I just spent several hours trying to get these pictures to upload. Very frustrated with LiveJournal and Semagic. Will, of course, get over it.


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If you attempted to email me at my neitherday.com address today, my email was down for approximately 10 hours and there is a reasonable chance I did not receive it, although I am receiving some (but not most) of my missed mail now that my email is working properly again.

Thank you, purpleglitter, for being so helpful.

Due to certain computer issues, I have lost an unknown number of emails over the past 2 days. While I believe that most of my email has gotten through, if you send me an email either yesterday or today there is a reasonable chance that I did not see it.

AIM is been having so much trouble lately it's unbelievable. When I get on, I often end up disconnected. And there are many times I simply can't get on. If you are trying to contact me via instant messenging, it would be better to do so via Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, or MSN Messenger. I usually log into all my accounts simultaneously with Trillian, and with the recent wonkiness of AIM I am more consistently reachable on other networks.

The gorilla glue seems to be doing a good job keeping my staff held together. I can even put my weight on it. For a long time I've had a sense that those things around me that I most considered truly mine have been broken and put back together, sometime precariously. I've always felt a connection with such things, because I have put myself back together from the shattered remnants of long ago. I remember when I was around 13 (give or take a year), I had a Commodore 64 and the floppy drive didn't work. I repaired it using rubberbands, and it worked well for many years until I got a 386. I've always felt that I'm running on rubberbands and duct tape. Now my staff is this way too. Perhaps this will serve not only to be more mindful of its care, but also to increase my connection to it and my commitment to understanding the meaning behind it.

I'm drifting through the days haphazardly. I don't feel like I'm making it. I tried to make it to the bank yesterday, but wasn't able to get out of the house until too late, despite having gone to bed at 10:00pm the previous night. I got to the bank just after it closed at 4:00pm. I completely lost it. I had just found out that my neurology appointment friday was no longer in the hospital computer system. I'm going to have to wait until the 24^th for an 8:30am appointment. It's going to be very difficult for me to get out at that time, because my problems often are worse in the morning, however it was the only time available until february. Soon I will attempt another trip to the bank. Hopefully I'll have better luck this time.

It is the criminals responsibility not to be criminals. People should not be telling us that we need a police force, airport security, or anti-virus software. What they need to be doing is telling the criminals this:

If you're walking by an unlocked car, don't steal it.
If someone leaves their front door unlocked, don't rob them.
If someone leaves their notebook computer unattended, don't steal it.
If someone has an nice watch, don't rob them.
If someone is stopped at a red light, don't carjack them.
If you are on a airplane, don't blow it up.
If you are riding the subway, don't blow it up.
If you are riding the bus, don't blow it up.
If you write computer programs, don't write a virus.
If you've hacked into a system, don't delete any files.
If you work for a bank, don't steal people's account numbers.
If you are near a school, don't sell drugs to kids.
If you are in the mob, don't kill people.
If you are a serial killer, don't kill people.
If someone annoys you, don't beat the crap out of them
If your partner dumps you, don't murder them and their family before you kill yourself.
If you are the head of a large corporation, don't raid your employees pension fund.
If someone looks like an easy mark, don't defraud them.
If you can't afford your next fix, don't mug someone in an alley.
If you are driving, don't speed.
If you make money, don't evade taxes.
If you are a criminal, don't break the law.

Once this meme gets sufficiently passed around LiveJournal, we will have no more crime.

Been busy with computer stuffs. Last night zarthon, purpleglitter, and I built purpleglitter's new computer, Clementine. Since the Windows XP CD we installed didn't come with the newest security patches and the patches weren't downloaded immediately after the computer was brought online, today I spent a couple hours getting rid of the infection that sprung up within 24 hours of Clementine's completion. Everything seems to be under control now. I need to improve on the work I've done with Oz and there are some tweaks I want to do to Severus as well. I've got plenty to keep me busy this weekend.

Oz is alive again! I brought it back. Not on Linux as I was thinking of installing, but Windows 98. Oz is currently the only working computer at purpleglitter's place. Her computer died yesterday. The motherboard is shorted out, and it is essentially unrepairable. By cannibalizing the parts I needed from purpleglitter's computer and expending a lot of effort and time, I was able to get Oz working again. Oz was at the point where it wouldn't even make an attempt to boot. Starting it up is still a bit like starting an old lawn mower. You have to give it a few tries before it catches. Most of the time it just starts to start, but quickly dies. Five or six attempts usually does the trick. Oz has other quirks as well, such as not being able to store any information in BIOS when the power supply is disconnected. None, not even the time and date. But it still gets online and that's what matters.

Severus appears clean, for now. However, I am getting strange access attempts originating within the house_of_clocks local area network. I'm currently trying to narrow down where the signal is coming from. I am concerned that there is another infected computer in the house.

The infection is back on Severus. I need to attempt to clean it again. Grrrr....

I am 90% certain that Severus has been disinfected. The virus scan came up clean and it is exhibiting no suspicious behaviours. I will continue to watch it closely over the next week or so, but at this point I feel comfortable enough with the situation to use it as I normally would.

I hate screensavers. There used to be a point to them: to prevent screen burn it. But now it just serves to crash long-running processes. And you can't turn it off in safe mode on XP. You can't even change the settings. It goes off at 10 minutes and that's that. If your running something longer 10 minutes that that will potentially crash if the screen saver kicks in, you have to sit at the computer and jiggle the mouse at an less than 10 minutes intervals. Later today I need to see if Oz, a somewhat stripped and aging 200MHz Pentium II, actually still functions at all. If it does I'm going to install some form of a Linux system on it as soon as I have money to buy cables to connect it to the internet, which probably won't be for over a week. I'll have to see happens when I turn it on.

Last night I discovered that Severus has an infection. I need to attempt to cure it today. Pain in the ass. I really hate hate hate the microsoft.com site. Most of the features don't work in Firefox. Even from Explorer, many of the site tools I need aren't accessable from a computer not running the same version of Windows, which is inconvient because the infection blocks those tools from being accessed directly from my computer and I don't have access to another computer running XP. I'm going to give fixing it a try, and if I can't get Severus cleaned and secured, I will have to say goodbye to having PhotoShop on my computer and make the move to Linux.

Something that greatly annoys me about Windows XP: When an application is not responding, "END NOW" doesn't actually terminate the process. It simply sends a request to the process to shut down immediately, but often if the program was already having problems shutting down, it will be unresponsive to that request as well. You have to load the task manager and end it the process from there. This can take forever because often the process that has quit responding is dragging the entire system down. The feature worked on older versions of Windows. I have no idea why it doesn't work on Windows XP. It's not like things don't crash and burn in XP. They do quite often. Grrrrr... I should switch to Linux, but I'm too addicted to PhotoShop. (yes, I know about GIMP, but it's not the same.)

I did some data entry for purpleglitter. Entered half the items and will do the other half in the morning.

I've gotten Severus running again, and it's playing music for the first time in a long time. The problem now is that the cord I was using to hook my computer up to the router has died and I don't have a replacement and I won't have any money to buy a replacement until I get my check which comes Friday. So until then I still have no internet in my room.

dalious picked up a wireless router a while ago, and I plan on installing it the next time I have a chance, which will involve dragging Severus into merryperseis's room and setting it up there for the installation process. I also need to get a wireless card before I myself can benefit from it's installation.

I don't know anything about securing a wireless signal, as I've never actually dealt with setting up a wireless LAN. I'm hoping I can guess my way through it, but I can't estimate how much time it will take me.

I feel wonderful right now. I'm actually getting things done. I haven't really doing anything in months. I feel a change. A shift. A movement out of my rut. My motivation is back and I want to keep it.

Apparently the computer I thought I fixed isn't so fixed after all. Ah, well. I'll have to try again at some point. I have an idea of what the problem probably is, just my solution does't seem to have been enough.

I seemed to have fixed some very long term suckage issues with one computer tonight. It's not perfect, but it is much improved. More work needs to be done, but I need to get some work done on Severus first.

Severus is currently out of commission. It has been for the last few days. I need to hard reinstall Windows XP or install Linux. I'm haven't been really motivated to do either as depression really saps motivation. I'm leaning towards Windows XP, simply because I have only limited experience with Linux, and don't think I'll have the energy to set up something I'm not used to the workings of. Hopefully I'll soon find the motivation to fix it, as not having internet access in my room sucks.

Sara and I met in Porter Square yesterday at noon ready for our trip to Cauldron Farms. We were both hungry, so Sara treated me to an Indian food buffet lunch before we left. I enjoyed it very much and felt ready for the trip.

When we got to Fitchburg there was no one waiting at the station. We waited for about 20 minutes, then Sara went to a nearby internet café to look up Raven's number while I waited at the station in case someone from the Farm arrived. Shortly after she left to get online I started having trouble walking. At first it felt like I was trying to get up a very steep hill even though I was on level ground. Soon I couldn't maintain my balance, so I sat on the ground. Luckily I was at a transit station and sitting there didn't look particularly out of place.

The spell didn't last too long and I was up to walking again by the time Sara got back with the bad news: Raven had canceled via e-mail shortly after we had started our journey. So no reading. A waste of money and a day.

It was two hours before the next train to Boston, so we decided to tool around town. We really wanted to find a coffee house, but were unable to. We did run into a cool queer kid who explained to us just how little there was actually to do in Fitchburg. I though with a small state university that they might have at least an okay coffee house, but I guess not. We did have fun talking to him and before we knew it, it was time to head back.

On the train back I had another "spell". More intense and twichy than the one in Fitchburg. This time I lost consciousness for what Sara tells me was five or ten minutes. Nobody usually pays notice to this things as long as one stays off the ground and doesn't make a good deal of noise. As I remained relatively quite in my seat throughout the episode, I was not hassled.

I did end up going to the ground shortly after we arrived at Porter Square, but again I was on a transit platform, so it didn't look particularly out of place.

Sara insisted on seeing me home, but didn't end up staying for very long.

-----

Once home I tried to get my computer patched to avoid the worm that I heard was going around yesterday. Unfortunately I still don't know if it is properly patched. It has intractable adware on and I need to reinstall the operating system. I'm very very tempted to install Linux instead of XP, because I'm so pissed off with Microsoft's policy of leaving gaping security holes in their products and then charging for products that attempt to fix those holes. I've already given up on Internet Explorer, maybe it's time to ditch them completely. I would miss Photoshop. That is the only thing stopping me.

----

Today I woke up quite disorientated. My behind-elbow and behind-knee were really bothering me. I was a bit stumbly. But I'm not going to let my "spells" dictate my life, so I left the house anyway. I headed over to Walgreens, and almost made it to the door before I went to the ground in the parking lot. Again, as with these things, it was not a catastrophic fall as I knew I was about to go down. I ended up on all fours twitching because I wasn't able to properly orchestrate my decent. Quickly several people came by asking if I was "okay". I told them that I was, that this happens all the time, but they were insistent on "helping" me. They even called the emergency services. Oh joy!

The police arrived first. I told the officer that I was fine, that this happens all the time. He said that I should get checked out at the hospital anyway. I replied that they checked me out last week for the same thing and said it was nothing. That going again would be a waste of time. He seemed stunned by that statement, but I didn't really care. The firefighters and the paramedics arrived in quick secession, each again trying to convince me to go to the emergency room. I refused and signed their little thing saying I was refusing treatment.

Soon after they left, I went into Walgreens. I ended up on the floor in the back isle. Apparently "customers were worried", so management called the emergency services. I left before they could arrive.

I'm at purpleglitter's now. Still a bit dizzy but feeling better. Ready for more adventures.