I took my dad to the fancy Korean restaurant in the neighborhood. My food was good but my dad didn’t like his. Probably because it was unfamiliar. He got bulgolgi and I got a spicy chicken dish that was red with pepper. It also made me sweat profusely. It was a bit more expensive than what he was expecting, but they brought out so much food that we were both stuffed. In any case, I’m sure I won’t hear the end of this. My dad likes to complain. At least we got a good dinner out of it.

Doug Mayer, you know, the Car Talk guy. Pretty cool, eh? I had to write to complain that I couldn’t listen to Car Talk online. They switched from Real Audio (sorta evil) to Windows Media Player (much more evil). I mean, I hate how Real keeps trying to get me to buy things, but I’ve been using their products for free for years. They have to make their money somewhere instead of just stealing it like Microsoft does. OK, so Windows is more like extortion than theft.

Most of the NPR programs are using Real, and I had no problems. Oh, well. You win some, you lose some.

My dad and I went to Skyline Restaurant in Portland. It’s a fairly famous hamburger shop that had the admiration of food critic James Beard amongst others. I’ve been going there for over 30 years. Well, the first thing I noticed was that the fries and ketchup were different. Not bad, just different. My burger wasn’t as good as usual, and my dad’s chicken burger was tasteless.The waitress made herself scarce, too. We waited 30 minutes for the check and had to have them search for it.

Like I said, though, it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good. Small disappointments.

So I pulled out an 80’s green shirt to wear as protective coloration today and nobody else was really wearing them. Even got pinched by a guy I don’t know. Whatever.

Guess why I didn’t post last night? I wish I could say it was something exciting but it was because I scored a bunch of comic book scans and I was busy reading them. Yes, I was guilty of leeching off the kindness of the people writing the books but I offset it by knowing that I don’t have collector’s guilt and don’t have to buy mylar bags, etc for the books.

So my driver’s license looks like crap. Not because the picture looks like crap, but because they all look like crap now. Check out the pastels and the ghostly image on the right. They didn’t let me keep my old license, either, the one I’ve had for the last 10 years.

I should have told them I lost it, like I should have told them I lost my Japanese Non-Resident Alien booklet (their equivalent of a green card). Well, less junk is probably good. I have enough junk as it is.

So, I was worried that the medication I take or some illness is making me burp a fishy smell. Well, it started happening yesterday during the day, instead of in the evening. Then I remembered that I’m taking “Fish Oil” as one of my vitamins. Duh.

Went to the local REI today to get a small bottle for my ma. She’s going to Japan in a couple of days, so I needed to get her travel bottles for some toiletries. I think it’s because the weather is so nice, but REI was more crowded than it was during the opening weekend. My huge $1.40 purchase didn’t take too long and the cashier told me that the place had been nuts all weekend.

I got my friend Greg to help me pick up a new TV for my parents. My sister is coming to visit, and she doesn’t think she can survive without a TV. It’s stressful enough here without it, I guess. Well, instead of buying an HDTV-ready TV, I just bought a “cheapie” Toshiba. HDTV-ready sets are over $900! Well, I was all set to buy a 32″ Toshiba for $407, but after seeing it near a 27″ Toshiba, I thought the difference wasn’t obvious, and being non-obvious it certainly wasn’t worth $158. The 27″ Toshiba was only $249! And they didn’t care about selling anything extra at BestBuy. Just get a cart and run it to the checkout stand. Whee!

And now I can’t remember what else I was going to talk about.

So, being a geek and finding Friday night to be a good time to be tired from the rest of the week, I like watching Friday night TV. Unfortunately, Friday night TV doesn’t always like to be as friendly. Fastlane went away as did John Doe, The Lone Gunmen, and Firefly. And those are just the shows I like. Luckily, there’s Monk on USA Network, but the season is over as of 3/5/2004 and the new season doesn’t start until June.

I have high hopes for Touching Evil on USA Network as well. If nothing else, I have to watch it to make sure and if it doesn’t pan out, there’s always mysteries. Unfortunately, there’s only so many evil murderous freaks I can read about before I have to go back to comic books.

Unfortunately, I was down all day. And that means my sister’s knitting blog was down all day.

However, it wasn’t Qwest’s fault. In fact, it looks like Qwest did their magic in the middle of the night (my old connection died at about 12:11AM). I tried changing out the DSL modem at 7:30AM and everything seemed to be working fine. However, the instructions I got from my ISP were a bit off, and my ISP also wanted me to change my system to use DHCP. I had to wait until I got home to get things working. My friend altered some things on my computer to get things going.

Well, now things are sorta back working. My modem says:

My resolv.conf is still being overwritten, but at least I’m back and so is my sister’s blog.

So now I have a whole 72MB of RAM for my SPARCclassic. And tomorrow, my DSL gets upgraded (hopefully) so my sister’s web site might be faster. And faster downloads. Yay.

And I think that’s all I can think about right now. Saw a couple of friends today who live in town but I haven’t seen for a year or more! One is even in my neighborhood. Yay.

Well, I hope my DSL is up tomorrow. We’ll see.

Yesterday kind of sucked at work (at least towards the end) since I didn’t get some things working. That means I have to use Microsoft Windows, something I dislike. Really dislike. Really, really dislike. You get the picture. I was terribly disappointed.

Does anyone not have troubles with their iPod scratching? I think they make them with extra scratchable materials. Holy crap.

And by this I’m really avoiding what I meant to say, I finally got another copy of “Alternative” by the Pet Shop Boys — my favorite group — and I really enjoyed it. But I forgot how much I liked the Duran Duran’s 12″ mixes. The longer remixes of a lot of bands just leave me bored. Some of the worst is Spandau Ballet’s repetitive nonsense. Yeesh. But Duran Duran adds twangy guitars, horns, and even disco-y violins to “Planet Earth,” “Girls on Film,” and “My Own Way.” The remixes were all called “Night Version,” and were even faster than the regular version. I don’t know if they just happened to hire the best studio musicians, but it just sounds like they were all on.

OK, so the lyrics are all kind of silly. But you have to remember I’m the guy who likes:

“And I should’ve been gone
After all your words of steel
Oh I must’ve been a dreamer
And I must’ve been someone else …”

I did get a copy of “One Thing Leads to Another” by The Fixx. That’s another excellent stream-of-blithering song. Wow. Did that guy do that in one breath?

Today was supposed to rain, but it was a beautiful day and the first day this year that was over 60 degrees. I met a friend for lunch and we blabbed for 2 1/2 hours, then went for a random walk through the neighborhood. Things of note: sections of the giant sewer tunnel being built under downtown Portland, and the stump of a tree that looked about four feet in diameter (maybe more). The tree was a huge cedar and my friend was upset that they killed such an old tree. I counted the thick rings, and I only counted 22. Wow that thing grew fast.

I must have driven 300 miles yesterday. My buddy Greg convinced me that no one else wanted to go to the ham radio junk fest swap meet in Puyallup, WA. Made a couple of mistakes and didn’t buy anything.

The first mistake was eating breakfast at a place called Nickelby’s in Tumwater. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either. We ate there as an experiment and also because we didn’t know if we could find the place that our friend Bill likes. I’m not sure, but I think it’s the Hawks Prairie Inn that we drove by right off the freeway. Duh. We drove right by it after we left Olympia.

The second mistake was eating at a fancy McMenanin’s again. I’ve tried the Hotel Oregon in McMinneville and yesterday I tried the Olympic Club in Centralia, WA. Neither of them was as good as the local McMenamin’s Tavern.

It was a fun time otherwise. Fun driving if you don’t have to do it very often.

When I got home, I had the box set of Duran Duran singles. There are 13 CDs, and each is a reproduction of the 12″ singles (or a 45 if there was no 12″ single). I listened to that while I was putting together a ham radio kit. I forgot how much I liked those old Duran Duran 12″ singles. “My Own Way,” “Planet Earth,” “Rio,” and the list goes on.