Now it may be a fairly unkown fact about me, but I can't stand cats. Mainly, if for any reason, it is because at our old house there were cats that made a permanent residence there. And when the males went around marking their territory, it wasn't pretty.

But, anyways, I have another reason to hate cats: It seems I'm allergic to them. Yesterday I went to an allergist to see what the heck I'm allergic to because I have nasty allergies at certain times of the year (and I've got asthma so we were there for that too). Well, I went in and they poked my back with all sorts of pollens and stuff. It appears I'm not allergic to anything organic (as in trees and such), just cats and dust mites (apparently I got a huge welt from the dust mite test). They also put me through a treadmill test to test my lung function and I got another surprise there. I'm not asthmatic enough to even be labelled with having activity enduced asthma. So I'm testing that by laying off my inhaler whilst being active and seeing what gives. I made it through bowling last night without a problem. Tomorrow when I go to work I won't "deasthmaize" and see how I do there.

Speaking of tomorrow it's my first payday (yay!). It's driving me insane to see how much I've made in the last two weeks. I'll probably have a picture of me and my check stub up for you people :-)

In the land of NES development I've gotten two opcodes interpreted but now I'm stuck on something else: it seems I'm not interpreting the ROM data right. I've run my test ROM through a couple of disassemblers and they're reading the first four bytes in as something else (actually, the two disassemblers had different results. Go figure :-P). I'll have to do more research to figure this out. In the mean time you can read a blow-by-blow run-down of development here.

As of today (or yesterday now :-P) I've been working at Wal-mart for one week. I've done probably about everything, now, and seen just about everything put on layaway (except groceries). I'm not sure what my standing is now, but I was already getting high praise on Monday (can't let it get to my head). Also, yesterday, the other layaway boy had his first day and I showed him the ropes. He'll be mainly working when I'm not. Just some interesting stats that I'll be updating regularly. To date I've boxed/binned the following: 4 GameCubes 1 GameBoy Advance SP 2 Xboxs 2 PlayStation 2s 1 Laptop

Quite fun, eh? Also, at the request of SeniorUSB, here is a picture of me in my "little vest":

One day after work I went to the electronics dept. to take a look at their laptops because apparently I'll get an extra 10% cupon for Christmas bonus. I didn't really expect to find anything aside from budget systems, but I found this. With the exception of hard drive space it is more powerful than my desktop (which will become a file/web server). A feature I thought was kind of interesting was the fact that it can play DVD/CDs without even booting into Windows (save on battery life I'm sure). But it will be nice to have a portable computing solution, not to mention just downright cool :-).

In programming land, I'm currently working on trying to write an NES emulator. This is pretty much just for the learning experience to help understand the behind the scene ops of computers/game consoles. I hope that by learning that stuff I'll have a better understanding of current systems (GBA, GCN, etc.) and thus develop for them with little or no learning curve. I've found a bunch of handy info at NesDev.com which is helping quite a bit and I more or less understand how the whole internal system works, but figuring how you load things in from ROM sill escapes me. Hopefully this time next week I'll have my mock 6502 running a few opcodes. I'm mainly trying to get the thing to the point that I can run the original Mario Bros. which is fairly basic but it'll be a mighty cool feeling, I'll tell you now :-).

Well, I made it through my first day working in Lawaway. Overall I think it went pretty well (except all the women's underwear I had to handle :-P). However, it'll be nice when I can go in there and know what to do instead of hanging around more seasoned coworkers and have them coach me through everything.

I just did the math and my first paycheck should be about $326.20. Figuring I get about that much every week (and those are only 25 hour work weeks, mind you) by the time Christmas is over I'll have around $1300! Enough to by myself that laptop :-D

In non-job related news, my Episode III DVD arrived today. I'm not sure if I've said it already, but I got it completely free all because I took a survey :-D. It doesn't get much sweeter than that. I'll probably watch it tonight and watch all the extras over the next few days. Ought to be a nice break from work :-).

Well, yesterday was a great day... NOT! Somehow, and I've yet been able to figure out why, my password got reset. Now I figure it's one of four scenerios:

A) A little kid somehow changed the password by pounding on my keyboard B) One of our neighbors has been sitting cracking our WPA passkey the last month (and I think that all of our neighbors have WiFi) C) Some Uber h4x0r who's peed off at me snuck in via the internet and changed it hoping to make my life miserable D) My SAM file got corrupted

D is the most likely scenerio, but you can't discount any of the others. Anyhoo, I spent most of yesterday figuring out how to undo it without reinstalling Windows. My first thought was to try the Linux distro austrumi which has a utility called nt_pass (only in version 0.9.2, btw). Well, that didn't want to work because, gosh, my SAM file is read-only. Well what jerk wrote that program? :-P

So, I went and did some more searching and came across a little hole in the Windows Istaller. Here's how it works:

A) You'll need a Windows XP/2003 CD (any flavor: plain, SP1 or SP2) that's bootable (I 'spect most have this kind) B) Boot with that and get to the point where you can repair a Windows install (Enter, Enter, F8, R I believe is the key sequence) C) Just go along with that. Your computer will reboot and start the second half of the install. D) Be paying atention to the progress bar in the lower left of the screen. When I says "Install Devices" hit F10. You'll be greeted by a command prompt which will allow you to do darn near anything you want. E) In this particular case run the command "control userpasswords2" and a friendly box will come up where you can reset passwords, add users, etc. F) Once you've done whatever it is you're going to do let Windows finish installing or you'll lose everything you just did.

Needless to say that I created myself a new user account so I could leave the Aministrator one alone ('tis one of the drawbacks to 2K3. You have to go using the command prompt just to get to a place to add a user :-P). But now I'm back in business and everything works great. I hope somebody out there finds that useful because it sure was to me.

Well, I made it past my interview (I'd like to say with flying colors). I may as well say I've got a job (I have no doubt in my mind that I'll pass the drug/alcohol test). In fact, before taking the test today (yuck) I overheard the people in the back talking about how I was "the only one today" and that Wal-mart hasn't been "getting any applications". They're deperate. They need me.

No updates on Ramboella as I can't find my darn Office CD key back (had it just last week :-P). I may mooch off my parents copy of 2K3 Pro (it is nicer) but I'm going to have to do something and soon if I'm going to be on the job 5+ hours a day.