indiboi.com

Right, so… again, still alive.

I totally forgot to mention that back in June (I guess) I made jelly, preserves, and marmalade, heh… Mint, Kiwi, and Orange (shock) respectively. I used pineapple mint for the jelly which basically causes it to taste like pineapple much more than mint, it’s good though. The kiwi preserves ended up being painfully sweet, ehhh… and the orange marmalade is absolutely wonderful. The downside is that orange marmalade requires an insane amount of work to actually make. …scraping all the white crap from the inside of the peels of several oranges and lemons takes forever.

My car didn’t pass inspection, so I’ve been relatively immobile lately. I’m going to get it fixed, but I need to wait until I get paid which won’t be for a little while yet. This has severely limited my ability to travel to Harrisburg, or more realistically severely limited the amount of time I can spend up there, since I need to have the ‘family’ car back by 7AM during the week. It kind of works out, sort of, because Patrick is working considerable overtime anyway, so I’d not likely go see him, much to my disappointment.

Hosting clients seem to be dropping like flies lately. It’s probably not as bad as I perceive it to be, but I’ve lost a good number without really balancing it out. I guess it’s par for the course, since I don’t usually have cancellations — mine just come in waves for no apparent reason. As an aside to the whole work thing, ever since moving to the new server there hasn’t been a second of downtime that hasn’t been scheduled for (Apache upgrades/network upgrades).

I have been spending a decent amount of time actually working lately. Most of it has been billing related work, there’s been a lot of changes to accounts, etc, and billing seems to have been a little messed up by clients not creating their new payment plans as they should, oh how I hate that. Also though, there’s been a lot of bullshit with my old server provider: they simply wouldn’t cancel the server, it took three separate requests and now they want me to pay for the entire month after I cancelled it originally. Fuck that… their network quality had been so poor I ought to be demanding they pay me! I’ll never pay for service that I didn’t want provided anyway.

Additionally, I had a client get his money back from the credit card processor simply by claiming he didn’t know what the charge was for… basically fraud. This was a most infuriating situation, to the point I’m still considering changing credit card processors, prohibiting orders with AOL email addresses, and preventing the use of AMEX cards for payment. I’m just sick of that level of bullshit, there’s absolutely zero merchant protection: a customer can claim they never signed up, etc, and just automatically get their money back without regard to the truth of the matter. It’d be one thing if just one month of service was refunded, but the processor stole 6 months of service fees totalling about $100. You want to know what is hilarious about this? I bet you do… As per standard procedure when someone is past due, which by default is what happened here… going six months past due instantly, the website was suspended and terminated. In a couple of days I receive a message from the credit card processor indicating that the customer called them back and appologized, the customer realized finally what that $100 over the last six months had been for. I ended up being able to keep the money that was rightfully mine and turned the customer’s website back on. Can you explain to me how someone can’t remember the name of a company they contract with for services? I know the name of every single company that I pay any amount of money to on a regular basis and what that payment is for.

My bank seems to have changed their online banking for the worse lately too. It used to be that any money transfer done online would take effect immediately as a memo post. I could then immediately use the money without having to wait several days for the actual transaction to post to the account. It seems as though the transactions no longer memo post, but show as “transaction in progress” instead. Now, this would seem to mean the same thing, just the terminology being more precise. It isn’t. My rather hefty server payment was declined because of this “transaction in progress” much to my horror.

I’m now wearing size 34 pants. With the size 34 pants I still need a belt. The pants I bought just a couple of months ago, size 36, fall completely off within moments of putting them on. This is a considerable problem because, even though I knew better, I went out to walmart without wearing a belt. My pants weren’t falling off, they seemed to have done their re-shrink deal after being laundered, etc. By the time I got to the store I ended up having to walk around holding my pants up as to not create a ’scene’ by them falling off, lol. I’m down to size large for shirts, instead of extra large, but of course due to my neck being 17.5 dress shirts still fit all wonky. I don’t remember my waist ever being a 34… I think I went from “children” sized clothes right to 36… hitting 38 and staying there toward the end of highschool. I hate to admit it, but I actually even owned a pair of size 40 pants, now granted I know that was a purchasing accident… they must have been mislabeled. Regardless though, I can say that I dropped from a 40 to a 34 in six months because of that, lol. The whole weight-loss situation is both a blessing and a curse… I’m scared to try on my leather pants that I spent quite an insane quantity of green on… they’re painfully too big I’m sure.

I’m up to my eyeballs in tomatoes from the three plants I have in the garden. The irony is that I don’t even like the damn things! I brought in practically half a bushel of them yesterday morning, oy! I finally made the tomato sauce from scratch that I’d been going on and on about to everybody all summer! Preparing Roma tomatoes for making sauce is an insane amount of work, btw, one needs to pierce the skin, blanch the tomatoes, peel the tomatoes, slice the tomatoes, scoop out the seeds of the tomatoes, then dice the damned tomatoes! It was extremely good though, lol. I did cheat a little by adding storebought garlic and onion… but the tomatoes, herbs, and peppers were all grown by me. :-) Note to self: wear rubber gloves of some kind when preparing all of this — my fingers smelled like garlic for a week!

I needed a hair cut, it was getting out of control. I could have done the unusual and actually went somewhere and overpaid for someone spending 10 minutes with scissors on me (I’ve paid for a haircut THREE times since August of 2002) or done my usual haircut on myself… I’m rather good at it, btw, because I do actually care about my appearance, otherwise I wouldn’t cut my own hair. Remember a while back when I’d done the blue with black tips? I then dyed it all black to get rid of it? Well, I still had a little bit of that black left floating above a sea of my painfully ordinary blah brown hair… A proper haircut would have still left some black and I thought that was just dumb. It also helped that I’d just watched this movie with a guy having a very short hair cut… he was hot, but anyway. I pretty much shaved my head, just for the hell of it, it’s just hair, it grows back. The woman sees my haircut and gives it, literally, two thumbs up. Matthew comes by and gives his fashion-nazi approval, all good. I go visit Patrick and he goes apoplectic. He’s still bitching about my hair, lol. Actually, he’s relented slightly, but it’s pretty amusing with how much he obviously hates my hair cut. Of course, we seemed to have had the same idea, at least to do drastic changes to our hair… When I arrived at his place he’d gone back to red fauxhawk. I adored the sort of shaggy, curly, moppy looking hair he had, made him look all cuddly or something. I really like his aggressive/edgy fauxhawk look too though, it’s more of who he is in my mind anyway.

I also have a new cellphone. My whatever it is piece of shit Nokia was getting on my nerves with high regularity. It has this tendency to not ring whenever I’m in my bedroom causing me to miss considered important phone calls from Patrick & Matthew. I started looking for a replacement only to decide it was just too much money… I wasn’t going to buy a new phone unless it met two very important requirements: 1) It must have bluetooth and 2) it must have a camera. The camera part is slightly less important, but these days most bluetooth phones have a camera anyway. I settled on the V600 from Motorola, but again, $300 for a phone, ick. Lastnight I randomly mention something to my brother David about his ‘old’ Samsung X105… I totally forgot that he ever had a T-Mobile phone, and didn’t even consider the idea that he’d still have it anyway. Turns out that he did still have it, and he gave it to me. With a quick swap of the SIM card I now have a Samsung X105, schweet! I told Patrick that I’ll be getting my gay card points back that I lost by having that shitty Nokia. Score for getting a new and better phone for free.

The wireless network here was also expanded by the addition of another wireless router/WAP. Getting the two WAPs to bridge/span together was a bit of a task, my iBook doesn’t want to switch away from the Airport even if the signal from the other WAP is considerably stronger. I also started having all sorts of strange speed issues when connected to the Airport. I finally gathered that the channels of the two devices were too close together. After spacing them the entire channel spectrum apart speed returned to normal. Hopefully that solution will be the permanent one.

Alright, that’s enough for now… as this turned into an hour long entry instead of being a quick point rundown like I originally intended, whoops.