Everybody dance with your tail!

Alright, so the other day i was chatting with a buddy online and accidently came up with this cool idea. on one of the art sites i post to a lot of artists through around these "Art Meme"s. i'm not really sure how you're supposed to pronounce "meme", but it basically is a way to cleverly obligate people to draw specific things. for instance they'll have a little instruction on it that says "now draw your character as a muffin" or "what's the scariest thing you've seen recently?" and the person draws accordingly. best of all, you get to tag someone! which basically means they now have to draw this thing too!

well, i started one of my own. i called it the "Tail Buddy Meme". basically each person who's tagged has to draw their character interacting in some way with their tail which has been painted/taped/glued/glittered/etc. to look like a silly puppet version of themself! so far, just a couple of us have done it, but we're still waiting for those we tagged to step up to the plate. ^..~

here's the one that i did:

Tech UNsupportive part 2

so it seems i was right afterall, i had to call back again and talk to another tech, though this guy was patient enough to listen to the whole issue and not just cut me off early like the last guy did.

what's more, he's agreed to send me a new power adapter to replace this one that i believe is causing the issue.

now, on a much lighter note... enjoy some "engrish" and smile. :)

This last one is how i felt when calling the Dymo Techs. :P

Tech UNsupportive

So i'm currently sitting on the line with a Dymo Label Tech, trying to get this darn'd label printer fixed.. again! i was on the phone with these guys last time for 26 minutes. the printer was sent in and apparently not fixed.

now this tech is telling me that it's a new serial number, so they actually replaced the unit. but it's still doing the exact same problem. it prints one label, then says that it failed to print that one, and just sits there refusing to print any more labels. ever!

he's telling me that it could be a firmware update issue and that we should go ahead and update the firmware for this printer. ok, i'm willing to try it since it'll be done while i'm on the phone and i shouldn't have to hang up and call back.

i know i've had my fair share of both sides of these tech calls, being the customer and being the support. honestly, i don't really like being the customer...

scratch that, he DID want me off the line. as i've said before, i've been on both sides, and i can tell when the tech is just trying to get me off the line because a problem is too hard for them to figure out easily. he's emailed me the info on how to do the firmware update, so i can do it "at my own convenience". this is tech-speek for "don't stay on my line, i've had a long day and really would rather not help you right now, so i'm gonna email you something to try and if/when it doesn't work you'll call back and most likely get some OTHER tech besides me so i won't have to deal with this issue any more".

these techs think i'm some idiot or something. the reality is that i probably know more than they do when it comes to computers!

i really wish i could just make them understand that i know what i'm talking about and have the issue pretty-well narrowed down to what the problem is. anyway, i'm gonna try this firmware update, i'd LOVE to have that update prove me wrong! mostly because i don't want to have to deal with this printer any longer. it's a frustrating issue to troubleshoot. :P

Dreams of Strange Congruity

Okay, so lastnight i had a rather strange dream... i can't recall how it all started, but what i can remember goes something like this:

"i'm riding a mountain bike, i note that i'm in 3rd gear, and apparently being in higher gears is important to me because i can go faster away from the Cadillac that's chassing me around this dirt-bike trail. for a while i've got some distance on him and he's a ways behind me, but as the path gets muddier, i have to down-shift and lose speed. at one point i'm in second gear and going through a particularly muddy area, i can see the car coming up on me fast and i reluctantly shift down into first gear, peddling hard to get to the back of the school ahead of me. it's not far, so maybe i can make it!

i finally get to the small covered area just as the car rushes by me, narrowly missing and screetches to a stop just a few feet infront (good brakes!) when it stops, i can see that it's been hauling a small tanker on 2 axles. it's no bigger than my outdoor gas-grill at home but it looks like a small rail-road tanker car. when he stops, this thick green gel slops out the open hole on the top and splatters down one side onto its wheels and the ground, slowly oozing more down to the dirt. the car suddenly kicks into reverse and tries to run me over again, this time seeming to deliberately miss (though i doubt he'd mind if he actually hit me!) at this point of dodging aside quickly, i can see that the tanker has left a nice little trail of ooze from where it was to where it is now. the car somehow releases the tanker and as the guy pulls forward to quicly speed away he throws a lit-match out the window, catching the trail of ooz on fire! it races up the line like those old trails of gun-powder in the old western movies and i hi-tail it out of there to get away before the tanker explodes!

i dont' get too far before the thing blows up, sending burning goop everywhere, the car is long-gone and i've just barely made it around a corner out of the blast (i had to wipe some off my sleeve though). i don't feel like i have much time to look around though, so i start to make my way down this long hallway that connects the front of the school to the back, though it's open to the outside at both ends. kinda like a long breeze-way.

when i get to the front, i turn to look at the front of the building and it's not a school at all! it's actually a grocery store (no, i didn't note what one specifically it was. lol) but i headed inside with my mother. no, i don't know where she came from, but it's a dream so it doesn't have to make sense. i get inside and i'm looking for something or someone...

i head down the front of the store where the checkout lanes are, i'm on the bagging-side of those lanes right now and i finally spot a familiar face, Dracos! it's my buddy from so long ago online! (not his character standign here, but the real guy in this case). i introduce him and my mother to eachother, but they both chuckle as they shake hands, letting me know that they still remember eachother from "last time". i'm totally lost because i didn't know they'd met before, and certainly didn't remember introducing them to eachother "last time". it was shortly after this where i was quickly rushed to a different scene, in an actual school this time...

one of the professors from my university was there, and was about to do some kind of clever magic trick with a windows 98 install CD or something. he had a very young girl stand up on the back of the stage before the audience with the cd in hand holding it infront of her while the professor stepped to the front of the stage. someone was calling out commands to the two of them that supposedly proved that "she had the real one and he didn't", or something like that.

it was in the middle of this magic-act that my nasty alarmclock went off, jolting me back to the fuzzy reality of early morning. so from there i climbed down off my bunk bed and shut off the alarm. i couldn't just ignore it, this alarm was for me. :P

LOVE, LOVE, and LOVE

Okay, okay... so i was just kidding about my last comment on my last post where i made it sound like i'd forgotten about Velentine's day. i have a number of things planned, and i'm not letting it surprise me this year. ;)

but i'm also not going to spoil any surprises by typing out my plans in here since my girl reads this too! :p

Hope ya'll have some nice plans for Valentine's day too. i know i'll be finishing the day by DJ'ing on-air for the satuday night Rock show, so one detail i can share is that anything we do will need to take place earlier in the day thank 7pm.

Litter, Love, and Laundry

Okay, so today's been a relatively uneventful day. that's not a bad thing at all, but it does give me time to think. this can sometimes be a bad thing. however, today isn't so much a rant as it is a venting of what's going through my head.

Lastnight, my roomie and i had to talk about some stuff. he's been gone in the National Gaurd training for 3 weeks and came back to a "dirty" house. i personally think we've been doing a good job to keep things clean, i mean he IS a bit of a clean-freak but we discussed this lastnight. we talked about a number of things, and unlike back in october, we didn't end up in a near-fight about it all. both of us were quite level-headed about it and understanding. i had a few points to make as well, though most of it was about his fiance who comes over and "helps" around the house. i put that in quotes because she really only cleans when she thinks it'll bother my roomie, never just because she made it a mess. she'll leave dirty dishes all over the house and just do a mad-cleaning just before my roomie gets back so he won't see it and get upset. so she'll text me and be like "hey, set aside saturday to help me clean the whole house because he'll be coming back into town in the next few days". meanwhile, i'm already super frustrated for comming along and cleaning up behind her! so no, i really don't want to give of my busy day and "help clean" a house that i don't really think is dirty anyway and that she's mostly caused any messes in.

Even my own girlfriend is very carefully to keep things clean that she uses, and any "mess" is confined into my own room (instead of in a common area of the house). so she's been keeping herself blameless in all this.

But as i said, lastnight we hashed a lot of this out. i still think there's a bit more to discuss with my roomie's girl, but we'll see how things go from here. one of my biggest complaints was how she'd use my nice dishes to feed the dog with. blegh! but now she knows that bothers me so she has no reason to do it again.

In a completely seperate issue, my buddy Paw is struggling with his schoolwork again. it seems that his computer is doing some pretty bad things and keeping him from using it to do his schoolwork! he's recently replaced the power supply, which was suspected of causing the problem, but now it looks like it might be (might also be) the motherboard. his computer keeps going into standby "every 2 seconds", as he says it. i have no idea what would make a computer suddenly start doing that, unless the install of windows got corrupted at some point and it may be reading something wrong about its own motherboard, or perhaps the motherboard isn't disributing power correctly, so windows hibernates to protect itself. i wish i had a good answer for him, and i wish i had a good motherboard and setup that i could send him. i think i might have somthing, but i'll need to talk to him to find out if it'd be much use to him or if it's underpowered for what he needs.

Today after work, i'll swing-by and pick up my girl and head out to the lake where a friend is holding some nice stuff for her. a faculty friend of mine here on campus is donating to her (free of charge), a small table, 4 chairs, a large mirror, a set of nice dishes/china, and several cookware items! it's a rather exciting thing that she's doing that for us. so today i'm going out there to her house by the lake to pick all that up in my truck.

I think that's about it for right now, but i'll keep ya posted later if there's anything new to report... oh yeah, Valentine's day's coming up... guess i'd better "thow something together" for that. ^..~ (as if i haven't already. lol)

Time to get started...

alright, so this is my first journal over here on blogspot. it's a nice cozy little place to be and i hope it'll help me to keep my readers posted about what's going on in the life of the busy wingless Turquoise Dragon.

i know that for starters i have something to be extra happy about, my girlfriend! she and i have been dating long-distance for about 2 years, but as of this new years (2008->2009) i was able to go retrieve her from florida and bring her back here to texas. it was quite a blessing to be able to make that trek, and many many things went into making it happen. God was so good to me to provide the funding needed for the travel, and providing a place for her to stay until she got her own apartment. now she's got a fantastic job doing things she loves to do! it's kinda short-term, but it still goes 'til may and they'll see about re-evaluating the finances to keep her around earlier. she's working for an author, doing things like desgining the covers for upcomming books, arranging pages within the books and the photos that go in them, as well as just being an all-around "handy girl".

well, i'll leave my first post at that for right now. but expect more soon! (especially since my girl is likely going to be helping remind me to post stuff here! lol)