Category: Personal

My friend Phil spent his Xmas break in a location I haven’t thought about since 1982, Falkland Islands. I have no idea what goes on there–I imagine sheep and puffins shivering in some southern sleet–so I was excited when Phil returned to fill us all in:

Most of all it seems a very sociable place. No doubt social connections in any small town or village are pretty tight, but when it is as cut off from the outside world as Stanley, they must be stronger. It feels like everyone knows everyone else, particularly among those who grew up on the islands. As my dad said after visiting, at times it can be like being in the enclosed social world of a soap opera. On our last night we ate at the Brasserie and it seemed like the place was full of people we’d met over the previous fortnight, much like the limited social hubs (the Queen Vic, the Rovers Return) in any soap.

I’ve uploaded to Flickr this last weekend’s trip to Las Vegas and the Adult Video News Convention, a calvacade of porn stars and knobbly toys. Warning: may contain photos of me giddy with joy.
UPDATE (1/12/06): As of this morning, only four days after posting, my shot of me and Mika has become the most viewed photo at my Flickr site, blasting out other photos that took a year to garner the same number of views. Sex sells, what can I say?

On Saturday, December 3, my bleedin’ PowerShot A70 broke. Though I could still view old images, the viewfinder in camera mode showed a blur of black and violet. Balls! This will be a regularly updated entry to see how long Canon takes to fix this problem.

UPDATE! 1/3
FedEx note on my door sez they tried to deliver a package, but maybe this is something else I ordered (shoes). The exciting answer tomorrow!!!

UPDATE! 12/29
A little email (followed by a letter the same day) informs me that the camera has been fixed and shipped. So I will have to borrow a camera to get that New Year’s Eve action. Balls.

UPDATE! 12/21
Canon loves me! They really love me! They’ve officially decided to fix my camera FOC (free of charge). Niiiiice. “You will receive the camera within 7 working days of this date.” I put that date at 12/30, just in time to catch a photo of me sicking up too much vodka for New Year’s. Excellent.
But we’ll see, won’t we?
UPDATE! 12/19
UPS delivered the package to Elks Grove, IL this morning. Get to work, dudes.
UPDATE! 12/13
Returned home yesterday to find the letter from Canon containing my UPS sticker. I sent out the camera in the box today. Let the thumb twiddling begin!
December 4
Took the camera down to Russ Camera, just to see if this was a commonly diagnosed problem. It was.
“It’s the chip!” the lady there said. “Are you out of warranty?”
Yes, I am!
“Did you buy it with a credit card?”
Yes, I did!
“Ah, well, some credit card companies actually extend any warranty for you. You should give them a call.”
December 5
I give my VISA card a call and find out that yes, there is an extra year tacked on to all orders paid. Cool.
December 7
At work, I call Canon and I don’t even have to worry about warranties. Because this sounds exactly like a bad chip, and the A70 was known (was it?) for bad chips, they will fix it for free. But they need the camera’s serial number.
I rush home after class and in the final five minutes before their customer support goes home for the day, I relay the serial and I’m told that they will send out a packing label for me. Upon receipt, it should take 7 – 10 working days. I imagine a backed up tech lab with piles of faulty A70s. A harried chip-replacer says to himself “Goddamnit! I must be seven to ten days behind. And it only takes a minute to replace!”
December 10
Still no packing slip in mail…hmm…

It all started with this article over at MSNBC.com, called How to Get That Perfect Shave. I can’t remember what I was searching for originally, something about types of aftershave for sensitive skin. No matter.
When I first started shaving back when I was 15, I didn’t know anything, and my dad had been using blue disposables and Barbasol for years. My total beardage was a thin whiff of a moustache. If I left it on, I looked like a tool. If I shaved it, I immediately broke out. Great options.
Years later I decided that perhaps electric shaving would be better, so I got one of those three-head whirly-blade things for Xmas, and for about a decade I used that. With sensitive skin, this was better, but still not effective, and there were always sections to go over again and again. Then I got the Gilette Mach3 (for a birthday gift, but used only much later) and after reading the article above, starting using that in conjunction with Aveda’s shaving creme and Nivea aftershave balm for sensitive skin.
But I still felt I was missing out of the retro fun of a brush and a safety razor, and sent out a poll to my male friends. Unknown to me, 2/3 of them had already gone back (or had never left) to the traditional, old school method of shaving.
So finally, I invested a little chunk o’ change and got me the goods.Read More

Hey, to the twat-faced coward who dented my driver door sometime early this morning…I hope your shlong drops off. And if you already don’t have a shlong, I hope you grow one. Arrrgh.

Yeh, so, uh, how long did that take? Four days, people. Four days to get up on a new server, reconfigure my database and my email.
At one point I was running two help desk chats at the same time with two different companies (ipowerweb, my host, and spamarrest, my spam blocker) while being on the phone to Verizon Online (my ISP). Major frustrations included:
1) Not having a reliable FTP program–or server, I dunno. It would drop the upload connection every couple of minutes, making transferring 250mb of info (not a lot, I know) take something like 4 hours.
2)Not understanding that, though my settings stayed the same, I would still have to erase all my accounts and reload them. This took a while to figure out.
3)Following the tutorials for backing up and re-importing a MySQL database to the letter, then finding an error message on upload. “Line 2048: Error: Unclosed quote” or some such malarkey. Holy crap! Ipowerweb techies of the highest level had to step in and figure it out.
4) Worrying that I missed four days of important, business-related email. Seriously.

You might not even notice (I hope not), but I am going to move servers on iPowerweb.com to take advantage of their new admin software VDeck. Mostly this means for you people that my email may bounce back to you. If so, you can always send it to my gmail (if you know me, you know this address…). In the meantime, here’s a photo of a kitten performing opera.

Sup, my peoples? After one month of procrastination and two months of Blogger buggering up my entries, I finally knuckled down last night and installed Movable Type 3.2 on my system. With help from Patrick Benny, I got the thing up and running. Then with help from this Flash tutorial I transferred all my Blogger blogs to this one big blog.
I know the site looks very rudimentary right now, but I’ll get the graphics going soon. Right now, it’s all about the text, baby!
Also! When I first started blogging, the blog was called “Up Among the Golden Spires”. I thought that mixing politics and dumb web links wasn’t what I wanted, so I split the blogs into five separate pieces (Blogger didn’t have categories like MT does). And my main page “Stone Cold Pimpin'” was born.
Question: Should I go back and call this one big blog Up Among the Golden Spires or keep with Stone Cold Pimpin’?