Saturday July 3, 8:45PM

Well, my week of ‘vacation’ off from work has begun. The gym is closed from July 2 to July 8 for Independence Day.

I started my week away from cheerleading with, what else? (sigh) A trip to a cheerleading/gymnastics equipment supplier. -More about that later, i’m off to meet Erik and Reed for a shirley temple (they’re having dinner) at Bogey’s and then fireworks.

– 10:45PM –
Back from Bogey’s and the fireworks in Duluth. Predicatbly, traffic did not move a whole lot leaving. Especially with the Duluth police department’s 15-minute-per-direction traffic strategy 🙂 Well, I’m sure their intentions were good.

…So, on friday I left the house with Erik to pick up Reed at the Atlanta Athletic Club (exclusive meets well-to-do). This accident was blocking our normal route out, so we drove past the river instead and headed to GMR in Lithonia. Unfortunately, we ventured out into Atlanta traffic on the perimter, through spaghetti junction, during rush hour, on a holiday weekend no less. Needless to say, there was lots of braking involved on our trip :-). We stuck to side roads on the way back via Stone Mountain, stopping at one point to try to get some funnel cake (we were unsuccessful).

Stone Mountain, Georgia

The funnel cake shop was closed even though we visited during working hours

The rest of my day was spent trying to clean the W32.Pinfi virus off of my computer (the scan took 5.5 hours to complete). I discovered that I was infected after Warcraft 3 stopped working properly.

In addition to the virus, I found that my one of my DDR dance pads isn’t working (sensors seem to function, but the PS2 won’t recognize it). So, today I went to find a Multimeter Expert at the hardware store and bought a multimeter and some wire. After spending 40 min resoldering/shrink-tubing the cable that I incorrectly clipped , I unsuccessfully attempted to diagnose and repair the problem with the dance mat. The circuit pathways are extremely difficult to probe, due to extreme cheap-ness. A new one will cost $20…. and replacing the circuit board with one pulled from an el-cheapo controller will cost at least $10, plus effort getting the flat circuit paths connected correctly (translation: pain in the ass). I’ll toy with the idea of constructing my own pad, but that’s more $$ than i currently want to spend on a game that should work already.

Can you tell that a chemical engineer did this? 🙂

Turns out i’m going to run in the Peachtree Road Race tomorrow with Reed and Otis(?). I’m not in running shape and I don’t have a pair of sneakers properly broken in… guess this means i’ll miss church tomorrow because Iffy’s throwing a barbecue at 1’ish… but i guess we’ll see what happens. Stay tuned to this web log!