i got a letter from my mortgage company telling me i have to pay $360.29 extra each month for the next year because of taxes. that kind of puts a damper on things for a while. stupid taxes.

sam's on vacation for three weeks. adam came in late today and is now on involuntary vacation for the rest of the week which was a rather hasty decision by management. the company we were going to buy has been bought. my wireless network was launching a DoS on the cordless phones and had to be destroyed. my project to segment each colo customer into his own vlan failed due to a piss poor network design by management. and there's never any food in the office.

did you ever wonder if little fat kids are really super intelligent and are scheming to take over large cities by exhausting the available food supply and cause everyone to go into a panic and starve to death?

me neither.

one of andy's fish died. everyone in the office is sick. a long-time employee is getting fired or will quit in the next few days. and i've been appointed to decide whether or not to buy a company and its assets. other than that, it's work as usual.

i dropped my car off at douglas automotive yesterday to have them look at the suspension. they did so this morning and came to the conclusion that the rear springs aren't the right ones for my car. i didn't really see how that was possible, but i had them put the stock springs back on because it was too low otherwise. ~$200 later, i have my car back and it handles very nicely. i can accelerate into turns much faster because the car doesn't roll as much and it's lower to the ground so it looks better.

adam and i once again headed to his parents house this morning to finish my suspension. we had some initial difficulty removing the factory strut and spring from the wheel well, but once we figured out how best to do it, swapping the other side was fairly painless. when the jack stands were removed, i kind of chuckled at how low the car was. the back had no finger gap and the tires were just barely riding below the frame. i kept saying how low it was because the back was much lower than the front; much lower than i had wanted. adam and his dad assured me that it was supposed to be like that, so we headed back home. as i was driving around, i noticed that the back was hopping up and down a lot, much more than it should be, especially considering we just put a race setup on the car. when i got home, i told adam that something was wrong and that it's bouncing around too much. he drove the car around and thought the springs may have been put in upside down.

adam and i left at about 10:30 this morning to go to his parents' house to work on my car. about three hours later, we finally got the new eibach spring and bilstein strut on the right front side. once we figured out the best way to do it, we had the left front side done in about an hour. it was getting late and we were both tired, so we decided to leave and come back tomorrow to finish the back ones. the front became lowered to about two fingers' gap between the tire and the fender. there's no rubbing and the steering is pretty tight around corners. since there's only about 4 fingers' gap on the back wheels with a stock setup, i'm thinking that the new springs will lower it too much and it'll either look ghetto or rub around goofy corners.

i ordered new checks today because i'm still using ones with my old address and my old bank name on them. i was kind of hoping to bitch at the bank and complain that i shouldn't have to buy new checks because they got bought by another company, when in reality i'd just be getting new checks because my address changed. anyway, the order form for these new checks had an option to get a custom message printed above the memo field. the example ones they listed were all god-centric and stupid ones like ``i'd rather be fishing''. adam and i were trying to figure out something funny to put on them instead. i thought of ``your products and/or services suck'' so every time i wrote a check, the cashier or person processing checks would see it and laugh.

i just ate a chicken pot pie from boston market. it was rather tasty.

disregard what i said about the graphical work. i must have forgotten how to be creative or something because i spent all day staring at the graphics and couldn't make them do what i wanted them to. i want to take a vacation from work but i know i'd just end up sitting at home and checking my e-mail every five minutes anyway.

andy took the fish back. i started work on dls' new website. my graphical skills are not impressive but at least it'll be better than the piece of shit hacked together over the years that exists there now. i haven't done graphical work for a long time; it was nice to not have to stare at a screen full of code for a while.

regarding the aforementioned multicast issue, i e-mailed the customer and just asked if they could stop doing multicast and do unicast instead. they said ok and changed the streams. funny how we spent all that time trying to work around them when we could have just asked them to stop doing it.

adam and i rented 'uhf'. i really like that movie.

i don't have much to say. i'm tired.

i moved the fishtank to my desk because i couldn't see them from where i sit. it's very entertaining to watch the fish attack eachother.

i opened a ticket with cisco because i needed to figure out how to configure our catalysts to disable sending multicast traffic to every port in a vlan. the cisco engineer responded with a url to a 30-page document on cisco.com explaining the intimate details of multicast and igmp. we pay for a support contract and get an engineer to respond with ``rtfm''. i wish we could tell our customers, who don't pay for support, to read a manual or take a course on how to use their computer.

i was in a porting mood this evening and whipped together two ports; cadubi, an ascii art drawing program, and xscavenger, a neat little thinking game. i never thought i'd see the day where i install something from ports/games/, much less be the maintainer of one of them.

i stopped by the office this evening to see the fish that andy bought. they're a hell of a lot smaller than i was expecting, but i guess they're better than rocks.

brian came over last night with his shiny new playstation 2. we played (or, rather, i watched brian and adam play) gran turismo 3 all night until i fell asleep when adam and brian left to rent more games. that game is neat.

andy moved into my office last night. i walked past the doorway to find a new nameplate under mine. as we were cleaning off his desk we found a fish bowl, so andy decided to go buy fish for it. supposedly there's a ``blowfish-like'' fish in my office now. neat.

i was hoping to put my new springs and shocks on this weekend but i have to attend a birthday party instead. that doesn't seem as cool as a new suspension system for my car.

watched two touring/gt races on speedvision, then went driving around with adam, rented three movies, then ended up at the theater. we saw 'final fantasy' which was beyond boring. the graphics and such were excellent but they're only neat for the first few minutes until you're overcome with boredom. after that, we came home and watched 'traffic' on dvd, which was a much better movie.

sam, tony and brad are leaving tomorrow to go to detroit, so brian and i have to pretend to be the salesmen for two days. if anyone wants a t1 for real cheap, call me tomorrow and i'll talk you down on your own price. heh.

andy finally put his pictures up from the wisconsin dells trip. he only took pictures on the drive up, of the hotel lobby, and saturday's dinner for some reason. i wish i had pictures of us on the mopeds, those were neat. anyway, the pictures are here.

i felt special yesterday because i could play the theme from the movie blade in my car loud enough that the bass hurt my chest, but today i figured out i can play ``smack my bitch up'' by prodigy loud enough that the extended yelling portion of the song causes temporary hearing impairment and causes my ears to ring. those titanium tweeters kick ass.

my bilstein shocks and eibach pro-kit springs came today. they sure do look nice sitting in boxes in my living room. they'd probably look nicer on my car, but adam says we have to wait until the weekend to install them. shucks.

we left dls at about 11:45am on friday and headed for wisconsin dells. i took the legend and drove with andy and his girlfriend. about 150 miles later, we were the first to arrive at the hotel. adam got to the dells first but got lost and drove past the hotel, so i guess he won the race. bah.

after checking in, a bunch of us drove down the street and went go-karting. a neat track, but not enough lap time to make much progress. i started about 10th and finished third. my brakes didn't work, so i went flying into the pits and smacked into the back of adam. he wasn't too happy about that. after go karting, we went to dinner and then swimming, then hopped from hotel room to hotel room not doing much of anything.

we're all leaving tomorrow to go to wisconsin dells. i'm looking forward to the go-karts, but not the hanging-out-with-a-bunch-of-nerds-in-hot-weather thing.

we had the day off, so i brought the car to advanced audio this morning to get the subs put back in and the front mid speakers fixed. i got bored, so i took sam's jeep to delta sonic to get washed, then drove back, sat around alltemp for a while, went back to advanced audio to meet brian, then we drove to a bunch of car dealerships and looked at bmw's. brian finally realized his shopping cart^W^Weclipse looks stupid, so now he wants a bmw (an m3, of course). many hours later, my car is done and it's now loud as hell. the subs seem to pound a lot more and the addition of two rockford fosgate titanium tweeters in the doors makes the mids and highs sound a lot better.

oh, as brian and i left motorwerks of south barrington, we pulled out behind a black chevy blazer with the license plate ``ICMP EKO''. i must say this is the best damn license plate i've ever seen.

we got digital cable installed so we can watch speed vision. that's about the only thing we wanted that our analog cable didn't have. it's hot in here.

went to advanced audio to get all the audio equipment put back in. they only had time to fix the headunit, so i have to bring the car back on thursday. one of kevin's friends came by the shop with his saturn that has 6 18" subwoofers in it and does about 152 decibels. he parked it outside the garage and with the bass turned up, it caused a nearby car's alarm to go off and shook the closed doors of the garage to make them flex about 1". the doors of the car move about 2" when the bass hits and standing next to the car makes your shirt move. he had to cut a hole in the hood to bolt on 4 more alternators and he has 4 batteries in the front and two in the trunk. why he put all this in a saturn, i have yet to figure out.

some adt guy came to my door yesterday from adt, saying they're giving away free security systems. i said i already had one but it wasn't hooked up, so i signed all the crap to get service hooked up. they were supposed to come out this afternoon to set it up, but never did and never called. i'm beginning to think it was a scam and they just got my credit card number and know that i don't have an alarm, so they can come back and steal my non-existent furniture. at&t is coming out tomorrow to convert us to digital cable so we can get speedvision. word.

spent a few hours driving around after work. my car needs a new radiator. i came home and spent the rest of the night hacking away in php.