It’s amazing how quiet it gets when it’s so damn cold that you can’t go out without a heated astronaut suit or something. Last night, I closed my bedroom door to trap some of the heat, and it blocked out the sound of my computer’s fans and the occasional refrigerator noise, and I was stunned at how quiet it really was. It reminded me of when I was sleeping in Ray’s basement in the middle of nowhere, Indiana, or when I get the huge, soundproofed suite in Las Vegas, and all I can hear when I get in bed is total silence, and maybe my own heartbeat. By morning, it was almost warmed up to 15, and the mafia wannabes were outside yelling at the tops of their lungs while moving around cars. But it was nice to have a few hours of peace, and I do get that Vegas suite in a matter of days.

I haven’t left the apartment all weekend, as I mentioned, although I did go out to throw out about eight bags of takeout food garbage, and I made a quick run (literally) to the Korean bodega on the corner for some supplies. There weren’t many people on the street, although it’s now about 26 degrees outside. I believe the temps will slowly crawl up into the 40s and then drop down into total devastation again before I leave.

I realize it may be boring to be reading the Weather Channel here, but not much is up. All I’ve done all weekend is read or cycle through the channels, but I guess I’m pretty happy with that. If I had the opportunity to do it for another 10 or 20 days, I think I would. I mean, eventually I might do something drastic, like actually write on the new book or do some sit-ups or something, but I don’t think it will come to that.

OK, food is on the way, so I better find my wallet and eagerly await the door.

It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold.

I haven’t left the house since I got home Friday. I don’t even know how bad it is outside except that NY1 is saying it’s 10, and with the windchill, it’s -2. It is actually ten degrees WARMER at my birthplace of Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota. I spent my first few decades hearing the horror stories of how cold and miserable it was up there, and now it is WORSE here. Why haven’t scientists built some kind of weather dome to stop this shit? What about building a bunch of nuclear reactors that bilged into the Hudson River so the temperature went up about sixty degrees and we never had another fucking blackout again? And what the hell happened to that global warming we were supposed to be looking forward to? Jesus fucking christ.

At least this means I will have an even better trip to Vegas. I’m leaving on Friday morning, and I’m pretty psyched about getting out there. I haven’t actually thought about packing or what I will be bringing, but I am excited about seeing everyone again, eating some real food, and spending some money.

I’ve actually been spending some time reading Tom’s Hardware and all of the other usual sites to gear up for another big hardware upgrade. It’s been two years since I built my last machine (aside from the video and firewire upgrades) and I think it’s time to give her a new lease on life. I’m thinking about swapping in another motherboard with a fast Athlon 64 and a boatload of RAM, possibly swapping in a different video card, and maybe another drive (although I think I’ve only used 28% of the existing 40 Gig, so that could wait.) My ultimate goal is to run mythTV and turn the thing into a TiVO-killer. So I’ll probably try throwing in a TV tuner card and maybe two of them, one with an IR receiver and remote, and get everything built. I know that will be a bitch and a half, because I will have to upgrade to a new Linux distribution, and then get one that supports all of the new hardware, and I think Red Hat is about at the end of the line for me. I have vaguely thought about Debian, but I haven’t done any research yet. I know that will mean a whole new world of hurt, not because Debian is bad, but because I will have to unlearn all of the bad habits and small hacks I’ve picked up in the last six or seven years and start over.

Six or seven years?!?! Fuck, time is going too fast. I guess I did switch from Slackware to Red Hat back in 97 or so, when I got an unexpected bonus at my old job and nobody told me, and I seriously spent an entire weekend mortified because it looked like two paychecks had been direct deposited in my account, and I wondered if I should immediately call someone in payroll at 9AM on Monday morning or I should take the money out of my account immediately. I did call payroll, and they said nothing wrong had happened. About an hour later, my boss came in and said “sorry, I forgot to tell you on Friday. Good job, etc.”

I immediately concocted ways to upgrade my old computer that at the time had a fast 486 in it, which was about two generations behind the curve. Any time I have money in my pocket, it always seems to go to new hardware, because I can always justify the purchase of any equipment that could be use for writing. Peter, the guy across the hall from my office, was also hitting all of the hardware web sites, and told me about one of those hole-in-the-wall places that sold parts on the web, but they were also local and you could go in and buy stuff for the same prices, which sure beat going to CompUSA for stuff. So I rushed over there after work and bought a K6-2 motherboard and a bunch of RAM, a new hard drive, and the first CD-ROM ever to grace my computer. I got the newest shrinkwrapped Linux I could find at that point, which was Red Hat, I believe 4.0. And that started the allegiance to that particular distro.

Anyway, I have a horrible headache for some reason. Maybe I haven’t drank enough Coke. I should get back to playing SOCOM II for a while.

I was up almost all night last night, then woke up early and read until I could fall asleep again. Then I had a weird dream that I was listening to this new album that was by Stanley Clarke, but it sounded almost exactly like if Frank Zappa had come out with a new album that continued on from the stuff he did right before he died. I half woke up, and still heard music, and then heard that it was really shitty Spanish music, like the stuff that sounds like flamenco or almost country, but with some crooner guy singing in a really awful style. It turns out that the landlord had some guys working down in the basement all day, banging around and listening to this total shit. So I had to listen to Hammerfall and Slayer at top volume to drown it out and possibly scare the people.

I went to Barnes and Noble today, because it was pouring rain and it seemed like the thing to do. I’m reading this book that’s an oral history of New York, lots of interviews of people about New York in the postwar period. I think I got the book for free last summer when I bought more than fifty bucks at Coliseum, and never read it. I’m really digging through the house for stuff to read; I have stacks of books I haven’t read, but it’s all stuff I don’t want to read. Does that make sense? Anyway, I went to B&N and looked around for a while, mostly trying to find books under ten bucks. I ended up getting books on Pearl Harbor, Lincoln’s assassination, and a cool pocket editon of Tale of Two Cities that’s printed like one of those little Gideon bibles, with thin pages and Metal Curse fonts, but a very nice binding. I also finally found a copy of the new release of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I’m listening to the commentary right now in the background, which is funny in a strange way. The director, Renny Harlan, has that halting Finnish sort of accent, where his English is perfect, but it has just that little bit of a pronouncement to it. Anyway, it’s entertaining to me.

The gout is about gone, so everything worked. Still eating cherries by the firstful, though. OK, gotta get back to Renny.

OK, I think I figured out how to change this site over to 2004. I hope it works. I’m starving and need to find something to eat, and I don’t have time to dick around with this anymore.

Nothing else to report. It was very nice outside, but the sudden temp change has triggered my gout and now my toes are sporadically killing me. I know it sounds like some funny disease that old, crotchety people have, but it fucking kills me. Imagine someone slamming both of your big toes in the trunk of a car, and then leaving you there for a week. I’m popping allopurinol like candy and eating cherries by the pound. There’s some enzyme in cherries and strawberries that helps dissolve it. I can still walk fine, no problems or anything, it’s just at the annoying stage.

OK, food, before everything closes. Contrary to popular belief, the city of New York does sleep. Later.

I forgot to mention this, but Speakeasy tried to screw me out of $200 while I was on vacation, and of course I found out about it when my phone and internet were destroyed last weekend. See, a little while ago, they offered to switch me from a straight-up connection to a linesharing connection, and the two things that made me hesitant were the startup costs, and the fact that if something ever happened to my phone, I would also lose my internet connection. They got me to pay $200 in startup equipment costs at a time when I was saving every penny for vacation and eating easy mac for lunch and dinner because I really needed the money, by promising me a refund on all of the equipment costs. I got screwed on that. And the second point, well within a month or so, I did lose both phone and internet in one swoop, probably because the geniuses at Verizon got a disconnect order on the old straight-up line and he accidentally disconnected both because as he was leaning over the frame rack, he was smoking crack, bumped his arm and it disconnected both lines. That’s my theory anyway.

The rebate signup page reminded me a lot of the old Juno DSL rebate page, which I think got customer complaints at a ratio of maybe 1 to 1. I filled everything out, and I think they said they would pay me back in 8 to 263 weeks. That really pissed me off, as I thought maybe I could get a check before xmas and spend it on presents, or at least buy myself like four or five of the new Criterion DVDs that are out. So I get back from vacation last week and find a postcard in my mailbox that says “the address submitted on your rebate form did not match your DSL service address.” So if my rebate address is so wrong, why the hell did they send me a card there? Of course, it’s addressed to John Kenroth and they omitted the hyphen and changed the Street to ST and the apartment # to apt# or some other shit that is obviously going to break a diff script or whatever.

In all fairness, I shouldn’t blame Speakeasy. I have had accounts there since 1996, and although they’ve had some fuckups over time, they have also been fairly cool, both at the larger corporate level and at the tech support level. Also, from my experience at Juno, I know that they probably don’t personally handle these rebates. They probably hired some fulfillment center with an office in Delaware or whatever who they subcontracts all of the postcard sorting and data entry and complaint hotline answering. Back when I was at Juno, they mostly farmed this stuff out to high-security prisons, mostly because of a lack of organized child labor in this country. Who knows what they do now.

I managed to call someone a couple of days ago, and he managed to get my shit straight, and said I’d get a check to me in two weeks. I’ll hopefully have that money in my hands before I go to Vegas in January, so I can rent a fast car, some automatic weapons, and lots of ammunition. End of story.

I bought another quart of sulfuric acid and dumped it down my tub drain yesterday. That shit works wonders - I know how I’m getting rid of any bodies The Cleaner-style if it ever comes to that (and I don’t have any quicklime.) A quick aside, speaking of John Wayne Gacy - does anyone remember how the Blimpie’s in Bloomington had that weird, animated clown statue in the front window that looked exactly like JWG? I remember driving by there at night, and this animatronic killer clown was sitting in the shadows, and it always used to be really freaky. That’s my only Blimpie’s story, although everyone in my office has a better one: back when we used to be temporarily located in a bunch of apartments near Penn Station, a bunch of people from the office went to lunch at Blimpie’s, and everyone got totally, completely, shitting-blood-and-praying-to-die food poisoned there. So Blimpie’s isn’t a good word around the company. Anyway, the acid - a while ago, I went to this local hardware store and asked if they had any Drano or Liquid Plumber in like a gallon size, or something cheaper than the grocery store, where it’s like ten bucks a pint and you need to buy like 13 of them to clean even a slow drain. So the dude looks around, pulls down a shade over the front window, and asks, “Are you a cop?” and I say, “no dude, I just want some liquid plumber!” And he knocks me on the floor, and starts checking my jacket, and yelling, “ARE YOU A FUCKING COP? ARE YOU WEARING A WIRE, YOU MOTHERFUCKER?” And I’m screaming, “No! Get the fuck off of me!” So he goes back behind the counter, and says “Okay, check this shit out…” and pulls out a bottle with more warnings and disclaimers on it than a nuclear warhead in California. “You ever see this shit before?” he asks. “No, what is it?” And he’s like “Forget it man, maybe you should go to the Key Foods and buy more foaming Drano.” And I’m like “No dude, let me have it! Nothing else works.” And he’s like, “Okay here’s what you do. You don’t have a weak heart or anything, do you? Anyway, put on some goggles and gloves and a rubber suit. Then open this shit with a knife, and then throw away the knife, but not in your own trash can, or it will eat through it - put it in your neighbor’s can at like three in the morning. Then pour it all in the drain, and run like a motherfucker to the subway and get on a train and don’t come back to your house for like three days. AND DON’T TELL ANYONE YOU BOUGHT IT HERE!”

So anyway, I got some of that acid, and my drain is still slow.

And yes, I am going to Las Vegas in January for my birthday. I think it will be me, Bill Perry, Lon Tierney, maybe Todd Duffin unless he pusses out again, and maybe some other Aventail people I don’t know. So once again, if you are also interested in dropping in, let me know…