ok. so it was a moderately interesting weekend. er, well, saturday wasn't much to write home about, but sunday was a lot of fun. i got up (gasp!) early and ran out to the grocery to pick up a few things. then, after waiting about an hour and a half for the dishes to wash, i began preparing a breakfast (lunch, at this point, really) that would have made Shamu cry. oh, it was a bountiful feast… homemade venison sausage (thanks dad!), omelets with ham & cheese, crispy strips of bacon, and biscuits (thanks Pillsbury!). why do i think you will find this interesting? i dunno. but i was really proud of myself for pulling all of this off, and wanted to toot my own horn a bit. it's funny, i don't do it very often, but i really enjoy cooking. paul's dubbed me Iron Chef Kentucky for my skill on the grill (though i'm sure 90% of the grillmasters out there could put me to shame…), and i think everbody just enjoys watching me work the grill because i enjoy it so much. likewise with the breakfast thing. i had a blast getting everything together, and was thrilled that it all turned out so good (granted, i forgot the biscuits in the oven and they got a bit too brown and crispy on the outside…).

then, of course, last night me & the boys picked up a boxed thanksgiving dinner from K-Roger, heated that sucker up, and went to town. it was actually really damned good. of course, we were all expecting pre-cooked, piping hot from the box dinner, so the hour & a half we had to wait while the food was (re)cooking really stoked our appetites. now, of course, we've got probably 3 or 4 pounds of turkey meat in the fridge that we'll have to finish off in the next few days.

basically the past two days were the "days of gluttony" for us, but do you hear me complaining? hells no.

now, i'm getting ready to head to virginia tomorrow on an alteration of the traditional family thanksgiving. normally, my folks stay in their hometown and have a big breakfast social party thing they throw every year. then we usually have thanksgiving dinner there at home. this year, they've decided to go spend the week at my grandma's house. normally, we go to grandma's for christmas, so this year it'll be a bonus to get to visit her twice.

on to another topic… if you guys have been by today or yesterday during the day… you may or may not have noticed a slight difference up there where the pics of brian & i are… i made a neat little tweak to the site over the weekend that provides a webcam activity indicator of sorts. i've been wanting to implement this for a while now, and finally got around to it. basically, if one of the webcams is active, the picture changes color a bit, and the rollover tooltip changes to "webcam active!" it really was a little simple tweak with the help of php, but since i'm in a my-own-horn-tooting mood, i figured i'd tell ya about it. of course, since brian's home computer is kaput, his cam won't be on much until he gets a new one, and since i'm heading out of town, mine won't be on again until next week. not that anyone would really want to see my silly ass sitting and staring at a computer for 8 hours, looking bored. but it's there anyway.

well, happy thanksgiving, folks.

while i'm here at work thinking about it, i should probably write the post i've been promising my co-worker i'd write for several months.

mainly it's to point you guys to his site www.ae4rv.com so you can go get your fun on. geoff has several nice flash games that he's been working on. the big daddy of his games is his (nearly) world-famous version of asteroids/lunar lander called Flashteroids. it's a pretty complex little game that can be quite challenging. he's started liscensing the asteroids portion of the game for a few sites, and even has a custom version (called "Hendroids") up on the phil hendrie show's funhouse.

really though, as far as i'm concerned, the nuclear powerplant simulator is his best game so far… and it's not even finished. but he's threatening to one-up himself with his newest game, the flash based WWII Pacific Theater war game.

he's also got a nice High Frequency Radio Propagation Primer (primarily for HAM Ops, but an instructional piece for the layman as well…) which will soon be featured at the Swiss Museum of Transportation and Communication. (and probably on their site, as well, assuming they can get it working properly.)

anyway, check it out, play some games and enjoy yourself.

well, it's time for my bi-weekly post to what was once my daily obsession…

i've been so disconnected for a while… between a few months of hell at work (which are now thankfully starting to slow down and normalize) and the "free time" that seems to be slowly dwindling away from me through some unknown time vortex, i've barely been on my computer in a communicative, productive capacity at all in the last several weeks anyway.

of course, i spend 8 hours a day on the computer, and perhaps that's part of it… perhaps i'm finally starting to burn out on the whole computer thing. i really don't think that's the case, but i have to entertain it as at least a possibility.

really, though, after the events of Sept. 11th, the aftermath of that, and between buying DVDs, PS2 games, and not one, but two games for my PC, i've basically been doing the late 90's teenager thing of vegging in front of the boob tube or drooling in front of a 3D computer gamespace.

maybe i'm due… i never got into this stuff all that much in the past… was never much of a computer game player. of course, occasionally a couple days of my life would get sucked out by the PS1 at a time, but that was usually a rare every three or four months thing. it's just been happening a bit more often lately.

but yeah, so, we saw the series premier of Enterprise last wednesday, and it was pretty damn good. except that opening theme music which was utter crap. in fact, it was worse than that. the opening theme to Enterprise is so bad that i can't even conceive of the words to adequately describe level of disgust i feel for it.

and i bought the V mini-series DVD a weekend or so ago. it was just as good though even more cheesy than i remembered. the scene where the alien 2nd in command swallows the gerbil, or whatever it was, was just laughable.

and i've been having weird dreams lately. the first i remember was one i think i had the night i watched the first half of the V DVD, which apparently was my mind combining the World Trade Center attacks with the V story. we were up in a tall building some 200 stories up, and all of a sudden the building just leans over and falls to the ground. we're alive but scrambling to get out and to find people with our high-tech devices. we eventually make it to a house, but it's quickly taken over by what is apparently a human militia group and we're kicked out on our ass.

not sure what that all means, i guess it was just my subconscious trying to come to grips.

other dreams have come and gone, but this morning it was dreams about my ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend (previously dubbed "idiot-jerk") who were being nice if not overtly friendly towards me. i'm guessing that this dream was trying to tell me to forgive "idiot-jerk" and get over it and on with my life or whatever, but i don't think i can do that. forgive him, i mean. i think i'd like to hold onto that for a little while longer.

otherwise, i've been happy and healthy (a little too healthy if my expanding waist-line is any indication…) and apparently never without something to do.

and now, it's time for me to get out of here a little early so the systems guys can rape my machine and infect it with the Visual Studio .NET virus. apparently, i'm going to have to learn to deal with even more Microsoft crap. bah. bill gates, i spit on thee.

i really needed this. it's been an incredibly relaxing weekend so far, and there's one more whole day to go! hell, maybe i should call in on Tuesday and just make this a mini-vacation… nah. i got too much work to do.

anyway, friday after i (finally) got home from work, i spent a couple hours hanging out on the couch watching t.v. with our kitties. i hardly ever actually just veg. out in front of the tv anymore, and usually only if someone's already watching something interesting that draws me in. i've generally just gotten so fed up with the amount of total crap the networks attempt to pass off as entertainment, that i've just given up on watching tv altogether. but you know, at times it's just like watching a train wreck. you're sitting there, half zoned-out, flipping through channels trying to see if the next channel could even possibly be worse. usually, it is.

what i would love to see would be a group of really good, really challenging directors and writers join forces with a talented group of actors and start their own cable tv network. can you imagine scorcese, david lynch, david fincher, and others of their ilk creating all the programming for a network? sitcoms, drama, soaps, news programs… man, i would pay $50 a month just for that one channel. "screw digital cable, just hook me up with that one channel please. in fact, here's an extra $40 a month if i can get the 'no commercials' version of the channel."

of course, then you'd never get me away from the tv, i'd gain about 300 pounds in two weeks, and i would die from a massive brain hemmorhage from trying to figure out what the fuck was going on in each show.

but anyway, it's been a nice weekend. had our normal sunday band practice, which was interrupted by jim's in-laws coming in with his wife's grandmother in tow. we felt like we had to turn down the volume quite a bit lest we severely offend not only her elderly ears, but her elderly moral sensibilities as well. playing our songs just isn't quite as fun when we can't crank it up. but it was a good evening anyway, paul & neil showed up shortly after jim's in-laws, and we continued to drink and play music until we just couldn't play (or drink, since the beer was all gone) any more. we then moved the mob back to our house, where neil soundly whipped all our asses in a drunken game of trivial pursuit.

tomorrow, i think i'm going to pick up the new printer i've been wanting, buy a laser pointer to drive the cats absolutely insane, and do some more serious relaxing.

in other news… in case you hadn't noticed, something that our man at themes to work properly once again… so, if you already had a themes cookie set, you should now be seeing your chosen theme again (and, would have noticed this like… a week ago), and if you hadn't set a themes cookie, or didn't know about our different themes, you should check out the themes page to see what it's all about.
and, finally, it would seem that my webcam is cooperating again. i was having some weird issues before, but have had it running now for about a day & a half without it breaking, crashing, or otherwise not working. so, check out the cam page to get a glimpse of either my (and brian's as well) lovely visage, or the wall behind my chair.

oh, hey, i've been finding it difficult to think of things to write about considering the general banality of my existence, so if anyone would like to send me a topic to discuss, .

what a crazy week this has been. i realize that i tend to think of myself as someone with little to no "real" life, a layabout, a lazybones, an anti-social bastard. for the most part, that's probably true, but the events of this past week have hammered home to me just how active my inactive lifestyle really is… throw one wrench in the works, and i'm struggling to hold on.

my parents let me know somewhere around the 21st or 22nd that my sister would be home (their home in Princeton, KY, not mine in Louisville) that weekend and would need me to pick her up and to take her to the airport. unfortunately, her arrival and departure schedules were timed just poorly enough to potentially interfere pretty seriously with my work week. now at work i've been just busy as hell. i can barely take time out to chat with my friends, though i do try. and we've got a couple projects i'm knee deep in that have semi-unrealistic deadlines so i really can't afford to take off work for an extended period at this point. my sis was trying to get me to take off a monday & a tuesday, then a half day on thursday to take her to the airport. i managed to convince her to get in touch with some friends and make arrangements to minimize my time away from work, but of course in the process i was really just compressing three days worth of activity into 1 and a half.

on sunday (when i had been planning for and looking forward to a cookout at a friend's house) we decided to cut the day's activities down to just band practice so i could leave at a decent hour. practice ended up running a little long, but it went pretty well so it was worth it. i think i finally left town around 6:45.

another odd thing that i've noticed is that it seems like every single time i go home, it always manages to be during a storm of some point. it always rains on me either on I-65 south, or somewhere along the first half of the western kentucky parkway. this time it managed to do even better than that. it pretty much rained on me down the majority of I-65, and all of the first half of the wk parkway. it was a very impressive storm system that stretched the entire length of that parkway, from Elizabethtown to Princeton, and i really enjoyed trying to catch some good looks at the huge, breathtaking lightning that was going on. i really wished that i had a camera and more time… i would've loved to just pull off the road and try to get some pictures of the sky.

i finally managed to make it home around 9:00pm. the drive through the old hometown was pretty surreal. i go home so infrequently these days that it's just very odd to see all these familiar things from which i'm so far removed. but i did make it home, and hung out with my parents for a little bit since my little brother and big sister were out at the moment providing me what would most likely be my only opportunity to really talk to them. (my little brother tends to monopolize my time when i'm there, which i assume is just a normal little brother thing). almost the first thing out of my mom's mouth was her asking me if i'd permed my hair. i explained to her as i pointed a finger at my dad that no, unfortunately i had, in the genetic crapshoot that is human reproduction, inherited it from him. this got us started talking about other things i'd inherited and from whom, and about family and family history. as it turns out, it is generally believed that i have some melungeon blood from my mother's side, and that my… is it great-great-great grandmother?… was Native American…. there may be another great in there, i obviously don't have any native american features…

anyway, so i helped my little brother (once he got home and i had to quit talking to my parents) dismantle some pieces of his old computer in preparation for the computer parts he was expecting on Monday. another reason for me to go pick up my sister was so that i could help him put his new system together. he showed me his fish which had spawned two separate broods, so there were somewhere around 100 barely macroscopic little fishies swimming around one of his tanks. he played me some of the songs he was writing with the little band thing he's doing, and i showed him a few tricks i'd picked up recently (namely simple things like the blues scale, and how to know what key you're in…) as well as some older tidbits of guitar knowledge.

the next day i took my car to the local repair shop to get the front brake pads replaced and ended up tooling around town until the work was done. i walked up and down the courthouse square area and ended up in front of sharon's parent's business. i went in and had 15 or 20 minute conversation with sharon's mom, and found out that i'd missed seeing sharon by about an hour. i didn't even have any idea she was going to be in town, or i'd have forwent band practice on sunday… ah well. i guess that's the way things work out sometimes, but sharon, if you read this, i'm sorry i missed you.

once i finally got home from that outing, i helped my bro set up his new machine (thankfully, all the parts had arrived.) of course, we ended up having to run out to radio shack twice to pick up some extra parts that he hadn't known to buy beforehand. but we did finally get the beast up and running at around 7:30 or 8:00, and i got the windows installation started for him.

sara and i left town much later than we should have, and ended up getting into Lexington around 1 in the morning on Tuesday. she gave me some crazy directions to get back home to louisville that i ended up screwing up briefly, and i ended up getting home around 3:30. i slept a couple hours then went through most of the day at work pretty much zombiefied. then that night i had band practice again. nice little bookend to the trip home since being at work for 8 hours didn't really help me feel like the whole weekend ordeal was over.

my bandmate's wife had brought home the kittens she'd told us about, and he surprised us with them (since they hadn't told us they actually HAD them yet…). we ran out after practice and got the necessary things, litterbox, food dish, food, litter, and then took them to their new home. we'd called paul to let him know we were bringing them, so he was still up to see them and play with them a bit.

it was amazing. after climbing out of the carrier, the little things were just wandering all over the house, in full-on explore mode. of course, brax and paul were waving their toys around effectively forcing them to postpone their explorations for some play time, but it was all alright. they adjusted so well and so quickly it was just really surprising. no accidents, no complaints, not even any hiding under the bed. they were just kind of walking around like "ok, let me figure out where the hell i am and what all this stuff is, then i'll come hang out and play with you all." they went to their litter box like it'd been in this house in that location for all 12 months of their lives, and they found the food and water and ate with no hesitation. and boy are they cute.

so i ended up staying up with them until around 3:30am. another night with little sleep. yipee.

wednesday is the traditional comics/denny's day, which was good, as usual (it's nice to have those routines, sometimes). and a little later (like around 9:30pm) my sister finally showed up. she stayed with us that night so that i could take her to the airport on thursday. i think i finally got to bed around 3:00am. (keep in mind, i have to wake up at around 7:45am every day…)

i worked straight through until 2:00, left work early and picked up my sis at home. we grabbed some lunch and then headed out to the Cincinatti airport (near Florence, KY and at least 30 minutes outside of Cincinatti). after nearly falling asleep throughout most of the drive, we finally got to the airport and i helped her carry in her bags and kept her company for a while. we stopped and had drinks (coffee for me, diet coke for her) at the "cafe", and just kind of hung out and talked for a while. we said our goodbyes and she headed back to france for another good year. me, i headed back home. thankfully the coffee had done the trick and i didn't have as much of a struggle with sleep on the way back home.

once i got home, i took a little time to relax, then called up brian to see if he still wanted to hang out. he came and picked me up and we headed out to fazoli's for some italian fast food. he had to show me his new musical equipment, so i got to play around with his nice new Gibson and his crazy pedals for a while. and, as he pointed out, we hung out for a while on the back porch (the main feature of the old apartment that i really miss) drinking bourbon and just chatting. a pretty pleasant night, overall.

and that was pretty much the entirety of my week thus far. so much for not having a life, eh? now, it's friday, i've got a three day weekend, and i've been sitting here at work for an extra hour to write this blog entry… i've gotta get out of here and start the maxin' and relaxin. i feel like maybe this time, i actually deserve it.

for all of you, our dedicated readers who have shown extreme patience in continuing to visit us here in lovely lovely bipolar land of the decrepit finicky servers… here's your reward. this is an email exchange with one of the guys at our web host.

From: "Justin Ramsey" <[email protected]>
Reply-To: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: x13design.com
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 17:12:02 -0400

Real traffic: 8096603999183.844 MB

—

and my response…

—

Justin,

thanks for your reply.

wow. that is a completely inconceivable number. according to my server stats, we only get around an average of 120 visits per day. And, again according to my stats, we've done a maximum of 98MB over the past nine days. i don't see how this can tranlate into that impossibly large number.

Eric indicated that the server we were hosted on was experiencing Denial of Service attacks. I would tend to think that that might be the ultimate cause of this outrageous number.

If you can point out exactly what's being downloaded from our site that is causing this unbelieveable amount of transfers, please let me know, otherwise, don't try shifting blame for your inability to control malicious users from hacking your servers.

thanks for your time, and i look forward to your reply.

m@
—
Matthew Rasnake
x13design.com

as you might imagine, i really do look forward to his reply.

and…

life remains interesting.

i was right. finally getting the computers set back up again didn't affect my (unfortunate) posting schedule at all, it's pretty typical for me to skip, oh… 7 days. anyway, as i mentioned, i've got both machines up and they've been puttering along quite happily. i've finally gotten some real applications installed on a machine again. after all those crashes and reinstallations i'd left my old machine pretty bare in the software department for a while. well, no longer. i've got the itch to attempt a redesign of coffeemonk.com again, and who knows, i might try to come up with another theme for ye olde bipolar.

played music with the boys on Sunday, the boys having acquired some new strings for my guitar. amazingly enough, the new strings did the trick and i was actually able to play (mostly) in tune. then, amazingly enough, we actually successfully had a second practice again on Tuesday night. both seemed to go pretty well, we're trying not to pressure ourselves too much about writing new material. we've really gotta finish up the few songs we have before we start warping our brains with the creative process again. fun side note, i borrowed jim's 4-track and all the practice tapes that we could find, and i'm hoping to be able to go through them here soon and see if there's anything worth transmuting into the digital realm. if i come up with something, perhaps i'll put 'em up and link to 'em. y'know, get some feedback.

erg. it's way too late for me to be doing this. i'll try to take a few moments to write more tomorrow. i need all you joseph's out there to interpret some dream imagery for me. and well, yeah, i guess that's the bulk of the rest of what i've got to say. unless i come up with more tomorrow (don't hold your breath).

my BIOS chip arrived! amazing how little it takes for me to get excited lately. i now have BOTH computers up and running again, though most likely, this will not in any way effect the amount of posting i do. it will make me a little happier though, i hope. now i just gotta pay my bills, get my new guitar, then i'll be set for… a little while. a former co-worker emphatically suggested i start saving money… "just in case." which really is always good advice.

i'm really beginning to think i'm cursed. i seem to have some type of effect on things around me that causes them to break or stop working. as i mentioned in my last post, i did a number on my new computer's BIOS chip so that it doesn't boot up at all now. i'm still waiting for that replacement chip… hopefully it'll come in today. well, yesterday, as my other computer (the smaller beastie that's serving up the internet connection for both my (defunct) and paul's machines) was processing the x:13 design web server logs to update our stats pages, something untoward happened and just completely spazzed out the system partition on the hard drive. it was still running and happily serving the internet connection when i got home, but as soon as i attempted a reboot, it wouldn't go through with it. after running scandisk and finding over 21MB of lost data and "fixing" an obscene amount of corrupted files, it still wouldn't boot… surprise, surprise. so, last night i… once again (7th time's a charm, maybe?) began reinstalling windows. i can't wait til the new Amiga motherboard and OS come out. as soon as i'm able, i'll buy two of the fuckers and forever rid myself of this windows CRAP.

to top the night off, brax and i went over to our friend jim's house for band practice (our first in several months… we're such slackers…) and, of course, my guitar has gotten to the point where you just can't tune it properly any more, and if you can, it won't hold it for longer than… oh… two seconds. so, practice was a bust. i guess i'll be going to the guitar shop sometime this week to price a new one and maybe slap some money down on one (assuming my BIOS chip comes in so i can balance my checkbook… aaarrrggghhhh…)

otherwise things are pretty status quo for me, though it sounds like brian had a bit of an adventure with the cat and bug person yesterday. and he asked if i'd like to go see radiohead in New York with him, and i'd love to, but can't really afford it… so it's good that Guy is excited about the possibility and will most likely go.

ah, paul found some pics of the actress who'll be playing the part of the Vulcan in the new Trek series. can anyone say "HOT!"? and actually, i think i'll go ahead and put up my breakdown of the hottie-star-trek-chicks that i laid out for paul the other day. it's interesting to see how, women in star trek, aside from becoming more powerful characters, are also getting better looking with each series. here's the breakdown of the progression: (oh, and this is frequently recurring or main characters only)

Original Series: Uhura, Yeoman Rand
Next Generation: Tasha Yar, Deanna Troi, Beverly Crusher
DS9: Kira Nerys, Jadzia Dax, Ezri Dax
Voyager: B'Elanna Torres, Seven of Nine, Capt. Janeway (hey, she could be pretty hot at times…)

and it's also funny, as paul pointed out, especially since Next Gen anyway, there's always a tough one and a pretty one, though the lines do blur from time to time. Tasha – tough/pretty, Deanna – pretty. Kira – tough/pretty, Jadzia – pretty/tough, Ezri – pretty. B'Elanna – tough/pretty, Seven – pretty/tough.

anyway, that's enough on that topic.

well, so much for that three-day streak, huh? bah.

it seems like a lot has happened since the last post, but i think i mainly didn't post because i was so involved in trying to get my new computer set up properly. when i get involved in a project i tend to get a little too focused. anyway, so nathan (who i mentioned in the last post) came down for a visit with the crew this past weekend and a good time was had by all. i survived another swing of the hatchet at my place of work, and have another new supervisor and a different "team." i'm still doing the same job, it's just names and group affiliations that have changed. as i mentioned, i got that new computer set up, but wednesday night i got really stupid and decided to try to upgrade the motherboard BIOS… this had exactly the opposite effect from what i'd hoped it would have. rather than making my system magically faster and better, it actually made it not work at all. funny, that. anyway, a quick email to the motherboard manufacturer, and i've been assured a new BIOS chip is on the way.

another thing i found out today, from my former supervisor and smoking buddy at work, is that my crush thinks i'm cute! apparently, my supervisor talked to one of her (my crush's) friends about my interest in her (my crush) and that person then told her. apparently, she said something along the lines of "oh, don't you remember, he's the one i told you i thought was cute." and also, apparently, her friend told her that she "needed to do something about" the whole boyfriend thing. who knows, something might come of this after all. i guess this means i'll have to start taking more showers and dressing a little better again. oh, and as i told paul, i'll have to start running again.

here's a list of things i told paul that i needed to either start doing, or stop doing:

1. quit smoking — it really sucks and makes me feel like crap about 85% of the time.
2. quit eating such big meals. — even when i don't intend to, i usually end up getting more food than i technically need, then, because i paid for it, i feel like i have to eat it.
3. start running — self explanatory, considering the above two items.
4. stop waking up — really, if you think about it, waking up is the primary reason that we have bad days. if we didn't wake up, we wouldn't really have a bad day now, would we? that waking up shit is for the birds.

i think that was about it. but now that i'm sitting here, writing this, and my eyes feel like they're burning because i'm tired and they've been open too long, i realize that i need to add one more thing to that list.

5. start getting to bed on time — this might help with the whole waking up thing… perhaps my days would go better if i were more lucid throughout them.

anyway, it's beddybye time. 'night folks.