Wow, I haven’t updated this thing in a long time! Let’s see…
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I’m not in high school anymore, but I was not too long ago, and that’s when I came out, so this gets posted here

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Ever do something that was fun a long time ago, then you try to do it later in life and it ends up sucking? That’s kinda how my night went tonight.
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I just got some nifty mapping software, and I’d like to keep track of all the places I’ve been on it. So, if I’ve been to your house, or you want to have your own pushpin in my gigantic map of the US/Canada/Mexico/Western Europe, please send me your address. Many thanks for those who are willing to help my new project. This will not be shared with anyone, it’s just for my own reference, like a personal IFPL

A few hours ago, I decided to upgrade to Office 2003, and this meant upgrading to Outlook 2003 (I’m a heavy Outlook user). Among other annoyances I had to correct, one was a system tray icon that is impossible to get rid of, and all the “help” sites told me to use the “Hide Inactive Icons” thing (they call it a feature, I call it shit) to hide it. This was unacceptable, since I don’t use that particular “feature”, so I spent about another hour Googling. FINALLY, I found an MSDN developer’s blog with a comment that had a link to a tool that MIGHT be helpful. It’s called KnockOut, and has an option to get rid of the tray icon. Unfortunately, this program runs in the tray as well, but once you close it (at least on my system), the Outlook tray icon is still gone, and doesn’t come back until you restart Outlook! So, for you programmers out there, there’s demand for something automated to do this, like a script or program that doesn’t run in the tray (I found thousands of hits from people wanting to turn this off as well). Knockout does it pretty well, and doesn’t require any installation, just run the EXE from somewhere. Hope this helps!

Ok, so maybe I’m not done
I shifted the layout around a tad, changed a few things here and there, let me know what you think
One of these days I want to make a major change, but not tonight, too tired.

One more post for today, a quick update on the pickup truck:

We’re still trying to sell this fucker. My mom, who is a bit delusional as a car seller, is asking even more for it than before, $3200. On top of that, an interested buyer asked that we take it to a mechanic and have the perennial oil leak looked at (not fixed, just checked). We did, and got the verdict today: It needs a new rear main seal and a new valve cover gasket, over $650 worth of repairs. I told my mom to tell the guy that if he pays for the repair, we’ll knock $800 off the asking price. She called him, ignored my advice, and tried to get the guy to pay for the repair PLUS her original asking price. He hung up on her, and we’re now stuck with this thing again. Based on her previous selling attempt (the Accord), we’ll probably still have this damn thing through at least spring. We’ll also probably need to stick real plates on it if we have it that long (those Farm Use plates won’t fool the cops forever, though luckily we can keep it parked behind the building where they can’t see it), and it’ll need a city sticker before then.

So, I’ve told my mom over and over again that I wouldn’t pay more than $2800 for that truck, nor would I pay anything close to that if I still had to pay for the repair on top of that, so if someone out there wants to offer $2800 total (truck and repair), PLEASE email me!

Oh, and the plates for the Land Rover arrived a few days ago (can’t remember if I posted about it), so I have my wolfie plates finally! Yayness! It seems to have developed a drip under the rear differential, though, I need to find out if that’s normal Land Rover drippiness, or something to be checked out.

Yesterday, my mom and I were talking about vacations, and I mentioned that I didn’t think I could get time off for three vacations. She got a strange look on her face, and I said I was going on this trip to Florida (Pawpets Megaplex) in March, and the convention in Philly in July (AC, of course). It occured to me right about then that my mom would probably really enjoy Anthrocon. She’s a HUGE Scooby Doo fan, she often acts like a puppy (when no one else is around ), and she would probably be perfect fur material. So, I suggested she and my sister come with me to the con in Philly, and she seemed quite interested. I later showed her my art collection (minus the few yiffy/babyfur pics), told her what a fur is, and showed her photos from Pawpets Megaplex and Anthrocon (which mostly focused on the fursuiters, as usual). She seemed even more interested when I explained that there’s a lot more to it than fursuiters, they just hog all the pictures. She even said something about asking my grandma to come.

So, I’ll most likely be bringing family to Anthrocon ‘05. I wouldn’t be rooming with them, of course, but the usual beach trip gets really old really fast, and something new is always fun. I don’t particularly want my grandma to come, since I’d probably have to come out to her about being gay as well, but we’ll see what happens. My sister would enjoy it if she could bring a friend (she’d enjoy a croquet match if she had a friend to babble with), which shouldn’t be difficult. And, I get extended peace at home, and it could possibly bring us all genuinely closer (not like the fakey-closeness we have now), and I wouldn’t likely even need to share a room with them. Sounds like a good deal to me :-).

In other furry news, I finally got in touch with White Wolf, and she’s making me a tail & ears! I know, I know, I already have one tail & ears set, but I have always adored WW’s work, I just could never get her to return my emails for some reason, so now I get the first tail I laid eyes on after discovering my furriness

My plans for Megaplex are coming together fairly smoothly. I still need to price/locate a trailer for the trip down, and I need to contact the hotel for parking fees once I know the size of the trailer. I didn’t want to tow one for this trip, but we need more than five people to maximise the fuel costs, but with more than five, there’s not enough cargo space, and my roof rack only reaches halfway back. I thought about getting one of those receiver hitch carriers, but then we wouldn’t be able to open my rear door, which we need for the two jump seat riders. Aside from that, and hotel stuff, everything is pretty much squared away. This trip is gonna rock!

This just in: There’s a new version of Trillian Pro out! Don’t rush off too fast, it’s an Alpha release, still too unfinished to be Beta, but a friend of mine downloaded it earlier this evening, and it looks pretty good so far. A little tricky for existing Pro users (lots of misplaced controls), and not trustworthy/proven enough for me to download it myself or recommend it to anyone, but if you enjoy beta testing and don’t mind risking your Trillian profile’s integrity (back it up frequently!), knock yourself out

I’ve been told I’m hard to shop for, so if any of you want to get me something for some reason (people tend to give me boxes with shiny wrappings on December 25, I don’t get it ), check out this page:

http://lupinia.us/FJL/wishlist.htm

It mostly consists of artists I’d like to get CDs/MP3s of, but there’s other stuff on there too.