"Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse."
To counter this, I decided to finally get my lazy ass up and in gear. My financial problems are being worked on, all due bills have been paid, I tricked my bank account into believing that I still had some space left, so the next few bills will be processed smoothly too (at least if everything goes according to plan(*)), I called Agency X to get in touch with the callcenter dudes and they're patching my local number through to them. Also, my mobile should be working within the next 2-3 days again.

On the note of mobiles:
R, a frequent reader from Canada, noted how much more variety there is in ringtones over here in Europe, and that people over here even have 2 mobiles. I was surprised to read that she was actually enjoying all the ring-a-ding-ding-dong (at least it sounded as if she was): those ringtones, the latest from Shaggy, Black Eyed Peas, Scooter, Rammstein and whatnot, they usually annoy the living hell out of me and in about 90% of all occasions that include me and one of those supposedly 'hip' ringtones involves an incredibly high amount of supressed aggression on my part and the virtual death of literally dozens of people. But then again, I guess it could be worse. I suppose living in Finland, Norway or (Murhpy forbid!!) Japan would be the deepest pits of Hell for me (in regards to ringtone/mobile maniacs).

Something completely different: I managed to claim a microwave oven and some other neat stuff for my place. We're becoming a pretty well-equipped flat-community, the only big stuff we're missing now is a washing-machine and a dishwasher; and maybe a freezer...

And that's it for tonight.

(*) Murphy's comment to that: "No plan survives enemy contact."

Re: callcenter agent
Hmz. I left my place early on Friday, and it seems that the callcenter dude called me about 2 hours after I had left. Not the guy from the agency that got me the job, but the actual callcenter dude. It seems that the agency didn't forward my parents' phone number to the callcenter guys. My flatmate called and told me they'd be trying to call me on my cellphone some time on Monday or Wednesday. Problem with that is: my cell currently doesn't work due to unpaid bills. So now I don't have any chance to reach the callcenter guys (since I don't have any number there I could call), the callcenter guys have no chance of reaching me (since they don't have my current phone number), the agency is only reachable on Monday again, which might be too late (I'll try anyways of course) ... I knew something had to screw up yet before that job was safely collected.
Regards to Mr Murphy.

... and then there was rain
This morning, I awoke to the last remains of a pretty nice dream, involving a good friend of mine (who I happen to see rarely, and who I happened to have a crush on pretty much exactly a year ago). It took place in the winter, at some vague point in the future (at least that's what I thought when waking up) and we apparently had not seen each other for quite a while. We had some fun in the snow (heaps of snow, actually!) and later sat at a nice fire talking about this and that. I've not felt that comfortable when waking for a long time...

...and then I took a look out the window: grey skies, heavy with rain. I wish my life could be at least a bit as comfortable as that dream was, would beat sitting here alone and lonely, watching the rain and listening "Stan" by Eminem any day.

Unemployment begone!
Remember when I was looking for that call-center job a couple of weeks back (first September post)?
Well, after having a talk with the people of that agency, they said they'd call back within a week to let me know about jobs and whatnot. They never called, and I was really mad about that, spent €10,- and an entire afternoon just on getting to Cologne and their place and it didn't seem to pay off at all.
Well, today they called. When I picked up the phone and the guy on the line said "Agency X here, am I talking to..." it actually took me about a second or so to realize where to place that name. Anyways, it seems my worst nightmares of jobless low-life have been shut up rather nicely, I'll start some time in October! Yay!

End of the line
Seems I was a bit too eager with this month's share of downloads: September 20th brought an email from my ISP telling me that my monthly traffic limit of 5 gigabyte had been reached and any additional traffic would go at a rate of 1,2c/MB. Good thing I had a backup connection via 56k...

Gonna be offline for most of the rest of the month, gotta lower any extra costs I have to an absolute minimum.
Have a good time and see you in 10 days!

Quake done quick
So, finally, after hours and hours of unsuccessfully trying to set up a TCP/IP server to play some good ol' Quake on the internet (the original Quake, no Q2 or, (higher being of your choice) forbid, lame Q3), we managed.
And damn, this was fun!! I'm painfully missing the LAN sessions back from boarding school time, where we had 3-4 servers running a full DM6 (that's 16 people per server, telefrag ahoy!). Anyways, back to the game for me, there's still 2 episodes that need to be finished, and the one or the other Shambler and Fiend to be gibbed.
Party on!

Urgh
Hardly any food throughout the day and then 9 beer: I should've known it wasn't the wisest of all ideas. My stomach despises food yet.
At least the sun's shining. Although sunshine's being a mofo with my headache, but hey, at least I'm trying to be positive, eh?

The good old times
Turn on "I will survive" and read.

At first I had a life,
I had many friends,
until I found this bloody game
and now I'm 12 again,
i spend so many nights
telling my girl I must log on
but now I can't
because she's buggered off and gone...
So now I'm back
at 12 o clock
I've got no social skills
and I'm not taken anymore
Weren't you the one that I defended yesterday,
You little swine - now I may as well be gay
Oh no not I,
I will survive!
Just as long as I keep on this crap
I'll never have a life...
I've got no girlfriend to lay,
None of my mates will come and play,
but I'll survive...I will survive...

(Dedicated to the wonderful game Planetarion. Courtesy of Netvyper and his logfiles =))

To new frontiers .. but how?
So I finally decided I want a new design for my blog. It's been the same old, same old for more than 18 months (that's one and a half year!), and it's an only slightly edited pre-set too.
So I want something funky, original. But ... I have not the slightest ideas. Unfortunately, and unlike some other people in my age, I'm no wizard with Photoshop, no genius of webdesign ... but I am a sucker for aesthetics. And I've long felt that this blog needs a good mop-up.
So what's the plan of actions then?
I guess I'll be sending a couple of IMs and emails to various people I know who've repeatedly proven their webdesign/gfx skills to my utter amazement and will hope that one of them feels enough pity to sit down for some 30 minutes and stamp out a cool design or 2.

Wish me luck. It's only for your own best...

format c:
Today was one of those days again where everything is going well (see post below for that) until you get the idea that you could reboot your computer again, since it's been running for days in a row.

BAD IDEA!!

After rebooting, I was confronted with what looked like a freshly installed WinXP. Overcoming my first shock ("OMG! 'tis all gone!") I tried setting everything into place again ... to no avail, as I was shown after the next reboot!
Yes, the GUI was back to good old-fashioned win9x-looks and feels. But that's where the good news were at an end already. My personal files and folders seemed to have been scattered all over my HDD, my internet connection refused to work even after a complete purge'n're-install, my Desktop had an assembling of different icons whenever I rebooted again ... I was that close to the good old problem-solving 'format c:' when I remembered my nifty system-tweaking tool (TuneUp Utilities 2004), so I started it up, tried this and that ...
... again to no avail: my personal files/folders were still scattered over the place, the icons on my Desktop were still playing hide'n'seek after each reboot. This called for drastic measures! But before letting my ace 'format c:' slip out of my sleeve, I tried re-setting the system to the settings from a week ago, which was the last time I had made a recovery point.

And hallelujah! It works again!
Now back to re-installing all the programs I had set to work since then.

Piece of advice: Don't attempt a SP2 installation for XP.
It fucks up your machine royally. This has been the third time I had to use recovery points after trying a SP2-installation...

P.S: Oh yeh, and when starting my desktop PC (because I thought it might take a while with the recovering) I was victim of a HDD crash. ~30 gig of mp3 lost, not to mention all the other stuff I had on there.
Murphy's been out for me today.

Got life?
So my uni life-to-be is finally being hammered into some sort of shape and form. Today I spent about 2 and a half hours sitting in a room at the uni and listening to the description of what it actually is that I'm going to study and how it is supposed to work. There's still not too much finalty in the whole thing though; I do hope that things are being 80% sorted when I'm done with my first year...
Anyways. So I'll be taking modules, and the first year (=2 semesters) is the same regardless of which direction I want to take, apart from having to choose my first language. After today's info meeting though, I'm not sure anymore if I really want to go for Chinese as first and Arabian as second language; Chinese/Japanese, Japanese/Chinese or even Japanese/Arabian sound like great choices too.
Damn you, info meeting!

Anyways. Being out there today (and interacting with other human species for the first time since Friday) showed me that there are indeed quite a couple of hot girls in the city of Bonn. And quite a good percentage of them seems to be in my semester. Yay me!

\o/

Life is good
Incredibly enough, I'm feeling perfectly "in tune" with everything at the moment, I'm doing fine and it's amazing to realize that it doesn't need anything special to feel that way.
The weather is fine, though windy, and I'm even pondering taking a walk along the river Rhine.

P.S.: Women
A's talk of visiting was nothing but that, talk. Unfortunately. Disappointingly. She's left for Portland 4 days ago, and all I got was a call on Sunday morning at 9.

A: "Hey, just wanted to say bye before I take off, sorry about forgetting to call back last night."
Me: "No prob. Have fun. See you next year I guess."
A: "Well, yeh, take care."

Some incredible 20 seconds or so. I really don't know what I must've been thinking for the past couple of weeks.
Bah!

Finally!
It feels like ages ago, but it has been only 17 days since I last posted. (I had to check, heh.)
Since tonight, my home connection is working as it should, something I had been hoping for since the end of last week. I'm a speedfreak now and browsing on a 2Mbit connection. My first download struck as me kinda weird, until I realized it had taken me only roughly 45 seconds to download about 10 megabyte ... go figure.
I've been exploring my new home town Bonn a bit while I was offline (had nothing better to do anyways), I very much enjoyed the good weather we finally had (well, for a couple of days, at least) and I've actually been playing "Baldur's Gate II - Shadows of Amn" quite a lot and got further than ever before. Being offline helped a lot there... ;)

Anyways. Now I'm back and rocking. Expect a few more updates from my end again every now and then. I'm currently looking for jobs, might start working in a call center for some odd whopping 9-10 Euro/hour, wish me luck.
Back with more soonish.