Year: 2007

Yesterday I got a copy of Diskeeper to properly defrag my hard drives, which I haven’t done in several years. Possibly 7 years. The program works great and I’ve run it on my laptop and office computer several times now, and the drive looks better each time.

On my office computer, though, the page file was spread into tiny pieces all over the hard drive. The program recommended that I do a boot-time defrag, which reboots the computers and starts up a DOS-looking application that takes care of the page file and a lot of other boot-up things. The problem is, I started it at 5pm yesterday and it’s STILL GOING.

Right now it’s at STAGE 3. I don’t know how many stages there are and there’s no kind of status indicator on the screen. I know it’s running because I can hear the hard drive making noise. I left it running all night, thinking it would be done by morning. Has anyone ever done this? How long did it take you?

This morning sure sucked. As Payton opened the passenger door to the car, I noticed it hadn’t even been latched all night. Meaning he didn’t shut the car door yesterday morning when we got home. I didn’t say anything, though, I just started the car so we could leave for school. I mean, I tried to start the car. The battery was dead. Payton’s open door caused the dome light to stay on all night, resulting in a dead battery.

I called a couple people I know, hoping to get a jump start from one of them but nobody answered. It sucks, not having anyone to help you out when things go wrong. If this had happened in Illinois, I’d have dozens of friends, family and neighbors to choose from. I really should get around to meeting more people.

The kids and I came back inside. They played DS while I got prices on a jumpstart from every tow service in town. The cheapest ended up being $35 and it took him about 30 minutes to arrive. The jump only took a couple minutes and we were on our way. As I was pulling onto the ramp to get on the highway, I flipped on the heat since the windows were fogging up. That killed the car again. I thought it’d be okay since the car had been running for 5 minutes at that point. But no.

The tow guy had called me from his cell phone earlier since he wasn’t sure where my house was so I called him back on his cell. He asked where I was, then noticed that I was right in front of him. He pulled over and gave me another quick jump. Luckily, he didn’t charge $35 again. He recommended that I stop by their shop and have the battery checked out, which was free of charge. So I took the kids to school, signed them in an hour late, and went by the shop.

The shop tells me that the battery isn’t looking too good, but it might be because it was drained overnight. They recommend a new battery which is something like $79 installed. I tell them that I’ll have to wait until later in the week when I can afford something like that. I planned to check out a couple automotive stores for cheaper batteries that I could just install myself.

So I run a few errands around town (not battery hunting though), leaving my car running as I visit each place. My last stop is the bank to cash a check for groceries later. When I come back outside to the car, it’s dead again. I’d left it running but for whatever reason, and it turned itself off. Shit. I call the battery place again and ask them to send their tow guy. I asked if they could just go ahead and bring that battery for me and I’d buy it from them. They said they couldn’t do that and I’d have to pay another $35. My hope was that if I bought the battery from them, they’d be nice enough to not charge me $35 again. But that didn’t happen. Goodbye, grocery money.

BUT the tow guy did show up with the battery and installed it for me. I’ve had no more problems since then. I’m sure I needed a new battery anyway since I’ve never bought one for this car after 4 years of owning it. Payton felt bad about it all and apologized a few times. I told him maybe he did me a favor by killing my battery now instead of it dying someday when I’m driving out in the middle of nowhere. Gotta teach those kids to be optimistic.

I might be wrong, but I think the only time I really complain about life is when my car does frustrating things. I’m pretty easygoing, but I can’t stand it when my car doesn’t work. I guess because it seems like it screws up my entire day whenever something goes wrong with it. Which it definitely did today. And I hate cars. I wish so much that I didn’t have to own one. We are slaves to these stupid machines.

But in happier news…I got really cool stuff in the mail from Spessa today. And I got a letter from some law office, representing one of the credit card companies that I quit paying last year. The letter says, “This letter is to inform you that our client has authorized us to offer you a settlement (reduction) on the remaining balance. Please call our office for details.” My whole plan with ignoring my credit cards for the past year was for them to go into collection status to eliminate the high interest rates and late fees. I didn’t expect them to offer reductions! The balance on that one is only $600. That’d be great if they knock off a 1/3 from it. I’m going to call them in a day or two.

Also, my car/renters insurance dropped. A lot. I think it’s $17 or $18 per month cheaper now. I got my first bill from them at the new rate. It was $100 per month before and now it’s $82 or so. They sent me a letter a couple weeks ago, letting me know that the rates were going down. I didn’t know insurance companies lowered your rates when they could. I thought they only raised them. I’m happy about this.

Tonight the kids and I didn’t do much. They played DS all evening (geez, 5 hours straight I think) and I worked a lot to catch up from this morning. They’re addicted to a game called Animal Crossing. It’s the online version where they can visit other worlds and have visitors in theirs. It looks completely unappealing to me. I’m more of a Super Mario Bros. person, which I finally beat on DS yesterday.

I got rid of cable TV a couple weeks ago, to save $40 per month and since I never watch it myself. The kids play DS so much now that they don’t even miss it. I still have the basic network stations, because it was cheaper to keep those than to completely get rid of it since I have internet and phone service through them. So at least we can still watch Simpsons occasionally. But TV is pointless for me. I’m too addicted to the internet to watch it. And if I had to watch one more episode of The Suite Life of Zach and Cody…

This is a long entry. I’m defragging my hard drive right now. I don’t think I’ve defragged any of my drives since I installed Windows XP in 2000. The graphical representation of them looks pretty messy. Just look how cluttered this is. Whatever happened to the old defrag with all the different colored blocks, where you could actually see what it was doing? I know Windows 98 had that, but with XP it’s just a bar across the screen and you can’t really tell how bad it is or what it’s doing. I used to sit and watch an entire drive defrag when it had the blocks. It was like a game of Tetris, but with no effort! The DOS version was especially soothing to watch. Wow, bedtime.

I got overly OCD about my phone lines at my desk today, disconnecting everything and untangling it from the mess of electrical and network wires that wrapped along the walls behind my desk. I put hooks into the underside of the desk to hang the wires from and mounted a 5 port phone jack into the middle of it all. All of the phone wires are off the floor now, completely away from the rest of the wiring. While doing all of this, I had Cool Edit monitoring the line to make sure the background noise level didn’t get too high. I completely eliminated a buzz that was showing up in phone recordings before. I even labeled the lines with my Dymo labeler.

That’s how I spent a few hours of my Sunday. I also disassembled a metal frame that’s been sitting on my back porch for several months and threw it away with some broken chairs. I took it all to a nearby apartment complex and threw it in their dumpster. I was expecting some kind of resistance from the residents for using their dumpster and had arguments all planned out, but I met nobody there.

While I’m taking apart this metal frame, I hear this woman’s taunting voice but I’m not really paying attention to it. But after a second I realize she’s talking to me. She thinks I’m the next door neighbor and says something about me hiding behind my fence. She calls me by my neighbor’s name a couple times during it but doesn’t actually look in my direction. The people next door always have weird drama happening so I don’t know what it was about. I know that if it really was my next door neighbor she’d been talking to, he’d be out there screaming obscenities at her down the street. I bet she wondered why he didn’t.

All of my Godaddy sites were down for about an hour this morning. I joked with murd0c that it was probably because of daylight savings time. Later in the morning, I saw an article on Slashdot, stating that Godaddy was actually having DST issues and that’s why they were down.

My week has gone something like this:

Sunday, Feb 25th: Drove to the Portland airport and hung out for about 8 hours, just killing time on the laptop until Jammie arrived. Then we drove home.

Monday: Worked, picked up the kids from school, we all went to Tilt at the mall and won tons of tickets.

Tuesday: Took the kids to school, then started driving towards Seattle, listening to almost nothing but the entire Nirvana discography. Seattle is about 5 hours from my house. We stopped in a town about 45 minutes south of Seattle to visit relatives of Jammie. Hung out there, went out to eat at a nearby casino/restaurant, then gambled a few bucks for about an hour.

Wednesday: All of us drove to Seattle for the day. Visited the Experience Music Project which lasted several hours, went up in the Space Needle, rode the monorail, visited the fish market to watch them throw fish. Around 5ish, Jammie’s relatives left us and we went to our hotel.

Thursday: We visited Ye Olde Curiousity Shop and took the Underground Tour of Seattle.

And then…celebrity stalking! No trip to Seattle would be complete without visiting the house that Kurt Cobain shot himself in.

After that, we drove to the house that Eddie Vedder lives in and took pictures. GPS rules for celebrity stalking.

For those who plan to visit Seattle and are having a hard time finding the addresses for Kurt and Eddie (as we did), here they are…Kurt lived at 171 Lake Washington Blvd East in Seattle. Eddie Vedder lives at the end of 44th Ave SW in Seattle. I don’t know his house number, but his GPS coordinates are:

LATITUDE: 47.53138300
LONG: 122.38926400

After the stalking was done, we drove back to Jammie’s relatives, went out to Mexican food, and then drove home to Albany. We arrived home by midnight. Originally we’d planned to visit Aberdeen, Washington (Kurt Cobain’s home town) but it got too late and it was 2 hours out of the way so we decided against that.

Friday: Bowling with Kcochran and friends! It was fun, we drank a lot, my scores were horrible.

Saturday: Breakfast at Original Breakfast. Then we stopped by Fred Meyer and Staples. Jammie bought a laptop for school which I’m jealous of. Hung around the house the rest of the day and did nothing. Went on a walk around Albany for a couple hours. Got ice cream, attempted to win some crane machine prizes at Pizza King, checked on a few geocaches along the way and talked to Cal on his new voice bridge. Took Jammie back to the airport in the evening and got back home around 3am.

Every time I buy printer ink, I get postage paid envelopes to send back the empty cartridges to “HP Planet Partners.” But after getting reamed for $20 – $25 per cartridge, I don’t really want to give anything to HP that will allow them to save money. My hatred of printer ink prices far outweighs any good I’d be doing for the Earth. I fill up the postage paid envelopes with trash, Halloween candy and mean notes instead.

And I am a fan of recycling. I recycle all my paper, cardboard and plastic. Today I stood in line at Fred Meyer for almost 20 minutes, just to recycle $2.00 worth of cans and bottles. But paying $20 for .24 ounces of ink makes me not care. And now they’re rigging their printers so you can’t even use competitor’s ink cartridges.

I need to find one of those kiosks that refills ink cartridges for half the price, if they still exist. I’m pretty sure there’s nowhere in Albany that does it, though.

I sure haven’t been up to much lately. Friday, the kids and I saw Bridge to Terabithia which was nothing like we expected but still a really great movie. Saturday it was in the mid 60’s out and we Geocached for 4 hours. The kids had mud completely covering their shoes and pants on the first one. I even got muddied up a little. Some girl, who was fishing nearby with her parents, came by to see what we were doing in the woods. We’d been searching for an ammo case for about 20 minutes at that point, and after we explained it to her she found it within 5 minutes.

After that, we checked on another one that we’d found a few months ago but just wanted to see if there might be anything good in it. But that one was missing from its usual spot. So we decided to try the elusive Simpson Park cache, which we first started looking for in 2004, I think. Jammie and I finally found it last year but the kids never got to see it, even though we’d tried twice. It’s about a mile hike into the woods and I was able to lead them right to it this time. There was even a PLA button in it still, from the time Jammie and I visited it before.

It was dark by the time we got back to the car. Since there was another cache right across the street from there, we decided to check on that one too. It was still there. I don’t think any of us got anything particularly good from geocaching this time, but it was fun, and we left a lot of random junk in them.

Sunday we did laundry, mostly just to get their shoes cleaned up. And then last night I made a PLA TV episode, which was 100% inspired by Jammie. I showed her the original Kids in the Hall skit last week and she said it wasn’t funny. And maybe it would be funny if the guy said “cactus” instead. So I created that, just to amuse Jammie!

Last Friday, Mr. Spessa sent me on some missions in Eugene, Oregon after work, which were really fun and profitable. And Eugene isn’t as bad of a place as I expected. It’s actually a nice little town.

Binary Revolution Radio read one of my emails, schooling them on 80’s vs 90’s movie quotes. Click here to listen to episode #183 to listen to StankDawg & savant read my email. Skip to 21:55 if you don’t want to hear the whole episode, then 25:30.

No school for the kids today. We went to BTH for lunch and to the library. I dropped off the Roald Dahl book that I finished (Boy) and we picked up a bunch of new books. I got Charlie & the Chocolate Factory for both me and Emily. I read it all tonight and it’s pretty good. It’s kind of hard to say which movie followed the book better. Both had their strong points, but I still like the old 70’s version much better.

My weekend was boring. I think I watched 15 to 20 episodes of The Pretender. Plus I watched one tonight. I’m nearly done with season 3, now. I’ve been just deleting them as I finish them since I doubt I’ll ever watch it again. But it’s a great show and I’m enjoying it a lot. I found out that there were two Pretender movies made too, so I’ll have to find those next. There were supposed to be 4 Pretender movies made, but due to bad ratings, they only made 2. But at least the reviews on the 2 are good.

Oh yeah, I finished watching Early Edition a week or so ago. All 4 seasons of it. That was a great show too, even if they couldn’t seem to keep any characters. On all of their season finales, instead of having some great buildup of what was going to come in the next season, they were always lamely coming up with some weak story line to get rid of a character that didn’t want to be on the show anymore.

I put some shelves in Payton’s room over the weekend, which he really needed. He’s pretty happy about that. His room was trashed before because he didn’t have anywhere to put anything. Guess that’s about all I did this weekend. Pretender took up all my time. Stupid TV.

Over Christmas break I was able to do some major cleaning out of my storage unit in Illinois and bring back a lot of good stuff with me. Among my favorite things to have back are…

My lineman’s handset. This would have come in very handy several times this year.

My keyboard. I’ve had Sonar 4 Producer Edition and Reason for months now with no keyboard.

RTF gave me this when I visited NYC last year and I had to dump it in storage for a year.

Ten years of home video. And my photo albums.

My rotary dial telephone. How did I survive without it?

The kids’ Gamecube. Not that I play it, but they sure are enjoying it.

DVDs!