Domestic Geek

So I went to the Apple store Friday night for the release of OS 10.3 (Panther). We were given these cute little dog tags as a "free gift". Marcus mentioned that they went up for sale right away on eBay and silly me thinks, "Who's going to spend money on eBay for something that was given away free?" I guess many people will, as noted in this eBay search. Some of them are already going for over $20. Weirdos! I swear, if they start going for over $50, I might be tempted to let mine go.

The dude Marcus works with soldered my iPod port back on today and it's WORKING! (For now, anyway.) The guy told Marcus he couldn't guarantee how long the soldering would last. Hopefully, if I'm really careful, it will last until I can afford to get me a new 30GB one.

Lycos mail has been down for most of the afternoon/evening. I wonder if they got taken down by a virus or something. It's not like them to do "maintenance" during the day, during the week. It's usually mid-morning on the weekends and they usually give advance notice. I really hope I didn't get any important email.

I've got so much work to do, but I'm soooo damn tired lately. Planned Parenthood discontinued the pill I was on and they switched me to something else. I wonder if that has anything at all to do with it. Probably. Also being angry at work doesn't really help. I noticed something today. Our company colors are red and black. Angry colors. I've been staring at the color red for years. That's can't be helpful for my state of mind.

Well, I think I'm going to turn in early and hopefully get an early start on it all tomorrow. G'night.

Current mood: frustrated
I purchased a used iPod from a guy a couple of weeks ago so I could use it as an external hard drive as well as an mp3 player at school. It worked pretty well until Friday. I noticed the firewire plug was loose and you had to set it just right for a connection to be made. Well, I transfer my project onto it that I spent most of the evening before working on and left for school. When I plug it into the G3 there, it won't work. In a little bit of a panic because the project is due at 12:30, I tell the teacher I'm going to run home and burn a CD and I'll be right back. Well, the CD burner is in my Windows box and after transferring my Quark files over to be burned and burning the CD, the files couldn't be read by my G4. Marcus later told me that is a common problem with Quark files (they lose a resource fork or something). So, I frantically search for Marcus' iPod all the while hoping he hadn't taken it to work that day. I found it, copied my files, unplugged it from the machine, set it down to use the restroom, grabbed the iPod and rushed back to school. I plugged it in and noticed that I had managed to pick up MY iPOD (the broken one)! So, I run home again and get the correct one. Now I've wasted two hours. Needless to say, the project wasn't done on time. I ended up staying there until 3:30 to get it finished. I should've been to work about 2 or so. It ended up taking me an hour and a half to drive to work. Between the rain, the people leaving for the Labor Day weekend, the accidents, the Bronco game, it was a real nightmare. The manager was waaay not happy with me. Especially since they ran out of 16" dough since he proofed too much of it and it blew. He ended up having to make some dough. Poor baby. It still didn't make up for the prep that he was supposed to have made for me (and didn't) last Friday and Saturday while I was off in Colorado Springs with Marcus, Mike and Nina. (That's a whole different story that I may post about later.)

Well, I took the old iPod apart to see if I could fix it. My friend at work, Dave, lent me his tiny star bit screwdriver so that I could get the motherboard out. Some solder that held the firewire port broke loose and the pins coming out of it snapped. Marcus is going to see if some guys at work can solder it. Obviously, this was a bad design on Apple's part because Marcus came across several people on the web with the same problem, but no solutions. The cost to get it repaired would pretty much equal a new iPod. Since I can't afford that, I'm just hoping Marcus' friends can save it. I'll find out on Tuesday. Keep your fingers crossed.

Well, I've got dough to do in the morning, so I'm off to bed. I've got a lot I need/want to get done tomorrow.

Current mood: nervous
Well, I'm about to begin some upgrading to my site. Mainly, my movabletype and my gallery. I'll work on some MT hacks and stuff I want to try if all goes well. So, if my site doesn't work anymore, that's the cause. Keep your fingers, eyes, and toes crossed for me. Thanks.

My newest impulse purchase is an Apple iSight. I don't know what possessed me except that I've always wanted a webcam of some sort and Marcus got one, so...

Now I just need to figure out how to use the darned thing. The guys at The Apple Store had two of them set up to chat across the store. They even had them configured to import video into iMovie (with some additional software). Too cool. I guess the days of real-time video conferencing are here!