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    We still didn't have power but at least I had gas-heated hot water for the morning shower. My fish was lying awfully still on the bottom of his cube, so I thought he might've succumbed to the cold. I got him to move though by prodding him with a toothpick, so maybe he was just sleeping (or, more appropriately, hibernating). I was disheartened to find out the Detroit Edison recording was still saying power would return in thirteen hours. It was mild and almost sunny out, so it seemed hard to believe repairs would take all day. I left an hour early since there was nothing to do. Remarkably, there was little reaction today to yesterday's ridiculousness. I found out my friend Joe had lost power at his house only this morning. Edison was saying his power might not be restored till Monday! His wife was worried where they and the kids would stay, but Joe was more concerned about where they'd watch the Super Bowl!
    The field engineer showed up around five or six, having flown in early this morning. Dave and Dennis showed up around seven. They started testing the encoder at eight, after programming. I hung around till about eleven. The power had come back on at around seven, fortunately, so I had a nice warm comfortable sleep.

---

    I celebrated Groundhog's Day by venturing out of my hole to see Li'l Stubby & the Disappointments show in St Clair Shores. It had been several months since I'd seen them, so it was pretty cool. As promised, my friend from Illinois showed up. I hadn't seen her in a year and a half, so that was cool too. Her husband was with her, along with her husband's family and a couple of her friends. They kindly let me squeeze into their group.
    I tried to go all out by recording the band with two separate DAT recorders. I wanted to get some definite stereo separation. But I screwed up the first set when I couldn't get any audio levels on one recorder. I found out later I'd stupidly plugged the mics into the "Line Out" socket! I swear I need my eyeglass prescription checked.

---

    The local paper, the News Herald, announced that my friend Bill was named Police Officer of the Year. I'd had no idea; I hadn't seen any "For Your Consideration" ads around or anything. Sadly, I forgot to scan the photo.
    I worked on making an MP3 of one of the Stubby songs from last night and I uploaded it to my Stubby page in the afternoon. Afterward I drove out to Canton to watch the Super Bowl with my friend Mike and his family. Like last year he made buffalo wings and nachos. I was mainly interested in seeing U2's halftime performance, and the commercials, completely unexpecting that for once the game itself would be as interesting.

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    I ate and drank so much over the weekend that it felt like I'd gained a hundred more pounds. I hate to admit it but I discovered midway through the morning that I'd actually popped the button on my slacks! Talk about humiliation. Luckily this happened at home so I was able to change before I left.
    I got some bad news when I got in. Reid told me that Dave's illness had returned. (Almost a year to the day, it seemed.) He'd be seeing a specialist some time this week and it was possible he might undergo an operation immediatelty thereafter. Reid hated to say anything about it, but this might seriously jeopardize his chance to go to Las Vegas in two weeks, and Reid had only just paid for the tickets.
    I went shopping for clothes after work, once again reminded how it's impossible for me to buy clothes. Even though we'd just had a fresh snowfall, even though it was the middle of Winter, all the stores are selling polo and golf shirts. I have to invest in clothing for the future rather than buying stuff that I need now.
    I worked on another Li'l Stubby MP3 at night.

---

    We had more problems with the encoder today. Video was fine, but the software was reporting continual warnings about bad data. Dennis finally figured out it had something to do with the corporate LAN. We're supposed to have a dedicated subnet, but it appeared some other terminal was encroaching on us. Our room was full of network people trying to track down the problem, but of course once they showed up the errors stopped.
    Dennis returned in the evening to swap more encoder boards. New boards had shown up today, having been requested over the weekend. They helped out, but we discovered a further board was still bad. This time I didn't get home till twelve:thirty.

---

    The time has come to start redecorating, to start pulling down wallpaper, to start moving furniture, to start painting. I left the place in a bit of a mess, with my big screen TV sitting face-down atop my bed. The work day was pretty quiet. I got to kill time with my book on Cascading Style Sheets. I had no idea so many of the HTML commands I taught myself are being deprecated; not only do I have to unlearn everything, the CSS commands don't appear much better or shorter. Some of my site was down part of the evening; I'm not sure why.

---

    I got a surprising e-mail from my Illinois penpal this morning.
    "Our friendship has become a source of contention between my husband and me. I appreciate your years of friendship, but I must take my husband's feelings into consideration and not keep in contact with you any longer."
    It came as quite a shock. I know I'd had some beers on Saturday, but I hadn't been that drunk. So I have no idea what brought this about.
    Dave was in today. His surgery won't be till the end of the month. He'll be working next week, too, which will allow Reid to go to Las Vegas after all.
    That final encoder board should've shown up today, at work. We were able to track on the UPS page that it had been received and signed for. Now we just needed to wait for it to make it to our door. Dennis got impatient and asked me to go to the mail room and look for it. Coincidentally, I ran into our delivery guy just as he was about to go on his rounds. Dennis came back at around seven and he and I tested the new board, as well as the ones which had given us trouble on Friday. And I got home around ten.

---

    My place is a mess, with all the furniture in the middle of the room and sheets of plastic all over. Work was pretty quiet. Shared some e-mails with my friends Mike and Joe, discussing the possibility of another poker night. Reid left early, not feeling well. Mexico's transition to our satellite is not going all that well; I'm getting lots of late night calls, which at least are barely understandable. Watched the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. Then watched a couple season four X-Files episodes before bed.

---

    Basically spent the day writing, offline. Did a little writing in my web log. I've gotten a resurgence of interest in my web log, although I'm not sure why. Today's article was about how superior Canadian TV coverage of the Olympics is to American coverage. My one big point is that American networks always pre-packages and tape-delays everything -- and right after I posted this, the CBC pre-empts their Olympic coverage for three hours of NHL action! Watched a couple season four X-Files episodes. Pretty dull day.

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    My sister-in-law Debby's mother Bea had her 80th birthday today. Rick and Debby had a big dinner over at their house; Rick grilled some delicious pork loin outside even though it was raining. Using PIP, Rick had both the Olympics and golf on, to please everybody. Only watched one episode of X-Files at night. Barely did any work on the website this weekend.

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    I stopped at the post office before work, finally sending Phil his copy of the U2 Las Vegas show. More problems at work: the hardware down in Mexico was acting up. At work, we found out Mexico is having problems with their encoder. I'm also having terrible luck with my pants; last week I popped a button on one pair of slacks and tonight I ripped another pair. No, I didn't say I split them, I said I "ripped" them. They snagged on the Formica counter and I got a nice gash ripped into the left pant leg, right below the pocket. Luckily I leave late enough so it was easy to sneak out without being seen.
    I'm seriously thinking of giving up eBay for Lent. This should help save me some money. But if I'm to give it up, I should start using it; right? I was quite pleased to discover that the three things I'd been wanting to get were suddenly available. I got the sticker set for The Lord of the Rings Topps cards (which had arrived today), a LOTR Topps cards binder, and now tonight that A.I. Oscar promo CD was up for auction again. Unfortunately, the auction would end at four in the morning, so was forced to merely put in a proxy bid before I went to bed.

---

    I couldn't resist: I woke up early to watch the Oscar nominations on E!. I was pleased to see Lord of the Rings get so many nominations, but I still think A Beautiful Mind will win the big awards. There were a few surprises, like how the Academy remembered Ethan Hawke and Renee Zellwegger. I was pleased to see John Williams get nominations for both A.I. and Harry Potter (even though Harry Potter is simply a hybrid of Hook and Home Alone).
    I was also pleased to discover I won the A.I. promo I'd bid on last night. It was pretty cool how I'd gotten the three things I wanted right before I gave up eBay for forty days. I guess it kind of takes the "sacrifice" out of it; but I look at it as "working out according to plan".
    Mexico fixed the problems with their boards, but now they're getting the same "corrupted data" messages we got a week ago. I'm assured though that this is unrelated to our problem even though it's strange the error messages are the same.
    I'm having such fun sneaking updates to my blog page from work that I'm seriously considering turning my homepage into a blog. I even found a couple templates to steal...I mean, to base my blog on. And I got the ball rolling by starting a second blog page on which to test my designs.

---

    The walls were almost ready for painting, but first we had to put primer on. We thought Dave might be in, at work, but he e-mailed us to say he had more tests. He assured us he'd be in tomorrow and Friday so Reid could continue with his Las Vegas vacation. Dennis showed up around four to show me what I need to do Friday. Mexico is almost ready for the transition to the new satellite and on Friday, before I leave, I have to pull the patch on the old satellite feed.
    I have to confess to being a bad boy. I logged onto Blogger at work and was so intent on tweaking and finessing my new blog page that several hours slipped by. I didn't prepare tomorrow's schedule until late at night. (It helped that it was a quiet night with few phone calls.)

---

    We put the first coat of paint on. My big Valentine's treat was devouring all the Chinese food leftovers before I went to work. Dave was in, as promised, but he left soon after I got in. The operation is still scheduled, but he's seeking second opinions anyway, including perhaps driving to Minnesota next week. Found out tomorrow's poker night has been called off. It seemed set in stone last week, but for some reason it didn't come together. It was a fairly active day with a lot of trouble calls. But I found time to make my homepage's new look official at around six:o'clock. I had failed to set my VCR to record Whose Line so I tried to sneak out early -- only to find out ABC was showing Peanuts and Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons. I thought about treating myself to a shopping spree at Borders or Best Buy but was too lazy.

---

    Another coat of paint at home, another quiet day at work. I decided I didn't like the look of my new homepage after all. The CSS and Javascript tricks on the original had been pretty cool, but my feeble coding skills could not match them. I also wasn't completely won over on the color scheme. However, I discovered another blog template I liked a great deal -- plus, it was freely up for grabs. So even though my new look had been up for less than a day, I revamped it entirely.
    I thought I might be able to sneak out early, but I remembered I needed to stick around to pull the plug on Mexico. They were the only ones with programming still on, so I had to wait till their show was done. I worked more on my homepage's new new look when I got home. I ended up staying up till four:thirty. I also managed to watch two more episodes of The X-Files late at night, finishing the season four box.

---

    I did some shopping for a futon in the afternoon. I like the idea of a futon, and I need to replace my bed. The box spring recently broke. I guess it could be simply because I'm such a load, but I'd be more tempted to say it's because a lot of stuff got stacked on top of it during the renovations. Had Taco Bell for dinner as usual, and spent a good deal of the night unable to tear myself away from tweaking the homepage's new look.

I watched disc seven from The X-Files season four box, finishing the box entirely.

---

    I thought I'd picked the futon model I wanted, but I completely changed my mind when I went to another futon store today. So I'll probably be bouncing between the two stores this week. The prices and models are similar, so it basically boils down to which one feels comfortable. I've noticed that the backs of many futons are too reclined, and since we'll be using it as both a couch and a bed this seems important.
    The walls are painted, so new baseboards were sawed and nailed in today. I filled out my tax forms after dinner. For a while I thought I might be getting seven hundred bucks back total, which could pay for the futon and then some. But once we double-checked the math this was reduced down to two hundred and I had to pay the State fourteen bucks.

---

    We got all new snack machines at the building today. Dozens of them lined the hallway. "It looks like heaven," I told the deliveryman. After work I went back to Futon Shoppe. Now that I was looking for a wooden frame, I needed to browse again. The second store had a nice frame called the Monterey. This store had a similar model called the Berkley. The prices were about the same, but this store would throw in a mattress cover and would also pay the sales tax. I was told they did not have the mattress I wanted, but it would be on Wednesay -- which was the same thing I'd been told at the other store. So I told him I'd be back again Saturday.

---

    I had trouble sleeping and got up around six. Things got worse when I went deaf in one ear. My ears were so clogged that using a Q-Tip to clean them out just made it worse, and I ended up obstructing my left ear. I felt lopsided, which made everything seem so strange today. I'd been meaning to give a package of tapes and CDs to my friend Joe, but he's been too busy now that he coaches his sons' roller hockey team. I boxed the multimedia materials up and mailed them off to him this morning. I had to remind to favor my right ear whenever we got a call, at work. Once again we had trouble with the computer running our on-screen Program Guide. NT had crashed and would not let us boot up again. We tried a repair reinstall but for some reason NT refused to copy over one file called "shell32.dll". Our support group in San Diego finally offered to overnight us a new Program Guide computer.

---

    I was still deaf in one ear, but I finally ended that by using a capful of peroxide. The front room is almost back to normal. The big TV even got moved from the corner to the center of the wall: the first step in turning that room into a home theater. Speaking of home video, I hadn't heard from NetFlix in quite a while about the last movie I returned. They apparently hadn't received it, so I decided to finally mark it as lost in the mail just so they'd me the next title in my queue. By remarkable coincidence, I got an e-mail from NetFlix this same morning saying they'd received my disc. I'd sent it back to them on January 28!
    The Program Guide computer showed up; Reid put it in and since he was told it was completely configured, he powered it up and put it online. Unfortunately, he was given incorrect information, since we still needed to configure the Program Guide to our own set of channels. I did this when I got in, but the computer started screwing up video just like it did last time. We took it off line, and I was ordered to wait till after hours to work on it. I ended up staying twelve hours. I had the San Diego guys on the phone with me, and I almost had the thing working, but one of the guys told me there was a final step I needed to make. And when I clicked on the final step, the program froze. I spent three hours trying to undo that final step, until we conceded defeat and promised to try tomorrow.

---

    I managed to fix the Program Guide's "BlockGen" error all by myself. I found the problem in the Windows NT registry. I deleted that key, configured the profram again, and got it running. However, when San Diego called, they were concerned I was sending out the data at the wrong baud rate. They'd told me it was 254K last time (when I'd caused serious problems with the baud rate), but now they were saying it should be 56K. Unsurprisingly, the program did not work at 56K. But when I went to change it back to 254K, the 56K setting kept showing up. Just like yesterday, it seemed like everything San Diego told me was not only wrong but made everything worse. This time I stayed till nine:thirty before we decided to give up and try tomorrow.

---

    Dennis offered to buy us lunch today. Since it's a Lenten Friday, my choices were limited, so I just got a tuna salad. I was finally able to give Dennis back his Godfather DVDs that he'd loaned me. (I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that the discs got packed away during the renovations, and I sort forgot I still had them.) Fred from San Diego, our hero, the guy who knows the most about our setup, was in today, and had set up a Program Guide box in one the labs. I got a call around five:o'clock that he probably wouldn't be able to give us any information till Monday; so not only did not have to stay late, I actually was able to leave a little early today.

---

    Went back to the Futon Shoppe and bought the Berkley frame and the expensive Simmons Beautyrest mattress. As hoped, we got the free mattress cover and they paid our sales tax. However, they'd sold out of the mattresses they'd gotten Wednesday, so I'd have to wait till next Wednesday to pick everything up.
    I managed to watch one of those pirate LOTR:FOTR DVDs from Hong Kong. I was particularly entertained by the DVD's English subtitles, since it was obviously translated from English to Chinese to English. The poor sod who worked on it had no idea who "Isildur" is, and kept referring to him as either "Sauron" or "Elrond". Go figure: in the Chinese version, "Elrond" dies at the beginning! Here's an example from "The Shadow of the Past" scene. Here's the original dialogue:

GANDALF: This is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom, taken by Isildur from the hand of Sauron himself. For sixty years the Ring lay quiet in Bilbo's keeping, prolonging his life, delaying old age. But no longer, Frodo. Evil is stirring in Mordor. The ring has awoken. It's heard its master's call.

FRODO: But he was destroyed. Sauron was destroyed.

GANDALF: No, Frodo. The spirit of Sauron endured. His life force is bound to the Ring and the Ring survived. Sauron has returned. His Orcs have multiplied. His fortress of Barad-Dur is rebuilt in the land of Mordor. Sauron needs only this Ring to cover all the lands in a second darkness. He is seeking it...seeking it...all his thought is bent on it. The Ring yearns above all else to return to the hand of its master. They are one. The Ring and the Dark Lord. Frodo, he must never find it.

And here's the verbatim Chinese retranslation:

GANDALF: This is the one ring. Forge by the dark lord Sauron. Men doomed. Taking the hell by Sauron himself. For 60 years the ring Bilbo was keeping. Long in his life, to live in his old age. Evil is stirring in Mordor. The ring has awoken. It hear his master called.

FRODO: But he was destroy. Sauron was destroy.

GANDALF: No, Frodo. The spitting of Sauron endured. His life force his band to ring that ring. Sauron has return. His men on the blood, they are to rebuild the land of Mordor. Sauron need this ring to cover the land of the sicken darkness. He's seeking... The ring will hand to the ring of the master. They are one. The ring from the darklord. Frodo... You must never find it.

A couple other curious bits are when Galadriel says the ring "ensnared a new bearer", the Chinese version says "It insist a new baron"; and how the Hobbits are referred to as "hoppits"; and when Frodo proffers the ring to Gandalf and he shouts "Don't tempt me Frodo!", the Chinese version has this as "Don't touch me Frodo!" Pretty funny stuff.

---

    Spent the afternoon watching the US / Canada gold medal hockey game. It was tough to know who to root for, since there were Red Wings on either side (and on the Russian team two nights ago). I'm kind of glad that Canada won, since they really seemed to enjoy the victory. My brother Mark and his family came over for dinner and we watched the Closing Ceremonies.

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    My bosses were restless for news so we had to call San Diego frequently. Reid took off early since he wanted to come back later and work after hours, fooling around with the patch bay. I got the Program Guide computer working at around seven:fifteen, once I convinced all aspects of the program to remember the 254K setting. I stayed around a half hour to confirm there were no video problems.

---

    It had been warm yesterday, but this changed by nighttime since it snowed over night.

I've been meaning to get an oil change for a while. I didn't have time again this morning but I at least had enough time to stop at Borders before work. I picked up the new X-Files Magazine plus two The West Wing books. I shouldn't admit this, but it was so quiet at work today that I managed to read the entire magazine. Yesterday had been rather warm, but it was snowing today.

---

    Dennis got us lunch again today. Reid paged me at home to ask for my order. It was a good thing he did, since it helped me find my pager, which had gotten lost during the renovations! I got a chicken sandwich this time. It arrived shortly after I did. Another rather quiet day. I think I'm getting a cold. Also, my left wrist is getting sore. I think I sprained it when putting away the table saw back on Sunday; but for some reason it's taken till now for it to really start hurting. My futon did not come in, reportedly because of yesterday's snow. "Worst case scenario" is that it will show up Friday. I missed seeing U2 perform on the Grammys, but I did catch one or two of their acceptance speeches. I didn't bother me at all that they lost to the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack in one category. I thought it was kind of cute.

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    I definitely have a cold now. Dave was back in, as promised; but he left before I showed up. I guess things aren't quite as good now; the doctors at Beaumont don't sound too optimistic, but he got a second and better opinion from U of M. (He did not go to Minneapolis.) He's still going through with the surgery, at U of M (at the end of next month), but apparently this means he'll be out again for six more months for more therapy.

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