Sunday, October 5, 2003
Last night I dreamt I was nearly killed by a roller coaster car which had fallen off its track inside of a giant co-ed lockerroom while I was trying to find my locker because I had somehow left my stuff unlocked. A woman and her child were following me around, as though I were guiding them around, but I wasn't, and I turned to her and said something like, "See how unsafe this place is?" and continued past the fallen roller coaster car. I didn't notice if there were people in the car, but I remember not being astounded at the incident at all—no one was. It just happened and that's all.—Ran memory tests from memtest86.com on computers—no problems. Laundry. Some house cleaning. Patrick and I completed our absentee ballots. Went to the Castro with Patrick for a haircut appointment for me with Bao at Nice Cuts. We didn't realize today was the Castro Street Fair. Fortunately, we were able to find parking with little problem. Got my hair cut. Then we had dinner at My Friend: garlic chicken, broccoli cow. Patrick's fortune: Good news will come to you from far away. My fortune: The smart thing is to prepare for the unexpected. Said hi to Jesse who had ordered takeout from My Friend. Said hi to Adrian and Little Brian and their housemate Kim, then—later—Karl and Kevin. We saw whoever it was who did the show called "20 Years of Madonna in 7 Minutes" which we saw at Trannyshack in March 2001. He was doing the same old act on the Castro Street Fair stage but added the newest hits—American Life, Hollywood—at the end. It was really hard to see because the sun was setting and the stage was facing east and was uphill from the crowd. So not only did we have to look in to the sun to see the performer who was mostly backlit, but we also had to be 12 feet tall to see well since we were way in the back. (Who chose to put the stage there instead of the bottom of the hill letting everyone take advantage of the natural vantage points that would create?) I wondered if we'd still be seeing this same act 10 years from now—"40 Years of Madonna in 18 minutes" and later still: "60 Years of Madonna in 53 minutes." Errands at Walgreens. Installed updated drivers for the Soundblaster Live! Value sound card I have. When it restarted and was waiting for a login, just before I touched it it restarted automatically—very voodoo! I can't decide if I need to give up on Windows XP or the hardware I have—not sure if one or more hardware components have gone bad or if the problems I've been having are a driver issue with Win XP. I could conceivably spend $300 to replace all the hardware components I think might be at fault, hook it up to the new hard drive with Win XP and it still might give me problems. Might be safer to set up a BSD with a new drive, run it for a while, and see if the same auto-restart problems occur. Yes, I think I'll do that. Grrr! I don't like when computer problems drag on for a whole month!