Yesterday, I finally had a chance to talk to my mechanic directly about my car. And, he listed everything he had checked/tested/replaced in the month he’s had it. Needless to say, it was a very long list that I have no hope of remembering. He said that the only theory he hadn’t yet checked, due to the complexity involved, was an overly-worn camshaft.

He knows a guy at one of the Ford dealerships around here who will give him a good deal on a diagnostic, if not free, so he’s going to take it there for us and let them figure out what’s wrong.

I want my car back

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Also, road trip this weekend, I’m going to Four Quarters for Beltane. I’m heading out on Thursday, staying a night at efwolfcub’s house, then camping for the weekend. So, I pretty much won’t be online while I’m gone.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

While looking for something unrelated in one of my desk drawers, I found an extra set of Russian keyboard labels that I forgot I had. In case you didn’t know, I’ve wanted to learn Russian for many years, I’m just really slow at it. Last October, when I bought my nice new glowy keyboard, I also bought some key labels to make it a bilingual keyboard, in an effort to motivate me to pursue my language studies. And, it has helped, plus it looks cool and confuses people

Anyway, since my laptop is now usable (thanks to the memory upgrade), I decided to put my second set of labels on it. Will I use them? I dunno, but they look cool, and I get to see that awesome “What are all those funny squiggles?” look from others while travelling.

And yes, I have pics (click to enlarge them):
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I’ve seen some people giving MyFursona a lot of flack lately for being “half-finished” (I’m “softpaw” there, btw). And, admittedly, it is a work in progress. But you know what? They may still be adding features, but the parts they already have actually work. And their site is free of critical, show-stopping errors.

Tonight, I tried to register an account on a similar site, FURiends.com, mostly to keep my name from getting taken by some n00b. But, it does look quite polished (aside from the f***ing ads), so it may take off too, who knows. Right off the bat, I was unable to create an account because the verification image was broken. I gave up, and tried again later, same problem. Could it be an IE6 bug? Nope, same results in Firefox. So, I tried to load the image by itself, and received a PHP Fatal Error: Call to Undefined Function. For those who aren’t familiar with PHP, that’s a pretty freakin’ big problem.

So, I decided to pursue the matter some more, and clicked on the Support link. Oh look, they have an online helpdesk; I have one of those too, I’ll use it. Nope! “License Error: Key file has expired”. That’s not quite what I was expecting to see on a production site, since it probably means they were using a trial version that they didn’t purchase when it ran out. But, it’s a mistake every admin’s allowed to make once, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Luckily, they had a support email address too. So, I wrote up a nice email explaining the errors I encountered, and even made a friendly offer to help out if they’re short on programmers. Sent the message on its way, and figured it would make it somewhere, right? Nope! Denied again. But this wasn’t just any typical mail server error. The support address listed on their site, which looks like it’s an alternative to the helpdesk, is actually directly integrated with that system. And, since it’s broken, it rejects all incoming mail.

At this point, I’ve written them off, at least for awhile. I understand the complexities of running a site like that, but to have that many critical problems that make the site unusable is just pathetic. The FurAffinity team could do better, and that’s really saying something, because they suck pretty hard. Their choice of advertising providers really irks me as well, there were some very shady-looking domains asking to plant cookies on my computer; but that’s a whole other discussion.

If you want to join a site that actually works properly, check out MyFursona.

EDIT: Thanks to some very ironic timing, the MF crew found some pretty major exploits and have taken the site down temporarily. I stand by my statements about FURiends, though.

Well, about a half-hour ago, my LJ account reverted to its Basic status. It occurred a little faster than I expected, but I was able to get my theme the way I wanted it beforehand (thanks for the info on that, tango!), and I didn’t have to do major work to my userpics to compensate for their voodoo-ish deactivation algorithm. Only one of the ones I like didn’t get chosen, but I really like the ones that stayed, so it’s no big deal.

Also, I don’t think this is likely to be a problem, but if anyone reading this is thinking about gifting me a paid subscription, please don’t. Such gestures give me warm fuzzies most of the time, but I don’t want anyone sending LJ money on my behalf anymore than I want to spend it myself.

And, just to clarify, I’m not “leaving” LJ at this time, and I’ll continue to update as regularly as I update anything else. I only dropped my paid account.

Despite my need to be a recluse this week, in order to catch up on my work, I decided to accept a local friend’s invitation to go see a play with her tonight; Shakespeare’s 12th Night, performed at JMU.

I’ve never really been a fan of Shakespeare, but this was probably the best of his plays I’ve seen! I had a hard time understanding them, with my redneck vocabulary and all ( ), but I understood the actions just fine. Shakespeare was a dirty, dirty man! This play has gender-bending, drunken antics, and even some borderline-gay scenes. Something for everyone

Afterwards, we snuck backstage to say hi to a close friend of hers who was acting in the performance. She’s only a casual acquaintance of mine, or so I thought, but she recognized me right away and was quite chatty with both of us. Perhaps we talked more than I remembered in school, and my memory just sucks that bad?

Anyway, that’s about the only noteworthy thing I did tonight. If you’ve never seen 12th Night, I highly recommend it, even if you don’t like other Shakespearian plays

While checking my usual forums this evening, I stumbled across the news that Ozy & Millie, a favourite webcomic of mine since high school, will be coming to a final end at some point this year. This comic has nearly been a daily part of my life for the last six years, and even with all that’s happened in that time, it’s always been there give me a smile in the morning. So, needless to say, it was very sad news, even though this is how I’d prefer something like this to end, rather than decaying into crap (Peanuts/Garfield/tons of others) or being abandoned mid-storyline (Venus Envy [grumbles]).

In lighter news, I sooooo want this in my car!

I don’t think I’ve ever put so much work into being able to take an online quiz! For those who don’t know me; being unable to do something tends to create a nearly irresistable drive to do that thing, just to say I did it. So, when I saw that personality quiz pop up in everyone’s LJ, I tried to go to the site for it, only to find that the domain wouldn’t resolve for my DNS server, or any of the servers it’s paired with. Non-tech translation: According to several DNS servers, www.learnmyself.com is a non-existant domain. To access it, I had to:

1. Perform a WHOIS lookup on the domain, to get its name servers.
2. Repeat step 2 with a different WHOIS search, because Network Solutions was doing strange things.
3. Perform an NSLOOKUP on www.learnmyself.com on its associated name servers.
4. Manually edit my HOSTS file to force my computer to resolve the domain correctly, instead of relying on DNS to do it for me.

Anyway, here it is:

My Personality

Wee, home from another Pittsburgh trip, for my monthly hit of furry goodness

The trip up there started pretty normally, but the Turnpike portion was, erm, eventful. My EZ-Pass didn’t read because I held it wrong, so I had to take a ticket and pay cash. And, without getting too gross, I had to stop a lot. But I made it, and met up with lilpup and crew around 11:30, I think (I have no clue what time I got there).

On Saturday, the group decided to go shooting at some range Dobie knew about. I didn’t bring a gun, I’m really out of practice, and I wasn’t particularly in the mood for that sort of fun, so I met up with Fox_Cub, Teddy, and Firefox for lunch at Sonic, followed by shopping. Fire and I headed back to Pup’s, but with no contact from the shooting crew, we decided to see what Swift was up to. It was great seeing him and Sil again, and other friends of ours who happened to be there

Today was fairly uneventful; we started out shooting a humourous video at the park, but after finishing the first scene, a bunch of parents with kids showed up. Finding a new location turned into finding dinner, but I had to leave early :-\

I’m really tired now, hence the short, choppy post. It was really great to see all of you again (I’m too lazy to type names), and I look forward to next time!

This weekend is empty, I think, followed by Beltane the weekend after.

My mom basically insisted I take her car this weekend to go see Ash & crew, so looks like I’ll be able to make it after all! My ETA is about 11:00pm.

Yay, I actually made it out of the house today! A friend from high school and I have been partially in touch for awhile via LJ, and we recently got in touch again via AIM. Driving out of town for socialization all the time blows, especially when I don’t have a car readily available, and she and I had stuff to talk about, so I molested the Rover into working and met her for a walk in the park. I forgot how much fun she was to hang out with, I wish we would’ve done this before now

We walked the entire circuit of the park, talking about all sorts of stuff and catching up on the past few years of our lives; typical girl-talk stuff. Afterwards, she suggested we visit the Earth & Tea Cafe, a hippie-looking place I’ve never actually been in. They’re pretty pricy, and their food is a little strange (like, weirder than Panera), but their tea freaking rocks! Huge selection, too; well worth it overall

Back to work in my office after that, but hopefully we can meet up again sometime.

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I finally heard from the mechanic today about my car, but the news wasn’t promising. In short, he’s completely stumped, so he has a Ford expert he knows taking a look at it tomorrow. I’m hoping for a miracle, but if they don’t get it before they close tomorrow, I won’t be attending lilpup / spikeblackfang’s birthday party this weekend. So, if you’re attending, you may or may not see me, I don’t know yet :-\

EDIT: This webcomic by gen is absolutely awesome, if you haven’t seen it, and today’s strip made me crack up laughing for some reason. Pure awesome