Sunday Sunday Sunday

I renewed my lease today. Hard to believe i'm already coming up on 12 months in the bay area. It was wonderfully appropriate that my boy James was working the leasing office when i went in today, because he was the one who set me up last fall (he showed me the apartment, ran all of my paperwork, etc). Even better, he'd started working here right before i moved in, and i was his first new lease. And even *he* said that he feels like the past year has really blown by.

But on the other hand...last summer feels like it was a lifetime ago. And in a way, it really was, with so much that happened so quickly. If you were to take a snapshot of mid-September, 2007, and deliver it to Past-Neilam three months prior, he would have taken one look and said "No fucking way. Never happen. Who the bloody hell are you, anyway?" Poor bastard had no idea what was coming.

But before i delve too deeply into the past (i'll save the 1-year retrospective for later), how about a new topic.

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I logged into Ticketwanker at exactly 10am today to snag my ticket for In Flames & All That Remains in November - yeah! \m/ And i went ahead and sucked up the inconvenience fees for the Bullet For My Valentine show as well; i was hoping to save a ton of money by driving up to SF to buy directly from the venue, but my last attempt was foiled because i didn't know the Warfield was closed for renovations. And now their box office apparantly isn't open on weekends (suk).

Anyway, Ticketbastard has OH SO GENEROUSLY been "giving" me a "free" iTunes download with each ticket. I don't use iTunes nor the iTunes store (fuck DRM), so i've been giving away the download codes to friends. So if you're reading this and would like a free iTunes download, drop me an email. First-come first-served; i have two up for grabs now and more to come, i'm sure.

I know TM's assholery is a well-known rant, but here's a data point anyway: The face value of my In Flames ticket was $22. The fees added another $13.25 (60%). And no, it's NOT going to help when Live Nation breaks off next year; i'm afraid they'll only make things worse. Like when Microsoft "saved" us from IBM back in the 80s.

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I repaired my ReplayTV yesterday! It died about a year ago; i packed it up and brought it to Cali with me - too apathetic to debug it, but unwilling to dispose of it. Finally yesterday i decided to have a look; turned out to be a hard drive failure which was really bloody easy to fix. The hardest part, actually, was building up enough motivation to dig out my desktop PC and set it up. This required reorganizing my desk area, messing with a rat's nest of cables, and clearing up enough space for the behemoth 21" CRT which i haven't gotten around to replacing yet.





The rest was cake. I didn't even bother buying a new drive - with 4 hard drives in my PC (aka archive box), it wasn't hard to free up the smallest one (120 GB - remember the days when that was a lot of space? Man.). I downloaded a clean factory image for the Replay and used RTVPatch to image the drive. Open up the Replay case, pop out the dead drive, and mount the fresh one:



Then just reinitialize, and voila! If i'd known it was this easy, i would have hacked the thing years ago - back when i watched enough tv to have need for more storage space. Or at least before the Olympics. Ah, well; better now than never. And it was nice to see that i still know my way around the inside of an ATX case; i even reorg'd my hard drive cluster (cleaner layout; less tangle with the ribbon cable).

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Finally, i went out to buy a shredder this afternoon but (even after having done some research) couldn't decide how much shredder i wanted. A smaller model which would take up less space and be more portable? Or the grunt-worthy monster which can pulverize cds, credit cards, and floppy disks with its mighty jaws! Hmm, suddenly it doesn't seem like so hard a choice. But at the time i was torn, so i gave up and went to Kohls instead and - to my surprise - FOUND PANTS THAT FIT ME! But more on that later; right now it's time for bed.