I was craving Indian food (after having eaten some at a great buffet around my work) and I went online to get a recipe for something I knew I liked - Chicken Tikka Masala.

The thing is, I'm one of those people who, when he gets a test that says, "read all the instructions before beginning the test," and then the last instruction is "don't do the test," I fail. I do stuff as I'm reading. So here's how the night went:

I got my chicken out of the fridge (after having marinated all night long) and started the oven preheating. The instructions say to cook this sauce while you're baking your chicken, so I started getting out the ingredients for the sauce while the oven was heating up. Ten ounce can of tomato puree - check. Five ounce can of tomato paste - check. Two pounds of chopped tomatoes...

TWO POUNDS OF CHOPPED TOMATOES?! I didn't have any tomatoes at all, let alone two pounds.

I turned off the oven, cat-proofed the kitchen, and went to Safeway to get my two pounds of tomatoes.

That's a shitload of tomatoes.

Got home, started it all back up, started chopping/de-seeding the tomatoes. About halfway through that, the oven was ready to go.

Now, you're only supposed to cook the chicken for like 10 minutes, which means I had supposedly 10 minutes to finish chopping a pound of tomatoes, get all of that in the pot, and have it boiled down to a "thick sauce." 10 minutes later, the chicken was done and I was still chopping tomatoes. I left the chicken in and set the oven to "warm" so the chicken wouldn't overcook or dry out, but would stay warm.

I finished chopping, dumped the tomato stuff into the pot along with 4.5 cups of water and started "cooking on a low temperature" according to the instructions. I then mopped the kitchen because two pounds of chopped tomatoes generally yields a lot of water, much of which ended up on the ground in my furious chopping effort. (It was at that exact moment that the Swiffer WetJet decided to run out of WetJet liquid soap, so it's probably not as clean as it should be.)

After an hour of "low," I decided that the heat needed to be, as Emeril puts it, "kicked up a notch." I wish I had time lapse photography of the heat knob. I'm sure it would show me cranking up the heat like nobody's business. By this time it was, oh, about 8:00p.

In the meantime, I thought I'd make some Indian flatbread ("naan") to eat with the chicken. I mixed up the dough and stirred the pot of sauce by holding the spoon between my teeth (I had doughy hands). I kneaded the dough for 10 minutes as specified and finished with that at about 8:30p. Next step - let the bread sit for three hours.

THREE HOURS? There goes the flatbread idea.

Two hours later, it was like 10:00p, the sauce was boiling on medium heat and was nowhere near "thick," and my flatbread still had a minimum of an hour and a half left to sit before I could start cooking it.

I put in a call to Jenn (who was at a meeting at the time) and she brought home Burger King. We'll be trying to finish up the Indian cooking effort tonight.

I've learned a couple of things from this. First, always read all the instructions before you start and be clear on what they mean. Second, sauce doesn't cook down as quickly as folks might imply, and "low heat" means "all day."

It sure smells good, though.

I was wondering if I'd get a Traffic Asshole before the Thanksgiving holiday, and sure enough, society came through for me.

Behold: A double-long dump truck doing 20 miles an hour in the fast lane!



He stayed in the fast lane for probably five miles. Traffic was backed up way beyond that even. Once you got past him - smooth sailing.

Thank you, Traffic Asshole, for a nice commute just before the holidays.

Well, I knew my good mood couldn't last forever, and after Sunday's beating, it didn't have much left to it. Today pretty much killed it off.

I've fought with things pretty much all day long to get them to work correctly. I mean, everything down to the weather was against me.

I went during lunch to UPS my PS2 to Sony. It was clear when I looked out the window then it started raining buckets as soon as I stepped out the door. I got to the UPS place and stood in this ridiculous line for like 20 minutes, then as soon as I was done, the rain stopped. Fucking figures.

Our marketing department pisses me off, too. We recently put out a press release telling people at the bottom of the release to "go request such-and-such whitepaper at the web site." Prior to release, I informed the marketers that we don't have anywhere for people to request such things. Do I need to create something? "No, they'll just email us." Are you sure? I mean, people see something like that, and they want a form. "No, don't worry about it. They'll just email us." Fine.

The request came in today - around a week later - that they need a form for this whitepaper thing. Except now it's a last minute emergency instead of something I could actually have taken some good time with and made extensible and functional. Thanks for the forethought, guys! Everything with marketing is always a fucking fire drill. One would think that, as capable humans, they'd learn by now. Maybe I'm overestimating their abilities. After all, these are the people who gave the graphic designer full credit for the web site I built.

I woke up Saturday morning around 8:00a and finished reading my book, Artemis Fowl, while lying in bed. Excellent book, and it put me in a reasonably good mood.

Around 9:00a or so, I decided it was time to call Sony regarding my Playstation 2 issues. I steeled myself for a long fight on the phone, getting ready to sit on hold and be transferred from person to person while they tried to stall me long enough to give up. I prepared my soul for the endless ridiculous troubleshooting steps that they'd send me through repeatedly. Then I dialed.

I didn't wait on hold at all. I got straight through to a technician, Michael. Michael asked me a couple of fairly simple questions regarding the problem I was seeing and the steps I'd already taken to solve it. After around three minutes of answering questions, he offered me a "waived fee" (reads: free!) repair. No fight, no hassle, no hold time, no transfers.

Holy shit.

He told me he'd email me the information to send in with my PS2 to the repair facility. I thanked him and hung up. Sure enough, the info I needed was in my inbox this morning. If this all goes well, I'm going to fill out a positive feedback form for these guys. That just rocks.

Got my chores done reasonably quickly and had some time to just sit down and relax. Watched a little TV. That sort of thing. Honestly, I don't remember a lot of what went on because I was feeling generally good and overall just relaxed.

Saturday night Jenn and I went to see Elf. That movie was too funny. I love Will Ferrell anyway, but in this he was too much. I laughed totally hard and felt completely justified in spending my $8 to see it. I'll be getting it when it comes out on DVD and will add it to my standard holiday rotation.

Sunday...

Ugh.

I don't have a lot of Good Days, so I revelled in Saturday's glory. Everything about Saturday rocked. I was in a good mood all day long, things generally went my way, I didn't have to stress about things or feel like I needed to fight people to get things done. It was great.

Sunday, on the other hand, I could probably have done without. I ended up going to the mall to the local Cost Plus World Market to pick up some spices I wasn't able to get at the grocery store. Of course, they were understaffed at the checkout line and I got behind two people buying 20+ glass items, each of which had to be individually hand-wrapped and packaged... It took me like an hour to buy three packets of spices.

My parents each called me to "helpfully" inform me that, even though they're not moving anywhere for months, they drug down 12 boxes of schoolwork from the attic that I have to go through. Normally I'd say "pitch it all" but it's not just mine - it's mixed in with my sisters' stuff. And I'd like to have my trophies and things, so I guess I'll be going through boxes this weekend, exactly what I wanted to do.

Which got me stewing over the upcoming holiday weekend.

I hate holiday weekends. Why? Because they're not restful. All holidays do for me is generate stress and irritibility.

I don't like turkey. I don't like ham. Don't ask me why, I just don't. Weird? Maybe, but I'm sure you can think of a few foods you're not too partial to, also. But you know what holiday "feasts" consist of? You guessed it. We had lobster one year. That was great. I remember a year we had Chinese food, too, and that was really cool. The rest of the time, ugh. (Luckily, Jenn's family is eating long before mine, and Jenn's family is going to an all you can eat buffet - anything you want. That's perfect as far as I'm concerned. I'll fill up there and then just "make an appearance" at my family's dinner.)

I don't like family gatherings. I don't really have anything to say to people. Folks ask me what I've been doing at work, but there's no point in trying to explain it because the people at work don't understand what I do. All that ends up doing is causing a glazed look on whoever I'm talking to, which further irritates me.

I don't like the lack of coordination and scheduling. I don't like driving all over hell and back trying to make it to everyone's house because everyone wants to "see me."

What the holiday ends up being is less a holiday and more a "try to please everyone else" fest. Fuck that shit. I'm going to fucking snap one of these years and then... well, just you wait. They'll be talking about it for generations to come.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is - I have a four day weekend coming that I was hoping was going to be one day of hectic shit and three days of rest and relaxation. Instead I've got one day of hectic shit, one day of going through boxes of shit, and two days of trying to calm down and chill out before Monday shows up again to piss me off. What a waste of paid time off. I should have just opted to work through it so I'd have an excuse to not have to deal with any of it. At least I'd be able to get something done in the office with no one there.

I was looking at my blog this morning and I realized that there's still a lot of work to do. I have some keen ideas for fixing it up a bit that, pending on how much time I get this weekend, I may get around to doing. Then again, I may save it for next weekend when Jenn's at work so I can actually concentrate on it.

Things I want to do include:

Get rid of the huge list of "date" links along the side navbar. That's nuts.

Make the templates a little more standardized by using includes rather than having the template physically on every single page. That might not make sense to the non-technical, but basically, I want to maintain my template in one spot, not on each page. Easier to update, right?

Fix the TrackBack thing. It doesn't seem to want to put the TrackBack URL in there.

Fix the admin interface so entering entries with formatting is a little easier. Greymatter had a much better interface so I'll probably just rip off some of the Javascript from there and integrate it into the pMachine interface.

Fix the little blurb things (see just below this entry) so that if I make them links to stuff on Amazon, you can mouseover the link and see a picture of what I'm talking about. Sort of like a picture tooltip.

Put my Amazon, BlogSnob, and AllPosters affiliate stuff back on the site. It may not actually generate any revenue, but they make it look special.

Put my junk store, wish list, and sites-to-visit links back up. Almost more for my convenience than for yours, since you cheap-asses never seem to buy me anything, nor do you buy anything from me.

See if I can somehow get the center column to dynamically size itself so those with higher resolutions on their monitors can fit more on the screen. I had it working this way before, but for some reason it broke, so I took it out.

Change my "about" and resume pages over to PHP to take advantage of the new template.

Fix the little butterfly in the top corner of the page so clicking it takes you to the home page.

Lose the calendar in the left bar. Is that really any help to anyone?

Update my terribly out of date "about" page.

Fix the entries on the blog that have pictures. The images need to move to the pMachine "upload" directory and the location in the entry needs to be changed. Also, the "pop-up" window functionality for images has been lost in the move to pMachine so I need to build that back up again and put it back in the appropriate entries.

Fix entries that link to other entries so they don't link into Greymatter.

I think that's it. At least for now.

In other news, I'm stewing a little over the whole Playstation 2 debacle. I'm really hoping I don't run into trouble when I call them Saturday (and I know I'm going to end up calling them). Maybe just this once things can work out right the first time around? Stay tuned...

It's been a while since we had a Traffic Asshole, so I got one for you today.

I hate traffic accidents. They fuck up traffic for everyone, regardless of which direction you're traveling or where they are in relation to you. Why is that? The answer is simple - Rubberneckers.

Yes, it's the people who need to slow down and check out what's going on that end up clogging up the roads like so much shit in the drain. I wish I had a plunger big enough to take care of the problem, but I don't. My blog is my plunger.

Let's let the image speak for itself, shall we?



As you can see, we've got an accident on the opposite side of the road, in the oncoming traffic. We're separated from the oncoming traffic by a concrete barrier in the center of the road. This same barrier pretty much obstructs any decent view one might get of anything over there, but that doesn't deter the myriad rubberneckers (particularly the guy immediately in front of me) from coming to a near complete stop just to check out what's going on, then flooring it to close the 500 meter gap between him and the car in front of him. Nothing wrong with my side of the road, just people slowing down to watch the flashing lights.

Absolutely ridiculous.

(That said, the poor quality of the image just goes to show you how badly I need a better digital camera. I think we could all commiserate on our traffic woes better in a higher resolution, don't you?)

After badgering my boss (Greg - I'll name him by name this time because he's been bitching about how I refer to him here like he's two different people) to try Time Crisis 3 out on his PS2 for a couple of days, he finally did and called me up last night to tell me that...

It worked.

So it's not a problem with the game at all, but, rather, a problem with my Playstation 2, which I had a feeling was the case.

The thing is, I'm not at all comfortable with cracking that thing open to fix it, clean it, or what have you. I found all sorts of guides telling me how to fix it, ranging from a simple cleaning to adjusting gears to messing with the laser voltage, but none of them really made me keen on dealing with this thing.

Then I found that there's a class action lawsuit against Sony for exactly this reason (official site here). Turns out, you can get a free repair from Sony if you call them and complain about it. I think I'm going to try that out before I commit to cracking it open or doing anything rash.

The more I read about it, the more irritated I get. This seems like a vastly common issue. Makes me wonder if Sony engineered them poorly specifically to get consumers to buy more units.

I still have a lot to do on pMachine, including fixing the categories on all of the articles that I've previously posted, but there are like 400 or something and that's going to take a bit. I'll get there.

I'm also considering just going forward with things and allowing the past articles and entries to just wither and die like so much detritus. But that's my history, and I should probably make it somehow viewable, if for anything but retrospection. What a pain in the ass.

Speaking of pains in the ass, I went to the doctor yesterday and got the "Dr. Jellyfinger" treatment. I told him it was just like being at work, but in the doctor's office, I was getting paid more. The doctor thought that was pretty funny. That's the first time I've gotten that, and I have to say that, 100% conclusively, there is no way I could ever be gay.

Tried a "Peppermint Mocha" Frappuccino today. That was pretty good. I may have to change my usual order. I even got sprinkles.

I'm in the process of copying my CD collection into 256kbps AAC format, and so far it's going well, but I'm not too far into it. I have like 700 CDs, and after a week of this, I'm only into the letter "C". I need to have like this CD jukebox where I can load everything in all at the same time and just have it rip all of the CDs simultaneously.

I went to see the latest (and presumedly final) installation of the Matrix series today. Work had a little outing and rented out the theater down the street, so I figured it'd be as good a time as any to see how they finished off the series.

I always say, you get what you pay for.

If you saw The Matrix Reloaded, you'll kind of know what I'm talking about. In that, you see the first Matrix slowly crumble, and I don't mean in the movie - I mean quality-wise. The first one, we came to expect certain things. We came to enjoy the visual style and the original effects combined with an easy to swallow philosophy lesson hinting of religious symbolism. In the second one... where'd that great style go? Why'd the subtle lesson and symbolism get thrown out the window for an in-your-face lesson a la the "special" episodes of sitcoms?

To really understand why this was so bad, you don't have a choice but to look at the first two movies. I mean, they're a part of the trilogy, and as the conclusion of that trilogy, you need to keep that in mind, so I'm going to continue going back to them.

This, however, is not a review of the first or second Matrix films. It's a review of the third. I just needed to throw some context in there so you understand it when I say: How could they do this to me?

In the first movie, we spent most of the time in the imaginary "Matrix" world that the story revolves around. We saw the "real world," but the action took place in the Matrix, fighting the powers that be from within. In the second movie, we got a lot more "real world" and less Matrix. Still about half-and-half, but more "real world" than I was liking.

The majority of this latest takes place in the "real world," and I've gotta say - the real world is a drag. It's bland, it's boring, it's not even interesting to look at. Why are we stranded there? Let's see some more of the stuff we came to see!

Instead, we get things like Keanu Reeves attempting to be emotional. We get an ever-thinning Carrie-Anne Moss. We get not nearly enough Monica Bellucci. And we get random scenes that have no real discernable meaning to the plot - total filler.

Bah. As my friend Kristen says, "ridiculous emotional claptrap." I went on a ten minute rant about how many things were wrong with the end of the movie alone. There were so many other ways to end it. How about this:

Neo, after fighting his way through the Matrix, finally defeats Agent Smith. As Agent Smith dies, Neo wakes up in a white room to find out the whole thing was a medical experiment being done by the machines to see if humans would be able to accept a Matrix in lieu of a real world.

Or how about this:

Neo fights Agent Smith and prevails, only to find out that the "real world" is a second Matrix and now he has to bust out of that, too.

I'd even accept:

Neo fights Agent Smith and prevails, then wakes up in a pink harvesting pod just like he did in the first movie.

But no. Instead you get utter insanity. No cohesion. No follow-through. Nothing that resembles the first movie aside from some peripheral references to events in the past. Don't we, as the audience, deserve more than that? It doesn't have to be a happy ending even, as long as justice is served.

I feel betrayed. Betrayed by the Wachowski brothers for having seen such promise in the first movie and to have that thrown entirely away by commercialism and overproduction.

My only hope now is the success of the Harry Potter series. Sigh.

I'm going to call this the official move announcement for paraesthesia. I'm running pMachine as my blog now, and will no longer be maintaining the Greymatter blog I was using. If you've found me and you're reading this message, this is the place. Welcome. I'll be continuing to tweak the template and fix things as I find them, but it's functional and I need to get things moving on this.

You'll notice I now have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to, and if you register as a user you can also be notified of things as they happen (like the paraesthesia mailing list, right?). Plus, if you want to leave a comment and you've logged in, you won't have to type in all of your vitals - it'll just know you.

And who knows? Maybe soon I'll have some "members only" stuff (not like the jackets, more like stuff that only members can get to). I suppose it depends on how many folks I can get to register. We'll see.

In the meantime, like I said, I'll keep working on this thing and we'll see if we can get something good done. I know there's some work I need to do on the administrative interface to get the macro keys to work closer to Greymatter (I had that totally customized, man, and now... primitive).

This is the first entry I've actually personally made in pMachine. I've finally gotten around to updating the templates on everything, and while there are several color-related CSS things I need to finish, I think I've got things pretty well taken care of. Now I just have to figure out how to import my stuff from Greymatter, and I'll be good to go.

I've almost got my implementation of pMachine ready to go. I worked a bit on the templates and such and think I've just about got it set for prime time. I just need to figure out how to import my Greymatter entries in there and I'll be set. After that, it'll be a matter of importing things in, then messing around getting the uploaded images and whatnot to show up correctly.

This weekend was supposed to be relaxing, but I'm feeling pretty wiped out right now. Saturday we did our usual chores, but Sunday we actively did nothing. Jenn got kind of bored and ended up going grocery shopping, but I got a chance to watch a couple of the DVDs I've recently purchased and catch up on my Playstation time.

At the time, I thought it was kind of nice and rather interesting to be bored - I'm usually going so much or have so much on my mind that I don't just get to sit down and relax. Looking back on it now, I realize that having nothing to do stresses me out. I can't just sit and relax because I always have this nagging feeling that there's something that has to be done.

To that effect, I woke up this morning totally wiped out, and I'm still dragging. I find that it takes me the two days of the weekend to get ready to unwind, then by the time the weekend is over, I'm finally getting decent sleep and would love to take the time to actually, truly unwind but it's already time for work again. It's a losing proposition.

I really need to replace the battery in my camera. Wouldn't you know it, but as soon as the battery runs out on the damn thing, I end up finding buttloads of candidates for Traffic Asshole of the Week.

Speaking of cameras, I tried out this other camera that we have, the SiPix StyleCam Blink. It's this tiny camera, similar to the camera that I use to take the Traffic Asshole pictures, the Che-ez Splash. I like the quality (if you can call it that) of the Che-ez camera better than the SiPix - the SiPix is really grainy while the Che-ez is smooth. I guess we're talking the least of two evils, but for those in the market for an affordable, portable digital camera, I'd go with the Splash.

I got my new modem today, so I think I'll go home and try installing that bad boy into my new computer. I still need to put the SCSI controller in, too, so I'll do it all at the same time.

Today's a hurry-up-and-wait sort of day. I'm supposed to get my product demo all compiled up and burned onto CDs for everyone, but I have one piece that I'm waiting to get from another guy and he's having Visual SourceSafe problems, so I don't think I'm going to make my 11:30a deadline.

Oh, just got another email. I guess it's back up. Maybe I'll make it after all.

In the meantime, I've got everything set to go, ready to burn the CDs and distribute this thing once all the pieces are in place. A nice close to a good project. At least I'm not running around frantically trying to get things to work.

At 12:30p I'll be heading down to the semi-yearly coding "competition" they refer to as "Boot Camp" around here. Each time they have a different problem to solve and you get assigned to a team and your team has to come up with a program that solves it. Previous problems have included creating an online auction system and solving a business problem of your choice (your app had to be the "most used" at the end of two weeks to be the winner). This year it's the "Puzzle Challenge" where we have to write an app that will solve... a puzzle of some nature. It's a surprise, so I don't know what it is yet. We'll have eight hours to solve whatever it is. Should be fun.

Plus, you can win prizes for good coding. I plan on winning.

So I'm waiting. Waiting for the other guy to finish his part of the demo project. Waiting for 12:30 to roll around so I can go kick some coding ass. Generally waiting.

I think that's hella better than scrambling around madly, don't you?

I was just looking at this guy's blog when I noticed something happening, and it was so subtle at first that it sort of took me by surprise.

As you sit there reading it, the entire site changes its colors. Slowly, but constantly. Watch for it. It's pretty messed up.

This is something that I think should go in the user-written FAQ area for iTunes on the Apple site, but they don't have one for iTunes for Windows, so I'll just post it here.

Problem: The GEARSecurity service won't start up automatically. This can result in the inability to read/rip CDs as well as the ability to burn a CD in iTunes for Windows. You may get a popup window when you start iTunes for Windows that says something like "You have no compatible hardware for CD reading/burning" or "The iTunes service for importing and burning CDs and DVDs has not been started. Please restart the service to enable burning and importing."

Solution: One of two things could be going wrong here. First, check to make sure the service called "GEARSecurity" is set to "Automatic" startup. You can do that by right-clicking the "My Computer" icon, selecting "Manage" from the options, and selecting "Services" from the tree on the left-hand side. In the service listing, find "GEARSecurity" and make sure it's set to "Automatic." Chances are it is.

The other thing could be that iTunes for Windows 4.1.1 distributes an old version of the GEARSecurity service that doesn't work quite right. You may need to download and install the latest GEAR driver set. That's what fixed my problem, but I'll be damned if I didn't have to search deep in the forums to find it.

If it still doesn't work, you're hosed.

Yesterday was packed chock-full of shit for me to do.

At 7:00a I had my usual once-every-four-weeks haircut. By 8:00a I was at the allergy doctor's office getting my weekly round of allergy shots. 9:00a I got to work.

Got a lot done at work. I'm still working on the product demo, but it's getting closer to the deadline and I'm almost done.

Okay, I just now got a sales call and I have to throw it in here because it was just dumb.

Sales Guy: Hi, my name's Carl and I'm calling from [some web company I don't recall the name of] and we'd like to build you up a web site and send you the URL to it so you can look at it and see what you think for 15 days.
Me: You'd like to build us a web site?
Carl: Yes, we would.
Me: That's interesting, Carl, but building web sites around here is my job. Thanks, though.
Carl: We're not looking to replace you or anything, we just want to build you an additional site.
Me: Carl, why would we need another site?
Carl: The more sites you have, the more people you reach. [Does this guy know what he's talking about?]
Me: Riiight. I don't think so. Sorry.
Carl: Are you sure? Even if you don't use it, maybe you could get some ideas from it.
Me: Somehow I'm thinking not. Thanks anyway, Carl. *click*

I hate sales calls.

Okay, back to yesterday.

At 3:00p the company had a cosmic bowling event I went to. It was hella fun, even though I don't know half the people who showed up. (I'm not too social at work. Go figure.) I ended up bowling with Chris, our CTO, who, as it turns out, is a pretty cool guy on a social level. I think he was sharking me at bowling, though, because he'd bowl two or three gutterballs, then get like six strikes in a row. Huh.

They had a Monte Carlo bowling thing going for a while, too, and I won $25. Not bad for an afternoon at work, eh?

My average ended up around the 130 range and my high was 180. Can't complain about that, except today my wrist is a little sore and my left ass cheek is killing me. (Get your mind out of the gutter [bad bowling pun not intended] - I'm a right-handed bowler, so I slide on my approach with my left leg.)

I was supposed to get together last night with Gerb, a friend of mine who I hardly saw when he was away at college and now I hardly see him and he only lives like 20 blocks away. We planned to get together like a week or so ago and then he ended up working late instead of coming over. I guess that's just the way it goes.

Instead, I spent the evening networking the new computer to the old one and migrating documents and settings. I haven't got the modem for the new computer yet so I had to run Internet Connection Sharing (sucky sucky) so the new one could download and install patches from Windows Update. That alone almost convinced me I need DSL or cable modem. There were like 80MB of patches and things to download, which means it's probably still going. I know it was this morning. Bah.

I also settled in and watched my copy of The Matrix Reloaded in preparation for my viewing of The Matrix Revolutions next week on the company outing. After watching it for the second time (first time since the theater), I think it's starting to grow on me a bit. You really can't look at it from a standalone movie point of view; you have to look at it not only in its context in the trilogy, but also from a "what points are they making philosophically?" standpoint. Entertainment-wise... eh. But raw analysis? Very interesting. I definitely picked up on some stuff I didn't catch the first time because I was too preoccupied with the suckiness factor.

It's still not as good as it should have been.

Oh, and I've decided after researching it and talking to some folks that I'm going to stop ripping my CDs in to 320kbps MP3 and instead use 256kbps AAC/M4A. It'll save some room on the ol' iPod without really giving up much in the way of quality, and that's the happy medium I'm going for. Am I re-ripping my existing stuff? Probably. I haven't really ripped too many of my CDs anyway. Ideally I could rip them all into a digital, lossless format and then have a conversion program that encodes them into whatever format of the day I'm using. But I don't have a terabyte drive to store all the originals on, so screw it. 256kbps AAC it is.

Or, more to the point, new blue computer. As in, IBM. But first, a quick rundown of the other events of the weekend.

Friday night (Halloween) I went to the Winter Hawks game and watched what essentially amounted to a colossal game of Pong. I wasn't into it, the nonexistant crowd wasn't into it, and the team wasn't into it. They really kicked it in gear for around five minutes there, but that just wasn't enough to hold my attention too well. I flipped through a magazine for some of it because I was irritated and bored with the poor hockey. The goalie now makes stupendous difficult saves but will watch the puck travel slowly through the five-hole like there's nothing he can do about it. Maybe time for a trade?

Saturday morning I took my car for an oil change (Acura "free lube for life," baby!) and helped out my parents at their garage sale. It was maybe 40 degrees Fahrenheit out all day long but buttloads of people showed up. I was taking the money and I couldn't keep up with it! It didn't help that my parents didn't have half of the stuff marked.

When all was said and done there, I got rid of a bunch of crap and raked in around $20. Not the most colossal haul ever, but it's more room in my apartment and $20 I didn't have before. Maybe I can buy, like, a Coke at the hockey game.

Saturday night I went to a Halloween party over at my friends Jason and Tracy's house. Their parties always rock. I was much more happy with my costume this year than with my costume from last year, and folks were suitably impressed. Played a little air hockey, played a little pool, and generally hung out. I look forward to the next one. I'd have parties at my place but I don't know enough people who'd show up (I've tried that before).

Sunday I spent most of the day hooking up the new computer. I got an IBM ThinkCentre M50 with a 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 video card... it rules. I hooked that up and was finally able to plug in all of the devices I've got because of the miracle of USB. Plus it recognized them all automatically, which is exactly what it should do. It just doesn't get better than that. It's so much faster, so much better, I don't know why I didn't upgrade before.

Oh, yeah I do. Cost.

I got a good deal on this, though, and it works like a charm. Love it. I only ran into two problems, both related.

First, I wanted to put my modem from my old computer into this new one. So I took the modem out of the old one, popped open the case on the new one and... saw that all of the cards in the new computer are low-profile. Which means they're half the size of the full-height cards. Which means my old modem is two times too high to fit in the new computer. Dammit. So I'm searching for a new modem.

Second, I wanted to hook my scanner up to the new computer. The scanner is a SCSI device, which means I need to move the SCSI controller from my old machine to my new one. Which means I need to pull that card out of the old machine and... yeah, that's right. It's two times too big, too. So I'm searching for a new SCSI controller.

I went to Fry's and picked up a USB 2.0 160GB external hard drive so I have loads of space to store all of my media files and documents. Why didn't I get another internal drive? Only enough room for one drive in the low profile box. I got it for $200 after rebate, though, and that's not too bad considering the price of 160GB drives and the price of external drive enclosures. It even comes with different faceplates so you can customize the colors and stuff on it.

Today I ordered an external USB 2.0 DVD+/-RW/CD-RW drive from Best Buy. $200 after mail-in rebate and I'm good to go. That should be here in the next couple of weeks.

I'm kinda digging this whole low-profile-and-external-drive-combo thing. Makes it easier to use the hardware elsewhere, take it to a friend's house, etc. Or if you don't need it, but you're taking your computer, you don't have this full size tower case to lug around. Pretty cool.

Oh, I also finally bought a car power charger for my iPod. I've been caught too many times without battery power in there. No more!