DSL situation! Fixed!  Yay, Brooke for the DNS thing. I haven’t taken networking yet, and I’m a little foggy these days, but that was the situation.  I changed the DNS from "automatic" to "use these DNS."  (FWIW, Verizon DSL DNS are 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2)  And yes, Ann, the tech support blows.  My Internet version of tech support works much better, and, is right!  (Of course, the bitch is when the internet isn’t working and you can’t access the tech support. Feh.)

Geeky question number 2:  One of my favorite bloggers is knocked up too, and a week behind me.  She has this cool pregnancy script that updates like "I’m in week 5! My baby is the size of a sesame seed, and growing arm buds" kind of thing.  But, it’s php, and I’m pretty sure I can’t add a script like that to Typepad.  Has anyone seen a ticker-type script, that works via HTML instead of java or php? That would be cool, too.  I’ve been looking myself, but am feeling really foggy. Oh wait, I already said that.

Some updates to my favorite computer things:
Bloglines now offers PACKAGE TRACKING which is like the marriage of peanut butter and chocolate. YUMMY.
Gmail now has 2GB of storage, and rich text formatting. 
That is all.

1.  Firefox
2.  GMail
3.  TypePad
4.  BugMeNot
5.  Bloglines

Find out why behind the cut.

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English Genius
You scored 100% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 100% Advanced,  and 77% Expert!

You did so extremely well, even I
can’t find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon
intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don’t. You
have an extensive vocabulary, and you’re not afraid to use it properly!
Way to go!

The Commonly Confused Words Test

(Now I’m wondering what I got wrong!)

Happy Rollins Day!

A meme, stolen from BizarroGirl:

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jstrizzy tagged me with this, which might be the saddest meme for me to do, ever.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer 

    One. I am so not kidding.  Etta James, "At Last," which was our wedding song, and the only reason it’s on here is because I needed it for a grad school project.

2. The last CD you bought
    1200 Curfews by the Indigo Girls, and it was the first time I’d purchased a CD in YEARS. Seriously.

3. The last song you listened to before reading this message
    That Nickelback song about the blow job. It was on the radio, and led to Dave ranting about the lack of good American metal music, about how In Flames won a Swedish Grammy for best albums because "the Swedes know where it’s at" and how "New Metal is just a bunch of punks whining about how their parents don’t love them or their girlfriend broke up with them. Waaaahhh." Heh.

4. Name 5 songs you listen to often or that mean a lot to you
    "At Last," Etta James — wedding song, you know.
    "Dead Man’s Hill" — Indigo Girls, makes me cry every time I listen to it, because it reminds me of my dead friend JT for so many reasons.
    "Perfect Day" — Lou Reed, makes me cry because it was played at Aton’s funeral, and I wrote that whole essay around the lyrics.
    "Wild World" — Cat Stevens, & "Wish You Were Here" — Pink Floyd, both equally meaningful in the "Screw you, Death" tour of ’99-’00.  Again, can make me cry if I really listen to the lyrics.
    "Epic" — Faith No More, an anthem of adolescence, that when I hear it randomly on the radio now, I hear it as a sign of ‘everything will be okay.’  I cannot hear it and not remember walking around the old mill town with Amy, barefoot, in the middle of the night, just wishing desperately that we were grown up, or at least old enough to drive.

5. Who will you pass this stick to (3 people) and why?
AgentLulu, because she is a Rawk Goddess
jnstarla, because she needs to be distracted from package tracking
molly, because I want to force an entry out of her.

Amy made me two CDs, and in taking Dave’s car to work, I’ve been able to listen to them and enjoy them.  But I really don’t listen to much music beyond the college radion station.  I don’t have an mp3 player, I don’t have an internal CD burner, I don’t have much need to listen to music, I guess.  I used to work in the music department, for YEARS, I did, and I was always hearing new stuff and loving it.  I have tons of CDs from those years, most of them promos, but I just don’t get much new music exposure these days. 

I’ve been working with one of my old clients this week to troubleshoot a Norton AntiVirus problem; basically, it stopped working (but not due to a virus) and uninstalling and reinstalling failed halfway through the reinstall, and googling the problem led to "yeah, and symantec’s ‘fixes’ don’t work."  Well, fuck.  Instead, I set him up with AVG, the free antivirus stuff we used at the library, and he was satisfied.  However, I had taken my laptop with the Symantec fix instructions opened in Firefox to his building, and realized right away that they have an open, and strong, wireless network.  I showed my client, who had been mulling about signing up for DSL, and he got excited.

So, today, I picked him up a wireless adapter at Staples and installed it while he told me all about his 1942 furnace, and how he rigged it up to a British thermostat to set the interior temp to 38 degrees, so that when he went to FLorida in the winter, he didn’t have to pay so much to heat his house.  There was also a story about finding a pipe at Chop-Chop’s ("I still don’t know what his real name was, everyone called him ‘Chop-Chop’") house, buried in the back yard, and a whole bunch about photography, with the added prop of him unearthing a portrait of him and his wife that my Dad die back in the late 70s. It’s a small state.

Anyway, he was very excited to be stealing internet from his building. "I pay $1850 a month! I don’t need to ask permission!"  It is the super-luxe retirement village in town, and what the hell? If they don’t lock down the network, expect people to use it.  And, of course, I totally undercharged him for labor.  I spent probably 5 hours over 3 days with him, and charged him 50 bucks, but he added in an extra ten "for gas."  I’m sure the Geek Squad charges a lot more, but whatever, I also got a free York Pepperming Patty and the opportunity to see an elderly man reading a Nora Roberts book. It’s all good.

Tonight, hockey game! This is my fourth of the season.  I can’t believe how quickly I’ve converted to total hockey fan.

So, one of the side effects of it being month fucking SEVEN of TTC (and, no, no bleeding yet, but my HPT yesterday was negative, so really, I’m just waiting for it to start) is that all of those plans I made back in June have sort of backfired.

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Well, it’s over, and we had a great day.

We woke up at around 7:30, 8 oclock, and it was the first time I’ve ever opened presents in the daylight.  With our brunch, we always had to get up before dawn to get the present part done and start cooking for the guests, here with just the four of us, we were totally leisurely about the whole business.

We did stockings and drank coffee, then made breakfast and took showers.  We opened our gifts mid-morning, and just as we finished, my sister called to check in (no ring, much to my mom’s dismay, but she did get a bracelet and a car stereo — I joked that she should have taken the bracelet and said "yes, yes! Of course I will!" and hung the bracelet from her left fourth finger and continued with "but it’s a little big . . .").  We went for a walk around the neighborhood, took some naps, and I made my first ever holiday dinner of Glazed Ham, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, rolls, and salad.  Dave picked up his mother to join us, and it went well.  After dinner, while Dave was cleaning up, the disposal stopped working right, so my dad and he spent an hour tracing the problem back to a nasty drain trap, the contents of which dumped onto my dad in the process of fixing it, and basically, it was a matter of years worth of crap in the trap that caused the problem.  Dave was completely amazed that my dad was so cool about it, since it both "looked and smelled like puke."  While the menfolk were playing plumber, my mom, MIL and I were playing Yahtzee.  It’s all good now, and what’s a holiday without a little drama?  Of course, I’m playing Yahtzee and my dad proclaims that all draisn should be checked, really, and they go upstairs as I realize there’s an empty FRED box under the bathroom sink that I can do nothing about.  When I asked Dave later, he said "So WHAT if he saw? We’re MARRIED! It doesn’t mean we’re TRYING to CONCEIVE, you know."  Which, he had a point…. it could be considered "Oh, we had a scare, but it’s okay now!"  I guess an OPK box would be harder to explain away. (Although, there was something really adorable about Dave saying the phrase "Trying to Conceive." Hee.)

Dave took MIL home after everything was cleaned up, and we watched some Arrested Development with the folks, and now they’ve gone to bed and we’re double dipping on our network with the two iBooks.  Tomorow we’ll take down our tree (it stopped taking water a week ago, and it is READY to go outside) and exchange what needs to be exchanged, and then my folks will go home for two nights, and return on the 28th for a night before they drive off on their East Coast road trip — NYE with friends near Philadelphia, and then a few weeks booked for Florida to visit family and attend a photog convention.

(Dave has just told me that I need to type "Free Tommy Chong" and be done with this entry.  The stuff below/behind the cut was typed up early, so

Free Tommy Chong.

And now, for the totally materialistic recap of the S-G Household’s Agnostic Christmas ’04:

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