My dad likes to make fires cause he likes his room alot warmer than the rest of the house (plus heating costs keep going up). So the other day, I walk into his room and see my dog's head literally inside the fireplace "playing" with the firelogs. Everything is a toy to her. Rocks, sprinklers, anything that is thrown, large pieces of wood and, apparently fire. I don't think she hurt herself too badly, just her whiskers were a little singed and curled up. Add that to her swelled up nose from when she slammed into the wall when she was chasing her ball, and her broken fang, probably from the rocks. :-/ At least she's smart enough to stop when you tell her too.

And then there's my other dog, a little white chihuahua who's been having something akin to seizures. He stiffens up and stops responding to anything for about 5 minutes. He won't move at all; If you stand him up he will just drop on the floor. This has happened twice so far. I'm going to have to take him to the vet soon.

Link

The sound on the site is a little loud, so turn down your speakers.

I was at the tv, enjoying a nice steak that had cheese and chili on it, with some a1 (i love to put everything on everything :)), and then the tv and some of the lighting in the house went out. I didn't think to much about it, as this has happened before. The microwave, all living room plugs and lights, and my bedroom plugs and lights are all part of one circuit, and it cant handle the load and has caused the breakers to reset alot (my computer is actually drawing power off of my dads room; I decided a while back that drilling a hole in the wall for an extension cord for some of my room electronics would help alleviate the load on the circuit). So I go into the garage and flip the breaker switch back on, but nothing happened. My guess is that one of the wires shorted out (unless the breaker box also somehow utilizes fuses along with the breakers).

So now it looks like I'm going to be spending money and my weekend rewiring much of the house. Bleh. Even if it does turn out to be something easily fixable, I'm still going to want to add some circuits to prevent this from happening again. The house was built in the 50s, and much of the wiring is outdated, and ungrounded (except for the receptacles that my computer goes into; I grounded that to some pipes in the crawlspace under the house). At least all the power isn't out. And I finally get to use the cool turbo linux icon. :)

I while back I had to reinstall windows, and when I was copying data back onto the computer, I had to restore my pictures from 2 different backup sources, with many of the pics that were already on the computer going into different folders and having different filenames. So now I have many duped pictures with different names contained in various, unsorted folders. Picasa isn't able to scan for duplicate pics, and I can't find anything else that is of use. Any ideas?

Last spring I didn't attend UNM college for some reason that I still have yet to figure out, but instead, I went and got a part time job. Now, I am trying to keep my job, and attend UNM at the same time, but it isn't working out, as most of the good classes take place during the hours of my job (which has no set schedule, so I am on call for most of tuesday and wednesday). I am still living with my dad, who wants me to be a full time student so I will be covered under his work's insurance policy, and yet still wants me to keep my job.

This is annoying...

You are probably asking yourself right now, "What is a smoot?". Well, apparently, it is a unit of measurement created by MIT as a prank, and the good people at google decided to make use of it. I learned about it's existence when I was messing with the measuring tool in Google Earth.

I wonder if Google employs a person who's sole job is to put easter eggs like that into all of their programs?

It turns out that my next door neighbor accidently took them yesterday when he was over, mistaking them for his own. He was kind enough to give them back. I just have to remember not to leave the keys in the open from now on. I don't blame him, he's left his own keys over here a few times. He also gives us free chips from time to time(he works for frito lay).

No harm done.

Have any of you seen them? If you find them lying around, please email me.

I just got this in today. Took more than three weeks to get here because of some problem on their end. They didn't ship it until I called them to ask were my package was. When I ordered it, I was under the impression that it could play mp3s, but I misread the badly formatted specifications, which were apparently copied from here.
So, in summary, they suck shit, and I need to research my purchases better.

The birds that I mentioned last journal finally got their nest built. Hooray for them. I just hope that it doesn't fall again when their are eggs in it.

And for some reason, whenever I try to go to abcnews.go.com, mozilla crashes. My guess is that its because of some extension that I installed.

I'm starting to feel sorry for the bird that keeps trying to make its nest under the roof of my back patio. Each time the bird's nest is almost complete, it gets blown down by the wind (it's been very windy today). It has made its nest about seven or eight times so far, and it is still hasn't given up. You would think that it would quit trying and go somewhere else after so many attempts. Though I think that the reason that it hasn't given up yet is because this bird's parents are the same one that made their nest on a bedroom window sill last year, and the year before that on the front patio.

And today I figured out that I had left my n64 console on nonstop for a good year. I keep it within its own drawer underneath the tv, and while I was spring cleaning, I discovered that it was left on since the last time I used it. What a waste of electricity. At least the thing still seems to be in working order.

Actually, just kidding. April fools. You really aren't dead.

I bet I had you there for a second.

Nothing else to see here. Move along.

Just when I think winter is over, we get snow. Just 4 days ago, the high temp was close to 25 degrees celsius (75 in farenheit), and now it's freezing. The grass was green, the peach tree in the backyard was blooming. Now everything is white. This is the most it's snowed all winter long. Not that I have anything against snow, it's just that I'd rather have it happen during December, not March.

Oh, and the people around here suck at driving in the snow. Half of the cars want to go half the speed limit, while the other half want to go their regular 15mph above the speed limit.

I ordered some blackout blinds for my window a while back. They just got here today. Huzzah.

My next door neighbor keeps a light on during the night, and my old drapes weren't any good at keeping it out. One of the things that I did to keep the light out before I bought the blinds was to cut out a piece of tin then hinge it to my window. I eventually hooked up a motor that I got from an old paper shredder to it to automate closing and opening it.

The things you can do when your bored...

Qwest finally got around to upgrading my connection like they said they would. According to a test done by dsl reports.com, my connection is now 1270/816 Kb/sec. Everything is nice fast(er) now, except /., but I assume thats a problem on their end. My IP address also seems to have changed. They say that I have a dynamic address, but I've only seen it change whenever I turn off power to the modem, which is almost never.
I'm still dumbfounded as to why they would do this (losing customers to Comcast?), but I guess I shouldn't look the gift horse in the mouth.

I got a note in the mail from my dsl provider, Qwest, saying that if I call them, I can get upgraded to their Super mega deluxe premium package (whatever they call it), at no extra charge. Apparently, the package changes my 780/256kb dsl connection into a 1.5mb/860kb connection.
Of course, while I'm suspicious about it (companies are supposed to be evil, and giving away free stuff is not evil!), I still went ahead and called them and "ordered" it. Whether or not there are any catches attached to it remains to be seen. This may keep me switching to comcast, which I've been pondering doing for a while.


In other completly unrelated news, I see that /. now has republican and democratic topics. I guess it must have came with the politics section...