Thursday Night/Friday Morning

2/28/2003
Writing from bed at the end of the first night of the conference for my work. It was a pretty good night. I made it down to Virginia before the snow hit and now the whole area is blanketed with over six inches of brand new snow. Thankfully, we're stuck at the hotel later today for training (8 hours), so I'm not going anywhere.

Tonight was pretty good. I got here early and found my boss (unlike last year), we hung out in his room as people came and went. Got a lot of female comments on my new look (lost a lot of weight, new glasses, new hair), so that's really kind of cool. We went out for Mexican food for dinner and had cheese steaks (straight from Philly) for lunch. My god both were excellent.

Right now I'm kinda winding down. The stragglers were in my room playing xbox for a while. I want to stay up late and play nhl 2003 (a friend left it in my room) so I know what the hell I'm doing. But then again I better go to sleep because our day starts at 8:30 am and they're coming to get me early.

I don't know. I'm always kind of lonely after gatherings like this. Even if i had a wife I couldn't have brought her with me here, but there's something incredibly dissapointing about being with people all day and having to say goodnight. I'm longing for someone to share my life (let alone the bed tonight), and I feel so weird for admitting that.

When I'd go to wrestling in Philly years ago I'd have the same peaks and valleys emotionally like this. I'd get SO worked up to see my friends and have a good time that I'd be incrediblly down on the way home because it had to end. I don't want the night to end. I want that someone special to be with me NOW and tonight and to lie together and hold each other while we sleep. This single life sucks the way it is now.

I need someone more than I'll ever admit. I don't want to be alone tonight, but I will and that's just kind of that. I'll dream of someone special and maybe, just maybe, one day she'll be here when I awake.

Off to bed.

k9

Ugg.

I'm up and at work. Going for another hour before I have to go out back and bring in wood for the weekend. The path is frozen solid now. That slush has turned into an inch of high quality ice and I'm sure that I'm going to be swearing up a storm upon returning from the cold.

I was up late last night. I've explained that I work online in a sports community. This is my day job. This is also my night job as I was up until 12:30AM explaining to a member that there's a difference between saying "you and Joanne" and calling someone and asshole on the boards. He doesn't see the difference. I have a headache.

I'm currently fretting over my processor. It, of anything, HAS to come today. If it doesn't, then there's no way I can show off my computer tomorrow. Even it it does, I'm going to be working all night building it. Ugg. Ugg.

Back to work.

k9

Tuesday Night

So I'm the stupidest person on earth, or so I feel.

The key part of my bulding madness is that I was going to network my two computers together. I bought a hub and got some wires. So today I decided to set this machine up as a host and get the network started before I build the other computer. Uh. Umm. Did I mention that I'm the stupidest person on earth?

The new computer has a build in network port. I remembered that THIS on had one on the back. I remember it clearly. Sure I do. I plug the wire into the back of the hub and go down to the back of my computer and ... and ... and ... there's no port to stick it into. D'OH. If you've followed this blog you know I replaced my motherboard last year when the old motherboard didn't work with my video card. Guess what? It was the OLD motherboard that had the dongle for the network. Sure this one has a network in the BIOS, but I never bought the dongle for it, so guess what? LOL. Waiting for another thing to come in the mail.

So what I'm waiting for: processor, external modem, network card.

If all 3 don't come by thursday, I can't take my new baby computer (and it's SO tiny that it fits in my breadbox) with me to my business seminar. Oh well.

In other news, I finished the conversions. I even added a site search to the site. Just go to my stuff and pick "site search." I resubmitted all the metatagged pages to google so HOPEFULLY they'll start showing up one of these days. The weird thing is that only 140 of the 200+ pages were actually in the google index. So I resubmitted the site and hopefully they'll all be indexed in the near future.

Heading to work.

k9

Tuesday Blahs

I was up late last night converting strips over to the new format. I made myself stop after I finished season 11 as I had totally lost my mind. I had to stop myself as I wanted to finish last night but I was making so many mistakes in the coding that I had to stop myself. I have 4 seasons to go then I'm going to resubmit it to google with the new keywords in place.

The only other news is that my RAM, network hub, network cables, mouse, speakers, video card and hard drive came yesterday. I'm waiting for my processor, sound card and actual case unit to come. It's exactly the case that a lot of "experts" warn against, buying from six or seven different places and having to wait for the important parts. Oh well ...

I'm too tired to think. Halfway through 12 now ...

Updating: 12, 13, and 14 done. 15 finished later. So far case decals and sound card have come. External modem is set to get here thursday. No word on processor, but the entire shuttle unit has shipped.

Cross your fingers.

k9

PS I miss my moops. :P

Monday Morning

I'm a very silly man. I was up late waiting up to tape this week's Penn & Teller on Showtime 2. I was also talking to people on my pager that late. Somewhere along the line I saw five minutes of a ghost story program and freaked the heck out of myself. While the girl who was being haunted was hot as heck, the whole concept was enough to make me want to sleep with one eye open when I finally gave up and went to sleep at 3 am.

I don't tend to believe in ghosts or spirits or whatever. My dad had a couple spooky encounters in the 70's but they were too similar to urban legends and he was too drunk, excuse the insult to him but it's the truth, to remember a lot of things clearly from back then. But I do know with my weird luck that if someone's going to wake up to see someone ethereal standing in the center of a bedroom, it's going to me. I don't know how I'd react to that, but five minutes of a scary documentary on ghosts is enough to make me toss and turn and sleep with the lights dimmed but sort of on.

This doesn't explain why I go out of my way to watch or tape these shows. While I absolutely hate horror movies (I'm not into gore), any documentary or show on A&E or Discovery -- I'm so there. I think I have about 20 or so of them on tape in my collection. Ghosts of Gettysburg, Hauntings Across America, the Unexplained ... let alone 5 or 6 books on the subject. I have a really good one that's a directory of haunted places in America. One day I sort of want to visit some of the alleged haunting sites just to see if anything strange happens. I'm an idiot, I know.

When we were living in Maryland my sister, brother in law (then her boyfriend) and I went to a supposedly haunted house that was on the national parks tour. They (claiming to be "sensitive") claimed that they felt something at the house, and yes, my camera batteries died when I got there (a "typical" event at haunted sites), but I didn't see anything weird, feel anything weird and that camera could have been dead long before we got there since I didn't check it.

I guess I want to believe, but then again I'm scaring myself to death doing so. Silly doggie.

In other news, I'm awaiting the first of my packages to arrive for the new computer that I'm building. Hopefully it'll all get here by Wednesday so I'll have a working computer by then. It's really a PITA when I need to shut this system down (AOL Sat dish is a major memory hog), to record in DVD quality. Plus the new one will have a 120 gig hard drive on it (partitioned 10 gig, 50 gig, 60 gig probably, or even 20 to 100 -- just to get the swap file and OS off the same "drive" as the capture drive), so that's a lot more space than I have here.

I hate waiting ...

k9

Sunday Morning

It's Sunday morning and I'm half awake. I was up late last night watching the Mike Tyson fight. After a week of build up, after a week of drama, the fight went 49 seconds. So much for the idea of watching a dramatic ten round match. I'm not a big boxing fan. Sometimes I feel it's more fixed than wrestling. The way the guy went down last night had me immediately say "the fix is in" because it looked so staged it wasn't funny. No one else is claiming fixing but it would make sense. Tyson needed to win this fight. The other guy got $1 million for just getting in the ring. I'd still get in the ring with Tyson and take 2 punches for $1 million.

Flipping channels now. I have to work in 24 minutes. I was going to play some simgolf but it's too darn addictive. Looking at the weather and we're still expecting flooding today, then snow, then 40 mph winds. Greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeat. I'm kind of glad that I did wood yesterday. But it looks like the water from the drainage hose cleared the path better than it was yesterday. I probably would have fallen and gotten covered in mud. That's just my luck.

Had another weird dream this morning. It was sort of 3rd person perspective. I watched as a woman was called up to manage a women's softball team as a replacement for a big name coach. The drama was that this lady hadn't played softball in 10 years. The team owner called all the team members together for an emergancy meeting, half the team were in dresses because they were on dates and po'd at being there. One of the women did the classic move of throwing a ball as hard as she could at the manager to test her, instead of catching it with one hand (ala League of Their Own), she picked up a bat and hit it out of the ballpark.

I woke up after that.

I am currently watching a CNN special on the supplement ephedra. I can't do diatary supplements. I have high blood pressure. That stuff would be like writing my own obituary. Just pick a day to die, take a pill, and watch my heart go boom. It's just dumb. Same with steriods. Did you know that steriods go to random parts of your body? A friend of mine watched as one of her friends (a wrestler) tried them ignoring all of her warnings. Instead of going to his arms or legs, it expanded his neck muscles ... to the point he couldn't breath. They put him in a hospital for a week and a half on a breathing tube until his neck muscles relaxed and he could breathe on his own again. It was perhaps the stupidest thing she's ever seen and boy did that guy listen to her after that.

Oh well, off to work.

k9

Saturday Afternoon

I rescheduled my afternoon shift in order to stay in bed for a long while. I really overdid it out there on the wood today. While I'm sure I burned off the half a pizza I had before venturing out there, in typical fashion everything was a lot harder than I expected. I think the major mistake was shoveling a path. When I shoveled I uncovered the drainage hose from our gutters and it was freely sending water down the path I had created. This turned the remaining snow to slush pretty quickly and the 2 minute walk from wood pile to house turned into a 10 minute ordeal of swearing, cursing, and general pain in the neckism. I was out there for two hours instead of the normal one it takes me. I only stopped because my heavy leather gloves were so water logged at that point that they were starting to fall apart.

Got back inside and found that one of the cats had dumped my soda on my keyboard. He was in search of catnip. He then promptly got sick all over the floor as I staggered into the shower. I really do like animals, but today lol ... having to clean up cat barf when you're totally at the end of your rope just isn't really right. I said the hell with it, changed my schedule, and went to bed after that. I didn't really sleep since I was waiting for the frozen food guy to get here, but man, I needed to get off my feet.

One thing I should note, I haven't just lost weight from dumping soda. I've also dumped a lot of snacks. I saw a report on how many calories were in the cookies I used to eat, in pop tarts, and in a lot of other things. I used to munch constantly or even have a meal of 10 cookies or so. I stopped doing that. Now I occasionally have some chips or a candy bar but nothing too over the top. There's not a constant open thing of chips here. There's not a constant need for snacks. If I get really hungry for snacks I have a couple of peppermints or a cup full of total raisin bran.

I know I'm doing a lot better than my dad was at this age. He was already 220-230 lbs. and was on the way to heart surgery. My mom at this age was also very overweight (I'm surprised that I don't have the pear shape or big butt that her side of the family has). I know I'm doing better than both of them. But still, there's a lot more I could be doing. I hope it's showing. I know I look different but I'm trying. So keep up with my webcam and let me know how I'm looking.

Anyway, my brain is pretty much gone. I have to work in an hour and hopefully I'll get through the three hour shift without incident. I think I'm going to play some simgolf ... yum .. simgolf ...

k9

Saturday Morning

It's Saturday morning and it's raining. This is quite good. It's melting the snow. I hope anyway. I tried going out to get wood yesterday and I couldn't even get near the pile due to a foot and a half of snow that had been frozen solid. I tried shoveling it but it was so solid that I felt like I should have a taken a sledgehammer to the entire path first and then tried to shovel it. I gave up. It was too much work. I knew it was going to get warmer and going to rain today so I decided to risk it. It's raining now but not melting that much yet, so I'm going to give it a couple of hours and get the slegehammer ready if need be.

I was just out on the back porch and it's raining so hard that I wish I had bought a rain slicker the other week. I'm already cursing myself for not keeping some of the chemical hand warmers that I put in my mom's emergancy kit. I just know I'm going to get soaked again. Ironically, I'm currently drying all my outdoors clothes. They were still soaking wet from the big storm this week. So I'm laundering them just to get them all dirty again so I can launder them again tonight. Makes so much sense doesn't it?

I've told you all about my weirdness at night. How if I have to get up early instead of using an alarm clock I always seem to give myself a nightmare or a strange dream to go "whoa" then wake myself up. It's MUCH worse when I have to go to the bathroom and it's cold and I don't want to get out of bed and even worse after a long night of converting the site to the new format. I swear that my subconcious is just nuts. This morning was such a case. I only remember bits and pieces from this moring but here's the highlights ...

There was an extended segment of Gilligan's Island. Except the castaways weren't in "modern" times, they were on a Spanish Galleon from the 1400's and were all speaking with British accents. They had apparently tried to escape from the Island in this Galleon and hit a storm. This was the day after where they ran aground on a new island, only to realize that they were right back where they started. It was funnier with the British accents, honest.

I remember leaving that set and walking by another set and Burt Reynolds and Martin Sargent were doing a cooking show. I don't even want to go there. It was the scariest thing you've ever seen. Neither wanted to do anything so they were cracking jokes to each other as nothing got done. Scary. Scary.

I walk out of that set and run straight into Megan. She's complaining that her Norton picture viewer wasn't working for women. I said to download their live update program and update it. She didn't want to, called it sexist and was about to get in a big fight with me when I finally gave in and woke up.

It was 7:11 AM. I didn't have to roll out of bed until 7:55 AM. So I boycotted getting out of bed, going back to sleep, opening my eyes, and nearly everything else until I was time to move.

That's how the day started. 1 hour and 30 minutes until I go face the woodpile.

God help me.

k9

Oh Man ...

I guess it's not a good week to go clubbing. I'm watching CNN's reporting of the deaths at the Great White concert in Rhode Island. This is just insane as it followed the horrible horrible events in Chicago, with the 20+ dead from being trampled to death. The tragically ironic thing in the Rhode Island case is there was a cameraman there from a local news station there doing a segment on nightclub safety. His pictures of the fire are just startling. Just scary.

I'm flashing back to the mid-90's. I was invited to the premiere of a wrestling federation called the PCW (one of many with those initials). Their first show was held in a club in Reading, PA. The nightclub had a bar then an open area in front of the stage. The ring was stuck up in the middle of the open area and there wasn't a lot of room to get around. I was there with a friend and we were having a drink at our table when we heard a commotion. A rival wrestling promoter got in an argument with security and suddenly blam the smell of pepper spray fills the room. The crowd panics at first, but everyone calms down as we grab napkins to cover our mouths and we file out a low staircase to get outside. It could have been much worse, I was surprised that it wasn't, but I'm getting goosebumps at how lucky we were.

A second flashback was about a year later. A famous incident (in wrestling circles) at the ECW arena in Philly, PA. It was the main event and the idea was for the bad guy to hit the good guy with a flaming chair. At the same time the lights were scheduled to go out as part of another angle. None of us knew that as the bad guy hits the good guy with the flaming chair and the chair flies off into the crowd right in front of us. Huge flame as it flies through the air and the lights go out. The arena fills with smoke and it was weird. No real panic, we all don't know what's going on. We're in the dark, the place is filling with smoke and there's fire in front of us. Some 1200 people look at each other and walk calmly out of the building. Only one person was hurt, he tried to grab the chair for some reason and he later sued the ECW and lost his court case because his claims didn't hold up in court.

Thinking back, I was lucky in both situations. In Chicago it was pepper spray that started the fatal stampede. In Rhode Island it was botched "pyrotechnics." One person reacting differently, one person panicking and it all could have turned out differently. It scares me to death right now just to think about these people who didn't get out. My thoughts and my heart are with them and their families right now.

k9

Back up ...

Blogger was down for most of the day yesterday and I'm playing catchup with my thoughts here so forgive me.

Season 16 is launching soon. I'm in the process of converting the previous 15 seasons into the new format and properly meta-tagging all the old issues. This is a tedious task as some of the earlier strips (season three's opener, for instance) were just packed with people to list in the meta tag. On top of it I'm documenting the early songs and footnoting them in the strip and making new graphics for each one. It's a pain in the ass but hopefully it will be worth it. I plan to resubmit the entire site to Google after I finish, and hopefully down the line see about getting us to be the site of the night.

To be honest with you, our hits are way down. We're not dying by any means, but it is eye opening to see how many visitors we lost through the blocking of linking to our pictures. I think it's better that I have a better perspective on who is actually visiting the site now, but dang, it's kind of disheartening to know that 25% of our visitors or so came from links to the pictures on the site. I know we're just a crappy little comic strip site, and I know we'll have our own little spot on the net for as long as there's a TechTV, but I do want to increase viewership.

My head is a mess right now. Not so much pain as just being mixed up lately. I've got so much going on right now but so little to do. Right now I'm waiting for the parts to my new PC. With monitor it's going in at about $1600. It's about $400 less than the same system would cost having it pre-built. I'm also cannibalizing an old version of Windows XP and my DVD-RW drive for the new system.

Here's what it's going to look like:

Shuttle SN41g2 Socket A Aluminum Barebones kit (based on the latest nVidia nForce2 motherboard)
AMD Athlon XP 2400
2 sticks of 256mb DDR PC2700 ram
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro All in Wonder card (taken from this PC)
Pioneer 4x DVD-RW (taken from this PC)
Sound blaster Audigy
Windows XP
NEC MultiSync LCD 1760v Monitor
Tremor TDK 120w Speaker System
generic keyboard, generic optical mouse
Generic external 56k modem (the Shuttle only has 1 PCI slot)

I went with the XP 2400 because I'm reading reviews that say a 2400 paired with 2 strips of RAM in this architecture can make the system about as fast as a basic 2800. I know that doesn't sound very cool, but it is a couple of hundred dollars difference between getting a 2800 chip and a 2400 chip. I'm overcoming the performance difference with 2 strips of RAM that are still cheaper when paired with the 2400 chip than buying JUST the 2800. Let alone buying RAM on top of that ...

I went with the Sound blaster Audigy basic because the Audigy 2 is an incremental upgrade and getting an OEM version of the Audigy was a whole lot cheaper than buying a retail version. I'm not doing 6.1 sound on it. I'm doing 2.0 sound, and I picked the Tremor speakers because they're high quality and tiny form factor. I love my current tremors for this system and I wouldn't trade them for the world. I feel they're the best "value" two speaker system on the market today. But I'm no expert really. I know what I like. I like the thin look of the tremors. I like that I can stick them in my suitcase with subwoofer and not take up the entire thing. I don't care if they don't have a headphones jack on the front. The Audigy has enough outputs on it to make up for that ...

If my calculations are current, the bulk of the system will get here before I have to go away next week. I want to have the whole thing built by Thursday morning when I have to leave for my yearly work retreat. I'm SO not ready to see people again. The good news is that it looks like I've lost 9 1/2 pounds since last summer. Yup, for the first time in 4 or 5 years I'm under 200 pounds. The bad news is that I really don't want to see these people when I'd rather be building my computer system. Digressing; you've all read my horrible luck when it comes to shipping. This time I tried to order as much stuff from one place that I could, and I picked standard shipping (when standard shipping was less than 5 days), because it's Thursday. No one delivers on Saturday. It usually takes a day to process orders. So overnight mail would be mailed tomorrow (hence monday delivery). 2 day -- same thing, Monday delivery. 3 day same thing ... and I promise not to whine too much while I'm waiting.

Really I do.

k9

SNOWED IN

Like most of the east coast, I'm currently snowed in. We got between 12 and 18 inches, depending on the spot in the yard, and got another inch or two this morning. I was wise. I canceled my appointments for this morning. The roads haven't been plowed, it is still snowing, it's not good driving conditions. My mother ...

Well, she decided to keep the appointment to take one of the cars in for work on the engine. Therefore I had to follow her in the other car. We had to go down our mountain. About half the way down there's a woman walking a dog. The dog isn't on the leash. My mom stops. DEAD stop. No time to react on a snowy hill. I go straight into a ditch. I'm fine, the car's okay, but I'm angrier than hell. One little honk on the horn and the dog would have run. You just don't come to a dead stop with other traffic behind you on a snowy hill.

We got down the hill and the main road wasn't plowed. We got to the highway and it wasn't plowed. We had a miserable ride to the car place. There was no place to park at the car place. We got back on the road and barely made it back up the hill to our house. Just a miserable day all around.

Yesterday, I proved I'm an idiot. We got all that snow. I don't let my mom do the front yard because my mom doesn't know how to shovel snow. She knows how to move snow, sure, but she doesn't know how to pace herself, to stop and drink water or how not to overdo it. So I go out there and I start shoveling. I'm pacing myself. I'm shoveling shoveling shoveling. I'm making a perimiter around the cars. Shoveling like mad. The hood in my sweat shirt falls down over my eyes, I'm dripping with sweat. I go to move the hood out of my eyes and BLAM. I see stars. I almost fall down. I've run head first into the car's mirror. I have a nice big welt on my forehead.

Spent most of yesterday in a total daze. So I've proven once again what a total idiot I am.

Was there ever any doubt?

k9

WAR, Snow, and other Stuff

Update: The big storm I was rushing home to avoid turned out to be freezing rain. Not too bad. Had I stayed an extra day I would have been SOL because heavy snow hit the entire region I was in yesterday. So I'm feeling less stupid about rushing home. Now back to the blog ...

I turned on CNN a few minutes ago and there are women calling in for advice because they can't sleep. They're too afraid to sleep because they think they're going to miss something. They think that we're going to go to war RIGHT NOW and that terrorism is going to come to their neighborhood.

I sorta miss the Clinton age. All we really had to worry about was who Clinton was sleeping with at the moment. That was about it. Life was good. Nobody cared. Period. Nothing mattered.

Now? It's exactly what people predicted. We put a pro-war anti-environment oilman in the white house. EVERYTHING "liberals" accused him of being that "conservatives" pooh-poohed turns out to be true. He's not even trying to hide it. He's already forcing through nominations of ultra-right wing judges to positions that are being called "holding positions" until there's a vacancy on the supreme court.

If you put a great white shark in an area with a lot of seals, some seals are going to die. If you put the great white oilman in the white house ...

Oh well.

It's 7 degrees outside. One thing I can't blame on the president is the weather. This is one of those winters where I went on vacation to a VERY cold place and I was walking around with an unzipped jacket because it was 10 degrees warmer on average than it's been here all winter. We've had snow covering anything off and on since October 31. Honest to god. Every couple of weeks we get a new blanket of it and it never melts.

I have dreams where it's raining and warm. I have dreams of thunderstorms. I have dreams of it hitting 50 degrees out. LOL. That used to be my sweater/no sweater mark. If it hit 50 or below outside, wear one. Now, I think it's 20 or so. If it's 20 degrees F out or below, go for it, if not, screw it. It isn't THAT cold.

Remind me of this when I bitch about it later since I have to go out and do wood at noon.

Right now I have to get my butt in gear and go to work in 3 minutes. Ugg.

k9

Saturday Update

It's Saturday afternoon and I'm home, vacation ended this morning as I went back to work. I wasn't ready for it and I had something like 300 e-mails waiting for me on my work account.

It has been an interesting couple of days. Thursday I was set to get together with one of my friends but I hadn't heard from my friend at the time we were supposed to get together. I was really worried about it because it was my last day there and it wasn't like my friend not to contact me.

Hour after hour passed and I pretty much figured that my friend wasn't coming. I feel so dumb for just waiting around and not going out to dinner or anything, but I hadn't heard anything and they were set to meet me at the hotel. Then I flipped on the news ... snow storm. 4 to 8 inchs expected by morning rush hour. It was supposed to cover all three states that I was going to drive through.

I had planned on leaving at 6 am and getting home at 4 pm but with the snow, and since I was already up, I said "hey, why don't I try it earlier?" This was probably the dumbest thing I've ever done. At that point I hadn't had any rest all day. I really needed a nap and I should have made time to nap ... I didn't.

Heard from my friend about midnight. No big deal; relatives had come over and they couldn't get away. Of course I was set to leave at 1 am so we got an hour to talk before I had to go. During our talk I put my big old 17" sony monitor on my bed with the rest of my stuff to go out to the car. When I sat down it flipped off the bed and fell about a foot and a half. It seems to be okay, I did plug it back in and it came on just fine. Bad sign for things to come though.

I did hit the road at exactly 1 am. The first hour or so was okay, I was over prepared with food and with sodas. By 3 am though, I was a mess. I almost fell asleep at the wheel. I found a rest stop and cleared my head. It was something like 10 degrees out and for some reason I had to go to the bathroom constantly. It was like I had the bladder of a small child. But I think that helped because I started a pattern of stopping at nearly every rest stop, going to the bathroom, walking around a bit and waking up, then hitting the road again.

I couldn't just stop and sleep because snow was coming by morning. With that in mind I bought a couple of caffiene tablets at a rest stop. I will not recommend them to anyone. While they did pick me up as soon as they hit my system, every time the passed through my system, they actually made it worse than it should have been. I will NEVER do that again. I'll just stay an extra day and wait out the storm instead of doing the stupid thing of driving all night.

With all the stops I made it home in 11 hours and 30 minutes, instead of the normal 10 hours and change. I don't even know if it snowed there. It was clear the entire ride home.

Got home and at that point I had been up 30+ hours straight, the last 11 and change were spent driving. I was dead tired. I brought my stuff inside the house, said hi to my dad and explained to him that we got my mom Valentine's day stuff, then crashed for a couple of hours.

When I got up I didn't immediately put my computer back together. I sat there looking at my computer desk. I decided that I was going to get a usb 2.0 hub and put it on top of my computer desk to cut down on the number of cables I had on my floor (it was a total mess), I also decided to get a LCD monitor to take with me on the road.

Then I got to thinking. Shuttle XPC kits are on sale. I could take my DVD-RW drive and graphics card, get a new hard drive, soundcard, some RAM and a processor, and that would make a nice little TV/VCR/tivo replacement unit. So that's what I'm doing. With LCD, existing copy of Windows XP, old keyboard and mouse and make all my insanity come true.

After the last time I tried to build a computer ... god I am insane.

k9

All I Want is ...

to get that dumb Christina Aguilera song out of my head. "All I Want is YOU!" Ugg. Getting ready to have a bath in a tub that really wasn't designed for baths. It is too low and too narrow to really be comfortable. I just want to soak my back because my stomach is a mess and I really want to relax today. I do have to go out a couple of times later but tonight is all about going to bed early as I'm on the road at 6 am tomorrow. The week has gone by too fast.

Lost last night because I was burning a DVD. Pinnacle studio 8 is awesome. Unfortunately if your video is not DVD quality it takes FOREVER to rerender it up to that quality. I spent five hours here waiting for rendering and compiling and then burning. Oh my god lol. Once I get home I'm going to convert the one thing I have in lower quality to DVD quality and then the heck with it. DVD capture from within the program and hopefully cut down on the god awful rendering times. I'm also going to look for a bigger hard drive to replace my 40 gig main drive. It would mean another reformat but gosh darn it, I need to do it if I'm going to continue to video edit.

I haven't had the time I wanted to spend writing strips. I did covert some of the older ones over to the new format yesterday. I'm somewhere in the middle of season 2. Not only am I changing the format, I'm also meta-tagging for keywords at the same time and documenting the songs for the earliest strips. If you want to see what the new format looks like, go to episode 1, it should be in proper format now.

Working on the last 2 strips for season 15 hopefully today. If not, probably tomorrow night. I want to shake everything up again for season 16. So stay tuned.

More tonight. Missing everyone a great deal more than I thought.

k9

Afternoon Thoughts

I am reading "Around the World in 45 Years," the 45th Anniversary Collection of "Peanuts" by Charles Schulz. I have the 50th anniversary collection at home and I got this one at sale at Walden yesterday when I was out. It really isn't the cartoons that I'm after; the first chapter is an incredible blog-like account of Schulz's daily life and him wondering out loud about his characters while relating real life stories and how they influence his strip. It's an amazing account that only geeks like me will appreciate I guess. He wonders why people put up with Lucy, why Snoopy always goes after Linus' blanket for no apparent reason, what kind of stress motivates Marcie to be an over achiever, what Peppermint Pattie's homelife is like ... on and on and it's fascinating to me because at 45 years of writing that strip, he still didn't know. Those ideas hadn't been developed yet and they were still there waiting to be explored for a future strip. It's incredible.

I write a comic strip. I do. I can't draw a lick and have no artistic talent to speak of but I put out a lot of funny words to pictures. Well, funny 6/10ths of the time anyway if you believe my critics. I can relate to Schulz wondering about his characters because in my free time sometimes I wonder about my characters like that as well. For me it's a way to generate ideas. For example, I don't know much more about Patrick's homelife than the rest of you, no clue about his family, but in an early strip I explored that (see if you can find that one). I wrote him with an over-protective mother and a smart-alleck sister and the idea was generated in one of these sessions by the question of "Who would Patrick call if he had to call home?" What I came up with made sense, I still think it does, and it was a useful addition to the story through the use of the "wondering" excercise.

With that said, the next strip I'm putting up tonight is dedicated to Charles Schulz and anyone who ever loved "Peanuts."

k9

Day Three Away

It's still kind of early on day three of my vacation. I made the drive here in a little over 10 hours. Hit heavy snow in Pennsylvania on the way out, but it cleared up. Sadly, my car is covered in dirt and crud from the road. I probably could go get it washed, but let's face it, on Friday I have a 10 hour ride home and it'll just get messed up again.

I'm totally zonked. Yesterday I had my first walking around a mall experience since I broke my toes. I handled it pretty well. I had my oversized boots on because Sunday night I stubbed my toes (ironically tripping over my boots), and I was in a little bit of pain. I think I was just worn out from the drive and walking. Not Laura level walking, thankfully, but enough to tucker me out a bit. I woke up this morning in the middle of my bed with my sweater on and my book on the floor.

I had another dream that I was on American Idol. This time it was the qualifying round and Simon was being so mean that he made us do math problems along with the auditions. Then I went back to the dorms and someone had stole my bed. We were all packed 4 or 5 to a room and there were even people sleeping in the bathrooms. So much for privacy. It was like a 3rd world FOX production.

Saw Joe Millionaire for the first time last night. Dear god that man is a moron. In typical FOX fashion they billed it as the show that he makes up his damn mind and, well, he didn't. I also didn't believe the shot they used of him when he was walking around through the woods with a coffee cup. SURE the girls were looking out at him (with cameras right there) and saying he had a lot on his mind ... but if you want see true sulking, depression, boughts of happiness, then boughts of murderous thoughts all you have to do is go up to my links and click on Moopie's blog at Oomph-Girl or Britney's Blog at her own site. If you want true drama, they're the best at it. They'll keep you on the edge of your seat with each entry. Forget "Dear diary, I met a boy and I think he's swell. Oh whenever will our hearts meet?" Forget that. These girls are angry and would probably break Joe Millionaire in half.

Summah's good at it too (and Okto-girl was when she had a blog), but Summah would break me in half for real if I gave out the link to her blog. For real. She's got armor and a sword and it's go time.

Bought a "New X-Men" trade paperback last night. It collected the second arc of the revamped X-Men. Essentially, Marvel is redoing the X-Men to make them more in line with the movies. New X-Men is the flagship title. It took me a long time to warm up to the idea that it's now essentially a sci-fi title and not costumes and bad guys. Sure they fight, but it's not colorful villain of the month and a "gee swell, I learned something" ending. The trade paperback I bought fills in the issues that I missed and I was on the edge of my seat late last night as I read all the issues. If you're jonesing for a good read, you can't go wrong with either new X-Men trade paperback that's out now.

On that note, I need to check into work and take a long hot steaming bath and relax ... until House keeping comes and makes me nuts.

Be bad.

k9

On the Road Again

Getting ready for another trip for a week to parts unknown, like always I get introspective just in case. Moops, Laura, the Evil One, Summah, the Okto Girl, Steff and the rest, you all know how much you mean to me. If anything happens you know how much you mean to me. Life wouldn't be the same without you all and I smile each time I see you online. Make sure that song is playing should anything weird happen. I'm leaving at 6 am and I still haven't finished laundry or figured out everything I'm taking yet. I still have a million shirts to hang up, let alone cats to feed.

In other news, I'm watching "Smokey & the Bandit 2." I've never seen all of this movie before; only parts of it here and there. This time I'm sitting down and watching it on AMC to see if it was as bad as it always seemed. So far it is, it's a classic case of sequelitis. all the attitude of the original but none of the fun. It's getting worse as we go along.

Trying the Avantgo.com software for my Treo. It lets you download news articles, driving directions and weather reports. I sort of like having news articles on my PDA so I can take them with me. I guess it beats endless games of Bejeweled ...

Oh well, not much to say, about to get more laundry.

k9

Half Awake

I took my very last pain pill this morning and, of course, I'm zonked. I'm totally stressed out right now since I haven't taken it easy since breaking my toes and I'm paying for it. One project that's filling my time is the conversion of all the strips to a new format. It's not a HUGE difference, but I'm doing little things like adding a navigation bar to the bottom of the strips (so you'll be able to go backwards and forwards ine sequence and to the home page on each strip), and I'm filling in the credits for the songs in some of the earliest strips.

Before I go further:

HAPPY 18th BIRTHDAY TO CHELLIE THE OKTO-FIS!

Chellie girl, you're one of my favorite people in the world and the reason why we do so many Dr. Who strips. One more is coming one of these days as your late birthday present, so have a happy day, welcome to "adulthood" and smile you crazy Okto! :)

More in a bit, I'm dazed.

k9

Strange Dreams

I had two very strange dreams last night. In the first some how I got transported to another dimension where the whole world was a death star/shopping mall. I thought my friend was transported too so I went on a ton of adventures in order to find him and rescue him so we both could get home. Of course, it turned out that it was this dimension's version of my friend and he was the evil behind everything, so I ended up having to escape from him.

Eventually I found a portal home, or so I thought. The main female villain stopped me right when I was going to go through it. She was trying to entice me into staying so they could capture me. She started to take off her clothes (and I'm having strictly PG rated dreams lately) so she was down to a bikini. She wanted me to come closer and closer and ... well something felt wrong, so I did the unexpected. I jumped forward, but both arms around her, and dragged her into the portal with me. Of course the portal was fake so we went past her startled guards on the other side of it, and ran 20 feet to the real portal and went through it.

Once we came through to the other side, she was pissed, she asked me why the heck I did that. I told her two things: 1) that was the worst striptease I've ever seen and 2) it worked. She didn't know what to say. So we became travelling companions as it turned out that we weren't in the right dimension anyway. It took a long time to get home and I guess we lived happily ever after ...

Okay the second dream, I applied for a new FOX "normal guy meets who wants to marry a millionaire" show. I am a generic average white guy. I'm not a hunk and I'm not handsome. I'm also not fat nor am I a total slob. I'm so generic I can be just about anything. So I was surprised when they gave me a ticket to come out to Las Vegas and interview for the show.

When I got to the giant hotel/casino, they took everything out of my wallet except for my ID and a few bucks. They didn't want me gambling too much while I waited for the interview. They put a microphone on me so I'd get used to it and an ear piece in my ear so I could be notified when it was time for my interview. They told me to see the casino, but to be ready to come for the interview.

What I didn't know was that it was all a ruse. The entire hotel had hidden cameras and the entire place knew it was a taping for "Joe Clueless," FOX's new reality TV show where a clueless average white guy gets $10 million dollars if he stumbles into love one night at a casino. The catch was that if anyone told me, the whole thing was off. No one would fall in love OR get any money.

So I'm walking around and talking to the producer. I stop at the craps table and since I've never played, I put the $5 dinner money they gave me down and ... well I shoot and win. I keep winning by the time I was done, I turned $5 into $5,000 and make the whole table a lot of money in the process. They give me a comp room and I'm so amazed, since FOX had only paid for a dinky little room since I wasn't supposed to stay long.

I start to walk around the casino and people recognize me. I think it was from the craps run since it seemed like everyone was around the table. So I say hi when they do and make reference to it. I'm still talking to my producer and she says that there was a delay with the camera guy (he missed his flight), so she has me walk around some more.

This is when it gets to be like something out of the truman show or those stock commercials where people are mistaken for heads of companies because they own stock and .0006% of the company. People were coming up to me and telling me their life stories or doing dances or going on and on about random things.

I never saw people's faces in the dream, they were kinda blurry. It was also strictly pg, since while I have a twisted little mind, it never really results in really fun dreams like that.

I decided to go get something to eat and there were women everywhere at the buffets. "James, come here ..." "James join me ..." I mean tons and tons of women. Some obviously hitting on me, all with different platters of food, all compelling me to come over. Since I've only been hit on twice in my life and been totally clueless about it both times (figuring it out hours later ...), this was a shock. When two women started screaming at each other over who would eat with me, I sorta figured something was going on and tried to find a quiet spot.

So I go and find a quiet little lounge and talk to the producer, who is still making excuses and keeping me occupied, telling me about her life and everything. That's when a showgirl comes in and sits down near me. She says a quick little "hello" and "do you mind if I eat?" and I notice that she has a fudge popsicle shaped like a banana which she seductively eats in front of me. I get the hell out of there.

It continues like this until it gets ridiculous. Since I had a comp room and $5000 from craps, and FOX didn't have any explanation for why the interview wasn't happening, I went back to my room and told them thanks but no thanks. The producer sounded down since we had a good time talking all evening through all the weirdness, so I asked her if she'd hang out after her shift was over. She agreed ... and that's where the dream ended.

Epically weird as normal.

k9

Late Sunday Night

Believe it or not, I am in bed. I am typing away on my new handsping treo 90 pda. This was a pretty amazing day.

I was goofing with my mom that we should get matching treos with her retirement money. I explained that we could keep our schedules on one pc and be able to look them up. It would help if we had the same unit.

I WAS JOKING!

Next thing I know we are on our way to staples to get them. Staples, of course has them on display but none in stock. So we ended up at circuit city. They were more than willing to take her money since they had two in stock.

This thing is neat so far. I am not used to how small it is. It has a similiar style keyboard to my aol pager. But there are differences. No smiley face button, for one, and it doesn't automatically make caps when you hold the buttons down. It is also a bit unweildy to type on, since it isn't as compact. All said and done, though, I really like it so far.

I am sending my old visor to my sister. I am going to miss it. The leather case was so comfortable to have in my coat pocket. This is so light and so tiny that I am going to need to get a case for it. Just to make it feel the same.

Kind of sad, actually, been through a lot with that guy. But it is SO nice to be able to ditch graffiti and type freely without my gigantic external pda keyboard. Won't miss that one at all.

Heading to bed,

k9

The Shuttle Disaster

My dish was out earlier so I had a DVD in when my mom came running upstairs screaming to turn the TV on. While they're on the same system, when the dish goes out, it only goes out on some channels and apparently the news channel was on when they tried to watch the news. What they saw was the shuttle exploding as it was passing over Texas. You've all seen the details now and hopefully you're doing better.

I'm flashing back to January 28, 1986. I had just moved from Washington State to a suburb of Baltimore. I was in Spanish class one morning. Something was going on with our room that day so we had to move to a very cramped and tiny storage room to have class that day. I was feeling fine for most of class but suddenly I got dizzy and almost passed out. I remember looking at my watch as I got dizzy and almost got sick. They sent me to the nurse's office and I didn't think anything about it as my mom came to get me. She was in tears. She told me the shuttle blew up. I was in shock.

I later learned on the news that it blew up at about 11:40 am, the same time I saw on my watch as I was dizzy. Scary coincidence.

My aunt, who lives in Texas, just called and debris from the wreckage are being found all over town. The neighbors have some in the backyard. She's afraid to go outside because it's dangerous stuff.

What a day. My heart goes out to the families of everyone involved.

k9

Snowy Saturday

It's snowing again and I have a massive sinus headache. I'm going to take my allergy meds in a few and I hope it goes away because it's really starting to get annoying.

I was acting weird last night. For the first time in ages I didn't feel like being online, so I pulled up my AOL pager (hey, I'm still addicted to e-mail), turned off my regular AOL, and played some Neverwinter nights. When I got bored with that, I was actually in bed by 11 and read some of "the Pentagon Wars" until a little after 1.

I fell asleep and had this epic dream. It was something out of "Escape from Experiment Island" on TLC. Four teams made up of people from TechTV were trapped on an island and the only way off was to build a battle machine that could launch home-made missiles at the other teams using a riding lawn mower and whatever they could find on the island. The goal was to battle the other teams and get access to the helicopter to take them home.

Megan, Patrick, Morgan and Leo had teams. I don't remember the other people on the teams (though I think a bald Ray Weigal was on Morgan's team), other than they were the usual nameless faceless drones you see in the background on most TechTV programs.

Patrick's team had a wild idea of taking guitar strings and make a mini-catapult that was towed behind the lawn mower. In the final battle they would hurl their paint balls at the other team.

Megan's team made a modified crossbow launcher that would be hand held and would shoot the other teams.

Morgan's team made a slingshot out of her bra. I'm not kidding. I have a sick and twisted subconscious. But you all know that. It was mounted behind the driver and a team of two would pull it back and fire the paint balls.

Leo's team had jack squat. To his disadvantage, he had the work station next to Morgan's and when he heard that she was walking around braless he couldn't work. He couldn't lead either and his team essentially told him to get a life and all joined Patrick's team.

I remember the battle starting and Leo's machine blowing up with him sitting on it. It didn't matter, really, because he forgot to add a wheel and he was trying to drive and throw paint balls at the same time.

Patrick's team got an early lead and was able to get some hits on Morgan's team, but the sneaky Megan's slow and turtle like contraption silently snuck up behind both Patrick and Morgan's team and eliminated them both.

So Megan won and got to go home with her team. The rest? Well, they sat around bitching (and/or leering) until Morgan and Patrick ended up tying Leo to a tree and they all found another way off the island.

I don't know what happened to Leo, nor do I care at this point. This dream scared the hell out of me.

Maybe this is why I woke up with the worst headache I've had in a while. I so need a soda and some chocolate. I have water and total raisin bran instead.

This is Stef's revenge, isn't it?

k9