Monday, I'll be off from work. While this initially sounds like a Good Thing, ultimately, it is not.
At work, Monday is my main day for doing stuff. Bill paying, timesheets, invoicing... it all gets done on Monday. I'll do it Tuesday, sure, but I hate getting out of my routines.
Some of you may be asking why I won't be at work. An excellent question, inquisitive reader! You see, I've got to be in court at 2:30 for a speeding ticket I got a month or so back. I'm not happy about it, but if I go to court, the chances are much higher that I'll merely go to driver's ed. This is a Better Thing than my insurance going up.
On the flip side, Monday evening is my first rehearsal for Lady. I'm really looking forward to it. I found out about the casting; my friend Kellye got offered a role, but turned it down to take a more challenging role in another show (I'm totally psyched for her, though; getting offered two good roles at one time has never happened to her, and she's overjoyed). Bryan got cast (as my brother, though I have no idea what his name is). Courtney didn't get cast, but instead is going to be the assistant director; eventually , Courtney would like to direct, so this is a cool thing. My friend Valerie (who auditioned on Monday) got cast, as did Cassie (the really cute girl with the pretty eyes from my audition entry). All in all, I'm quite happy with the cast. :)
In the "other random things" department, I'm reinstalling OSX on my tower. I backed up all of my Empire files (again), so if I have to wipe everything, at least I'll have that (though I'd rather not wipe everything). I would have done it earlier today, but it's been storming off and on; I didn't want to start installing and then have the power go out, potentially screwing everything up even more.
Between this and the rehearsal tomorrow, there (more than likely) won't be a Lair update tomorrow; aside from the fact that I don't have any content to add (though I suppose I could whip together some quotes and whatnot, and maybe a quick review), I'm just going to be too busy between court (no clue how long it'll take, but it'll happen at a horribly inconvenient time) and cleaning my apartment. If the OSX update tonight goes smoothly, though, I can start kicking ass on work.
Oh, and for those that were wondering, I fixed the problem with my headlights. Apparently both bulbs blew at the same time; strange, I know, but it happened. Of course, this was after I paid $30 for a new headlight relay that I had to drive all over for, but nevermind that! :)
I also seem to be making regular lengthy updates to the blog; this is my fourth in a row (with 13 entries in 28 days). Go me! I'll be curious to see how long I can keep this up; I have no idea what my rehearsal schedule will be like, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for a multitude of free evenings. :)
Let's start this off on the right foot and begin with the positive!
First up, the mess with Comcast is sorted out. I don't know if Comcast did anything or not, but when I checked it last night, I was still getting the stupid "Welcome to Comcast!" message. I then unplugged the power strip that the cable modem and Airport are on, then restarted it. Worked like a charm! I have no idea why, but I also don't care.
Enough with the good stuff, it's time for the shitty news.
First up, and the reason that this entry is titled what it is instead of "Two Broken Things and Two Fixed Things," the Blacklist appears to be on the fritz again. I can't add new entries to the list; I get an error message each time I try. I was getting this same error the other day, but I was able to get around it by clearing out some of the redundant subdomains; looks like I'll be doing that again. Yehaw.
I'd really like to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of MT-Blacklist, but to do that, I'd have to be running the latest and greatest version of MovableType. To do that, I'd have to pay $99... donations are greatly appreciated. :)
Item Of Non-Functioning #2 would be my G4 tower. I'm not sure what's going on with it, but it isn't good. Right now, I'm using my laptop exclusively, since the tower is running slow as molasses when I attempt to do anything; this is a change from it's "everything is broken when you wake up the computer," and in addition to it's inability to mount .dmg files. *sigh* I'll be spending some time on it this weekend reinstalling the OS... again.
If this computer were my only experience with Tiger, I'd think it sucks. However, I'm running it flawlessly here on my laptop and on one of my computers at work; my personal computer just plain sucks. I'm hoping I can afford a new one by next March, when it will become five years old. Maybe I'll turn it into a file server or something... dunno.
What's really important about this piss-poor news is that all my Lair files are on it. I'm not in danger of losing the data, but at the same time, I can't work on Monday's update. Just as well, I suppose, saying as I don't have anything to add. If I can get my computer up and running quickly, maybe I can pound out a quick review. Using my laptop won't be an option; you see, the tower doesn't have a DVD drive, so I have to mount the tower onto the laptop as a firewire drive and install it like that. Nothing more fun than tying up two computers at the same time!
The third thing that is broken is, as always, my car. This time, it's the headlights. Specifically, they aren't coming on at all, though I do have high-beams and running lights. The Headlight Relay is clicking when I try to turn them on, so I'll be getting a new one before attempting any other fixes. This is a major pain in the ass, though, since it means I can't drive at night, and I've been leaving early the past few days to make sure I get home before dark (I left at 5 today since it looked like it might storm).
This sucks for the upcoming weekend because I've got a party on Friday and a play to see on Saturday; I will be attending neither event (and will be relegated to sitting around my apartment) if I can't get the problem fixed tomorrow. Grr.
...although it would mean that I would have nothing else to do but work on reinstalling the OS. Nah, not worth it. :)
I realize that my readers (which is like seven people, but whatever) are of varying ages. Some are in college, some still live at home. Those that have yet to experience the sheer joy of living on their own should pay particular attention to this blog entry, and the advice that it contains. Sorta like that song about sunscreen from a few years back, except that I doubt I'll ever get any radio time with this.
Contrary to popular belief, there are some things around your home (whether it is an apartment or a house or whatever) that you can safely ignore. Dusting? Pah. A thick layer of dust on everything is healthy; it keeps light from hitting everything quite so harshly and causing unnecessary eye strain, so not dusting is actually healthier for you. Vacuuming? Your dirty carpet should be able to present an accurate record of your daily activities to archaeologists in the distant future; really, who could be so short-sighted that they don't take future generations' needs into account?
While vacuuming and dusting both present physical clues that, to lesser people, mean they should be taken care of promptly, taking out the trash presents no such clue sometimes, but through a cruel twist of fate, actually is important. For example, take my situation: my primary dinner meal consists of two banana, peanut butter, and honey sandwiches, each downed by a glass of milk. It's healthy, it's tasty, but most relevant to this blog entry, it doesn't generate much trash (a used banana peel and some bread crumbs). As a result, my trash can fills at a less-than-prodigous rate.
Usually I can keep track in my head of how long it's been since I last took out the trash. However, spending two nights at my dad's really threw me for a loop on this one. Usually when I start seeing fruit flies in my field of vision while sitting on my lazy ass watching television, I take it as a sign that I needed to take out the trash about two days ago.
Perhaps you can see where this is going.
Fast forward from whatever arbitrary time I was talking about to Sunday, about thirty minutes before I left for the audition. I went to throw something into the trash, and noticed that it was actually full. Well, time to take out the trash. There also seemed to be a few more fruit flies than normal. Okay, so it was past time to take out the trash, I told myself. No worries!
Note: the previous "no worries" comment official concludes the understatement portion of the blog entry. You may now continue reading.
I approached the trash can and saw a few more flies inside. Okay, mildly obnoxious. However, then I had the unfortunate (though inevitable) thought to get the crushed milk carton out of the top so I could take the can's cover off. The trash can literally exploded with fruit flies, swarming over everything. It was totally and utterly disgusting. I estimated that there were at least 60 flies total. Thankfully, as this was relatively early on a Sunday, I hadn't had much to eat, so I had no lunch to lose.
After several futile attempts at killing the horde manually, I opted to get my vacuum cleaner, which sees very little action otherwise (see above), and waged my own personal Holocaust against the vermin. I have to admit to quite a bit of sadistic glee at watching their numbers thin, and it was amusing to watch them circle the end of the vacuum's hose like water down the drain (seriously, they spun around the hose in mid-air over and over before getting sucked in). After an initial pass, I discovered a large group hiding on my cabinets (go figure, brown bugs on brown cabinets are practically invisible). It took my two more passes, but I got the vast majority of them.
That was Sunday, and today is Tuesday (for the unobservant). There are still several of the little buggers (literally!) flying around; they're much easier to kill now, but still, I hate seeing them at all. But let that be a lesson to you all: take out your trash on a regular basis, don't just wait for it to get full.
Also, here are a few follow-ups to previous blog entries:
Fantastic Audition: I got the role of Nicholas. No surprise; it was the role the director has been hounding me about for almost a year. Not sure how my friends fared, though.
Damn Comcast!: So, the whole problem originated with me not actually paying Comcast the money I owed them. Whoopsie! However, I've been unable to get online with my connection since Thursday, despite paying them (I dropped a check off Thursday evening). As I mentioned, I've been hijacking someone else's wireless connection (although Davis has since disappeared, I'm now using some generic linksys wireless router), but it sorta sucks, since I'm not always getting three bars on my connection. Lame. But I talked to a guy at Comcast tonight, and apparently my account has to be rebuilt, or something. Whatever. He says I should be back in business tomorrow morning. Groovy.
So I auditioned for The Lady's Not For Burning today. I must say, I did a freaking fantastic job. The director has been after me for one particular role for quite some time now, but I managed to only read him once the entire audition. I ended up reading for a total of four different roles (three if you don't include the one guy I read briefly at the end of the audition). I nailed every character, as far as I'm concerned.
As is usual in theatre auditions, there were more women than men, so the guys were jumping from partner to partner, myself included. This was fine by me, as I got to read with my friend Kelleye (who I hope gets a part; I thought she read well, but I only saw her once or twice). The thing that me really happy, though, as that one of the girls there (who was incredibly cute; she had the most beautiful blue eyes... uh, anyway...) specifically asked to read with me. This wasn't a casual "hey, can you go over this scene with me" type question; this was a grab-my-arm-and-look-me-in-the-eye request. How could I say no? To make things even better, she apologized for asking me (Why? Who knows?), saying that she just really wanted a good actor to read against. When a cute girl is saying that you're a good actor... well, it just gets you all warm and fuzzy inside. :)
Auditions will continue tomorrow, and I'll be going just so they have more bodies to read against the women. The director was telling me that he's still not even half-way to casting the show; however, he could be swamped tomorrow, so no point in worrying about it now. Hell, maybe Cassie will show up again tomorrow. ;)
So, all of a sudden, Comcast is forcing me to download some sort of software just to get online. The worst part is that the stupid "Download Now" link doesn't work... great. Hopefully I can talk to someone on Saturday, when (a) it won't keep me from going to work, and (b) won't cost me a thousand minutes on my cell phone (I never come close to hitting my max, but still...).
I'm online right now through the ignorant generosity of "Davis," whoever the hell that is. I'm just happy they didn't bother closing off their wireless network. :)
This week's update is on a more personal level than a normal Lair update. Specifically, all the updating is to the blog and my personal site (which, amusingly enough, still has the old site layout).
The changes to the blog are actually fairly minor. I changed up the Links section so that it has links to the aforementioned personal site, my last.fm (formerly AudioScrobbler) account, and my MySpace profile. I shifted the Empire links to below the Search box, and changed the link back to blog.evula.net.
There were a few updates around my personal site; specifically, to my Xbox and DVD collections, as well as finally adding my notes on The Normal Heart to the Theatre page. However, the major addition to the site was the inclusion of the Pics page. There are 35 pictures altogether, broken into three different categories, and all with a short commentary by me. The Photoshopped Pictures section is my favorite, for obvious reasons, but still, it's cool to see them all in one place. I'm sure I'm missing some (I can think of a couple of PS'ed pics that aren't up there yet), and I'll be adding them as I get them.
If you're wondering why there wasn't more content added to the Lair today, bite me, my schedule was seriously screwed up by my car. :)
Haven't had too much to say, since I haven't had much happen.
My car got put in the shop on Thursday and Friday. Being without a car sucked; not only did I not get to spend my evenings here at home (meaning I couldn't work on the stuff I wanted to add for tomorrow's update, but food that I'd bought and had planned to have consumed by now is just sitting there). On the plus side, this should prevent my car from overheating as much as it has been recently. Yay.
I'm still finding stuff that is missing from my car. Not only did they take the car stereo, but they also apparently took the pliers that I used to adjust the temperature of my AC/heater (the knob fell off).
I also found out today that they took my (non-functioning, hah!) Maglite flashlight that I kept in my car. I didn't realize that it was gone until I went out to get it so I could replace the batteries and the bulb that were both dead. Oh well, I guess the next show I do, I'll just have to be 100% sure to bring my other one, since my backup is free-floating out there now...
My copy of Tiger is acting a little funny. iChat keeps randomly quitting on me; this last time, it walked me through all the "this is the first time you've run this copy of iChat" stuff, and several of my preferences were reset. Not only that, but iChat was Aqua, while the rest of my computer is Graphite, and I had dual-scrolling buttons (both up and down at the bottom of the scroll area, as opposed to being at the top and bottom). Quite perplexing.
In better news, I'm going through old CDs and ripping the good stuff off them. The Forrest Gump soundtrack has several good songs (I'm listening to Sweet Home Alabama currently).
Backstroke of the West is the name of Revenge of the Sith after it's been translated into Chinese and then back into English.
Holy shit this stuff is funny. I've decided that I'm going to start saying "Everybody is good" when I walk into a room.
I also never knew that the Presbyterian Church was descended from the Jedi Order. You learn something new every day...
Tiger upgrade went off with only a few hitches, huzzah huzzah. I had to install it twice on the tower (first time a straight upgrade, the second time replacing the old system folder) before it finally worked properly. However, I had to manually upgrade from 10.4.0 to 10.4.1 and then to 10.4.2; I couldn't just jump from .0 to .2 for some reason (the installer just wasn't working for me). It did work on my laptop, though; dunno why.
I only have a few widgets right now, and none of the cool effects (them spinning for the prefs on the back, the watery effect when you drop them) work because of my shitty old video card, but still, I'm enjoying it.
Read the title and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Because of my computer set-up, I have to use my laptop (with the DVD drive) to install Tiger on my tower; I'll be restarting it as a FireWire drive to the laptop. I backed up the important stuff (read: the 1.1gb The Empire folder) to the laptop, though I'm not going to be wiping the tower down (it's a pain in the ass that I'd rather not deal with).
Once all that is done, I'll be installing Tiger on the laptop itself tomorrow.
The rest of Sunday will be spent playing with widgets and downloading my favorites ones that I use at work. :)
Also, while this is installing, I'm going to work on my car. Maybe I can figure out why it is over-heating... I looked at the reservoir last night (the car was too hot to open anything up, but the reservoir is transparent) and it looked like it was completely full, which it shouldn't be. Hrm.
Turns out there were 35 other people.
Yeesh.
So at 8:24 this morning, I leisurely stroll out to my car. I unlock the driver door, and see a couple of CDs strewn in it. "Strange," I think to myself. "I don't remember doing that." Looking up slightly, I see that my glove compartment is open, and the majority of the contents (map, registration info, etc) are on the floor in front of the passenger's seat. "Strange, I don't remember doing that, either."
Because I'm slow, it's only then that I realized what happened. Sure enough, I shift my eyes ever so slightly to where me CD player is... whoops, I mean was. Son of a... *sigh* There's the frame of my dash, just hanging out there with several wires dangling where once there was a fully-functional (and fully-loaded, if you consider a single CD to be "fully-loaded") Kenwood CD player and radio combination.
First thing I do is call my dad, to let him know what happened and that I'd be late. Secondly, I call the cops. I cool my heels outside while I wait for the officer to arrive, when over walks the groundskeeper (really nice guy; even knows my name). Turns out that I was one of five total cars that were broken into: three were in the same lot as mine, and the other was on the other side of the complex. I was the lucky one, though; everyone else had a busted window, while mine had been pried open and the door unlocked. They were just looking for goods, though; the CDs I mentioned were still in their cases (though one of the CDs was the pre-show music for The Normal Heart; can't really blame them for not taking that).
After the cop got my information and filled out the report, I cleaned up my car a bit. The groundskeeper came back over and we shot the shit a bit more, when I realized that I was actually missing a piece of my car: the black section over the window that was pried off so that they could unlock it. The groundskeeper said he hadn't thrown it away, and after a short inspection, found it in the grass. The beautiful part about this is that there are some nice looking fingerprints on it; I opened and closed the door for the only other person that has ridden as a passenger, and I don't think I ever put my hand on that part of the door when closing it, so hopefully those fingerprints will help nail down who did it. Looks like I'll be calling the cops again when I get home. Good times. :\
So, now I have a car with a messed up window (still works, but it doesn't quite seal the way it used to; I don't know if it is water-tight anymore), but no CD player. This really, really sucks for me, since I drive about an hour and a half ever day. I don't know when I'll get a replacement; money is a little tight right now, and I won't be putting anything of value into my car until I get that window fixed (otherwise it'll be even easier to get in). *sigh*
So, I only have two things this time around: one Rant by SuperNova, and one Review by yours truly. MacWorld was a bit of a bust when it came to getting stuff done; my plane rides were incredibly short (and when you take out the time that I couldn't use my laptop, it only gives me about an hour total that I could do anything).
However, I have started working on setting up a database to start driving some of the Lair sections... believe me, once I get them actually working (that's the sticking point right now), it'll be awesome. :)
Anyway, as I mentioned in the title of this entry, today's Lair update will start to set the schedule I'd like for everything to go on. The first Monday of the month, I'd like to have an update that adds new Rant and Review content (meaning that, hopefully, I'll have some to add). Then, about two weeks after that, I'll have an update that adds new Quotes, Jokes, and Junk to the site.
I'm not entirely sure of how feasible this schedule is... I know I've got tons of Quotes and Jokes to add, but the other content is fairly hard to come by. However, I'm sure that everything will come together... right? :\