The camera got here less than an hour after that last post, and I've spent much of today playing with it. I put some new pictures up, and even a 360° QTVR movie of my front yard and neighborhood. The camera came with PhotoStitch, which aligns several pictures almost seamlessly and lets you save it as a QuickTime VR movie. On my first attempt, I only took 8 pictures, and I held the camera myself, and the software just coudn't hack it all together. On my second attempt, I took 16 pictures, and used a tripod, so the movie I put here on my site is almost perfect. I just wish PhotoStitch let you loop the image back on itself, so you don't have to scroll back the other way when you reach the end. One funny thing about it, two chicks were walking down the street when I was taking the picture facing north, and by the time I had taken several pictures and was facing south, they had walked past the house, so you can see them twice in the panorama.

My camera should be here today. =) Just in time for my birthday, too. I bought a bottle of Bacardi, some limeade, and some expensive steaks to barbeque this evening. It should be pimp.

I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 6 yesterday, and this morning I uninstalled it and restored IE5.5. It was causing Word and Excel to crash all the time. The only advantage over IE5 that I noticed was the ability to block cookies based on certain security settings--specifically, third-party cookies, such as those from porn sites that you probably don't want on your computer. ;)

Until they come out with a newer version, hopefully with some bug fixes that will let me run it on my machine without any problems, I'll just stick with IE5.5.

I tried to watch the Raiders/Cowboys game last night, but ABC was out the entire night. I tried calling my cable company several times, but I constantly got a busy signal, and I doubt that many people were calling in to complain. Even when I went to bed after midnight that channel was still out, so even if some people had complained, it apparently didn't do any good. Like Ty said, there are a few advantages to living in such a rural area, but there are many more disadvantages.

Well, I feel much safer now that the state has made more money off seat belt laws.

Oh, and apparently a movie is to blame for drag racing in St. George. We all know drag racing didn't even exist before The Fast and the Furious was released.

I replaced the rear brake shoes on my truck Saturday, and everything went perfectly, except that I forgot to tighten the self-adjusting starwheel so the new shoes would seat against the drums. It's no big deal, though, because it will adjust itself by one tooth on the starwheel every time I apply the brakes, and eventually they'll both be working fine. Until then, my front brakes are doing most or all of the work.

Actually, something might be wrong with the left-rear brake, 'cause I heard some strange noises coming from there today. I decided that I'm going to buy a 2½-ton floor jack tomorrow so I can lift the truck easily to see what the problem is--I'm sick of crawling under the truck with a bottle jack, which is a hassle to raise and lower anyway. I'm certain that I reassembled everything the right way, but there were a few parts that looked worn on both brake assemblies, so maybe one of them broke under the pressure of thicker shoes.

I had forgotten that I can stream X96 now that I've got DSL, and it's been working flawlessly all day (I wish I had remembered weeks ago). It doesn't even cut-out when I'm downloading video clips or mp3s, and the quality is good.

My MicroDrive shipped on Friday and is scheduled to arrive tomorrow, but it's not going to do me any good because my camera didn't ship until today, and probably won't be here 'til Thursday or Friday.

I was flipping through the channels after the NASCAR race this evening (Tony Stewart won, damn straight!), and there was a show about cosmetic surgery on the Discovery Channel. They actually showed the procedure while some woman got breast implants--that was pretty cool to see on tv. =) The stupid thing was, though, that the woman already had nice breasts...it's such a shame women are driven to do things like that. I just don't see why things like that happen. I personally don't think size matters one bit (well, unless they're too big), and I don't know any guys that feel any differently. Am I wrong?

Michael finally had a tooth break through today. It's not very visible, because I think all his other front teeth are about ready to come through as well, and there's not the tell-tale white spot and bulge, but you can definitely feel it just barely poking through the surface. Babies look so different with teeth, and I'm excited to see what he'll look like when more of them start coming in.

From: Jacko [jacko@badassmofo.com]

Subject: boobies

I saw a show like that on MTV once, it was funny because they would show the boobies whenever it was "medical" related, any other time they would blur them out. So, they would show the boobie while the doctor is marking the lines, evaluating, but when he turns around and she is putting her shirt back on they blur them out. I'm like WTF? You were just showing the boobies, now it is inappropriate? I'd bet that MTV had a panel to determine when the boobies could be shown, and when they could not. Had I been on that panel, the blurring guy could have gone home early.

Heh, that's a good point. What's more damaging to a child: seeing nudity, or seeing a human body being sliced into?

Well, I just ordered a Canon Powershot S10 and an IBM MicroDrive (340 MB). So hopefully by this time next week, I'll be displaying a ridiculous number of stupid pictures on the site. =) The MicroDrive will hold the equivalent of 10 rolls of film (240 exposures total) at the absolute maximum quality, and about 127 rolls of film at the poorest quality, so it will be very nice not having to transfer pictures to the computer all the time in order to take more.

Yesterday evening, as a final act of desperation in trying to get my internet/phone bill straightened out, I emailed the Director of Internet Services for Emery Telcom, explaining the situation and how I had been treated by their customer service. I didn't get a reply yesterday, and I was really hoping to hear back from him by this morning when I got on the computer, but he hadn't replied. Then, just before 10:00 this morning, I got a call from the same woman who I had talked to yesterday and had given me so many problems--she was calling to let me know she had credited my account for the full amount that I had been overcharged. If I had known that it could have been taken care of that efficiently, I would have emailed the guy last Friday instead of driving down to their office and trying to take care of it in person.

I told some dudes I'd plug them (not that it'll bring them much traffic), so here goes:

     Abused Reality

     Foshizzo Productions

There, wasn't that fun?

Damn, am I pissed off. When I signed up for DSL, I asked for my dialup account and my second phone line to be cancelled, and I also asked to be switched over to Emery Telcom's interstate long distance plan to take advantage of the $10/month discount on DSL.

I got my combined phone/internet bill last week, and they had cancelled my dialup access, but everything else was screwed up. They didn't switch me to their long distance plan, which means I was charged an extra $10 for DSL, they overcharged me $0.99 for the DSL setup fee, and they didn't cancel my second phone line, which means not only was I charged for an entire month, but I didn't received a prorated portion of the amount I prepaid last month.

I went into their office last week and was told that they would fix everything, and I could just call back in a couple of days to get an updated billing amount. I did so today, and was met with a lot of hassle. I was told that I have to sign a paper before they would switch my long distance over, which I wasn't told when I had asked for it originally, and I was told that they could shut-off my second phone line now, but it wouldn't be retroactive back to the date my DSL became active. The woman I talked to said that they had no record of me asking for those things to be cancelled, and that it was just my word against theirs--so basically, I'm a liar. I asked to talk to her boss, but she was conveniently not in the office, so I'm calling back tomorrow.

If this doesn't get resolved tomorrow, I am going to have to come up with a way to hurt them, maybe post flyers all around town telling people how they treat their customers. I mean, c'mon, it's not my job to make sure they do their job properly...I had no way of making sure the woman who took my DSL order carried out my instructions, and I had no reason to believe that she wouldn't do it in the first place.

I stayed up 'til almost 4 a.m. last night finishing Clive Cussler's new book, Valhalla Rising. Cussler sure came up with a good way to continue writing Dirk Pitt adventures without worrying about how old Dirk is becoming... =) I won't say more than that, just in case somebody who intends to read the book but hasn't yet is reading this now.

I've been having dreams lately about people who I know only through the internet. Last night, I had a dream that I was out mountain biking on a dirt road, when I saw an old, worn wooden sign that said "UCF - 10 mi" pointing down a side-road. So I took the road, and met up with James, and we biked together through some abandoned buildings that were filled with old computer equipment. A couple weeks ago, I had a dream that Thom moved into the house next-door to mine, except that he didn't know I lived here, and I was debating whether or not to go introduce myself. Yeah, they were both strange...I wonder what's in store for me tonight...

Pharmacies have got to be the least efficient places in the entire world. My wife dropped off a prescription for our son last week, and they said--like they always do--that it would take about a half-hour. Well, who the fuck wants to wait around that long for somebody to grab a bottle off the shelf and hand it to you? She just left and I went back later that evening to pick it up, but I was informed that they didn't have the prescription and it would take at least a day for them to get it. So I waited until today to give them plenty of time to get it in, and though they had it ready this time, they didn't have my insurance information in their computers, as if I hadn't filled prescriptions there at least ten times. So I ended up waiting an entire hour for the fucking bitch to enter fewer than 100 characters into the computer. They seem to revel in making people wait, as though it's a necessary part of filling a prescription--they just enjoy it.

I've been looking for a decent freeware FTP client for a very long time, and yesterday I actually found a great one called SmartFTP. I like it so much, I'm using it in place of CuteFTP now.

This seems pretty ridiculous to me--several Utahns are complaining about not being able to bring their concealed firearms into a convention at which Dick Cheney will be speaking. First of all, DUH! He is the Vice President of the United States of America, and I'm sure the Secret Service will be more than happy to allow people to roam around with concealed weapons...or not. Secondly, the convention is held on privately-owned property, and there are no laws against property owners restricting concealed weapons. So quit crying.

Very possible. =)

I was in my back yard this evening, driving a wedge into a tree stump trying to split it, when I heard voices and footsteps approaching from my mom's yard. I kept pounding the wedge with a sledge hammer, and then two kids, about 13 or 14 years old, stepped through the gap in the fence and into my yard. When they saw me they hesitated (they must have been deaf not to hear me), and I asked, "What the fuck are you doing?" One of them hurriedly mumbled something like, "We're lost." I just told them, "Get the fuck out of my yard," and they both mumbled, "Sorry," then went back down my mom's driveway and back onto her street.

What I don't get is how people know they can cut through mine and my mom's property to get between 2nd and 3rd East. You can't see straight through, because my garage and several trees block the view, and up until last year, there wasn't a break in the fence. It's happened at least two other times that I know of, and surely many more that I don't. I'm either gonna have to re-erect the fence, or post armed sentries to keep people from cutting through. Damned kids.

Hey look, Brandon's got a new website (formerly Pixelated Vision). Check it out.

You just gotta love ranking third in a Google search for hick trash.

It's my sister's birthday, and I just wanted to wish her a happy one. =)

Ok, so I drove all the fucking way up to Orem today to exchange my motherboard for a new one, and I finally got home around 10:00 tonight and put it all back together. Fuck, nothing worked--the video display kept going haywire, and finally it just quit working altogether. I ended up calling Ty just a little before 11:00 to see if he had a spare video card, and he had two that he lent me, but neither would work on that board.

So here I am, using my old PII-266 to email my manager at work asking for the day off tomorrow for yet another trip to Orem, this time to return every fucking thing I bought from EBC. I don't think I'll ever buy an Asus board again, even though the old one I'm using now has served me well for almost three years.

Well, camping this weekend was the usual--pretty fun, but nothing spectacular. I managed to lose the grill that covers the stove burner on my barbeque on my way home. My wife noticed it was missing about ten minutes after we got home, and I had hit a large bump in the road where they were paving SR-10, so I went back in the car to try and find it, but it wasn't there. I'll probably have to make a new one somehow if I want to use the burner again. I've got five days off during Labor Day weekend, so we're going to go camping that weekend, then again the following weekend when Mike will be able to make it.

Tomorrow, I'm going into the office, bringing my son to a doctor's appointment, doing a little shopping, and exchanging my motherboard...it's going to be a long day. I hate Tuesdays, especially when it involves bringing my wife and son along with me to Provo. I don't mind their company on the drive to and from work, but the hassle of dropping them off and picking them up all the time is wearying. It wouldn't be so bad if we had a decent car, but all we have is my truck, which my wife won't drive (and I wouldn't want her to, either). It would be much nicer if I could just get dropped off at work, then get picked up when I'm done, and head for home. But it's never that simple...

I've got a lot of shit to do this week, including replacing the rear brake shoes on the truck, tons of yard work, and fixing a few minor things on the camper before we go camping again. I can't wait 'til I actually get some time to just do absolutely nothing.

Hahaha...Ty's latest post about G.W. Bush is right on the money. =)

In order to bring everything along camping that I want to bring, I have to cram a bunch of stuff inside the camper, like the barbeque, my bike, the spare tire for my truck, firewood, and all kinds of other stuff. Last night around 9:30, I decided that it was too big a pain in the ass to try fitting all that stuff inside the camper, so I went to my mom's to borrow her trailer made out of an old Datsun truck bed. The tires on it have been flat for so long that the sidewalls were cracked where they've been bent for several years, and I just happened to have a set of tires I could put on it, so I went to work. It took me 1½ hours to get my tires on it, mainly because it was hard to get a jack under the axle without it slipping. It looks kinda funny, because the Datsun was only a 4X2 with fairly small tires, but the rims and tires I put on it are from the Toyota truck my wife rolled a couple years ago--they're 31X10.5" all-terrain tires on really nice 15" alloy wheels.

I was pretty exhausted when I finally got home with the trailer in tow behind my truck, but I had a few more things to take care of before I finally went to bed. Today I need to get a safety chain for the trailer, and wire the brake lights to my truck. Hopefully I can do that on my lunch break, because as soon as I get off work, we're heading out to Huntington Canyon, probably the same campground we stayed at a few weeks ago.

Wow...Main Street in this town hasn't changed much in the past 75 years.

Went for a little drive yesterday evening to find a place to camp, but came up empty. We took the right fork of the White River, and not only was the road pretty crappy, but there were no decent camping spots, and no FS-developed campsites. There were signs all over stating that no campfires were allowed except in designated areas, though there were no designated areas. Suck. So we're either going to take the left fork, where we know there are some good places to camp several miles down the road, or we'll go to Avintaquin up Indian Canyon, or possibly Huntington Canyon. Basically, with all the fire restrictions, the Forest Service is charging people to have a campfire, since the only place you can have one is in an FS campground. Oh well, Avintaquin is $5/night and Huntington is $3...not too bad since we're only staying two nights.

A funny line from my Ford repair manual:

"Be careful not to cock the piston in the bore."

Don't worry, I didn't. =)

I ended up replacing my front brakes yesterday, but of course, something had to go terribly wrong...it was my fault this time, though. After I had gotten the left side completed and put back together, I started the engine and pumped the brakes a few times to get the pads seated against the rotor. Instead of the brake pedal getting harder to push, it got really spongy. I got out to see if the pads had seated yet, and I noticed brake fluid all over the place on the right side of the truck. Stupid me, I had taken the right caliper off to compare it to the left side, and I forgot to put it back on before pumping the brakes, so the piston came completely out of the caliper and all my fluid drained out of it. I had a big mess to clean up, plus I had to get the piston back into the caliper, which took me quite a while. And since my brake system had been opened up, I had to bleed the air out of the system before it would work properly again. Hopefully the rear brakes go a little better when I do them later this week.

I cut my left index finger pretty badly just a little bit ago. I was trying to feel how much air my CPU fan was moving, and I accidentally touched the fan. I instantly started bleeding, and it was running all down my finger. It hurt for a few seconds, then the tip of my finger went numb (and still is right now). I've just got a couple of band-aids on it, and I can still type well enough, at least until it starts hurting again.

We're going camping this weekend, and it looks like Jaysen and his wife are coming, and possibly Mikey and his wife too. It should be good times. I actually hope I see a bear, or even better, a mountain lion, while I'm up there. I plan on doing some hiking away from the well-traveled routes, so there's a pretty good chance I'll see something.

I went to the hardware store today and bought new valves for the bathroom sink faucet, plus I got new steel-braid water lines and new shut-off valves. It took me about three hours to replace it all, which is way longer than it should have...I just had a lot of problems removing all the old stuff. At least the leaky faucet is fixed now--we haven't had hot water in the sink for two weeks because I've been too lazy to fix it.

I also bought new brake pads and shoes for my truck, and I'm debating whether or not to start installing them today. I don't think I'm going to go to work this week, so it wouldn't hurt if I take my time and install them over the next couple of days. I definitely don't think I can handle doing front and rear brakes in the same day. I've never done rear brakes without help before, so it should be loads of fun this time, especially since my truck's rear brake assembly is much more complicated than most.

When I was in Orem on Tuesday getting all my computer shit, I saw a blue Dodge Dakota extended cab 4X2 heading up University Parkway right in front of me. It had California license plates, and--this is the strange part--it had a piece of women's nylons stuffed with something (possibly two pieces of balled-up newspaper) hanging off the rear bumper, and it resembled a nutsack. I'll never know why somebody would do such a thing, but I thought it was pretty funny. It's for that exact reason that I bought a disposable camera today to keep in my glovebox.

My damned computer is still fucking up. Whenever it's on for longer than a couple hours, it just locks up. I'm running a temperature monitor that displays the CPU temp in the tray, and it's staying around 140°F, which is well under the 203°F that AMD specifies as the maximum in this techdoc.

I bought a new vacuum cleaner today, which will probably make my mom happy, 'cause I won't be borrowing her vacuum all the time anymore. It's a good thing my whole upstairs has hardwood floors, or else I'd have had to buy one much earlier.

Well, hopefully I've fixed my computer problem--the damn thing was overclocked! The core voltage was set to 1.85 volts in the BIOS, but according to AMD, it's supposed to be 1.75 volts for a 1.2 GHz processor. The motherboard manual says to leave it on the default, but the manual is wrong not only about that, but several other things as well.

I had made a salad earlier this evening and was getting something to drink, and when I went to pour my Pepsi into a glass, I inexplicably poured it right into my salad. I don't know exactly how this happened, except that maybe because I was pouring with my right hand (which I rarely ever do), my brain sent some wrong signals to it or something. I had poured about 1/3 of the can before I realized what I was doing, even though I was looking at it the entire time. Anyway, I had to dump the salad and start over again...

UDOT is resurfacing my street, and they left flyers at all the neighborhood houses explaining that they would be doing it on Wednesday, and that no vehicles would be allowed to park on the street until 6:30 pm. So I parked my truck at my mom's house, and every time I had to go somewhere, I walked back and forth to get to and from my truck. All they ended up doing yesterday was tearing up the old asphalt, and they didn't even finish all of that. The only thing they did today was send a street sweeper up and down the street a few times, but no construction was done. As far as the flyer mentioned, Wednesday was the only day they'd be working, and I assumed they'd be done by the end of the day. It's been nice because most people seem to be avoiding my street, even though it's completely open to traffic--it's normally one of the busiest streets in town, but lately it's been quiet.

My ISP must have fixed any problems with their DSL service, because everything seems to be working now. My computer is having problems now, though. It locked up when I was playing Counter-Strike earlier, which I assumed was just the game, because it did that occasionally on my old computer, but it hung-up again when I was typing a post about two hours ago. When I rebooted after that, I got an error message from the BIOS saying that there was some problem (invalid checksum or some such thing), and it had reset back to the defaults. I just said fuck it and shut the thing off, then went upstairs and made some salsa that I've been wanting to make for the past week or so. I very much dislike having problems with a brand new, expensive computer. If things keep up like this, it's all getting returned.

I was just getting ready to go to Gas-N-Go to get something to drink when a package arrived from my ISP. They must have tested my line a couple days ago without me knowing, so now my DSL service is up and running--not bad, only took them 8 days. =)

It's supposed to be 256K DSL, but I'm getting transfer rates to my FTP site of over 30K/sec. So I'm pretty happy with it, except that now I can't connect to Yahoo Messenger, which I use for work. Oh, and AIM just quit working on me now. Fuck...now I can't even hit Google's site. Damnit, this sucks...time to call tech support.

After working for five hours yesterday, I went to EBC in Orem to get my new computer parts. They ended up not having the motherboard in stock, so they called the Salt Lake store to make sure they had everything on my list, which they did. So I went back to work in Provo to call my wife and let her know I wasn't going to be home for a very long time, then I headed north again to Salt Lake City. I got all my computer parts there after about a 15-minute wait. I was amazed at how small a socket A chip is...I was expecting something much bigger and thicker--after all, my PII cartridge is relatively large, and I'd never seen anybody with a computer as new as this. Anyway, I loaded all the stuff in my truck, but I had left my headlights and foglights on (which I almost always use when I drive), and the engine just barely turned over fast enough to start--phew!.

I filled up my front gas tank at the Maverik about a block away from EBC, where regular unleaded was $1.39/gallon, which is much cheaper than here in Price. On my way back into Utah County, traffic started getting heavy, but I eventually got to Springville where I was going to drop something off at my brother-in-law's place (thanks Jaysen!), and about a block away from his house, I passed him going the other way. He saw me and turned around and followed me back to his place, where I used his phone to tell Traci I was on my way home.

I got home and the first thing I did was go to my mom's to switch modems, but it turned out her modem was also ISA, so I was pretty much fucked. I switched modems anyway, since I was already at her house with my modem and driver disk, and her computer was already taken apart. After that, I went to Papa Murphy's to get some pizza...it was almost 9:00 p.m., and I hadn't eaten anything except a few sunflower seeds all day, so I ended up eating more than half of a large pizza.

After that, I got busy removing reusable parts from my old machine and putting my new machine together. God damn, that is a fast fucking machine! Photoshop 6 loads in literally 7 or 8 seconds. My somewhat old hard drive is noticeably slowing things down, so I'm going to get a 60 gig IBM drive after I get a digital camera. But for now I'm stuck using my old machine, which I had to put back together this morning before I could start work. As soon as I get DSL, I can use my new machine for work, since I have to have an internet connection to do my job.