So I woke up and went to work today to slap on stickers on 24000 magazine covers. As bizarre as this may sound, it was quite the event as there were about 20 of us in the room working coherently together as we all aimed for that common goal: to finish as fast as we could so we could get out of there!

At first I didn’t think it was all that bad, but once the heavy lifting, and bending up and down with those magazines came along, my back started to ache up a little. Taking only short breaks at a time, it was quite the task for all of us. Nonetheless the job had to be done, and now I can say that I have been a part of the sticker day: a monumental event at work.

We ended sticker day at around 4:30pm only because we actually ran out of stickers before getting to all 24000 magazines. We still have just over 600 to go apparantly. That we will tackle sometime next week apparantly.

It was actually good timing since immediately after, I just headed downtown and met up with RS whom I hadn’t seen in a few months now. Originally intending to go to the street festival with a new found friend, she backed out last minute, so it turned out to be just the two of us. It was quite fun though, as we learned that we had even more things in common than we had originally thought. It was a non-obstructive evening, which made it all the more better. Besides the sudden downpore of rain, I think it was one of the more entertaining street festivals that I had attended over the years. We got to see some rather talented individuals and bands, getting to the groove of things with Kona (and those darling kids in the pjs!), finally seeing a performance by the Samba Squad (my ex-coworker is a long time member), and even getting an autograph by a 15 year old saxophone prodigy (would you classify him as that?). He was quite impressive, especially at his young age, and learning afterwards that he had only been playing the sax for 2 years. He was originally trained in classical flute. What a difference. Let me know how the album is, RS!

The dinner of the evening was held at Otabe Japanese restaurant. I had gone there one time long ago, tasting their ramen dish. I didn’t remember how it was so I wanted to try it again. Unfortunately the soup base was little to rave about. Although the noodles were quite good, they were reminiscent of the fresh noodles you can get in the grocery stores. They apparantly didn’t have any kimchi left, so they replaced it with takuwan, which doesn’t even come close. Their fish selection was non-existant either, as their only fresh fish of the day was salmon and tuna, two of the most common fishes you get anywhere else. RS was nice enough not to complain to me though. I think it was just bad timing that we went there just before closing time. They must have not had much in the kitchen. Well, I guess it’s safe to say that I won’t be going back there anytime soon.

We also stopped by a gelato place at the Beaches but didn’t actually get anything because of the looks of the pistacchio and banana flavoured gelatos. Two artificially looking gelatos was a good sign to pass this place up.

As we were walking back to the car, we walked on the boardwalk where you could see lightning in the far distance. It was neat to see the night sky glow like that. People were still on the beach, listening to the waves, and observing the flashing lights in the sky. There were a number of inukshuks along the boardwalk where people were taking their photos with. Who makes these anyway? They just seem to appear one day.

Although I really only did two things today, it was a tiring day indeed. You can bet that I will have a really good night’s sleep tonight!

Tomorrow, I go see Anita Baker!

Officially I have now cooled off for the past 10 days. What does this mean? I suppose you can say this marks yet another chapter of my life. While I believe this was a good choice to make, I cannot be entirely sure until the next few years, since that is when everything will come to realization. There is no turning back from it now and I will just have to manage everything as it comes. I can tell you all that this will be a little difficult on my part, but I will try and scrape by with every ounce of energy in me.

On another note, my computer is finally getting back to working condition. I managed to finally install a working copy of Windows on my computer, virus free. I now wait for the outcome of my data recovery. I sure hope they can work miracles because if I had to start from scratch, this would make things more difficult on me yet again.

I honestly can’t believe it’s nearing the end of July. It seemed like only yesterday that we were in June. The summer went by fairly quickly and I wonder what exactly I did this year. Not much to be exact. But at least I have been enjoying my time, which is essentially the most important of things, isn’t it?

From now on, however, I will carefully monitor what I do, and will have to selectively choose as to what I want to do as I will no longer frivolously spend on anything and everything… not like I was doing that to begin with. But you know what I mean. Right?

Fraught with never ending computer troubles it seems like this month has been nothing but complete chaos. As soon as my hard drive died on my a few weeks back, I ran out and got a new hard drive to continue with my daily business.

Ever since installing Windows XP on that new hard drive, things haven’t been as smooth as it once was. I somehow managed to get spyware on my computer, thereby annoying me to death with its continuous pop-ups and internet redirections. Seeing as no anti-virus software nor any anti-spyware software managed to find and remove this, I lived with it for a good two weeks or so. Today, however, I decided to be smart and reinstall Windows before it got to my neck.

I thought it would be a quick and dirty procedure but low and behold, I am now re-installing Windows XP from scratch for the fourth time today. The Windows XP installation seems to work smoothly, however the trouble comes when I try and install the Windows XP Service Pack 2. In the middle of the installation, it seems to have trouble copying files over and eventually stops the installation altogether. The system then complains that some of my files are now corrupt and unreadable and that I should perform a chkdsk on my disks.

When I reboot my system, Windows performs its chkdsk utility and it always finds corrupt or problem files that it tries to fix. I seriously do not know what is going on here and I do not know why I am having so much trouble with this installation that was so trouble-free the last time I had to format my drive.

I don’t remember the last time I had so much trouble with my computer. Generally speaking, I ususally have good luck with them but this past month has been the worst most likely ever since I’ve ever owned a system.

Computers are great when they work the way you want them. But when they have a mind of their own, it royally sucks.

Not to mention that this morning I found out my entire site and emails had been removed from my webserver. Fortunately my host was able to retrieve it within minutes of my support email to them. That’s one thing they are good about, is returning my emails.

Anyway, by the end of the night tonight (and it’s already 10:48pm), I hope to have a clean and running version of Windowsx XP SP2 installed and ready to take on more abuse starting tomorrow morning.

Why me?