It's the most wonderful time of the year! One of my favorite commercials, at least for this time of year, is the staples commercial where theres this guy gliding through the isles at staples in a shopping cart and two kids looking like WTF, school again? I feel a little like all of the characters in that ad.

Today I unlocked my room at UMass and began the move-in process. Martha stopped by to help move around the room which took no less then two hours before we had it how we (think we will) like it. Yesterday I plopped $310 down at the textbook annex to buy all my books. I definitely didn't feel so wonderful spending that much money on books, but whatever.

At times I feel like lets bring on the fall, but the summer went by so fast I feel like I missed it. But whatever. It's here. I will be moving the rest of my stuff in tomorrow and wiLL BE GETTING ETHERNET ACCESS!!!!!. Heh. I finally get to go away from this slooooooooooow 28.8 crap onto a usable internet connection.

[It's the most, wonderful time, of the year! --- They're going back!.....] I need to get a video clip of this commercial hehe.

I'll let you know how it turns out. Hopefully this is gonna be a great semester. Better then all the rest.

This past weekend I spent more time in my car then anywhere else. From 8 in the morning Saturday until 11:30 that night I was driving too and from Ithaca College. This is my brother's first year of college and I wanted to help him move in. I was expecting a nice drive through the hills, but instead the drive was horrendous. Almost the entire ~11 hours of driving were in rain and fog. During the day it was horrible, but deal-able, but during night I couldn't see anything.

The trip was not a complete failure though. I did get a little look at the campus which seemed to be a nice place to live. My brother is on the twelfth floor in one of the towers which has a view of the fountain on Ithaca's web page (see above).

Monday I started back at the help desk.. It has been sooo busy here. On the phone almost all the time. Its 4:30pm right now so I get to go home soon, woohoo.

(woops, I forgot to post this.. it was left in draft mode)

Wow, it’s been a busy week. I have started to post this blog entry several times but never finished it. I WILL finish it this time so here it goes.

Friday night out on the town with Elliott and Liz was fun. We ended up at the karaoke place at the bowling alley in Northampton. We had a good time, remembered why I am not a professional signer. :) On the other hand Liz and Elliott did pretty good.

Saturday was the BBQ at Amos'. There were a bunch of people there: pulski, bob, greg, caraline, dave, big dan, and of course amos, annie, debby, sally, and alden. I think I got everyone but its been a week (almost) since it happened so sorry!. One thing I learned from this event was that chickens like to eat........... chickens! After eating bbq'd chicken (yum) I threw the leftovers into the chicken coop and they fought over them! Hahaha.

Sunday Amos, Jeff and I met up at a WeMaLu meeting in Greenfield. This is the 1st time I went to this, but probably not the last. By all the talk there they convinced me to try Debian on one of my systems. I installed it yesterday and its not too bad. Its a bit different then redhat which is what I'm used to so I got a lot to learn still. Anyway, yeah. Good times there too. I'm jealous now though. Right now Amos is in CA hangin with noca! NO FAIR! hehe.

Monday -> Friday. Today is my last day of working at OIT Software Support, and the whole week here has been pretty busy. I took some pics of the office that will be posted in the next few days so you can see (after I'm gone!) what its like here. (My monitor pic is at the end of this entry.) I'm not going far though since Monday I'm back at my old job, the helpdesk for the school year.

Also during this week I have been trying to use my moms JVC GR-DVL520 digital video camera with my computer. I got a TI 1394 card and a belkin firewire (6-4) cable but every time I turn the camera on or plug the cable into the turned on camera, or start up with the thing on WinXP totally freezes on me. No mouse, keyboard, disk activity. I hear the little "new hardware beepy thingy" then nothing but a frozen screen. Anyone know whats up with that?

It's freezing caused my registry to become corrupted last night too. I had to recover an old registry from 6/4/2002 since winxp doesn’t keep regular updates of it.. and sys restore was blank.. argh. Also does anyone have a good way to backup \windows\system32\config\* regularly? Any help would be appreciated.

Ok, well time to get back to my last few hours at SWS. Gotta get all my stuff off this comp and re-ghost it to the June image.

I leave you the promised picture of my 21" Monitor. Excuss the mess.

Ok, not enough time fully express the awe and wonder that is my 21" monitor since I gotta get to bed, but it is here. 21 inches of enjoyment. I have it running at 1600x1200@85hz and it looks damn nice. Tomorrow/Saturday I will get a picture of the setup on here so look out for that.

In other news this week has been full, and will still be full of bbq's/parties. Yesterday there was a nice bbq/LOTR screening at cmatera's place. Today first I hit the Casey farewell party at the pub, then headed over to the gathering at Mac's. They played a few songs and we all hung out. Good times.

Now I got 3 more to hit this weekend.. The Software Support one tomorrow, potluck at phluid's Saturday, and a WeMaLu bbq Sunday. It's like everyone in Mass is cooking it up this loooooooong weekend. Wed, thr*2, fri,sat,sun. No time to enjoy my monitor! =]

Goodnight all.

I just spoke with the registrar's office and they said that schedules will be on wise Thursday August 22nd, 2002. They are supposed to be sent out in Monday the 18th's postal mail.

It's about time! I've been waiting for my schedule for several weeks now. Hopefully I got all the classes I need/wanted.

In a few short days this beauty will be mine, all mine. What you are looking at is a 21" Dell/Sony Trinitron Total Flat monitor. While it is not brand new, it is in perfect condition and was leased out to some company previously. I got a pretty good deal on it as well. $265 + $68.75 s&h == $343.75. It even has a one year warranty in-case since it is used there is some problem with it. Hopefully I will not need to use this warranty however. For more info on it visit the site I bought it from.

Oh I can't wait. I will post a real picture of it once I get it setup.. probably a week from tomorrow. I've been wanting a 21" monitor for years and finally I will be getting one. w00t!

Yeah its over. Not this BLOG but my vacation. Yesterday was my last day on the cape and I finally met up with Rich. He lives 20 minutes from where I was staying but I never got in touch with him until the last day. We ate lunch at the TGI Friday's in Hyannis. Good food there. We talked for awhile eating huge burgers then took off.

After lunch I headed back and started packing. A few hours later I was off on the road to Charlton, a town that is almost as small as mine. Don didn't give me the best directions ever, but I eventually found my way to his house where his parents were having a BBQ to celebrate the Patriots first pre-season game. I am not a sports person myself but I beat everyone at a game of EGGS (basketball OUT/HORSE/etc) and I also beat Don in a game of pool. After chilling for several hours I took off for home.

I forgot to take pictures of Don's house and Rich's visit but they really did happen. =] It's weird now being back at home, but in another few weeks I'll be packing up and moving back into UMass. Rich and Don are ready for school to start back up, and I am just about there myself. Now if UMass would just give us our damn schedules. Maybe we'll be lucky and tomorrow they will be online.

Yesterday I got to meet up with Martha in his home town; his home even. We had a bbq at irpaC's father's house where I got a pic of Martha and irpaC (along with me). After eating a great dinner Martha took me on a tour of his neighborhood and house.

Just to let you know, Martha is my roommate, Brian. Martha is only his nickname. I will let him post a reply to this message telling the story of why that is what we call him.

My sunburn still a little soar but not too bad anymore. In a few days it should be totally gone.

Most of today I have been playing WCIII with KC. Hopefully we'll play this a lot when we get back to college. Multi-player WC3 is great. =] Well thats it for updates for now. We are about to have a bbq here on the cape with huge ribs so I gotta get goin.

Today's trip to Water Wizz turned out to be fun just like I expected. But since we are on the karma series, today's badness was that I got horribly horribly sunburned. I applied SPS30 sunscreen three or four times, but it didn't seem to work at all. I got sunburned everywhere the sun screen was on. Either the lotion was crap or the ozone really sucks these days. I was not the only one burned either, irpaC got it even worse then I did. The burning reached much further then just Massachusetts however, take a look at what happened to president bush while he was golfing this weekend.

All I have to say about that is "Muwhahahhahahahahhahahahahahhahahhahahahahhahahahahahhahahhahahahahhahahahahah". =] I'm red, but not bleeding. Tomorrow I probably will be worse though so I probably shouldn't laugh too loud... damn karma. :) ..... Hmm.. If bush got burned that bad, what happened for his good karma? He get to blow something up? Something to think about..........

Well I made it down to the cape without any major mishaps, as long as you don't call getting rear-ended major. I was about to get into the bridge that goes over to the cape when a new york car bumped into my back end while we were in stop[... I did, he didn't] and go traffic. Luckily no danger was done since I was in too much of a hurry [we were running a little late in getting where we were going] to get his information. Other then that my car drove beautifully.

I am now situated in the basement of irpaC's house. I stopped by best buy and picked up a shinny new sound blaster live to replace the chip that got zapped in the lightning yesterday so now my computer's as good as new.

Well as I have been up since 6am today, and have driven almost the entire length of Massachusetts, it is now time for bed. It is nice here, but rather hot. Tomorrow we are planning on going up to Wareham Mass to a water park. Should be nice, COOL, fun.

Well since I was bitching about how bad my troubles were yesterday I should have known that today's computer problems would rival that. Today there was a huge lightning storm while I was at work. Eye whitenesses (my father) said that he saw a spark jump from the floor to near my computer desk around 2:30. It turns out that this spark took out my ups's modem protection (saved my modem!) and also my sound card. My speakers only play sound out of the two rear channels in a very muffled tone. Looks like I am going to be giving staples $70 soon to pick up a new sound board.

Not all of today was bad however. I met up with Dennis the mechanic again this evening and he fixed my car right on the spot! Apparently a relay was shot in the car that stopped the internal fans from turning on to cool the engine down. My car is now ready for the trip tomorrow. Yay for the cape. I'll blog from there next.

Well forget what I said yesterday, I am having a type 1 week. Work was ok but did not end after 5pm. For the past three hours I have been trying to recover my WindowsXP Install. I have recovered almost everything so it is ok now, but it wasn't that fun....

The problem was this, NTFS sucks. Ok, to be more specific, my ntfs file system decided to corrupt ntuser.dat which was located in g:\documents and settings\Urgo. That one little file caused me 3 hours of troubles. This isn't the first time I've had this problem, a message telling me my profile is corrupt when I try to log into XP. Normally however I can just use system restore to get back my old version, but stupid me turned that off some time ago..

Anyway I ended up having it make a new profile, Urgo.Urgo-Gondor, and moving all of my old Urgo folder into there (excluding ntuser.dat). Since this seems to be a bimonthly event I think I am going to be backing up that file regularly now.

Eak, its already tomorrow. I gotta get to bed. My car is *hopefully* going to get fixed tomorrow. Apparently the fans do not turn on so that is why the engine is overheating. It works fine if I'm cruzin, but if I get in traffic its all over. I really hope I'll be able to make it to the cape this weekend.