…rocked! What an absolutely fabulous (if a bit short) show! There were themed sets, Gwen in all her never-ending abdominal hotness, and cool people all around. Blink 182 did this nifty trick near the end of their set: the drummer rose up out of the middle of the crowd, on a rotating dais, playing a second drum set. He was about ten rows away from us, and soloed for ten minutes or more. It was awesome.
Around 11:45, when I finally got out of the $20 clusterfuck that the Shoreline Amphitheater calls “Premier Parking,” I decided that I was hungry and needed to get a little bit of food for the next few days in my new place. I ended up with $244 in basic necessities (cooking oil, eggs, butter, garbage bags, cereal, Pop Tarts, Chef Boy-ar-dee, etc.). Wow.
When I got home an hour later, I actually put it all away while chatting online with a friend two timezones later (what the hell she was doing awake is beyond me, but I’m not complaining). Finally, I had to unpack the box with all the pots & dishes in it, because I was really hungry by then.

Looks like my new DSL is working! I am very impressed. I ordered DSL through Sonic.net. They promised to have my DSL activated (via SBC) on June 21, although they hinted that it might be active earlier. Sure enough, while we were unloading the moving truck, I plugged in the DSL equipment (which had been delivered a few days before), and got a solid green light (solid green lights are good).
A gargantuan “thank you” goes out to my good fiends who toiled for hours to get all my stuff from the old place to the new: Danielle Cassley, Tantek Çelik, Bob Grosso, Mike Kobb and Russ Sanon. I could not have done this without them

Yesterday, I help a friend get their Epson Stylus Photo R200 USB printer up-and-running. Although they support Mac OS X, treating it as a first-class-citizen in the documentation, the software has many shortcomings.
First off, downloading the driver is a cumbersome process. After clicking through several pages on their website to find the right one, you end up downloading a self-extracting StuffIt archive. That produces a folder containing a disk image file. Double-clicking that produces an Installer VISE app. Launching that finally gets you to the installation process. This process requires that you quit all running apps and that you restart at the end. Now, as far as I know, as of Panther (and probably earlier), you don’t generally need to restart after installing USB drivers.
In addition, while searching for the driver on the website, you’ll see a note that warns you not to connect the printer before you install the software (a common Windoze admonition when installing USB devices); the printed instruction sheet that comes with the printer very clearly has you connect the printer first, then install the software (for both Mac OS and Windoze).
Next, after you’ve completed the installation process and restarted, you need to add the printer in the Print Center. (I’m not complaining about this step; every printer requires this.) There is a menu whereby you choose what type of printer to add (TCP/IP, Rendezvous, USB, etc.). What’s tricky here is that if you choose “USB,” as one would expect, the Epson printer shows up, but always displays “Driver not installed,” and you won’t be able to select it. Instead, you must choose ”Epson USB Printer“ (I may not have that quite right) from the menu, and only then can you choose the printer and set it up. The Epson printer driver should not create a separate menu item just for its printers.
After all that, you can, depending on what capabilities you choose, end up with two printers in your list of available printers, one for “normal” printing, and one for “borderless” printing. These should instead be a single printer, with appropriate settings available in the print dialog.
Anyway, after figuring all that out, it seems to work. I only printed a simple black-and-white text test page, and the printer took upwards of 30-45 seconds to get started printing, but was reasonably fast after that (for an ink jet).

Every now and again, maybe one in one thousand incoming spam messages makes me laugh. The latest:

Subject: Elisha Cuthbert recommends these penis pills.

For those of you who don’t know, Elisha Cuthbert, one of the stars of the Fox television series 24, is one of my favorite sexy celebrities. So the subject definitely caught my eye and made me chuckle. But what made the message laugh-out-loud funny was the sender:

From: Vaughn

I still didn’t read the message, because it is spam, after all, but I did get a kick out of it. If it isn’t funny to you, then you need to watch so much Alias that both shows meld into one.

Berkeley called today to tell me I’ve been readmitted. Unfortunately, I have to wait until Monday to get the oh-so-symbolic student ID card, and to ensure that I can get it on Monday I have to go to campus tomorrow to ensure my approved application gets into the system before the Friday night deadline, but I’m walking on air (and writing excessively long sentences to boot)!