Things are getting really crappy again. I'm stuck in a colossal rut. I've been a hermit, retreating back into my little hole over the last couple months. I don't even know why. I've kept only sporadic contact with some people, with others, none. It seems I pick up a guitar about once, maybe twice, a week. My musical ideas are about as frequent. I feel like I'm running in place. I really don't know what to do.

Just had to get that off of my chest.

*warning: semi-geek content* Jeff stopped by earlier. That was a nice surprise; we passed a guitar around and tried out some riffage. I particularly liked what he was doing, so I set up the recording rig quickly, only to find it didn't work. One of my USB ports was getting funky...it wasn't communicating with any devices. This meant that I couldn't use Cubase, so I had to fall back on GarageBand. I was convinced that I had a dead USB port and that I was going to have to say goodbye to my beloved iBook for a couple weeks while its logic board was replaced. Then I thought to myself, "could there be a port conflict?" I figured I'd restart the computer. Sure enough, when I plugged the Cubase key into that port, it recognized it! My comp OK and I can breathe easy. :)

I was supposed to work 4-9 tonight, meaning there was a party or some other function booked at the gallery. I got there at 4 and Roger, the guard who usually is the shipping attendant, said to check in at the control room because the party was cancelled. Ernie, the assistant director of security, was there and caught me before I could leave, saying to stick around because he was going to make sure I got paid for coming in, even if the thing was cancelled. I wound up sitting in the break room with another guard who was supposed to work the party. Ernie came in around 4:15 and said 'Go home and get paid for four hours.' Hell yeah, I'll take that!

Elsewhere... I was talking to Bridge the other day and she's coming into town for Xmas. That made my month...I can't wait to see her. Also, I really should get a gym membership. I did my last workout for school today and I'm really starting to get on a roll.

One of the guys at Cyberjammin turned me on to pandora.com, an awesome (and free!) Internet-radio-of-sorts site that tailors itself to your interests. You program a 'station' by entering an artist or song of your choice, and it plays things similar to what you entered. I've already found out about a couple awesome bands whom I plan on checking out further, and I only found the site last night. You can have up to 100 stations. I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time there.

I was happy to find in my email this afternoon a message from Apple stating that my laptop bag FINALLY shipped yesterday. It's only been what, two weeks now?! Yay backorders. I also got a start on the last defunct area of the site: the photo galleries. I have the infrastructure finished, now I just have to prep the images, make thumbnails and plug it all in. Should be done by my day off on Tuesday. Once that's done, I'll worry about those CSS issues in Internet Exploder. That will yield the first fully-functional, up-to-date site I've had in the better part of a year. There are a few little things and tweaks that I'd like to add, but those are more like an afterthought.

I spent a few hours tonight getting my new guestbook 99% finished. Or so I thought. I packed it in for the night but decided to check in on Internet Exploder on the PC. Ugh. It looks like garbage. It's great in Safari and Firefox on the Mac, almost perfect on PC Firefox, but alignment and font sizes are all screwed up in Internet Exploder. Looks like I have a whole bunch of stuff to add to my CSS just so it will render correctly in that POS. Damn you, Bill Gates!!!!

For as much as I complain about winter for the first 10-11 months of the year, I've realized that I actually like it. Go figure. I don't think I could ever live in a climate that didn't have four seasons. That's all; I'm done. :)

Website report: So I finally got the Movable Type templates fleshed out. Woohoo. I have an image-page ready to go, just need to get the content from my Windoze box and cell phone onto the iBook. I've found a new, more secure guestbook. Once I'm done tweaking it, hopefully within a couple days, I'll make it public.

On another note: wow, the OS X AIM client field is pretty crappy. I've used three AIM clients in the week that I've had the iBook, with varying results.