What's New?

(last updated 1/13/97)

Well, let's see... Last week was a very long and difficult one for me. And it wasn't just because I had to go back to work after about two weeks off either ( that really DID suck though). See, last week was the "Week Of Stupid Theme Songs" inside my tiny little brain.

I spent Monday listening to:

"Who wears short-shorts? We wear short-shorts. If you dare wear short-shorts, Nair for short-shorts...."

play over and over again up there. That's what I get for watching the Simpsons. Tuesday was even worse, as I was stuck listening to (and whistling):

"I searched the world over and I thought I found true love. You met another and PHTHHHHT! You was gone."

Mind you, I haven't seen Hee-Haw! in years, and it's not exactly on my top five million list of good TV shows, but apparently I'm a latent Hee-Hawmosexual or something. Not to mention that you can get yourself a hell of a lot of odd looks by whistling "phthhhht!" on the elevator. So maybe a little bit of therapy is in order for me (although, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a corn cob is just a corn cob."

Wednesday wasn't much different. I started out the day very nearly dropping my keys in the toilet, and from the time I said "Oh Boy" out loud, until I fell asleep sometime very early the next morning, it was "Quantum Leap" day. It's a happy little tune, but after about twelve hours it was really starting to piss me off.

Thursday was much easier to deal with. I sat on my glasses as I groggily got into my car that morning, and let out a hearty "DOH!" Maybe the folks nearby started to get sick of hearing me whistle the theme to the Simpson's, but I sure never got tired of it. Even while I was awake and still whistling at 1:30 in the morning, my toes were still tapping away under the electric blanket.

Friday was a medley kind of day, as I switched back and forth between "It's About Time, It's About Space," "Lotsa Luck," (remember that one? "I usedta buya pickle. It only usedta costa nickel. And a bus ride only usedta costa dime.... LOTSA LUCK!"), and an encore of the Simpson's. Since I obviously couldn't go on this way (my damage is brained enough already), I dosed myself heavily all weekend with Buddy Guy, BB King, Bonnie Raitt, and some Jerry Garcia, and I think I'm feeling much better now. I offer this by way of explanation for why I got very little indeed done on my web pages this week. I finally got the CGI account set up for my on Dreamscape's server, and promptly uploaded a script for a new, improved guestbook. Other than the fact that it doesn't work, it came out quite well. I spent a few hours putting it, and the HTML parts together, and then a few more hours trying to figure out why the CGI script wouldn't work, and then I gave up. That was Friday night, and I haven't had the heart to go back there since. Hopefully it's something simple to fix, and when I get in the mood I'll go back after it again.

Uncle Pat insisted I give him a new banner with his picture on it, and while I have to work on it some (OK, a lot) more, I at least have it kind of up there. He'd like everyone to know that he's available to babysit small children, too.

I added a "Stupid GIF Tricks" section as well. There's not too much there just yet (you've already seen most of it), but I have some more stuff in the works. The really hard part is keeping them small enough that they don't take forever to download. I think I'll try some line-art or some simple drawings instead. They should take up less space.

I tried a bunch of new toys out this week, too. There was a talking clock which sat down in your toolbar and announced the time in a pleasant female voice that was kinda cute for a few days. Then I got sick of it, and canned her. I also grabbed a freeware calculator that is truly excellent. It'll do about a million conversions, has at least that many physical constants built-in, it'll do statistics and just about anything else you can think of. It even has a financial calculator, that'll figure your mortgage payments and a ton of other stuff out for you. And it's freeware, too, so I have to recommend it. It's called "Calc95."

"Notepad+" is another freebie, and very nice. It's much better than Windows Notepad and its features include: no more file size barrier under Windows 95, it opens multiple files, it's MAPI enabled to send files through e-mail, it supports drag-and-drop of selected text, has user-definable fonts & colors, it'll let you use Open- & Save dialogs Filters, it has smarter hot keys, and numerous other improvements over standard notepad. So if you're sick of Notepad, and you don't wanna open WordPad every time you write something over a few Kb long, you might wanna give it a try. Search for it on your favorite Shareware site, or e-mail me for the URL (assuming I can find it).

One last pretty nifty freebie is "Loupe." This is screen magnifier, designed to work like a jeweler's loupe. It'll show whatever your mouse cursor is over in a separate window on your screen at normal, 2x, 4x, and 8x (with or without crosshairs), and will also display either vertical and/or horizontal rulers graduated in pixels. But that's not all!

Loupe will also display your system properties (type of processor, Windows version, CPU available and in use, system properties free, and display information) with nice little pictures, and has a list of Win 95/NT error codes and explanations. And as an extra bonus, this thing will also display a chart of ASCII characters, and their binary, decimal, hexadecimal, and octal equivalents etc. This is all for the price of nothing, which is a pretty good deal, I think. One of the only drawbacks to loupe is that it apparently uses a massive amount of your system resources. Using Wintop (it's one of those cool kernel toys) I tracked it as using up to (and maybe over) 60% of my system resources, which left very little left over. I'm usually in the 80-90% free range, so this thing CAN put a crimp in your system. I wouldn't use it with a whole lot of programs running at the same time.

I managed not to wipe out my computer too badly this week, though I DID try to install that wonderful mousepen I bought a couple weeks ago. I couldn't get it to work, and I wound up removing it through Device Manager. Or so I THOUGHT, anyway. The next time I rebooted my computer, it went through its little routine of having an error trying to open some damn mouse driver or other, and that I'd just have to reload windows again. Well, I wasn't ABOUT to reinstall windows, that's for sure. Fortunately I was able to go into Safe Mode (getting REAL friendly with that sucker) and edit my system.ini. Seems this mouse driver software changed my software to read mouse.drv=tmouse2d.drv (or something like that). And, apparently, it installed a corrupt file that Windows couldn't open. Well, I've looked around at my system.ini enough by now to know it's supposed to say mouse.drv=mouse.drv (I naturally double checked with the OEM system.ini backup file), so I just changed it back and was running again in no time.

Well, I s'pose I've run on too long again, so I'll quit now while you're still awake. I've got grave doubts about accomplishing much this week, but you never know. I've just had to tear my downstairs bathroom wall apart, since I've gotta replace a rather large chunk of rotted, 1910 vintage drain line. Then there's my incredible laziness and couch-inertia to overcome. Well, there's a week off before the Super Bowl, so maybe I can get SOMETHING done (depending on which part of the house falls off next). Oh, and let's hear it for SU, gettin' their act together down at Alabama. Wednesday night they're at Seton Hall, so let's hope we can get a league win under our belts (it's my Dad's birthday, so maybe we can get a little help).

Well, take it easy, thanks for stoppin' by, and I'll see ya around.

What's Old

1/06/97

12/30/96

12/22/96

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