Apologies to anyone reading this via an RSS feed. I’m in the process of moving a bunch of stuff over from my old xanga site, so your feed reader might get hit with a bunch of stuff from years ago. I am trying to remember to tag them all xanga archive, not that that will help you. I’ll try to remember to start each title with [xa], which should help as well.

My stress level is floating somewhere between just below my eyes and about 4 inches above my head.

It is 11:49 a.m. and I have already had a day. First, the left shift button on my (practically) brand new keyboard is flakey. Expect strange punctuation in this post.

I’ll start with today and then move all the way back to the rain we had about a month ago and try and catch y’all up. All in all, today has not been that bad. I slept later than I should have because my wife has been an absolute wonder in doing what she can to get our 9 year old son and our 6 month old daughter ready before she has to leave for work at 6:40 a.m. We agreed that it is my responsibility to get the son ready in the morning, but she’s taking care of about half the stuff he needs to do every morning.

Well, when I woke up, wife and son were both sick to their stomachs. I’m feeling fine and I had the same leftovers that wife had for dinner and son had a completely different dinner, so it’s not anything we ate. Wife and I agree that son can stay home from school. I had to leave earlier than usual because (knock wood, praise murphy, etc.) we are in the process of buying a house. Needed to meet the realtor and inspector at said house at 9 a.m. and had to drop baby off at daycare by 10 a.m. It’s about a 40 minute drive from new house to daycare, so I’m praying mighty hard that realtor is on time. She was not, but inspector was. Got baby to daycare on time and then called work to let them know that I was staying home because the son was staying home and son begged me to stay with him because he is feeling so crappy.

The boss was not pleased at all. At the moment, I am not working at the restaurant I have worked at for almost six years. So, the new boss doesn’t know me and my work ethic all that well yet. His reaction, I think, is why I am feeling so stressed today. Another big part of it is, I love routine, and today was definitely not routine. Quite frankly, the last five weeks have been anything but routine, but I will get to that.

I have already been written up one since I have been at the new restaurant. That’s only my third write up in six years and it was more a documentation thing than anything else. (I had a couple of people walk a drink tab… I dropped food off at the table next to them, asked them how they were doing since their drinks were almost empty, went back inside for refills for the first table and they had bolted by the time I got back to the table.)

So, that’s my day so far. I need to make the 45 minute trip back to the island to get the girl, and I have to do that before 6. Until then, I’m here with the son and now the wife.

I forgot to mention that part of the story…. I also apologize for my writing style today. I’m just “puking the story out” and not revising it, because frankly I am too mentally exhausted to do that.

So, wife asked me yesterday if I could be at house for inspection. I told her I couldn’t get off work. She couldn’t get out of work today either. It would have been nice to have someone with the inspector, but it’s not the end of the world. Anyway, when I called in, wife had just told me that even though she was really needed at office, she was taking a sick day because she started puking at work. By this time, I am halfway to island and did not bring my work clothes, so I couldn’t go in to work, even if I wanted to. After all the craziness of the day, I really would have loved to go into work just to have something routine.

By the way, not only do I love routine, but I get really out of sorts when plans change and change often.

And, not that I think any one got this impression, but I want to make it absolutely clear that all I am feeling at this very moment is love for my wife. She apologized for having me take the day off work, when it turned out she was going to be at home all day, too. I told her she is silly. I still needed the day off since she is in no shape to take care of the son.

So, that’s my day.

Now, how about that rain we got?

I don’t know if this will be short or not.  Mandatory evacuation for the island was ordered on Thurs. Sept. 11 2008 at around 0930 hours. Up until this point, we were planning on staying. I believe this only the second mandatory evac ever ordered for Galveston. (In Texas, mayors were only given the right to declare mandatory evacs five or so years ago.) Mandatory is not truly mandatory in the sense that cops will throw you in jail or physically force you to leave. Rita was the last time a mandatory was ordered and the island suffered a little bit of damage then. With the two kids, we knew we definitely had to leave if they declared mandatory. I don’t know how much y’all have been following the storm, but it is definitely good that we did leave.

Fri 09/12 at appx 1800 hours we lost power at the place we evacuated to (about 30 miles up the road). Power was not restored for a week (almost to the minute).

Thank goodness my cell phone has internet and thank gooodness i had a car charger.

Wife’s dad decided to stay on island for storm. I won’t even talk about that. Anyway, I believe it was the Monday after power went out that he wanted to go up to Fort Worth to stay with his sister and see if the hotel corporation he works for could use him up there. (At this point in time, I believe he was under the impression that the hotel he worked at wouldn’t need him on the island for about three months.)

I convinced wife and kids to go up to Ft. Worth as well and have a little vacation. Baby had developed a heat rash because of power being out, meaning no a/c. Everyone was ready for a shower, etc. They stayed up there through Saturday, 09/20, or thereabouts. She was originally only going to stay for a day or two, but with the power being out, I convinced her to stay until it came back on.

Because, you see, besides the power being out, things were not very good here. Ice was almost impossible to find. (no fridge means you want to have lots of ice handy). Where we are at right now, is a pretty large town and all traffic lights, etc. were out. So even driving around was an adventure. Grocery stores slowly opened up,  but they didn’t have food. All perishables at grocery stores were tossed. Since a lot of people didn’t stock up (or stock up enough) before hand, non-perishables went really fast. Simply getting deliveries to the store was a logistical nightmare.

i did the FEMA POD thing a day or two after wife went up and… well… I’m not convinced their track record is any better than since Katrina. They gave me 24 packs of Tuna Salad and Cheese nips and four bags of ice. it took about 4 packs of tuna salad to make one sandwich.

I also need to rant for a second. In it’s own way, Katrina messed up galveston pretty well… after all those people got their 2000 dollar credit cards and spent it on stuff like flat screens, FEMA or the government or someone put the screws down on assistance. Rita came through not much longer after Katrina and i never heard of anyone on the island getting any assistance. Granted, we didn’t need nearly as much, but some would have helped. normalcy didn’t return to the island until about a month after rita came through. we didn’t have power in our place for over a week after rita, just as one example. i think wilma affected us a little, too, but i can’t remember how, so not receiving assistance after that was no big deal.

now, with ike (which i’ve taken to referring to as “that little bit of rain we got a while ago”), aid is very slow in coming. so far, for example, the only thing our family has been approved for is temporary shelter, which it is sounding like runs out in four days. granted, i have to update my information with fema, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

A couple of days after the wife returned, we were informed by the management company of our condo that all 72 bottom units were deemed inhabitable and it would take appx. 6 months before we could live there again. so, at this point in time, i was about to technically become homeless and also at this point in time, while not technically unemployed, i wasn’t working. my restaurant is on the island and we weren’t even allowed to enter the island.

The good news is that my parents (who have been my landlord for the last 6 years) do not have to pay for any of the repairs to the condo. It’s all covered by the mandatory flood insurance the management company had.

Fast forward two or three days to Wednesday 09/24. i am informed that the restaurant that i worked at was under 8-10 feet of water. To jump ahead, we are expected to reopen in about two weeks. At that time, though, there was no set date…. Spring Break was a hopeful date. i was sent to work at another restaurant on the island on that day. 09/24 is also my two year wedding anniversary and five year anniversary of “officially” dating. I also found out around this time that we have until Sun 10/05 to get all of our stuff out of the condo. So, i had about 11 days to get all the stuff out.

i worked from appx. 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on wednesday, then went to the condo and loaded up my first pick-up truck load of things that were salvageable. our condo only got about 8 inches of flooding. great news  in the sense that the water didn’t get into the electrical outlets, so i could actually turn power on while i worked. to jump ahead again, when we got all of our stuff out, i journaled about it and said:

As far as personal property goes, we lost about 40% of our belongings. At this moment, I’m pretty frustrated with our mayor. Much of what we lost could have been saved, had we been able to get into our townhouse earlier and started cleaning things up. I don’t know that much about construction, but I think the damage to the townhouses would have been significantly less, too…It was… what… 10 days after the storm before I could even see my place? On the bright side, a majority of the stuff we lost was furniture that was given to us for free over the years. For example, our couch is gone, but it was free and it was way too big for our place anyway. We lost our dressers, too, but again, they were free and less than aesthetically pleasing. Now, we’ll have the opportunity get stuff we like and that will match.

So yeah… that’s where i still stand… i’m beyond feeling just “pretty” frustrated with our mayor.  we definitely would have still lost the couch… dressers would probably have been saved, though, and we could have almost certainly saved closer to 75% instead of just 40%.

Thursday was the same deal. work 8 to 2, go take a pick up truck load go to sleep.

wash, rinse, repeat on friday.

Saturday was the first time i knew my schedule for work. every other day, they would just tell me when i left the night before. my schedule was something bizarre like 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. for saturday and then 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. sunday and i think monday. keep in mind, the island is still under curfew at this time. i’m not allowed to be on the island before 6 a.m. yet, magically, i am supposed to be at work at 6 a.m. and at this point, almost none of the traffic lights are working. so whereever there is a traffic light is now a four way stop. there’s only about 15 of those between getting on the island and getting to work. *sigh*

curfew starts at 8 p.m., at this point in time, by the way. so, i’m obviously going to lose two days of getting things out of the condo.  of course, this all changes around 9 a.m. on saturday. (remember what I said about routine?) they send me over to work at a different restaurant, supposedly for a day, but now it is the entire time.

anyway, all the way up through saturday 10/04, my routine becomes work from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. then load a truck load and come home. on one of those days, the truck blows a tire. while i am a masterful changer of tires, i have never done so in a truck. it is completely different. and, the tire jack is behind the back seat which is, of course, loaded with clothes so it is almost impossible to get out.

the place we evaced to is my brother’s house. when we evaced, he was away for work. he was back for about a week and was gracious enough to sleep on the couch. he is now gone again until appx. 12/17, so while we are “homeless”, it is not so bad.

week of 10/06 - 10/12 was the closest week to “normal” that i had. the only stress things around that time, that i recall, were getting son registered for a new school (we went to the one in the city we live in and they told us we needed to go to a different school not in the city… 45 minutes into the paperwork we were filling out) and that every day i had off, i still needed to run to the island for something. not so stressful, but i had really been looking for a day off where i didn’t have to do anything. (i finally got that two days ago… days off since 09/24 have been busier and more stressful than workdays.)

10/13 wife went back to work… or was supposed to. i’ll spare you the drama of that story. good news she was paid the entire time she was off. bad news is, she works for the state and there are rumors of a massive layoff because of the storm.

10/15 is the day we went and saw the house that we have put the offer on.

10/17 my grandfather passed away

10/18, i think i technically did a “no-call no-show” to work. another write-up offense. didn’t get written up and boss was understanding. i spoke to a girl the day before and she said she would pick up my shift, but then with the news of my grandfather’s passing, never talked about it with the manager before i left.

10/19, all in all, was a pretty darn good day. still had to drive to the island even though it was a day off, but other than that, everything was swell.

10/20 i mentioned above. nice, relaxing day. kid at school. baby in daycare, wife at work. home all alone. oh so nice and quiet! got my new computer sort of up and running. (i’m almost positive the old computer didn’t make it through the storm. it was sitting on the floor. i looked at it right before we left and decided to risk leaving it there, since it would take about 30 minutes to get it all unplugged. water got on the mother board, but doesn’t appear to have gotten to any of the components like the hard drive, video card, etc. so, might be able to rescue most of it). oh. new computer sucks… didn’t realize when i bought it…  got it dirt cheap at fry’s, but it is definitely not as good as old computer. strangely enough, it runs WAY faster running off of an ubuntu live cd than it does running windows vista basic. vista basic will not allow it to connect to the internet. ubuntu live cd will. strange.

10/21 - yesterday. another fine day.

10/22 - today. see above.

and now that it is all written out, stress level is mostly non-existent. was e-mailed the inspection for our house as i was typing this, and it might be a deal-breaker for our lender. but i doubt it. thanks for reading… really needed to get all of this off my chest.

for the two of you (give or take), that I haven’t got a hold of, I’m fine. Fam is fine. I’ve been able to contact over 80% of friends and they are fine. No one knows anything about houses, etc. In fact, y’all probably know more than many of the evacuees.

I’m frustrated about a bunch of stuff that is too boring to mention and won’t solve anything. One thing I do want to bitch about is adobe flash. FFS, if you insist on building your site with flash, can you at least provide an option to view a bare bones HTML site?

I usually complain about things like this for universal access reasons, first. (for example, flash is useful to blind people how?) preference is my next big thing (e.g. Movie times load a lot faster if you are ONLY downloading them and not 18 movie posters and queuing 5 trailers).

Right this moment, my biggest frustration is that my only Internet access is through my phone, which will NOT accept any flash. I don’t mind missing a video or whatever, but not being able to access my work website and know when I should report back really fucking sucks.

Since I dropped the f-bomb I must be getting worked up. Signing off.

Okay, I know I have been away for a long, long time. I have lots to say, which is part of what has kept me away (I don’t know where to start and feel overwhelmed about getting back to blogging).

But, a major reason I can’t write much is that my computer (as much as I love it) feels the need to take a break every hour. After 60 minutes of running, it feels the need to reboot. So, I can’t really sit and work out a thoughtful post until I get that fixed. I have a show opening in a couple of weeks, an almost 3 month old baby, a just turned 9 year old son and a really fantastic wife, so I can’t focus on the computer as much as I would have back in the day.

Instead, I can offer you what I hope I can make part of this blog in the future… my shared items from google reader.

I’m not making it linky… you just have to copy and paste:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15996853835023077878

If you do the rss thing, it has it’s own feed. Sweet. If not, you’ll just have to check often. Writing a note on something I read takes far less time than writing something “really good” for here, so you can imagine what I will do more of.

As I mentioned, I want to incorporate the shared items over here. Of course, getting my computer to stay on for more than an hour at a time takes precedence, so it will be a while before that happens. Thanks and good night.

Here’s something interesting. You can pay 12 bucks for a 30 pack of recordable CDs, or you can pay 10 bucks for 50.
All other things being equal (i.e. both sold at the same store, both record at up to 48x speed, etc.), one might assume that company number 1 is just trying to squeeze a couple extra bucks profit, right?

Nope.

This law was enacted so long ago, I forgot about it. I knew Canada has had similar laws on the books for years, and I knew that similar laws were attempted way back when cassette tapes came out, but ultimately failed.

So, if you buy a CD-R that is marketed explicity for copying music, royalties are paid to… someone. If you buy a CD-R that talks about being used for data instead, there are no royalties being paid.

My understanding is that in Canada you can go ahead and, say, download music to your heart’s content, since your paying the levy on blank media and so the artists are getting their royalties. That’s great for the Canadian citizen and probably used to be great for the artists, but is a little antiquated with the idea of just storing all of your music on a hard drive or on an mp3 player (although they might have levies on those, too. I don’t know.)

If that were the case in America, everything would be all fine and good, too. Too bad that’s not the case. The Recording Industry of America (RIAA) has been suing everyone and their grandmother lately for downloading music. A google search will give you more information on those suits and how well they are working out.

The RIAA’s latest idea is to add a $5 levy to all broadband internet access.

Wired has an excellent article on the subject and covers most of my objections at the end. Here’s another interesting article.

The always awesome freedom-to-tinker has the most neutral analysis of the issue I have seen so far and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has some interesting ideas on how this should be implemented.

Of course, I have some thoughts, too.

The idea of a fee added to my ISP bill at first, left a bad taste in my mouth. Immediately, I started considering all of the edge cases, which aren’t really edge cases. For example, my parents are on broadband and never download music (legitimately or not) at home. I would guess this is the case for most pre-GenXers (to choose an arbitrary line and a bad label for people).

There is no illegitimate downloading going on at my house, either, so I wouldn’t want to pay. And there is a slippery slope argument about who is next in line to put some money on my ISP bill.

*If* this idea comes to fruition, and *if* one can voluntarily choose to pay this, it might be okay. But, for my five bucks, there better be some kind of “store”. All the music that is covered by the five bucks needs to be available and found in one convenient location. No DRM. I’ve paid my money for the music. Since I don’t buy a whole of music any more, 5 bucks is reasonable for no DRM and for keeping the music if I choose to opt-out of the 5 bucks any time in the future.

Some specific thoughts:

From Portfolio:

“Today, it has become purely voluntary to pay for music,” Griffin told Portfolio.com in an exclusive sit-down this week. “If I tell you to go listen to this band, you could pay, or you might not. It’s pretty much up to you. So the music business has become a big tip jar.”

It is only as voluntary as paying for a candy bar at the convenience store. Of course, reading that quote one paragraph after reading how it is a 10 billion (with a b) dollar industry makes one wonder if the tip jar is such a bad thing.

Griffin says that in just the few weeks since Warner began working on this plan, the company has been approached by internet service providers “who want to discharge their risk.”

“But more important than the risk for an I.S.P. is the marketing,” Griffin says, drawing a comparison to Starbucks’ marketing of “fair trade” coffee.

“I.S.P.’s want to distinguish themselves with marketing,” Griffin says. “You can only imagine that an I.S.P. that marketed a ‘fair trade’ network connection would see a marketing advantage.”

I smell something funny. ISPs currently have no risk, as they are considered common carriers. Like phone companies, they can’t be held liable for what happens over their lines. When someone plans a bank heist and calls their cohort, the Feds go after the caller and the callee… not the phone company. While ISPs may be talking to Griffin, it would almost certainly be for exploratory reasons. They haven’t been named in any lawsuits yet (and shouldn’t be). In fact, the 5 bucks a month, if anything, could threaten their common carrier status… If they charged some people and not others, they might be more liable for monitoring their pipes.

If this ever comes to fruition, I’m curious as to what would happen to, say, iTunes, emusic, Amazon mp3, etc. Do they just go out of business? Become the “stores” where you can get this music easily and thus get a chunk of the 5 bucks a month?

There are 22 items in my feed reader. Most are sitting there to be discussed here. I’m sick of looking at ‘em, so here we go:

Greg lets us know about Starbucks closing shop for an evening. Details from WSJ here. Greg says it a bit more grumpily than I might (hadn’t had your coffee yet?), but I mostly agree with him.

The question I’ve been seeing about this was whether or not it was training or a publicity stunt. While it was both, I believe it was more of the latter. Having spent my fair share of time working for national chains, let me tell you it is extremely rare to close your doors for anything. (The restaurant I currently work at, for example, was open the day after our island was “unevacuated” from Hurricane Rita. We had about 1/3 of the product for our menu, but we opened.) It would have been only slighty more challenging, logistically, to have the meetings and keep the stores open.

As I only drink brewed coffee, I can’t tell you if the training has made a difference or not. But, as Greg mentions, with the “new” espresso machines Starbucks has, there can’t really be much that the training did. The “super-automatics” give consistent shots of espresso… not necessarily good shots of espresso, but consistent ones. It’s the one thing that I can think of that Starbucks has done that is McDonald’s-esque.

Nine Inch Nails is fed up with the recording industry.  I’ve heard the new album(s) is pretty good. News reports are that they have made a ton of money this way, too. Add rant about RIAA here, if you want.

Anne hits it on the head: “i’d like to say that LIVING, on a day-to-day basis in a place that is, by and large, a vacation destination is, in fact, NOT a vacation.” I need to do another post on this  pretty soon. The short version: It’s entirely too easy to become jaded to things you see on a daily basis. Sure, *you* might think it is neat to watch a cruise ship come into port. *I* think it means the ship is at least four hours late and I’m gonna have a good ol’ butt-kickin’ at work.

Alas, poor Netscape.

My birthday is coming, you know…  I also never want to hear any more complaints about the amount of music I own.

Wal-mart no longer selling Linux in stores (still selling online, though).  Non-story, really. The big story is that they ever sold it at all. As to whether or not 2008 is the year of Linux on the Desktop is a post for another time. (Short version: It’s not, but it’s the wrong question to be asking anyway.)

Time to get ready for work.

My “new” computer is now up and running. It is, as big bro put it, mostly a Frankenstein machine… cobbled together from bits and pieces of old computers.

New pieces include an Intel dual core running at 2.3 ghz, 1 gig ram, 160 gig SATA hard drive.  Also, an NVidia Video card with 128 mb and a DVI output for the flatscreen I’ve had since last year which wasn’t being used to it’s fullest potential.

Quite frankly, this blows every other computer I have used (not just owned, but used) out of the water. I’m looking forward to Ubuntu finishing it’s update, so I can see if I can do video editing for the theatre on this, or if I will have to suck it up and put Win XP on this as well.

See here and here.

If one is considering voting in any of the primaries that occur today and they are planning on voting Democratic, I think this would be enough of a reason to vote for Obama.

In an effort to post more often, one of the things I hope to unveil “real soon now” are quickie posts, or qk for short. Each will start with qk to make it easier for y’all to filter.

Part of why I don’t write more often is that I am not generally satisfied with a one or two sentence post. I generally want to expand and expound until the issue is beaten into the ground. Thinking a post all the way through and composing it takes a lot more time than I usually have.

qks will be things I run across that don’t need a lot of extra insight from me.

Once I get post via e-mail working (haven’t worked on it since whenever I mentioned it last), qks will become much more regular.

This qk will not be so quick. A lot of the things mentioned have been sitting in my feed reader for a while and I want to get them all cleaned out.

1. Why am I only beginning to realize how wonderful Wikipedia is? I could write a pretty detailed post about that, so I’ll quit now, while I’m ahead.

2. Something I need to add to the baby registry: Spongebob Squarepants rectal thermometer! Hey Spongebob! That’s no pineapple under the sea, you’re livin’ in!

3.  I’m sorry, this is just not possible. Give me a white shirt and a 15 minute drive (preferably to an interview) and I will prove it. (If I eventually move all of my archives here, I highly recommend “the Zabasome” to help explain.)

4.  A WPM Speedometer. This would be awesome. If I had a deskjob, I would get one immediately. If I had the slightest clue about programming, I would hack together a driver to make it run on Linux I’m sure someone will. This would be too much fun. And, while we’re at it, I would hack at the Tachometer on the right and make that work as well. I don’t know what for (maybe number of times you hit backspace), but for something.

And that’s it for now.

Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has an excellent article on an issue many Americans who want high-speed internet are facing. He also has a follow-up with letters from both AT&T and Comcast and plans to tell us what he decided to do, which I will link to later, when it is posted.

Oddly enough, I am in almost the exact same boat as Dwight. The mrs. and I started as high-speed internet customers with Roadrunner. When Comcast took control in the greater Houston area, there were no major changes to our service… at first. In fact, the change has been almost completely unnoticeable. (I would bet that Mrs. Z hasn’t noticed any changes at all.)

Within a month after changing, our cable went out for a while. No significant amount of time, but enough that it was noticeable and something I hadn’t recalled happening with Time Warner. In the 3 or so years that we had Time Warner, I recall one or two cable outages and each time, it was because of something significant (i.e. very big storm). When it occurred with Comcast, there was no good reason. It just went out.

Anyway, I thought nothing more of it, until I went to Comcast to exchange one DVR and return another. (We get both our cable and internet through Comcast and previously through Time Warner). I had been in the Time Warner office several times before and was always beyond impressed with the level of customer service I received. Even if I had not gone in with the diminished expectations of having to deal with someone in the cable industry, I got amazing service. Not so with Comcast. The lady who was working there actually looked like someone had pissed in her Wheaties and she had just taken a(nother) bite.

Fast forward a couple of weeks to when I am ready to use BitTorrent for a download of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. I mention what I was downloading not to show how uber-geeky I am (since, really, Ubuntu isn’t geeky at all anymore… In fact, I think it is way newbie-friendly), but to show that I was using BitTorrent for a perfectly legitimate (and legal) reason.

Within minutes of firing up BitTorrent, MY WHOLE NETWORK became practically useless. The laptop on wi-fi was at about 4 kB/s. I disabled wi-fi, plugged in and still was around 4. I tried the desktop computer and it was no better. Even my phone was faster using AT&Ts EDGE network than it was using the wi-fi in the house.

It’s possible that Comcast is just sending reset packets to BitTorrent and the rest of my connection problems were unrelated, but it seems unlikely. My guess is Comcast was so busy trying to determine what packets were BitTorrent and what weren’t that it degraded all of my service.

15 hours later, my network still wasn’t in good shape. A straight download using my web browser was still horrifically slow. I went ahead and used wget to download as it always seems to zip along much faster. Not this time. It took almost exactly 24 hours and the connection was dropped 8 times!

All said, my network was almost completely useless for 72 hours. I’ll reserve judgement on whether or not this was all BitTorrent related until the next time I run BT, but I certainly don’t like the way it looks.

---

Which brings us to the links and the problem I face. RoadRunner was great. (It was actually Earthlink using RoadRunner’s pipe, which might be why). Up until last week and the issues mentioned above, Comcast was noticeably not as good but not significantly worse that it would even be worth considering changing.

Unfortunately, my options right now are Comcast, who will essentially turn my service off for a couple of days, or AT&T who will give all my info to any three letter acronym they choose. (They are also DSL, which I have never been a fan of. We won’t even talk about the horror of unsuccessfully attempting to install DSL at madre’s place.)

Some quick comments on both of Dwight’s blogs:

Navyduck in comments on blog 1:

“Verizon is supposed to be putting FIOS into the houses in Pearland”

FIOS is what I really want. I fully expect it to be available in my area around the same time that quantum computers are released.

Big Kahuna in comments on Blog 1:

While you may look at the NSA and FISA and see someone’s rights being trampled (your “moral” choice), I see my rights being threatened by those who would plot terrorism against this country. My “moral” choice would be to protect the lives of Americans by thwarting terrorism. I applaud AT&T for assisting with this, not decry them as immoral.

Other than people in the White House, I didn’t realize people actually talked (much less, thought) this way. FISA was ignored, for one thing. The fourth amendment, which is clearly a right, was broken by AT&T and NSA. Plotting terrorism, I suppose, threatens rights. But, I’ll go with the broken right over the threatened right, first. If FISA had been followed, both “rights” would have been protected. A rant for another day.

Comment from Steve C in blog 1:

Check out his link. I love the picture. (Boing Boing is a pretty good website, as well.)

From AT&T in Blog 2:

On the first one, AT&T does not comment on matters of national security

Uh-huh. I can’t read that as anything other than, “Yep, we did it. We’ll do it again, if we can get away with it.”

On the second, we have said categorically that we do not intend to be an enforcement agent or a policeman for content transported on our network

AT&T attempting to filter copyright traffic isn’t a major concern to me yet. I think it was just some corporate guy saying something that made no sense because he didn’t really understand what he was talking about.

From Comcast in blog 2:

We are in the process of evolving our network from broadband to wideband with the deployment of DOCSIS 3.0

This would be cool. I’ll wait for that egg to hatch, before I count it as a good Comcast thing, though.

On the network management questions, Comcast does not, has not and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer to peer services such as BitTorrent.

Sending reset packets doesn’t block BitTorrent but does make it almost as useless as outright blocking it.

Our goal is to provide all of our high-speed Internet customers with the best experience we possibly can.  To meet that goal, we engage in reasonable network management and use several technologies that, when necessary, enable us to delay some anonymous peer to peer bulk traffic during periods when heavy anonymous peer to peer usage is causing congestion on the Internet.

I fail to see how having speeds that are 10% of the dial-up connection (for 72 hours, anyway) I had TEN years ago is a “best experience”. When I first saw cable internet advertised, they were claiming speeds of 100 times faster than dial-up. Let all the BT through and I’m sure we would still be at 4x dial-up speed, at least. I would consider that, while less than satisfactory, a much better “best experience” than 10% of dial-up speed.

I wonder who defines reasonable in reasonable network management. I’m sure it is the same person who defines anonymous in anonymous p2p. Also, how is p2p defined? Speaking of which, how can my BT download cause such significant congestion in under 10 minutes?

I’m not liking Comcast’s answer at all.

Sadly, AT&T doesn’t look any better. I’m sure inertia will keep us with Comcast in the short-term. And, maybe if I eat all my veggies at every meal, FIOS will appear “real soon now”.

As of a couple of days ago, disk encryption just ain’t what it used to be. A huge vulnerability in the way almost all full disk encryption is performed was just announced over at freedom to tinker. Of course, there is discussion over on Slashdot.

As the title says, many of you will probably consider this more boring than me talking about the theatre. This vulnerability has the potential to affect all of us, though, which is one of the reasons I mention it.

Quick Summary:
You have a disk (or folder, or even just one file) with encrypted data. You feel secure that it will take a lot of effort to unencrypt the data without your password. Someone grabs your laptop (which is in sleep mode) and “does some magic” (you can read the paper if you really want the details) and gets your password. They are able to get the password easily because it is stored in memory which most people (incl. computer types) have assumed that memory goes “kaput” immediately on losing power or reboot. This last point is such common knowledge that almost every company that makes encryption software has based their software on that fact. (That’s one of the reasons the password is in memory.)

Big deal, right? You don’t encrypt any files, folders or drives, so it won’t affect you. The problem is, this attack can potentially be used against websites where your information is in a database of some sort (think Amazon, etc.) Potentially is the key word, there. With physical access to the computer being necessary, there are easier ways to break in to a server. (Easier… not necessarily easy.)

This attack will mostly be used against laptops. A salesman leaves their laptop while they use the restroom or some such.

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 Here are the (more) interesting parts… stuff, oddly, not mentioned any where that I have looked yet.

The reason that the password is kept in memory is convenience, mostly. The paper mentions “on-the-fly” encryption a few times. By keeping the password in memory, you don’t have to wait for the file, folder or disk to decrypt every time it is read… or every time it is written to. You also don’t have to enter your password every, say, 5 minutes, which could be really annoying if it is actually a passphrase with multiple numbers, uppercase characters, symbols, etc. If you put your computer to sleep or lock your computer, you would only have to enter your computer’s password when you were ready to work again.

My rose colored glasses say that sacrificing some of that convenience would allow the vulnerability to close significantly.

I would also hope that moving the password to a thumb drive and only being allowed to see the encryted stff when the thumb drive is plugged in would be a workable solution.

The paper concludes that any solution to the problem might not be so easy, though. (Both solutions would require significant rewriting of the programs, I’m sure. The second solution would also require the aforementioned salesman to take the thumb drive out of the computer when he went to the restroom. He’s more likely to do that than turn the computer completely off, but still not very likely to do it.)

I also wonder if anyone has known about this vulnerability before. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NSA already knew about it, which would be a bummer, in the sense that the guys from Freedom to Tinker have done a lot of great research in the past (lots of DRM and DMCA stuff) and if the NSA already knew about it, that’s time they could have used working on other research.

It would also be interesting if any “black-hat hackers” have already known about this and have already used it. At least now, “we” are on even footing and can figure a way to protect against it.

Finally, the basic version of BitLocker, which is part of Vista, automatically loads the password before anyone even logs in to the computer. That significantly extends the amount of time someone would have to get the information off of the computer.

My nose is above water, so I can breathe again. Both of my shows open Friday. At my “home” theatre, we have preview tomorrow night (well, tonight now…), which is our final dress rehearsal, but is open to the public. We don’t advertise it, but people are allowed to come in and see it for free.

One of the guys I have worked with has said, “the show is never done. You’re always working on it.” Sadly, that’s true. It’s rougher for me than most light designers because I typically run the lights for the shows at my home theatre as well as design the lights. That means there’s no break point. No natural place where I can say, “My work is done. Have a good run.”

For the most part, once the run starts, I consciously change my perspective from light design to “running crew”. Of course, if I see a mistake one night, I then see it every night and it will always bother me so I can’t fully change my perspective, but I can enjoy the run of the show much more than thinking about where I want to tweak stuff.

I essentially have the okay to quit working on the light design for the show at my home theatre. With this show, more than any I’ve worked on, it’s hard to let go. There are three more “big” things I definitely want to do before I completely switch roles. There are also two “looks” I want to completely change as well, and then I can let go of the show. That’s about 8 more hours of work, which is about 4 more hours than I have before we open. Some will get done. Some might not get done until after open. Some might not get done at all.

Fortunately, the other show was dead easy. Before I forget, the requisite pics:

As you can see from the pic on the right, there’s not a lot going on. The set never changes. Only two actors to light. Most of the action is at the card table. (Roughly where the two chairs are.) I have some final bits and pieces to put together for that, but nothing that should take too long. Unless, of course, I don’t want to give up on it. But, I’m happy enough with it that I can walk away. And, I won’t be running the lights, so the one cue that really bothers me won’t be something that will keep me awake at night.

Well, it’s way past my bedtime… esp. if I want to get any of those things done at the theatre(s) tomorrow.

I have had a blissful six week “vacation” from theatre work. It’s funny that, having done theatre for over two years now, I don’t even consider the one day I did a light hang and another day of doing sound work as “working” at the theatre… that still counts as part of the vacation time.

One of my light design buddies made an interesting comment during the aforementioned light hang. “Every theatre wants to open either right before Thanksgiving or right after,” which is why I have had a nice long break, and will now be going full throttle again.

The theatre I primarily work at opened two weeks before Thanksgiving and another theatre I work at opened the week after. Most theatres around here typically run four to five weeks per show. With Christmas and New Year’s, both of these theatres were pretty quiet until right about…

now.

I find myself in the same boat as the last time both of these places had shows… both are opening up very close to each other (this time, actually, on the same day) and both have asked me to do the light design.

I will probably end up running the lights for the first theatre as well, although the theatre and I are trying to find someone else to do it.

Anyway, I’m back at that annoying spot in the process where I’m feeling overwhelmed by it all. I went and watched rehearsal at theatre 1 today. We only made it about 40% of the way through the show. I have my dream light design already done for that. Paring that dream design down to reality is the overwhelming part. What do I cut? What is really needed for the show? What will really give the show some punch? What will get lost in the mix? What can I do with the instruments I have?

And so on and so forth.

I was going somewhere with that at one time. Typical caveats are in place… I won’t have a bunch of time to write until mid Feb for sure and more likely until mid March.

Okay, the treat for reading a less than stellar post:

That’s the pre-show look for a show I forgot I even did. (Rattling around in the back of my mind is the idea of writing a Curriculum Vitae for my theatre work. It won’t be helpful in the near future, as my gigs come mostly from word-of-mouth and reputation, but it is embarrassing to, say, forget you did a show…) The show only ran a week (special engagement) and it wasn’t a traditional light design gig which is my excuse.

As I said, I might not be able to write much for a while… pics next time I write may be of the baby… We’re getting that close!

Computer repairs are on-going.

Sadly, the three computers I am working with are all incompatible with each other. Yes, I can move the power supplies or the optical drives or things like that. The processors and memory, though, are all incompatible from one machine to the next. For the time being, I’ll be using the computer madre loaned me. I’m going to take one more crack at getting the 3 ghz running, but prospects are dim.

I’m frustrated because I don’t want to be wasteful. I don’t want to just throw away all of the parts that are still useful and useable. I can’t consolidate them all into one computer, or even consolidate them at all. So, I’m stuck with one fully working machine. One machine that technically works but is not really worth keeping up and running and one that may or may not ever boot up again.

The windows “rant” that was promised ties in to all of this.

Two of the three computers had Windows ME on them. The third had Win XP. Both of the computers that had Win ME on them had the hard drives destroyed. Thus, no more Win Me. So what if I want to have Win XP or Vista on the computer that is working? I should qualify for upgrade pricing. Having never tried to install Windows, I don’t know if the upgrade CDs will install without verifying a version of Windows on the computer. If it doesn’t, no problem. Windows is back on the computer. If it does, it won’t find any version of Windows and I’m out of luck.

Upgrade price for Win XP is 100 bucks (according to the ms website). Non-upgrade price is 200 bucks. I am sitting here looking at three computers, all of which have (or had) Windows on them. It would really bother me to shell out twice as much money for Win XP when I should easily qualify for an upgrade price.

Why not just take the hard drive that still has Windows on it and put it in the computer I am using? According to Microsoft:

If you overhaul your computer by replacing a substantial number of hardware components, it may appear to be a different PC. You may have to reactivate Windows XP. If this should occur, you can call the telephone number displayed on the activation screen to reactivate the software.

So, I could probably get XP up and running. But, I would have to jump through hoops, at the very least.

dislaimer:

I am an extremely satisfied user of Linux. I am not a zealot. If you prefer Windows, that’s cool. Linux does pretty much everything I want and has given me a much more satisfying computer experience than Windows.

/disclaimer

It is very frustrating that all of this work would have to go into getting Windows back on this computer. I should be able to plug the other hard drive in and everything should work with few problems.

(Windows is not necessary on my desktop computer but would be useful on some occasions.)

Getting Linux on this computer was a simple matter of putting in a CD and pressing enter about 7 times, typing a user name and typing a password twice. An hour later, the computer was up and running.

Full circle: Since it is most likely that the 3 ghz won’t be working again, I’ll probably end up getting a new computer. Fry’s seems to have a pretty good deal right now and the computer includes Vista Home Premium. (Upgrade price for that is 160. Couldn’t find a non-upgrade price, but let’s assume that it is 100 bucks more.) The computer at Fry’s is only 330 bucks (1.6 ghz, 1 gig memory, 120 gig hard drive, DVD-RW). Not that I want Vista, but that’s an awfully steep discount. Why, theoretically, pay 200 bucks to get XP back on a computer?

And, of course, if I get the new computer, guess what? None of the processors or memory I have can be used in potential computer #4.

What a month.

 

On December 15, I created a bunch of DVDs for the main theatre I work at. Unfortunately, the only way I know how to create those DVDs is using WinXP. The camera that the data is stored on saves in a propietary format and I haven’t found a way to open the files in Linux. Granted, I haven’t done a ton of research on it, either.

 

When those DVDs were written, I turned off the computer. I didn’t realize that I was turning the computer off for so long. Something, alas is wrong with that computer. At first, I thought it was the CMOS battery. I had previous problems with the computer keeping correct track of the date, etc. Sadly, changing the battery seemed to have no noticeable effect. Long story short, nothing seems to have worked to raise the computer from the dead. I believe it is either a motherboard or processor issue. I haven’t decided on whether to fix the computer or not.

 

On one hand, it is certainly faster than the computer I am using currently. 3.0 gig processor vs. 1.4. 512 mb vs 128 (plus another stick I found that I can add to that computer… No, the memory for the two computers is not compatible…)

 

On the other hand, I think it will cost about the same to just buy a new (bare bones) computer and add pieces from the old computer into that one.

 

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So, the primary computer went down. No prob. We have a laptop. Something happened to the laptop. The screen is in less than stellar shape. *sigh*Right around this time, Google updated their sharing item for Google Reader. They have a pretty nice widget for it that allows you to put it on your blog. (Aside: While they have glossed over it, the implementation of the new way of sharing was a big fiasco.) (Aside 2: The first link is set to open in the same window as this post. The second is set to open in a new window. If anyone has any preference as to which way I code the links, please let me know. I will probably go with the latter, unless there are major objections.)You may be thinking that adding the greader widget is what broke my old blog. You would be right and wrong. I installed the widget and it was missing one obvious and majorly important feature. When you share an item with Google Reader, you can not add a comment saying why you are sharing the story! WTF?The whole idea of adding the widget was to add more content to the site, so y’all would have at least a little more contact from me than has been happening in general for the past couple of years. It didn’t seem to make much sense to share stories and not give a little bit of a comment from me on them.Google reader does have an option to e-mail items, though. My old blog software also had an ability to post e-mailed items. Enabling that feature is what broke my blog. (Technically, enabling incorrectly and attempting to fix it is what really broke the blog.)

 

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As you can see, the blog is back up with (I hope) a much easier address to remember and a ton of new features (though I am once again having issues with the e-mail function. heh.). More on that in a moment, though.Loving mother “lent” me her old computer (the one mentioned above with 1.4 processor, etc.) I remember when G specced this computer out and it was blindingly fast for it’s day. To give you an idea how old it is, when I got it up and running at my place, the first thing I saw was a splash screen for WinMe!oh.dear.I think she lent it to me last Thursday. I got it up and running and everything was a-okay. Then, when I booted it up Friday, it didn’t want to play nice at all. The only piece of software I installed on it was a firewall. Nonetheless, after SITTING IDLE for two hours, I got something I haven’t seen since… well, since I ran WinMe about 4 years ago. The BSOD! The dreaded Blue Screen of Death.On top of that, I got a message that I haven’t seen ever. I’ve heard about it, though… a “SMART” screen. Keep in mind, loving mother gave me the computer on the condition that I give her all of the old data from it. In hindsight, I probably should have done that as soon as I hooked it up. Of course, I didn’t get the computer set up until about 1 a.m. and I just wanted to make sure everything worked correctly. It didn’t seem like such a big deal to test out the internet functionality first.

 

The salt in the wound is that I was about to start moving her data when I saw that BSOD and then the smart screen. I think there is a happy ending to this story, but we won’t know for a while…

 

I have, of course, attempted to “recover” the data in a non-destructive way, in case I was wrong… Sadly, the tools I was using wouldn’t allow me to work on the hard drive unless Linux could mount it. Linux wouldn’t mount it.

 

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If you are following along, that leaves me with three computers in various states of disrepair. This brings us to today and the fourth computer which actually worked just handily, thank you very much. Except it is REALLY FRICKIN’ SLOW! It’s a 900 mhz processor with 128 ram. Poop!I’ll tell you what, though, it’s (second) hard drive works just fine in the computer mom loaned me. Strangely enough, that second hard drive was the one I purchased to save the 900 mhz computer when WinMe (that dreaded thing again) decided to rear it’s buggy head and destroy the first hard drive in there.Life is a circle. Or something.

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Which brings us back to blogging. I am sure you can understand that during these travails, it sure would have been nice to blog about it. Fixing computers took precedence over fixing my website, alas.So, asoc is dead. Long live asoc. Before I really tore apart the old blog, I did back up the database and all of the pieces. In theory, I should be able to move those posts over here. Here is to hoping… Otherwise… well, everyone hates to lose a journal or diary but it happens sometimes.The old blog was running on something called b2evolution. I’m going to go out on a limb and say b2evolution came from the same original code as what the blog is running on now… WordPress (link is in the lower right corner. No need to relink here…)

 

With less than 24 hours of usage, I can already tell I like WordPress about 1000 times better. Installation took maybe 10% of the time. To be fair, some of the installation time for b2e was learning how to set up MySQL and other components that wp also needed. Still, the wp install was light-years faster.

 

WP, for me anyway, seems a lot better in many ways. While you are down in the lower right corner looking at the WP link, why don’t you go ahead and click the “Register” link, too? Currently, anyone can register themselves. Long, long time readers will remember that I was going to set up protected posts. Doing all the registering for people, however, made it a non-starter. That might have been an option I chose during the b2e install, but it sure doesn’t seem like it.

 

Speaking of installs, wp seems to have a very good upgrade path. The upgrade info I read for every version of b2e pretty much said you had to start from scratch and then re-import everything. No, thank you. Also, as I was trying to install the “latest and greatest” b2e, it kept choking on the database. Brand new, fresh database for it to work with, and it simply wouldn’t resolve. Going to the forums pretty much had you talking to one guy. At least, it seemed like only one guy always answered everything.

 

WordPress will do the install for you for free, if you want, which is awesome, although something I didn’t need or use.

 

You see the horizontal lines in this post? Believe it or not, that was not an option in b2e. I eventually got it set up to do that, but I was given very stern finger shakes from the documentation saying it was a bad idea to do so!

 

WP also asked, as one of the first steps of install if I wanted my blog to be searchable by google, etc. No more clumsy hacks on my part to tell the robots “no index, no follow”. Schweet.

 

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That’s enough for now. Next time, maybe, I big ol’ “rant” on upgrading Windows computers. Maybe.

 

omg! im so 1337! i got the first post!

This new footprints feature bothers me, in a head-in-the-sand sort of way.

As most of you know, I have essentially moved to another pasture for my blogging. (If you didn’t know, e-mail me. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly invited to the new digs.)

Most of the stuff in footprints, I can figure out. For example, someone from Cali today clicked on a link to send me an e-mail. (The e-mail has mysteriously not shown up, but that is a different story.) Almost all of the other entries are from someone in Cali and someone in D.C. checking out my site. Oh, and someone reading me through RSS. I’m a-okay with all of that.

The person in Maryland who tried to sign in as me? That’s a little disconcerting. And, very close to when footprints came out, the googlebot came around and crawled some part of the page. The googlebot is the straw that broke the camel’s back, as far as me leaving. It used to be that I could add some code to my page to make sure search engines didn’t crawl here… Some changes happened a while ago which made it “non-trivial” to insert that code again. Since I was already considering leaving, it wasn’t the end of the world that I couldn’t get the code to work anymore… It was just time to finish packing the bags.

Well, I did pack my bags, but I never “moved out of the house”, as it were.

Especially now that I have seen the googlebot re-emerge, it’s time to take everything down. *sigh*

So, sometime over the coming weeks, I have to either make every entry private or delete it. That’s going to take some time… Especially since I’m sure I’ll end up reading some of them.

Anyway, I’m talking about nothing here, so feel free to ignore. But, if you see things changing around here, you’ll know why.

peace.

I guess you could say I have an odd way of donating stuff. Perhaps, it is because I don’t really have a lot of money. Perhaps it is because I realize anyone can just give money (even if it’s just a bit of change).More likely, I think it is because merely giving money is too abstract for me. After all, you give the money and you go on about your way…Maybe you think about where the money went, but do you really know what it was used for? Are you really sure it was used for good?

So, when I give of myself in a “selfless” way, I like it to be something a little more concrete. For example, in college, I was in Alpha Phi Omega- a resume builder service fraternity. Yeah, it looked great on the resume. But, what really kept me doing it was seeing how it positively affected specific people. For example, one of my favorite recurring service gigs was to go to Tanager Place and play with kids who had some rough times.

Another time, I raked some leaves for an elderly lady. Whoop-de-do. An hour out of my life. But, it was huge to her… Not only because she couldn’t do it, but also because she had someone to talk to for an hour (okay, two… she wouldn’t let me leave when I was done).

Of course, there is nothing wrong with giving money… I just like to see a bit more of an impact from what I do.

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Now, I give blood. In one sense, this is more abstract. On the other hand, every time I give, I go with madre, who either talks about the time her blood was used directly for my grandma or how often my grandpa used to give before he died, which makes it more concrete.

Speaking of madre, she’s doing something else that is really cool. She’s donating her hair to kids who need it.

Madre was supposed to have her hair cut for the first time last Friday. Sadly, her hair wasn’t quite long enough, so she has to wait a few more weeks. I had dinner with her the night before she was supposed to cut her hair and she was understandbly concerned that she would look like a geek with a super short hair cut.

Now, since my hair isn’t(and never will be) long enough to give, I did the next best thing… I shaved all of mine off, so she wouldn’t be the only geeky looking one in the family. Now, since I keep my hair pretty short to begin with, that’s not such a big deal. So, I cut my goatee off, too. All I had left on my face were my eyebrows and eyelashes.

***

Having no goatee may not seem like a big deal. But, keep in mind, I haven’t seen my chin in six years, so it’s pretty odd, to me. And, it’s really all I could do. I know I actually didn’t do much, but it’s made a difference. After my girl heard what I did and heard why, she donated her hair. At least two other friends have considered doing it, after hearing my story. I work with well over 40 other people who were shocked (shocked, I say!) to see my chin and so they are at least aware of the program, now, so maybe others will do it, too.

I look a lot different now. It’s hard to get used to (it’s taking WAY too long for that goatee to grow back!). But, then, I think about it, and these poor kids don’t have a choice about how their hair looks. I remember when I started going bald at 21 and how hard that was for me to deal with… I can’t imagine how hard it is for a little girl of 6 or 7 years old to have no hair. So, every time I think about how I would love to have my facial hair back, I think of how I at least have that option.

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My good deed for the day is done. Whatever you do, I suggest doing something good somewhere down the road. Thanks for reading.

Oh, you want pictures, don’t you? If you read this far, you deserve ‘em:

Lots of things to talk about…

Gentoo is hosed. Ubuntu is up, instead. I was having compiling issues with Gentoo (couldn’t get “X” to work properly… X is what gives you a “Windows” environment [a.k.a. GUI - Graphical User Interface]). Ubuntu is simply awesome. I’ve only had it running for a couple of days, but I can’t imagine using a different OS. It’s a one-CD install and it’s free, free, FREE! There is also a liveCD, if you just want to look at it in Windows and see what is going on. I’m getting used to Gnome (vs. KDE) and think I may be enjoying it more… Regardless,
Ubuntu is is super cool.

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I forgot that Firewater.tv is streaming the album listed below. If you have a broadband connection, why don’t you check out some music? Tracks 2, 5, 7/8 (must listen to together) and 13 are esp. nice.

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My old computer still works, btw. I haven’t figured out what I am going to do with it. The first thing to do, of course, is to move the data from the old box to the new box… There’s quite a bit there that I need to go after. For example, it would be REALLY nice to have the 12 or so gigs of music on the new box to listen to whenever I want to. After that, I’ll probably move one of the two hard drives from the old box into the new box. Then, as my dear friend Emylou put it, I might “Office Space” it. More likely, I’ll either turn it into a server for what is fast becoming a “home network” (girlfriend got a new computer, too). The other option is to let it collect dust until girlfriend’s kid is old enough to responsibly use a computer… Then, throw in a new video card (for no more than 50 bucks) and let him have a machine.

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Almost done talking about computers… Honest. Given the change to a new box, I temporarily forwarded all of my e-mail to my gmail account. I think I am going to get rid of the “temporary” part of that… gmail is just the bee’s knees. I still have invites if anyone wants to try it out.

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I didn’t mention that I went to San Antonio, did I? My anniversary with the girl was in September, so we went. That’s where the current background pic is from… the riverwalk in San An-tone. Better version of the pic available here. Why am I just talking about this now? I finally decided to download all the pics off of my digicam today. San An-Tone was fun. Snow in Galveston, I am still not sure about.

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Speaking of the girl, I’m pretty sure she totalled her car two days ago. Ugh. On the bright side, her son is adorable. He has taken to telling one of my favorite jokes over and over. “Hey, Todd, have you heard about the new pirate movie? It’s rated Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” Of course, he doesn’t say it quite perfect, which just makes it more adorable.

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I made it back to 01/01 on Xanga stuff… I ain’t going back any further. If there is something I should really know that happened in 2004, you’ll have to shoot me an email or leave me a comment. Thank you, good night!

Quickie, then I have to get ready for work.

Gentoo is essentially up and running. GRUB works… I can turn on either Windows or Gentoo when the computer starts. The Windows side is working fine (with the exception that I have to be an Admin to access the internet! Talk about a security issue…) Gentoo has a little bit of work yet, but it’s in better shape than I would have expected… The only thing that looks bad about it right now is that I have to fix my fstab file. (Go ahead, sean, you can snicker at that…).

Today is Monday for me. I have, I’m guessing five days averaging 9 or so hours each day coming up. Then, one day off. Then, do it all again, and a week “off” to help Oich move from Chicago to Houston.

So, see y’all soon… or see you in February. One of the two.