The Aerie
*%!>crackle< Hello? Hello, is this thing on? Testing...
Hello. We're back from a smidgen of a crash over the last few days, if you happen to have noticed.
Something screwy happened to my hard drives, and while we didn't lose any personal information (like photos or personal files) the system configuration information got all blowed up. In order to fix it I ended up having to go out and buy a new pair of hard drives and set up a whole new operating system, then copy the information off the old pair.
While that was terribly annoying, it was worlds better than what the alternative might have been: that the drive fails and I lose everything on it permanently. So I am not sure, but I think this gets scored in the 'win' column.
One thing that definitely gets scored in the win column was the assistance of my friend Ben, who diligently recreated much of the configuration and setup on the system. Had it not been for him this would all still be down. Thanks Ben!!
So I can't write to my birthmother. I found this out on Saturday. She sent me an e-mail, I wrote her a reply, and immediately upon sending it I got:
550 Comcast does not support the direct connection to its mail servers from residential IPs. Your mail should be sent to comcast.net users through your ISP. Please contact your ISP or mail administrator for more information.
Ah. Huh? Wha? So, what, alluvasudden I can't write to my birthmother? Last week I could, this week I can't? What up?
I've talked to Comcast until I'm blue in the face, but of course they have no idea. Some IT manager somewhere decided that this step would reduce spam, and pretty much unilaterally decided to alter the face of e-mail architecture.
I brought this up on a mailing list, where it was met with shrugs of indifference. "Comcast customers who don't like it can find another company," was the concensus. But that's nonsense. Comcast is like a big apartment building, and there are already people living there when suddenly the building management decides that your son can't call you on the phone anymore. No, if your son wants to call you he can call the front desk and have his call passed along, or if you don't like it you can move into some other apartment.
That's America these days: if you don't like what the corporation has decided, you can move.
Anyway, hi birthmom! I'll write soon... from my Yahoo account! I hope your visit to the dentist wasn't too terrible!
Went to see Stephanie Miller today after she broadcast her show from the newly-remodeled Coffman Union on the University of Minnesota campus. I can catch the 16 bus two blocks from work and it stops right in front of Coffman, so it was a quick trip.
Caught the tail end of Miller's show/performance, and it was truly amazing. If you haven't listened to it, it is lightning fast comedy, replete with improvised sketch comedy and sound effects. Jim Ward is the comedy engine, a polymath who can produce an almost infinite variety of voices and is terribly terribly quick. It was fun to watch them work along with Chris LaVoie, who remained back engineering the show in Los Angeles.
This was the first time I've been in Coffman Union in probably ten years, certainly since its extensive remodeling. The place was unrecognizable, although I did not go downstairs to the basement bowling alley and video game parlor where the majority of my time in Coffman Union was spent. I used to play the video games, but there were always some truly impressive lightning-fast games of ping-pong being undertaken by young Asian men completely unconcerned with Western cultural stereotypes. I'll have to go back sometime and see how the downstairs has changed, or if it is even still there.
After the show there was a reception which I paid to attend, since I wasn't able to see much of the show itself. I arrived nearly first to find a very tasty looking buffet set out. Never being shy about such things I took a plate and was about to serve myself when I was shooed away from the table by one of the caterers arriving with another tray of food to put out. I stepped aside obediently, at which time the rest of the audience arrive en masse and formed a half-hour long line that stretched out the door. So despite being the first person to grab a plate, I was one of the last to actually put food on it.
I sat at one of the tables at random, and was shortly joined by a pair of men who then spent the next ten minutes very carefully ignoring my presence. Finally I moved to another table where people seemed to be convivial. Glancing back at my prior table I caught the two men glaring at me as if I had somehow offended them. Weird.
When Miller and Ward arrived they were immediately swarmed. I felt bad for them, as they barely got a bite to eat and seemed to quickly give up on the idea entirely. Despite this, they were extremely friendly. I got some food when the line subsided and ate while they made their way through their well-wishers. Finally I got a chance to shake their hands and thank them for coming and for producing the program which has been keeping me sane at work for the past six months.
I needed to get back to work so I took off shortly thereafter. But it was a fine old time. I did take a couple of photos with my new phone, and I'll have to try to upload them sometime this weekend when I have a minute to try to figure out how it works!
That may be a challenge, though, because I was fortunate enough to pick up a small security-scanning contract to carry out this weekend, so much of my time will be busy scanning and writing the report. Next weekend is Easter, and then the weekend after that I'm off to Mage-Con in Nebraska at the invitation of a friend who is running the con. The construction is underway in earnest up in the attic, and there is so much to do!
*Phew* Well, okay. I think I have now replaced every posession that I owned.
I bought a replacement cell phone yesterday - a T-Mobile "MDA". It has all the usual features: web browser, MP3 player, quad-band-blah-blah-blah-blah. I couldn't care less. If it werent' for the fact that the phone company only lets you "upgrade" your phone once every year, I would have gotten one of the free-upgrade phones, but I didn't care to be stuck with a featureless piece of junk if I didn't like it. At least if I don't like this one, I'm stuck with a full-featured piece of junk.
Haven't had time to do anything much with it. I had a client contact me about an additional income-earning opportunity and I hopped on that right away. Plus I took my daughter to see "V for Vendetta" at the Imax theater, a movie that ought to be required reading for high school history classes. Really interesting website, too. The most subversive film I've seen in years, especially when you turn the protagonist's logo upside-down. The nerve of the directors to make the "hero" a terrorist who blows up buildings is immense.
So in the past week I've dropped a chunk of change on remodeling, bought a used car, a batch of airline tickets to Germany, and a cell phone that will play music, take pictures, and work in Germany. I'm about bought-out, I don't want to buy anything ever again. PAYING for all this remains a mystery. Fortunately my boss returned from her vacation and did NOT immediately turn in her two-weeks notice, so I am slightly safer in my position for the time being. Slightly.
Tonight I have to print out two years worth of invoices, letters, and e-mails billing a company for work I was ordered to do by the courts in 2003, which is not yet paid. Hopefully my friend Al, who is a lawyer, can compel the parties involved to pay me the money they owe me. It would help a little bit amidst all these cash outlays.
Tomorrow I'm going to see Stephanie Miller around noon, that should be fun. Her radio show is some of the best daily live radio I've ever heard. These guys are talented and hilarious, sometimes painfully so. Snorting your morning coffee out your nose hurts!
Expensive weekend. I think I spent more this weekend than at any time since I bought my house 15 years ago. Certainly the week itself has been so.
We kicked everything off with a five-figure check to start the contractor on the remodeling project. Then on Saturday we test drove a vehicle to replace our minivan, and we drove to the travel agency and purchased our tickets to Germany this summer. One nice side effect was that the airline tickets seemed positively cheap by comparison. After test-driving the car to the travel agency we drove back to the dealership to purchase it. All in all, we spent almost two thirds as much as we did when we bought our house back in '91.
To answer everyone's question, it's a 2005 Pontiac Montana SV6. We bought it because the sticker said it had only 5200 miles on it. However it actually had 7200 miles on it - according to our salesperson one of the employees used it as a 'demo' vehicle, meaning they drove it around for free for two months.
This isn't actually the car I wanted to buy. The car I wanted to buy is a hybrid-fuel seven-passenger minivan. Unfortunately the car I want to buy doesn't exist yet. The only hybrid seven-passenger vehicle right now is the considerably-more-expensive 2006 Toyota Highlander SUV, and they're hard to come by. Of course, the vehicle I wanted to buy was a 2010 seven-passenger hybrid minivan, but that choice was taken away from me by a delusional, bellicose lout.
Anyway, it has a lot of nice features, like a DVD player, and CD-Mp3 capability. Also sorts of dashboard geewgaws: the radio shows you the name of the song that's playing, the dashboard has printed messages to help explain the car like "LOW FUEL," "MILEAGE 15.4 MPG", "OIL 32% UNTIL CHANGING" or "ENGINE DISABLED BY ALIEN SHIP."
But for all that, I don't care. Buying a car used to be exciting, but this time it was merely a very expensive chore. I think this was because the prior van had been working absolutely fine. Most times when I've bought a car it has been under duress. In fact last summer's purchase of my Plymouth Neon was the first time I ever bought a car when I strictly didn't have to (and, interestingly enough, if I had not bought it we would have been in real trouble since I don't know if the family would have fit in the Metro for the week it took to replace the van). This time, since there was nothing wrong with the van, the experience was unrewarding. There were no sudden realizations like "I won't have to replace that broken windshield wiper!" or "I won't have to listen to that rickety van door slam shut again," or any of those little reliefs you get when moving out of a rattletrap old car.
Instead it was simply "Great, now I'm back in hock again."
Because of course for better or worse this year we need the cash: so the insurance payment goes into the bank with the rest of the remodeling money, and the car is completely financed. I'll worry about paying for it AFTER our August trip.