well, this has been a rather pleasant weekend (plus Monday). sometime friday my federal tax return finally posted to my account (thank god for e-file and direct deposit!) probably making this occasion the one time in my life where i've actually been pleased with our "government." of course, i still think income taxes should be done away with in favor of a federal sales tax, but that's another topic for some other forum.

my plans all along (since figuring out that i would be coming out of the tax season much better off than paul, who unfortunately had to pay taxes this year) have been to utilize this bounty to considerably improve my financial state by paying off all the various and sundry little petty debts i'd gotten myself into over the course of the past two years. little things like unpaid doctor bills, vet bills, cd club subscriptions, etc. all told, it amounted to a little less than $700 of debt, so i've not been doing as badly as some, but i'd never been able to catch up long enough to actually take care of these things. well, now that i've had this groovy tech job for almost a year, and have gotten rid of one deadbeat roommate and replaced him with two lesser deadbeat roommates (sorry, brian, couldn't resist… brian's actually the only one of the two new ones to be fully paid up), i've actually been able to place myself on a little firmer financial footing. all our bills are being paid on time, and once the newest roommate pays up, i'll be doing much better. SO, i'm out of debt. which, as brian would say, is what we'd call a "good thing."

i'm on a bit of a high right now, having just phoned the last collections agency that i was concerned about and finding out that… somehow, outside the bounds of my memory, my account with them had been paid in full back in 1997. i don't recollect it, but i sure don't mind finding it out four years later!

top that off with the fact that i'm planning to head out to a local computer retailer today to pick up a secondhand Dell branded sony trinitron monitor for the low low price of $168.00, and coupled with the fact that i've just purchased a 256MB stick of RAM for this fabled machine i'm planning to build in the next couple months, and you can understand my elation. i may, finally, have a system i can actually use to do the types of stuff i like to do. a machine that won't complain when i run more than three programs at the same time. a machine with which i might just be able to take over the world. oh, wait, i'm still going to be running windows, aren't i?

anyway, enough gloating. suffice to say, right now, this matt is a happy camper.

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.

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.

i have the most awesome sister in the world. i'm having a bad day today, actually took a half-day off work since i was feeling very ill, and when i get home, i find a package waiting on my doorstep. my sister bought me a little item from my wishlist for no real reason other than she just wanted to. my sis is the best.

oh, and if you didn't follow that link to my sister's blog, follow that one. she's been doing better than me on the updating thing, and she's only been at it a couple weeks. so far, her posts have been insightful and informative about some of her adventures living and working in Paris.

so i ended up taking a half-day, coming home and crashing out from like 1:30pm to 6:48 or something. i woke up sweating like crazy, probably because i'd managed to fall asleep IN my bathrobe under all the covers and blankets, and i actually woke up holding the blankets up to my chin… i do not like being sick. i'm probably going to end up taking tomorrow off as well, if my present condition is any indicator of how i'll be feeling in the morning. besides, i've been wanting to take an extra day off, and now that the new corvus site has finally launched, i can relax a little bit… until we start on phase 2 anyway.

i'm suddenly craving orange juice… but i think i'll just go have a cigarette. gotta treat the body right, ya know.

alright, i've been reading erasing.org for several months now, on a mostly daily basis, and i just now clicked the Sadness link. such a simple concept, replacing words in corporate slogans with the word sadness. simple, profound (in spots), and so much the story of my life (at times).

so, i got an email from since he's been reading, he's not really finding anything out about my life, but about the other useless crap i've felt compelled to fill these pages with for the past few posts.

i figured he would have liked the "holy grail" post, but then he's heard about her enough times, it's old news to him. i figured he would have liked my "year in review" post since i provided a brief roadmap to some of the more important points of my life that have occurred since the inception of this blog.

but he's right. with the exception of the "holy grail" post, everything else has pretty much just been filler.

so, i've been busy at work, at least until a week ago, when the frantic activity suddenly came to a grinding halt due to the fact that no one could seem to get me the remaining three pieces of content that i needed to complete the new corvus site (on which, btw, are welcome).

in my home life, i've been busy cataloging my comics, now that brian and i are helping beta-test OmniComics and catching up on email. i've now got five emails in my inbox at home, compared to the 25 that were sitting in there for a few weeks. i've been trying to refine my focus a little, concentrate on certain projects, see them through to completion… y'know, the way it should be done. like the puffin i tend to get 15 or 20 projects going at the same time, and just never finish them. when i think about all the things i've got "waiting in the wings" i just feel kind of hopeless and lost. so, it's been good to finish the email project, to be near completion on the comics project, (and yes, i'm still working on the bipolar redesign project, which is… uhm… kinda close).

overall, i can't say i'm really happy, but i'm not really depressed either. i'm just kind of… here. and i don't know, maybe that's even worse than the other two.

ah, don't worry 'bout li'l ol' me though, i'll be fine.

ok, here's a reduced calorie version of the post i attempted to make the other day.

( or, the story of the year 2000 )

other things that happened pre-bipolar:

started the year in the arms of a beautiful woman, who i ended up falling in love with, and who ended up leaving me a couple months later.
lost my job of two years at the local bookstore, because of my own negligence.
spent two months off work, before breaking down and taking the Kinko's job (around the time of bipolar's first month).

so, now it's a new year, i've got the perfect job, and i'm making good money. hopefully this year will be a little better than the last.

i wrote a long ass post yesterday, but blogger ate it. i guess they were still working on the new server and i was one of the lucky ones it burped on.

then, i was going to rewrite a brief version of the update today, but (surprise, surprise) i got caught up in doing a temporary redesign (the one between this and the permanent redesign) today while i was busy doing nothing else at work.

so this little post is filler. filler and crap. but now you know that a bipolar redesign is actually in progress, so if it's not up by the end of next week, you can all and give me shit for it.

and tomorrow, i'll try to rewrite yesterday's post. believe me, it's not time sensitive shit i'm talking about here.

g'night all.

yet again, i've let more than a week slip by without a post. i think i've been too grouchy lately for the people i hang out with to chastise me for it too harshly. up til today, i've had my head either buried in work, been playing "timsplitters", entering my comic book collection into my recently restored OmniComics database, or trying to re-start the reorganization of my personal life (ie. cleaning the hell out of my room).

i did get one email from nathan demanding that i update soon, since he finally went to the trouble of adding me to his AvantGo client on his Visor handheld. (hi nate)

which reminds me, a while back, we added some code to our pages to make them "AvantGo friendly." if you use AvantGo, and you'd (for some reason) like to be able to read us on your handheld, just use the following links:

for brian's blog, use /bipolar/blog.html
for my blog, use /bipolar/mlog.html
(just a note, if you try to load these links in anything other than AvantGo, you'll be redirected to our frameset, so you can see bipolar in all it's black skull-festooned glory.)
if users of any other handheld browser software want this ability or are having trouble getting the pages to load, just send me a note, and i'll see if i can make it work.

hrm. well, i just attempted to create an AvantGo "channel" for us here, but it would seem that if we get more than 5,000 subscribers, we'll have to pay $5,000. not that this is ever going to happen, but i don't want to open a $5,000 can of worms, no matter what the odds.
so, while we're not an official channel, you can still download us to your heart's content just by adding us to your download (or channel) list.

in other news, after three weeks of torturous work, i've been sitting on my ass here at work ALL DAY waiting for three paragraphs of content and some revised images for the project i've been working on. it's bad enough we had to push back the original deadline a week, but now we're so close and i've not been able to do a damned thing because i'm waiting for content. grrr. but, hopefully we'll have the new site up in the next day or so and i'll put in a link so you can see what i've been working on so diligently (before today, anyway).

in other other news,
this Salon article brings the whole technical virgin thing into better focus. it's now been upgraded (in my opinion) from the status of "funny joke site" into the realm of "pointed social satire." i never thought people could actually be crazy enough to believe that only "traditional sex" is "real" sex. apparently i was wrong.

4:32 still waiting for content.

what a couple of weeks. it seems like i've been too busy to do many of the things that i began enjoying on a daily basis. like blogging, for example… and not just writing this one, but reading the many blogs i enjoy reading from day to day. i'm hoping once this big project i'm working on at work is finished, i'll have a little extra time every day to get back to my blogs.

it's nice to see nanette again, though I really haven't had a great deal of time to actually hang out with her & brian since she got here. thursday, the delayed but much longed for comic day saw me at work for an extra two hours (or more) so pretty much as soon as i got home brian & Paul were bitching profusely about my tardiness and their overwhelming hunger. we introduced nanette to the (usually) wednesday tradition of comics & denny's, where we were informed a major travesty had occurred and they were out–completely out–of ranch dressing. no ranch dressing?!? how can we possibly eat a meal a denny's with no ranch dressing!?
…
well, angrily, of course.

since my Christmas present for Paul had arrived, we popped it in immediately on our return home and proceeded to laugh hysterically for over an hour.

Next came Friday, which found me, once again, staying late at work, except that this time i was there an extra 5 (that's five, f-i-v-e, 5) hours, bringing my total for the day up to a whopping 13!. i stopped off to grab beer, cigarettes, and food on the way home (since brian had informed me that both paul & guy were present, that they were going out to eat, and would be imbibing a bit… well, except for guy, who doesn't drink. then once home i proceeded to drink a little and whup both paul & brian's asses at a healthy game of timsplitters deathmatch. i'm sure this was all very amusing for nanette, who sat reading on the couch, and who'd occasionally attempt to assuage our egos by politely laughing when we silly boys tried to be funny.

then, after the drinking and the killing, we decided to do the eating. we took nanette to the infamous, legendary Twig & Leaf for a bite of the ol' Louisville Paul (oh, i mean hot) Brown. we settled comfortably into our booth and reviewed the menu. even i had planned to try the hot brown, since i've either never had one, or can't remember having had one. much to our surprise, when nanette tried to order, we were informed that they were out of the alfredo sauce that is used to make the hot brown. apparently there has been some conspiracy regarding nanette's visit to Louisville. our two traditional restaurants were both understocked on crucial elements needed to make the dining experience a complete and successful one. fortunately, they hadn't run out of their regular cheese sauce or twig taters (ie. tater tots). we finished our "meals" and headed back home clutching our protesting stomachs.

today has been an interesting exercise in "speed moving." one roommate, the unfortunately hippie-fied and constantly delinquent bob, is being ejected from this house. to our dismay, even having been given two months notice, (and a few random reminders) he had made no effort to pack or begin moving any of his (enormous amount of) stuff. so, Brax came over, he & I went to hawley-cooke to grab an assload of boxes, and we began packing bob's things for him. by the end of the evening Paul had also arrived, and between the three of us, we managed to compress what traditionally has been a two or three day affair into the miniscule space of 5 hours. bob's things are almost completely removed from his former room, and waiting for him in the basement. i can't wait to see the look on his face when he actually returns home to an almost empty room. hehe.

now it's time for bed. my body is tired, my brain is tired, and i have to rest up for what will surely be a record breaking drinking bout tomorrow night. (for me anyway).

i'm generally not a violent person, but every once in a while, if the wind is right and the planets are aligned, certain people–just by their being within my sphere of perception–cause me to imagine bashing their head forcefully & repeatedly against the metal corners of my cubicle until their blood stains the fabric walls and bits of bone and brain collect on the floor at my feet.

mind you, this doesn't happen very often.

i came across a link today that reminded me quite a bit of brian, & some of the online shenanigans i've participated in or been privy to. shauna of flaunt.net (along with a friend) has recently created whowouldbuythat.com which is dedicated to uncovering the strangest of online auctions.

in other news, i spent a few minutes last night (or hours, really) helping paul with the puffin-a-go-go. he's added a few links to his "go-go-to" section, and I managed to get his archives up and running, so all you puffin readers run over there and check up on any posts you might have missed.

well, i suppose since i'm here at work, i should probably do some.