interesting weekend. quite the learning experience as well... let's start at the beginning, shall we? Friday: ended up staying at the office until 8PM working on that same massive ticket broker project. ugh. it's immense and i will be relieved when my participation is completed. grabbed grub on the way home, ate, and crashed... yep. no crapple. :/ --on top of that, we have 2 sick ppl in my immediate office and i'm deathly afraid of viral infection, esp. when my immunity's down from lack of sleep. so i slept. and slept. ah nice rest. 'cept fer waking up in the middle of night wide awake! ack.

so... zoocube. got the highest score ever. then i decide whether i should travel to gurnee mills at 8AM saturday. nah, back to sleep. nice sleep. had a weird dream that i hooked up w/linda cohn (yes, the sportscenter anchor) only she looked like rena sofer (most recently of coupling -- she was great in The Chronicles). did i mention that she also had tendrils growing out from the bottom of her feet and shoulders? anyways, it was a cool dream in a weird way.

so my shopping trip aborted i decided to stay inside and work on putting together my rig. that was a pain in the ass. not only have i still not figured out my widescreen entirely nor my Pannie XP30 dvd player, learning to use my new Yamaha a/v receiver is like learning a 2nd language! it's ridiculous. also learned my dvd player cannot be multi-region hacked only chipped so that was a bummer.

had to quit that since i ran into a wall when i realized i didn't have enough cables. so i got online and started d/l bittorrent fansubbed anime. it still amazes how far advanced the fansubbing community has become. it's certainly a high-tech cottage industry yet i still don't see where they get the resources ($$$) to do this. bittorrent is hellishly cool tho for fansubs. oh yeah, came close to breaking my all-time score on zoocube, and i wasn't even trying.

so today arrives and stakk decides to brave the cold and clueless by heading up to gurnee mills. i left during the Bears/Packers game hoping for less traffic and shoppers. and it wasn't bad. still plenty of folks out doing their thing but bearable. picked up another pair of black Bed-Stu shoes only these are mids and instead of costing $60 (on sale) these were marked down to $20! w00t. at the Borders outlet i bought 6 new manga books@$3 each that normally go for $10-$12/pc (i.e. Tomie!). got 4 more jeans and 4 more BR boxers. then sat in the line to leave almost as long as i was inside the joint!

hit worstbuy on the way home to get some more component cables, a digital optical, and some banana plugs. came home to some exciting michael vick football and more bittorrent d/l. as i worked on my rig. after bouncing back and forth between manuals i finally got my dvd player to play thru my rec'r w/video & audio. damn. this is a learning process...