Life and Times of Dana

I have spent the better part of the last two days reworking my other site, www.megz-bytes.net, and getting the new games page done the way I want it.

If you are interested in games, especially if you like old Nintendo, Atari, Colecovision, Commodore 64 and the like, then you will definitely want to check out the games download page. I have links to emulators and ROMs there so that you can play those games on your PC. You can even run your Gameboy or Gameboy Advanced games on your PC.

Just remember that it is illegal to have a ROM of a game on your computer that you don't already own.

Today I'm just going to relax and work on my car for a while. The weather has turned colder the last few days and I want to finish it before the snow starts to fly.

This just goes to show how much of a life I have. I have been working on my other website since 6 this morning and it is now almost three in the afternoon. I got the navigation done the way I want it now (it took two tries), but now I need to change the color scheme a little, so, I guess thats what I'll be working on for the next few days.

I never did get to work on my car today. I got so engrossed in getting the website navigation done that I didn't take the time to work on the car and now it looks like rain.

Well back to the drawing board and new colors and backgrounds for the other website.

I don't know about you people, but I love games. I have a collection of nearly 10,000 of them. Old games are some of my favorites but I don't want to set up my old Nintendos or Atari or whatever it might be. I prefer to play them on my computer and so I have compiled a list of my favorite sites to download old games and emulators as well as ROMs for the old consoles. Some of these sites even have emulators for the Gameboys and Xbox so I can play the games on my computer too. You can find that list at www.megz-bytes.net/gaming2.html . You can access that page directly, for now, though I am in the process of redesigning the navigation for that site and will have a link up on there as soon as I am done. Have fun downloading and playing the games.

Today I am going to work on my other site's navigation and then work on my car. I have to finish getting the car ready for winter and don't want to do it after the weather changes like normally happens. Since the weather is nice and I don't have much computer work to do this week today would be a good day to do it.

I started working on a slight redesign of my megz-bytes.net website over the weekend to make it load just a tad faster for those on 56K. Thanks to people calling me with computer emergencies it won't get done until towards the end of the week.

People don't seem to understand that I like to have my weekends free, too, and kept calling me all weekend to fix their computer problems. I may be a geek and love computers, but I also like to have time for myself.

I'm hoping that this will be a slow week for repairs. I only have two places to go to, as of right now and two computers on the bench, so I should be able to get some work that I need to get done, done.

Here it is Thursday morning and I'm wondering what this weekend will have in store for me. I have plenty of work to keep me busy for today and tomorrow and it seems to have slowed down for a short time. I'm glad that it has because, I need the rest.

I find myself checking on my ex-fiance's profile to see if she is online lately. I would love to talk with her, but I am afraid that everything will start back up for me. I have never felt this way about someone in my life. I am still in love with her and it makes it difficult to think about other things some days. I'll make it through all of this emotional turmoil but it will take a while yet.

This time of year is always hard on me. I seem to have the best memories and the worst for this time of year. They all come flooding back and I have to just plod along doing whatever it is that I need to do to keep my sanity. Most days I just find some work to do and other days I sit down with pen and paper and write. Writing is quite the outlet for me. Sometimes I write stories and other days I look into myself. Actually when I'm writing my stories I'm writing about myself or things that I have experienced. It helps me to get things out in the open, to take a look at them and deal with them.

Looks like another very loooooong week. Thanks to all the virus writers and spyware/adware out there I've been cleaning systems of all that crap. I didn't get home until nearly 9:30 last night after working on just two systems and I have to go back to the last one tonight to finish it up.

I think my dog is getting mad at me for staying gone so long throughout the day. Last night she flipped her hair at me and wanted outside then ignored me for a while.

I have been having fun lately gathering roms for some of the old console games like Nintendo, Atari, Coleco, C64 and such. I got some emulators and now I can play some of those old games again. I will put links to all that on my other site sometime within the next week. I am also going to redesign the entry page for that site. For those of you that don't already know, that site URL is www.megz-bytes.net.

Here it is Saturday morning and it's pretty darned cool outside today and I'm tired from putting in too many hours through the week working on computers. I haven't even done much work on my stuff this week.

Looks like I don't have a date for this weekend either as I haven't heard anything from that lady I met 2 weeks ago. I have been invited over to my friends' house though for today, but I don't think I am going anywhere.

I did fix a couple of links on my other website this morning and have been doing some research online for Windows XP service pack 2. I sure have been getting a lot of work straightening out systems that have installed it. 16 bit programs no longer work under sp2 and now I'm trying to figure out what I need to hack to get them to work.

On another note I have been missing my ex-fiance like crazy again. With the weather turning cooler and Halloween coming up I got to remembering last year and the fun we had going to haunted trains, houses and hay rides.

Well, it looks like it's going to be another weekend with just me and my dog. I still haven't heard from that lady that I met a week and a half ago. I called her last night to see if she wanted to go to the auto show on Saturday this week and got her voice mail. I guess she's not as interested as she said. Oh well, that's people for you.

I spent yesterday at a friends house straightening out their computers and had a very good day just talking to them. Sometimes that's what we need. Just good conversation. I'm going back again next week to do some electrical work and visit some more.

Today I have two more computers to work on and another long day. I have been putting in some very long hours lately. People are even calling me on the weekends and late evenings for help. This weekend I'm turning off the cell phone and letting the answering machine get the other phone.

Good grief! Blogger is giving me fits today. I also tried to print out some checks for my checkbook and my program no longer works under XP service pack 2 so I had to go out and buy a newer version today. You just gotta love Micro$oft and the morons that do the coding there.

I have a lot of computers to work on this week and it looks like I'll be busy for several weeks to come.

Last Sunday I was asked about doing a website for one of the local bands and I gave them a few of my ideas, including putting up a few MP3 files for downloading and possibly embedding some songs into the webpages. It looks like a promising deal and I'll be able to get a little more creative than what I normally do for websites.

I was also asked by another local musician to write the words for four of her new songs. She gave me the recordings and the sheet music to see what I could come up with. I haven't written any songs in quite a few years now so this should be interesting.

I never did get to go on that date yesterday. It seems that she got hurt helping her parents on Saturday and was hurting so I just stayed at home and played with my computers, like I always do.

I discovered a great little program called station ripper that allows me to record music right from a web radio stream. It's based on stream ripper for Linux and is ported to Windows. Now I can record streaming music on my Windows box as well as my Linux box.

Since recording streaming radio also gets some of the banter from the D.J.s I also have been trying out some free MP3 editors. Audio2x, MP3trim, MP3directcut, all provide good tools and are easy to use for editting the MP3 files directly. There is another site that gives good info on MP3 editors for Linux, Windows, and MAC called mp3-converter.com and is a good place to start looking for tools.

It's Suday andI'm wondering what today will bring. The lady that I'm supposed to have a date with today was supposed to call me Friday or Saturday to let me know what we will be doing today and she still hasn't called. Oh well, there's plenty to do if she doesn't call this morning.

I went to some friends house on Friday and fixed one of their computers and I'm going back during the week and fix the other one. Nice people, they are. I met them here on the internet and have started to have a friendship with them. It's nice to have friends that care and you can talk to that aren't in the fellowship. Sometimes "earth people" are what I need. "Earth People" are what I call people that have never had a problem with alcohol or drugs. These people know what the next right thing is without being told or without having to learn it later in life. They never have to think twice, they just "know".

I think we talk as much as I work when I go over there. It's just good to have someone to talk to, even though it's just small talk most of the time. I get to get out of myself and just get into life.

I really hate this starting over crap. Since the breakup between my ex-fiance and myself I haven't done any dating and now I have this date for Sunday and maybe even Saturday with this lady that I met last week.

I'm still hurt over the breakup but I'm not going to let that interfere with the rest of my life. I have picked up the pieces before in my life and carried on and will do so this time too.

I had an internet friend of mine ask me if I was still sober. I am. I'm not going to let anyone else live in my brain except me. Just because life happens to go in another direction than what I had planned doesn't mean that I will let it get to me. Besides, I always remember the saying, "If you want to give God a laugh, tell him YOUR plans."

Monday night went well, except that I drank too much coffee and didn't get to sleep until around 2 a.m. That made Tuesday a very long day. I still get up around 5 a.m. every day, even though I am supposed to be retired.

Monday morning I decided to install service pack 2 for Windows XP and see what would happen. As some of you know, I have already had bad experiences with it on some of my customers computers. It didn't take but 20 minutes of trying to navigate the internet before I reset most of the security that Micro$oft had set up. I also ended up disabling the firewall. It's a lousy firewall to begin with. Between their security measures and the firewall it is next to impossible to navigate with Internet Explorer and it disables most of the third party tool bars.

I sit behind a hardware firewall and have a software one installed and so have no real need for Microsofts sorry attempt at firewalls. Their pop-up blocker even blocks you from downloading from the internet unless you go through some obfuscated routine to allow it.

I switched to Mozilla Firefox and Netscape 7.2 some time ago but still use I.E. for certain tasks.

I can already predict a lot of work thanks to Microsoft and this new service pack. I have a lot of small businesses and individuals that run XP and they will have plenty of problems once this service pack is installed.

I had a great time yesterday. I went to breakfast with a friend of mine, then she and I went for a drive and then out to one of the Lake Erie parks. We walked out on a small peninsula, about a mile out into the lake, and just sat there and talked for a few hours.

It made for a long day, especially since I also had my home group meeting last night, but it was well worth it. I found out that her father has over 40 years of sobriety and she is in alanon (well, nobody is perfect). It made for a very interesting day.

Tonight I have to go give a "lead" in the inner city. Quite a few of my friends that have never heard it are planning on being there. It's been a few months since I have done this but that's ok, I like doing it.

Some how I lost a day this week. I woke up this morning thinking it was Friday and had some time to get some things done around the house. WRONG! It's Saturday. All day yesterday I was thinking it was Thursday.

I guess I got a little too busy this week. I have a couple of friends that want me to come over today but, I don't know if I will. I'll call them later and see what they want to do. If I don't go over there I'll work around here.

I want to get all that stuff I have packed up moved around and make some room in the backroom for the computers I have sitting in the kitchen. Hopefully I'll get my kitchen back. Then I want to get this desk cleaned off again. I've been doing so much work at the computer that I have little notes all over the desk in little piles. Maybe I'll actually use that PDA that I got a year and a half ago for my pile of phone numbers.

Looks like tomorrow won't be quite so hectic. I got another computer fixed today out in Holland, Ohio and also had to go pick up another printer for myself.

Tomorrow I just have to tear down my mothers scanner and go find a new light for it. I think I have one but I'm not sure.

Good thing it didn't rain last night. I left the top down on my convertible last night. With the way the acorns are falling the last few days I'm lucky it wasn't full of them.

Looks like I may have a busy weekend ahead. I might be going flea marketing on Saturday and I have an early breakfast meeting on Sunday. The days just seem to be flying by with plenty to do now. I don't even think about going to Canada much any more. I can cross the bridge anytime I like and I don't even want to go. Oh well.

Looks like this month is going to start out being a busy one, as far as fixing computers go. I have been getting lots of phone calls to come and fix sick or dying computers.

I can't seem to get rid of these last three kittens, so I'm going to live trap all the mothers and grab the kittens and take them all to the Humane society or the ASPCA and see if they can adopt them out. I think I'm going to keep the one I call Buddy though. I'll take him down and have him fixed and maybe make a house cat out of him. He seems to like coming inside and he likes to play with the dog.

If you want to see something really funny, you should watch my Rottweiler playing with this cat. She even tries to get the cat to play tug-o-war with her. I get a lot of laughs watching the two of them.

I really would like to get out of this business but the money is good right now. I just paid property taxes and next month I have car insurance and License plates to pay for. I guess I better keep doing this stuff for a couple more months. It will help the pocket book some. Most of my customers, lately, are businesses so I do make more money working on their computers than I do working for individuals.