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    To thank us for adapting to the changes at my work, my boss's boss got us sub sandwiches for lunch.
    I had some frustrating problems with my Pine MP3 CD player this morning. That stupid thing is really getting on my nerves. It skips like crazy and it even has trouble playing normal CDs. It's getting so aggravating I'm thinking about giving up on it and getting a different player. A friend of mine has good things to say about the Rio Volt, and the TDK Mojo is supposed to be good too. I guess you should check the Gadgets page to learn what happens.

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    I was peeved to discover the Mexican late show was back again, unannounced. I had intended to leave at eight last night but suddenly and unexpectedly found myself having to stay an extra hour.
    I tried doing some shopping for the Rio Volt, but had no luck. It's out of stock at the CompUSA by work; and Circuit City, Best Buy, and Media Play barely have any MP3 players, let along the one I want. I went ahead and ordered the Volt online, from Advanced Computech, for about forty bucks under the list price. I ended up needing to phone them anyway when I accidentally ordered two Volt players. At least I found out they're on back order, but at least are expected next week.
    It's pretty quiet today...which makes sitting around till nine even harder. I spent a while revamping this diary section. I finally got around to separating things by month instead of week, and to putting entries in progressive order. This should make navigation easier and hopefully make things more readable.
    We got some good news about my boss. There are plans afoot to go visit him this weekend, but I might back out. I think I'm coming down with something. My colds almost invariably start with a sore throat, but this time I've had a tummy ache and headache for two days.

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    Felt groggy and tired, so it was a good thing it's Saturday. Thought I was going to do some web work, but I got sidetracked instead playing around with Napster. Ended the day blowing the dust off an old laseridsc of mine. For some reason I felt like watching the Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie.

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    Spent morning on Napster again. Tried to install some old fonts I'd saved and ended up messing up Microsoft Word somehow. It only displays one group of fonts in its list, and if I try and scroll down the list the whole program freezes. I thought maybe one of the fonts starting with "B" was causing the problem, so I started deleting them; but the font list still causes Word to freeze. Had some relatives come over around dinner time. Actually did do some web work later on.
    It was a busy night for TV watching. I needed to tape the season premiere of The Sopranos so I could watch Fox and the season premiere of The Lone Gunmen. I'm saving Sopranos for tomorrow but I thought Lone Gunmen was okay -- of course it helped that I'd read so many poor reviews beforehand.

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    Not that many calls at work, but lots of e-mails and little jobs to do. Later on I watched Mitchell, from Mystery Science Theater 3000. I kind of wish MST3K was required to provide "equal time" to the people they ridicule -- not because it would be fair, just because I'm fascinated to find out what the hell those people were thinking when they created such an idiotic movie.
    Finally decided to download AOL's Instant Messenger and give it a try. I used to hate it since it would go into a tizzy every time I disconnected from the Internet. I used to like how ICQ would simply and quietly go to sleep upon disconnecting, but AOL's program would practically be outraged I'd signed off. Regardless, I had problems getting it since their download rates were amazingly slow. I can't believe the whole first episode of Sopranos was simply watching the FBI plant a bug in Tony's basement. They only make thirteen shows a year, and that's how they spend one? On a plot point other shows would've handled in five minutes?
    Got some news from my friend Phil. Our U2 tickets showed up from the fan club. We'll be roadtripping to Cleveland and Lexington during the first week in May. I plan to document this so hopefully there will be additions to the Travel and U2 pages afterward.
    Almost forgot to mention the unexpected snow. I couldn't believe it when I stepped out of the building, at work, and found it was snowing. I guess I hadn't heard any weather forecasts today. The snow was so thick and dense it looked like fog at first; but despite all its ferocity, we only got a dusting. It was enough though to wreak havoc on the expressway. I was forced to get off onto side streets, since there was a big three-car pile-up blocking the way.

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    Had to go to the post office again for another eBay money order. I'm ticked off that I lost on an auction last night though. I've been waiting for weeks for something about Ryan Stiles to come up. He's the funniest guy in the world, but surprisingly he and my other favorite, Colin Mochrie, don't seem to engender any collectibles. But finally I caught sight of a Ryan Stiles autographed 8x10 for auction yesterday. I had high bid for most of the day, but then lost the auction at the last minute.
    For the heck of it, I tried to hand feed my fishy fish. I usually drop his little freeze-dried bloodworms from the end of a toothpick; this time I tried to see if he'd eat right off the toothpick. I was shocked when he snapped so hard he practically yanked the toothpick from my hand. I didn't expect the little fish to be so strong!

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    I confess I got in to work late today. Oddly, I had nothing to do and no reason to leave late, but I lost track of time anyway. A friend from my old job contacted me this morning. We're to meet next Wednesday for margaritas, which should be fun. AOL's downloads were a heck of a lot faster today, and I got their Instant Messenger loaded in no time. Also did a few touch-ups on my Gadgets and Food pages.

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    I was upset with myself this morning since I set my VCR wrong. I meant to set it for channel seven, so I could tape Whose Line is It Anyway? on ABC, but accidentally left it on channel four (NBC). I tried calling home, during work, to get my mistake corrected, but I kept getting a busy signal. I could not believe my phone was in use all day, but I also could not believe my family would be dumb enough to leave a phone off the hook all day. Regardless, I ended up missing my favorite show.
    Oddly, there was a dial tone when I got home; so I guess I owed my family an apology for doubting them. It turned out our phones were out all day and they had to use a cell phone to call up and get service restored -- which did not happen til right before I got home. It's amazing how elaborately outside forces had to conspire just to keep me from watching Ryan and Colin.
    One of the pitfalls of keeping me from being entertained was that I was bored enough to do some online shopping. I spent some serious money too, getting some new Harry Potter stuff as well as a new sound card!

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    Yesterday I was reminded part of my commute will be closed for construction. The sign said my portion of Southfield Freeway would begin March 10. Today, the sign said March 9 -- today! Fortunately it wasn't closed yet, but I assumed it would be by the time I left tonight.
    I avoided the Freeway, taking Telegraph south. And on the way home I discovered the northbound part of I-75, by my house, was closed too. I was upset there were no signs at all, but I found out the expressway was closed because some dumb-ass trucker crashed into the Vreeland overpass. Vreeland was closed as well too.

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    For some ungodly reason, a full twelve hours of shows was programmed for today, starting at eight in the morning. I drew the early morning shift, but when I showed up at eight I discovered the schedule had been changed. Nice of them to tell us. The schedule now ended with my shift, so my coworker didn't need to come in.
    I impulsively started some web work when I got home. Windows has a nasty habit of losing my USB scanner, so I had to load the drivers again. But after that I was able to start augmenting my Photo Gallery with snapshots from my college years.

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    Worked some more on the third CMU page. Tonight was a busy night. I thought the Sweeps weeks were over, but tonight seemed to have more counter-proigramming than in February. It was tough to decide what to watch or how to watch it, but I finally worked out that I could watch my Fox shows from eight to ten on my desktop, tape The Screen Actors Guild Awards on TNT from eight to ten on the downstairs VCR, and tape Sopranos on the upstairs VCR. I also wanted to watch Gwyneth Paltrow on Inside the Actors' Studio on Bravo, but luckily I found this would be replayed at midnight.
    Jeez, the things I do for television!

---

    It turns out the closure at Southfield was only for the weekend. One lane is closed for now, and the big construction reportedly doesn't start till July 4. I-75, however, is still closed by my house while repairs continue on the Vreeland overpass. I had to take extemely busy surface streets for the start of my commute.
    Lots of e-mails for us again about lots of little jobs.
    I was disappointed my Sound Blaster sound card didn't show up today. I'd paid extra to get it 2nd Day Air and it still wasn't here. The Creative store had even sent me an e-mail today saying they'd sent it back on the 8th. Nice promptness too, by the way.

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    I got my sound card tonight. Unfortunately I find I can't use it.
    The curse of the impulse buy: I didn't do enough research or I failed to admit the card was not what I needed. The Platinum Live! card I bought comes with both a card and a kind of audio "drive" which fits in a 5.25" bay. The whole reason I'd bought the Sound Blaster was to enable me to work with digital audio. But i found the digital inputs were all on this "drive" and not on the card itself. The only trouble is, I have no open bays. I filled my second and last one up when I got my new internal Yamaha CDR burner.

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    Got some troubling news this morning. My sister-in-law called to say my youngest nephew is in the hospital. He spent the night throwing up and his parents were concerned he might become dehydrated.
    I tried to play around with my sound card some more. I thought I might simply leave the "drive" part as an external, but it was not fully covered. The Yamaha was self-contained however; so I decided to swap them. It was pretty dang difficult to wedge that Yamaha drive out, but I managed. I slid the Sound Blaster interface in and left the Yamaha to be an external. However, I now realized that although I could leave it out and although the SCSI ribbon was long enough, the Yamaha no longer had a power supply. The wires were not long enough for it. So I was pretty much where I started. ...But now with a slightly bent tower frame.
    I stopped at CompUSA before work. I guess there's no such thing as a power supply extension cord. So now I'm thinking about getting a new tower with more bays and just transferring all my drives and cards and boards over. But then again, if I'm going to get a new tower, I might as well just get another motherboard and a faster processor, right? Maybe even dual processors!
    I met up with an old friend at Rio Bravo after work. I hadn't seen him in quite a while. Paul was let go from my old company about half a year before I was. It was fun catching up things and talking about old times. When I got home, I found out my nephew was doing better. I guess he just had a bad bug.

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    Maybe I did it out of desperation or maybe I did just for the heck of it, but I created a personal on Love@AOL this morning. I won't give away my screen name, but it's probably fairly obvious it would involve my SFG mystique. (This might be viewed as shooting myself in the foot with regard to attracting members of the opposite sex, but I believe in truth in advertising.) I at least refrained my using my caricature as my photo.
    Our boss's boss forgot us about us today. Both Reid and I did not have lunches, since it was Thursday, but the big boss forgot about providing food for us, like he'd offered, and we had to silently starve. Of course, we could've just called him up and told him, but we were both too shy to insist on free food.

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    I can't believe it snowed so heavily this morning! I could've even made fifty bucks off it, since Pat, our cleaning lady, had heard some long-range forecast saying we were all done with snow. For the last several years, we seem to always have a snowfall around Easter, so I was dubious about Pat's forecast. Too bad we didn't shake on it.
    Several screwy problems at work, almost all of them due to glitchy hardware, and, thankfully, all short-lived. We had more problems with Mexico's broadcasting -- I guess we're using too much bandwidth for both our transmissions and Mexico's own domestic transmission -- and I also had to spend some of the day tracking down model numbers and serial numbers to some of our equipment for some reason.
    In the evening I was able to put all that behind me and head to my friend Mike's house for another poker party. He had a pretty good turn out, since almost all the regulars showed up. Mike got to show off his wireless audio system by cueing up six hours of MP3s and sending them from his computer to his home theater. There always seems to be one funny incident that we get to rag on for the rest of the night. Last time it was Schmoe's story about his cat; this time it was Mike's announcement that "last time [he] looked, Larry was a guy". As is always the case, you had to be there. And as usual I overstayed my welcome and didn't leave til two:thirty.

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    St Patrick's Day.
    I didn't really celebrate it, but I did wear green. No parties, no green beer. All I did for the whole day was make CDs. I made a Michael Utley / Robert Greenidge compilation and I also made a Loreena McKennitt compilation. The Loreena CD came out quite well. I chose my most favorite tracks and I'm quite proud of the crossfades I did. (I've also decided her album The Visit is my favorite, since five of its songs made the cut. Eh, what the heck...here's the track list:
The Mystic's Dream (off her live San Francisco promo)
Bonny Portmore
The Stolen Child (off her live San Francisco promo)
The Bonny Swans
Full Circle
Blacksmith
Courtyard Lullaby
Between the Shadows
Seeds of Love
The Seasons
Snow
Moon Cradle
The Old Ways
The Mummers' Dance
All Souls' Night
Come to the Hills
    In case you couldn't tell, I like Loreena's music a lot. I whole-heartedly endorse it, and recommend The Visit and the mask and mirror the most. You can also visit her site at Quinlan Road.
    At night I went over to my brother Rick's house. I hadn't been over there in quite a while, so I took the opportunity to visit and to tease my nephews.
    P.S. By the way, I can't believe Entertainment Weekly made such a big deal out of their look at the special effects in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Oo, you mean they're on wires? Oh my God, you can't be serious!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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    Spent most of the day working on my CDs again. My brother brought his family over in the evening. My neices exploited my computer so they could make a scan and burn a CD. Their visit made it difficult to tape my usual shows; I needed to tape Fox as well as Sopranos. Fortunately I found out Sopranos would be rebroadcast on Tuesday at 11. Now I just need to remember that when the time comes.

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    My boss's boss felt bad for missing our lunch on Thursday so he treated us to pizza today.
    Over the weekend I was shocked to get a response to my AOL personal. I even got another one today, but this one turned out to be a shill for some adult porn site. I suppose I should've expected that kind of thing. I was more concerned about getting misleading or untruthful e-mails (or none at all), and I completely forgot what perfect bait a "lonely guy" personal would be to the Great Online Porn Industry. I got a kick out of how purportedly "This Site was created by and is run by all females between the ages of 18 and 27 years old. We made this just for men. We believe we know just what you want and we want to give it to you." Yes they do -- although it doesn't take a great deal of intuition to know what guys want most of the time. But congratulations to them for making the most of it.

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    Found out a relative of mine is using Praxil. I guess that explains why she was in such a good mood the other day. I made a few web searches on it, reading some troubling articles.
    I guess my boss's boss enjoyed the Jimi Hendrix CDR I'd made for him since he brought in a couple dozen of his wife's 45 rpm singles to burn to another disc. We also got an update on my boss. I guess he might be back as early as May 7. In the meantime we might be getting a temp to assist us. This might be difficult since the temp might have to work on his or her own, due to our upcoming vacation schedules.
    Got a follow-up e-mail from the girl who'd written me over the weekend. It turns out she's trying to make money off me too. Oh well. At least the pictures on her site were nice, so I saved them for free.

---

    I remembered to tape Sopranos last night, thankfully. I also got my new webcam from a company called "x10". What I like about is that it's wireless, so I can set it up all over.
    What concerned me more was that my computer was seriously gorping up this morning. It froze at least three times, doing nothing more stenuous than keeping three browser windows open. I rediscovered Windows's Internet Explorer Repair Tool; I ran it and was informed I needed to reinstall. When I checked Details I saw some complaint about the ADVPACK.DLL. Maybe that explains why I also haven't been able to get into Windows Update in about two weeks. I tried reinstalling IE5.5 -- which was tought since I needed a browser to do so -- and after finally tracking down the setup file I was informed it could not continue because I already had the latest browser installed!
    Gee. Think of that. A piece of Microsoft software which is incapatible with a piece of Microsoft software.
    I at least was able to find ADVPACK.EXE which at least bumped from me version four to version five. I guess still need an equivalent for 5.5 though since I still can't get into Windows Update.
    In the evening, I guess I felt like torturing myself since I reinstalled Windows 2000 (in its own partition).

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    Had to stay late because of audio problems. My coworker Reid had to fault one of our encoder board sets this morning, so I had to swap it back before I left. As usual there were complications so I ended up staying a halfhour late and faulting four times before setting things to rights.
    I didn't get around to watching NBC's Ed til tonight. On a whim I looked out for sites on Stuckeyville. I found a very nicely done fan site at Virtual Stuckeyville. I was immediately jealous of their layout and especially their navigation bar menu. I found it was Javascript so I spent a long while trying to find a tutorial or some program which would help me add it to my site.

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    I tracked down a Belgian program (in English) which would help me create a navigation menu bar. I worked on it in the morning, so preoccupied I almost left late for work. Got back to work on it in the evening. It looked great in IE5.5 but like crap in Netscape 6. Only half of the navigation bar was showing up in Netscape. I stayed up much too late trying to troubleshoot it.

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    Kept working on my navigation bar. I downloaded Netscape 4 to see if it was displaying just as oddly as Netscape 6. (It was.) So I conceded defeat and redesigned the navigation menu so it looked better in Netscape (and slightly worse in IE5.5). I also discovered that IE5 in Windows 2000 showed the navigation bar just like in Netscape. Weird.
    Speaking of Windows 2000, I had much better luck installing drivers. ATI had an official Windows 2000 package for download and this one installed much nicer than before. It was nice to have a desktop TV in Windows 2000 now; plus I got drivers for my Lexmark printer and 3Com HomeConnect webcam. Pretty soon I can dump Windows 98 entirely. Can't say I'll miss it either, since it's been behaving so annoyingly recently.
    I finally got around to working on my boss's boss's CDR project, compiling his wife's 45 rpm singles. The first couple I listened to were in pretty bad shape; but it dawned on me, since several of the titles had been popular in their day, that I might be able to find listenable copies online. I checked Napster and had great success: I was able to find MP3s of all but four of the desired songs.

.

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    It's Oscar night tonight. This is one of my favorite days. I'm one of the few people I know that truly enjoys the Academy Awards. Not the fashions, not the glitz, not the showy production numbers. The awards themselves.
    I'm not brave enough to make any predictions, mainly because my hunches keep changing. I'm tired of hearing about Gladiator and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so one of those will probably win.

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    Man, I really geeked out on the Oscars Sunday. I watched E!, the awards themselves, and more E! for a total of fourteen hours of coverage! I admit I miss Billy Crystals movie parodies and song parodies, but I thought Steve Martin was excellent. His monologue was winner from start to finish. As far as the big awards, I was pleased to see Steven Soderbergh win for best director, since it seems being nominated twice in the same category should automatically make you best director. But I don't really see how Gladiator can be best picture. And I was rather irritated that E! kept referring to it as the new Ben-Hur since it bears a much stronger resemblance to Spartacus.
    I was incredibly disoriented when I got up this morning. It felt like it was still the weekend. I felt out of sorts the whole day. It seemed like everything was ill-prepared and I should've just stayed in bed. For instance I found out too late that Southfield Freeway was completely closed, although I managed to get to work via the service drive -- but then found out that my exit was closed as well! Then, when I got in to the office I discovered we'd had a power outage over the weekend which had fried some of our equipment.
    In short, everything was cocked up.

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    Evidently only two things were seriously damaged from our unplanned weekend shutdown. A hard drive dedicated to Mexico and a set of encoder boards for one of our broadcast channels. I was asked to call the computer company regarding the Mexico hard drive; we have an on-site repairman who showed up in the afternoon. He swapped out the hard drive and I assumed we were good to go. We still needed to restore our data from our tape backups, but I cautiously chose to wait till tomorrow.
    When I got home I discovered my Rio Volt had shown up. I'd ordered it from a store called Advanced Computech a while ago and they'd called me up Friday to alert me a shipment was coming in. I checked out my player and then wasted little time in downloading a firmware upgrade and installing it. Details soon on the Gadgets page, I would assume.

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    An amazingly long day. My boss's boss came in after hours to try and work on our system. We're branching out to allow another company to use one of our channels, said channel being 112. Somehow this number got changed to 113 when published, so instead of just correcting it we've been forced to actually change the channel number here to 113. Due to intricacies and vagaries of the software, this is not as simple as renaming the channel; we were forced to delete the existing channel and recreate it with the same settings. The deletion was alarmingly deleterious. The surrounding channels flickered and tiled as if overcome with grief, keening and wailing over the loss of their comrade. Getting the new channel to work, and the system to recognize it took a lot longer than expected. I can't resist the urge to note that it was I who realized my boss's boss was relying on the software's default settings when in fact we needed to manually change the transponder number. Once that was done the channel was finally online.
    However we still needed to enter a program schedule into it, to show up on the on-screen program guide. I deleted 112's schedule and typed in one for 113...but we still kept seeing 112's. We decided to reboot the computers. NT started running CHKDSK and it found some errors. I tried to open the on-screen guide program but it wouldn't start. I finally found out it was missing some files -- which CHKDSK had just deleted during the boot-up!
    We could not find any copies of the program guide software so we need to put a call into our supplier. The schedule has been input for tomorrow, but if we don't get the software soon the on-screen guide will be saying "No Info" by Friday. I didn't get home til midnight, spending eleven and a half hours at work.

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    We'd requested replacement encoder boards from our supplier back on Monday. I called to find out if they'd been shipped and was told they were backordered but should arrive tomorrow. Our replacement software for the on-screen guide would be on its way too.
    My boss's boss showed up this evening, too. We wanted to work on the Mexico hard drive, restoring our system information from our tape backups. We ran into problems here as well. The system said it could not write to the hard drive. It knew the hard drive was there, since it listed it as a device; but we couldn't do anything beyond that. We wondered if the hard drive needed to be formatted or initialized, so we ended up giving up and waiting till tomorrow when I could give the computer company another call.
    This time we got out around ten:thirty.

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    My boss's boss had the day off today. I couldn't blame him, after so many late nights, but I envied him too. I was almost dreading having to go back to work -- something I used to feel constantly at my old job and a feeling I'd almost forgotten. Maybe I deliberately left a little late, maybe I took my time driving in, or maybe I got caught behind every slow driver in the Downriver area. Whichever, I discovered that Dennis was in, in fact. A channel had gone out on us again and he'd been paged to come in. He rushed around, faulting and swapping encoder boards to try and restore our channels. Every time he fixed a channel it seemed to adversely affect another. In the end, we were still one channel down and we were forced to have Traffic reschedule programming, moving shows from 107 to 105 since 107 was stuck on a freeze-frame.
    I called up the computer company and their on-site repairman showed up again in the afternoon. He swapped the hard drive again. He stayed around long enough for us to run the restore off tape backup. The OS should be up and running now, but we'd need to perform a subsequent restore to update all our data. As before, I held off doing this on my own.
    I got home at my usual hour, at last. I spent the evening playing around with a new piece of software for my website. Recently I'd been working with Web Menu Builder from some Belgian company, but despite their claims of rigorous testing the end results were buggy and were not all that compatible between IE and Netscape. This new one is called All Web Menus, and is so far working a lot better.

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    I got up at nine this morning so I'd be ready when ten:o'clock rolled around and I could try and get concert tickets through Ticketmaster. Today was the day to buy tickets for Jimmy Buffett's concert at Alpine Valley. Since Buffett is pimping us by not coming to Detroit this year, we're forced to road trip. As I got up I realized that ten:o'clock in Wisconsin would be eleven:o'clock here, so I still had time before tickets went on sale. I stayed logged into the Tickemaster site, awaiting my chance. When 11 EST rolled around tickets were still unavailable online. A few minutes later I lost the ability to refresh the web page and then had trouble getting back into the site. A few minutes after that I was able to access the concert page again but was having trouble securing tickets. A few further minutes and, like a storm passing, everything settled down and everything was fine...except they were only selling lawn tickets now. I had a strong feeling that's all there were to begin with and Ticketmaster was just toying with us to put us in our place and make us feel grateful for what we had. I bought my three lawn tickets, like a good little boy. Seeing a Buffett concert from the lawn is like trying to read philosophy in a parade. One detracts from the other. You can't do both. But, as my concert-going friends say, at least we can get into the venue,
    I spent the rest of the morning working on my website. I finally finished rejiggering the Javascript code so I could finally open up my e-commerce store. This is a lot bigger than that Cafe Press store I have, and which I've seen on many other sites. Now I can offer high quality clothing embroidered with the loveable SFG caricature logo. I've already tested and approved a sweatshirt, a fleece sweatshirt, and a Henley sweater; soon I plan to offer a Spring jacket.
    I was shocked last night to discover I'd forgotten to do something at work. It was too late to fix it last night, so I drove in this afternoon and corrected my mistake. I timed it so no one else would be in, since I didn't feel like confessing my lapse. I admit it here though. I picked up some Taco Bell on the way home. While in line, some stranger suddenly started telling me all about his plans to take his two daughters to the Tigers' Opening Day this Tuesday. At night I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie, my latest NetFlix rental. I'd recently finished a book called Hitchcock's Notebooks which had talked in depth about the movie. I hadn't seen it in ten or fifteen years and barely remembered it.

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