wtf?
This is a conversation I had with a caretaker in my house.

Her: "Is your mother still sleeping?"
Me: "No, she's just upstairs."
Her: "I know that."

I'd like the record to show that my mother never said she was going to take a nap.
It's random shit like this that will make people go insane if they stay at my house for too long.

Boo!
So yesterday I was talking about something without actually saying anything in regards to Manchester, NH. Well, it was about Godsmack and their desire to end their tour at the same place it began: in Manchester. So the city council thought about it for a while, considered the pros and cons, and then they considered to deny the people of a Godsmack concert:

“Considering the totality of the information presented to me, it is my belief that this concert venue under these circumstances is not a suitable host site for the proposed Godsmack concert and will have a significant negative impact on a large portion of our community,” Driscoll wrote city leaders yesterday.

Significant negative impact? Please define!

Alderman Steve Vaillancourt applauded yesterday’s decision.
“It’s clear this concert would be too noisy and too disruptive,” Vaillancourt said.

Ooh, noisy and disruptive. That's the perfect reason not to have a concert. If the location of the concert is able to hold ten thousand people, the amount of volume coming from the speakers should not be greater than a conversation in a library. Please.

Their decision is influenced by a July Slipknot concert where some people bitched about the noise and the vulgar language. The show was considered a "disaster" because of it. What the...? Perhaps they should think about the concert that started Godsmack's tour instead, not those clown-makeup-wearing Slipknot folks.

So much for your first amendment rights, eh?

Welcome home, Godsmack. Too bad you can't play here. :p

No more Jackass
No, don't worry. I'm still here. Heh. But "Johnny Knoxville" and company are pulling the plug on their MTV series. Looks like Johnny wants to pursue a movie career instead of breaking his ankle trying to cross waterways on rollerblades. Can't blame him.

In other news, I guess there are such things as sex planes. I hope you can't qualify to be in the Mile High Club by bording a "sex plane," because that's just too damn easy. Do I make you horny, Baby?

Also, what do you do if you're a cop and you beat up a diabetic? You sue!

And finally, for those of you who have taken physics, you may want to throw out everything you know right out the window. Homie Jon found a story that theorizes that as the universe gets older, constants like the speed of light may not be so constant. Freaky.

Hey, yesterday was the third Wednesday of the month... Oops.

All of these stories (except the last one) were stolen deliberately from some site called Neoflux.

Manchester, NH is run by a bunch of 60-year-old assholes
More news as it develops and as stories get put online tomorrow.

In the mean time, bask in the glory of popular Chilean baked goods.

New site URL
Since my site is destined to be eradicated sometime soon (being an RPI grad and all), I'm gonna need to find a place to toss my site of junk. Until I do find such a host, feel free to link to or bookmark this URL for the time being. And some day, when you least expect it, you'll be redirected to the new site. Ignore the pop-ups.

Story Smorgasbord
My computer's fine now, I think. Woo. Now I can like... uh... finish that Diablo 2 mod and stuff I'm working on. It's essentially done; I just gotta find the items in-game and make sure they do what they are supposed to do. And fix some of the unique weapons that are already flawed.

* This is an interesting read about human behavior at the movie theater. Almost all of the money movie companies are making this summer come from opening weekend, and then attendance drops about 60% the next weekend. And, these movies are still making as much as the movies of last year and the year before that. That's neat.
* Dynamix is done. This kinda makes me wonder what will happen with Tribes 2 and their other games.
* Football season is coming! And Terry Glenn won't be playing, 'cause he's being an asshole. I guess he didn't really want his $11.5 million signing bonus. Should be an interesting season for Patriots fans.
* Did I post this before? I might have. But anyhoo, future generations may never see the Milky Way courtesy of artificial lighting. How unfortunate. Oh wait a minute; the other story I was thinking of was about how 25% of people can no longer see the Milky Way because of prolonged exposure to artificial lighting. Or something like that. Don't know where I read that, though.

I should have become an environmental engineer
... like I was thinking of becoming back when I was a freshman with an undeclared major. Sure, the pay is crumbier and the job appears to be depressing, but at least I'd be employed by now. :p I think.
Speaking of employment, though, I stand a chance at being an assistant webmaster-type of guy for the Concord Monitor if I play my cards right. These folks actually return my calls and stuff, unlike other companies I have applied for. Perhaps this is a good sign of things to come. God, I hope so. Otherwise, I may have to see how the worker shortage at Home Depot is doing, since even Manpower told me that the chance of them finding me a job is, and I quote, is "slim to none." I love the new economy. And my lack of relevant work experience.
I don't even care how much this assistant webmaster job pays, I just need something, anything to make my resumé worth looking at for more than five seconds.

Maybe if I had some body perks, I would stand a better chance of securing myself a job. Hehe.
Or maybe I could get a guest role on The X-Files, since everyone and their mothers will be on the show next season. With Duchovny (Mulder) out of the picture and Anderson (Scully) essentially done with, Chris Carter has been looking for ways to keep the show afloat. They should just scrap the current "story line," let agents Doggett and Reyes run the show now, and change the title of the TV series. Sort of like what they do with all the different versions of Star Trek. Name it X-Files: The Next Generation or something. Heh.

I think I've mentioned this before. If I have, oh well. Oh shit, I'm digressing. Go figure.

I still hate my computer's situation, too, although the only viruses I got today came as email attachments from other people's infected computers. Tomorrow is formatting day, Round 3. Hum.

I wonder if Acoustic Lab or Index Corp has any openings...

Pffft.
No sooner did I post that message, I got the same damn trojan again. This is unbelievably ridiculous.

When I get the virus, my CPU usage (according to Task Manager) shoots up to 99%-100% (so I can't do anything), and certain processes start taking up more and more memory. Most notably, this happens to inetinfo.exe, which I guess is one of the main files for running IIS (and one that continues to try and get permission to access the net according to my firewall). I'm guessing this virus exploits an IIS loophole of some sort.

And the beauty of this is that I can not remove IIS from my computer once I install it. Fucking weird. Going to Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel and trying to remove IIS just causes my computer to sit there doing nothing indefinitely. Task Manager says all of my (unused) CPU power is dedicated to the System Idle Process. Heh. Idle.

So you know what that means? I guess I get to format and try installing win2k again! This time around, I won't install IIS. I hope that's my original problem. I'll have to find something else so I can learn ASP, but I suppose that's the price I have to pay for... uh... trying to make my computer functional and secure. :p

If still trojan bullshit continues to occur, bringing my computer to a near-halt, I'm going back to Win98. Screw this crap.
I better figure out how to convert my hard drive to a FAT32 system, though, heh. Supposedly you can't go back if you convert to NTFS or something.

Time for bed. This is causing me to pull out my hair. :p

Backing up is so overrated.
I was still getting that VirtualRoot trojan every now and then, so I decided to format and reinstall everything today. They sure don't make it easy to uninstall Windows 2000 or format an NTFS drive. Wow...

I think I'm ok now. I haven't contracted a virus yet. Heh. Norton AV was the very first thing I installed, even before I installed my CD-R or display drivers. :)

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I lost half of my AOL instant messager buddy names. I lost all of ICQ buddy names. I lost my Eudora email address book. I don't know how this happened. I backed up everything I had on my hard drive before I formatted. So now I'm essentially screwed. I even checked my mother's computer (which is where everything is backed up) only to see that certain data files never made it to her hard drive. This is very weird, because I didn't back up just data files, I backed up everything. :/ No dice. I don't get it. If certain files didn't make it to her computer, there would have been a network error alert box popping up saying, "Hey! There was a hiccup! Try again!"

I'll add names to my respective IM clients as I remember them, but I may require you (the visitor) to provide the J-man some info if you're one of those visitors I actually talk to. Essentially anyone's IM name, ICQ number, or email addy would be most appreciated.

*sigh*