After weeks and weeks of dead computers, deader servers, the flu, crappy economy and the cancellation of Pushing Daisies, things are starting to even out a bit. I've posted a few recent sites to the portfolio, with more on the way pending completion.

The Dark Art Store is still offline, and the eCard gallery doesn't seem to like the new server, but most of the Sinister Sites are back up and running.

If you're in or around Chicago, there's a lot of spooky stuff going on in the near future. Head over to the recently-launched DarkChicago.com for a quick overview of upcoming creepy news & events.

The sad thing is, this photo needs no caption

In the late 1990′s I began a long-distance/online relationship with a woman in London. It lasted for a few months. At some point she challenged me to come visit her to prove I was sincere, which I did. Things got hot and heavy in the weeks leading up to my visit and the L Word got used. Then I got there, and it became apparent that something was amiss. She was weird and distant, claiming nothing was wrong but certainly not exhibiting the feelings for me that she’d claimed she’d had.

So the weekend was frustrating and bewildering, to say the least. It remains one of the more painful memories of my adult life.

I flew home, hurt, confused and rejected. Once I was safely an ocean away, I guess she decided it was safe to tell me The Truth. Turns out that she had started seeing somebody else well before I arrived, and decided somehow that it would be better to just not tell me. Mind you, she told everybody else (the backdrop for this was Whitby Gothic Weekend), just not me.

So on top of everything else, I got to add humiliation to the mix. I spent the weekend with her in Whitby, thinking that maybe there was still a chance, while everybody around us knew there wasn’t. Ha ha. What a chump.

Why am I writing about this now, 10 years later, when I haven’t thought about it in years?

Because she just sent me a friend request on Facebook, suggesting that we “bury the hatchet.”

I politely declined.

I don’t know why it’s bugging me. I guess it’s just the hubris involved, and her cavalier attitude – I’ve never been treated quite as cruelly as this woman treated me, so either she’s unaware of the consequences of her own actions, or she just isn’t concerned with them. Or figures that the Statute of Limitations on such things has expired and it’s OK to talk to me now.

I guess not. I’m surprised to find this memory is still quite painful, as such things go. I’m generally a pretty forgiving person; I don’t like to bear grudges. But I seem to be keeping this one.

Maybe it’s because there were so many things she might’ve done to mitigate the hurt she caused. Looking back at it and realizing how many times and ways she could have just come clean, or at the very least given me ANY indication, about anything, instead of just remaining distant and inscrutable until I was a thousand miles away.

I suppose I should thank her in a lot of ways for cementing some lessons that the divorce I’d gone through the year before all this happened had started teaching me. I certainly came out of those couple of years a much harder, more cynical person, but I also was much more clear on what I wanted out of a relationship, and what I was willing to put up with to get it. More to the point, I was ready to be alone if that’s what it boiled down to, because it would be better to be alone than to go through something like that again.

As it happens, I lucked out. A woman I’d met almost a decade earlier looked me up online and we started talking – again, online, long distance. The difference being that I didn’t fool myself into thinking that IMs and phone calls were a relationship, and this time she came to visit me. That one ended better – we’ve been married for almost 10 years.

The point? I don’t know, honestly. I guess I felt like venting and, hey, it’s my blog, so where better. Nobody has to read it unless they want to seek it out.

This will either send you into hysterics, or leave you scratching your head. The former will identify you as a graphic designer; the latter means you’re… probably not a designer.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1823766

I’m posting this in the hopes that it’ll get indexed by Google and help save other people the multitude of hours I spent trying to solve this problem.

I have a Dell laptop with a SigmaTel sound card in a Windows Vista environment. After spending two consecutive nights researching why I couldn’t record internal / stereo mix sound, I finally found that it’s because the system simply isn’t wired to do it. The blame seems to fall squarely on Dell.

Regardless, there’s a simple $17.95 program called Total Recorder that bypasses all the problems and lets you record audio generated from a website, MP3 program or other source that uses your computer’s internal speakers. Here’s the link: http://www.totalrecorder.com/productfr_tr.htm

That’s it. I installed the program, ran the setup wizard (PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE INSTRUCTIONS) and was able to record internal audio immediately.

I hope this helps somebody else out.