Jeff Billimek’s Journal

I had a nightmare last night about a nuclear holocaust. For some strange reason (It’s a dream, what can I say) I was at a seedy strip club in Las Vegas near the airport. In my dream, the Las Vegas airport is like thirty miles from downtown separated by desert. So in my dream I’m sitting at a table with some dancer trying to sell me something and out of the corner of my eye I see a bright flash from the big window emanating from downtown Las Vegas. To my horror I looked out the window and saw the mushroom cloud over Las Vegas. It was a terrorist attack. In my dream I had the same dread-filled horrible feeling I got on September 11th. Then, in my dream, I went back to the airport and was trying to fly standby back to Atlanta but all the flights were grounded.

It was an odd dream. I usually enjoy nightmares, but this one really disturbed me. As soon as I woke up, I turned on the TV to “CNN”:http://www.cnn.com/ just to make sure that everything was ok.

I was supposed to go to a “LAN party”:http://fragfest.adratek.com today that Mark White told me about. I spent the morning installing games like “Unreal Tournament 2003″:http://www.unrealtournament2003.com/, “Splinter Cell”:http://www.splintercell.com/, and “Counter Strike”:http://www.counter-strike.net/. After I installed some of these games, I realized I hadn’t played Counter Strike in (literally) years. I decided that I probably wouldn’t be too useful at the LAN party since my FPS skills left a lot to be desired. So I decided to forego the LAN party today until I can hone my skills some more.

I spent a great deal of time updating stuff in “Money 2003″:http://www.microsoft.com/money/. I decided to reduce the value of my “Ford Explorer’s”:http://www.fordvehicles.com/suvs/explorer/ asset account to reflect depreciation. I went to the “Kelly Blue book”:http://www.kbb.com/ site and got the updated value for it. This led to like a $12,000 reduction. I put this in as one transaction for 3-1-2003 but that screwed up net worth. It showed my taking a huge hit for this month. That’s not what I wanted so I distributed the depreciation over the five months since I bought the car. This made things a little smoother. I now need to update the asset amount once a month to keep it smooth.

I also called “Best Buy”:http://www.bestbuy.com/ today to see if they had the “Microsoft Wireless Desktop Bluetooth”:http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/keyboard/wodbt_info.asp in stock. I had been checking over the past few weeks and they finally got four in last night. I drove out to Best Buy and bought it using the gift certificate I got from Mom for my birthday.

On my way home I also stopped at “Target”:http://www.target.com/ and bought a new electric razor. My old Norelco broke and I had a full week’s worth of facial hair that’s been driving me crazy. I got the top-of-the line “Braun Syncro 7526″:http://www.braun.com/na/products/shavinggrooming/dryshaving/dryshaving/syncrosystem.html. It’s really cool. It self cleans and everything. It was pretty expensive though.

After I got home, I started charging the shaver and installed the Bluetooth keyboard + mouse. The keyboard is a lot nicer than the old Logitech wireless keyboard I had. It has those special buttons across the top that give me one-touch access to common things. You can also remap those buttons to whatever you choose. The mouse is basically exactly like my old corded Optical Intellimouse Explorer. It also has five buttons. One drawback though is the Intellipoint software no longer allows you to map buttons to custom things ties to specific applications. I don’t know why they took this functionality out, but it was really nice. The Bluetooth range is really nice too. The keyboard worked in every corner of my apartment, even through two walls. I was impressed.