2004-10-12 - 8:03 p.m.

I've been so busy! I've been trying to find the time to write an update but until now I haven't.

Let's see.

Nields IH full-band shows last weekend were exquisite. Nerissa was on fire, and took every opportunity to gush about her impending marriage. Click here for pictures. I went to B Side Records beforehand and got Madeleine Peyroux's new album Careless Love, Eva Cassidy's Songbird, and Spanish for Hitchhiking's The Starling. They're all good discs but I'm blown away by Eva Cassidy. I arrived at the IH at 2:50 and was first in line. Had a nice chat with Patty, helped preserve parking spots for band members, etc. The first set had a full house...but the second set! Balcony was closed and there was no dance floor! I was crushed. But..man..they ROCKED. I took some .AVI's with my digital camera and they came out OK.

Tuesday night I went over to my coworker Mary's house to figure out why her newly-installed cable modem wasn't working. Turns out when she bought her computer last year, she brought it into work, and the dopey sysadmin we had at the time set up IE to use the company proxy server...so when she tried using IE after having the modem installed, it of course didn't work. I deselected the "use proxy server" checkbox and voila, it worked. I then was there till midnight cleaning off viruses, Trojans, and other malware. Her Norton Antivirus was NOT set to auto-update, so every time she'd run a virus scan, it came back clean since it was using year-old definitions. *sigh*

Wednesday night I went over to my mother's house to diagnose why HER new cable modem wasn't working. Simple, it'd lost sync. In the process of loading a modern virus scanner, firewall, etc, I hosed her Windows 98 installation. *sigh* As soon as you'd click OK to log in, Explorer would crash - even in safe mode, even after I confirmed step-by-step to start nothing. So, Saturday I went back and spent 7 hours rebuilding it. I of course was triumphant and she's a happy broadband user now.

So then since I was out two nights in a row, it took me till last night to catch up on the Words-L email! And that's why I haven't updated. :)

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Yesterday at Costco I bought Easy Media Creator 7, and lo and behold, it can burn DVD-R's just fine - Nero 6 barfed on every one of them. Good thing I didn't give that spindle of 50 DVD-R's away like I contemplated. However, I seem to have lost the ability to do anything with my live-action Sailor Moon episodes, so that's not good. I'm hoping the latest software update will help...when tech support gets back to me about why the installer keeps having an internal error 2715 when I try to install it.

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So I've been having an exercise motivation problem ever since I got back from California in August. I think I'm climbing out of it, though. I've slowed down to ~97 rpm from ~101 and while that seems minor, it's an entirely different intensity. I think I need to keep at the 97 level for a while and rebuild my stamina, and then once it seems easy again I'll resume the 101 RPM level.

I also need new sneakers for the bike. My feet were hurting using my old one s that were dedicated to the task, so I tried my normal sneakers, and that made a world of difference. So, buying new sneakers is on the list.

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Oh, also on the list for some point is buying a new chair for the living room. This recliner is dying and I don't want another $300 Costco Cheapie to replace it.

Then there's the fact I want a new TV............

Oh, and I want this too.