August 2008 Archives

I am coming upon a major change of my life right now. Right now, I'm in a negative cash flow situation. It's not by much, but I'm having to do extra stuff just to tread water. I can't do any more than what I'm making now, or I put losing my disability at risk. The main reason for the money crunch is that I am presently supporting two apartments, which is eating up over 40% my income. Over 50% if you include utilities and Internet as well. With utility rates going up drastically over the next month or two, the decision has been made for me. I'm going to have to squeeze into my families apartment. This will free up several hundred dollars a month, at the sacrifice of me having a private place to hide when my illness acts up.

This will be a difficult thing, moving into one apartment, but it needs to be done. There is no other way around it. And I have always taught my son that 98% of the time, the hardest path is the one to take, because that will be the right one.

The tipping point happened last week when the car failed the annual vehicle inspection. The hydrocarbon level on the car is over twice what is allowed. This is telling me that the engine is slowly dying. It's been eating a quart of oil every thousand miles for a while, and it looks like some seals somewhere are failing. Whether it's the heads, or one of the cylinders I don't know. This car is a teenager, 15 years old now. I just rolled over the 138,000 mile mark.

Here's what I've been dreading: I'll have to go into debt to get a car. I am a big follower of Dave Ramsey and he doesn't do debt. He says to save up and pay cash, but I don't have the time to save up before this car dies.

My job requires me to be a lot of places, so not having a car is not an option. The last person to have my job was basically forced out because she couldn't drive. So she took hours to get anywhere on the bus, and often depended on others for transportation.

So the question now is how much of a car do I get. I don't want to get too much of a car, because it will cost a lot per month and take a long time to pay off. I also don't want to get a cheap car that won't hold up before I can save up and get a good vehicle. This vehicle was already 7 years old and about 60,000 miles when I bought it.

If there is a magic benefactor that would like to donate a couple thousand dollars to the cause, I'd greatly appreciate it. =)

Okay, am I glad I made a copy of everything before I wiped the website. I found out that I was missing a CSS file, which is the style sheet for the formatting. Once I dropped it in, everything came up okay. Whew! I had no idea why the formatting was screwed up and no idea on how I was going to fix it.

Now that that's done, I can concentrate on other things. I'll talk about those tomorrow.

I have had time to cool down now and calmly document what happened with my Internet connection Tuesday. I had Earthlink through Comcast in my apartment, and straight Comcast in my families apartment. I wanted to move my Internet connection over because I had cable TV on it as well. It turns out that cable modems are set to a particular cable drop. Which means you can't steal my modem and hook it up on your cable and expect it to work. Well, I cancelled and returned the families modem, and set the transfer in progress.

Then the headaches started. I literally spent half of my monthly minutes on the phone alternating between Comcast and Earthlink. When Comcast was Time Warner, they had a partnership with Earthlink. That partnership no longer exists, and it seems that they are almost enemies now.

I started at 10am, and I had to cut it off at 4:30 so I could get to the Gamerz Depot. That was a good thing, because I was so upset that I started screaming at the technicians because I was stuck on first tier support and no one would elevate me.

When I got home at 10:45, I saw that I had Internet, but I didn't. My computers acted like I had it, but I couldn't get anywhere. I started calling Comcast and Earthlink again, and even managed a call to Linksys for my router. I gave up around 1:30am.

Up at 7, on the phone at 8:10 and finally got to the right person who finally fixed me around 9:30. I am still ready to eat nails and spit tacks. When you're on as many mood stabilizers as I am, getting to the point where I am screaming at people and ready to take a hammer to something says that I got pushed pretty far.

You don't want to see me like that. It wasn't pretty, and someone really could have gotten hurt.

Okay, the formatting is screwed up, but I kind of expected that. Give me a couple of days to straighten it out, and we'll get back to "normal."

What should have taken an hour or two took multiple hours due to Vista not uncompressing one folder. I had error after error. It took the longest time to discover that. However, once I got everything straight, the install only took a few minutes to go through the installation process.

I'll admit, I actually downloaded and installed Expression Engine before I found the problem. I might just go back after trying to fix the formatting.

It's late, I'm going to bed, and I have a lot to do tomorrow that I will explain later.

If you can't navigate beyond the front page, that's because I'm busy ripping everything out and doing a cold install instead of an upgrade. This time it's Moveable type 4.2. I'm trying to fix a problem where when I hit the publish button, it's not actually making the archive file and publishing it to the front page. I figure the problem lies somewhere in the non-updated files or the database, which is why it has survived two upgrades.

Anyway, I'm shaving my head before tackling this install so I don't have any hair to rip out of my head during the process.

I'm deleting the SQL database, as well as every file I can lay my hands on. Once the website is empty, I can drop the new files in, create a new database, and hopefully everything will work. If it doesn't, I'm looking at WordPress. I'm sick of the extra work in doing something that I shouldn't have to do.

Watch and heed. He speaks the truth, and all should give full attention to every word. In my job as advocate, I always say the job of a Citizen is to keep his mouth open. That means communicating with your Congrisscritters.

This is what you get for voting Liberals into office. Granted, the track record of the Republicans are't too much better, but Liberals have always championed "Multiculturalism" and "Diversity." They have seen that 90+% of the Black population votes Democrat (and thus Liberal), even though it is these very Liberals that are enslaving and destroying them. Now the Liberals see that the Illegal immigrant "vote" is also overwhelmingly Democrat as well, so the Liberals are doing everything possible to grant voting rights to NON-CITIZENS.

You should always pay attention to what your candidate is actually saying, the little "under the breath" words as well as the shouted ones that make the soundbite.

Helena, Arkansas is right across the Mississippi River from Memphis. I've been through it a couple of times, heading north on I-55. At present, they are under a 24 hour curfew because of the rampant crime in the city.

There is no "right" side of this problem. The needs of the people are to stop the drug violence and random shootings. The Rights of the people are to be free of random searches and seizures.

There is a delicate balance between our Constitutional rights, and the needs of the people. When the people give up Rights for security, the Rights go away and are not likely to reappear.

It is the job of the People to protect themselves. It is the job of the police to arrest lawbreakers. The two have some congruence, but are mostly incompatible. If the People won't stand up for themselves, then the government will stand up and take some Rights away in the name of Security. And of course, those who give up one for the other deserve neither.

We are all being trained to let the government do things for us, instead of doing it for ourselves. That is the true tragedy of today.

I have come across these videos from two different sources. They are cases on not talking to the police.

Now, I don't mean if you are reporting a crime, or you are a witness to a crime, but if the police come to you and start asking questions, your first inclination should be to shut the hell up and stay quiet.

These videos are about 45 minutes of your time, but they are very well spent time. I know the lawyer speaks kind of fast, but he has a lot of information.

Here is a video from the police officer who followed him.

When I had my CCW, and I ever had to shoot somebody, the one thing I was taught to say was "I defended myself." After watching this video, I am now of the mind that you shouldn't even say that.

Take these videos to heart. Or else.

You see, I have a problem with this program, it won't publish my entry unless I manually publish it. This is something that I should not have to do. I went and repaired the MySQL database, just to see if that makes a difference. Hitting the publish button in 3...2...1...

10 Second update: No, that did not work. It looks like I will have to back up the Zone, then destroy and do a new install of Moveable Type. If that doesn't fix my problem, and the support forums can't do it, then I might have to move on to a new software. I'll do it on some Sunday when I have a lot of time, like when a Football game is on.

I finally found out the final standings for The Big Waaagh Warhammer 40k GT. Like I thought, I was in the middle somewhere. I ended up in 45th place out of 82, with 44 battle points out of possible 100, 45 Sportsman out of 50, 12 out of 20 for painting and a total of 101 points out of a possible 170.

I wish I could have done better, but I did the best that I could do, and that is all anybody can ask. I'll be back next year and looking to do better. Maybe my Sisters will make a higher mark.

Thanks to a friend and his son, after a 16 year hiatus, I have gotten back into Battletech. The thing about it, is because of Mechwarrior:Dark Age happening in the same universe, Battletech is now known as Classic Battletech. Yes, even after all this time, the universe for this game is still alive and well. In fact, in the Northeast, I am told that CBT is very active in the game stores.

Now that I have started to play again, I have dusted off the remains of my battalion and got back into the fray. I had a full battalion, which was a total of 40 battlemechs, including the battalion commander and his command lance. That's three companies, each consisting of three lances, each lance has four battlemechs. I had a company of light battlemechs, a company of medium battlemechs, and a company of heavy and assault battlemechs. Two lances of the light company survived, one lance of the mediums and (thankfully) the full company of the heavy and assault battlemechs. I only found two of the four command lance 'mechs.

When I bought and painted them in 1991, I had them painted in a variety of patterns, to denote lances that would fight in arctic conditions, forests, and city. Now, I have decoded that I am going to paint them to one standard, as it is easy to pick out a 40 foot tall battlemech in most conditions. Guess what base color I have decided to paint them? If you guessed Ultramarine Blue, you've been reading this blog for a long time.

Here's a picture of a Warhammer in the forest paint job, and then in just base coated in Ultramarine Blue. Click on them for full pictures:

As you can see, this guy is bristling with weapons. The arms are Particle Projector Cannons, he has medium lasers in his torso and that thing sticking out in the top left is a Short Range Missile system that fires six missiles at a time in a salvo.

Now here's the interesting part. You see, when Battletech first appeared, Battletech maker FASA "borrowed" designs from the old Harmony Gold Anime called Macross. There were also designs "borrowed" from another cartoon called Exo-Squad. Well, lawsuits were thrown about, and in the end, all of the borrowed designs became "unseen" and went away. Thankfully, a lot of them were redesigned and became the "reseen" and so carry on the tradition.

This in the end means all of the unseen battlemechs I own have become very valuable over the years. People are paying a lot of money to buy battlemechs like what I have, even more when they are in the original packaging. I'm sitting on several hundred dollars of little lead miniatures that a lot of people want to buy. But I'm not going to give any of them up, simply because I want to keep them and perhaps pass them down to my son, because he has interest in CBT as well.

I'll post as I get more of these 'mechs detail painted.