year new happy

Happy new year... or whatever.

Another blah subject...

Yet again, I'm the master of memories. I forgot to pay the electric bill, and they shut it off yesterday. Actually, I thought it was on autopay, but apparently not! I rule.

On the bright side of that though, I met Rachel for dinner and went a place called the Greek Isles. It was quite tasty... I believe we will be returning.

I watched a movie last night, The Bourne Ultimatum. It was very mediocre. I wouldn't recommend it.

I guess that's all for now.

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

I think the most challenging thing to come up with in this blog is a new title every day.

I spent most of the day doing nothing today. I did get the oil changed in my car earlier, and I made slightly less of a mess than other times. It was enough that I didn't have the use the hose this time to clean up. I just used some paper towels. Progress!

I skipped out on Tommy's Christmas party last night. If Rachel had been off work, I probably would've gone, but I just didn't feel like leaving the house last night. I was just tired and wanted to become one with the couch.

whatever

Ya know... I sit here and read other peoples' blogs, and I feel a bit jealous. Other people's seem so much better written with an actual point, or some thought behind what they're saying. I just kind of get on here without a purpose and have at it, writing whatever comes to mind. You couldn't tell, could you?

I'm not well spoken. I'm not well read. I feel like life is slipping away, and I need to document it somehow to give myself some type of history since my brain doesn't seem to remember things properly. I can come back to this a few years from now, and be nostalgic kind of like when I read the old #porn logs. It makes me remember a completely different me than I've come to know today, that I somehow forgot ever existed. It's weird.

What's new in life? Nothing at all. Still working. It's been a rough week without much sleep. I actually started feeling ill on the drive home today for some reason. I've never felt like that before. I was fine all day at work, and on the drive home, I actually felt like I was getting car sick, which is a feeling I haven't felt in years. I stopped at Best Buy just so I could get out and walk around. I never really started feeling better, even after spending around 15 minutes in there. I got back in my car, and continued on my journey home. I stopped again once I crossed into South Carolina at Sub Station II to get myself some dinner. By the time I left there, I was feeling slightly better, but the continued drive home made me ill again.

I got home, ate about half my sub, and fell asleep on the couch. I slept for a couple of hours and woke up around 9:30 this evening. The sick feeling is gone. I'm kind of worried that I'm coming down with something though. Perhaps it's just lack of sleep. Here's hoping...

Ha... made it two days

Haha, I made it two days in a row. Skipped yesterday though.. I fell asleep on the couch. Nothing really exciting happened yesterday, worked, came home, watched some TV. I watched some show on the Comet jet airplane from Britain in the 50s and how dangerous it was. It was on History International. I love that stuff.... but it'll fuck with you if you fall asleep to it. You'll end up dreaming you're in the Civil War or something.

I hooked up the ION USB Turntable the other day and ripped a couple of records. One of which was the "Wrestling Album" from 1985.

Two days in a row??!?!

Yeah, I'm really going to try to update this thing regularly.

I had a pretty shitty day today. Woke up in a bad mood anyway, then forgot my cell phone at home. I don't want to talk about work too much, but I got some bad vibes today. I called the doctor, and they made me feel like a criminal for trying to get a refill on my Zoloft. For fuck's sake, it's not like it's Oxycontin. You mean it might make me not feel suicidal? God forbid I want to continue taking it since it seems to help most of the time. They said I had to come in for an appointment, which I have no problem with. The earliest I could get in was on Monday morning, and I only have 3 pills left, for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.... meaning I'd have to skip Sunday, or they'd have to call me in a refill. I don't care which, unless they want to squeeze me in on Friday. But no, they put me on hold, and come back, and they say "The doctor says I can call you in a refill, but if you don't come in Monday for your appointment, we won't ever do it again." Huh? Do I make a habit of skipping appointments? Why are you being so rude, judgmental, and assuming? I'm just like "um..okay."

I honestly wonder if I just take things the wrong way when I'm having a bad day.

The only saving grace this evening was kickboxing. It's very therapeutic. I think I punched Matt in the chest kind of hard today.... just a reaction when he came at me.

I guess I'm done bitching for the day.

Who has time?

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. I keep telling myself that I'm going to start updating this on a daily basis, but who has time really?

If I think about it, what would I say? I usually go to work and I come home. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays I go to kickboxing. I guess I could talk about that. Or I could talk about my home life, and how much I despise it.

Did I tell you my friend Sean died last Tuesday? That was pretty depressing. I went home for the funeral. He and his wife used to come over to the house and pick me up.... we'd go to Dwight's in the middle of the night for milkshakes, and back to his place to watch movies or something. He didn't like me sitting around being depressed all of the time. He was really a great guy... honestly, it's a real loss to humanity, because he was one of the few truly wonderful people in the world. We hadn't really hung out a whole lot lately because of geographical reasons, but we still chatted on occasion.

I'd talk about my personal life and how miserable I am.... but then I'm sure it would come back to haunt me. Rachel likes to bring things up in arguments, and any exposed information is used against me. If you wonder why I keep things bottled up, it's because I'm paranoid. She makes me that way. Oh no! I've (probably) said too much. (REM anyone?)

Have a good night. I won't.

An interesting weekend.

UFC 77 was a lot of fun. Some of the fights weren't so exciting, but it was a blast to be at a live event. Seeing Aaron and Samara was awesome too. They have nice touches in their house. It actually looks like someone lives there. Ours still looks like it was just built, and some homeless people moved in and put crap everywhere.

How now brown cow?

Ever think back fondly on your childhood? How great it was to not have to work, pay bills, be responsible... I don't think it was really as great as I like to remember. I remember school, homework, fighting with my brother, etc, etc, etc.. other personal stuff I don't really want to get in to.

I think there was a reason I was depressed.

Yeah, I dunno. I wasn't really going anywhere. I was just thinking...

Hi.

Hi.

What's been going on? Me? Oh, nothing much. It's been nearly a month, and nothing has happened. I've been working on the forum and the wiki.

I'm looking to go to the UFC fight in Cincinatti on October 20th. It will be my first. Hopefully I enjoy it.

I love cheese.

Good day.

How cool is this...

Rachel's birthday is coming up, so I went to CompUSA and bought her another monitor. Why? It's what she wanted. Our video cards have two outputs. So I bought her an LCD with a DVI cable. We set it up so that it mirrors her desktop normally, but anytime she plays a video, it automatically plays it full screen on the second monitor. This was functionality built into the NVidia driver. It's pretty slick.

Now she can watch DVDs while surfing the web or whatever else she wants to do. I must say it's pretty nifty.

Oh yeah, and I kinda broke my car. Well, not really. I just didn't know what I was doing. My coolant temperature light has been flashing blue lately, which according to my service manual and newbeetle.org it means that the sensor is malfunctioning. I found the sensor, and proceeded to remove it. However, coolant began spraying upward all over my hand and all over the garage. It was awesome. Guess I know what I'll be buying tomorrow. :P

Supercharger Install page...

Okay! I put up the supercharger install page.

Blah.

Can't sleep. Back to day shift tomorrow, and I can't sleep. I have to get up in ..... 6 hours, and I can't sleep. Blah. I just wanted to complain.

Always something....

So I bought a new hard drive at Best Buy today. The external 500GB Western Digital drive was $120, and the internal was $165. I would've preferred an internal, but I'll take whatever. I'm not too picky.

So I'm backing up my data onto it, and my PC just decides to power off. All this time I've been running with 5 hard drives in that machine, and while I'm copying the data to this USB drive (which has its own power supply) my PSU has decided that it cannot handle more than 2 IDE drives at a time. It will just power itself back off if there are more than that plugged in. This posed quite the problem, because 3/5 of the drives are "dynamic" which means they act as one drive. Therefore to read my data, I need all of them to be functional.

Soooo.. I found an old Packard Bell PC with an AT power supply in it. This is the old kind that doesn't require that it be hooked to a motherboard to actually power up. I unplugged the 250GB drive that isn't a dynamic drive and isn't a boot drive. I plugged in the 20GB boot drive, and 1/3 of the dynamic drive (this one in particular was a 100GB). I plugged in the remaining two drives to the AT power supply unit and powered it on. Then I powered back on my PC and viola! It's ALLIIIIIVVVEEEE!!!!

I've got crap everywhere in here. At least the data's not gone though. The power supply is probably just on its way out, which is kind of upsetting because I've only had it around a year and a half. And yes, it was actually connected to a UPS when all of this occurred.

It's aliiiive!!!!

The supercharger is in and working! I'm loving it... it's pretty fun to drive, and it was very educational. Aaron is a wealth of knowledge, and I actually have a somewhat decent understanding of my engine now. You can view the live shots from the webcam in the archives from 8/14/07 and 8/15/07.

On vacation...

It's nice being on vacation. My brother came up from Myrtle Beach and visited for a couple of days. It was good to see him. Aaron is on his way down today too to start installing the supercharger. I'm going to move the webcam downstairs into the garage to capture all of the fun!

Webcam Project

I've been working on building a Linux webcam computer for a while.... as money and time allow. I finally have the functionality basically working the way I want it. Now I just need to pretty it up a little.

What a friggin mess!

Jesus... I spent the day learning how to change the oil in my car. It was pretty interesting... bought some ramps, oil, filter, filter wrench... and went at it.

Little things no one tells you... the oil tends to shoot out at first when you remove the drain plug. It doesn't just fall straight down. That ended up being a nicely sized puddle underneath the car before I got the drain pan moved. And the oil filter... Jesus Christ.. what a bitch to get off. I'm thinking someone overtightened it *ahem* Mr. Tire Kingdom *ahem*. The oil wrench I bought was fitted and used a ratchet. It slipped though. I had to use packing tape looped over (to make it sticky on both sides) to create the friction I needed. It took me like 3 hours to finally get it off. (My car's a little cramped too, so one of those universal belt things definitely wouldn't have fit.)

Overall, it was a successful endeavor. I'm moving on to replacing the spark plug wires tomorrow!

Oh yeah, I also attempted to use my Rollerblades for the first time today. I took a little tumble. :-P

Maybe I'll see if I can screw up something else tomorrow.

New Car!!

Well, we spent the day today at the Volkswagen dealership and came home with a shiny new Jetta! Rachel's very excited. Click the picture to be taken to the gallery.

License Plate!

Nothing much going on these days... I lead a pretty boring life. I got my Latvian license plate in the mail and put it on this weekend. It's already filthy from the drive home. I need to wash my car again.

I also went to WV this past weekend for Mr. Nunley's wedding. It was a very nice. It's good to have an excuse to travel into town, and I appreciated the invitation.

One last thing, I think Aaron and I are going to install a supercharger on my car sometime in August... whenever I can get some vacation time. That should provide for an interesting time and a good learning experience!

Spark Plugs #2

Done. The spark plugs in the bug have been replaced. I just needed an extension for my socket set.

Spark Plugs...

I must say... I was definitely more intimidated than I should've been. I bought a service manual for my car, and I've replaced 2/4 spark plugs today. I don't have a socket long enough to get to the other two, so I'm going to have to go to the hardware store tomorrow.

Back in business...

Okay! First of all, I heard from the APA today, and they're looking to see what kind of openings they have in teams on Sundays.

Second, I got my website restored. I didn't feel like arguing with them. I disabled the board temporarily until I can work on it some.

Third, I reordered the Photo Gallery to show the last updated albums and files first.

Fourth, Rachel found a Black Widow in our garage.

Nothing new, really...

It's Mother's Day!! You can see the pretty flowers I got for my mommy and grandmothers! I got Rachel some Swiss Chocolates and Ariel made some stuff in school to give her. I'll be taking her out to eat when she gets off of work.

Work sent me to WV for a couple of days. It's always nice to go back and visit, but I'm glad I moved. I like what I do and where I live sooooo much better now. I miss my friends though. :-(

I replaced the marker light on my car today. I just remember that it was burnt out. (Rachel only told me like 2 months ago.) I'm also looking to possibly buy an old truck, if anyone's selling. I want to spend less than $2000.

I'm also looking to join a Pool League. I've sent an email to find out more information. Hopefully the schedules don't conflict with my Muay Thai classes. I think it sounds like a lot of fun.

That is all.

Updates

It's been a busy week at work... kickboxing on Monday & Tuesday was a blast. Oh, and mjbforum.com's webhost suspended the service because they determined that my software infringes somehow on Microsoft's copyright, although I've never received anything from Microsoft. It's amazing how that works. I have a feeling it was getting a lot of hits and they determined that it needed to be removed because although they allow 3000 gigs of transfer, they don't want you to come anywhere even close. I'm still fighting this one. It's been down for 3 days now....

Fun stuff.

This past week...

Kickboxing was awesome. I enjoy it immensely. I felt like I was going to die the first night, but I'll get there eventually. Meanwhile, it's getting me out of the house and getting me to exercise a little, which was my goal. Work's been super insanely crazy. Problems after problems after problems. It's kind of frustrating.

Upset City..

It seems that MMA has been nothing but upsets lately. I was pretty disappointed last night while watching UFC 70. I, along with most others, expected Cro Cop to walk all over Gonzaga. I hope he's okay! He fell on top of his leg, and it looked kind of nasty like it might have been broken.

Kickboxing

The first real post...

I start kickboxing classes on Monday. I'm really looking forward to it. I think it will be hard work, but it looks like a lot of fun. I'm taking them at a place called The Ultimate Gym here in Charlotte.

The Classic Rewrite...

Here's a new blog. I didn't like the other one. Maybe this one will be better.