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I'm a bit conflicted whether I should post this or not but here goes. If you don't want to know things about me of a rather personal nature, stop reading. Seriously.

It might make the guy who did the voiceovers on the Geico commercials cry...however it will make you laugh. Incoming fake PSA...

I've posted a few pieces in my writing section which will seem a little odd without context. Way back in the late 90's and early Noughties I was involved in e-Wrestling. Think role playing game involving sweaty guys in spandex. One of my characters was called Darklight Warrior. That was my online alter-ego before I was dubbed Wraith, which has obviously stuck to this day. The name came from a bit of an amalgamation from several Final Fantasy games.The heroes in the original game were called Light Warriors. One of my favorite characters from FFVI was a rogueish guy named Locke Cole. He debuted as Light Warrior, once he turned heel, the Light Warrior name didn't really fit so I went with Darklight Warrior. And on it went from there.

I always kinda thought of it as "what if Sting went really, really off the deep end?" Turns out it was a merger of Tommy Dreamer and Sabu in white face paint. Guess I was ahead of the curve way back then. Fun fact: I did the crow gimmick a full year before Sting stole it and Mark Madden tried to steal the name. Seriously.

The previous paragraph will mean nothing to people who haven't followed wrestling in the past 15 years. Sorry about that.

The stories:

Where Are They Now: Darklight Warrior
Darklight's Reform 1
Darklight's Reform 2
Darklight's Reform 3

Got a RocketFish 7.1 audio card today, basically a clone of the Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio. Yeah, I know, Best Buy's house brand what ARE you thinking? Well A) it was relatively cheap and B) See below.

It has an optical port which is a big plus to me. I can tell a big difference between the old Audigy 2 SE that I had to hack all over the place to make work and the newer card. Front channel is clearer, audio's about 10db louder in general. I credit the fiber optic cable for that. The old card you were forced to take a mono mini-jack to RCA converter and use an RCA cable to your receiver's COAX audio port. I'm honestly amazed that ever worked really.

As for the drivers, the ones RF include with the card are shit and as mentioned on some reviews and forums Vista will not auto find the drivers for you. Apparently Windows 7 will but it will also do your laundry and find your keys for you. I digress. I went with some working hacked drivers, or more accurately proper Creative drivers updated to work with the older cards that often work better than what Creative puts out. I used them with the Audigy until Creative actually came out with a somewhat-decent driver I'm sure coincidentally with the Win7 drivers.

For those interested, DanielK's drivers are located here. He updates the post when he does a new release. Very, very handy since Creative will (probably)never update the older stuff again and RocketFish appears to lean on third-parties to update their stuff.

I can't really complain about the Audigy finally giving out. I had it for about 3 years, it did pretty much what it was supposed to and now it's time to move on. I need to feed some high-bitrate audio through this guy to see what I get but for now, it's done some pretty good work on my music collection.

The good thing that came out of this is I found a really decent DLNA server to stream things to my PS3. In a nutshell, it lets me take things on my Media Center PC and watch or listen to them on my Playstation 3, It's called PS3 Media Server oddly enough. Its GUI is Java-based, seems more lightweight than TVersity which I was using previously. Makes sense since TVersity is a bit more bloated cause it handles a bunch of streaming setups. Saved my ass last night when I wanted to watch the new episode of Doctor Who.

The GUI seems a little broken in the Beta version I'm using and you will definitely want your PS3 and PC on a wired connection unless you're on Wireless-N or something depending on what you want to stream. It's a little backward in my opinion though. I watched the Doctor Who episode which was x264/DD5.1 in a MKV. Program transcoded with no glitches. I watch episodes of Bleach and Naruto Shippuuden in formats the PS3 can handle natively, both MP4 I believe, and I had to change to a wired connection so the PS3 could handle it.

Now to play some more. Makes me happy!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Reminds me of Miroku from Inuyasha. In hamster form. Just sayin.

Aetna sucks. No really they suck. They're a shining example of why Health Care Reform was needed, and is still needed. Over the past 3 years we have had them, their rates have gone up significantly and the coverage has been less. We are now being forced to use mail order for certain "maintenance medications" which has significantly raised the prices of said medications. We were sold that it would be cheaper than going to the pharmacy. They, of course, lied.

I was insulin-dependent a few weeks ago, but thanks to Aetna I've had to go with Plan B. At the suggestion of a friend, I've started the Couch to 5k program. It's designed to get you in good enough shape to be able to run a 5K, or 3.2 miles. I've personally never been able to run over 1 mile and that was back in 8th grade but I've always loved running so hey, what the hell right?

I'm in the middle of the second week in the 12-week program: Walk 5 minutes, 6 intervals of run 90 seconds, walk 2 minutes, then a 5 minute cooldown at the end. I've actually been doing a lot better than I thought I would. I'm having to do a lot of stretching before and sometimes after the runs but I can definitely tell a difference in my energy and my mood. I've also changed my diet a bit to eliminate bread and pasta and add a lot more fresh veggies, fruits and lean meats. Still working on totally eliminating bread. I'll make it eventually...

Hoping I can stick with this and not get bored and give up like normal. I have 30 pounds to go and the motivation is simple: no more hospitals, no more insulin. I have too many little ones in my life to not be there to see them graduate/get married/have kids/make mistakes/live.

I mean aside from a job I can't stand, physical, mental and emotional problems and a general ennui I'm in a pretty good place. Things could definitely be worse. So why can't I get motivated to do anything? I know the mental stuff has a lot to do with it, the constant anxiety does not help. Why can't I just push through it like everything else? For the first time in my life I know there's several women interested in me, and I definitely am interested back but I can't do anything about it. I know there's a few guys too but sorry, um, not in this life.

I've thought about counseling, or even just getting some mind-adjusters. Not a fan of things that alter my mental state but I'm not sure what else to do. Just need to get past that giant brick wall in my head that convinces me I can't do something. I can sing, can't perform. I can act, just not in a crowd of people I don't know. I can't cold call people sometimes. I just...can't. It's not that I don't want to, I just can't.

The most annoying thing is that I can analyze and recognize all of these things about myself but I can't fix it. And if you know me, you know that annoys the piss out of me.

The urge to delete this is overwhelming. Revealing something about myself to a wide audience. Gasp, choke. Oh well. Get over it.

Today we lost 14 people due to job cuts, moves or moving-ons. I am not happy about this.

The place I work is losing its soul. It's not a fun place to be anymore, and it's showing. The people that subscribe to us are unhappy about the new ways of customer service, the loss in quality due to the cuts of the past few years, the new delivery system. The people that work here are unhappy because of the environment they're being put in and having to face said unhappy customers.

There are some people here, myself included, who have not had a raise in over 2 years. In fact the pay was scaled back.

More and more of us are having to split our attentions between here and another site. In my case, the entire region. It all just seems to be going in the wrong direction.

I hope for everyone's sake there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not an oncoming train.

Nope, that's not the latest lopsided High School Basketball score or misguided NBC game show. That's the number of people that worked here 10 years ago vs the number working here today. Actually I should subtract 2 since one person was let go and another is retiring in a couple weeks. We have 80 less people working here today versus 10 years ago and counting.

Maybe I should back up a sec. I was back in the break room looking at the yearly collage of old New Year's pages when something struck me: the photos were much bigger than normal and there were much less of them. I started counting the 2000 page vs the 2010 page and sure enough, 174 employees in 2000, 96 now-ish.

That didn't seem possible back then. Sure there were rumblings back then "oh, newspapers are in decline, there won't be any in 20 years, it'll all be online or some other form we don't know about...". OK so some of that was completely warranted but did I think back then in 10 years we wouldn't be printing here, we'd have nearly half the staff and we'd be in bed with TCO? No fucking way. It boggles the mind.

Also boggling are the amount of long-timers still around. Some have retired or expired since 2000, some outright quit and/or were fired. I guess I have to count myself in that number since I've been here for 12 years now(even tho the caption on the New Year's page says 13, it's 12 in 2 weeks. Seems longer). Also interesting to me is how they skew older. The advertising and production side by far have the longest-tenured people left here. News tends to skew younger with the exception of sports cause hey, getting to sit around and report on ballgames(occasionally live) and talk sports all day seems like a pretty sweet job. If I did that I'd probably stay in it as long as I could too. Actually I kinda do with MMA recaps which I will get back to doing soon but I digress.

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I guess you never know what could happen. Industries die, small island nations have disasters that destroy entire cities, crackpot right-wingers say stupid, stupid, STUPID shit about said disaster(looking at YOU, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh you disgusting pig). The South has 3 solid weeks of freezing weather. These are all things you would put in the "very unlikely to happen" files and yet....

Except for the Robertson and Limbaugh thing. Totally expected from 2 of the biggest pieces of shit on the planet. Die in a fire. Please.

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Speaking of people that should DIAF, Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker(President, NBC) have not only destroyed NBC's ratings but are now about to take Conan O'Brien off of The Tonight Show because of said ratings collapse. Conan has been a gentleman in these proceedings as far as I can tell, and has far more to lose. He moved his entire family, band, staff, writers to California and they are all now looking at the prospect of not having a job. This is an asshole move by NBC no matter how you look at it. I wish Conan the best, and I'm proud to be on Team Coco.

I don't know if this is a national trend or something with our local store but the CVS pharmacy I've been going to for years has been in a steady decline. I have almost always been able to put in a prescription and pick it up the same day. In the past year I have had to wait several days to get some things like insulin.

On top of that just yesterday, after being told on Friday that I would need to come back for a fairly common prescription, that they had lost the card I had given them to get the medication at a severe discount. They offered to give me 3 days worth but I declined. I paid the full insurance price just to get out of there. I had spent 10 minutes in there earlier in the day without getting helped. Just wasn't in the mood.

Being forced to get my insulin over mail order is suddenly not seeming like such a bad thing...

I guess one danger of ripping your entire music library and sticking it on random play is forgetting some of the things you've collected over the years. Nothing like rocking out to Queensryche then shifting over to The Lion King soundtrack. Oh our teeth and ambitions are bared...BE PREPARED!

So it's been awhile since I wrote anything meaningful here. With the heraldonline experiment being an utter failure I figure I may as well do something with my space again. No not myspace, I don't go there other than Dark Horse Presents. I am on Facebook and Twitter, as you can see from all the tweets that are on this site. It started as a way to track a sick friend and ended up being something I use daily. Go fig.

I'm @evilwraith on Twitter, easy enough to find on Facebook. Just like on here I screen everything so if I don't friend you, don't be too offended.

Just updated the site to the new MT yesterday and they've completely redone the backend. Lots of bells and whistles to it now. It looks for context clues in what you're writing to search for pictures to use and ideas for what to write next. Kinda neat I guess but what I write is a bit stream of consciousness so I don't know how much that would help me out. Seems like a distraction really.

No witty way to end so I'll just say peace. And I'm out.

Listening to: Cowboy Junkies:Trinity Revisited

Forgot how good Cowboy Junkies were. Gooooood music.

Added a live Twitter feed to the sidebar. It was way easier to use Twitter's own little chunk of javascript than the plugin for MT. It kinda works the way I wanted tho I really wanted it to update the live blog. Oh well. Don't matter.

Speaking of web-type annoyances, MovableType is a real pain in the ass to get working properly. There are some hacks out there that should be incorporated into their code to fix some things that seem to come up every time. I'm still considering ditching it and moving to something like Drupal.

Picked up the new Dave Matthews Band album this past week. It's got a really good sound, like a throwback to the older albums before the mainstream crap started taking over. Well worth the purchase.

Picked up Legacy of Y's Book I and II for the DS over the weekend. Atlus did their usual wonderful job with the port but I must say the game hasn't really aged well. There are a lot of spots in Y's Book I where it doesn't give you a single clue about what you need to do. I actually had to consult a walkthrough to finish the game, and I hate doing that on the first playthrough of an RPG. Not sure if Book II is any better, but it's certainly more difficult so far. I don't regret the purchase because I've always wanted to play through an actual version of the game and not the shit NES ports that were out here. I think I do want to track down the PS2 sequel and give it a try. Come to think of it, I think we got Wanderers of Y's (Book III) on the SNES and that was just a really bad port. Guess I'll do some fact checking on that.

Another game I've played recently is Burnout Paradise. Pretty fun, but extremely repetitive. I can see the appeal of the online pvp aspect of the game, and I may check it out soon. I just spent a bunch of time unlocking cars and stuff. From what I gather that's half the game right there.

My RPG backlog is getting ridiculous now. I've got FFIV, Dragon Quest IV and V in shrinkwrap waiting for me, Persona 3, FES and Nocturne that I've never touched, Blue Dragon around here somewhere. Dunno why I keep buying them. Maybe I think I'll have some time to play them someday. Whatever. Still haven't finished FFX, X-2 or XII and XIII is just around the corner. Sigh.

Well I sorta do anyway. You can catch me on Twitter at @evilwraith and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/westonsmith. I don't approve of social networking in any of its various evils but what the hell?