Just Got done visiting here

Going through some stuff

For some reason I decided to go through some of the CDs and stuff Mom has around here. I find she bought, while we were out at my grandparents' house, some DVDs of Roy Rogers that she never even opened. I imagine she bought these and then hid them or definitely intended to watch them. I don't even know where she found them. The Elvis movies were opened, but they might have been from Half.com. And she might have watched them when I was at work back then. She could get around rather well, but as my mind flashes through things, her mobility gradually declined.

I found home video tapes of stuff she recorded, and it's sad to see her there doing things just barely 11 or 12 years ago. She bought our VHS-C camera in late 1999, and she got to use it quite a bit. She went to a few festivals - there's some tapes I hope I still run across and copy to DVD. First time at Jacobs Field on Mother's Day in 2000. The time she visited my older sister when she lived in Ann Arbor and went to the Windsor Casino and went to a Detroit Lions game on Thanksgiving. I really hope I find that tape.

It make me depressed to see some of that again, but things like Makenzie (then my only niece) watching and playing along with My Neighbor Totoro made me happy that I found it again, glad that I was able to record that, but sad that things turned out the way they did.

Anywho, some of the CDs I might look to taking to one of these places that buy or exchange your unwanted media like CDs and DVDs and see what I can get in exchange. I really don't need cash for these CDs. Stuff I really have no interest in. I guess if other family members really wanted them, they'd have claimed what they wanted already.

I am keeping some of Mom's CDs. At least the stuff I also like. I see no reason to get rid of all of Mom's stuff at the moment.

Annoying!

Power out again! 5:23 pm

How we were affected by the 2011 storm (so far anyway)

Last night I was watching Tosh.0 on Comedy Central, and around 23
minutes into the latest show, the power hiccups and so does the
satellite box. Dammit. It's having troubles locking onto the signal, so
I knock some ice off the dish. That helps things, but then 3 minutes
have passed. Another 2 minutes possibly left, and the power drops out
for a brief moment and comes back on.. ARGH...!!! And then just as the
box is getting done with that, the power goes out AGAIN. It comes back
on and then out for the rest of the night after 10:39 pm. The UPS keeps
1 light and the router and cable modem powered for about an hour or so
before it beeps continously and I shut it off.

Anywho, I find the electric company outage reporting number and go to
use the wired-in phone, the one that works when nothing else will and
report things. I get told due to the overwhelming weather related
problems, it might not be until 12 noon Wednesday for most areas, and
even then, there's spots that won't get power until later in the day.

It's going to be a long, cold night.

Schools are closed, Cleveland is in a state of emergency. There's ice
everywhere there's snow. And ice where there isn't snow.

Wake up this morning to find that the report of above freezing
temperatures was accurate, as some of the ice is gone now. A green tarp
put out front to keep water from leaking in has actually backed up water
to the door and leaked underneath it. It's just in the carpet on the
front porch... Not much but that tarp needs moved or adjusted.

At 8:59 am, the power clicked back on. I started cranking the heat and
getting things powered on. The satellite easily finds a signal. My car
which was covered with ice last night isn't covered this morning. But
now we have a howling wind and I don't need that.

Oh wow. I hear the fire siren from in town now. At least some part of
Minerva had power last night. I saw the orange glow of the sodium lights
over the distant tree line in that direction...

Some people who went to Dizzney World for the week aren't missing
anything. I wish I could not be missing it with them.

Heartcatch Pretty Cure ends and I has a sad

I wanted to see Dark Precure get her ass handed to her and feel good
about it. I wanted to see this series last another year. It got me
through a very tough time last year. Around this time last year I was
deep in depression because my mom had suddenly passed away and none of
us got a chance to say goodbye. I mostly sat around, did very little (I
did work on some figure kits but after I was done with them...) and all
the shit with the anime club, the convention, and life in general came
crashing down on top of me and life pretty much stopped.

I sat and cried a lot. I watched a lot of TV. Then there was Heartcatch
Precure. Its opening song was a bright spot in a dark room. I had
something to look forward to.

Dammit, I wish I was able to afford ordering the toys from Japan.
Dammit.

I liked how the episodes played out over the year. The summer episodes
covered Erika's club going to the beach and working on things for the
fall culture festival. Erika's lack of ambition in cleaning her room or
doing summer homework. Then the culture festival came along and that
turned out pretty awesome.

They got to be on the Uta Gassen over New Year's Day. I still wish I got
to see that clip of Morning Musume in their red china dresses a few
years ago, according to a note a friend sent me.

There were the various action stage shows that played throughout Japan
througout the year. There are lots of clips of these shows on Youtube.
Look carefully and you might find pieces of entire shows. I found 2
complete shows. One recent show had Kumojacky, and ones I've seen all
year had Cobraja as the bad guy. I didn't see any with Sasorina in it,
or maybe I didn't file that away and I probably did. All of them were in
the musical over the summer. According to the last couple of episodes,
the Heartcatch winter musical is playing now. It started on Christmas.
Maybe that will also get released on DVD. At least the show will be
released on DVDs in the coming year so maybe there'll be extra stuff on
them. Dammit Toei - you had a good thing here.

I hear the show was darn popular and the movie was a big hit.

Then I see a photo from someone in Japan - a bin of small Cure Marine
plushies discounted to 100 yen each. It's like giving them away!!!
Dammit!!!

I must get some sleep. 2 am and there's a coating of ice on things
outside. I don't know if it'll freeze solid with the layer of water on
it. Storm, what storm.

Ripped out pants, gee thanks

So anywho I'm doing my things today, and at one point I decide to visit
a Gamestop store in one plaza because it's on the way through the area
while I'm doing things and I wanna check on a couple things and maybe
get them with the gift card.

I park facing towards the rest of the parking lot and mind you, this was
on a slight incline. Because of this, I will from now on try parking as
close as possible to the store in situations like this from now on.

tonikaku, I have the car parked. And I begin walking towards the
Gamestop store. Suddenly my right shoe / foot gets told that it's
suddenly going to slide out from under me. And in doing so, my shitty
pants that I have on (let me correct that a little - the fabric is just
fine, the stitching in any clothes I wear really needs reinforced from
now on) rip from the crotch to one side on the left and down the right
leg inside seam. Quite a bit. If I wasn't wearing underwear, I'd have
flashed a couple people who saw me slip.

I didn't see any ice - I guess you could call it black ice. My plans for
the day got put on hold. I may have (or it felt like it anyway)
dislodged a few bones and joints fighting to keep my balance and not
fall on my fucking ass. I managed to not fall down and instead climb
back in my car, pride bruised (if not killed entirely) and I go home to
change and then mend the blown stitching with heavy duty button thread.

WHAT THE HELL IS IT WITH THIS PUNY THREAD THEY KEEP USING!!
GODDOMMITTTT! I really need to send a letter to King Size and tell them
to stop using wimpy shitty thread in their products. This has been the
bane of my existence. Clothes that fit, but held together with puny
thread. It needs to be thicker and more resistant to body oils /
whatever they're called / possibly sweat. It needs to be more "manly"
thread, Tim Taylor-ized thread. I've tried nylon thread and it still has
a problem of breaking down.

On another note, I've found that by telling Paint Shop Pro that my sheet
of paper is just 1 more inch longer, I can get it to print on most if
not all of the length of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I really hate that
lower half-inch margin Print Layout kept screwing me with. So I said
"OK, custom size paper 8.5 x 12.5" FTW!!! Really helpful when printing
DVD insert cards.

Jan 20th - Happy birthday to Becki Doland (in memory of her anyway) and
Elizabeth Cox, who lives in Ravenna and has tried very hard to not get
in contact with me and in fact probably has ignored or not gotten my
messages sent via Facebook, Deviantart, and MySpace. And I posted a
video of her that I recorded on Youtube, too.

Don't you just hate it when you drive somewhere and you either get
tailgated or people drive kinda too far away from you? I mean, there's
got to be the 'right amount' of following distance that makes you feel
OK about driving somewhere. If they follow too close I get pissed, but
then I get uneasy when they don't follow close enough. "Do they know
something I don't? Are my tires getting ready to explode? Is there
something coming out of my exhaust pipe? WHAT!!!???"

Anyway, I'll show those pants who is boss. I repaired them with button
thread and I hope to go back there tomorrow and finish what I planned to
do. And I'm parking right in front of the damn place and tell them to
get their property manager to salt down more of that fucking parking
lot.

K-power magazine

Some people don't remember the great 1980s computer magazines. I still
have a fondness for them. Scholastic would not be left out in their
publishing empire of various stuffs. They had Family Computing which had
some nice programs you could type in your computer in BASIC and other
things and run them. I see today's people calling "typing in a program
printed in a magazine" as Coding. No, you're not "coding". You're Typing
in a program printed in a magazine. When you're writing a program,
you're coding but only then!

Anywho, a hole in my collection that I really wanted to fill was the
earlier issues of K-Power magazine, Scholastic's computer magazine for
kids. I barely managed to snag 2 of the run without covers. There were
only 8 issues printed all in 1984 - thereafter it was folded into Family
Computing as a small section. There were a few other special books, but
the magazine itself was special.

In today's technology and all, it's now possible to have an electronic
copy of those issues, and I stumbled across one such site with K-Power
and Family Computing in PDF format. I'm glad I also found a torrent for
K-Power magazine PDFs because the site was missing 2 files and I had the
torrent download those missing files.

It's interesting going through the articles. Too many articles begging
kids to not "steal" software or use their "hacking" skills to disrupt
stuff. There was one guy who spent his own money to press a small record
of music he composed on a computer - and the surprise of all from that
is the guy has it on his website! Search for "Classical Mosquito" and
you can find MP3 files (well, in M3U format which just has the MP3 link
in it and you download that) of the guy's record. Some files are missing
from his website, but Classical Mosquito is indeed there.

The ads could have been left out. Really annoying ads. Some articles
would be page of article, page of ad, another page of article, another
annoying ad. Not all ads were annoying, but some look out of place. I
need a PDF editor that can delete pages.

It was nice to finally see the missing issues of K-power. Chuckled over
some kids who sent in programs being described as "a real hacker's
hacker." Yeah, right. Whatever. I spent time converting some Apple Basic
programs to Atari BASIC since I understood what was common to both.

I'll bet any kid who got their photo printed in K-power got beat up
later on or at least was full of themselves afterwards. The editorial
staff was always looking for stories of kids at the time who did
something with a computer. And I wonder why K-power lasted only 8 issues
on its own.

There were other things Scholastic published, like the 10 book "Micro
Adventure" series. I had managed to collect them all some years ago
after a lot of searching. It was rather exciting and unique at the time
to read a well-written adventure story and have a BASIC program to help
move the story along. In fact, there were several programs in the book
you had to type in at various points in the stories.

Re: my counseling

The guy I've been seeing has seen that I've been progressing and dealing
with my mom's passing well. I still have flashbacks of that last week.
Sometimes I wake up in tears. Other nights I've found myself still awake
at 2 am. This is a recent trend. I try to fall asleep but instead find
myself still awake as late as 3 am.

Retry: Addendum on the Takhar incident

Blogger's email to blog feature has been f^cking up lately. I'll have to
re-register my keitai a different way.

I took a little time to read the email from Takhar to the Ohio AG
office.

As it turns out, this was something sent to them from the Bookspan Book
Club on December 9, 2010. The account info they got did not include a
phone number so they did various searches to find one, and presto, they
came up with my phone number. However, the address they were sent did
not match my address they somehow found. I don't know how they matched
the phone number.

So I don't know who it was who owes money to Bookspan Book Club. It was
probably someone who used to live here but now doesn't and hasn't been
here for some time now.

I just find it odd that stuff like this happens without more checking
and oversight.

And additional to that: Ohio Edison placed my mom's arrearage on her
electric bill with a collection company. They fully well KNOW my mom had
passed away. Who do they flipping think will pay the bill? There's no
estate as it was, and even if there was, it's insolvent. They're getting
a Drop Dead letter.

If I were to take a guess as to how much debt my mom left behind, it
would be over $7,000. And the law states nobody is responsible for it. I
don't have to pay it and that's that. The companies who foolishly took
on this task will have to write it off.

Ohio Attorney General resolved the Takhar Problem

I had not realized I accidentally sent my complaint in to have it
replied to at my other address instead of to Yahoo!, but I got a nice
email from the Ohio Attorney General saying they had contacted The
Takhar Group and advised them to stop contacting me. The reply from
someone in connection to that company said they used search services to
pair up my phone number with the address of someone else they were
apparently after. I don't know who they were really after - but this
sort of thing brings up this issue:

WHY DON'T THEY CHECK THE NAME OF THE PHONE NUMBER WITH THE NAME OF THE
PERSON THEY REALLY WANT TO CONTACT?

We've gotten phone calls looking for other people who have lived at this
address, but it's annoying to think they're just pairing the address
with the phone number and ignoring the name. They _USED_ to live here
but now they don't. I mean, who would go through so much trouble to
change the name on the phone number in the listings and still be at the
same address? People move and frequently take their number with them. I
think these companies are stupid in that they don't look for the person
and address first, then do another database match up search to make sure
they have the right phone number. It's common sense to do this. Making 2
databases that linked with a common data attribute was a basic lesson in
SQL.

We've even gotten mail for other people at this address and they've not
been here for over 4, going on 5, years now. Jamie Joy? Who the hell is
Jamie Joy? I think another name was Robert Smith.

The reason I did not contact Takhar Group directly is that I've heard of
other people contacting them and finding out Takhar tries to get people
pay for something they don't owe.

I've not gotten any more calls from Takhar Group and I find it really
annoying they called outside of permitted hours and on days they're not
allowed to call. Thank you Ohio Attorney General office. You got me the
desired results. I sent Takhar a letter after the first call and then
got 2 more calls. After the 2nd, I turned over the matter to the AG's
office.

2011: Year of the bunnygirl, and something I've noticed

OK. ignore that first part even if relevant.

I've noticed I dislike having whiskers. I'm lazy in that I don't like to
shave often. But the sensation of facial hair is uncomfortable. I find
it feels like hundreds of little annoying pinpricks all over my face. I
woke up in the middle of the night to use my electric shaver to get rid
of them. If I shave too often, I tend to get irritated skin even when
using shaving foam with aloe (can't shave when too short as it's counter
productive), then get bleeding bits which I use my styptic pencil on
(which I like to say is made from Stypticin which it isn't) and that SOB
thing stings. And aftershave also stings.

So it's a toss up between shaver and foam (which also produces
sensations that really bug me when the blade is getting ready to go dull
and I've got facial hair that's not really suited for a shaver like
that) and using my electric shaver which can also be annoying in that it
pulls at whiskers in the wrong way if not handled correctly. It also
helps to clean, lube, and use sharp cutting thingies that mine uses, one
of those Norelco types.

There are also little noises produced by operating machines of various
types that I'm sure most people tune out but I hear them and sometimes
bug me. I can't describe that well because I never know what'll pop up
and bug me.