Well, let's see... We seem to've made it to the new year more or less intact. My New Year's Eve was by no means exciting, but pretty enjoyable (by my standards). At midnight, I got to watch FOX blow up a hotel in Las Vegas. They had some pretty cool fireworks to go along with it, which beat watching the ball drop over Times Square. Of course, the best part of New Year's was the Twilight Zone Marathon on the Sci-Fi channel. I only made it till about four thirty in the morning, but I have another six hours on a videotape I'll probably put aside and forget about for a couple of years. I have a lot of those. Every once in a while I'll be pleasantly surprised by what I put aside and forgot.
I downloaded and tried out some new toys, too. For a long time, I've been trying to find a decent FTP program, and I literally tried about a dozen of them until I found "ftp explorer". It's beta freeware, and it's the best one I've used out there. It works just like Windows Explorer does, and is capable of creating and saving about as many ftp connections as you could possibly want. I use it to upload and download my web files, and it automatically selects ASCII or Binary file tranfers. I've had trouble uploading files of more than 10K to my website at 28.8 (my modem tends to hang up on me; whether it's Dreamscape, my Winmodem, or the phone line, I don't know), but they almost always make it through with ftp explorer. Since it works just like Windows Explorer, you can drag and drop from your hard drive to website. It also makes file deletion very simple. And the fact that it's fully functional freeware means you get all the features without all the whining for money. If you're interested in getting it, e-mail me and I'll give you the address to get it. I could just give it to you right here, but you've all been quite lax on signing the guestbook, or writing to Uncle Pat. So you'll just have to send me e-mail.
Speaking of the guestbook... God knows the one that's out there right now is dreadfully slow and annoying to use, so I forgive you for not signing it. I've been trying to learn enough CGI to write my own script, and I'm ready to give it a go as soon as DS gets on the stick and gives me that CGI account I requested. I'm not promising it'll work, but I'm gonna try.
I also downloaded a program called Internet Control Center. ICC is a navigation bar that'll sit on your desktop. With it, you can link all your Internet utilities (like your ping, finger, ftp, web browser, dial-up, e-mail, Archie, oh hell, anything you can think of) together. Just push a button and this thing'll connect to the Internet, and launch any (or all, or any combination) of your Internet-type applications. It's really a pretty nice idea, as far as it goes. If you close it out after you've launched a program from it, it'll close out that application as well (found that out the hard way), and I managed to lock it up a few times (but hell, I manage to lock up just about everything). Otherwise, it's a pretty good program. I prefer to just use my desktop shortcuts for these programs, so I imagine I'll be getting rid of ICC pretty soon.
I also grabbed (can you tell I took a week and a half off for the holidays, and spent WAY too much time on the computer?) the latest version of the Power Toys and Kernel Toys from Microsoft's site. I really like the CAB viewer (which lets ya peer in to those mysterious CAB files), and TWEAK UI, which lets you REALLY screw around with your User Interface. I love to tweak things.
For instance, I went out and bought a mouse pen. I figured this would be a big help with some of the graphics and drawing programs I've been playing around with. Unfortunately, when I loaded the driver for it, it apparently overwrote one of the drivers that Windows absolutely INSISTED on having. So it basically said "sorry, now you have to reload windows" and then shut my goddamn computer down. Repeadedly. I didn't seem to be able to locate what it needed in "Safe Mode" (a mode I have become all too familiar with), and recopying my previous system registry didn't help me much, either (only after it was way too late did it occur to me to browse my CAB folders for the file I needed). I tried using my handy-dandy "First Aid 95" emergency start-up disk, too. It proudly came on the screen, and excitedly instructed me to type in "PC911" to verify that I really needed some help. Then it scratched around a bit, shrugged, shook its head, and told me it couldn't find any problems, and that I pretty much shouldn't bother it anymore.
Well, what the hell. It wouldn't be my first Windows reload. No problem. Hell, I'm gettin' pretty good at this shit. I've got these computer things pretty much figured out. Yeah, right. It's been a while since my computer's been messed up this badly. I'll skip over the gory details, but I had this thing was so goddamn fucked up, it took me several hours of putzing around to set it straight again. Things STILL keep popping up. Everything (from my applications to my Zip) was screwed up. It lost my modem, no longer recognized my Zip drive, added a phantom printer, and just in general made my life miserable. Even my Dial-Up Networking connections were useless. I don't know about you, but if I can't get online for a few hours, I start to get the shakes.
So anyway, after few hours of tweaking, deleting, reloading and rebooting, I finally had everything pretty much back to normal. So then I tried reinstalling this mouse pen thing (hey, I paid $16.99 for the damn thing!). Not only did it not work (I managed not to blow away Windows this time though, which I see as a major improvement), but my friggin' modem port was open, so I couldn't use it (again). Well, fortunately just removing the stupid mouse pen took care of that, but needlesss to say (so why say it, right?), that damn mouse pen STILL isn't working. Have no fear, I don't give up so easy, and as soon as I recharge my batteries a bit (I had to go back to work today, and it's really infringing upon my free time) I'll give it another go.
In football, at least, it was a good weekend. It's very rare indeed that ALL the teams I'm pulling for actually win, but this weekend that's what happened. I loved watching the Packers literally stomp San Francisco into the turf. And it's always a pleasure to watch John Elway lose. I'd also like to point out that the one team the Jets managed to beat this year was Jacksonville, so they're really the ones that deserve to play up in "Foggsboro" next week (we'll settle for Bill Parcells though). Anybody who isn't totally sick of Dallas is an idiot, and it's great to see that all the fans of all the teams still in it are a bunch of excited loonies (as opposed to, say, Dallas fans, who all look like somebody's holding a very large turd under their noses).
Oh, I'm using another freeware HTML editor now called "HTML Create." It basically just saves a lot of the repetitive typing of HTML tage and stuff, but it's pretty handy (particularly for frames, which I can't edit in Navigator Gold; in fact I can't even open 'em in Navigator's editor) to have, and it's free. Speaking of free, you might notice (if you look around) that I've got some more animated GIF's kicking around here and there. I've got a few more in the works (sure would be handy to have one o' them-there mouse pens, too), and someday you might notice a few more popping up here and there. I'm trying to keep them from getting TOO awful huge, since I know I hate waiting for shit to load.
Well, I'm sure this is all much more than anybody wanted to know, so I guess I'd better knock this off while you're still awake. I downloaded a bunch more toys, and I'll be playing with 'em over the next week or so, and if I find anything cool, I'll let ya know. If you don't hear from me again, you'll know I've REALLY killed my computer this time. Otherwise, I'll catch ya later.
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