Phoning above it all...

This weekend wasn't too exciting. Got some housework done with Nicole on Saturday. Managed to watch Heathers on Saturday Night and then watched Conspiracy: Trial of the Chicago 8 Sunday morning. Saturday morning, Nicole and I went and saw the new Jackass movie. It was probably the high point of the weekend.

I do, however, feel like I actually accomplished something this weekend. I volunteered at the Rise Above It All headquarters in Belltown this evening, doing phone banking. In two hours time, I called 100 phone numbers. I ended up leaving more messages than anything, and did get a few freaks in the process, but all in all, I've done a little part to hopefully get monorail passed in this year's election.

I had two calls that got pissed off at me for interrupting the World Series, one woman who admonished me for soliciting on a Sunday (eesh, I'm volunteering for cripes sake!), and one woman who told me her husband was a DOT engineer and thought the monorail proposal was seriously lacking. The one call I got that I could've possibly changed the person's opinion was this guy who said that Seattle/Puget Sound really needed to build some form of rapid transit along the I-5 corridor, and that the monorail didn't do enough. After the call, I was left thinking, "Shit, I could have told him that this initiative is only the beginning of what could be a 58-mile citywide system." And he bitched about how the monorail didn't go to the airport and to the east side and elsewhere, like the transit systems in Chicago (where he used to live).

Well, no, it's not going to go there because it's a Seattle-only system. If you want so-called regional transportation, that's what ST Link is for. Good luck with that. Let me know how that goes, considering it'll only go within a mile of the airport and then you'll have to transfer to a shuttle to get the rest of the way. Sheesh.

So, next Sunday I'm going to volunteer on the phone banks again. It's pretty grueling work, but it's worth it. And although I'll miss the season premiere of the Simpsons, I'll catch it Monday on the TiVo. Oh well, it's worth it to get the word out.

Monorail Yes!

Hello, you've reached my broken answering machine...

So, I get home today, and a certain gray cat had apparently ruined the answering machine. Don't ask me how, but she likes to jump up on the bookshelf the answering machine is on, so she can look out the window. Well, when she gets up there, she ends up walking all over the answering machine. She has erased the outgoing welcome message twice. I come home today and nothing works on the answering machine. The answering machine's on, but none of the buttons do anything, including the on/off button. I tried pulling the power out and putting it back in, and still the same. So, the answering machine's been tossed and I'm going to go with Qwest voicemail service again. It's $6.95/month (bleh) but I'll live. I liked it when I had it at the old place. And to think that the only reason I have a landline phone is because of the TiVo.

Watching the Screen Savers right now. I must say that the Wil Wheaton housecall was pretty good, and I'm happy to hear that he's playing around with an iBook. Of course, I'm typing this on my iMac.

So I heard rumors today, of the new PPC 7457, which sounds like a very attractive chip. I'm going to wait to get a new Mac until 1.6GHz chips are available. I want to double the performance of 800MHz iMac, on a clock speed basis (and if they come out with dual-1.6GHz Macs, that'll be even better). My girlfriend's DDR PowerMac is awesome, though, even though it has dual-867. Definitely a fast Mac.

I've signed up to volunteer in the phone bank with Rise Above It All this Sunday. Hopefully it'll go well. Monorail Yes!!!

New music to listen to...

So I'm sitting in front of my iMac, listening to the new Dave Matthews Band album. Not too shabby. This reminds me of the last DMB concert I went to. My girlfriend was under the impression that there were going to be a lot of hippie-like folk there, a la Grateful Dead. I told her to expect a lot of preppies and yuppies. And I was right. She was bummed, but at least the concert was good. It might have been really cold that night at the The Gorge Ampitheater, but it was nice to finally get to see them play live.

So, this week I made a little trip over to Half.com, to get some music. For anybody who wants to get CDs cheap, this is the way to go. I managed to get Enya-Watermark, NIN-Downward Spiral, NIN-broken, and Live-Mental Jewelry for a whopping $18.55 with shipping charges. Pretty nice, eh?

So far, I've received all of the CDs, except for Mental Jewelry. And, one of the ones I had ordered was canceled. Oh well, there're always other sellers to buy from. I cranked up Enya today and really let the subwoofer have at it. The reports of copius amounts of bass in Watermark were not exaggerated, and I enjoyed the floor-shaking, window rattling sounds of Orinoco Flow and Cursum Perficio.

Well, back to listening. I've got enough MP3s now to fill up another CD. I should really get an iPod.

Beware of M$ software updaters...

I can say I've never had a problem with a software updater from Microsoft, until today. I've used updaters on Windows and Macs, and all of the Windows updaters have been great. The Mac updaters also have been great, but the Office v.X 10.1.1 updater is a piece of crap, without a doubt.

I'd been following the reviews at Versiontracker, and they weren't encouraging, to say the least. Lots of people were reporting problems getting it installed, with missing library issues, and wiped out Office install directories. Well, I bit the bullet, and installed it on my iMac G4/800. It went fine, surprisingly. I was pleased.

My PowerBook's at work, so I went to work and installed it on that. Blammo, it fucked up my Office install. First I got a privileges problem with the installer. In that process, the Office Component Library got wiped out. Since I'm at work at the moment, and I don't have my Office CD, I use AFP to connect to my iMac at home. Grabbed the component library again. I decided I'd try to install SR1 again. Didn't work, that wiped out Word and Excel, leaving the original files in the trash. Well, at this point, all I could do was drag my Office folder to the trash.

Similar problems occurred on my girlfriend's PowerMac. To make a long story short - if you have these problems, there's a very simple way to get back to a working installation of Office:

1. Delete your current Office folder
   
2. Install office from the Office CD
   
3. Install SR1
   
4. Install 10.1.1 update
   

It seems that there's a problem with the 10.1.1 in the way it sees installed permissions. One person on VT said that the updater expects that the user installing the update must also have installed Office and SR1. And the installer doesn't require admin access, so OS X network admins be aware: you could have users installing this update really screwing shit up.

Long story short, be wary of any updater, M$ or not. At least this update didn't delete all of my hard drive.

Ship Happens

So, this is the first entry. I'll keep it short and sweet.

Been watching The Ship on the History Channel. Quite the show. It's got its fair share of drama and intrigue, and even though I'm more of a technology lover, it holds my interest. Thank goodness for TiVo. What the hell was THC thinking, putting 3 episodes of it (2 1-hr and 1 2-hr shows) on Tuesday?