As I promised yesterday here is my request for addresses for Christmas Cards.

If you want a Christmas card from me this year just leave me a comment with your address. All comments will be screened so you won't have to worry about privacy. If you prefer not to leave a comment on this entry you can leave me a direct message through LJ, you can DM me on Twitter, message me on Facebook or you can simply e-mail me. If you've already sent me a Christmas card you can definitely expect to get one in the mail.

This post and all of my public posts have been cross-posted to both Twitter and Facebook thanks to the magic of apps. Don't be surprised if you see a link to this entry at those places.

Is it time to go to work already? Just when I was blowing the dust off of my LJ account...

I've been crazy busy with overtime at UPS again. I really hate this time of year because it leaves me with so little time to enjoy the holidays. I wish I could say "to hell with this overtime!" but I really need the extra money. This is the time of year when I make the bulk of my pay for the year. Feast or famine at work indeed.

Anyway, I'm doing Christmas cards this year. I don't have the option to screen comments while posting from my phone. So e-mail me if you want a card or you can wait for a screened-options post to go up tomorrow.

I finally got myself one of those newfangled Android smartphones. I have to admit it's pretty nice to have everything on the go. It really comes in handy for those days when I'm at work for 10 or so hours. I even found a decent LJ app which works surprisingly well. So let's see how yet another attempt to keep a journal turns out.

Personally I blame blogging for Damage Control and Twitter for the major lapse. Since I enjoy both it can't be helped. At least I'll be better able to keep up with friend's journals now.

The start of this month has turned out to be a lot busier than I would have liked. I promised more LJ updates so here's to hoping I'm able to make time to post at least once or twice a week now.

The first week with Star has been an interesting one, and as I suspected she's a bundle of energy. The hardest part about getting a new dog so long after your previous dog is dealing with your own expectations. By that I mean I've found myself completely used to the way my previous dog, Jo-Jo acted and sometimes I find it difficult not to expect something similar the from the current dog, Star. Of course these dogs are two completely different sizes, ages, breeds and temperaments. Star has a lot of energy to burn off but I'm supposed to keep her from doing much more than walking until at least April 14th. When she gets excited she runs, and runs, and runs, and it's extremely hard to get her to calm down. My mom underestimated how much energy she has and partially regrets the hasty decision to adopt Star. I think an important lesson has been learned but the dog is ours now, so there's not much to do except work on her behavior.

I'm partially annoyed but I have to constantly remind myself that the dog is still just a puppy, even if she's already a year old. On the positive side of things the training to get Star to sit and stay is slowly coming along. She'll do what I say half of the time and other times she'll give me a blank stare. On the best of days I've been able to get the dog to submissively sit, lay down and even back away and sit with a very stern glare. In the immediate future I'll probably buy a few new toys and some of those toy treat combinations to keep her occupied when I'm not around. I'll also have to see with the vet if she has a sensitive stomach or not, every few days she throws up once a day (never the food I fed her in the morning, thankfully). She doesn't seem to be sickly so I'm not overly concerned.


If dealing with the dog wasn't enough my new desktop has been a constant headache. I originally bought this new machine back in early June from Cyberpower PC and a few months later it's been one problem after another. Constant blue screens, general instability, etc. At first I wasn't sure if something was conflicting with Windows 7 or if it was hardware. I ended up getting help via online forums and narrowed it down to hardware after I updated all of my drivers and flashed the motherboard. What I was left with was a very stable system that tended blue screen about once a month. I had Cyberpower send me a new motherboard and tried to replace it myself, but that ended in failure. So in mid-December I ended up shipping the entire system to their California location for repairs. When it came back things were good for a while until I noticed I couldn't put the computer into sleep mode or turn it off without having problems turning it back on.


Instead of posting the usual boot sequence the computer would just emit several short beeps and the screen remained dark. So I called Cyberpower again and they had me re-seat the RAM. That seems to solve the problem until it happened a few days later. So I ended up trying various combinations of less RAM, moving the sticks into different slots, pulling out the graphics card and ultimately nothing worked. Fed up with the system, I've gotten authorization to send it back to Cyberpower again for more repairs, under warranty of course. After this ordeal I'll never buy a CP machine again. Which is a shame since my previous desktop from them lasted seven years without a single problem, and even then I just needed a new power supply. But that desktop is now eight years old and it's only getting slower as time passes. So this will be the last post I write from the desktop. In the meantime I'll be on my laptop, which I bought three years ago and works quite well. It could use more RAM but otherwise it has been a solid machine.

Finally, I'm in the process of saying goodbye to my host of ten years for The Ice Cave. I've never had any major problems with my host until downtime started to become a serious issue. A few months ago the entire shared server would go down for a few hours. When it was restored things were usually okay, minus a frustrating outage of a half hour here and there when I was in the middle of updating Damage Control. Then on Monday night the server went down for about 14 hours, and since then has continued to go down at least once a day for an hour-and-half or so. Since then I've begun to move to a new host. The domain name servers are already being switched and Movable Type is currently kicking my ass.

The problem is that the MySQL database has grown to about 100MB in size and the default server program, PHPMyAdmin can't make backups of files larger than 20MB. I found a work around with a third party MySQL dump program and the files are safely on my hard drive. However I'm having trouble uploading the compressed file to my new host in MyPHPAdmin. Only half the files are uploaded but I can use the MySQL program again to import the saved files. As for Movable Type itself, Damage Control has grown so large that the blog backup utility stalls and I can't make a complete backup. But from what I'm reading if I have the full MySQL dump and all of the files from Movable Type I should still be able to transfer the blog without issue.

At least my Balto site and the other sites should transfer without issue. My new host also has a quick installer for PHPBB and that's now installed. I may consider reviving The Icy Boards but only if I can find a backup of my old files from the Ikonboard. Unfortunately Ikonboard is no longer supported and Ketnar.org, the server hosting TIB seems to have gone down. When everything is taken care with Damage Control I'm going to begin the process of updating TIC before I even think about TIB.

It's going to be a busy weekend with this server move. =/

So my mom and I added a new member to the family. And for a nice change of pace it's NOT another foster child. (At least not yet anyway...)



This is Star, an interesting poodle/cocker spaniel mix we adopted from one of the local animal shelters.

If you had told me a little over a week ago that I'd have a dog by this time next week I might have laughed. But apparently my mom was ready for a new dog much sooner than I thought she'd be. Last Wednesday she visited the Women's Humane Society and looked at a few dogs. When she told me she was doing so over the phone I thought it was for future reference. At first she saw a pure white, blue-eyed Siberian husky puppy and asked if I would be interested. As much I as really like huskies I told her "no" as we didn't have the space or time to deal with such a high energy dog. Later she called me while I was at work and told me she saw a white female cockapoo mix and really liked her. So I was to travel down to the shelter the next day and check her out. In the meantime my mom put in an adoption request. When I did visit the dog I found her to be a bundle of energy and such. So my mom and I decided to visit her once more on Saturday before making a final decision.

The Humane Society did a quick check of our home and neighborhood before we were allowed to adopt her. The process was amusingly easily as we just had to verify we had a cable tie, a collar and a leash. After a bit more paper work on Saturday, adoption fees, shots, and the cost of spaying I was to pick up the dog on the following Thursday. By this time my mom had settled on the name "Star" and I didn't have any objections.

Fast forward to today and it has been interesting to say the least.

After her spaying Star has been pretty fidgety and the shelter workers insisted I leave her e-collar on for two weeks. Given how much she tries to bite at the incision area it would be pretty irresponsible to take the collar off anytime soon. For the moment Star seems to be terrified of steps. Getting her to go up them is impossible on her own but she seems okay climbing down with them some encouragement. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the e-collar, if the collar is a factor at all. On the upside she takes well to being brushed and she doesn't mind having her paws held for inspection. Because she was found as a stray (who might have escaped from her previous family) not much is known about her. She seems to be in decent health minus being a little on the thin side. So once she's healed up and the collar is off I'm not too sure what to expect personality-wise. Already she likes to jump and rear up, so I imagine she could be a handful down the road. After Star is healed I'll work more on basic training and commands until I'm able to save up enough money for obedience classes or I find more work.

I'm glad to have a dog but some of that joy is tempered by not quite knowing what to expect. Although Star isn't my first dog she's quite different from Jo-Jo in terms of personality. In that regard another beagle mix would have been my first choice but the shelter didn't have any. I guess I should read up on poodle mixes very, very soon.

And hey, a post before April 1st.

For Christmas of either 2005 or 2006 I received a new pair of work boots. Today I finally replaced them. Call it being extremely frugal or just lazy but I've never been the type to replace an item unless it really needed to go. (Video game consoles and handhelds might be the only exception I've made.) My boots were in pretty bad condition but sheer laziness and being in a cash bind kept me from buying a new pair until today. When I mentioned my new boots to my mother over the phone she said, "It's about time." I'm pretty sure when I go into work tonight my co-workers might say the same. But just how bad were the boots I replaced? I'll let the pictures and the boots do the rest of the talking!



-Saying "I wore the hell out of these boots!" may or may not be an understatement I only just replaced the shoe strings in October. To their credit the outside only just begun to really fall apart when I started wearing them to work 30 to 45 hours a week instead of my usual 20 to 25 hours. And they had excellent odor control. To this day my boots don't really have any odor beyond a light moldy smell when they're damp.



-My right boot literally says "hi!" It didn't get to this point until December. Since then I've had numerous occasions where I nearly tripped over my own sole and fell flat on my face. Considering the concrete floors at work that would have really hurt...



-And brand new steel toe boots for comparison. They're actually smaller and lighter than my previous boots. I just hope the odor control is just as good and that I get five or six years out of them.

A quick question for everyone out there. Would anyone be interested in exchanging user information on Twitter? I joined back in mid-January and for the most part I've found myself fascinated with what people can write in 140 characters or less. If you're interested in friending me (with full reciprocation of course) my Twitter account is here. When my college professor sent me an invitation link back in November I wasn't sure if I'd like the service or not. Sure Twitter and Facebook are all the social rage right now but popularity doesn't necessarily make a service good. You'd only have to turn to the now defunct MySpace as an amusing example. Nevertheless, I'm surprised at how much more enjoyment I'm getting from Twitter as opposed to Facebook. The services are very different from one another but Twitter gets directly to the point in a way that is infinitely more satisfying than Facebook. As for this social network, it seems I'm pretty horrible at keeping my LiveJournal up to date these days. If I can post something once a month I suppose I'm good. Once a week and I'd be quite happy. The days of posting several times a week or even during a day are probably gone for the foreseeable future.

But hey, I've managed to post something for the month of February, even if the month will be literally over in a matter of minutes.