nah no thanks

They pretty much offered me a promotion at work, but I'm not gonna take it.

It's only like $2/hr more, but then I'd have quite a bit more crap that I'd have to deal with. Plus, I'd have to work full time instead of just three days a week, and my shift wouldn't start until 10 AM, so I'd have to take the bus to and from work every day, instead of catching a ride in (and sometimes home) with my mom.

I see you judging me. And you can stop it.

Yeah yeah, boo hoo full time. Go to hell. I don't know who decided that people need to work five days a week to be DECENT HUMAN BEINGS, but fuck you.

As far as having a job I don't like goes, I'm happy with where I am right now. I make a little more money than I need to pay bills and go out, and I feel appreciated there. Which is nice for a change.

On the hair front, I did end up taking it down to the scalp, and I really like it like that. But after shaving it again on Saturday, I'm starting to get a rash from it. So I'm gonna probably have to wait a couple weeks before I do anything with it again, which is unfortunate.

I don't so much mind the effort, and I prefer the no hair at all thing, it's just that my skin can't handle it. And now my head feels like it's covered in sandpaper or fiberglass.

With ten thousand little tiny Mexicans stabbing each other on it.

I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you.

that's right I am

Talking about my job on my blog. Considering it was a long weekend, we got done surprisingly early today. Hell, I don't think anyone was on vacation, and nobody phoned in sick; we were finished earlier than we'd normally be on a Monday, despite having the extra work from the day off.

I mean, we didn't get off on time by any stretch, but I only clocked about an hour of overtime. I'm hoping tomorrow goes smoothly too.

A couple people approached me, seeing if they could trade shifts with me in a couple weeks. I decided that I don't need to be a pushover anymore, and apologetically declined. They wanted me to work on Tuesdays. I really really don't want to do that job three days in a row. I need that day off in the middle to rebuild my tolerance for being there.

In other news, Sephiroth from Kingdom Hearts 1 is still kicking the crap out of me. I'm not sure if leveling up more would really help now, I think I just need to get luckier with interrupting one of his especially mean attacks.

And finally, I was gonna bic my head tonight, but after shaving it down with the electric trimmer, I decided I didn't care enough anymore. It's just an awful lot of effort for something that'll only last a couple days, and doesn't really make much difference anyhow.

Maybe I'll do it tomorrow.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The whole reason I decided to get rid of my hair today! We got some stuff from Petland today at work, and when I was opening something, I caught a glimpse of what was either a piece of plant matter, or a little maggot of some sort.

But then when I tried to take a closer look, I couldn't find it again. It was probably nothing, but I decided I didn't want a maggoty head. So there you have it.

How can you just leave me standing
Alone in a world that's so cold?

day final

I think I'm gonna reformat the partition with Linux on it from ext3 back to ntfs. This is me giving up on it entirely now.

See, yesterday I was trying to get my iPod working with it, and in the middle of trying to sync up, knotify crashed. Not entirely sure why the KDE stuff was doing anything in the first place, seeing as I was using gnome, but when it crashed, my external HDD and my iPod disappeared from the desktop, and I couldn't unmount them.

For some reason, I felt like looking at a couple things on the iPod before going to bed tonight, and when I did, I discovered that it was totally wiped. Apparently, when knotify crashed, it corrupted my iPod. Thankfully, the restore option in iTunes worked, and I just had to copy everything back over.

Of course, I'd wiped the partition with all my music on it to install Linux, so I had to get it back off the external HDD. Let this be a lesson to all of you to back up your files. I'm also glad that it didn't corrupt the external HDD when knotify crashed.

So yes, Linux wins. I give up.

Shall we kiss on the lips, or will I say that I'm sorry?

day four

I had a thought to try running it through the terminal, so I could see what the errors were. It threw some stuff about GLX at me, so I figured I'd try it with Direct3d again, instead of OpenGL. Amusingly, it worked the same way it did the last time with Direct3d.

Which is to say, poorly, but technically it did run.

Anyway, at this point, it seems like I'm really just better off booting into Windows to play. It looks like I'd probably end up spending more time trying to fiddle with settings to get games working than actually playing them. And if that's the case, I'm not sure that it's actually worth it to bother setting it up so I can boot into Linux just to chill out when I'm not gaming. Because I can do that just fine in Windows.

Wir haben uns im Traum verpasst.

obligatory iron man post

Went to see Iron Man with Alex tonight. It was pretty good, but we didn't really think it lived up to all the hype. (What does, though?)

After the Baconator Fiasco, I thought it would be a good (bad?) idea to go to Burger King to try their Steakhouse Burger.

Well, it turns out it already got pulled from their menu. Maybe to make room for their new Indiana Jones-themed burger. At any rate, it was a disappointment that they didn't have them anymore, so I had to settle for a normal boring Whopper. If I'd known they weren't gonna have the Steakhouse anymore, I would have just gotten food at Edo's with Alex.

day three

Well, I've found another couple ideas for trying to get this working, so now I'm in the process of trying 7.10 x86 instead of amd64. I've gotta say, though, my hopes aren't exactly super high at this point.

For now, I think I'm gonna hold off on buying the new system, but it sounds like just my GeForce 6600 that's causing all the problems. Found a potential workaround for it, at least it's a known issue, so it's not just a matter of me sucking, personally.

Update - 1:13am

So, much to my surprise, the nvidia drivers worked without and tweaking or mucking about once I was running the x86 install. Don't really understand how or why, but there you have it.

So, with the drivers in place, and my dual monitors working, the next step was to see if I could get WoW to run. Took a bit of tweaking, and I finally managed to get it sort of running with Wine.

Except, I had to run it with Direct3d to get better than unplayable framerate OpenGL was giving me. And even still, it wasn't very good, and the textures and terrains were all pretty awful, so I figured I'd try using Envy to set up my graphics drivers instead.

Of course, now when I try to load the game, I just get a black screen, and then it crashes out before I can do anything. A couple hours of trolling forums hasn't really gotten me any ideas about how to fix it. Either I've already tried the tweaks that are suggested, or the problems aren't quite the same as mine.

day two

Well, repartitioned, formatted, all that jazz. 8.04 still wouldn't work. Same problem with it just hanging on the loading screen.

So I went ahead and installed 7.10 instead off the live CD. I've got a stable desktop environment now, but I can't get the damn Nvidia drivers to work to save my life.

I've been going in circles for hours now, trying different combinations of things, from the restricted drivers to installing various version with Envy, and messing around with xorg.conf but nothing is working out. At worst, it's totally borked, and at best, it's usable for stuff like Firefox, but not what I want.

And the secondary monitor just won't work at all. Gonna try setting stuff up with it unplugged to see if I can get it to work that way.

Update - 2:22pm

And no dice. Not on the drivers anyway. So I'm at the point of giving up on this stuff now.

I've managed to get it to chill out in 1280x1024 with the crappy default driver, so I think I'm gonna just leave well enough alone at this point and not worry about it. I'm not really sure what I'm gonna do about the whole computer thing in general now, though.

I didn't want to get the new system unless I could figure out how to get everything up and running on this system because I don't want to be stuck with a new computer with no OS, save for one I can't configure. It's possible things would work more smoothly on a new system, but that seems like a bit of a gamble I'm not sure I'm willing to take yet. So who knows.

ubuntu adventures day one

Need a new computer, trying to get Ubuntu 8.04 running.

I've got a burn of the Live CD now, trying to get it running on this system, but so far it's just hanging when I try to boot with it, and it doesn't look like it's detecting my keyboard either.

Checksum on the .iso was ok, and it burned and verified presumably fine. Gonna give it another shot, and if it doesn't work, I'll try burning it again, on a slower speed.

Update - 2:21pm

Well, I was trying to use the x86 iso, and it's still not working on the second burn, so I'm going to try the amd64 one. I am using an Athalon 64 processor on this box, so maybe that'll work better.

Downloading now, then burn, and try again!

Update - 3:00pm

Well, amd64 didn't work either. Same problem. Gonna try the alternate versions of amd64 and x86, in that order.

Update - 5:46pm

Posting this from inside Ubuntu 7.10, via the Live CD. I think I might try making a partition on my HDD for Linux and see if I can't get one of the 8.04 installs to work for me.

it's better moist

A couple days ago I baked some cinnamon buns, but due to certain distractions during their oven time, they came out a little overdone, and I was forced to give them a B- grade. After some time had passed, I decided to revise my grade to B+, because pretty much everything about them was how I thought it should be, except for the overdoneness.

The dough probably could have stood to rise a bit more the first time around too, but I think that was offset by the lemon glaze, which turned out delightfully.

Yesterday, though, I decided to bake a carrot cake to use up the egg whites left over from the cinnamon buns. The carrot cake was A+ for sure. I'm very happy with it!

I picked up the recipe for it from Canadian Living, and just made a couple substitutions:

4 egg whites instead of 3 whole eggs, and
2¼ cups cake flour instead of 2 cups all purpose flour

I also put the pecans on top of the cake instead of in the batter, and used fresh pineapple.

Yum!

Where are you tonight I wonder,
and where will you be tonight when I cry?

just don't

Lately I've been craving that awful salty taste and texture of fast food burgers. So when Alex came over today, I declared that we were going to Wendy's.

Unfortunately, I misspoke and accidentally said "baconators" instead of just "baconator". So, to honor The Code, I had to make my order plural.

Figured I'd go for broke and order the combo, and just get a second baconator a la carte. And Diet Coke for the irony.

Here's a tip:

Don't eat two baconators.

While I was eating it, the baconators weren't really the horrible part, as I was expecting them to be. Rather, as a result of presumably not changing their oil for months, the fries were really bad. I wouldn't have eaten them, if not for The Code.

But in the end, I think the baconators were what left the lasting horror. I think my stomach went into shock for a couple hours after eating them, saying, "No, you can't be serious. You don't actually expect me to deal with this crap do you?"

Now that that's worn off, and it's resigned itself to actually digesting that "food", I feel like I'm going to die, and I hope that I do. It's kind of like there's a slug in my gut the size of a man's fist, and it's throwing up.

The good news is I'm not craving fast food anymore.

Who am I to need you when I'm down?
Where are you when I need you around?