well, i'm back now from my short weekend visiting my folks and my little bro, and i'd have to say i had an enjoyable time. seems like a whole lot happened in a 30+ hour period. saturday afternoon i spent pretty much all my money getting my oil and other various fluids replenished, so i ended up having to ask the 'rents for money (for the first time in a thankfully longish time) to get me through until payday. if my roommates would stop giving all their money to their stupid evil girlfriends, or spending it on guitars, i could probably actually do more than just pay bills with my money. (to set the record straight, brian has actually been the most consistent and responsive rent/bill payer for a while now, so the guitar comment is more of a friendly jab than an actual complaint).
i seem to inevitably end up in the "godfather" role, where i'm the one handling all the bills and my roommates end up owing me large sums of money. i don't anticipate having these problems when we move in with paul, even though the roommate i'm taking with me is the one who owes the most money. but, i've pretty much decided that if he doesn't catch up soon, i'm going to have to open up the proverbial can labeled "whup-ass"–either on him, or on that evil bitch of a girlfriend (who owes him probably a couple thousand dollars and keeps asking for more despite the fact that they both make about the same amount of money and she's living with her parents).

anyway, enough about that. my mom cooked her usual excruciatingly good meals while i was home, and i, of course, brought little samples back with me to help me survive 'til payday. today it's leftover country ham… mmm good.

my brother's been getting more and more interested in computers in the past year or so, so quite a bit of our conversations this weekend centered around that (he wants to buy a new computer, and m&p have agreed to front the money if he stops acting like a holy terror for a while.) so we discussed his options, and we've pretty much decided we'll build him a system like the one i'm planning to build, and probably come in under the parent's budget constraints. he wanted to buy an iMac, but it was about $500 outside of his range, so we're talking a PC. it's cheaper, and there's tons of free software (hehe). i also helped him out a little this weekend by acting as his computer merit badge counselor for Boy Scouts. basically i just asked him a bunch of questions, he gave me a bunch of answers, did a few little things on the computer, and everybody was happy. and, this may sound like neandarthalic chest-thumping, but i surprised myself with some of the stuff that i knew about computers and computer history.

sunday was fun, we were in the kitchen standing in the patio door with an air rifle (BB gun) trying to see who could shoot the ears of corn in the squirrel feeder (no animals were harmed in the making of this blog). then we ended up talking about my prowess as an archer from my own Boy Scout days (me insisting i was good, my dad insisting i was… well, maybe not that good). dad ended up busting out my old little kid bow and an arrow (probably the only one left intact from my days of shooting trees, stumps, the ground, and the garage). after my bro hung a soda can from a tree limb, i tried to shoot it with the bow and arrow. took me four tries, but i nailed it. after that, of course, for like an hour the three of us were standing out on the patio trying to shoot the can with dad's different bows. i think i was the only one who got a good solid hit on it several times, dad and javan each either hit around it, nicked it, or "bumped" it with the shaft of the arrow. so, i guess i was pretty proud of myself for proving to my dad that, hey, i really WAS good at it.

so, all in all it was a good weekend, a little of mom's home cooking, some family bonding time, and some good driving (amazingly enough, there wasn't a single spot of construction on the entire Western Kentucky (aka. William H. Natcher) parkway).

but i'm back at work now, bored as hell. half our servers are down because the AC went out in the server farm area and they overheated. hehe. ain't technology great.

oh, and be sure to check out my sister's posts about underwear (Mon., Apr. 9) and French radio and music (Thurs., Apr. 12). very entertaining stuff.

and also, sharon–continuing her sometimes theme of posting "forwarded emails" with commentary– has a nice post (Fri., Apr. 13) with some guidelines for interacting with and/or understanding the opposite sex.

welcome one and all to the official unveiling of bipolar 2.0. what you see before you is the glorious work of your friendly neighborhood (if your neighborhood happens to be hong kong) jessie hung (whose own site seems to be in a state of flux right now…), and also with some judicious scripting magic performed by yours truly.

a thousand thank-you's to jessie for this winning entry, and also to our other contestants (notably the greatest girl in the world), whose entries you'll also be seeing in the hopefully near future. as soon as jessie picks her favorite show from transmission3000, we'll be sending out her prize.

my task the past few days has been teaching myself rudimentary php scripting, and modularizing bipolar to the point where we'll soon be able to offer the option of selecting your favorite look. so, for those staunch goth/metal kids out there who loved the black & skulls theme of the old bipolar, you'll be able to choose that as your standard interface. notice, of course, that i'm saying "soon" and not really giving a specific date. in case you hadn't noticed by now, i'm a bit of a lazy bastard, and since i'm the one that has to do all this work, i'd rather not put myself under too much pressure.

also, due to this choose your favorite bipolar idea we're working on, if anyone still wants to get in on the bipolar redesign act, just whip something up and send it our way. we'd love to eventually have several hundred different designs available, if you guys think you're good enough.

anyway, enjoy the new design, and tell us what you think, or write jessie personally and tell her exactly how much ass her design kicks.

… glory be! the bipolar boy's actually got a little follow-through! …

so, i had this conversation with my mother earlier this week, and we ended up talking about my smoking habit. basically, her telling me (of course) that i should quit because it's not good yada yada yada… which i already know. and believe me, i often think of quitting for all those reasons, but i just don't want to right now, and it's that simple. well, of course, it's not that simple, but y'know.

well, i ended up trying to explain to my mother why i smoke, which forced me, in the process to admit to myself why i smoke. or at least to attempt to figure out why i continue to do this to myself. mainly what i came up with is that i know it's bad for me, unhealthy, but since i'm not happy with my physical being right now — i'm lazy, i'm getting fat, tired all the time, always oversleeping. let's just say that psychologically i'm not in a good place, because i'm neglecting my physical self, and i'm neglecting my physical self because i'm not, psychologically, in a good place. basically, what i told her was that i didn't feel like i deserved to treat my body any better than i am.

but don't you worry 'bout me, i'm just having a little personal crisis here, and i'm sure, like puffin, it'll all get a little better when the weather gets a little warmer.

and yeah, jessie won the big contest, so we'll be putting her bipolar redesign up hopefully by mid-next week… assuming i can find any free time in which to work on all the little things that need to be done. but, it looks great, and you'll all be pleasantly surprised once we've done away with all this black and these skulls. i know i will be.

my sister is still kicking my ass at this posting thing, and thankfully she's had a few moments to write some longer posts in the past few days. it's nice to be able to keep up with her life this way since she seems to be able to write email to my roommates and my friends but not to me. sorry, just had to get in a little dig there sis. i know, i haven't written you either… i'm a bad brother.

well, there are, perhaps, other things i could say… but i won't. it's late and i'm tired. good night all.

wow, is it that time already? time for the weekly post from matt? oh, how far i've fallen.

thankfully though, it's nice to see that my sister, my best friend, my partner ( over there my favorite girl are all better at this than i am. despite my sister's newly overbearing workload (and the fact that she doesn't have access to the net from her home in the suburbs of Paris) she still manages to post on a regular basis. paul, despite his new computer and subsequent addictions to OmniComics and instant messaging, is still managing to post almost every day. brian, despite numerous hours doing those things that brian does, posts practically every day. and sharon (who's name i can now use, with her blessing, since she's decided to forgo the whole anonymity/hiding behind a persona thing), despite her apparently constant need to change her site's design and where she's hosting it, is also posting on a more frequent basis than yours truly. and she's also baking me brownies. did i mention that i'm still completely in love with this girl?

but it seems like, between busy times at work, fights with webcams, system wipes & reinstalls, and extended hold-out-until-my-eyes-dry-up-from-lack-of-sleep battles with House Ordos and House Harkonnen, i should be able to find some time, somewhere, to update this blog. it seems like it, but it's apparently not true. "we try to resist keptin… he put creatures… into our bodies… makes us do tings." but not "tings" like updating a blog.

i'm not exactly sure why that star trek reference is relevant, but i've not made one in years, and somehow felt it would fit. so sue me.

anyway, so i did finally manage to reinstall windows on my machine at home, get it back up and running, and "glory be!" the webcam seems like it may actually work correctly this time. i hope. of course, i forgot to take it to work with me today, so you don't get to see my practically immobile self sitting in my cube for 8 hours today.

and finally, today is the official last day of the redesign bipolar before we do! contest, so if you're working on an entry, you've got until 12:00 AM tonight to get it in. we've got a couple entries so far, and they're both pretty durn good. i can't wait to show 'em to ya. i think we'll have a few bugs to work out before we get the things up (after judging is done), but barring unforeseen circumstances or acts of god, we should at least have screenshots of all the entries up by the "no later than" winner announcement deadline of 9:00 PM on Monday evening.

12:00 AM tonight, Friday night, the 23rd. remember. and if you've got an idea but haven't even started on it yet, no problem, we're accepting any entry, from the most fully developed online bipolar "portal" site to the most hastily-drawn badly-scanned concept sketch you can come up with. so do it. 12:00 AM. that's midnight. Friday. don't forget. 12:00AM. twelve-o'clock. when the big hand and the little hand are both pointing up (for you analog people) and the sky is dark. that's the deadline.

well, this past week has been a big pile of crap. i still haven't managed to get my sleeping schedule into any kind of reasonable order, and my entire life seems to have been suffering. i can barely stay awake at work, my productivity level has dropped considerably, and i've just generally felt horrible the entire time. why do i always do this to myself… i mean, it's not like i've never treated myself this way before. it's cyclical… i'll do well for a while but always eventually end up running myself into the ground.

to top it all off, brian bought Dune 2000 last weekend in hopes that he & paul & i could play some networked games, and the damn thing has sucked out my will to live. for the last four nights, this game has contributed significantly to my loss of sleep. combined with the fact that the nice new web cam i bought has been fucking up since Tuesday night and i've been spending several hours almost every day since trying to get it working again. hopefully i'll be able to spend some time on it tomorrow so that you can all watch the exciting events a casa de bipolar.

speaking self-referentially of bipolar as i was, i should now point out that we now have our first official entry into the redesign bipolar before we do! contest. i've sworn to both paul and brian that our first contestant (who's apparently in the process of moving her site again) will not get preferential treatment from me. but it looks really nice, so anybody else planning to enter better have their shit together.

well, helped out paul a little more today, and it seems like he's well on his way to becoming a computer geek just like brian & i. he's catching on to some of the more esoteric aspects of owning your own computer, like file/directory organization, and desktop maintenance. he's a quick learner, that one.

while paul was playing around some more, checking out the napster thing and installing some more software, i headed out to compusa again today and took back that piece of crap Kensington web cam. (really, though, the Kensington had much better picture quality, it just wanted to crash my machine). the logitech (same exact type brian has) hasn't crashed my machine once, so i guess i'll take the quality hit. so, bipolar cam3000 is now truly bipolar. there are two separate portables right now, but we're working on a dual portable (most likely with a smaller image size) as well… it's not going to be that hard, we're just lazy.

speaking of being lazy. don't forget about our contest!

as in, "i reckon that'll work…"

of course, if you were really observant yesterday, you'd have noticed that i made the last post around 3:30 AM… so, despite the fact that i was almost falling asleep at the wheel on the drive home from work on Friday, i ended up staying up until almost 4 in the morning.

it's been a pleasant day today. got up around 1 or 1:30, went out for lunch at KFC, then ran over to compusa primarily for kicks, but also so i could buy this year's version of TurboTax deluxe, and so Paul could debate buying a new computer. Well, he didn't, but i did manage to get my software, and picked up a new webcam for 30 bucks, to boot. Though Paul didn't get his computer, he did get approved for a credit card thing, so (looking at it one way) he walked out of the store $2400 dollars richer than when he'd walked in.

we came back to the house and i started trying to set up the web cam. it gave me some weird problems trying to install and update the software, but i finally got it working. then, i tried to change a simple little option in the controls of the software, and it locked up. in fact, it pretty much locked up the computer every time i stopped using the camera. so, when i'd exit the program, it'd lock up the computer. i even tried a different webcam program, and it had the same problem. so, needless to say, i'm taking the damn thing back tomorrow and trying a different cam. (if you're interested, the first and only pic that actually made it onto the site is here

while i was busy fighting with the webcam, paul was apparently busy convincing himself to buy the computer he'd looked at. he and brian went back out to compusa, and about an hour and a half later, the puffin came back with a kick ass new Sony VAIO. his new machine kicks brian's and my machine's combined ass. after setting it up, we debated for an hour or so (as we played around with it) about whether or not we wanted to strip that Windows ME crap off there and put on some Win2k. We finally decided that we couldn't stand the thought of a machine actually running ME on a regular basis, so we ended up reformatting the hard drive. and since then (almost 6 in the evening) brian and paul and i have been diligently working to bring the new beast to full working order. i've had fun, but now, it's time for bed.

oh, and don't forget the contest.

at least i can say this for myself… at least i'm consistently inconsistent.

so, it seems like quite a bit has happened since the last time i posted, but then, nothing's really changed. like brian mentioned, i finally managed to finish watching that dune mini-series that i started watching, what… 3 months ago? watched the second episode on Monday, and the third yesterday (which kind of forced brian into watching it, since he was off work yesterday). overall, i thought the series was really well done. there were some instances of really shitty acting, but the primary characters were all done really well. i thought the second episode was the best of the three, by far. if you've not watched it, be sure to do so if the sci-fi channel reruns it.

i also finally managed to finish cataloguing my comics collection, so that's one huge project pretty-much out of the way. the next step is to find coverscans for all the issues i have, so if anyone knows of any out-of-the-way comics coverscans caches on this 'ol net, .

i cleaned my room, did my laundry, balanced my checkbook, caught up on some overdue email… altogether, it's been a pretty productive week for me. and i'm feeling pretty good about things right now.

and today, apparently, i've been productive and prolific, as not only am i writing this post (finally) i also wrote two rather lengthy posts to a discussion thread on an Amiga site that i frequent (which is something i never do). here's hoping today's trend calms down and spreads out to at least one post here per day… well, it's a thought anyway.

oh, and i know brian's kind of mentioned this, but just in case you hadn't noticed, bipolar has already moved to it's new home. note the swanky new address in the address bar up top…

alright, i've been reading erasing.org for several months now, on a mostly daily basis, and i just now clicked the Sadness link. such a simple concept, replacing words in corporate slogans with the word sadness. simple, profound (in spots), and so much the story of my life (at times).

so, i got an email from since he's been reading, he's not really finding anything out about my life, but about the other useless crap i've felt compelled to fill these pages with for the past few posts.

i figured he would have liked the "holy grail" post, but then he's heard about her enough times, it's old news to him. i figured he would have liked my "year in review" post since i provided a brief roadmap to some of the more important points of my life that have occurred since the inception of this blog.

but he's right. with the exception of the "holy grail" post, everything else has pretty much just been filler.

so, i've been busy at work, at least until a week ago, when the frantic activity suddenly came to a grinding halt due to the fact that no one could seem to get me the remaining three pieces of content that i needed to complete the new corvus site (on which, btw, are welcome).

in my home life, i've been busy cataloging my comics, now that brian and i are helping beta-test OmniComics and catching up on email. i've now got five emails in my inbox at home, compared to the 25 that were sitting in there for a few weeks. i've been trying to refine my focus a little, concentrate on certain projects, see them through to completion… y'know, the way it should be done. like the puffin i tend to get 15 or 20 projects going at the same time, and just never finish them. when i think about all the things i've got "waiting in the wings" i just feel kind of hopeless and lost. so, it's been good to finish the email project, to be near completion on the comics project, (and yes, i'm still working on the bipolar redesign project, which is… uhm… kinda close).

overall, i can't say i'm really happy, but i'm not really depressed either. i'm just kind of… here. and i don't know, maybe that's even worse than the other two.

ah, don't worry 'bout li'l ol' me though, i'll be fine.

i wrote a long ass post yesterday, but blogger ate it. i guess they were still working on the new server and i was one of the lucky ones it burped on.

then, i was going to rewrite a brief version of the update today, but (surprise, surprise) i got caught up in doing a temporary redesign (the one between this and the permanent redesign) today while i was busy doing nothing else at work.

so this little post is filler. filler and crap. but now you know that a bipolar redesign is actually in progress, so if it's not up by the end of next week, you can all and give me shit for it.

and tomorrow, i'll try to rewrite yesterday's post. believe me, it's not time sensitive shit i'm talking about here.

g'night all.