well, it seems our server is having some troubles lately. the main reason i decided to switch x13 to a commercial server space was so we could get more consistent service and uptime. so much for that. luckily, the web server itself has been operational more often than the rest of the service we're paying for… the FTP has been up and down for the past several days. we're investigating our options.

This past weekend was fairly enjoyable. friday night paul and brian took it upon themselves to "medicate" me in hopes of curing me of the cold i've been fighting the past week. the night before, i went to the "healthy" burrito place (Qdoba, on bardstown road… and well, it's healthier than La Bamba's) where i proceeded to completely soak each bite of the burrito in lovely lovely tabasco in hopes that it would help "burn" the infection right out of me. as you can imagine, by the end of the meal, i was sweating like a pig, with a big grin on my face. but back to Friday… now, for nearly five years, i've had this aversion to whiskey as a result of a bad night with a bottle. couldn't even stomach the smell of the stuff. i've been trying, over the course of the past year or two, to regain my ability to stomach it, since i like(d) it so much more than beer. as far as i'm concerned, beer is piss water–any kind of beer. and, you have to drink so much of it to get any effect, you end up feeling bloated and uncomfortable by the end of the night, which kind of defeats the purpose of getting drunk.

anyway, brian and paul got this idea that they could give me whiskey to fight my cold. they lined up three shots for me. a regular, a kind of regular +, and a double. they expected me to drink this. number 1 went down fine (followed quickly by some mountain dew), number two went down not quite so fine. i stared at number three for a while contemplating the wisdom in shooting versus sipping. i went out on the back porch for a smoke. i decided sipping was about the only thing i could handle, as my gag reflex was fully prepped and ready to go were i to even attempt to shoot the last one. funny thing is, i barely got a buzz. normally, three shots of whiskey would have made me loopy… i'm afraid this may NOT be a good thing.

i won't go into more details of the night (paul & brian were both much worse off than i was, to say the least) but all in all it was a fun night of walking, completely f'ed up, up and down bardstown road (and spending half the time on back roads for reasons of paranoia).

yesterday was a nice day at work. not once, but twice i got an eye-contact/smile/wave/"bye" combo from the cute girl at work. i've been digging on her for months now, but i can't seem to get the nerve up to ask her out. i'm too much of a shy guy, and don't know what to say in those situations. i just know, as soon as i walk up to her, i'm going to feel like a complete moron. a maroon. ah, well. i'll figure it out eventually. oh, and one of the guys at work is threatening to reveal my secret, or force me into a situation. his threat earlier today was to page her over the intercom and use MY number. the fact that i'm a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier than him doesn't seem to dissuade his eagerness for subterfuge.

finally, for those of you who enjoyed the pics of capeboy, here's a couple more now that amiga.org is back up.

unfortunately, i still haven't been able to find a good pic of the cute amiga girl, but if i do, i'll let ya know!

i started writing this big post yesterday about the (seeming) futility of life, but ended up having to scrap it because people here at work kept bringing me stuff to do. funny how i can go most of the day without anything, then from 3:30 – 5:30 stuff always finds its way to me. i'd much rather just HAVE something to do all day, than sit around half the day only to have to rush to fix or finish a couple little piddling jobs at the end.

it's not all that bad though, 'cause today, for the first time in several weeks, i've actually managed to make it through all the blogs in my "blogs" bookmark folder.

well, i hope everyone has been enjoying the new bipolar redesign. and i've gotten word from a couple people already who are interested in contributing to the choose your own bipolar collection. i'm really looking forward to getting that together… if only so i can eventually see which design turns out to be the favorite… i'll admit it, i've become a stats junky. the only problem is, i think this whole idea has postponed my original idea of just putting up screenshots of the winner and runner-up designs so you guys could look at 'em. maybe i'll get a screenshot of sharon's design up… or maybe i'll just devote the time to putting her into the rotation and figuring out the whole browser-cookies-with-php thing.

and my sister is apparently going to be spending the weekend in Florence, Italy, hopefully she'll come back with some fun stories for us.

oh, and brad, if you've still not managed to read the new green arrow, do so. It's pretty kick ass (as if we expected anything different from kevin smith after his astounding run on daredevil).

anyway, that's what i'm going to call a post for the day, unless something really exciting happens and i just have to write about it (don't hold your breath.) oh, and maybe i'll get back to that futility post in the future, if i feel there's really a point to it all.

welcome one and all to the official unveiling of bipolar 2.0. what you see before you is the glorious work of your friendly neighborhood (if your neighborhood happens to be hong kong) jessie hung (whose own site seems to be in a state of flux right now…), and also with some judicious scripting magic performed by yours truly.

a thousand thank-you's to jessie for this winning entry, and also to our other contestants (notably the greatest girl in the world), whose entries you'll also be seeing in the hopefully near future. as soon as jessie picks her favorite show from transmission3000, we'll be sending out her prize.

my task the past few days has been teaching myself rudimentary php scripting, and modularizing bipolar to the point where we'll soon be able to offer the option of selecting your favorite look. so, for those staunch goth/metal kids out there who loved the black & skulls theme of the old bipolar, you'll be able to choose that as your standard interface. notice, of course, that i'm saying "soon" and not really giving a specific date. in case you hadn't noticed by now, i'm a bit of a lazy bastard, and since i'm the one that has to do all this work, i'd rather not put myself under too much pressure.

also, due to this choose your favorite bipolar idea we're working on, if anyone still wants to get in on the bipolar redesign act, just whip something up and send it our way. we'd love to eventually have several hundred different designs available, if you guys think you're good enough.

anyway, enjoy the new design, and tell us what you think, or write jessie personally and tell her exactly how much ass her design kicks.

… glory be! the bipolar boy's actually got a little follow-through! …

so, i had this conversation with my mother earlier this week, and we ended up talking about my smoking habit. basically, her telling me (of course) that i should quit because it's not good yada yada yada… which i already know. and believe me, i often think of quitting for all those reasons, but i just don't want to right now, and it's that simple. well, of course, it's not that simple, but y'know.

well, i ended up trying to explain to my mother why i smoke, which forced me, in the process to admit to myself why i smoke. or at least to attempt to figure out why i continue to do this to myself. mainly what i came up with is that i know it's bad for me, unhealthy, but since i'm not happy with my physical being right now — i'm lazy, i'm getting fat, tired all the time, always oversleeping. let's just say that psychologically i'm not in a good place, because i'm neglecting my physical self, and i'm neglecting my physical self because i'm not, psychologically, in a good place. basically, what i told her was that i didn't feel like i deserved to treat my body any better than i am.

but don't you worry 'bout me, i'm just having a little personal crisis here, and i'm sure, like puffin, it'll all get a little better when the weather gets a little warmer.

and yeah, jessie won the big contest, so we'll be putting her bipolar redesign up hopefully by mid-next week… assuming i can find any free time in which to work on all the little things that need to be done. but, it looks great, and you'll all be pleasantly surprised once we've done away with all this black and these skulls. i know i will be.

my sister is still kicking my ass at this posting thing, and thankfully she's had a few moments to write some longer posts in the past few days. it's nice to be able to keep up with her life this way since she seems to be able to write email to my roommates and my friends but not to me. sorry, just had to get in a little dig there sis. i know, i haven't written you either… i'm a bad brother.

well, there are, perhaps, other things i could say… but i won't. it's late and i'm tired. good night all.

wow, is it that time already? time for the weekly post from matt? oh, how far i've fallen.

thankfully though, it's nice to see that my sister, my best friend, my partner ( over there my favorite girl are all better at this than i am. despite my sister's newly overbearing workload (and the fact that she doesn't have access to the net from her home in the suburbs of Paris) she still manages to post on a regular basis. paul, despite his new computer and subsequent addictions to OmniComics and instant messaging, is still managing to post almost every day. brian, despite numerous hours doing those things that brian does, posts practically every day. and sharon (who's name i can now use, with her blessing, since she's decided to forgo the whole anonymity/hiding behind a persona thing), despite her apparently constant need to change her site's design and where she's hosting it, is also posting on a more frequent basis than yours truly. and she's also baking me brownies. did i mention that i'm still completely in love with this girl?

but it seems like, between busy times at work, fights with webcams, system wipes & reinstalls, and extended hold-out-until-my-eyes-dry-up-from-lack-of-sleep battles with House Ordos and House Harkonnen, i should be able to find some time, somewhere, to update this blog. it seems like it, but it's apparently not true. "we try to resist keptin… he put creatures… into our bodies… makes us do tings." but not "tings" like updating a blog.

i'm not exactly sure why that star trek reference is relevant, but i've not made one in years, and somehow felt it would fit. so sue me.

anyway, so i did finally manage to reinstall windows on my machine at home, get it back up and running, and "glory be!" the webcam seems like it may actually work correctly this time. i hope. of course, i forgot to take it to work with me today, so you don't get to see my practically immobile self sitting in my cube for 8 hours today.

and finally, today is the official last day of the redesign bipolar before we do! contest, so if you're working on an entry, you've got until 12:00 AM tonight to get it in. we've got a couple entries so far, and they're both pretty durn good. i can't wait to show 'em to ya. i think we'll have a few bugs to work out before we get the things up (after judging is done), but barring unforeseen circumstances or acts of god, we should at least have screenshots of all the entries up by the "no later than" winner announcement deadline of 9:00 PM on Monday evening.

12:00 AM tonight, Friday night, the 23rd. remember. and if you've got an idea but haven't even started on it yet, no problem, we're accepting any entry, from the most fully developed online bipolar "portal" site to the most hastily-drawn badly-scanned concept sketch you can come up with. so do it. 12:00 AM. that's midnight. Friday. don't forget. 12:00AM. twelve-o'clock. when the big hand and the little hand are both pointing up (for you analog people) and the sky is dark. that's the deadline.

well, this past week has been a big pile of crap. i still haven't managed to get my sleeping schedule into any kind of reasonable order, and my entire life seems to have been suffering. i can barely stay awake at work, my productivity level has dropped considerably, and i've just generally felt horrible the entire time. why do i always do this to myself… i mean, it's not like i've never treated myself this way before. it's cyclical… i'll do well for a while but always eventually end up running myself into the ground.

to top it all off, brian bought Dune 2000 last weekend in hopes that he & paul & i could play some networked games, and the damn thing has sucked out my will to live. for the last four nights, this game has contributed significantly to my loss of sleep. combined with the fact that the nice new web cam i bought has been fucking up since Tuesday night and i've been spending several hours almost every day since trying to get it working again. hopefully i'll be able to spend some time on it tomorrow so that you can all watch the exciting events a casa de bipolar.

speaking self-referentially of bipolar as i was, i should now point out that we now have our first official entry into the redesign bipolar before we do! contest. i've sworn to both paul and brian that our first contestant (who's apparently in the process of moving her site again) will not get preferential treatment from me. but it looks really nice, so anybody else planning to enter better have their shit together.

well, helped out paul a little more today, and it seems like he's well on his way to becoming a computer geek just like brian & i. he's catching on to some of the more esoteric aspects of owning your own computer, like file/directory organization, and desktop maintenance. he's a quick learner, that one.

while paul was playing around some more, checking out the napster thing and installing some more software, i headed out to compusa again today and took back that piece of crap Kensington web cam. (really, though, the Kensington had much better picture quality, it just wanted to crash my machine). the logitech (same exact type brian has) hasn't crashed my machine once, so i guess i'll take the quality hit. so, bipolar cam3000 is now truly bipolar. there are two separate portables right now, but we're working on a dual portable (most likely with a smaller image size) as well… it's not going to be that hard, we're just lazy.

speaking of being lazy. don't forget about our contest!

as in, "i reckon that'll work…"

of course, if you were really observant yesterday, you'd have noticed that i made the last post around 3:30 AM… so, despite the fact that i was almost falling asleep at the wheel on the drive home from work on Friday, i ended up staying up until almost 4 in the morning.

it's been a pleasant day today. got up around 1 or 1:30, went out for lunch at KFC, then ran over to compusa primarily for kicks, but also so i could buy this year's version of TurboTax deluxe, and so Paul could debate buying a new computer. Well, he didn't, but i did manage to get my software, and picked up a new webcam for 30 bucks, to boot. Though Paul didn't get his computer, he did get approved for a credit card thing, so (looking at it one way) he walked out of the store $2400 dollars richer than when he'd walked in.

we came back to the house and i started trying to set up the web cam. it gave me some weird problems trying to install and update the software, but i finally got it working. then, i tried to change a simple little option in the controls of the software, and it locked up. in fact, it pretty much locked up the computer every time i stopped using the camera. so, when i'd exit the program, it'd lock up the computer. i even tried a different webcam program, and it had the same problem. so, needless to say, i'm taking the damn thing back tomorrow and trying a different cam. (if you're interested, the first and only pic that actually made it onto the site is here

while i was busy fighting with the webcam, paul was apparently busy convincing himself to buy the computer he'd looked at. he and brian went back out to compusa, and about an hour and a half later, the puffin came back with a kick ass new Sony VAIO. his new machine kicks brian's and my machine's combined ass. after setting it up, we debated for an hour or so (as we played around with it) about whether or not we wanted to strip that Windows ME crap off there and put on some Win2k. We finally decided that we couldn't stand the thought of a machine actually running ME on a regular basis, so we ended up reformatting the hard drive. and since then (almost 6 in the evening) brian and paul and i have been diligently working to bring the new beast to full working order. i've had fun, but now, it's time for bed.

oh, and don't forget the contest.

argh. thank god the weekend's finally here. i've been so damned tired all day today. i could barely keep my eyes open at work, and i think i was grumpy and uncooperative occasionally. sleeping 4 – 6 hours a night just doesn't cut it, and i seem to do the same damn thing every week–get home from work, and have the best intentions of getting into bed and asleep at a decent time. but, like i said in my last post, i have been making great strides with personal projects, so i guess it's not as bad as it could be. though really, i'd be much more accepting of my inability to get to sleep at a decent hour if a female was involved…

which, at least on thursday night, was almost true. i got a call from mi amor and we had a wonderful long conversation. it was so nice to hear her voice again… she and i have been away from each other for many many years, after i went off to college, then she went to college in a different state, and now… she's moved all the way over to the (as brian likes to say) "left coast." needless to say, it's a rare treat for me to actually get to talk to her. and the sound of her voice and her laughter still resonates within and lifts my spirits.

my sister has been so busy with her new duties at work that we've hardly had a chance to IM each other over the past couple weeks, and she's apparently had very little time to update multiliterate as well. i'd kind of gotten used to being able to talk to my sister across the ocean, and to read about her interesting experiences in the city of love, i really miss it now. well, here's hoping that she hits her stride with the new job and manages to wrangle some time to update.

in contest news, paul has answered the "redesign bipolar before we do" challenge. he hasn't told us his ideas yet, but i'm sure they're going to be good. but don't let that sway you from entering… paul may be one of my bestest friends in the world, but that don't mean his redesign's going to get any slack from me come judgement day. and we're even talking about the possibility of setting up multiple versions of bipolar… if we get enough good designs, we may eventually set it up so you can choose your favorite. rest assured, we will declare a winner even if we have to drag a wino in off the streets to break a tie.
so… enter the contest damn you.

oh, and i've added a "judging" section and a parenthetical statement to "rule" #1 on the contest page. if you're planning to enter, or are already working on a design, you might want to check the additions… they aren't changes, just clarifications.

at least i can say this for myself… at least i'm consistently inconsistent.

so, it seems like quite a bit has happened since the last time i posted, but then, nothing's really changed. like brian mentioned, i finally managed to finish watching that dune mini-series that i started watching, what… 3 months ago? watched the second episode on Monday, and the third yesterday (which kind of forced brian into watching it, since he was off work yesterday). overall, i thought the series was really well done. there were some instances of really shitty acting, but the primary characters were all done really well. i thought the second episode was the best of the three, by far. if you've not watched it, be sure to do so if the sci-fi channel reruns it.

i also finally managed to finish cataloguing my comics collection, so that's one huge project pretty-much out of the way. the next step is to find coverscans for all the issues i have, so if anyone knows of any out-of-the-way comics coverscans caches on this 'ol net, .

i cleaned my room, did my laundry, balanced my checkbook, caught up on some overdue email… altogether, it's been a pretty productive week for me. and i'm feeling pretty good about things right now.

and today, apparently, i've been productive and prolific, as not only am i writing this post (finally) i also wrote two rather lengthy posts to a discussion thread on an Amiga site that i frequent (which is something i never do). here's hoping today's trend calms down and spreads out to at least one post here per day… well, it's a thought anyway.

oh, and i know brian's kind of mentioned this, but just in case you hadn't noticed, bipolar has already moved to it's new home. note the swanky new address in the address bar up top…