopping itself to tell the truth. I don't consider speeding to be a vice, so I can still do that. Then there is my aversion to responsibility, but is that a vice? I don't think so. I'm actually a pretty responsible person when you consider how I was in my early-to-mid twenties.

I have already taken care of most of the bureaucratic portion of the workday. Just one more thing to do so perhaps I will be able to relax a bit around here this afternoon. Everyone is back from vacation, judging by the fullness of the parking deck, so they can take care of the fluff today. I can at least park in my building's deck after 9AM, since the layoffs freed up about one hundred parking spaces.

Nothing spectacular to talk about today. Just some indigestion from too many nacho-coated tacos, preceded by the annual blackeye peas and collards. So far 2003 has not impressed me, but there are 363 days left so things have plenty of time to turn better.

I have been thinking about implementing different available styles for the site, just in case someone does not like grey text on black. The problem is that I would have to rewrite at least this page, and then the menu would still be the old style. For it to look slick, I will probably have to rewrite three pages. I could just duplicate the files, each indicating a different style sheet, but talk about a pain to update! Since, as far as I know, the majority of browsers do not support personal style sheets, you are just stuck with what I like, but only to a certain extent. Karen, for example, seems to not have the font that I myself decided to use, so she reads this page in the Arial font. Lucky for you all, I have not figured out how to push fonts on my viewers.

After deciding that I am beyond the point of help as far as spam email goes, I am now trying to get listed in a Google search of my internet handle: Yegolev. Instead of finding this domain, it asks "Did you mean: yugoslav" and lists a few of my postings on various message boards, some of which I have not been to in a very long time. This was fine when I was trying to hide, but the jig is up. To facilitate my vanity, I'm now using a keyword tag. The thing is that I found out I am not entirely sure what this site is supposed to be about. Just me, I guess. Also, I sometimes make Karen laugh.

I have had plenty to keep me busy today. So of course I put off some real work so that I could write here.

Probably the most annoying thing to happen this weekend was that my stove stopped working. The breakers are fine so it must either be the cooktop itself or some loose wiring. Knowing the electrician like I do, I would not be completely amazed if the wire was just resting against the contact and managed to slip off. Still, I have scheduled the KitchenAid repair person for Thursday morning, so if the wiring is fine I will at least be able to boil some water by Friday as long as it is not something terribly bad.

Today I am going to try to return the rest of the extra tile, however I must have taken the receipts out of my bag, for some totally retarded reason. I do have some copies of the receipts I made for faxing to the bank so hopefully I'll be able to get some satisfaction. I might also be forced to eat at a fancy Mexican restaurant in the nice part of Alpharetta. If I can, I'm going to see about buying the one missing tile I need. I think that laying just one tiny tile should be within the realm of my abilities, but we shall see.

I have been practicing a bit of advice from Karen: use more commas. I am not sure how I am doing. I had threatened to go inserting red commas all over, but we all know that was just a bluff since that would require far too much effort.

Another change is the New and Totally Original Forums, which can also be seen hiding meekly in the left menu. I swear it's not a guestbook. You might also notice that I am expermenting with a new form of information delivery: the tool tip. The fun thing is that I can provide an extra layer of information, but you are free to ignore it if you like, and if you do want to see it you don't have to load up a new HTML document. And I'm doing it all without JavaScript, yay for me.

Kaley has gone to California with her boyfriend, San Francisco I think. No, his name is not San Francisco, she's going to San Francisco. Maybe she will have something for me to write about when she gets back.

Another Christmas come and gone. Lots of cleanup to do but in the end it was fun and I got far too many presents.

Kaley wants me to tell some stories about her, so I'm going to see if inspiration hits me and I'll put something up here. Basically what we do is just sit next to each other at family gatherings and talk, occasionally getting somewhat drunk. We can't always sit together but we make a point of it. The last dinner, she was recovering from a hangover so I just had some Asahi by myself, but we still talked.

That night I was laughed at by the habachi chef when I tried some of my pitiful Japanese on him: "Nihonjin desu ka", I asked him, only I pronounce it "des" since I seem to be learning Japanese with an accent. I think I heard Osaka in his reply, and I'm glad that my total ineptness at Japanese amused rather than insulted. Or perhaps it did both.

I was pretty accurate on the gift list from 12-20. I got a soldering iron, and a nice one, too, with multiple tips and an extra plumbing kit with flux and solder. That's great, since I'd be a moron to not practice a bit before getting all in my GameBoy Advance.

I also got the Black & Decker RTX or some such, not to be confused with a Dremel, since, unlike the Dremel, it is orange. Right now it is hovering dangerously close to the entertainment center, and I'll be cutting that vent hole as soon as my punishment chores are done.

Yes, in trouble again, and Karen has asked that if I'm going to talk about getting in trouble I should also talk about why I get in trouble. This time it was me being totally drunk off of tequilla and lighting up a cigarette. Actually the tequilla was not getting me in trouble directly, it was the cigarette. The tequilla just amplified the desire and lowered my willpower to resist the nicotene addiction. I realized too late that I should have never, ever promised that I would never smoke another cigarette. I suppose I was doing great to stop at all, because it's really damn hard to ignore that desire. Anyway, the moral here, kids, is to avoid making promises that you know you cannot keep. That promise-breaking is some bad shit.

Back to the gifts, Karen bought two neat T-shirts for me which are essentially Japanese shirts that read as very funny when worn by a gaijin. Kaley gave me a GoldMember DVD, which we watched that night. My father-in-law also got me a set of kitchen-or-grill-wear based on Goofy, which I will be using as soon as my grill starts working. My mother-in-law got me a 365-beer-a-day calendar. Karen says that her mother thinks I'm a drunk, which of course is not true... I just drink a lot of beer. Still, I'm going to have to start doing some home-improvement stuff to make up for my slouchy behavior. It sucks turning thirty.

Finally, I know I talked a lot about the GameCube and Metroid Prime, but that was before I actually played it. I also have Super Mario Sunshine, and while a lot of people are complaining about Sunshine as being disappointing, I never finished Mario 64 so it's all good for me. I see the similarities, sure, but I'm not disappointed at the lack of groundbreaking gameplay in Sunshine. Give Miyamoto-san a break, will you?

As for Metroid Prime, I can honestly and directly say to anyone who does not like this game: you are a total idiot. OK, perhaps not a total idiot, but people who don't like Metroid Prime cannot possibly like any of the other Metroid games, and probably should not be allowed to play any games at all. I heard of someone who didn't like it, my old associate Bill, which is totally absurd. There must be some error on the part of Bill that causes him to not like it. I immediately thought that he must have been expecting a first-person shooter. Prime is not TimeSplitters, not by a long shot, even though it does have the superficial appearance of a FPS, but you barely have to scratch the surface to see that it is not one at all. I assume that Bill was persisting in thinking he was playing a FPS rather than a platform game, in which case I can see where the controls would seem off. Gameplay, however, is pure Super Metroid. Boss fights. Platform jumping. Upgrades. Exploration. Plus the new visor mechanic, which is damn cool and expands on the neat x-ray vision from Super Metroid. This game alone is a reason to buy a GameCube.

I might be getting Animal Crossing, too. I'm not ashamed to say it looks like my kind of game.

Things are sort fo winding down here at work, but only because people are scrambling off to vacation like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Two of my Hindi clients will be working on Monday, but they know they won't be getting much work done since the majority of the Christian-types will be out Monday. Including me, although I barely qualify as a Christian-type.

I have a new Reader of the Month, Kaley Kinnin. Kaley is a good friend and for some reason I guess I never told her I had a web site. She finds this out yesterday and asks to be Reader of the Month. No problem. Anyone who has been following along, and I realize that person is just me, knows that in order to be made Reader of the Month all you need to do is somehow let me know you read the site. You would think that this sort of promise of fame would get me more comments, but as the determined fan of A Web Site will note, there have only been three people who got this award, and that counts Kaley. Karen may have gotten it once but she doesn't count since she's mentioned in several places here. Plus she's angry at me right now, and although that is a pretty regular and normal occurence I have to disqualify any people who are mad at me. My web site, my rules. Sorry sweetie.

I think Kaley also said I should talk about stuff besides computer-related things. I admit I have been going on about my machine and the various things at work lately. Hopefully in the near future, Travis Tritt will do something else to piss me off and I can bitch about that, or I could do another of the successful "the roads are full of assholes" pieces which went over well. Until then, anyone looking for something non-technical in the way of bitching and moaning is encouraged to scroll down this page more, as well as check out the archives for a nice long set of complaining. There is some technical stuff sprinkled around but maybe it can be ignored while you seek out the true gems.

On the flip side, I won't be abandoning technical groaning here on the main page. It's hard pandering to a diverse audience, but until I get some indication that the few technical people who might possibly one day read this are in no way interested in my wacky adventures in computers, I'll keep putting that sort of thing out here. Or I might move it to its own page, like my ramblings about games. I'll worry about that later.

I did get my LAN set up this week (sorry, Kaley). I broke down and bought a router from BellSouth, as you might remember, and after some easy setup Karen is surfing the web from her bed. That is not the end of it, unfortunately, since one of the reasons she is mad at me is because I have not yet transferred a USB-hard-drive-full of Sims furniture to her machine. I really thought she would be more mad at me for not yet figuring out how to make The Sims actually run on her new laptop.

Since I doubt I will have the free time to update this site until next Thursday, I'll go ahead and talk about the presents I am expecting. I can check back to see how right or wrong I was. The one I am sure about is actually supposed to be a birthday present but since my birthday is January 5, I am lucky enough to get it for Christmas: a GameCube. I'm really hyped about that one but since no one understands my love of games I really try to keep a lid on that stuff. Even better, John Milton should be visiting this weekend and although I am not allowed to smoke with him anymore he is causing me to be able to open my GC before the actual gift-giving ceremony. On top of that my brother-in-law went to Sam's Club and bought Metroid Prime. Karen paid him back for some reason, even though most people agree that he still owes me and John Milton (but mostly me) for spending an afternoon of my vacation tracking his Siberian husky through the woods. Still, I can't complain about having Metroid, even though Karen says he bought it mainly so he could play it.

Next up, I am hoping I get a soldering iron. I'm sure that immediately after I get one, Karen will find and buy the GameBoy-to-GameCube adapter, thus nullifying my reason to get the iron in the first place. That's fine, I could use one anyway. I'm also supposed to be getting a Dremel, which will help prevent tragic mishaps when I cut an access and venting hole in the back of the entertainment center. I just don't feel good about using my jigsaw so close to all those wires. A Dremel is a tool that keeps on tooling, or something, so it will be immensely useful in my lifelong hobby of house maintenance.

The other gifts, either I don't know or I forgot about. That's the great thing about being me, you can tell me you are getting me something for Christmas but if you do it before Thanksgiving there is a strong possibility that I will just forget about it. Too bad my simple charms are aggrivating instead of endearing.

It seems like I have a whole lot to talk about, probably because I have had a very eventful week and I can finally vent to my web page and the miniscule audience it has. Also I'm pretty excited at the prospect of getting some days where I don't have to do any work for Coca-Cola, so I'm in a pretty good mood right now.

The people gathered at the cubicle behind me are having a discussion about just who they can get to do some UNIX work for them. I'd say something except that it is important to follow proper channels by calling the Help Desk. Tee-hee! Besides, I also overhead what they want done and it's not actually a task that I would be allowed to do.

I finally got my DSL connection up again last night and all it took was a complete reload of XP. I might not have reduced the frequency of reinstalls but at least it does not crash so much as W98.

I spent quite a bit of time downloading drivers and updates, plus I took some care to clean up my trashyard, otherwise known as my d: partition. I cleared out duplicate SBLive installations and some mysterious ProAudio Spectrum drivers, then got the latest set from Creative Labs. I'm glad they finally have some drivers for XP. I also moved up from the venerable Nvidia Detonator 29.42 to the current 41.09 version. Preliminary results are good; more testing is to be done in Morrowind but the main menu of Dungeon Siege is noticably better. I hear speed suffers a bit but if the picture is greatly improved then who cares? Not me, since I don't play games that demand ultra-high framerates on a regular basis. For best framerate on a GeForce 3 you will need 29.42, and with a GeForce 4 you will want to use the 30.82 Detonators.

I also threw in the towel and ordered the home networking kit from BellSouth. I'll pay them to support it, I just don't have the time to learn all of this silly MicroSoft stuff. I don't understand what's so hard about making the network interfaces act normal. I figure they ripped off Apple so much, why not spend some time "ripping off" the tried-and-true UNIX networking model? Maybe because it doesn't have enough silly features such as QoS, half-ass sharing and being agonizingly stupid. I'd think about using my Linux machine as a router except that I am pretty sure BellSouth won't connect to it. Who cares, it's worth $349 (before rebate) to have them to blame when it doesn't work so that Karen will stop complaining about my lack of ability to fix it. Of all people, she should realize that I am an AIX tech, not a MCSE, and I use my brainpower learning AIX, Oracle, SAP, NIM, Perl, ksh, awk and whatever else I need to. So it's all up to BellSouth now.

Busy busy busy. Usually at this time of year there is a freeze on IT changes at work, but so far no one has told us to stop. In fact things are pretty hectic. The biggest thing I am working on at the moment would be testing migrations to AIX 5.1 from 4.3.3 without destroying the preexisting SAP and Oracle installations. By the end of the week we should have completed a simultaneous upgrade of SAP, Oracle and AIX, and maybe they will all be operating in 64-bit mode. I was pleasantly surprised that SAP started at all after my migration test, so maybe things will be smooth. Besides that, I'm on call this week and am wrapping up the installation of two new 64-bit machines into our biggest SAP landscape. So I have been sort of busy.

John Milton still has a difficult time seeing me as someone who has a job where I am on call. Likewise I am amazed that he has a legitimate job, and furthermore that he has enough dedication to it to not ditch and visit me when he has things to do. I'm not surprised that it involves both sales and manual labor, two things he's good at. Despite our best efforts, we are both growing up.

I know that I promised some more pictures of the house, however I am still not connected to the internet and I am throwing in the towel. I'd like to make sure my machine works, so I'm probably going to reinstall it again to clear out the brain damage it suffered during the recent thunderstorms. I tried an upgrade installation already and it actually made things worse, so now I have little choice. Once that is done I will see if I can connect to the internet and then decide on a course of action. There is a chance that my DSL modem is bad, so I will wait and see.

Thanksgiving was pretty pleasant and we picked up a tree while in the mountains that weekend. Later on we found out the cold, hard truth about ornaments and hardwood floors. The number of casualties is unacceptable, so we have agreed it's a good idea to get some sort of tree-rug to help keep from losing more ornaments, particularly the sentimental ones.

I have been kept pretty busy at work since the weekend, and more stuff is coming up. This weekend is the Global Information Christmas party at the Hilton, so there could be up to one thousand computer geeks getting ripped. I also have lots of actual work to do, and in reality a surprisingly small percentage of Global IT (or whatever my division is called these days) could be called geeks, however it is not totally a lost cause due to the open bar.

In house news, I finally have a propane tank. It's not connected to the house, but it is buried in the yard. Maybe I'll get that taken care of soon.

Today got off to a good start. I got under four yellow lights in a row and didn't stop at all from Bankhead Courts to past The Bounce. If you are not familiar with those landmarks, I crossed Fulton Industrial and I-285 on Bankhead and DID NOT STOP. Woo freakin' hoo! On top of that, the parking deck was only two-thirds full when I arrived. I think today will be a good day.

Maybe Travis Tritt came to his senses, his Christmas lights were only on that one night from what I can tell. He was probably just testing them.

I was supposed to have quite a bit of stuff to do today, however a good bit of it relies on some other people to come to me if or when they need me to do something. Not that I am complaining, but it's a little hard to keep my eyes open. Besides, if they don't call me during normal work hours then they might call me afterwards.

The faint clicking of mice is lulling me to sleep like crickets. Time for coffee.

I have been working on the Tip Board for amateur Japanese translators. The technical difficulty at the moment is printing the characters that pass through the Perl CGI program that displays the log. I figured out just today that my ISP is using Perl 5.00530 and the "use utf8" pragma is missing. Things would be a lot easier if they either upgraded to Perl 5.8 or at least somehow loaded utf8.pm on their server. Until that distant day, users will find the easiest path is to manually set their browser encoding to Japanese(EUC).

I'd like for this site to be as easy to use as possible and as simple as possible, however since I have acquired a headache and some actual work has sprung up, I'll have to leave this for another day. If anyone has any ideas, drop them into the guestbook.

On the way home yesterday I noticed Travis Tritt has his Christmas lights up already. You can't see his house from the road, but the end of his driveway was all lit up with non-colored lights. It's not even Thanksgiving, shouldn't he have some bundled cornstalks or overripe squash instead of Christmas lights? I already thought I wouldn't like him just based on what little I know about him and his business practices, but now I'm pretty sure we would not get along. Karen thinks that his mullet would keep me away if nothing else. Hopefully this will not hamper my rise in local politics. For what it's worth, I'm willing to entertain the idea that it was due to his wife, Theresa. I am very familiar with the unpredictable decorating ideas of my own wife so I'm willing to not hold it against Travis. He also scores a few points for having a llama.

There are probably not too many of you who know this fact about Karen and me, but we are trend-setters. Karen more than me, and we do it unintentionally, as I am sure a lot of trend-setters do. The best example I can think of right now is more of a prediction: oiled-bronze fixtures. Actually if you go into a store like Home Depot or Lowe's you will probably find oiled-bronze stuff such as doorknobs and faucets; Delta has a set in that finish. It's already starting to catch on even though we decided several months ago to use them, even before we knew what the finish was called. Another good one is the small surge of interest in Toulouse Lautrec which came about once we had done our kitchen in a French theme. My favorite example is when I took an interest in Hawaiian shirts. Karen thought I was stupid, and rightfully so considering how I dressed when she met me. Since that time, the shirts have come and gone again. It's too bad that we don't get credit for being the leaders that we are.

I finally got my Japanese submission log working. I don't really know what to call it, but it is a place to put tips on Japanese translation that do not appear in many or any books. I don't know how much use it might see but it is ready to go. It is a modified version of my so-called guestbook, which is really just a file that you can stick comments in. I even got it to display kana and kanji, just paste or type your characters in and it should work. It works with me pasting, since I cannot type kana easily.

K and I got the house cleaned up a bit this past weekend. We actually have most things on a shelf now instead of in boxes on the floor. On top of that, pretty much everything in the house is finished except for a few nagging bits with the windows. I'm going to either fix the remaining items myself or just ignore them and move on with my life. I know that I'm picking at things that comprise about half a percent of the items in the house construction, but I think that if I can get closer to 100%, why not? But the time has come to take ownership and forget about the construction industry as a whole.

After all this time, I have cancelled my EverQuest account. To me EQ has become the AOL of online games. The rest of the discussion is in my Games section.

Hey, a very fast update. You are thinking that I must have some serious complaining to do, if you know me, and you would be right. I only last night discovered that the BellSouth guy who came out and fixed my DSL also broke at least two of my analog jacks. I have not tested them all but the two I know about are fairly important; one is the modem-hole in my office and the other is the single jack the DirecTV receiver plugs into. If that thing cannot call home we are going to get charged $50 or something. Silly me, assuming the tech would not disable my already-working lines. I know he put in a filter at the NID and I am guessing that he just filtered out the dial tone on a lot of jacks, but I don't know. If I knew what he did I could fix it myself. The odd thing is that my phone works, but we are just using one jack in the bedroom for that.

I don't have any money and I don't have much time but I am starting to think about upgrading my machine again. Partly this is because the thunderstorm we had on Sunday night caused some strange things to happen, such as some Windows components appearing to be not installed. The most obvious one is the Volume Control. How could you uninstall the Volume Control? My XP CDROM was in the drive for some reason and I don't remember leaving it in there, and my bootlist starts off with the CDROM so who knows what happened. I don't want to reinstall so I'm going to see if the rumored XP recovery works. Last time I tried it I initiated a reinstall. There is also the Service Pack but at least I downloaded it as an executable.

I would at least like to get an additional hard drive. I have been running on a single 40GB for way too long; it came from my old CAMEL machine in its last production days. Since then I built NARCISSUS around that disk and now have XP2 built around it, although there are several NARCISSUS parts in XP2 besides the drive.

As you can tell, the important pieces are not bad except for the disk. The mobo and CPU are no pair of slouches although they are aged about a year, and I am in the top percentile of air-based coolers. The GFX card is holding its own and my hearing isn't sensitive enough to warrant a new sound card, although the SBLive is having a hard time getting along with WinXP. That is because Creative isn't interested in supporting it, but despite various device problems in my Device Manager I still get sound, so who cares? Sometimes it is even EAX and surround sound.

So it would seem that I could use another hard disk, at least because my machine keeps having unfortunate accidents and I can store a backup copy on disk until I decide to buy a tape drive. But if I were to be able to get my parts I want, this is my list today:

I have added a new section that will eventually have some useful information on it for the amateur translator of Japanese. I don't have any idea if this sort of stuff is covered in a traditional Japanese language course since neither Karen nor I have taken one, but this is the sort of knowledge that someone who is teaching themselves will definitely find useful.

Another weekend has come and gone, the only productive thing being... uh... I don't know. Nothing I guess. I did manage to return some of the leftover tile to Expo at Perimeter, just $420 back after the 15% restocking fee. The rest I will have to take to the Expo in Alpharetta.

Today is a big day. BellSouth and HiFi Buys are both coming around today to fix things. HiFi Buys wanted to reschedule so they would not have to backtrack a lot, and I would have let them come by later in the afternoon except that Karen was nice enough to take off her lunch time to meet both of them. It would have helped if he had called more than thirty minutes before the appointment, too. I dare not ask BellSouth for a reschedule or else I might never get someone out. Karen is so nice for taking the time to do that.

I just talked to the BellSouth guy, who I suppose might actually be a FastAccess guy since that is the division that handles the DSL. I explained that not only was my DSL not working but my analog connection has suffered for some reason, most likely due to the security system. He also said he'd take a look at the weird wiring in my office, which I am pretty sure was done by the security guy, David Wiggley. David seems like a nice enough guy but he's not impressing me with his wiring ability.

There are just a few more things to take care of and I will start letting stuff slide, or more accurately I will take ownership of all of the problems in the house. I might sleep better at night once I do that. This house is excellent beyond my imagining already, so at some point I'm just going to have to stop getting irritated at this sort of stuff and start fixing things myself.

I have had a sinus infection all weekend and it is still going on. I don't have time to go to the doctor so I'm hoping to call for some antibiotics. It's mosty gone now, though. If you have deduced that the sinus infection and subsequent ear and throat infections had something to do with going out on Thursday, you are partly right. I had a scratchy throat Thursday morning but I was not going to let it keep me from going out. It seems that all-too-often I will have some sort of problem just before an event, like the upset stomach I had the day before I did my first skydive. I did it anyway, of course, and I didn't leave any marks in the jumpsuit, either.

That does mean I have accomplished little house-wise this weekend. I did manage to clean the floors and do some dishes. Otherwise I was just sleeping and playing games when I could sit up. My DSL is still broken, so no online games.

Seems like there is a sync problem with my DSL. Man, does that sound familiar or what? The line tested fine so BellSouth is sending someone out between 1100-1400 on Wednesday. This coincides with the DirecTV guy, I think, and hopefully with the plumber and electrician who still have some stuff to fix up. I have a feeling that the DSL problem has something to do with the security system. I can't fix my machine until I get sync on the line, though, because I don't know if I'm actually fixing anything. The fact that dialup is working make me think that the DSL filter attached to the security system has something to do with it but I don't want to get too deep into rewiring the thing.

So tired. Don't want to be at work. The costume was successful, though. Took pictures. Still have makeup in my ears. Maybe no one has noticed.

I'm not so tired that my curiosity is completely shut down. I spent today trying to figure out how to display different characters than what you find in Latin-1. Now, ph34r my l33t sk1llz as I attempt to display kanji characters: 儉儺. I kick ass. However you need the proper font to see it, so if you only see garbage you should get the SimSun font. One way to tell if it is not working is that the fallback font is Arial instead of Technic, but if you have seen Chinese characters then you can probably tell if it is working that way. I'd put the SimSun font up here except that it is a 10MB file and I only have 30MB total storage on this site. If you have Windows 2000 or XP, or if you have Office XP or maybe Office 2000, you already have this font. If not, good luck finding it since Microsoft doesn't have a font download anymore. I think they want you to upgrade to Windows XP.

In a related item, Karen did not find additional language sets on Windows Update for her W98 machine at work. It looks like Microsoft is discontinuing additional language support for the obsolete operating systems, which makes sense from both a support and a bandwidth perspective. It helps that Win2k and WinXP both understand Unicode, so if you still have problems even with the Simsun font, I can't really help you other than to suggest you upgrade to WinXP or some other operating system that is capable of understanding Unicode.

Today is my anniversary. I have been happily married for four years. Four years? It does not seem like that long. If I didn't already know it, that would be the surest indication that I have been having a great time. I have the most awesome wife in the world.

Any of you who follow games the way I do probably have read some previews of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The previews make the game sound great, pointing out nice things like greatly expanded dialog, better graphics, more radio stations, and other normal-sounding things. Let me tell you, after playing it for just one hour last night, that these previews do not do this game justice.

In an almost-shocking reversal of normal game industry promotion, Rockstar just kept a whole lot of stuff secret. Either that or I didn't read the right preview. The most shocking new feature? Original and authentic music from 1986. I'm not saying that they re-recorded "Billy Jean", I'm saying that they have Michael Jackson singing it on the radio. Not just him, either; you have the likes of David Lee Roth, Judas Priest and that girl who did "99 Luft Balons". The actual songs.

With that part out of the way, let me list a few things that amazed me just within one hour's play time.

Normally I'd put this stuff in the Games section, but I just have to get the word out to go buy this game. I would have paid $75 for it.

I'll end this on a negative note. I want all of you people that commute to listen up. If you are going the speed limit or below, stay in the damn right lane. Do not get in the left lane unless you need to make a left turn. In particular, do not move into the left lane and pace a car in the right lane. There are at least a half-dozen people behind you who have little desire to drive under the speed limit for various reasons, and unless you are interested in furthering the Socialist movement being fostered by the Democrats, let people do as they please. I pay my taxes and I pay my tickets, so move the hell over and let me by, assholes. When they say this is a free country, they mean don't impose your opinions or ideals on others, jerks.

I'll be going to see Sector Nine tonight. Hopefully I can get my makeup on properly.

I updated my work laptop with Win2k's SP3 and now it thrashes more than ever. It's doing it right now. More memory would help, it has 196MB now, but I'll never squeeze an upgrade from the workstation people. I nudged my pagefile up from 360 to 400, maybe that will help. Reading the XP in a Nutshell book is also helping since 2k is pretty similar. If you want the book, try the Amazon link above. One day I'll make enough money from that so that they will send me a check.

Tomorrow is my anniversary and we are sort of celebrating it by going to a Sector Nine concert at the Coca-Cola Roxy. I will dress up and I might even take some pictures.

Speaking of pictures, I have decided to take some new pictures of the house now that we have it cleaned up somewhat. Since my DSL line is still unusable, I will have to install the camera software on my laptop and upload from work. I should have been doing that the whole time but I have an issue with putting non-work stuff on my laptop. However, uploading over an OC3 is pretty damn fast. The 10MB SP3 was downloaded in less than ten seconds.

There is a new link above indicating that the BlogPhiles were not overly offended by this site and decided to add me to their ring. Now I am not just an island of complaining, I am part of a larger complaining collective. I do feel kind of bad about submitting myself into the ring since, honestly, I only like to read my own writing. But it did say to submit if I really, really liked my blog, which I do. I'm so cool. I love me.

They stipulate no porn, so I guess I won't be uploading those pictures of me being naked around my house. Too bad for all you. But is it porn if I don't make any money from waving my wang around? Maybe I'll ask them.

WinXP networx r teh sux. Either that or I just don't understand them well enough. In case it is my fault, I have ordered some books on XP. I used the Amazon link on this page, too. I think I'm almost up to $15 earned by now.

I have not abandoned my sanity, trust me. I would not just go buying books on a Microsoft operating system at a whim. However either I or the Network Connection Wizard blew up my config and now I can't use my DSL connection. Even more bothersome, all of my connections were wiped including the dialup connections. As you can see, I don't have time to learn this stuff the normal way. I also rationalize that XP is almost a worthy operating system. It certainly doesn't crash much, too bad that hardware vendors don't write decent drivers for it. I'm talking to you, Creative Labs.

As you might guess, this issue is keeping me from uploading pictures to the web site. Yeah, that's it.

I installed my DSL last night and it works great. I left it downloading stuff this morning and it probably finished the whole load before I got to the office. Next step is to install the BlueTooth adapters and get my network going. Maybe I can convince my wife to play something with me then. Probably not.

Someone complimented the site, if you can believe that, so he is the new Reader of the Month. In case you do not know about this award, it is given to the person who lets me know they read the site, not including my wife. This does not necessarily happen each month but it sure as hell doesn't happen weekly. I'm going to return the favor my having lunch at his fine establishment, the Cajun Kitchen on Marietta Street. If you really need a reason to go, they have Sweetwater 420 on tap, but the food is excellent as well. I have been too busy to get by there much in the past few weeks but I'll be going today.

Since I am such a slacker with the pictures, I'll just tell you what I am doing with the house. It is mostly done and I am living in it. The only thing left to do is the tile and unfortunately my tile sub is far from the best. The tile itself looks fine, especially since we were going for a natural look anyway and slightly misaligned tile is great. The bad part is that he is incredibly slow and a bad estimator of how much tile he needs.

The plumbers are done, and good riddance. I have some things to do regarding faucets and such, but they are not coming back. Not bad subs really, but I'm trying to get rid of everyone who does not live there. Today there should be some paint touchup going on and I am going to call my builder today and make sure he knows about a couple of items. I'm also going to go ahead and schedule the final installation of the entertainment system even though the entertainment shelving is not done. This is because of a communication problem, which is the kind of problem you will see most often. As a result I don't know how long it will be until the entertainment center is built but considering the library shelving will cost $4000, I'm sure it will be a little while.

Not much else going on aside from camping at my house. Maybe soon I will be able to use one of the showers. We used the oven last night, and I have to say that the salesman was actually right when he said our food would taste better in this oven. Strange but true. That was the best DiGiorno pizza I have ever eaten. Even better, it turns itself off when the timer runs out.

The phone jacks that I checked all have both lines going to them, or at least two RJ6 connections. Excellent. I also tested the hot tub and it is great. The panel usually works fine if you don't put the cover on it, and we have the doors laying flat on the deck now. It's still kind of weird; I have never owned a hot tub before and I have to get used to the idea that I can jump in whenever I want.

Karen is interested in moving in tonight (woo hoo!) so we are getting some stuff together after work and having a little moving-in party. Actually it will be more like a we-don't-have-to-live-with-the-inlaws-anymore party. We are going to yank some wine and firewood and test out the fireplace.

Today was Community Reading Day and Lance Armstrong came by to speak in the courtyard as well as read to the kids. I missed out on that. I'm not good with kids. The staff meeting was canceled on top of that because my boss is sick, so I had a pretty quiet day. Still having it actually.

Where have I been? First I was slacking off on the house pictures, then I was working on getting a mortgage, then I took a week of vacation so I could personally attend to house matters. The aftermath is that I now have a very nice mortgage rate of 5.75% as of the closing on October 4.

There are still a few things to do, and I have escrowed some money to make sure these things get done. From a conversation I had not five minutes ago, the tile work should be finished on Wednesday and the plumbing on Thursday so I might actually have a usable house by Friday. Woo!

There will be quite a bit of punchout (the construction lingo for all the little things the owner has to point out to the builder before he is allowed to call it done) even though my builder seemed enthusiastic about having everything fixed up by Friday. I did not point this out, however, since he has several lists from me and I am actually starting to enjoy that look on his face when I suddenly remind him of something he had been hoping I had forgotten about. That sort of thing includes yet-undone items such as opening a hole in a stairwell wall, making the front french doors actually close properly, and install the windows properly. Sound like something any moral builder would do on his own? Welcome to construction, where morality is left at home with the dropout kids and welfare mom.

Actually almost every subcontractor that worked on my house is extremely competent and I would recommend most of them. There are a few that I would not but generally look for obvious clues, such as estimates scrawled on a spiral notebook page with elementary-school spelling errors, and you should avoid the bulk of them. I would also like to point out that the worst workers are all white guys. Irony is, I bet they are all racist too. Damn those hard-working immigrants!

John Milton helped me a lot last week. Unfortunately he is not allowed to access the internet so he won't get to see this message. Since he works in antiques, his experience in lifting very heavy things came as invaluable help. He also kicked my ass at Dead or Alive 3 a lot.

Even better news, today I ordered DSL from BellSouth. Yes, me! I finally get a decent connection! And to think, all I had to do the whole time was build a $400,000 house on a new lot such that BellSouth had to actually set up a new telephone pole. Now I just have to find out if I have a working phone jack in my office. I can hear you saying "Huh?" already. The deal is that there are two lines wired into the house but I only ordered one number. Silly me. I don't remember if I have jacks from both lines in my office but I also don't remember asking for two phone lines. It seems like something that I was talked into, but that is OK as long as both lines have a jack in my office. The fun part will be discovering if UPS can find my house to deliver the modem. After that the fun part will be the bothersome feeling I get after spending a week downloading the XP Service Pack over dialup and then realizing that I am no longer a filthy dialup user. So long, suckers! I know I said I'd remember you when I finally made it to the top, but hey, get your own.

Listening to the radio and watching some TV this morning made me realize that I am much more patriotic than I thought I was. I don't have much else to say about today.

I finally added some HTML so that you can access the newest pictures in the Construction Log. If by some chance you are new here, start at the bottom of Page One.

I finally found a restaurant that has Sweetwater 420, the Canyon Cafe near Perimeter Mall. The bad news, of course, is that I would be doing great if I could get there in 45 minutes from Hiram. At least Hiram has more than two drive-through package stores, maybe one of them would carry it. Sweetwater is a local brewing company that has won top honors in Las Vegas, from what I hear. I can believe it after trying their 420 pale ale. Since the brewery is on my way home I might just stop by one afternoon when they open to the public, which just happens to be at 4:20pm on Monday and Thursday. Oh yeah.

No more of the crazy talk from last time. I promise. Instead I'd just like to publicly acknowledge the gigantic amount of hard work that Karen was doing in keeping this construction circus under control. Now that I am doing the bulk of the coordination and communication I truly appreciate the effort she made. Hopefully what I lack in vision can be made up for by me being a hard-ass. Without going into detail, I'll just say that I am going to have to really start riding these guys to make sure that this whole thing is done right, or as close to right as possible. I'll be living here the rest of my life so quality is the first priority.

In other news, I don't know. I'm trying to keep up with my responsibilities. I do manage to get some playtime in here and there. Our friends miss us and we miss them. I am planning on everyone visiting once the house is complete, sometime in November I guess.

I totally forgot to mention that I have been actually watching the Today Show lately. Not because of Crap Lauer and his gleaming scalp, but because Satan Herself, Katie Couric, has taken some time off and left Ann Curry to do all the important work. Such as roll around in a wet suit. Yowza. I can't really think of a better word to describe that, but trust me when I say it was good.

Before you say that I am weird for having a thing for Ann Curry, ask yourself if you like Katie Couric for any reason. If the answer is in any way positive, I think we can assume that we will be on opposite sides of the fence on the whole Today Show crew. Except Al Roker, who doesn't like Al? He's totally getting shafted. Oprah should have given him HIS own show, too.

Rest assured that I don't just have a thing for Ann Curry. Like any normal male, I have a list, and I suspect that the actual list for most men is bigger than what we tell our wives. Why? Well, you have to admit that you find someone attractive, even in a small way, whom your spouse thinks is hideous. Especially if you are a guy like me who does not necessarily buy into everything the media feeds me and has diverse taste in women. My wife can understand Wonder-Woman-era Lynda Carter being on my list, especially when you notice that she did a voice in Morrowind, but when I mention someone like Jennifer Tilly there are a few questions, and even more if I were to start talking about Ann Curry.

It's even worse because, in the poker game of my pants, there is no trump card and deuces, jacks and sevens are wild. That means that I usually don't have any way to describe what I find attractive about someone. Ann Curry is a perfect example. In fact, some mornings I don't find her attractive at all. Let's face it, it's all primal. Emotions and what Little Gary tells me, and he's never logical.

In my dream last night I thought I had erased a lot of this front page. That dream made this body of work somehow seem important. Maybe it is. I have seen some crappy web sites that have tons of visitors, so perhaps there is some lost soul out there who gets at least some amusement from my commentary on random stuff. I might be the only thing between that person and suicide, so obviously I must go on with this.

I know that if you are using a screen resolution lower than 1024x768 then you will not be able to see the entire menu on the left. Too bad. Maybe I'll figure that trick out but not today.

I have not gotten lazy, exactly, but I didn't put out the effort to upload the new pictures. After the next set, I expect that the exterior will change very little.

My buddy Shaun has given the site at least one thumb-up. Mostly he was telling me about his bad-ass rig he is assembling as the parts come in. Technically and aesthetically, it kicks ass.

I took some pictures of the house this morning with the rock up, or at least some of it. I'll get them posted later this evening unless I get lazy, which has been know to happen. We are getting into the detail phase now and K and I are doing our best to keep on top of the situation. Tensions are high all around but we are making good progress and the September 15 date looks reasonable.

I made some changes to the guestbook in the hopes of making it easier to read. I'm not sure I succeeded so I'll just wait and see if anyone complains. Then I'll change it again anyway.

Looks like I might have finally gotten rid of the superfluous scroll bar, thanks to the O'Reilly book, although I had to employ too many edits to make this happen. I'm also trying a pixel-width specification for the left menu. I know that if I actually have a readership then you people are very quiet, but I'd still like some input on the layout.

The cultured stone is being put up. Since I am leaving my laptop at work overnight, I can almost guarantee there will be some sort of pictorial update to the Construction Log.

I am just now using a new version of ViM: Gerhard's version 6.1.18 with Python 2.2 interface with VisVim. I don't know what the last two additions give me, although the ViM window looks a bit better. Before it did not maximize fully for some reason and now it gives me a bit larger work area. Perhaps I am looking at the Python interface. Who knows. The move to ViM 6.1.18 was a good idea anyway.

I start classes today. I was a lazy bum this weekend and did not post up the new pictures of the house. There were not many, maybe four. Instead of doing that I was playing Grand Theft Auto III most of the weekend.

I guess I only start "class" today, since I have not been able to get registered for the night class yet. I should be able to get an overload tomorrow, which is convenient since that class starts tomorrow night at 6pm.

First class went OK I think. I was not close to the front and had trouble hearing what was being said but I am pretty sure I got the right room. Afterwards I picked up a nice, shiny textbook: Probability and Statistical Inference by Hogg and Tanis. $98.45 plus $4.58 for a spiral notebook. What a rip off. It really makes my stomach turn to spend that sort of money, especially since I really need every bit of it for the house. Hopefully I will be able to skip on buying books for some of my future classes.

Genius that I am, I realized that I could help my enormous menu by using a smaller font size. I was looking up what the format would be in my trusty "SAMS Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 4 in 21 Days" and I saw that Laura Lemay suggested I use CSS instead. Well, duh, what was I thinking? As I like to do, I just guessed at what the proper attribute should have been, and it worked. I still don't know the difference between CSS1 and CSS2, but apparently it does not matter.

My friend Shaun has always suggested I use PHP, and I am starting to think about it since I have a tough time properly formatting my pages to look decent. You might notice a few cosmetic changes but they are nothing complicated, just check the source. If I really wanted to get into it, I'd probably go Perl actually, since what I would learn by doing that would have direct application to work. However, rewriting this site in Perl, PHP or anything would probably be overkill. What would get me out of the Stone Age of the web and into at least the late 1980s would be learning some damn JavaScript. I hear that stuff is crunk.

I have some ideas on how to spruce up this joint, and I just ordered some O'Reilly books: HTML/XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Insert evil laugh.

Wow, it has been a while. I have recently discovered that what I am doing here is called blogging and this page would be called a blog. That would be short for weblog. Sounds Brittish for some reason, perhaps because it reminds me of the word sprog, which may not be Brittish but I think it is. I'm not as good as the pros but that is probably because I am writing all this code myself instead of using some sort of blog-generating application. Also, I'm probably not nearly as entertaining as an intelligent girl, or maybe that's just my personal bias coming into play.

I still have a job, for the few of you I have not told. I'm calming down, grinding my teeth less, eating fewer muscle relaxers. OK, so it was Midol, but it's not like that stuff will turn me into a woman or anything.

Time limitations or not, I'm all about EverQuest again. Not sure why, guess I'm just an idiot. Actually I picked up Grand Theft Auto III when I was out buying a head of lettuce. Karen calls me up to tell me about this hilarious review she had just read about GTAIII and wants me to pick it up. I groan and complain "Oh, if I have to..." but I have to get it anyway because my Hardcore Gamer Association membership has been in danger of revocation, and I could not let the Association find out that my wife was asking for be to buy this. That's just embarassing. Like the Half-Life thing. I mean, it's only been banned in Australia, plus I've played it a little before, so of course I want it.

I guess since I am on the topic, I'll do something I hardly ever do but always want to, and I would if I were able to write while driving home every day: complain about something. What, I complain all the time? Well, it's a hobby. Anyway, pay attention Australia: Switzerland requires people to own a gun once they reach age 18, or so I am told, and they have a terribly low crime rate. I'll tell you, if I were to want to go on a crime spree I'd think seriously about doing it in the UK. Those silly cops can chase me all they want with their little sticks, I think I'd be watching TV on a big screen that evening. What about murders, you say? If I were to want to kill someone, I certainly don't need a gun. I have a license to pilot a machine that can travel very fast and will probably kill if not cripple someone if I hit them with it. There is always the good old pry-bar-to-the-head too, or really a sharp stick would work just fine.

Ceilings are in the house, and speakers are in the walls. Back deck and front porch are to have the footings poured soon. Water has been attached to the house. I am totally nuts with excitement.

I have started tweaking my rig rather than play games because I am rather time-limited lately. A real annoyance after I went through all of the trouble to get EverQuest installed and the pain of that Creative modem. The good news is that Creative has recently released a new set of drivers for the SBLive on XP. I verified this morning that the snap-crackle-pop is gone when starting up WarCraft III. Next will be checking on the sound-stutter in Morrowind, but I think that might have been related to performance.

Morrowind is a huge program and it really stresses even the most cranked-up rigs. I embarked on my recent journey through tweak-land in the hope of making things easier on my machine when running it. I installed Cacheman on both my home machine and my memory-constrained work laptop. It definitely helped my laptop, but the jury is still out on whether the rig benefits. I'm sure it does, but will the results be noticable?

I also installed RegCleaner which works great at keeping me from borking my box again with ignorant registry edits. Not a whole lot to clean out after the recent reinstall of XP, but I found a couple of things to get rid of.

I started using Diskeeper on my laptop as well, but I am not certain of the benefits. Considering the usage of my two machines, I would expect the work box to need a defrag more often and benefit more from it, but so far I can't say that I feel strongly about there being an improvement or not.

I don't know if I mentioned it here, but Nvidia's 29.42 drivers seemed to both speed up my framerate and cause some weird graphical glitches. Those glitches, it turns out, were simple "tearing" which was made apparent by the actual speed increase. The problem is not really that the frames refresh too fast but that my monitor was stuck at a 60Hz refresh rate. That problem itself is with WinXP and can be fixed with a registry edit if you are daring. If not, there is a wonderful tool for working with Nvidia cards called RivaTuner. This little program exposes all of the hidden abilities of your GeForce card, plus it will undo that silly refresh rate lock. I pushed one button to set all resolutions to max refresh and another to make the change. As I said earlier, I have not fired up Morrowind to test these tweaks yet but I feel that this will eliminate any tearing.

I installed the new version of Ad-Aware while I was at it. If any of you install it, remember to get the latest reference file. Installing RefUpdate will make that sort of thing easy.

I cleaned up the menu a bit, removing things that were not getting any use. I'm starting to dream of a better menu again.

I bought a new modem, a cheap-ass piece of crap made by Creative. I suppose it would not be so crappy if Creative would start putting out drivers for their products to run on XP. It was $59, which is outrageous for something that sucks so badly, but the wonderful US Robotics modem was $99 and I didn't feel like wasting a whole benjamin on something that would probably get fried again. Did I mention that Creative is crappy? Sure, I run a SBLive in my rig, but I don't have to like it. They have crap support for XP even with the SBLive, which is damn near ubiquitous.

The storms during the first week of July blew out the analog line where I am staying. BellSouth fixed it by Wednesday afternoon but I discovered last night that my modem is dead. It is very, very frustrating and disappointing. I had just gotten EverQuest to work, and I always have things to download, plus the fact that I used it to upload pictures to this web page. I'll see how long I can go before I buy a new one anyway. I might not buy one until I move into my house (end of August they say) because this is the second modem of mine that has been zapped by this phone line. I think. My mother-in-law has lost at least one as well. I will have to think very hard about buying a good one or not. I will eventually have to get a line conditioner or whatever they are called these days. I think they are built into modern UPSs, which I will want to get one day when I have money.

That does mean that I'll have to do some sort of magic to get the construction pictures onto the web page. I will just have to load the camera software on my laptop and, for extra safety, upload the pictures from work. Never heard of lightning disturbing our LAN, but if the modem in my laptop gets zapped I can get a new one for free.

The web server I am using seems to be having a problem with time. The timestamp it puts on the files I ftp to it is one hour and twenty minutes ahead of the time on my laptop. Since my laptop is synchronized by a time server, I'm pretty sure it's not me that is off. It is causing weird things with IE when trying to fine-tune my web pages and I am forced to force IE to reload the page because it thinks the page has not been altered. I guess. I might tell my ISP, I might not.

Wacky day, I have been exchanging mail with Scott Thigpen. You are probably thinking, "You mean THE Scott Thigpen, the very same I have seen mentioned on PvP and Penny Arcade? Star of stage and screen, winner of eight Golden Globes?" Yep, except for the star-of-stage-and-screen part. You are probably wondering why someone such as myself would be allowed to email someone like Scott. It's the old Kevin Bacon Theorem: turns out he married a friend's sister. I would not go so far as calling Scott and I friends or anything, mind you, since we just exchanged a couple emails today. He's probably calling the local authorities, actually. However I would like to plug his art since he's so damn good at it. Now, all four of you check it out.

I should have the new pics coded in now, except that it looks like Ye Olde Dialupe went toes-up and I only sent five pictures. I'll have to get that done tonight. I took a few more pictures this morning, so they are starting to pile up.

I am pleased to welcome a couple new readers. One seems to be a fan of my dry humor (thanks Carter!). I hope that everyone is able to find what they are looking for on this site, if not just send an email or call. If anything here is confusing, I'll be happy to explain it. I realize that I am serving a diverse group, and I also take no responsibility for comments in the guestbook. Have fun, and I'll get some more pics out soon.

That didn't last long. The Morrowind pics are up. Please verify the verbal and written discussions we have had about my characters.

I'm resisting adding a section to show off my Morrowind pictures. Instead I reorganized the family pictures a bit and added the requested picture of the new kittens. There is also a new picture of Karen there as well.

PC fixed, pictures loaded to web, hope it works because I don't have time to test it all right now.

Yesterday I bought an Xbox and a pre-owned Max Payne. It's pretty damn cool. Too bad I am playing it on a small TV with monaural sound from twelve feet away... but it is still pretty damn cool despite that. Karen was impressed with Max's slo-mo leaps and dual-Beretta action.

Hopefully I will have a working PC by the end of the week. Once the reinstall is done, I will get to do the fun stuff, which includes reinstalling The Sims without losing any dowloaded furniture. I will be able to upload some more pictures, too. I have not done that yet because I keep thinking I'm going to get the rig running again shortly so there is no need to install the digital camera software on my laptop. Also, I'm a big procrastinator.

We are finding that the house is bigger than any of us thought. For example, the chimney. We had planned to cover it with real stone, but it's bigger than any of us thought it would be. We had to order more brick, so now we have this nice three-tone obelisk. Turns out that the stone required to cover it would weigh 20 tons. That's a bit much for the foundation to support so we are looking at alternatives. Not a big deal, really. In the overall project, things have gone very, very well so I am not worried about it too much.

Oh, wacky times. I feel like they are, at least. Here's the summary: visited John Milton, my parents, adopted three kittens, work projects ambushing me, started playing Achaea, and rig still eerily silent.

Various pictures have been taken of things, but with the rig down I can't do any updating unless I install the digital camera software on another machine. Why am I avoiding that? Because I'm sure it won't work properly and I don't feel like I should be wasting my valuable time on it. Besides I'll have the rig reinstalled soon enough.

I had promised John Milton I would visit him the weekend of May 18, and later I find that my parents have three motherless kittens, so I combined the two trips. Overall the trip was much nicer than it has been historically. My parents have come a long way on the house they are building; unlike mine, theirs is on a small cove of either Gantt Lake or Point A Lake. I'm not sure if there actually is a Gantt Lake, but there is definitely a Point A lake. There are kitten pictures but they will be uploaded later.

The house has a roof by now, and the plumber is installing stuff. Both bathtubs are in position. We got white tubs since they were easier to get and Karen thinks she will be happier in the long run. There is still a lot to do and look at, so I will hopefully have a lot to say once I put more shots into the construction log.

What is Achaea? It's a MUD. Well done and free, however there are definite benefits to sending in money. I'm still evaluating.

I have also been accepted as a student at Georgia Tech. Now I just have to figure out how to register for classes. It's good that I work right across North Avenue from campus, I might have to go knock on some doors to get any info.

I am not really sure what the real cause was, but my rig does not have a good boot sector. I can't find a good way to get around the STOP 7B error, so I will just have to reinstall XP. I'm playing around with the idea of finally buying a second hard disk. They are pretty cheap these days, and I may get one. Karen said I could buy an Xbox if I wanted one, even before they dropped to $199, but I think I'll just buy another 40GB disk instead. If I don't get my rig up and running again, I will have to buy an Xbox and Morrowind too. At least I can still listen to the soundtrack and remember what it was like to play.

Finally, Vanilla Coke is released today. Go buy some, it is very tasty. We are having a big party right now, sort of like the PowerAde party. There's food (hotdogs, hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, Golden Flake products, garden burgers) and drink. Notably Vanilla Coke, but there also seems to be something going on with Minute Maid and Nestea. Everyone's favorite Coca-Cola characters are here, namely the polar bear and that creepy Nestea snowman. I declined the opportunity to try to win tickets (Chastain, Braves and other ATL attractions) since it seemed like I would have to stand in a giant green bottle and grab things flying around me. But I snagged a VC which is why I went.

I have also managed to dork my rig such that it will not completely boot. It will get to the XP load screen but after that it's the good ol' BSOD. It complains about something wrong with the hard drive. I tweaked numerous things and made a few mistakes, so who knows what's wrong. All I know is that the last good config option isn't working for this particular problem. There is a much longer story behind it, and I'll tell you all about it if you contact me.

The house? Wonderful. Go check the latest pics. We, for some reason, need to buy a tub tonight. Something about the plumbers need it by Friday. I'm sort of unclear on the reasoning, but if Karen is OK with buying a generic white tub from a retail place then I am too. This is not the tub in the master bedroom (I think), it is for the upstairs one.

More pictures of the house, which is looking like a house now. Check the Construction Log for the latest. We are looking hard for lighting now. The roof should be complete very soon, then we can get to the fun part of wiring and plumbing. The various porches need to be built, as well as that chimney I won't shut up about. The hot tub won't be here in time, but I won't be the one building the porch or installing the tub, so I can afford to not worry about it a whole lot.

As for work, the question of the day on my floor was "Where's my Vanilla Coke, beyatch?". That may seem like something odd to hear from The Coca-Cola Company employees, but the local radio personalities have not only sampled VC, but Q-100 had some sort of crazy Vanilla Coke party. The Regular Guys (Larry and Eric) were likewise granted some of the stuff. Meanwhile, the hard-working joes that keep the information flowing through this giant global enterprise are going thirsty waiting for some. What's up with that? All of my friends are like "Yo, G-Ride, where's my damn Vanilla Coke? I thought we was friends, whatup?" and I'm like "It ain't like that... I only get what's in the vending machines, you mooching asshole". I would have thought that we would have had at least an informal table set up outside the cafeteria, but no. Last summer we had a huge PowerAde ho-down, complete with pro skateboarders, a raffle for a Hummer and free massages. The stress-relief kind, not the other kind. However, not even a T-shirt for Vanilla Coke. I got a T-shirt for our Fridge Pack promotional, dammit, where's my props? By the way, you should go get some of those Fridge Packs.

Just so you all know, Karen has called the first VC I find. Maybe I should have gone to that all-hands meeting. I can find just about anything we make or distribute in North America, such as Planet Java, Mad River and other obscure stuff, so maybe I'm just not looking hard enough for Vanilla Coke.

I took too long to update the Construction Log and I am a bit behind. It doesn't help that my framing crew works like madmen... at least not as far as taking pictures goes. Since those pictures were taken, we had a heavy rain that moved a lot of fill dirt around. My builder, Larry Rakestraw, says that it will not be a problem. He's a good guy and I believe him.

Other fun: the hardwood-floor-refinishing of my in-laws house had to be redone because of extreme ineptitude on the part of the guy running the sander. It looks much better after all of the yelling, but of course we all get to inhale the fumes again. They are getting closer to finishing their redecoration project. Meanwhile I am 25% done in building a complete house.

Funny thing, my dad is also building a house, and has been for the past year or two. I forget how long he's been working on it, but it is really just him and whoever he can get to help him for free on the weekends.

So, why have I been reluctant to devote time into updating the web site? Morrowind. No need to provide links, just use your natural WWW instincts to look it up. I have forsaken all other games. Except maybe Ico. And Diablo II. And Gran Turismo 3 (thanks Karen!). Morrowind is everything you have heard it would be, but better because it's in my grubby little hands. I am fondling the disc right now. I have not yet figured out how to do squat with the Construction Set that comes with it, but that just means that it is very, very cool.

I forced myself into a work-free weekend. There was work to do, especially after the week-long disaster of a system copy I was trying to complete by Thursday afternoon. I mostly finished it up by Friday morning and did cleanup for most of the rest of the day. I had contracted some sort of throat infection from Karen, too, so I stashed the pager and cell phone and drank some beer.

Rather than waste the weekend getting some much-needed rest, I have updated the Construction Log. Have fun looking through this update. I'm going to bed.

A change in style. I came very close to using the div tag, and what's more scary is that I almost put some JavaScript in here. The code examples that I found were very long for such a simple task as making a menu that I decided I would wait until retirement to do JavaScript.

The Born-On Date joke has gone on long enough. It wasn't entertaining to anyone except me in the first place.

For those who are not up to speed on the whole situation of where I am living now, here's the long version. I am building a house and it seemed like a very economically-sound idea to sell The Mushroom (the old house) and use the cash to fund the new one. We had to get a loan anyway, but no sense in getting one for the full amount or in starting the loan earlier than necessary. So far, in fact, we have basement walls and a roughed-in driveway and have not yet taken any draws against the construction loan.

Obviously I wasn't going to save any money if I moved into a motel or something for the six or eight months it would take to build, so I moved in with my in-laws. Most people flinch when I say that, however my wife's family is great and they really like me. Unfortunately they are redecorating their house right now. This means that they are building a new master bedroom and bath into what used to be the office space for their business, plus they are adding hardwood flooring. The new hardwood flooring will contact the old hardwood, so ALL the hardwood has to be refinished. What this means is that two weeks from now I'm going to have to move out again.

Most of our stuff that we decided to keep is in climate-controlled storage. I have some clothes and my computer, along with fifty essential computer games and my two main consoles with some choice games (too bad I don't have a TV to hook them to!). I have managed to locate a large number of socks and put them in a pile near where I believe my underwear to be, but many of my other clothes are underneath Karen's vast wardrobe which is laid across three pieces of furniture in the den as well as filling three large plastic bins.

It's not as bad as it sounds, but I have not been sleeping well. This is mainly becase I need to get used to a bed before I can sleep comfortably in it, and the fact that someone gets up around 0430 each workday and turns on the heat. I wake up with sweaty nightmares (yeah, 5am is still night to me, I'm not and never will be a morning person). After I get up, I drink some coffee that is already made, so it balances out really. I then sit around in my robe until I feel like going to work, then drive 45-60 minutes into downtown Atlanta. So it's not really that bad. I'm getting to drive the Maxima, too, since Karen only has to walk 100 yards to get to work. I am starting to worry about my truck, though, since there has been talk of trading it in for something Karen can drive.

I have a chance to go to the Atlanta ComiCon, which is the weekend of 04-13, thanks to a friend in the business. Not that I wasn't able to go as a normal shmoe, but everything's better when you are there on "business". If I get to see or touch anything interesting I'll be sure to mention it.

A long-overdue update. If anyone has been trying to call me at home, I have no home anymore. Send me an email to contact me, and if I think you need it I will give you my cell number.

There are pictures of the house, however I have not uploaded them yet. Not much to see, really, since all I have right now is a set of basement walls. They will be posted soon.

The old house is almost ready to sell. I still have some work to do on it before we list. It's looking a lot better than I thought it would.

Work is really picking up, which is made even more fun by my lack of sleep. I don't think I have slept well since moving in with the in-laws a week ago. I tried taking a break this week from house-related work, and that mostly happened but now I have to get back into it. I managed to mis-plan some work-work I did yesterday and had to spend today manually putting a filesystem into a HACMP configuration. I have one filesystem left to create today, so I'll just have to update the disaster-recovery machines tomorrow. No working very late, either, since I have to go do some stuff at the old house and pick up mail at the old PO box. I hope I can remember it, my mind is really fuzzy this week.

I have tried to cancel my EQ account, however it seems impossible when EQ will not start up. It does not see my 3D device for some reason, so I'm going to have to call them up. Even if I had the time to play, the recent price hike is a bunch of crap. For that price I'd rather play Camelot.

Gamers.com: The Tekken universe advances rapidly, with new generations of characters appearing in each installment. Will Paul Phoenix ever just die of old age?

Masahiro Kimoto: As long as no inevitability is forced on our story line, he will not die. Our development team secretly loves him.

Had fun today adding some shared filesystems to a HACMP cluster. Not tricky if you remember you need to do everything through the cluster tools, and it's not fast by any means. Still, it's 3pm and I'm wondering how to fill the afternoon. There is work to do, however the bureaucratic processes create a bottleneck which cause me to work in spurts rather than in a continuous stream.

I looked at my existing cgi and have considered going all-out with it here, however there will definitely be a learning curve, and I still don't know exactly what I want to do with this layout. It will almost assurely be easier to continue with the file-per-page structure I have now. If either of my readers has an idea about layout, let me know.

I ran HTML Tidy across this page and it seemed to take issue with my line length. Whatever, ViM does word wrap. I have also made a slight change to the site. See if you can guess what it is.

I don't care for frames a whole lot, but this was much easier than writing a CGI program to handle the drop-down menu I was going to do originally. I might do the drop-down but I will look around to see if I can find a nice menu system that I like first.

Do you own a Game Boy Advance? You will find and indispensable product at Portable Monopoly.

Also of note is the fact that A Web Site is completely XHTML 1.0 Transistional compliant.

As you can see I have found the Joy of Compliance. I decided to just comment the offending link until I got around to reorganizing. I figure that the Epox links you can still see should be enough to get you started. Even though making this site conform to XHTML 1.0 is not the same thing as making sure it looks OK in Lynx, I'll try to do both at the same time. You Netscape users need to just convert to Mozilla. More to come.

Except for one single link on this page, my index passes the XHTML validation. Yippee. But what to do about the link? I think sweeping it under the carpet is the thing to do, so I'll just have to work on my reorg.

I have some news, just not the much-needed redesign. First of all I have been very busy and have found myself exposed to new (to me) technologies lately, both work-related and otherwise. In work-related news I am finding it has become a good idea to read up on UNIX security and of course AIX in particular since that is what I support. Turns out that IBM has a relatively recent Redbook on AIX 4.3 security. I haven't read it yet, though, because I was soon distracted by Steve Gibson. Turns out he is more interesting than security details. Yes, I do find security technical info interesting. Also in work-related events, my new position has put me in closer contact with SAP support and I just finished watching some parts of an Oracle upgrade. Previously the extent of my involvement was just to be handy for running two scripts.

In the home-user category of interesting things, I have decided that WinXP's built-in firewall is the most likely cause of me not being able to play any online games lately. I have not verified this, but I don't remember being able to play either Dark Age of Camelot or EverQuest since the move to XP. Except of course for the morning when I looked into Mythic's incredibly useful support web page and found a reference to problems with XP's firewall. The support doc simply said to disable it, so I did and Camelot ran without issue for another thirty minutes at which point I logged out normally. Guess it's back to ZoneAlarm, and Steve Gibson recommends that anyway. Hey, I respect anyone who codes in assembly. I can barely manage Perl.

Shockingly enough, this page fails the test done by the WC3 HTML Validation Service. My CSS failed the WC3 CSS Validation Service as well. I am probably not going to do a whole lot to try to make this site look decent in Netscape, other than to urge users of Netscape to give Microsoft the finger by using Mozilla instead. If you are truly old-school, take heart: I will be doing my best to redesign the site to appear even more nicely in Lynx. The most noticable problem would be my crazy tables, but I know what the problem is and will surely fix it at some point. As if anyone uses my tables besides me, and really the Druid Spell Chart is less efficient without color.

This week my friend Shaun donated a Linux machine to The Cause, which means now I have absolutely no excuse to avoid setting up a LAN. He even worked on it while he was trying to move his family to Kansas City from Atlanta. I have somehow created a monster with him, but I am quite proud of my monster and hopefully when I get into this Linux thing we can cause some real problems, rather than just annoy our wives.

Lastly, I have been interested in putting up a resource list for XP that is similar to the links provided for users of the Epox 8KHA+ and general hardware info, however I haven't dug up anything tremendously useful. You might think Shaun would be some help, however he is in "fuck Microsoft" mode with no sign of turning back. I did find this item concerning the tweaking modems but I doubt that sort of thing is what my reader would find useful. I am of course assuming that you remember how to do this from your early years, and it is pretty dang easy compared to Ye Olde Days of modem tweaking. There is also a procedure to force the Hardware Abstraction Layer into submission in the event that you change your system board and XP starts acting wacky. I located that story at Windows XP User.

My new rig has come together, finally. The hardware upgrade went as well as it usually does for me; remember I'm not a Intel-trained guy, it's just my hobby. The most interesting side-effect of that is that every time I do this, I'm doing it with all-new technology.

There was one problem worth mentioning. I got my parts Thursday night and discovered that the Epox 8KHA+ mobo only accepts PC1600 and PC2100. I had PC2400, which after I got into investigating this DDR RAM stuff, probably would have worked since my PC2100 stick is running at 1600. I think that what the manual meant was that the 8KHA+ will only be able to clock the RAM to 2100. Anyway, I thought I had to get a different DIMM.

The bigger mistake I made with the RAM was that I was in such a damn hurry (was going out of town that weekend, and I managed to jump out of an airplane, too) to put my rig together I lost all semblence of having a brain and bought some over-the-counter RAM from a local computer chop-shop (never buy computer parts from a white guy, trust me). I'll be getting some good RAM pretty soon, though. As it stands, my rig runs but I am not going to be changing the frontside bus to 133MHz with this stick. Why, you ask? I actually did run it at 133Mhz (making the RAM run at 2100) and it didn't take long for it to heat up and puke its contents all over the hard drive. I was happily playing Aliens vs. Predator 2 when old Narcissus locks up (I had not assigned a new name after the hardware upgrade yet, now she's known as xp2). After that it won't load Windows 98, seems like the user32.dll has an invalid length and several files are crosslinked. Most of them are Iomega files, so I naturally suspect that software as the problem. I had been having driver problems with my new GeForce3, particularly the "extra mouse cursor" problem, but I didn't think that was what caused the file problems. Before I do that again, even with new RAM, I'll be making some modifications.

It didn't take me long to decide that, since my c: partition was pretty much borked anyway, it was time to move to XP. Installation went as it usually does: smoothly. I've only been running XP since the 20th, but so far I love it. I'm still trying to figure it out, and as such it still has that factory-fresh look. I'm trying to figure out how to group up my programs for easy access without polluting that nice, clean desktop. Man, I love a clean desktop. It fixed my mouse problem, too.

AvP2 runs just fine, as does The Sims. Due to the extended outage time, I have given Karen extended computer time to make up for her not being able to download furniture for a whole weekend. Fallout Tactics runs great as well, and I'm going to try Thief II as soon as I get a minute, but it seems like every time I sit down I end up playing AvP2, Fallout Tactics or Dark Age of Camelot. I was able to run the EverQuest patch program without doing a reinstall, but I have not tested the game itself yet.

The final hardware includes an Athlon XP 1700+ CPU, Epox 8KHA+ mobo, 256MB DDR, Gainward PowerPack !!! Golden Sample GeForce3 Ti500, and the pre-existing SB Live! w/ surround speakers, 3Com 10/100, Creative 24x4x2 CD burner (which works much better than it ever did under Win98!), and Ye Olde 8x CD-ROM. Since my burner is now actually reading at 24x, I'm probably going to finally remove the CD-ROM and put something useful in there.

As for pictures, the "second" computer is a Linux machine, so the scanner will have to wait a bit. I have confidence that the XP box can handle it, though.

Finally, Karen and I have set up a trip to Walt Disney World. We will be leaving on Feb 6 to stay at the new Animal Kingdom Lodge. Both of us could really use a vacation right now, and since we have had to postpone the house for a bit there is no reason to sit around and do nothing.

I suppose that if I did have any regular readers, this last bit of inactivity would definitely scare them off. I do have some updates planned but they may take a bit of time, at least for me to make some time to work on this page a bit more. At most, I'll have a second computer with an attached scanner so that I can post things that are actually interesting.

I was cursing the name of whomever designed our HR website, and thanking the same for making a site map. At some point today I realized that my own "a web site" has gotten bigger than I thought it would, and perhaps the complete lack of interest I have from even my own guildmates in EverQuest was due to the horrible navigation I have implemented. In true hacker style, I have thrown together a workaround while I am thinking of what would be a good solution to the linking problem I seem to have. I have also incremented the maintenance level in imitation of software developers who label a workaround as a fix.

For some reason, the Geek Shop is where my anime section is. I have actually put something in there today. There are also some pictures from the new Shadows of Luclin expansion of EverQuest in the EQ section. Look under Games for the headlines.

Oh, where do I begin? I think the decision to act as general contractor for our new house has been made. I will not be much help in this work since of the whole extended family I have the least construction experience. I will help out where I can but since I work in Midtown Atlanta there's not much chance that I'll be able to do any real supervision on a job being done over an hour's drive away. I will, however, be expanding on my original role as "heavy" to encompass pretty much anyone and anything that needs to be leaned on. Nothing like a brusque phone call from a "downtown bigwig" to get people to hop-to.

In other news, there is not much. Plans to sell the current house still stand and I am charged with getting it into salable condition. Recently Finagle's law started acting up and a dead tree fell on the small dog pen we have in the back yard. A bit of father-in-law experience with chain-link got us back up with a very decent repair at a cost of perhaps $15. I will get a complete list of must-fix items from my realtor in January and in the meantime I will probably be ordering some bags of grass seed. First I have to figure out just what will grow in my yard.

I realized that I had somehow forgotten to advertise a certain film that will be out on Dec 19. I am advertising to whoever the someone is that is making my counter advance. I assume that someone is checking this page, but why they don't sign the guestbook is beyond me. I mean, it's not like a regular guestbook with all the extra crap no one needs, and in fact it only has two comments in it if you count the one I put in there. It's more of a chat thingy than a guestbook anyway. Enough complaining, now I'll just threaten you with bodily injury if you do not go see The Film. Go to hell, Jar-jar!

Updated the Games section. Also we have construction documents and are waiting on a price from the builder. Things are looking good as far as I can tell, and we may be able to afford the whole thing, which is probably the most exciting part of it all. If the plan is followed, there will be pictures of the plot soon. Also, we now own the three-acre plot.

At work I have been moved from my shared office on the first floor to a "temporary" cube farm on the fourth floor of the same building. I put those quotes in because there is some debate on just how temporary this spot is, and there is a pool right now. No money involved, unfortunately, but the dates for moving to our "permanent" spot across the street range from Feb 2002 (my aggressive bet) and Oct 2003 (a long-time company associate's bet). I had originally said Dec 31st of this year but the overall pessimism, plus the fact that this company takes forever to do the simplest things, encouraged me to slack up a bit and bet on Feb.

Cube life is not so bad, actually, other than the constant fear of having my stuff stolen. The only people who can tell what I am working on are my teammates, and they are not the people I worry about looking over my shoulder. I did manage to hang onto my whiteboard, which is a definite bonus. Also, I am now on ethernet and can surf more efficiently.

Hot Date, what little I have seen of it, seems pretty decent. It also actually runs on my rig, but as Karen has noticed it could be a lot better. Besides neat stuff like buying presents and then having them actually used as the gifts back in the "old" game, the interface has been tweaked so that things are easier to find. Karen approves of the new organization.

I have not spent much time watching Karen play because I promised Raziel I would help him find the secrets of his past... and kill people, mutants and demons so that he might consume their souls. I know I am somewhat flighty, but the fact that Soul Reaver 2 pulled me away from Deus Ex, EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot should say something. I believe that Twisted Metal: Black has been eclipsed as the Best Game on the PS2. Keep in mind that I own every Twisted Metal game.

This may be my last update for a while. The Sims expansion is out tomorrow and I have not yet built a rig for my wife to use, meaning that my rig is going to be put through the wringer and I won't be able to get onto it for a bit. I also have not been able to perform the upgrades I had planned due to lack of budget so we'll just have to suffer through running The Sims on my Athlon 550 with 390MB of SDRAM. Perhaps its time to try the old "pencil trick".

I modified the site to comply with the popup ad suppressor I use. No more opening new windows. Complain if you wish.

As I write this I am on hold with my ISP, hoping to diagnose exactly why my DSLAM is not seeing my IDSL modem. The first suspicion from the L2 tech is that a repeater has gone bad. I hope that Covad owns that repeater, and not BellSouth. You'd think I lived in the deep wilderness if you went by my broadband options.

Not much to tell except that I have had a bit of work to do lately. I have managed to add a guestbook/live-chat sort of thing a few days ago and I am patiently waiting for my userbase to make their mark.

Update: this is a known issue at my CO, it seems that the DS3 line has no slack and is actually quite taut, so the non-technical wording of my problem would be "the cord won't reach". Is it really 2001? Are we still using cables? Where's my flying car, dammit?

I added some pictures to the Camelot Journal. Probably too many feature my pet tree. These pics are not from Nov 11, but I just now got around to adding them. Kogolev's journal so far is a pictorial one, since he really just runs around killing things.

There have been a few reorgs in the Games section. I split EverQuest from Camelot, removed any trace of Anarchy Offline, and added a few links for those of you who don't yet own some of these. I have also begun a journal of the adventures of Libilbhdhbh, my druid in Camelot. I will soon start a journal on the life and times of Kogolev, my magician in EverQuest, and expect to see cameos from other members of Feir'Dal, which is probably the oldest guild on The Nameless which has not dissolved or split into separate guilds.

In other news, the construction documents for my new house are almost done and if the current schedule holds (and I have some money to pay these people) we should break ground in mid-November. My office somehow got bigger, which is not a bad thing, and I will even have a place to put our antique hostess bar in there. I am also going to get some sort of vaulted ceiling, either peak-type or barrel-type. Of course, the hard part is yet to come.

One of my staff indicated that she got a headache trying to read the site, so I changed the text color... again. Hope everyone likes it. Actually I like it, too.

Another maintenance release. Poke around to see what's new, although it's not much at this point. I have plans, just not enough time to implement.

I replaced the Geek Tools page with the Geek Shop. It's slightly better organized and was a great excuse for me to practice the CGI I have been reading about lately.

Welcome to Version 5, I hope you enjoy your stay. I realize that is asking a lot.

As you may have noticed, I have learned some HTML. Other things I have learned include the fact that FunCom is run by a bunch of people with no real concept of what it is like to work in the IT industry. They are all great guys and gals but it is apparent they don't have any idea what they are doing. Not that I have had a lot of time to play lately. Check the Games section for more babbling of that nature.

I keep threatening my EQ guild with they notion that I may return, and so far I have to say that I have not been able to keep the fear in them. I'd love to play some more EQ, however the thought of riding that damn boat from Faydwer to Antonica is keeping me from logging on. But I probably will when I get some time.

For those of you who are keeping up with the local events, I have seen the preliminary drawings for my new house and I am amazed. It looks like the house is going to kick more ass than I thought, and sooner than I thought. With any luck we will be breaking ground in November.

We have also sent the film to be developed, so those of you looking for the Scotland vacation pictures will hopefully not have to wait much longer. The travelougue may take longer due to the other things I will have to do, such as get my current house into shape for selling, replace the plug wires in my truck, finding a handyman to do some stuff such as finish the walls in my garage and do some light cabinetry, plus replace my carpet with hardwood, and probably a load of other things I am forgetting. Heck if anyone needs some work, drop me a line.

I have added some vacation pictures I found after I fired up my old machine that I used before I built this rig. Some are from 1999 and some are from 2000, but I don't have exact dates for any of them. I added more pictures in the Anarchy bucket, too. These are less weird but I do make fun of the new Star Wars movie. If anyone else has a strange screenshot you can submit it to me via email. I will check it for quality and maybe post it.

I believe that my email links were not working, so I have changed them to the known-working yegolev@speedfactory.net. I have too many addresses anyway. I am hoping that is the reason I do not get any comments about this site, rather than mentally damaging my visitors with a super-sucky page. I mean, I know it sucks but it won't get any better without someone helping me out.

A plea: if anyone has a tested way to run Ultima VII on Win98, please drop me a line. Otherwise I'll have to relearn all those mad DOS skillz and load it on my 486DX-66.

I have put up a page for my Anarchy Online pictures. Unfortunately I lost my beta pics, but hopefully there is enough weirdness from this set to satisfy. You can find it from the Pictures area on the right or from the Orange Tidbits.

The Geek Tools are not just for geek stuff anymore, and have been moved up a bit in the scheme. In case you need some additional info: WinRAR is a great archiver that can decompress just about anything. Ad-Aware roots out those pesky cookies and programs that track where you go on the Innur-net. Zone Alarm is a free firewall. ViM is a "better than vi" text editor (using it right now). WsFTP is a free ftp client. A.X.E. is a hex editor for all you kids. The rest is really fluff... go check it out.

I have been having more success learning Perl than learning how to download and install Slackware, but I will crack that nut one day. It seems straightforward, if you consider Lego straightforward.

There has been a major overhaul of Shaun's page. The use of PHP has gone way over my head.

I have added a bit to the Orange Anarchy Online page. I hope it is somewhat entertaining. In case you were wondering, the "lag patch" worked well enough that I have been neglecting to update my page. Now my big problem is the memory leak, but that's next on their list. Actually I have some other issues, go read about it on the Orange page.

This update is just to mention that I agree with the general player population of Anarchy Online: the game does not work. Well, it doesn't work at peak time or any time surrounding it, and it does work in that I can log in and walk around. As for doing stuff, well... I can do stuff that does not require the server to know much about what my client is up to. I was trying to play a bit with Buddakahn but when we cannot see each other it sort of inhibits cooperative gameplay.

Good news for all of you, I have sold out. I think I should refer to it as cashing in, but I will have to see if this thing works at all. Basically I have signed up with Amazon to sell things from here. I normally advertise freeware, but now that I can line my pockets with gold I'm pretty much a carnival barker. Cynicism aside, I can refer you in good conscience to purchase the Gorillaz CD. I haven't enjoyed a disc this much since Beck. If anyone has some moral objection to my violation of the purity of "a web site" (as it seems this is called), you know where to find me. I know some of you are going to be buying a bunch of books anyway, so why not do it through here?

Hoody-hoo! 82 hits! Some of those are mine, but I have fixed that in a way. I had to reload Narcissus (that's my rig) and for some reason I can't find my copy of FrontPage. Well, to hell with it, I say. Now I'm checking my code using IE on the local file, which is what I should have been doing the whole time. I'm doing my editing with ViM, and let me tell you, coding a page has never been faster for me. I'm even typing this out longhand instead of cut-n-paste... but I suspect that will change after a few hrefs.

Yup, just pasted the paragraph tag. I'm so lazy. Anyway, been playing Anarchy Online and I have put some stuff on Ye Olde Crappy Site. The headline is, it is great when I can play.

I now have a cat. His name is Duncan Armstrong, and if I had to have a cat (which, apparently I did) I think a nice Scottish one would be best. When I get that digital camera going, I'll post some pictures. My poor rig is still being loaded with essential drivers and apps, so it might be a while.

Found out my dear Karen reads the page (at least once) and so there should be some clarification of the 06-15-01 comment. I'm not too weak to have and subsequently raise a child, but I must say it is definitely something that neither Karen nor I want to do at this time! We are pretty confident we could raise some sort of uber-child, but that time and money is earmarked for other stuff. Maybe one day, but not today. Think of not having the guts in the context of being unwilling to make that sort of sacrifice, both from our perspective and from the supposed child's.

Got my Gorillaz CD today, and it kicks ass. I also had the brainstorm to put up a picture of SF, a.k.a. Shaun Friend, in the Pictures section. He does qualify as one of Us, in case you can't find the proper subsection. My Perl books came in with the CD, but don't start looking for CGI in the next few days. I could list off the stuff I have to do in the next few days, but do you care? No, you want results! Then let me get to work!

Should have seen the datestamp coming. Anyway, Friend Shaun has a bit o' news to share. I believe that Friend Shaun is my only real-life friend, so posting this probably won't mean much to anyone else, but still I have to give him the propers for doing something I haven't got the guts to do.

In other news, I have decided it is time to learn Perl. I installed ActivePerl, which seems to be the prefered version for MS-32, and signed up for the mailing list. The servers at work already have it, so I'm almost there. My wife (unknowingly, so far) was nice enough to buy me a nice package of Perl books. Since Friend Shaun has taken up PHP, we'll have a bake-off one day and see what's up.