Amanda invited me to her annual New Year’s Eve party this afternoon and I accepted. Fellow ASMS alumni Darryl and Ethan were there, along with a friend of Amanda’s that I did not know. We joked around, watched a few films, and generally had a good time. Unfortunately, Amanda says she’s moving so this will probably be the last New Year’s get-together. It’s been fun.
Things plodded along slowly at work. We spent several hours in the morning troubleshooting a problem with a handheld peripheral. The remainder of the day was dedicated to moving PCs. The site where I work has a little less than 1,000 workstations, the vast majority of which are leased, so there’s almost always work to be done.
Mom made her custom pita pockets, one of my long-time favorite treats, for dinner. It’s just a simple mix of iceberg lettuce, crumbled bacon, jack cheese, and ranch dressing stuffed in hollow pita bread, but it never fails to please.
With it being the first Monday following Christmas, things started to return to normal as people are returning to work. Most of my coworkers are still on vacation but the person I work with most was back and we attacked the workstation backlog with renewed vengeance. I picked up my first paycheck before I left for the day.
A belated Christmas present, Dreamweaver MX 2004 was waiting when I got home. I initially selected Dreamweaver due in large part to it’s solid feature set but also largely due to it’s dual support of both the Windows and Mac platform out of one box. I expected that the EULA would allow for a supplementary installation on a portable and it does, but that secondary system has to be of the same platform. What the hell? Furthermore, I’ve discovered that while you can select either platform initially, you cannot switch to the other platform later if you change your mind. All this, folks, thanks to the new product activation scheme that Macromedia has implemented across its entire Studio MX 2004 suite of applications. Does this mean that the Macromedia products are now copy-proof? No, because any resourceful user intent on bypassing the scheme can find a key generator that will produce a key for a site license that will bypass the activation requirement entirely. I should know; I’ve seen it myself. So in the end it’s the same old story: I, a paying customer, am prevented from making a legitimate use of a product because of an activation scheme. Thanks a lot.
I performed the most effective rain dance known to the common man this afternoon. In other words, I washed and waxed my car. I helped Mom wash her car too. I watched promotional episodes of Pretear, Saint Seiya, and Final Fantasy: Unlimited from some of the Newtype discs that have piled up from past months. I finished up Trigun, Vol. 1. It’s a fair bit larger than your typical volume of manga. I also noticed that the anime differs a fair bit from the manga. The manga seems to start right around episode five and skips around from there. Wolfwood and Legato are nowhere to be found in the first volume.
The D-Link router and Linksys card are finally communicating. I found a couple of issues at the heart of the problem. First, the newest drivers (v1.3) from Linksys weren’t working at all. Things started working as soon as I reverted to an older driver version (v1.2). The other things I noticed is that D-Link’s web configuration may not display pages correctly in non-IE browsers–a very annoying oversight on their part.
I went to see Paycheck with Mom and Dad at the local cinema this evening. While this theatre is one of the newest in Dothan, it is still an archaic design by today’s standards. I felt like I was watching the movie through a telescope. I’m exaggerating, of course, but the sooner we get some new theatres, the better. The movie was enjoyable, if unremarkable.
