A Happy Christmahanukwanzaakah to all!

Well well, that time of year is here yet again. A time for some of joy and receipt. A time for others of sorrow and tax. Where the tides of the season find you, let it be know that this one bids you much happiness! It is a dear pleasure to know you!

My season has been a little weird. A good friend in the country, my first Christmas with a partner in a long while, and barely enough cash to stretch across all my friends for gifts. The main save-all for this season has been my blessed deal-a-day sites and Steam.

Let me digress for a paragraph. Steam has been the best thing to happen to gaming since Nvidia came out with SLI. A community where you can buy the games, connect automatically with friends in the same game, track your acheivements and all with a simple email address. Steam is what XBL wishes it could be. Steam offered literal fleets of sales for the holiday season. The gift of game will keep me consumed for many hours in the coming month.

A few hours with friends and family is enough to cure what ails you in most any case. My foot feels better, and I'm going to get my teeth taken care of sooner than later. There is a LOT of New Year time-off coming up, So I plan to have a a lot of fun and a lot of alchol.

Merry Holidays and Happy New Year!!!

-The0

Surgery! Good times!

I was recently hospitalized and released on account of a infection. Tiny little bacteria, all swarming around inside me, began to get hunger and eat up on my flesh. I have no idea how that got there, all I know is that few would be able to make it through the multiple shifts I had to endure simply to spend a couple days off of it. At the end of my couple of days off, when it started to look more like a bratwurst than a foot, I took a roundabout trip to the surgery wing of St. Lukes hospital, via route of family practice.

After a quick look from a bevy of aghast nurses, the surgeon walked in. He took a quick survey of the area, stabbed me a couple of times with a lidocain needle, and began to slice. This was astounding. It was a world-opening pain, the kind where you don't really even feel it anymore. Needless to say, I think this guy was something of a sadist.

I was hospitalized for about 4 days, dreading the next visit from the surgeon. Rough asshole. While I was laid out on a back breaking bed, one of the molars chipped horribly. This is a molar which supposedly was supposed to be removed when I was closer to 19. I'm beginning to see why. I was accompanied near the whole time by friends and the ever-dear Dr. Girlfriend. I saw a good few movies, watched enough TV, missed a lot of work, and learned that morphine doesn't really do much more than itch. The moral of the story is...

is...

I don't know. Fuck, that surgeon fucking sucks.

-The0

Treachery on the 7 Seas

Recently, through a very lucky set of conditions, I was able to obtain a version of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I am currently running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit, and I was actually pretty happy with it. But times, they change, and so must I. I wanted to have the 64-bit capability so that I could expand to more RAM, and be on the curve of 64-bit programming. What I learned may startle you.

YOU CAN'T JUST TRANSFER OVER 32-BIT FILES AND PROGRAMS TO A 64-BIT SYSTEM!!! Who knew?! Not this guy. So here I am, I have cloned my whole full hard drive to one twice its size. The end result I desired was to have a Windows.old folder on my bigger hard drive, not just on my old hard drive. This Windows.old folder would have all my old settings, all my old programs, even all my old music and libraries! I could simply copy and paste those all onto the same drive, and be done with my upgrade. I. Am Stupid.

I went ahead and tried to do most of this. About the only thing that wound out working was transferring my steamapps folder over to the new steam folder. With that setting the precedent, I decided to copy over every program file in it's like program file. Windows 7 64-bit has a special Program Files folder for 32-bit programs. Cramming files like I did messed up a LOT of things. I guess you could say it'd be like trying to cram a Neon onto a V8 engine, even if you get it to friggin' fit, how in the snot will you make it run? Not very well.

So I decided to try and go back and delete these files. This is the most annoying thing about Windows 7. Just because you put a file somewhere, or install a program, doesn't mean that 7 will let you remove it. It's not enough to be the Administrator. You need to have the permission of Trusted Installer. Who the hell is Trusted Installer, and when did he touch my PC?! This probably applies only to direct Windows features though. Still, quite confusing.

The best thing I wound up doing was formatting and starting from scratch. That works well. I'll be careful this time, and copy over My Documents one folder at a time. Then, fresh installs of all my old programs. The most convenient discovery so far is a site called Ninite. It's a site that allows you make one massive download of all the common applications you would want on a new PC or OS. Pretty nifty.

This is going to be a long voyage. All ashore who's going ashore!

-The0

Public Awareness

Radio Iodine. Have you heard of it? Not the radioiodine which is used in the treatment of thyroid cancer. The Radio Iodine that was an alternative band born in St. Louis. It was short lived, only pushed out one EP and one album. I recently came into possession of both of these collections after some rather avid hunting on Amazon, and I'm glad that I did.

Now, I would've been another member of the public not aware of this band had it not been for one weird thing. When my older brother went off to college, he left a good sum of his old clothes behind in his room, which henceforth became my room. I found a nice long sleeved black t-shirt in this room a couple of years after he left, which I started to wear around frequently. After a while I found that there was a weird crust-like collection of lines on the left sleeve. It took about 15 minutes to ascertain that this was no stain, but a logo for Radio Iodine. I thought my older brother hadn't listened to 30 minutes of alternative in his life, certainly not to my knowledge. I did the research then, found out what the hell this band was, and made it a goal to have their material.

That was about 4 years ago. Since, I finally found the CDs at a beyond reasonable price, and become a good fan of them. This is all despite the fact that they broke up in 1997. They have an alluring sound. Dirty yet smooth. Think Cranberries + Garbage + Megaherz = Radio Iodine. So I of course had to tell my older brother about this whole enterprise. The odd thing is that he had no idea how he came into possession of the shirt either. It was a total mystery to the both of us how that shirt came into our possession. Still, I had new music, and it was good.

Later that very day, my older brother had lunch with one of his old high school friends. They reminisced about the olden days, and somehow or another they came to the conversation of the first concert to which he dragged my brother. A small, simulated excerpt from that conversation:

'Wait, wait, I remember that now! Did a band called Radio Iodine have anything to do with that?"

"Yeah it did! I was really into them for a while!"

"Did you happened to have any merchandise from that show?"

"Yeah, I bought a shirt."

"My brother has that shirt now!"

My older brother told me about this conversation. I insist now that whether it was his or not, this shirt, through a semi-bizarre set of circumstances, has opened me to the small, short-lived story of a good St. Louis band. I like their stuff, it Audiosurfs very well, and it appeals well to any small party.

I'm keeping that shirt.

-The0