Domestic Geek

Man, I couldn't go to sleep last night and it wasn't because of insomnia. First, I had taken a nap yesterday afternoon. I was not feeling well and I was really cold. Then I had waaaaaay too much caffeine right before bedtime. I had two large cokes with dinner, several glasses of iced tea when I got home, plus I drank a venti Green Tea Frappucino. I don't know if it had caffeine or not, but it definitely had sugar. I was WIRED! I took a shot of NyQuil to try and knock myself out at midnight and it was still a good hour before I could settle down enought to sleep. Argh! Not smart.

I finished watching season 1 of Veronica Mars on Saturday. Good stuff. I'm so glad they put a lot of television shows on DVD these days. It really makes it easy to catch up on stuff you missed or want to see again.

I will find a job this week. The unemployment money runs out at the end of the week. I still have a hard time believing it's been three months since I was laid off. Time flies when you're having fun. Yeah, right.

I need to run the steam cleaner here in a bit. I had a bottle of pet odor remover on the carpet where I was trying to remove a stain where Skippy peed. He ended up knocking it over and I didn't think anything about because I had put the lid back on. Later Marcus mentioned that the carpet was soaked. It turns out the bottle has a nice hole right in the center and half of the bottle leaked out. Geez, how stupid is that?

RADHOLE sent me one of the STS-666 Mission Patches and I need to complete the task set out for me as a minion. Marcus did his a few days ago. I need to come up with something clever, dang it. I think my clever bone is broken.

OK, I've got housework to do.

*sigh*

Once again Saturday is over. I didn't do squat, it seems. I looked for PPP puzzle pieces (I found a #192—damn, that's a lot of pieces to be found yet since I've only got 20).

I did manage to design and implement my default avatar, so yay for that. That's him/her over to the right there. Isn't she cute? It's an androgynous kind of little icon...kind of like Pat from SNL. Now my comments will work the way I had envisioned. I'll try and upload some more default avatars this week, but feel free to become a member so you can upload your very own for commenting. Just keep the files to 100px square or less, please.

Dad came by today. He was very sad. He went to visit an old friend/former coworker and the poor man is very ill and possibly suffering from Alzheimer's. The man is only in his mid-60s. The thought of getting old and feeble disturbs me. I'd almost rather go quickly in some kind of an accident that lose control of my senses.

Well, I'd better try to go back to bed. I was having a coughing fit earlier. I hope I'm not getting sick. I'm not sleeping again and when I do, it's filled with disturbing, physically draining dreams. Grrr.

Hey everybody.

I'm still here, just haven't felt like posting. The change in weather coupled with not hearing from the guy I interviewed with on Friday and realizing my unemployment runs out on the 21st triggered major blahs yesterday. It's starting to feel like I'm never going to find another job. The feelings of worthlessness set in. I started feeling the weight of another crappy Christmas coming. It's only 2½ months away. I had a little pity party for myself. I'm feeling a little better today, though, but not much.

I wanted to post about the little project I had Marcus working on for me. During the Blogathon, I noticed several sites that had audio links in their posts. A lot of people were using a service called hipcast, but that costs $$. People using Wordpress have a customizable flash audio plugin that is really cool and requires just a tiny bit of code in your post. I used Radio Blog Club to put the audio link for my Thursday Thirteen Favorite Songs post, but that only works if they have the song you're looking for in their database and the site is down alot. I know I could just use Object to embed audio, but I like the look of the Wordpress player and the tiny bit of code in the post.

There was a thread on the EE forums where somebody was asking if anybody could make a plugin for EE based on the Wordpress plugin. Stale Betty came up with a solution, but it requires a lot of code in the post and a custom field, so only one audio thing per post. I wanted the ability to have many. Anyway, I put the challenge to Marcus and he wrote me one, using both the wordpress plugin and stale betty's code. The only problem is I also have to use the Allow EE Code plugin in order to use it, but that's OK. Anyway, here's the little bit of code (I assigned it to a custom html button, so I only need to click one button to put it in my post):
{ exp:my_stream name="songtitle.mp3" id="1" }
Neat, huh?

All it cost me was making Marcus a Halloween graphic for his site! Isn't it cool?

I need to do a little more testing by going back and replacing all the songs in my Thursday 13 post. That'll test the "id" function of it. If every song has a different id, then they can't play at the same time. I realy need to get my head straight and figure out how to do these things. I've always wanted to learn php and I like tinkering with code, but this underemployment and depression is kicking my ass.

I've got a final rant I need to make. We get East and West coast stations on our Dish. I've been using the East coast to get the shows I like on CBS. Last Friday, I missed the last 10 minutes of Ghost Whisperer and two weeks in a row I haven't gotten the whole Without A Trace. Pisses me off. I'm trying to bit torrent them as we speak. I've switched to taping the West coast ones. We'll see if that solves this stupid problem. I'm also mad at CBS, the network. Your The Class show is stupid and nobody is watching it. Thanks for switching your line up to put it in between How I Met Your Mother and Two and a Half Men in a lame attempt to gain viewership. You're lucky I was looking for something else in the program guide and noticed your switch. If I had sat down to watch How I Met Your Mother on my PVR and found out then that I had The Class instead, I would've been pissed instead of mildly irritated. Jerks.

OK, enough posting for now. I've got housework and template fixing to do (I have got to get the comments template DONE!). Have a good Tuesday everybody.

I finally installed Yoshi's Vox crossposting extension. This is only a test.

The contest was a nice diversion from this whole unemployment mess. I finally got a response to one of my many resumes out there, but once again, it's for a job that's a contract "as needed" basis. I need stability with a set minimum income. If I had known things had gotten this bad, I wouldn't have been so quick to tell my old place of employment that I wanted to leave. Granted, I don't see that company staying around for the long term, either, but at least I would've been employed while trying to figure out where to go next. *sigh*

It appears this is the future for graphic designers. These companies don't want to have full time employees that require benefits and taxes and such. I'm not working for $10/hour or less if I'm responsible for paying all of my own taxes out of it. I made more money as a pizza insider than that, never mind what I made as a driver. I'm so tired of it! I went to school and I've got skills—I deserve to be paid for the use of those skills. I've started looking into other fields, but I don't know what the hell I want to do.