package retrieval adventure

people have sent us a few packages here on the other side of the planet, but the post office does not deliver them all the way to our house, so we have to go pick them up, usually from the main post office downtown near our house. recently we received a package and for some reason or another, the pick-up slip we got in the mail was different form the usual pick-up slips, and the address on it was for a different post office.

so I looked up the address of the post office, and it was on the other side of town, 3 buses and about an hour away. I get Skye and myself all ready for a little adventure, and head out the door around 2:00p. we catch the first and second buses just fine, it’s a pretty hot day, and we’re both gradually getting sweaty. while we were on the second bus (actually a tram), we get asked to see our tickets…  holy crap. in the more than a few months that we’ve been here, I have never once even heard of anybody being asked to see tickets, so we stopped buying them months ago (I know, I know).  so of course, I didn’t have one. mr. ticketman informs me there is a fine of €40, payable immediately to him. I suppose it’s a good thing I had it with me, because I’m not sure what he would have done if I hadn’t had it (which I often don’t).  so I pay him the fine, and go on with my trip.

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T-Mobile… smart? not so much

chelsea wanted a new phone, and was looking at the BlackBerry, and because Verizon has a propensity for handicapping phones, I didn’t want to buy a BlackBerry from them. so we switched to T-Mobile, but this required us to sign a new 2-year contract, which is fine, but then we moved to Slovakia, and they don’t have service here. so we called up T-Mobile after we arrived and they said it’s fine, just get them proof that we are in fact living overseas and they’ll remove the $400 early cancellation fee.

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condiments

it seems to me that condiments at restaurants should be free. or, if not free, at least included with the price of the meal.

fry sauce is a condiment.

and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

thoughts on proprietary file formats

so we got a new camcorder for christmas (mrs. claus was nice enough to bring one by for us), and I broke it out, started using it, got it home, and tried to hook it up to the computer…  well, that failed with a cryptic error message, but no big deal, the memory card is easily removed, and the camcorder conveniently came with a USB card reader. so i plugged that in, attached it to the comp, and tried to open the files with my favorite in-a-hurry audio/video player, VLC

nope. try again.

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How will it affect your family?

A friend of mine posted a video on his blog. I watched it, and couldn’t tell if I should laugh, or cry, or scream. At first it looks like a joke, and I almost started laughing, but then it just keeps going, and going, and all the while getting more serious. Which leads me to believe that it wasn’t a joke, and if it wasn’t a joke, then I have to reply. But I didn’t want to reply on his blog, and have him feel as if I were attacking him personally. So I’ve posted it here because I just can’t let this go without saying something.

Video after the break.
Continue reading “How will it affect your family?”

stupid roomate

me and my girl had been lookin for a new roommate for quite a while, since about new years, but no luck. so she started to get a little desperate and this guy shows up with this hella pitiful sob story about how he has to be out of his current place in two days.

he seemed cool enough, to her, i never met him before he moved in. so he gets moved in in like 8 hrs, all his crap in the garage and all over the basement. i finally meet him, and he’s kinda wierd, not good wierd either, kinda creepy and shady. for example, the first or second night that he was there, i was coming out of my room heading for the kitchen and he’s walkin past me with his hands behind his back, so i get a little curious as to what he feels he has to hide from me, because he’s 36 (which in itself is kinda odd, living with people 10 yrs younger).  i talked with my girl about it, and she said that she found a brown bag next to the couch, so i figured he just feels like he has to hide his booze from me and think nothing more of it. but then the next day, my girl asks me how much jack was in a bottle we had in the cupboard, and i told her i didn’t know, but she says there was only like an inch left in the bottom, and i’m pretty sure the bottle was half full when last i saw it, but i can’t say for sure, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

the next day. while straightening up my room, i notice my piggy-bank is gone. i may have misplaced it, but my first thought was that the new roomate (joel the creepy fucker) stole it.

it stays missing, i never find it, and later that week, we talk with our other roomates, and come to find out, he’s been stealing change from them as well. i guess they came home from a nice valentine’s weekend away to find their change jar, which is rather fat, and hence holds a lot of money, was missing about three inches worth of change, about $60. but the worst part is, it was hidden in their closet, so that means the fucker was going through our stuff!  after i heard that, i decided right then and there that he was out, i don’t give a shit about the lease, if he’s stealing from us, he’s either out of the house, or i’m beatin his ass.

my girl calls her dad (the landlord) and gets his permission to kick him out of the house, so joel calls her, and she tells him that he has three days to get out, he asks why, she tells him, and all he cares about is getting the rest of his rent back, he doesnt even try to deny it.

so he’s gone, moved all his stuff out in one day. but before he left, he stuffed our garbage cans FULL of his shit, which may not even be his shit the way he was going on around the house.

but i gave him a little going away present… while he was gone one night, after the incident, i cracked open his coffee maker and disconnected the heater, so it will only make cold coffee.  =)

so today, we’re gettin ready for a little party, and we noticed that there was a bottle of sprite that was in the same cupboard as the jack, that is now empty. fucker.

anywho, long story short, make sure you check references of new roommates, now matter how desperate you are or how nice they seem…  and keep a screwdriver and a coffee (dis)repair book handy in case things go sour.

plur l8

OMFH

that’s Oh My Fucking HELL!! for those of you not in the know.

i am so sick of the company that my domain is registered through right now it’s not even funny. they have pretty much killed my site for the past three weeks and it is still dead. (i’m writing this through a more direct path that my hosting provides in situations like these)

my current registration period was going to expire, and my hosting company started offering domain registration services that they didn’t offer when i got the webspace, so i wanted to switch over to them to make everything easier. so i pay for the domain service through them about two weeks before it was to expire, and they tried to switch it but it didn’t work, so they tried again, but the second try was too late and my name (iohelix.com) was now being held ransom (ok, not really, but that’s what it seems like).  come to find out that there was a registrar-lock placed on my domain that nobody told me about, and i can’t remove it until i renew my subscription through my current company, so i finally give in and pay them what i need to to get it working…

still waiting…

its been a week now and i still have no control over my domain. the customer service they are providing is horrible, they have NO customer service on the weekends (?!?), no phone numbers that work, and the customer service they do provide is either wrong, or ambiguous (“don’t worry, we are getting in contact with department concerns”)  WTF???

anyway, they finally figured out that somewhere along the line, the order got lost and they are currently working on it, but that’s what they’ve been saying this whole time, so we’ll see…  anyway, just to let you all know, if your domain is registered through HostDime, Fariert, or any of their affiliate companies (except eNom, who is the actual registrar that HostDime is a reseller for), get out now!

just venting…
>(  l8

more to come when my service is finally back up…

school and dumb buses

so school started again, that break was either not long enough or too long, i’m not sure which, but it definitely wasn’t time to go back to school. as much as i love school, it’s still poopy to have to wake up that early just to fall back asleep in class. or have there not even be a class, which was the case yesterday. i woke my ass up at 7:30 to get to my class at 9:10, but then, after i got there, i sat there for like 20 minutes out in the hall, waiting for somebody, anybody, but nobody showed up, no teacher, no students, nobody. stupid first day labs.

my next class was at 2:00, so i went to work, then back to school for an hour, yep, that’s it, 1 hour. went home and sat around, or rather drove around, hunting down some money so i could buy me and my girl a couple of iPod’s (which are dope as hell by the way), then i had to go back to school at 7:15 for a night class, which is going to suck, but at least the class will be worth going to.

so i got home from that class, loaded some songs onto my iPod for today (gotta love firewire, 800 songs in about 5-10 min), then went to bed, but couldn’t sleep, and after i finally got to sleep, the dumb dog woke me up at like 6:00 this morning, and i never got back to sleep… so i got up around 8:30 and headed off to school with my girl, she had to go to work before school so she dropped me off and i waited for the shuttle… saw one, but it was the wrong one, going the other way, too far away to catch, then another one, and another… still waiting for mine…  40 minutes later, as my class was starting, i called my girl and had her take me to school. stupid shuttle.

so now that i’m finally warm again, i’m chillin.   ;)

but school’s lookin good, the iPod kicks ass, and i have a girl that loves me enough to leave work just to take me too school.

plur, l8

stupid computers

the computer at paulsen construction was gettin to be pretty full, so i decided that it was about time to wipe the hard drive, get rid of the dual-boot that was on there and repartition the drive with one drive. because the reason that there were two partitions is no longer an issue.

so i did, except that the dumb thing decided that it wanted to make the new drive (freshly formatted, etc.) drive letter f ??? so i get windows all installed (all the while not knowing it was installing on drive f), which takes about an hour, and then check the thing and notice that its drive f. so i take the drive that was supposed to be f, and change it to d and try to change the new drive to drive c, but it won’t let me. but it’s okay, i’m not too pissed, just a little annoyed, cuz i can easily reformat, remove the conflicting drive, and reinstall windows, not that big a deal, except that when i remove the drive, and go to reformat, the computer doesn’t detect the hard drive !!!  OMG!  so i have to flash the BIOS, fiddle with shit, and finally get it to detect the hard drive after about a half an hour of stress. so it’s finally installing, and i’m playing on another computer, but i just wanted to let everybody know, that computers suck!  just buy ’em and leave ’em alone.

grrr, lates