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04.02.03 :: 22:08
I had a really rotten day --; Nothing earth-shattering bad happened, just a lot of rain on my parade to make me miserable all around. I can only hope tomorrow is better. hmm... Good stuff that happened today... Bought a cheapy CD player so that I can listen to music at work ( ^^ ). My bro's going to sell me his GBA + accessories + some games for $40.
The weatherman says it's supposed to snow tonight with the white stuff hitting the valley floor o.O; We went all winter without the snowline getting that low. Judging by where the snowline was on the mountains today, I can almost believe I'll be driving in white stuff in the morning.
04.03.03 :: 21:51
Snow didn't hit the valley floor. I was still miserable today, but not as much as I was yesterday. How come whenever I intend to go to bed early I never make it? Alessar hooked me up with the Final Fantasy X-2 OST *_* *wuv* I didn't think it was being released until the end of the month, but the net is a great place, eh?
04.09.03 :: 21:55
I forget to update this blog when I write LiveJournal entries. Bad bean, bad --; There isn't much to talk about since the last 3 days have been me whining about how much stupid people suck and loathing my job. Nothing the general public needs to read about, eh? ^^
I got my paws on Final Fantasy Origins today. I really dig the face lift they've given it. The characters in FF1 are SNES quality, which makes 'em less 'painful' to the eyes. I like how it now changes target when you kill the monster that your attack was perviously going for (instead of wasting the attack like in the original). I especially dig the revamped music. Tres cool. Though I still mildly offended by the idea of an "easy" version of FF1. What's wrong, kiddies nowadays can't handle the full throttle gaming goodness that us fogeys went through? I bet they wiz their pants at WarMech too :P
04.10.03 :: 23:27
Stayed up late catching up on Liberi Tenebri; wasn't as far behind as I thought I was ^^; I cleaned the house to passable standards tonight. I really should have started earlier in the week. Darn me for being lazy.
I had a unique call today... It was enough to jar me out of my jadedness, at least for a while. A woman called up for help with her email and she was frustrated, but that's nothing new. No, this woman was crying. (That's familiar, I sometimes cry when I get extremely frustrated..). But she was also hurt 'cause the tech she spoke with before me wouldn't help her... He was too frustrated with her to get her problem solved.
I couldn't leave matters as they were, and I wouldn't give her back to the original tech even though I knew who it was. So... I started building her ego back up, y'know? Telling her that it was okay and just hang in there with me and that we could fix her problem. I guided her through some simple stuff and it didn't fix her email. She started getting frustrated again and I was like "Now, now, it's okay. I have a deeper bag of tricks than this. [pat pat]" I had her run the IE repair tool and that fixed her email. When she saw that her email was working again, I could almost see the smile on her face. It wasn't a big thing, but kind of like... relieved. "I didn't know you could do that," she said. Well, yeah, a lot of the useful things you can do are 'hidden'. You have to know where to look for them. I know she wrote down my name and now I'm "married" to her if she ever calls up again, but... right now... I don't think I care.
04.12.03 :: 10:39
Yay! I finally got to spend hours and hours of time pitting my Ice Climbers vs. someone else in Super Smash Bros Melee. I was pretty sure I'd get my butt kicked, to be honest ^^; (They're the *Ice Climbers* after all). Especially since I was going up against Elf and Marth. Elf's good with Marth and has a lot more practice than I do. But somehow, when the night was over and the dust settled, we were tied for the number of OKs and he respected my mad Ice Climber skills ^^ Yay [proud bean] The trick, I think, is to change your colors all the time, then they never know which Ice Climber is the one they need to focus on ;) Poor Brian got the short end of the deal (though he got half as many OKs as one of us, so he was doing pretty well it was 25-25-12 I think).
Oi! More people just showed up. Gotta jet ^-^
04.13.03 :: 21:11
W00t! It's been a good weekend with lots of friends, games, and fun :D Let's see, I continued to demonstrate the greatness of the Ice Climbers ;) We went to DQ for Blizzards on Saturday for lunch. And the Olive Garden was quite accommodating once it sunk in that I was dead serious about 24 people for dinner and I was going to plant my butt in their bar until I got a table for all of us :) (That worked out nicer than I was anticipating. I did the first 'shift' and my parents relieved Dave and me at 5:30.. then Olive Garden coughed up the table at 6pm ^_^ We had 4 waitpersons keeping tabs on us o.o)
I've also made out like a bandit ^^; For one thing, I'm going to end up with more chocolate cake than any person should have in their possession at one time. We had the cake from the Olive Garden party (I took home most of the leftovers). Work's going to provide a cake and my mom's got one as well. Oi, too much of a good thing! [nods nods] I also got 2 copies of the Harry Potter movie and 2 copies of GTA: Vice City ^^; I returned one of each today at Freddy's for Dark Cloud 2 and Pikmin. (Elf's description of Pikmin: "I like the game. The only bad thing about it is that sometimes the Pikmin die and it makes me sad =(" I'm going to see how many Pikmin I can kill >=) My aunt made me dust covers for all of my game systems. They fit perfectly *_* [hugs her dust-cover clad game systems]
04.14.03 :: 22:26
My E3 registration was confirmed today *_* I can't believe I'm actually going to be able to go. It's like... unreal... a dream... a life long goal... like always wanting to visit Japan or something, only harder to accomplish. I'm going to go to bed with a huge smile on my face tonight, oh yes I am... *_*
04.15.03 :: 21:47
I had a very good berfday ^_^ Lots of good food, *way* too much chocolate cake, and scored some neat gifts ^^v My parents surprised me with a new computer chair ^^ The one I had was Elf's old computer chair (before he gave me that I was using a chair from the dining room table ^^; ) The orange Elf-chair was literally being held together with duct tape, but at least it had a cushion! The chair my parents got me has more levers than you can shakes a stick at; every little thing adjusts. They also got me one of the roll around mats for the carpet :)
Yun got this stupid "1000 no Kotoba" song stuck in my head. I didn't like it that much the first few times I heard it, but it's grown on me. I like it more after seeing the video that goes with it in FFX-2. So much emotion behind that song. That makes it better.
04.16.03 :: 22:16
I picked Elf up today ^^ He's gonna be here until Sunday :) We spent the day / evening playing games :) He's been unlocking things in my Super Smash Bros Melee game that I haven't done yet (like Smash The Targets, I hate Smash The Targets ¬.¬ ) He unlocked Gannon for me ^_^ Meanwhile I latched onto his GBA SP and have been playing Phantasy Star. I love games, there's no denying that, but I missed most of the SNES / Genesis generation games due to lack of funds =/ I've only played a handful of the games from that generation and I'm not that big on emulators. I'm glad that a lot of them are being re-released ^^ I can catch up!
04.18.03 :: 06:37
Got home from work last night and discovered that my digital cable box wasn't working =/ Had to call Charter's tech support and we established that I'm going to have to swap it out for a new one (I could have told them that when I called them, but they have to take me through the motions y'know). On the bright side, Dave came over and he, Elf, and I had dinner and I watched them play Go (and I played more Phantasy Star ^^ )
Stupid customer for yesterday was a man who flat out REFUSED to give us his name or the name on his account, but he wanted us to replace his 'broken' cable modem. I explained that I needed a name so I could look up his account so I could test the modem. No, just giving me the MAC of the modem isn't good enough, I need the name as well. (Though, on later contemplation, if he had given me the MAC I could have done a search and I have a good chance of finding his name that way, but it's *a lot* of extra effort I shouldn't have to go through...) He demanded to speak with a manager, they were out of the office, whatever. He called back about an hour later and was forthcoming with his name. At which time we discovered that he owed over $150 on his account and that the modem wasn't broken, his account was shut off :P Yeah, no cable Internet for you.
04.19.03 :: 11:39
Stupid Elf, he got me hooked on Animal Crossing again. "I just want to test the GBA / GC link cable," he said. Yeah, then I had to run around and dig up fossils, and pick fruit, and go to the dump and police station, and, oh yeah, testing the cable. Heard Kapp'n's cucubmer song and laughed, then went back and forth several more times 'cause his songs are funny. Now I can sing along ._.;; Stupid Animal Crossing addiction, I thought I was over you!
The Cucubmer Song
Ye can't go wrong
With my Cucumber song
Cucumber, Cucumber
So green and long
They're so good cooked or raw
Or with some coleslaw
Go get me two or three
That I can gnaw
More of Kapp'n's songs can be found here.
04.20.03 :: 11:39
Sometimes life works in freaky cool ways. My dad had planned on coming out to the house yesterday and mowing the lawn. (First mow of the spring and the yard *really* needed it. I kept losing Pepper in the tall grass o.O) So while I was standing out on the porch yesterday morning before I went to work I was looking at the rose bushes wondering how to trim them without killing them. I'd decided that after my dad mowed I'd go over to the neighbor's and ask for their advice.
Fast forward to me coming home from work last night. The lawn was mowed like I expected. In addition the ditch and around the house had been weed-eatered, the rosebushes were pruned and tied back, the blackberries had been mostly chopped down, and the low hanging branches had been cut. It was like an army of high school kids had descended upon my house and did all the yard work I needed done *_*
I went to Freddy's to buy my parents a small thank you gift and then went over to their apartment to thank them in person. They'd worked on the yard for five hours. When they were working on the low-hanging branches they were using a hand-clipper. A neighbor walked by with another neighbor on a riding a horse and saw what they were doing. He told them to wait up for a minute, ran to his house, and brought back a 12' limb cutter for them to use :)
There's still some stuff I can do (like sweeping the porch and the walk). I'll dig out the broom after I'm finished here and do that. Dad says he's going to come back next weekend if it's not raining and whack the yard down again with the mower. This time he just cut the grass down without picking it up.
04.21.03 :: 22:35
I got home from work tonight and fell into bed to sleep. I was just too weary to not sleep. I think I kind of zoned on the drive home too. I remember seeing a lot of cops, but I don't remember much else b'sides that ^^;
The very first call I took today was from an angry man who would not (absolutely refused) to accept that the ISP does not have some influence over other companies' servers. Like, his DSL service was working, he could reach all webpages except this one in Texas. He spoke with the people in Texas and they were up. The problem was a backbone provider between us and Texas. For one thing, I have no way to contact anyone except the people one hop before us in the chain (and this provider was several hops beyond us) and secondly, I doubt they'd listen. As much as it galled him, web servers do go down from time to time and if it's a server we don't have direct control over, tough shit. That's how the Internet works =/ Regardless he hung up on me as I continued to try to explain that to him.
I ended the day with another man telling me that it was bullshit that his computer was having problems and to fix our servers in his area (and I know it's his computer). That's not uncommon, but the infuriating part was how condescending he was. "I've bought 10 ISPs and I know how you techies work! Stop blaming my machine and fix your servers!" Uh huh.. if we took *all* the calls I receive during the month and figured out how many are the ISP's fault and how many are customer / machine problems we'd soon discover that the ISP makes up a *very* small percentage of that total =/ Anyhow, that call ended with me telling him to call me back when he had an error message and we'll troubleshoot from there and him telling me to call him when I was ready to admit that the modem pool in that area was down :P (It wasn't, btw, I put him on hold for a moment and called it up to be certain :P )
Those two things alone aren't that bad, but when every call I took today was over 15 minutes (and many stretched into half hour long calls when they *shouldn't* have been...) it takes a lot out of a bean. I've been told (by multiple people) that I should leave my stress of work at work. I try to do that, but what if a good part of the stress is dreading going back? Like.. it's easy to say that your stress decreases when you leave the lion's den, but what if you know you have to return tomorrow? o.o
04.22.03 :: 20:39
I didn't take many calls at work today because one woman had me tied up for two hours. What were we discussing? First it started with the webbased email. At around 40 minutes she accidentally moved her taskbar to the top of the screen and then broke down in tears from sheer frustration. 10 minutes was spent with me cooing at her and reassuring her that we could get the taskbar back down to the bottom of the screen. Did that, she moved it to the top again, we moved it back to the bottom, I told her that it was a good time to break for lunch ^^; At this point 80 minutes had passed. We both needed a break. I told her to call me back in a couple hours and we'd plug away at it some more. Two hours later she called back for another 40 minute session of figuring out email (this time with Outlook Express 'cause the webbased mail just wasn't meshing with her). Yay, she was happy, though she did call back one more time with a quick question ^^;
That took a lot of energy I didn't really have to give. I didn't sleep last night (shouldn't have taken a nap when I got home). And I know that in most cases I'd probably be feeling all fuzzy-warm about helping her, but I don't =/ Though... I'm not bitter right now either (which is good). I feel bad that she was thrown in the deep end of the Internet and I was the only lifeguard on duty. I'm glad that my employers won't get tweaked at me for spending two hours with her, but she *really* needed a tutor, not a tech =/
04.23.03 :: 20:28
Today's tech support was just as bad as yesterdays, only there was no crying involved x.x Today I spent about two hours total helping a man set up his DSL. He'd done almost everything wrong that you possibly could. (He didn't have a firewall set up). He did, however, put the filter on the same line as the one going to the computer (which is the one line that isn't supposed to have the filter)... He disabled his network card in his machine so we had to re-enable it... He plugged the line from the wall into his computer's dial up modem instead of into the cable modem... Something within his computer was assigning it a DNS and I couldn't find out what was doing it for the life of me (fortunately I was able to 'override' it by putting a DNS into the right place).
And, just because it wouldn't be fun to have all the issues on his end, an 85 minute call to Qwest by the Lead Tech found that the customer's phone was ringing in two locations. That would be a problem, yes. After they resolved that problem I went back to fighting with the customer's DSL on his end. All afternoon as soon as we hammered down a problem another would pop up. Very annoying.
04.24.03 :: 23:08
Work was busy today, but in a good way. At least I felt satisfied at the end of the day that I'd gotten some things accomplished. Got home and tried to work on the cleaning the house, didn't get very far. Napped and dreamed of Quistis o.O; Got up and have been writing SeeDfic ever since. I have about a page written so far (4k).
04.27.03 :: 01:08
Actually, I ended up writing 11k. Yay. Baku's acting up --; I've spent this evening trying to restore and patch and uninstall / reinstall things and nothing is hammering out all the bugs. I think I'll format and start over again tomorrow =/ Not how I wanted to spend my Sunday, lemme tell ya...
04.27.03 :: 11:44
Forgot to blog the weird dream(s) I had yesterday. I dreamt that I lived next door to an ex-secret agent who was going senile. Usually I wouldn't care, but he kept planting landminds in my yard and I had to go out and clear them before I could mow the lawn ^^; This happened several times. My mom came over to the house and it happened, only this time the guy was so whacked that he'd left out some of the bits that actually made the landmind dangerous (so it was just a hunk of metal in the yard). She stormed over to the old man's house (where his daughter was) and tore into them. The daughter was kinda apologetic but like "It wasn't even armed! No harm done :)" and mom wasn't accepting that at all ^^;
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