o/` Radiohead – Fake Plastic Trees o/`

Second entry of the day, yay.

So I said I was going to play with my bios this morning right? Ugh…

Fun With My BIOS

Hehe

I thought it would be fun to make a “splash” screen when my computer starts up, and my Asus motherboard came with all the software needed to acomplish this task, so I boot into windows and install the software.

The software isn’t the prettiest I have ever seen, it’s actually rather sad looking, but for some reason I decide to trust it, and I discover this neat little “backup your bios” tool included! Kickass.. I backup into a file on my harddrive (and onto a floppy disk just in case I need it in that format). Mistake number 1? Trusting this software.

I had a splash page that I prepared in The Gimp while still in linux. I go through the easy “do this then hit next” wizard, which includes pointing to the bios config file that I saved, and at the end of it they say to reboot the computer so things will work. I reboot.

The splash screen works! YAY!

I get an error about a missing “FastTrack Controller” … now I had had this error before, and Myk fixed it somehow while helping me out with my system. It’s not a terrible error, it still boots, but it’s silly to have an error like that. So I boot into windows.

“Wizard has detected new hardware, run hardware installation wizard now?” … WTH? I thought at first it was redetecting my normal Nic card, because windows sometimes likes to install drivers mulitple times (for fun?) so I cancel that and assume it’s just a silly windows thing. I go online to search for that FastTrack Controller error, and the first hit is for the P4S8X (my motherboard) help messageboard … apparently by default the ATA/Raid controller is Enabled, stupid? Yes. I restart so I can disable this in the bios… but why was it all of a sudden enabled? I reboot, go into the bios, change that back to Disabled, and go back to windows.

“Wizard has decected new hardware…” This is when it dawns on me that there is obviously something else wrong… why was something re-enabled that I had disabled? What is this driver that Windows wants to install? The driver for the SiS nic card.. my onboard nic card that I had disabled. Reboot.

Go into the bios, check my settings, and sure enough, EVERYTHING is set back to the defaults!!! That bios config backup tool *didnt work* So I fix everything in the bios (i hope!) and putter back off to linux.

Now this adventure would not have been so bad if it didn’t take half the morning %) Ugh! So much wasted time… I wasn’t even about to mess with the sounds on startup, it would be cheesy anyway, and probably get annoying %)

*looks at the time* Hrm, I suppose there is something I can work on for the rest of the day, I’ll think of something, if all else fails I can always look for quotes to add to my random quote file on my website *wanders off*

o/` A Perfect Circle – 3 Libras o/`

I was in #linux on minute.clockbot.net yesterday helping out an acquaintance with a Perl script he’s working on. It was really cool, he can check his mail (hosted in linux) from a web browser, the page looked really nice too, but he was having trouble viewing each email. You could see the inbox, the subject, sender, date… but when you clicked on the mail to read it you got an error. Now my knowledge of mailservers is severely lacking, Myk controls everything to do with our mailserver and I only weakly grasp the workings behind it all, but I said I’d take a look at the perl just in case I could be of help. On first glance I was lost! I understood what the script was doing, but without more knowledge about mail I had to admit I was really at a loss to what it was. I was able to tell him that it was not the perl script however… the error he recieved on the page when he tried to view the inbox was nothing like the error that the perl should have given if that was the problem. In the end he found out it was a simple mail problem, I was happy to point him in the right direction tho, and it made me feel better about my Perl abilities %)

Ah, last night Myk got printing all set up on my computer %) It’s so nice, color even! I have to say one of the biggest problems with linux is the difficulty in printing, that bothers me, but eventually (with a weekend of work!) we finally have our network printer printing perfectly, it’s so nice! And the color quality is actually better than when we were printing from linux to win2k, I am so happy… not that we print a lot, or care too much about the ‘quality’ when we do print, but it’s nice to have the ability and reliability there %)

We watched “The Sum Of All Fears” last night, it wasn’t bad, ‘cept for the whole Ben Affleck saving the world from nuclear disaster thing… oh, that was the whole movie? Dammit!!! It really wasn’t that bad, pretty much what I expected, but nothing award winning in my books *shrugs* After watching that I went to read for a while. I have about two chapters left in Book 9 of the Wheel Of Time, I will probably finish it tonite %) I went to bed rather early, around 10, since Myk wants to get on a “better sleep schedule” and keep a “better diet” He’s so cute %) He really looks fine, I mean neither of us are in top physical condition (no 6-packs I’m afraid, LOL) but we are healthy and by no means fat. I am glad I am involved with someone who is health concious tho, I have a terrible tendancy to revert to a bad diet when people arent looking, heehee, I guess I would have more self control if I gained lots of weight on such a terrible diet, but my weight always seems to stay within a 10 pound buffer zone around 130 pounds.

Myk didn’t have time to set up Unreal IRCD on my computer last night since he was busy getting printing to work, so I’ll work with services later sometime, instead I think I am going to go lurk in the wonderful world of my computer’s BIOS. Well, I am going to play with it a bit anyway %) See, my wonderful Asus board talks, but it has a female voice! It’s turned off currently, all it does is “talk” when booting up (to say the boot went successfully or not and why) and it verbally warns you if the CPU is too hot, or a couple other problems I can’t think of right now. When you turn the voice off it just uses system beeps to warn you of such things. But I have a pretty good handle on my box’s stability and cooling needs, so I was thinking of turning the voice back on, and changing the startup wav.. yes, you can change the wav files!!! So on bootup I can make it beep like R2 to say my boot was successful!!! YAY!!! Also, there is a “splash screen” that comes up when you first boot up, currently it’s turned off, and says “Asus P4S8X” with their pretty logo, but you can change that as well!!! Yeah, so I can have an r2-d2 picture there instead %) I am gonna mess around with gimp for a bit this morning to get a good splash page made. All these things are changed with a win
dows program that came with the motherboard (ick windows, but what could I expect?), I havent even installed the program yet. But this will give me a good lesson in how to backup a BIOS %) since there is no way I am changing anything until that is done, fun stuff.

Yeah, so I am going to go do that noew *wanders off*

Strange, my premium subscription ran out on saturday and my page doesnt look all *unpremium* yet… they must be lazy %) Hehe…

I have til Febuary 1st to get the network admins at psiblade to get their acts together and fix the services and make sure the server is stable or I’m afriad some of my friends are leaving. This upsets me of course, if they leave I’ll be joining another server with them… not that that’s a problem, I’m already on two servers, but I will feel as though I had failed them because, well, I have. It’s frustrating, these admins can’t even pull themselves to have a meeting if their lives depended on it! Rar.

Ok, I won’t let this ircserver thing bug me anymore, there is nothing I can do about it at the moment.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time reading, only have about 150 or so pages left in Winter’s Heart, it’s good, but I am noticing as the Wheel of Time books progress less and less happens in the story as it gets insanely complicated %) I took “Signs” back to Blockbuster, and um, ok, that’s about all I did yesterday %) It was a nice relaxing day….

*45 minutes later*

Gah! Sure, as soon as I say “I won’t worry about the ircserver thing, I get bombarded with an admin saying “I DONT CARE WHO HOSTS THE SERVICES!!!” and getting all crankiey with me, all I did was tell them we needed to fix this problem with the services or we’d lose chatters. See the ircserver we are running is Unreal IRCD … which is lame anyway, it’s because the people who started the network are all windows people, and even thought now most of the server is running on unix boxes, they won’t change to a REAL ircd (heh)… and currently they have the services running on an unstable windows box (redundant yay!) that runs on some business DSL line somewhere. So after this little bitching session by an admin I found these services: http://www.ircservices.za.net/ … they look decent, Myk is going to set up a local ircserver tonight so I can play with how to install these servoces tomorrow…(I would install the ircd, but since Myk is familiar with the configs it would take him a fraction of the time I’d take me to figure everything out)

NEXT!!!

I’m writing an admin page for R2D2’s (the ircbot) mysql database, so I can edit it from a browser (on our internal network, I am still far too paranoid to give root mysql access to any page on the web, .htaccess protected or not). It’s coming along nicely. I’m also moving the “address book” that I have on my computer to minute (our webserver) … so I don’t have to have apache and mysql running on my workstation all the freaking time, hehe.

In other news, while I was spending hours *relaxing* this weekend Myk was setting up CUPS on our printserver. Previously we had used a Win2K box for our printing and scanning.. only because there are no scanner drivers for my crappy old parallel port HP scanner in linux, but we decided that our limited scanning usage is worth just hooking it up to a box in windows when we need to scan. Having any sort of server in windows is absurd… we’d be getting ready to meet friends at a new restaurant, quickly go online to grab some directions from mapquest… and the print would fail because of some stupid windows problem, the windows box was sitting in the corner doing nothing for 2 weeks and all of a sudden it crashes during a print request, or just deletes the printer driver all together. It caused many very angry nights %) It’s all working nicely now, YAY! Even color %) CUPS is so nice *hugs her printserver*

So I was talking to a friend today about depression. Apparently he has been through rough times lately, and his depression that he has had for a very long time it is finally too much to handle alone. I mentioned my terrible time with the anti-depressant amitriptyline, and after mentioning this I decided to look up some information about this drug that I took for so many years (it’s scary how little I know about it). I found out some frightening things.

Family Practice Notebook : Amitriptyline

First of all, apparently the do not prescribe this for depression anymore because of “adverse effects” and among the these are “sedation and morning grogginess” “weight gain” and “Anticholinergic Symptoms” which include, yep, you guessed it, seizures! (I had a seizure my senior year in high school while in english class, they never found the true cause, but I got off the amitriptyline very quickly after that). Anyway, this site explains a LOT of my problems in high school, what was the doctor thinking putting me on this crap?! The funniest thing is, this medication is often used for insomnia… and insomnia is one of the most serious problems I had growing up! So it didn’t even work for that… Thanks doctor, for making me paranoid to take the advice of any doctors! Gah…

Anyway, it’s after 10:30 and I still havent showered and dressed *eak* … I hate mondays. *wanders off*

I had a decent day yesterday, did a lot of reading, then in the evening we ordered pizza and wings, and went to Blockbuster and picked up a few movies. The pizza was decent (for philly anyway), the movies were ok… We got “Signs” and “Ice Age” (as well as “behind enemy lines” but we havent watched that yet) and I guess I expected more out of them. Signs was basically just a bunch of “dramatic shots” and “dramatic catch lines” strung together in a so-so alien invasion movie. And Ice Age could have been much better if the sloth wasnt so annoying… I suppose it catered to ayounger audience than I am, but it had a lot of adult comedians… so I guess I expected more, more “Antz”-like I guess (that computer generatedmovie with Woody Allen, came out around the same time as “A Bug’s Life”)… anyway the long toothed squirrel was funny, that was the only character that saved the movie from being a complete bomb. The funny thing is we planned to see both these movies in the theater. We went to see Ice Age, but there was so much traffic that we arrived 10 minutes after it started and went to see “Panic Room” instead (which I dont recommend either), and the night we planned to see Signs there was a terrible rain storm, and a 45 minute drive on a friday night to a busy theater to meet our friends wasnt high on our list of things we wanted to do that night %) In the end, I am quite pleased that we didn’t see either of these movies in the theater.

I went to bed around 1 am… this better diet and regular sleep schedule has done wonders for my insomnia troubles. The best part is that doctors told me all along that I should try both these things to cure it and I never listened to them %) Oh well… I am just glad I can sleep like a semi-normal person again, I just need to stay away from the temptation of taking naps, especially on weekends!

So the irc server that I am part of is really starting to bug me…. ok, it’s been bugging me for months, but it’s really getting to a point where I can’t STAND it anymore. The services go down approx. once a day and when the ONE person who has access to the services box is gone for the weekend, of course they go down friday night and leave a server full of bitching chatters. So this morning, upon waking up, I find a pm from a friend of mine who moved his room to this server… he is threatening to leave again because the services are so unstable… it’s understandable, but to appease him I wrote an ops script on R2D2 (my irc bot) to give them ops when they ask for it in their room, the bot will also keep the room open so the modes and topics remain when the services die… this is starting to sound a lot like the scifi server, gah! Oh well, the server admins are trying to get together for a meeting about all this, hopefully something can be fixed before all the people I convinced to join our server leave… I guess I wouldnt be so frustrated if I hadnt tried so hard to get users onto this server. I guess it makes me look bad, I promote a server and then it turns out to have flakey servies.

Today will probably be pretty boring, but that’s perfectly fine with me %) I am really enjoing book 9 of the wheel of time series, and keep thinknig about how awful it will be when I finish book 10 (it comes out this month) … I will have to wait a couple years before the next!! AH!!

Anyway, I am going to wander off and do … stuff.

http://www.knology.net/~carlos/redneck.htm <-- hehe

o/` Jewel – Don’t o/`

I have a sinking feeling that my list of “things acomplished” for this week will be rather short. On that note, I will noew write in my weblogs %)

On my birth certificate my name is “Elizabeth Ann Krumbach” … a nice first name that I’ve always been fond of, a middle name that is so common that it’s joked about, and a fairly uncommon last name. I’ve always liked my name, and the name “Elizabeth” gives TONS of options for a nickname. My parents called me “Beth” … apparently it’s because they had considered the name “Bethany” for me (ick). I never much liked that nickname, I guess since it was terribly boring. I actually got into a conversation once about how boring the nickname “Beth” is. So all through my elementary and middle school years I would drive my teachers insane by switching between wanting to be called “Beth” and “Elizabeth.” Eventually I settled on Beth.

During my senior year in high school I got online. And at this time all I had been exposed to as far as the net was concerned was aol chat rooms, and as a whole I was actually AFRAID of the net!!! Crazy huh? So when I decided to go to scifi.com and join their chat it was quite a step for me. When coming to create my handle (nickname) a few things went into my choice, PrincessLeia2. So in IRC people started calling me “Leia” and “PL2” and “Princess” … fine with me, the net was still distant enough from my own being that I didn’t consider that a real NAME for myself, and no one knew my real name, part of my paranoia was using the alias “Eve Johnson.” Amazing how paranoid I was! Now anyone with half a brain when it comes to computers can find my address AND unlisted phone number (no, that is not a challenge you crazy people!). Anyway, as my web presence increased, I met a few of my online friends, generally when I met them they’d have trouble calling me by my real name, which was kinda funny, and I actually began *responding* to “Leia” hehe… yatta yatta a couple years go by… I date, move in with, then break up with an asshole ex who didnt let me online and finally come back to my chatting world in sept 2001. I started dating Myk, and I sent him an email once and signed it “Liz” … I guess because I had finally got my self esteem back, and my life had COMPLETELY changed, I was really a whole different person then I was growing up. He commented on this and said it would be cute if I was “Lyz” .. as in Myk and Lyz … Now this thought had crossed my mind before, but I never took it seriously until he brought it up.

So my name is Lyz right? Have you EVER tried to change what people call you? I quickly realized that it would be nearly impossible to get my family and older friends to call me anything other than “Beth” so I just went along with telling new friends and family (Myk’s family) that my name is “Lyz.” Now remember online friends calling me “Leia”? Well I was at a lan party a couple weeks ago (the new years eve one) and a real life friend of mine called me “P L 2”!!! I have been officially deemed a real-life acronym, hee. Granted, I chat with this friend as well (in a chat room made up of all real life friends), and when playing games at the lan party I am always “PrincessLeia2” or “pleia2” *shrugs* Still, it was a new and interesting experience %) Anyway, now I have this problem of responding whenever anyone says “Lyz” “Beth” “Leia” “PL2” … and it causes strange, confusing situations, like the other day when I called Myk… the first voice message I left on it I said “hi baby, it’s beth…” and the second said “hi myn, it’s lyz…” … I am already messed up enough without having issues about what I should call myself ;)

Wow, that went on longer than I expected, hehe… Ummm… so I cleaned the apartment this morning, same old friday morning thing, I even got around to cleaning off some of the dirt scrape marks off the walls, I dont know how the walls get dirty but they do… and of course I ran into the problem “if you clean a spot you have to clean the whole wall” UGH! Hehe… I used windex on the wall
s too, they are all white walls, but not perfectly white, they are sorta off-white I guess so I didn’t want to use the bleach cleaner we have… anyone have any bright ideas on what would be wiser to use than windex? I actually don’t mind cleaning, sure I never want to get out of bed and use energy ;) but it does help clear my head (or maybe that’s the bleach? Hee), and it’s quite relaxing in a way.

I finished Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery last night, that’s the 3rd book I’ve finished since writing my last review, not unusual for me %) I should type up those reviews in the near future, and possibly make a second book page for books i’ve read in 2003.

I dunno what I’ll do today, I think I am going to look at some sed and awk books that Myk has and see how I can work on changing the name of a directory on my webpage and then changing every single document that points to that directory to a different directory without having to open every single .html and .php file on my webpage to do it manually (that would literally take DAYS). Fun fun, but I really hate the MyImages directory, and it’s silly to have an almost empty /images directory right above it.

Right, so I am going to TRY to get some work done today, yay it’s friday!!!!

Hmm, my premium subscription to this runs out today, sad… but I dont have the money to continue it, and I am not excited enough about the ‘features’ of premium to keep it even if I did, oh well… *wanders off*

Gah, today is even worse than yesterday as far as getting work done is concerned %)

I love getting stuff in the mail, I got my Disney Day’s calendar from my sister yesterday… it’s one of those day-to-day calendars, and she gets one for my every year for Christmas, this year she actually asked me if I still wanted one, well of course! *grins*

Today I finally got the second half of my shipment from bn.com.. and it totally rocks. See I didn’t want to spend $25 on the “Platinum Edition” of Beauty and the Beast (yes, the Disney movie), so I just bought the normal, one-dvd version for $18. Then I get a mail about the DVD being “currently out of stock” … great, but then about a day later they say it had been shipped, yay! So I finally get the dvd today, open up the box, and it’s the “Platinum Edition”!!! I pulled out the reciept real quick to make sure they didnt charge me extra, nope! I even went to the site to make sure I wasnt completely mistaken… nope! This rocks! Now that I have this version I am really glad I got it instead of the boring normal one.

So I was sitting in chat today, not really doing anything (shut up, hehe) and this person comes onto the clockbot.net server (which is strange unto itself since not many people know about that server) and joins #linux … a room I chat it, which is strange AGAIN because that room doesn’t get a great deal of traffic. And so this guy comes in and asks “are you a member of PLUG?” … I’d expect this on freenode since the PLUG room is there, but not on psiblade!!! After I recovered from my shock I said I was.. then he explained that he found the server through the PLUG website, which is interesting, I assume he meant through the “plug how-to archive” which is linked to phillylinux.org .. and hosted by clockbot. It’s still interesting that he found minute.clockbot.net from here, since I don’t think that is listed anywhere, but maybe he could have just typed in clockbot.net as the ircserver and it found it? Who knows! This guy sounded pretty cool tho, 19 and from a part of Philly I have never heard of (that doesnt say much, still dont know the area well)… It was nice talking to a new person tho, it’s not terribly often that we get new chatters in psiblade, and even less often that we get *intelligent* new chatters, heehee.

Um, I am done noew. *wanders off again*

o/` Barenaked Ladies – Powder Blue o/`

Yesterday was much better than the previous days. I didn’t really get much done, but I wasn’t depressed like I have been.

I got sorta bored and decided to clean out the drawers of my desk. I am such a terrible packrat, and when it comes to my computer desk I have never been very neat %) I suppose if I had 50 drawers I could be neater, I never seem to have enough room so I resort to stuffing things in the drawers. So I resolved to clean them out. The funniest part of this was when I was going through all the computer documentation… I have this habit of putting ALL my computer manuels and such together, so I have this big pile of unrelated some VERY old computer documentation, the gem of this search? I found install directions for Myst on win 3.1 hah! I did manage to clean the drawers out tho, and I put some of the stuff into boxes in the laundry room (where all sorts of stuff is stored). My drawers are all clean noew %)

So while putting away my drawer stuff, I once again thought about how much of a terrible packrat I am. I really have gotten better over the years, but I still have BOXES of Star Wars and Disney toys, as well as hundreds of odds and ends that I just can’t seem to part with, no matter how slim the chance is that I will find some use for them in the future. Like my Magic cards… while my toys might find a home of their own in a special room of my house, I can’t say that there is a very good chance I will ever play Magic again, but alas, I keep my cards around for “someday” … I think my problem is I get emotionally attached to my things, I really am a materialist unforutnately. Lucky for us Myk is not a packrat at all.

I decided to go into windows yesterday to install MS Office so I could go through some of the old floppy disks I have from high school. I was looking for one specific file, and I have TONS of floppys.. and I would have looked at them all in linux, but OpenOffice isn’t happy with all 3424 different file formats I used while in high school %) So I go to windows, install MS Office and go through my files… of course I never found the one I was looking for (a George Lucas film study paper I wrote my senior year), but I did find a few other short things that I had written about random historical figures that I thought would be cool to put on my site, if for no other reason than the internet needed more information about these people %)

I also started cleaning up my /html directory on my site… I still had some old files in there from php nuke that I needed to get rid of, and I kept the /html/themes/princessleia2/style directory because all my pages were still pointing to the .css file in there. So I went to every page on my site and pointed them to the correct .css file in /html … I finished that this morning, it took a very long time since there were also a few other changes i needed to make… like making my princessleia.com image ‘link’ on every page border=”0″ … and add the body tag where I had forgotton it… amazingly enough w3c.org WILL validate the page fine if you forget a body tag even if you use /body at the end of the document! Strange. Anyway, I made my site much better now… I also found a bunch of pages that I made for all sorts of reasons (picture pages and such that I made and sent the links to friends, hardware pages to describe my computers, etc) that I never got around to linking back to the main site, so in all I guess I added something like 7-8 little sections to my site yesterday, fun fun.

I guess that’s all I want to write for noew *wanders off*

I was going to work on my website right? I was going to acomplish something today so I dont feel depressed right? I was going to… oh… *quiz* … Looks like I am not getting work done AGAIN %(!

“The lesson today is how to die…”

Which Strange Little Girl would you be?

This quiz made while Angel was procrastinating her ass off.

You are the kind of person who always used to ask why, until your parents screamed “Because I said so, now shut up!”. You’re always seeking answers to ever question, solving every puzzle. You also have a strong sense of justice, and believe that ultimately people should pay for their crimes. At the same time, you do hold compassion for those who act out of pain, which creates an inner struggle. How does one judge someone and simultaneously understand why they have done wrong? It’s a balancing act, and weighs heavy on your mind, particularly when judging yourself. Sometimes, there is no answer to a question, which disturbs you. Your goal in life should be to seek a happy medium between ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘forgive and forget’. Not everything can be black and white, right and wrong. Don’t fear the grey. Trust your intuition, because it’s usually right.

This description is very interesting, since I was sorta struggling with the “justice” thing a couple days ago in an entry…

o/` Dido – Isobel o/`

I feel better this morning.

As I have been complaining about lately, I am depressed. I’ve considered seeing a doctor about this depression, but honestly I don’t want to become one of the masses of zombie anti-depressant takers. I always get over it eventually anyway.

So yesterday was a lousy day. I woke up around 6 am and took a shower since I needed to drive to work with Myk so I could take the Jeep to Pep Boys to get it looked at (it’s been making this ticking noise for about 2 weeks or so). It was snowing, I am not a big fan of driving in the snow, but to avoid traffic we took mostly back-roads, and people there seemed to take care driving, which I assume is because most of them were driving in their own neighborhood… and everyone knows the only place you need to be careful driving in is your own neighborhood! Anyway, the roads werent too bad actually, Myk drove into work and I drove from there to Pep Boys. I went to Wawa around 7 to grab something to eat. Wawa is like a gas station without gas pumps (well, some of them do have gas pumps.. but this one didnt), and the amazing thing, that I have mentioned before, is a great number of them dont take credit cards! All I had was $2 and a $20… and of course the total came to something stupid like $2.14 so I had to break the $20 that I kept meaning to put in the bank, and what really bugs me is I have something like $10 in change here at home that i always neglect to bring anywhere. Anyway, I sat in the Wawa parking lot (which is actually the same lot as for pep boys) for about an hour listening to NPR before my appointment at Pep Boys at 8… it would have been silly to drive 20 minutes home, sit around home for 20 minutes and drive the 20 minutes back you see…

I get to Pep Boys for the appointment, and STRESS to them to check the oil before they did anything ’cause we assumed the noise was attributed to an oil problem, so an hour later they come back and say that the oil was very low and is either leaking or burning pretty bad. I sorta expected this, and so the suggested they do an engine diagnostic to see exactly what was going one, $85 *ugh!* $85 before they could even START work on it! Oh well… an hour later they came back and told me that there was some oil thingy broken, which also caused the meter in the dashboard not to work (I HAD noticed that), they said fixing that would be $75. No problem! That’s not bad… but then they suggested a tune up and cleaning of the fuel injecter thingy (yes, that’s a technical term %P), I told them to fix the oil thingy and I’d get in touch with Myk to see if he wanted to do the tune up. The tune up and stuff ended up costing around $240, eak! But the Jeep needed it so we went through with it. It was about noon by the time they finally got done, luckily I had brought a book so I wasnt terribly bored. I get up to pay for the work and the credit card was denied! I called Myk to ask what I should do, and he wasn’t at his desk (I had his cellphone for the day) so I left a message, and wandered around Pep Boys for a while, about a half hour I guess, then finally decided to put as much on the card as I could, and pay for the rest out of my savings account. I did that, and it really bothered me, because my precious savings was now down to $100 %( But it’s work that needed to be done, and my money really was for situations like that. I was going to go get some lunch after that, but I was just too upset. (turns out the credit card company hadnt processed our last payment yet, after 2 weeks, so we didnt have enough to cover it, but we would today! bastards…)

I drove home, got home around 1. I found a notice on our door about us owing for the water bill. This upset me ’cause I remember writing that check out, I walked up to the office and had them check their records and they admitted a mistake on their part and apologized profusely. UGH! Then I get home from the office, and notice the answering machine had a message on it from the health care insurance peop
le who I had called the previous day. Now these people are VERY hard to get ahold of, you wait on hold forever, assuming you dont get a busy signal when you first call, which I usually did, and I wasn’t home for their call back! So I had to do the whole thing over just to get them to answer a stupid question I had, this time I agreed to stay on hold. But calling 3245 times, FINALLY getting through, THEN being put on hold for 15 minutes did nothing to improve my mood. After that was all straightened out I went out to check the mail and we get a thing from blockbuster video saying that we didnt return a DVD. I remember specifically returning this dvd, so I was upset %) I called them and I get this kid on the phone who mumbles that it has been “taken care of” … no apology or anything! Gah. By this point I was ready to crawl into bed and just cry, so many mistakes by other people that are coming to bug me! And of course it all has to come on one day *knocks on wood*

But instead of crying I decided to go grocery shopping. I used my money ’cause I wanted to get the shopping done asap, and I needed to do something to keep my mind off how crappy I was feeling. Luckily the shopping trip was fairly uneventful. I went to pick up Myk from work around 3:30, and while driving out there I notice that I can still sorta hear the ticking in the engine!!! Now talk about wanting to cry!!! Myk got into the Jeep and I said “i am so sorry, it’s still making that STUPID noise!” And of course as I usually do in situations such as this I start blaming myself and how I cant even do a simple thing like taking the car to get it fixed. I guess I was sorta freaking out ’cause Myk asked me to calm down. We started driving home and he assured me that the sound wasnt nearly as loud at it had been, and on a whole the Jeep sounded and was running much better, he said it might take a while for the ticking sound to go completely away because the engine was almost completely without oil and it needed to be all oiled up again, or something, car engine functions are not my forte %). I guess I was fairly wound up when we got home, it’s just difficult to relax, and I KNEW as soon as I began to relax I’d fall asleep because I was so tired. We ate dinner around 4:30 (i had neglected to eat lunch in all my frustration) and then around 5:30 I sat on the couch to read, and started falling asleep. Myk and I decided to “lie down for a little bit” so I slept til about 8:30 %) Naps are bad! Luckily I was able to go back to bed around 1ish and get a decent amount of sleep… although I am still tired. To top it all off I had a headache most of the day yesterday. I think it was a combination about being outside with the sun and glaring snow and being stressed out %s

And now it’s today. I am sure I had a bunch of introspective things I had planned to write about when I went to sleep last night, but as with most nighttime ideas that I have, I have forgotten, since I didn’t think to write anything down. Bleh, I am tired.

Oh! I did get the guestbook finished on wallaceandgromit.net, so now it’s all pretty. I guess I am a bit down because I have accomplished much of what I set out to do in the past few weeks. I wanted my IRC bot to have a mysql database, so working with Perl DBI I was able to do that, I made guestbooks and polls for my sites using php and mysql, and I even went further to create a password protected site for users to access the IRC Bot’s mysql database from the web %) It’s really cool looking too, unfortunately I can’t show everyone since the whole point is it’s only available to certain users, lol. Oh well, it’s a table that looks like R2-D2 with the info inclosed in the “body” of the droid. It’s cute. Maybe I will just work on my site this afternoon, basic html pages to pass the time, I have tons of sections I began working on and never finished. I need another perl, php, or mysql project!

Anyway, I need to go do morning things noew.