I'm going to get my ass out of bed early tomorrow, so when I get done working I can go straight up to Provo. We're going to spend the night up there at Jaysen's, then Saturday we're heading up to SLC to do some shopping and to visit Mike and his wife. If the weather is bad or we get done shopping really late, we might even spend Saturday night at Mike's. I'm looking forward to spending some time away from home...hopefully this weekend will seem longer than the last. Anyhow, if I don't post before tomorrow afternoon, I'm sure I won't do so until Sunday at the earliest.

A group of religious freaks is protesting condoms being available to athletes at the Olympic village. Among the stupidity in the article: "The eyes of the world will be focused on Salt Lake City as a symbol of peace and brotherhood in the wake of Sept. 11." First of all, the events of September 11th had next-to-nothing to do with Salt Lake City, and secondly, I don't think anybody will see the Olympics any differently now than they did two years ago. "Peace and brotherhood," my ass.

More idiocy: "Organizers should use this opportunity to showcase 'virtues, like the spirit of unity and sportsmanship, not recreational sex -- not even safe sex,' said Swindell, 28. 'Where are their priorities?'" Yeah, jeez...how inappropriate of them to promote safe sex!

Two whole demonstrators showed up for the protest. I'm surprised they scared up even that many. "We plan to have around 40 to 50 pro-life demonstrators out here during the Olympics." So does "pro-life" now mean "anti-condom?"

What the hell is with this influx of Mormon movies?

Bleh...whenever I plug in a USB device (or turn on a plugged-in device), my computer locks up for about 10 seconds, then it reboots itself. It might just be my computer, but then again it might be my own doing. I seem to recall fooling around in the registry and removing some stuff in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run. Still Image Monitor is still in there, so I would expect my USB detection to still work, but it's definitely not working. So I'm going to reinstall Windows 98 over itself and see if that'll fix my problem. Maybe it'll even fix the problem with my soundcard, but that'd be a damn miracle.

There's not a whole helluva lot going on lately. Saturday, I pretty much stayed home and cleaned up the house a little, and Sunday I put the driveshaft back on my truck and took it for a spin around the block--I miss driving that truck. I've decided to try and sell my Nissan once again (dropping the price by $300), and I'll use the money I get from that to get my truck fixed. If the $1,200 from the Nissan won't cover getting everything fixed by the Ford dealer, I'll do some of the work myself and leave the important stuff to the "professionals."

I've got to head into work tomorrow to give some training to my entire department. I'm pretty sick of training people, especially because I'm not getting paid more money for it, but what choice do I have? I could quit my job, but there's no way I could get a comparable job here in Hickville.

I got my CDRW drive back today and of course, couldn't get it to work. I took it to Ty's to try it out in one of his machines, and it worked just fine. So I borrowed a power supply from him to try in my computer along with the CDRW drive, and it worked once, but after rebooting it stopped again, then started after another reboot. So I've definitely narrowed the problem down to an intermittent power problem in the drive itself, and I've emailed the company back telling them what I found out. It shouldn't take a genius to figure out that when a drive works once, then simply quits working without even being touched, then begins working again in a different computer, that it may just be an intermittent problem. If they'd tested it more thoroughly, it would have saved us both a lot of time and money. As it is, I'm going to demand that they refund my shipping for this second time I have to send the same drive back.

My soundcard also mysteriously stopped working right when I put the CDRW drive in, so I'm going to see if I can get it working again tonight. If not, I'll spring for a decent soundcard rather than another $10 cheap-o one like I have now.

Utah Senate takes a step in the wrong direction when it comes to concealed weapons permits.

Check out the huge turnout at a protest of the Olympic Rodeo event in front of SLOC headquarters. Two groups, PETA and UARC, could apparently only scare up three protesters.

First CNN steals Paula Zahn from Fox, so Fox steals Greta Van Susteren from CNN, and now CNN has stolen Connie Chung from ABC. It's a good time to be a female journalist.

My photo printer arrived yesterday, and despite the driver CD being defective, I got it working ok. I've only printed on regular paper so far, but the quality is still nice. Now I've got to buy a load of photo paper so I can print some of the nicer pictures I've taken.

My FRS radios also got here yesterday, but I haven't used them much except to play around the house. Maybe tomorrow I'll take one around town with me and see what kind of range I can get while talking to my wife at home. I'll have to wait until after I get paid at the end of the month before I can buy some rechargeable batteries, 'cause I'm sure these will eat batteries like mad.

Crap...I just checked the status of my CDRW drive on the website that I bought it from, and they say it tested ok and they sent it back. I know for a fact that the drive has some sort of problem, although it's an intermittent problem. I had it working one day, and the next day, without me even touching the thing, it was acting as though it wasn't getting any power. Hell, I've had my old CD-ROM drive attached to the same IDE and power cables for years and haven't had a single problem, and it's connected to those same cables now without any problems. I know damn well I'm going to have to send the thing back in again, and I'm gonna be pissed as hell when it happens. If they don't pay for the shipping this time, I'm going to go ballistic.

Boi-oi-oing...have a gander at the Dodge Ram SRT-10, slated for production for the 2004 model year.

This weekend has been great. Ty invited Traci and I over for dinner Friday night (which was excellent--Ty's a great cook), then we watched The Score, which was a much better movie than I was expecting.

My sister invited us, along with my mom, over for dinner Saturday evening, and it was really nice. It's not often that I hang out with that many of my family members at once, at least on a non-holiday. It was also only about the fourth time in my life that I've ever eaten lasagne, and it was good--I don't know why I don't have it more often.

This afternoon I ate dinner with my wife at her parents house, and it was good as usual. It's been nice this weekend to have not fixed any actual meals. =)

I bought some plywood today (which barely fit in my car) to make some shelves for my kitchen. My kitchen has very little counter space, so I'm adding a few small shelves in a couple of corners, and a small counter next to my stove. I've already cut out, sanded, and primed the corner shelves, and I'll probably throw a quick coat of paint on them before I go to bed. I've got some more planning to do on the counter, though--I'm sure if I don't think it through thoroughly enough, it'll either look like shit or simply collapse.

Sweet...currently I'm ranked first in both games of LORD running on Solo's BBS. Back in the days before Price had internet access, I used to play LORD quite a bit on BellySoft BBS through a 2400 baud modem. Even though there are so many more sophisticated games to play online now, LORD is great fun for nostalgia's sake.

That game sucked ass. The call that ruled that an incomplete pass rather than a fumble may have been by the book, but the book is bull-fucking-shit. It rather looked like the ball had completed its forward motion and that the quarterback had began pulling the ball back towards his body, but that'd be a hard call to make. The rule that reversed the call is the biggest bunch of shit I've ever heard, though. According to that rule, a quarterback could waive the ball back and forth over his head the entire time he's looking for a receiver, and if somebody knocked the ball out of his hand, it would be ruled an incomplete pass, even though the QB obviously wasn't indending to pass the ball. Which was the case tonight--Brady obviously had faked a pass and was bringing the ball back towards his body when it was knocked away, which by all logical means should have been a fumble, and the Raiders would have remained in the game. I'm surprised at how calm Gruden was at the post-game press conference. I would have been mad as hell if I were him, and rightly so.

I'd really like to see the Packers go on to win the superbowl, but teams that I like rarely do that good. Oh well, I guess it's better than liking a team only because they win, like a lot of dumb-shits out there.

I have got the shittiest luck when it comes to computers, apparently. Last night I installed my CDRW drive and it was working perfectly. I burned an audio CD, then I shut my computer down for the night. This morning when I turned it back on, the drive wasn't working at all. Windows won't recognize that it's even there, and it won't eject the CD tray either. Obviously it's not a problem with the IDE cable, or else the eject button would still work, and it's obviously not a power problem, because I switched power connections with my hard drive. That's the one thing I hate about shopping online is that now I have to deal with shipping the damned thing back and waiting for a damned replacement.

I just bit into the most vile tasting thing I've ever tasted, but the scary thing is that I have no idea what it was. I was eating some sunflower seeds when I bit into something that was the wrong kind of crunchy, and suddenly I had the taste of burned shit in my mouth. I've never actually tasted (or smelled) burned shit before, but I'd imagine this is what it tastes like. I spit it out into my cup of sunflower shells and hurriedly ran to the bathroom to wash my mouth out. When I returned to my desk, I peered into my cup to see what the hell I had just almost eaten, but I couldn't make anything out. I'm guessing it was a beetle of some sort, roasted and salted.

My CDRW drive got here Tuesday, and my printer is supposed to be here Monday. Seeing as how I ordered the two items at the same time, though from different places, you'd think they'd each arrive around the same time. Especially when shipping on the printer was twenty-five fucking dollars--they should have easily been able to get it here in fewer than 10 days. Here it's been almost a week since I ordered, and I didn't even get a tracking number until this morning.

Michael is finally walking regularly. Before, he would take a step or two if you really coaxed him, and even then he would only do it if he had something to grab onto at the end of those one or two steps. Yesterday, he started taking steps without being urged and without having any particular destination in mind. It won't be too long before he'll be walking everywhere, which means it's time for me to child-proof my home a little better.

Check out this public forum article in today's Tribune, a response to a previous article about the divide between Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah. Here's a quote: "The Tribune only deepens the chasm by further disenfranchising gay people by ignoring them in the report." The person who wrote this must be a complete fucking dolt. The article in question was about the animosity between the dominant religious group and the rest of the state, so no shit gay people weren't specifically mentioned in the report--don't gay people count as the rest of the state?. There was also an article in the same issue of the newspaper about the new 511 traffic and road condition hotline, and I don't recall gays being mentioned in that either--better start your complaining on that one too. I'm not saying this guy(?) (with a name like "Lore," the writer's gender is rather ambiguous) doesn't have a legitimate beef with the Mormon church, but it hardly falls under the same category as the article he's complaining about. There's nothing quite as stupid as interjecting yourself into a discussion where you clearly don't belong.

This sounds like it would be an excellent movie. =)

There is nothing more entertaining to watch on TV than the movement of Jon Gruden's lips, especially after two consecutive 15-yard penalties. Like the announcer said: "Who needs audio?"

Ok, I ended up spending $15 on a power lock servo from the junkyard on Wednesday, and when I tried to install it today, I realized that it's not quite the same as the old one. Everything was identical except for the push-rod that moves the lock mechanism--the new one was about ½" too long. So I tore apart the old servo to see if I could somehow exchange push-rods, but they were riveted on. I found the problem with my old servo, though--a small copper contact rod had broken, something I could probably have fixed with a paper clip and some solder. Instead, I ended up removing the contact from the new servo and soldering it into the old one. I also exchanged some other parts, such as some gears and a little copper switch plate thingie, because they were in better shape. So what should have taken me less than 15 minutes ended up taking me almost two hours. It was worth it though, because having one door lock not work was driving me crazy.

Is the Mormon Church a "sanctuary for pedophiles?" Yeah, probably.

I got sick of that old layout sooner than I thought I would. This one is very similar to the layout before the last one, which I liked quite a bit, and I suspect I'll have this one up for a very long time. I may just change the top image and the colors every once in a while. The image you see right now was taken by me two days ago on my way home from work. I turned off US-6 onto Consumers Road and drove about ½ mile before I had an unobstructed view of the sun and clouds, and I took two pictures that I stitched together to get a single image. I had to edit my car antenna out of the image, but you can't tell at all where it was.

It's hard to believe I've been with the same company for so long, but they let me choose a five year service award today. They had quite a few nice things to choose from, but I ended up picking out the most useful item, a pair of Uniden FRS400 radios. I could never talk my wife into getting an amateur radio license, but these will do well enough when we're travelling in separate vehicles or hiking or something. My Kenwood handheld ham radio will receive FRS frequencies, and I modified it to transmit on them as well, but since it wasn't designed to transmit on those frequencies, my range was extremely limited even when using 5W output. The Uniden radios output 500mW, and I've used a radio similar to them and the range is pretty damned good.

I just ordered a CDRW drive and an Epson 875DC photo printer. So now I can store all my pictures (over 1GB so far) somewhere other than my hard drive, and I'll finally be able to print them too. My wife is really into scrapbooking, so she'll probably use the printer more than I will, but it's still a nice change of pace when your wife encourages you to buy new computer equipment. =)

I am so damned sick of the Olympics, and they've not even begun yet. It'll only get worse from here, but I can only hope that once they're over, the goddamned news media will shut the fuck up about the Olympics.

I had to go to work today for my yearly performance evaluation...I hate those things. My company requires employees to create objectives and goals to reach for the next year's evaluations, but since I'm the perfect employee, it's hard to make things up for that. I always end up putting a bunch of bullshit down on my evaluation.

While I was up there, I stopped by a junkyard to get some parts for my Subaru. I needed a hubcap, a power lock servo, a hood release lever, and a rear cargo cover, but all I ended up finding was the hubcap and the servo. The junkyard was so goddamned muddy...I'm never again going in the winter. The good news is that they had several '88 Subarus, so I know where to go when I need parts.

Testing began yesterday for the Daytona 500, with a rookie (and Jeff Gordon's protege) making the fastest time.

My wife and I both got nasty colds last week, and we ended up spending the entire weekend at home feeling like shit and doing nothing. I was going to take the xmas lights down off the house, and Traci was going to take down the tree and all the decorations, but it's all still up right now. Unfortunately, I was feeling well enough to work today, but I got a late start because I didn't sleep well last night and woke up after 9:00 this morning, so now I have to work late.

Even though it's the beginning of January, I have this urge to do outdoorsy stuff, like hiking and biking and fishing and the like. I've been thinking about going for a drive either up Nine Mile Canyon or to the San Rafael Swell sometime soon, but I don't know if it'd be a good idea to haul Michael around with us all day while we do that. He'd probably get bored and fussy from the seemingly endless driving. I'd like to just do it alone, but I don't think my wife would appreciate me leaving her home alone with the kid all day. Eh, I'll just have to settle for biking near Price until it gets warmer anyway. It's not worth driving for several hours just to freeze my ass off when I can do it near town in much less time. Come springtime, though, I'll be making a lot of road trips.

I must be doing something wrong--my site ranks first in a search for utah riceboy (screenshot) and utah hick (screenshot).

I ended up buying that Subaru today. It runs really well and it's in fairly good shape for its age. It's an '88 4-door wagon, 1.8L 4-cylinder engine (gutless), 5-speed manual transmission, power windows, power locks, power mirrors, A/C, and best of all, it's 4-wheel-drive (with low-range even). And everything seems to work on it. So now I've got something to drive to work that won't get me ticketed by the police or killed.

For some inexplicable reason, whoever built my house put a medicine cabinet in the bedroom that I'm using for an office. I decided I'd quit being lazy and finish painting the room, then I'm going to decorate it. And since a medicine cabinet adorning the wall just doesn't fit in an office, I took it out of the wall and I'm attempting to patch the hole left behind. I've never done drywall work of any kind, and I'm sure I'll end up screwing something up and having to redo it a few times before it's perfect. I'm hoping I can match the texture too, but I've seen cans of spray-on texture that should work well enough.

This all started when my mom gave me a really nice shelf that I was going to use to display some knickknacks and whatnot, but it was too long to fit on any of the walls--two are interrupted by windows, one is full of cabinets, and the other had that damned medicine cabinet on it. With the cabinet gone, I'll have room for the shelf, and I think I'm also going to buy a bunch of small picture frames and display some pictures I've taken with my digital camera.

Is it just me, or is anybody else getting a 403 Forbidden error over at Hear Ye?

All the time off from work I've taken lately seems to have flown by. I suppose that's because I didn't do much of anything the entire time. New year's eve was great--we had some friends over, ate and drank a lot, and played board and card games. We shouldn't use a holiday as an excuse to do it again, because once a year isn't often enough. =)

I emailed the president of Carbon Credit Union, informing him of what happened (just in case he doesn't already know) and of my intent to close my account. I'm sure the employees of a larger, national bank are better trained and have a little more restraint than those of a small town credit union.