---

    I actually stayed up till two:thirty last night, waiting for Strong Bad's e-mail. I never did see it show up, but it showed up this morning.
    I thought I was done with all the work on my new and improved Diary pages, but in the morning I discovered the link to the November page was broken, in the menu to the left. Since I'd cut-and-pasted this menu to every page, every page had to be corrected. Construction is progressing on the Vreeland road overpass; half the girders are in place, stretching over southbound I-75. I tried going to Borders before work, but they had nothing I wanted. As expected for a half-week, it was a pretty quiet day at work. I only got a couple calls. There's a show this Saturday, so Jeremy was not in today. I went to Best Buy after work, looking for a USB hub. They didn't have any hubs, so I got PCI card instead, which at least gives me USB 2.0 capabilities if need be. I also picked up the (US) Quadrophenia DVD and the COncert for New York DVDs. As morbid as it might sound, John Entwistle's passing had renewed my interest in The Who's music; and I was pleased to see The Concert for New York was not highlights, like the CD, but contained the entire video presentation.
    On the way back, I spotted a blimp low in the sky, above my neighborhood. I took a picture of it when I finally got home.

By coincidence, my Amazon UK package had shown up, so I had even more DVDs to watch. I got season one of Absolutely Fabulous and part one of season two of Upstairs Downstairs. I was less pleased with my other purchases: the special edition of Erik the Viking turned out to be a useless full-screen pan & scan version, and instead of the unedited overseas edition of Eyes Wide Shut I got some Elton John concert! How they could confuse Nicole Kidman in her underwear with Elton John at Madison Square Garden is beyond me!
    The USB card was easy to install, but I now no longer have any open PCI slots. It was nice to get my scanner operational again.

---

    I was up till around three last night, watching my new discs. I spotted that blimp again, but this time closer to work. I wondered if it might be in town for the Ford Seniors golf tournament in Dearborn. The work day was even quieter than yesterday. I got some wrong numbers, but only one trouble call (although it was from Mexico). I learned some cool news from The One Ring.net that the list of charter members would appear in the expanded version of the DVDs (running nineteen minutes long, and scored with new music by Howard Shore) and then the Apple QuickTime site had a full-size version of The Two Towers preview. I downloaded it when I got home. I needed to find a patriotic font for some offline work, and I had the idea to change my homepage logo in time for the 4^th. I again spent the night watching my UK DVDs.

---

    I was running out of time to get my haircut, so I stopped at the nearby Bo-Ric's before work. There were two people ahead of me already, but I tried to chance it. But when the first person was done, the barber informed me a guy named Mark had come in earlier and had also put his name on the list. I didn't have enough time for that, so I left. It was still too early to go to work though, so I headed over to Woodhaven to try the other, new Bo-Ric's (on the corner of Allen and West). (And if that didn't work out, I could always go around the corner to Fantastic Sam's.) Luckily, I was the only customer, and got my haircut started instantly.
    Another quiet day, especially since it was the day before a two-day holiday. We got a couple calls, but the phone didn't ring at all in the evening.
    I finished off my Ab Fab disc at night.

---

    We had classes from nine to two today. Reid had gone camping up north, so Jeremy and I were working it. I tried to get in at around eleven, to let Jeremy leave early. There was only one show left now, starting at twelve and running till two. As it turned out, the show got canceled. I'm not sure what the details were, since the show was in French, but I assume not enough people had logged in to watch to warrant continuing the show.
    I was able to leave at ten after twelve, giving me a big headstart on the day's plans. I'd been invited to go to my brother Rick's house to swim, and then we'd go to our parents' house for dinner. My brother Mark's family had been invited too. It was nice to be in a pool again, even though the water was 92°. My parents grilled sausages and chicken, and then we were back to Rick's to pile into the van and go to the Trenton fireworks.

Ooo, aah, here's a RealVideo file of the grand finale.
Watch it now (if your modem is fast enough), or download it for later (1.9 MBs).
    My youngest nephew Jake had gone camping in Irish Hills with the family next door. He'd taken all the stockpile of fireworks with him, so for the first time in years Rick and the boys did not shoot off a few fireworks at home afterward.

---

    I thought today was a company holiday for everyone else, but there seemed to be a lot of cars in the lot. The programming schedule was the same for Jeremy and me, with even the return of US shows. I only got one trouble call. I tried to edit my SFG homepage, but Blogger seemed to be down. I could access their homepage, but could not revise my page. All I wanted to do was remove my 4^th of July logo, but I was prevented from doing so until Blogger fixed their server problems late in the day.
    This was quite frustrating and I gave more thought to switching to one of those other services, where I could run the blog right off my own server. I'd been interesting in pMachine, since reading about at Hostile Redhead's site.

---

    I went ahead and installed pMachine last night. I worked on it all day today. Just so I could control all my old entries, I redid them all in pMachine's PHP database. I even redid the comments. And I kept working on pMachine's templates, trying to get them to resemble the look of my existing weblog. At night, I finished off the Upstairs Downstairs DVDs and finally got around to watching one of my NetFlix discs. Someone was setting off some illegal fireworks on the street behind us, giving us a nice display out the side window.

---

    Work on my new PHP based weblog went a lot smoother this morning. Around midday I did some work on my Diary page, including turning my Fourth of July footage into RealVideo (above). By afternoon I impatiently decided to go live with my new weblog, publishing it online and making it official. Maybe it was lack of sleep, maybe it was being in front of the computer too long, but I developed a serious headache by dinner time. I ended up needing to take a nap in the evening.

---

    A major traffic jam, immediately into my commute, as I-75 was down to one lane at the Veeland overpass construction. I wrote a letter to Xoanon at The One Ring.net since he was saying there is no car in The Fellowship of the Ring. Faithful readers of my Diary know I already posted a screen grab of the car back in my January 21 2002 entry; and I brought this to Xoanon attention. I kept checking TORN throughout the day, hoping to see some reference to me...but I got nothing.
    One of my bosses called, telling me he was off-site for the rest of the day and telling me to pass this along to the production boss (who wanted to schedule a conference call). I am terrible at obfuscation, and I ended up going so far as offering my boss's cell phone number out!

---

    I finally got around to call the hand surgeon up about scheduling surgery. I figured out how to add "pBlocks" to my SFG weblog, so I could keep an almost-live running tally of my musical, TV, movie, and food interests. I didn't get the return call from the surgeon, so I'll have to call ahgain tomorrow. My brother Mark phoned up, about some problem he was having seeing web pages in his browser. My sister-in-law Eileen had written a résumé in HTML, but their stupid Windows 2000 was showing it as a text-file. I could not figure out why, so I had him e-mail it to me. It looked fine, and I even uploaded it to my website (temporarily) to show him. I have no idea why his Windows 2000 browser could not view an HTML page offline.

---

    Called the surgeon again. Looks like the operation will be Friday, July 26. I got a new batch of CDRs delivered from American Digital, so I burned copies of some TV special MPGs and finally got them off my hard drive. I also burned a quick CD of Li'l Stubby songs. By coincidence, the Li'l Stubby lead singer e-mailed me today. I wrote back, saying I'd probably see him early in August, at the Dearborn Homecoming.
    There was another fire drill. Our old evacuation route was obstructed by a flood in the hallway! (This could possibly have been the reason for the evacuation, but I think it was really just a plain old drill.) I guess the workmen renovating a large room around the corner from us had hit a water line. Water was streaming down the wall and creeping along the floor.
    There was a cataclysm of another kind online. The Strong Bad Message Bored at Homestar Runner.com had crashed, wiping out all previous posts (an archive of a few years' worth of material). Some of the regulars were thunderstruck. I've only been visiting for a couple months, so I was able to deal with it better. It seemed obvious we simply had to start from scratch in reposting and building the Bored back up. So let it be known, I am the first person on record to write in and comment "Hey, guys, have you clicked the 'O' in 'Bored'?!"
    The new era begins.

---

    I finished volume XI in Christopher Tolkien's The History of Middle-Earth last night. I've had the book for quite a while but reading it was tough since I got bogged down by all the detailed descriptions of Elvish language philology. I forced myself to finish it up this week, and I finally got around to start the final volume of the series. I was chagrined to see it has a 1996 copyright -- which means it's been sitting in my closet for six years!
    I booted into Windows 2000 on a whim, shocked to discover there were 21 downloads waiting for me at the Windows Update site, including 12 critical updates. I didn't have time to download them -- I didn't even have time to prepare a sandwich for dinner. Work was rather busy, especially during a special broadcast in the late afternoon. I discovered people were actually talking about me on the Strong Bad Message Bored. I treated myself to Taco Bell on the way home, to make up for missing dinner. In the evening, I did some work on installing a live, real-time counter on my SFG weblog. Now I know how many people are on my site at the same time (and I don't have to rely on some ad-driven outside site).

---

    Pretty quiet day. Dennis came over, working with the tech people on our video feed. I guess it went okay...at least we didn't lose video. I went to Best Buy afterward, and installed a new phone when I got home. We have caller ID now, so anybody with an "unknown number" better get used to hearing "unanswered rings".
    Late at night, I felt like giving my fish another taste of fame, putting him on my homepage again.

Here, he gets a chance to bask in the glow of his own worldwide celebrity.

In fact, you can e-mail my fish at fish@troubledloner.com. He'll try to answer as many as he can, but swimming in a tight circle, hiding behind his rock, eating, and pooping take up a major portion of his day.

---

    I finally got back to booting into Windows 2000 and downloaded all the updates I needed. I tried working on the CSS in my SFG weblog, toying with making in skinnable. In the evening I fooled around with Fruity Loops, and ended up creating a little song. Here's the MP3, if you'd care to listen (1.9 MBs).

---

    Went to the Plymouth art fair, along with my parents, three aunts, one uncle, and a cousin.

I didn't see much I liked, but I was taken with some music being performed by Tim Janis and his two soloists. So the only thing I bought at the art fair was a CD.

The other thing I paid for was a plate of Thai food from a booth. There aren't that many Thai restaurants close to me, so I'd been lookng forward to getting this meal since last year!
    I'd brought some Motorola Talkback 2-way radios just so we wouldn't get lost. My dad refused to take one, citing how my Aunt Dorothy's house is within walking distance, so if he got separated he would just go there. Sure enough, when it came time to leave, my dad was the only person unaccounted for. He might've walked back, we knew, even though it was a very sunny and hot day; and we ended up walking around looking for him anyway, just to make sure.
    He was at my aunt's, like he'd said. Now all together, we went to Applebee's for dinner. When I got home, I wrote up the entries for the last week.

---

    I almost forgot to check Strong Bad's new e-mail before I left; and it had been a big weekend in Free Country USA since there were new Toons and Games menus too. Jeremy had written in to my SFG Shoutbox this morning, so I assumed he was in today. Oddly, once I arrived I found out he was not in. I found out Pete Townshend is back to updating his website, and that there's also official Who content as well. I signed up with them to be a registered member. I guess I'd been in a hurry to update my Diary page yesterday, since I discovered plenty of errors and typos to correct tonight.

---

    Reid was convinced he'd been banned from Fark. He could see his message board posts, but no one else seemed to be able to. If took him a couple days to figure out why everyone seemed to be ignoring him; and today, finally, he sent out a post reading "If you can see this press '1'". No one responded. If Reid's hunch is correct then this was quite a weasely and cowardly way to ban people.
    Now that Jeremy was back I learned he had not commented in my Shoutbox. It had been Reid, impersonating him. So Reid got banned from my Shoutbox too.
    I was enjoying working with pMachine on my SFG homepage. So, when I got home, I paid for the full version, which allowed me to turn my Food, Music, TV, and Gadgets pages into weblogs too.

---

    There was a special show tonight which would run till nine:thirty, so I went into work an hour later. I finally called up Wyandotte Hospital for pre-admission. They asked me about my medical history amd insurance. Since there were still several days to go, the nurse told me she'd send me my packet of info rather than reading it to me over the phone. I at least learned my surgery would be at twelve:thirty on the 26^th and that I should show up at ten:thirty. I let my aunt and uncle know since they'd be driving me, and Jeremy know (when I got in) since he'd be covering for me.
    There'd also been a special show this morning, which Reid had almost missed! His alarm clock had failed him, and then, trying to make up for lost time, he got pulled over on Michigan Ave for speeding. Luckily Jeremy had shown up early today. I also found out Reid had left Total Fark in protest and had joined Something Awful's forums.
    Now that I was using pMachine I could edit my SFG pages at work, and I spent much of that late-evening special show converting all my content over to the new PHP pages. I got a surprise when I got home since Dan Pozsgai, an old friend from high school and college, had e-mailed me. His brother had spotted Dan's pictue in my CMU photo album.

---

    That same special show was being repeated today, so once again I went in an hour early. Reid was really enjoying the Something Awful message boards, since they had a higher caliber of people and material than on Fark. He was also quite pleased how his first post had gotten over a thousand replies. Jeremy and I had never seen him so happy.
    Dennis called up to discuss our company outing. Even though the Tigers are doing so poorly, we opted to go to Comerica Park anyway. We'd need to go soon though, because of an impending baseball strike. Dennis suggested Sunday, August 11. We figured we'd need two tickets each, and Dennis asked for a definite answer tomorrow so he could go out and get tickets.
    I decided to work on my Movies page tonight, during the special show, changing it into a weblog just like my other pages. I also added a couple more movie reviews along the way. I wanted to redo the page with frames, so that the full list and the reviews themselves could show up on the same page. The trialware copy of Dutch's HTML Frames on my laptop had expired, unfortunately. I eventually went ahead and paid for it online, but I needed to be e-mailed a serial number. That serial number did not show up all evening. It didn't show up after I got home either, but by this time I could download a new copy of the trialware version onto my desktop PC and get my code for free. I worked up how I wanted the frames and finished up my new and improved Movies page before I went to bed.

---

    It occurred to me that my dad might want to see the new ballpark, and since we're not the type to go see a game on our own, I thought I might invite him to go on the work outing with me. I forgot to ask though, so I needed to call him up as soon as I got in. I stopped at Burger King on the way; while sitting in the drive-thru a woman came out and hand-delivered my meal, even though I was second in line. I gave her five bucks and she went back in. I then wondered if I should continue sitting there and waiting for my change. It was only 45¢ and I should've been mature enough to just drive off; but at the same time, it was still money owed to me and I doubted the guy in front of me would take that long anyway. I felt more foolish with each passing minute. Soon it got to the point where I wanted to stay just to find out what that guy was waiting for. He honked his horn to get somebody's attention, and then was given a heaping handful of ketchup packets. At last I was able to move forward and ask for my change. The girl at the window did not seem too pleased, and she made a big deal about unlocking the cash register till. It turned out she thought I'd already left, without waiting to get my change.
    I called up my dad as soon as I got to work, and then I left a message on Dennis's voice mail. Jeremy would not be able to go, it turns out, since he has a championship softball game that day. Dennis called up later saying he couldn't get Tiger Den seats, but we'd be sitting thirteen rows from the on-deck circle by the Tiger dugout.
    We had some more trouble with special shows today. Traffic called us up to ask why channel 105 was blocked, only now informing us that the select-site broadcast on that channel had been canceled. This was news to us, especially Reid who'd manually authorized twenty or thirty receivers yesterday for this special show. There was also a special broadcast on 301 later on, and we were on the phone with Traffic for the duration getting updates on last-second sites to add.
    We had another special show on Tuesday to work on. It was to be viewed by a select group of six hundred sites. Reid printed up the codes for all the sites and we split the sheets up evenly between us. I had four and a hafd sheets of sites to authorize, and I was quite proud of myself for getting them all done by the time I left.
    I finally got the serial number for Dutch's HTML Frames when i got home. Since July was almost over I went ahead and ordered The Fellowship of the Ring from DVD Planet and I also ordered some books from Amazon, including The Philip K Dick Reader I'd tried to get from Borders.

---

    I didn't get up till noon. I hadn't planned on it, but I found myself working on my Buffett page. I turned it into a weblog too. I wanted to keep the same look and only use one table cell as a weblog, so I worked all afternoon on how to use the <IFRAME> command in both IE and Netscape.
    It was about time to clean my fish's cube, so I got started after dinner. I poured some of the water out into the sink, so it would make it easier to transfer my fish from the cube and into a cup. There was an unexpected landslide of gravel which startled the fish. He jumped away, and got sucked up by the water flowing out. Before I knew it he'd been poured out of his cube and gone down the drain! He was caught at the bottom of canister that is our garbage dispos-all. I could see him lying down there, but I could not get to him. I tried scooping him up with a spoon and even a pair of tongs; but it didn't help that he kept trying to flop away. Just in case he might dry out, I ran a trickle of water down the drain. Maybe the trickle was too strong, or maybe he flopped right out of the dispos-all, but after a while I couldn't see him at all. I assumed he'd gone on down into the plumbing. I also assumed that meant he would die soon; but then again, as far as I know he could live there for quite some time.
    I couldn't help but feel guilty, as well as stupid, over Fish's accidental death. Since I'd just been making such a big deal about him on my homepage and here in the Diary (posting photos and giving him an e-mail account) I felt obligated to write up an article on his passing.

---

    I watched the Vanilla Sky DVD last night, and then turned around and watched it all over again for the director's commentary. Although I planned on mourning Fish online for a while, I was not quite so grief-stricken in real life. I almost threw out Fish's cube yesterday but then had second thoughts. I gave it the cleaning I'd intended, and then I went to the fish store in Woodhaven to buy a new betta. It was dark and cloudy for most of the day and it rained hard as I set out. My first two fish had been blue and red so I wanted something different. I got a solid red fish, named, of course, Fish.

---

    I started my commute early so I could go to the Mervyn's by work. I picked up some more polo shirts and even had time to hop across the street to Borders where I got some magazines. It had been hot and sunny when I'd gone in, but when I stepped outside it looked amazingly like a completely different day. The temperature had dropped, a strong wind had picked up, and the sky to the west was a solid sheet of dark gray, like a chalkboard. Of course the rain didn't actually start till I had parked and was walking to office building. I met Jeremy in the lobby, who'd been on his way out for a break. We went back to our office where we found Reid in a tizzy -- video had gone out -- and he was making frenzied phone calls. But he saw how drenched I was, he realized the outage was just rain fade.
    My on-ramp to I-75 was closed, so I was forced to take surface streets home. At night I worked on restoring a poll to my SFG page. I used to Create-A-Poll.com, but I'd been disenchanted with them when they started forcing pop-up ads to appear. Tonight, I managed to get a PHP-based poll running off my own server. I stayed up too late watching TV.

---

    Wyandotte Hospital called this morning, informing me that my insurance company had okayed the procedure this Friday but that I would have to pay the bulk of it. I was asked if I wanted to cancel, and I had to admit that I probably should. Not only did I not feel like paying for what would probably be an expensive operation (as if there is such a thing as an inexpensive operation), but my wrist wasn't even bothering anymore. So I canceled. And I called up my aunt and uncle to let them know they would not have to chauffeur me. And, when I got to work, I let Jeremy know he would not have to work my shift.
    Apparently we lost video this morning, before I got in. It was not rain fade, and no one knew really what had caused it. That big special broadcast was this afternoon, the one where we'd had to setup six hundred sites to receive it. The stupid show lasted for all of 49 minutes. (We must've prepped for it for about six hours though.) I took a different route home, getting onto I-75 a different way. My SFG poll was not going to well. My question was whether I should get another fish or not. I was starting to get votes, but I was being told not to get a new fish even though I already had.

---

    Late at night I impulsively wrote to the Strong Bad Message Bored and suggested everyone meet up at my message board the next time the SB Bored crashes. I even created a new category for them. Before bed, I started reading my copy of The Lord of the Rings fan club magazine, which had shown up in the mail. I was shocked to discover my name was mentioned on page 24, in the Peter Jackson interview. I was so geeked I had trouble sleeping. And when I got up this morning I scanned the page and put it up on my SFG site. I checked the Homestar site, but interest in using my message board was minimal, at best. In the afternoon I discovered a new online DVD rental oufit called DVD Avenue. My friends and I had grown dissatisfied with NetFlix's slow service and had been looking for some competition for a while. However, it figures that this competition didn't show up until NetFlix had improved (going from a week-and-a-half return rate back to two or three days). But I signed up for DVD Avenue anyway, just to check them out.

---

    I finally found my VCR remote this morning, missing since Sunday night. Our spectrum analyzer device had to get inspected, but it did not pass. Some techs from the computer room loaned us theirs, and through a perverse stroke of luck they happened to be in the room when we lost video again. They finally got the chance to see it for themselves and to see what we'd be talking about.
    There was a package on the porch when I got home. My "Black Knight" figure from Sideshow Toy's Holy Grail collection had shown up, along with my copy of The West Wing Script Book.

---

    Reid and Jeremy reached me through my SFG Shoutbox that they wanted me to bring some food in. I tried to respond, but then realized it would probabbly be easier just to phone them. They asked me to bring in Burger King. I took their orders and stopped on the way in. The day was blissfully quiet; I only got one phone call, and it was a wrong number. I liked the Black Knight figure so much that I ordered the "Patsy" figure. It's officially sold out, but I got it through eBay. My DVD Avenue movie rentals showed up today.

---

    My brother Rick's mother-in-law had her 80^th birthday in February and his father-in-law's 80^th is in September, so the family decided to throw them a surprise joint-birthday-party today.

We learned my dad had won a Harley Davidson contest. He'd entered it just because he figured if there was a contest he could win it would be one where he didn't care about the prizes. He didn't win a bike, but he won a bunch of Harley Davidson merchandise: car floor mats, a blanket, a flashlight, a black t-shirt, and a black leather baseball cap. Since my dad is hardly the biker type, it was pretty funny to see him wearing the cap.

---

    I finally got around to working on the next page of my CMU Photo album. While I was doing scans I also remembered to scan my Buffett tickets, to create the missing image in my June 22 entry. I then did another week's worth of entries on this diary page. I worked on my SFG homepage in the evening, creating a photograph of the kitchen sink as a crime scene, in response to Fish II's accidental death. I complicated things by coming up with a plot on how I had been detained for questioning and how my weblog had been confiscated by Inspector William Montcrief because of all my Fish-based writings. Before bedtime, I finished one of my DVD Avenue movies.

---

    I had trouble sleeping last night, so read almost all of The West Wing Script Book. Since I'd supposedly been detained by the police, I was unable to pose for today's webcam shot.

    I didn't find out till I got to work that I needed to stay late so that the techs could take down our signal to see if they could find out why we're getting video hits. It turned out though that the satellite test might not work since it was so overcast. So I stayed an hour late for nothing. At least two DVDs I'd ordered showed up tonight.

---

    Having gotten two DVDs last night (and waiting for The Fellowship of the Ring next week), I ordered some PAL DVDs from Amazon UK this morning. I swung by Optimeyes on the way to work. Now I was done with my left wrist I could get my eyeglass prescription checked. I made an appointment for tomorrow. I would be working late again tonight, but for no reason I came in on time. Reid secured a moving van for Thursday. The tests were run, after programming ended, but I don't know if anything was learned by them. The guys on the satellite team said we could go up 3db even though the guys on-site said this was wrong. We raised the signal 3db only to hear that it was affecting the transponder next to ours, so we ended up loweing the signal 3db which put us right back where we'd started. And I got home an hour and a half late.

---

    I got up early to make my eye doctor appointment. They found a lens which improved the sight in my right eye, but they could do nothing to counteract the blurriness in my left. The doctor had a hunch I might have keratoconus, where the cornea begins to change shape, and asked if there might be someone in my family with this problem. This sounded like what happened with my brother Mark, but this had been after he'd been wearing hard contacts. My cousin Brendan had had terrible problems with his eyes too. I ended up getting some Nike frames for $179; this didn't sound so bad until I found out the lenses themselves were $155. I could get my glasses in an hour and a half, or else I could pick them up before they close at eight. Work got in the way of either time. I had enough time to pick up some tennis shoes (at the nearby Payless), since my old shoes had been hurting my feet last Saturday, and then I went in to work.
    I was sorely tempted to sneak out of work early so I could pick up my glasses. There was a show running till eight, so leaving would be highly irresponsible. I did it anyway. But I only got about five miles down the expressway before I chickened out and came back again. I sat around for twenty minutes, without any phone calls, without the chance to get my glasses, until the show ended and I could leave again.

---

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