The Downward Spiral

I couldn’t sleep last night.. lots of stuff going on in my head… some of it was probably caffeine, some of it was the Witcher game I’m playing (which is totally awesome), and some of it was just this non-stop dreaming trend I’ve been having.  I woke up about every hour at least.. I think Shannon and I took turns waking each other up too.

The other night too I had this overwhelming fear come over me.  Like all at once I saw my mortality and the mortality of everyone I knew… I unwittingly put myself through what I would approximate to be each of their deaths.. what I’d feel like… how I’d go on.. what I’d do next… it was a lot to deal with.  I don’t know what brought that on, but it was pretty intense.

I think I need some time off.. maybe just some sitting around time.. video game time .. I dunno.. I guess I always feel weird this time of year.

man I hate Comcast’s TV stuff.. it just sucks.. Internet is fine, the the DVRs and such.. blech

I was looking to jump ship to satellite… but o, a huge nail in the coffin of Dish network.. you have to have a phone line (or ethernet cable) attached to each receiver.  So I’d have to run 4 more ethernet cables or get a home phone.. both of those options suck… so, no Dish.

so.. I checked with DirecTV and see if they have that requirement too.. they do not.  You can’t order PPV without a phone line, but there’s no fee either.  You can still use Ethernet instead of a phone line with their big DVR too to get PPV.

So.. DirectTV would be the choice over Dish.. even though it’s more expensive.. basically I want all the “normal” channels (with HD!) and HBO and Showtime and maybe access to PPV and OnDemand stuff for about $80/month.. that’s basically what I’m shooting for.

I’ve been having nightmares.. well, what’s new right?  But they are keeping me up all night now.. for the past week or more I’ve been getting up with a start and not able to go back to sleep.  Two nights ago I woke up choking.  So, awesome.

They seem to follow my normal themes of alienation, isolation, and the inability to act… mixed with horror.. zombies have been big lately.  Zombie apocalypse even.  I really hate zombies.

I could have slept a lot more this morning.  Saturday I got to sit around all day with Shannon and that was the best thing ever.  Last night, even though I was having fun, I was just sooo freaking tired… and then when I slept it was partially in fear of what was going to happened as soon as I closed my eyes.

I haven’t been inundating myself with horror recently, so I don’t know what gives… maybe it’s not enough horror.. maybe all the shit in my head is actually scaring me… hmm.. that would suck as there’s kind of a lot in there.

What I should really do is do a couple sober weeks again.. I think that helped me last time… and then be sure to do something more than chores the next day.. and then get to sleep on time.  Or play video games, all day.  Or watch more horror until I become desensitized again… those sound all reasonable things to do.

I ordered the Slip disc set from NIN before I left for the NORTH this last week… it was supposed to be delivered to work around July 29th.  I got back and Lorie thinks that it might have come, but it’s not on my desk and, like, where the hell else would it be?  The tracking info isn’t there on USPS, and I think Lorie is thinking about something else, and so today I wrote amazon this:

It is well passed the estimated arrival date and I haven’t seen this item.  USPS doesn’t have a record of this item in their online tracking information using the tracking number you gave me (9102127391979434370610).  I had this item shipped to my office, and no one here has seen it.  What can you do to get this item to me?

and about an hour later I got this:

———————————
Greetings from Amazon.com.

I am sorry that you have not received this order.

I can only imagine how frustrated you must be with us at this point,
I appreciate the admirable restraint you exercised in your message.
My sincere apologies for the time you have spent dealing with this issue.

It appears the package may be lost. Please accept our sincere apologies for this inconvenience.

I have placed a new order for the items. There will be no charge for this replacement.

Here are the details of the new order:

Order Number           : 104-0346080-2333857
Shipping Speed         : One-Day Shipping
Estimated Delivery Date: August 06, 2008.
———————————

… that, my friends (and other online retailers.. or those that would be such) is customer service.  That is what it’s all about.  That’s why I buy from Amazon and never worry.  Newegg is another such retailer.  They set the bar.

Hell.. I even kinda wanted to write back and say sorry for not thanking them for being so awesome

ds moved again… I’m back online now.  After a weekend of moving (no small thanks to Matt, Todd, and Pat who did quite a bit of it) I’m damn near totally back online.  I hope Shannon likes all the improvements we’ve done around the house… I know I do ;)  She’ll be back on Thursday.. damn I miss her.

One more outlet to do and then I’ll be totally done.. woot!

So since I’m moving in to Shannon’s here soon I’m taking over the spare bedroom as my office.  The room was tan (like beige) and red (like maroon) and had a puppy dog border in the middle.  Instinctively Shannon knew that the colors in the room wouldn’t do.

So she charged me to go out and find a new color, which I did… Rainstorm from Sherwin Williams.  It’s like a Midnight Blue which is my Crayola color favorite.

So we took the wallpaper trim off on Monday and starting taping… finished taping on Tuesday and did the primer, and then on Wednesday painted the first and second coats.  Today we started to take off the tape to see our work.. and it needs some touching up.. but other than that, it’s done.

Sound like it was fun?  No.. overall it was a hellish experience sent from Lucifer himself to destroy the soul and hope of all mankind.  I hate painting.  It sucks.  There is nothing good about it.  Well, there is one thing almost good about it.. when it’s done… then it looks pretty ok, except for the parts that are fucked up and need repainting… so.. even the good is still mostly a hot poker in the ass… fire and brimstone.

Truly damper on my will to live.

Fuck that.

Shannon and I are now open water SCUBA certified.  That means we can technically dive anywhere unsupervised…. and we could probably do it too :).. but we’ve put a cap on ourselves to keep it a max of 30ft until we go with a dive master to deeper waters.

Right now I’m interested in doing quite a few of the specialties and then up to Advanced Open Water… any higher than that doesn’t really interest me right now.  Shannon is on board for everything except Night Diving

Anyway, we had a great time over the weekend.  5 dives total.  The first 4 were all skill dives.  Well #4 was supposed to be pretty easy… that was the first hoops test while supervised… by that time we were really comfortable.  But the visibility dropped to like 2ft (from 5ft) and I lost Shannon.. she went up.. Olly found me and then I completed the course… I think Shannon did too.

On #3 was the mask removal and replacement… after I took it off I got a jet of water up my nose, started choking, and just about couldn’t complete it.. but I got through it and stayed under… got my mask back on… cleared it.. coughed a bunch of times (underwater with a regulator.. ya :)) and all was well.  When we went up I had to blow tons of snot out.. but that was all the damage.

The last one was a dive all by ourselves… no supervision at all… in 5 ft visibility water at about 20ft.  Pretty cool stuff.  That was actually the most fun dive because we worked so well together.  We swam through hoops again .. this time way more gracefully… and then navigated back to shore all under water… all by ourselves.

Anyway.. we had fun there and like all the instructors (Terry, Warren, Jason, Warren, and Olly) told us, if we can dive at Beaver Lake, we can dive anywhere.. it’ll be better.

Jon wanted me to blog some shit so I thought I would do it to it.

I haven’t twitted some tweets in awhile because twitter is like overloaded or something.  I can’t connect to their gtalk interface so that sucks as longing in to a website to update shit bothers me o so completely.

I got all the parts for my cool car setup.  Matt helped me install the backup camera and hard wired the Valentine one… ok he actually did it all.  The only thing I’m missing is the hard wiring of the multimedia thing… which he will also likely do all of.  Right now I just have it sitting on my passenger seat.

Setting up the multimedia thing took some work.  I copied all my mp3s on to the box, but it doesn’t support id3 tags so I made a directory structure under “music” with the arist name, then the album name under that, then XX - Title.mp3 … to do this I used the excellent program mp3tag which is free and works wonderfully.  You can rename files based on id3 tags, lookup tags for songs on Amazon or other Internet places, and of course change all the id3 tags.. it’s the shit and a half.  So I went through ALL my music … sorted (by hand) all that stuff and then used the mp3tag program to fix the file names… pretty damn awesome.

Then I moved on to movies.  That player will play VOB files straight off DVDs, however there is a caveat… most DVDs are encrypted with Macrovision making them unplayable… so you have to deMacrovision the VOB files.

But… you know.. if you are going to have to process shit anyway, why not use something that will decode and transcode in one step like the wonderful DVDx Ultra Edition.   You need the ultra edition to decode the VOB files.  With that I can rip DVDs and save them to DivX files in one step.. takes a long time, but as I’m not in the large scale pirating industry, I can do one a night and be happy with myself.

The settings for DVDx took a little while to figure out.  You definitely want to sync the audio and video.. you definitely want to tell it no zooming.. use full frames… don’t chop up the AVi.. set the file size to infinite… I’m doing NTSC and resolutions of 720×480 (American DVDs).  And then there’s the DivX tuning.  You want to do multipass (multipass 1st pass and then second pass at multipass nth pass) at probably like a bitrate of 2000 kbps.  I just redid this at home… and upon checking it I’m reminded you probably want to set the force 24hz thing (or something like that) or else the movie might stop encoding half way through and popup a box, but then continue going after you hit ok.. lamesauce… but acceptable.. it tells you how to fix it.

Jon made a DVD for Belize 2003… as he didn’t Macrovision it I was able to copy that straight over and it works great with DVD controls and everything.  Pretty slick.  However… if you are going to go, go all out and rip it properly with DiVX.

Scott at work told me about H264 and that if I was going to start ripping movies and put them on a uPNP drive to serve them up to my PS3 that I’d probably want to use that format… and that’s probably true… but then I can’t use them in the car… of course I could do both.. or rip to h264 and then, if I want, recode to divx later… that might be an option.

Other than that I’ve been working on more camera stuff at the office… we are about to install a new 8 IP camera system in Eldon Missouri.  We are just waiting on a hard drive to be shipped back and then it’s go time.  There will be a lot of work, but it’ll be the biggest camera install yet.  We use Arecont IP cameras and Luxriot… cctvgadgets.com is the place to get the cameras and then bluecherry.net for the Luxriot licenses… great bang for the buck on all that.

Besides techie stuff, Shannon and I are going great.  We had our 6 month anniversary last month and continue to get closer together.  We haven’t spent a whole day apart since December.  I will likely be moving in to her place very soon.. probably just after Matt and Kat get married … probably around August.  It’s great to be in a relationship with someone not too much like me, but where we can make each other better through our differences and love for each other.. it’s something very very special.

Shannon and I took Scuba lessons over the weekend.

Saturday was all book work which we had studied for all week.  Out of the class, we were the most prepared even though we hadn’t done any of the eRDP stuff.  Turned out that that was way easier than we thought it would be and knocked it out in the half hour before class started.  The rest of everyone had to go over that stuff anyway, so we ended up being way ahead.  So we got done about 3pm instead of 4… rock on :)  I ended up with 100% on 3 of the quizzes, 80% on one, and then missed 3 on the final.  The final questions I missed were dumb.. I knew the answers and totally marked the wrong thing or misread the question… dumb mistakes.

Sunday was doing all of the 5 confined water dives at the Blue Springs pool from 8am to noon.  That was the real fun.

It started with 8 laps up and down the pool with mask, snorkel and fins.  It had been a long time since I went snorkeling so the whole breathing and putting your face in the water thing was a little crazy.  I’m not sure I’ve ever used fins before and so that was a little weird.. but I got more and more used to it.  We ended up doing 10 laps instead of 8 because another guy said 12 so we just split the difference.  I used my arms during this time.. putting them below me in a V and then shooting them out like a torpedo in front of me and then pulling back and that shot me forward, but turns out that you aren’t supposed to used your hands at all.. so my arms were sore as hell unnecessarily.. oh well

Then we tread water / floated for 10 minutes.. that was much easier than I though it would be… it was over before I knew it.

Then we donned our Scuba gear and got to it.  It was really easy to breathe out of the regulator… much easier than I thought it would be.  Of all the tests, it was pretty freaky to remove that from my mouth, but the rest was ok.. well .. after I got used to it.

The initial problem I had was kinda two things… one was sitting on my knees.. even weightless underwater I still had trouble… I just kept creeping forward or couldn’t sit still or whatever.. and that made me kinda freak out and breathe harder, which made me really uncomfortable… this was fixed by sitting on my fins and kinda laying straight horizontal in the water and “holding myself up” with my hands.

The second was that I kept blowing bubbles under my mask, which hit my nose, which is almost totally CO2.. so that would make me feel like I couldn’t breathe.  Problem there was I was exhaling too much… basically hyperventilating… which, with the kneeling thing was making it worse cuz I was freaking out… but I got it fixed by the end… breathing IN slow I got, but had to do the same out too.

So by the end I was pretty good.. pretty comfortable with everything.  I need more practice of course… more maneuvering under water, but I think the biggest thing.. the being able to breathe underwater part I got down.

Talking with Jon today, we didn’t do the scariest thing.. buddy breathing.  You take 2 breaths and I take 2 breaths from the same 2nd stage.  I dunno if that is by design or what.  They did say that’s the 4th of 5 options in emergency no air ascent situations, so maybe they just leave it out now.

Case in point, Jon had to use the spare 2nd stage on Dad’s equipment in Belize… not buddy breathing.. Jon ran out of air at depth.. and then they ascended too fast… big rick of DCS, but they were ok… Dad didn’t get it until later on another dive.

Anyway.. some scary shit can happen .. but a lot of it is in your head.. and you are your own worst enemy.. the rest is pretty easy .. I totally love it.

I’m at 119 pounds.. I haven’t been here since high school.. woot