French Silk ice cream and raspberry Milano cookies for dinner.

O, yes.

I woke up at my usual 6am today, but then while I was in the shower I remembered that my job doesn’t start until 9:45 today. That realization for some reason made me feel much more awake instantly. But now I have some time to kill.

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seriously, originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

Last week I drove by the GE plant that I took pictures of through the fence in May. It was in the middle of being torn down. Wrecking balls and cranes were actively destroying it as I drove by. Had I had my camera with me I would have loved to take some photos, but, alas, I did not. Today I drove by again on my way to Yerba Buena to work and there was nothing left except a large expanse of open space with tremendous rubble piles strewn about.

I stumbled across this today. It’s only one frame of a comic by Ted Rall, but it was the funniest. I bet I’m breaking laws by putting it up. Whatever. I think it’s funny. I’m not sure why though. I can’t figure out which character makes me snicker the most; the woman who thinks the president will answer to her, or the woman who has a simple and blunt explanation.

The highlight of my day was drinking a glass of rootbeer. I really wanted one, and then I had one. Excellent.

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nap time, originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

I never would have expected myself to what I did in the wee hours of the morning today. I stood(slept) in line for American Idol auditions. It wasn’t for myself; I’m not going to go try to sing for anyone, much less sign my life away on one of their release forms, but my friend Gina is excitedly participating.

I agreed to go with her a couple of weeks ago because she couldn’t find anyone else to go. I couldn’t believe it and it sounded like it’d be an adventure.

There turned out to be far fewer interesting people there than I thought there would be. I didn’t find that out until the sun came up though. We arrived just after 3 a.m. and I think I was asleep on the ground by 3:45 with no regard for the people who were not sleeping and talking and singing and being obnoxious all night long. Poor Gina couldn’t fall asleep because she was excited and also because of the loud people around us.

When I woke up it was light out. Things were supposed to start happening around 8. I held the place in line while Gina went and put some things in the car and did her makeup and hair. This was when I started observing that there were just a whole bunch of ugly people.

The ugly people came from all over too! The people behind us were from Hawaii, and I saw signs people were holding that said they were from Minnesota. This is kind of crazy. I guess it’s a big deal to lots of people. Everyone is wanting to get on the news because Channel 2 is there. The American Idol people were making the crowd scream and yell for their cameras too.

We eventually got inside and got wristbands and tickets for assigned seats. That was followed by a quick logistics talk about tomorrow and some Q&A. We were free to go by about 10 o’clock.

Tomorrow we have to be outside the Cow Palace at 5 in the morning. I think it won’t take too long. We are fairly close to the beginning of the line on the inside. Gina will go up and get to sing for about 10-30 seconds in front of a producer and they will either tell her to go home or tell her she is coming back Friday or Saturday. Should be fun.

I slept all afternoon.

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my view, originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

that’s all really.

For some reason, the limit to me for sleeping in is noon. I don’t like to let myself stay in bed after that. I probably fell asleep last night around 4:30, but when I got up today and saw the clock say 12:04, I needed to get out of bed. Even if it wasn’t to do anything in particular.

I did end up doing something in particular though. It ended in me killing a computer. Not violently like Joe and Jessica tend to do, but in a more subtle and accidental way. All I was trying to do was make a 40GB hard drive recognizable on an older machine. That required flashing the BIOS. Now the PC that I was trying to upgrade was not a reputable make of any kind so locating a BIOS file was fairly difficult. Apparently the one that I ended up using didn’t work. It seemed to flash just fine, but when I restarted the computer, it would come up with an error and tell me to go into Setup. Setup could not be gotten into though. At this point there is nothing to do. All this stuff is before it detects any drives or whatever, so I can’t just stick a floppy back in and do it over. I read a few places about possible solutions. One was to try a hot swap with working BIOS chip. I tried that with one that was from an older computer with a different chipset, and it didn’t work. I have no other ones that I want to take the BIOS chip off of to try it with. If I could find an ISA controller card, supposedly with one of those the floppy is accessed before anything else so I could flash the BIOS again, but those are very old and hard to come by. It’s the reason I’m a packrat, but people convince me to throw things away, curse you!

We have other computers around, so it’s not the end of the world. I’d never screwed something up like that before, so it was kind of fun.[/nerdiness]

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journal, originally uploaded by mrwilloby.