taco bell has been on my mind ever since i had read that dardy got some the other day. what intrigues me is the meximelt. i’ve never had it before and knowing now that many people consider it their favorite taco bell item, i’ve gotta go get it now.

i was telling paul about my adventures in replacing the bathroom faucet with the lack of proper tools.

me: so i was trying to get the old faucet off, but there’s 9 years of dirt, grime, and mineral deposits that i had to fight with and i didn’t have any of the right tools.
paul: so you had one of those basin wrenches?
me: no, i just told you i didn’t have the right tools.
paul: what??
me: yeah, all i had was a pipe wrench and pliers.
paul: so did you get it off?
me: yeah, but i had to rip off the basin from the pedestal to get access.
paul: so you recaulked the basin?
me: yeah.
paul: man.
me: i know.

happy new year! i was celebrating new year’s at paul’s place and for dinner paul made prime rib. he asked me how big of a cut i wanted and i told him to give me an inch. he cut me an inch and a half instead and i looked at him, looked at the cut of prime rib, and said, “alright, i could do that.”

last year, i placed second in my company’s fantasy football league. this year, though the last games have not been played and i might be prematurely calling it, it looks like i’ve won. unless the 2nd place team’s 2 players can rack up an unprecedented 190 points, i think i’ve got it in the bag.

this season has been chock full of injuries, disappointing performances from studs, and surprising rookie performances. all in all, it’s been a fun season. i wish i played in more than one league, but it was good fun, nonetheless.

after getting a brand new windows vista laptop, i was pretty excited to see what all the hubbub was all about with vista. yeah, there was a lot of bad press about the OS and yeah, it is rumored to be slower, so why go with vista? well, we’re gonna eventually move there anyway, so i figured we might as well make the plunge now.

the biggest issue i’ve come across so far is that the default windows vista drivers do not correctly identify the external usb hard drive that we have. in fact, none of our external drives worked out of the box. and the fix was actually not very easily found for me, anyway.

but here’s the fix that worked for me in case anyone else runs into the same issue that i found from here:

1) go to c:\windows\inf
2) change the permissions of INFCACHE.1 so that you can delete it.
3) delete this file.
4) reboot.
5) plug in drive and it worked for me.

now that we are fostering 5 little pups and a big mama dog and after getting sick from what could have been some kind of bacterial infection, i’ve been even more diligent that ever before about washing my hands after handling any of the dogs.

as a result, my hands have become super dry. i’ve tried using lotion, but either i’m not using enough or the soap is just too strong. either way, my knuckles have become really dry and it has now spread to other joints. so dry that they are cracking and bleeding. 🙁 i think that i will go and try to get some super lotion to help out with my hands.

the worst case scenario is that i’ll be wearing vaseline gloves soon. =P

i was talking to paul and he was mentioning that i should really implement support for his company’s plugin into my gallery. i took a look at what was required and it didn’t look like it was going to be too bad. i just had to add a media rss feed to the gallery and the plugin should pick it all up.

or so the thinking goes. it turned out that i had some broken code, well, not broken, but let’s just call it bad code in my gallery. so i decided to clean everything escape, escape all special characters and generally be standards compliant. i knew i wasn’t standards compliant, but there wasn’t really anything motivating me to fix things because it still worked.

it also turns out that i have a LOT of javascript going on in my gallery to make it look pretty. this is my favorite version of my gallery so far. so anyway, i did all the things that i thought i needed to do to support the plugin and i tried it out and sure enough, it didn’t work. i pinged paul and told him that it didn’t work for me. we debugged it a little and had resolved that there was nothing else that i could do and that the plugin was probably confused with all of the junk i added to my gallery to make it look pretty.

paul: let me work on it a bit and find the problem.
wilco: it’s not a big deal for me 😛
wilco: i don’t care myself, but if you care then that’s fine 😛
paul: it’s a big deal for me 😛
wilco: hahaha

i guess it’s all relative. he told me today that there’s a version that’s working better with my gallery and it should be released soon. now that’s service.

i worked on this problem at work that really shouldn’t have taken so long to figure out. i don’t know why it did, but there was a time where i was ready to throw in the towel. i just thought that it just might not be possible. after struggling for such a long time, my frustration started to get the better of me.

after taking a little break, i finally got things to work. it really wasn’t THAT hard, but there must have some kind of mental block that i was suffering at the time.

i think that it’s because i have been under the weather. i just haven’t been thinking straight for a while now. i have had some bad, bad stomach problems and i think now that what i actually had was campylobacter. i sort of think i got it from the dogs that we were fostering. the crazy thing is that i’m actually pretty anal about washing my hands after handling the dogs. but man, nearly two weeks of bad stomach problems…i’m just glad that i’m feeling better now. it’s been a tough couple of weeks.

i found a link on how to upgrade ram in a dell latitude that absolutely saved my life. on my previous ram upgrades all of the ram sockets were accessible on the bottom of the laptop. needless to say that when i went to upgrade this laptop and found that the laptop did not have two banks for memory, i was terrified that you could only upgrade one bank and had to buy the machine configured with the other bank as is. it just didn’t make sense to me at all!

it turns out that the other memory slot is UNDER THE KEYBOARD. sheesh, talk about inconvenient! but prying off the keyboard wasn’t that bad after i got over how scary it seemed because it seems that it’s a friction/snap fit and you kind of have to torque the keyboard out of its place.

all in all, it was still pretty painless and definitely worth the savings to upgrade yourself instead of paying double for dell to do it for you.

great post on the howto, it saved me!

i’ve been sick as a dog this weekend and slowly getting better with each day. yesterday, i drifted in and out of consciousness. i had the worst chills and hot spells that i could remember in a long while. with two down blankets on me, i was still shivering uncontrollably. at first, i had thought that i had a bad fever (which i still think i did, but was not the root cause of my illness), but later had decided that i actually had the case of bad food poisoning.

i’m not completely sure what it was that did me in, but i think it was the little cesar’s pizza that i had on saturday. it’s the last time that i’m going to have the $5 pizza. i didn’t eat anything on sunday except half a bowl of soup that christi forced me to eat. on monday, i started to feel a little bit better.

right now, my stomach is still turning a little, but the fever and chills have gone away. it’s been a pretty miserable weekend and i just want to feel better soon.