Everybody's always telling me I should try to get a web design job. Today, I found a part-time opening for just such a job, so I applied. I don't have any professional experience, but I've got several years of experience doing my own site, and I've even done a few sites for other people. I plan on keeping my current job, but since I often spend several hours doing web design when I'm not working, a part-time job doing it would actually be fun, 'cause I'd be gettin' paid. =)

May 15th is going to kick ass. Not only is it my third wedding anniversary, but both Weezer and Tool are releasing their new albums that day. Looks like I already know what I want my wife to get me for an anniversary gift. =)

Work is really sucking lately. A good friend of mine, Keith, recently got re-hired as a manager, and he was going to request that I be on his team. We had worked together in the past, and I loved being on his team...he gave me important work to do, and put me in charge of almost everything. On my current team, it seems like I'm always doing the work nobody else wants to do, and I usually have no idea what the rest of the team is doing (mostly because I telecommute). It turns out that Keith's request wasn't granted, and I'm going to stay on the team I'm currently on. I was really looking forward to a change, but it looks like I'm stuck in the same old rut I've been in for the past year. :(

I went to bed with a headache two nights ago, and when I woke up yesterday morning, I still had it, which is a bad sign for me--my day is always shitty when I wake up with a headache. I just tried to ignore it most of the day, but when I got done working, I took some Excedrin, which seemed to help. Not too long after that, I got a really gnawing pain in my gut, which hurt so bad I took a painkiller. On the bottle the painkillers are in, it says not to take them with alcohol. Well, I had a tiny sip of Jagermeister (less than half a shot) a couple of hours later, which I didn't think would have any effect. Apparently, either the painkiller, Excedrin and/or Jager did have an effect, 'cause I got sick as hell. I hadn't eaten much, but I'd drank a lot of Dr. Pepper and some ice water just before, and it all came up. I wasn't able to eat or drink anything without vomiting it back up until about 3:00 this morning, when I had some water and saltines. Even now I don't feel all that great, but I'm eating a king size Snickers right now, 'cause even thinking about eating anything else makes me nauseous still.

I heard through the grapevine (well, actually, from Ty) that DSL might be here as early as next month. And according to an email I received from my ISP about a month ago, the price should be around $35/month, which would be cheaper than the $20 I pay for a second phone line and the $20 for dialup service. And I'm only 3½ blocks from the phone company's office, so I shouldn't have any problems getting a line. I just hope they're not being overly-optimistic...in fact, I would be stupid to believe it until I see it.

Microsoft Word 2000 sucks a fat one. When I started using it for work a couple weeks ago, I disabled AutoCorrect, AutoText, and AutoFormat, because I'd rather do things for myself than let a software program decide for me. Today, I was working on a huge document with a table that spanned several pages, and I needed to break the table up into smaller pieces, so I used the Split Table option to do it. There was some unusual formatting in the scripting (HotDocs variables) on the document, and whenever I'd split a table, Word would convert some text to special characters, such as :( into a single frowny-face character. It took me a while to figure out what the hell was going on, and when I checked my preferences, all that AutoFormat shit was turned back on. So I had to uncheck about a million checkboxes to turn it all off again, and there's no tellin' how long it'll wait before deciding to fuck up and turn it all on again.

This weather sucks. It was quite warm for a few days, but now it's cold, and it's supposed to rain this weekend. Looks like I'm gonna spend the whole weekend inside either on the computer or watching tv. How fun.

After posting this question in the Greymatter forum, and not receiving a response after a few weeks, I figured it would never get answered. But I decided to check again today, and somebody posted a fix just yesterday. So I just barely fixed my gm-library.cgi, and it worked. =) It allows me to have the week and month names abbreviated in the header above each post...looks much better now.

I emailed my ISP asking them to switch my dialup account to a different modem pool, as they recently bought out several smaller ISPs in town, and I got much faster connection speeds using my mom's dialup account on my computer. I wasn't even sure if they would give me an account on a different server, but not only did they switch me, they did it within an hour after I sent my email.

So now, instead of 28.8 connection rates, I'm getting more like 45.3 and 49.3 kbps. Plus, I never get disconnected, whereas it happened several times a day (or even several times per hour) with the other modem pool.

Looks like Atroxi.com is making a comeback! Woohoo! Sorry, but I just gotta get my hopes up that the radio show may come back as well. =) That was seriously the most fun to be had on the internet.

Today was an excruciatingly long day. I woke up a half-hour late, but made it to work by 8:00 a.m. My wife took our son to his doctor's appointment, and he got four immunization shots, so he hasn't been a happy baby today. I was expecting my wife to pick me up at work at or before 2:00 p.m., but since she was with her family, all of whom are habitually late for everything, she was 2½ hours late. I should have expected that to happen, but I was still really pissed off that while I was stranded at work for over 8 hours, with nowhere to go and no money with which to get something to eat, she was out playing around with her family. Never again will I allow her to drop me off and take the car with her...ever.

We got home, and I gave the lawn a badly needed mowing. And now I remember the one reason summer sucks: allergies...oh, and yardwork (ok, I guess there are 2 reasons). I've felt like shit the entire evening since mowing the lawn, and it still looks like shit. There is something seriously wrong with my lawn...it looks as though it was trampled by stampeding horses, like somebody is holding polo games on it when I'm not looking. The soil is pure clay, and both my lawns really need to be ripped out, new soil brought in, and sawd planted. But that'll never happen, 'cause I'm too cheap to spend money to improve my yard. That's like buying flowers for your honey on valentine's day...what a waste. =)

...sucks. I really oughta create a section of my site detailing why Utah sucks so badly...then the majority of the visitors to my site who don't give a shit about Utah don't have to read it all on the main page. =)

I swear, someday I'm going to be one of the fatalities on this road. Since my son was born, I rarely go above 70 or 75 mph, but occasionally it's hard not to be aggressive when there are retards behind the wheels of most cars. At least having my son in the car keeps me from driving badly, but when he's not with me, that's when I tailgate and cut people off. Hopefully, I'll get into the habit of driving safely, even when he's not in the car.

Which reminds me, a couple days ago, some old man in a Mark VIII was turning left out of a parking lot, and tried to squeeze in between me and the guy in front of me, though there was only a couple of car-lengths between us. He had pulled out and was partially in the oncoming traffic lane and partially in the center turn lane before he even had a slight opening in front of me, so I gunned it and cut him off, 'cause I would have had to slow down to let him in without rear-ending him. He straightened out in the center turn lane, since I wouldn't give him room in my lane, and continued for over half a block before I ended up turning into Gas-N-Go. It was just too bad I was turning, or else I think he'd have driven in the wrong lane for quite a distance before anybody let him in. He just gave me a look like I had done something wrong, and I wanted so badly to just ram him.

Fuckin' Jehovah's Witnesses...I don't understand how they think disturbing people in their own homes could possibly get people interested in their religion. That goes for all religions, for that matter. If I was looking for a new religion (which I never will be), I don't think waiting for it to come to me would be the right way to go about it.

If I went door-to-door preaching atheism, and was as persistent as some jackasses who do the same for other religions, I guarantee most people would get pretty pissed, even though they believe it's ok for their religion to do the same thing.

Religion is for the stupid and the weak-minded. Some of the smartest people I know, and those who have the best sense for what's right and what's wrong, are atheist. People of religion are just the opposite--generally dumb, unjust, and gullible as hell. Of course, I live in Utah, and I don't have a good sense of what religion is like outside the state, but I imagine it's pretty much the same everywhere, just not as oppressive as here.

Man, today was a nice day. I didn't wake up 'til around noon when my mom rang the doorbell, but after visiting with her and getting something to eat, I loaded my mountain bike into my truck and went for a drive (well, after jump-starting the damn dead battery). I went just north of town on a little dirt road to a trail that eventually just ends, but if you go far enough cross-country, you come to another dirt road that leads to another town. I just parked my truck at the start of the trail and rode my bike until the trail ended. I would've liked to have gone further, but I didn't want to wear myself out and be too sore to go on another ride in a day or two. It was hot enough to go shirtless on the ride, so I got a little sunburn. So now I'm pink instead of bright white. =)

I just relaxed the rest of the day, reading a book, and watching three episodes of SG-1. This entire weekend was pretty relaxing, actually...it was the first time in quite a while that I didn't have anything important to do.

I hate it when I lay down for a nap, and end up sleeping way longer than I intended. Even though I woke up a little later than usual this morning, I was dead tired when I got off work, and around 8:00 p.m., I layed down for what was supposed to be a short nap. I woke up about 15 minutes ago, and my whole evening is pretty much wasted away. What really sucks is that I still feel really tired, so I think I may just go to bed now. :(

Somebody has serious doubts as to whether or not the Chinese were to blame for the collision between the U.S. EP-3 and the Chinese F-8. C'mon, the Chinese jet's top speed is 984 mph (1,595 km/h) faster than that of the U.S. propeller-driven plane (EP-3/F-8 facts), and it is much more maneuverable. That's like saying a Yugo with its 1.1L 4-cylinder engine could not only catch up to my Ford with its 5.8L 8-cylinder engine, but could ram my truck without me having enough time to take evasive action, and it could do all this while off-roading.

The crew of the U.S. plane says they were on a "fixed course," and did not cause the crash. The Chinese claim that the U.S. plane veered into the jet. How could a plane, with a wingspan over 3 times longer than the jet, get anywhere near the jet, much less collide with it, without the jet pilot ever knowing? If the other Chinese pilot witnessed the whole thing (and he had to have, or else how could the Chinese claim their side of the story?), why didn't he warn the other pilot of the impending collision? It seems much more likely that the jet was buzzing the plane and just got a little too close--in which case, the plane would have little or no time to take evasive action, with its inferior speed and maneuverability.

I'm not dismissing the possibility that the U.S. could be to blame, but I do believe it's way more likely that China is.

Cool, the Northern Lights might be visible from here tonight, and possibly tomorrow as well. According to the Space.com weather forecast, they should be visible from as far south as northern California and Colorado.

Bleh...this sucks... Mebbe Tahj left for the army already. :(

Update: Nevermind, it's back up, but will probably be gone again when Tarshy leaves for the army.

I've recently taken an interest in model rocketry. I was really into it in 5^th grade, when I was in a "Young Astronauts" group in school...it was gay, but I built a couple of rockets and had a lot of fun doing it. Now, I'm going to build my own rocket from scratch, with the exception of the motor. I've got a couple of cardboard tubes to work with, though I still need some thin balsa for the fins, and some thick-ass shit for the nose cone.

I started building a remote control from spare parts I had in my toolbox today, and I plan on building a launch pad tomorrow. The remote consists of the case to the face of the CD player that was in my Jeep, a lighted 12 volt switch that I had in my toolbox, and some spare parts that I soldered out of a Sony Discman (headphone jack and some switches). I still need a pushbutton switch, but that shouldn't be too hard to find. I was gonna run it off a few AA batteries, but they would barely power the light on the switch, so I decided I'm gonna use a cigarette lighter plug, and I'll need my truck or car near the launch site to use the remote.

If this actually ends up being more than just playing around, I'll take some pictures of the rocket and the launch, whenever that is, and put them on the site.

Oh, and I found this site to help me out with the things I can't figure out on my own. I plan on using the largest motor I can get my hands on, and I'll need all the help I can get so I don't fuck it up and blow my first rocket up before it goes anywhere.

Are you bereaved from the loss of a loved one? Are you all alone in this world, with nowhere to turn? Are you one of the billions of wounded souls who have suffered a deep and unnameable anguish? Well, there is someone out there who understands. Or, to be more precise, something that understands. Something far bigger than you can possibly imagine.

I left my truck's headlights on yesterday while it was parked in the driveway, but luckily I had backed it into the driveway, so I was able to get my car right in front of the truck to give it a jump. Took more than 20 minutes to get the battery charged up enough to crank the engine.

It had snowed last night, and today all the melting snow was leaking into both of my vehicles. My car's windshield isn't sealed very well in the upper-left corner, so the driver's seat was soaked. And when I grabbed my jumper cables from behind the seat in my truck, there was a small puddle of water back there...I have no idea where it came from. Time to get the silicone out. :(

I finally figured out how to space text correctly in Photoshop 6. I was having problems with either too much or too little spacing between characters, and it made my text look really crappy. But if you select the Type Tool, click the Pallettes button, then click the arrow at the top of the Pallettes window, you'll see an option called Fractional Widths. Make sure it is unchecked (I guess it's checked by default), and you're hooked up phat. Now I don't have to manually edit the spacing between characters anymore. =)

The new 2002 Impreza WRX has got to be the most badass car anybody's made in a long time.

For a 2.0L 4-cylinder to pump out 227 horsepower is pretty impressive (my 2.4L Nissan only puts out 155 HP). It comes with four doors, all-wheel drive, and it looks wicked--everything I need. When I replace my Nissan 240SX, I need something that my license plates won't look stupid on, too. =) If I had the cash, I'd get one of these in a heartbeat.

Last year sometime, I was doing some work using Word 2000, and it crashed big time, freezing up my whole system. When I restarted my computer and loaded Word again, the menu and toolbar were gone, which left a lot of functionality unavailable. I figured the whole Word installation was fucked, but since I could still view documents in it, it was pretty much good enough to meet my needs.

But at work, we're discontinuing support for Word 6.0a and WordPerfect 6.1 (thank the devil), so I needed to have a fully-functioning version of Word 2000 on my machine. So this evening, I borrowed an Office 2K CD and tried installing over the existing installation, but Word was still screwed up. I completely uninstalled Office then, and reinstalled--still nothing. My final option was to get on the web and search for a solution, and I found one quite easily. All I had to do is add the /a command-line switch to the Word shortcut, and it solved all my problems. For nearly six months, I've been living with the problem of not having a menu or toolbar, and all it took was less than a minute to look for and implement a solution. Sucky-sucky.

My ISP's backbone has been down for most of yesterday and all day today so far, and they're not answering my emails as to what the problem is and when it will be fixed (big surprise). I'm borrowing my mom's internet account, so I can finally use the 'net. She actually uses the same ISP as I do, but our ISP bought out several other ISPs in the area and my mom's account is just on one of the several different modem pools, which I assume use different backbones.

In other news, infants can be such cry-babies. =)

I just had a huge post typed up in Greymatter, and I figured instead of tabbing through several fields to get to the submit button (I like to use the keyboard almost exclusively), I'd hit shift-tab to go to the Subject field, then hit enter. But Greymatter took me to the login screen rather than submitting the form. I clicked Back, but the page had expired, and all my data was lost. :( Looks like I'm going to have to do a few modifications to the script so the submit button is right below the main entry text box.

Anyhow, I hurt my back really bad today when I was painting the baby's room. I was holding the paint roller awkwardly and applying a lot of pressure, trying to squeeze every last drop of paint from it, when suddenly the pain hit me, and I almost collapsed. I had to support myself with one arm on the window sill and the other on the step ladder. It took me quite a while before I could stand fully upright, and as soon as I could, I immediately took a prescription pain killer and a muscle relaxer that I still have from the last time I threw my back out. After a while of stretching as much as I could stand, the pain started to subside, and I feel a lot better now, except for when I try to bend over or crouch.

The baby's room is mostly finished, though, and it looks damn good. I still have to haul the area rug upstairs, and my wife has to put the border up on the wall, then we can move all the furniture in. Finally, my house won't be so cluttered with the baby's stuff. =)

My little sister thought she was going into premature labor today, but after going to the hospital, they told her it was probably just kidney stones. So either my sister has no idea what labor might feel like, or the doctor at the hospital is a complete idiot. My sister is very small--she weighed around 100 pounds before she became pregnant--and she's gained very little weight since, plus she's already had a few complications with this pregnancy, so I'd think her doctor would be espcially cautious. If I was her, I'd get a second opinion.