Heya, take two!
Like I said, we were at gencon last week... Julie, Jackie, Bergertime, Ocean, Cassie and myself. We had some fun... we had some not fun... we caused a little trouble and made a little profit. Okay, starting with the cool stuff.. we all hung out and played many games together including "settlers of catan" and "Scrabble" as well as a rousing game of "Upwords" which I don't recommend anyone try. where was I? oh yeah.. so we all had some fun.. we did True Dungeon which I was a little upset at because I died only 45 minutes in, and had to wait over an hour for the next member of our group to die. I am truely a stupid rogue. Anyway, I think this part is truely damning me as an ultra-geek... I'm good with computers.. I like DnD... Star Trek even... wheew... I can't wait to see the cool names I get called at the gym! Okay... causing trouble... we went out for italian food in Indianapolis... and the town was truely not ready for a convention of such magnitude... it took a good half hour to get a seat, which wasn't bad at all... but we were in a room with a bunch of loud bachelorette party middleaged bitches. So we sat for about an hour and a half through ear shattering laughter non-stop... completely non-stop. So finally after brief brainstorming we decided to make a toast to "Shutting the fuck up." well when this toast was declared the entire room that we were in cheered.. except the bachelorette party that stood stunned for exactly 2 seconds... and went right back to doing what they do. Well, there was a problem in the kitchen and our food took another 2 hours to come... but we got half of it free, and 2 desserts... but the pain from the bitches remains... I think they caused permanent ear damage... shrilly bitches they were. ah.. then there was our money making... Gencon was so disorganized that Berger had to wait in line for 3 hours for generic tickets... so we started brainstorming when we met up with him, and we decided to buy extra tickets... and try to sell them at a higher price. So we bought like 120 tickets at $1.50ea. Then went to the middle of the line, and sold about half for $2.50ea... and people were thanking us for selling them.. it got them out of line fast, and onto gaming, and we got paid for the wait. ah... life is funny sometimes. well, that's my update, I hope it was as entertaining as something entertaining.

Heya guys, sorry it took so long for an update. We stayed at a hotel that advertised "Internet Access" and when we got there, it was $11 a night to use WebTV... that bites... that bites the big one. So I didn't update. I bought an adapter for my cell phone, but I don't think any updating was going to happen over 14.4kbps cellular Inet. Anyway, the trip was pretty cool, everyone went through wide emotional ranges... me too. yeah I know you're thinking, "what? brent moody? never!" But really, I had some cancelled events at gencon, and some things weren't as cool as I wanted them to be... but all in all it was a good time, with good people. I came back to the soup today. work abounds... everywhere. I'm rushing to type this because I have to go to lunch then tear down 25 computers and bring them to the junk hall. but it's kinda nice to be back. I was sorta dreading work... but really it's good to see everyone here again. I hope you didn't miss me too much, I'll come back later with some good rants. Later all.

So I had never changed the transmission fluid in my Truck before... it has 50,000 miles on it... so today while getting an oil change the cool guy doing it said in broken english, "Your transmission fluid is black, it should be pink, you should have it changed.. we can change it." I said okay... well alter they found out that I had a hole in my exhaust and they plugged it up with a towel.. the car caught the towel on fire... they sealed the hole up with a plate and some liquid gasket... come to the bill... $230. They count a 4x4 as 2 transmissions... but they did a fine job, and I liked the nice hispanic fellow who talked at me a lot. There was this extraordinarily fat couple in there too.. all the fat lady did was bitch. bitch bitch bitch... you think my bitching is bad? you should have heard hers... "it's been more than 10 minutes.. it says 10 minute oil changes, we should just leave" yeah lady.. just leave.. while they're checking all your fluids.. the dipshits had a broken dipstick, and tried to accuse them of breaking it... I wanted to punch a small hole in that fat sack of shit so it would oooze out then I could light the fat on fire... or make soap. Was I a little harsh there? yeah, I was... sorry if you were offended... I'm pretty overweight myself... but I'm excersising more, and eating much less... and I bitch less in real life than I do online... actually I more rant about things like the RIAA, and America's political stances... they're bastards. wait, where was I going now? oh yeah, I have to go to my parent's work in the morning to finish up my mom's computer that I royally screwed up, because I'm a suck-ass computer tech. I can fix anything that's not screwed up, and everyone's crap is waay too screwed up to fix by the time I get to it. Well, I'm gonna prepare for my upcoming vacation to GenCon!!! which I have been looking forward to all year. aah, vacations rock. this one doubly so becasue julie will be there, all hail the hypnotoad... BZZZZZZZZZZZ. later all!

Well, I've screwed everything up this weekend... go me! I didn't get anything accompished in a personal/creative sense... and everything I did got phucked up. My parent's computer? yeah, I screwed that up good... well it wasn't entirely my fault there were a few things that didn't work the way they advertised it to. first the windows 2000 upgrade... didn't work like it was supposed to. and second, my mom's accounting software installs BDE on it.. which is a borland product for database administration... why make a separate program for doing something windows already does? don't ask me, I'm just the bum who found out that this one thing doesn't work with windows 2000 but it works with windows 98.. which btw is more than 2 years unsupported by Microsoft now. But anyway, I did screw it up good. Not to mention the RIAA has been pissing me off more and more. apparantly they're serving subpoenas at the rate of 75 a day on US citizens for the crime of sharing the music they love. What rat bastards! Do you know how much they want per infringed song? no I'll bet you don't know what sharing one song with your friend is worth to the RIAA... well here it is... they want $150,000 PER SONG! Now congress was deep in thought friday contemplating this, and they think each song is really worth 10 songs, but each song is only worth $250... but since each song is really worth 10 songs, each song costs $2500. Now, I don't use software that shares MP3's but I have a HUGE collection... every CD I've ever bought is backed up to MP3. soon that will probably be illegal too, as according to the millenium copyright act that disabling copy protection methods is illegal... shit why do we pay any money for CD's at all if the usage on them is going to be so extremely limited. with Sony and their Key2audio crap making Ripping impossible without circumventing it... might I add you only need a ruler and a permanent marker to disable it, but this is denying you the right to acceptable use as outlined in the 1970's copyright act. Not only that, but the RIAA has beaten Verizon into the ground and got a court order for them to defy their privacy agreement with their clients and reveal the names of the clients who downloaded music that they liked. The RIAA is paying off congressmen of course with this many fans you can imagine that the RIAA is just pissed off and embarassed because they can't keep their Website from being defaced so it's just down most of the time. They also having a new NARC website in case anyone thinks someone pirated something... god forbid that... sharing music is being taken more seriously than weapons of mass destruction! I can see it now... you're holled up in an old hotel room, helicopters and bright lights heard and seen through the windows.. the voice comes in "come out with your hands up!" And you shout "Try and get me coppers, I have the whole REO speedwagon collection and I'm on a UPS powered wireless internet connection.. try and stop me!!!" just then SWAT breaks through the glass and doors simultaneously putting several bullets in your head just as you would expect a rogue para-military group to do... where was I? oh yeah! Narc on your friends, c'mon everyone's doing it! Narc on me why don't you!? I have 1 stratovarius song that I don't own the CD to... well.. I paid for the CD, but it's an import and taking forever to get here.. if it makes anyone feel better I ordered that CD because I liked the one song I downloaded online. Meanwhile congress is mulling about prison terms for Kazaa users, this may explain why last year the RIAA was given INTERNET VILLIAN AWARD!. Now I don't mean to scare you, but the RIAA isn't evil in itself.. if SOMEONE managed to KILL every single one of THEM ALL... some other group would manage to take their place as incessant cyber terrorists intending to bend the already scewed legal system into making ORDINARY PEOPLE into criminals. ugg.. I've ranted too long.. I need a drink, god damn. later all.

So I'm still working on that video capture machine that I was working on yesterday. Apparantly pinnacle doesn't like to maintain a fast internet connection because it's going to take an hour just to download the drivers... granted the drivers are 374MB... I cleaned my office last night, so that I could set my keyboard up again. it's been so long I think I'll have to vacuum out the MIDI plugs. MIDI has to be one of the coolest things invented... that and Mountain Dew. So anyway, I was setting up my stuff after cleaning the crap outta my office, and now I have room for things and stuff... it's amazing. I'm the biggest mess I know... I can't organize worth a crap. I do try, but nothing works, my brain fires too oddly and forces me to leave everything where I can see it. as you know... that's not good... my computer's desktop constantly gets filled with stuff, then I just pack it into a folder called "old desktop" when I get sick of looking at it. Well, I have to get back down to the room that I was working on... it's been almost an hour... I just got off the phone with Jordan so that's what ate up my hour... I wsa supposed to go to a bachelor party for a friend, but I'm too busy to make it to one of those, and since he's with someone he's not really a bachelor... it's just wierd to me... bachelor parties, it's like you're celebrating something that's fake, because you're not a bachelor in these days if you have a girlfriend (or boyfriend) you live with them often, and when you live with someone, dammit, that means you're not a bachelor... Even if youlive alone, but see these people everyday, you're not a bachelor. The institution of love has gotton beaten down lately. But in all honesty I'm busy saturday helping a different friend move, and then I have some PC work to do for my parents, since I'll be on vacation next week who knows what will happen, so I have to get it done. allright, I'm outta here for now, I'll post more crap when I get to the room.

Waiting for Windows to format a computer... it seems like it's been forever... wait, it has been forever. If I died, but my spirit goes on, would I realise that I'm dead? Would everyone else be alive, or would everyone else I interact with be spirits of other dead people. I guess the question is this, is the plane of existance I'm living in now real, or was I in a real plane before, and now it's not. and if so, are there places where my ethereal plane cross with the real plane? So I'm in this lab, and the class is over, but people still come pouring in to use the computers, likely for no-good I might add. The only reason I'm here is to fix a computer's config. I should have shut the door, it locks, and I have a key, but the students don't. Aha! I have a great idea, I'm just going to play Stratovarius very loudly... I choose... "Anthem of the World" yeah, that song rocks! downloading... downloading... playing loudly... oh yeah... lol... she asked me to turn it down, to which I responded, "Are you supposed to be here?" to which she said, "I'm a student" to which I said "Who's your instructor, I'll call them" to which she said "I'll be going now." Ah, what a wonderful day for this crap... oh good windows is done formatting and it's now copying files... fun. I should have screened that print that just went through, damn I'm lazy. But I hate it when people use the color printer to print a black and white picture... That color refill is expensive damnit.. even the black ink for the color printer is expensive.

I was practicing my guitar last night, and I kept thinking, wouldn't it be great if I could think of something worthy of recording, and then do it. I have some great recording software called n-track studio by a mad genius named Flavio Antonio http://www.fasoft.com Its only limitation is that you can only record one track at a time, it's pluses is that if you've used pro-tools.. it's not a hog like pro-tools, it'll integrate with other software because it uses standard wavs to record, and all the mixing is done in a separate file for that wav file, and it uses directX plugins.. hell yeah! Did I get too excited there? I do that sometimes. I love creative things, but I seem to be not doing anything... actually it gets me down... I wanted to record songs, but they always sound crappy to me, I'm very VERY hard on myself about everything. I have no portfolios of anything to show for anything that I do... I suck... crap.. I took this from a high to a low... I guess that could mean I'm bi-polar or something...

So I didn't sleep well last night. I'm too old to be afraid of the dark.. but I am. I woke up at like 3:45am looked outside and it was CRYSTAL clear. I could have gone to take a photo shot of Mars... but no... I stayed in my bed... because I was tired? NO, because I was afraid to go downstairs, then outside at 3:45am... I don't know what it is, but something feels particularly evil about the outside between 12:30am and 5:00am... My mom probably conditioned me to be scared at that time. well I've written a crapload... and this was more introspective than my normal global rants... take care all.

America is fascist. Now before you go waving your flags in my face, or emailing me pictures of the holocaust, or whipping out your webster's dictionary hear me out. Fascism can exsist without a dictatorship, all you need is an extreme right wing. Well, believe me, we have them. Fascism is mostly an economic control policy, focusing on free enterprise and business under centralized government control (by the way, that's almost exactly how the webster's definition from 1981 read). Well unless you're blind, you can see our big businesses and our centralized government make us prime candidates for this. Now, you also need extreme nationalism... I've never seen so many american flags go up for us carpet bombing some poor dirt country called afghanistan back into the stone age, when they hadn't even made it out of the stone age to begin with. Or back in 1991 when we did Desert storm... american flags everywhere.. up to that point Iraq was the most advanced nation in the middle east, it had the lowest crime rates, the best educational programs... don't let our sanitized news media fool you, we didn't do anything good there. Everyone cheered at the lighting up of AA fire and live explosions on TV... by the end of the first night, we had put in place the means for over 2,000,000 iraqi's to die, 60% of them children under the age of 10 according to an LA Times article. Racism is rampant here... In america everyone hates everyone else for lots of bad reasons. in the '60's you were bad if you were black, in the '70's if you were a woman, in the '80's if you didn't wear ugly colors, in the 90's if you were gay, and now it's a combination of all those things... how are we getting better? eh screw it, me bitching about it isn't going to change a damn thing.. arrg.. I'm gonna do some work.. later all.

Hey all, nothing really happened today. I went to the grocery store.. but mostly it was a boring day. Last night I was out with my telescope, the moon was up, but I was really looking for Mars. It rose at 10:30, but it was behind clouds to the south even after midnight, so I took a few moon pictures. It's a cool time with mars being closer than it's been pretty much in recoded history. If I can nab a picture of it, I will do so.. not a crappy picture either... I hope. If it's not cloudy tonight, I'll try again. So far it looks like it will be fairly not cloudy. I am making arrangements to train to be a pilot. I've dreamed of it most of my life... flying. My biggest problem is that after I get it, I'll want a plane, and those are expensive. Not to insult any pilots, but I don't want a little skyhawk.. especially not for $150,000. If world war 2 military planes could go 400mph, why should current civilian planes only go 175? If you ask me, and I know you haven't, there should be more ducted fan jets. you can get those up to 375.. not amazingly fast, but also not 175. Too bad those guys want half a million bucks for one. I saw the videos, old planes were pipes and cloth, probably cost a whole $75 in parts... if we've advanced so much, why is our pricing structure so out of whack? Well, no one could probably answer that for me... as well.. why am I watching the Panic Room while typing my blog? I don't think anyone could answer that either. Well, I guess that's it for this day's fine adventure, I'll work on a crappy website to show off my crappy astrophotographs so I can link to them soon. Later!

Time for more pleasant conversations, I had a ton of fun with bergertime, ocean, cassie, jackie and julie yesterday. Julie and I went to yuppie town, this high priced trendy area near lake zurich. Then we went to bergertime, ocean and jackie's place and played not one, but two rousing games of scrabble before going to see "Pirates of the caribbean" That movie made me want to be a pirate. Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom are so dreamy... honestly they make a great screen presence together, Depp is quite the versatile actor, he goes from serious to near goofy roles very seamlessly, I was a big fan of "Sleepy Hollow." Keira Knightley was also nice to see in the film. I think the last time anyone remembers her from was Star Wars Episode 1, she played Queen Amidala's decoy, and the queen herself many times. It was a real fun movie, the only thing I didn't like was the ending.. if you didn't see it, discuss it with me in the comments section after you have. (I don't like to spoil movies for people). It was VERY violent for a disney picture though, I was happy to see that, I was afraid the disney logo would kill a good film, it didn't, I liked it. Try to make a sentance run-on more than that last one, my english teacher would have failed me for not knowing any gooder. End Transmission

So there I was at work, thinking there was nothing to do... well that was incorrect, our non-exsistant helpdesk operator decided it would be a great day last night to take off. Well, maybe I should explain more, this "helpdesk operator" thinks it's okay to take classes in Wisconsin in the middle of the afternoon, she's gone everyday from 11:30am to 4:30pm... now the kicker, in the summer we get a day off if we work 9 hour days.. well she opted for that plan, so somehow between 7:00am and 8pm (those are our functional hours) she works 9 hours.. well as far as I can count... you can only put in 8 hours in that amount of time. Now, I'm not her boss, and I'm not an hour monger, the only reason I care is becasue everyday she complains about another girl she works with not putting in her hours. Now her boss and my boss are the same person, so she'll always tell me "the boss said (insert random exaggerated lie here)" So whenever I go ask the boss if he said some rediculous thing, he slaps his hands on his face and says in a low frustrated voice, "arrg that isn't what I said!" So now I just don't bring it up to him, he's a good guy and doesn't need me to bring up this helpdesk lady's incompitence any more than he already hears it. So now that you know she can't possibly put in all her time when she's here what do you think she does? She talks. Her job is to answer the phones and how often does that happen!? never! even her personal calls get picked up by the lab aids.

Okay, so there I was thinking I had nothing to do, when the lab aids come in and tell me the main website is down. so I checked it, it's fine. wierd to get a call like that from someone who's usually good about that stuff. Well, since the helpdesk lady assumed she put in so much extra time during the week, she took Thursday evening off, and automatically gets fridays off. So these lab aids were stockpiling help calls on their desk because they didn't know what to do. They couldn't enter them into the computer system, and we have only 2 techs, me and this other guy. The other guys does NOTHING all day. Well, he reads fark.com, and plays quake 3. Whenever the lab aids tell him there's a problem, he immediately yells, "AARRGHH, I JUST WALKED IN THE DOOR AND I'M ASSAULTED WITH WORK,GOD!!!" So the result is that the lab aids are afraid to approach anyone with problems. Well that does me a hell of a lot of good being the only one there on fridays. So the real problem is that one of our other important webservers went down, hard. We lost a hard drive in a proprietary Linux box. So needless to say, none of us could do anything about it, so I made a 10 minute replacement server, informing everyeone that the main server had problems. The guy who could take care of it, was off that day, and completely unreachable. He's not going to be happy when he gets his emails... I hope he can get the drive to work again. Well at any rate, that's my work rant.. I normally don't work rant, but it's been getting increasingly frustrating. Thanks for reading this is you're still here!

I thought I'd take this time to post about why never to use Pep Boys for anything. Well, now that I've wrote it, I'm sure there'll be a freaky ad at the top for pep boys. In November my Girlfriend and I went down to Atlanta for a kickass concert called ProgPower. it's a gathering of rare prog metal bands, last year was remarkable, because they had Blind Guardian, and Edguy, and Gamma Ray first time in America. So we went there. We stayed in a crappy hotel dressed up like a nice one, the holiday inn capitol plaza... never go there. We switched 2 nights in to another place. Well, we had a pretty good time checking out Atlanta, then we went to leave, that morning we took our tour of the CNN building, and as we were pulling out of the parking lot.. BAM, my front left wheel fell down, with the truck landing on top of it. Then it immediately started to rain. Well it got towed to a Pep Boys, then it took them 2 days just to wheel it in their garage. They diagnosed it with bad ball joints, and attempted to TRY to order new ones. Being an auto parts store I'd think they'd have something like ball joints, but this is not the case. it took a half a week to get the new parts in, and when it came out, the truck was still misaligned, and I was $1000 in the hole. that sucked... but the trip was fun.. but don't use pep boys, even the one's here screw you... don't get me started on my brake job BEFORE we went to Atlanta that while they were doing it, should have seen worn Ball joints... sigh.

Oh, Did I mention that Sony is the most EVIL corporation in the world? yes, more evil than AOL and Microsoft. I'm simply responding to those Sony Ads at the top of my page that seem to imply that you should buy something from Sony... you shouldn't. They're evil, and out to screw you.

Well, I updated the old blog. But since only 2 people in the world read it, I am wondering why I did it at all. oh well, I'm gonna go do something useful like.. work.