05.01.02 :: 13:14

Went to bed at 11pm, woke up at 1pm; only got up once to feed Pepper. I slept lots and I'm still pooped. I think I'll be going back to bed after the mail comes...

05.01.02 :: 18:51

Mreh --; Nick messaged me this afternoon asking me to come into the office to work. The access servers were down and they weren't able to get them back up. Lots of people were calling to complain about not being able to get on. I had mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I was grumbly because he knew that the doctor had ordered me to rest for a few days. I also didn't want to go in because I already put in my "issue apologies" time earlier in the week when the mail server went down. I didn't want to do it again --; Also, they'd sent out several emails to the members telling them that the servers would be down for a couple hours. Ample warning was given... but why were they moving the servers in the middle of the day..?

On the other hand, I felt guilty for not being there when they needed me. I always feel like slime when I take time off work (either sick or vacation). It's the same little whiney voice that insists I be where I say I'm going to be 5 minutes early.

Nick wanted to know when I'd be back and more or less kept asking me questions until I stopped responding. That didn't sit well with me. It makes me want to quit my job, just so I'll be left alone long enough to get feeling better. He probably doesn't realize how much I kick myself when I feel down; that I'm taking off so that I'll get better. I could keep pushing... who knows where I'd end up with that... probably with bronchitis. In short, I just want to be left alone. When I'm feeling better they can start loading crap back on me again.

05.02.02 :: 13:07

First off, a bit of sad news. T's father passed away yesterday. I was fortunate to meet him while at T's wedding. He was a kind man who jumped in with the kids on the dance floor. My thoughts and prayers are with the Marble family.

I'm progressing steadily along the road of recovery. I'm not nearly as tired today as I have been the last couple days (though I am sore, sleeping too much x.x) I'm taking my medication like a good little bean, and it seems to be helping. I'm coughing a lot of the crap out, which is good ^^

When I haven't been doing my impersonation of a sack of potatoes, I've been playing Arc the Lad II. I'm stuck right now --; I can't find the switch to open a door so that I can continue going through this maze. The game is so new that there aren't any (good & English) FAQs about it yet. The official strategy guide isn't going to be out until May 20th. I've resorted to posting a message on GameFAQs message boards and hoping some kind soul will respond with a helpful answer.

05.03.02 :: 01:14

Mreh, the main dial up pool at work is still down last I heard. The only reason I know is because some customers who know my mom (and where I work) went to my mom this afternoon in an effort to get to me. My mom explained that I was home sick and haven't been to work since before the main pool went down; I don't know anything. Mom passed their complaints on to me. I'm not mad at mom for doing so. I'm mildly peeved at them for approaching mom instead of driving down to the office to speak face to face with someone if phone calls went unanswered. (Am I the only one who prefers to raise a ruckus in person?)

I dread going back to work, to be honest. I don't want to be tossed into the middle of this mess --; I don't want to spend 8 hours apologizing to people. If I wanted to do that, I would have kept my job at Harry & David's. Before I quit they were going to "promote" me to customer service (in other words; give customers what they want so they stop complaining). In a perverse way, I'm glad that my stomach is still sour. But I'm not entirely sure that it's my illness causing it or if it's stress...

No one has responded to my request for help on the GameFAQs Arc the Lad board. Bah! I despise being stuck in a game. It ruins it for me --; I've been sniffing around my collection for some other game that might hold my interest until the strategy guide comes out, but nothing's caught my eye. I started a new game of Vagrant Story and was promptly smacked down by the Minotaur boss. (I so suck at that game). Maybe I'll give FF8 another whirl. That's my usual stand by game.

05.06.02 :: 23:28

Oi, a lot's gone on in the last couple days. I'll start with what's happened most recently and work backwards (which is backwards, but it's my blog, so there :P )

Tonight I opened the copy of Grand Theft Auto 3 that Vera picked up for me. I'd been looking forward to playing it all day while at work (after my work day, longing for such violence shouldn't be a surprise). Vera had bought it new at Funcoland for me. (I wasn't able to find it up here for some odd reason, every place I looked was out o.O ) So I opened the wrapper, took off the title / seal across the top, looked inside and found 1 game map, 4 torn pages of a skater magazine, and some Windows game demo disc. I'd be frickin' ripped off! --; Needless to say, I was furious.

I called Funcoland (thank goodness Vera had also given me the receipt). The sales associate I spoke with was baffled, but said that if I could mail it back before the 7 day return was up, they'd replace it. 3 days were already gone by now. I expressed my extreme displeasure that if this game wasn't refunded I'd be livid (like I wasn't already, it was a $57 game with tax --; ) I made arrangements to overnight express it to Vera and have her raise hell with them.

Then it occurred to me that Funcoland, Babbages, Gamestop.com, and Software Etc. are all under the same parent company. I called up the Software Etc. in the mall here to see if they'd do an exchange in this case. I spoke with the Asst. Manager (who knows me 'cause I come in so often ^^; ) He said that *he* couldn't do it, but since I was such a good customer and they were associated with Funcoland, the Manager would probably exchange it if I called him in the morning and asked. I'll be ringing them up before I go to lunch tomorrow to see if they'll do it else I'll be running to the post office to throw the game into the mail to Vera.

That was the icing on a crappy day. Work today was Hell, pure and simple. If Dante's version of Hell existed my level would be doing tech support when all the servers were down with no hope of getting them up. I finally got a bit more of the story on why the main dial up pool was down last week; Qwest unplugged the lines. Why Qwest did it I haven't found out yet, but that sent 'em scrambling to get phone lines from somewhere so that people could get connected to the net. The current set up is a hodgepodge of phone lines from 3 different carriers.

Only the smallest pool (Kfalls) didn't have to change their dial up number to a temporary one. Every other pool does, which means contacting *a lot* of people. There's a message on the answering machine, but how often do people actually listen? --; I was on the phone 8 hours solid explaining how to change phone numbers and apologizing and smoothing things over. What makes this situation even worse is that because of the move I can't call long distance currently (two of the pools are out of the area). So if someone calls with a problem from out of the area I can't return their call --; Yeah, there are a lot of pissed people right now...

There are also an abundance of stupid people, which is compounded when their righteous indignation rears its ugly head. Here's a sampling: 1) A woman was angry because I kept telling her to go to her desktop. The reason she was angry? She had a laptop, and thus didn't have a desktop. 2) Another woman didn't like my instructions for changing her phone number and asked for another tech. I told her that I was it. Her droll response, "How unfortunate." I bit my tongue and finished doing the setup. She exhibited her stellar skills by not getting her own user name or password correct. It took three tries before she managed to type in the magical combination of the two that would get her online. 3) Yet another woman (who says women're better?) didn't like Hollie's explanation of what was going on with the phone lines, insisted that she call up a tech to tell her what was really going on, so Hollie called me up. (Admittedly, we both take a small amount of pleasure in watching the reaction when 'the tech' comes up and it's another female). This woman obviously was put off by the fact that another woman was explaining exactly the same thing Hollie had just told her. Bah.

But just explaining problems wasn't my only challenge! When I got in from lunch I found that the access server was down. Yeah, I kicked it and got it up again, but that sucked --; What also sucked was having a computer on the bench to be repaired while all this other crap was going on. (At any given time there were 3 - 6 phone lines ringing with 2 people answering, that's how busy it was). Fortunately, the repair was an easy one, but I wasn't impressed when I booted the machine and found that the guy's wallpaper was a bare breasted woman. Why can't people do me the favor to at least *hiding* their porn before bringing the computer in? --;

I slept like crap last night because of (justifiable) anxiety about today. I slept about 3 hours of tossing and turning. I did have a dream this morning. I dreamt that I had a book published. Many of my favorite authors took my works on as a "pet project". They edited them, cleaned them up, and then published them in a paperback volume. I remember that the quotes on the book were from various authors talking about how excited they were about my future as a writer, that I was a diamond in the rough. The publishing company had given me 2 copies of the book. I was walking downtown to give one of them to one of the owners of Lithia Motors and then I woke up.

Honestly, I felt a pang of regret when I woke up. It hurt, not physically, but kind of like the deep disappointment type hurt. I sat there for a while and savored the feeling of satisfaction... Probably like savoring an especially stimulating wet dream. I didn't want it to be a dream, but it was. Maybe someday it won't be...

I got your message, NB, thanks, I needed it :)

05.07.02 :: 09:25

I just wanted to do a bit of wallpaper introduction. The work wallpaper is the draft of a picture being drawn by Helen Fong. It's not ready yet, but I still think it's spiffy ^^

Today's workday is being more mellow than yesterdays [knocks on wood]. I've only gotten into one spat with a customer ^^; "The number you gave me doesn't work!" "Yes, it does." "No, it doesn't." "It's the only number we have right now, so that's it. If you want help I'll be glad to go through it with you." [click] Must work on people skills ^^;

05.07.02 :: 23:11

Today was a lot better than yesterday. Still pretty busy, but not insanely so. (I only had a backlog of calls to return, like, 10 times instead of having a constant backlog like yesterday). Hopefully tomorrow will be even calmer. I could go for that. I come home from work and my shoulders are in knots ^^;

I called up the Manager (Craig) for the local Software Etc. He couldn't do an outright exchange for GTA3, but he did offer to call the Funcoland in Cali and see if he could smooth things out for me to get the exchange made. A few hours later he called back and told me to just bring the game in and he'd exchange it out of his inventory. (A *very* kind gesture since he didn't have to do that. It wasn't his store's problem).

Anyhow, the Manager of the Funcoland had been unco-operative and rude to Craig and he wasn't happy. When Craig asked him about what happened the Manager said that they got games from the manufacturer all the time that were like that. Craig found that suspicious. (I would as well. I've been buying games since the Atari 2600 days and have never encountered anything like it before..). So he called the Regional Manager and told him about the Funcoland in Cali having problems with "new" games. Now the Regional Manager is looking into it ^^; Ah, what a can of worms we opened with that one...

To tell you the truth, sometimes I have to wonder if the Software Etc. where I buy my games isn't the corporate exception ^^; I've tried ordering from Gamestop.com and ran into problems (my only poor experience with online shopping, in fact). Likewise Austin won't shop there anymore 'cause he feels that they ripped him off. Now this Funcoland thing... [shakes head] If you're ever in the Rogue Valley Mall, be sure to shop at the Software Etc. ^^

I started playing GTA3. I have to limit how much I play right now. I have another project I have to do on a tight deadline. I've broken it up into pieces so that if I have any time left after the nightly chunk is done, then I may play games :) Since I also have a self-imposed cut off time for quitting, I don't always get in as much as I'd like. It's better to stop and get some sleep than stay up 'til 2am playing and then be dead the next day.

I got your email, Jackie. I'll try to be on AIM more often, but it probably won't be this week. It distracts me too much when I'm trying to work to have the little thing *blinking* at me. I want to put tape over the bottom of my monitor to make it stop :P

I'm getting myself mentally psyched and organized for the rest of the month and into June. I don't have anything planned this weekend (except reading). The following weekend, Star Wars II comes out and we've started organizing a get together at my place. So far it's going to be Vera, Austin, and Jeffy. I can't guarantee that we'll get tickets. If not, Vera has a good backup of anime to watch ^^ The weekend following is Anime North. I can't believe it's this close already! I think I have most everything ready. All I really need to do now is pack.

Vera, Austin, and I are going to be doing a lot of work on the house during June. There's also the OIT commencement to attend. That's going to be a happy / sad event. Going to commencement *always* make me sad to the point of wanting to cry. I'll be happy for Elf, Dev, Kooz, and the rest of the guys, but I'll miss them...

My brother sent a review from the newspaper about the play he's currently performing in. The reviewer mentioned him by name and said that Nanki really made the performance ^_^ I'm proud of him. Those type of reviews are great for his portfolio ^_^ I'm glad that when we "grew up" my brother and I both got to do the professions that we wanted: I'm a computer geek and he's an actor :)

05.08.02 :: 23:27

Work is getting progressively better, yay. The most noteworthy call was a discussion I had with a customer. He reiterated his point four times (I kept a tally). After the third time of saying *exactly the same thing* I told him that I understood his point the first time and that he didn't need to repeat it. So he did one more time --; Just one of those little annoyances to test my patience.

I witnessed an accident on the way to taking some lunch to dad. A large plumbing repair truck had pulled to the side of the road in front of City Hall (like he was going to park there). He then jetted back into the lane and smashed into a minivan. The minivan's nose was pinned under the larger truck, it wasn't going anywhere with someone pulling it out. I think both drivers were okay, they'd gotten out of their vehicles and were examining the damage before the light changed and I kept going. When I got to dad's work (only a couple blocks away) I spotted an officer sitting in his cruiser on the side of the street. I walked over to him and reported the accident. He told me that they'd already dispatched officers to the scene.

05.09.02 :: 22:14

Brian left with his battalion for their deployment to Egypt this morning. He came by last night to say good-bye before he left. I asked him a bit about what it'd be like there. He said that the base was out in the middle of nowhere and that nomads would come along and set up camp right outside the fence. They'd then toss rocks at the soldiers for about a week until they got bored and left again ^^; He also said that the nomads would find landmines, pick them up, take them to the front gate, and want to give them to the sentry. I advised him to politely decline landmine gifts from random nomads ^^;

I outsmarted myself today ^^v I *hate* clothes shopping with a passion. Well, I'd nearly resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to go shopping for undies this weekend 'cause I was down to the palm tree pair. I opened the draw to see what was left, [dug dug], and o.O'd at what I found. I'd stuffed away several new pairs that still had the price tags on them. Woohoo!! I planned ahead! Clothes shopping has successfully been dodged ^^v

Oh, one more thing, Centra Garden may be down for a day or two. The server it's being hosted on is being physically moved in the next 24 - 48 hours. Maybe I'll get to move into my new office next week. Four walls and a door *_*

05.10.02 :: 19:43

I only slept 4 hours last night. That was my own fault. I was having cramps and I refused to get up and take any medicine for it. If I hadn't been lazy / stubborn I would have slept better ^^;

Warning: Possibly offensive rant ahead. If the ranting doesn't offend, the language might ^^;

My "battle" with Mac customer that's been going on for, oh, 3 days now is starting to fray both of our nerves. He'd done some repairs to his machine and afterwards his email stopped working. I admitted that I don't know much about Macs to him. He asked why we didn't have a Mac technician in the shop. This is one of my favorite questions, btw, because it always pisses Mac users off when I tell them the honest answer (I won't lie): there isn't a need for one. We get 2 - 3 Mac support calls a month. That's hardly enough to justify a Mac tech.

Anyhow, I figured out a work around for his problem, but during the course of our conversations he's convinced that I hate Macs. (Which isn't true, I hate Mac *users*, there's quite a difference!) Today he told me that he'd put his Mac up against any PC I wanted. I somehow kept myself from laughing. The depth of some Mac users' inferiority complex never ceases to amaze me.

Macs vs. PCs is a stupid comparison for the simple reason that the only thing that really distinguishes a *PC* from a Mac is that the PC isn't Apple proprietary, meaning that you don't have to rely upon one company to rip you off when you need parts ("$100 for a mouse, are you fucking me?" Don't laugh, I've seen it.) If he wants to compare Mac OS and Windows OS, that's another matter entirely that's worthy of debate.

To be honest, I think we have more *Dreamcast* users than Mac users. I more often offer support for getting that game system online. I have more documentation written up on it as well. Bah, he kept repeating how he's been "doing" computers for 9 years now. Whoopdee fucking doo. I've been programming / using them since I was 12. That's 13 years and I'm pretty damn sure that I have a better understanding of what makes them tick.

Anyhow, during his latest call this afternoon he told me to "chill". I'm glad that he's taking the high horse. It'll make it easier for me to smack it on the ass and be rid of him if he doesn't start listening to me. I'm pretty sure at this point that his OS is messed up. His mail program keeps corrupting the information he enters into it, a fact that became pretty obvious when I told him to retype in his saved password and it miraculously started working again. "Why did that work?!" I don't know, I'm a stupid PC user, but I'd recommend looking at the software if a pattern begins to emerge (which it already has).

So, of course, I'm feeling rather snarky towards Mac users when the very next caller I got after him was a woman using a Mac. But working in the mysterious way that the Lord does sometimes, she was one of the nicest customers I spoke to all day. She just wanted some help with setting her homepage and I was able to teach her a few things (I'm not completely clueless about Macs, after all). She hung up a very happy camper. My faith in humanity has been restored a little bit.

The usual disclaimer applies when I rant about Mac users... I fully realize that not *all* of them are that way. Only a majority IMO. Also, in my very biased and anger prompted opinion, there are only 3 non-sucky Mac users on this planet: Adam, Yun, and Xplo. They know how to use their machines and don't whine about biases if they have to get help. You don't hear Linux users complain about biases and by reading this blog everyone should be familiar with the depths of Window users' stupidity at times. I'd say Mac users == whiners, Windows users == idiots, and Linux users == elitist. But that'd be stating the obvious, I think.

05.11.02 :: 17:37

I figured out what to do for my mom for mothers' day. I'm taking her, dad, and myself to see a couple movies and then dad's gonna take us to dinner. We're going to see Changing Lanes and Spider-man. I was going to add Scorpion King in there as well, but mom and dad have already seen it. Usually at least once a year our family does a 'movie marathon' day in which we see as many movies as we can in a single day. Our record is four, with the final movie being Schindler's List. Note to self: don't pick *really* long movie to be the final one.

Just to be on the safe side I also bought her the tape of Oceans Eleven. I would have gotten her the DVD, but she has yet to figure them out ^^; (I've shown her a few times, but she hasn't converted yet). Dad got her a plant of some type (living I would assume ;)

I also picked up the first batch of tickets for our group viewing of Star Wars Episode II. The theatre here finally caught a clue and started accepting debit cards (yay). I bought 10 tickets (which have already been claimed) and Justin will be picking up the second batch on Monday. I'm not sure how many bodies will make up our final count, but I can assure that if Episode II's JarJar is as much of a turkey in this movie as it was in the last, there will be much mockery =]

Who's Your 80s Movie Icon Alter-Ego? Find out @ She's Crafty

Name: Amanda Anderson
Nickname: Greenbeans
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