---

    I spent most of the day watching finishing up my NetFlix rental (The Cell). We had our Labor Day cookout today (to leave Monday open), with big steaks on the grill.

I was upset that I almost forgot a big eBay auction for one of the LOTR Memorabilia Cards. I checked eBay later, and then was surprised to find the auction wouldn't end for nine hours! I found other card auctions ending sooner, so I put a bid in for one. I did a Google-search on the Memorabilia Cards, wanting to know which ones were rare. Along the way I came across a message board entry, at the Topps site, from some guy complaining that he'd bought two boxes of LOTR cards and had been unable to get one full set out of them. This was remarkable, since I'd gotten three full sets from my one box. He had listed the dozen cards he needed, and in a sudden rush of generosity I offered to mail him those from my stack of extras. I won my one auction.

---

    Mexico and Canada took pity on us and had not scheduled any programming today, so we had Labor Day off just like everyone else at the company. Typically, I spent most of it at the computer. I turned my Movies page into its own blog-type page (moving the movie-related homepage entries onto it), while moving my DVD reviews to their own page. I also added a half dozen new reviews. In doing so, I had to do some work on my alphabetizing. Stupidly, for no reason, I had the W's as the last letter. I also had to renumber the A through C entries to make room for a D entry now. I watched some of my Speed DVD, finally getting into disc two, just so I could write a review of it too. And then after dinnner i forced myself to go out. I'd been meaning to see Signs and this seemed the perfect time to do it.
    I went to the 6:35 show at the Star Taylor. I wasn't keen to be shocked and startled by loud noises, so I sat a bit farther back from the screen than usual. Two teenaged girls were a couple rows ahead of me. They thought they were terribly cute; so cute in fact that we wouldn't mind that they were talking and giggling too loud. Just as the movie started a group of teenage boys showed up, and the girls got up and stood there for a while, setting up a seating arrangement. I feared it was going to be a long two hours. A woman and her kid, in the row in front of me, to the right, got up in a huff and walke off. I assumed they were just going to move, but in fact I think they spoke to the manager.
    Right during the scene where Mel Gibson is walking with a flashlight through a spookily rustling cornfield, some guy with a flashlight started walking up the steps to the right. It seemed a strange time to look for trash, but he continued walking slowly up the steps with his flashlight aimed at the floor. A few moments later I saw him slowly walking down the the steps on the left. I even wondered if this was the Star's lame-ass way of adding to our moviegoing experience. After that the houselights even came up a little bit, which greatly pissed off a deep-voiced man behind me. Mel Gibson was articulating the theme of the movie on-screen, but I was distracted as the manager finally spotted the row of teenagers in the middle of the theater. He asked them to come with him and, surprisingly, they got up and followed him out without a word. So what I assumed would be a rant on my Bitter Old Man page turned into a happy ending.

---

    Jeremy surprised me by using my homepage's Shoutbox to ask for food. This is our Friday tradition, but he said he was hungry and wanted Taco Bell. We'd had another tour in our office, I guess, so Dennis had come by earlier. Reid had already left, for a doctor's appointment. Reid came back to the office later, after we'd eaten.
    At night I worked on adding a game page to my SFG site. I tried to create a crossword puzzle but it was too difficult. Instead, I found a Java applet that allowed me to create word searches.

---

    We had some more video outages, right after I got in. We called over to the video hub to report them. I reported them wrong, confusing my information and getting it backwards, so Reid had to send out e-mails to clarify everything. These continued outages pretty much proved the fault was internal, after our encoder but before the satellite dishes, but the techs still did want to own up to anything; nor did they suggest narrowing down on what equipment to monitor next.
    I saw a very bizarre ad for a real-life Harry Potter vibrator. I posted this as my first submission to group blog at Door.nu. Sometime between my leaving work and my getting home, the Super Evil forum crashed. It was down for the rest of the night. My Yatta DVD and CD were waiting for me when I got home.

---

    Joel was in to fix one of our TV monitors. Dennis had been in, dropping off our new company polo shirts, one of which Reid handed over to me. Jeremy was dressed up with a tie, for some reason. Something to do with a court appearance.
    Reid's message board was still down, so around lunchtime he called up eHost to find out what was wrong. Evidently all the PHP boards on eHost were down. Reid also asked if they could get their phpBB board upgraded from 2.0 to 2.3. The guy said they were looking into upgrading all the boards. He sounded rather beleaguered, like he had been hearing this a lot today. Reid let him go, and the Super Evil message board came back to life a short while later. I couldn't resist posting how my board had been working although Reid's board had been down twice recently. Jeremy shot back nastily that that's because my board doesn't have any visitors. He also razzed me once again on crashing my board by simpling trying to add a link on it -- which, frankly, I was getting tired of hearing about.
    I read some unbelievable news about Greece's parliament passing a law prohibiting electronic games. I ranted about it on Bitter Old Man and, later, wrote it up again on my homepage. I spent so long writing it up I completely forgot to bid on another LOTR Memorabilia Card auction. I found a similar auction later, putting in a bid when I got home.

---

    I got letters from two different people saying they were getting Mailer-Daemon errors when they tried to e-mail me. Strangely, I received their letters even though they'd reportedly been bounced back. Jeremy announced on my Shoutbox that they wanted Arby's. The Arby's on Telegraph Rd is difficult to get to because of counstruction on the southbound lanes. The Arby's on Southfield Rd whihc I used to drive by is also difficult to get to, since the I-75 exit to Southfield Rd is closed. I decided to go to the Southfield Rd one anyway, approaching it from the west on I-94 instead of the east on I-75. I stupidly got off the expressway at the wrong exit; I got back on the expressway but had to go way out of my way to turn around. I took the next available exit, headed right (south), and somehow made it onto eastbound Southfield Rd. I wasn't paying attention (again) and ended up following the truck in front of me into a turnaround lane! Traffic was too heavy for me to swerve back onto the left lane, so I was forced to turnaround onto the westbound lanes! Once again I had to doubleback, wasting time, making myself even later. It should've taken me thirtty minutes to get to work (not counting the food stop) but I was on the road about an hour!
    I'd missed a cluster at work too. We'd had two select site broadcasts this morning. One of the Traffic guys had a big list of last minute sites to add on, and then it became apparent that he'd also forgotten to mention two regions we were supposed to have authorized, so Reid and Jeremy had been bombarded with calls. We got still more calls when the show was repeated (after I showed up). One bit of good news was that the broadcasting techs were going to swap their up-converter over the weekend, which should correct out problem with outages.
    Jeremy continued to poke fun at me on the Super Evil board. After he went home I noticed he'd left himself logged in to the Redhead's site, so, just to get back at him, I posted an inane comment is his name.
    I wanted to upload a small graphic, when I got home, but my FTP program stubbornly refused to. It took a while for me to notice the the program was reporting an error with my Troubled Loner server. I logged into my server's Control Panel and was shocked to discover I was 140 MBs over my limit! I was shocked it had allowed me to upload that much (but then balk tonight at a stupid little 19kb graphic) and shocked that I'd never gotten any kind of warning from my host. So I tried to do some emergency salvage work, moving files over to my Bitter Old Man FTP space. This took a lot of time, as well as a lot of work to make sure my hyperlinks were still good. In the meantime finished up issue #4 of The Lord of the Rings Official Fan Club Magazine. I was talked into ordering Signlanguage, Viggo Mortensen's book of book of photographs (out of stock at Amazon, but readily avaiable from the publisher).

---

    I found the LOTR fan club is offering an exclusive autographed photo of Dominic Monaghan, so I ordered mine. Along the way I finally put in an order for the Sideshow Weta statue of Boromir, which after months of waiting was finally nearing its release date. I spent the morning moving more of my website files. I also used a link checker to make sure I corrected all changed links. I was chagrined to find there were dozens that had been wrong for quite some time, especially here in the Diary section. In the afternoon I went to my cousin Liz's house, in Gibraltar. She was hosting a big family get-together of my dad's side of the family.

---

    My stupid cable modem had gone out last night (so all my hyperlink corrections had been to my offline files). Irritatingly, the cable modem was still out. I tried resetting and power cycling the cable modem but that didn't help. I even checked the RF connections in the basement; one was loose, but tightening it didn't correct anything. So I spent the afternoon with another NetFlix rental (Out of Sight). I worked on my August diary page in the evening, finishing it. Halfway through I discovered my cable modem was back up, so I uploaded all my changed and corrected files.

---

    I stopped at the post office on the way to work, mailing that guys dozen LOTR cards. (Speaking of that, I never did a get a thank-you from that one store to which I'd returned that extra box. Ingrates.) As if my cable modem trouble had followed me, I had trouble getting online at work. I visited a few pages and then IE stopped accessing sites. Reid reported he could not open any new IE windows, on his computer, but could still use the first IE window he had up. E-mail worked fine, but I could not get online through IE. Later on I discovered Netscape worked fine, so I was able to browse with that late in the afternoon. In the evening, I poked around IE's connection settings. I unchecked a few things; and when I re-checked them, IE worked again. I don't know if need refreshing or if this was just a coincidence, but it worked fine after that.
    Back at home I spent the evening burning CDRs to clear some space on my hard drives. I got rid of a lot of big fat SHN files.

---

    Leo Laporte's latest newsletter urged us to download the new SR-1 for Windows XP. I didn't exactly trust it, but I did so anyway. I hoped it might correct my icon problems with IE and Outlook (which Windows Blinds screwed me on), but it did not. About the only difference I noticed was the window for downloading anything now has more warnings on it. I went to the post office again, this time to get a money order for my eighth and last LOTR Memorabilia Card. There must've been a hellacious accident on I-94 dozens of police cars and motorcycle cops and emergency vehicles were zooming west while I was on the eastbound lanes.
    I got three of my LOTR Memorabilia Cards. I'd gotten them through eBay from the same Canadian card shop. I'd lazily paid the full shipping price for each, so it was awfully nice of them to refund me $6 (US) in cash. I also got two CDs from Amazon: Stephen Wright's old album (available on CD as an Australian import) and the CD of Stephen Lynch's A Little Bit Special which I wanted to give to Dave when we see him later in the month.

---

    I'd told myself I would stay away from all the 9/11 TV coverage. (As a woman columnist in a Boston paper said, why do we need television to remind us of a day none of us can forget.) But, hypocrite that I am, I ended up watching CNN all morning anyway. There were some observations at work too, but they were done by the time I got in. In a similar vein I had observed the national minute of silence by sleeping right through it. Still, I had my own commemoration as I drove into work by listening to that U2 compilation I'd made last year.
    The One Ring.net had some bad news for me. Sideshow Weta had reorganized the release dates for their series five statues. Boromir, which I'd waited a year for and which was finally supposed to come out and which I'd just finally ordered on Saturday, was now not going to be released until next Fall, 2003!
    I was asked to stay late again tonight for some more testing. I guess the satellite group in California was convinced we were affecting reception on another transponder again, so they wanted us to take our signal down after programming. Apparently one of our techs had been called in last night at 11:00 PM to drop the signal a few dB.
    I'd taken a liking to some potato skin chips, but the snack machine by us had run out. The one upstairs was out too, but I discovered some in the machines by the east entrance. I waited for the phone call and then put our signal into carrier mode. They checked the noise floor and the California guys told our tech he could raise the signal a few dB. When they told him to stop he said this was about where it had been before he'd taken it down at 11:00 PM last night. So, once again, it sounds like those guys in California have no idea what they're doing.
    I got the Viggo Mortensen book already. I hadn't known Bill Clinton was to be Letterman's guest tonight. After listening to Bush's halting faltering delivery today, it was nice to hear a president who can speak off-the-cuff, can string two sentences together, and who sounds like he knows what he's talking about. It almost didn't matter that Bill was such a lecherous snake oil salesman.

---

    I stayed up too late and I got up too early. Still, this allowed me to stop by Bed Bath & Beyond and gift a present for my mom's birthday tomorrow. She wanted, of all things, a peppermill. Once I got to the store I realized I had no idea what kind, so I quickly went to my fall-back position of getting a gift card. I also picked up a Blockbuster gift card for my nephew Jake, since we'd be meeting at Rick's for dinner Sunday to celebrate all the September birthdays. I had time left to go to Borders too; they didn't have any new books for me, but I did pick up a birthday card.
    There was another cluster at work. That other division that we broadcast to had decided to have a special show this morning that only US sites could view. We had never officially been told to separate US and Canada sites, but for the most part we'd been doing so anyway. But now suddenly we had to go through all three or four hundred sites to make sure the US ones would be able to view the broadcast. I showed up in time to help out; Jeremy started at the bottom of the alphabet, I started at the top, and we met in the K's.
    Dennis had asked us to test two VCRs recently, and we finally got around to doing that later. Neither one worked (the first one wouldn't power up at all, the second one kept spitting out the videotape). A woman from Traffic visited us too, giving us a several-page list of sites we needed to look at before another special show tomorrow. Jeremy started working on that, while I tried to rewire our old VCR back up. I continued work on the list in the evening; unfortunately I wasn't able to finish it since I wasn't sure what that woman's notes meant. Hopefully I'd done enough so that it wouldn't be a big hassle for Reid and Jeremy to finish up tomorrow.
    On the way home I was going my usual five miles over the speed limit. The car behind me merged into the center lane to go around me, and suddenly the car behind it erupted in blue and red lights. I'd escaped getting a speeding ticket by just a car length!

---

    Today's lunch was from Wendy's. Everyone wanted Big Bacon Classic combos. Reid and Jeremy had finished up work on yesterday's list. The special shows today went off all right. We had some last minute add-ons, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
    Out of the blue I got a response from my AOL personal. I'd completely forgotten I even still had it running. I checked it out but apparently "Love@AOL" has paired up with Match.com (aw, isn't that sweet), and in the process my account had changed. I spent some time filling out their forms and upgraded my profile into something more like Match.com's.

---

    I finally finished The Lord of the Rings. I'm chagrined to admit it took me around ten or eleven months to finish it. It's not that the book was too much for me -- I've read it several times already (so many times I've completely lost track; but I think I've read it at least ten times now) -- it's that I just don't have a lot of time to read anymore.
    I made some changes to my SFG homepage template, removing the horizontal green bar. I also changed some links on the menu of my SFG guestbook. I edited this offline, and I wasn't till I uploaded the changes that I realized I'd completely screwed it up. The offline version I'd edited was not up to date, and in overwriting the online version I'd just lost several months of messages!
    Hopefully I might be able to find a more up-to-date version in the browser caches at work or on my laptop.
    I spent most of the day with another NetFlix rental (Hard Eight). At night I cleared off some more hard drive real estate by burning some of my MPEGs into VCDs.

---

    Before I went to Rick's house for the big September birthdays celebrations, I swung over to Blockbuster. I still buy Christmas presents for my nephews, but I was unsure about birthdays. Joe is too old, by our unofficial rules, but John is borderline. I decided to get John a present after all, so I picked up another $25 gift card. I was expected a cookout today, but dinner turned out to be spaghetti.

Mark showed up on his own. He had driven rather than biked; he'd taken a bad tumble recently and his left leg from knee to hip was an ugly purple. He stopped by our parents house afterward to see the new roof, which had been put up Thursday. Mark and I sat in the kitchen and he told me his misadventures trying to buy a printer from Best Buy.

---

    At work, I checked my laptop to see if its browser cache had old copies of my guestbook. Not only did I find those, I also found old copies of my homepage complete with old designs and texts. I saved those old messages, adding them to the archive of my current homepage. I also found old webcam images, which I also saved and will probably be adding them where appropriate to these diary pages. I could not find a recent enough copy of my guestbook though; but then it dawned on me how Google caches pages. So I found the listing for my guestbook and looked at the version they had cached. It wasn't quite up to date, but it was more recent than what I had. I waited till I got home to do any editing though. I had some packages waiting for me: I got Monsters Inc as well as my second to last LOTR Memorabilia Card. I stayed up far too late watching Monsters Inc and its extras.

---

    Jeremy, on his break, saw me in the parking lot and called out "Late again?" to me. However, he sounded like a woman which meant this obviously wasn't intended for me, so I ignored him. Dennis called up, saying he was in San Diego. This business trip had been in the works, off and on, for a while; but this was the first we'd heard that he was actually gone. I discovered an interesting program called Eskuel, a tool for MySql administration which looks a heck of a lot easier to use than phpMyAdmin. At last I can backup my PHP databases. I downloaded it and ran it when I got home, and, by the looks of it I optimized my SFG homepage and forum databases (but I wasn't sure how to back anything up).

---

    We had a big show around midday, which kept us busy for a few hours. Afterward we got to talking about old cartoons. Of course I watched a lot of them as a kid, but I couldn't honestly say I liked any of them. None of them stood the test of time and was watchable nowadays (with the exception of Looney Tunes, but those weren't made for TV or for kids). I realized the only thing I really liked about the cartoons were the theme songs. So I spent a nostalgic evening trying to dig up as many WAV or MP3 theme songs as I could.
    The one show I did remember really liking as a child was The Friendly Giant, out of Canada.

The coolest part of the show was the opening, and, when I checked back home, I was very disappointed no one on the Internet seemed to have a copy. The CBC site had one or two clips, which was the best I could do. One clip was inaccessible though. RealPlayer asked if I wanted it to find it through other means; I clicked OK, curious what kind of subterfuge it had up its sleeve. After a few moments of listening to my hard drive creak, RealPlayer said it could downstream the file now through UDP, whatever that means. And then I found RealPlayer still could not find the file, no matter what it had promised. Further, Internet Explorer wasn't working now. My cable modem was still operating, and in fact it looked awfully busy; but IE6 wasn't able to connect to anything. I opened up my packet sniffer (Ethereal) and saw that all the traffic was listed as being, yes, you guessed it, UDP. So somehow RealPlayer had taken it upon itself to completely gorp up my Internet connection. I had no idea how to undo this, so I resorted to the simple reboot...which seemed to do the trick.

---

    Today was extremely quiet. It would've been completely uneventful except that we had rain fade about fifteen minutes before the end of the schedule. Our signal came back after about six minutes. It was still raining hard when I left; it was difficult to see the lane markings. Several streets in the neighborhood were flooded.
    I took those cartoon theme songs from yesterday and spent the night making a RealMedia slideshow of some of them.
    I signed up with Something Awful, paying ten bucks to join their forum. My United Devices application finally broke 10,000 points today doing its part for cancer research.

---

    The choice for Fast Food Friday was Arby's. Construction on southbound Telegraph was apparently finished (and it's about freaking time), so I could go to the Arby's there instead of the one on Southfield Rd. It was another very uneventful day. I killed some time in the Something Awful forums. I actually liked the serious forums more than the crude ones. One thread on photography featured some great work by a guy named Eddie O'Bryan. Back at home, I finally got The Who's CDs of their Detroit concert. As advertised, it was directly off the soundboard. There was no additional mixing, so the sound was pretty much monaural. But, it's still a great idea and much more trustworthy than your typical bootleg. (And I was pleased to see they are real silver CDs and not CDRs.)

---

    Last night I stayed up late watching Anthony Hopkins in Titus. I spent most of today working on this diary. The month was almost over but it wasn't till today I started work on this September page. I typed up the first 14 entries. Dennis called me up, asking me if I still wanted to go to Dave's tomorrow. We had made these plans many weeks ago, and I'd assumed they'd be called off because of Dennis's trip to San Diego. He was back now, and I guess the visit was still a "go". Dennis couldn't get in touch with Reid though. I offered to private-message Reid through his message board, but of course my computer chose that moment to lose connectivity again. I couldn't connect to anything online, even though my cable modem looked operational. It took me a while to remember how RealPlayer had apparently screwed up my connection, and I'd how I'd gotten around this by rebooting. I e-mailed Reid. Then I took my fish to the kitchen and carefully cleaned his cube again. After that I went out to Taco Bell for dinner.
    I guess I was bored tonight since I actually watched pretty much all of the Miss America contest. I was really rooting for Miss Oklahoma; she was a cutie. Dennis called again, teleconferencing Reid in, and we agreed to meet at work tomorrow at noon. I stayed up late again watching Titus again. This time I watched it for the commentary track.

---

    Of course, now that I needed to bring that Stephen Lynch CD with me I couldn't find it. Luckily I dug it up in time to leave. I couldn't get over how cool the sky looked. It was streaked with blue and white waves, and as I drove to meet Reid and Dennis I had fun imagining that the neighborhood was actually in a huge dome under the ocean. I was going to Dave's with Reid, but Dennis decided to drive separately, so he wrote down directions for us.

Dave's house was pretty easy to get to, plus we were able to follow Dennis. Dave's wife Sue met us in the garage; I hadn't seen Dave in several months and she warned us that he was much thinner. Actually, the thinness made him look young, like a teenager, and I joked that he looked like a Calvin Klein model.
    We fetched the grill out of the basement and began assembling it.

It had actually been a wedding present for them, three years ago, from Sue's place of business. They had planned on putting it together once they moved out of their condo into a home, but that was before Dave's illness changed those plans. So we offered to put it together for them -- or at least Reid and Dennis did, since they already own propane grills.
    Dennis was very impressed with this Sunbeam Grillmaster 540. After we got it together we had Dave come out for the ceremonial Pushing of the Igniter Switch.

Unfortunately nothing happened. Dennis turned on the side burner to see if that might work. Dave pressed the button again, and this time a huge blast of flame shot up in front of me. I guess Dave had been pumping gas those first couple times but there'd been no spark; this time though, all the excess fumes were ignited -- in my face. I felt the blast blow back my hair, but strangely I did not feel any heat. I think we freaked Dave out though, since he turned slowly and went wordlessly back into the house.
    Dennis renewed his efforts, checking the wiring on the ignition switch. The side grill worked, obviously, so Reid helped trace the wiring from there to the main switch. And, then, when Dennis tried the main switch, he gave Reid a shock. Thankfully, that was the last accident in our comedy of errors. Once we got it worked, Dennis volunteered to man the grill (since Dave insisted on staying inside), and we had some good eats for dinner.

The Lions christened their new stadium in a big way with a touchdown return at the opening kick off. I figured we might as well turn the TV off, since it wasn't going to get any better. This proved quite true. (Across the street in Comerica Park, legendary radio announceer Ernie Harwell was broadcasting his last Tiger game.) Reid and I took off at halftime, and I made it home to watch plenty of coverage of the Emmy Awards on E! and NBC.

---

    America: A Tribute to Heroes won a couple awards last night, so I stayed up to watch some of the DVD, which led to my staying up later to watch U2's Live in Boston DVD. I forgot to bring a spare set of rechargeable batteries with me, so when my Rio Volt died out I was stuck listening to radio. There's programming this Saturday so Jeremy was not in. Reid had to leave early to take care of some problem with his driver registration. Thw day was pretty quiet. Back at home, I worked on revamping my homepage. I'd been considering changing its colors, and I figured I might as well do it today since it was the first day of Fall. My colors could change with the seasons. I worked so hard on fine-tuning my color selections that this actually took much of the evening. I also had plenty of Emmy coverage on tape to watch. I'd taped five hours of E!'s pre-show coverage and then two further hours of post-show!

---

    The Redhead commented favorably on my color change, and this reminded me I needed to change my Comments and Archive pages to match the new colors. I got a bunch of Mailer-Daemon errors during the afternoon -- about an e-mail I hadn't even sent! It was tited "Laura's Choice" and evidently some bastard was spoofing my e-mail. The originating IP, as far as I could tell was 209.123.192.170. I looked this up at Spam Cop.net and found the "Laura's Choice" e-mail was already reported. I'm not sure what that meant, or what I could about it, but at least I wasn't alone. I watched The 6th Day at night; it was pretty bad.

---

    Dennis called up asking us some about some facts and figures regarding the encoding system. I spent a while trying to get definite answers out of all our manuals. I couldn't find exactly what he wanted, so I ended up having to call our support staff in New Jersey. At night, I watched Panic Room.

---

    I got Julie Kryk's newsletter and she had some remarkable news. "Julie Kryk is going to appear on VH1's new reality TV show called 'A Night With'. It's going to focus on Julie's performance with U2 in Las Vegas, as well as focus on her life, music career and hopes for the future (set to air sometime in December 2002)." The show would include a concert taped in Windsor on October 8. I doubted I'd make it, but I forwarded the e-mail to Phil in case he could go. I figured one of us should, since we're the guys who made her famous!
    I had trouble accessing some of my e-mail accounts, as well as accessing my Troubled Loner and Bitter Old Man sites. Since they're run by the same company, it appeared their server was done -- just SFG's had been down before. Having gone through this already, I did not freak out; in fact I did nothing, and let the situation correct itself. My sites were back up early in the afternoon.
    I made sure to watch my Wednesday tape of season premieres tonight, once I was done taping Thursday's. I was very impressed with The West Wing. But, even considering my devotion to Julie Bowen, Ed is really getting tiresome.

---

    Fast Food Friday was KFC, which was kind of unfortunate since I'd just gone there yesterday. It was another very quiet day at work. I got my next Who CDs, from their Tinley Park show in Chicago. (I'd ordered this because Roger Daltrey had messed up the words on "Love Reign O'er Me" so they did the whole song again.) I watched my Thursday premieres in the evening. I thought the Friends cliffhanger was one of the dumbest things ever; it could've been settled in two seconds, and it pissed me off that they actually tried to stretch it out into an entire show. Scrubs was as good as always, I skipped Will & Grace as always, the new show Good Morning Miami was crap (and the love interest looks like some kind of humanized Disney creature), and ER was a monster of an episode.

---

    I finally got around to read the contents of a spooky site I'd heard about. The site had plenty of text and it actually took a while to go through it all. As promised, the story was indeed pretty damned creepy. It inspired me to do a little work on my SFG site's own little bit of the supernatural. I'd gotten complaints that my evidence wasn't convincing enough, so I tried to highlight it more by adding an outline to Heather's ghost photo (which actaully was something I'd been meaning to do for quite a while).
    I got Singin' in the Rain on DVD delivered today (a week later than expected), so I spent the afternoon watching it and its extras. I finally changed the colors on my SFG Shoutbox, but I cheated by using an existing CSS template. At night I defragged my C:\ drive. Surprisingly, it had been several months since I'd done that.

---

    I finally got back to working on this diary page. I spent the day writing fifteen more entries, including this one. In the evening, inspired by the Singin' in the Rain DVD, I watched Meet Me in St Louis on laserdisc. I spent the evening sitting around, waiting till midnight, when I'd be able to see the new Two Towers trailer on AOL.
    As it turned out, the official LOTR site itself spilled the beans on the AOL trailer, sharing the link for it so people outside of AOL could see it. This allowed me to download the RealMedia to my hard drive as well. (Unfortunately this was the link to the normal RM file, not the higher quality broadband version.) A lot of people on the TORN discussion board didn't know how to do this, so I uploaded the trailer to my SFG site for sharing. I did not want to make a big deal about this, so I only mentioned it in one of the Comments on my homepage. I also planned on only sharing the file until the freely available QuickTime file was made available the following night. I was sidetracked though when I discovered my Comments no longer worked on my homepage. I had not tried them since upgrading to pMachine 2.2, so I needed to fix this now. No wonder no one had commented on anything last week. It took a while but I finally figured out what I was wrong. I uploaded the missing and needed file, got my Comemnts working, shared The Two Towers trailer link (on my site as well as on TORN), watched the trailer several more times, and finally went to bed.

---

    In the morning I discovered Ain't It Cool had the link to AOL's broadband version now too, as well as an unexpected QuickTime version (but not the high quality QuickTime the official site would be unveiling tonight). I downloaded the broadband RM version now and then uploaded it, silently overwriting last night's version.
    It was disgustingly hot today. It had started getting seasonably cool over the weekend, but we were back in the mid-80s now. I was quickly running out of checks, so I needed to go to the bank before work and get some replacements. I was a bit unsure about this, since the instructions said I had to go to the bank where I'd set up my account. This would be terrbly awkward though since I'd have to drive all the way to Centerline for this. Although there was a bank near where I live there'd also been one near where I worked, so I'd set up the account during my lunch hour. I tried going to the National City bank by me anyway though, just to see if I could plead my case and save me a long drive. As it happened, there was no trouble ordering checks from this branch. I showed them my credit card, I showed them a voided check, the teller typed some stuff on her computer, and I was told I'd get my checks in two weeks.
    It was a pretty quiet day at work. Jeremy was not in today since there was a broadcast on Saturday. I got an e-mail reminding about tomorrow's blood donation which I'd scheduled a while back. I teased my e-mail buddies about how long it had been since our last poker night -- and I got an amazingly quick response. Poker night would be scheduled for this Friday. I discovered the Gibson Research Center had a utility called "XPdite" to check for another lapse in Windows' security. This hole should've been fixed by installing XP's SP-1, which I'd already done. I ran the utility anyway when I got home and was shocked to discover it reported my system was not secure. I went to Windows Update and found some more patches to run. I also ran the "express" install for SP-1, which, strangely, was still listed as an available download even though I'd already run the SP-1 install. I began to question whether I'd successfully installed SP-1 or not, since this new install seemed more effective. (It still did not correct the Outlook and IE and Help and Search icons which Window Blinds had ruined for me.)
    Just like last night I spent the evening waiting for The Two Towers trailer. I wandered over to my Buffett page for the heck of it, and was shocked to discover my weblog was broken. I had completely failed to remember that when I updated my main weblog's files I would need to do its too. I guess that shows you how little I care about my Buffett page now. I did fix the page though. I began to worry when midnight came and the official site's download page did not change. I found out though that the QuickTime download was abvailable from an Apple site instead. And I stayed up way too late watching the trailer over and over again.

---

Next Month
Back to Trouble Loner homepage
To Bitter Old Man site
To SFG World