Author Archives: Shadowtwin

Lunch; Secret Window

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Today was a rather enjoyable day on the homefront. It is not often that my wife and myself go out and do things, which we did today. I suppose that the base reason for this is my agoraphobia, not that I think I actually have the affliction, but anyone seeing my reaction to large public places would surely think I did. It probably took me quite a while to become the hermit that I am, I don’t really mind going out in public places as such, I just try to avoid it when it is not necessary. I don’t think that it is a fear, or anything of that nature, it is more like a choice to simply avoid all the weird people doing weird things. Okay, I am going to change the subject here, as I seem to be digging myself an ever deeper hole.

The really strange thing about my not going out much is that the times we do, I really enjoy it. We never see the weird people doing weird things, we simply go out and have a little fun and then come home. Why, then, do I have this notion that I want to avoid all the strangeness out there? I gots no idea.

As sited in a Previous Blog, my wedding anniversary was last Wednesday, and it certainly did not get a celebration at all. We went out today to do something enjoyable to make up for the lack of being able to do so then. We decided on lunch and a movie, which is like dinner and a movie, minus the not getting home until midnight aspect of it.

My wife’s parents had given us a gift card for On the Border, which is an upscale type mexican restaurant that serves really yummy food. It is not exactly authentic mexican food, but the version of it that those of us who are not Hispanic have grown to love. Tasty, tasty stuff, and huge portions of it. Though at the prices they charge the portions had better be huge. The meal would have been completely free to us, had I not indulged in a beer once I had received my food. Perhaps it was better that I ordered that four dollar beer, as it would have seemed really cheap to try to put the tip on a gift card, IMHO. My wife left the tip for the meal, which was five dollars, even after I had offered to pay it, since that was darn near the price of the beer after tax. Oh well, tasty, tasty stuff.

My wife’s brother (yes, my brother-in-law, but it seems that I should give credit to my wife for having the family, since I never got so much as a call from any one of my relatives for the anniversary, let alone a gift) gave us a gift card to AMC theatres for the movie. The card did not have an amount printed on it, so my wife opined that it may not be enough to cover the tickets (her brother is only twenty, and not independantly wealthy) so I would make up the difference at the box office. As it turns out, he went above and beyond the call, giving a twenty dollar gift card. We spoke briefly of using the remaining balance to buy soda or popcorn, but eventually decided that one of us could go to the next movie for free if we didn’t. So we didn’t.

The movie that we saw was Secret Window. This movie has gotten really bashed in the ratings game, having only a 47% positive review on Rotten Tomatoes. Ebert has This to say. I think that Ebert does a much better job of describing the film than the people that reviewed it over at rotten tomatoes.

I don’t like Johnny Depp much as an actor, but he did do a very convincing drunkard in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. He did a pretty good job in this movie as well. The novella, by Stephen King, that this movie was based on does not have really anyone in it. Just the main character, his (ex)wife and her boyfriend. Without character interaction there can be little dialogue, without dialogue you really don’t have any way to judge a character’s actions. Depp certainly made the point that the character was not ‘all there’ with his actions, most notably scrubbing his hands for way too long in one sequence.

It is hard to try to discuss an actor’s performance in a movie without giving away plot elements, that is what I am trying to do, so bear with me.

At exactly the point in the movie that I knew how it would end, they threw in the fiance of his (ex)wife. That was entirely too convenient to the flow of the movie, and thus, had no effect on the outcome. Had the editors put that scene further back in the screenplay, to give it enough time to fade from your memory a bit, it would have made the whole story a lot stronger. I think so anyway.

I am going to speculate that King wrote this little story while he was going through a little bit of a ‘Writer’s Block’. Like many King stories you simply must read the story to appreciate the screenplay. This is one of his stories (like most of his work) that I have not read. I am sure that it is extremely difficult to try to act out the thoughts of a character, yet Depp did it, and pretty masterfully I might add.

Johnny Depp just seems to have that touch, much like Tom Hanks, where he can act out any role and turn that movie into a blockbuster. Why that didn’t happen with this film is still a mystery to me. I think that the number one reason is that it is so similar to another King story called “the Dark Half”. Start telling the same story twice and even your fans may turn on you, no matter that the other film was released well over a decade ago.

The movie was pretty good on its own merits, better if you have never read any Stephen King. The ideas that he used may have been recycled, but they were recycled from his own twisted mind. Can one ever actually copy theirself?

Country Thunder

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Well, I guess I didn’t blog yesterday. I actually did, unfortunately both the index page and the archive page have mysteriously disappeared. That just goes to show that you should never break from a habit once you have formed one in doing this sort of thing. Usually what I do is write this, then upload the index page only. The next day I will then save the index page as the archive page before starting to write the next blog. Yesterday I saved them both at the same time and uploaded them at the same time. They were both working at the time so I figured it was all working properly. After I had deleted the old index page, I went to my site to try to grab a quote that I had put in there only to find that the index page was from the previous day. No problem, I thought, and I tried to access the archive page, not there at all.

I suppose it is possible that one of you still has it in your history, unfortunately by the time you read this, it will have been over written by this. Strange irony, that. It does beg the question, if I blog and no one reads it, did I really blog at all? The answer to that question is yes, or else I would have given up on this whole thing a long time ago. In the future I will just continue to handle one upload the day I write it and the other upload the day after, it has actually saved my ass a couple of times when, for one reason or another, one of the two uploads didn’t stay uploaded. I wonder if it is a problem with my server or my ftp client, but not enough to change either, just enough that I will be a bit more careful in the future.

I know that you must all be crushed about missing out on one of my blogs, so I will do a quick recap of what you actually missed. I spent a long time talking about the battle.net community, after having read a recent guest article over at DII.net, and then had just a little blurb about the impending Country Thunder festival. I may just go into that again, as it is only a few days away now, and the signs of it are everywhere.

Yes, I will go into that again. The aforementioned festival is the bane of my existance. I absolutely loathe Country music. I mean, hell, that is not even a good title for it. Most of the people who whine those songs have never been to the country. Sure they will whine about growing up on the farm, but that doesn’t change the fact that they likely grew up in some manicured little suburb and that the boots that they wear have never touched anything other than concrete and asphalt (perhaps a dance floor as well). I know a lot of genres of music are like that, possibly all of them. You have your “Gangsta rappers”, some of whom I understand are from the ‘hood’, while others are from the same ‘hood’ that a lot of us came from. Then there is the rock scene, where every band seems to claim that they were living out of their drummer’s van for a couple of years eating nothing but ramen noodles waiting for that one big break, while in reality they were just living with their wealthy parents in SoCal. That is the way of the musician, I guess I shouldn’t slight Country “artists” for that.

You may have noticed that I used the word ‘whine’ a couple of times in the previous paragraph. I did not mean that in a bitching sense, I meant that they sound like crying three year olds when they sing. Though that is more in the male artists than the female. This is one of the two things about the songs that really annoy me, the other is the combination of slide guitar and guitars that have a thing called a “b-bender” (which is like a whammy bar, but works on only one string of the guitar, the b-string, and makes the music sound even more like a crying child). I am pretty sure that it is not really healthy, but I actually begin to get angry when I have to listen to country music for too long at a time, more on that below.

The last thing about the music that I can not stand is the “Country Accent”. It is not an accent. If you go to Boston, you will hear people with that accent, similar in New York or any place you visit. The “Country Accent” seems to be an accent that one can be infected by while living anywhere in the U.S., it simply involves trying to sound like you have a southern accent when you really don’t, and the end result is that you really sound/look like an idiot. I don’t mean while they are singing the songs, I mean while they are talking. These country artists keep that twangy, weird accent while they are talking to reporters and on talk shows, it is just sick. To site a couple of examples, from the genre of music I listen to, of other artists not doing it, look at Dave Mustaine of Megadeth and Axl Rose from the tragically doomed Guns and Roses. They both had very distinct singing voices that you either loved or hated, but sounded damn near human while actually speaking. Dave Mustaine in particular, as I heard a radio interview with him, over the course of the thirty minutes of listening to him talk I couldn’t believe that he was the man behind that acid-like, gravelly (is that a word?) tone in their songs.

But wait, I was planning to talk about the festival…Here we go. Despite my best efforts to try to find the actual population of florence, all of the estimates that I find look exactly like This. There are certainly not 17,000 free people living in this town, as the 14 new home constructions in the last year should prove (I think they count the inmates for tax benefit reasons). I have heard the number 10,000 thrown around a few times to count the number of people in the 4 male and one female prisons here. That would make the population be 7,000, which I still think is about double the actual population, but I can not find the real numbers on the internet. What I can find is a total school attendance, Kindergarten to 12th grade, of less than a thousand. I think that would support my theory that the population is far lower, but that is merely speculation. The site that I linked to said that there are 2,900 women in florence, I believe that the prison holds about 500 of them, bringing the actual population to about 2,400 women. Then, assuming that the split of men to women is nearly equal, I guess there are about 5,000 free people living in this town. That is all speculation, but I bet my number is far closer than theirs.

Now, throw in Contry Thunder. I don’t know the numbers, and I can’t find them on the internet, but imagain a show like OZZFEST, that has as many die-hard fans, and runs for four days, with ticket prices starting at free at the shops in town. There must be hundreds of thousands of people that go to the show, and the ones who camp there will invariably come into town for things like ice, water, beer, soda and chips. Never do they buy anything like, well, you know, actual food, only the items that I listed. The entire town is in chaos for four days.

Florence has two Circle K stores, placed strategically directly across the street from one another(I say that this was strategic, ’cause why in the hell else would a company put two stores within a 12 second walk of each other?). Both of them bring in those ugly port-a-potty type things (four each last year) to accomodate all of the people that show up there to buy beer, ice, water, soda and chips, never anything else at the Circle K either, as I found out from conversations with the managers at them.

At any rate, when there are like say 50,000 people invading a town of 5,000 people, it is quite insane. The roads leading to town have been revamped since last year, but the rest of the town remains the same. There are barely two lanes on main street, and they are made with a patchwork of pavement that has two inch gaps in it every fifteen feet (that is quite literal, not cracking pavement, that is how they had planned it, back in the forties, also I think it is concrete, not asphalt).

It is a major economic boom for all of the stores and resaraunts here, of course, but it is also a bit much for any of us to deal with. We all, where I work, have to work pretty much from open to close to accomodate it. The people who deliver us ice, normally twice a week in the warmer months, have to deliver it sometimes twice a day during this festival. Also, the people who work at the various museums here in town have a large spike in traffic (I think that is the leading reason that tourism has been so much higher in the last year, we actually got a group from Germany in the store a week or so ago, when I asked why they decided to visit florence for their vacation, they said that they had found a link to the tourism board from the Country Thunder website.). Perhaps German children rebel against groups like Rammstein by listening to Country?

The only real problem with this whole thing is that I literally get angry when I have to listen to country music. We play country music, exclusively, on the radio while the show is in town. I don’t get angry like I am going to go and kill, or anything like that, it just shortens my temper and makes me not the frienly butcher I usually am. I certainly don’t think that there is a drug that could help me, if you dislike something to the point of anger, the only solution is to stop doing that something. If you don’t have a choice in the matter, I guess you should look for your happy place. I can usually keep from being too angry or disgusted by the music if I just replay some old Metallica album in my head. Yet, sometimes when the combination of the slide guitar and ‘b-bender’ hit, I can no longer block it out. (I must say, again, that I am sure that it is not healthy to hate something so much, but I do.) My only respite is to turn off the radio, or go far enough away from it that I can no longer hear it, which is difficult on the four busiest days of the year.

I don’t think I have yet killed anyone in a “Country Music” induced rage, but if I had, would I actually remember it?

TV shows

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Well yesterday was my weekly day off and either all of my readers know that by now, or none of them care. No one emailed to ask if I had uploaded it to the wrong directory, which has happened quite a few times, both me doing that, and me getting emails about it.

As I mentioned in my last blog thing, yesterday was also my wedding anniversary. It went about as well as could be expected when she got up at 4:30 in the morning to go to work while I slept until about 9:00 not needing to be to work until noon. I didn’t get home from work until about a quarter after eight, and she had to be in bed asleep by 9:30. I had left out a card for her before I went to bed the night before, and she left out two cards for me before she left for work, so it is not like either of us forgot the date, it was just not an opportune day for us to really make a big deal out of it. We will likely go out to eat and watch a movie on Sunday as a celebration.

We did both watch the latest South Park episode. It was not one of the funniest ones thus far this season, but there were still a few times when a normal person would laugh out loud. There were also a few times when only a sick, demented son-of-a-bitch like myself would laugh, but isn’t that exactly what we have come to expect from the show? I do wonder how any network would let a show (even if it is animated) get away with having a a child put a supposatory into another child, or let a child dressed like a robot give sexual pleasure to a movie studio exectutive, but if I question it, won’t it be banned? Best not to think about it.

•Watched the latest episode of Survivor just before I started to write this. It was sort of an introspective episode with not a lot happening other than the big ass reward/immunity challenge thing. I was extremely disappointed that they did not show how the picking of the teams went, as they were divided into groups of four before the challenge started. The thing that I found a bit interesting is that it really looked like the team that won the initial challenge is exactly the same four that are kind of the power people there right now.

Boston Rob won the challenge, of course. Now that Lex is gone there is no one there that can match his speed, dexterity and stamina. To be fair the final challenge, for individual immunity, was a puzzle challenge that required only intelligence. Now to be brutally honest. Two of the girls that were trying to solve this puzzle have children that are old enough that they must have been born while the mothers were in their teens. I am not going to go look at the profiles to see if that is true or not, I am just going to say that the average woman who gets pregnant when she is fifteen is not exactly a Rhodes Scholar, if you get my point.

The only saving grace is that it is now following a path that will lead to Shii Ann being voted next week. If you have never watched any of the other seasons of survivor, you should know that the second the votes become predictable, the game gets changed. They have always used new and unique ways to throw a mokey wrench into it in the past, I am expecting them to do something similar with the show next week. If Boston Rob actually wins the immunity challenge he will just have to start shooting the fish in the barrel. I am sure hoping that they will set up a challenge that will really show off the skills of Rupert and Big Tom, if there were an endurance challenge for them to hold a heavy load, say 50 pounds, in front of them, that would be where Rupert and Tom could really win, yet that wouldn’t be fair to the women. Hell, maybe someone should steal Rob’s beloved BoSox hat, maybe that is where he draws his strength.

I have no doubt that they are going to do something to really mix up the strategies with the players in the next episode. I don’t know how they are gonna do it, but I do know that each episode that we watch is actually three full days. I am sure that once they see that it is all getting a bit to predictable they throw in challenged that are geared for the strengths and weaknesses of certain players. That is why they call it “reality t.v.”, because there is nothing real about it.

• While I was writing that little bit about Survivor up there, I went to look for the official site. Once I got to google, a thought occured to me so I just typed in survivor.com. Now, what I thought I would get was the site for the still performing band Survivor, who had their only real breakthrough hit with the song “Eye of the Tiger”, which was featured in one of the “Rocky” movies. Not so, that site can be found Here if you really want to see it. I figured if that was not the site that it loaded that it would obviously be the official CBS survivor site (linked to above) which was also not the case. I am not going to put up a link for what you get to if you simply type in survivor.com because it doesn’t deserve one.

If you go to that address there are pop-ups galore. You feel like you are playing a video game trying to close them as fast as they come up. It tries to get you to download program files and likely gives you tons of cookies (unless you have your browser set to prompt for adding them). That site has been in business for about five years, while the t.v. show survivor has been going a couple of years longer, and the band was popular back in the eighties. This is where I am going to go well away from my normal views of government interference and say that there really should be laws about this.

I watched a show on PBS some years ago (so many years that I can not find it in their show listings at all). There is a practice called “cyber squatting” that people do. They find a name, or a term, or a typo for a name and register that domain. That is all well and good, right, but then what they do is put up tons of Malware, porn and other nasty stuff on a site that is likely to be hit by typing the name in the address bar. That is wrong!

I went to look for a solid example of this and found it in spades. I am not going to post any of the links, since I think this practice is simply atrocious. Just look at any college athlete who is getting a lot of press coverage, then type in that name .com and you will find these ‘cyber squatting’ parasites.

What they do is register that domain name, for less than twenty bucks a year, then put all of the scumware on it. They then offer to sell the domain name back to the person/company who has that name for 100-1000 times the price the registration actually cost. If that is not illegal it should be.

The question that I have is; CBS has a ton of money. They should know that a lot of people, a lot of children in particular, are going to type in survivor.com and expect to see information about the show. Wouldn’t it be in their best interest to go ahead and pay the person trying to extort them to make it so that parents won’t put the word “survivor” onto the list of things that their kids can’t look at?

Anniversary; Video Games

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Well I didn’t post anything yesterday. A quick check of my site stats shows that about three people actually know that. I assume that those are the same three people who are reading this now, so I apologize to the two of you, I am one of the three and don’t deserve an apology.

As I type this it is still April 13th, but by the time most of you will read it, it will be the 14th. Being that it is the 14th of April, that means that 139 years ago today President Lincoln was assassinated. 92 years ago today, the Titanic hit a glacier in the middle of the ocean and sank, killing some 1,500 people. Also, three years ago today I married my beautiful wife, happy anniversary!

Let that be a lesson to all of you to do a little research into the date that you choose to get married. The only saving grace about the day that we chose is that Lincoln didn’t die until a bit after 7a.m. on the fifteenth, and the Titanic didn’t actually go down until about 2a.m. on the fifteenth. All the more fitting that the fifteenth is also tax day. Still having the other things happen of the fourteenth just means that they will be on the news on our anniversary, so better just to not watch the news. Besides, we should be out having a romantic dinner, instead we both have to work, and vastly different hours, so we won’t even see each other much. Life sucks, let’s move on, shall we?

The reason that I didn’t write anything yesterday was because of a game that I bought. It is a year or so old, it is called “Schizm: Mysterious Journey”. It is another one of those Dream Catcher games. I enjoy to play them from time to time, they are trying really hard to copy the original Myst with every title that they release, and doing a pretty good job of it for the most part. You can pick up any one of their titles, except for the brand new ones, on their website for ten or fifteen bucks.

Anyway, I was saying that they try to rip off the original Myst and by that I mean that there is no character interaction, only a few scattered holographic clues. -This is why I assume that their games are so inexpensive, it is pretty obvious that they have simply recycled the same game engine for every one of their games. The user interface changes just a little bit with each one, but it is so close to identical that you know they didn’t actually have to pay anyone to go in and code a new engine.- The artwork in them is beautiful, well at least it was, they have been using the 640×480 display since their first release. They still use that resolution, despite the fact that almost no one has a computer that can display images properly in that resolution anymore. That means that what would/should be beautiful artwork is more like artwork that you can kind of count the pixels in on a monitor any larger than 13 inches.

Just for fun, I just shut down and plugged in the tiny little monitor that I have as a back up (which is right here because I was using it to try to troubleshoot problems I was having with the pc that I bought for my mom and have already discussed way too much to link back to it) and restarted. I loaded one of the saved games, just to look at the artwork on a smaller monitor, and as suspected it really was quite impressive. The animations still looked a little bit bad, like maybe they were rendered in 256 colors to save on disk space, the game has 5 cds and takes over three gigs of hard disk space -at maximum- for a game that will only take you a few hours to complete.

The familiarity of the Dream Catcher games is kind of the reason that I enjoy them, once in a while anyway. Here is every one of them ever made in less than a paragraph. Game starts, short intro with voice-over. Start in unfamiliar territory, must look at everything. There are strange symbols all over the place, you have to write them all down. Somewhere you will find something that shows how the number system works (usually in the form of a pictogram or a measuring device). There will be 15 or 20 puzzles that you must complete, never very difficult, but enough to make you think. Then, after playing it for four hours or so, you complete the game and throw away your notes, ’cause there is ZERO replay value. That is it, every game they have ever made.

I have left out all of the detail, of course, but the games remain the same. It is the formula that Myst used and the formula that every company from here to hell and back has ripped off. I mostly enjoy them for the puzzles. The way that I look at it is that you are basically watching a cgi movie from a first person vantage and have to occasionally solve a puzzle to make the movie keep going. The stories are never really that compelling, or maybe they are and you just don’t think so anymore after having played so many titles that you can’t remember which story line goes with which game.

There is one thing in this game that was a bit irritating though. You have two characters that are there, but who can not see each other or touch each other, but often have to be in the same place at the same time to make an action happen. The game expains this away by saying that each person on the planet is somehow living in a different dimension? but all still there. Yet, when you put something down with one character, the other one can pick it up. That just didn’t make much sense. Some of the actions required that one person hold down a lever, then you switch to the other person to switch another lever. Just weird stuff. Especially when you have to make them both go through 15 or 20 screens and a couple of animations to get to the same place once you know what they need to do.

The puzzles in this one weren’t all that good. I was able to do the whole thing without looking to a walkthrough, with the exception of having to look at one when I had made a stupid math mistake that left me one click away from the right naviagational coordinates in one of the flying machines. I always check the walkthroughs later, just in case I missed any easter eggs also.

Now to really get bitching about it. All of these games that are supposedly set on other worlds have all of this advanced technology that is basically made out of sticks and tree trunks. Yet, there are generally only a couple of houses in the places that you explore. Am I to believe that somehow this civilization continues to survive with a population of like ten people? How do they procreate? How did they make all of the devices in the first place? What is the source of power for the flying machines, what is the source of power for the ones that can go up and down the rails without engines? Why are some of the devices made out of tree trunks and the like when others are made of obvious metal and plastics? If they can make a lens (there is always a lens, trust me) out of glass, why can’t they make windows to put into their houses? If they alone know how to run all of these systems, why didn’t they use them to get away before whatever catastrophic event took place?

I suppose that all of the last paragraph was pretty much retorical, you play the game to play the game. If you start to analyze the game too much (hell, at all really) you are gonna find things that just don’t make a damn bit of sense. The games are pretty fun to play once in a while, when you are really bored and even watching reruns of Jerry Springer doesn’t sate the boredom.

• Now the real question. How is it possible that I can buy this brand new game, five cd’s worth of it, for 10 bucks (it is a year old) while all of the music companies are still charging more for a cd than for a cassette? In a failed business venture a couple of years ago, I found that you can make a cd complete with a jewel case and front and back cards for about fifty cents. Well, that wasn’t counting the ink in the printer so I will bump that up to say fifty-two cents. If I can do it myself for that price I would think that any major music company would be able to get a much better deal by buying hundreds of thousands of the items, as opposed to the hundreds that I bought. I really believe that, at this point, it is probably more expensive to make a cassette tape than a cd/dvd because so few people are actually buying that type of media now.

The whole point of being a music star is to make your money on ticket sales. If you can not generate enough ticket sales to make you wealthy then you are not a very good musician/group. Of course, the publishers of the music are the ones that make the money, and also the ones that set the price, and also the ones who are pissed off about people sharing files over the internet (with the exception of Lars Ulrich from Metallica, who mistakenly thought that since Metallica’s music has sucked for the last decade people were downloading it instead of paying for it. No. Lars. No one is listening to that shit.)

The grand humor of that is that bands that are struggling to make it really want their music to be shared over the internet, while the bands that made it, then lost it, are pissed off that they don’t seem to have the power they did back in the ’80s. I bet that if a band like “Quiet Riot” got a song downloaded over the internet enough that it got some requests on local radio stations, thus leading to actual air-play, and resulted in a tour with their name back in the lights, “Quiet Riot” would endorse whatever file-swapping software had made that all possible. I can’t speak for “Quiet Riot” though, and I know from first-hand experience that their singer is just a total asshole who still thinks it is 1983 and he owns the world. (side note, I had no idea that Randy Rhoads was ever in that band, thank your stars that he did a couple of albums with OZZY later or his memory would be just as dead as he is.)

I did a bit of Roadie work for the now defunct band EisenBlakk (Roadie work being that Dwight let me go to the shows for free, even drove me there, and in exchange I just helped him unload all of the band’s equipment; a pretty good trade off). His band was totally cool, as were the guys in the band ‘Dirty Rhythm’, whom I met at a venue in Eugene, OR. at an Eisenblakk show.

Shortly after that brief arrangement, I had the opportunity to meet the guys from “Quiet Riot” in about 1991, bunch of assholes. On the other side of the equation, I also got to meet the guys in “Blue Oyster Cult” who were jovial, and just happy that they were still able to make a living by playing music.

This one went a bit weird, that is all for today.

Websites>Children; Sex Ed

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I got an email today from someone that I have never heard of, and have no idea how they happened upon my site. This person told me that I should stop with the bashing of MSN customer support. That is a valid argument, probably the best argument that I have gotten since I started doing this site all those weeks ago. I respect his POV and appreciate his email. Thing is that the MSN customer support is just so rich a subject that I could go on and on about it for days, if I was so inclined. They seem to have the guys that get turned down for jobs at McDonalds working there. If anyone really wants me to stop my bitching about their inept service, that person better work for them, and be in a position to hire people who have ever actually done anything to a pc other than love the monitor in a disturbing fashion…Show me just one case where MSN customer support has fixed a problem (not counting incorrect passwords) and I will quit my bitching.

Nice to know that someone happened upon my site though. Unless, of course, my regular reader actually sent them a link. I am relatively sure that I didn’t send them a link, so it must have been just a chance occurance.

• There is something that I was thinking about today that I found just a bit amusing, if not disturbing. I started to keep an actual journal when I was in the sixth grade (that would be a diary to the ladies), but gave it up after it had been found and, consequently, read by one of my brothers. I just quit keeping the journal altogether, even though it was probably not nearly as personal as some of the stuff that I post here. Why is this? I have two working theories, I am not sure which one is closer to the truth, I am not sure if either one is even close to the truth to be honest.

My first theory is that I was at that age where things start to happen for young people. Hair started appearing on my fingers, toes and elsewhere. I do not remember a word of what I actually wrote in that journal, but I could surmise that I would have written about changes that my body was going through. As I think back on it, I think that would be an interesting read for a lot of kids (more on that in a moment).

My second theory is that I would like to be remembered, long after I have died and gone into the dirt that christians call heaven. Words that you speak can often be misquoted or just ignored, words that you write down are there. Words that you write down are there forever (depending on the source of the media that you are using). What I write here could easily outlive me if I could get a relative to preserve it all on a disk. The thing is that I think a lot of people are doing the same thing.

Lots of wealthy people choose not to have children, yet have their memoirs printed. I am certainly not wealthy, I look at it kind of backwards. If I can not offer my child the absolute best, I would rather not have a child. I don’t mean toy cars and the such, I mean that if I know that I will not be able to provide the best education for a child I would rather have that child not be born. I certainly could not foot the 30,000 dollar a year charge for an ivy league college, but I would expect that my child would be capable of that level of success. Sure there are sholarships that would cover some of the cost, but the out-of-pocket cost would still be pretty high. One could only mortgage their home so many times…

Myself, as your average blue-collar worker, could not provide the correct environment for a child to thrive. I could surely provide an environment where a child could survive, yet I would feel extremely bad if the time came when he/she got accepted into an ivy league college and I had to say that we couldn’t afford it. My lack of education would then go against my child. Forcing them to work low wage jobs all his/her life, would it be better to have or not have that child? I thought that the whole point of having children was to make sure that they have it ‘better than you did’. I am sure that there would be no lack of love (site my dogs, for example), but education is everything for a child. I know that I can not afford to send a child to the best schools, and I think that is why I type here each day.

This site will likely be my legacy. The thing that is spoken of, in hushed words, from one family member to another. They never had any children, people will say, that must have been a sad existance. I don’t suppose I will really mind if I am remembered that way, I just don’t want to bring a new life into this world that can only hope to be remembered the same. I strongly believe that the goals that you have for your child/children should be to do better than you ever did, if that is not possible please use a condom…

• When I was in the sixth grade they started doing sex ed. I really think that the teachers were more uncomfortable than the class. When the movies played one of the teachers would go to the bathroom, while the other just sat reading the paper. When it ended he would look up and say, “any questions?”. Even if you had questions you would not ask them from this guy.

Totally on a side note, the latter of the teachers was later arrested and charged for molesting children in the third grade class while he was a substitute teacher at a different school. You just have to love the grammar school system here, don’t you?

I really can’t remember exactly what those videos showed, what I can remember is that it set everything to a certain age. Say you wake up on your sixteenth birthday, that means that you will have full pubic hair, even if you have never had a sign of it before. Men will have chest hair at eighteen, again, even if you had never had any sign of it before. The male penis is able to function for reproductive purposes at the age of thirteen. I assume that all of these things must happen on that particular birthday, as the video did not describe any ‘gray area’ that could explain anomolies in their system.

The thing is that I got hair on my chest before I got hair on my love-sack. A friend of mine, name of Mike W* had a full beard by the time the puberty bug got down to his cajones. Sure, it is not an exact science, so don’t try to make it so exact in the ‘self help’ videos about puberty. That just goes to make us al self-concious and really hate the guy who made the video in the first place.

Of course it is me being bitter, and I think I am really getting good at it. YMMV, but the facts will remain the same.

Mom’s PC

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I got that marvel of technology that is my mother’s computer yesterday. It sucks just as bad now as it did like thirty years ago when they first released it. It is not that it is bad, or slow, on its own merits, it is just that it is a dinosaur by todays standards. It works quite properly but it has a problem with a modem being inserted into it. Not like a ‘non-compatible device’ type thing, but just an actual scream like ‘get that damn thing away from me!’

I had never had a problem like that before on any system. I did what I knew was necessary and went online to get the correct modem drivers, they installed just fine. In fact, it connected to the internet just fine, but I was not able to download anything. Not even to load a web page. I was pretty convinced that the reason for that was that the computer was an old office machine, more on that in a bit.

So I called my ISP to see if they could help me troubleshoot the problem. I really should have known that it was a bad idea, considering my last experience with their technical support people. The first thing that I said to the tech was that I thought the problem was because the pc I was trying to configure had previously been running on an intra-office lan. I suggested that there may be a proxy setting somewhere that I was not seeing that would clear the whole thing up. The tech said, “mmm hhh. Okay, did you check your password?”

If I had any common sense I would have just hung up right then, instead I told him that, yes, my password was correct and that I was not having a problem actually connecting, the problem was in downloading. So he promptly suggested that I may not have the correct modem driver. Okay, maybe there is an off chance that I could connect with the wrong modem driver, but honestly, this guy was not listening to a damn word that I said. After a half an hour or so, he concluded that the problem was that my version of Internet Explorer was not up to date.

Now I am always using machines that were in their prime several years in the past. I am always behind on my Internet Explorer updates because, in my opinion, every time they upgrade it it just gets worse. Everything loads slower, there is more crap that you can’t make disappear, it is constantly in your face. I do sometimes get broken images and the such using such an old version, but I am always able to load a page like Yahoo, I was not even able to do that on the machine that I was working on yesterday.

The guy eventually transferred me to another tech, I explained to her what I thought the problem was, and she asked if I was sure I had my password correct (do they even tell them what they have already tried when they transfer the call?). She had me try to ping a couple of websites from a dos prompt, which I was able to do with no problem. In my mind that just reinforced my theory that there was some proxy setting somewhere that needed to be taken care of. Instead of helping me try to find it, the tech told me that I needed to call the pc manufacturer since it was not a problem with their service. That was a bit irritating, but I suppose it wasn’t their fault, their service really wasn’t my problem. I was pretty frustrated at that point so I just went to bed (I had about half of this written at that point) to look at it in the morning with a clear head.

The first thing that I tried in the morning was to go into the BIOS and disable the network password. That had no effect, so I changed it back. Then, with my system’s screen beside the new system’s, I started checking for differences in the dial up networking. They were all good. I started looking through the networking, and I found the first problem. That was that the setting on my machine said to use the windows log on, the new machine said to use the network logon. Once I changed that the computer would connect about twice as fast, but I still didn’t get any information to transfer. I set up a new windows log on, which I am not sure had any effect, but I left it anyway.

Then, just on a whim, I went to find files/folders on the new machine’s start menu and typed “Proxy Client”. It displayed a few help files, but more importantly an executable. Once I opened that folder I saw that it was indeed trying to connect through the proxy client/server thing. It had a button on it whereby I could disable it. Once that was done the internet started to function normally. Though when you first connect it still asks for your network id, password and the domain. It is easy enough just to close that, and I don’t feel like screwing with it any more, so I am calling it fixed.

On a side note. This is a problem that I know would have been fixed if I would just have formatted the hard drive and re-installed the OS. The reason that I didn’t do that is that it already has licensed copies of Word, Excel and Quicken installed. Not a bad bundle of software for 49 bucks, eh?(75 with shipping). I am not sure about the legality of using a program that is licensed to someone else, but whenever I read those agreements it always says that they are for use in one machine, and I have that machine sitting right beside me with the software in it. In my opinion they sold me those licenses when they sold me the system.

Now to talk about this being an office pull. The reason that I bid on this was that I knew that it was an office pull, that much was mentioned in the ad for it. Also mentioned in the ad was the software that was installed. Now I assumed that what this meant was that when they pulled it from the office they had wiped the hard drive and re-installed the programs. Nope. They didn’t delete anything. I mean seriously the had moved some of the desktop icons to the recycle bin, but they were still there.

Some of the stuff that was left on the machine I found a bit amusing, if not disgusting. Such as links to a couple of gay porn sites. An MP3 library that boasted a ton of Bob Marley, Dave Mathews, Sublime and some band called ‘Snot’. Also still installed were AudioGalaxy, Napster and some other file sharing thing that I had never heard of. I deleted everything that I found that was not directly associated with making the machine run. After all I bought this one to replace one that was virus infected, the last thing that I needed was for Mom to happen upon one of those files and open it only to find that the seller had left a trojan in it somewhere and steal all her credit card information, or something even worse.

After browsing the internet for a bit, just to make sure that all was working correctly, I noticed the little computer with antenna pop up in the system tray. Yes, it has Norton antivirus installed on it also. It did a live update, and when the screen saver came on it went ahead and performed a system scan. Now I am pretty sure that you have to pay for that live update thing, so this likely won’t last long, but the fact that it did it once, then scanned for viruses and didn’t find any kind of sets my mind at ease. That has always been my worst fear when thinking of buying a used machine. I am sure that lots of people sell old ones when they upgrade, but I am always thinking that someone is trying to screw me into buying something that is totally screwed and will work only long enough that they can say, “Well, it worked fine when I gave it to you.”

If you didn’t know me you might think that I don’t trust anyone. If you do know me, you know that I don’t trust anyone.

Well that is just about enough about that computer. With a bit of luck I won’t have to speak of it again for at least a couple of years.

Howard Stern

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Well it is Thursday so I am back to this after taking a day off. That is kind of a difficult thing to get used to. I have only been doing this for a couple of months but I have gotten so used to writing at least a little bit every single day, regardless of how tired I am, that it just seems odd to not do it on wednesday. In fact yesterday I really had the urge to write a bit after watching the latest episode of South Park but I just didn’t, no real reason why or why not.

I will probably talk about the South Park thing a bit at the end, but for now I have to first give you the test that was promised Last Friday. Unfortunately I can’t ask how many gallons of water lake Mead holds because no one took the time to figure it out and send me the answer. I promised a test, though, so a test there shall be. It will be just a single question and if you get the answer wrong you will be taken behind the barn and shot to death. Here is the question:

There are 40 socks in a drawer. Twenty of them are blue, twenty of them are white. Without looking, what is the fewest number of socks that you could remove from the drawer to be sure that you had a matching pair?
A. 2
B. 3
C. 21
D. 40

I like to keep my tests simple. If you really feel the need, go ahead and email me your guess. Perhaps I will award a pretty gold star like my teachers used to. Or not, such an easy question probably doesn’t deserve such an award. I did at least keep my word and put a test up on thursday. Pity I don’t have the time/inclination to dig out my javascript dictionary and look up how to do radio buttons, as that would look a hell of a lot more professional. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

• It has been some time since I have put any news up here and I really feel the urge to do it again today. I am just sick and tired of the FCC trying to impose the moral view of the religious nuts on the rest of us. They of course pick really easy targets when they do, like Howard Stern. Back in the news again after an unprecidented fine is proposed against Clear Channel so they dropped him completely. It is not like Clear Channel carried him on many stations it appears that his show only ever aired on six of the stations, but still it just sickens me.

It is an AP story, but I read it Here. What I find the most disturbing is just how small the fine really is in comparison to how much money that station generates annually. No, strike that, what I find the most disturbing is that I am being forced to bitch about this, yet again, it is not like the show is being forced onto children in school. People who listen to the show have a thing called ‘Free Will’, I thought that Howard Stern had a thing called ‘Freedom of Speech’, guess I was reading a pamphlet from some country other than the good old U S of A. Stern had a quote in the article that I think was pretty dead on.

In a statement posted on his Web site, Stern characterized the fine as furtherance of a “witch hunt” against him by the Bush administration, which he says is punishing him for his criticism of the president.
“It is pretty shocking that governmental interference into our rights and free speech takes place in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s hard to reconcile this with the ‘land of the free’ and the ‘home of the brave.'”

To be fair, I suppose Stern has probably pissed off a lot of people with his show. People in high places. I don’t listen to his show at all, I find it to be a tad gross, but I have caught clips of it when he is bashing other radio personalities like Larry King. If he doesn’t care about pissing off people in his own business then I have no doubt that he probably does say things that would piss of the President and his cronies. The thing is that the president is not much different than about 99% of the religious kooks in the US so Stern would probably be getting this same treatment if he never said a word about politics.

This all really should be moot. Why is he not allowed to say what he wants to say? If he is not using profanity, or describing beating children, or raping women, what the hell is so wrong with it? I have listened to Larry King’s show a couple of times and have found what he is saying to be as offensive, if not more so, than Howard Stern. Then there is Rush Limbaugh, that guy can throw around hatred for black people, call the lower class the “scum he wipes from his shoes” and I am sure that he has said a lot worse things that I have just not heard about. Where are the fines for those guys?

So, is the FCC basically trying to say that it is absolutely fine to hate people based on their race and talk about it on national radio, but you can not talk about a vagina? I don’t get it. If I had children, I would like to think that I would rather have them hearing about sex than hearing about how to hate black people. After all everyone has sex at some point. While only some very small-minded people hold a grudge against people who have skin that is a different pigment than their own. The people who have a problem with the subjects discussed on the Howard Stern show are likely exactly the same people who preach abstinance instead of birth control, while they have a pregnant daughter, two sons in the KKK and absolutely zero base in reality.

Maybe Stern is right, what he is saying is not any worse than what some of the right wing radio kooks are preaching and he is getting the bulk of the fines for it. Almost half of the 4 million dollars in fines since 1990 imposed by the FCC (if the article is accurate).

The article goes on to say;

Stern’s nationally syndicated show features graphic sexual discussion and humor. It appears on more than 30 stations — most of them owned by Viacom Inc.’s Infinity Broadcasting unit — and draws millions of die-hard listeners.
Infinity spokesman Dana McClintock said the company has no plans to take any action against Stern.

Whether Infinity has cajones or is just making sure not to sour their cash cow is not really all that clear. At least they have not decided to take his show off the air, mostly because it would be all but suicide for them to do so. I doubt that people who listen to the Stern show would ever listen to that station again if they were to willingly cut his show. Again, this all should not be an issue anyway. We all have freedom of choice, if you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. That, I think, is how people like Limbaugh are able to get away with bitching about the plague that is ‘black people’. They believe it to be true, their listeners believe it to be true, and those who don’t want to hear it simply turn the dial. Yet, these Limbaugh-ites are exactly the same people that are making a big hubub about Stern talking about sex. The world is just going straight to hell.

To conclude, it is pretty clear that the FCC is only handing out viloations based on listener complaints, right?

Though the commission received no complaints from listeners to Infinity stations, it is looking into fining that company, too.

Your tax dollars in action. Fining people based on not having a complaint filed against them, but the possibility that maybe someone could have complained, but didn’t. I love this country (that was sarcasm, in this particular case).

Dogs; Terry Brooks

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Well the night happened, and the day came, so I guess I must type something here for your/my amusement. I spent a long time, after arriving home from work, typing an email that I may just quote on this page since it is about a subject that just really crushes me. That being said, I am going to discuss my dogs for a couple of minutes, then go off on whatever tangent I will invariably end up writing about.

I have stated previously that my wife and I are the owners of two ‘Vicious Pit-Bulls’, I always say that in jest since the dogs never do anything to show the vicious nature of the Pit Bull. The stereotypical Pit-Bull is a Junk-Yard dog that is trained to attack and kill anything that it sees, our dogs are trained a bit differently. I really believe that if someone were to break into the house while we were away they might use their base animal instinct to attack that person, or failing that, the fact that they both sound like the spawn of Satan when they bark would likely keep your would be intruder well away from our place.

The thing, the important thing is that we have total control over them. I am sure that it sounds a bit silly to say that, since I have previously written about one of them carrying undergarments and shoes out into the yard, but as far as their actions while we are at home, they jump when we say jump. They sleep in the room with us, and they are just cuddly little things for our amusement most of the time. Most of the time.

During a requisite ‘belly rub’ the other night, we noticed that Warlock, the older of the two dogs, had a couple of pretty serious half cut/half abrasion type of things on his hind legs. He was limping a bit also. Thing is that when he didn’t know that we were watching he forgot to limp, so we know that it isn’t anything serious. It was just the two of them playing and she got him, she got him real good that one time, and he has a bit of a boo boo that will take a while to heal.

They ‘play fight’ a lot, and it is very difficult to discern whether the battle is real or playful, unless you look at the happy, wagging little tails, that is. She, Zelda, is not fully grown yet and still has all of the energy of a puppy, Warlock doesn’t have all of that energy, but he is a trooper and hangs in there most of the time. Zelda does use some dirty tactics though, her number one attack is to get him off guard and bite his dick. Not to speak for an animal that has been castrated and has no voice, but, I bet you if he had balls he would be a very unhappy animal a lot of the time right now.

Zelda has yet to be spayed and I am kind of wondering if that may be part of the reason that they seem to fight so viciously when they play. After a round of ‘play fighting’ we can usually find them both laying side-by-side on the floor, sleeping. Zelda certainly owns his ass though. He is probably in the seventy pound range (just judging by having to pick him up to carry him inside from time to time), it could be less or more. Zelda is about three quarters of his weight, but wins every ‘play fight’. She is a bitch. (Literally, she is a bitch by definition, and also she fights dirty so that just adds to the bitch description.)

My wife likes to buy them bones to chew on (I do too, since even as much as the bones cost they still cost less than new furniture) and that is when the real fighting starts. Treats and chew toys are always bought in equal quantites, one for each dog, but the dogs don’t seem to understand that, and will fight over one while there is another one, exactly the same, lying there untouched. Even if we put them into each dog’s mouth they will invariably start fighting over just one of them. I assume this is like the classic argument that children make about how the one glass has more Kool-Aid than the other.

While I was on the phone with my Mother the other night, the dogs got into what I am going to call a real fight. My Mother could hear the growling through the phone, her boyfriend could hear it also, and he was sitting ten or twelve feet from the phone that it was coming through. The dogs were both up on their hind legs (makes them stand about nipple height on a 5’10” man) and they were not pulling the punches. I did jump in to pull them apart, but I tell you that if they were not my dogs I would have run like hell. They looked and sounded like they wouldn’t care who or what they tore apart. It was quite a vicious display.

Knowing that they were both my dogs, I jumped right in there and pulled them apart, but don’t lots of stories about pit-bulls killing their owners start that way? Once I had them both by the collar, and smacked each of them on the snout, they calmed down. I guess if that huge black dog is yours, you know how well it is, or isn’t, trained and you no longer look at it as a huge dog, but the puppy that you raised. Everyone else will be afraid of the dog, because of the negative press, but they really are good dogs.

The one thing that the dogs do viciously attack is…Flies. Yes, the common house fly. Normally we never see them in the house, but the last few weeks they have been here and the dogs can snap them right out of the air and eat them. Also, they do enjoy cockroaches, but the chase them around way too much before they just let them die and leave the body for us to sweep up later. And the cockroaches only come out when it is dark, so that means lost sleep as the dogs sniff around at it for a couple of hours until I finally just get a tissue and throw the damn thing away.

After reading your email, I went to Amazon just to read some of the reviews for the magic kingdom series. The thing that I found interesting is that the first three novels in the series all get a customer rating of 4 or 4.5 stars, while the fourth book, the one that I only got a couple of chapters into, has five star ratings from all the customers. One of the customers said that next to the ‘Xanth’ series this was the best thing going. Why did this one get the best reviews when I thought it sucked so badly? Oh, I guess that you likely don’t go to write a review about it when you hate it then do you. And by the time an author is on his tenth or twelfth novel he probably has a following that would read a retaraunt menu that he had written and find it the best literary work of all time.

On a side note my wife came in as I was typing this and asked what I was writing about, after seeing the subject line she fired off her two cents that Brooks is just unreadable. I told her that your real beef with him was about it being so derivative of LOTR, she said that was funny since she read all of Tolkien’s stuff and never made it through a single one of Brooks, even though we have damn near every one of them on the shelf (in hardcover no less, gotta love those 5-7 dollar prices. Unfortunately that book store went out of business so now I have to shop through amazon just like everyone else.) So I guess that really does just show that everyone has a different opinion about what writing is good and what is bad.

Funny thing about that bookshelf of mine, I always wanted to have a bookshelf in my house, since that is one of the first things that I have always noticed missing when I visit other people’s houses. My bookshelf, though, has turned more into a book graveyard. Out of the probably 100 or so books on it the only ones that find regular use are the thesarus, dictionary and Bible (the bible just for reference when I am bashing it, I want to make sure that I have the quotes right and be able to site the book and verse), other than that we have some classics that get read, sherlock holmes, dracula and the unabridged complete works of Edgar Allan Poe to name a few. So about 8% of my bookshelf is ever touched and the rest of it might as well just be painted on the wall for all the good it does.

Yet, our dvd collection is used constantly, even the ones we don’t particularly care for get watched once in a while. Is that simply because you have to actively read a book while you can passively watch a movie, or do we (people in general) really hold a grudge against an author or a book that we would never hold against an actor or a movie?

Again, I have gone way off topic. I was intending to mention that Brooks had also done some books in the horror genre, I have never read any of them and was searching on Amazon when I found this link. It has nothing to do with his horror writing, but it does just go to prove that he readily admits that Tolkien was his main influence in the Shannara series. (I hope that link works).

Terry Brooks admits to ripping off Tolkien

With that, I think I am going to quit trying to defend him, and just remember his work with the fresh eyes I had a decade and a half ago. His work was the first that I had read in the fantasy genre and I really found it fascinating, knowing -now- that it was all pretty much ripped off from Tolkien can’t change the impact that it had on me in my early teens. Imagine if I had picked up that Piers Anthony novel and just hated it, I might never have read fantasy again. Instead I picked up Terry Brooks and became a fan of the genre. Knowing that I became a fan of someone who plagiarized (sp) someone elses’s work is a bit disheartening, but knowing that it is also the reason that I will be in line to buy the first edition of the Flux hardback should be enough to prove that his work had a profound effect on me.

Donnie

games

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Damn online video games have consumed too much of my time yet again. Not even particularly good ones, just the games that can be found on the free sites like Pogo.com. It doesnt take long before you find out that you have pissed the whole day away playing really lame little games.

I guess it is better that way, since I didn’t have anything really worth talking about in the first place, and the only feedback that I get about this site is from my wife. So is it actually more productive to piss away my time on writing this than it would be to piss away my time playing a game?

Someone suggested that if I want to generate traffic to my site I should go and post messages in popular disucssion forums with a link to it. That is kind of exactly the opposite of what I was trying to achieve when I decided to set this whole thing up. I told my family and friends of the site, of course, but was hoping that within a few months I might start getting people to happen upon the site that I had not practically begged to visit it. That has not yet happened and I guess I really should be grateful for it. I mean if I actually had more than two or three people that actually read the site on a day to day basis I would probably feel just a bit guilty for cutting it short, which is what I am going to do right now.

Right now I just seem to feel that wasting my time playing cheesy little on line games will be more productive than trying to continue on this train of thought.

PC’s; The MacGyver of True Value

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Well as my regular reader(s?) might have noticed there was no new blog thing on Saturday. If you are upset about this feel free to voice your displeasure in the Complaint Department.

You see, what happened is that I had a hunch (go Velma!) that maybe the reason that the cd drive from my computer would not work in my mom’s computer was that it required me to install drivers prior to shutting down the pc and installing it. This led me back to believing that if I were to just get a cd drive I would be able to format her hard drive and reinstall the operating system. So when I got home from work last night, that is what I did.

And a big thanks to Ron (a guy that I used to work with) who donated the cd drive, which through some miracle was exactly the same brand and speed as the one in my mother’s pc, even though it was pulled from a system that was three years older than hers (which just really proves that she took it anal when she bought this system to begin with, at the price she paid anyway.)

Now, trying to make sure that I had this thought through pretty well, I made a clean windows 98 boot disk on my own machine and clicked it to write protection (this is possible the only time I have ever done that on any floppy ever, that may be why viruses spread so easily, lots of people probably never take that one second to write protect their floppies.) okay, now I needed to make sure that I was booting in the order that I wanted to. Into the BIOS I went, first boot set to floppy to make sure that I got a clean boot. Second boot to cd, though it wouldn’t really matter since I was using a floppy boot disk, I just wanted to make sure that it didn’t try to boot from the hard disk. With fingers crossed I restarted the system with the boot disk.

I got it booted to an a: prompt, and switched it over to the cd drive. I typed in setup, and it worked! It asked if I wanted to restore core system files or format the drive and reinstall windows, and I went with format. It went to work telling me that it would take 30-60 minutes for the process to complete. I called my mom to get her windows 98 key, thinking that I had the problem all but solved, yes, there is a but, about fifteen minutes into the process it abrubptly stopped. The screen said “Write error! boot sector virus detected. continue y/n”. Of course when I typed either of the letters on the keyboard nothing happened and I had to power down with the button on the tower.

I really thought this was just a minor setback. I figured I would be able to format her hard drive manually, then do the install. I went to search the internet to find information about formatting a hard drive, since I had only ever done it once without just using a system rescue disk. Once I had the information that I needed I popped the clean boot disk back into the floppy and powered on her machine, nothing happened. Well, the light flashed on the cd drive a couple of times, and the power light on the tower came on, but nothing displayed on the monitor at all, and the floppy drive never gave any indication that it was trying to read. I hit the reset button a couple of times, tried to shut the power off and restart, even unplugged it and plugged it back in, ’cause I mean it might work, right? Nothing.

There is one thing that was odd about the machine though, and that is that each time I opened up the bios after trying to load windows it seemed to randomly set which device booted first. I only tried to load windows a couple of times while I was initially looking at it the first day, but each time I went into the BIOS afterwards the boot order would be different, and on occasion either the floppy or cd drive would have been disabled.

I am wondering if when I tried to format the drive and install windows again it somehow did format the drive, but then replicated the virus in the boot sector. I am not sure if that is even possible, as it would require that the virus be in the actual system memory. At any rate, I theorize that if I were to remove the old hard drive from my system (which has a working, bootable OS on it) and put it into hers it would probably boot. At least I was theorizing that last night when I looked at the clock and saw that I had just spent another four hours fucking with the damn thing. It would make sense though, if the infected boot sector of the hard drive was the first thing to load it would never make it far enough to load the drivers for the other devices, right? I honestly don’t know.

I had exchanged several emails with Flux over at BlackChampagne regarding this problem, and I started thinking about what he said about putting a value on my time. If I were to be paid the wage I make at work for all the time that I spent working on/researching the problems that this machine is having it would be about 200 dollars. This machine is worth way less than that, even in perfect working order. In fact, I just went on ebay and bought a system that has the exact same hardware as her’s: 366mhz processor, 6 gig hard drive, 64megs ram (well hers only has 32, plus I have an extra 128 on the shelf that I will throw in it), with the same integrated sound and video as her system, but it lacks a modem, which I will re-cycle from her dead system. How much does this pinnacle of modern technology cost on today’s market?? 49 dollars (74 after shipping). Had I known that in the first place I might have just gifted the damn thing to her, as she did have a birthday last month, and paying 74 dollars to replace a system that she paid about 17 times that for would have seemed to be a nice gift.

Mind you that 74 dollar system comes in working order with a Windows 98 operating system already installed. No monitor though, god damned cheap bastards. Let that be a lesson to me to always check on ebay before I decide to pour all these hours into trying to fix an old, worn out piece of shit.

This makes me think of a quote that I heard from a guy at the local True Value hardware store. He said, “it doesn’t make any sense to be penny wise if you are dollar foolish.” He said this to me when I was trying to extend the life of my bathroom sink faucet by replacing all of the seals in it. The repair kit for the faucet cost 7 dollars, a cheap new faucet was 12. I bought the repair kit and spent a good hour fixing it, I was damn proud of the five bucks that I had saved by doing it myself. Unfortunately about a month later one of the water inlet pipes on it rusted completely through and, with water spraying all over under my sink, I was forced to pay the 12 dollars for a cheap new faucet. As I was buying it, the guy smiled at me and said, “dollar foolish”. (I have been buying parts at this place for years so, no, he wasn’t just trying to be an asshole, he had told me originally that my faucet should be replaced, that was where that whole quote came from.)

• This guy at the hardware store, he wears a name tag that says “MacGyver” though his name is Dave, has helped me solve a lot of problems since I bought my house. Even after he told me about being “dollar foolish”, he told me that instead of using expensive cleaning compounds to remove calcium deposits from my cooling system I should instead use vinegar, but when I am not at home so the smell won’t drive me out of the house. To cover up the smell after the vinegar has done its work, just a tablespoon of liquid fabric softener. That solution cost less than a buck, while the chemical cleaners that yield the same results cost about ten.

When I was trying to replace a piece of pvc pipe that had broken, but the water would not shut off completely so I could get it dry enough to clean it and put on pvc cement, he suggested that I take the crusts off of a piece or two of bread, then roll the bread (not the crusts) into a ball and stick them in the pipe while I worked on it. A few minutes later the repair was done and I went to check the faucets to make sure I was getting water, I could see the bread dough coming through them in little bits and realized that that was why he said to use bread, so I wouldn’t clog up the line.

When I was trying to replace the hinges on some of my kitchen cabinets (I have enough hinges to replace almost all of them, but the rest still work, and I am lazy) but the screw holes were stripped out, I thought I would have to replace the wood, nope, he told me to put a bunch of toothpicks in the holes with some wood glue. I let it set and was able to replace the hinges without a problem.

Don’t even get me going on what this guy can do with a box of baking soda.

Any time that I have to go to the hardware store now I always look for Dave. He is going to tell me all of the conventional options as well as what he can come up with to save me a buck. As I think about it, that is kind of like why customers buy meat where I work. I will tell them exactly what is the truth, no more, no less. I don’t lie to them to make them buy a more expensive cut, I just tell them the truth. I think that is why a lot of people don’t mind paying a little bit more to buy stuff from people who know their business, as opposed to saving three cents to ask a kid how to hang drywall or cook Chateau Brionne. For that you want someone who knows what they are doing.

If you do need to know how to cook Chateau Brionne just email me. This is possibly the most delicious dish I have ever tasted. Beef is the main ingredient in this dish, but really good beef.

That is all for today.