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May 04, 2005
walls smeared with the paint of a thousand eggshells
So, today I turned my room from a pit with holes in all the walls to a pit with big smears of white paint over where I spackled up the holes in the walls. I don't know exactly what led me to assume that the big gallon of white paint in the basement was probably the same hue of matte white that the house is covered in, but I guessed wrong. It kind of reminds me of a video game level where the walls are covered in random smears of blood, as if to suggest some horrific butchery that occurred just before one's arrival. Except these smears are white. Off-white.
Oh well. In three days, it ceases being my problem.
I packed up the surround sound and VCR downstairs. One of these days I am going to have to just break down and take it in to have the DVD player part of it fixed, as this part has never actually worked. Always test your electronics before hucking the box, boys and girls. Anyway, I guess I could always just get a new one, but it's become a point of pride. I want MY DVD player to work. Not some other stupid DVD player. MINE.
Also figured out a weird error with my online billpay. I was typically annoyed by the initial response that I got via email yesterday, the one that answered a question that I did NOT ask. What I did ask was why changing a payment caused the application to give the ambiguous error message "please try again later."
So it turns out that if you have a payment scheduled for, say, the 15th of the month--a recurring payment, that is--the application will automagically reschedule the payment to fall on the Friday before. The thing is, if you go in and try to change the amount of the payment and stubbornly insist in not changing the date on which it is scheduled to be paid to a weekday, the application gets confused and gives you that weird error message.
The solution was to change the date. Hopefully their software engineers will put a fix in there for that, or at least add some data validation that alerts you to the need to fix the date.
I thought the living room couldn't get any fuller. I realize now that not only was I wrong, I also have just so much stuff.
Also, surround sound is so much better than built-in speakers. After I unhooked my setup I reconnected the TV, using just the TV speakers. It sounds like everybody is talking through tin-can telephones. If you don't have at least surround for your TV, you're not really hearing TV. You're hearing some kind of tin-can TV.
Posted by Mark at May 4, 2005 01:18 PM
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