managing stress in a fast-paced world

I’m loading POI’s into my GPS… the crappy thing is there are no free red light camera, or speed trap lists.

I’m going to make my own POI list… anyone with any ideas for lists?

It always seems like when something goes wrong all kinds of things go wrong… I take that back, nothing is really wrong, but when it rains it pours. Here’s an example:

1 - tookout a big cashiers check from bank #1 to pay for the wedding.

2 - took cashiers check (supposedly as good as cash) from #1 to deposit into bank #2 and get an even bigger check. Was told check #1 would take 4 days to clear! WTF?

3 - get new cashiers check from bank #2 and use it to pay for the wedding.

4 - schedule mortgage payment 4 days later, check #1 hasn’t cleared yet so payment gets returned, because the account was short $400 (from the cashiers check that hadn’t cleared yet! coincidentally it clears about 3 hours after the payment was returned.)

5 - call mortgage company to reschedule payment, they say ok.

6 - get a call from mortgage company, haven’t gotten payment yet, and nothing is scheduled. I tell them I’ll make a payment now online, but then get an error online (this service is not available).

7 - Call back mortgage company to make a payment over the phone, but they tell me my account is “frozen” and to call my bank and ask why it’s frozen.

8 - Call bank and ask why my account is frozen, they tell me it’s not frozen.

9 - Call  back mortgage company to tell them my account is not frozen. They say they can’t do anything…

10 - Eventually I spoke to someone who figured out how to remove the frozen flag and not give me any late fees or anything.

Then today I get a call from the financial adviser who says to get the full benefits we should put in another $1k PLUS $200/month. Sheesh, why does everyone want my money!

I ordered a Garmin Nuvi 680 GPS from amazon.com last week, it shipped today! yay! I’m looking forward to getting a gps, so many times I’ve gotten lost or stopped to pull out my phone and use google maps only to have it tell me it can’t find the address. This is the start of outfitting a vehicle for travel. The next step will be a police scanner, radar detector, and then finally the new car

I spent $500+ at Frys Electronics last night… I really hate spending money there, if they didn’t have such good deals I would spend my money elsewhere. But the thing is they have good deals, and I’m a sucker for a good deal. So I bought 1.5TB of hard drive space and a new Antec P180 case. The great thing is that the case is version 1.1 which is basically the same as the more expensive P182 and it’s black not “gunmetal” which I wasn’t so crazy about in the P182.

I spent all night installing the old file server into the new case and installed openSUSE, which I now realize I don’t really like. I’m downloading Fedora 7, CentOS 5, and Ubuntu 7. I’ll install them all to try them out and then decide on what to use. Any suggestions?

I’m now a married man, it feels about the same to tell you the truth, not much has changed. We did have the wedding we wanted. Everything went as expected and I’m so grateful to all the people who stepped in to help. I guess it’s now time to get started on the thank you cards…

BTW, does anyone know how to convert a Powerpoint presentation to an avi or mpg?