Lewies Blog

As a few of you may know, I have a pretty nice setup for my gerbils that has just been growing and growing. The two critters have a very happy time exploring every time I change it on them. Gerbils love to gnaw constantly. Unfortunately, it has been digging into my sleep. I have a home with ten cats and the safest place for them is in my bedroom.

These guys (Ying and Stewey) have been a part of our family for about a year now. Ying is black and Stewey is tan. If you are near the Northern Virginia area, and have an offer or some questions - send me an email via lewismoten@gmail.com. I’ll try and get a list of all the stuff that will come with this setup tomorrow. For now, I have some pictures. You can also watch a video of my gerbils in action.

I was surfing on Blog Explosion again to waste some free time and came across Geek Blue. An article was posted about a virtual item bought for $100,000. The article went on to say that someone had purchased a space station in an asteroid belt.

I had never heard of this game and searched for it on the internet. I found the website for Project Entropia. I found the following information on the website about the purchase of an asteroid space resort.

The ASTEROID SPACE RESORT was today, 24th of October 2005, bought by avatar “Jon NEVERDIE Jacobs” for a sum of 1,000,000 PED (100,000 US Dollar)!

The screen shots looked OK and best of all, the client was free to download and install. There are no monthly fees. I had to confirm my email address and for some odd reason, they wanted to know what town I was born in.

So what is the catch? It is hard to make money in the game. At least, so far it’s been hard for me. If you want the easy way out, you can use a credit card and buy some PED’s. I’m trying my luck at sweating. Sweating is the process of extracting sweat from weird animals that attack you. Every animal is hostile. You can’t fight the animals unless you equip a gun, but guns cost money as well as bullets. You can’t sell the sweat to NPC’s or terminals, so you are left to depend on other players who wish to purchase it. There are usually players at a teleporter advertising that they are willing to buy.

The game reminds me of Star Wars Galaxies. It’s in the future, has lots of weird animals and plants, and the world is just huge. After an hour and a half, I found the port of Atlantis on my own. I found that the Eudoria Geography site helped me out on this adventure. I followed the coastline from Troy to avoid monsters. I was killed once with only one hit from something that looked like a tyrannosaurus rex. Another site that is helpful is Entropia Pioneers.

The interface of this game is hard to figure out at first. I’m still stumbling over things. Just today I learned how to divide stacked items by double-clicking them. People in the game have been willing to help me out. One guy even lead a few of us for free to another town (Twin Peaks) about thirty minutes away so that we could have a second teleporter on our maps. Teleporters are great for avoiding long journeys. Another guy traded me a gun for some bottles of vibrant sweat that I had collected. Of course, it needed a lot of repair and bullets as well.

Every time I look at prices of things, I think of it in real-world currency. Since the gun needed over five PED of repairs, I just thought of it as costing me fifty cents to fix it. I would have to collect a lot of sweat to trade for that kind of money.

The biggest plus to this game is that you can make money from it. You can cash out your PED’s into real money through the game. So here you are with a free game, making money, and can make a living in the real world as well - just by playing. The only problem is that it probably would take a lot of hard work, free time, and effort to make a living like that.

I have just watched what has got to be one of the worst movies ever, Fat Albert. It was so boring and drawn out. My wife and I suffered through it because we were curious about how it would end. I thought about giving up a few times and Angel asked me as well if we should stop. Once it was over, we agreed that it was a complete waste of an hour and a half with each other.

The only reason we found ourselves chuckling was because the characters act so stupid or a situation comes up that would never really happen. Do not see this movie.

It started off with the Fat Albert cartoon. Doris cries while watching it and a tear falls onto her remote control. The tear enters Fat Albert’s world and opens a portal into the real world.

Even the ending is stupid. Fat Albert risks staying behind and cheers Doris on in the race. This apparently is the only reason Doris wins as she thinks about his cheering and speeds up and passes the other runner to claim first place.

We ran out of heating oil this past week. The delivery man arrived today and refueled our tank with one hundred, fifty gallons for the low price of about four hundred dollars. That is almost twice the amount we had to pay last year. A technician came out later to relight the furnace. He pulled the cover off and we saw rust everywhere.

He got the system running. Angel and I watched as he banged on the pump just to get it working. Then he started draining a lot of light brown water into a tin can. He was done and started looking around. He immediately shut off the switch and said we would die if we run the furnace. In the back, our exhaust pipe had a huge rusted hole in it. We would have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

It appears that we have plenty of water damage to the heating system. It may be that the chimney vent doesn’t have a cap on it. That would explain how all the water got down there. He also mentioned something about some water not being blasted out of a long plastic pipe that leads to a drain in the middle of the floor.

I am just confused when it comes to the operation and maintenance of this heater. I don’t know what needs to be done or how to maintain it. My dad could probably figure it out in no time at all since he works on that kind of stuff.

My parents had a heat pump and all you had to do was keep the power on. There weren’t any deliveries or technicians to restart the system when it ran out. Weather damage was minimal since the pump was built to sit outside in the environment. There were no chimneys that could cause water damage.

My coworker asked me to come into work early today and indicated that it was very important. She said there would be bagels and orange juice, but it seemed something else was in between the lines. I printed some directions to the office over on MapQuest to avoid the highways, hoping that I could get an edge on how long it takes to get to work since I wouldn’t be able to take the HOV lanes.

In the end, I got to work in just under two hours and arrived thirty minutes later then I was supposed to. I was a little down because I had thought what ever was going to happen, already did and that I had let her down as well as my manager.

I got to doing my work and had to hunt for another coworker for some debugging assistance. I couldn’t find him until my managers door opened. He walked out and the manager as well as the director asked me to come into the office.

They filled me in that the meeting was to be held on the hour and that my coworker and I would be recognized for our contributions to the team. Our database developer had left us last year and I took over his tasks and kept up on my own stuff as well. I have a deep knowledge of many of the projects we work in both the database and programming code.

Of course, everyone wanted a speech and I was clueless as to what to say. I acknowledged that one of my coworkers worked through a lot of things with me and that the team is a really good help as well. The other coworker who got an award helped save me from the torment. We all had bagels and orange juice.

Today was my first day visiting a therapist. I was a few minutes late, but I made it. Now I’m not sure how therapy is supposed to work, but for about an hour, I was telling this guy everything. All the while, he kept comming up with this question asking me what was wrong, or what I wanted to fix.

I was kind of confused, because here I am telling him how messed up I am and he acts as if I’m just like any other normal person. (By the way, let me know if you ever meet a “normal” person. My guess is that they are similar to the “Average” person.) It was sort of a challange, because I had to keep thinking of things that I have done in the past and I’m not quick to recall things long past.

The time is up and he wants me to see him every week so he can find out more. There really wasn’t any advice or guidance. I guess this is normal practice to draw as much background history out as possible before anything happens. One odd thing I realized while I was there is that I wouldn’t look at him while I was trying to think and talk. I kept looking at the blinds on the window.

Come to think of it, there was a therapist that I had saw once before I left my old job at digitalNATION. I had driven down to Miami, Florida and back to Alexandria, Virginia without letting anyone know. I almost lost my job over that one. I was supposed to see her for three sessions, but as soon as I left the company after the first session, my insurance had expired. All I remember is that it was a very depressing session and I had to keep myself from breaking down.

Today, I wasn’t depressed. Not even after I had left. The Psychiatrist that recommended me to my therapist is a different story. She just mentally wore me out the first day I saw her. Maybe it’s a thing with women since it seems to be easier for me to communicate with women then with guys.

I misplaced my employee badge two days ago. I arrived at work and realized I didn’t have it. I quickly hunted for it this morning and failed to find it. So tonight, I’m cleaning up my room. I found a pair of shoes that I had lost track of for a few months now among the junk.

So now that my room is “cleaner”, I still can’t find this badge. I’m going out of my mind. For some reason, losing stuff is the only time when my room gets clean. I’m even doing a load of laundry too.

Other things that I have found:
- A mini box of rice crispy’s
- The missing lense to my glasses
- A floor
- Tools (Drill, Wrench, Screwdriver)
- An MP3 Player (Rio Forge)
- A business card for a fitness center

News Flash!

After almost 4 hours of throwing things into garbage bags, I found my badge! Each night when I come home, I empty all my pockets onto my bed before I change my clothes. Somehow the badge went a little too far between the bed and the wall. Maybe it was one of the cats playing with it. Maybe it was me forgetting about it and moving sheets. I don’t care. I have my badge! I can stop cleaning and wait a few more months before I lose something else.

I was at work and Angel told me that I had to see something special about our kitten, Prince. I asked if it was that white spot on his chest and she said, “No” and that we would need to take a picture. I got home and she showed me that he had two sets of fangs. At first, I thought that one set was the bottom, but then I saw the bottom set as well. Interesting sight, but I wonder if he has (or will have) any toothe aches because of this.

It’s been a while since I got my free iPod. I have found that it has somehow merged itself within my everyday life. Before then, I would have never thought that I would become so dependant on an audio player. I had a Rio Forge, but hadn’t used it much. The iPod integration with iTunes is what has made everything so convenient in my life.

Since then, the color models have come out along with the video, mobile phone, and nano iPods. I would love to get my hands on one of the video iPods because it has color, more storage space, longer battery life, plays videos, shows album covers, and can store/display pictures. On top of that, they come in solid black.

It appears that the free iPod program that I had participated in before has also been extended to offer “premium” iPods. So if you haven’t already, sign up for an offer and post your referral link on your blog and in your email signature. Don’t forget to validate your email address as well.

If you want to see me sporting off my iPod, then take a look at this video - Lewie and his free iPod.

I read about a pretty neat browser today called “Flock“. It has a lot of integration for blogging built rite into it. When I clicked the blog button, it asked for the URL of my blog. It was able to detect my blogs API and connect up to it.

I am able to drag my Flickr photographs from the top-bar into each post.

Although the editor is a WYSIWYG editor, it doesn’t have much functionality rite now. My preference would be to add a spell checker to it.