![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Livejournal Discipline
Jul. 6th, 2006 11:05 amI guess I'm gonna have to set myself some rules if I'm going to do real updates. Lately, all I do is skim.. and by the time I'm done skimming, I'm not really in the mood to write. Perhaps I'll try a new strategy... posting before I look at LJ for the first time each day. We'll see how that works for a while.
So I'm at work, waiting for the credit card company to call me back and update my credit card machine. One of the waiters knocked our old machine onto the floor, sadly killing the paper feed. For weeks now, we have been manually pulling the credit card paper through the machine, generating slips with variable word height... some very tall.. some very, very short. We have been waiting for a loaner credit card machine from the leasing agency. You see, even though we lease a $250 machine for $40/month, they don't seem to have any on hand to replace our broken machine with. So now we have this archaic two-piece machine, and I'm downloading the information necessary to have it running. Then we have to send them our machine so they can fix it... heh... FIX it... after we've paid for a new one three times over. Did I mention they are even rude about it all? fun fun fun....
Life has been hectic, post-wedding. Right now we are getting ready for a yard sale this weekend. We HAVE to unload some of the stuff we have accumulated so we have room for our new things. We also have quite a few of Wendy's Nonny's things that we don't plan on keeping. I just don't see an 8'x8' romance novel library as being integral to our home.. :) So we're unloading more stuff onto the octogenarian yard sale shoppers that traverse the weekend streets. It will be nice to have the garage back. heh...
World of Warcraft has been fun lately. Wendy and I are finally getting our characters up high enough so that we can rejoin Dave, Scott, and Jon in doing instances. Wendy, Dwayne, Jen and I did a really long instance together the other night and had a kick-ass time. I'm looking forward to a good Radio Spy 10-man. Picho, on Durotan, has been doing a little bit of raiding with his guild... but still doesn't have any real epic gear. He did get a rather gnarly mace from Zul Gurrub... which I'll have to post sometime when I'm not at work... heh...
Bonnaroo still haunts me. I haven't danced to a good DJ in so, SO long. And Sasha was amazing. As the sun started to come up on Sunday morning, he broke into a mix that included "We are your friends". A couple thousand happy hippies hopping to this tune was overwhelming... and I pine to be back there dancing. I had to look the song up, and was happy to find both the version that I heard by Justice AND the original song by Simian. But listening to them is bitter... like hearing a love song after your lover passed away. Still, I'm a loved and lost kinda guy... so I find myself singing the chorus rather often.
Work has been tough. Restaurants an be such petty and juvinile places at times. I work with some truly fantastic people, but many of them don't take any form of responsibility for the environment, so it's hard. Finding beer bottles in the women's room garbage doesn't make me laugh anymore. I desperately try to set some kind of behavior and expectation standard, but the employees are like brilliant 9 year olds... they push the boundries for no other reason than to make sure nothing can truly be expected of them. I'm not some kind of taskmaster... I just want a sober and stable work environment. And while we often have it, other times it feels like I'm herding cats. I just do my best... and hope for the best.
Wendy and I are still doing wonderfully. We love each other very much and have started working on a baby. I'm reticent to even announce that, because people keep pestering us about when we're having one, what we're having, and how many. Wendy just looks at certain people with amazement, "We've only been off the pill for a month... you'll know when *I* know." Family is the worst, but that's only because they are the best... supportive and helpful. We're very blessed.
The house is going well. The yard looks like a yard. The garden beds look like garden beds. The hedges are responding well to being cut back. I still have a deep desire to wipe out the front yard with poison, plop down a layer of earth and sod, and start over... but I'm not sure I can get away with that... so we'll see. I HAVE to get a shelf system built in my computer room, so that might be my next big project, but we ordered an outer door with a kitty door (gotta keep the litter away from Wendy) and I should have that installed soon. We're putting Claren's litter in the garage and putting a new door from the house to the garage so she can get out to it.
I built a new computer for my birthday present from Wendy. I am very proud of what I put together, but i've had a DEVIL of a time getting it all to work properly. It all boils down to the fact that I don't have a copy of Windows that isn't working on another machine at the time, and Windows is being all pissy and bitchy when you try to steal their software. After trying a supposedly virgin copy of XP home and finding out it was already on four other machines, I broke down and installed the Vista beta that I had signed up for. So my new computer is running Windows Vista.... beta software... on my main machine. I truly am a glutton for punishment.
Everything was going fairly smoothly till I got to sound. My speakers are digital Cambridge Soundworks... and I don't have a traditional digital-out port. So I tried scavenging some parts from my old computer (which I'm selling to help finance this venture) and installed the Soundblaster Live 5.1 from it. Only the Vista drivers for Creative hardware doesn't include 5.1 drivers. So I had to install some hacked varieties. They worked fine... for a while... but then things started to break down. Finally, I removed it, and now I'm trying to see if I can't get an optical cable to work properly from the onboard Realtek card... but that's slow going as well. Vista just doesn't know how to deal with this hardware yet. So I'm running in two speaker mode.
This is too long... so I'll continue it later. I think my new LJ discipline might work. We'll see.
So I'm at work, waiting for the credit card company to call me back and update my credit card machine. One of the waiters knocked our old machine onto the floor, sadly killing the paper feed. For weeks now, we have been manually pulling the credit card paper through the machine, generating slips with variable word height... some very tall.. some very, very short. We have been waiting for a loaner credit card machine from the leasing agency. You see, even though we lease a $250 machine for $40/month, they don't seem to have any on hand to replace our broken machine with. So now we have this archaic two-piece machine, and I'm downloading the information necessary to have it running. Then we have to send them our machine so they can fix it... heh... FIX it... after we've paid for a new one three times over. Did I mention they are even rude about it all? fun fun fun....
Life has been hectic, post-wedding. Right now we are getting ready for a yard sale this weekend. We HAVE to unload some of the stuff we have accumulated so we have room for our new things. We also have quite a few of Wendy's Nonny's things that we don't plan on keeping. I just don't see an 8'x8' romance novel library as being integral to our home.. :) So we're unloading more stuff onto the octogenarian yard sale shoppers that traverse the weekend streets. It will be nice to have the garage back. heh...
World of Warcraft has been fun lately. Wendy and I are finally getting our characters up high enough so that we can rejoin Dave, Scott, and Jon in doing instances. Wendy, Dwayne, Jen and I did a really long instance together the other night and had a kick-ass time. I'm looking forward to a good Radio Spy 10-man. Picho, on Durotan, has been doing a little bit of raiding with his guild... but still doesn't have any real epic gear. He did get a rather gnarly mace from Zul Gurrub... which I'll have to post sometime when I'm not at work... heh...
Bonnaroo still haunts me. I haven't danced to a good DJ in so, SO long. And Sasha was amazing. As the sun started to come up on Sunday morning, he broke into a mix that included "We are your friends". A couple thousand happy hippies hopping to this tune was overwhelming... and I pine to be back there dancing. I had to look the song up, and was happy to find both the version that I heard by Justice AND the original song by Simian. But listening to them is bitter... like hearing a love song after your lover passed away. Still, I'm a loved and lost kinda guy... so I find myself singing the chorus rather often.
Work has been tough. Restaurants an be such petty and juvinile places at times. I work with some truly fantastic people, but many of them don't take any form of responsibility for the environment, so it's hard. Finding beer bottles in the women's room garbage doesn't make me laugh anymore. I desperately try to set some kind of behavior and expectation standard, but the employees are like brilliant 9 year olds... they push the boundries for no other reason than to make sure nothing can truly be expected of them. I'm not some kind of taskmaster... I just want a sober and stable work environment. And while we often have it, other times it feels like I'm herding cats. I just do my best... and hope for the best.
Wendy and I are still doing wonderfully. We love each other very much and have started working on a baby. I'm reticent to even announce that, because people keep pestering us about when we're having one, what we're having, and how many. Wendy just looks at certain people with amazement, "We've only been off the pill for a month... you'll know when *I* know." Family is the worst, but that's only because they are the best... supportive and helpful. We're very blessed.
The house is going well. The yard looks like a yard. The garden beds look like garden beds. The hedges are responding well to being cut back. I still have a deep desire to wipe out the front yard with poison, plop down a layer of earth and sod, and start over... but I'm not sure I can get away with that... so we'll see. I HAVE to get a shelf system built in my computer room, so that might be my next big project, but we ordered an outer door with a kitty door (gotta keep the litter away from Wendy) and I should have that installed soon. We're putting Claren's litter in the garage and putting a new door from the house to the garage so she can get out to it.
I built a new computer for my birthday present from Wendy. I am very proud of what I put together, but i've had a DEVIL of a time getting it all to work properly. It all boils down to the fact that I don't have a copy of Windows that isn't working on another machine at the time, and Windows is being all pissy and bitchy when you try to steal their software. After trying a supposedly virgin copy of XP home and finding out it was already on four other machines, I broke down and installed the Vista beta that I had signed up for. So my new computer is running Windows Vista.... beta software... on my main machine. I truly am a glutton for punishment.
Everything was going fairly smoothly till I got to sound. My speakers are digital Cambridge Soundworks... and I don't have a traditional digital-out port. So I tried scavenging some parts from my old computer (which I'm selling to help finance this venture) and installed the Soundblaster Live 5.1 from it. Only the Vista drivers for Creative hardware doesn't include 5.1 drivers. So I had to install some hacked varieties. They worked fine... for a while... but then things started to break down. Finally, I removed it, and now I'm trying to see if I can't get an optical cable to work properly from the onboard Realtek card... but that's slow going as well. Vista just doesn't know how to deal with this hardware yet. So I'm running in two speaker mode.
This is too long... so I'll continue it later. I think my new LJ discipline might work. We'll see.
