Well, right now I’m sitting in the waiting area of the Saturn dealership over on I-45 by 1960. It was time for my car’s 84k mile service, so I scheduled some time to come out here and get it taken care of. In addition I’m going to have to stop at Fry’s on the way in to work to see if I can get a new tone probe and generator. For those not in the know, tone probes and generators are used for tracing out phone/data lines. You plug the generator into the plug and switch it on, and then you go to the other end (say, a phone room) and use the probe to detect the tone the generator’s putting out, which leads you to find the correct line. I’ve got a few lines at the office that I need to track down, and I lost my original probe. Fun fun.

The main thing that annoys me about this Saturn dealership is that they used to have an open wifi connection here. Now, though, they’ve locked down the wifi with WEP, which I suppose is their way of saying, “Oops, we didn’t mean for this to be open in the first place.” So, right now, I’m using my cell phone as a Bluetooth modem. Even then it’s not as functional as I like; I can’t get my VPN client working on it and can’t connect to my servers at home. About the only thing that’s working right now is web access. Still, a working open wifi connection would be great here; some people like me come in during working hours and it makes it easy for me to actually do work. Right now I can’t make any calls while the phone’s in use.

Like I said earlier, I met Sean and Jinny for coffee Wednesday evening. It was kinda unexpected; Sean called in the middle of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and I had actually ignored the call because I didn’t recognize the number. However, Sean left a voicemail so I went ahead and checked it (I figured that whoever it was, if they left a voicemail it was important), got back with Sean, and went off to meet him at Denny’s. It’s always good to meet up with those two and discuss current and former times.

Speaking of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, I actually did end up enjoying the film. The key to it is to not take a single bit of it seriously. I might end up adding it to my permanent DVD collection out of shits and grins. We’ll see, though.

In any event, that’s about it for me here… time for more waiting on my car. Fun fun…

Well, another weekend is over and done with. Granted, I’m not sure where the hell it went to, but it’s pretty much over.

Yesterday at about lunchtime, Dave came around to the house. Unfortunately, Chase went into serious protection mode and we had to restrain him; for some reason he did NOT like Dave being there. In retrospect, it was my fault, as I let Dave go in first and Chase probably thought he was an intruder. He wasn’t any better the rest of the day, either. *sigh* I just hope he eases up over time and realizes that Dave is a friend. Interestingly enough, later in the day, Gus overcame his skittish nature and came into my room to meet Dave. Dave had never seen him before, and made sure to make friends with him. It’s weird when the cats are friendlier than the dogs…

Anyway, after Dave arrived, he and I went to Pei-Wei for lunch. After having our lunch we headed back to the house and he proceeded to introduce me to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Unfortunately, I would have to say that Louie lasted longer than I did; at the 17 minute mark, when I saw them walk into a room about to have guy on guy action, I said, “STOP! Enough.” Not that I have any problem with it, mind you, but at that point the movie was getting too surrealistic for my tastes. So, I ended up putting the 2003 miniseries of Battlestar Galactica on. However, right before we reached the halfway mark, the power flickered and the movie cut out. We took that opportunity to head on to dinner at the Black-Eyed Pea. After dinner, we headed back to the house, where I introduced Dave to the 80’s sci-fi/fantasy goodness that is Krull. After the movie was done, he headed back home.

The main thing that bugged me about yesterday was that issues with MK Online and with work meant I ended up neglecting Dave a couple of times. I hated doing so; he said he didn’t mind, but I felt really rude doing so. *sigh* In the end, I told Dave that it was days like yesterday where I hated my MK Online job.

I wanted to watch Corpse Bride tonight, but unfortunately something was wrong with the disc. Mom tried watching it and it crashed her DVD player part way into the movie. Then I took it and put it on my own DVD player, and it didn’t work at all. I tried it on my main PC using PowerDVD as well, to the same result: both times the player hardware/software just locked. I’ve already arranged for a replacement from Netflix and am sending the bad one back tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get it soon.

Otherwise, the only other thing I’ve done today was set up Mozilla Thunderbird on my mom’s laptop and get her brand new domain and email address set up. It didn’t take too long; it was just a matter of getting Dad to buy the domain name, and I did all the technical work after he had done so. She’s getting this new domain so she can get rid of her AOL account; all she uses her AOL account for now is email and she’s kinda miffed AOL’s giving away free email now. At this point, I’m reasonably sure I can give her better spam/virus filtering anyway, so she wins in the end. However, it’ll be fun for me as my AIM account is tied to her AOL account and I don’t know if it’ll end up surviving…

I also ended up setting up GNU Privacy Guard on my main PC as well as Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird. Now all of my emails are being cryptographically signed, and if people want they can encrypt email to me. I admit I’m not doing this for any more reason than it looks neat and acts as a kind of verification later on if people want to confirm if a message came from me. If you want my PGP key for my darquecathedral.org email address, you can get it here, and for my MK Online email address, you can get it here.

And now, it’s time for me to start winding down, as I have work in the morning. Fun fun…