Peter Murphy – Things To Remember

cdtool rocks %) Myk showed this to me after I was puzzled when xmms crashed and my cd kept playing. Apparently a process is not created when playing from a cd… this is very interesting. This cdtool program simply tells the cd to play, stop, go forward, backward, change volume… by simple command line commands. It’s cool because unlike mpg123 and such it just goes off and plays on hardware and you dont need to use a screen, or take up a terminal or anything to keep it running. So this is the perfect program to bind those silly hotkeys to! I figured out the Debian way of binding keys this afternoon (it’s a bit different than redhat since redhat, and slackware apparently, both automatically look for an .Xmodmap file on starting x, while debian does not). It was pretty easy, but the results are very cool, yay hotkeys! They will be useless no longer! I am going to update my how-to bind windows keys thing on my website probably tomorrow (or this afternoon if I get a chance), and I’ll link here when it’s finished. Hehe… while I was at it I also bound Opera to the Windows keys again (just the winkey, not alt+winkey like I had on redhat). My system is coming back together nicely %)

So yesterday we just decided to go ahead and get the eye exam done for me. I made an appointment at a optomitrist’s next to a Lenscrafters in the local mall, so it should not be hard to find… the appointment is on Thursday at 5:30. Eye doctor’s appointments arent bad… nothing to dread like other doctor visits, and at the end you get to see better! I actually find myself excited by this, I am so sick of squinting at everything, it really has gotten bad. And this way I dont have to look foolish at the DMV… and I can get new frames.. I’ve had these ones for a very long time… since early high school anyway, that’s, what, 6 years at least… They show their age %)

Pepboys doesnt take appointments for oil changes. This is very strange to me… I mean I remember when my parents got oil changes they didnt usually get appointments (I assumed this was because they went to the cheapest place in Portland), it was first come first served, but ever since I moved to NY they really preferred if you got appointments. *shrugs* I guess Myk is going to head down to Pepboys after work to get the oil change… I guess it’s a little overdue, and we are taking a 6 hour drive up to Rochester, NY next week for thanksgiving.

CourtTV is not a bad channel. See lately I have been in a really weird mood and I’ve been watching tv more than normal. Under normal circumstances I watch Adult Swim on sunday night and The West Wing and Law and Order on wednesday night, but I’ve been watching tv for about an hour about every other day for the past week… Not because anything is on, just because I didn’t feel like doing anything else. So I found this interesting show on CourtTV called “Forensic Files” .. it’s quite good. (I am really into documentary type shows, and with our “free cable” (comcast screwed up, so we get a few channels we dont pay for) we dont get many of those good documentary channels). Yay () abuse.

I finished a couple books over the past couple days and have been too lazy until now to type up the reviews:

Coldfire Trilogy Book 1: Black Sun Rising, By C.S. Friedman, 568 pages
I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend of mine who had previously never let me down in his excellent choise of books. This book had a very intersting story, I really did enjoy reading it, but it doesn’t fall into the catagory of ‘excellent’. At times the characters didn’t feel real, and each time there was a deception it was painfully obvious, so much so that it was difficult to believe that these intelligent characters would fall for it. It was interesting how the narrative shifted between a few characters, but the balance of this narrative was strange. The story was quite original however, and the idea of the world they were on (a colony of people from earth that settled there) was very appealing to me. I guess in all it would be easy to stop with this book (as the first in the trilogy) but I really am interested as to where this story leads, I will continue reading this trilogy.

The Color Of Magic, By Terry Pratchett, 210 pages
This review is being written after my second time reading this book (the first time was a couple years ago). Amused by Pratchett’s excellenct use of satire in his work, I enjoyed this book again. I do however have to say that his later books definately show a more masterful storyteller in Pratchett. Moving along, this is the first book in the Discworld series. It is split into four consecutive adventures of the four-eyed tourist TwoFlower and his relucant failed wizard tour-guide Rincewind. They travel the disc meeting Gods, Heros, and countless magical creatures. This is the first of Pratchett’s books that I ever read, and it lured me into this wornderful series.

I hate ebooks. I am assuming that the trouble I am having locating an online copy of The Outline Of History by HG Wells (published in 1922.. so legally now public domain) is because Barnes and Noble just recently published an ebook version. Now a friend of mine (during my search yesterday) suggested I got into a warez ebook room on dalnet to find it… fuck that! Hehe… Breaking the law to get a silly history book, how much more geeky can you get? I can just see myself getting busted for trading a history ebook… not that it’d happen but the idea is humorous.