Someone told me, “Jeff, all you have on your homepage is journals.” That’s right. And I always get surprised when people come up and tell me they read it. Why would anyone want to read this?
Spent today getting together the youth directory at church. I’ve got a good template setup, with about 2 dozen pictures in it. It is just a matter of getting all the pictures. I think it will turn out ok.
Did I mention my sister got herself her own domain? – mrswilliamson.com So now I know that the apocalypse is upon us. My sister has her own domain. And the funny thing is that some people at church don’t even know we are siblings. We’ve been going there forever. But since my sister has a different last name, I guess it isn’t so obvious to some of the new people.
Tomorrow I turn in my computer back to Nortel. Sorta putting closure to the whole thing. I have mixed feeling about it. I had a good time at Nortel with all the trips and the good people I met. However the last few months have been bad. I felt as though I had to impress my boss with what I could do. Seemlingly nothing I could do was ever good enough for him. I could never save enough money for the company. What me worry? I suspect Nortel will soon declare bankrupcy. So maybe it’s good I got out now. I always got grief from my “buy only American” friend for working for a Canadian company.

Welcome to September. There is a net saying that goes along with this month. “The September that Never Ended”. In the infancy of the internet most users were college students. A large influx of these users would gain access to the internet each September when school started. They didn’t bother to follow the rules and kept asking the same questions over and over again to discussion groups. In 1993 the situation changed. It was that year that AOL began offering users access to discussion boards on the internet. That year is now commonly referred to “the September that never ended” since there are always a huge influx of new users on the net.
By coincidence I gained access to the internet that year also. Probably didn’t check my email until that September. With my brand new email account at Lipscomb, I began asking friends at other schools if they had email. (Some knew what email was; some didn’t). Now it seems universal. Most people are able to tell you if they have email or they don’t. Back then it wasn’t so clear cut.
I began freshmen year without a computer. Each dorm had its own computer lab. My dorm room happened to be located next door to the computer lab. So I would just go next door if I needed a computer. Several were usually free at most part of the day. However right around 12 midnight all of the computers were taken with people trying to churn out a paper overnight.
And don’t even get me started on the MOOers and MUDers. MOO was an early chat program. MUDs were the same type of chat environment in a virtual world game. The games were addictive. I know quite a few former Lipscomb students who wasted their tuition away skipping class and playing these lame chat games. Many of them didn’t have computers of their own, so they stayed on the public lab computers.
Computer addiction is very real. I personally know at least one couple who’s marriage was broken up primarily due to the computer. On the other hand, I don’t think I’m addicted to the internet. It doesn’t get in the way of my other parts of life. I haven’t stopped interacting socially. If anything I look forward to getting out of the house and getting away from the computer.

Today I fixed my neighbor’s computer problems. Turns out something went wrong with their router. So I took the router out of the loop and everything worked. Seemingly I’ve become the computer nerd that everyone calls if anything is wrong with their computer. Some people must think that all I’m preoccupied with is computers. This is far from the truth. I do use computers alot, but it definitely isn’t my life. You can tell that from reading this weblog. Only a few times do I talk about computers.
I never really thought of myself as a computer guru. There are plenty of other people who know much more about computer than I do. I know the basics. I know basically how computers are setup and what to do if something stops working. But as far as setting up a computer OS and doing the complicated stuff, I am clueless.
It’s been almost 2 months since Star Wars Episode II came out. I still haven’t seen it yet. Am I missing anything? Who knows. I think it’s been out long enough that I could probably catch it at a dollar theater. But the more likely scenerio would be for me to catch it on TV or rented at someone’s house. Episode I was ok…buncha eye candy, but nothing earth shattering.
This week there was an announcement in the church bulletin which only effected 8 people. Why they are wasting space for this announcement I’ll never know.
Earlier, when I said there were no 7-11’s around here, boy, was I right. The nearest one is in Park Hills, Missouri…236 miles away. I would say that 7-11 has done a really good marketing job since even folks who don’t have stores near them are already familiar with their stores.
If you like the band Weezer and the Muppets, go here (real video link).
I’m glad to see that Dave Pirner of the defunct band “Soul Asylum” has decided to go solo. I heard his song “Never Recover” on Lightning 100. Even though I hadn’t heard the song before, I instantly knew it must have had something to do with Soul Asylum.

Kudos to whoever redesigned Friendship Christian School’s webpage. Looks MUCH better now. Before it looked as if they let high schoolers design it (which they did). Guess they weren’t thinking when they gave an influential project over to a high school computer class. Now they just need to get rid of that lame fcsweb.net domain and get friendship.edu.
While browsing Friendship’s webpage, I found some webpages of friends I know:

• Berek Whiteaker
• Marie Pickler

Not much to them. Seems like they used Playskool’s “My First Webpage” as their design template.
Finally got my sister’s weblog back up and running. Sometime ago Blogspot crashed and lost many of its pages. Users had to republish all of their pages in order to see it again.

Found a good Nintendo game emulator. We’re talking NES; none of this Super NES or Game Cube business. I’ve been playing Super Mario Brothers 2, the only game I ever beat. I never had a Ninetendo myself. My next door neighbor had it, so I spent many hours during my junior high years next door playing that game. Seeing it again pretty much confirmed that the graphics, although much better than Atari 2600, were pretty bad compared to today’s standards. It’s got a comicbook-like 2 demensional feel to it. I’m still trying to get used to the buttons. It seems to pause as the ALT button (jump) is pushed.

I think alot of life’s questions could be answered by getting people to learn how to use a search engine. I get called all the time for simple computer questions. Most of my research is done via the internet. If these people could learn to use it, then I wouldn’t have to be bothered as much.
Channel 5 keeps interupting the Late Show because of this nasty tornado warning. Methinks its partly because of safety concerns, but also because they like to show off their new toys.

Dungeons and Dragons….I never really understood the fascination some people have with the game. The actual gameplay is arbitrary according to the mood of the dungeon master. I’ve played the game once and just got frustrated with the slowness of the game and quit a few hours later. Is the game inherently satanic? Nope. Can the game be made to be satanic? Definitely. For the most part I’d say that D&D is a clever marketing scheme to sell books, dice, and other paraphernalia to eager buyers.
Yesterday I found a turtle in my yard. It had been there for quite a while, but I hadn’t done anything about it. Since it wasn’t moving at the time that I orginally found it, I thought it was dead. But later on I had saw that it had moved to a different part of the yard. So I decided to take it down to the lake to release it. I put on some gardening gloves and picked it up and put in a box. The turtle was most definitely alive. It had only one eye open and had its mouth wide open. When I went down the lake and tried to pick it up again, the turtle arched back on its back legs and was ready to attack. So instead of picking it up, I sorta dumped it (gently) out of the box. The turtle moved quickly toward the water. So yesterday I saved a turtle from an untimely death.

This just in from the Angelfire/Tripod conglomerate:

“Beginning on April 30th, disk space on Tripod/Angelfire’s free service will be limited to 20 MB. After this date, members of our free service who exceed the new limit will need to remove files or upgrade to Angelfire Plus.”

I have an Angelfire page which exceeded 20MB. So I spent alot of the morning reducing my graphics to reasonable size. I also took down some audio files, which drastically reduced my disk quota.
This is a bit drastic from Tripod/Angelfire. They initually advertised 50MB free space. Now they’re cutting back. I guess it was used and abused by users for putting pirated mp3s on there. Also the internet advertising is just not what it used to be, so they’ve got to save costs somehow. Will it drive users away? Maybe. I’d imagine some of the bigger pages have been forgotten…..or have been mirrored elsewhere.
I see the Goo Goo Dolls are set to release a new album, “Gutterflower” on April 9th. So I guess we’ll hear more overplayed junk on the radio. “Slide” and “Iris” were good songs, but were waaaaayyyyy overplayed. I soon grew tired of them. The same thing will probably happen this summer also. Or the album could fail miserably.

Finally figured out what was wrong with me not being able to view my webpage. I had to change around some settings on my Internet Explorer. Funny how Netscape, FTP, Ping, and Tracert’s internet connection all have to do with Internet Explorer settings. Sometimes I think Microsoft has too much control over my computer.

***Now with pop up windows.*** As much as I hate pop up windows, I’ve decided to implement them in this website. You’ll see the post below contains links to pictures which will appear in pop up windows. Hopefully this will enhance this website.
Ok, now on with my rant. Ever notice how people put really annoying nicknames in their MSN Messenger? Right now I see that “UHH OHH It Aint My Fault” is away. And who’s fault is it that UHH OHH is away? There’s really no need to put these annoying little worn out cliches in your display name on MSN. Put your real name or a well known nickname. Note to MSN: Please make it where we can supress this annoying little feature of MSN Messenger.