I don’t know what happened. I figured today would be a good day. We had a great dinner out last night, opened presents and everything. For some reason I feel like BURNING something today. I think this day has just gotten started off on the wrong foot, and it’s severely glooming up everything that subsequently happens.

Had a lousy sleep, for starters. Woke up around 4:30 and did not sleep properly after that. Got up and went to work. Got annoyed that my once-vacant fourth floor of the parking deck is now more full of cars than any over level, thanks to the new companies that opened up on the fifth floor of the building. Don’t know what I’m going to do about that yet. Park on three, maybe. Or in that bunker that runs down under the ground level of the deck for some untold reason.

So I get up to my desk and decide to try my new XM satellite radio which my wonderful wife gifted to me yesterday. Bollocks—the damn thing doesn’t get ANY signal in the office at all, probably because we’re facing the wrong way. I need a clear view of the southern sky to make it work, and all I have is a clear view of the northern sky. So no XM in here, which is where I could have listened to it probably 90% of the time if it had worked. That’s real great.

Then there’s this abominable email waiting for me from that fucking idiot head of the directory department who I know I’ve told you how much I loathe. Explaining that there’s still FURTHER hours of work I need to pitch in every damn time one of their stupid fucking directories goes live. Creating goddamn AD BANNERS to promote traffic to the sites. The maddening thing is that I should have been doing that already, but I forgot to do it for the last couple of sites we put up. It takes me a couple of hours to do, jacking around with Adobe ImageReady which is a program I severely dislike, creating ad banners which I also severely dislike, trying to figure out what would be a snappy way to animate them which—you guessed it—I also severely dislike. So you can imagine that it wasn’t a very happy email for me to be receiving first thing in the morning.

The other thing that’s irritating me is what I found out about the TiVo gift subscription my parents generously gave us last night. To own a TiVo, you have to pay $12.95 a month to have the “TiVo service,” which gives you the program guide, schedule updates and all manner of other things essential to the operation of the device. My parents bought us a complimentary “lifetime subscription” so we can pay a single lump sum and stop paying monthly for the rest of the life of our TiVo, which is cool. Only problem is, when we attempted to use the gift subscription last night, we found out it only works when you activate a new service contract on a new TiVo unit. i.e., you can’t use it to convert your existing monthly billing to a lifetime contract. And, the gift subscription is conveniently non-refundable. So, unless we want a couple hundred bucks to go down the drain, we’re going to be buying another TiVo.

Not that that’s necessarily bad. I’ve always wanted a second TiVo box for my big screen TV, so I can record Star Trek and all manner of other geeky things over there, and my wife can record all of her favorite shows on the other one. It’s just that…yeah, now we have to go and drop $200 on a new TiVo box. Yes, we get $100 of that back in the form of a mail-in rebate, but I hate mail-in fucking rebates. You’re never quite sure you’re gonna get ‘em back, y’know? And until you do, it’s money you don’t have in your bank account. It’s not really that big of a problem, but today—when everything else is already pissing me off—it’s irritating me more than it probably should.

I think what I may be suffering is “post-Christmas stress disorder.” You know the one. Where you get a whole bunch of cool stuff, and you have to go to the fucking office and listen to people bitch and whine about what you haven’t done for them lately instead of actually playing with your toys. My XM radio got activated last night around midnight and I had a brief time to play with it; I still haven’t set up the mobile antenna and stuff in my Trans Am, and that’s going to take a bit of time to do the right way. I’ve got to go to my grandfather’s house tonight and reconnect all of his computer equipment; he just moved to a new residence so I’ve got to take care of that before the Comcast installer comes out tomorrow.

Sigh…I just want this week to be over. Or at least this day, because frighteningly it’s only 9:20 in the morning and I already feel like I have no patience left at all. I think I need to get those STUPID DIRECTORY AD BANNERS done first, because I know they’re pissing me off, and nothing is going to make me happy until they’re off my plate. So I guess I’ll plug in my ratty old headphones and listen to the SAME DAMN MP3s I’ve been listening to for eons, because the XM RADIO DOES NOT WORK UP HERE. Thank you.

Once I clear away these stress-inducing factors, I expect to start having a good time with all of my stuff. The XM radio is going to be great in the car. I can’t tell you how sick I am of stupid commercials on the radio, and the same blasted songs played over and over. I’ll also be able to use it at home—I had it set up in my computer room last night and it was working fine in there, because I have a south-facing window. (It’s the only window in the house that faces south. At least we have one.) The built-in FM transmitter is strong enough to pick up on the stereo in the living room, which is good. As soon as my activation kicked in last night, I noticed Deep Tracks was playing what sounded like a whole Pink Floyd album in one long set. It was awesome. I even set up TuneSelect to alert me when Pink Floyd is playing on any channel in the spectrum. I’ve wanted to get more exposure to that band lately.

Another thing my parents brought for me from Michigan was not really a gift at all, but it still feels like one. It’s the old Dell 486 that’s been living on their basement floor for the last…probably six years now. It was my first new computer, the machine on which I first enjoyed classics like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, and the box I used to chat on Compuserve with endless people. All of that stuff is still on the aging 1 GB hard drive, and was never copied onto any other medium because those were the days when hard drives were just big enough to make floppy backups absurd, but we didn’t have CD burners or Zip drives yet. I’m sure there’s data there that would be an absolute blast to see again, even some stuff I lost a long time ago and seem to have no backups of.

I know the primary hard drive works, because a couple of years ago when I visited my parents, I tried transplanting the HDD into another machine. It spun up and seemed to work fine. But because the drive was installed with a disk overlay utility to allow the 486’s BIOS to read higher than 500 MB, the new machine couldn’t read its data. I could have fixed that with a format, but obviously that would defeat the whole purpose by eradicating the data I’m trying to access. I could have installed the same overlay software on the new machine to get it to read, but no longer had the disks, and I had no luck finding copies of that kind of crap on the Internet. My only hope is to get the whole ancient box to boot up. Given the state it’s in, that could be a challenge. But it’s not rusty or moldy or anything, at least. Full of cobwebs and spider carcasses, maybe. And you should see the keyboard—eugghhh. The power switch is broken off so the only way to turn the machine on is to take the lid of the case off and press the stud. In a way, seeing this old PC again was like unearthing an ancient civilization that you used to live in during a former life. I had great times with that box. This week, I’ll see if I can reclaim some of those memories. Like finding stone tablets buried in the sands of Mars.

All right, I can see that I’m just evading my responsibility to create STUPID AD BANNERS by sitting here and writing gobbledegook on Oddball. Time to stop that. Go have my cereal bars for breakfast and then get to work. Sucks, but that’s life. Maybe by this evening I’ll feel less like throttling somebody. At lunch I’m thinking of going down to my car, setting up the XM car kit and trying the radio. I’m gonna have to go park somewhere else to do it, though, because the whole parking deck is—once again—on the wrong side of the building, and the building itself will block any LOS signal from the satellite. Sigh.