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    Spent the day taking down the Christmas decorations. Knees and back very sore. Had New Year's Eve's shrimp and cocktail weenies as lunch. Kept an eye on the Outback Bowl: my nephews, as part of the Trenton High School band, along with many high school bands across the country, were part of the halftime show. The TV cameras did not show them, but at least it showed more of the massed bands on the field than last year.
    ...And thus begins the year, the decade, and the 21st Century. Beyond Jupiter and the Infinite. (P.S. Don't forget to write "Third Millennium" on your checks.)

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    Back at work again, at last. I've been gone so long I almost feel I need retraining. I'm impressed I even remembered how to get here. Had a moment of panic when I got my first phone call and I realized I had no idea what to do next!
    By the way, my coworker told me today NASA is adopting the dual-wheeled space station design shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey but probably won't implement it till 2050! I find this staggeringly infuriating. NASA moon walks stopped in 1972 and since then we haven't done much more than take photographs of other worlds. Space travel by 2001 did not seem all that implausible, but according to the "revised schedule" I'll be around ninety years old by the time this station goes up! I want my space pod! I want my monolith! I want to see a Star Child! (Although, come to think of it, the movie was prophetic in one sense: Heywood Floyd's daughter does get her Bush baby.)

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    God, what a night. Someone had noticed a problem this morning, that our channels and encoder boards were no longer aligned, so I'd been asked to do a routine fault on the spare board at night. This should've been quite easy and simple, but my stupid clumsiness made it escalate into a serious problem. When faulting the spare board, I accidentally dislodged another board which brought down, I believe, five out of eight channels. Fortunately, there was no programming, but still having five channels go black is serious business. The day went from uneventful to way too eventful in seconds, and it took about twenty minutes to rectify the situation -- since I had to fault each channel in turn to get them back on the air.
    Sheesh!

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    The big news today is all on other web sites. I have become quite the geek, gorging on information regarding a couple big interests. My friend Phil, who is happily back online, has contacted me about rumored U2 concert dates, and we've already started discussing potential road trips. I haven't come across the list he found, but I've been keeping a close eye on the (unofficial) U2 Tour site. A formal announcement from the band is due on January 9. And tickets for our hometown show might go on sale as early as January 13.
    Speaking of U2, I was trying to listen to one of their CDs in the car this morning when my cigarette lighter broke -- the lighter I was using to power my CD player. I was left music-less, which is not a nice way to start the day. And now I have to make time to take the car in.
    Meanwhile, back on the Web, I spent much of yesterday and today reading Harry Knowles's engrossing reports from The Lord of the Rings set, at his Ain't It Cool News site [note: scroll to the bottom for the archive index]. What his articles lack in spelling and grammar are made up in tantalizing glimpses of what is most definitely the most anticipated movie of the year. The formal premiere of the movie's trailer is scheduled for January 12. (Another favorite site for LOTR information is The One Ring.) I swear, the more I see about this movie the more I can't wait to see it, even though it's pretty much a year away. The sets and costumes look fantastic; I hate to get my hopes up, but it truly looks like the fillmmakers might do justice to JRR Tolkien's massive and magnificent tale.

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    I gave up on one of my website projects by starting another. I impulsively started up a U2 page, similar in construction to my Buffett page.
    More hardware problems at work, but discovered the fault was not in our room. However, I was forced to fault the encoder board which provoked so much trouble two days ago. Thankfully I got it right this time.

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    More work on the U2 page.
    I've had the DVD of Seven Samurai, from NetFlix, for over a month, too intimidated to watch it. I forced myself to start, getting an hour in. Later, Gladiator showed up from NetFlix (which I'd been expecting for about a month). I had no trouble getting through that one, staying up til four in the morning to watch all two and a half hours.

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    Did some computer work in the morning and spent the evening at a friend's house. Finally got the last Christmas present out of the house, being able to present it to my godson.
    I was shocked later, upon watching my tape of Fox's Sunday shows, to discover The Simpsons was actually funny again -- downright laugh out loud funny. The fact this also occurred on the episode wherein Homer discovers the reason for his psychopathic stupidiy was especially encouraging. Could this be the turning point? I wondered. Could this be the moment when the creators of the show finally decide to redeem it and restore the show to its former glory? Well, no, of course not. That would mean the writers would have to work harder. So they allowed Homer to voluntarily return to his moronic retarded state.
    What a shame.

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    It took me months, but I finally forced myself to order some new microphones. I used my Christmas money and got a money order from the post office with which to buy a new set of Core Sound binaurals. It would be great if this arrive by the end of January, since I have plans to see Li'l Stubby again the first weekend in February. If I'm ablew to tape the show I'll be able to add something to my Stubby page.
    Back at home, someone had taken Tuesdays with Morrie out from the library. I'd been interested in reading it, and managed to get halfway through in the evening. I suppose the book is supposed to be inspirational, but I found it terribly depressing. Every bit of sage advice on living Morrie gives is something I've already thought of, something which was made perfectly obvious to me, and nothing which I have followed or taken to heart. It doesn't matter how many times I point out the obvious to myself, I end up disregarding it or ignoring it. Nothing will change, as if I actually prefer living in this rut.

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    Some anticipated changes are finally coming to a head at work. I'm not sure why it's taking so long, but I have to admit it's nice to see people working on one's own behalf.
    Meanwhile, I've been waiting for quite some time for another letter from my friend in Illinois. To my great delight, that e-mail finally came today. But what she sent turned out to be a forward of that stupid e-mail tax warning!

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    Spent pretty much all day fixated on the computer. Started early in the morning so I could get in on the pre-sale for U2 tickets. And continued once I found the pre-sale was delayed til four. You'd think a major institution like Ticketmaster would be prepared to actually sell tickets, but I got plenty of "HTTP 1.1 / Server Busy" errors come four:o'clock. But what care you about customer service when you're a monopoly?
    I suppose I have no right to be ungrateful since I did manage to sneak in around ten after four and snatch up two tickets. (And no, they're not for sale.) Still no word about when the second night goes on sale, but at least we'll be able to go to one show.
    By the way, my boss was victim of some computer problems at home. He was unable to boot into his Dell desktop. Dell technicians wever visiting his house on a daily basis, first swapping his processor then his motherboard and then his RAM. They finally discovered, today, that the whole problem was caused by a short in his mouse!

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    Got up early this morning to take my Saturn in to the dealer. Figured putting a cigarette lighter together would be a snap, but was still there almost two hours. The bad part was I was so incredibly sleepy for the rest of the day.

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    Thought I had a party to go to at night but found out in the morning it had been rescheduled til next week. Too bad. I could go for some gluttony. As it stands now, we'll have two parties in a row: Poker Night and the Super Bowl. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, if it's better spaced apart or not.
    My friend Joe gave a me a link to a place called Techno Sphere, where you can create a little creature who lives in a virtual landscape. The creature will then e-mail updates on how it's doing. Mine is called Essefgy (for SFG, get it?) and his is called Maizer. Mine's still alive, which I guess is a good thing; but he's not eating well -- and to my great surprise, he's pregnant!

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    Had to work this morning, which kept me from waiting in line for more U2 tickets. Was able to check out Ticketmaster Online though, but it turned out to be pointless. The May 31 date at The Palace of Auburn Hills is still unofficial.
    However, my order form from Propaganda finally arrived, so I should be able to get some tickets this way.

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    Nice lazy day. My elder brother's family came over for dinner. ...That's about it.
    One question though: how the hell did Richard Roeper get hired to work opposite Roger Ebert? What -- was he chosen by Florida voters? I guess my hunch was right: that Ebert is a petulant, spoiled little baby who wants things his way and needed some weakling to bully. I suppose he represents a more populist viewer, but we don't need another yahoo spouting off shallow reactionary opinions -- "oo, my mind wandered", "oo, there were too many scenes at night!". That's what the IMDb and my Movies page are for. Siskel & Ebert would sometimes be fired up enough to vociferously debate a film's merits; nowadays, Reoper whines how a film was too talky and Ebert lectures him on why that's a stupid opinion; and then Roeper cowers and grudgingly mutters "Oh, well yeah okay."
    I swear, I haven't seen someone so lightweight since George Dubya's last public appearance.

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    Because we deal with international clients, we usually don't get American holidays off, so it's quite bizarre that I only had to come in a couple hours today. Who knew Martin Luther King Jr Day was more globally recognized than Fourth of July or Thanksgiving? Spent the morning at Border's, spent the rest of the day working on the computer.

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    In case you haven't realized before now, I am a moron. Made a special trip to the post office this morning to get a postal money to send to Propaganda for my U2 tickets. I needed to know their address so I could write it on the money order, and had deliberately set the instructions aside for this. I ended up leaving without them, which forced me to head back home. Halfway there I realized I'd already written the address on my envelope and could've simply copied it from there.
    D'oh!  ...I got in to work ten minutes late because of that too.
    Also, for a year or two, I've been sponsoring a child in Bolivia, through Worldvision. This evening I got a letter saying he and his family had moved. No explanation was given. They are now outside of the organization's coverage area, so the sponsorship has ended. Even though we were hardly close, I still feel a definite sense of loss.

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    The day seemed spent on catching up on things: I got back to using my Pine MP3 CD player, I'm finally close to finishing my Criterion Collection DVD of Seven Samurai, I reminded myself to be more timely in writing up these online entries, I finally updated some of my pages, and I spent some time checking out Javascript and Flash sites in hopes of improving some of my pages.
    About the only interesting story for the day was that Worldvision sent me a notice saying their sponsorship fees need to be increased by a couple dollars. A remarkable coincidence, isn't it, that this letter arrives the day after I found out for the time being I'm no longer a sponsor.

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    Not much happened today. A fairly quiet and uneventful day. I finally finished Seven Samurai last night, but now I have to start it over again for the commentary.
    Had trouble driving home, after work, which led to the discovery that one of my headlights is out. I swear, you take your car in once for something, and then all the other parts of your car start vying for attention.

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    Busy morning, making several stops on the way to work, including buying a new headlight bulb. Fortunately, swapping headlights in my Saturn is quite easy, and I was able to effect this in the parking lot. A lot easier than my old Oldsmobile.
    Spent quite a while this evening researching Flash. Hopefully I'll be able to put this to use in revamping my site. I've got some ideas but only need to figure out how to enact them.
    My friends and I are finally having a Poker Night tonight. This is supposed to happen every other month, but amazingly our last one was about half a year ago!

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    Stayed at the party til three last night. Witnessed a few big-money games, heard a few interesting stories (including one involving a cat's butt), and got to check out my friend Joe's new ReplayTV.
    Watched the Inauguration this morning on my desktop. It seems only a few months ago that a young George W. Bush, on Oct. 27 2000, declared to the citizens of Toledo OH: "...if I'm the one, when I put my hand on the Bible, when I put my hand on the Bible, that day when they swear us in, when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not to uphold the laws of the land."
    Found out my Core Sound microphones are in at the post office.
    Tonight is our work dinner, which has been postponed since before Christmas time. Luckily the restaurant chosen is quite close to my house.

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    I guess I'm one of the few people who watches awards shows just for the awards. I don't care about the fashions, I don't care about maybe seeing the stars flub up, or counting how many times they cut to a shot of Jack Nicholson. I like awards shows just to see if the shows or movies I like will be singled out; also, to see if the writers and directors and crew people I like will get their due. Most guys fixate on sports and athletes; I fixate on screenwriters and directors, cinematographers and editors. So right now, including tonight's Golden Globe awards through the Oscars in March, is my playoff season.
    And oh yeah...I like all the cleavage too. Can't forget that.

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    My boss missed our dinner on Saturday and he wasn't in today either. He had to have his wisdom teeth removed, so I guess he'll be out for the rest of the week. The big boss (my boss's boss) will, however, be spending the week with us instead, since evidently there are some big changes afoot, involving moving our broadcasts to Mexico to another satellite.

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    The day started off nicely, with, at last, an e-mail from my pen pal in Illinois. I burned two CDs for my boss's boss only to find out I'd mistakenly used CDRWs, which are unplayable for him.
    The DVD of Frequency has a screenwriter's commentary in which he doubts anyone listens to that kind of thing and dares anyone to e-mail him. I do, and I did. I guess he got more e-mails than he expected, since it appears he has the address set with an auto-responder. For my pains, I got a brief "Thanks. TE" reply.

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    I was able to try out some 3D imaging software, but it looks terribly intimidating and I doubt I'll be able to anything at all with it.
    Was it supposed to snow today? My drive home was atrocious. Even more infuriating were the cops on the road. I know I'm asking for a ticket because of this, but it really pissed me off. On Southfield there were at least four spin-outs, but around the bend, about a half mile away, a cop was preoccupied with the van he'd pulled over into a parking lot. Over on I-75, there was a traffic jam and I discovered a lane was blocked off. When I finally got past it, I learned the only obstacle was a police car sitting in the right lane.
    Adding to my irritation, I screwed up in programming my VCR and I missed Ed tonight.

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    Quite the busy day and late night. My coworker had it worse, since some of our encoder boards took a dump this morning, forcing him to take some channels off the air while he made the necessary changes. I had to do the same, in reverse, before I left at night (to revert things back to normal). It didn't go as well, and I ended up staying two hours late.
    I also stayed up late, back at home, to make a couple updates on my web pages.

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    Looks like we have a bad encoder board. Although instructed to do so, the changes I made last night simply brought the problem back again this morning. My boss was away again, but he's obviously getting his e-mail, since he kept forwarding requests to me this afternoon, directing me from afar.
    Got more snow before my nightly commute, but at least the roads were better salted than on Wednesday. Spent the evening on the website, jotting down a whopping twenty-four new movie reviews for my Movies page! I learned that ABC affiliate WXYZ-TV screwed me over again last night, pre-empting another Whose Line is It Anyway? in favor of some stupid local program -- and once again they pre-empted the new show and let the rerun air. I've grown tired of e-mailing them, but let it be known they still disgust me.

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    Did a lot of bookkeeping work today. Wrote a bunch of checks for my credit cards and my car payment and other bills. Then I spent the afternoon defragging all my partitions. In the evening I watched both Drew Carey PPV specials. Ryan Siles and Colin Mochrie are simply the funniest guys on the planet.

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    Super Bowl Sunday. I guess there's some kind of sporting event surrounding this, but for me it's a 12-pack of MGD Light and two bags of Krunchers. Watched the events with my friend Mike and his family. I remember the infamous commercials as being pretty irritating last year, but I enjoyed a couple this time. Probably the stand-out was the eTrade.com one about the monkey finding the pets.com sock puppet. I mainly liked it since I used to really hate the pets.com sock puppet. Bud had some good ads, but I'm too fed up with that whole overdone "Wassup" campaign to enjoy anything about it. Mike also sagely pointed out how last year's Super Bowl had been rife with ".com" ads while this year's was full of cellular phone company ads. So I guess that will set the tone for the rest of the year. As far as actual game play, that had to be one of the most awkward and clumsy Super Bowls ever, a constant string of incompletions and turnovers. But then again, since it took place in Florida, can we really be sure the Ravens one? The Matrix-like Eyevision effect was pretty cool, and actually useful; and I bet it won't be long before they start floating key players on wires too. But, really, what do I care? I was too busy with the nachos and fried chicken.

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    Man, Sunday made me fat and sleepy. Our boss was back today. I think our room is falling apart, since now one of our computer hard drives is acting up. It's making sounds like a dentist's drill. In my old cable LO days, we used to tape an astrology show called New Horizons. Whenever we'd have hardware trouble the host would inform us Mercury was in retrograde, which supposedly causes a lot of equipment problems. Maybe that's the case again.

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    I finally became a fully recognized, salaried employee I work for. Due to some bizarre and inexplicable complications, my probationary period pretty much doubled; but today I got my employment packet, stuffed to the gills with confusing and techical forms which took most of the eveing to decipher and sign.
    At night, one of my Tech TV e-mail newsletters mentioned PriceWatch.com, through which I could find affordable copies of Windows 2000. I was able to locate a full and legal version of Windows 2000 for ninety bucks. I've heard good things about it, so I went ahead and ordered a copy. Details soon.

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    Well, it figures...now that I'm no longer hourly, I end up having to stay an extra two and a half hours to help troubleshoot that encoder board problem. We were certain we'd our tech support company to FedEx new boards over. Since the channels had actually switched, I was tempted to think the whole chassis needed to be replaced. But it turns out, after trial and error, that a BNC cable was bad!

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