---

    There was a show today, but someone had the ingenious idea of changing Jeremy's schedule to Tuesday through Saturday, so he could cover the weekends for us. This was a win/win situation since we full-timers got our weekends back and Jeremy benefits because Saturdays are only half days. It felt strange not watching hockey today. I'd gotten used to Saturday games, but the next one was Monday, and was also the first game of the Stanley Cup finals. I toyed around with Style XP in the morning, got some computer work done in the afternoon, and then made my usual weekend stop at Taco Bell for dinner.
    On the way home I stopped at the local videostore and rented The Others. The case looked like a two-disc set, but only disc one was available for rental. I went to the counter to ask about this. "There's not much on it," the girl replied. "Only behind-the-scenes stuff." This kind of dumbness left me dumbstruck, but I took disc one anyway. By the time I got home I had grown irritated enough to post a scathing rant on my Bitter Old Man page. I worked some more on trying to put a Flash chat room on my site. I found a nice template, but it was written in French, and I went so far as to use Systran.com to translate the instructions, even though these were in pidjin English. I slaved over CGI, PHP, and MySql based chat rooms before finally finding one called Phatt Chat which worked perfectly right-off-the-bat and didn't even need to be edited or configured! I finally got around to watching The Others at the end of the night.

---

    I decided to move Phatt Chat to my Bitter Old Man site, since I was stuffing way too many tricks and doodads on the SFG homepage. I got back to working on my Diary, finishing the last ten entries on the May page. After dinner I got back to watching my Upstairs, Downstairs DVDs, starting disc three of the season one box.

---

    I took back The Others on the way to work. I was compelled to ask again about disc two. It made no sense that they were not renting it. And I was further taken aback to see they weren't even renting disc two of Harry Potter even though its supplements are being advertised on TV. A woman explained to me that most people prefer only watching the movie, but they have disc two available separately for those who ask it. She handed over disc two of The Others and told me to keep it as long as I needed. I felt bad about libeling them on my web sites, but their policy is still stupid.
    I discovered people on Livejournal.com are putting up audio entries. (Kind of like what I did back on July 21 2001.) So I could resist mocking them (like the guys were doing on the Something Awful forums) on my Bitter Old Man site. And I finally got around to posting my first message on the Strong Bad Message Bored.
    Disc two of The Others was easy to get through, only taking a couple hours. Good thing my video store prorected me from it.

---

    Dennis had us working on converting our database to Excel, so we could exchange lists with another department. We didn't think this was possible, but a call to San Diego informed us that an Excel export function is built-in to our database. However we found out it's not built-in very well. We still had to export as a text file first, but it beat our previous way of just printing these huge lists out and faxing them (especially since our fax machine is a piece of crap).
    I was shocked to find that The Wicker Man DVD in England has a commentary, while the US edition does not. I ordered it through Amazon UK, and gave some more thought to buying one of those hybrid NTSC/PAL DVD players. I was leery of getting the no-name Korean brands, so it was heartening to discover that JVC and Toshiba apparently have similar models with built-in converters. I couldn't decide which one had better features though.
    I watched the Wings / Hurricanes game, but sadly the Wings lost. Can't say I was surprised, since they were fresh off the high of beating the Avalanche, but it was frustrating nonetheless. My t-shirts package arrived from Homestar Runner tonight.

---

    McCartney concert recordings were starting to show up online, including an ALD recording from Washington DC in SHN format. I would've thought the Beatles collectors would be savvier than U2 collectors, but this mono and obviously ALD recording was being touted as "soundboard". I forced myself to finally get my oil change this morning (only a thousand miles late); I even allowed myself to be talked into getting a new air filter. Dennis had another question for us: if we could confirm the 8mm tape backups on one of our servers were running and if we could perform a full restore off one of those tapes. The operations manual showed that we could, but I could not figure out how to get to the menu it showed. The guys in San Diego were no help and barely seemed to know what I was talking about.
    Despite my interest in better known brands, the guys at the DVD Talk and Nerd-Out forums still seemed to recommend the Malata. Coincidentally, a new model for the Malata had just come out, the DVP-520, so I went ahead and ordered it from some place in New York called Luminous Film & Video Wurks.
    I caught up with everybody at Big Al's afterward. Mike handed over his Buffett tickets, which I would either be passing along to Patti or selling on eBay depending on what Patti tells me when she finally gets around to letting me know her plans. And I got to show off my wrist brace, which I was wearing until I could see the hand surgeon in two weeks.

---

    Reid had his Isle Royale photographs and he took them over to Dennis's office. In the meantime Jeremy and I finally got started on another one of our projects: pulling up the floor panels and tracing all the computer network cords to the router. This was sweaty and uncomfortable work, especially since my left hand was pretty much useless. Reid returned as we finished. Pat, our cleaning woman, was upset when she found the floor she'd just mopped this morning was already dirty again.
    Just before a special broadcast the building alarms sounded and a robotic voice over the PA ordered me to evacuate. I guess it was a drill, and I stood around outside for several minutes waiting for the all-clear. I got text-paged while I waited; I called when I got back and found out Dennis had thought I'd been indisposed in the lavatory. I told him how we'd been evacuated and he told me the Traffic department had been looking for me to authorize some more sites to this special show. I got a call from San Diego in the evening: they finally found out how to get that menu I wanted. I needed to type in an additional command, which the operations manual had evidently overlooked.
    My Saruman statue from Sideshow Weta finally showed up. I missed some of the Wings game and I was too superstitious to watch too closely, but fortunately the Wings won. We were tied 1-1 but the Wings took the lead and then cemented the victory by scoring another goal thirteen seconds later.

---

    My back had been killing me last night from all the heavy lifting. I felt much better now though, after a night's sleep. I checked Direct Connect for any more McCartney SHNs and instead discovered the U2 ElevaSHN Hub had video MPEGs of the 2001 Las Vegas show! I downloaded them while I was at work. I finally heard from Patti: she was asking for only two of my tickets, so I quickly wrote to Greg and Schmoe's sister Michele to let them know the others were still available. Greg wrote back saying he would be unable to go since his dad would be in town that weekend. I went to Best Buy after work, getting some more Neato CD label sheets and shopping for CDs and DVDs. Before bed, I tried fooling around with disc two of the Memento special edition. I tried to get the movie to play backward, but my Toshiba 3109 only played the black and white stuff in order and then jumped to the movie's last scene. I thought it was stupid this backwards version was simply the same disc one with the chapters programmed in a different order. If they'd really wanted to make it a special feature, why didn't they just rearrange the scenes into a new MPEG-2 file?

---

    I forced myself to finally clean Fish's cube. It had been quite a long time since I'd done it and the water was noticeably yellow. I hadn't even done that thorough a job last time either. I worked at it this time though, wiping down the cube and flushing the crud from the gravel.

    All week long I'd been working on making CDs for my other friend Mike. This Mike is a big Sting and Paul McCartney fan and I'd been meaning to send him some of the concert stuff I'd collected. I finally talked myself into it, if only to clear the files off my hard drive. I'd burned so many CDs that now I needed to go to Office Depot and buy some empty jewel box cases before getting my usual Taco Bell dinner. I finished up all of Mike's CDs tonight. I even made an extra copy of the McCartney ALD show to give to my brother tomorrow, since I'd be going there for my niece's birthday. The Wings were playing again, but not till evening. I got so impatient I even watched my Lord of the Rings SVCD (something I had vowed not to do since I didn't want to spoil the August 6 release of the DVDs). People had been teasing me about my Red Wings sweatshirt, since mentioning here on my Diary; it was too warm for a sweatshirt now, but I did have a solid red golf shirt to wear. It did not look too lucky though since the Wings looked a little lost on the ice, while the Canes got in their way and got underfoot like my brother's annoyingly overeager and cloying dog. The Canes had the lead for most of the game, but thank God the Wings managed to tie it up in the closing minutes, sending it into overtime. I hated to watch so I read in the bathroom; the game continued without me, though, as if waiting for me to return. First overtime became second overtime became third overtime. The crowd sure got their money's worth, since it was almost the equivalent of a second game -- except for the fact that the hometeam lost. The Wings were the first to score, making the score 3-2 and the series 2-1.

---

    Even though I'd just cleaned the Fish's cube yesterday, I was again puzzled to see a thin rime of bubbles at the surface.

These, I knew, weren't just bubbles but had a kind of solidity to them. I had no idea what they were though, so I finally got around to trying to find out. It was from a site called Healthy Betta that what I was seeing is called a bubblenest. It's how the male prepares a home for the female's eggs. This also explained that my betta was evidently a male (and was as naïfly optimistic about getting laid as I was). Another eye-opening bit of news was they recommend cleaning out the fish's water every week.
    My parents showed up in my brother Rick's huge pickup truck. They were carting an old bookcase to Mark's, a bookcase which had originally been mine in our old house. My dad had wanted to get rid of it, but my brother Mark said he'd take it, and would put it in his basement. Once we arrived, Mark and my dad went to a nearby Home Depot to get some pegboard to fix the back of the bookcase. My niece Heather showed me her new iMac and told me about a freelancer job she got taking photographs for Hour Detroit magazine. After our pizza dinner, after Cathy opened her presents, Heather let me try out the iMac. I showed her the Homestar Runner site, and we spent the rest of my stay going through the cartoons and through Strong Bad's e-mails. Back at home, I stayed up way too late finding 80s albums online to listen to.

---

    The backwards Memento movie played much better on my DVD-ROM drive, but it still annoyed me that I couldn't pause or bookmark my place. I'd forgotten all about the planned construcion on I-75, closing down northbound. I guess through-traffic is still allowed, but the exits are closed (since northbound is routed onto one lane of southbound so the northbound lanes can be torn up). I took Telegraph up, taking a shortcut to Southfield Rd via I-94 east. Unfortunately there'd been an accident on Telegraph, so traffic came to a complete stop for several minutes while a police car and a tow truck blocked the way. It took forever to get home too, since I hadn't noticed construction on southbound Telegraph has it down to one lane for several blocks.
    I wrote Michele about Patti's decision; she wrote back later telling me to go ahead and sell the rest. Playing around with Style XP themes had me thinking about trying Stardock's Window Blinds again. I saw they had a new version, too. So when I got home I instantly put Mike's tickets up on eBay (Item #1359359515), using the Buy It Now feature to sell them for exactly what Mike had paid for them; and I also went ahead and downloaded Window Blinds. It was fun spending the rest of the night going through all the offerings at the WinCustomize site. I also got a couple packages: my next LOTR medallion had shown up and I got some PAL DVDs and The Chamber of Secrets audiobook from Amazon UK. The Wings played again tonight. This was more like my type of game: no nailbiting, just a good old 3-0 score.

---

    Looking about for more Flash tutorials I discovered something called Swish. It works like Flash but has less features; it's also certainly more affordable (at fifty bucks compared to Flash's five hundred) and easier to use. I could add animation to my SFG site in seconds, which made me sound like one of the blurbs on their website. I even ended up buying the program. I was less keen about Window Blinds though. It seemed just as buggy as before. It uses other applications to control my taskbar and desktop, and it was difficult to change from one skin to another with completely losing the taskbar or the icons on my desktop. So, one day after buying it, I uninstalled everything and went back to using plain, simple, dependable Style XP.     Reid had let me know Cafe Press has some new items to sell, so I spent the evening designing new products to sell in my Cafe Press SFG store. Some guy had bid on Mike's tickets too, but the bid wiped out the Buy It Now option. The goal was to get back the $180 Mike had paid for the tickets, but with only a fifty dollar bid (and the knowledge that dozens of June 22 tickets were also up for auction) I began to worry I would eventually have to tell Mike he'd lost out.

---

    All the overhead fluorescents were permamently on at work; the light switches were ineffective. This bothered Reid more than me (I'd like the room brighter), so he'd called up building services. When two men showed up, they said I needed to call security to have the CO₂ sensors turned off first. This seemed simple enough, but required several phone calls; and in the meantime the men had discerned that our problem actually originated in the hall around the corner, where a phone repairman had disconnected one too many wires yesterday. Once they reconnect that line, our light switches could work again.
    Dennis complimented me on my Bitter Old Man site, which he'd discovered. He also told me there would be more work done on our video carrier, which meant moving the attenuator today and muting the video tomorrow so that satellite techs could study our signal. He'd be coming in tomorrow evening for that. He invited me to stay and watch, and I accepted even though I knew it would interfere with tomorrow's Stanley Cup game.
    I tried to meet the guys at Big Al's but I didn't see them. I sat in my car, waiting for some sign of them, but finally gave up after fifteen minutes and went home. I got another LOTR trinket today: the One Ring from The Noble Collection. I liked the wooden box it came in, but I was disappointed in the ring itself. Instead of the Elvish writing being engraved, it was simply etched on in white. Lame. I spent the night turning my Chamber of Secrets audiobook CDs to MP3. If I used a 160kb bit-rate I could fit all eight discs onto one CDR, to listen to on my Rio Volt.

---

    I did some more searches for Flash tutorials, which led me to Moho, a program for 2D animation. It was like finding an old friend, since Moho was one of the first shareware programs I'd downloaded when I'd first started using BeOS. I also found a site called Dynamic Drive which has lots of great DHTML scipts, many of which gave me ideas for my webpages.
    Dennis was determined not to miss any of the game tonight, so he was going to bring in a high-powered radio of his. While I waited I checked NHL.com and discovered I could downstream the game through the website. Our corporate firewall blocks QuickTime and RealMedia, but it allows Windows Media Player files, so I was able to listen to the pre-game. I also saw I could listen to the feed from the Hurricane's hometown of Raleigh. I thought this might be interesting, so I switched over to that. I can barely get any kind of AM or FM signal in our basement room, but when Dennis showed up his radio pulled in WXYT's play-by-play flawlessly. (i was hoping to get all riled up by the Raleigh announcer, but in fact he was quite fair and impartial -- which was no fun.) Dennis muted the video signal and when the techs were done we were told they'd managed to boost our signal by 3db. Perhaps we'd have fewer receivers losing signal in the field...but we couldn't get too enthusiastic since several of our own receivers were not able to regain the signal once we restored video. We heard the first period here and some of the second. I heard the rest of the second period in the car. And I finally got to watch the third period when I got home. The score was 2-1 Detroit in the final minutes but it was still possible for the Canes to steal victory from us; so that was why it was so sweet when Shanahan chucked the puck into an empty net for a 3-1 score which pretty much cemented the victory and brought the Stanley Cup to Detroit for the sixth time in ten years.

---

    It was with a shock I realized Father's Day was only two days away. I figured I could pick up some gift cards from Meijer's for him on the way in to work...but then realized he and my mom do their shopping on Fridays, and it was possible I might actually run into them at the store!
    Jeremy celebrated the Red Wings victory by wearing a Lidstrom jersey today. Strangely, although I'd seen plenty of jerseys worn around the building in the past, hardly anyone was wearing one now. Jeremy and I got in a small argument over how the other stations had pre-empted their late night programming to extend their news coverage on the Wings. Jeremy was all for it, but I believed only WXYZ (our ABC affiliate) should have had exclusive rights, and that the other stations were trying to steal their thunder and their viewers. (Basically I was sore that WWJ [our CBS affiliate] almost pre-empted Letterman (but luckily they had him on tape delay an hour later.)
    Despite the work last night, the satellite guys wanted to take our signal down again this weekend. We always seem to get lots more calls after something like this, and we wondered if maybe the satellite guys don't completely kill the signal but bring it up and down again and wig out all our receivers. So we decided to mute the video signal at the same time, just like Dennis had shown me last night. Jeremy would be in on Saturday and could mute the signal after the last show; and I could swing in on Sunday and restore video, which would give the receivers a day to adjust before programming resumes on Monday. Jeremy was unsure sbout using this computer and its clunky old interface, but we could kill the video by pulling one of the patches in the patch bay. We were however unsure exactly which patch to pull. Dennis had the day off, taking his family to King's Island in Ohio, but Reid tried to page him and reach him on cell phone. Dennis called back around five, letting me know which patch to pull. I left a message for Jeremy for when he comes in tomorrow.
    I swung by Meijer's and got my gift cards as well as a greeting card. I did some work on my SFG site in the evening.

---

    I didn't do much today but the day flew by anyway. I finally got around to moving Window Blinds over to my Windows 2000 partition. I also finally remembered to jot down my Zone Alarm Pro serial number so I could activate that as well under Windows 2000. I was using this OS as kind of an elephant burial ground for all the applications I'd bought but don't use, keeping them running just to save face. I also finally got around to implementing one of the DHTML tricks I'd seen on Dynamic Drive, namely the pop-up boxes on the menu of my SFG homepage. (The script on Dynamic Drive did not work very well, actually. I had to go to the writer's homepage for the update.)

---

    I had to go in to work today to restore the video signal. Since I'd be going in at the usual time, I used my alarm clock even though it pained me to hear that noise on a Sunday. I checked newsgroups and found out there was a lot of Beatles stuff up for grabs, some more McCartney boots, some old studio stuff, and MPEGs of the entire televised Party at the Palace concert (featuring McCartney) celebrating Queen Elizabeth reigning for fifty years. My computer was busy all day. I went to work, pushed the patch back in, and was disappointed to find onlly a couple receivers came back to life. The others I had fix manually, either by hitting the channels button to goose them into life or by power cycling them. This did not bode well for Monday.
    I really wish people would stop planning graduation parties on Father's Day. My brothers had been affected by this last year, and now it was our turn since we'd been invited by my cousin Alex to the graduation party of his step-daughter. It was a year and a week ago we'd been there last, on Cathy's birthday, and I had an incredible feeling a déjà when I showed up. There was the same catered fried chicken, the same tent in the backyard, the same lone young girl in the swimming pool, even the same weather: partly sunny but with heavy clouds threatening rain. I was concerned about an auction for Buffett tickets too, just like last year, but this time I was the one doing the selling.
    My brothers and their families showed up as well, so we pretty much celebrated Father's Day there.

---

    I woke up with some tummy problems this morning. I'd only had two cups of beer yesterday so it couldn't be that. It reminded me somewhat of my illness following nephew Joe's graduation, and I wondered if it was another case of a potato salad or the like going bad in the sun (although the food had been set out in the garage). Maybe I will have to refrain from eating any mayonnaise-based product during the Summer months! Whatever it was, I was almost dreading going to work, especially since I'd needed to use my bathroom five times already. Just in case I chugged some Maalox, took some Tums, and also took some vitamins and B6 pills just in case. I also didn't bother getting lunch on the way. My plan seemed to work I guess.
    A woman sent me a question about my ticket auction. I was grateful for the interest since no one else had placed a bid all week, and I feared all three tickets (a $177.84 value) might end up being sold for fifty bucks. By the end of the work day the high bid was now $105. This was getting closer, but still too low. I treated myself to a Taco Bell grilled stuffed burrito on the way home, to make up for skipping lunch, and then I settled in to watch the end of the Buffett ticket auction. I assumed the dollar amount would jump up during the closing minutes, as people clambered to get that last bid in. I was not disappointed. The high bid went from $105 to $107.50.

---

    Today is the day of my doctor's appointment, so I took the day off. The guy who'd won the three Buffett tickets had already paid me through Paypal, so I mailed the tickets in the morning. I also finally sent off those CDRs to my other friend Mike. I headed out to Wyandotte afterward, stopping at Arby's for lunch. I was unfamiliar with the office but knew it was on the southbound side of Biddle, by Eureka. When I got there the only building on the block was an NBD bank. It had four floors though, so maybe the doctor's office was upstairs. I tried the street-side entrance but all I found was a small lobby with two locked doors and the entrance to the bank. I eventually found out the stairs for the upper floors were at the back entrance, but heaven forbid someone might put up a sign explaining that. I'd wasted twenty minutes trying to find the office, but at least I was still ten minutes early for the appointment. I had to fill out some forms and then wait to be called by the registration nurse. She came out from a side door and called the name "Clyde Atkins" a couple times. Noting the marked dissimilarity to "Mike Asteriou", I chose not to respond. Eventually the nurse gave up on Clyde Atkins and, noting the clipboard I had in my lap, brought me into the office anyway. After handing over my insurance card and answering some questions, I was able to return to my chair in the waiting room. I got to see there for quite a while, counting how many times the stories on Headline News were repeated. At another door, leading to a hallway, a different nurse would bring patients in to see the doctors. Everybody but me was getting called. People just walking in were getting called. Surely my time had to have come and passed by now. After a while I wondered if I was being blackballed. Was this some kind of hazing process they force on all the new patients?
    Eventually my name got called, probably simply by process of elimination. They had simply run out of names and it was either call mine or start all over again. Actually, it sounded more like "Mike Estrada", but that was good enough for me. I got up quickly to claim my chance. If there was a real Mike Estrada behind me, he could eat my dust. (I probably had accrued quite a bit of dust by now, come to think of it.) I was led to exam room 2, where I continued to read The Salmon of Duubt, the book I'd brought. I'd expected to need hand surgery but the doctor said he preferred giving me a Cortisone shot. I told him I'd already had this and it had done nothing, but he argued that in most cases he'd be able to relieve the pain with a simple shot. I have to admit he did a better job of it that my family doctor. For one thing he injected much deeper. He gently eased the needle into the base of my thumb; it took so long that I was convinced he would bore his way right into the bone, but this was because he was moving deliberately slowly. My hand did feel better afterward, and I was able to move my thumb around. He said to give it till the weekend. If the pain did not go away then I could have the surgery. (Unused to these things, I'd expected the surgery would be done right here in his office, but he said if I made the call then he would meet me at Wyandotte Hospital, up the street.)
    Back at home, I got another e-mail from Patti. She said her friends were backing out, so she wouldn't be able to use my Buffett tickets after all. She asked if I could put them up an eBay, but that was laughable. The concert was in four days, so it seemed impossible to sell the tickets and mail them in time. I'd been so concerned about selling Mike's tickets I hadn't thought about mine. I told Patti how Michele refusal hadn't sounded too definite, so maybe she could talk Michele into going. Hopefully she could. We'd already lost seventy bucks on these stupid tickets, and now I might be out $177.84.
    I spent the evening working on my website. Dennis had rediscovered my Windjammer Cruise page recently, talking to me about it. I checked the old pages out myself, and was shocked to discover all my RealMedia file links were broken. I seem to recall removing those files back when I was having server space issues, and evidently I'd never bothered to move or restore the files. I finally got around to fixing that now

---

    Since I was getting a new DVD player, Reid had asked if he could buy my old one. This would actually be a Father's Day present, he said, since it sounded like he'd actually forgotten Father's Day last Sunday. Reid had asked me Monday if I could bring the player in today; I hated to lose the player before my new Malata player showed up, but I packed up my Toshiba SD-3109 and put it in my trunk. Reid had forgotten to bring in the money, but I assumed he was good for it. But then we joked about how he would quit tomorrow, and I'd found out that his working here for a year and a half was just a big ruse to get his hands on my DVD player.
    When Reid left at the end of his shift, I followed him out to the parking lot and handed over the player. I'd forgotten the remote though. I went to Borders after work. I picked up the new Minority Report score and also a book on Flash 5 Cartooning. Inspired by Homestar Runner I wanted to put some SFG cartoons on my own site, and, dang it, I wanted to get started. Chapter 2 of the book pretty much ordered me to buy a graphic tablet. I'd been considering this for a while (Reid has good things to say about his) so I obeyed the command and ordered the Graphire2 from Wacom. It's their cheapest board. And while I was spendng money, I found out I had lost money; Patti wrote back saying that Michele could not go to the Buffett show in Chicago this Saturday. "The streak ends," she wrote, referring to our annual attendance, and I was out a hundred eighty bucks.

---

    The new fad around work was Yatta!, a strangely hypnotic video of six guys in their underwear singing a catchy disco song. Once Reid found the link (yesterday), we simply could not stop watching.

I got an e-mail from the guy who'd won Mike's Buffett tickets; I guess they hadn't shown up yet, so now I had that to worry about. It was bad enough Mike had lost money on the deal, now the guy would give me negative feedback on my eBay profile. I did get some good news today though, my Malata DVP-520 DVD player finally showed up. Now I'm able to watch DVDs from any region, including PAL discs. I celebrated by watching some of the PAL discs I'd ordered in the meantime, like the Powell/Pressburger classic A Matter of Life and Death (unavailable on DVD in this country -- come on Columbia Tri-Star, what the hell's the matter with you?!), all of Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone, and about a half hour of episode one of the BBC's four-part adaptation of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.
    I had inital problems setting the player up (I had the video output set for AUTO, but discovered, at least for my TV, I needed to deliberate set it for NTSC), but once I fine-tuned my settings the player worked like a champ. Because of the Nerd-Out and DVD Talk forums, I could even anticipate some of the player's quirks (like needing to set the surround settings to "NONE" in my case, since I'm only using headphones. Otherwise the center channel dialogue would be drowned out by the surround channels). I especially liked the Malata's zoom feature. I could not only zoom in on the image but zoom out, so I could see the entire video image. You'd be surprised how much is cut off on the sides, even on letterboxed images, and how much is lots on the top and bottom and sides for full-screen images. And now that was no longer a problem.

---

    We had some rain fade again, which knocked out our signal for a few minutes right around three:o'clock. I happened to be on the phone with a customer unable to tune his receiver. I explained to him he'd be completely unable to do so now, since we couldn't even get our own signal until the weather cleared up.
    Otherwise it had been a rather lazy day. I went to the Star Theater after work, instead of going home, so I could see Minority Report. I guess the only things to get me in a movie theatre are either Tolkien or Spielberg. I guess the rains had been hard enough that Eureka was flooded underneath the railroad tracks, by I-75. The way to the Star was blocked by orange cones and orange vans, and westbound traffic was forced to turn onto the eastbound lanes. Luckily I was able to cut through the Trade Center lot to get to the Star's side entrance on Pardee Rd. I didn't have time to get popcorn, or even see any trailers, so I got some popcorn on my way out.

---

    I did some work on the computer but really the one thing I needed to do today was vacuum out my car. The interior has become so covered in fast-food crumbs I'm surprised it hasn't evolved into its own biosphere. In the evening I listened to the Radio Margaritaville broadcast of the Chicago show I was supposed to have gone to see. I couldn't decide if I was glad I'd stayed home and skipped the road trip, or if I'd chickened out.

During the intermission, Steve Huntington, the Radio Margaritaville DJ, talked about the Librarian of Congress's decision to overcharge Internet radio. The Librarian's first proposal on fees had been shouted down and I'd thought that was the end of it; but now he'd come back, yesterday, with a new plan. He'd dropped one of the fees, but this still meant Internet radio broadcasters were responsible for two fees while AM/FM broadcasters only had to pay one. This makes absolutely no sense. It looked very much like the big guys were ganging up on the little guys; and it also looked like one more example of how the government despises the Internet. I'd already gotten riled up enough yesterday to post a rant on my SFG homepage; and I got riled up again now. I went to site called Congress.org (not to be confused with Congress.gov, which is Congress's actual website), filled out their e-mail form, and CC'd my complaint to Senators Levin and Stabenow and Representative Dingell. I could easily imagine getting an immediate cease and desist order for my websites, now that I'd given them my e-mail address. But, for the record, this is what I wrote:

I am extremely disturbed by what I read on the Washington Post website (courtesy of the evil Internet).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20412-2002Jun20.html
Why is it that these small-profit if not non-profit music outlets are being required to pay two fees while broadcast stations only pay one? Fees that will surely drive most of these small-profit if not non-profit music outlets out of existence.

I really hope this is not because the expanding broadcast monopolies have more influence. I really hope this is not because Washington has confused downstreaming audio with the dreaded downloading of MP3 files. I really hope this is not because you have forgotten that the voice of the few still needs to be heard. And I hope this is not because of some misguided effort to help musicians and songwriters, since the ones who most need support are best served by Internet radio.

Please do what you can to make sure these various outlets can continue to expose audiences around the world to lesser known artists and broader styles of music and expression. To lose that would be a great shame.

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    I found a lot to download in newsgroups today. I also forced myself to finally do some work on this here online Diary. I had yet to start the June page, so I finally got around to that, writing up the first ten entries. My dad grilled some burgers for dinner. While we ate, my mom spotted some tiny ants by my dad's plate. They would suddenly just appear, so my mom wondered if they were falling from the skylight. My dad however, when he spotted an ant on one of the hamburger patties, wondered if they might've gotten on the plate while he'd been cooking. Just to be on the safe side, he and I went up on the roof to spray around the skylight. Right in front of the skylight, the roof had an awful lot of give to it, as if the wood were rotting. My mom and dad are already talking about getting their basement walls repaired, since the crawlspace leaks, and now it looks like they might have to get a new roof too.

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    Jeremy had said he wanted to see as many as three movies over the weekend, but it turned out he'd seen none. The day was pretty quiet at work, and I found myself way to distracted by a game on Yahoo! called Text Twist. At least I broke 100,000, so I had a sense of accomplishment after wasting so much time. I finished listening to The Chamber of Secrets audiobook CDR I'd made, sitting in the car for the final minutes after I got home. I watched the AFI Tribute to Tom Hanks tonight on USA in my room. As I flopped onto my bed, my keychain set my car alarm off. I swear I can hardly get the keychain to unlock my Mdoors now, but merely thinking about alarm button sets it off.

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    I left the house without remembering to set my VCR to tape NBC's Scrubs-a-thon tonight. I had to stop by the post office on the way to work to mail a CDR to a fan. At work another turf war was going on, with the other help desk people saying our database was not as up to date as their "Tracker" database. "This is a concern," one e-mail ended, ominously. Our response is pretty much, "Yeah, well tell us something we don't know." The problem is we inherited most of these discrepancies, so they would not be addressed in the weekly updates of new site changes. Dennis had to finally step in and warn us about "finger pointing", which of course made the other guys defensive.
    I got home in time to tape the Scrubs-a-thon, but I in the meantime I watched the A Beautiful Mind DVD. I'd been curious about this movie since it beat The Fellowship of the Ring at the Oscars. To me, it was The Competition. (And Russell Crowe was already on my pooplist when his equally overrated movie Gladiator had won the year before, spoiling LOTR's chances to win as an action/adventure epic.) Jennifer Connelly did a nice job, but Crowe's performance was right out of the Big Book of Movie Affectations. As if welcoming back into the fold, I discovered an e-mail right afterward announcing that the The Two Towers teaser poster and movie preview were available online. I love the new poster. I practically got chills when I first saw it, and it's got me geeked up all over again! Peter Jackson, you wuz robbed!

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    We were told those database updates were not top priority, and that we would have to e-mail Bob as soon as we done with them. I did so -- only to get a mailer-daemon error in response, saying that Bob's address had the word "mail." in it, which was the old style of corporate e-mail address. So the one person we needed to RSVP was the one person who wouldn't get it.
    I tried to meet the guys at Big Al's Sports Bar again tonight, so I could give Mike his money. Once again I did not see them inside; and after waiting fifteen minutes in my car, I gave up and went home. I'm really getting tired of sitting in Big Al's parking lot for no reason, so I swear that's the last time I'm going to wait for them. If they want me to join them then they can frigging pick me up at home. Roche, a street on the way home (which everyone around here insists on pronouncing "ro-shay"; whereas I cause a scandal by preferring to pronounce it "ro-sh"), was lined with huge orange and white cherry-picker trucks. For a moment I was afraid I'd come home to find the power out again, but it was with great relief I spotted some porch lights were on. WDIV was supposed to show the Detroit/Windsor Freedom Festival fireworks, but they had been canceled. I guess they feared it would rain, but the joke was on them since the evening was fine. Unfortunately I didn't find out about the cancellation until too late, so I missed my chance at seeing The West Wing. They'd probably reschedule the fireworks for tomorrow, which meant I'd miss Thursday's shows too.

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    Since I wasn't able to meet up with Mike last night, I tossed his cash into an envelope and mailed it to him. I'm still not sure what all those trucks were for last night. Some of the easement trees had been trimmed down, away from the power lines, but there seemed an awful lot of trucks just for that. I went to Target's this morning. I'd read in Film Score Monthly that Target's copy of the Attack of the Clones score CD had a bonus track, so even though I already had a copy of the CD I bought this one too. Matter of fact, I had my old copy with me, since I'd been listening to the music during my drive. When I told Jeremy about the bonus track, he asked if I could have the old CD, and since it was already in my car I was able to fetch it without a problem.
    My Wacom graphic tablet showed up today. It comes with its own mouse, so I assumed I'd have to give up my nice Logitech optical cordless mouse. Luckily I found I could run both at the same time. I don't have enough USB ports, so I unplugged my scanner for the time being. I guess I'll have to buy a USB card or hub or whatever. I spent some time screwing around doodling on the graphic tablet, but I didn't create any worthwhile art or do anything toward creating Flash animation. Hopefully soon, though. If I don't, then it's my own danged fault, and I can no longer blame it on not having the right tools.
    By the way, the Detroit River fireworks went on as planned, even though tonight looked even stormier than last night.

    Since I've been watching the BBC DVD of Our Mutual Friend, I looked up Anna Friel in the IMDB today. She was one the leads in Our Mutual Friend, and her being such a cutie-pie was one of the reasons I got the discs (along with my being a fan of Charles Dickens). I found out one of her recent movies is called Me Without You with Michele Williams. By remarkable coincidence, Michele Williams was a guest on Late Show with David Letterman tonight, so I got to see a clip of her and Anna Friel on the very same day I first heard about the movie!

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    I seemed to be putting a lot emphasis on my SFG, without much thought to the other domains in my empire. Heck, Reid was doing more for my Bitter Old Man site than I was, using the Rant page to vent his spleen. It occurred to me that this here Diary might actually be better over on the Troubled Loner site than on the SFG site, since it had less to do with my being short and fat and more to do with my being a loner. So I impulsively moved all the pages over to the Troubled Loner site.
    I'd been shocked last night to find out legendary Who bassist John Entwistle had passed away, the night before the start of their North American tour. I listened to Quadrophenia on the way in. The day was extremely quiet and uneventful; disregarding wrong numbers I think I only got one phone call. I worked on my Diary pages in the evening, working on a new design. There was no need to have it resemble the pages on my SFG site, and I wanted something a little darker (though not illegible). Actually, I wanted it to resemble one of the Blogger templates, which is pretty much what it ended up looking like, with just a few of my own touches. I also did a little work sprucing up the Troubled Loner homepage. I redid the Flash animation in Swish, which allowed me to add sound to it.
    Afterward, I finished up Our Mutual Friend and then watched my Gosford Park rental.

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    Gosford Park's disc was jam-packed with extras, but I didn't have time for them all. The disc was a Blockbuster rental, not from NetFlix, so I needed to return it soon. I tried to cheat though, by taping the commentary tracks so I could listen to them later while at the same time working on the computer downstairs. Having completed the new Diary template, I redid all the Diary pages and then uploaded the changes. Near the end, I changed my mind and fixed up a few more things. I'd used Courier New for the font all this time, but I suddenly changed this to Verdana. This made the pages look even more like that Blogger template, but that's what I liked. So I changed all the pages again and once more uploaded the changes.
    I headed off to Taco Bell for dinner, finishing up Quadrophenia, and returned Gosford Park as well. I spent the evening do more web work, concentrating on the Troubled Loner homepage again. I added links to my other sites, so I can start advertising my great empire. By the way, I discovered Anna Friel has her own official website; not much to look at (the site, I mean), but at least she's contributed some personal messages. At the end of the night, I listened to some of the first Gosford Park commentary. Julian Fellowes had a lot of interesting things to say, but all the talk about downstairs life was tiresome. The filmmakers were so proud of themselves for focusing on downstairs life even more so than upstairs, as if blithely unaware that a British TV show, succinctly titled Upstairs, Downstairs, had done all this thirty years ago.

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    I thought about going to Best Buy to shop for a USB hub, but instead I lazily stayed in the computer room. I'd already worked for two days to finish up the new home for my Diary, and I went right back for more work. I started adding ten more entries to the June page, but then kept at it, all day, until I finished all June's entries, including this one.
    A big hello to the Hostile Redhead who was kind enough to mention two of my sites on her homepage. I've been noticed -- and by a redhead too (yee ha).
    I'm embarassed to admit it, but I really can not wait to find out what Strong Bad is going to do about his computer.

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