"On the inside it hurts less, the outside seems so cold."
The movie let out around 1:30, so it was after or around 2AM by the time I got back to Charlotte. Being that it's Charlotte, it was completely dead at 2AM on a Friday night. No cars going anywhere in town (I didn't see a single other car my first time through end to end), no people, everything with it's lights off (minus gas stations). So I drove out to Wal-Mart to entertain myself. Wandered around, saw some things I felt like buying. So I bought two little Chicken Cordon Bleu singles in the freezer section to eat when I got home, and chocolate oreas, and chocolate cupcakes, and honey buns, and a candle, and the widescreen Tron release on DVD, and a cool portable soap holder. At this point, I had been wandering aimlessly in Wal-Mart for over an hour and it waslike quarter after 3, so I gave up hoping something would happen or be going on and left and came home amd got online.
"Crawling in my skin, these wounds they will not heal."
Sick... I've been sick for around two weeks now. First it was just a headache and congestion, I figured maybe I brought it back from Atlanta or something. And I didn't go to work the beginning of the week of the 14th because of it, and when iwent in later that week, I was so congested and felt like crap and everyone could here it, and Dean said I probably hadwhat him and Nick had weeks ago. But then it started going away, headaches left, just congestion stayed... then BAM! I think what bro had was lingering int he house, mutated, and attacked me in a weakened state. And then I was more congested, pressure in my head was intense, sore throat, and more. And it hung on. By Monday of last week, it was bad, and mom made me an appointment for 10AM. I went in, he did his questions and little examinations, gave me antibiotics, said I was contagious. So, being contagious, I stayed home for that reason alone until Wednesday afternoon/thursday.. I've been sleeping a lot though, so I stayed home every day since also. I've reversed my sleep schedule because of it though which isn't necessarily bad, but not really all that good either. I slept 12 hours last night though. I've also lost 10 pounds at some point recently.
"This world is gonna pull through, don't give up, you've got a reason to live, can't forget."
Dinner... went out to dinner a few times recently. The Chinese buffet being popular. I stopped there after work and go a dinner buffet take-out one night a week or three ago. And then the family went the week after that. I love that place. Tonight, mom, dad, and I went to the new Applebee's in Charlotte. My cousin Brandon works there we found out and he was our waiter. Was cool to see him again, we used to hang out a lot when we were little, wander around in the woods at his house, or the creek at his house before that. Play with Ninja turtles, slime, etc. Then middle school and high school hit and we went different ways. He seems really nice these days though. Mom ended up getting the chicken fajita I think. Dad and I both got the 20oz Porterhouse steaks with garlic mashed potatos, sauteed mushrooms, and garlic toast. I had been craving steak since about mid-week. Mmm, it was great. I wish now I had gotten a dessert though, the white chocolate and walnut brownie with ice cream and white maple sauce looked so good. Got home and weighed myself, 165.5 instead of 10-under 163.5 I've been showing lately. Unfortunately, my meal alone weighed 2 pounds easily, so I'm sure it'll all be gone tomorrow. ;)
"So go on, if this will make you happier, it got you this far, did what you had to do."
Improvement... need to start working out. Making plans to buy a new bike now so I'll have the money by spring. I was looking at a new $700 Trek last fall when mine got stolen thanks to little bro. I should start weight-lifting again, I loved doing so at Rose when i was there. I had friends to go with there though. Maybe after I register for my one class (heh, if I'm not screwed already) my KCC id card (after I get one, I never have in the years I've been there so far)will get me into their weight room for free...that would be cool, I could work out after or before class sometime. Debating grabbing our exercise bike from downstairs again, or one of the weight benches. I'd also like to bring sis' old (boughtnew, used one year) dorm room fridge up here... put my brita pitcher in it, some snacks, maybe pop, though I haven't drank anything but maybe one glass of Code Red since Christmas day, maybe earlier. Mostly just water, some SoBe, orange juice, milk. Not even chocolate milk. Cleaning my room... slowly again. No real rush, taking care of and getting rid of things as needed. Working on that more.
"Time is a valuable thing, watch it fly by as the pendulum swings, watch it count down to the end of the day, the clock ticks life away, it's so unreal."
Been buying little things lately. I bought a little desk lamp shortly after x-mas. A cool little candle as mentioned earlier. The little portable soap holder mentioned earlier also. The candle because I like candles, just rarely want to spend several dollars on big ones, this one lasted being lit continuously for a night, the entire next day, and the following night and cost 64 cents... works for me. The soap holder because I'm sick of sharing a bathroom with siblings. I have seperate towels and wash clothes, seperate toothpaste, I pick specific shampooI want to use, and soap... the problem with seperate soap is, where do you put it when not in use but when it's still wet? Nowhere! Shampoo bottles can be put elsewhere, toothpaste tubes can be put in my bathroom bag, etc... everything else has a container. Youc an't just dump a wet bar of soap in a drawer, and if I leave it out, it gets used by others (not that I mind the use, it's that I paid for it with my own money for my own use, and I want my moneys worth :P). So anyway, enter my cool blue portable soap container. My soap can happily be put away now. There was some other small thing I needed/wanted, but in my haze at Wal-Mart I forgot it and can't remember since. Next time it becomes an issue, I'm sure I'll notice and remember.
"Wake up kids, we've got the dreamers disease."
Weird dreams lately. The most recent one that I remember the most about was being a witness to a murder or something and them hiding me as a girl. And I made use of that fact by applying and getting back into Rose-Hulman using this fake girl's identity. Wandered through my old dorm and saw how completely it has changed, one door int he building had been closed off and made into a room where the straircase had been. Saw all the new buildings. And of course, saw tons of people I knew. At one point, I was talking to someone I knew (can't remember name) on some bleachers. Later, saw my friend Karl and talked to him a ton. Only problem being, Karl never went to Rose, he went to the Math/Science Center with me in high school. All in all, a weird dream. Had a few others lately, not sure why. Another recent one had my friend Jimmy, also from the Math/Science Center. Took place in a huge mansion (like the mutant academy ala X-Men in size) that seemed like it was down south. It had a grand entrance hall with a single staircase going up three stories inside the main entrance. Chandaliers and all. Parts of it had a hunting lodge look, or like a jolly british fellow int he old days had gone to Africa on a hunting trip and had decorated the place int hat style/feel when he returned. At one point while being shown the way to my room I looked out some windows and saw a large number of people walking around on a giant tree outside, talking, sitting at tables, everything, the tree was that large. It seemed like ahuge willow tree, or had vines and such hanging off it at the least.
"And now you're half awake, you bend till you break, and make the same mistakes, always."
For anyone that doesn't know, I'm a lucid dreamer, always. I'm always aware dreams are dreams and that I'm asleep, so during dreams like this, I'm actively thinking about how odd things are and trying to make sense of them. Often-time, this is why i remember them so clearly... I'm conscious enough to know I'm dreaming so usually remembering isn't hard either. I used to have dreams and not write them down until lunchtime at school even, sometimes years later with certain dreams. It's makes a lot of dreaming more interesting in ways, since you can change things, re-"watch' things different ways, and is a lot like a virtual reality movie. The downside I've had problems with also though... what happens when you're having a nightmare you can't control instead, are FULLY aware you're asleep, but can't wake yourself up despite that? You can't get out, you can't change anything, you're trapped in your mind. I used to have a recurring dream like this at my great-grandmothers cottage when I was little, it had to do with my dad being on an airplane, and the airplane flying over a completely black background, like a side-scrolling game, and a giant drum of white paper unrolling below it, and little bits of sand or gravel were under the paper, making little bumps and spikes in the paper as it pulled over them, and to me... it was like my mind was being sandpapered. I'd be screaming at the top of my lungs out loud but couldn't wake myself up, and no amount of shaking or talking to me would get through either, every time I had to be splashed with water, sometimes even a large saucepan full. I have no idea why I had that dream (as many as 5 times that i can remember), why I *only* had it at my great-grandmother's cottage, and why never since we stopped going there. Interesting none the less.
"They were too weak, too prone to break, their needs too deep, their skin too thin."
In other news, some birthdays:
12/24 - Heather!
01/04 - Amber!
01/05 - Kim!!!
01/22 - neko!
01/25 - if_i_had_it_all!
01/27 - Ben!
And last but not least, a very Happy B-Earth Day to Bill! who had it earlier today, the 28th. :)
Happy B-Earth to you all!
"You've wasted every moment, of your Saturdays and your Sundays."
Computers... not sure if I posted this before or not. But after I got my 40G drive for X-Mas, I bought a Maxtor Ultra ATA/100 card while iN Atlanta the week after New Years. I got both in my desktop, and finally got the Pentium Pro 200 w/512K cache that I bought off eBay, got it all together, and whoohoo, running desktop. For some reason, when explorer is the shell, the system locks up randomly at times (running XP) which makes no sense. Particularly when it doesn't do it at all while running geOShell (my shell replacement of choice anyway) as the shell. Strange stuff, but with a 4+ day uptime right this minute so eh. I conglomerated all my mp3's onto a 15G partition of the 40G drive, at 10G right now, and not done copying over. Need to do data recovery on my 13G drive though that has the messed up FAT and partition tables. I found the program R-Studio at http://www.r-tt.com but the trial only allows you to recover files smaller than 64K. If anyone knows of a program that's free, will recover all files, and works as well as R-Studio, please let me know. Otherwise, if anyone wants to buy me a license, or find some other method (heh heh) for me torecover all my files, I'd appreciate it. I really don't want to pay for the program for one use though, if I frequently had data recovery needs, it would be great, but for one use, meh.
Speaking of uptimes (watch me jinx it), XP here on my laptop is currently at 17.5 days with no reboots or hibernating and heavy use every day. My 2K Pro highest on this laptop was 23 days before a bad PSP install killed it, I'd like to think XP handles program errors a little better though (no BSOD yet after 4+ months of use). Meanwhile, I stole the AT power supply out of my 486 and put it in my P90 NetBSD box since the old one the fan just stopped entirely (was a mini-AT power supply from a refurbished Packard Bell... go figure. ;)) so now my server is on 24/7 also and at a 14 day uptime right now. Still running 1.5, maybe I'll download the newest images, and upgrade the entire box sometime soon. Might be getting a 200MHZ Evergreen MxPro to upgrade it to from lil (Is that still happening? :)) so it might be more decent pretty soon. Desktop has 128M, server has 48M, this laptop has 192M.
REQUEST: If anyone has any 72-pin SIMMs they don't want or can't use in sizes larger than 8M (I have probably 12 or so 8's still with 8's in everything I can put them in, they fill slots fast, but don't help much) feel free to donate to me. I'd really appreciate it, I don't personally own a single computer that was made in even the late 90's i don't think, just older. I don't have a single computer that uses 168-pin DIMM's either, everything uses 72-pin SIMMs. (This laptop is gov't owned, buying anything for it would be pointless when they'll take it back when I leave my job and whatever I would have bought for it then would be useless to me.)
Next up is to get the IBM P100 Cyndi gave me up and running something useful. Maybe I'll swap drives and make it into my server even. Then one of them, or else my 486 needs to finally be made suitable for dad to use as a writing computer. The 386 running Win 3.11 that he's using now runs MSWorks fine, and is on the network even, but it is slow and the hard drive is tiny.
Code... a while back I started making a scheduler program for my own use. It's current incarnation is here and is really basic. It's modelled after the "Benjamin Franklin Coercer" and as such is supposed to only be a single day schedule. Ideally (it doesn't currently) it supposed to delete any tasks completeed or not after 24 hours, the idea being to teach you set reasonable goals that you'll actually accomplish in a day. As I said, that hasn't been put into mine currently, mostly because I'm not sure how I want to progress. I was debating between having it serve two functions... the original idea of the BF Coercer clone (one that actually works, doesn't crash, or hide itself irrecoverably, heh), and also making it so you could switch a day/calendar mode for long-term goals or for people who'd rather use it like that. Comments, ideas, and suggestions appreciated. You'll need the VB6 runtimes as with previous programs, I'm on a VB kick or something as sad and disappointing (disgusting?) as that may sound to some. ;) I haven't worked on my counter recently to fix the bugs, maybe I will someday soon.
More recently, I'd like opinions, suggestions, etc on a web site. http://www.eatontheatres.com is our local two-screen theater. Sadly, their page is made in Netscape Composer, has lots of serious problems, and generally looks like it came out of something's ass. Serious problems like if your browser doesn't support javascript, the navigation box is useless and you have no way to browse the site. Serious problems like the frame size being too small, and if you go to the slide advert page, and click the back link, it's not targetted (or even updated to use the current site location) for the right frame and you get a second (or multiple) top frame inside the main frame. Serious problems like seperate font tags (eww to begin with) for color and sizes, and then italic tags all around a blank space. For the web designers out there, just look at the source, it scares me. :P So anyway, last summer/fall (2000) I talked to the theater owner and said I'd redo it. I didn't get around to it thoughuntil recently and that's what I would like opinions on. Currently, my test page is at http://medlir.warped.com/hosted/eaton/ IT IS INCOMPLETE. Currently, I'm happy with the layout as I've changed it so far. I think it looks much better, and is much more useable and actually helpful for people (movies showing and related info all right there, plagiarized info removed, and links to a source with much more info for those that want it provided, navigation available in multiple forms and at the top and bottom of the page, combo box working properly, info put in readable manner, etc.) Colors are being played with, I truthfully like the dark blue better, I find it easier on the eyes (and the two other people I asked directly said the same) than the red/aqua/yellow they use together. The dark blue also matches and compliments the link colors and the projector image coloring. I am considering making the large and bold text in the movie boxes a barely perceptible light blue or off-white toc ut down on the contrast. The advertisement page is the most recent thing to be worked on, I need to integrate the slide examples pages into it though still. And the about page doesn't exist as I don't have the history info I'd like to put on it along with the full contact info. I'm debating also adding a concessions page. So anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts, comments, feedback, suggestions, whatever. Bugs! It's all valid HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS, so ideally, it should work everywhere, but I need reports on what doesn't work in browsers with bugs (bleh, I can see Netscape 4.x having problems already). For instance, I'm told that on IE5 on Mac OS 9, when you scroll down, the combo box disappears oddly enough. Go go gadget MacIE. So any info people can give me would be helpful.
Also, hit 2000 on my counter of my lastn page yesterday/today. Huzzah!
"Say goodbye, lose your friends, make them go, don't need them around."
LiveJournal... removing a bunch of people. I always look for at least a warning or explanation why when other people remove me even if I don't care that they did, so this is mine. I don't read most of your journals, and some of you I know through IRC or soulxchange or elsewhere and have onlytalked to maybe twice in my life. :P I don't even read everyone I purposely put in my "Default View" group. For informational purposes, I like having tons of people on my friends list... I love information, and the more people I have, the more information I have available to me, and the more links I have to elsewhere on livejournal and other people and even more info. For *that* reason, I don't really want to do this, I like having a giant web of links to everything, I'm a child of the net I guess. :P But it's currently too much to maintain with everything else on my plate, and using the institution's (LiveJournal's) methods. My solution is to remove people from my friends list, and make an off-site page of links to people (integrated with LJ of course by link and using the same style) to keep track of everyone still. With that said, if I remove you and you truthfully read my journal, and want to remain to have access to any friends-only post I may make, just let me know and I'll add you back. For the most part, I don't think anyone will really care. Note: Removing you from my list on here doesn't mean I don't like you, don't consider you a friend, or don't care. :P Currently though, it's overwhelming me to the point that usually I only read Cyndi's LJ, and no one elses unless I find a lot of free time to go around and completely catch up (as I did with a few of you last week while sick). Sorry to anyone this bothers/annoys/angers/saddens/etc. Here is the page I created. This will obviously be a continuous process. :P
I put my trust in you
Pushed as far as I can go
And for all this
There's only one thing you should know
I put my trust in you
Pushed as far as I can go
And for all this
There's only one thing you should know
I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
I had to fall
And lose it all
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
Yes, this is a long entry, no I didn't use an lj-cut, no I don't care if your friends page is long because of it, it still has the same number of entries on it, a couple extra K of text won't kill you, it's my journal, deal with it.