Exciting and Creepy

For my speech club, one of the things I have to do is to gather news articles for the extemporaneous speaker's research. Today I ran across this one.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18358876/

This looks really cool, but for any of you who have ever seen the movie: "Six: The Mark Unleashed" (or read the book of Revelation for that matter), this is a rather creepy article.

I don't have much time, but check it out.

Long Time, No Post

Wow. I've been doing a really bad job at keeping you guys up to date. Let's see, where to start… Well, I guess I'll just have to hit the highlights. I'm not sure if I've mentioned all or any of this yet, so you'll have to bear with me.

April 13^th-14^th: Our Boy Scout troop went on a camping trip to Hocking Hills. Basically, we got there, slept, woke up, cooked, ate, packed, and hiked. For those of you who have never been there, Hocking Hills is, how to put this?, hilly. And as such, there was very little (if any) flat ground to hike on. This is the reason I was so sore the next day at church. Some of the sites we went to included Ash Cave, Cedar Falls, Old Man's Cave, and Rock House. Rock House was especially fun, because I'd never been there before. It's the closest thing to a cave in the whole area, but other than that, it's very hard to describe.

April 24^th: Troop Meeting at the RCC. We built fires, which we then lit with magnesium (oooOOOooo). After that, we practiced for my Eagle COH (Court of Honor). That could have gone better, but the guys have the basic plan in their heads now.

April 25^th: Something happened today, that I wasn't expecting to happen for another week or so. Microsoft Office 2007 got here. My family thinks I'm nuts just because I was a little excited when it got here. I reality, I've been wanting it ever since Microsoft started the ad campaign. I watched all the tutorials and learned all I could about it. I don't think my excitement was wrongly directed. The UI is a lot easier to use and there is a new program called OneNote which looks to be extremely useful. Going to go to church tonight and practice H-Duo with Andy afterwards.

April 27^th: Planning to go to the SON Rise Party with Isaac, Matt, and Sean. Wait, Sean, you are going right? Anyway, I expect to stay up really late (like 'til 8:00 AM) and have a generally fun time. One thing I've never quite understood about the SON Rise Party is the name combined with the date. I mean, shouldn't it have been a few weeks ago?

May 2^nd: That is weird! Looking ahead at the calendar, I realized that my birthday is next week! I can't believe how that snuck up on me. Used to be that I'd have started counting down the days back in February. I feel old…

May 2^nd: The down side: I have to take end-of-the-year tests on my birthday. :((

May 4^th: My Eagle COH.

I guess I'll stop there. I can tell y'all the rest when it happens. So, for now… Adios.

Computer Issues: SOLVED!

Greetings,

I know it's been a long time since I've posted, but I have a good reason. My Internet has been down. Last night I decided that I was going to get the problem fixed, so I called Dell Tech Support. I made the phone call some time around 11:30 PM and I got off the phone at about 1:30 AM. I didn't get to bed until 2:00 AM. I was very tired. I know most of you are thinking, what's the big deal? 2:00's not late, but I would just like to point out that I woke up at 6:45 after only 6 1/2 hours of sleep the previous night. Also, we went to another family's house for supper and I wore myself out. Also, I can say from experience, that there are few things more boring than waiting for a computer to restart. During the 2 hour phone call, I restarted my system at least 10 times.

Evidently, my problem was that my "socket files" (I have no idea what they are) were corrupted, so I had to delete and reinstall them. I went through a bunch of troubleshooting steps with the guy and finally I mentioned that I'd been getting an error message that said, "ERROR: SOCK_RAW" (yeah, I probably should have mentioned that earlier). He found that bit of information helpful, and we were able to get it fixed. He told me later, that if I hadn't mentioned that error message, the next step was to completely reinstall my operating system.

Just one more thing I wanted to mention, while we were are the other family's house, I discovered that they have a computer that is running Windows Vista. For anyone who has talked with me on the subject of Vista, you probably would be able to correctly guess that I went berserk. It's SO COOL. Definitely a sweet operating system. I'd like to get it, but the combination of the price and the fact that it still has a few bugs to work out, are making me hold off.

Anyway, just wanted y'all to know that I'm back. So, I'll probably be on the IM more often and I have my e-mail access again.

I'm happy right now. :)

Cya

New Post at F.o.r.m.e.r.l.y. D.e.a.d.

Hey guys,

I don't suppose that you check my other blog (http://www.formerlydead.blogspot.com) very much. Mostly because I haven't posted there in over a month. So, that's why I announce it on this blog that (as you can probably see in the title) there's a new post at F.o.r.m.e.r.l.y. D.e.a.d.

While I'm on the subject, I might as well explain the reason for the periods in the name. It could be traced to the fact that in the title, I speak of a definite deadness. (Period Dot, finished, done deal), but that's not the real reason. Actually, when I started that blog, for some reason, I could not enter the word d.e.a.d. (in reality I still can't). After much frustration, I found that my internet filter would not allow me to type the word d.e.a.d on a web form. The only way I could get it to work was to add the periods.

You might also find it interesting to note that this blog's real name is Covered by B.l.o.o.d., but (as you may have guessed), I can't typed b.l.o.o.d. without periods either.

Vista Transformation Pack

One thing I forgot to mention in all of my updating is the reason why I had a long posting gap. Well, here it is: I’m stupid.

I have made some pretty bad choices in my downloads before, like Internet Explorer 7, well that wasn’t bad, just that it was still in the BETA version! I have also before managed to download spy ware and all kinds of other fun stuff. Well, my most recent misguided was this Vista Transformation Pack 6.0. The idea is that is makes your computer look like Windows Vista (I’ll just assume that you all know that that’s the newest Operating System from Microsoft) and it works great. Until you try restarting your system. Then I started getting error messages about Windows Explorer and I couldn’t do anything (operating without a taskbar is hard). Anyway, I decided to restart and same thing happened again. Now, here I should explain that everything else that I’ve downloaded could be fixed relatively easily. Just uninstall and it’s fixed. But this Vista Transformation Pack actually went in and changed some pretty important files, so when I uninstalled it. It didn’t fix those files. The result was that when I restarted again, I only saw a black screen telling me that I was missing a System32 file and I needed my Operating System CD. For about three days, I was restricted to web mail and I thought that I’d lost everything on my computer, indeed, I thought that I’d lost my computer all together. My only consolation was that I might end up with a newer computer (with Vista), but I really didn’t want to spend money I didn’t have. But eventually, I found the CD (which I didn’t even know I had) and was able to repair my system.

I would just like this post to stand as a warning to anyone who wants a Vista look for their computer. DON’T USE VISTA TRANSFORMATION PACK. Even though I have my computer back, I still get error messages for just about everything. I’m still looking around, but I think I’m going to have to buy a registry cleaning program. That will cost a good $30, which isn’t as much as a new computer, but I could have saved myself time and money, by not downloading that stupid program.

Last Couple of Days

AHHH!!!! My titles are starting to sound like Isaac's!

I think I’ve finally found the flaw in my blogging philosophy. I always wait for something big to happen before I post, and when something big does happen, I’m too busy to post. So, with that in mind I’m just going to bring ya’ll up to speed on what all’s going on.

Sunday was what is commonly known as Palm Sunday. Triumphal entry and all that. So we got a break from our regular series (we just finished Song of Solomon, and it was... different than most of the other books in the Bible). One younger sister was sick, so she and Mom stayed home. There was a fellowship afterwards. The food was good. Lots of cakes though, I think we were the only people to bring any kind of cookie.

I believe I mentioned earlier that I got my driving permit. Well, I am now driving and having quite a bit of fun with it. No crashes or even close calls. Though I should say that if you ask my older sister, she is more of the opinion that I’m... what is a word she would use for it? I don’t know, but she didn’t really like that one turn I made onto the state highway.

On Monday, it was mostly school and watching younger siblings. Usually, when I have to baby sit everybody, I don’t get much done, but I managed to get all of my school done. Yay! I also actually ran my first errand. I drove to the IGA to get chicken, but there wasn’t any so I just drove home again. hmmm... Is that an errand or not?

Today, I went to speech club and I actually got some pictures! These were taken during our Impromptu Apologetics class. (Yes, we have some pretty weird people). So I’ll just give the picture, and then whatever derogatory comment I can think of after that.

DISCLAIMER: These people are WEIRD. I will not be held responsible for any mental injury that might occur by looking at these pictures.

This is my brother. Actually he’s pretty nice once you get to know him. He was sick today, so he didn't go to speech club or scouts.

This is Andy. I’m doing Humorous Duo with him. It’s about the Lone Stranger and we have a lot of work to do on it by next week.

This is our club director. Oh, BTW, our club has a website at http://www.aosda.org/, but it is not quite up to date. So, if you want old info, please check it out.

OK. I don’t know how we got on the topic (probably Blake), but somehow, someone started talking about biting toe nails. So, Blake (in back) and Andrew (in front) decided to show everyone how you could get your leg high enough to do that. Yes, they ought to be put away or something, but they haven’t killed anyone yet, so I guess that’s why not.

This is just an average picture of our club meetings. From left to right, it’s Hilary, Danni, Deborah, Blake, and behind him is Jake. Deborah was wearing Jake’s hat for some reason. No one dared wear mine.

Evidently, Deborah doesn’t like getting her picture taken.

Another picture of Andy, behind him at Robert, Liz, and Ben. I could give very interesting backgrounds on all these people, but alas, I have neither the time nor space.

Andrew just being... Andrew.

Ooh. I just had to add this picture of Josiah and his book. It’s not very good, but I like the concept of the person being the picture on the book thing. Oh well.

After speech, I drove to Boy Scouts, which probably could have gone better. We did everything we said we’d do, but I still wish there were more guys. I also drove home. My first time driving at night or in the rain.

And now here I am. Sitting at my desk at 11:30 at night wondering why I just wasted ½ hour of sleep telling you all of this stuff that you probably could live fine without. Oh, well.

I'm too tierd to fight the formating now so, Adios