---

    I guess things were settling down for Mike and Joe. They hadn't been writing much lately, but I found several e-mails from them this morning. Per tradition, I listened to U2's October on the way to work. The stupid Xytech program was down again. Reid had already called the corporate help desk about it. The guy in charge of running the server responded, saying Xytech had been moved to a different server and e-mailing us instructions on how to reconnect. Reid had tried it, but got nothing but error messages. He also found out the Traffic and production departments couldn't access it either. So the guy in charge of the server was rather alarmed. I tried the instructions later and was able to connect without a problem. Reid said it must've just come online, since it hadn't worked when he'd tried it. I tried not to gloat. He got the better of it anyway, since I was now stuck having to type in tomorrow's schedule. Mexico apparently has gone back to its Fall schedule; its late show had been running from six to eight recently, but now it was running seven to nine like it used to. I was less than pleased by this reversion.

---

    Reid had a tough morning. There'd been a special broadcast this morning, before I came in. It was so special only one single box was authorized to receive it. Which pretty much guaranteed that when the time came that box would lose its signal. A guy with a German accent called up to complain, demanding to know why the box wasn't working and why it hadn't been tested before hand. Reid was probably wondering the same, but of course couldn't say anything like that. He tried to correct the problem, but his troubleshooting did not work. The customer was livid. "Thiss iss unprovessional!" Reid, however, found being yelled at in German was quite novel. It was an important show though, so we got lots of e-mails about it throughout the day. It was kind of funny watching the transmission; since the audience-of-one could not watch, the shoot's crew stood on the set looking lost. Reid tried to arrange an emergency delivery of a new receiver box for the same show tomorrow morning.
    My penpal wrote again, sweeping aside the war talk to ask if I'd heard from anyone we used to work with. This reminded me how I believed I knew the e-mail address of a mutual friend but had never tried it. I made a point to try the address out tonight. I also found an extremely interesting article on Salon.com. It was about RAWA, a group of Afghan women who are fighting the Taliban by secretly educating girls. Their subversion delighted me. I felt perverse glee reading how the all-covering burqas the Taliban forced them to wear were enabling them to smuggle cameras about to record the Taliban's injustices. Their dedication and their determination finally gave me a sense of hope out of this whole misbegotten mess. I was disturbed though by the fact I could not access their website. I couldn't believe the corporate network was keeping me from it; but I got the same error messages on my laptop too. I guess traffic to it was too great, and apparently their server could not handle it. I hadn't known RAWA was featured CNN's documentary Beneath the Veil. I recalled seeing an MPEG of it mentioned in newsgroups. I went looking for it at night, and tried downloading it. My Internet connection has been quite iffy since the weekend. Sometimes I can get on, but soon after I'm booted off again. I hoped it was just high traffic; and this seemed to be so, since I had better luck later in the evening.

---

    I managed to get almost all of Beneath the Veil overnight. I was only missing three pieces. But sadly, I could not stay online long enough to download them. (And they disappeared when I tried again after work.) Reid came in early to make sure today's special broadcast went better than yesterday's. After all that trouble, the German guy had to sheepishly admit he'd put the wrong coaxial cable into the back of the receive box. That's why Reid had been unable to get it to tune to the satellite signal. It looked like there'd be more special broadcasts this week, including some test broadcasts later in the day. Reid had to leave early to go to the bank. One of the big bosses was offering to sell an SUV to him, if he paid seventeen thousand dollars. The money would allow the big boss to put down his own payment for the SUV before handing it over to Reid. Reid was slightly suspicious, but he admitted he definitely needed a new set of wheels. Between four and five I got a flurry of phone calls. All lines were busy and every problem was complicated and time-consuming. It was not a fun hour, although with all the dancing and juggling you'd think it would be.
    I was glad to get back home, so I could watch the new episode of The West Wing. I liked the series so much and I was so intrigued by how they'd handle an episode on terrorism that I was actually excited to watch it.

---

    Reid was not feeling well, suffering from a reaction to some new medication he was on. He ended up leaving early. The day was quiet but long. My e-mail worked, since my old friend from work wrote back to me tonight. I had to go back to not only recording Thursday shows on VHS but to recording "Friends" on my hard drive. This proved easier to do with my expnaded hard drive space. After all the kerfuffle with The Lord of the Rings trailer, I decided to put a countdown on my homepage.

---

    I got completely fed up with my cable modem this morning. Usually I'd get ten or fifteen minutes of usage before it craps out, but today I couldn't get on right after starting Windows. So I called up Comcast@Home's tech support. I reached someone fairly quickly, but then he transferred me to a technician...and that's when I had to sit on hold for a long while. When I finally got to talk to someone I explained how I'd managed to get online by manually inputting my addresses and settings, but evidently there was something I was missing. (Actually the one setting I knew I did not have was the WINS resolution.) The technician explained that the IP address I was using was old and in fact I was apparently leeching off someone else's connection! (No wonder my cable modem was always showing activity!) He had me change the Computer Name (going from an -A suffix to a -C) and had me go back to using the automatic settings.
    I discovered another Buffett ad in the paper, for ticket sales tomorrow. I was suddenly reminded how I should've been keeping an ear out for a radio commercial too. I rushed upstairs to my room, hooking my DAT to my receiver in case I wanted to record some radio stations while I was at work. This was complicated by the fact the LED on my receiver has died, so I had no idea what stations I was listening to. I listened to a few stations to try and get my bearings -- and I managed to catch the Buffett radio commercial, right around 11 AM! It was quite a morning.
    It rained all day. I got in quite late. Dave had actually been in, and he'd waited for me. He left word with Reid for me to call him on his cell phone about tomorrow's Tiger game. I still wasn't all that enthused about going, so I'd volunteered to work tomorrow's shift. Dennis called up too, to talk me into going to Comerica Park afterward to at least see some of the game. This was a possibility, but I knew I'd be too lazy to try it. I called up Dave and he told me how he still was not in good enough condition to go tomorrow, so he was willing to work my shift. He wasn't planning on going to the game anyway, but he could at least come in to the office for a couple hours. I hated to think that both of us would be no-shows, so he talked me into going. I called Dennis back to make sure he hadn't scalped my ticket in the meantime.
    There was more crap about authorizing boxes for special broadcasts, but once that was out of the way the day was pretty quiet. I rang in the weekend by working on my Buffett page, editing my audio file of the radio commercial and scanning the newspaper ad.

---

    We were supposed to meet at ten:thirty at work for the Tiger game. I decided to go in early, before ten, so I could try to order Buffett tickets online. I assumed Mike and I would end up using a broker, but it was worth a try. I set my clock for seven, but this turned out to be far too early. I reset it to eight for some additional sleep. I left at quarter to nine so I could stop for breakfast burritos. I was at the office by ten to ten. I had both computers up, one to Ticketmaster and one to Palacenet (which turned out to be running on the Ticketmaster server too). I figured Palacenet would be the better bet, since Ticketmaster would be deluged by all Buffett dates going on sale at once. But, moments after ten, I was shocked to discover I was being offered tickets! They were lower level, so I snapped them up. I guess wearing my Buffett sweatshirt was a good idea -- although it hadn't brought good luck when I'd bought it at the June concert! I tried to get some more tickets, since I was reportedly the only one of our group shopping for them today, but both webpages hung on me.
    I gave up. I went outside and got to see Reid's new big maroon SUV. I got him to drive to the game too. Dave showed up, but went quickly inside. And Dennis pulled up, telling us the rest of the group was up at the front lot. I guess sixteen people were supposed to go, back in September, but only eight were going today. It was a windy chilly day, but at least it didn't rain, like yesterday. The sun was out for most of it, but when clouds got in the way it got cold quick. I kind of regretted having Reid drive me, since his space-age gas gauge showed he had exactly two gallons left in his tank. We all showed up early to the park, for the buffet in the Tiger Den. I was disappointed to find out they were serving a breakfast, since this didn't seem to conducive to beer drinking. It took a while for me to get in the mood. (A Ballpark Frank outside helped too.) We had pretty good seats, near home plate.

Yesterday's game was canceled, so today was a double header. It didn't matter though since we couldn't see both games. We barely made it through one. The Tigers let two runs score almost immediately. They played so lackadaisically we wondered how they'd survive another. I lost interest early and concentrated more on what to eat. I had two big Labatts beers, a frank, a bag of peanuts, and Cracker Jacks -- the four food groups. I think the final score was 8-2, Royals, but I really don't know. I thought we might hang around Downtown but instead we went back to get our cars. I got home around four. I tried to take a nap, but woke up with a hangoverish headache. It didn't help that I'd been woken up by phone calls. One call was for John, my nephew. He'd ordered a corsage for his homecoming but had evidently forgotten it. The florist was about to close, so he'd taken to calling all the Asterious in the phone book. I gave the guy the right number, and couldn't help chuckling over John's predicament. How could you spend money on a corsage and forget about it? And when exactly tonight would he remember. (By the way, John had reportedly taken pains to dye his hair blue again, to match his date's dress.)
    By luck, I found the last three parts for my Beneath the Veil MPEG. I was able to compile it and watch it during the evening. I finished it around ten:thirty, only to find out CNN was going to air the documentary at eleven.

---

    I watched Ebert's show, I listened to Car Talk on my computer through QuickTime, then I went upstairs and watched my rental of Time Code. I didn't find till late afternoon that the U.S. had begun the attack in Afghanistan. It was then I found out the Emmys had been postponed as well. As a fan of awards shows I was disappointed to hear this, but the news was certainly understandable.

---

    Dave was supposed to come back today, but he'd sent an e-mail from home saying he probably wouldn't be in till Thursday or Friday. I found a bunch of very interesting links on Afghanistan over on Wired.com. It was amazing how bustling downtown Kabul looked so desolate, even twenty years ago. The tallest building visible was four stories high. It made downtown Gibraltar look like Times Square. Yet somehow therein were the people who threatened to kill all the atheists. I followed a link back to RAWA. I was once again touched by their plight and their determination to better their situation. So I went ahead and donated to them through Paypal.

---

    I've been reading Entertainment Weekly for a while. Some times I find it stupid, most times I find it forgettable, but this week's cover story on the 100 Best Soundtracks really irritated me. It was filled with fluff and pap -- like the songs from Pulp Fiction and, amazingly, Beat Street (!) -- while historic film work like King Kong and Adventures of Robin Hood and Star Wars was relegated to the end of the list, like afterthoughts. So I finally wrote to them to express my displeasure.
    We were having trouble connecting to the system in Mexico. Oddly, we were able to ping it, so we could communicate with it, but it did not seem to be responding. Not only could we not login, it wasn't even giving us the command prompt with which to try. Reid and I spent the afternoon making phone calls about it. At least the Mexico system was up and running, so the problem was not critical. We also discovered another team is putting together a web site which would include our job descriptions and pictures. It was requested we fill our section out by Friday, COB [close of business].
    Sideshow Weta, who handles the merchandising for Lord of the Rings, was beginning a medallion program. The medallions, which would be released one a month starting in January, looked pretty cool, so I signed up.

---

    I thought my connectivity problems were behind me but I had trouble starting up AOL. My browser and newsreader and Outlook were working fine, but AOL would not start. I'd been running my Windows 98 version under Windows 2000, so I wondered if I needed to install a fresh version for this OS. I went ahead and installed AOL6, but was instantly reminded how I hate the way it displays e-mail (which is the only reason I keep AOL). I left early to stop by Office Depot. I wanted to buy some kind of frame or hanger for my Lord of the Rings poster, but they didn't have anything. Michael's, a crafts store, was being built next door, but wouldn't be opening till the 18th. I brought my digital camera in to work, just so I could have my picture ready for that webpage. I ended up having to take my own picture, but it came out rather nicely.
    Here you go, girls...

    AOL was the same this morning, even though I'd installed Windows 2000's own copy. Since I'm no fan of AOL6 to begin with, I uninstalled it and put AOL5 in its place. This worked, but it would not automatically restart when it needed to install an update patch. I tried the shortcut for the Windows 98 version, which somehow worked. So I uninstalled the version I'd just put in, and went back to the way it had been two days ago. (I have no idea what caused the lapse yesterday.) I was late for the U2 webcast, but it started late too. I tried taping it, but RealPlayer kept rebuffering on me. It sounded good and I was impressed that it came with live, running video; but since I could only hear about two minutes of each song I eventually gave up on it.

---

    Things were quite busy at work. We had an extra special ultra-secret broadcast today, authorized for only a handful of receive boxes across the country, and intended for corporate managers to instruct them on how to fire employees.

---

    Dave was in today. The guys in Mexico might have discovered the problem with their network connection. They were loath to cycle the power on everything since they had no spare encoder boards. If their channels for some reason did not come back online, then they were sunk. The encoder boards had been sent from San Diego weeks and weeks ago, but were reportedly still tied up in customs. Once again, since the problem was not critical we decided to just wait it out. The rest of the day was very quiet. I got my Buffett tickets in the mail, back at home.

---

    I had to work again today for a couple hours. On the way home I stopped off at Michael's in Southgate and bought a 36x24 poster frame...only to find out my Lord of the Rings poster, at 27x41, was too big. So, when I got home, I ended up sticking the poster up with Scotch tape. I got my U2 tickets in the mail, from the fan club. I'd been worried that too many people were requesting that show or that I hadn't sent my money in fast enough, so it was great relief to have the tickets in hand. As a registered member of U2.com I was supposed to have access to their Wednesday webcast for seven days. I watched it during the afternoon and recorded the audio from it. In the evening, I finally got around to finishing off the September entries for this online diary as well as starting this October page. At night I watched my rental of Total Recall. I already had seen the movie, so I was able to dive right into the extras.

---

    I woke to the sounds of something slithering and then falling to the floor with a soft thump. I assumed it was my Lord of the Rings poster, but it turned out to be some plastic bag heavy enough to weigh open the door of the blanket hamper and fall out. I spent the morning burning CDRs, despite having had such a huge partition for audio files. My printer didn't seem to be working right in Windows 2000 so I had to reboot to Windows 98 to print labels. I rebooted to Windows 2000 to listen to WDET's QuickTime simulcast of Car Talk, but now QuickTime was screwing up too. It sounded just as glitchy stuttering as it does in Windows 98, so now I'm screwed!
    In the evening I got a call from Phil, finally responding to my e-mail about our U2 tickets. He told me he hadn't expected me to buy the expensive ones. I thought that was the plan since he'd told me he didn't want to wait in the GA line. He'd gotten two GA tickets, but it looked like he'd be selling them off. Everyone else who'd been interested in the trip was backing out, so, as predicted, it would probably end up with just Phil and me going. I also got into an involved AOL IM chat with a friend named Mike, all about how to burn CDs without gaps between tracks. I also finally scooped out the snail from my fish's cube. The snail appeared dead, so I wanted to keep a closer eye on him by keeping him in his own Dixie cup. I watched the big 100th episode of Inside the Actors Studio. I added several reviews to my Movies page, and I also added a menu bar to it. Late at night, I watched my second rental, The Dish.

---

    Dave was back in, at work. He asked me about my trip and I joked blackly about the plane ride -- how our destination seemed like a good terrorist target and how my parents were insisting I go so they could be on Larry King Live afterward. The guys at San Diego kept our fax machine busy, sendng us three separate copies of instructions on how to cope with the end of Daylight Savings Time, even though we're already set up automatic changeovers.
    I saw something that seemed to suggest RealPlayer Gold Pass users might be able to access a higher-quality RealVideo file of the U2 concert at Notre Dame. If so, it might be worth the ten bucks just to get a good bootleg of it. I talked myself into signing up when I got home. I had already bought RealPlayer Plus a short while ago (since I'd been using their free versions for so long), but it did not look like I could simply activate a subscription. It appeared I'd have to buy RealPlayer Plus all over again. Remarkably, I talked myself into it. I bought the program again, but could not log into the Gold Pass site. It requsted a password which I hadn't known I'd needed to set up. I checked my list of old passwords and discovered I'd gotten a Gold Pass password when I'd first bought RealPlayer. So I'd just signed up for a redundant account!
    I believe I was able to cancel this second account online. And the Gold Pass version of the Notre Dame concert was indeed better.

---

    The Free Press had a glowing review of The Phantom Menace DVD, which talked me into leaving for work early so I could swing by Best Buy. It was raining hard this morning. So many leaves had collected in the gutters that the streets were flooded in three places between my house and the expressway. Listening to WDET's pledge drive, I was intrigued by mention of portable radio powered by a crank. It would've cost me a $500 pledge, but I made a mental note to investigate these.
    I hated just buying one thing, so I also picked up The Simpsons first season box at Best Buy. The later years of the series have pissed me off so much it's soured my appreciation even for when the show was good, but, regardless, this seemed like a collection I'd need to buy even if I didn't exactly feel like watching it. The girl at the checkout was puzzled why so many guys were buying Phantom Menace, till I explained it had just come out today.
    Dennis had delivered shirts with our company's name embroidered on them. They looked nice. Reid and I had to prepare for some special show by authorizing six pages of sites. We each worked on three pages, but I ended up doing four and a half after Reid left. I shopped around for a crank-radio online. I found one that was a radio and a flashlight, which sounded perfect for those Summer nights when the power goes out. I thought my dad might like one as well, so I ordered two since his birthday is coming up.

---

    It had been over a month since I'd updated the x10 webcam "exterior" shot on my homepage. I booted into Windows 98 to take care of this, but bizarrely was unable to upload the shot. I ended up saving a freeze of it and uploading it separately.
    Reid had had some trouble this morning. Video had been erratic, so he'd started faulting boards. This did not change anything though. Oddly, the broadcast was simulcast on two channels but Reid only saw problems on one. He talked the production group into running the feed through a frame-sync and the problem went away.
    Later in the day, I discovered a link on The One Ring.net to a Lord of the Rings fan club. I was pleased to see this was underway now, and I was delighted at the offer that my name might be on The Lord of the Rings DVDs! I immediately signed up as a charter member. By coincidence, I got an e-mail invitation from the club just as I was signing up.
    I had to stay late, after programming, to undo the changes Reid had made this morning and to align the channels. My videotapes have a habit of jumping to WGN on occasion, and as I drove home I felt the certainty that this had happened tonight. The conditions were too perfect: I was late, I would miss the start of The West Wing, so of course I would have to be recording the wrong channel. Matter of fact, when I got home and turned the channel on, it would be in commercial so I'd waste even more precious minutes trying to find out what network I was taping. ...All of these were true. I'd missed all of Ed, but luckily I only missed fifteen minutes of West Wing.

---

    I'd recently been informed that the RealVideo versions of U2's Notre Dame concert were missing two songs, removed presumably due to copyright reasons. Luckily someone had recorded these and had them available as MP3s. So I spent the evening mixing them into my copy, creating an expanded original mix.     There were more problems with video again, this time on a different channel. Luckily Dennis was able to come in, and he discerned that the problem was another bad feed from the production department. It looked fine to the naked eye, but the equipment noticed it, and the bad feed was throwing off our encoder. He showed us how the bad sync was discernible through our waveform monitors. The big bosses were upset to hear we hadn't known this. Dennis pointed out we had not been hired as video engineers, but knew it was best if we became better versed with the troubleshooting equipment, so he told us he'd be having informal "classes" on it later. I once again had to stay late to re-align the channels. There were a lot of audio downloads tonight, especially all The Who stuff I found in a group which trades SHN files.

---

    Dennis was with us again, but he was too busy fielding e-mails and taking phone calls to run us through any classes. At night I got into an e-mail chat with my pen pal. She had written to express her disgust with her printer. I wrote back for her to remind the problems she was having and what error messages were popping up. She tried to print my letter, she reported later, and had seen a new error this time. She realized now that the problem was the parallel connection needed to be tighter!

---

    One knob in the shower stall finally gave up. The only way to operate the cold water now is to use a pair of pliers. I'd recently found an alternate recording of the Cleveland U2 show Phil and I had been to. I spent the day turning those MP3s into CDs. I went to Taco Bell for dinner and also picked up some blank CDRs at Office Depot. I watched TechTV's Big Thinkers while I ate. Scott Adams was the guest. I was quite taken with his musings that the growth of the Internet is a lot like a central nervous system, and that flying satellites all around the planet is a lot like developing eyesight. I was willing to go even further: maybe our planet was just like a gestating baby, developing and growing, becoming aware, defining its senses...and maybe the known universe was nothing but the darkness inside a womb. Which suggested that maybe, once we achieved the final stages of growth and awareness, we would be able to burst forth, born into an entirely new existence, as vast and amazing to our senses as the real world must be to a newborn baby! This felt like such an exciting, mind-expanding concept -- until I realized it had pretty much been already discussed in Stanley Kubrick's 2001.
    I talked to my friend Mike again about burning CDs. This time he called. We ended up staying on the phone for about three hours, I think. I watched some of the Concert for New York on my desktop while we talked. A lot of people said police officer Mike Moran's challenge to Osama Bin Laden was the high point of the show -- or maybe The Who's fiery performance. But my favorite part was that silly three-minute Woody Allen movie.

---

    I was pretty sure my snail was dead. His shell looked empty, and I hadn't seen him at all in the week I'd had him in that Dixie cup. So I went out to the pet store and bought a new one. Actually I bought two: a yellow one and a black one. I'd been told this place sold small snails, but they still weren't as tiny as the original ones I'd gotten. I spent much of the afternoon watching Simpsons episodes from my DVD box set. They did their job: I was reminded of their realistic, affectionate portrayal of a family, before Homer turned into a deranged imbecile, before all the characters turned into cheap gags and excuses for movie parodies. Even the creators, in their commentary tracks, seemed taken aback by the charms of the first season -- which begs the question, "Exactly whose fault is that, guys?"

---

    Some show no-one knew anything about it showed up in our schedule log for tomorrow. It figured that the guy in charge of Traffic was off today. I guess he was called up at his house though. By the end of the day we found out the show had been canceled anyway, and had probably shown up in the schedule log in error. Thinking of some new stuff to add to my online Store, I did some research on companies who did glass etching. I also found out the soundtrack to Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone will be two CDs overseas, so I ordered it from Amazon UK. I also ordered an import DVD of A Matter of Life and Death -- my favorite Powell/Pressburger movie. I can't play it in my DVD player, but I can at least watch it on my DVD-ROM, and until some stateside company wises up and releases it here this is the best I can do. Having finished my Cleveland CDs, I started work on CDs for an alternate recording from Lexington. I also created a new front page for my "official" Taliban site.

---

    My mom had made some chili while babysitting my nephew yesterday. She gave some to me, but warned me to put a lot of cheese on it since it had accidentally stayed too long on the stove and gotten burnt. I didn't know you could burn chili, but I realized the truth quickly. It smelled horrible, and it tasted like a damned ashtray! I couldn't help it: I threw it all down the sink immediately. Mexico had finally gotten their spare boards from customs a couple days ago. They'd put them in, but now were reporting problems. Our diagnostic screens showed only green when we dialed in, but they were reporting the boards themselves were showing error lights. Reid suggested they fault to the spare tomorrow, before programmimg. Dennis joined us at work again. Later in the day he started the first of his classes, showing me the waveform monitor. Afterward we talked about movie rentals, the upcoming Lord of the Rings movie, and I also showed him my Taliban site. As I walked out, at the end of the day, I saw signs that there would be an evacuation drill tomorrow, "weather permitting". I'd seen that excerpts from the Harry Potter soundtrack were available at its official site. I couldn't remember the URL when I got home, so I went to the official movie site (which, strangely, had no link to the soundtrack). I liked their countdown to the movie's release. I figured out how it worked and unceremoniously adopted it for my own homepage, changing its target date from November 16 to December 19 to reflect the opening of Lord of the Rings. I got perverse pleasure in using Harry Potter's countdown to advertize its rival. I eventually did find the soundtrack site, and was rather disappointed in the excerpts available. I really wanted John Williams's music to be great, but it sounded too much like Hook.

---

    I'd seen Mexico's late show wasn't starting till seven:thirty these next three days, which meant I would be staying an extra halfhour. Dave had no problem with me coming in a halfhour later. It was nice to sleep in even more, and my morning also went quite leisurely. I found out Mexico had not faulted their boards this morning. Reid, who'd come in early just in case, had called them three times without answer. I got a call from Mexico later in the day. They told me they'd been hesitant to fault anything without contacting the support group in San Diego first. Things had gotten worse however, since now our diagnostic screens were reporting constant errors. Every three to five seconds we'd get a message that the encoder is set as "INTEGRATED" but is actually "DIGITAL". The troubling thing is that the encoder is integrated, so some piece of equipment or some setting was terribly confused. We got San Diego on it and they promised to dial in to Mexico. Dave and Dennis went out and got Pizza Hut pizza for us. Reid had some, but I'd already had lunch on the way in. Dave told me he wanted me to finish the rest of the pizza off by the end of the day; and I told him this was a job which played to my strengths. In the middle of the meal, the overhead PA speakers started beeping and we had to evacuate. We did so leisurely. Dennis called over to the production department to let them know we had to leave the room. We followed Dennis out, but soon realized he wasn't sure which was our preferred exit. I knew how to get out, of course, but not the quickest way; and it didn't help that the stairwells were reportedly off-limits. As we walked, some guys in red armbands told us we were dead. I thought they were teasing, but I guess we'd failed the test. We stood around outside for a while, chatting. It was a sunny mild day. Dennis told me his wife had visited my Taliban site and enjoyed it.
    Later in the afternoon Reid called up San Diego to check their progress with Mexico. Our contact there sounded like he'd just remembered. This infuriated us, since all that time had been wasted. Dennis decided to "escalate" things by calling one of the bosses in San Diego. He also walked Reid and Dave through the waveform class. Later in the day I got several calls from San Diego. For some reason they could not dial in to Mexico's system. This seemed odd since they should be able to do so through our system. We can connect with Mexico, so it seemed that San Diego should be able to too since they could connect with us. But they couldn't, so I had to poke around the system settings for them and be their eyes. To make things more puzzling, the settings seemed correct. I dutifully had the pizza for my dinner, which meant I could leave my dinner bag for tomorrow's meal. Back at home, I downloaded the big fat Windows Upgrade Advisor to see if it was worth buying Windows XP on its release tomorrow. As always, my webcam, my printer, and my scanner looked to pose problems.

---

    I left too late to get XP, but I wasn't that eager to get it anyway. Still, I enjoyed reading up on it at home and at work. No progress had been made with Mexico's constant error message. San Diego still said they were unable to dial in. Feeling I should do something, I gave Mexico a call late in the day. I was informed they'd fixed the problem. It did not have to do with the encoder at all, they said; it was instead a power problem. I had no idea how this could be so, but I took them at their word -- especially by the fact the error message was gone. By the end of the day they'd restored all their boards, and both online and spare boards were all up and responding.
    That night, at home, I saw that U2's official site now had message boards open. I checked them out. Each concert from the tour had its own topic board, and I was disappointed to see ours was listed as "Detroit, IL". I tried to write in -- and would've been first -- but for some reason my password was not accepted -- even thougn it had been provided to me in an official e-mail! For the record, here's what I would've posted:

First Bono says "Detroit, Ohio" during the concert. And now Zootopia has moved us to Illinois!
It's Michigan! Say it loud, say it proud! Michigan! M!CH!GAN!
The state that is shaped like a mitten. The state with two peninsulas. The state with the longest coastline this side of Alaska. The Great Lake State. The Water Wonderland.
Detroit, Michigan! Home of the auto industry and losing sports teams! Motown. The Motor City.
Got it now?

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    I was now thinking about getting Windows XP today. But before I left I discovered someone in the U2 newsgroup had posted the link to MP3s from a third Cleveland bootleg. This turned out to be the Assisted Listening Device recording I'd been trying to get from eBay. I was equally happy to download it for free. Only half the show was available, but I found out another site had had the concert up for a while! I got the whole show from there (u2achtung.com). I swung by the Best Buy near work and picked up XP Home. For the heck of it I also bought Brian DePalma's Dressed to Kill on DVD and the Hannibal CD soundtrack. XP was marked at $99 but it rang up at $85. Oddly, the difference took a few seconds to take effect; I saw it change on the register's LED while I was handing over my credit card.
    The XP box was encased some impenetrable plastic casket, and I was prevented from opening it even though I legally bought and owned the damned thing. I worked at it with my car keys, but to no avail. I simply wanted to bring the manuals in, so I could read them at work; but either Best Buy or Microsoft's anti-theft paranoia was so great it was keeping customers from accessing their own purchased items. I ended up having to bring the whole Best Buy bag in, and letting Reid cut into the plastic with his pen knife. The manual turned out to be pretty paltry. The day was pretty quiet. We were informed our signal would be taken down this weekend, but it wouldn't affect any programming. I had to send out notifications.
    In the evening I got a nice e-mail letter from a woman in the UK. I was pleased to see my crank flashlights had turned up finally, since my dad's birthday was in a few days. I wasted little time in installing XP, but was informed I did not have enough free space. I needed a whopping nine hundred forty megabytes! Since I'd have to reinstall most of my software, I booted into Windows 98 and wantonly started deleting stuff. I started the install at around ten:thirty and finished before eleven. My mom had been interested in XP, not to use but because I'd thought about asking for it for my birthday. I decided not to, since at the time I thought I could get it cheaper online than at the stores. I hadn't counted on Microsoft stipulating that their vendors could only discount it alongside a hardware purchase. I let my mom know I'd bought it, and she offered to pay for it. She also told me she'd given up on trying to find me a brown cardigan (which was what I was asking for) and had decided to knit me one!
    I tried to experience XP as intended, but it wasn't long before I reverted to the "Classic Windows" look. I spent a long time getting used to it, personalizing it, getting it the way I wanted. I stayed up till five in the morning!

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    Only got a couple hours before I had to wake up for the Saturday shift. Went to McDonald's for breakfast burritos, but found out they couldn't break my twenty. I had three dollars' worth of the $3.18 cost, but the only change I could drum up in my car was a dime and a nickel. Luckily the kid at the drive-thru let me get by with that. I only had to work two hours, but they seemed longer than usual since I was impatient to get back to playing with XP. Got Arby's for lunch on the way home; their pop dispenser poured out carbonated water instead of diet Coke, so I was stuck getting regular Coke. We babysat my nephew Jake today during the afternoon, but I mainly stayed in the den to mess around with my new OS. XP was fun to use, but I was getting quickly annoyed by its continual reminders that I had run out of space in the E:\ drive. My E:\ drive was a small partition set aside for the Windows swap file and nothing else, so these constant XP reminders were nothing but pointless. Even more frustrating was the fact that even though I disabled these reports they kept showing up anyway. By evening I decided to concede defeat and get rid of my E:\ partition. I'd simply combine it with my F:\ partition. Of course, my current version of Partition Magic wouldn't work with XP, so I went out to the nearby Office Depot after dinner and bought version 7.0. I made the change when I got home, but then was unable to boot into XP afterward. The computer seemed to try, but right before Windows started the computer crapped out and tried rebooting again. It did the same thing when I tried to boot in Safe Mode. I ended up booting into Windows 2000 for a while, just to be able to do something, but this didn't help my XP problem. I realized I'd been too hasty to kill off the E:\ drive. In doing so I'd gorped up Windows's swap file, and it was probably the loss of this which was throwing the OS off. One would think this state-of-the-art OS would be able to adjust and create a new swap file, but then again I probably should've taken more care before effecting the change. There seemed no way to get into XP again without simply reinstalling everything. So, practically twenty-four hours later, I installed XP all over again -- needing to again too. I needed to reassociate all my programs again, if not reinstall those as well. I stayed up till four instead of five, but then again Daylight Savings Time started tonight too.

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    I worked on burning some CDs in the morning. I'd had trouble with this last night, but things were working better now. I'd managed to a better recording of U2's Cleveland show and I wanted to share it with Phil and Steve. That British woman sent me a photo of herself today too. Eveybody came over for dinner to celebrate our dad's birthday (which would be Wednesday). It seemed like a rehearsal for Thanksgiving. Heather showed up too, showing some of the photographs she'd taken for her art classes. She and her mom Eileen told me how they'd seen some strangeness whlile Heather had been taking pictures by their cottage in Chelsea. At night, I finished the Edward Scissorhands DVD.

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    I forgot to send back Edward Scissorhands but I did stop at the post office to send Phil the Cleveland CDs as well as my check for the Las Vegas trip. One of the big bosses was supposed to be in our office today, reacquainting himself with all the equipment in preparation of a tour of big muckety-mucks on Friday. I guess he'd shown up already before I got in. The hard drives and monitors still cluttered thr floor, even though they were supposed to removed today. Dave and Dennis had gone to get an equipment van, but it turned out to be defective. I heard about it afterward: Dennis was still a little unnerved by the fact the van had had no brakes, and Dave had managed to stop it only by standing on the brake pedal. They'd abandoned the van in the parking lot, and the old computers had to remain here until a new van could be procured. I had the room to myself for most of the day, since Dave and Reid went to a meeting. I e-mailed Phil about the package I'd sent, and he e-mailed me back saying I should've deducted the price I'd paid for concert tickets from the airfare. And speaking of U2, they were on Late Show with David Letterman tonight.

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    My dad on Sunday had happened to mention wanting a paper cutter, which I immediately thought would make a decent birthday present. So I got up early to go to Office Depot again. Last night it was announced the company CEO was retiring; I guess I hadn't fully realized how busy the office would be. Video of the announcement and a press conference were shown repeatedly, and the programming department kept calling over to revise the playback schedule. Reid had been really overworked in the morning, though things were settling down by the time I got in -- even though programming was still changing things.
    The computers got moved at last, which really made the room look big and empty. Not only were they off the floor, but the table two of them had originally sat on was gone as well. I finally asked if I could swap shifts on Monday the 12^th. This would allow me to go to the Buffett concert at the Palace without taking the day off. I still couldn't get over how busy that week would be, since I'd be flying to Vegas a few days later.
    I was a bit alarmed to get an e-mail from the office in Atlanta saying the deadline had arrived for sending our insurance forms back. I'd put this off for so long that I'd forgotten about it, and now I'd not only have to fill everything tonight, I'd have figure out what those forms were for. I went through them all when I got home, though none of them made sense to me. I probably wrote contradictory figures or information on the different sheets, but at least they got signed and sealed up.

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    I decided to toy with Partition Magic again, before I went into work. I wanted to shrink my engorged E:\ drive and made my C:\ drive bigger (so it would stop with the reminders about running ouf ot disk space). So I shrank the E:\ drive, leaving some free space between it and the C:\ drive, and I hoped to expand the C:\ drive. However, Partition Magic seemed only able to do half this. The E:\ got shrunk and got moved; but the C:\ drive stayed its same size and the free space between them was untouched. I wondered if this was because my C:\ drive was NTFS and the free space wasn't. But I'd have to wait till I got home to work on it any more. I stopped at the post office again to mail off my insurance forms. Reid had brought in Dunkin' Donuts as a Halloween treat, and Dave let him leave a halfhour early. About the only activity was the appearance of some folks who were part of the company's PC Renewal group. They wanted to upgrade our computers. We weren't sure if the programs we need would be compatible with Windows 2000, so they settled on upgrading us from Windows 95 to Windows 98. I spent the evening updating my homepage, and I also fixed up my Guestbook a little, changing it from its drab black-and-white. As per tradition, I listened to U2's October and Tales of Mystery and Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project during my commutes today. I missed out on trick or treating because I was at work, but I guess we had about a hundred or so kids at the house. I'd been curious if the terrorism scares might keep kids indoors, but I guess not.
    I tried working on my partitions when I got home. I converted the free space into an NTFS partition and tried to combine it with the C:\ drive but this didn't work either. With no other ideas, I tried running Check Disk through Partition Magic. It was reported there was a drive problem, but evidently Check Disk could not make changes on the same drive it was running on. It can't "unmount" it. That's nice, especially since Windows XP doesn't have Scandisk anymore. So I was forced to reboot into Windows 2000, where I could run Check Disk on the C:\ drive and fix whatever problem it had. I felt sorry for any XP users who didn't have the luxury of a separate operating system to fall back on. Once I rebooted into XP, Partition Magic worked fine and my C:\ drive was finally enlarged. I also got my desktop TV to work in XP. ATI hadn't released an official XP version of their Multimedia Center, but they suggested the Windows 2000 would do the trick...which it did.
    Before the night ended I got a chance to download Enya's song from The Fellowhsip of the Ring. It was my first chance to hear any music from the movie. I was disappointed the song wasn't melodic enough Enya's lethargic delivery was less than inspiring (Loreena would've been so much better!) but the song grew on me after a few listens.

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