MikeBrum.com

I received my RAM for my (Mariah’s) laptop. Now it’s up to 72M from 8M (a nice hike, eh?). Installation went smooth and there’s no bad news to speak of. It’s the first time I’ve done *anything* with any laptop hardware (even though it was horribly simple), but I’m still happy with it.

I’m sure a certain someone will be more than happy when I turn over control of the laptop to her in April :)

A bit earlier tonight I removed my nipple ring. It was migrating and REFUSED to stop crusting up and I was getting little bumps on the sides of the exit holes. All in all, not a good scene and it wasn’t making any progress.

So, in classic BME tradition, I decided to take some before & after pics. :)

You’ll notice quite a bit of crusties on the ring, as I took the pics before I cleaned it after I got home from work.

I then cleaned them with sea-salt and a q-tip and removed all of the dry skin and crusties as I could. I then did an actual sea-salt soak and “massaged” my nipple to make sure that any lymph was removed during the soak. It’s not something that you want to be encapsulated in your nipple when the ends close up. If so, you’re just asking for trouble.

So, in massaging it, my nipple started to bleed just slightly. Not too surprising given that they were still lymphing and that they were migrating. Since there wasn’t any white or green “stuff”, I figured I was pretty good and dried everything up.

I snapped another pic and that was that. Everything’s looking good now and I’m sure I’ll have them re-pierced in a few months (that would be the 3rd time for each nipple!). I think I’m going to try a larger gauge right off. The first time was at 14g and they migrated. The second time they were done at 12g and they migrated too. I want to go for 8g or 6g and hope they stay put this time. If they migrate out this time, I’ll probably give up.

They say third time’s a charm – we’ll see!

I picked up a new mouse today. I currently have a very nice cordless keyboard and mouse from Logitech. I’ve had it for about 2 years now and the mouse buttons are finally starting to wear down. Double clicking can be hard and a lot of time clicking & dragging is very difficult too. The switch inside it is almost shot.

So, I went out on a limb and picked up the 3M Renaissance Mouse. I’m not a fan of ergonomics for no other reason than it’s uncomfortable to me. But this just looks “fun”. It fits my hand very nicely and even though having the left & right mouse button under my thumb seems odd, it hasn’t been too hard to get accustomed to.

So here’s a few pics so you have an idea of how wacky it looks.

Oh- and it makes playing MechWarrior 4 A LOT of fun! :)

Well, INS officially sucks. There’s no doubt about it. Luckily, they’ve given us some very helpful information the past 2 days, but that doesn’t make up for sucking in general. They just suck a little less right now.

Other than that, I’ve been generally exhausted lately. Stress sucks.

Mariah coerced me to snap some pics tonight for her so I’m going to throw a couple up for shits & giggles. Nothing exciting, but why the fuck not.

1. Just me.
2. Close up of my eye (It took a few times to get that shot – I was seeing spots!).
3. Profile with nice shot of my lobe.
4. My big forehead. It looks bigger from the top.
5. My tongue (it’s a bit yellow because I was drinking Coke).
6. You can see up my nose… and my septum plug too.

Yeah, I was right and my modified image uploading feature now works correctly! So cool… so cool…

I think I have figured out what the deal is with my funktified thumbnails.

<geek>

I use PHP (as you might know) for almost all of my programming with only a few Perl remanents here and there. PHP makes it a lot easier to do a lot of the things Perl does fairly well; DB connectivity and the use of GD for instance.

I use GD to create the thumbnails and then save them to their own happy little directory. They’re created from pre-existing .jpg files, compressed a bit and other then their dimensions, they’re the exact same picture. That’s why I was SO DAMN CONFUSED at why I kept getting these REALLY HORRIBLE looking thumbnails when they were created dynamically through PHP.

I’ve been using the ImageCreate() function in PHP to create a GD image and then assign the pre-existing JPG information into it (in short). Well, I just found out today that there’s an ImageCreateTrueColor() function that does almost the same thing as ImageCreate() except for one small (but very important) detail… ImageCreateTrueColor(), like it’s name implies, creates a true color image from your designated specifications. ImageCreate() creates an image with 256 colors!

Why is this important? Well, because my images that I’ve been working with are true color images (taken from my digital camera). So, when a true color image (which contains millions and millions of different colors) is put into an image format of 256 colors, A LOT of image information is lost – thus resulting in a funky ass picture that might not look anything like the original pic.

I need to point out that nowhere in the specs of ImageCreate() did it mention that it only uses 256 colors. Only in the specs of ImageCreateTrueColor() is this distinction made. (something that would be greatly useful to fix!). This is why, for so long, I had no idea what was going on.

</geek>

I’m at work right now, so I can’t do anything about it, but as soon as I get home I’m going to probably make the changes in the appropriate code and hope (and assume) that it works. It certainly does make sense on paper!

Well, I heard back from the guy that I talked to about that job a couple of weeks ago. He wants to know when I’m available to start, so I’m going to send him an email with all that info and try to fish for some more info myself. I’m very excited about it!

That’s obviously the good news. The bad news, and it really doesn’t get all that much worse than this, but Mariah was denied at customs, thus she’s not in Boston right now like she should be. We’re not sure when she will be getting here, so you’ll undoubtedly be kept in the loop (as I don’t have a lot else to write about).

So, needlessly to say, I’m REALLY bummed right now. This really sucks.

Well, it’s Thursday (and also pay day). Too bad rent’s due. Eh.

Tonight, I’m going to be getting some food with Kel and her friend Danilla. Kel’s going back to Florida next week, so gotta say some good byes. Then on Saturday, it looks like I’ll be bussing down to Newport again to get all geeky with Nick, Joe and Pat. I hate the bus! Bah!

But, that’ll be the last D&D game for a few weeks. Mariah’s arriving on 3/6 and we just have a bunch of stuff to get done and my next couple of weekends look blocked. Hopefully Nick will get motivated and actually prepare BEFORE Saturday so we can get a lot done. If not, then it looks like we’ll be stuck waiting for a bit.

Not much else is going on. Though I do have to say that I’m REALLY excited about Mariah getting back to Boston! Other than about a month in June before the wedding, she’s here for good. Her pooch is going to be brought down around 3/23 by her mom & step-dad, so that will be weird. I’ve never owned a dog while I was living in an apartment, so this is going to be a learning experience. Hopefully it won’t be too big of a hassle. Oh well, not much I can do about it. The dog comes with Mariah – it’s a package deal :)

Well, my lunch break is coming to an end. I’ll undoubtedly write more as things develope.

I made one of those friend quiz things. Feel free to check it out here: http://crazy-ted.friendtest.com.

Some people (namely Pat and Elly) have decided to take the quiz twice. Elly did after finding out a few things, but Pat did after I basically told him all the right answers :) So taking that into account, Mariah is still in the lead of the non-cheaters. :)

Either way, enjoy. It’s something pass a few minutes.

This weekend wasn’t too bad. When I got home from work on Friday, I had received two items I had won from eBay, a 4-port router and a 10/100 LAN / Modem card for my (Mariah’s) laptop.

Since I wanted to stay online, I decided to futz with the laptop and get that all set up. Much like the way my luck goes, it was anything but smooth. It got to the point where anytime I tried to connect through the card, something (IE, Netscape, AIM) would crash. So, after a bit more than an hour of that, I gave up.

I ended up talking to Mariah for a while and we both got offline around midnight. I couldn’t sleep so I had the ridiculous idea to screw with the router. Surprisingly enough, the setup went VERY smooth and I had all 3 of my PC’s online and working without issue. Additionally, getting my laptop squared away wasn’t difficult at all and everything works great now! I’m very pleased with the way things are working with it! (And I can even play MechWarrior 4 again!!!)

Saturday consisted of me taking the bus down to Newport to hang with Pat and Nick. Saturday night consisted of playing D&D with Pat, Nick and Joe, after he arrived later that evening. Everything went really well. It was the first time we all played our characters together since we converted them to 3rd ed. from 2nd ed. We’re all considerably more powerful and working well together (roughly speaking). We ended up playing until about 5:00am or so. At 5:30, Joe and I left and I actually drove back to Brockton. I got right on the train without crashing at Joe’s and go home around 7:30. I was asleep about 8:00am. Needlessly to say, it was a LONG day!

Yesterday was overly uneventful by all measures of the word. I have no idea what is in store for this week, though we’re playing D&D again next weekend… which hopefully won’t run as late into the morning!