---

    I picked up my new glasses on the way to work. As you can see, they're a lot narrower than my older pair.

I made a point to talk to the doctor about his diagnosis. His hunch could very well be correct since it turns out my brother's cornea problems had preceded his wearing hard contacts. I'd gotten the chronology wrong. Hard contacts are prescribed for keratoconus to prevent further deformities in the cornea. However, as I found out later from the Center for Keratoconus, the exacting and painstaking fitting process might do more harm than good, and, lucky me, keratoconus is a degenerative disease for which there is no cure. The most extreme solution is a cornea transplant. From what I've read, I'm one of the lucky ones since mine only affects one eye.
    Reid was already gone by the time I got in. He'd worked a half day, so he could move into his new apartment. At night, I found someone had posted a bunch of porn links in my SFG Guestbook. I removed them all, marking the first time I'd needed to censor my Guestbook.

---

    Today was the first day of Dearborn's Homecoming festival. Li'l Stubby & the Disappointments would be performing (Thornetta Davis would be headlining), so of course I had to see them and record them. They started at six though, which was too early for me; so I arranged to switch shifts with Jeremy. I got in around eight this morning. Reid left early again, so he could be home for the Comcast guy to set up his cable modem. It was another quiet day and in fact, since I was so impatient, it was excruciatingly boring. The only bit of excitement was getting caught in a tug-of-water between our bosses and the video techs. They wanted to take down the signal this weekend for more testing on our outages, but our bosses would not give permission since the techs had not implemented a formal Test Plan. I guess our bosses didn't want the techs to get in the habit of taking the video down every weekend just for a look-see. Phone calls were made, e-mails were exchanged; but nothing came of it. I guess I'll have to wait till Monday to see if the techs went ahead and took us down anyway.
    Jeremy and I spent the rest of the day using the Shoutbox on my SFG page. We posted messages making fun of Reid in his absence. Finally four:o'clock rolled around and I was able to leave. I went to Best Buy first for batteries and then headed over to the Homecoming festival at Ford Field. I was early, but Li'l Stubby were already there setting up and running through mic checks. After all that effort and scrutiny I expected to make a great bootleg this evening, but unfortunately once the show started the guys at the mixing desks had an annoying habit of mixing on the fly: the bass would disappear, the backing vocals would overwhelm the lead, etc etc. I guess the best to see them is still in the cozy confines of the Blue Goose.
    I'd brought my walkie-talkie but I didn't need it to meet up with Joe and his family. They showed up at the main stage shortly after Li'l Stubby started.

Joe finally got the chance to hear the band I've been talking about, and he liked what he heard. He went off to sign up for bocce ball tomorrow and I got my requisite shish tawook from the Lebanese booth. Joe's wife Jackie showed up later on. I found out her mom had fallen and knocked her head earlier in the day, and Jackie had been with her at the hospital. We stayed by the Italian tent, waiting for the announcement of the bocce tournament schedule. Joe would be playing at 6:00 PM tomorrow -- right at the same time the Jimmy Buffett cover band "Air Margaritaville" would be starting on the B stage!
    I got back home around nine:thirty. The drummer for Li'l Stubby, Jeff Lebiecki, had joking asked if I'd have an update on my Stubby fan site tonight. I hadn't intended to -- I figured I wouldn't have time till Sunday -- but I ended up creating and uploading a new MP3 anyway.

---

    I continued work on my Stubby fan site this morning by posting some of my pictures to the Photo Gallery. I headed back to the Homecoming festival at around two:thirty. By coincidence, just as I pulled into the lot I spotted Mike and Sarah and their kids walking out. I caught up with them and we walked the rest of the way together. Most of the afternoon was spent by the carnival rides, where the kids could buy wristbands for $12 that would allow them to ride anything until five. It was unbearably hot by the rides, especially since they had been erected on the baking blacktop of a parking lot. I kept wondering why I didn't just go spend the time in a beer tent, but instead I hung around with the parents. We moved over to the Italian tent eventually, where we had a slice of pizza or two, a beer or four, and waited for Team ShortFatGuy to take to the bocce courts. This year Joe and Greg would be representing Team ShortFatGuy.
Mike had no qualms about skipping the game in favor of watching Air Margaritaville. I have to confess I've that after last year's Alpine Valley debacle and then losing two hundred bucks on Buffett this year, I've become quite disenchanted with him, so much so that I was seriously planning on boycotting even a cover band. However, the first bocce games ran late, so since Team Short Fat Guy had yet to start, I wandered over to the B stage at six:o'clock.

    I got a kick out of the emcee's description that Air Margaritaville plays "Jimmy Buffett-type music". Yeah, the songs are so much like Buffett's they even share the same lyrics and melodies!
The band was better than I'd expected. I don't mean they were great mimics; I mean they offered a better selection of songs than I'd expected. I would've figured they'd just play the Greatest Hit(s) album, but instead they had some surprising selections like "USS Zydecoldsmobile", "I Will Play for Gumbo", and "Livingston Saturday Night". I had my camcorder with me, so I taped a few snippets. I also recorded all of the latter song, which I'll probably post on my Buffett page. Unless Buffett makes a Fall or Winter appearance, this could be my only update of the year there.
    I ping-ponged between the B stage and the bocce pit. Greg and Joe were leading at first, but I guess I jinxed them by staying away too long. When I got back they were losing 8-3.    

They stayed in the game the whole way, but they could never regain the lead and Team ShortFatGuy was out of the running after the first round. Coach Larry bought the consolation beers.

    Joe and Greg had gotten up at six this morning to put a blanket up on the hill and claim a space for our firework viewing tonight. We sat on the hill and waited for it to get dark. The crowds were thick but I still managed to get some more shish tawook and beers for dinner. The headliner for tonight was country singer Lee Greenwood.

I never used to mind his great "God Bless the USA" anthem, but listening to it now is like eating my vegetables. Still, I recorded the song and will probably put it up on my Music page. Dearborn's awesome and extravagant fireworks display followed. (Use this RealVideo file to compare it to Trenton's 4^th of July fireworks: downstream it or download it [4.1 MBs].) And then came the packing up, the long walk back to the car, and the slow crawl down Cherry Hill while I tried to find my way up to Ford Road and then home via the Southfield Expressway.

I tried a shortcut which I swear was sending me north toward Ford Rd but a policeman in an intersection forced me to turn and I found myself somehow right back on Cherry Hill! Somehow I'd gone full circle on only two right turns!

---

    I spent the whole day on the computer. I only really planned on creating a RealVideo file of Lee Greenwood, for my Music page, but I ended up making a RealVideo file of Air Margaritaville for my Buffett page and of the Dearborn fireworks for this Diary page. I also finished off disc one of A Beautiful Mind and, at night, finished off the entries on my July page and started this one.

---

    Feeling proud of myself for all my webwork, I checked out my Diary page this morning...and discovered the link to Bitter Old Man had been wrong all this time, on all my Diary pages! Jeremy told me he'd become a registered user on my SFG message board; in fact, he was the only other registered member besides myself (of course it helps that you don't need to register to post on my forum). He mentioned he'd like a link to my homepage in the forum, so he wouldn't get lost, and in trying to do so I completely hosed the forum.
    The big news of the day though was the arrival of my Lord of the Rings discs from DVD Planet. I watched it greedily when I got home.

---

    We found out that the power will be shut down this Saturday for the south end of the building. This might not affect us, but just in case it might be necessary for us to show up and monitor the room. The actual broadcast stuff is hooked up to the compuer room's power, so in that we should be safe; but if our air conditioning goes out, the room would overheat quickly and we could fry out plenty of sensitive and expensive equipment. We got a lot of phone calls around midday, more so than usual and certainly more so than last week. I'd been so obsessed with Lord of the Rings last night that I'd completely forgotten about how I'd killed off my forum. I worked on this in the evening and was able to restore it without any lasting effects. I also figured out how to better provide that requested link.

---

    It's official. Dennis wants Reid and me to show up quarter to seven on Saturday morning. We can either shut everything down preemptively and show up in the afternoon to power everything back up, or we can and monitor the room and potentially not have to shut anything down at all.

---

    I was stunned to discover my cousin Jay's wedding is this Saturday. I was convinced it was later in the month. I'd planned on getting a new sport jacket for the occasion, since I probably can't fit in my old ones; but now there was no time. Coincidentally, after restoring my own message board, Reid unveiled his new and improved (and non-MSN) Super Evil Message Board this morning. And coincidentally, amid discussions of the power outage Saturday, the whole building had lost power this morning. Tellingly, our air conditioners had indeed gone out, so presumably they're not protected by the computer room's UPS and chances are they'd go out on Saturday too.
    I discovered a site called AMI BIOS or Not which I thought was rather amusing. It occurred to me that I could do the same thing with food products over on my SFG site, so I spent some time looking for photo-ranking code. Most of my time though was spent trying to correct an annoying problem my IE browser had developed: it would not open pop-up windows. If I clicked on a link that opened up a new window (like most of the links here in my Diary) only the frame of a window would show up. It would look like the browser had frozen, but I would still be able to use this second window if I manually pasted a link into the Address bar. Maybe it was a browser problem, but installing a service pack did not correct it, nor did upgrading to IE 6. So maybe it was a graphics problem -- but I couldn't upgrade the video drivers since I kept getting some error about the "RPC Stub". I thought I'd hit a roadblock, but I did a Google search on "RPC Stub" and discovered this is an Install Shield error when there's some problem with incompatible or corrupt files. I learned all about it at this page, and even learned I could download a program called "mcrepair.exe" should correct the incompatibilities.

---

    I got my haircut this morning, at the nearby Bo-Ric's. I spent the whole time having to listen to the lady manager explain the new computer system to the lady barber (with a lot of "honey"-this and "sweetheart"-that, even though I could tell they hated each other), but at least they finally cut my hair short enough in back. Reid and Jeremy had requested I bring KFC Zingers in today, and I was early enough to be able to do so and still be on time. I went to the KFC on Telegraph, north of Ford Rd. Little did I know here existed some kind of space/time anomaly within, but I showed up at 12:08 and did not get out out of there until 12:28. I went from being early to late and all I did was order three Zinger combos. It didn't help that the woman in front of me seemed to be inventing her order while she stood at the counter, deciding only at the end that she wanted everything on the menu -- but different.
    Dennis stopped by, discussing plans for this Sunday's work outing. The interruptions in our video signal continued in the afternoon. We were positive these hits were not our responsibility (since our internal video feed was unaffected), but no one else had any idea what might be causing it.
    I tried to do more work on my photo ranking page at night. I got a call from Mike, inviting me over for a cookout, so he could show off the new landscaping in his backyard. I had to decline though since this weekend is so busy.

---

    I got up around five so that I could get to work by six:thirty. Frank, the building supervisor, told us the power would be shut off promptly at seven. I went online in the meantime, discovering to my delight that Strong Sad were being made available after all at the Homestar site. A workman showed up, informing us he needed to shut off our AC units. I was taken aback by this, since it was exactly the opposite of what we were there for. He started heading for the back room and Reid and I followed as if to physically block him. We refused to let him and, sensing something was strange, the guy said he'd go make sure. He came back a couple minutes later admitting that "something had gotten lost in the translation".
    Remarkbly, the AC units stayed on when the power was thrown. We had to stay anway though, just to make sure. Pretty much everything stayed on in our room, in fact, except for the overhead lights and the stuff against the back wall. This included the PC I use to go online. (It also included the TV, but not the VCR.) It did not take long for the rest of the building to start warming up and turning clammy. It appeared most of the building had been shutdown, since I couldn't find a working snack machine or a lavatory with lights.
    I got some Taco Bell for an early lunch on the way home. I took a nap in the early afternoon, and then when I got up it was time to get ready for Jay and Sung Me's wedding. I put my on my new shirt and my new tie and then headed off to the Korean church. I wasn't sure what kind of ceremony to expect, but I made sure to wear good socks. It turns out the only thing Korean about the church is the sign. After the rather short service, we blew bubbles instead of throwing rice or birdseed.

We were early for the reception, so some of the couples bided their time at a Wendy's across the street. One of the reception's most noteworthy events was when Jay, not known for public performances, serenaded his bride with Elton John's "Your Song". The people up front held up lighters and the staff obligingly killed the lights.

(I asked Jay, a huge McCartney fan, why he did an Elton John song. He said he'd wanted to do "My Love" but Sung Me hates it. "Ah, it starts," I sighed. "It starts already.") My sister-in-law Eileen and I joked about all the musical clichés the DJ could play; these were all old titles like Proud Mary and Colour My World and Celebration, stuff that probably never gets played anymore. Celebration however was the third song played.
    I worked some more on my photo ranking page when I got home.

---

    Everybody last night had thought it was nice of me to invite my dad to our work outing, but actually I was doing it because I'm a lazy cheapskate. Neither of us was likely to go to a Tiger game on our own, so using him as my date seemed the easiest way for him to get a chance to go to Comerica Park. We met up at the company lot at eleven:thirty. Dennis and I got to meet Reid's date, my dad got to share some stories about old Tiger Stadium. Then took off for our noon resevration at Xochimilco's in Mexicantown. Jonard and his girlfriend met us there. Our corner of the restaurant was so dimly lit that it was impossible to read the menus. We tilted the menus and turned in our chairs desperate to catch some kind of reflected light. Luckily I only wanted tacos. I stuffed up on so many tortilla chips that I probably didn't even need the main course. Dennis led the caravan downtown; however we got separated right by the ballpark. I wasn't able to follow them to their usual parking garage, so I ended up just parking by the Detroit Opera House. At least we already had our tickets in hand, so we could just meet up inside the ballpark.
    Dennis hadn't been able to get Tiger Den, but had at least gotten us close to the field. However, this meant our seats were uncovered, and it was so blazingly hot that I could barely move. Dennis tried to talk us into getting beers and hot dogs, but I spent all my concentration on willing my brains not to explode. I was not a very good host either, since I made no effort to show my dad around the park. He went off on his own, in later innings.

The Tigers played unexpectedly well, against the Orioles, scoring two runs immediately and maintaining the lead throughout the game. They bungled it near the end when the shortstop baubled a cut-off throw, missing his chance at getting the guy at second out and then completely forgetting there was a guy behind him rounding third and heading for home. The crowd instantly erupted in boos, and a disillusioned little kid behind me cried out "What are you doing? What were you thinking? No wonder you're a Tiger!" Poor kid.
    I am forever amazed at how simply sitting in the sun can wipe me out. I crashed when I got home, taking a nap.

---

    Reid's new message board was pretty active, although a lot of the activity was just some guy called The Sun God posting a lot of useless junk. He was also posting a lot of "hotties" from the Maxim website, and Jeremy was taking a lot of enjoyment out of hijacking these threads by posting photos of fat ugly losers from Cliff Yablonski's site.
    That Girl Behind the Door had posted some stuff in my Shoutbox and in my own message board -- including another request for a link! I assumed she was trying to make fun of me for crashing my forum last week. Jeremy had missed our work outing yesterday because of softball championships. Not only had they finished up the Summer season they got the jump on the Fall season, so I think he played five games yesterday. He looked worn out and his right arm was sore; so he took off early.
    Reid had created an MP3 category in his Super Evil message board, not to post files but to share links to files. For the heck of it I stayed up way too late playing around with my copy of Fruity Loops, and I came up with a silly little MP3 for them.

---

    It turns out That Girl Behind the Door had actually been serious when she requested another homepage link on my forum's front page. I explained to her that there was already a link to my homepage, but she shot back that this was not good enough. So, not wanting to disappoint one of my very few registered members, I added two more links at the top of the page. It was a quick fix, since they were just text based, but at least they worked.
    I made myself terribly late today. I hate to admit it but it was mostly because I simply could not find the Honeymoon in Vegas CD I wanted to listen to. Things were made worse too by the fact I-75 was now closed, with all traffic routed onto Telegraph. I take Telegraph anyway, just to avoid construction, but with all traffic routed onto it Telegraph was extremely slow-going. I was twenty minutes late. Reid and Jeremy complimented me on my MP3 and Reid showed me the fan fiction he'd created in his forum. The stories followed similar themes involoving how various male forum users found true love with each other; several stories seemed to end with the phrase "manly embrace". Strangely, none of my own web pages would show up. I wondered if it was a PHP or MySQL thing, but even my few remainingly HTML pages were unreachable. I got my laptop out and tried to FTP into my webspace. That was unreachable too. And it appeared, for the first time, that my web site was actually down. I made a call to my web host to report the problem. And I also went over to Door.nu to tease the Redhead about crashing my entire site with her stupid link request.
    I'd been told that my site would be back up in a few minutes, but those few minutes turned into hours. It was a bit unnerving only seeing this when I typed in my domain name:

Gateway Timeout

The following error occurred:

Server unreachable

---

Please contact the administrator.

and i couldn't help wondering how much data I might lose when the site came back up. Now that my weblog is PHP based, I'd never bothered to back it up offline. I tried to change my e-mail address on Reid's message board and I suddenly found I could not log back in. I was informed I was "inactive". I was getting the feeling that computers hate me. It must've rained during the day, since when I left the sky was roiling with copper colored clouds and there was a quarter-rainbow in the east.
    I continued to call my web host every few hours, but their server and my domain were not restored till eleven:o'clock at night. Thank God, nothing appeared to be affected or missing. During the afternoon I'd found a tutorial on adding a new button to the menu of my YaBB SE message board; I worked on it at night, adding a nicer link to my homepage.

---

    I still could not log into Reid's message board in the morning, but he went through the Admin pages when I got in. Somehow my profile had actually been made inactive, perhaps simply by changing my e-mail address.
    The homophobic fan fiction continued, and by afternoon I felt like contributing my own. I know I should've aimed it at Reid, since he'd started it all, but instead I picked on Jeremy and his fetish for hijacking Sun God's "Hotties" forum.

    Jfathers was on a mission. He had seen her once, but now he wanted to claim her. His fingers were poised over the keyboard; the mouse was waiting on its pad nearby. If only he could remember. He took a staggered breath, closed his eyes, and then with renewed purpose, he typed frantically. He stung at the Enter key with almost a triumphant flourish. -- This had to be it.
    He'd seen her image once, but it had been enough to inflame her visage upon his mind. The lank hair, the bulbous chins, the Coke bottle glasses, the acne. He could've sworn he'd saved her portrait to his private album on Photo Island, but he'd almost swooned this morning when he'd found it wasn't there. He could not let her slip away that easily, that little vixen. He wanted to claim her picture -- claim her herself -- and share her beauty on the Super Evil forum. Her, and all the other plus-sized women who would be his harem.
    He refreshed the album page, and suddenly she was staring back at him. "Yes!" he cried aloud, and his right hand slipped inevitably under the table. His cry had alarmed the other patrons of the Internet cafe, but he didn't care. He didn't even care that his fiancée was always wondering why he was spending so much time at the computer. She wouldn't understand. And now that he thought of it, she could use to put on a few pounds. She was looking unhealthy.
    Not like the apple cheeked girl grinning back at him from the screen though. No, she would never snap at him. She would not be like that waitress, telling him to please pull his pants up because he's disturbing the other customers. Jfathers would not let his attention be diverted by trivialities. He was in a world of his own, behind fervently closed eyelids. A world where those beauties on Photo Island would engulf him in their embrace, where their mounds of flesh would bury him in their ecstasy. Where the fat of their awaiting arms would hang down like curtains, where the flab of their bellies would hang like a kilt, where their breasts would fall like an avalanche upon him and smother him in love. Then and only then could Jfathers truly be happy.

I actually enjoyed writing that a great deal, since it had been my first fiction in a terribly long time.
    I'd had to stay late last night to physically swap a decoder board. I had to stay late tonight to swap some connections on our patch bay (so we could continue troubleshooting the intermittent video outages). At night I stayed up way too late working on another Super Evil MP3.

---

    My two MP3s had found me such favor that I had been elevated to a moderator position. I was now moderator of the MP3s and Movies forums and give the title of "Minister of Propaganda". In the afternoon I found out I had to stay late again tonight for a teleconference. A couple hours after that I got calls from some bigwigs asking exactly what was being broadcast. Evidently the satellite company was convinced we were causing our own outages; and not only that, we were affecting some Internet company on a different transponder. They wanted to force us into taking our signal down so they could run tests; but since we were live on two channels, we refused to do anything until eight:o'clock.
    In the meantime, I was getting more and more irritated in my and The Sun God's daily debate over how he insists Fellowship of the Ring "sucks" (or "S0XX0RS", depending on his mood), that the special effects are bad, that the direction is bad, without providing any basis for his assertions. I finally got so sick of his groundless opinions that I decided to give him a final smackdown and vow to ignore all his futureLOTR posts. "“I've never been Peter Jackson's biggest fan," I wrote, "and some of his storytelling choices did indeed bother me when I first saw LOTR; but there is no possible way you could convince me that LOTR is lacking in 'production'. The look of the movie is staggering. Its special effects are beautifully rendered and integrated into the scenes with a naturalism lacking in most of the glorified videogames posing as SF movies. The cinematography is gorgeous, the costumes and sets were even better than I imagined them while reading the book, and -- think of it -- a fantasy film with actual acting.
    “So that's it. What it boils down to is we're right, you're wrong. Case closed. And that's my last word on the subject because I'm really getting tired of pointing out the obvious.”
    Here's part of what Sun God wrote back. "oh yes and LOTR didnt lack in production.. if it did so we wouldnt see the movie.. the productor is the problem solver into the movies... guess you didnt know that... notice there is no oscar for production..." So, earlier he'd been saying "director sucks, production sucks,.... bad movie” but now suddenly LOTR's production is all right. That is, if your pidgin English confuses "production" and "producer" (which begs the question why would I find it necessary to point out to him that LOTR had a producer?). And if I'd wanted to break my vow already, I would've pointed out that there is an Oscar for producers. It's called Best Picture, which is why a film's producer is the recipient. "...guess you didnt know that..."
    Anyway, the teleconference after eight:o'clock was quite brief. I didn't even need to be there really, since some techs manually took down the signal for me. Mere seconds after we went black, the satellite guy was apologizing to us and thanking us for our time. So the signal noise they'd been experiencing was evidently not from us.
    I messed around on the computer when I got home. I also finally got around to canceling my membership with DVD Avenue. I was informed I had to send back my two movies in two weeks or I'd have to pay $25. Which I guess means I have to start watching them.

---

    Today's request was to bring in Grilled Stuffed Burritos from Taco Bell. Only Jeremy and I would be dining since Reid was at his girlfriend's work outing. I went to the new Taco Bell / Pizza Hut combination restaurant on Telegraph and Eureka. Remarkably, while I ordered, two different people came up to complain about their food. Having crashed my message board with another link request, now the Redhead is suggesting I add background images. Back at home, I got my next two Homestar t-shirts.

---

    Jeremy needed me to work today for him. Luckily he reminded me about this yesterday since I'd completely forgotten the agreement. The shift lasted two hours and there were no phone calls. Back at home I revamped my SFG website a bit, moving all my DVD reviews to a separate database and creating a new Movies page along the same lines as my TV, Food, and Gadgets pages.
    Another cousin, Christine, was married today. I did not go to the ceremony since only the uncles and aunts were invited. I heard it was quite nice, especially the food.

---

    At the Redhead's insistence, I put background images up on my message board. My mom defrosted ravioli from Easter for a big dinner tonight. Rick and Debby couldn't make it, so I had to pick up my nephews Joe and Jake. My nieces Heather and Cathy insisted we watch Iron Chef, which I saw for the first time. My sister-in-law brought some short stories she'd had to write for a class. She's quite proud of them and I might end up adding them to my Library.

---

    Sun God was getting on other people's nerves evidently, and Reid took some pleasure by banning him for posting digusting photos from Rotten.com. Ironically, Reid got himself banned from the Redhead's website a few hours later. Even more bizarre, I discovered I could no longer access the help forum for my Yabb SE message board. The corporate firewall said the site was blocked because of "Pornography"! Evidently they were confusing "yabb.info" with "yabb.com". ("Yabb.com" does contain pornography. But if the stupid firewall is going to block all extensions for any domain name that has pornography, then they might as well ban "whitehouse.gov" too!) Once again I found out I had to stay late to perform another swap on our patch bay.

---

    It looked like the Redhead had done an IP ban on us when she'd banned Reid, since I wasn't able to access her site either. I at least could access her website with my laptop (and at home).

---

    Reid and I had fun coming with MS Paint renditions of Great Scenes from the Movies. I put mine up on both his message board and my own. I also did some MS Paint caricatures of the Homestar characters, which I put up on Strong Bad's Message Bored. At night, my DVDs from Amazon UK showed up.

---

    I finally found time to get my oil change before work. Dennis was over since some very important bosses were supposed to be touring. The morning group never showed up. The afternoon group was just two people. Another switch was made to the feed we were monitor; we had more intermittent video hits, but now they were affecting our internal feed. It was tough to tell now whether whole channels were down or if it was just our internal feed.

---

    Today's choice for lunch was Zingers again. I made a point to go to a different KFC this time; and since these lunches are turning into a weekly thing, Reid and Jeremy pitched in five bucks each. Reid and Dennis had a big meeting with Traffic this morning. We're working with a software company to unite our databases. I'd been inundated with change requests a couple weeks ago, but it turns out my work was not up to snuff. I paid more attention to making sure the site IDs and receiver unit IDs were correct, but Traffic was upset because the site names don't match. This all could've been avoided if they'd pointed out at the time that their site name changes had to be followed down to the character -- random abreviations and all. But Traffic would rather be petulant and accusatory.

---

    I found a site called Replacement Remotes last night, so I ordered one for my TV. This morning I discovered that (the remaining half of) The Who is offering CD copies of each of their tour dates. I ordered up last night's show, which happened to have been at the Palace. I finished up Abre Los Ojos this afternoon. I watched episode from my Upstairs Downstairs season two DVDs at night.

---

    Entertainment Weekly had not shown up yesterday, which turned out to be a good thing since I hadn't read any of last week's at all. I worked at it now, hoping I might finish it in time for the new issue to show up tomorrow. (I found out eventually though that last week's was a double issue, which meant there'd be no new one this week. This was fine by me, since reading that increasingly useless magazine is turning into a chore.)
    I worked on my next NetFlix CD in the afternoo. It was The Cell, an old one, but one I had not seen yet. I watched the movie and then got through the commentary by the end of the day.
    On a whim, I tried running that United Devices application again. This time, at long last, I could finally log in and sign up. TYhe appliocation downloaded its first project and then set to work on it (analyzing 300 ligands, whetever that means). My computer was now busy trying to find a cure for cancer.

---

    My UD application had completed its first project overnight and was already at work on its next. I continued to let it run, even after I left.
    Jeremy was not in today, since he'd be working Saturday. While Reid was at a meeting with the production team, we started taking video hits. A guy from the video hub came over; and fortunately for us the video hits continued, so he could witness them too. Even better, the test feed we were internally monitoring went black too. I told him how our test feed had failed too, last Thursday. He immediately said that meant the outages were coming out of our encoder. I couldn't believe he would say that, since we'd spent three weeks monitoring the feed directly out of our encoder, and it had been rock solid during all these video hits. However, now that we'd started monitoring feed after it passes through the video hub, we were starting to see outages corresponding to our over-the-air outages. This meant it was not our encoder, it was not (since the outages were occurring internally, before being broadcast) some random interfernce. And it pissed me off that he was accusing us, when we had verified proof it was exactly the opposite.
    The box of Topps' Fellowship of the Ring Update Cards showed up; I'd ordered them through eBay from a place called Treasure Island Sports. Luckily I had some card sleeves still lying around, so I immediately set to collating the cards and putting them in order. I got three complete sets out of my box. And my one Memorabilia Card was Sam Gamgee. I needed to get the other seven cards, so I got straight on eBay afterward and started shopping around. I was just grateful I did't have to shop for prismatic cards and stickers and autograph cards like with the first box.

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    I discovered the bosses had organized a teleconference to discuss the video hits. I was asked to participate, and I explained what had happened last night. The guy from the video hub sounded like he was trying to cast doubt on my story, by saying he hadn't seen the test monitor go out, but that was because he'd been heading for the door with his back turned. He'd seen the after effects though, but he still seemed determined to steer attention away from his group by insisting on casting doubt on our encoder. It was finally decided we would now monitor two points along the signal path: at the up-converter (which was a further step back from the translator, where we were monitoring now) and from the platform in the computer room.
    I went to Best Buy after work, picking up the newly reissued Who My Generation set, Springsteen's The Rising, and the brand new Dixie Chicks CD. Remarkably I had not heard a thing from the Dixie Chicks CD and was buying it just on the strength of their first two releases (and on two glowing reviews I'd read).
    To my great surprise and puzzlement, that card shop which had sent yesterday's Fellowship of the Ring cards had sent a second box!

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    I went to the nearby McDonalds for lunch. I thought my total was $4.21 so I paid with a ten and a penny. When I pulled up to the drive-thru window, the woman said the total was $4.24, but I was already handing my money over. She closed the window and I sat there wondering if she was trying to figure out why the hell I'd given her a penny.
    Dennis had been over this morning, rewiring stuff to give us those two requested feeds. Reid's message board waa acting erratically, reporting PHP errors about how it couldn't connect to the database. We thoought it was down, but actually we could get the board working if we hit Refresh enough times -- however it got tiresome having to do this for every page. Over on my board, we killed some time writing up haikus (a requirement of every message board).
    I got a call from Dennis asking me to stay late after programming, since the techs wanted to play with our signal. Fortunately this only lasted about fifteen minutes, and in fact was only for our internal feed and did not affect our broadcasting at all.
    At night, I put bids in for more Memorabilia Cards, winning three auctions. I saw a review saying that the Japanese issue of The Who's Quadrophenia CD is the best one, so I tried shopping for it. Along the way I found a Japanese store that sold the Yatta CD and DVD! I couldn't resist, and I ordered both of them, despite the fact I'd just bought three expensive collectible cards.

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    Julie Kryk, the girl Phil and I made famous at the U2 show in Las Vegas, had her face in the paper. She'd be performing at the Arts, Beats, & Eats festival in Pontiac this Saturday.
    I found the receipt to my first box of Fellowship of the Ring Update Cards and saw that it was a duplicate of the second receipt. The invoice number was the same, the order number was the same, the saleperson was the same. It seemed to suggest that Treasure Island Sports would have no record of even sending me two boxes. I could keep this second set and save money on another Memorabilia Card. However this seemed a dangerous line to cross. Downloading binary bits to piss off the RIAA and MPAA is one thing (hell, they're such whiny crybabies, they frigging deserve the grief), but keeping a box of collectible cards sent to me error is something else.
    So I wrote a cover letter, packed the box up, and stopped off at the post office to send it back.
    Reid had not been feeling well and in fact had gone home already, before I showed up. Jeremy and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to rag on him on his own board for managing to always leave early.
    A couple days before, the Redhead had unexpectedly mentioned me on her webpage, saying I had renewed her interest in U2. She also expressed her frustration at not being able to find the Zooropa album around, so I rewarded her by uploading MP3s of all the remixes of "Lemon" I could find in my vast U2 archives.
    Evidently Reid had roused from his sickbed long enough to see our message boards posts. I'd been demoted from Minister of Propaganda to a plain user.

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    Since it was Friday, Jeremy had posted his lunch request in my homepage Shoutbox, but I had trouble refreshing the page to see if Reid had ordered. My cable modem was on the fritz, only staying connected for a couple seconds and then rebooting itself. Luckily I persisted long enough to espy Reid's order, and thus went to Wendy's. I scolded Reid for punishing me, but he said it was because I'd been "sassing the admin". I didn't agree. I'd been making fun of him personally, not in his position as admin. So I trashed him on my message board instead.
    I didn't wait for the weekend, I cleaned out my fish cube as soon as I got home. I still cleaned it in the kitchen, but I stayed clear of the sink, and I removed the fish first before emptying any water.
    After years of having a personal site, someone finally sent me an e-mail asking for a date. Unfortunately for me, it was from a guy.

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    My neice Heather had invited me to her new apartment, just off the U of M north campus in Ann Arbor. I carpooled with my parents, although I should've known better. I'm beginning to seriously fear my dad is getting too old to drive. We spotted the sign for the apartment complex, but he was going too fast and missed the entrance. He tried to pull into the next driveway, but this turned out to be the exit, and there was huge black pick-up truck sitting there, waiting to get out. I swear, if that truck had been further forward, we could've slammed right into its grille -- all because, apparently, my dad thought the apartment complex would be kind enought to provide a "second chance" driveway for people who missed the first one.

    Heather got some good deals on furniture, so her place was already looking quite nice. I wondered if her parents (who were also there) were jealous, since the place looked as big as their first apartment, and Heather was living there alone...plus *wink wink* her boyfriend has the flat above her. Now that's the life. I wouldn't've minded that kind of deal at my college -- excepting I'd pefer the boyfriend changed to a girlfriend.
    We left early so we could beat the traffic from the Wolverines/Huskies game. Since I was my parents' captive, I went with them to church too. I would've figured the organist to have worked the kinks out by now, but there was an awful lot of feedback when he sang. (Who would've thought the music at church would damage your hearing?)
    In the evening I did some work on my webpages. Reid and Jeremy had been complaining my homepage loads too slowly. I wondered if this might be because I'm using pMachine to run seven weblogs off the same MySQL database; so, as an experiment, I reverted my Food, TV, Music, Movies, and Gadgets pages from PHP back to HTML. I copied all their entries back to their respective HTML pages, and then deleted the entries from the MySQL database. It appeared my hunch might've worked, since the homepage did indeed seem to be loading faster.

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