MikeBrum.com

As some of you know, I check many of the different mailboxes on our servers that have been set up over the years and also the catch-all account at work. This means that I get to read TONS of spam every day. Naturally, Monday morning is the biggest load since it’s everything from the weekend from Friday night.

I received this in one message today and I just can’t get over it:

Come on! What is “100% Natural” about binding someone’s mouth closed so that they don’t snore??? It just seems to me that a device like that is just asking for someone to die due to some unfortunately though ridiculous accident!

It’s about as “natural” as cutting off someone’s foot to solve a limp!

I’m rather pleased to say that I’ve figured out how to capture video and audio on my machine now! It’s something I’ve never done before, so I’m quite excited about it! I have to get some longer cords to set up a line from my VCR to sound card. For the time being, I’ve been using a CD player as a stand-in to test things with an audio line in.

In other news, it’s cold and snowey. I don’t like cold or snow at all. I think today is going to be me hanging around at home taking it easy. I’m just not in the mood to spend a ton of effort bundling up to wander around in the cold and get snow all over everything.

I left work a bit early today (5:30) and headed to the Sprint service center out near Coolidge Corner so they could look at my phone and try to figure out why it just wasn’t woking. I gave them the phone and made myself busy for an hour while they ran it through some magic tests. After all that, they didn’t know. But that’s a good thing – because they simply took my phone and gave me a new one (though the exact same model). I suspect that it’s probably a factory refurb, but this one turns on and works – my last one wouldn’t ;)

The only bad thing is that I don’t have any of my contacts that were in the old phone. If it would have turned on, then they could have transfered the info to the new phone, but since it was absolutely dead, there wasn’t any chance of that.

So if you gave me your phone # in the past – make sure you send it to me – just to make sure I get it again!

I’ve just been doing some small things and tying up some loose ends that were pushed back while I was on vacation. Looks like all the little things are taken care of – so now it’s onto the bigger projects… ugh…

I’m in Canada now. Marria is off at work for a few hours so I’m taking this opportunity to check messages, do an update (obviously) and just relax in general. I’m still feeling rather horrible from this nasty sinus cold but I’ve been noticing some slight improvements and I hope that the end is coming soon.

Flying out of Boston was a chore. The plane that was flying out of Ottawa to Boston that we were going to be boarding was delayed for an hour due to de-icing. It’s definately something that I’m glad that did (because dying in a plane crash wouldn’t be fun), but none-the-less, it’s very annoying to just sit around in the airport termnial bored out of my mind.

I brought Marria a few gifts and she gave me my birthday gifts. They’re all going to be a lot of fun and I’ll take pics and list them out when I get home. I’m sure there’s going to be quite a few pics when I get home, so stay posted.

Anyhow, I’m going to be getting off so I can go and take the dog for a walk. I’ve only been here a few days and I’m already being put to work. Geeze ;)

Saw Dog Fashion Disco, Deadsy and Mindless Self Indulgence tonight. Very fun show!

DFD was great – the were the main reason I went to the show. I would have liked them to have played a longer set, but they were still really good!

Deadsy was really flat. They really weren’t overly animated (not that you’d assume so with a name like “deadsy”) and to me all of their songs sounded the same. The drummer (as odd as it sounds) was probably the most talented in the group!

MSI was A LOT of fun – very energetic and great performers. During the latter half of their show, some guy’s forhead came up and smacked into the top of my cheekbone / bottom of my eye. Yes – it hurt a lot! It’s a bit puffy and red right now. I’m thinking I won’t get a black eye (else I probably would’ve by now) but it might still be a bit puffy tomorrow. Eh – I’m not too worried.

Either way – it was a lot of fun! Nick is watching Requiem for a Dream right now. It really wigged me out when I watched it. I usually enjoy fatalistic irony, but for some reason this movie just didn’t sit well with me at all.

Anyhow, tonight was a lot of fun and I hope to sleep well. I’m pooped – so I’ll need it.

So, yesterday started off a bit shakey… after that was mostely dealt with, I left for the train. Guess what – I missed it. Seems the MBTA (the people that run the public transit over here) changed the commuter rail schedule on 11/4 but never updated their website. So the train that I was catching now leaves 15 minutes earlier – just enough for me to miss it.

Needlessly to say – I was NOT pleased!

So for the 2 hours I had to burn I wandered around Boston aimlessly taking pictures (a bunch included here) because I simply had time to burn and had my camera with me. It was really windy and it was actually difficult to steady the camera at times because everything was blowing so hard! But then again, I tend to love the wind, so it wasn’t too bad.

So I finally get to the train station and I get picked up by my mom’s husband, Ray. He took me to my dad’s for a while where I got some decent food and basically sat around. From there it was to my mom’s where my brother was hanging around with some of his friends. They didn’t end up playing paintball due to a bunch of rain, so I didn’t miss anything there. We ate some cake because it’s Ray’s birthday on Wednesday and my mom always gets people cake.

When I get home my roommate was laborously cleaning the bathroom (rock!) – seems that he’s having some girl over. It’s always nice when other ppl clean and you don’t have to ;)

Anyhow, here’s a bunch of pics from around Boston…

Last summer a bunch of us – Marria, Shannon, Rachel, Jon and Shannon’s sister – went to a petting zoo not too far out of Toronto. A bunch of us posted a bunch of pics a few months ago. Well, one of the things that happened was 2 emus that were there were going NUTS and running into the fences and shit… it was simply crazy.

Anyhow, I took a bit of video of it and it just sat on my hard drive until last night. I pieced the bits together and dropped some simply music behind it. There’s no real editing done, just splicing the different pieces together and it’s not small either – about 16M. Sorry about the size – I don’t know the first thing about video compression!

So, here’s the link if you want to take a look at last summer’s crazy emus!!! Just save the file to disk and play it from there. Enjoy!

Oh yeah, that was me.

I got bored and started changing shit around and now this is what I’m left with. I’m not sure if I like it or not but I’m going to leave it for a while.

If you have the inclination – leave a message.

Well, it’s been over 3 weeks since I last updated. As you recall from my past update, I was waiting on an order for some computer parts. Unfortunately, those guys were incompetent assholes and not only sat on an incomplete order for a week and a half without letting me know, but then failed to offer any sort of customer service after that week and a half of silence. Fuck that. I’m fairly sick of being ignored and only being considered as someone to give a business money.

So, that aside, I ended up going another route to get computer parts and that went smoothly until UPS fucked up royally and lost shit and after a lot of fuss and problems I finally got my stuff and I’m back up and running without issue.

Now that I have a way to comfortably get online, expect a more regular updating schedule. I’ve been fairly busy lately, though nothing overly huge to note. Drop messages if you are curious.

Wow, the past short while has kept me VERY busy. The past few weeks at work have been nothing but crazy and exhausting. Not bad, just very nutty.

Other pieces of news: my computer crapped out on me and I’ve been running around trying to get everthing to work properly. I have an old instal of win98SE running on a thrown together machine, but it’s far below the level that I want/need. So I need to get my other HD with win2K up and running, though I’ve been having some strange problems with that. *ugh*

In a few weeks I should be receiving a barebones machine from Alvio. They have some really good deals on barebones systems, esp. if you can strip out some of the things they throw in there. Unfortunately, I’m not expecting the machine for a while because it’s going to be built, then tested, and THEN shipped. Plus, I opted for it to be sent ground because 2nd day was something like $50 – screw that!

So that’s effectively my last few weeks in a very small nutshell. Though I do have to say that there was one to two weeks that I did nothing but work, sleep and work more, which wasn’t overly fun.

Hopefully this computer shit will clear up soon and I can get back with the way things are supposed to be… hopefully.