I got a butt load of house cleaning done today. Maintainence had to fix our toilet. I had to scrub the floor behind the toilet and it went from there. Boy am I tired! Did I mention I have a nasty cold? Bleh!

I took a break to play with the Sims. The G-Boys were lonely so I decided to make them a friend. His picture is my new icon. Since my own boys insist I’m the only one who thinks my Sims look anything like the people they are supposed to look like, he will be known as “Mystery Man” until someone else can identify him. 🙂 I’m planning on making more friends; to be eventually let loose in my made from scratch world. BTW, does anyone know how to custom color Sim hair blue?

Amber is sitting at the edge of the bed, staring at me. Can you guess it’s time for her dinner? I expect to be tripping over Ribbon by the time I reach the kitchen. As much as the two dislike each other, they still love to join forces and gang up on the meowmy.

Today I finally got around to updating BitComet. In addition to looking a lot more snazzy (and, ironically, rather BitLordish), version .93 has a scheduler. I probably won’t use it, though, as I make it a habit to start up PeerGuardian before running BC. PeerGuardian doesn’t have a scheduler, though, and I refuse to set it to start up when Windows starts. The update also changed some of my settings and the site that I use to base them on is currently down. Has anyone else noticed an increase in sites temporarily not being available?

Anyway. To celebrate the upgrade I decided to get an account with a BitTorrent tracker site. I often have files that I want to share with others. I opted for “The Pirate Bay”. It seemed appropriate what with my Oliverette roots. Unfortunately, I discovered when creating a torrent file using BitComet, that BC adds a crap load of “padding”. I mean, the twelve files I wanted to share became 33 by the time BC was done creating the torrent file. Fuck!

I’ve been noticing that a good many of the folks who are “torrenting” with me use ?Torrent. This may be because my favorite file sharer uses Demoniod.com, who advocates ?Torrent, for their tracker, but I decided to give the client a try, anyway. I like the fact that it gives us dummies the option to automatically create settings based on our internet connections. I’m going to run it with the suggested settings for a bit and see if things speed up (Gods know when I tweaked my settings on BC to accomodate my now slower connection, things started taking twice as long). It took me a bit to figure out that I needed to create folders for the torrents and the downloads. Once I got that figured out, it became a cake walk. I even created an extra folder for my completed downloads to be automatically moved to so that I don’t mix them up with the incomplete ones!

I’m keeping BitComet at least until I finish uploading my share of the files I’ve already downloaded. Once those are done than I’ll start uploading torrents to “The Pirate Bay” and share the link to my account. ?Torrent has been set up as the default client now, so any new files will be handled by it. We’ll see how stable it is before I give BC the boot.

For those on my f-list who enjoy file sharing, might I suggest PeerGuardian 2. In addition to your firewall, it helps to keep unwanteds (like anti-piracy groups) from accessing your computer. Not 100% foolproof, but definitely better than downloading those torrents naked. While I use it soley while BitComet is running, it can also block web sites and spyware (though the company, themselves, insist there are better programs for the latter). Occasionally I’ve had to tweak the settings; allowing a site that has been blocked when I know it shouldn’t be. Other than that it seems to be a wonderful program.

Now if only I can figure out why Time Warner wanted access to my computer….

A friend of Miss “Wicca is whatever I want it to be” is demanding I cite my proof that Wicca requires both a God and Goddess. While the thought of ignoring them has occurred to me, my evil side truly wishes to shut them up. 🙂

I’ve got some books and sites at my fingertips, unfortunately a good plently of what I learned came from my teacher, friends, flist members, comms and library books, all of which are kind of hard to cite, especially since I refuse to drop names (the fact that my memory is teh suck doesn’t help much, either *laughs*). I hate to ask for help with my homework, but can anyone suggest some serious (preferably online, not-so-traditional) sources I can take a look at?

Thank you all so much in advance!!!!!

Ben goes back to school tomorrow. Jarret, the next day. Mom has a bottle of vodka an some Mountain Dew stashed for that party Thursday morning. 🙂

Been busy getting back into my old routine. I found it very hard to accomplish much of anything that didn’t require my computer, as I was regularly tripping over teenagers. Today I managed to 86 a bunch of stuff, found the missing forks (someone had been putting them in the main compartment of the dishrack, burying them with plates and bowls, then not putting said plates and bowls away when they dried…. for about a week), chiseled off some of the soap that somehow manages to accumulate on the bathroom soap dish at an alarming rate, and got myself looking presentable.

I discovered I really need to pick up a pair of Bluettes.

I have been able to further tweak my laundry method. Now that they’ve fixed the entrance to the atttic so that it no longer requires a screwdriver and a prayer to use it, I found the 16 gallon bucket I had in storage and have been using that to soak the laundry before indiviually agitating items in the 5 gallon bucket, then rinsing everything in the big one (twice), again. I’m getting much more clothing washed at a time; I just need to adjust the timing so it isn’t taking me an hour to get it done. But even when it takes that long it feels good to be able to get my clothes so clean (and with minimal impact on the environment, too!).

Miss “Wicca is whatever I want it to be” is apparently hoping to sic her friends on me. Excuse me while I shit myself. *rolls eyes*

My tummy is trying to decide between a ham “sammich” and M&Ms.

I shall (hopefully) spend tonight making new price labels for my macrame jewelry. If I’m done tonight then tomorrow I’ll make those headbands.

Yup! I gotta plan!