Lee.org

I cancelled my Earthlink service today.

My sister got married this weekend. The wedding was great. I’ll have photos up soon. And, yes, the minister said, “Mao-widge” during the service. If you are furrowing your brow at that statement, then watch The Princess Bride!

Making an announcement mailing list happen for the PVPOA is stalled. The PVPOA lawyer wants that all the world take risks while the PVPOA sits in its cocoon. “Oh! They’ve encased the PVPOA in Carbonite! It should be quite well protected. If it survived the freezing process, that is.” This is driving me crazy. Here, I should be smiling after getting rid of my sister ( ;-) ) and.. grrr..

I brought my dad to the airport today. He’ll be in Florida for a couple weeks. By mid-November, I’ll have the house to myself. At least for a while.

I’m now getting 100 spams/day. I signed up for a trial of Cloudmark’s Spamnet. I threw 500 spams at it and it only missed about 10 and erroneously marked about 5 good messages as spam. The good messages -did- look a lot like spam… ie one was a sale at Dell.. that kind of stuff. Cloudmark does a much better job than my current Mcafee Spamkiller. At $4/month, it’s a huge bargain. I’ll start paying for it as soon as the trial expires. I don’t know what I’m going to do after I stop getting spam! My spam poetry, all that free porn popping up on my screen… I’ll have to start replying to -real- email instead! Yech!

I saw this teaser for an interview with Sting.. I think he was on 60 Minutes. It went something like this: “Sting is worth $300 million dollars. He lives a fabulous lifestyle, he’s very happy, he’s been knighted by the queen of England and done all sorts you can only dream of.” Cut to Sting during the interview. He looks great. Mid-thought, he looks up, pauses and says with a slowly widening smile, “It’s good to be Sting.” Damn!

TIJC wrote about computer mice in his journal recently. I responded…

>It turns out that a Microsoft Mouse really doesn’t take well to having it’s moving parts lightly treated with machine oil.

I’ve been jump-up-and-down happy with my Logitech Mouseman dual optical sensor mouse for a few years now. http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=logitech+mouseman+optical+dual+sensor

It is fantastically smooth and responsive. The only surfaces it doesn’t work well on are monochromatic ones. So I taped a piece of paper with a MS Streets and Trips map of my neighborhood right to my desk. Which brings me to my mouse rant: Why are mousepads smooth? That is EXACTLY the opposite of what they should be.

Computer guy is a real business! I made something like $400 this weekend! I’m still selling Marilyn Merlots on eBay too… I just invested another $1500 in stock and it’s selling at a pace, 1-2 bottles per week. Living at home is going fine. I’d rather be completely on my own, but living here has allowed the business to happen.

I took the Technology Education test almost a month ago. Results will be in soon. Then… where do I go with jumping through hoops to get into grad school to get a job? I was talking to a client recently (MS) about school… He’s been in the Jersey City schools a lot. Those teachers make more, but I don’t feel very good about getting hazard pay. We’ll see.

My love life has awoken. I like it. I’m happily pursuing such affairs. PPG is great. Siobhan is terrific.

I haven’t flown the plane in a while :-(. Julian has disappeared on me. I have to try and find him!

My sister is getting married on Saturday! I’ll have a new brother, yow! That’s weird! but good. Weird but good. And Melissa’s happy. That’s even better.

My dad will be leaving for Florida right after that. That’ll leave just Noni and myself in the house. Noni will be leaving for Florida next month. We’re all going to the Siedlecki’s for Thanksgiving… I’ll be flying with Julia. She was going to fly on her own because she’s a big girl now but our plans lined up well enough for us to fly together.

It’s weird giving people in my journal pseudonyms. I don’t know if I like it. We’ll see.

Good night!

lee

I installed Windows XP early on Friday… and late on Friday… and early on Saturday. Here’s a list of tips for installing XP and Office.

• I tried (unsuccessfully) to use the Install from Scratch system on a computer that already had Win2K. I found myself in this awful state where nothing would run properly. (In all previous versions of windows, I’ve found it important to wipe your computer every year or two. Performance and compatibility karma come your way when you do). I eventually did an “upgrade” install. It seems to be working ok.
• If you threw away the envelope that your Windows XP CD came in (Doh!) XPKey.exe (a 48k download from The Blue List) did a fine job of finding my key. Curiously, it didn’t work on Office XP for me.
• I’ve got some terrible hesitation/hanging weirdness going on. From my web browsings, it looks like it’s related to Instant Messaging being built in to Office. Doing the following seems to have worked for me: Go to Microsoft Outlook | Tools | Options | Other and turn off “Enable Instant Messaging in Microsoft Outlook”. Also, it seems important that you don’t kill the stupid Windows Messenger system tray program. When I did, I started seeing stupid slugishnesses.
• Running sfc.exe from the command prompt seems to have helped the sluggishness

A great movie. Psychos in Love is like a Keystone Cops version of The Great Train Robbery.

Noni, Bamfa and Julia making meatballs!

Last night I went out with Dave B again on a Gluttonous adventure. I showed up at Pub 199 at 6, he was there a few minutes later. Right up at the top of the menu (I don’t know how we missed it last time) was the trypic of steamed clams special, steak special, and lobster special. I opened with 2 dozen steamed clams and a beer. We moved on to lobster and a potato…. and more beer. Then we had dinner: more beer (of course) grilled cheese, grilled cheese with tomato and another potato. My tummy hurts. Gluttony is good. :-)

I wrote to a friend today the following:

We were talking before about what the heck we should each do for a living… I wanted to give you hopeful news and say that I’ve been being “The Computer Guy” with moderate success for the last couple months. I go to people’s homes and help them with their computer problems. Little things and large things alike. And gosh darn it, I think I’m good at it! There’s a big teaching component to it, showing people how to do things and helping them help themselves. I think this could really be something.

This weekend I went up to Boston… and then on to New Hampshire with Trav to go see the New Hampshire Gathering of Scottish Clans. It was great. All the clans had booths set up, there was some fantastic traditional and modern Scottish music and the food was good (we had haggis!). But the most important part of the day was seeing people throw things that shouldn’t be thrown.

The amateur contest was infinitely more fun to watch than the pros. First, because we got to stand much closer than on the grand parade grounds. Second, because it’s more fun to root for a local guy who is throwing stuff because it’s fun instead of a hired professional stuff-thrower. Third, and most importantly, when they were throwing the 28 lb weight, we were told to watch out; an errant throw could come our way and kill us. How cool is THAT?

Mike Z (from the Boston area) making one of his field-record-breaking throws.

The Crazy Lawsuit Contest! The contestants throw a 28 lb weight straight up into the air as high as possible over a bar. Of course, what goes up…
I figured that a tosser only loses his step 1 in 10 times after throwing… and the weight would only actually hit an unawares contestant 1 time in 10… So that’s only a 1 in a hundred chance of sqwish-age! I’m pretty sure Mike Z won this one too, throwing 17′! Imagine throwing a 5 gallon water bottle up onto your home’s 2nd story roof!!

Mike Z (again… the other contestants’ photos didn’t come out as well, sorry) throwing a 28 lb weight at us. He won this event too.

Trav and I just before getting our haggis puffs. Good times! The taste reminded me of cappaletti, actually; I think it was the allspice.