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It's not really that funny anymore. This is the third day in a row hotmail has been down. I MUST access that account in order to coordinate efforts with my project members. I've tried my other accounts - my Yahoo one, my Deja one, my GTE one, and none have worked correctly. The GTE one especially is great because I paid for it and the second time I tried to access it after setting it up I couldn't get in.

Today I slept for about 12 hours. Needed it I guess. Anyway, I had one of those dreams that lasts about 6 hours, where you keep waking up momentarily and then roll over and go back to sleep and the dream doesn't even skip a beat. It's like extended REM sleep.

This dream was a bit of a nightmare. See I met this girl and we started talking and she started hanging out with me and soon she was saying we should move in together so we did.

Only, all the warning signs were there. She took me to her place and described everything about her life in inane detail, while showing only cursory interest in large pieces of data on my life. We had sex one time and after that it was me having to give long massages almost as a slave and being 'understanding'. She picked out the place, I paid the money, all her stuff came with, I did all the work. After moving in she put up a wall and refused to spend time with me. Her family kept saddling me with various tasks and responsibilities and expectations. Soon I was trapped, financially tied to the apartment unable to leave, boxed in by her family, a slave to her screaming, demanding, uncaring self.

There were similarities to M in the dream but differences also. It sure felt nice to finally wake up the final time and instead of rolling over, getting up to put that behind me.

Hey, one year ago today I started at the Census. Well, I didn't really start until the 10th but I was there for half the day. That was a fun time... I miss that commute, I really do. Also miss getting paid a bundle to lounge around talking. Miss my lunches out on the back porch of the building, blissfully alone in the blue sky and warming sun.

This also means I've had my PC for over a year now. It's been flawless!! One of the best things I ever bought. Aberdeen is truly a great company. Since I bought it I've added a Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 91 perfect flat aperture grill 20" monitor (which is the best monitor I've ever seen), a Zip drive, a Voodoo5 (to replace the TnT2 Ultra), 64 MB memory (total 192), a printer, DSL, extensions for the keyboard and mouse so I can 'surf' from the couch, a scanner (which I've never actually used), a microphone, an MS Sidewinder pad, the keyboard from my brother (after my good one stopped working due to water spillage), my stereo, a Golden Orb (which enabled harnessing 85 more MHz out of the machine), another case fan, an adaptor to run the 13" monitor for trips, an adaptor to let me play CDs from the boombox through the PC so I can listen to music while fragging, a great canvas book for a mousepad, a set of desk-like furniture, and tons of software to optimize the hell out of everything.

The thing has worked so damn well. My mouse, an MS ball mouse with a wheel, has REALLY sold me on good ball mice. duo's MS Explorer optical, for instance, has turned into a buggy, annoying, jumpy, glitchy mess. My ball mouse on my special 'mousepad' (a book made of canvas) tracks flawlessly ALL the time and never ever gets dirty (inside), and with PS2Rate it's smoother than a USB optical mouse and uses fewer resources.

But I mean my old Packard Bell was a nightmare. I will never buy a "brand name" computer again (Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, etc.). They use shabby materials, they weigh you down with tons of software already loaded you don't want and you'll never use that you have to spend hours or days getting rid of, they don't let you choose exactly what you want, they give you proprietary crap for motherboards with integrated (read: slow, buggy, and unupgradeable) vid and sound (the bane of duo's existence), they don't actually give you the CD for your operating system, and they cost more. The choice is clear. duo's upcoming machine will come from Aberdeen. Who else says "we'll install any hard drive ever made, any vid card you want, any sound card you want, the perfect case for you, exactly the type of RAM you want (because once you get past the stupid Best Buy ads there are tons of varieties of RAM), the exact motherboard you want, if you want to leave out this or that we will etc. and we'll only give you the software you want loaded, and we'll break it in and do performance benchmark testing on it which we'll send to you also and you'll pay less"?

Having music on the computer is so nice, even if you never pirate anything. You're just there reading the news or talking to someone or browsing a new site, why not bust out a few songs for the playlist? It's so convenient.

It is time for some bike pics. Nothing real special, but nice stuff. This picture just makes me happy. Great looking machine. This is the Euro-spec GSX-R1000, in Euro-only red. Is it the baddest production bike ever released to the public? Possibly. Here is a guy with a ZX-9R warming up the rear tire, hehe. This female is truly hardcore. Here is the "teaser photo" from MO's openbike shootout. Left to right: R1, 9R, Gixxer 1000, and Honda CBR929. Gee, I wonder which one will win (Gixxer).