No one visits this site
Hence, I don't feel like saying anything today. Except Win2k and I don't get along, apparently. And I can't play Diablo II anymore. Bah. Guess I'll play some Deus Ex instead. Fear.

A second chance
I think I might know why Win2k is locking up on me...

Software sucks
Bah. Whoever said Windows 2000 is the most stable Windows OS out there is full of shit. The bastard locked up on me frequently last night. I dismissed those lock-ups because I still had all of those Windows patches and updates and stuff to download; maybe those would make the lock-ups stop happening. Guess what? They don't. I don't get it. Apparently, I must be doing something wrong or my computer is "special." Right now, I'm working on getting Win98 working properly again. I'd rather work with this OS and its poor use of system resources and random illegal operations than Win2k's unparallelled ability to piss me off by locking up threefold in 20 minutes. That's horse shit. Maybe I'll try Windows 2000 again whenever I get a new hard drive (which is a very low priority), I'll slap their NTFS file system on it and see if that makes any difference. I don't see why that would... but whatever. Computers work in funny ways.

Update: My computer performs 3 or 4 illegal operations at start-up. The error occurs with msdrv.exe. This error has been happening since the day I left college. I just looked for some info on this executable, and it turns out msdrv.exe is part of a trojan horse called Backdoor.Asylum. Damnit. At least the errors were occuring because my good ol' antivirus software had the file "in quarantine." Heh. I still wish it told me about the trojan the day I got it, though. :p

Another Update: Egads. There's this other wussy trojan that found its way onto my computer disguised as an HTML document stored in my "Temporary Internet Files" directory. This wussy trojan was used to set up that other trojan in the other update. That just goes to show that you should:

SCAN YOUR COMPUTER FOR VIRUSES REGULARLY!

Don't say I didn't warn ya.

Late stories
Win2k has locked up on me on three occasions tonight. I'm not sure why it's doing this. Nor am I sure there's a correlation between each lock-up. Whatever.

* Urban warfare has reached a new level. Armed with EMP's, percussion grenades, and really bright lights, this armored SUV could be the Army's new toy.
* A 9-year-old in college? She's considered to be really smart for coming up with a great new idea: a backpack-like thing that you put around your waist and thigh. Great, sign me up for ten of these. I want an unconfortable version of a fanny pack.
* Hey! The Bush girls are at it again! Don't they have any friends that are over 21? I'm sure those secret service people that watch the girls can hook 'em up. Or, since they're in college, why not go to any frat party?

Blogger is slower than monkey feces rolling uphill as of late. Not cool.

Smooth sailing
Still in the process of getting everything to work properly in Win2k. I haven't encountered any real problems. Most of my work involves downloading a program and/or installing it in this operating system. Tribes 2 doesn't want to work properly, but I'll just get someone to send me an updated version of the file that is causing me all of the misery.

I kinda dug the installation process of all of my hardware. I didn't have to run around the internet looking for Win2k drivers for... say, my SCSI CDR drive. The only drivers I had to download were the latest Detonator drivers for my video card. No biggie. I didn't even have to do that if I didn't want to. But I had to in the name of not chewing up my computer during online gaming practices. :)

Software that I don't have on CD tests my patience. Stupid phone modems take quite a bit of time trying to download IE and virus scanning updates. *sigh* I'll have to save that stuff for later. :p

Melons rule!
My mom has a garden, and you know those little plastic white signs that tell you what vegetable is being grown at that spot? Well, there's one that says "cantaloupe" for some reason.

Mmm... cantaloupe...

If it's true that cantaloupe is growing there... uh... I don't think cantaloupe grows this far north of the equator.

I'll shut up now.

*yawn*
I'm pretty tired right now. I didn't get many hours of sleep last night because I decided to be a really nice guy and help one of my ICQ buddies out with a C++ project until 3:00 in the morning. Too bad I had to get up at 8:30.

T'was a pretty long day for me as well. My brown poodle was starting to look like a hippie, so I dropped him off to get a hair cut. I then came home and slept in an unorthodox position for another hour. Someone else picked the dog up from the groomer's. Heh. Then I dicked around for a while, made a stop at the bank, and confronted several miles of construction and the cones that go with it. Once in Concord, my mom poked at my face for an hour. She's taking some class in... eh... I don't remember what it's called. It isn't aromatherapy, yet it isn't considered dermatology. And I guess she needs to work a certain number of hours giving facial massages and other weird skin / face things, so she uses me as her guinea pig once a week.

Anyhoo, after that somewhat torturous experience, I made a trip to Borders and I picked up a pair of ASP books. While looking through the collection of Internet books they had available, there was a piece of literature titled MP3 for Dummies. What the hell is there to know about mp3's that requires a 400-page book for? I don't get it. You go online, you download Winamp, you find some songs (or rip your own), and you play them. The end.

So yeah. I have a pair of ASP books now. Good stuff. Maybe I'll even look inside them some day. Hehe.

I think I'll install Win2k tomorrow, try and get everything I current have installed for Win98 to work in Win2k... maybe fiddle around with some web server stuff. No ASP stuff yet. Then, some weeks later, I'll be really l33t and have a full-fledged dynamic web site on my own server (or thesevoices.com, should that ever be up and running again), thereby tearing me away from the shackles of crappy side programs like that search engine and Blogger! Wow, I feel so inspired now. I'm getting kinda attached to Blogger, too, though... Whatever.

Story time
I want some warm weather again. Today wasn't bad, but I'm still digging that wonderful weather that occured during finals week. Frisbee-playing weather. Shorts-wearing weather. Hard lemonade-drinking weather. *sigh* Maybe next week.

* Americans are stupid. Canadians seem to know a lot about we Americans (hell, they broadcast the news going on in the US on some stations), but we don't seem to know anything about them. All Americans need to know is that Canada gave us ice hockey, strong beer, and... umm... their maple syrup kicks ass. The story came from Jon.
* There's nothing special about this disabled golfer story, but I found it funny that the Supreme Court had to make a ruling about letting Casey Martin use a cart to get around the golf course instead of walking from hole to hole.
* Intel to cut prices again! Too bad they keep slashing the prices of the chips I don't intend to buy. Damnit! All I want is a p3 850 to max out my Dell. Rumor has it that I could squeeze a 1 Ghz into my motherboard without complications... I may have to look into that. But first I need to make some money. And to get a rockin' video card.

The light blue color used for links is too light, isn't it?

And Metafilter has restricted who can visit their site for the time being. That sucks. There's some great stories there. And I want to read them. :(

Gotta find some work
I had to offset the color of my links so they don't get mixed up with the red-blue color palette I use for my amusing conversations.

Jake: tampon commercials oppress me
me: help! help! i'm being oppressed!
Jake: exactly.
Jake: and then they try to rise up and kill your head!
me: those types of commercials are made by the man in order to keep the brothas down
Jake: word
me: Being broke sucks
me: I want money
Jake: ummmmmm
Jake: that really does suck =(
Jake: you should get graduation checks! that's what i did
me: oh yeah? nice
me: I want an allowance from RPI
me: I want that $120k given back to me in monthly installments over the next 10 years
me: that'd be sweet
Jake: askldfj
Jake: heehee
me: my thoughts exactly

--------------------------

Just finished babysitting my nephew. Before this ends up being a permanent career move on my part, I think I better do some more job hunting. My first run through the process since graduation didn't bode too well. Those companies had their position filled or much more experienced applicants. So, time to try again.

I found a couple webmaster internships jobs in the Boston area. Unfortunately, I'm not willing to work for nothing. I'll have to sift through the HeadHunter and Monster databases later tonight.

I've also been finding a lot of jobs requiring Perl as of late. This is pretty odd, because I used to never find jobs requiring Perl, but ASP instead. I've only found one ASP-needed job in the last couple weeks. Interesting. I'll probably pick up an ASP book at a bookstore in Concord when I make a trip there tomorrow.

No hockey tonight?
That's a shame. I wanted to see the Avs prove me wrong again.
No X-Files rerun last night either. FOX found it more important to broadcast some Nascar race. Damnit.

While I scrounge for things to do, feel free to entertain yourself using the links below:

* Bubble Boys Hockey! You know it. Do you have what it takes to win the Bubble Boys Cup? You must be 21 or older to play (it's a Bud Light promotional thing).

* I scored a 22% on Metrosexuality's Gay-O-Meter. I'm wondering if that's a good thing or not.

[GARBAGEman]: Hi Jerome..... Wassap?
me: not much. sitting back, wishing I had a Bud. ;p
[...]
[GARBAGEman]: oh yeah.....in germany we call it "yellow water"
me: lol
[GARBAGEman]: I wonder how you can get drunk by this .....
me: I don't think you can. it is essentially water. I can't drink the stuff myself. :p
[GARBAGEman]: HAHAHA...

Salt overload
Has anyone ever died / overdosed on Saltines?
I really want to know.
And I like Ritz better...

Link dump 2 of 2
I was gonna be a jerk and hold onto these stories until tomorrow, but since I don't really want to discuss my horrible adventures with Geocities, take these links and do what you want with them:

* I wish I was in middle school, went to tour a prison with my class, and was used as a demostration for a strip search. Aren't there rules against this sort of stuff? Pervs.
* This proves my theory (look at question 10) that TV is the best birth control we have! I wonder how much money the government spent on this research. I could have told them that for $10.
* Thou shalt not say the Lord's name in vain, or prepare to be disqualified.
* I was gonna say, thank goodness NASA is gonna attack a comet, because they haven't jetisoned a multi-million dollar hunk of metal at a celestial body in a while. I need my fix!

Link dump 1 of 2
I know how much you love random story links. In fact, the demand is so great that I'm having trouble keeping up. After all, who else can bring you the news like me? That's right. No one. Your sole purpose in life is to read my witty annotations.

I haven't shut up in the last couple days about other things that I wanted to save my stories for a slower day. Well, today isn't particularly slow (I have plenty of stuff to bitch about) but hey, what the heck? Have some computer stories! Link dump #2 will contain the sex, profanity, and destruction that you folks yearn for. Literally.

* "Hey! Microsoft is bundling software to their upcoming operating system and that's unfair!" said AOL. "Hey, it's cool," says AOL after they worked out a deal to bundle AOL 6.0 with Windows XP.
* Are you telling me that those spam messages that so-and-so is dying from a rare disease and you should forward this message to all of your friends could be false? I mean, each time the message is forwarded, a dime is sent to develop a cure! And don't forget, if you don't forward the email, you're a heartless bastard who should be very ashamed of yourself. Jerk.
* Anyone need a 50" plasma display monitor? It weighs 101 pounds, has a billion input terminals, and they slashed the price by thousands of dollars! Believe it or not, this is a really cheap price compared to most of the other places that are carrying this item. I think I'd rather get a new car, though.
* Quake for cats! I wonder if my cat would go for this at all. I don't think so, all he does is sleep all day and eat and be fat. But at night, it's almost guaranteed that there will be a headless rodent somewhere in the house or near the driveway.

It's fairly grey outside
Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day.

Or... I'm only happy when it rains?