Saturday, October 4, 2003
Last night I dreamt I was part of a theatre show. The performance had started and my part at the beginning had something to do with handing out tabloid-sized sheets of paper printed with something (music lyrics?) and the tops of which were cut to resemble (I think) choir boys. I handed out about 6 of these to the audience—it was just part of the act, maybe a way of getting the audience into a participatory mood. After that, however, I realized that I had not studied any of my lines for the rest of the play, and I panicked! I casually pulled out a 3-ring binder while onstage as another actor came on and started doing his or her lines. I figured I could just get by the rest of the play by reading out of the binder. I don't remember anything else from this dream.—Breakfast at home with Patrick: Biscuits with mini cow patties and shredded cheese. House chores. Patrick prepared meatballs and funghi marinati for tonight's dinner with Erik and Carol. After installing Nero's 2.0.1.59 aspi driver (wnaspi32.dll) for Win XP, I downloaded and installed an open-source CD ripper called CDex 1.5.1 and tested it with Dido's "Life For Rent" and my computer blue-screened with "STOP: 0x0000008E" on track 5: "see you when you're 40." Normally when software crashes the first time I use it, I immediately uninstall it. However, I'm out of options. I tried Audiocatalyst and that crashed on me. I tried CD-DA X-Tractor but it wouldn't fetch names properly and seems to have not been updated in 2 or 3 years. Restarted and confirmed that I have plenty of disk space available (3 GB on C and 40+ GB on D). Simply played the Dido CD in Winamp—blue-screened with "STOP: 0x0000008E" on track 8: "sand in my shoes." Fried meatballs for an hour. Ripped Madonna's "American Life"—blue-screened with a fatal system error (c000021a). Uninstalled Nero's aspi driver. Attempted writing data to CD-RW using Windows XP (no application)—it was almost finished and then I got a blue-screen error: BAD_POOL_CALLER. Uninstalled Roxio UDF Reader and Onstream Echo 3.7 (aka 1Safe) because after these recent blue-screens I was getting alerts that Drive T—a drive set up by Onstream's software—was low on disk space. Restarted. Ran Scandisk on both hard drives. Edited my hosts file to block out unnecessary sites which I recently ran across which caused annoying pop-up and pop-under windows. Removed sfcenter.org from my bookmarks for the same reason. Added Margaret Cho's weblog to my bookmarks. Ran Windows Update on all computers (Q828750 and Q828026). Prepared our absentee ballots and assorted paperwork for voting purposes. Samsung's support website is down, so I can't find out if I have the most recent driver for our SM-348B combo drive. Their site says: "Try Again—Service is delayed due to the unusual numbers of users in the Download Center. Please try again shortly." I try again an hour later and get the same message. Tried writing data to CD-RW again—blue-screen: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Dinner at home with Patrick, Erik, and Carol: spaghetti and meatballs in red sauce, steamed artichoke with garlic mayonnaise dip, funghi marinati, Italian country bread, assorted marinated Italian olives, Villa Claudia Chianti 2001, Italian cookies.