I am not motivated today, shit, I am barely awake… The NIC on my motherboard apparently failed sometime yesterday, unfortunately for me I diagnosed that the problem was really Windows XP (I mean, really, by virtue of being a MS product it is suspect, right?), and after reinstalling I find out it was a hardware failure… I hadn’t even been using that NIC for a month… I took the 3C905 out of my machine to use in the firewall… Luckily rory had a spare 3C905 that solved all my problems…

I remember seeing this band at RIT a few years ago…. They were playing Emanon on the outside stage and it was rained out, so someone from EH talked them to coming up to NRH to play their set in the EH lounge (which at the time was still on the 3rd floor, but has since become the CSH user center). It was a fun band, but I kinda forgot about them soon after… They clearly have the greatest band name I have heard in a long time… I was looking for some info on the Dead Milkmen yesterday and stumbled across a tribute album, and SNMNMNM appeared on it covering Punk Rock Girl… I downloaded the mp3 and it is a decent cover (although the original is still vastly superior)…

GBI, the Global Baywatch Initiative has raised it’s current “Baywatch” Threat Status to Elevated.

I didn’t realize there was going to be a Powerpuff Girls Movie…

This song is catchy as hell, but the rest of the album didn’t do much for me…

Last night my birthday package from my parents finally came into my possession… Thanks to Kevin at UPS in Somerville for finally straightening this all out, and no thanks to the rest of UPS. Anyway, My parents got me a Plextor PlexWriter 24/10/40A, so I can now burn full CDs in 4 minutes. :) I installed it last night and it works like a champ.

Last night in celebration of being me, I picked up a VisionTek Xtasy GeForce 4 Ti4600 video card to replace my aging TNT2 Ultra… Playing Jedi Outcast at 1152x864x32 with every option turned to high is a beautiful thing… BTW, that game is amazing, go get it.

No more Megadeth… Thank god, they were never any good anyway.

Visit Jump the Shark, a chronicle of when tv shows begin going downhill… The name refers to the Happy Days episode where the Fonz jumps a shark on his motorcycle

Our route from the office to CSH is still awful (due to non-calling-before-digging) but through some creative manual routing I have managed to get around the bottleneck… I ssh to gti.net first, then from there I ssh to CSH. While GTI is slow, it is nowhere as slow as the current route from here at work to RIT. Forget BGP, I will take care of it from now on.. ;)

In other news, when I got to work this morning I had a package on my desk! Eagerly thinking that this package was my birthday presents from my parents, I ripped it open…. Imagine my surprise when inside the box was a copy of Quicken for Macintosh.. It was an amazon box, and I looked at the invoice and it was for someone else. I peeled up the label that had my address on it and saw the same information that was on the invoice. Yes, that’s right kids, UPS successfully received my redirection request, but put the label on the wrong package. Apparently my package is sitting in the holding room there. So some joker is coming out from UPS to get this other guy’s package, after which I am going to visit the CDC to make sure non of the Macintosh germs in that box have affected me in any way. I made the UPS guy commit to a time when my package will be delivered tonight, to my home… Supposedly I am getting it some time after 6pm, I will keep you posted on the details.

I have been thinking about this for a long time: this song is not only my favorite song in the whole world, but this particular performance of this song is my favorite performance of all time. Feel free to challenge me on this one, but you are wrong.

Once my back starts feeling better I catch a cold…. It is incessant…

Fuck UPS. My parents sent me my birthday presents which UPS tried to deliver yesterday to no avail (I wasn’t home yet). To reroute the package to my work, I called the number when then told me to use their website, which I did. Apparently that never went through, and they tried again this morning to deliver my package to home… I called the douches and they said they had no record of my request and I would have to wait ANOTHER day….

This is a bit hard for me to address here, but I figured my journal is probably the best place to start.

For the past few months I have been living in a moral quandary, studying about Zen Buddhism while continuing to eat meat as a part of my diet. The more I learned, the less I was able to tolerate the actions I was committing against innocent animals. I have been thinking about it for the past few weeks, and I have decided to become a vegan. Some of you will consider this an extreme action, others will break out into irony-infused laughter, both of which is fine with me. I understand that I have been very critical, even dismissive, of those who have chosen this path, but I really feel that it is the only way that I can resolve the guilt I now feel with every meal.

I really think that this will be a good thing for me, however… I can take the interest in cooking that I have developed over the past few years and now apply it to a whole new cuisine. I have even been strongly considering going to culinary school to become a full-time chef. We will see what path I am led down by this change, but I am sure it will be an exciting one. I know that this will be a shock to some of you, but I hope that you will all still accept me as who I am….

Amy left today, and I proceeded to celebrate my birthday all alone…. Surprising that the one roommate I would have pegged to forget my birthday ended up being the only one who remembered it. I have been really fucking depressed today, and I am just gonna go to bed now.. I will wake up, go to work, and not feel any better. Good night.