Fleetmack.com - December 2003 News

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December 2003 News Archives

Sorry, they're incomplete this month- my host deleted my site in mid-December, don't EVER use dot5hosting.com!!!

December 15 December 16 December 17 December 18 December 19 December 21 December 23 December 26 December 29 December 31

December 31, 2003

Happy New Year's Eve! Our internet connection at work has been down all week and will likely be down until Monday. I'm out to Keystone to snowboard for a few days - enjoy and have a great rest of 2003!

Here's something to keep you bored.

December 29, 2003

And look who's in the playoffs!! We finished the regular season on an excellent note. We ended our 6 game road skid, we beat the 49ers in San Francisco for the first time since 1979, and the mere fact that we beat San Francisco on the road (where the 49ers have averaged winning by 20 points this season) is quite a feat as well. Now it's on to the playoffs and time for my bets I placed last March to pay off. Remember, for a mere $25 since Vegas was a non-believer just like the rest of you, I get about $500 if they even make it to the Super Bowl, and an additional $1500 if they win the Super Bowl. Amazing what $25 can do. But I can't count my chickens before they're hatched. Green Bay is target #1, they're going down next week. They whipped our asses earlier this year, and heading to Lambeau this late in the season isn't easy, especially with Favre on the streak he's currently on, but mine and the Seahawks' confidence is high - congrats to my team!

HAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!! OH MAN THE VIKINGS SUCK!!! Hey all 5 of you that emailed me about the Vikings beating the Seahawks - SUCK IT!!! How can you start a season 6-0 and not make the playoffs?!?? Waaaahahahhahahahhahaha. We beat the Cardinals 38-0 in Arizona and you couldn't even beat them, oh man, this is huge for bragging rights for a LONG time to come, especially seeing how about 1/3 of all my friends live in Minneapolis. Sorry, I must go dry the laughter tears from my eyes now. Don't see Dante Culpepper doing his FUCKING GAY offsides-motion TD celebration any more do we? Oh man, too great, too great.

Anyways - obviously - I'M BACK IN DENVER!!! As the Nadas say "I've been away a bit too long...." I got home around 10:30 last night, no thanks to Laetitia's gas light, which failed to turn on to notify me of low gas, resulting in me sitting by the road for awhile as I ran out of gas. I'm an idiot. And I forgot my cell phone charger at home, so that means no cell phone (or phone of any type for that matter) for a few days. But the rest of the trip was pretty cool, I was VERY bored and was having fun with my newly discovered love - the timer on my digi cam. I bet I took about 300 pictures of myself on the way home, I'm going to write a stupied little quirk about a typical trip back to Denver with pictures included, so you can see how I entertain myself. You will surely stop reading this site forever when you see how messed up I am - this article will prove it. Expect to see this writing on Wednesday, as I'm going to the Canucks/Avalanche game tonight with B.J., Chris, and Nick.

Christmas break was wonderful, I'll leave it to your imagination, I'll put some pictures up tomorrow. I'm very tired right now. I'll put up a brand spanking new picture of the day for you, along with a new MP3.

HOMEWORK: Everyone post 1 topic in the forums, let's get these fuckers rolling again.

December 26, 2003

Had a great Christmas, hope you did too! I'm out to New Hampton until Saturday afternoon - late. Cheer for the Seahawks and....I can't believe I'm going to say this - The Broncos MUST win this weekend for us to make the playoffs, GO BRONCOS!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of course, as soon as I need them Portis is on the bench. If they lose this weekend, I will permanently hate them and punch Portis, Plummer, Sharpe, and McCaffrey in the ear the next time I see them, man I hate the Broncos. They'll lose this weekend just because I need them to win. GO SEAHAWKS~!!

December 23, 2003

Greetings from Carroll, Iowa..happy 2-days before Christmas, which this year is also known as Burrito-Day eve. Here I sit going for a 10:33 Central Standard Time update in boxers and my goatfest 6 T-shirt that Smitty gave to me. This trip has kicked so much ass it's just not describable. As of this minute, nope, can't describe it. My Grandparents and Uncle Bruce from portland are coming home today. Tomorrow Andy, Brent, and Cori will arrive from Des Moines and Chicago, then Friday afternoon I'm heading up to New Hampton to see my Grandma Lentz (no picture, sorry). Then back to C-town on Saturday and back to Denver on Sunday. This trip is going entirely too fast. I really just want time to freeze here for awhile.

Hung out at Tiff's place last night for awhile, and tonight we're going to Ames to have some delicious Great Plains pizza and then meet up with Brian Rash for a quick minute. I haven't seen that guy for a long time, probably 5 years or so, so that'll be pretty cool. Other than that, today is the day for me to finish the 'ol Christmas shopping and get some present-wrapping done. Gotta go hit the shower now and get on over to Denison for lunch - have a great day and if you don't read any further - have a fantastic Christmas! :)

December 21, 2003

Check this out, I'm showing Tiffany how to update the site. Pretty exciting huh? Get back to work shithead.

December 19, 2003

The day has come, that day, being Friday. I've been looking forward to this day for the last 17 years of my life. Ok, not really. I have, however, managed to spend my entire paycheck since Monday, pretty impressive, huh? Guess I'll be living off my cash and credit cards until 2004, damn I'm stupid sometimes, at least my savings account is doing pretty rocksteady. Remember Rockstead and B-Bop from TMNT? They ruled.

Finished my Christmas shopping last night, folded laundry, packed up, blah blah blah. We have our work Christmas party today, that means I'm done with work at like 11:30 this morning until December 29th, giddy the funk up!! I'll be heading back to Iowa, then on the 29th I'm going to the Canucks/Avs game with Beej, Nick and Chris, then on the 31st up to Keystone to see Cori (my sister) and Beej and friends will be there as well - so probably snowboard on the first of the year, then back to work for the 2nd, then snowboard on the 3rd and 4th somewhere, then it's just 3 days until I hit the ripe age of a quarter-century. Man I'm old. There will be fleetupdates during this time, trust me, just thought I'd give you a heads up over the course of the next few days.

As stated above, the forums aren't being restored, just restarted - so go re-register and post away! I have a feeling nobody will, prove me wrong fuckers and start some threads, I'll put it upon you to make this work, I'm not going to go out of my way to start threads anymore. You're going to have to show some initiative to waste your own time from now on :) And upload your own avatars now, it's easy - just go into your profile after you register.

I haven't done the updating to the Wil$on picture archive yet, but I'll try to find a new picture for you soon. Got 2 wins in fantasy hockey last night from Khabibulan and Durham, sitting pretty in 4th place (out of 12), so I'm pretty pleased with that. Finshed last in fantasy football, although I finished 8th (out of 10) in total points during the regular season, so I guess the league sorta pulled something on me like the refs pull on the Seahawks - forcing me out of the playoffs although I had more points than others, but for the Seachickens, the refs just trip our players and stop the clock for no reason so the other team can have the ball instead of time expiring. Yup, I'm bitter. Those 2 calls cost us the division if we win out, and the refs admitted they were wrong on both of them. What ever happened to "reviewing the call"?!??! Bastards, oh well, we should still make the playoffs then win the Super Bowl on a wild card instead.

Enjoy a new thing or two and again - welcome back! Merry Weekend Before Christmas!

December 18, 2003

Tired. Sleepy. Not Awake. Heavy Eyelids. Exhausted. Not Awake. Incoherent. This perfectly describes me today. Click here for a movie review, I won't post it here so I don't ruin it for you all.

There were geeks everywhere last night, you have no idea, dorks! Outside the theatre there were people in Midevil garb sword fighting in a huge circle. There was a family dressed up like wizards in line for the show that started after ours. Geeks everywhere I tell you! Allow me to use this time to refresh you things I hate about the theatre and why last night was so cool. Bathroom people. The movie itself (not including previews or the preview-previews) was 3 hours 20 minutes long, we had aisle seats - didnt' ONCE have to let someone through to go to the bathroom during the movie. Secondly: Not one cell phone rang during the movie. Third: Nobody talked during the movie (something I'm guilty of most of the time). I mean seriously, at one point in the movie when it kinda did a fade-in restart near the end, you could have heard a pin drop in that theatre. Only bad thing about the overall theatre experience is the preview-previews. Man I hate that, now instead of having to watch 20 previews, we now have to watch SUV commercials, cell phone commercials, etc. Yeah, not a big fan of that. I don't have an extra-large foam finger looking like a "Number 1!" that says "Preview Commercials" on it. That didn't make any sense.

I fixed the guestbook, it's back in commission. I had about 5 signers since my last backup of it, so their entries have been lost. Oops. Ah well, point is - the guestbook is back up and running.

The forums work, but I haven't yet restored the data, other than that - I'd like to welcome you back to the complete fleetmack.com, now hosted by WestHost, Inc. Hopefully they'll do a better job than the previous companies, so far they've been spectacular and the FTP operates at just under light speed, much faster than any FTP connection I've ever had. I backed up the entire site yesterday in about 10 minutes, tops, it was boombastic.

That's all for now, I'll give you a random picture of the day and a new MP3 in a short while...enjoy and have a great one!

December 17, 2003

Happy Birthday Klaver!

Wow, Ross got lucky, very lucky. Glad to hear you're ok, bud.

IF ANYONE HAS A COPY OF THE FILE "dec.htm" IN THEIR INTERNET CACHE I WOULD REALLY APPRECIATE YOU SENDING IT TO ME!!!!! For that same matter, if you have a copy of novnews.htm dated any later than 11-25-03, I'd also greatly appreciate having that - thanks for your help!

A few regular updates are back, I put the old MP3 of the day back up for one final go before it's retired.....

And the picture of the day is back up from the day of the site's crash - it's a reward for Heita being my most loyal reader, who claims to know more about me than I know about me!

Webmail is back up and running, we're no longer going with SquirrelMail, but now we're using NeoMail - this should work nicely, it lets you customize a signature and some other stuff the first time logging in. Go ahead and try your webmail, if it isn't working, send me your username and password and I will inspect the restores on my end. Kris - you need a new password of 6 or more characters for your FTP account, choose one and email it to bryan@fleetmack.com. Thanks!

Have I told you all that I detest Christmas shopping? Man I hate it, it's what hell is the equivalent of. In fact, shopping in general is the equivalent of hell. I went to the mall last night at Flatirons, malls would be cool if there was no people in them, but wow, I fucking hate shopping. I've raved about this before, so I won't get into it again. But yeah, I'm not finished shopping yet, need to finish on Thursday night, tonight I'm going to sit in front of a huge projection screen for 3 hours and 40 minutes.

Yup, going to Lord of the Rings for opening night tonight. This got me to thinking, I had no clue other than the little geek Frodo Elija Wood and Ian MacKellan - who was in this movie. I looked it up and felt like a damn moron. Did you know that Sam is Sean Astin?! I can't believe I never noticed that! That guy's got to be getting old, but he never seems to not look like a complete geek. Seriously. Goonies, Whitewater Summer, Toy Soldiers, Rudy, Encino Man - what a dork. How come he got to be in a cool movie? I'm surprised Cory Heim or Corey Feldman didn't get the part of Frodo. I guess they were inspired by Elija's work in Radio Flyer: Powered by Imagination. A classic (sarcasm)

So yup, I still have 6 beers to go on my Old Chicago Winter Tour, should probably finish that up one of these nights.

Written Earlier: The site should be in full effect shortly - the new site is basically http://69.36.167.87/ It'll be back to fleetmack.com shortly I'm sure, just need the new DNS to replicate, then I have some work to do - I'm really thinking by noon tomorrow everything will be kosher like a Jewish pickle. This web host has a much better and up-to-date software than dot5. digihosters had great servers but highly unreliable serVICE. For this reason, I will be again able to tweek the guestbook code to allow picture uploads I believe, but we'll find out. Woo Hoo! Trust me, mass testing will be done before I launch it.

Metallica and Godsmack are coming to town. I'm not going to go, durr. Metallica sucks now and Godsmack has worn off from the days of their good songs like Whatever and Voodoo -- although I am a pretty big fan of that new song, Serenity.

December 16, 2003

Ok - got a new host chosen, just waiting to get the nameservers to me, then I need to update those and wait a day or two for replication and we'll be back in business. From there I just need to create 2 databases and upload my backup .sql files and the forums and guestbook will be back - not to mention regular full pages and the rest of this site, which is incognito as of now.

I'm busy as hell right now, so this'll be short. Went Christmas shopping last night, jealous are you? Thought so. Lord of the Rings - Fellowship yadda was on Showtime last night, so I watched it again, I've seen that movie way too many times. After all those times, I don't really understand one thing. When they're in the mines and that huge dragon thing is chasing them and they cross the bridge, why does Gandolf stay behind and do the whole "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" thing, there's no way that mammoth of a creature could cross over such a narrow bridge. Gandolf should have just left with the rest of the fellowship, doesn't make much sense. Guess I should really read the books, I'm sure they'd explain it better. By the way, Return of the King starts Wednesday - rock on. I think these movies are much better than the Star Wars movies, I always loved them, but the new ones suck. I also watched part of Attack of the Clones last night as I folded laundry, that was on another Showtime or Skinemax or something I think. Having all the movie channels rocks, this is a luxury I will not want to part with.

As I said, I have a very busy day, so I'm going to get to it. Likely will have everything back up and running by mid-day Friday, but hopefully mid-day Thursday. Adios.

December 15, 2003

What's up fools? Yup, here's an update for you - it'll be long. Missed a few birthdays while out-of-commission - so happy belated birthday Tiff Bracken and Matt Boell (aka - bgtitters and animal)

First and foremost, let me give you an unbiased account of what actually happened here to mess this site up on a step by step basis, but quickly. On last Tuesday morning I received word that fleetmack.com was suspended because I didn't pay my host fees, rightfully so. I immediately paid them and my site was reactivated, email accounts and mysql were also activated. Sometime Wednesday afternoon, the guestbook and forums went down due to a closure of my mysql accounts for some reason, I sent an email to support and received to response. Around 4pm on Wednesday, fleetmack.com disappeared altogether. With emails into support, I received word on Thursday morning that they deleted my entire site and had no backups. I was to be compensated 3 months for this. Luckily, I had a backup of my own as of 11-25-03 (with an up-to-date guestbook backup and a backup of the forums as of 11-03-03). However, upon reinstating my account, I noticed that the upload speed of my FTP has been reduced to roughly (no, this is not an exaggeration) 1/1000th the speed of normal. Also - my MySQL is not up and running. I have sent 6 emails to support about this and received only the following response:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Dot5Hosting.
Your query is now being processed and will be answered shortly.
You can login and view your ticket at any time by visiting:
http://www.dot5hosting.com/support.php
You have been given ticket number ELP-43139-918 for any future reference.
Kind regards,
Dot5Hosting Team

If I log in, that ticket says "resolved". Basically, they are not addressing my problem at all, so I have to take it upon myself to find a new host. Becuase of my horribly slow upload speed, the entire site isn't active as of this minute as it's taking too damn long, so whatever is here now you get for now, I'm not going to upload the Wil$on pages or any more pictures or anything like that until the new host is chosen. I've had horrible luck with hosts as both DigiHosters and Cedant have done this exact same thing to me in the past before Dot5 could do it for me - so I'm going to take my time selecting a host who I can trust and I know won't allow this to happen again. Because of my molasses FTP connection, it takes me upwards of 2 minutes just to download this News page every day - and it's a whopping 6KB in size...for this reason there will be no more MP3's, Pictures of the day, or archived News until the new host arrives - this page will just get cluttered. Hopefully I can have this resolved before Christmas or the New Year, but no guarantees on that. I again apologize for all of your FTP accounts with lost data (everyone except Kris) and for your email accounts being down at this time. I will resolve this, I guess we can look at the positives of this - maybe the re-launch of the forums will strike more forum users! Either that or we'll lose the few of you who currently enjoy using them.

With that said - ON TO THE NEWS!!!! What a fantastic weekend, seriously that was just what I needed in every way. Friday Andy and I went to Old C's and completed half of the winter tour, I'll have to finish that up this week before I head back to Iowa. Man those Christmas beers pack a mean punch though, I only had 6 or 7 beers over the night and my head was just pounding all day on Saturday. So on Saturday morning I got up bright and early and for the first time, brought the Red Baron up to Keystone and gave 'er a ride. By the way, that picture of the Baron doesn't show it's bindings - here's the bindings I put on it. Let me tell you this - I had no idea how much difference a board and bindings can make in your sheer enjoyment of the sport. I don't know how I ever rode on that piece of shit Lamar. This Baron with my Mission bindings is outstanding. Talk about performance and sharp turns, this thing is a beast. It's about 50% as light as my other board/bindings so I was able to jump much easier and higher with less strain on my calves. The thing is so kickass, after my few trial runs to get the feel for it, I was up for a challenge. My goal for the year is to be able to ride rails successfully every time - that and to do a 360 on a regular jump, but I don't see that happening. So anyways, I thought I'd try riding a rail - nothing big by ANY means - something like this. Let's just say that hurt pretty fucking bad! I need a helmet and a mouth guard before I should try that again - and it was a wood rail which is more difficult than a steel one, but still - I didn't realize how hard even a short rail would be to ride. I'll have it down by the time the ski trip rolls around, I promise.

So yup, got a call from Rikelle the other night - Ivan (aka - Ghost) from Motograter (her old roommate) informed her that Chimaira was playing down at the Gothic Theatre, we went. Holy shit, what a show, these guys just put on an amazing show in front of the crowd of rougly 500 people. I've said it 1000 times before, this band is going to blow up. I never realized how popular Motograter was becoming until I asked Ivan if he'd seen Chimaira live before, his response was something along the lines of "Yeah, the were our opening act last year." Hmmm, so anyways, he got us backstage afterwards and we hung out by the bus and drank from the band's keg for awhile, was pretty sweet, but yup, I'm a dipshit and didn't have my camera, ah well. Turns out Ivan's aunt used to baby sit Corey Taylor (Corey grew up in Denver) and they're very good friends, so that was pretty sweet. I think Motograter is touring with Slipknot next time around, so hopefully I can get Riki to hook me up with a backstage pass. And get this 411 that i got this weekend - from a very reliable source. Slipknot's final tour this upcoming spring will be presented - get this - without masks! How ya like that? That could almost let them win a grammy!

Dunner had her graduation party as well on Saturday night at Potts, so Rikelle and I went there before and after the show. Dunner before the show = sober. Dunner after the show - whoa, drunk. I don't know if Riki or Dunner was drunker, but here's a picture of the two of them, you decide.

Seahawks played well yesterday, but couldn't pull it off. My only question - why the hell wasn't something done when the ref tripped Bobby Engram? Can't you call pass interference on a ref? I swear there's a conspiracy against us this year. That's the second game this year where the REFS ADMITTED they cost us the game. Refs never admit when they're wrong - and they've admitted that they've cost us 2 games this year. Horseshit. So yesterday, around 2:00 I realize that Laetitia needs an oil change severely before I go back home for Christmas. I hop in Laetitia and go to Sport's Clips to get a haircut - wait for a half hour to get it cut and then go to the store to buy oil, filter, and new wiper blades. By the time I get home, it's 3:45. It gets dark around 4:20 here right now (no pun intended, but it gets dark earlier here as the sun only has to go down as far as the mountains instead of the horizon) and I need the car to cool off a little. I wait until the sun goes down and realize it's still about 50-55 degrees outside. I change the oil in sweats and sleeveless shirt. I wasn't cold. This morning I wake up to a winter storm warning, snow, 60MPH winds, and 20 degrees. You've got to love Colorado sometimes.

I need to go Christmas shopping yet - yup, have a ton of that to do. Anyways, I'm rambling on quite nicely, so I'll leave you with that. Have a great week.