Blog Archive of the second half of 2005

This is my blog from July to November 2005. New blog can be found here!

November 2005

11/20/05 -- Since I went to bed super early last night, I got up super early this morning, at 7:30am. Made some coffee and started getting things done around here. I needed to free up some space on one of my hard drives, so I spent most of the morning burning DVDs/CDs. Eric was going to sell me a SATA 120GB 7200 hard drive for $50, but I forgot to buy it from him! I'll get it soon enough. My IDE controllers are full, but this MSI motherboard has a couple SATA controllers not being used, ah yes.
    Also did some housework around here too. Nothing too exciting. I did get tired in the afternoon and took a 3 hour nap, that was nice. Then most of the evening I did laundry and played some more F.E.A.R. I'm really getting into that game now, at first I thought it was lame, but there's something about jumping around a corner in slow-mo and shooting the bad guys, watching blood clouds come out of their body and when one gets shot in the leg he falls down shooting his gun all over the place...it's just a special feeling I get. LOL. I'm currently on Level 8 of 11. I do have some other new games to play, so not sure what to play after this one.
    A week from tomorrow, next Monday, I have to get my ass back to class to take the 3-chapter test. Shit, I need to read that this week. I've read about 10 pages so far and been putting it off. I did get the entire lab book done though, so I don't have to worry about that anymore. But if I remember right, it's a 3-chapter test next week and the week after that is the final and my time at DMACC is over! I'm kinda excited about getting my Associates Degree, but I need to get back into studying and getting those certifications over with. It's hard to concentrate on studying one subject while working, let alone two or three!
    Well I work all week this week. Most of you probably got Thanksgiving off, but I'm working it. Well, we are open 24/7/365, so someone is always there. I already work Thursday's and I had the option NOT to work, but on this Thursday I will make $30 an hour! An eight hour shift will earn me $240 for that one day, schweet!!! It's time and a half on TOP of the regular time paid, so you make 2 1/2 times more on holidays. So take that AND my $250 employee referral bonus, and I'm gonna have one HELL of a check next time, and it's about time too! Christmas and New Year's are both on Sundays this year, and I don't work Sundays, so I'll have those days off anyways.
    Oh yeah, I almost forgot! I also made a new page on my site, DJDingo's Favorites. Old favorites from 5 years back are all listed on that page. I have some really fun and cool links on there that I wanted to share with everyone. Took me most of the morning to make that page though, let's hope it works just fine too!

11/19/05 -- Time to update! I've been meaning to update this all week, but never had time and got too tired to do it! This week at work went by really quick, I couldn't believe it! My check this week was weak because they had to take a day out when I was sick for those 2 days. But I found out my next check will have my $250 referral bonus on it for hiring Brett and he hits his 90 days next Tuesday. The check after that will have $120 extra on it for all the money I put towards that class at work, and since I passed it, I get the money back and a quarter raise! Yeehaw. Oh, and since it was open enrollment for benefits at work, I previously dropped my medical insurance because it went up a few more bucks a month, but decided to keep it just in case I need it and with this little raise it should all equal out.
    On Saturday, I got up early, 11am, and was going to help out Eric all day today get some shit around here done. He got some new windows for the basement windows we had to replace. He wanted to fix a downspout coming from the roof, and fix the garage door. We started out going to Menard's then Culver's and to my Mom's house to eat and pick up a ladder. Got back here at 3pm, only 2 hours of daylight left, and started working on the windows. It went well. Eric put caulk around the edges then we screwed the window into place. We had a lot of fun with the word "caulk", made lots of jokes about it, hehehe. After that, we quickly got he downspout fixed and then it was on to the garage door, which I thought was going to take the longest. I guess what happened was Eric was pulling in and hit the button to make the door go up and something happened. Somehow the bottom wheel got jammed and stuck and the engine kept pulling and somehow busted one of the pulleys and got the door all stuck 'n shit. We simply replaced the pulleys that got busted, and it was a lot easier than I thought. Just looked at the other side of the garage door and did the same as was done over there. We got that fixed sooner than it took to replace the windows.
    That night I was supposed to go out with Shari and some friends for her birthday party. So far it was going to be her with her boyfriend, and her sister with her boyfriend and I was going to be the 5th wheel, grr... So I tried getting some other people together to go, but everyone was being flaky, and couldn't find sitters or something, those damn kids, so I couldn't get any other person to go. After a long ass day of fixing shit and getting up early when I should of been sleeping in, I decided not to go out that night. I ended up going to bed at 11:30pm on a Saturday night! I think that's a first.
    That was like the third thing in a row that I was supposed to do on Saturday night, but didn't do! I feel bad about it too. First thing was that I was supposed to go to the bar with some friends from work, ended up not going out. Second was that Mediacom Christmas party, didn't go to that either. And now this, Shari's birthday party, and I didn't get to go. I think the reason all this is happening is because I get up later and later each day during the week. When Saturday comes, I want to catch up on all that sleep and sleep in, but it never works that way, I gotta get up early to get shit done around here, so I don't get to sleep in. So by Saturday night, I'm already exhausted and don't feel like going anywhere. I do feel bad for telling people I'll be there and then don't show up at all. But I'm starting to really think it comes down to my lack of sleep! So from now on, I'm sleeping in on Saturdays!
    Well because I went to bed early last night, I got up at 7:30am today! I'm updating my site and burning stuff to CD/DVD because I ran outta room on one of my hard drives, the big one too! We'll have to see what today has in store for me!

11/15/05 -- First snow today! Dammit! LOL It started really picking up early this afternoon. I had an eye appointment at Lenscrafters today before work. The doctor that saw me was WAY nicer than that bitch and America's Best last time I went. She yelled at me for sleeping with my contacts in, while this new doctor said it would be best to switch to extended wear ones that are OK to sleep in. My insurance covered the exam except for a $40 "contact fitting", which was me trying on my new contacts to make sure they were the right ones, and I had to put them in myself! For $40! Ah well. I have to go back next week to pick my new contacts up. She told me these new ones are made of a different material so they might feel weird. At first it felt like I was shoving two pieces of cardboard in my eyeballs. I've noticed if I walk around and have air hitting them it makes my eyes dry really quickly, but maybe that'll change after I wear them for awhile.
     I told work I may be late but I ended up showing up 5 minutes before my shift. Grrr... They had me sit at a supervisor's desk for a couple hours because my seat was taken and there were no extra seats left in the place! I think they have hired TOO many people before they figured out where they are going to seat everyone. The first two hours at work was a nightmare, every call was hell and that computer locked up twice on me. I finally get my regular desk back when I realize they finally put XP on it. Oh great I thought, just when this computer NEVER failed me, never locked up and I never had to reboot this PC. I treated it well and it treated me well back. Surprisingly, I had no problems with it today. I love XP but with the shit programs we use, it's a surprise they all work together just fine. One program didn't want to work for me, but it also didn't work for some others either, but it wasn't a big deal.
    So while I'm at work, it kept snowing and snowing and snowing! I heard it was going to keep snowing till 4am too! That night when I left work, it was colder than hell outside, and all I had was my flimsy jacket on too! Had to scrap all the ice off my car, and not to mention they plowed the parking lot earlier so at this point it was completely covered in ice! I got outta there and decided to take the side roads home instead of the interstate. I was coming up on one intersection and a car come up on the other street and made my light turn yellow on me, and I was right at that point where I just couldn't make it, but I'd be lucky if I could stop in time. But at this spot in the road it was downhill and completely covered in ice. I slid left and right until finally stopped right on the line. Good thing no one was beside me too! Besides that it wasn't too bad till I got into the country. Very windy and snow drifts over the road, I took up two lanes to get through but made it home in one piece. We'll have to see how tomorrow goes!

11/14/05 -- What a bad weekend. I was in a bad mood all day Saturday. I was getting ready to go to the eye doctor to get a new prescription for contacts when I realized I didn't have my vision insurance card. Eric told me that most insurances won't pay for the exam after the exam, you must show your card while you're there, otherwise you'll have to pay for it yourself. Well shit. If I've been paying for this damn insurance all this time, might as well use it right? So I had to cancel the appointment until I could talk to HR at work, of course they are closed on the weekends. Then all day that day, I was working on my Mom's PC. Had to put in a new motherboard/CPU/RAM and with that reinstall Windows XP. This damn computer gave me nothing but headaches from the start. Once one problem was solved, there was another. Almost like working on a car, but I HATE working on cars while LOVE working on computers. I did this almost ALL day. Before DIT closed, Eric & I went up there for some parts we needed. The power supply I was trying to use wasn't compatible with this Pentium board, so I needed to get a new one. At DIT, found out they were out of the 'cheap' power supplies, but I could get one if I bought their cheapest computer case, so I did that. I was supposed to go to the Mediacom Holiday Party that night, but I just wasn't in the mood to go, so I didn't. Dan called later on that night wanting Eric & I to go to his new place to play Poker. So we did. Long game, shitty results, left around 1:30am, bah. The next day I work up early and continued to work on Mom's PC. Getting the new hardware in is the fast part, the long part is installing Windows, getting that all set up and installing every other piece of software on it. I finally got it done around 6pm. Since I had a new case and an extra power supply, I started working on my next project, a firewall PC. Friends of mine have told me about Smoothwall, a Linux-based firewall, and how kick ass it is, so I decided to start making one of those. I actually had enough computer parts laying around to slap together another computer. I got it all together, but will get around to putting in our network some weekend.
    Yesterday I was going through some stuff and guess what I found? My vision insurance cards. I had them all along. But at this point, I looked up the providers that they cover, and the place I was going to go to was not covered. Go me. So tomorrow before work I got an appointment set up to finally get my eyes exams and get some new contacts. I'm on my last pair now. I like to live on the edge.
    In other news, I just finished the game XIII, it was pretty fun. I just started F.E.A.R. and I've read a lot of good reviews on it as well. I also need to finish reading 3 chapters in my book and get all that done for the big test on the 28th. I've decided not to go to class till then and read and finish the labs at home. Only problem is I keep putting them aside!

11/08/05 -- Yesterday at work, my trainer asked me if I was ready to take the final test for the "Excellence in Customer Service" course. I told him no because I wanted time to study up and get ready for it. He told me that I WILL be taking it today. At first I thought, yeah right, but when I got home, I put a full hour into studying up for it, and it was easier than I thought. You see, at work, we basically have to be there for about a year before we get a raise, pretty crappy I know. But they have these 'courses' you can sign up for and if you pass them, you get a 25 cents raise for each one, up to two per year and up to four total, so I hear. Each course is a few hundred bucks, but once you get the book for it, you pay $20 out of each paycheck for it until it's all paid for or until you pass the course. When you pass the course, they reimburse you for all that money you paid towards it and you get a 25 cents raise. All you have to do is read the book, do the chapter tests, submit those answers online, and take the final test at work, which is a test over the chapter tests. So today I go in there, tell him I'm ready and finally get to take the test. I was blowing thru it very fast, it was easier than hell, and I needed to get 70% or higher to pass it. And I think you can only take it one or two times. I was trying to ace it, but I got ONE wrong, grrr...Ah well, I got 96% on it, so I passed. So within the next 2 or 3 paychecks, I'll get all that money back, plus my quarter raise, pretty sweet eh?
    Getting Mediacom to update their websites is like pulling teeth, I swear to God. We've been advertising this new software package, by Computer Associates that somehow WE have to support, but there are absolutely no links whatsoever on any of our websites! People call in and we have to either email it to them, or give the link over the phone, and that link is a mile long and whoever made it is retarded, not user friendly whatsoever. There's information about the Mediacom Phone, which JUST came out less than a month ago, but NOTHING about eTrust, which has been out for a few months now, makes sense, I know. Anywho, just very recently, we FINALLY got a link up there to download this new software. Only problem is that it's one ONE of our many sites and the link is in a random rotation with 3 other links!!! We tell the customer what site to go to, which is a site most people didn't know existed because it's not a Mediacom Internet site, then we have to have them hit refresh about 50 TIMES before that link finally pops up! I can't fucking believe it. I hear that Mediacom outsourced our web design team and getting them to do anything, let alone anything RIGHT, is impossible. OMFG. I believe the link is www.mediacomcc.com and the picture on the right side, top small one, changes randomly from these pictures...

The last one there is the one we have people 'hunt' for. And when you finally get it on the page, after refreshing 50 times, you get the feeling like you just found the Boardwalk sticker in the Monopoly game at McDonald's. But sometimes people get F5 happy, and hit it once too many and pass it by. Time to try again ANOTHER 50 times! Damn! ...When I get people with problems on the phone, I do everything within my power to get the problem solved correctly, the FIRST TIME. I just wish the rest of this company worked as hard as I do.

11/07/05 -- Supposedly today they got mchsi.com back up and running. It didn't work for us on our Internet connection at work, but they said it was working on the Mediacom network. If that's true, then why couldn't I get the site to come up when I got back home tonight? Even after I flushed my cache on the client and DNS server, it still didn't come up. Ah well. Good news is I got a screenshot printout from a friend at work who printed the page out when it was down. This is probably the ONLY copy of this that I know of, and you can see it here. Not much to look at, but that's what it said right before it was taken down. I heard at first it said that, then people over the phone said they noticed other stuff on it like smiley faces and arrows or something before Mediacom finally took it down. I did get quite a few calls on it today, but it came back up for most people, but still not me. It's funny, no bosses there will admit nor deny that it was hacked, they just say "they were having problems with it". I said that they wanted to update it for us, lol.
    I guess the Mediacom Christmas party is this weekend, yes early, but it's THIS weekend. I told them that I wasn't going to go, but I found out later that lots of other people are going, so I decided to go. Hope it's fun, either way we'll all probably go out to some bar afterwards so it'll be a good time either way.

11/06/05 -- I got even earlier today, about 10am, kinda sucked actually. But decided to stay up since I was already up. Called Dad, told him to come over earlier so I can get started working on his PC. Dad had the usual spyware on his PC, but this time got some virus that was being a pain in coming off the system. It was from a worm that he could of avoided if he did his Windows Update on a regular basis. I got his PC all cleaned up and told him to do updates when he got home.
    After that, I had my friend Shari come over and we started kicking around some ideas for her site. I threw a few pages up there for her to see what it would look like and such. Shari does a lot of paintings and wanted a website to show off her work and sell her artwork too. I decided to help, but was just going to do a simple site with artwork on it, since she's got no money for it. So that's what we started doing. I'll work on it some more this week and next. Shouldn't take me long to do, but I just want to make sure it's perfect before I unleash it to the Internet.
    I found out that sometime on Saturday, Mediacom's website, www.mchsi.com got hacked!!! My friend told me how some hacker group defaced it and it was shortly taken down after that. In fact, it's almost midnight right now on Sunday night, and it's STILL down! Here's the latest screenshot here. I joked around saying the hackers hacked it because they wanted to update it for us! LOL. And I also think it's kind of funny that it got hacked too, we'll have to see how long it stays down for. I bet that one guy who sat on his ass for the past three years is now shittin' himself trying to get it back up and running! hehehe. But the truly sad part about all this is that tomorrow is going to be absolute hell if it's still down by then. Of course Mediacom could put a message on their phones saying our site is down and to try later, but they won't cuz they cheapasses! Most boonies out there have mchsi.com as their homepage, and when they crack open IE and see a "The page cannot be displayed", before they bother to try another website, before they bother to check email and any other program that accesses the Internet, they will sit on hold for over 1/2 hour with Tech Support saying their Internet is down and get all pissed at us when we show them how stupid they are for not checking anything. Grrr... So I know tomorrow might be hell with this, but we'll see.

11/05/05 -- I got up "early" today because I had a lot of stuff to get done. I started making my list and decided to begin. First off, I have to fix Dad's computer; he got some virus on there that I have to take off. I also need to work on Mom's PC too. I got a motherboard/CPU/RAM from Eric and I'm going to back her stuff up and install the new hardware and reinstall Windows XP. I wanted to get working on those today, but Steve said they needed to save stuff off the PC first, so that's pushed back to next weekend. Dad was supposed to bring his PC over today, but he called back later saying they had to go to dinner and he's going to do it tomorrow. So most of the stuff I wanted to do today, I couldn't!
    I did move my server downstairs to our server room and hooked it up with the other server using my KVM switch. Got that up and running and it's pretty sweet. Took some pictures for your viewing pleasure...

    Now if Eric or I need to login to our servers at the server, we can do all that at our new work bench in the server room. It's almost done, still need to rewire electricity in there and put in a cooling fan as well.
    Once that was moved, I made the other monitor in my room a dual-monitor to my main PC. I've never done this before because I've always used the other monitor for the server. Luckily the VGA cord reached to my PC and it was up in no time. I found some kick ass program called UltraMon that allows you to have separate wallpapers and separate screensavers when using more than one monitor. It's really nice. Anyways, now I have more room to work with dual monitors, and I have it set up so I always have my Remote Desktop connected to my server on the other monitor. See pictures below...

Dual monitors with separate wallpapers.

Left is main PC, right is Remote Desktop to server.

    After that was all done, spend most of the day burning CD/DVDs, slapping on CD covers for them and editing MP3 albums. I ordered pizza from Paul Revere's and got STUFFED and then really sleepy. Passed out for a few hours, and missed a call from some friends from work that were going out tonight. The time I woke up, it was too late to go so I didn't get to. Maybe next time I guess.
    Well I'm going to finish up here. Got to wake up early to start working on Dad's PC. Peace out homies.

11/03/05 -- Need to update this! Another week at work this week, hasn't been all too bad. I about shit myself today when they wrote up on the board, "MSN is down". That was bad. It was down for about an hour or so today, and luckily we didn't get slammed with calls. If you didn't know, MSN.com is the default homepage in Internet Explorer, and some people out there have no clue how to change their homepage. When they went to open up IE today, it said, "The page cannot be displayed", and what's the first thing they do? Call Mediacom. Do they ever bother to try another website or check the lights on the modem? NO. Call Mediacom because it's OBVIOUSLY our fault. I'm kind of getting sick of my job if you can't tell already, hehe.
    I've been there just over 4 months and I'm trying my hardest to move up to another department. I just want ANYTHING but Tier 1 because then I'll have less or no retarded customers to talk to. Just this week I applied for TAC and Tier 2, but both were denied because they aren't looking for anyone that hasn't been there for 6 months yet. We were told to apply for them anyways just in case we did get selected for the job, and it lets other departments know that we're interested in moving up. I'd like to move up, but most importantly move out of Tier 1 and say goodbye to retards forever.
    Speaking of retarded, has anyone noticed Mediacom's webpage? It's at www.mchsi.com and if you didn't know, that website has not been updated for about three years!!! I've told them time and time again that it NEEDS to be updated badly. I even offered for them to hire me to do it! hehe There's shit on that site that says, "Does Mediacom work with Windows XP?", "Can I still connect to America Online 6.0 and 7.0?", and my favorite, "Now up to 3Mbps!" God it's sad. Seriously. Think about this. What other major corporation or ISP can you  think of that has NOT updated their site in three fucking years? Don't think too hard because the answer is NONE!!! Imagine AOL or Qwest with outdated graphics and old information? If you were a customer looking to switch to Mediacom and found their website full of OLD information, would you want to switch? It's a bad image for Mediacom and they need to change it and change it NOW. One of my co-workers said last year they gave him the project of going through the ENTIRE site, write down everything that's outdated and old or broke, which was about 90% of it and they sent that information up to corporate headquarters. What did corporate do with that information? Absolutely nothing. It kills me to think that there's somebody out there that has the job of taking care of the website, and probably gets paid big bucks for it to, and does absolutely nothing, but still has his job. Makes me sick. But don't get me started on corporate, I'll save that for a rainy day!
    Anyways, back at the homefront here, Eric worked all weekend on a workbench to put in the server room, and it turned out pretty nice. Eventually we'll have both our servers in there with my KVM switch and have a nice workplace to work on them if needed. We will both be using remote desktop on our dual monitors to connect to our servers, but have a nice work area if needed. Plus it gives us more room for other stuff in there as well. We still have to run some new electrical wires in that room because we just have a extension cord in there right now from the outlet in the other room. Not to mention putting in a cooling fan in the ceiling as well. Here's some pics of that bench. I'll add more when I take them so you can see it with computers and stuff on it...

    Well tomorrow is payday and I plan on getting more shit done this weekend. I have both Mom's and Dad's computer to work on so hopefully I can get that all done this weekend. Might go out Saturday night to, but we'll have to see. Anyways, Watson out.

October 2005

10/24/05 -- Another Monday. Have just a few more days left of being 27 years old too. I plan on getting outta work early on Wednesday night and having a few beers at a bar for my birthday. But the big party will be this Saturday night here, can't wait till that.
    I've been playing the piss outta Quake 4 lately, and decided to post up some in game screenshots for all of you to enjoy. See them here.
    That pumpkin carving contest is this Thursday at work, so I must get everything ready for that very soon if I'm going out drinking on Wednesday night. Still got a few more things to get for it. I'll be sure to post pictures of my scary creation. I also need to finish up my work costume, but that's not until next Monday, so I got the weekend to do that.

10/23/05 -- Friday night Eric & I went on a late night drive to McDonald's. I had him drive my car while I rode along. Something happened in drive-thru and my car's temp was thru the roof! It was in the red and that has NEVER happened before. We cranked up the heat and it finally went back down and was fine. The next day, Saturday, I got up late and was supposed to go to my friends wedding reception in the afternoon/evening. Eric and I were planning on going, but we just had too much stuff to do. I HAD to get my car fixed because without that, I couldn't make it to work. I ended up taking it over to Steve's garage to look at it. We both found out that the thermostat is working fine in it, but the radiator fan would not turn on at all when it was supposed to. So I figured it would be fine for now, it's almost winter and I have my heater on most the time anyways, and most my driving is on the interstate, so I doubt it would over heat anytime soon. I'll have to take a look at the fan, first make sure it works, and then run a manual switch on it to the inside of the car. I had to do that with my first car, my Mustang. Kinda a pain to do, but worth it in the long run.
    After I got all that done and got back home, it was getting late and Eric and I didn't know if the reception was still going on or not since it started pretty early, so we decided not to go. Didn't want to get all dressed up and find out the party is over. We ended up going to a couple bars with some friends and had a good time. We played pool at a pool hall first and I bet $5 a game of pool for 3 games against Eric. It just wasn't my night. In each of the 3 games, I was winning till the end, but fuct up the 8-ball somehow. Either I kept missing it or I scratched it. After I handed over $15 to Eric in prize money, I decided enough was enough, I'm going to stick to drinking instead. Grrr...
    Well today was quite a day too. Shari came over and we ran some errands and started being "creative" as she put it. First we did the whole pumpkin carving thing. You can see pics for that here. After that, we finally got to make those iron-on transfers that you can print on and make shirts out of. She made a shirt of Tenacious D and I made a shirt of my website. It was fun. I'm also planning on making one more shirt for costume day next Monday at work. I'm going to trash-talk one of our crappy computer systems on the shirt, it's going to be great.

Front of my "djdingo.com" custom-made T-shirt!

Back of my "djdingo.com" custom-made T-shirt!

In other news, Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast is supposed to be coming out sometime this week! Also I just got my hands on a copy of Quake 4. I just went through the first level, and I'm not impressed at all yet. It looks EXACTLY like Doom 3, but they say it's better than what Doom 3 was. One thing I've noticed that's better is that the flashlight is ON the gun in Quake 4! LOL

10/20/05 -- We've finally decided to have another party next Saturday for my birthday party. Really not sure yet if we'll party here or end up at some bar, but either way, I'm not going to remember it! If I don't remember any of my birthday's, do I really age another year?
    Today at work was another shitty day. I have to mention this one call I got though. This 65 year old guy called up saying he couldn't get online. No shit, no one can seems like. Anyways, he's all cool and all and I explain to him that there's a problem with his signal coming over the cable line and I need to schedule a technician to come out to fix it. At this point the guy just SNAPPED. He started dropping F-bombs on me left and right. First thing I said was, "You better watch your mouth". He just unleashed on me again. I then said, "You can't talk to me like that". He screamed some more then dropped more F-bombs again. I decided at this point to end the call. I said, "I am disconnecting this call", he then screamed, "FUCK YOU COCKSUCKER!!!" I've never had to do that at Mediacom yet at work, and I've been there almost 4 months so far. He really didn't piss me off but I had the last laugh because I hung up on him and he'd have to call back, wait on hold forever, and talk to the next guy to get a tech out there to fix the problem. I wasn't pissed at all about it, but the adrenaline was RUSHING thru my body and my hands were trembling, it was kind of cool! All this happened in the first hour of work, so every call since then I was waiting for someone else to unleash on me, but it didn't happen luckily...God I love my job.

10/18/05 -- I thought this week would be hell at work, but it's actually not going so bad. So far so good.
    This weekend, Eric and I are invited to my friend Scott's wedding reception. I guess a lot of single girls are going to be there, and weddings are a great place to pick up chicks, so I hear!
    Next Wednesday is my birthday, and I'm trying to get a party going on next Saturday night at my place. Having a party here will be cheaper than going to the bar, but we don't want to have to clean up the dump afterwards. Eh, we'll figure it out hopefully.
    I got bored so played some Half-Life 2 Deathmatch tonight. Haven't touched the game in over 6 months. Started halfway thru the first map and just dominated on the second map. It's awesome when you really get into the game and you get this kick ass adrenaline rush while you're playing. Really wakes you up. Anyways, I wanted to show off the final score, so here it is, enjoy!

10/16/05 -- Not a whole lot of excitement this weekend. Got stuff done I needed to get done. Had 100 pages to read in my book for another test in class on Monday. Finally went grocery shopping, scraping bottom of food supply all week! Mom had all three of us over for dinner tonight, it was nice. Had grilled chicken, baked potatoes, pork 'n beans, and salad. Each of us had two helpings of food and fresh brownies afterwards. I'm STILL stuffed from eating all that food! But it's good cuz I haven't had good food like that in a long time.
    Eric had a CPU he no longer needed, a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 2.16GHz processor. He sold it to me for a decent price, and it replaced my AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 1.73GHz CPU in my main PC. I can really notice the difference now in speeds, and I'm finally over 2GHz! He also gave me a new heat sink for that CPU as well, a QUIETER ONE! The last one I was using was so loud you could hear it when you walked in the door of the house! I think the next big thing I'll get for my computers is a 17" flat panel monitor to take over my 60 lbs. 19" CRT behemoth that's sitting on my desk. When I get that flat panel monitor, I can then move my desk back a good foot and a half, cuz this thing is so freakin' huge!
    That's the update for today. Hope I get to bed early tonight and not pull an all nighter like last weekend, the night before class when I had a test, cuz I'm now outta sick days! Anyways, here's a screenshot of my new CPU, enjoy...

10/14/05 -- This long ass week is finally over. The other day before I came into work, I got the email invite from Mediacom about the eTrust software we are releasing. As soon as I saw that in my inbox I said OH SHIT. That time has finally come. They were releasing 10,000 invites a week, but we just got ass raped on the phone calls during those times, so they held off on releasing the rest of them until now. But instead of finishing them up with another 10,000 a week, they decided to email all the rest of them out at once...all 55,000 of them. I just got a couple calls on it asking if it was legit or not, but I know next week is going to be the worst week of work to date. Mediacom is great.

    I wanted to put up something here that a friend at work wrote to me telling me the REAL story about Batman and the Joker and the real killer of his parents, from my previous post. Here's the answer...

...the storyline with the Joker killing Bruce Wayne’s parents is a product of the 1990 “Batman” film by Tim Burton. The comics all point to two (possibly one) story as to who killed the Wayne's. 1. A random street thug. 2. A thug named Joe Chill (corny, I know). Of course, having it be a random street thug gives the writers more creative liberty with stories, BUT, one could also come to the conclusion that the anonymous thug WAS Joe Chill. Regardless, it wasn’t the Joker who killed Mr. and Mrs. Wayne and that the death scene in the Burton adaptation was done for dramatic effect.

So that explanation explains a lot, and I kind of thought that one of the Batman movies was off on the storyline with it. Well, now we know the truth!

10/11/05 -- Work wasn't so bad today, pretty damn slow and I got to train one of my friends on the phone today, Bryce. He's the third guy I got a job at Mediacom. Once each of them works there 90 days, I get a $250 bonus for each, so $750 bonus all together! Awesome.
    After work, I was studying homework and stepped outside for a break. I just happened to look up at the right time and saw the best shooting star I've EVER seen! I was so great, I made a picture of it so you can see how close it was to the Earth. This is about actual size of what I saw in the sky.

It lit up like this for about 3 seconds, and when it faded out, I was waiting to hear a loud THUD, but that didn't happen. I've been noticing out here that you can see a LOT more stars, and this has been about the 3rd falling star I've seen since I've moved out here.
    And here's my fun link for the day. This is NOT safe for work, and contains nudity, but it's fun! Check it out here.

10/10/05 -- Well Sunday I was hung over as hell. Spend most of the day recuperating and getting the house clean. The entire bar downstairs and everything around it was all STICKY. Ick. Got the whole house cleaned up and stayed up too late and had too much pop. I tried going to bed at 2am, couldn't sleep, and knew I had a test in class at 8am. I decided to stay up till then, so I did. Got to class, asked my teacher if I could go home after the test to sleep, since I was up all night, and he said only if I get an A on the test. OK, I said. Took the test, wasn't as bad as I thought, and guess what, I got an A, so off I went after class. Only to find out I was so tired I left my lights on in my car, and my battery was dead. Had to have a security guy come out to jump my car. On the way home at 9:30am, I KNEW I wasn't going to have the strength to make it through work and get off at midnight, I'd be dead by then. I had an extra day of flextime, so I called up to use it and went home and crashed.
    Later on that night, Eric and I watched Batman Begins, first time I saw it all the way through. Not a bad movie, but I didn't understand some of it. I always thought that the Joker killed Bruce Wayne's parents, but in this movie, the guy that killed his parents was killed when he got out of prison. At the end of the movie, they show a Joker card for being the new villain in the next Batman movie, WTF?

10/09/05 -- My God, what a weekend. The party came and went. Only about half the people that said they would be here showed up. For those that didn't show up, see if you get invited back! Grrr... Felt like complete shit all day long, all of us did. But we finally got around to getting stuff cleaned up and back to normal. I guess I puked last nite, didn't even know till this morning. But I don't feel too bad about it because some other kid puked and Eric puked twice as well. Next time I'm staying away from the hard shit! But for those of you that came to the party, thanks for coming and I hope you had a great time, we'll see you at the next one! Photos from the party can be found here.

10/06/05 -- I kicked ass at work today, took a record number of calls with the shortest call times too! I have Friday off of work and I was going to get lots of things ready for the party we are having on Saturday. I was talking to Eric about it tonight, and we are guessing we'll have between 40 and 50 people here on the party, its going to be nuts. I need to get lots of batteries for my camera, so I can take a lot of pictures of it so I'll remember it! I'll be sure to post those pix here also. A 3-day weekend...oh yes. Here's is some miscellaneous bullshit to fill up this blog entry...
    I've been meaning to post this link, but this is a crude "Piracy Calculator". See how much your loot is worth!
    Oh, and I ran across this telling about how each sign of the horoscope drinks. For me it says...

SCORPIO Drinking Style: Don't ever tell Scorpios they've had enough, for they'll smirk at you and quietly but intentionally keep tippling till they're hog-whimpering drunk, out of 100-proof spite. Scorpios like to drink and screw you if you have a problem with that. Most of them see the sauce as something to savor in itself, and not as a personality-altering tool-though if depressed, self-loathing Scorps seek total obliteration. But generally, they're fascinating drinking pals, brilliant conversationalists and dizzying flirts. They also remember everything-especially what you did when you were blitzed. Only drink with a Scorpio who likes you.

Scorpio's are the best no matter what shit people tell you!

10/03/05 -- What another busy weekend. We finally decided to have our first BIG party this upcoming Saturday night. Been doing stuff around here to get the house finally set up the way we want it. Did some shopping the other day, and found a new poster I just HAD to have for my room, you can see it here. Oh baby.
    I am planning on taking my first flex-time day off this Friday to get everything done around here and also give myself a 3-day weekend! We are going to have a keg for our party. The invites we sent out said that if you want to drink free all night, all you have to do is bring us a bottle of alcohol to stock up our bar. I figured all the free alcohol we get, we'll be ahead from the cost of the keg. I've invited roughly 30-35 people so far, and those people will bring people too, so it's gonna be one hell of a party. I told Eric that if the cops don't show up, I'm going to be VERY disappointed. Then I also heard some stuff about that even if the cops DO show up, they can't do anything because this is considered a "private community", so we'll see. We'll have to notify the neighbors what's going down so they won't freak out on us when we have over 50 people on our deck!

September 2005

09/28/05 -- Big Update! I finally got around to taking some pictures of the house. Didn't get everything though. It is 2:30am and the other guys are sleeping so I was quiet when I took these. But anyways, without further ado, here are some pics of my new place!

My new room before I got everything unpacked.

Other side of room on the day I moved in.

Far side of my room. My friend Shari wants to paint something badass on this wall.

My closet and TV and the box that gives me my free 250 channels!!!

Wall behind my computer desk. Still have some bare spots to fill on the wall.

Door next to my computer desk.

Picture of Gordon Freeman over my lightswitch.

I didn't mean for this to look gay, just funnier than hell, I dunno.

Kitchen.

The wall jacks I helped install last weekend.

Room under the stairs, soon to be our "server room".

See the nice cabling job I did in this room?

A damn professional job if you ask me!

Downstairs living room.

Other side of living room. This is where I make bank :lol:

Our bar. Yes, we have a bar and you don't.

That sink makes it a "wet bar". Pwned again you are.

I'll take some more pics this week to show off the other parts of the house, so stay tuned!

09/26/05 -- I know I haven't updated this in a long time, sorry my faithful readers! Been VERY busy around here getting stuff done. I barely have anytime to do anything else really. On Saturday I went shopping and got some new work clothes and lots of stuff I needed for the house. The 2 big things I got was a big blue shag carpet for my room to cover up most of the wood floor. God it's so nice! Also finally got a coffee maker, and it's one that you set to make coffee for you automatically, very nice too.
    On Sunday, Eric and I spent all day cabling our house. We ran 2 Ethernet cables to each bedroom and got it all up in the suspended ceiling downstairs. All of it runs to our soon to be "server room" which will be located under the stairs. I have all the cable nicely setup to that room. We will put plenty of ventilation in that room too and need to run power to the room as well. In each bedroom, we have a special wall jack that has three connections, one for TV coax cable, and 2 ports for Ethernet cables. Wiring up those jacks was easy, just press the CAT5 cables into the correct colors and it was done. The other ends of those cables was another story though. It's been so long since I had to crimp Ethernet cords, it took me forever to get back into it again. Had to crimp 6 cables total, and it must of took me an hour to do. I had to get them just right, otherwise I started over, so that's what took so long. But after the first one, the rest seemed easier. My fingers STILL hurt from moving around those tiny wires, ouch.
    To my surprise, I hooked my PC up to each port up there, and put the cable modem onto each plug down there and guess what? Each cord works! And I didn't have to redo any of the ends, thank God. I was pretty impressed with myself for nailing it the first time!
    I do plan on putting up some pictures of my new place soon, to stay tuned for that! Need to take a bunch of pictures soon, but I should do that sometime this week.

09/18/05 -- On Saturday we got more stuff done around here. The house is really coming together. On Saturday night, we had Shaena and her friends over for her birthday. We got pretty drunk watching Team America and drank lots of beer and mixed drinks. We were all pretty tanked and decided to go up to Rudy's, the only bar in this town. Had a great time there, had lots of shots and more beer. We all came back here for a bit, then they all left. Eric and I were so drunk, we decided to go outside and go bat hunting. The night before I swear I heard about 500 bats in the row of bushes outside our house. We were sitting by the house chilling and I decided to take a walk to the bushes. I got all the way down the yard, barely able to walk, then I lost my balance, spun around, and fell on my back. I was laughing about it, then got very tired and passed out. I think I woke up 15-30 minutes later and Eric was gone. He also locked the front door too, and I didn't have my keys on me. So I had to jump the back fence and luckily the back door was unlocked. I woke up felling like uber-shit today, and we found my cell phone and the flashlight still out in the yard were I passed out. I told Eric that small party we had, things got crazy and just imagine what it will be like when we have our first HUGE party sometime early next month. I just better remember to take pictures!
    Tomorrow is another long week. I have class tomorrow morning, and on Tuesday morning there's another Microsoft Meeting at Wynnsong theatres. It's going to be tough to get up early and be way out there in time, but everyone goes for the freebies, and they're worth it.

09/14/05 -- I am about 90% done with setting up my room. We still have a few boxes we have to unpack and get everything put away. Don't have too much time this week to do that because we all work. I think it'll be almost all done by this Saturday, and I hope we do because we are having some friends over from out of town, it's gotta look nice for them!
    Eric's been buggin' me about getting a HD DVR for the big screen TV downstairs. So today, I got the OK from a woman at work and went in to Mediacom to exchange our cheap digital box for the high-def DVR box. This thing looks NICE. It has a 120GB hard drive inside and also 2 firewire ports in the back of it. Supposedly, you can hook up a PC to the firewire port and transfer files back and forth to the DVR box. I'm not sure if Mediacom locked out that feature or what, but we'll have to start looking up ways to get around it and get it hacked. That way we can record them on the DVR box, transfer the ones we really want to keep to the PC, then burn those off to DVD or whatever, so we can keep them forever. I got home late tonight after getting groceries, but I'll try to hook it up tomorrow and play around with it before work. I gotta be careful with all these channels, it's so easy to watch TV and not do anything else at all!

09/13/05 -- Had to get up early today too for the Mediacom guy. Had the schedule set to 8-12, got up at 7:45am but he didn't call till 10am. I guess the cable buried in the yard sucks, so he had to run a new cable to the house. He then hooked us up with 2 cable boxes and the Internet. I've had the Internet thru Mediacom before so no big whoop, but I've never had EVERYTHING on the TV!!! That's what I was playing with all day. I have two hundred and fifty channels!! I can't believe that! I'm used to about 5 channels! It's insane.
    At work, I finally got to ask my friend how Gizmo is doing, and I was surprised at what he said! He said the first couple days Gizmo hid under beds and behind couches the whole time, that I expected. But what shocked me is when he said that Gizmo was following him around the house and cuddling with him and purring, even playing with him too! I was shocked to hear that, because I expected Gizmo to take a LONG time to finally come around to the new people he's living with, but it only took a few days! Awesome. He said that he'd like me to come over to see him again, and since he's doing SO well with his new owners, I think I might do that.

09/12/05 -- Had class today. I took the bypass all the way around and north till Altoona, then up to Ankeny and it took me 45 minutes! I gotta find another way next time, I was tired as hell from getting up so early and from the drive. Maybe 63rd to I-235 then to Ankeny next time!

09/11/05 -- Today I finished moving stuff from my old place to my new place, made about 3 trips and the drive is about 15 minutes each way, not bad. Also started getting my room together, took about an hour to get my entire computer desk and every cable plugged in and up and running. That night, my friend from work came over to the old house to get Gizmo. He did exactly what I thought he would. Seemed cool until he saw the new guy and ran off. Then we had to chase him around the house to catch him. When I did, I tried to calm him down, but Gizmo KNEW what was going on, I think he knew all day, he had this look on his face like he was pissed off and knew something was up. We couldn't get him in the cat carrier because he was fighting me with all his might NOT to get in there. Finally we put the cage upright, and I basically had to shove him into it to get him in there. Seemed kinda sad because he was freaking out and started crying like he was hurt. We got everything in my friends car and off he went. He told me that he'd like me to stop by sometime to see him, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that, didn't want to mess up Gizmo's head anymore than it already was!

09/10/05 -- Moving day! I got up early and had friends over to help me move. It only took us 45 minutes to load up my stuff and then get to Eric's place. Dad had to park his truck kinda far away because it couldn't fit anywhere else. After a long time at Eric's we got back to the house and moved stuff in. Had a hell of a time with the couch and the big screen TV that goes downstairs, but we finally got it done. Not to mention it was over 90 degrees all day long, sucked ass.

09/08/05 -- Work STILL sucks, and I think it's making me go crazy. I just had the WORST call tonight. I had 3 minutes to go before I could leave and I get a phone call by some lady with some accent from who knows God where. She didn't know SHIT about computers at all and she was supposedly taking a class online! It took me five minutes to have her find her 'Start' button. I was going to die. I finally asked her to have her husband call back for help, she agreed. I gotta outta there at 12:15am.
    I also tried making a joke today to some lady on the phone that had 3 Apple computers and a Apple Airport wireless router. God I hate those things. Ugly as hell. Anyways, her Airport wasn't working at all, so I said to her jokingly, "Ma'am, the airport is closed, and all flights are cancelled." She didn't find that too funny.
    Well tomorrow is when Eric is supposed to close on the house. I found out a few days ago that the guy living there hasn't finished the downstairs basement yet, and he was supposed to have it done before closing. He's had only six months to get it completed too. Because of this, one of two things will happen... either we move in right away on Saturday and he has to pay a contractor to finish the bathroom, or the bank gives him another WEEK to finish it and we move in NEXT weekend. Ah shit. I told Eric we have to move in this weekend, because we have everything set up for this weekend. My Dad is bringing the truck over to help us move on Saturday, I'm giving away Gizmo on Sunday, my mail will start being forwarded there on Monday, and the Mediacom guy is coming on Tuesday. If our move gets bumped back another week, EVERYTHING has to be rescheduled, and that's just my stuff I have to worry about, Eric & Todd have all their stuff to reschedule too. But we'll find out tomorrow morning when he inspects the place and goes to close on the house. Good thing they are not waiting to the last minute to decide this, geesh!!!

09/05/05 -- The 40 Year-Old Virgin movie has got to be one of the FUNNIEST movies I've seen in a LONG time! Just about every joke in the movie, the entire audience was laughing out loud, as so was I. At some parts I laughed till I cried. I would definitely see it again! Can't wait for it to come out on DVD.
    Well, my Labor Day just came and went. Had to work today, I wasn't too happy about that till I found out that we got time and a half pay today, so today I made $18/hour! w00t! They were also nice and let us have an hour lunch today, God that was nice. But I know the rest of the week it will be back to 1/2 hour lunches, grrrr... You can't do shit in 1/2 hour! If you eat the crap in the vending machines at work, you can barely scarf down your food within 20 minutes. Then when you get back on the phone, you feel like you're going to puke for eating so quickly. One day we'll get our hour lunches back, just wish I knew when that was!
    Well, everyday after work this week I will be packing up the rest of my shit, because this Saturday I will be moving! I talked to Eric tonight, and Eric and Todd, and some other friends will be here Saturday morning at 10AM to move my shit into the truck, then off to Eric's we go to load up all his shit and Todd's too. It should only take up to an hour to get my stuff moved I'm thinking. Then more time getting all Eric's and Todd's stuff, then off to the house to unload it all. I heard that it will be raining all day on Saturday, now it looks like it's supposed to be sunny and a high at about 88 degrees, so we'll have to see how that plays out.

09/04/05 -- What a night! I'm lucky I made it home alive! We started out at Dave's house waiting for everyone. All the guys had black shirts on, and all the girls had red shirts on. Dan got a shirt made for him this week, a black shirt with white lettering on the front saying "My Penis Funeral". We started out going to a pool hall for a few hours and started drinking. I was getting a buzz pretty good because I didn't have supper that night! I hacked the pool table we were playing at too. The board where you put the quarters in was loose, so I found the lever that releases the balls and got us free games all night. My old friends who I haven't seen in a year and 1/2, Jason & Joe were there too. It was nice to see them again and catch up with them.
    At 9:30 our "party van" showed up and we all got in. Our driver lady said how there's no smoking on the van, but you can drink. And if anyone is going to puke that she has bags to puke in also, gross! Well we leave the pool hall and get beer on the way to the Lumberyard. I don't remember too much while at the Yard. I remember when Dan was on the shower stage. That was great. He had strippers all over him all night too, must be nice to be a bachelor! We left there and drove all they way back to meet up with the girls at the Twisted Parrot. I could barely stay awake on the way back, but I did. I was getting tired and needed to eat something, I was starving.
    We get to the Parrot, and Dave goes running inside by himself. Everyone else is taking their time to get inside, so I go in to see what Dave is doing. He's up on the dance floor, by himself, dancing all crazy, it was hilarious. We find a table and I finally get some chicken strips and we also get a couple orders of nachos. That really helped sober me up, I needed to! We all sat around drinking more while everyone else was up on the dance floor. I don't know how, but Dan's shirt got ripped down the middle all the way! Kinda sux since he just bought that shirt too!
    On the way home, Sarah is asking us where Tammy's beer cooler was. We told her we never seen it nor ever used it. She got all pissy at all of us and started crying. I was sitting next to her and tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn't. Grr...Then when we get back to Dave's house, we were sitting outside at the tables, Tammy busts out crying that it was all her fault. I about lost it. I HATE girls who are depressed drunks and cry over stupid shit like that. Sarah's mom jumped into action, looked in the van and FOUND the missing cooler. Nothing to cry about after all. Geesh.
    All the girls wanted to go out to the Yard, but they were only open for another hour and a half. Most of the guys were tired as hell already, like I was. I was so tired, I wanted to sleep in my car, but I knew I couldn't stretch out in my backseat. So some of them left for the Yard. I'm glad I didn't go, I took over $100 and my wallet at that time was bone dry! So I drove home kinda drunk but mostly tired. I almost fell asleep a few times on the way home, but I was determined to make it. From Dave's, it's like a 20 minute drive to my house so it was kinda tough! But I made it and passed out in my bed immediately.
    Woke up early, kinda hung over, but I'm doing alright. I'm going out with a friend tonight to see The 40 Year-Old Virgin movie tonight, it's going to be hilarious.

09/02/05 -- Finished a hell-ish week at work, arg. That last call of the week was me on speakerphone and the lady's other phone on speakerphone to a lady at Linksys. So we could all talk together and get the problem solved, it was crazy.
    Well tomorrow night is Dan's bachelor party! I'll try to take pictures and tell what happened, because it's going to be a crazy night!

August 2005

08/30/05 -- Work is really sucking bad. They've been giving us little perks here and there to help us out, but the calls are horrible. We did get a casual dress week all week, and today they ordered pizza for everyone, that was nice. But starting tomorrow, we are forced into mandatory 1/2 hour lunch breaks. We had an hour before, then 45 minutes, now 30 minutes. With that, they are still trying to get as many people as they can to come in during the day to work overtime to help out with the call volume. Things were already busy as hell for us, and with the Florida call center closed all this week because of Hurricane Katrina, we are getting those calls from all those Southerner's! I'm really starting to get burnt out from this job, and I've been there only 2 months! I think the kick in the teeth for me is the massive call volume we are getting. When I started, it had it's busy times, but you could actually take a breather between calls. Not anymore. At least I've been able to have my friend Brett sit with me all day and listen in on phone calls since he's still in training. I have a lot of fun with him there, and makes the day not so bad.
    I had my first day of class yesterday. All the guys in there were a year behind me in the program, so I only know a few of them. I guess I'm the only guy there that has some Microsoft tests passed. I need to get back on those and get those done and over with. I should probably start studying again when I get off of work instead of screwing around like I always do. Anyways, the first day of class was blah, just heard about the class and other stuff. It's really nice only having class on Mondays too! Next Monday is Labor Day, so no class for 2 weeks! I think this class will be easy compared to the last ones I took. The first few chapters is all about DHCP. I got bored tonight and added that service to my walkthroughs for Windows Server 2003. So sometime soon, I'll have to study for that class, study for my Microsoft exams, and study for this class at work. I got the book today for it, after I applied for the class 2 months ago. We have 6 months to read the book, and pass the tests. Not really a 'class', just do when you can, and submit your answers online. When you do pass it, you get a quarter raise in pay, but can only take so many per year and only so many to increase your pay so much. I think it's only 2 per year and 6 total to increase your pay. But this way I can basically give myself a 50 cents raise within the first year!
    But this weekend is Dan's bachelor party, and I know all of us are going to be completely smashed. That's what I really need after a shitty week like this! Then next weekend is when I move. Going to be a long, hard day's worth of work moving all my shit and Todd and Eric's shit, but after it's moved the easy part is unpacking. Speaking of, I need to continue packing up my shit! Ah, the joys of moving...

08/28/05 -- What a weekend. Friday night my friend Shari called and wanted to go out for a few so after work we went to the Twisted Parrot and had a few pitchers of beer. It was good to finally get out and drink away another shitty week of work!
    Then on Saturday, my friend Shaena wanted me to come out to hang out with her in Iowa City. I took a nap and woke up late and had to hurry to get ready and drive out there, so I'd be there around 6pm. It was about a 2 hour drive. I haven't been that far outta town in a LONG time, and I haven't been to Iowa City for about 5 years! It was my first time when I hit the new 70 mph speed limit that they increased earlier this year. Was 65, now 70, not much of an increase but gives everyone a reason to go 75mph or more. I even took a picture of the new speed limit, see it here. I finally get to Shaena's and we first go out to eat at Panchero's, a Mexican food restaurant. My first time eating there, but it was good stuff. Then we got some Captain 'n Coke and picked up a movie at Blockbuster. She's never seen Sin City, so we pick up that movie. We get back to her place and I decide to make a game out of drinking and a movie. Usually you do something like whenever someone cusses, but there's not too many cuss words in Sin City. So I decide whenever there is a gunshot, we drink. I don't think we got 1/2 way thru the movie and both of us were fuct up! She tried keeping track of the gunshots, but it was over 70 or more! Then we run outta Coke and we drive up to the gas station her boyfriend works at and get some more. First time I met the guy, seems pretty nice I guess. He was totally cool with me coming over to hang out with her, since we're just friends and all. She then puts Boondock Saints in the DVD player. I thought I've seen this movie before, but I haven't! I was too drunk to remember most of it, but I need to get it and finally watch it. She said that if we drank every time someone said 'fuck', we'd be dead before the end of the movie. Man, was she right! I tried counting, but in just about ANY scene they said 'fuck' about 50 times in a 10 minute stretch. Her boyfriend finally comes home from work and we all hang out for a bit, then they go to bed and let me crash on the couch. I couldn't sleep worth a shit, but I get up early in the morning, have some coffee and then the long drive home. I didn't get any pictures at all from my trip, but I got a few of her dog, Pudgie, he's a pug. See them here and here. He was a lot of fun to play with!
    I start class tomorrow at DMACC. I just have the class one day a week, thank god, cuz it's 8am-11am, tough hours for me because I usually don't go to sleep till after 4am since I work till midnight. This weekend I think we are having the bachelor party for my friend Dan, and we are planning to get that party bus rented and cruise around in it having a "mobile party". It's going to be a good time. Then next weekend is my big move! I've been packing little by little but I'll be all ready by then for sure!

08/26/05 -- I know I haven't updated this all week, basically cuz works sucks. It's already started on that downhill slide, and only going to get worse. We are basically getting slammed with phone calls lately because of the shit software that we released that somehow WE have to support and it's not even ours! It's so bad that we've held back the emails so more people can download it because we can BARELY help the people who already have it! They are forcing us to take 45 minute lunches because they think that will help. Of course it won't so they are going to force us to take 30 minute lunches pretty soon. Sure we need to find a new place and basically TRIPLE our employees to handle the HUGE load of calls we are getting and will continue to get, but they're cheap and won't do it. They'd rather pay out the nose overtime to all employees and wear us as thin as possible before they have to do that. Makes no fucking sense to me. I told one supervisor they might as well take away our breaks, lunches, crank up the heat to 120 degrees and walk around whipping us, so that way we have no problem realizing what it has basically become there for us, a sweatshop. "Things will get better", they say. Sure they will, but not until after January when we get to move to a bigger building and get more people hired, so from now until then, it's going to be absolute HELL. God, give me the strength that I don't go postal in there. Grrrr...!!!

08/20/05 -- Well I completely finished hacking my phone...for now. I finally deleted all the factory pictures and ringtones to give me more space for other stuff! Now the only thing I'll have to hook it up for is to transfer my files to and from it!
    It was Poker night at Amy & Dave's, and we only got up to 7 people. I was hoping my sister & her husband and their friends would come out, but I guess they were way too tired to go after being at the Iowa State Fair all day. We still had a lot of fun. I started off GREAT, but I went down and up for most the game. Eric had to buy back in and I actually took him out! I can't believe he called my all-in, and I had a straight Ace high too...on the river! We had some wicked hands that night though. Dan got 4 of a kind, I was ONE card away from having a royal flush, and at the very end of the night, Dave took out Amy with a straight flush, never seen one of those before! Sarah took a lot of pictures with my phone, she actually filled it all the way up! But I'd like to share some of the good ones with all of you now...

  Here's the chips we all started with.

  This is me looking retarded at the beginning of the game.

  My beverage of choice for the night.

  Sarah cheesin' it.

  The game is underway.

  I had to take a picture of the pot I won! hehe

  Eric's grumpy after I took him out.

  This is "Neanderthal Dan"!

  Sarah got bored after she lost, but I have this fabulous picture!

  Not sure who's pot this was, but still a cool pic.

I had shit left in chips, and there was 4 other people playing along with me. I was trying to go for 3rd place, but I knew I had to take out 2 other people to get there. I wasn't much of a 'force' at that point with low chips, so I figured, let them duke it out and I'll be left! Well, that actually worked! Somehow I laid low enough, and basically folded every hand that wasn't pocket Aces, hehe, and I ended up getting third place! Of course with the few people we had there, it was only $10, my money back, but I was still happy to make the top three!

08/19/05 -- Another long week at work. The best call today was that a guy, who owns an Apple computer, was trying to hookup his powerbook to his modem, but it wasn't getting any IP address at all...come to find out that he was using a phone cord instead of the Ethernet cord! Those silly Apple users!
    I finally got all my shit in that I ordered, and 3 of them on the same day! A 100-pack of DVD-R's, 50-pack of DVD cases (HUGE box), and my USB cable to hook my cell phone up to my computer. Ever since I got my new cell phone, I've been wanting to hack it. It took me 2 nights to find everything and get everything working, but I finally hacked it tonight! The first thing to hack was to take off the restriction on the cell phone so you can then use a program to transfer files back and forth to and from the cell phone. Verizon likes to "nickel and dime" you on everything! For example, any pics you take on your cell phone stay there till you transfer them to their website, then download them. Each picture you transfer from phone to site costs 25 cents each! Ouch!!! Now I can transfer all I want for free. Once that was done, I finally got some pics off my phone that I've been waiting to save. (The REALLY nice thing is that I can now get pictures more easily and add them to my website easier too!) Funny thing was that I thought my camera on my phone sucked total ASS because the pictures looked like shit while seen on the screen on the phone...it wasn't till now that I realize that it takes 640x480 resolution pics and they don't look half bad! Take a look at one now, this is me at work talking to you  boonies all day at work!

Once that was done, the next step was to take off that annoying "Verizon Wireless" banners that show on the front and inside screens. The main one inside the phone was easy, now says djdingo.com, but the one on the front was more difficult to find. That one now says www.djdingo.com! Can't get much more personalized than that! That covered most of the stuff I wanted to do with my phone, so I started seeing what I could put on my phone from my PC. Pictures are nice, but I wanted to see what I could do about sound files. All the ringtones on the phone are MIDI files, but I read that the phone can actually play MP3 files. Of course there's not enough memory on the phone to make it a portable iPod, but I thought making up my own ringtones would be fun. I found some funny .wav files, converted them into MP3's and uploaded to my cell phone. I just put on two of them for now, but this Family Guy mp3 is now my ringtone, and for another one, I have the Matt Damon's from Team America: World Police (one of my favorite movies). I think my phone's total memory is like 5MB, so there's not much of anything you can add to it!
    Well my sister and her husband are coming into town tomorrow from Colorado and going to the Iowa State Fair. I guess we are having some big ass steaks tomorrow night for dinner, then later on I think we are having another Poker night. And on Sunday, all our families are getting together to eat at Famous Dave's. I'm finally going to eat good this weekend, and it's about time!

08/17/05 -- Oh what a night. It was Sean's 28th birthday today and I met him at the Lumberyard after work and stayed there till close. It was amateur night and pretty fun. Sean's friends from work were there and paid to get him on stage for his birthday. Usually the stripper rips off his underwear, but Sean was prepared and wasn't wearing any! LOL You should of seen the look on the strippers face when she couldn't find his underwear! She tied his belt around his neck and rode him around the stage. Then got a permanent marker and wrote on his back "Insert Cock Here" with an arrow pointing down to his ass. Then the last thing was this, and I don't know why they do this, it's kinda stupid, but they put a empty beer can between his ass cheeks, then she crushed it with her knee. But anyways, it was a good time, I just took a 6-pack and good thing cuz I hear the cops were out thick last night, and I drove home just fine. Woke up with a slight headache, but then realized it's only Thursday and have 2 more days of work till the weekend, argh.
    I guess all of us are trying to get something going on for Dan's bachelor party coming up next month, the weekend before I move and the weekend before Dan & Sarah fly to Vegas to get married. I think the plan is to get a party bus. I've seen it around town a few times, it's a big school bus but it drives around town, and you can see black lights in it and people standing up dancing and drinking, it's basically a small dance club on wheels, but it looks like it's a lot of fun. Then I heard it's over $400 to rent it, so we have to get a lot of people in it to cut down on the cost for everyone.
    I finally got that Apple OS emulator up and running, well, sort of...I actually get stuck at the loadup screen and it just keeps working and working and working. I read that you have to have a CPU that can do SSE2 instruction set, but this AMD Athlon 2100+ can't do SSE2. I thought maybe it would still work, but just be incredibly fucking slow, so I turned it on yesterday and let it run all day while I was at work to see if it would eventually bootup. So over 8 hours later, guess what? It didn't, it was still on the loadup screen! In the meantime, I'll share it with my friends and try to find a CPU that it can install on. Ah, the trouble you have to go through for pirated software!

08/16/05 -- Another blah day at work today. But I do have some interesting updates about other stuff going on in the world today...
    The Doom movie is coming out October 21! Click here to visit the website and watch the trailer for this. I watched this, and quite honestly, the movie looks like it's gonna blow big time! Ouch! Almost looks like the Resident Evil movie that came out. Both movies based on video games, and movies based on video games usually suck ass.
    More crap to add to your PSP! Someone found a way to port Windows 95 onto Sony's PSP. Click here to read about it!
    Just recently, some hackers have found a way to run Apple's OS X operating system on a regular Windows PC! This is stirring up a lot of controversy on the Apple/PC front. I am currently trying to get a copy of this working, and I was going to add some screenies to my site when it's working. The official homepage for the project is here. Check it out!
    In other news, I finally found a home for Gizmo, my cat. One of the supervisor's at work wants him, and he's the first to offer to take him. I'm happy he's going to get him, I'm sure Gizmo will be happy.
    Tomorrow, Wednesday, is my friend Sean's birthday. He let me know that him and some other people are going to the Lumberyard for his birthday, who knew? LOL. I told him I get out of work at midnight, and he said he would probably be there till close, which is usually 4am. I'm definitely into taking break after work in the week to see some titties! Oh yes...

08/15/05 -- Not a whole lot of excitement happened today, just another Monday at work. We are releasing our own version of security software this month, and the calls are starting to come in for it. It's going to be an absolute nightmare. EZ Armor consists of antivirus, firewall, anti-spam, and anti-spyware, and it's being released to people who don't know their left from right click on the mouse! Oh God, please have mercy on us!!!
    Oh, I went to Yahoo! today and saw this picture on their site, something called "Blog for Hope". Anyways, their was 2 small windows on it, and it was switching pictures between different "celebrities" every second, and on one part of it, Hillary Clinton's picture is shown next to Tom Green. I thought, what a fantastic couple that would be! LOL. Check it...

08/14/05 -- Got a LOT done this weekend. On Saturday, after sleeping in, I started going thru old shit and throwing away stuff I didn't need anymore, and kinda started packing. I still have FOUR more weeks to go, but with this free time I decided to start. Later that night, I just wasn't in the mood to get ready to go out, so I chilled at home and got a lot of that done.
    On Sunday, I got up early, noon, and went over to Eric's to sign the lease and pay the deposit. Then I worked on my car, finally doing things I wish I'd done a long time ago, but either the weather wasn't right, or I didn't feel like it. I replaced a burnt bulb in my front parking light, easy, and then I tackled my instrument panel. For months now, the right side of my instrument panel has been not lit up because the light bulb burnt out in it. Not to mention my "Check Engine" light has been on all the time for about a year or more now. After taking apart half my dashboard, I finally get to it. The whole unit popped out with no wires, pretty nice. This is the cool part, I took the light out of the "Check Engine" spot and traded it for the burnt out one on the right side! Kinda strange, but the left side of the panel had 2 tiny bulbs, and they were broken and wouldn't stay in place. I tried using superglue a few times, one stayed the other just wouldn't stay. So I "MacGyver-ed" it and chewed a piece of gum and stuck it in place. I don't know if it really held or not, because after it's all together and lit up, its 1/2 as bright on that left side now. But the right side lights right up and no more "Check Engine" light! Woot!
    I also found out that the guy at the house Eric's buying is supposed to move out by 5pm on Friday the 9th of next month. I told Eric that he should get in there then, and start shampooing the carpet and really cleaning up the place. He wanted to see if I could get off work for that day, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to or not, since I'm fairly "new" and not sure when I can take a day off yet. Then the next day, my dad was going to bring his truck from work by and load up my stuff and possibly stop by Eric's and get all his shit, all in one trip! Then we'll have a new, clean house to move into by the time we get there. Todd's stuff would also probably fit in that truck too just fine. If you haven't noticed, I put a timer till the days on the front of my site, I'm pretty excited about it!!!
    Oh, and I did some online shopping last night. Got some things I've been needing, like 100-pack of DVD-R's, a 300-pack of CD labels, a 50-pack of DVD cases, and a USB data cable to hook my cell phone to my PC so I can hack it! I've already gotten free Internet on it, but that's just the tip of the iceberg so far!

08/11/05 -- This week has been nuckin' futs! I had some time I wanted to try to make up for leaving early on Tuesday, so I get up early, get ready and get to work about 45 minutes early to catch up on a bit of time. I take about 3 phone calls and was told to put myself in unavailable. At this time it was 3pm, the time when I start my regular shift, so I pack up my things and grab a desk where I usually sit. Then everyone stands up because we are having problems with the phone system. They wanted to reboot the phone system, so we all had to get off the phones. They tried rebooting it, but it did not work. A boss immediately started collecting up 6 people to go downtown to the Ingersoll office, and I was one of them. So a friend and I drove to Ingersoll taking all the back roads and I drove 5 miles UNDER the limit all the way there. We are given 1/2 hour to get there and 1/2 hour to get back, so I made sure to us that time wisely. We finally get to Ingersoll and get inside. This place is pretty big, but you feel like a rat in a maze going thru the place. I get assigned a desk with a low seat and a low keyboard, so I'm laid back punching the keys. I swear those PCs had a shitload of spyware on it and some other garbage, they ran slower than shit. Not to mention the shitty mouse I had, left mouse button barely worked, so I ended up switching the buttons from right-handed to left-handed, so right-click was left, and vice versa. That worked better, but took FOREVER to get used to! Well, we were only there for a couple hours and were sent back, so another slow drive home, had a few more calls, and lunch time! The rest of the day was pretty busy but I lived.
    I also made up a flyer for a free cat and hung it in the break room today. I have to give up Gizmo when I move because Eric won't let me have my cat over there, what an evil landlord! lol. I was going to give him to my mom, but I think he's making her sick because she's kind of allergic to him. It's sad I have to give him up, but I want him to have a good home than to have him put down. I don't believe in killing an animal just because that animal becomes an inconvenience!  I have a couple people already interested in him so far, so I shouldn't have any trouble finding him a home.
    Tomorrow is payday! I'm ready for tomorrow to be over so I can do something fun this weekend, but not sure what yet. I'd like to get to the Iowa State Fair sometime this weekend or next if I can. I love paying $5 for a beer, ha!

08/10/05 -- Nothing too exciting happened at work today. But anyone reading this who is STILL using Windows 98...UPGRADE dammit!! I'm so sick of getting phone calls from people still using Windows 98! That OS is going on 7 years old this month! LOL, I just looked at the official Windows 98 website, and this picture kills me. This is what everyone who still uses Windows 98 does when their computer doesn't work!

    Anyways, my connection here at home has been really flaky the past few days. I don't notice any difference, but all my AIM friends are telling me how I will log off and then log back in constantly all the time. Some how my connection has been "hiccupping" basically. At Mediacom we call it an intermittent connection issue, but when I go "offline" it's just for a split second then I'm back on again. I tried uninstalling/reinstalling AIM but still have the issue. It is only with AIM for some reason. So I decided to give Mediacom's Tech Support a call to see if I was in an outage. Of course I am, you ALWAYS are in an outage when you call, it NEVER says you're OUT of an outage when you are! I swear to God. But anyways, I talk to someone, and they were surprised to hear that I work there. I was like, "Yeah, could you check my modem in CoreOS for intermittent connection, and is PTK up yet?" He believed me then. He said my modem was reset 18 times just within the last cycle, so that is kind of a lot because I never manually reset it myself. He asked if I wanted to schedule a trouble call to have a tech take a look at it, but I told him I'm moving soon, but he insisted. So I said I'd like a Saturday afternoon since I work all week, and it wouldn't be till the 20th! Ah well, I'll probably cancel it anyways unless it gets worse. Funny thing was at the end of the phone call, he didn't offer me the survey and I asked why, "I never offer the survey", he said. What?!? My supervisor busts my ass if I don't and I fail the evaluation, but some other people can slide by with no problem? Grrr...I need to work that shift! I called around 2am, and he said it was over an hour since his last call! And it sounded like I woke him up too! LOL. One day I'll get that "dream" shift...one day...

08/09/05 -- Today was a great day and one like today probably won't happen again. I'm on my way to work, its hot as fuck outside, and I have no air in my car. I finally get to work and get in the elevator and realize it isn't going anywhere. After a few minutes the door finally opened and I got out knowing something was going on. I get up to Mediacom and 1/2 the lights are out, we had another power outage, woot! So I chill out with some friends and shoot the shit for awhile. Then they take a group down to the Ingersoll office, I got lucky and wasn't on that list, then later they do it again, but I still get to stay. I figured the longest I could stay there, the less work and less phone calls I would have to take. Only problem was there was very little space in Ingersoll, so the rest of us would just have to wait. So we try killing time, sitting around talking, played some cards, read my magazine...then lunch time came. Me and a friend of mine go out to lunch, couldn't eat there because the power was out, vending machines off, and we come back and see the power company guys working on our boxes. A lady we work with comes out and tells us the news. Mediacom called earlier about the power and Mid-American energy said 2 hours. Mediacom called 2 hours later, and now they were saying 3 hours. So we now had basically 3 choices... go to Ingersoll office and sit around in break room until a seat opens up, go home early using some of your flex-time, or just go home early and make the hours up later. Since I'm still new, I can't use my flex-time yet, but asked to go home early, and I was able to! I left there at 7:30pm, it was still light out! Quite a change from going home at midnight!

08/08/05 -- Ok so it's 1:30am and I got my hands on a working copy of Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta. Found out it will ONLY install on Windows XP SP2 though, and since I just had SP1 on my Virtual PC, I copied that installation, upgraded it and installed IE 7.0. Took some screenshots with some comments to add, so check it out! (Click each thumbnail to enlarge picture)

My first look at IE7, is this Firefox?!? Looks almost exactly like Firefox. Ah well, has some of Firefox's nice features such as tabbed browsing, and the search address bar.

Here's proof it is what I say it is, IE 7.0!

I couldn't resist NOT going to my own website with it! LOL

Here's a new feature, the Phishing Filter. Does Firefox have that?

Now click one button to delete all your tracks, great for public computers!

Here's a list of the default search engines you can use.

And this one is for my friends. That page displays correctly in Firefox, but not in IE6 because of the lack of .PNG transparency. But guess what, IE7 displayed it correctly! Wow!

I have to say I was impressed with it though. There really wasn't a lot to take pictures of because the entire layout was simple, VERY simple. I think IE got so complicated with the extra shit it accumulated over the years, that it's good for it to start over again being simple. I'd almost install it on my own PC, but there is no uninstallation file, and it may be buggy as well. But remember, that was just a beta, so a lot could change on IE7 from now till when it's released. For those open-source hippies that say Microsoft is stealing from Firefox, all I got to say is this, open-source IS open-source, no matter who you are!

08/07/05 -- Today was a good day. Last night's poker game was blah though, I did really well at the beginning and eventually went down to nothing. Then when the tables combined, I was by myself. Was kinda tired so came home, got some things done and went to bed early. Today got some things done and went to Eric's place to meet up with them and Jeff to discuss the lease on the house and the living arrangements. I went over there ready to roll some heads because it sounded like I was going to get stuck in the "small" room just because no one else would take it. Eric did a fair agreement on it, the price for each room varies depending on the square footage, so you basically get what you pay for. With that, Jeff wanted to pay the least amount for rent and took the "small" room, leaving me with the one I wanted! Todd and Eric both got the rooms they wanted as well, so it all worked out.
    So they way it looks, Eric wants the deposits and leases signed in a couple weeks, he signs for the house on September 3rd, and we all move in on September 10th. I just talked to my dad, who drives a semi-truck for his work, and he will bring his truck by here on that morning to load up all my stuff and take it over to the house in ONE trip. Oh yes.
    I also got the measurements for the new room, 10 1/2 x 10 1/2 and all my stuff will fit in there just perfect and I'll still have plenty of room to spare. Here's a rough draft of they layout of it so far...

    So I now have FIVE weeks to go from yesterday before we all get to move in. I'm really excited and I know it's going to be a LONG 5 weeks!

08/06/05 -- What a crazy day today. Our lights flickered a few times today, but finally went out and stayed out! They sent some people to the Ingersoll office and the rest of us just hung out for awhile. We had limited power in the office from the backup generators. They found a few phones with dial tones. I got stuck in a corner with a phone with a dial tone, but the PC wouldn't come on, yes! So some of us sat around and chatted for about a half an hour while trying to look busy while my supervisor was taking phone calls! It was awesome. Then was lunch time, but before lunch was over, I saw 2 Mid-American Energy trucks in the parking lot fixing the power and the power was back on. Damn. The rest of the day was a little busy, but wasn't too bad. Then I had about 10 minutes left before I got to go home. I was at the top of the list for the next phone call, and one finally came. I knew I had less than 10 minutes to hurry the call and get out of there for my weekend. The lady on the call asked a few general questions at first, then she asked how to setup her Macintosh laptop to get online...NO!!! My friends were sitting there chatting, and I muted the call and told them, "My weekend starts in 5 minutes, and this lady needs help setting up a Macintosh laptop to get online!" Everyone's jaw dropped. I about died, because usually these phone calls can last a long time, and not to mention I barely know enough to save my life on an Apple computer. But God was on my site, and this lady knew her shit and the call was over RIGHT when it hit 11:55, the time we can sign off for the day. It was a PERFECT ending. WHEW!!!
   Since OzzFest is cancelled till next month, I'll be playing Poker tomorrow night. Kinda glad I get to play, been wanting to lately, and I need to drink after this shitty week!

08/05/05 -- Today was basically SHIT, and it just got worse. I was pulling my hair out from the stupid calls I had today and how fucked up our computer systems are at work. NOTHING works, and if it does, it's not working for long. Because of this, we have to tell people that it will be 24-72 hours before they can get online again, and then they just unleash on us. Pisses me off. We can't get our systems to work worth a SHIT, but somehow we can keep most of our quarter of a million people online with no problems? That blows my fucking mind. Then in a meeting later on that night, I find out that we have to say a BUNCH of bullshit at the end of every call, and if we don't and that call is monitored, we FAIL the call evaluation. Enough fails and you can get in trouble. Fucking sucks. I was totally looking forward for tomorrow to be over and then go to OzzFest on Sunday so I can get shit faced and party my tall ass off, but all that changed on the way home...
    They had a "sub-DJ" on the radio tonight and he sucks ass. I heard him say something about OzzFest this Sunday being cancelled till September 16th! WTF?!? I try calling Lazer103.3 to find out what he said exactly, couldn't understand him, musta had a cock in his mouth, but the line was busy. So I call up Eric, end up waking him up, and tell him what I heard and he starts looking it up. There ain't shit on the 'net about this, but he keeps looking. I get home and we are both looking up shit, and I find out that it was actually cancelled and rescheduled till September 10th, and that's the weekend we are all moving into the house! NO!!! Eric looks up more info and tells me that hotdogs are $5 and ONE beer is $7.50! Fuck that! I told him SINCE it's the weekend we are all supposed to be moving in, and the fact that ONE BEER costs just as much as a fucking movie ticket, to fuck it, I ain't going. Shit!

08/02/05 -- The start of today completely sucked ass. I saw a note on the door yesterday from Water Works and it said that there would be no water from the hours of 8am-1pm because they are tearing up the end of our street for the past 6 weeks. I woke up today at 1pm expecting the water to be on, but guess what, it wasn't. So I call Water Works to see how long it would take, and they give me the cell phone number of the head guy on that project. I call him up and he said, "Uhh...maybe within another hour." Great, just fucking great. I need to take a shower and get ready for work at 3pm. I decide to give it some time and wait till 1:30, but it still wasn't on. Grrr... so I decide to get dressed and head to Steve's shop to brush my teeth. It was kind of hot out today, and I felt all sticky all day, ack. My hair was kinda messy, but I don't think anyone noticed. Water's back on now, so I'm looking forward to that shower finally.
    So this Sunday Eric and I are going up to Somerset, WI to OzzFest. Eric keeps complaining that he doesn't want to take my car because it has no air in it. I keep telling him how we will be going up there early and besides, we'll be outside all day anyways. But we'll have to leave at 6am-8am on Sunday morning so we can get up there before the gates open at noon and we can tailgate up there before then. It's gonna be a lot of fun.
    Oh, and the funny thing that happened today, I decided to get a new feature added on my phone plan, so I wait till after work to call up Verizon and talk to someone to get it added to my plan. The greeting on the phone call was, "Verizon...we NEVER stop working for you!". Then shortly after I find out they close at 11pm, so I have to call tomorrow morning! WTF?!? I think it's kinda funny, so I'll say something to them tomorrow to see what they say about it, hell Mediacom is open 24/7, so why not a cell phone company? Geesh!

July 2005

07/31/05 -- What a crazy weekend! I couldn't wait to get outta work Friday night, I raced straight home, got beer and finally relaxed. On Saturday, I went out and spent most of my hard earned money. Finally got another cell phone, went thru Verizon this time. Then I bought another surge protector for my server, and some oil, oil and air filters for my car. Spent the rest of the day playing with my phone and reinstalling apps for my server. Then my friend Shaena called and told me that she was going to be in town tonight and wanted to do something. They were going to a concert by the river and wanted me to go. I didn't have enough time to get ready so I didn't. But I talked Eric into going and him and I met Shaena and her other 2 friends at the concert around 10. They were serving beer there so we all got a lot to drink. The last band was the Nadas, first time I saw them. Not bad, Shaena came just to see them. It was around 11:30 before that was over, and we talked all them into going with us to the Twisted Parrot. One girl knew of the bar and didn't want to go, but we talked them into it. Sure it's kinda a crappy bar, but its the bar we go to all the time, so we all went out there in Eric's car. Damn construction had 2 of our exits closed, so we had to backtrack to get there. When we got there, Dan & Sarah were there waiting for all us. We had a lot of fun, drank a lot, and Eric bought everyone a couple rounds of shots. Then they were kicking us out, and I told Eric we had 15 mins to find a gas station to buy beer before it was too late. We found TWO gas stations, but guess what, they were both closed. Then it was past two and too late to by any alcohol. Eric didn't have any drinks at his place, but I have some bottles of stuff here, so I talked him into stopping by my house. Eric then realized it would be too far to go to his place from there, so we chilled on the deck here and drank for about an hour or so. Then some of the girls got sleepy and hungry. So we all went to Perkins. I was pretty tipsy by then, but Perkins was dead. After eating, Eric dropped me off here at about 5am! I crashed immediately in bed.
    The whole next day, today, I feel like shit and totally out of it. I finally got rid of my headache, but I feel crappy all day today. I wanted to mow the yard and change my oil before next weekend, but I guess I can do that this coming Saturday. Need to get my crappy car in peak condition, because I might be driving to OzzFest a week from today, next Sunday. Eric & I are really looking forward to it. We'd like at least one more person to go, but it's hard finding someone to go, because they'd have to take Monday off since we'd get back so late. I have a feeling most of the concert will be a drunken blur, but how else would you want to have it?

07/28/05 -- Today at work had to be the WORST day of work so far. God it sucked. I had nothing but fuct up calls ALL day. I think it started with a relay call I had before lunch. A relay call is when a deaf person uses a machine to type the message to the relay person and they read you the message and then you reply to them and they type it back to them. These calls SUCK, because any call will not be under 10 minutes, they are all long phone calls. This guy was pissed as hell to begin with and I tried helping him with his problems. I had him check his MAC address on his modem and he said he would be back in 5 minutes. So I'm sitting on the phone with this chick, who sounded pretty hot, and I start shooting the shit with her. I asked her name, but she said she can't give out her name just her operator ID. Then I asked her if she likes her job. She then said she cannot carry on personal conversations with anyone on the phone. Ouch. Ok fine, I'll just sit here with my mute button on. That call finally got over, but after lunch it got worst. I had some crazy lady call me, sounded cute at first, but later was telling me that she thinks her router is possessed and has demonic powers and started laughing really scary. Later on, I got some Indian guy on the phone, could barely understand him, told him to call back if he needed more help. The VERY next call was another Indian guy! Impossible to understand but finally got him off the phone. Then after that, the first Indian guy got me again! God! Couldn't shake him off easily, but FINALLY got him off the phone after about 30 minutes. Then the next phone call was some Korean guy, that actually sounded Indian, and I could barely understand a word out of his mouth. Eventually found out his computer language was in Korean, and I thought I was doomed. Had him hit the button on his modem and he was back online, THANK GAWD!!! Then I was the next person in line to take a phone call, and I had 3 minutes left of work, but luckily I didn't get anymore phone calls, and I blasted out of there as fast as I could.
    Then I went to Eric's and got that motherboard/CPU finally. Got home around 1am and started putting it into my old Compaq case. I wanted to try to use that case again because I liked it over the other case I got. Got almost all the way done before I realized I really couldn't use the case because of Compaq's proprietary cases. So I decided to toss that case and put it in the other case and got that all the way done. It's 3am now and I'm tired, I'll just wait till this weekend before I install Windows Server 2003 on it and get it completely up and running again.
    I also need to take out that damn electrical strip it was plugged into and smash it into a million pieces since it fried my last computer, then go get a real surge protector.
    I also need to get my car ready for OzzFest next weekend. Need to change the oil this weekend and fill up my tires and get everything ready. I'm really looking forward to the trip, I need one!
    Oh, and I also get paid tomorrow, so hopefully this weekend I can go out and finally get a cell phone again. I'll need one when I'll be living with Eric and the guys at the house next month. Hopefully I'll get a good deal on it!

07/27/05 -- Yay, it's Wednesday! Well last night I started my first tutorial/walkthrough for Server 2003, but I didn't know how boring it would be making it! After taking the screenshots, took a good hour to make that page from start to finish. I want to do a couple more tutorials on it, but hopefully next time I won't fall asleep doing it. Check it out here.
    I just got an email from work saying they are taking bids on that 3rd position. I was really interested in it because I thought it was 9pm-6am with Friday and Saturday nights off. The email I get today says it's for the same hours, but they switched the days off on it, which are now Thursday and Friday. No thanks. Grrr... oh well. Maybe something better will come along later down the road.
    Just talked to Eric and he will talk to Nick to get Nick to bring in that motherboard/CPU for me. It's going on 3 weeks now and I'm dying here with my server sitting in pieces. I should get the parts I need in the next day or two, I hope!

07/25/05 -- Started my 2nd week of work, same 'ol crap it seems like. I'm STILL waiting on that motherboard/CPU from a friend for my server. I think I should get it before this weekend. I've been waiting to get that back up and running again. In the meantime, I'm going to add more content to this website. I was thinking of making some more tutorials for the website. I was planning on making tutorials on how to get the HTTP, FTP, and DNS services up and running on Windows Server 2003. Once I get that all nice and neat, then I have something to go by when I actually have to do it again myself for my server. I finally got Server 2003 installed once again on Virtual PC. The CD copy I had from class was kind of scratched up and it took FOREVER to install. In fact, it never did complete, got stuck on 61% for a day, so I started over. I finally looked for and found the page on Microsoft's website where you can download the evaluation copy of Windows Server 2003. The download is 566MB though, but it's an ISO file. Just go here and sign up to get a downloadable copy, they will email you the download link and a CD-key for it. Now that's installed, I will go thru it and set up all these services and take screenshots of everything to make into a tutorial. It's going to be nice when it's all said and done. Other new content coming to the site will be about my trip up to OzzFest in a couple weeks. So stay tuned to that!

07/23/05 -- Finished my first real week at work today. Unfortunately no more of the days felt like the first Monday, which felt like I was there for 3 hours. I had lots of bad phone calls, and lots of good ones, but it's all pretty simple stuff. I'm just glad it's the weekend now. Tonight we are all getting together to play Poker. I wonder if it will be outside tonight, because the heat index right now is 114 degrees! Wow! I'm gonna go outside in a sec to see what it's like, haven't been out yet cuz I finally got to sleep in. Oh, I also heard that a position opened up at work on the 9pm-6am shift. The guy that was working there got bumped up to Tier 2, and they have an opening on that timeslot. That was the first timeslot I applied for, but was denied it, but I was able to get my name in on that bid, so maybe I'll get it. The guy had Fridays and Saturdays off, so I'm assuming I would have the same days off as well. It's gotta be nice to work those hours because almost nobody calls! Those hours would be great to fit around my school schedule too. But the thing I really like about it is this... The reason most of us are working there is to gain experience in our field. You can't get a tech job without experience, and help desk is usually where you gain that experience. Usually at least 2 years of help desk experience is enough to score you your dream job, or at least get your foot in the door at the place you'd like to work. The thing is, future employers won't know if you took 50 phone calls a day or 5 phone calls a day, so why not make it easier on yourself? That's the way I look at it, so we'll see if I get that shift or not. I know they go by seniority first, but if no one else takes it, I have a chance of getting it. Only thing I hope doesn't happen is that it would conflict with August 7th, because that's the day I'm going to Ozzfest!
    In other news, Microsoft announced yesterday the official name of their next main operating system. Formerly known as codename "Longhorn", it's official name will be Windows Vista.

07/19/05 -- What a day today. Work was busy as hell, and just nonstop phone calls, I hate it when it's like that. And every person was mad about something and had something to bitch about. But there was good news in my day. The first thing was that I went to Burger King for supper, (I don't usually eat fast food shit, but I was starving and didn't have chance for a sandwich at work), and my total was $3.60. I gave the kid a $10 bill, and he gave me back $6.40 plus my $10 bill back! I quickly stuffed it in my wallet, got the food and was gone. Oh ya! Usually I feel bad for the people who do that and give the money back, but this guy was just dumb so I kept it. Then when I got home tonight, my replacement hard drive finally came. The original one I had was a 60GB Maxtor hard drive and it was fried by lightning, and I had a couple months left on the warranty and asked for a replacement. I guess they ran out of 60GB hard drives, so they shipped me a 80GB hard drive, nice! That extra space will come in handy on my server. Only thing left to get is that motherboard/CPU from my friend, but I should have that this weekend. That'll give me something to work on this weekend too. I miss downloading! I just hope the other parts in that PC aren't fried either, but I'll find out soon enough.

07/18/05 -- Just got back from my first "real" day of work, from 3pm to midnight. Talk about cake! It seemed like I was there for only 3 hours! I did have some bad calls though, but the time just flew by, it's so nice. Then at the end of the shift, it's dead as hell, so I started reading my study book on my Microsoft exams. I need to get those done and get all that over with. The traffic was low on the way there, and even lower on the way home. Course half the interstate was closed for construction, and had to drive on detours, but still barely any traffic. When I move in with Eric and the other guys in September, there's NO construction from there to work, so I'll be home in no time. Now I have to decide whether to stay up till 4am, or go to bed early and get up early, hmmmm...

07/17/05 -- Not a whole lot went on today. Been playing GTA-San Andreas most of the day, almost to 100% completion. I just happened to save the next to impossible missions till last! Grrr... Shari also gave me a haircut today, it's been about a month and a half, so it looks really good now. It's just past 11pm and I'm tired already. But I want to stay up to 4am like I have been so I'll be just fine when work comes, and that's tomorrow, 3pm-midnight. I've heard lately it's nonstop busy from 3pm-10 or 11pm, then dead the rest of the night. I'll find out tomorrow, my first "official" day of work. I still barely know what I'm doing, but I'll get it figured out tomorrow I guess! Wish me luck!

07/16/05 -- Tonight Eric, Lisa & I went out for a late celebration of Eric's birthday. We first went out to eat, then later drove by the new house to show Lisa. Then hit a few bars after that. Eric got shot after shot and got pretty fuct. Since they were getting loopy, I decided to stop drinking and be the DD for the night. Wasn't as bad as I thought. I do remember driving thru West Des Moines, and this red Vet drives by me and almost hit me, was like 1/2 foot away from my car. Then I saw him swerving all over the road, I tried racing up to yell at the dumb fucker, but he ran a red light and was gone. Oh ya, Eric wanted to go to Keyster's, some bar in West Des Moines, used to be Mulligan's. The parking lot was PACKED, but he still wanted to go in. We get up to the door and the security guy tells us that it's a concert tonight and we can't get in unless we had tickets. We asked who was playing, he told us Great White. I said, "fuck that shit, we're getting outta here!" Eric was fuct, and said why wouldn't you want to see Great White?, so I reminded him about what happened at their last concert. (Ya remember, the fire and all the people being burned alive? Ya, that one.)  
    So anyways, got home late, and had to stay up till 4am again, so I got a bag of Reese's pieces and a fountain drink of Mountain Dew at QuikTrip. It wasn't until this morning when I realized the name of one of the drinks they have there. I cut out that side of the cup and scanned it to show you, I think it's pretty funny!

07/15/05 -- My training at work is finally over. We had a test over everything I learned all week, pwned it with 100%. Got paid and got it cashed, nice to finally have money again.
    Wanted to play Poker tonight, but didn't have enough people to play. Ended up hanging out at Eric's. We wanted to go to Legend's to eat and see Jeff working, couldn't find it, stopped by Dan's place for a bit and finally got to Legend's. A small pitcher of beer was $7.25 each! Ouch. After supper we went back to Eric's place and were listening to Lazer 103.3 on the way home, and they had the commercial for the 13th caller to win tickets to the OzzFest this year. I told Eric to call it and if he won, he'd be taking me. I actually heard they were giving away tickets on the radio at lunch today and wanted to go, but Dan wouldn't be able to go, so I thought maybe Eric could. I went to it a few years back and it was a blast. Eric called like 3 or 4 times, and on the last time he kept telling me it was ringing and he got through, and guess what, he won! It was pretty exciting. So it looks like I'll be going to OzzFest this August 7th in Somerset, WI with him and maybe some more friends. Only bad thing is that it's on a Sunday, but I won't have to work till 3pm the next day, so I should be fine. Speaking of, I'm trying to stay up late this weekend, because on Monday I start my regular shift from 3pm to midnight, gonna take a bit to get used to those hours.
    Tomorrow night all of us are going out to the bars for a late celebration of Eric's birthday. It's going to be a good time. Other than that, not too much going on this weekend. I should get another haircut soon, it's getting long and it's getting really hot out with it! I'm also hoping to get that motherboard/CPU from my friend and start putting my server back together this weekend. Still waiting on the replacement hard drive though. I got a feeling that every part in the computer got fried, but I hope it's not that bad. I'll find out when I get all the parts in though.
    I did want to show off this link my friend showed me. I actually thought up of this idea a few years back, and totally forgot about it, but someone already beat me to the punch. It says patent pending as of now though. But I bet whenever they do make these keyboards and sell them, they'd be around $500 or greater, expensive but cool as hell, check it out here.

07/12/05 -- Another boring day in training today, but he let us out an hour and 1/2 early so I got home and investigated more on the problems my server was having. Found out that sometime last week there was a lightning strike. This explains why my main PC was shut off, but my server was still running. They are plugged into separate power strips, and the one for my main PC is a surge protector while the other was just a cheap power strip with no surge protection. I busted out my USB 2.0 to IDE converter and started checking the server's hard drives. It had a 13GB C: and a 60GB data drive. At first the C: wouldn't read right at all, and neither did the 60GB HD. I tried others to make sure it was working, and it was working fine, but I thought I lost BOTH hard drives. The 13GB drive miraculously came up and I'm able to read from it, but my big 60GB drive is toast. Good news is that it's still covered by warranty till the end of November this year, so I'll be doing a RMA on it very soon to have it replaced for free. The 13GB I am copying its contents to my main PC so I know what I have to reinstall on it, but after that I'm pitching it. It's kind of flaky and if the other one is shot, then this one will be soon too. Somehow my DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive is just fine too, I checked it. Also tried swapping around the sticks of RAM I had in there before all this to see if that was the problem, but it still wouldn't boot. Hopefully those are still good though. So far my power supply, motherboard and/or CPU, and one 1/2 hard drives got fried from the lightning strike. Only problem is that there is no evidence that stuff was friend, nothing melted, no blown caps, and no smell of burnt circuits. I thought this PC was on a surge protector, but I guess not. I'll get a real one this weekend, and take the old one in the driveway and smash it to a billion pieces with a sledge hammer because it's costing me all this time down and extra money to get it back up and running! Grrr!
    So this weekend, I'll have that motherboard and 1GHz Athlon CPU from my friend for $25, and I'll get my RMA hard drive in the mail soon. The rest of the parts I have, but some other parts in this machine might have gotten fried too, but I'll find that out when I get my new parts in to reinstall everything.

07/11/05 -- Sometime yesterday my server was giving me a lot of blue screens so I fought with it trying to fix it. Then I had a big problem with Protowall and the newest block list. Had to install the newest Protowall, which is a beta version, but when I went to load the new block list, I'd get a blue screen. I tried everything, even updated to Service Pack 1 on the Windows Server 2003, which I thought I had on there before, but still wasn't working right. Eventually the PC would POST but then just hang and nothing would happen. I gave up on it for the night until I got home from work today. Good thing I have that power supply tester because the test told me that power supply was bad. Easy fix! I have another power supply in my other spare PC and lined it up to install it but realized I had metal frame in place where a switch was on the new power supply. See picture...

    So I took the case out to my garage and tried what I could to cut that extra piece away from the frame. Note that I have no Dremel tool so this was not easy. I tried a small hacksaw, but broke the blade. I eventually used wire cutters and hacked away at the metal till I got enough of it off for the switch to fit. It looks like hell, but it was the best I could do. I even filed down the sharp edges with a file so I won't cut myself when I reach back there. See picture here...(hard to see cut because the fucking flash on my camera is TOO bright! Grrr...)

    Anyways, I got that finally fitted perfectly and brought it inside. I did test this power supply just after the bad one and noticed that it's still good. I installed the power supply, hooked up all the wires, closed the case, and put EVERYTHING away and the PC back in its spot and hooked the cables back up. I KNEW this might be a problem because they say after you tinker with something, leave the case off of it till you're sure it works so you don't have to take it all apart all over again. Well, they're right. The same shit happened again! POST just fine then nothing. Grrr...
    But there is good news in all of this; last night before I finally went to bed, I emailed all my computer buddies asking if they had a motherboard/CPU combo that they'd like to sell to me, and I was looking for something over 1GHz (this server is only 500MHz). Figured since I'll be having to reinstall Windows all over again, good time to upgrade. Got an email back from a friend who has a motherboard and a 1GHz Athlon that he'll sell for $25. Done deal. Something I can do this weekend.
    GOOD NEWS!!! I just talked to Eric and the seller of the house accepted Eric's bid, so he got the house! I'll be moving in with him, his brother, and Jeff on September 9th. That date may change, but that's what it's at now. Seems like a long time away, but it's going to be a blast, can't wait! Woot!

07/09/05 -- I've decided to make this a BIG entry since I've been slacking lately...Finished my 2nd week of training at work. I have one more week of training, then I start working by myself with my new schedule, 3pm-12am. Seems like an easy enough job, just can't wait for the money to come rolling in!
    Played Poker last night. I started off really good, actually took out Dan, and that's never happened before. Then a few people bought back in, and I eventually lost, but didn't have to buy back in early like the others. Still a good time though.
    Eric told me he took an inspector to the house the other day to check it out, and everything looks great. I guess some lady who's also interested in the house put a bid on it, but Eric found out that she has to sell her old house before she can buy the new one, so odds still look in our favor. He also ran the idea past me that if I took the "small" room, then I could have Gizmo live there with me too. Gizmo is still up in the air, I'd like to take him over there, but it's up to Eric. I got bored today and measured out my bed and furniture and made a blueprint of the room and moved my furniture around to find the best positions for everything, and it looks like it will work out fine. In fact, here's a picture...

    Haven't been up to too much besides work. Realizing how little time I have not working on the weekdays. Just a few hours to do stuff, then eat and get ready for bed, then back to work. I've been watching episodes of The Shield a lot lately. Just finished up with season 3 and I'm ready for the latest season 4. Great show, I love it.
    Oh, I just ran across this on torrentspy and decided to post it. Figured I needed more content on this blog, so why not. Here are some screenshots of the new upcoming version of Longhorn 5203, notice IE 7 is finally included...

    And finally, some fun links I've ran across lately. Some crazy Half-Life flash here. Is Paris Hilton a ho? See Google's search results here. And here's my favorite new crazy pictures site I ran across here. (That link may not be safe for work!)

07/07/05 -- Haven't typed in there for a whole week! On the Fourth of July I went to some guys house that my mom & Steve know and had food n stuff there. I finally ran into an old friend of mine Jenny there, and had a lot of fun seeing her again. Other than that, just another week at work. I wasn't prepared to find out how many stupid people are out there. It's so bad sometimes you actually have to tell people to make sure they are typing in lower-case and tell them what buttons to push and when to push them. It's just like my previous customer service jobs, only worst, cuz 90% of the people that call are absolute boonies. Argh.
    On Wednesday, Eric, Jeff and I went to Lakewood to check out that house on the inside. Eric's already seen it before, but it was the first time for Jeff & I. We were really impressed. The only thing that struck me was that the 4th room seemed REALLY small, but it just looked small from all the computer desks the guy had in there, and I found out later that it's actually the exact same size as another room in the house that seems big, so we should be alright. The deck was nice and big, but I noticed it swayed a bit when we walked across it. I'm thinking that should be an easy fix. The "bar" downstairs was pretty small, only 2 stools could fit in front of it, but it was still nice to have one because most people don't. The yard was big and nice and the neighborhood is really nice too. It's a place where basically everyone knows everyone, and most people leave their doors unlocked around there. The lake is private, so only people that live there can use it, and you can use it at any time day or nite, and you don't need a fishing license to fish there either! He told us about a big party the town throws a weekend or two after the fair at the lake. They have free food, free beer, and a lot of fun stuff to do. I'm hoping we can get in there before that starts so we can go to it. It'd be really fun to attend, and a great way to meet new people around the neighborhood. Lakewood is right next to the new interstate, and it's only a 15 minute drive from there to my work, maybe shorter since I'll be working 3pm-midnight. It really looks like Eric will get this one, and I hope to God he does, because I'm even more excited now that I was before!

07/02/05 -- I wake up at 8am this morning to the sound of some guy hacking out a lung or something. I slept on and off all night, barely getting any sleep, and still tired as hell. Finally I decide to drive home and I get on my way. It was a real pain in the ass driving home because of the construction on I-235, really hard to find an eastbound exit because most of them are closed for construction. Well I finally got home at 8:30am, and passed out in bed. I just woke up and it's 3pm now. Wow. I was tired as hell. Ah well, I have a 3-day weekend this weekend, so I have plenty of time to get stuff done.
    In case you are wondering, I've decided to make the 2nd part of this year's blog on it's own page. The first part of this year's blog was very big in size! It's 149KB for the first part of 2005, while last year's blog is only 87KB, quite a difference! So if you want to still read the first part of this year's blog, the link is to your right.

07/01/05 -- Had a decent day at work. Fridays are casual and we also found out that all next week will be a casual week too, so that's pretty cool. I stopped by Steve's shop after work today to see everything. Inside is all set up and he finally got his letters for his front sign in, so those will be hung soon. Dan stopped by there too and showed my Mom and Steve his new baby, they had fun with him. After that I raced home, and copied my entire mp3 collection on my removable hard drive for Dan, and burned a few other stuff to CD for him. He's wanting to put together a Media Center PC so I'll help him out with some things. I also tried getting some people together for the night because we wanted to play Poker. I got everything copied and drove all they way up to Johnson to Dan's house. I was ready to go in and copy my stuff over for him before we left to go play Poker, but he was ready to go when I got there. So I left my car there and we drove to Amy & Dave's house to play Poker. I got a 12-pack of Coronas and the side ripped and the box dropped, but I only broke one bottle. Wonder if that's a sign. We played out in the driveway, 8 of us total, and it was a good time. I ended up coming out in fourth, but 3rd place was the first prize winner, grrrr. Dan was leaving so I rode back with him so I could get my car. At this time I was getting VERY tired, I've been sleeping by 10pm all week, and it was about 1:30am. We get back to his place and he wants me to leave my stuff so he can copy it later, but I wanted it back right away, so he starts copying mp3's over. It says it will take 120 minutes to complete. I told him it won't take that long and I sit on the couch. A bit later, we all start falling asleep and so do I.
    I wake up by a rubber ball being thrown at my face by Dan. He's telling me my stuff is copied and that I have to go home now. It was like 2:30am. I was tired as hell and could barely walk, let alone drive. I asked to sleep there, but he was telling me how they sleep in the family room on the couches because all their clothes are on their bed or something, I dunno. So I was kinda pissy, but I left and stumbled out to my car. At this point I was not drunk but extremely tired. I get in my car, put the seat back, and fall asleep.