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Year: 2009

And Then We Got Kicked Out

And Then We Got Kicked Out

Published Feb 27, 2009

Hope randomly showed up on my doorstep one day while I was busy feeling sorry for myself. I don’t know what made her fly out to see me; I guess she must have been bored. I also don’t know how she knew where I lived; but then again, I’m no longer surprised when Hope finds me. She takes amateur stalking to a whole new level. This was surprisingly less creepy than the time her and some of her friends drove to Los Angeles from somewhere in New Mexico and picked me up at the bus stop I was waiting at. But that’s a whole other story.

It was a Friday night and I was home by myself shortly after I moved to Portland, and there was a knock on the door. I kind of crept out and peeped through the little hole in the door and was floored to see Hope standing there. She let herself in, proclaiming that she had forgotten I had moved, and finding me was kind of hard cause she had been looking in Burbank for the first half hour of her “research”. She looked at me impatiently and asked me why I wasn’t dressed for going out yet. Somehow the whole situation struck her as “normal”. So I did what any rational person would do: I got dressed for going out and out we went!

I hadn’t really been in Portland long enough to figure out where the “happening” places to go were yet, but that didn’t matter. Hope did her homework and knew where we were going anyway. I wish I remembered where we went; it was pretty fun. We hit a couple spots before picking one to stay at for more than twenty minutes. Cruising around town was fun. I had been kind of homesick and missed the city lights, and this outing took care of that.

When we finally picked a bar to stay out, we found a cozy little booth to sit in and had some drinks and chatted about life and things. People (mostly boys) would wander up to our table and Hope would shoo them away; we were both taken, and besides, she was here to see ME. We were having a grand old time until somebody came along who didn’t get the meaning of the words “go away”. I had forgotten how much of a temper Hope has; she’s pretty quiet about it, but there’s no mistaking when she’s angry. Unless, of course, you’re Captain Oblivious, as this guy apparently was.

So she dumped her drink over his head.

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Names Changed* Now Open

Names Changed* Now Open

Published Feb 25, 2009

Names Changed* is now open! The layout is still kind of in testing, as I implemented some features I hadn’t made use of before. If something doesn’t appear to be working, or seems odd, please take a moment to leave a comment here and let me know, as chances are I haven’t noticed if it hasn’t been fixed yet. Thanks!

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Moving, Updates, and Ink

Published Feb 24, 2009

So, I’m getting ready to move this weekend. I still have a lot of packing to do… I hate packing. I’ve bribed some friends with pizza and beer to help me move my stuff. I’ve bribed another friend with more pizza to help me paint the walls back to the boring off-white color they were when I got there. I’ve secured a killer vacuum cleaner to rescue my rug that my grandma gave me, and will be renting a super steam cleaner to get the carpet back in passable condition so I don’t have to pay to have it replaced. My plan of attack is to finish packing this week, move the stuff on Saturday (and by “move my stuff” i mean “drive the truck and let the boys load/unload”) during the day, unpack the important stuff Saturday night, and paint the walls and clean the carpet Sunday.

I hate moving. I’m kind of excited though. Xoie will have a friend to play with, since my friend that we’re moving in with has a dog, too. I think having more places to go will help calm her down, as well as running and playing more. Pod is going to bring his computer over to my house so that we can get a little more spread of where we spend our time, cause I’m *always* at his house, and I would really like to spend more time at home, but still spend time with him. We haven’t been playing EQ a whole lot, cause we’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead, which is totally awesome. If you’re on Steam, add me as your friend. lifelessmind. I’d link to my profile but I can’t find the URL while I’m at work cause anything fun is surfblocked.

I had to take back the super sweet 3.16 dual core processor I bought. Turns out my motherboard only supports 65nm processors. So I already bought a new power supply, and got a video card sent to me, and if I bought a new motherboard to go with my new processor I’d need new RAM cause mine is slow, and I’d need a case, and at that point I built a whole new computer and that just wasn’t in my budget :( I did pick up a 2.2 dual core, which is the best 65nm I can still find at this point.. which, yea, is still better than the 1.8 I had in there, but not NEARLY as exciting as the E8600. Cest la vie. I’m excited for my new video card. Shawn says the video card will do me more good than the processor anyway, so the combination of the two is pretty good I’d say.

I’ve also been doing a lot of designing/coding lately. I’ve started (and scrapped) a good 4 or 5 layouts for this site already. I’ve got the main page (mostly) coded for the one I think I’ll be keeping.  I’m also starting a new project. Domain has been bought… but I’ve also scrapped 2 or 3 layouts for that one. I don’t want to get too much into specifics until the site is up, but it was inspired by this random freak-out I had over the weekend. While Kat Scratch Fever mostly is about the NOW of my life, this new project will give a little more insight about my past. I’ll let you know when it’s up and running.

Oh, and I got a new tattoo. I suppose technically it’s 2 tattoos (that technicality meant I had to fill out the paperwork twice! that, and I split it up into two sessions cause we ran out of time the first day). I just got the second one last night and it’s crazy swollen and red still. The left one hurt more than the right one. Probably because I’m right handed so the muscles in my right arm are stronger and more used to abuse. Anyway I don’t have pictures of both of them together yet, but they look the same, just mirror images. Pictures on my Flickr. Go look, leave comments!

That’s all for now.

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Repartitioning Adventures!

Published Feb 10, 2009

So, I decided that I wanted to play with the Windows 7 beta, but that I didn’t want to overwrite my operating system on either computer.

I started with Bob 1.0, my poor sweet 5 year old computer with Windows XP on it. I used GParted off of a CD-Boot of Ubuntu to shrink the partition on my main drive and then partition the new, un-partitioned space left by the shrink process. Windows 7 took ages to install, and ran a little slow on Bob 1, but certainly ran much faster than I expected it to run in the first place. I half-way didn’t expect it to install at all.

So last night I decided to shrink the partition on my storage drive in Bob 2.0 (my much newer computer) and poke around on that. I have no idea why, but the process didn’t go NEARLY as smoothly on this computer. Some of you may have seen my panicked Tweets about it. Oh, then then to make it worse, I discovered that Vista has tools to do this built in, well after the fact :|

So anyway, I guess when Windows Vista first partitioned the drive, it left blank space at the very beginning of the drive. When I went to shrink the partition, it decided that it wanted to move the partition to the left. So it took 2 hours to read my partition (why?!) and another 2 and a half to move it and create the new partition.

So I cleaned my bathroom while I waited, since I’m moving in a couple of weeks and have to clean it at some point anyway. I kid you not, that bathroom is positively SPOTLESS. Even the crazy muddy parts of the bathtub where Xoie puts her paws. I had a lot of time to kill.

Anyway, 4.5 hours later when I could use my computer again, I went to get some pictures of my camera (The bathroom only killed about an hour) and Lightroom started freaking out at me. “ZOMG I can’t find your catalog!” … well, said catalog is stored on my storage drive that I just manipulated the partitions on. So I go to My Computer, and while I could see the new G: partition.. the original partition was nowhere to be found. I just about died. I panicked and mourned my lost data, then started wondering “well.. if the data is gone… where the heck is the 350 gigs of space?!”

So i went into the drive manager, and found my data partition! Yay! Windows had arbitrarily reassigned drive letters and changed it from Z: to F: which made it get lost, because F belongs to one of my removable devices (I think it’s my Rebel, iirc). So I changed the drive letter back to Z and I could access all my data and Lightroom stopped spazzing out.

So I did my photo stuff and set Windows 7 installing and went to bed, cause it was about 1 in the morning at that point.

So yet again, I haven’t gotten a chance to really poke around with Windows 7 but it looks pretty sweet from what I’ve done so far. I’ll be playing with it and will likely write a post about it in the near-ish future.

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Finding Long Lost Love

Published Feb 5, 2009

Anybody that knows anything about my gaming history knows that Everquest was my first love. I played for a good 3 1/2 years, and while I was a very casual gamer (seriously. we exist!), I really enjoyed the game.

When my guild jumped ship and went to play World of Warcraft, I basically hung up my MMORPG hat. I played WoW and EQII for a couple months but didn’t like either one.

Well, the boy and I had been entertaining the notion of reactivating our accounts on some game lately, to casually run around and kill stuff every now and then. We were reminiscing with other people that had played and the such.

Yesterday I randomly remembered my EQ log-in name. After some digging, I figured out where my password recovery email wound up, activated my account and logged in this morning. My characters are still there!

… my level 65 monk is in Qvic, by herself. I don’t even know if it’s safe there. Then it came back to me. We had finished a raid, and I camped right there because I planned on never logging in again. Well… 5 years is almost like forever, right? I’m currently brainstorming on how to get her out of there alive, because I don’t remember anything about the zone.

Anyway, I logged into a low level character in a safe place and looked around, and honest to God, it’s like I never left. Everything looks exactly the same. I even remembered how to move. I’m amused.

So we’ll see how this plan works. We only expect to play maybe twice a week… it could be fun Remind me later to tell the story about how I first got into playing EQ; it’s pretty funny.

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