I’ve been using my Icemat headset previously, which is a separate headphone and speaker arrangement versus the usual integrated. They sound rather good, but they always made my head feel like it was in a vise and they sort of have the construction quality of a house of cards. I’ve already broken them once by simply putting them on, so I always wonder when it’ll happen again.

The metallic green of the Sennheisers is also nice in that sort of retro sort of way. I particularly like, of all things, the holder that came in the package. I can now hang the headphones from the shelf, instead of them taking up precious horizontal real estate.

Well, I’ve been struggling with the whole “indiboi” thing the closer I get to being thirty. For a good while it’s just been ironic, but once I hit thirty I think it’d be more like just sad.

I’ve been slowly working my way over to using indigomeridian.com for this site, but I still need to actually move it. It’s one of those more complicated than it seems sorts of things for certain.

I also underestimated just how much of a pain it would be to switch my usernames everywhere to “imeridian” instead of the old “indiboi” name. Very few forums allow a user to actually change his username, so I’ve had to inconvenience just about every admin out there, unfortunately.

Someday I’ll have it all taken care of, I suppose.

I had apparently linked my checking account debit card to my Paypal debit card sometime in the past. When I went to buy Taco Bell the other night, prior to realizing this compromise had happened, I went into ‘backup funding’ through Paypal.

Paypal wouldn’t allow me to unlink the bank account debit card, so I had to cancel it the next day. I figured that Paypal had already obtained the authorization so the existing ‘backup funding’ transaction for Taco Bell was taken care of.

Apparently it wasn’t authorized through the debit card, so what did Paypal do to fund the payment? …hit my checking account, the one I have to have setup so that I can transfer money away from Paypal.

They weren’t supposed to use that as backup funding for the Paypal debit card. I never set the checking account up as a backup funding source. I’ve come to find out that a bank account is the defacto funding source for all Paypal transactions. There’s no way to turn off that “feature” either.

They won’t allow me to remove the checking account from my Paypal account either, because that damned Taco Bell transaction is still pending.

Now it looks like I need to close my checking account too. Nobody at Paypal can tell me for certain that the $1.00 pending authorization won’t empty my checking account if it comes through for something greater than $1.00.

It’s ridiculous that they take the stance of ‘let the criminals make a mess.’ It doesn’t matter if there’s a 100% guarantee against unauthorized transactions when you’re unable to pay your bills when they’re due, but instead have to wait weeks for resolution.

I don’t think I’ll ever use that Paypal debit card again… once it’s eventually reissued, which is another serious bit of ridiculousness. I need to “re-apply” for the cards, they’re not just automatically reissued when reported stolen like any other issuer would do.

It turns out that the hard drive has failed, the diagnostics screen indicate that no drives are connected. It looks like I’ll be swapping the box this Friday, hopefully.

The sad thing is that I just finally hooked it up with a DVI-HDMI cable, and the new box will finally have the correct HDMI connector, I guess it’s a good thing I bought an HDMI-HDMI cable the other day too.

Interesting that I’ve been going through and watching all of my old recorded stuff lately… I ended up not really losing all that much I haven’t watched.

In the interim, with the massive increase in server costs, I’ve also lost a good number of customers in just the last two months. My expenses have drastically increased while the income has drastically decreased. This has placed me in a position where I’m once again considering closing up shop, but I just don’t know what else I would do.

The whole situation is incredibly depressing.

This is the before image that uses four Current USA dual daylight 6700/10,000K lamps.

This is the after image that uses two GE 9325K lamps and two Current USA dual daylight 6700/10,000K lamps.

That is an amazing difference, isn’t it?

Oh, and it appears my five little baby mollies have either been eaten or sucked into the filter. My money would be on eaten. The female molly still looks pregnant, if she ever does give birth I’ll move them out so as to help the babies a bit. I might even go so far as to protect the filter inlet. It seems I’ve gone to enough trouble with these mollies already, so perhaps if I get a couple babies the money I’ve wasted on the dead ones won’t be so bad.