Wednesday, December 31, 2003


Incidentally...

Today is my *personal* Bloggerversary. That is, today is the anniversary of the day when I personally became a Blogger- rhblog was born in March. I as a Blogger, came to be on New Year's Eve 2001. So Happy Bloggerversary to me!

LENO'S ON!!!! <everyone races for tv>

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!
posted @ 11:36 PM  |   0 comments  |  


Making good on my threat stage 1

Stage 1 of my threat of making a .com is taking all of my blogs (excuse me, neglected brain dumps) that are scattered all over creation, and combining them with my oversized bookmarks files that shoulda been condensed or at least done something about ages ago and now all done something about. With about 90 minutes to go (and had the computer disaster not happened a whole lot of this woulda been done sooner- GAH!), a good bit of these blogs are getting moved around. I'm not officially linking to them just yet, I'm just making a checklist here for right now partly because I'll be right here at Blogger for a good long time and yes eventually these links will go active in one way, shape or form, so this *is* a sort of "preview" I guess even if it's just in name only. :-/ Whatever.


V = lyrical = iblog (from ablogspot) = done
G = B/Dblog (from ablogspot) = done

I = picture = btik (next)
[update 11pm] done

P = kpax = wait for it
Y = spnas = wait for it

More later...
posted @ 10:37 PM  |   0 comments  |  

Sunday, December 28, 2003


BTW, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

<puts down big heavy book and waves>

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!!! Ours was nice and quiet- just the way we like it so I can't complain. Not that I'd want to, but then again, I already did the complaining (scroll down to the part about the ornament not shutting up and only the part about it not shutting up and thus so my having to put it back). The ONLY bad news I got for Christmas is that when I tried to email DG, the email bounced back. :.-( I hope our dear pal is alright! <everyone sends good vibes DG's way>

As to this big heavy book here... <attempts to hold book up to monitor, fails miserably and has to nurse the keyboard for several minutes>

We bought that 2-volume compleat everything-that-was-ever-published-plus-more Far Side set way back in late summer and had it in my closet all saved up for Christmas. Boy was Dad surprised!!! :-D So naturally we've been more than a bit busy reading it just now. That and trying to get the computer back up to speed after that little speed bump called a worm. Soon, I get to start redownloading all of my fonts. Oh goodie! <grabs book> MINE!
posted @ 7:57 PM  |   0 comments  |  


MINE!!!

I'm DEFINATELY going to go thru with my threat to go BlogSpot Pro here at rhblog in late Jan/early Feb of this coming year and one thing I'm gonna do is go nuts on the Fanlistings so expect a mahem onslaught of those annoyingly little boxes and stuff. :-D I've already been going thru thefanlistings.org and taking notes on which ones I wanna sign up for later on...but you knew there HAD to be that ONE I just HAD to sign up for NOW. Guess which one...Chris! ;-D
posted @ 7:37 PM  |   0 comments  |  

Tuesday, December 23, 2003


Pro Coder

I can't get paid for it, but I got the bestest boss- my Dad! After years of dropped hints and heckling and various other things, Dad has finally been convinced to get a website. So much so, that he's now been getting on MY case as to "when can we get started on it?" He's excited about it! YAY! Problem: the computer disaster.

We had a BEAUTIFUL site template built and after all that 8 hour hoopla we went thru trying to get that graphic done right- why oh why did I not make a "test" folder on the server so we could upload it and keep it? And why did I not keep the test folder or at least upload to one on my server? I was redoing my own site because I want to turn this blog here into a domain using Blogger's Blog*Spot Pro/Domain option next month. I'll have to switch stuff around but that was my intent.

Thankfully, because everything was SO fresh in my mind and the backups up until April were so good, rebuilding what I'd done for my site is REALLY easy. Redoing what I did for Dad will be a tiny bit harder because of the color issue, but also still easily redoable.

But the point is, I'm coding a professional website. I'm pro. Cool. No pressure (yoikes!). <others break out the large iron and put it on RH's head>
posted @ 7:44 PM  |   0 comments  |  


1 Partridge...2 Pear Trees

We have 3 Christmas tress, but we don't use one of them anymore cuz it's too big. We bought (excuse me, *I* bought) the third (excuse me, *second*) one just this year. So both trees are mine. Yes they're both fake and they're both about 4 feet tall. One's green and the other one's a white fiber optic tree with 3 color disk options. In my opinion, when we move out of this house, we should get a place where we can keep the third tree (and not sell it like we've been threatening to do) so we can put our older ornaments on that one cuz I like to put MY ornaments (read: Hallmark) on my green one, and my snowflake/angels and what would've been Christman symbols on my fiber optic tree. Boy I wish I had had the time to make the Christman symbols this year!!!

Anyway, the point of this post is not to talk about the tress this year (but we did see that Extreme Christmas special this year that featured the Christmas House in the Bronx and that other house with the 20-50 or so Christmas trees- I'm NEVER doing 50!) but one particular ornament which I got last year: the Death Star ornament. <everyone snickers>

Okay, this year, one of my radio stations, B106.7 (I need to add links to those on the sides here) is doing nothing but Christmas songs from the 20th to the 26th. Solid. Nothing else. So I'm playing some of my own (I played the radio when Mom got home but I'm ahead of myself here) which are religious songs while I'm getting the actual trees up...and of course the lights. I have 3 ornaments that plug into the lights and I leave them plugged into the lights all year so I don't have to futz with them. I keep their boxes tho cuz the DS one has "instructions" and these being "keepsakes" and stuff well...anyways. We all know about "the lights" right? I mean, one of my favorite "Christmas" tunes is the 12 Pains of Christmas by Bob Rivers. I wait ALL YEAR for that song- I'm serious and yes the lights are my fav part of the song! Why? Cuz I am NOT STUPID ABOUT MY LIGHTS! I pack 'em smart so they don't get tangled up. Much. I put ties around them so they stay put and I put 'em in plastic Ziploc bags and this year I went and labeled stuff. I went nuts last year on the bags and went nuts on the labeling this year.

So there are 3 things special about the lights this year. First off: we have 3 strings of lights. Actually we have 2 kinds of lights but we don't use the biggie bulbs anymore and in fact I think we've ditched those. We used to put those on the real trees back when we had real trees up in DC. Anyway, we have 3 strings of lights. We haven't used the 3rd string in years because when we bought (I can't be sure if I bought that tree too...I just know it's my tree) the green tree it only needed 2 strings so there's been this one string in the bag doing nothing for what, I dunno maybe 3 years now? Meanwhile, the 2nd string has had the second half of it dead for the past 3 or 4 years. Yeah, "one light goes out, they all go out" kind of thing only half of them went out and a couple of them need a lot of coaxing and prodding in order to work just long enough while your finger is there but other than that, they don't affect the rest of the strand. The important thing is, one strand HAS to go on top, and one strand HAS to go on the bottom, and the second half of the second strand HAS to be the excess that goes from the tree all the way to the outlet. Got the picture? Good.

Now back to the ornament for a moment. No wait, I have to do this out of order, skip the ornament for a moment, back to the strands: I have a pet peeve about strings of lights, especially ours. I don't know if this is universal, but our lights only have 4 colors on them and they're patterened. Orange (amber) - Red - Green - Blue - repeat ad nauseum. This means that if you wrap them around the tree in a certain way, you're gonna either get the same colors repeating themselves in stripes going straight down OR diagonally like a barber shop's peppermint stick thingy. I HATE THAT!!!! If it had 12 or so colors and where COMPLETELY randomized (the the 3rd disk for the fiber optic tree- ooooooh I love that disk!) I wouldn't be complaining! But NO we've got 4 PATTERNED colors. Which means we (that is, *I* since *I* am now COMPLETELY 100% in charge of the trees- they're mine all mine now, cuz after all, they *are* *my* trees!) have to string them juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust right.

I stink at stringing lights. My aunt Cathi however can string lights. She's a natural at it. I don't how she does it. You can't see the strings at all. The wires don't suffer and even tho the colors are patterened on hers (okay her mother's- well the tree is anyway) you can't tell it when you step back or look up too close. My aunt Cathi can string lights. I have to suffer and redo stuff and futz and fuss and practically do brain surgery to make extra damn sure I have the colors exactly where I do and don't want them AND make sure that they STAY THE FREAKING PUT! I'm scared the tree will catch fire (yes the plastic tree)- that said I don't like having to bend the wires of the stringed lights. AND I don't like the fact that when you take the trees up and down you have to bend each and every little single branch back and forth all the time. Folks, this is how things break and fall off. I don't like it when things break and fall off. Glue is not a fix-all and duct take looks like shit on a tree so I don't even try that. And now that I've got a fiber optic tree to boot (yes I've had stuff break off of the green tree already and no I don't plan on losing anything off of my brand new beautiful gorgeous white & colorful tree at this time) I've got to worry about fiber fillaments in addition to the wires and plastic branches. Ugh.

So now I'm threading wires, looping cords, bending branches, getting aggrivated over the fact that I forgot which was the bottom strand cuz I was so distracted that I forgot to plug the thing in while I was stringing so now I have to go back and REDO IT *after* I label it, etc etc etc and to top it all off, I've got an ornament that won't shut the fuck up!

So I'm listening to Michael W. Smith, Jars of Clay, and Amy Grant while stringing my tree and almost the whole time there's there near-constant "As you can see my young apprentice ~*::CsSSSZZZSSSSST!~* As you can see my young appren- <::crash::> As you- ~*::CsSSSZZZSSSSST!~* FIRE AT WILL COMMANDER!!!!" So I turn the music up. Eventually I get a little sick of hearing the mayhem amidst the sacred cuz after a while a little something started creeping into my head and it went something like this:

<sigs etc enter room to decorate .sigerette tree>

<.sigerette tree plays CAGZ while they decorate>

It's Christmas at ground zero "As you can see my young apprentice..." there's music "...your friends..."in the air. "...have failed..." The sleigh "...Now witness..." bells are ringin' and "the firepower of ..." the carolers are singin' while "...this fully armed..." the air raid sirens blare. "...and operational... It's Christmas at ground zero" "...battlestation!" the button "FIRE AT WILL COMMANDER!" has been pressed. <!!CRASH!!> The radio just let us know that this is not a test. ~*::!!CsSSSZZZSSSSST!!::~*


<Ianpuff:>"Now THAT'S an Endorance test! ;-)"

Sounds great here on the blog, but when you're trying to sing something sacred and profound, it gets a little...well...I put it back in the box. And then I made a map of all the Hallmark boxes in the filebox of Hallmark boxes so that we can put all the boxes back in the box in the right places so that there's plenty of room for future boxes amoungst the boxes in the box because there are so many boxes that the box is in danger of becoming full if you don't put the boxes back in the box the right way.

So after I got the jolly grey singing profound light bulb of doomsday out of the way (the X-Wing and Millennium Falcon got to stay), I needed to replace said socket with another bulb(*)- prefereably the one I originally took out. So I looked back into the old bag of replacement bulbs and de-socketed bulbs still in their socket shorts (or whatever those plastic thingies are). Further on down the first string's line, right at where it connects to the second string actually, the colors go out of whack by going out of their pattern. Drives me nuts cuz it ends up going something like orange-red-orange-plug-orange-red-etc. Looks like hell on the tree. About 2 tiers (stringwise around the tree) down, there was a little something going on where the string went wacko again and there was a green missing. It's been that way for a few years and I'd decided I'd had enough. So I took that extra baggie and went looking for the missing green. Wasn't there. So I went to the end of the second string- the end that was plugged into the socket. There are 3 missing bulbs at that end and no the colors aren't right down there either. But it had a green bulb. So I did the old switcheroo. I put the green bulb where it belonged. I put the extra bulb down at the end and put some extras from the bag into the open sockets down at the bottom. I thought to myself "considering how long this half's been out, this is probably moot. This thing ain't a-gonna light up." So I looked away for a split second and when I looked back up, of course, naturally- IT HAD LIT UP!!!! OH JOY!!!!!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YIPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <everybody's happy and celebrates> <.sigerette tree looks so cute with all its virtual decorations>

Do you know what this means!?!?! It means that we don't have to rush the last strand's worth of lights on the tree this year! That's right! We get to break out the THIRD STRAND!!!! YAY!!!! Of course we must keep with our tradition, so naturally the second half of the third strand doesn't work, but hey, IT WORKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WE HAVE A LIGHTED TREE!!!!!!!!!!! And the ornament shut up! (It's also still in the box, at the bottom of the box full of boxes.)

Let there be light indeed! :-) And no they don't blink. :-)

Now, as for these faux candle lights we bought last year which we intended to put in the widows...they plug into the sockets and the sockets are too far away from the windows, are too bright and only light up when you turn off the lights. In other words, they won't work here. Oh well.

(*) <Ewanpuff:>"How many Death Stars does it take to change a light bulb?"
<Seanpuff:>"Well considering how there were only two of them..."
posted @ 7:06 PM  |   0 comments  |  


System Of A Down

More like down, out, away, deadlocked, and damn depressed.

I once heard that there are 2 kinds of motorcyclists: those who have crashed and those who will crash. Consider myself crashed. I had my first MAJORASS computer disaster this month.

When I first bought this new box back in April, I suffered a bit of "new box depression" afterwards wherein I did very little with my brand new box. It was like I had my thrill of the chase for the ultimate computer and now that I had most of it, I wasn't really all that interested. Indeed, I all but vanished from portions of the internet for a long time. Now, I realize there was a VERY GOOD REASON that I did so little on my box because as I speak, 9 months of what seems like very little is now locked away on a hard disk that is now impossible to access no thanks to some fuckhead's idea of a good time. Probably a worm that my shit "anti-virus" program didn't catch. It contains information that cannot be restored because my shit cd-rw software didn't tell me how to properly back up stuff so the only thing I'd been able to put onto cdr was music (before I went and deleted all of it).

So as of right now, 9 months worth of emails, newsgroups, websites, fonts, images, bookmarks, essays, and a few other goodies are locked away forever on a harddisk. I could send it off to a data restoration place but at $70/MG and this being a 30GB harddrive, well...I'm hoping for a miracle here. I can't in good conscious delieberately delete 9 months of information I know is intact and still in existence (I know because we took it to trusted friends and tech geniuouses who tried to access the disk and couldn't).

So just WTF happened here Houston? Well lemme tell ya. It was late at night and I couldn't goto sleep so I decided to get up and do some computer work. Lately, I'd been adding more fonts and trying to consolidate some of my older cdrs which weren't all that full to see if I could combine them with related stuffs on the harddisk so I could put 'em all together on their own cdrs and be all nice and full and make sense and stuff and leave lots of empty space on my drive for more cool stuff. In other words, spring cleaning in the winter. Sounds like a good idea right? I was doing that and at the same time, and at this particular moment in question, I was REALLY wanting and trying to yet-a-freaking-gain to see if I could get this shit cdrw software to show me how to back up stuff on my system so I could update security patches and stuff and then also get back to doing my Dad's website (yeah you heard me right- Dad's website!!!).

So I get up and my shit "anti-virus" software (PC-cilin) is scanning and taking FOREVER to scan this one file. I've stopped these things before when they're hung up both because they're hung up and because I wanna do some freakin' work and had no problem whatsoever. I'm also able to press ctrl+alt+del in both WinNT and WinXP and get the Task Manager if there's a problem. So I stop PC-cilin to get some work done and it starts showing signs of freezing. Shit. So I c+a+d to get rid of it so I can get back to work. Things start shutting down and giving me error/send report/end program and then Windows starts showing signs of wanting to shut down. There's only one thing to do. Push the button and pull the plug. Consider the button pressed. Nothing happens. Press button again. Nothing happens. Pull plug. Okay. Turn computer back on.

OOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh it makes you just wanna shoot somebody. And I'm not a violent person. Our computer genious friends tell me that it was nothing I did, but that it was most likely a virus cuz my drive (which I had partitioned -by these same guys and apparently you really shouldn't partition in WinXP, shit os...) got completely full on 2 of my 3 partitions. No access. Can't even run their Norton (it's Norton's fault that I had to upgrade to XP and then couldn't even get Norton afterwards in the first place). Looks like it's a worm's fault. Can you say "capital punishment"?

The good news is that the great grand box migration (that is, WinNT to WinXP backup & transfer operation) was SO thourough and successful despite all the hooplah that absolutely everything up until April 2nd of this year (with the exception of some stuff that didn't make it from a minor disaster from 95/98 due to not knowing *how* to back up stuff) was COMPLETELY backed up so nothing lost there. Just the past 9 months of *THE* MOST CRUCIAL STUFF I HAVE!!!!

Fucking hackers. Fucking worm. Fucking PC-cilin. Fucking Nero. Fucking XP.

BLESSED FULL WARRANTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Didn't have to pay a thing!

Now if you'll excuse me, I've still got a few more things to install and then I've got some blogposts I need to write which I've needed to do for some time. :-)
posted @ 5:52 PM  |   0 comments  |