Official Ginko Blog

Last night, I walked back to my office to find (as the title and this photo suggest) that my two dogs Nick and Ned had eaten apart my leather wallet, which was sitting on the desk next to my workstation.  Luckily, my driver’s license and social security card survived the attack with only minor damage, and I’ve been able to order replacements for my credit cards, which I was advised should all arrive sometime before the end of 2008, shortly after the cards expire.

The wallet, however, did not survive the battle.

In other news, my mother having just recently moved to a new apartment, has finally gotten her computer hooked back up and online.  The entire process took about 3 hours on the telephone, with statements such as “No, the OTHER black cable”, “It only plugs in one way” and “No, into the ROUND HOLE!”.  There was also a trip from the cable company to re-connect her cable lines (after they insisted they were still connected when she first called them).   Hopefully, she’ll begin writing in her blog again.

Thinking about it now, I would do anything to have my old cable internet company back.  Anyone but these idiots. It took them 2 weeks and 5 service calls to move my business line from the house to my office, which are across the driveway from eachother. During the entire process I was without DSL and had intermittant telephone service, despite being told by several different service reps that it was a simple next-day process and my service would remain uninterrupted.  On top of that, they had the audacity to bill me for the move, the second service call (for when they had to fix where the guy connected my building to the neighbor’s phone line by mistake), and an early termination fee (which turned out to be a computer error).

It took another 4 days of calling supervisors and “Billing Specialists” (what the heck is a “Billing Specialist”, anyway?  There is nothing about billing that requires anything more than a calculator and some old FORTRAN code, let alone a “Specialist”) to get the charges removed, and they still won’t remove (or even discount) the “Line Move Fee”, claiming that most of the money goes to FCC taxes and whatnot and (even though the process took “longer than average”) they did get it moved.

-Hinoserm

My grandmother was in the hospital on Christmas day, so it got delayed untill the 3rd of Febuary. She’s doing ok, but has lost a lot of weight. Still, she looked healthy. Anyway.. we were all standing around and I noticed my Uncle feeding my grandmothers little fuzzy dog named Lucky. Well, this caused Grandma to get onto him.. and I looked at the dog and then up and mentioned that I still thought it was better than a schnouzer. I don’t like schnouzers. They are dumb and noisy and ugly. Well, my aunt LOVES schnouzers.. so she looked up and yelled “HE IS NOT BETTER THAN A SCHNOUZER!” Well.. my grandmother overheard her.. as did most of the neighbors. To which Grandma was like “Is so!” and just laughed. It was really funny..

In other news… I’m fat and have nearly crushed my poor computer chair. I should order a new one, but I don’t wanna. I think maybe I’ll try to build a custom chair out of high strength tube steel and foam padding. It’ll weigh like 8000 pounds, but it’ll hold up a car. Also, I got my fish tank up and running again. Only had to take the filter and lights apart a few times to fix them up, but it’s running real nice now. I could prolly shut one of the filters off just for the sake of saving power. It doesn’t need them both.. poor fish live in a swirling vortex of crystal clear water.

Remember the model I was building a while back? Yeah.. it went into the trash can yesterday. I knocked it off in the floor and stepped on it.. poor little car was flat as it could be. Oh, and my other uncle had a show cow die. It was cruel irony.. They had just given it a bath and were getting ready to put it on the trailor to take it to the Fort Worth stock show. Well, apparently giving a steer a bath is hungry work because they all left to get a hamburger before loading it. Well, when they got back, it had fallen over and strangled it’s self to death on the roap they used to tie it up. Still, it’s one less cow in the world, so I can’t complain. Other than complaining that they drug it into my yard where it sat for 4 days before the dead animal people came to pick it up.

I’m not sick anymore.

An official date of Feburary 20th has been set for my move to Texas.  I have still yet to tell my mother or anyone else about it, though my aunt knows now.

On a related note…

(Potentially angry content below.  This is where I warn you to put on your anti-emo eye protection before proceeding.  Contact your doctor immediately if prolonged exposure occurs.  Batteries not included.)
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I’m sick.  It’s either a cold, or the flu, or maybe some type of heart attack, or a brain tumor, or a dislodged banana… truth of the matter is I really don’t care what’s making me feel horrible, so long as I can take something to get rid of it — and so far nothing has.  I also get the feeling my constant whining about being sick annoys people, but I really don’t care.

In other news… Read more

Earlier, back in March or so, I decided to try the Internet Explorer 7 beta/preview/whatever, and it sucked.  So today, I loaded up Windows Update to find one of the suggested critical updates to be none other than IE7.

Being one to keep my computer up-to-date, I installed it, thinking “Hey, if they’re releasing it to a few million people, they must have made it suck alot less, right?”  I was wrong.  Very wrong.

Immediately after loading it, I have to think: What is wrong with people?!  The address bar looks like something akin to a Playskool Toy, the toolbar buttons are worthless, and best of all; you can’t change any of it.  It took me 10 minutes and a registry hack just to get the menu bar back to the top of the screen, and user forbid you ever wanting to move any of the toolbar buttons.

Now, I’ve been a strong fan of Internet Explorer since I can remember; It comes with the OS, it’s pratically the measure of standards, and up until now the interface was simple and intuitive, but, if this is what we’re to expect in Vista, I’m going to find myself using a third-party browser.

IE7 is going to get uninstalled, and if this is a glimpse of what our future is going to look like, I’ll gladly stay in the past.

-Hinoserm

I bought a model car today. I would tell you what it is, but that would require reacing over there and flipping the box over to read the top. Anyway, I pulled it out and on the side is this list of “Required paint colors”. Needless to say, that was completley ignored. There were like 4 diffrent shades of black it wanted me to buy. Black. BLACK! Black is black.. that’s what makes it black. Not this “Midnight black” and “Crystal black”. What the crap is that all about? Black is the abscence of color.. how can you have diffrent shades of something when it’s not a color at all? So it’s all black.. all of it. Took the little plastic trees outside and spraypainted all of it black. What gets me is that most of the pieces are SUPPOSE to be black, so why can’t they make them out of black plastic and save people a lot of work?! I’m lazy.. I don’t really care to paint all those tiny little pieces. I’ll be sure to post a picture of it somewhere when I’m done.

 In other news, Ginko Financial went down the other day. It was great fun.. I made these HUGE yellow signs to hang up everywhere. People would teleport in.. walk into the sign.. stare at it for a while and then try to use the system even though this HUGE sign clearly said it was broken. I made fun of some of them, to which they responded by telling me they hadn’t rezzed in yet. Still.. you go somewhere and there’s a HUGE gray block around the machine you want to use, would you assume it was suppose to be there?

 To top it all off, last night I went to open the drawr in my desk and ripped the front off of it. It was like the drawr just stayed in the hole and the front piece was in my hand. I just sort of set it back over the pile of stuff that rolled out into my bedroom floor. I think I’ll take some big drywall screws and just screw it all back together one of these days.