Will Farrell in The Landlord
http://sjl.funnyordie.com/v1/view_video.php?viewkey=3efbc24c7d2583be6925
Wow – is it just me or is Will Farrell actually getting funny again? We watched Stranger Than Fiction last night and it wasn’t his best, but it certainly didn’t suck.
On this day in history, exactly one year ago today … give or take a few hours, that is … Sara and I had our first date. We met online and had been e-mailing back and forth for a couple of weeks before we finally worked up the nerve to actually meet each other in person.
Just between you and me, I’m glad that we did!
It’s kind of funny because looking back, I distinctively remember her not being sure if she even wanted a relationship at the time and for a while I was kinda worried that she was going to back out and disappear, but fortunately I was persistent enough to stick around and coax her into giving it a shot, and a year later I simply couldn’t imagine it any other way. We’d both been through some pretty rough times recently and each of us came with our own “interesting” loads of baggage … who doesn’t, honestly? … but we supported each other and have worked through pretty much everything that’s stood in our way thus far and I’m confident enough in what we have to say tonight that I really don’t think there’s much of anything we couldn’t handle.
We’re a great team together and really, I think that’s what a good relationship has to boil down to or it’s just never going to work. And it’s tough to get over the ME mentality that we develop over the years between supporting ourselves and exploring what life has to offer and just trying to be independent – to work so hard towards the place where you don’t have to rely on anybody else, it’s certainly not easy to open yourself back up and learn that it’s ok to put yourself out there and rely on another person to help fill your daily needs, whether they be emotional, financial, or what have you. It’s a thing that needs a constant stream of good communications, even if and especially if it’s something you don’t want to hear. I may not like it during the fact, but one of the things that I love about Sara the most is that she’s got the guts to stand up to me and tell me when I’m wrong. A lot of people would rather kiss your ass or just keep their thoughts to themselves, but what good does that do either of us at the end of the day? Until we talk about it and get our thoughts out in the open, we can’t possibly expect to learn from our mistakes and move on – communication is good, even though sometimes it’s going to be unpleasant.
So I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that I want to have Sara in it with me and at this point, that’s good enough for me. We’ve come a long way over the past twelve months, seen a whole lot of good things and dealt with the bad ones as best we could, and at the end of the day I know that I’m a happier person because she’s in my life. Even if I can’t get her to pick up her dirty clothes every once in a while… 🙂
Well, no worthwhile updates on the hard drive problems yet, except that I also tried throwing a Knoppix live cd in to see if by some miracle Linux would be able to read the drive better than Windows, but it saw the disk as being completely empty. Hmmpfff…
On the other hand, I watched last night’s episode of The Apprentice tonight and all I have to say is that unless Trump still has a trick or two up his sleeve for the finale, this was a weak end to the season for sure. In previous years they ran events in the rain that hosted hundreds, if not thousands of guests and celebrities, and yet all they had to do this year was make a crummy commercial for a room deodorizer?! This show needs some original ideas and fast or I can see it quickly going the way of Survivor, at least in my viewing schedule.
Over the last few days, I’ve had a lot of computer issues floating around so when I found my My Documents folder to be missing, I guess I sort of just figured that it would turn up eventually. Well, late yesterday I finally learned that the drive that houses that particular set of folders in my server just up and crashed – I found this by way of Windows asking me if I wanted to format the drive when I clicked on it! Of course, I said no, but I don’t really know too much about disk recovery so I let it sit until I had some time to play with it today…
1) Started a simple chkdsk on it when I came home for lunch, but it finally gave up after finding about a billion bad sectors.
2) Downloaded Maxtor’s (now Seagate’s) drive repair utility because they’re the manufacturers of the drive, however the “short scan” failed at, like, 1% and the “long scan” gave up after finding 99 disk errors.
3) Tried running Spinrite on it, which is supposed to be one of the very best disk recovery apps on the market, and it seemed to be working ok until it halted itself, too! There must be a lot of work to do because it originally gave itself a timer of 8 hours to run the job, and had adjusted it to over 14 hours a bit later – I don’t care, just get me my data back. Nonetheless, it seemed to be going great until I went in to check on it and found that it had halted the recovery at .8732% – less than one percent! – due to the drive temperature crossing a threshold. It gave me an option to override and ignore any future temperature spikes, but I was afraid of losing the drive forever so I’m letting it cooldown now…
The funny thing is, I actually did have a backup of this drive! I say “did” because my stupid backup program deleted the backup files – I have it set to overwrite existing files and delete missing ones to keep it in sync with the working copy … and seeing as how the original is now gone along with the backup copy, my best guess is that the script saw that there weren’t any files to mirror in the source directory, so it just assumed that I’d deleted all of them and did the same to the backup. 🙁
Anybody who has any tips at all about disk recovery, please do feel free to share them at this point! That drive contained all of my personal files – photos, budgets and financial planning, pretty much everything I’ve ever written or done creatively … you get the idea. Help!!!!!
Well, we’re still on Bright House’s time for another week…
Would you believe that not one, but two excuses came up that prevented the installation from going through today?!
1) Apparently the fiber that had been layed last week was broken somewhere along the line, so it will have to be redrawn. They were going to come out and redo it this afternoon, but that never happened.
2) Worse yet, though, is that apparently the wall itself is also broken, by means of a giant crack in the concrete that runs the height of the building! I guess this was what our neighbor had been complaining about for his leak a while back – I never really knew what the problem was – but regardless, after finding the crack and talking with the neighbor himself (who is an owner, unlike us), the installer opted to hold off on drilling any more holes in the wall until she could talk to our HOA and make sure that she wouldn’t get blamed if the building were to later collapse or something because of her installation. Understandable, unfortunately, but that still leaves me without my FIOS!!!
So the install was rescheduled for next Sunday and she’s going to try to get an answer out of the HOA in the meantime – I really don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t see where it should be a problem because ultimately I shouldn’t have to get authorization from my landlord or the homeowners association just to switch cable providers, but these things can be crazy sometimes so we’ll see.
In the meantime, I think I might reorganize my office and move a few things around, now that I had to move my computer desk today for nothing. In part I hate to go to all of the hassle, seeing as we’re hoping to move later on this fall anyways, but it’s something to do and the place could certainly use a good cleaning along the way, anyways. And besides, this newfound creative spurt that I’ve got going might very well benefit from a bit of change to help me get some more work done in a place other than my living room in front of the TV!
We’re about to switch from Bright House to Verizon FIOS – as in, the tech should be here any minute – so if you don’t hear from me for a while, it means that both a) the install went horribly wrong, and b) our neighbors finally got around to encrypting their wi-fi…
Wish us luck.
It may very well be completely gone by the time anyone else reads this, but check out the awesome Easter gift that Sara and I received today from her parents and Grandma!
http://www.google.com/tisp/
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/
So yesterday afternoon I left work early so that Sara and I could go play over at Disney and check out the new Monsters, Inc. attraction at the Magic Kingdom. I’ll post my specific review of the preview here in a little bit, but here’s everything else that happened over the course of about seven hours…
I Thought YOU Were Gonna Check the Weather Report…
Aside from a horrible traffic jam because somebody decided to run head-first into a guard rail on I-75, the trip over was pretty uneventful, except for the fact that pretty much as soon as we got on property, it started raining. Not enough to consider turning around, but certainly not the little sprinkle that one would just brush off and be dry ten minutes later from, either. Luckily we had an umbrella in the car, so that got us into the park relatively dry, but Sara feared being cold and wet later on, so we (she) proceeded to spend a whole lot of money in the nearest gift shop on pretty much an entire set of clothes! Good news was that I got a new raincoat out of it … to replace the one I had back in high school … and of course, the moment we stepped out of the gift shop, it stopped raining and we never saw precipitation again that evening…
Buzz Fastpasses
We’ve been getting good at this whole Fastpass game and for the second time in a row, grabbed passes for Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin before heading off to eat. We did this last time when we were here with my Mom, too, and were able to get right on after we finished eating – very cool! Plus, this has kind of become a favorite for Sara and I, as we compete to see who can beat who – this time I clobbered her, although she’ll tell you that last time was a totally different ballgame.
I had found a cheat sheet online of where the best places to aim for are, but forgot to brush up before our match – next time should be an interesting game, though!
Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor – Passholder Preview
http://ssevener.livejournal.com/202716.html#cutid1
The Five Year-Old Flasher
I was so disappointed because I didn’t get to see it firsthand for myself, but while we were waiting in line for the flying carpets in AdventureLand, Sara witnessed quite possibly the funniest thing of the whole trip. All I heard was his mother shrieking something fierce – apparently only moments before I turned to look, this kid no older than probably four or five just happened to have his penis hanging out, just a flappin’ in the breeze! And I’m told it wasn’t just a little at the tip, but the balls and everything … stay tuned for my new sequel to Kids Say the Darnedest Things entitled Kids Do the Darnedest Things With Their Genitals…
I know – I’m immature. Already a known fact, so let’s move on.
Other Attractions
We didn’t really hit up a whole lot of other places after this – we did take a walk through the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse and go on the Jungle Cruise because we’d never done those before, and I think Sara got quite the kick out of the cruise just because not often do you get to hear that kind of a performance out of Disney castmembers … at least not intentionally! From there we got Fastpasses for Big Thunder, but never ended up using them, and doubled back for some ice cream in Tomorrowland before hitting up a few gift shops on the way out. I picked up a few pins for Sara, as well as another gift that cannot be mentioned here without worry of ruining the surprise, and we ended up leaving the park just in time to catch the last half of Wishes from a great spot in the middle of Main Street USA.
Fantasia Gardens Miniature Golf
Of course, the night was still young and lately we’ve been striving to make the most of our time together, so once back at the car we proceeded to go play a relaxing round of mini golf. The last time we played over there, we had an absolute blast at Winter Summerland by Blizzard Beach, so our first inclination was to go play the other course (summer) there, but instead we came across Fantasia Gardens first, which actually proved to be a considerably cooler course, although ultimately it was a lot harder and Sara beat me because I had a couple of really bad holes! Overall it was a pretty neat round and I’m sure we’ll go back, but my biggest problem were the hole on inclines – there were maybe three or four that started off at the bottom of probably 50 or 60 degree inclines so if you didn’t wail on the ball hard enough to hop over the hill, you never even got past the tee off! I had two or three 6 and 8 stroke holes because of this, and Sara ended up beating me by 2 or 3 strokes, so you do the math…
Blackout dates are now in effect through Easter, which is fine because Sara’s working anyways, but it was definitely nice to get over there and have some fun because we haven’t been there just the two of us in a while. I don’t know if we’ll go over anytime in April before our big vacation in May, but if nothing else, maybe we can squeeze in a short evening of dinner and fireworks at Epcot to end a busy week or something. We still haven’t spent as much time at MGM or Animal Kingdom as the other two, but I think hands down Epcot is our favorite park right now and aside from getting there two hours in advance to get decent seats for Fantasmic, you just can’t beat IllumiNations as a perfect end to a day at Disney World.
Good times…