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    I did some more work today, finally finishing up my new navigation menu bar. It works a lot better than the first one, and, as hoped, works fine for both IE and Netscape. In the afternoon my brother Rick invited us over for dinner. He grilled a tasty pork roast. His in-laws were over too. I helped my little nephew build a Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle. I got home in time to watch most of my Fox shows, including the long awaited return of Mulder to The X-Files. The Great Mulder/Scully Reunion was less than I'd hoped for, but it was still a well-done episode. Then again, I've always enjoyed their "mythology" episodes more than The Monster of the Week ones.
    Afterward, I found out from the Techno Sphere events newsletter that my creature had died. Oh, Essefgy, we hardly knew ye,,,,


Born 2.87
Died 4.18

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    We finally got those encoder boards from our suppliers. They also sent the program guide software. We had to wait til the end of the programming day before swapping any boards, but at least the on-screen guide is working. Dennis came in again after hours to work on swapping boards. It did not to too well, especially since two of the five boards turned out to be no good. Once again, every time he thought he'd fixed one channel another one would go out. I stayed around till one in the morning and finally had to ask to leave. I was feeling awfully weak and light-headed by the end of the night, so I decided to break my Lenten fast. I guess I'm glad I did it by choice and not because of a loss of will, but regardless I conceded defeat and bought some chips and M&Ms from the company snack machine.

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    Dennis warned us that the equipment had better work today, since he was not coming in. Instead he was going to the Tigers' Opening Day game. I found out that Dennis had stayed all night, working on the channels. He was still at it when the morning guy showed up. Things weren't perfect, though. We still had problems; but at least we didn't have to page him. I tried my best to work with the supplier company, letting them know of the sheet Dennis had left behind, itemizing all our problems and stating a list of demands almost worthy of being nailed to a church door. In the evening, I did some more work on my site, mainly updating my calendar.

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    One of the upstairs bedrooms is to be carpeted, so the furniture was moved out and is instead filling the hallway and blocking doorways. It's difficult to move anywhere, you either have to slither past dressers or climb over mattresses. And we're not even sure if the carpeters are coming today! This could last till tomorrow!
    It was good to have Dennis back again, since I knew he'd be a lot more forceful with our supplier company than I could. They've already agreed to send us another set of encoder boards and plans are afoot to fly out one of their field engineers to go over our system with a fine-toothed comb. It looks like another late night tonight. And in the meantime I finally updated this Diary section, typing up over a week's worth of entries!

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    Some encouraging news for our beleaguered system. We were sent some more boards, plus a field engineer was flying out to rescue us. He wouldn't be showing up til eleven PM though. We had some more problems in the morning but were fairly stable during my shift. I still managed to screw things up. All I did was close the doors to chassis enclosures but somehow this alone caused one of the channels to screw up. On the bright side, it was at least after programming was done.
    The best news of the day was finding our my penpal from Illinois wrote me in the evening!

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    The following is the literary equivalent of a contented sigh: ".....Ahhhhhhhhhh!"
    Dennis and the guy from Motorola spent last night working on the chasses, and everything was up and running today. No problems, no outages, all channels present and accounted for audio and video. Just like television. A fairly easy day and a nice way to end the week.
    All plans for getting a new computer went out the window today. I had to write my check for my federal taxes. Way back when I first started working at my new job I filled up my tax forms incorrectly, mainly because the tax forms are stupidly designed. The worksheet tells you to put a "1" in where applicable and then total those up; so I did. So somehow I was only declaring money withheld for myself where in fact I evidently wrote down I had two dependents. So less money was being held, and now, come tax time, all that money has to be repaid. Get this: I have to pay $1.960 to the federal government. And this federal government, to boot.
    To be honest, I blame myself. I had plenty of time to correct that mistake but never got around to it.

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    Had to go in to work today, but only for a couple hours. Now that my co-worker Reid is full-time he can no longer get overtime, so we've gone back to alternating weekends. I believe he went hiking this weekend. It was a good weather for it, since it was very warm and sunny. I ended up working on my Buffett page at night. For the heck of it, I started fooliing around with a new logo, and before I knew I'd completely revised the design and even added a Javascript navigation menu.

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    I couldn't resist watching The Ten Commandments on ABC at night. But I also made time to watch Mulder's return to The X-Files on Fox. The writers didn't have all that much for him to do, nor did they advance the great mythology much (as opposed to just convoluting or rearranging it), but it was still a pleasure to see David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson together again. I forgot how much I missed seeing Mulder on Sundays. After the show I read a deluge of newsgroup rants complaining how Mulder had virtually ignored the fact that his partner is extremely pregnant. These viewers seemed to think the writers were cheating us or teasing us, denying the characters true reactions just for the sake of drama. I didn't see it like that. To me, Mulder didn't question Scully's pregnancy since he was already aware of it. I'd almost go as far to say "he was in on it", but that could be miscontrued -- especially [heh, heh] if I put inverted commas around it. What bothers me more is the fact that Mulder, according to last week's episode, has been brought back to life after being interred for three months. Wouldn't that strike anyone else around as odd? Wouldn't Mulder be inundated with reporters from the tabloids? Wouldn't his face be plastered on the cover of every science and medical journal? Wouldn't one of his higher-ups be forced say, "Jeez, Mulder, I guess some of that wacko stuff in those files might be true after all." Scully pregnant? Big deal. Mulder able to hold his breath underground for three months? Now that's an X-File!

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    Made a point to get my haircut this morning before work. Here's proof, courtesy of my webcam.

   

    The repairs of Thursday night still held. Our network is still up and running and today was a fairly easy day. Dave sent us an e-mail. He's doing well and is looking forward to getting back to work.

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    We had a bit of fun today. Three companies, including the contract company I work for, are bidding on a project to convert our broadcasts to downstreaming PC video. The first tests were done today. One of the higher-ups here demanded a last minute change which jeopardized the first company's test. So now it looks like we sabotaged a competitor. The other tests went better though. I'm tempted to mention names, but it's probably best if I don't. Let me just say one has a popular name on the web, the other is already a well-known provider of streaming media, and the other is us. I didn't hear much in the way of response to the test, except for a few people towing the party-line as expected.

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    Both Reid and I have vacations planned in May, so our company was forced to hire someone we can train to fill in for us. The new guy has the unenviable position of being trained for a job he won't be able to keep, since once Dave comes back we'll no longer need a new guy. Since, it's good experience and no one's sure when Dave will be back full time.
    The new guy showed up this morning. His name's Jeremy. He showed up on a good day since for some reason we had a lot of trouble calls. We put them on speakerphone so he could listen in. I only hung up on someone once. Jeremy already seems to be catching on. We'll probably get along well, especially since he's eager to see The Lord of the Rings movie too.

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    A fairly plain day. Yesterday Dennis bought us lunch, to welcome the new guy. I'd been doing research on my fish sandwich story, so I wasn't hungry. I got talked into at least ordering a Greek salad, which I got to eat when I got in this morning. Jeremy's training continued. By the end of the day, he was taking a trouble call or two himself. I had been looking forward to watching Ed tonight, on tape, only to find our local NBC affiliate, WDIV, had pre-empted it. They aired some silly homemade show, following one of their reporters on a trip to Australia. A blatant nod toward Survivor, made even more shameless by the fact Survivor doesn't even air on the channel. Which I guess shows you what whores our local affiliates are.

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    Considering the whole superstition about "13" is based on the attendees of the Last Supper, and considering this Friday the 13th is Good Friday itself, you'd almost expect something biblical and apocalyptic would occur today. In fact, today was pretty nice. The building was pretty empty -- I didn't know it was a company holiday -- and I don't think we got any calls. Very quiet and uneventful. Even better, programming ended at five:thirty, instead of eight, so I got to leave early.
    I'd been thinking of working on my computer and i got a headstart this evening. I finally realized I could use my Sound Blaster sound card after all. Now that I have a DVD player I don't need a DVD-ROM, so I removed it and used the slot for my Sound Blaster's "Drive IR" thingy.
    I really wanted to get it working since I wanted to start digitizing video. I discovered, by remarkable coincidence, that someone had mentioned my site in the Jimmy Buffett newsgroup, and I further discovered my Green Flash video had been critiqued at another site (near the bottom). I was rather crestfallen to discover what I'd thought was the legendary Green Flash was in fact an "inferior-mirage flash". The writer also found disfavor with the quality of the file. So I thought it might be worthwile to digitize it again and encode it better. That was the plan, but I spent all night reinstalling the software, trying to get the stupid Sound Blaster card and the stupid ATI All in Wonder card to work together.

---

    I got up early today to meet up at nine at work. We had power down all the equipment in the room in preparation of the Easter shutdown. For safety reasons we have to have our CO₂ system tested, and this apparently, traditionally occurs on Easter weekend. We were only in for a halfhour though, so it wasn't too bad. I bought some new running shoes in the afternoon (I felt it was warm enough to stop wearing my boots). And I worked some more on my computer hardware. I still have no idea why I can not capture video with audio. Also, my Sound Blaster card barely seems to accept any inputs at all. I can get TV sound on my desktop TV, but, bizarrely, none of the volume levers control it -- as if it were some phantom manifestation that my computer refuses to acknowledge.
    I thought Friday the 13th was supposed to be bad, but this day felt worse. Nothing all that horrid happened, but I was in a sour mood all day...mainly because of my stupid computer. I've said it before and I'll say it again: computers suck. I can't believe I've got a job where I work with them, and I can't believe I dole out so much money to try and better mine.
By the way, I discovered we have a visitor. Some ducks have taken residence in the pool next door, swimming in the pond formed atop the pool's cover; and this morning we discovered a mama duck has built a nest right by our front porch, under the rhododendron. She's warming close to a dozen eggs. Here's a picture. Click on the image for a closer look.

---

    Went to early morning Mass, for Easter. I liked our priest's sermon. "That we are is God's gift to us," he said, "and what we become is our gift to God." It made me realize, just like the son who hid his talents, I think I'm not taking full advantage of God's gifts. "I like to let you in on a little secret," our priest concluded. "Here at St Joe's we celebrate Easter every Sunday."
    My brothers and their families showed between three and four. We had homemade ravioli, which my little nephew helped make on Friday. Luckily we finished in plenty of time for me to go in to work. It was time to power up everything we'd shut down yesterday. It had only taken a halfhour then; it took five hours tonight. All the encoder boards started screwing up on us again. We didn't get out til midnight. We didn't even have donuts, like they'd had last night.

---

    I guess it was another holiday, since the parking lot and the building were pretty empty. A nice quiet day, not much to speak of. Before I left, I did some word on our computer hard drive for Mexico. It might be close to operational now.

---

    I tried to rig up my webcam outside this morning, to get a live feed of our visiting mama duck. I hated to leave the webcam outside, but the best I could do otherwise was to set it up in the garage window. This did not provide the best angle, since the duck was too far away to see.



    In the evening, I did more work on my diary, writing in (or faking) all the entries I'd missed for the last week.

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    I set the wireless webcam out again, just in time to watch the mail lady walk up. I got another set of Core Sound microphones, so I should be set for all bootlegging conditions! Something funny happened at work. My coworker,,,who shall remain nameless...(apart from the fact we call him Reid) had to leave early today, before I even got in. His excuse was he was too hungover from going to Second City last night! I would love to have heard him call up Dennis with that line.

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    I finally got word from AOL that my photo has finally been accepted and added to my online personal. I expected to be inundated with babe e-mails any second now...
    I had the x10 wireless webcam out longer this morning, getting some decent shots of mama duck. She was more active than usual, and I even caught her taking a sip out of the Styrofoam bowl of water we'd left out for her.



    Spent some time trying to update some of my laptop's software in the evening. I hadn't paid too much attention to it, so I left it online and downloaded some updates as well as IE 5.5.

---

    I guess mama duck is getting tired of us. She tried to bite one of us yesterday. She seemed okay this morning though. Didn't get a very good shot because of the rain. Today was fairly uneventful at work, but we did get several calls. For the hell of it, I started a weblog through the Blogger site. I'd been toying with the idea for a while, since hearing about them on Tech TV. Having started it, it seems similar to my Diary pages. I hope there's no boring crossover, or that one cancels the other out. The main benefit to my Blog page is that I can update it right from work. I'll try keep discussion of days' events to the Diary, but discussion of random musings to the Blog. I'm also hoping to make the Blog open to guest submissions.
    I confess I turned into a big chicken tonight. I'd been invited to a birthday party, for a girl I'd worked with at the cable company. I was looking forward to it, since it was an opportunity to meet up with some people I haven't seen in months. But just recently I'd discovered the party was going to be at a big dance club in Mt Clemens. The pictures from their web site frankly scared me off. The place threatened to be full of way too many young people, way too loud, and way too smoky. So I chickened out of going. Instead, I'm here working on my Diary pages.

---

    I came very close to finally posting a public review. I've been tempted to spout off on the book or movie sites, and I came quite close to writing something on the Barnes & Noble page -- except that the site crashed on me. In the evening I went to my friend Mike's house where he, his wife, his mom, and his mother-in-law went out to a bar in Plymouth called Lower Town Grill. Mike's bother Jim is in a band called Government Honey, and this was my first chance to see them perform. As usual, I bootlegged the show.

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    I was back to Mike's house on Sunday morning, for the first Communion of Brian, his son and my godson. Before I left I made a quick NP3 of a Government Honey song (available on my Music page. The Mass was at St John Neumann in Canton (?). I can't say I cared too much for the church, since it had a new-agey kind of feel to it. I prefer a more traditional service. Then it was back to Mike's for lunch.
    I made it back home for my usual Fox shows. I have to admit I am growing more and more frustrated by X-Files. They finally have David Duchovny back, but are squandering his last few episodes by practically treating him like an extra.

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    Now that our big boss is in Las Vegas for the NAB convention, our boss Dave was in for a few hours today. It was good to see him again, and despite his illness he looked exactly the same and seemed in good spirits.

---

    Dave was in again, for a couple hours. I finally got Blogger working properly. I was getting errors every time I posted a new entry. These were not evident on the page itself, but caused problems in creating the Archives. I finally tracked down the problem. I'd typed the FTP path in incorrectly. Actually it was too correctly, since Blogger did not need the complete path for the Archives page.
    In the evening I got a note back from Robin. It was her birthday party I was supposed to go to last weekend. I apologized for not showing up and she mentioned that no one from our old company had shown up anyway. Deadbeats. (Myself included.)

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    Mama duck was a lot more active than usual. Maybe she was looking for food or house-building materials, but she even got off the nest.



    While on eBay I was tempted to buy some new mics from a place called Giant Squid. I spent some time on Yahoo Groups page, finessing my settings for the new BuffettList listserv. I also finally saw Almost Famous, which I enjoyed very much.

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    I finally got my package from Amazon UK this morning. This was the latest Harry Potter books and the audiobook CDs for The Goblet of Fire. The package probably arrived yesterday and sat on the porch all night long. Work was fairly uneventful.

---

    Another uneventful day. Things were very quiet at work. A field engineer from our supplier company is coming out this week to perform some hardware upgrades. He called to verify when he was coming in. Shortly afterward I got a call saying the guys at our network hub wanted to shut us down this weekend for tests. They were upset to find out about our planned upgrade, but it turns out their proposed time for the shutdown won't conflict at all.

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    Since I've got a birthday party on Sunday, I volunteered to come in Saturday to help the field engineer. My work day started at nine and lasted til after five. It turns out the field engineer needed to shut down our system and work offline, so the hub's plans would not have interered after all. It turned out we were missing four computer chips from the supplier company. The field engineer needed to contact the on-call tech, drive into the San Diego office, get the chips we needed, and drive them to the airport for counter-to-counter delivery. Unfortunately this last set of chips we needed would not show up til four tomorrow afternoon. The field engineer had planned to start at nine in the morning tomorrow, so I had to call up Reid and Jeremy and let them know of the change in plans. Inevitably things grew even more complicated. I did not have Jeremy's phone number. Bizarre as it sounds, we had no phone number on file for him and I was unable to contact him and let him know. The best I could do was leave a note for him, explaining that he'd driven in for nothing and was nine hours early.
    Back home, I treated myself to Taco Bell and taped the 61* HBO movie for my boss's boss.

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    My oldest nephew's birthday was back on Tuesday, but we celebrated it today. I'd at least bought his present, during a lunch break yesterday, but I had to stop on the way to get a card. I always forget the card. I almost made myself late deperately trying to find something decent out of the party store's poor selection of cards. I don't think I'd noticed how many birthday cards are based on flatulence jokes.
    My brother Rick had a cookout for the birthday dinner. It was great to smell hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill. You could almost time travel two months ahead and pretend it was Summer. Back home, I spent the night with my usual Fox shows. It is such a pleasure seeing David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on screen together again. But it's bittersweet to know that it will only last a couple weeks more. I made it through Season Eight on the promise of occasional appearances by Duchovny, but I seriously question whether I can make it through Season Nine without such hope. As much as I love watching Gillian as Agent Scully, the show does not really interest me without the two of them.

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    I'd failed to put the duck cam out all weekend. I finally got the chance to do so now though. The duck had moved her nest further away from the porch and further under the rhododendron. This seemed strange, so far along into the duck's nesting, but I assumed she had her reasons.



    Jeremy came in late today, so he could work the evening shift with me and learn the power down procedures. It was revealed to him how simple the evening shift is compared to the morning shift. A secret I'd prefer not to have revealed to too many. It turned out to be a pretty quiet day.

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