Monday, May 30, 2005

Can't think.

I'm going friggin' nuts. I can't get this girl out of my head. I met this cutie a couple of months ago when my roommate had some coworker's over. She's a smart, beautiful brunette. I think I've seen her about four times since. Everytime I've seen her I've either managed to do something dumb, or I just can't think of anything to say. I was amazed on Friday (when she was looking hotter than ever) that she was still talking to and hanging around me. She said three things that completely blew me away. I was showing her and this other dork my finished room lighting. I asked them if they knew what that was on my workbench. She pipes up, "That's a turbo!"

Wha? Did she really just say that?!? OMFG. She's incredibly smart, smoking hot, cooks, and she likes car stuff.

She then goes on to ask me how much power I'm making. She tells me how much power she's got and wants to know what I'm going to be making. I wanted to propose to her right there. ;)

Later that night she says that she wants to do 100mph in her VW. I almost had to pinch myself. This is the same EXACT goal as I have for my car.

Did I mention that she likes to wear thongs and has the world's sweetest ass?

I have gone over Friday's conversation 100,000 times. I don't know what to do.

I've made the mistake in the past more than once of asking women out when they were only trying to be nice. I wanna ask but I don't want to scare her off either. To make matters worse, I think that my roommate may have a thing for her. I don't want to screw up a 15 year friendship, but I also don't want to miss out on a possible new one. With someone of the opposite sex even! Who's hot and likes cars!!!

Did I mention that she is thinking about going back to school to become a doctor?

...jeez... It took me over an hour to write the above. I just can't stop thinking about her.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Cliff Yablonski hates... me!

Ooops, I got busted. I was using this hilarious pic from Cliff's site but I did a no,no. I never uploaded it to my image hosting site, I just linked to it. Oops. Sorry for stealing your bandwidth Cliff!

I apologize to anyone who may have been offended by that pic. It wasn't me that posted it. It was an angry Cliff. Actually, I found the picture that Cliff replaced it with almost as funny. ;) (Except for all of the nasty words on the bottom.)

My new pic is ohhhhhh sooooo much better.

If any of the female readers can guess what it is, you get a gold star. ;)

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Broke n' Bored

WOW, I have NO freakin' money. I just paid my car insurance a few minutes ago. I think I've got about $25 to my name until Wednesday (payday). When when I do get paid I really need to send pretty much everything to pay off my credit card bill.

I even had to resort to drinking beer when I went out on Friday. BEER I TELL YOU!! The humanity!!! LOL! It was a good thing I was actually winning at pool. A nice side effect of not downing Jack & Coke all night long. ;)

I really do hate being broke. All of my hobbies involve spending WAY too much money. I actually cleaned this weekend. I can see my bedroom floor and I've got some space on my workbench. I also found where my cleaning toothbrushes were. (They've been missing since I moved.) It was driving me nuts because when I was cleaning my intakea while ago, I didn't have my toothbrushes. Toothbrushi? es? i? Idunno.

I did spend money this weekend, which I shouldn't have. It was for a good thing, I swear! Shelves. Yep. A glorious plastic shelving unit. All so that I get some crap out of my bedroom and make better use of my garage. Even trying to be good costs money. Which bring me to another thing...

I've been thinking ALOT about selling things on Ebay. More specifically cables. I have checked out a few sellers on Ebay that are selling AV cables. They are very similar to the cables that NJ and I make every day. The incredible thing is that the Ebay sellers are charging 40% over cost. Subtracting parts and shipping, I could make $20 per set of cables. That adds up really quick. Which brings up a question...

How much can a person sell before a certain government notices? If I'm selling 5-10 set of cables a week, that could mean $400 to $800 a month. OMG that would kick ass.

The initial cash outlay isn't that bad either. I already have all of the tools, all that I would need is the parts.

Making an extra $5k a year would be like a $2.40/hr raise. That would be really nice.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Ebay Aholes

I'm getting really worried. I ordered a VERY expensive part for my car off of Ebay last Tuesday. I have heard NOTHING from the seller. I sent him an email last Thursday asking if he shipped it and for a tracking number. Zip. Zero. Nada.

He had 100% approval with 90+ buyers. WTF is going on?!? I'm giving the guy one more day to send me some info then I'm taking action.

The thing that really has me worried is that I used PayPal but I used it with my credit card. I'm pretty sure that I don't get the $1,000 buyer protection if I use a credit card.

UGH! This sucks!!!

Til morrow.

***TUESDAY UPDATE***

I emailed the guy directly and set him an email through Ebay. Still nothing. I said that if he didn't respond in 48 hours (by Thursday evening). That I would take action to get my money back.

BTW, I found out that becuase he has a 100% feedback rating, my purchase is covered by buyer protection. I should be able to get all of my money back if this guy doesn't send my my stuff.

This still sucks.

***WEDNESDAY UPDATE***

Thank God! It looks like the guy isn't a deadbeat seller afterall. The message I got from him this morning...

"your turbo got shipped out yesterday. we normally dont automatically email tracking info so i will make sure to have it emailed to you asap tomorrow. sorry for the confusion"

It still strikes me as being lazy to not tell your buyers what the heck is going on. If I pay you $500 for something, I wanna know EXACTLY what is happening.

I'm still probably going to be a little worried until I actually have it in my hands.

Monday, May 09, 2005

Cliff Yablonski Hates You.

Leave me the fuck alone.

This is what was running through my mind as my "manager" was bitching at me on Friday. I say "manager" because he pretty much just made himself the manager of our department one day. There's three people, so one person must be the manager right? Whatever. It wouldn't be soo bad but he tries to do as little as possible. Lately, we have been pretty slow. We've been doing crap work and helping out the other departments. By "we", I mean NJ and I. Our "manager" will make one of his three weekly trips to Sam's club, or somewhere else to do personal shopping on company time. Meanwhile spending all of the rest of the time browsing the internet. Oh wait, I almost forgot, he does go out and do a shitty job on a service call or two. It's really sad. When NJ and I went back to finish up one of our "manager's" service calls, we were greeted with broken parts and missing hardware. It looked like he had just ripped the piece of equipment out of it's mount. God forbid he spend the extra 5 minutes and do it the right way. I guess that it all comes down to work ethic. He barely has any.

I've been working since I was 13. I've always been taught to do the best that I can at everything that I do. I always have. No matter what I'm doing, I will teach myself everything about it. How can I do this better and faster?

I also own everything that I have. The only thing that I've ever gotten from my parents was $5k for college. I worked and paid for everything else during my 4 years of college. I'm amazed by how other people have managed to piss this incredibly valuable opportunity away. Three people that I work with were given a free ride to very good colleges. Do any of them have anything to show for it? NO. Can you frigging believe that!!! I would have died to have my education totally paid for. I'm pretty sure that if I had a bachelor's, that I would be much better off. Employer's still look at an Associate's Degree from a tech college as being a little more than nothing. It's really sad.

The one other thing that our "manager" said was that we needed to be more positive to the salesmen and not be soo intimidating. Ummm, no. If someone does a half-ass job and comes to me to figure out their fuck-up, I'm not going to do it without giving them grief. Especially if that person is making 3X what I am, and the only reason that they are doing it half-assed is to make an extra buck. Fuck you.

[2 paragraphs have been removed along with some minor editing. I just couldn't leave them. I'm not that mean.]

Holy crap, I need a new job.

Monday, May 02, 2005

Offline

For the last couple of days I've been struggling with my internet connection. At first, I didn't even realize that I couldn't access the net. I was re-building my HTPC (home theatre personal computer) and I was driving myself nuts trying to figure out why I couldn't access the net. I thought it was Windows' stupid firewall, or maybe some service that I accidentally turned off. (This was all on Friday night.) I was getting really pissed. I also wasn't thinking straight because it was late. I decided to sleep on it.

On Saturday I started playing with my HTPC, checking and re-checking everything. It just didn't make sense! Then it hit me... Could I even get to the net with my main computer? Nope! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! It's amazing how you can get soo focused on one thing and not step back and take everything into consideration.

When I originally plugged in my HTPC, I bumped the cable out of my router. It shouldn't have been soo easy to do. Unfortunately I had two cables with no tabs. You know, the little clippy things that hold the plug in the jack. ;) I now could at least access my router. But I still couldn't get on the freakin' net. I continued to play with cables, testing and re-testing everything. Still nothing. Break time...

I went out and rented Blade Trinity. Not too bad of a flick. It was pretty predictable but it made up for it with Jessica Biel. I love an athletic brunette...especially one with long hair. She was kicking ass in skimpy outfits showing off her sweet booty. Parker Posey is also good. She's got those funky lips kinda like Gina Gershon. I don't mean to ruin it for you, but the bad guy dies. Whodathunkit?

Back to the fun. On Sunday, I decided to replace a couple of the questionable cables with new ones. $25 later, it still didn't work. Now I was starting to wonder if Time Warner had cut me off for some reason. I was playing around and plugged my computer directly into the cable modem. BAM! I got activity and access. This means that it was my router that was causing all the problems. After a master reset, everything was up and running.

This is definitely not the way I wanted to spend my weekend. I have to admit it though... The last time that I had to do anything major to my router was Janurary '01. Four years without a problem is pretty darn impressive.

If you made it through this technical post, you get a gold star. ;)

The really bad thing is that now all I want to do I go drinkin' and shoot pool. Considering it's 12am on Sunday, all I can say is... DOH!