4:05 PM

Home now. Gave up any chance of a New Year's Miracle as while we did see one UPS truck on the road this morning, it sure wasn't coming this way. Besides, the one web site still has my order listed as "pending" so god only knows when it'll have shipped. I called that place last week and they assured me it'd be here this week but they were backed up because of the holidays.

I have the Sun Bowl on. Well, it's at halftime and I'm just waking up from a nap. I'm really starting to hate college football. Even if it's a team I like (Washington State -- who were the "other" team to route for growing up in Washington State; the primary team being the Huskies), I don't know how ANYONE can get through all of these bowl games. There are 5 today alone and more the rest of the week. It's absolutely insane.

I've decided to add "peopleyouwantedtowhackwithahammerbutneverdid.com" to the list. Looking at Classmates.com again and one of the guys I went to high school comes off in his profile (that's one of the extortion services -- $3 a month to list a crappy profile), as almost the same level of braggart and jerk as he was when we went to school together. On the plus side, he's in the Bay Area so he's probably slept with his fair share of TechTV people.

I have a headache. I've flipped on the Travel channel's "Top 10 Shark Encounters" just to watch rich people with too much time on their hands "get in touch" with large animals who will probably eat them. Well that's the hope anyway.

"Mumsey, look at that!" "What's that dear?" "This large carniverous fish seems to have eaten my arm!" "Oh dear!"

I never have plans for New Year's Eve. I always have to work so I usually spend the final hours sneaking into an online game to talk to my best friend. This year, I don't know, I can't get in with my laptop (doesn't have a 3d graphics card), and I don't know her plans. It would be just fitting not to be able to spend time with her tonight. It's just wrapping up the month where everything that could go wrong did. :(

On an up note my mom's bringing home subway so hey, we're having my traditional meal -- junkfood and I'll have a spare sub for tomorrow morning when I'm pulling my hair out trying to get through the day with no mail.

Got TechTV on now. Noticed the last product review was sponsored by Radio Shack. Becky's also being billed as Rebecca. Andrew Hahn gave his top 3 products of the year: The Xbox, XP, and the AMD XP Chip. I can't diss him because I have an Xbox, my machine will have XP on it if I ever get it going again, and yes, it's powered by an AMD XP chip.

He's back now with the worst products of 2001. He's dissing XP's plus pack as an added bonus, which I can agree with. $40 for stuff that should have been in the sytem. But now he's dissing Bluetooth, if you don't know what that is, don't even bother. Just know it sucks. Now he's onto the cuecat. It's a catshaped barcode reader that sent you to the website of a barcode you scanned. It was actually free. But no one cared. Finally, the microsoft $160 picture viewer. It's a floppy drive with a video out. You put your pictures on a floppy to play on your TV. Becky's vicious and slamming it now. Got to love Becky. She's absolutely evil. :)

-- k9

It's 17 degrees out on a Monday morning. Somewhere around 8:36 AM. We should have been on the road already for mystery shops but I think everyone has agreed that "F'n S* it's @#$@ing cold out" is hampering our efforts.

I'm trying to avoid another day of sitting here in front of my computer. Since ALL of my games and all of my stuff I need to do (like this site) are waiting for me on a hard drive that's waiting to go into the new system, I'm sorta stuck with finding things to do on this laptop to pass the time.

Saturday I reorganized my bookmarks. Yesterday I started seeing if they work.

5 or 6 years worth of bookmarks. It's actually quite a funny collection. While I can't share it, I do know that I probably have the world's biggest collection of female b-movie and tv star websites. I started looked them up a couple of years back for a friend who didn't have web access and only could get on once a week from another friend's house. They've sort of been sitting on my hard drive ever since.

I add some from time to time. Any time there's a movie with actors or actresses I like I look them up on IMDB and stick them in the folder. Honest to god, I have no idea who half these people are though so I'm sitting here wondering if my next project will be figuring out who these people are and why they were important enough to be in this directory.

I got so bored Saturday night that I went to classmates.com. WHAT A SCAM. Sure it lists everyone you went to school with but to contact them or to see their web pages it kept prompting me to "upgrade" my membership to a "gold" membership ($3 a month). Not that I'm cheap, but if I want to tell the guy that I beat up in 8th grade that I didn't think he was a dork and beat him up because he annoyed the hell out of me (we were best friends), I'd rather look him up on a free site and call him up rather than pay the extortion fee to get to the same point.

Know what would be sad?

E-mail:

"Dearest, Patty P, from 6th grade to 9th grade I had the biggest crush on you. I could never tell you because I was a scumbag geek and you were the preppy queen of the school. I just thought I'd tell you so I can bring some closure to my life. Best, James K."

Response:

"Who are you again? My wife don't type much but I'll tell her you had a crush on her. You want to take care of our 8 kids while we get some quality time if you know what I mean? Wanda Mae looks sorta like her when she was 14. You could relive old times you perv."

Some things are left in the past. I mean I like the concept of the site but extorting money to find out that your high school sweet heart turned into the lesbian stripper queen of San Diego just isn't right. Plus what do you say to these people if you do pay the $$$ to get through to them? "Hi Bruce M., You might not remember me but I thought you were a geek in Jr. High. You were pretty cool that one semester we sat next to each other in math glass. Good to see you've reproduced. Cheers!" and to say "Who were you?" in return do they also have to pay the extortion fees?

I think that's a new field we should go into. That's it, you, my last 3 readers, and I should start a web site that lists "people you wanted to have sex with but never got the nerve to approach." We could list all the towns in the U.S., all the major strip clubs, all the major porn sites, tv shows, any place you may have seen someone to develope an unrequited crush on. We'd have our listings by names that we'd like to be called followed by descriptions such as "that bald guy who works at the 7-11 on Maynard Street" or "the geeky kid with bad teeth and a plate in his head who used to urinate in his pants anytime they ran a microwave" so the sources of our unrequited love would have some clue to who we, err, our customers were before telling them to get lost.

This could be major! It would be "YoudontremembermebutIwantedtohavesexwithyou.com" and just think ... listing current and former TechTV people hmm ... we might be on to something! :)

Happy new year if I don't blog again today,

-- k9

6:49 PM

The past month or so was pretty hard for another reason -- focal point reviews.

The company I work for bought out another media giant and for some insane reason we started doing yearly reviews of our employees. This year it included my group.

A Focal Point Review for the company is designed to look at every aspect of your worklife and you know what? It's also designed to demean and humiliate you. You have to rate yourself but you can't rate yourself high without backing it up with numbers beyond belief, you can't even rate yourself medium without a fight. It was the most humiliating and most frustrating thing I've ever had to do on a job and frankly, for the $.05 pay raises we'll get from it, it so wasn't worth it.

After we wrapped up writing mine, I looked at my paid time off and realized that I hadn't taken any for the year. I was saving it because they tend to buy some of it back and I didn't know how much I had. Well, after the buyback I could have taken nearly 5 weeks off. I took two instead.

Taking time off when you work from home is weird. Since everyone else took PTO as well, I was sort of stuck. It is the time where a lot of events are happening for one of my areas so I was stuck updating screens myself twice a day off the clock. I even got yelled at because after one event was over I was not able to get online at 1 am to update a screen on my vacation. I was so tempted to just tell them to F themselves, but I didn't. I remained calm and just took it. I need the job right now. As horrible as it is.

My dad's getting better. After his Thanksgiving in the hospital he got pretty bad. Turned out he was taking double of his water pills to lose weight. He almost killed himself doing it. Last week I took him for a MRI on his brain to see if it caused brain damage. They cut his Xanax at the same time so hopefully that has him stable. He seems to be doing a lot better with less Xanax, I mean at least he can climb the stairs now, but we'll see what the results come back with.

Otherwise, I'm doing okay. Just have to get through this whole computer thing. I never intended on building a computer. I'm so not ready to build a computer but here I am building one. It's going to be hell waiting for the parts to come in and I have no clue what I'm doing but it'll be okay. I've survived worse and I'll get through this.

On that note, new strips when I can. More blogs any day now ...

-- k9

3:35 PM

So I'm stuck on my laptop. I have the new speakers, keyboard and montior hooked up to it. I upped the RAM from 96 megs to 160 megs ($23 at crucial with 15% online and employee discount). I also have my external hard drive here so I'm good to go for now. The display always has had problems with GIF files so I'm not sure what to do with it.

The downside is that all of my strips are on the backup hard drive that's not hooked up to anything. So I can't update the screens here. That's one thing I wanted to do during my vacation (that'll be covered in part 3), was to get this site going again. I mean there have to be TechTV fans out there still even in it's current form and I'll be doing strips again soon.

I think I covered it in previous blogs. Between all the changes, tons of work on my real job, and getting hit hard by the mention on LockerGnome (ugg! almost killed us in bandwidth fees), I've put this site on the back burner. Not going to explore everything but I will say that TechTV is a sad shell of it's former self and it's hard to watch right now.

TechLive has lost all of it's life. There's no spontanaity. I don't know why they bother having live shows any more. There's no fun left. Either from fan intereaction or just zany things going on. They've dumbed TechLive down to talking heads recycling old news with prepackaged segments rounding out the rest of the show. They are no longer innovating, they are no longer trying, it's like they don't even care. They shouldn't even have live shows. If they want prepackaged, do it prepackaged, and heck with several takes and different camera angles, they might have something worthy of syndication -- which looks to me like where they're heading.

I have a feeling that this year they're going to look at everything that works and everything that doesn't work after the changes. They may turn into a production house for syndication. This is my own speculation, mind you, so don't take it more than that but from what I'm seeing they don't seem to have much interest in being the cable channel/web site "for the digital lifestyle" any more.

The web site is even more horrific after the layoffs than anything. Well, let's not call them layoffs any more. They were firings. "Layoffs" mean people are coming back. They're not. So if anyone has any hopes to see people back, forget it. They're gone and hopefully moving on with their lives. Anyway, when I started to have computer trouble I went to the website for help. I've seen a lot of information on the air on what to do when things go wrong. Guess what? Couldn't find it.

I went to the website to look for a round up of Nvidia based video capture cards. I know Robert Heron worked hard on doing reviews on them because I've seen them on the air. Guess what? Nothing. Installing hard drive. Nothing. Motherboard roundup. Nothing. Best barebones sytems companies. Nothing. For a site that claims it wants to be our EVERYTHING when it comes to all things digital ... well, god, it's the last place you want to be when you're in a bind and need help.

I turned to google a lot last week. I put in terms that I needed help on and everytime it came up with sites that got me help. I looked up and researched my current motherboard and new motherboard on sites I found on google. I found my new case by searching google. There's no excuse for Techtv's site being this bad. While it was this bad before all the changes, after the changes you'd think that they'd either shut it down or go back to square one and make something that works. I hope they do one day if they're going to remain as a site.

Finally, the bloodletting itself. F*edcompany.com has had a lot on the firings. Don't know how reliable the info is but a lot of it seems to be from actual former workers at TechTV. Some of the finger pointing goes on over at Leoville so follow the gossip where you will. As always, the bloodshed came from all of the day to day folks. Most of the people who had a clue about how to fix things are gone now.

I won't hold anything back, I was angry at TechTV for a long time. They killed the community that I was a part of. They killed the fun times on the shows. They fired a lot of people I honestly cared about. While at times the professionalism at TechTV (on screen and off) barely bordered above a high school production of "Hair," that's what made it fun. It was never boring and I was always surprised by and I always had fun with TechTV. That's why I started this website.

Right now? I don't know. There will be strips again. At least to wrap up the season. Not sure more than that. It depends on how many more people are fired in the next couple of weeks. I'm out of the community thing now. I don't have time and really, while I do miss daily chat, I don't miss my stalker (that dude needs an atomic bomb dropped near him to give him a clue), and I think I'm better off being an enigma out here than being an active part of a community right now.

I miss making people laugh. I really do. So we'll see what comes of that.

Take care all, part 3 later.

-- k9

11:49 AM

Blogging on another Sunday morning, quite some time since I've had time to do this. This is the first of 3 catching up blogs.

I'm in heck. I mean real computer heck right now. Somewhere in early December I had a great idea -- refurbish and give my sister's family my computer and buy a cheap computer then upgrade it on my own to have a really kick ass machine.

I knew I should have known better. I really should have but you know, when an idea hits it hits and I go with it.

I found an amd 1800+ machine with 512 megs of RAM, 40 gig hard drive and DVD on an acution site. The auction was a build to order machine so I had to wait a week from winning the auction to having it arrive here.

I had promised my mom that I'd take presents to my sister in Indianapolis for Christmas. So the week before Christmas I hurried to redo my old machine and get it ready for them. I had problems with it and it didn't get finished until an hour before I left for her house.

In the meantime I had ordered everything I needed for the barebones machine. New cd-rw, new speakers, better keyboard, 2nd hard drive and monitor. Some of them gifts from family. It was torture as all the stuff came in while the new computer was ... well, that didn't get here until a couple of hours before I had to go to bed on the night before going to my sister's house. The sheer torture of the week while all the new stuff got here and the computer wasn't here yet was something I didn't want to go through again.

On the way to my sister's house I realized that I had forgot my laptop and all my clothes in my room at home. Instead of turning back, my sister bought me some new clothes to wear as my xmas present. She let my 4 year old nephew and 7 year old niece pick them out so for a couple of days I was wearing christmas clothes and scooby doo boxer shorts. Sexy. :)

Drove home like a madman on Christmas Eve to see my new computer. Got it put together and got it online and I started to notice things. I mean first, the K7SEM micro ATX motherboard only had 2 pci slots on it. The AGP slot would only take a 4x Nvidia AGP card. These are two things I didn't know when I bought the system. The modem was on one of the PCI slots and since I needed two for the audio card (the new soundblaster has a daughter board that doesn't plug into the PCI slot directly, but needs something to rest in), I didn't know what I was going to do about that but I figured I got a great deal and I'd figure out something.

Problems started when I tried to get the front of the case off. To be honest with you I hated the case. The case itself was a generic ATX case inside the front area where you'd stick the cd/dvd drives in was blocked with metal mounting rails. It also had a removable drive bay for the hard drives but you couldn't do anything with it until you got the front of the case off. I didn't know how to do that so I figured out how to get the mounting rails out without taking it off. I gave up for the night after seeing that.

Christmas morning at 6 AM I'm in the process of putting in the cd-rw drive when the front case pops off on it's own. I start to laugh. But hey, it's off. I get the cd-rw in, get the 2nd hard drive in and go to boot up. It only recognizes one of the 2 cds and it says floppy drive failure. I check everything and try again. This time it won't turn on. It gets a brief light on the keyboard when you turn the power on but other than that it's f*ed. I try removing things. Same thing it's just not coming on. No tech support on the holiday. No one on so I don't know what to do so I give up for the day.

Next day can't get to tech support. I check out Nvidia based cards and pretty much figure out that if I'm going to replace my ATI with a Nvidia card -- 4x mind you -- that does the same thing -- it's gonna be a lot of money. I finally get tech support and for them to look at it and to help put all the stuff in it's going to be a lot on shipping and up to 3 weeks to get the machine back.

I sit and I figure out all the problems with the new system. I solve the horrible case by going to colorcases.com and getting a custom case for a good price. I then look around and figure I can get a new motherboard and processor for a lot less money than getting a new video card and having them fix it would take. So late in the week I ordered a K7AMA motherboard with the same processor on it. It has 4 pci slots and will take any agp chip I throw in there. My company offered an employee discount on crucial.com RAM so I got a good deal on RAM for the motherboard and took the time to upgrade the RAM on my laptop.

The plan now is that I'm going to get another case, a dvd, and a hard drive for the now dead new machine this summer. I'll use it as the machine I take with me on the road. Since there will be next to nothing on it, I won't worry as much about it. I'm trashing the case that's for sure.

So as the year winds down, I'm waiting for UPS to deliver to me a new case, motherboard, and cpu. Wish me luck.

Part 2 of this 3 part blog later.

-- k9

12:04 AM

Sunday morning or Saturday late night, depending on how you look at it.

First, I'd like to start by thanking the Gnome for mentioning us in his newsletter. After the ribbing we give him here it was gracious and kind of him to do. It was nice and I've enjoyed all the feedback I've had since the newsletter plug and it's great to know that folks from TechTV think so highly of this site.

Unfortunately, the first bill came in for bandwidth usage since the Gnome mentioned us in this LockerGnome newsletter. Let's just leave it at right now, if you love this site and you want this site to stick around, dear god, don't tell anyone about it. ;) Seriously, $20 for the 3 days in November after the plug isn't that much to pay, but if I'm going to do this on a monthly basis then please do me a favor and NOT try to get us national exposure. I'm not a rich man by any means and since this is coming out of my pocket ... well do the math.

I love having you all here and I welcome you all here but this could quickly become expensive, and expensive means extinct in the current form. I don't want us to become another casualty of success on the web. I'm trying like heck for that not to happen, but if it gets too expensive, then I will find alternatives to the site as it is. We could go back to crashing the old hometown site on a regular basis if need be. Don't want to do that, but it would be AOL footing the bill and that's fine by me.

We'll see what happens. Again, I do love having you here, but please have a heart and go easy on the bandwidth for a little bit. It's the holidays and I have gifts to buy and bills to pay ...

k9