Definitely not a black eye. It's some kind of bacterial infection. So I have antibiotics and Garasone. The Antibiotics are horse pills, and I get to take them twice a day. I can live with that. The Garasone is eyedrops. I have to "instil 2 drops in the left eye three times daily, for 5 days."

I'd prefer a prescription to punch myself in the nuts. Hard.

So, the eyelid keeps swelling...I look kind of gross.

So! How're you doing?

I'd hesitate to call it a proper black eye, but I've got some bruising going on by my left eye, and my eyelid's a tad swollen. Fun stuff!

...unrefridgerated Chicken Divan is gross.

Well, I think this is officially the worst birthday I've ever had. I'm 30.

Internet Explorer 8 is out, and seems like a major improvement over IE7, which I was already a fan of. It's added Firefox like addon support, though it doesn't seem as extensive. On the upside, unlike Firefox, thus far it hasn't caused random lockups on my machine. I've been using Chrome as my main browser for awhile, but its Flash support is lousy to the point that it randomly locks up for 20/30 seconds on half the pages I load up. I'm gonna give IE8 a shot for awhile and see how it turns out.

Still dicking around on my computer...I installed Ubuntu, which seems very nice, though I doubt I'll ever do more with it than occasionally boot into it to try to break it. ATI's video drivers seem to suck, perhaps that'll improve with time.

Also, somewhat obviously, I can't sleep.

So I finally got fed up with all the quirks my computer had developed over the last 2 years, and finally decided that a clean install was in order. Boot-up times had reached approximately 10 minutes, too many things running in the background, continuous programs briefly appearing (and minimizing everything else) when I was in fullscreen mode, and the final nail in the coffin, found new hardware wizard running on every boot.

Anyways, lots of things weren't properly backed up, which is, obviously rather annoying, but nothing earth-shattering was lost.

Kept detecting unknown hardware again though, but seemingly not the same thing as before. Had to disable some of the advanced powersaving features of my motherboard to stop the wizard from popping up every time. I can live with that. Tried listening to some music, and no go. Stuttered like crazy, and checking task manager, wmplayer.exe was at 50% CPU usage, which is weird, and wmpnetwk.exe is sitting at 49%. I like Windows Media Player, which on its own makes me weird, but more importantly, I have to use them to stream anything to my XBox, so it's a serious problem. Troubleshooting led to all sorts of suggestions of router problems (which I've had lately), firewall issues (my firewall is nice and fresh), and suggestions to drop to WMP8/9.

There was also a lot of people who found the issue was corrupt video files, but I haven't downloaded much of anything since the format, so that seemed unlikely. I finally figured that it might be that I don't have many codecs installed, so it was struggling with some file it hadn't before. In the end, I figured out it was an episode of the Daily Show it was getting caught on. With that deleted, I'm running nice and smooth again.