Palmer's World

As you all I know, I recently purchased a mod chip for my XBox.

After a slew of tests and other things taking me away from my priorities, I sat down yesterday to start the process of tearing apart my XBox and modifying it.

I’m thinking this w0uld take 2-3 hours of my time. I take the motherboard out and follow the instructions very carefully as I am soldering components onto the board and don’t want to screw up.

After a few hours, Mike and I ready to test the guy out. The verdict?

Failure!

Don’t know what’s wrong?! Dang. Could it be a solder point?

After numerous troubleshooting sessions (read: I felt like I was back in school when I fried 7 Altera programmable logic chips) I resorted to the Internet to find the problem. Turns out that the instructions that some gracious gent wrote up forgot a key point to solder onto the motherboard. I apply the solder, plug her in and voila! IT’S ALIVE!

This was around 6:30. Essentially, my entire day was spent troubleshooting this thing. Sigh.

Anyhow, I’ve hit another minor snag where it won’t allow me update the bios with Evolution-X but at that point, I tried a few things, didn’t work and gave up for the night. I figure a fresh start (and perhaps some comments in the comments section from others who know what to do) may help me out.

I’m allowed to gloat on this blog, so I will at this point forward.

I took my French language test (both reading and writing) and scored big time on it. Bonjour, je parle french.

I am stoked. I did better than expected. The results are good for 5 years.

Granted, I made the BARE minimum to get into the levels I did, but at least I know where I stand and I can prepare accordingly in 5 years time when I have to renew them (aka, not a week before the test. It wasn’t my fault! They booked it and gave me a week to study!)

I’m having a good feeling about this upcoming weekend. I’m on a total high right now and all I can think about is Danny and Carol coming over and a few beer being drank. Insert those angels singing, insert good times to be had…heck, the Heart and Crown may have to be in order this weekend.

Some random trivia I stumbled upon last night while updating my MP3s.

I came across the song ‘Sugar Sugar’ a hit from 1969 – Billboard Chart #1 with a bullet.

So…the song is by The Archies. No problem, I just need the album artwork for my list and I’m on my way.

What’s this? I find out that The Archies are in fact a fictional band made up of the Archie characters we all love – Betty, Veronica, Archie, Jughead and Reggie! What the heck?! I never knew this! I mean, they appear in the comics all the time, but I thought it was just part of the story!

Turns out that the fictional band made some musical numbers for their animated series (which is stellar by the way. Go watch it!) and Sugar Sugar made it to the top of the Billboard – a first for a fictional band!

Mike’s MP3 player is on the fritz. The headphones don’t really work on it. So he’s been looking at getting an iPod.

So, me in my wisdom say “Pass that thing to me, I’ll fix it!” and apply some pressure to the headphone jack. After some wiggling the thing works! Yay!

Then after trying to reposition it, I hear a snap, and the thing goes into the player. Surprisingly, the thing is still working, but my genius self decides to pull out the headphones to see if I can fix it and the piece falls into the void which is the MP3 player.

I feel stupid. I feel bad. I know that he was going to get rid of it anyway in a few weeks, but now he’s out of music for a weeks until he gets an iPod.

Lesson Learned: Don’t let me mess with your stuff.

update: I am loaning him the money to buy an iPod. It’s the least I can do.

Congrats go out to Vero who got a role in the play she auditioned for! In other words, she came in FIRST. Yeah! She’s like Rocky!

I have no real idea what this play is about but I have found out that she plays an imaginary friend of someone. Ha! I sometimes wonder if I’m imagining her myself!

I will let you all know when she is performing, although the play is most likely in French. As she reads this I am sure that she will be calling me saying “Whoa, whoa whoa…no one should be invited to this thing!”

My only response is this…public play baby.

Maren just brought up the fact that she loves the Internet.

I wonder how it was back in the day of office work without the Internet? I thought that maybe people just chatted a lot more.

Then she wondered if they would spend a lot of their time smoking.

Wait a second…is there a correlation between the decline in smokers and the advent of the Internet in ’95? Whoa…the Internet has been around for 11 years (yeah yeah, we all know it’s from the 60s, but this guy didn’t have it until ’95.)

I was in the washroom this morning at another Gov’t building and noticed that they really lacked sufficient toilets for all of us.

That got me wondering who determines how many urinals and toilets are to be placed into a public washroom?

There must be some scientific stat like x amount of people = y amount of toilets.

Who has this information? I want to request more toilets and I need formulas to demonstrate!

The Scene: I enter the house and Mike says “Man, I heard some crazy news from back home about you. People are saying you are engaged!”

Wha?

Dana calls Mike asking if I’m engaged. Turns out Dana saw Jen in town and she said I was engaged. Jen said she heard from her mom. Jen’s mom works at the optometrist that my mom goes to.

Boom. Somehow Mom has been saying I am engaged.

I decide to phone her.

After much laughter we realize that either Jen’s mom, or Jen TOTALLY mixed up the fact that I have a girlfriend.

MEN, heed my warning! Don’t even say you have a girlfriend! People may think you’re engaged!

The funniest part of this story is when Mom says “Congrats on your engagement!” over the phone and I hear Dad in the background saying “What? Ryan’s engaged?”. HA!