6:25 pm

So they're back again. Hopefully to finally complete removing their stuff.

But they couldn't just show up and do what they need to do. Oh no. They began by beating all over the wall between the 2 Apartments. They've repeated their "performance" 11 minutes later, and then 2 minutes after that. About a quarter till 7, Mom said she can't take any more of that and so I call the county sheriff's dept. I explain to the lady that they've been harassing us this past week ever since the eviction notice was served on them. I told her the name and she said they spoke to her earlier today. Ah. I reiterated that I've been doing exactly what the deputy on Wednesday told me to do - stay out of the apartment and make sure she can get in. I haven't been in there since her brother let me in (with my sister on the phone at the same time).

Even just 4 minutes ago from typing this they beat on the wall. They did this while I was on the phone with the sheriff's dept. I have a 23 second video clip on a camera, put up right against the wall to illustrate how hard they were beating on it.

They also went and removed the air conditioner and put it on the wood chair we had left in the apartment. They were not authorized to do that. It was perfectly fine to leave that in.

Hopefully that was a sign they were actually vacating the premises.

7:21 pm - beating on the wall again.

See the video!

Maybe they're trying to get a rise out of me and I'm ignoring it all and that's annoying them, or at least they're trying to get my attention.

She Did It Again

Latest note:

"you were told to stay out until after we went to court the sheriff said (if) you were in here more time you were going to be charged with criminal trespassing Im calling him in the morning Im sick of this STAY OUT you want something wait till Im here I'll be out _before we go to court_"

I have not been in the place since her brother let us in Tuesday and especially after she called the sheriff to claim she was locked out on Wednesday.

She is sure making more problems for a place she's leaving.

She lied again to the deputy

Just got off the phone about the lady in Apt. B.

She's called the sheriff's dept claiming the locks had been changed and that she was locked out of the apartment. So while on the phone, I tested the front door to Apartment B. It was unlocked and opened right up. She has a key to that door.

She's trying to accuse me of trespassing. Last night while I was on the phone with the landlord, her brother invited me in the apartment. The primary function was to inspect and make sure the items she was not to remove were still there, of course minus the fridge.

As the deputy who spoke to me sees it, as long as she has personal property there, she has not abandoned the apartment. According to what we were told months ago, as long as the main occupant has not lived in the place for 30 days continuously, it can be considered abandoned.

The deputy said to make sure she has access to the apartment - easy enough. Not to go in there until after the Aug 24 court date when the judge says we have ownership again. The lady claims she'll be out by the end of the week. Fine. I'd like her out tonight.

The removal of the fridge to "fix" it is criminal though, but he says we'd have to sue her separately for that.

I basically told the deputy who spoke to me tonight that she's lied twice to them. She has never been locked out. The replacement of the front door strike plate was maintenance that she never told us about after one of her 'guests' kicked in the front door.

She's just dragging it out, and she can resolve it by just getting her stuff out as quickly as possible.

Latest note

Lady formerly of Apt. B has my reply to this note she posted last night:

I know you were in here trying to take pictures. I called sheriff that treaspassing & you are going to be prosecuted the frig was broke haven it fixed will be back tomorrow.

DO NOT COME IN here without my permission you are not my landlord if she wants to talk .....

My reply was basically:

I have already talked with the sheriff and my sister.

I have power of attorney for this building.

Since you have not been here officially for the past month and therefore not available, I do not need your permission. I was on the phone with the landlord last night when your brother invited me in. Landlord reserves the right to enter premises for inspection. See #13 of the lease agreement.

-end of that bit-

I'm amazed a little that she spelled 'prosecuted' correctly, such a big word for her small mind.

I saw her leaving a few minutes ago dressed in scrubs. She's got a job somewhere it seems.

My other sister said she was trying to intimidate me with her first statement. I didn't need to take pictures inside when I got such good shots from outside the windows!! Of course she wrote things on the one wall and I've been able to pull out a few things that were practically painted over. Her bitching about mouse droppings all over the stove (complete lie), the carpet being nasty (when I thought it was supposed to have been replaced?), no gutters on the house (which does not affect her in anyway) and something about the "landlord's [unintelligible] pisses his pants" which is just a juvenile shot at me. She was unauthorized to remove any property other than her own from the apartment. I'm surprised she didn't lock the door. ^_^ I reattached the
strike plate to the front door. I was planning to change the lock and then leave it unlocked to make them think they still had a working key. (evil grin)

The fact that con-artist called the sheriff's dept over the fridge basically means she's scared. She gets arrested for one more thing and she's in jail for a while, probably. I will see if we still have one photo of the fridge originally put in there so I can compare it to what they'll "return."

Maybe they got the notice ? ^_^

OK so anywho, tonight my mom has a sleep study and we leave here around 7:40 pm. I get back around 8:30 pm and notice the black grate thingy that goes at the bottom of a refrigerator is laying out front of Apt. B. Earlier there were a bunch of people, the lady we tried to rent to, her trespassing freeloader boyfriend, and a few of their friends.

I come back, they're gone. So is the frig. My sister bought that fridge. Boy will mom have a field day with that. There's graffiti in the bedroom. I got a snippet of that on the camera.

I called the sheriff to file a report and deputy called me back to take my report.

A few minutes ago, the guy with the green truck returns. Someone picks up the lady's car and he goes inside. Well, we can pretty much guess they've been fixing dry wall damage that has happened, and the guy doing the work isn't doing a bad job at that. I ask him where the fridge is, he says he doesn't know what's up with that. I guess another person with a truck showed up and they took it??

I told him the fridge wasn't to be removed. I went through the list of stuff that's also not to be removed. I had my sister on the phone the whole time. ^_^ He lets me in to see things, except for the bedroom. (you can guess why but I know already - and I really wanted a good shot of the stuff they wrote). There's a few more things of the lady's to remove and that's OK. I said as soon as her stuff is out, I need the keys back. The locks will be changed as soon as her stuff is out and I have the keys.

He'll finish up and paint things, which is OK. I mean, they're at least making some good, but at the same time they stole the fridge. The report is filed and charges will be brought up.

Whew!! I thought they'd never leave!!!

Annoying frustration of Google image search

I don't know what's going on with Google's image search, but every so often I'll come up with a search term that brings about annoying behavior that I cannot figure out!!

OK. On the desktop, it's WinXP with all the latest updates. We have AVG and Norton for antivirus protection, possibly Spybot S&D in the background, and Norton Internet Security.

Most recent search term I used was the entire line, including quotes:

"car show" "sailor moon"

The first page comes up blank!! It'll have the Google stuff at the top and then the line of page numbers at the bottom but no results in between! This bodes badly. If I bring up page 2 of the results, I get stuff. Usually when one page of results comes up blank, others later on can sometimes behave the same way. "gamehotties" or the site URL in full also brings up similar behavior of Google image search - some pages are blank.

WebTV NEVER has this problem!!! By comparison!

This behavior on the desktop occurs in BOTH Internet Exploder 6 and Firefox 1.whatever it is. (I have the install for FF 2 but haven't run it yet.)

I don't think I've ever had a problem with Google Image search when I used Internet Exploder 4 on the Win95 laptop.

ARGH! I hate knowing something could be filtering and or blocking my content for absolutely no reason at all other than it's trying to piss me off. A good thing I still use WebTV.

Sometimes when you fiddle with something you figure it out

When I found out about yet one more piece of Wedding Peach animation that I still had not seen, I tried a bit of a websearch to find it. One website had a link - the key verb is HAD - but the file was removed and so was the link!

Then I found someone on Youtube uploaded a rather poor quality copy of it. The clip is the 3 girls Yuri, Hinagiku, and Momoko, on stage singing Virgin Love. This appeared on a Furil concert Laserdisc, but for some reason ADV never got the rights to it.

The problems with the clip from Youtube, aside from the asinine and annoying blockiness - Youtube allows for clips to be 150MB or 10 minutes, so when you're under the time limit, at least go for quality - is that when you have decoders that can play Flash Video media, they don't always transcode into other container formats well enough that the audio and video match up.

One converter I have can do the video from 23 to 29.97 frames per second. The video plays too fast at 23, and too slow at 29.97. There was a middle setting of 25 that I had to use when extracting the video by itself. Then I had to go back in and pull out the audio by itself.

If I couldn't adjust the playback speed of the video, but I do have Audacity and it can adjust the playing speed of the audio! In order to remotely have the video and audio synchronized for much at all, they'd have to play at almost the same length of time. The audio, I found out, was about 1.7 seconds too short! Audacity allowed me to adjust the speed by a small amount - -.8 percent. That's a Negative eight tenths of a percent speed reduction. This meant the audio would now run longer than the video, but under tests I performed using Windows Movie Maker, it pretty much synchronized well, much better than the program that had converted it.

I had used VLC to play the original file and it did a nice job - the video and audio remained aligned, but VLC as a stream converter, it's lacking in functionality. It can play the file it creates, but almost nothing else will. My Apex DVD player could play it...

But at any rate, I was able to convert the file, mix it back together, and even grabbed my translation of Virgin Love, and subbed about 95% of the clip. ^_^

If I can get a nice clearer copy and the dialogue translated a bit better than I did it, I'll resub it again.

Now that I figured out that Windows Movie Maker can do subtitles but not exactly where I'd like them, I might re-do the Hana Yori Dango movie... ^_-

I figured out how to grab streaming media...

With the use of SDP Multimedia's streaming media downloading software, which is free, and Mozilla Firefox, also free, I finally was able to grab digital audio samples of stuff from Japanese web pages for anime CDs that have samples to listen to.

I focused mainly on Tokyo Mew Mew CDs because I seriously want the actual CD. Two tracks for Mew Pudding have a Chinese flavor, and it's those I really wanted. The audio samples are about 45 seconds in length, unless of course the actual track is just under that length... ^_^ The Windows Media Player clips are much clearer and better quality than the comparable and muddy audio of RealPlayer. I guess it's not Memorex either.

Basically... Load up SDP's software and launch Firefox (provided you are already online). Launch a 2nd window of Firefox because you will need it.

Go to CD Japan's website (just as an example - this could work for others that offer streaming clips of anything). Find the listing in English of the CD you are interested in. If it shows that samples are available, launch that page link in another tab. Close the originating tab.

Find the WMP streaming link for the clip you want to hear and left click on it. A smaller window will now open and load from some website. Pay attention to the URL that Firefox says it's loading that window from. You will need that as your Main website URL in the 2nd window. Write it down, and then type it in the 2nd window, but don't click Go yet.

Go back to the player window that opened. When the player window is loaded and likely the clip playing already, hit Stop on the play bar. Move your mouse pointer to the bottom, just above the bottom border for the window. If you right click here, you will eventually get to the pop up menu for Showing that page or frame's source. Open it. You want to see the source HTML for the player window. For the player I had to deal with here, the 2nd line actually linked to the media bar and played the clip. Highlight this line. The first one loaded the album image, the 2nd is the line you want. It's easy enough to figure out. Do Not include the quotes!

Copy the line that basically has the URL info you need, and go into your 2nd browser window. Paste the text there after the main site URL that you should have observed Firefox loading from, and Go.

You should get a slightly funky page, but the streaming media bar will be there, and loading the media. Stop the playback, and right click to look at the source for the page. This is where you should find the MMS link to the WMA media you are trying to save! When you find it, highlight and Copy. Bring up SDP's thingy, and Open, Right click to Paste and OK. Then Go and it will bring up a Save box, then grab your media. Presto. Always look for MMS links for media, and SDP can grab it.

Some of the Tokyo Mew Mew clips I saved were less than 45 seconds long, and the rest were about 45 seconds. Sometimes that's enough, but I still want those CDs!!

Da latest

Well, I have my withdrawal card from the union. I've begun filing for unemployment compensation but I don't know right now if it'll be approved right away or I have to appeal. I think that'll need cleared up.

I wrote a 2 page letter to the union appealing the decision to not pursue my situation, so perhaps it will be further looked into, since I can bring up any other issues that relate to my case.

I've filled out lots of job apps. Nobody's called me back on any of them. Maybe I should call them? Dammit.

When they ask for reason why I left LJS, I put down "desired a less stressful environment." The reason for leaving Big Bird, I put "desired a return to food service."

Rite Aid, in the same plaza as Big Bird, is looking for a full time cashier. That would be sweet. I'd be visible in the same building and pRick couldn't do anything about it. But they ask if I've ever been dismissed or forced to resign. I was dismissed before my probationary period was up at Fisher's Big Wheel because I couldn't work with one other guy and unload the trucks fast enough. I guess that counts, but if I don't list it as one of my thingies in employment history, I think they'll ask why it's not there, and I guess my answer would be it was over 10 years ago.

Hmm...

I applied at the nursing home where my sister works, but unless her boss lady gets enough balls to get rid of one lady who's been milking the clock, as my sister puts it, then I'm still waiting for too long for that call. My sister says I'd have to get a physical (I hate them), a TB test (I don't have it and one test in Jr. High I basically avoided because I hate tests where stuff is injected into you - just something creepy and wrong with that), and something else. And for some stupid reason, I'd have to wear scrubs. Uh... Altman Hospital has an online job app site, but they ask if I've ever been fired. Online info I found doesn't indicate that they can't ask that, and advice people have left says to answer truthfully. I'm not sure what reason to put.

Big Wheel - couldn't work fast enough
LJS - ???
Big Bird - buying the wrong item at the wrong time

Some people say to write "ask me to explain".

My friends who still unfortunately work there are not spending their money in the store anymore for fear what happened to me will happen to them. As long as it doesn't line pRick's pockets. Mom's psychiatrist (or whatever she is) says she's very familiar with Asperger's. Mom just happened to ask out of the blue. The doctor rattled off a list of stuff and Mom seemed to think it described me well, and that I was probably born with Asperger's, which means I got it from my dad, and he's a real jerk. So there's possible talk to set up an appointment for possible evaluation. And then there was talk of possible "prescribing" of medications. She can prescribe whatever she wants, I ain't taking it. I will refuse because I don't need medication for anything mental. I don't believe in in it because I'm not experiencing anything that needs medication. I'm not a crazy person like one lady friends have told me about. But if the evaluation goes the way we're expecting, at least there's SSI or whatever I'd get.

Gee, if only they hadn't changed the rules, otherwise I could look forward to a several thousand dollar award, like my dad got. For his "mental impairment" of whatever, he got a check for a cool $10K when he filed. Promised each of his kids $1K each, but me and my sisters had to call him on the phone at his new personal 800 number to beg for it. While his kids with his 2nd wife didn't. Messed up, ne? I never saw any of the promised money, either. I could use it now!!!

I felt good about Subway when I applied there. "We're Rolling" Pretzel company was hiring and I applied there. Panera Bread was hiring and I applied there, but they actually gave me an estimated amount of time before I could expect a call.

I guess things are more stringent now. Consumer reports? Background checks? !!! What does my credit score have to do with being able to work? That's stupid and unfair.

I am so bored.

Tamagotchi V.4.5 has the star thingy attachment and looks like the UraTama a friend got for me from Yodobashi Camera in Tokyo. ^_^

Oh yeah, blurb: Comic Con announcement of sorts: Tokyopop licensed Mamotte Shugogetten manga. At least this time we'll likely get to see the entire run. Raijin got only 4 books out, with nearly 5 or 6 books worth of content in their magazine. I emailed Tokyopop about not making the same mistakes.

I recommended they look into "Bow Wow Wata" and when I email them again about Shugogetten, I'll ask them to look into Hanaukyou Maids manga.

Compounding Crap

Well, it wasn't enough for me to get suspended from my job for doing
nothing wrong. Oh no. Our tenanant in Apt. B and her 'boyfriend' had to
add something more. At some point after Tuesday, like Tuesday night or
whatever, they threw a bunch of brand new finishing nails under my car.
While I think they were intending to try to make me drive over them and
flatten a tire, they were thrown in such a way as to short out something
in my electrical system, thereby shorting out my battery and destroying
my alternator.

I'm going to fill out an application where my younger sister works and
see how soon things happen after that. The union is fighting for me and
everyone feels I have a case to get my job back. There's things I did
wrong, but there's things I did right.

I have a feeling it'll be a tough fight and I might have to take it to
an arbitrator.

Just yet another personal vendetta thing the high boss has against me in
his quest to make me quit working there.