also, stopped in Jackson today  for work, passed that church, it is called, First Church of Jesus Christ Scientist.  So I am not sure it is scientology, but still an interesting name.

Wow, this weekend, I learned that I have come to depend on the Internet and electricty alot more than I think is comfortable.  What could cause me to come to this conclusion?  Well, let us start from the beginning.  Monday, I worked 12 hours, which while great for my paycheck, is bad for me in general, mainly because I am lazy and like working only 8 hours a day.  Forward to Triday.  Great day, Not the end of the month, so things aren’t hectic (I deliver copiers, and sales people tend to put in all their sales for delivery at the end of the month, so the first few days/2 weeks of the month are mainly pickups and some sales) and because of the holiday, as soon as we finished our deliveries for the day, we could go home - WOOHOO!  Got done around noon, instead of 3 as usual time.  Was lazy for the rest of the day.  Friday comes, and it storms a tiny bit, there were approximately 15 minutes of 60mph winds.  Power went out.  3 hours later, the apartments across the parking lot from us had their power restored.  I couldn’t wait!  It was only a matter of time before mine would be up!  Well, it came up about an hour later, or at least, it tried to.  There was some electricity, but not enough to run anything.  The lights kept getting dimmer and dimmer, until I lit a candle and could see again.  Well, no, I didn’t light a candle, I didn’t have any.  But if I had, it would have been brighter than the lights were.  So, a call out to the electric company was in order.  What is this?  An automated system that sends the report to their technicians.  Awesome!  Automation at its finest, I just call and report it, and they send a technician out right away!  Ummm, no again.  Power was off from noon:30 ish on Friday, and then Saturday rolled around.  I woke up excited, my room was so bright!  Darn, it was the sun shining in my window.  A very hot day, one that would have been perfect with some air conditioning.  Unfortunately, we still didn’t have power, so it was not quite perfect.  A friend of mine from work showed up, and gave me some relief, because his computer and network was down at his house, and needed it fixed.  I jumped on the chance to fix his computers (he also has air conditioning!) Fixed them just great.  Then I installed the drivers for the motherboard.  Then WindowsXP refused to boot.  Safe Mode attempt showed that it was having a problem getting past the AGP driver.  Odd, there wasn’t an AGP video card in his machine.  Oh well, I would think on it, and return home, praying for electricity the entire way.  It did not happen.  Then I had an Idea!  I have a laptop, and I have a battery backup.  So, the little juice that was coming out of the wall was powering my laptop’s ac adapter, and the battery backup was powering the cable modem.  YES!  I was online!  I could just tell that things were going to get good.  Then I realized, I still needed to get Dee’s computers running.  Off to my pile of miscellaneous hardware.  No good video cards.  Hmmm, then it hit me, my webserver has a GeForce2  video card in it, and being a webserver, it didn’t need a video card.  And it was AGP!  So, I gave the AGP card to Dee, because I know he can put a computer together, so popping in the video card shouldn’t be a problem.  Off he went, and I was singing a happy song to myself as I was able to get on the internet on my (linux) laptop.  Well, there were no updates at the electric company, so I called them a few more times, hopeing that perhaps my first few calls hadn’t gotten through somehow (hey, if power was out here, why wouldn’t it be there right?)  Oh yeah, the people across the parking lot had power.  Turns out, only our row of 4 apartment buildings had power.  I went to bed a very sad person without electricity.  I woke up the next morning.  The sky was overcast, it was going to rain again, and my roommate had heard on the radio that they thought the power was going to be knocked out again.  "Wouldn’t it being knocked out again, require us to have powe restored first?" I asked him.  He just shrugged.  Suddenly, I was excited, the lights started to get brighter, but as if on some cue, knowing my excitement was rising, bam.  Off went all power, and with it, the battery backup drained of its power, and laptop could run, however, there was no internet connection, so no need to keep it running.  Then I had a novel idea.  Let’s clean my room!  I mean, it’s been a while (I have pictures that I may post if I can get over the embarrassment of them) since I had cleaned it last, and so I went all out.  Broke out the Endust, and Windex and 409, and was about to break out the vacuum as well, but then, I realized, no power, so I was kind of crestfallen that I couldn’t vacuum.  I cleaned and cleaned.  Then Dee showed up, his computer still wasn’t working.  Neither was my AC, so once again, I hopped at the chance of fixing his computer (and basking in the wondefulness that is Air Conditioning.)  I simply reinstalled Windows (it’s so fun to do that)  and everything was up and running, he was happy, and his wife made me some corn on the cob (YUMMY!!!)  So, I came home, and glorious day it was, I could hear the sweet music of the air conditioner running as I exited Dee’s car and stepped onto the sidewalk leading to my apartment.  Ah, it was nice, although, I still don’t quite understand how or why the power was out for 50+ hours while the apartments across the parking lot had power after 3 hours.  Its crazy how things work sometimes.  Hope everyone else had a great 4th of July though.

Yo!  I’m #1 on Google and Yahoo for fhqwghads!

I’m going down to the shore for the 4th of July holiday, to the usual spot in OCNJ.  Should be lots of fun.  I might be leaving right now (from work), or I might be going home first and leaving tomorrow.  Don’t know yet.  I’ll decide when I get to the car I guess.

In the meantime, check out these links:

A visitor sent in this mini-itx page.  These are some of the neatest little computers I’ve ever seen.  Go to the Projects page to see more.

Also, Nuke the Moon.  This is hilarious.

Have a great holiday, everyone.

I was just daydreaming in my cube about the next time I’ll be able to hit the single track, and came across a good site for info on local trails and parks...
click here!
and here’s MTB slang dictionary... http://world.std.com/~jimf/biking/slang.html

Man.  As far as days go, today was pretty spectacular.  At work, I found out that I might be starting a programming project that will take until the end of the summer (when I leave and go back to school).  Which is awesome, because although I’m technically an engineer and I like engineering, I really love programming lately.  And this particular project would involve writing some C code to either replace a bunch of Perl scripts, or embedding some Perl into some C.  (I got chosen for this because I’m fluent in Perl.)  Now, if you’re not a programmer, right about now you’re saying either "What?" or "So what?"  But I am excited.

I also got 2 rad emails today from random people on the internet.  I usually get one or two of these a week, but sometimes less, sometimes a little more.  It’s definitely gotten more often since my site went from about 10 or 20 visitors per day to nearly 200 every day over the past year and a half.

In any event, getting these emails is easily one of my favorite things ever.  Complete strangers just emailing to say "hey thanks for putting this-or-that online," or "hey I like the site!"  That just rocks.  I feel so useful  : )

The first of these 2 particular emails was from another comp-E working at the Aviation Applied Technology Directorate at Fort Eustis, Virginia.  That’s so important sounding.  He wanted to say thanks, because by putting some info online about a Kenwood CD changer adapter, I saved him $60.  And he also gave me props on my musicbox.

The second email was really short, from a girl, and it contained the phrase "You sound like the perfect guy!"  I’m not really going to comment on that because I don’t want to sound conceited (and I don’t think it’s true... not quite anyway), but I’m saying, I just can’t complain when I get an email like that.

Oh, and I found my Unisys ID which I’d lost about 2 weeks ago.  That’s important because you need it to get past security on the way into any of the buildings; I’ve been scaling the walls and dropping in through open skylights for the past 2 weeks.  (Just kidding... we don’t really have skylights.)

So today, my dad was mowing the lawn like he does about every other day, and he stopped to sharpen the blade because it was leaving patches of uncut grass behind.  In the process of tightening the nut after replacing the blade, he slipped and nearly cut his finger off.  Ow.  So he went to the hospital and got stitches, and 3 hours later he comes home and resumes mowing!!

As I hear the mower start up, I think man, I should probably go out there and finish the lawn.  But my dad is stubborn, and I figured there was no way he’d actually let me do it.  A little nudging from my mom convinced me to offer anyway, and he didn’t even put up a fight.  I know my dad, and the only thing I can figure is that must have hurt like a son of a gun for him to let me do it.  Or something.

Anyway, I haven’t mowed any lawn in..... well, I have no idea how long it’s been.  Three or 4 years, easily.  So it was actually kind of enjoyable, in a character-building kind of way.  And you really appreciate things like a swimming pool a lot more after you’ve done something like mow the lawn.

Speaking of awesome music, I so should’ve included the new album by The Postal Service when I ordered a few CDs the other day from amazon.  Mark had been saying how good they were, but I hadn’t heard them.... then the day after I place my order, my brother is like "Yo, check out these Postal Service mp3s."  And they rock.  They’re like nintendo sound effects mixed with other weird stuff mixed with nice pretty melodies and action-packed storytime semi-lovesong lyrics.  You can download an mp3 of "Such Great Heights" on that site; it’s a good one.

I am thinking it’s a sign, that the freckles
in our eyes are mirror images and when
we kiss they’re perfectly aligned.
And I have to speculate that God himself
did make us into corresponding shapes like
puzzle pieces from the clay.
True, it may seem like a stretch, but
it’s thoughts like this that catch my troubled
head when you’re away, when I am missing you to death,
when you are out there on the road for
several weeks of shows... and when you scan
the radio, I hope this song will guide you home.

Come on people, that is emo 9000 right there, you gotta love it.

So in closing, I’d like to say that my 2 favorite song titles of all time are:

1. "Making People Apologize for Accusing You of Things You Actually Did," by Shai Hulud, and

2. "Like I Care," by Helmet.