Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004
And as I expected things are starting off nicely.
The LAN party on New Years Eve was fun, we got there around 8, were able to hang out with all our friends, eat some yummie pizza and snacks, and I brought along my laptop here so that I could install xv and vorbis-tools. Around 10 or so we started playing some UT, YAY! We played some of the cool Chaos maps, nothing like being able to kill your UT opponents with a sword or crossbow ;) Around midnight we all went into the living room and watched the ball drop. Watched a bit of Jay Leno and then went back to play a bit more UT. We stayed until after 2, when we decided that being up for over 20 hours in one day was enough, I was so tired. I took some pictures while we were there (yeah, I took them, so there aren’t any of me %P), they are still on the camera though, silly not having much internet! Oh well I’ll get them online eventually.
We got home from their place by taking rt 73, it took under 25 minutes, nice. No wonder 73 is so crazy busy during rush hour, it’s really the most direct route from where our work is and our new home is. I think I need a map of Montgomery County so I can get a better idea of where we are and all the roads we can take to get to home. I’m still figuring on about an hour commute.
On New Years Day we sort of wanted to go out and do something. Most things were closed, and we knew the movie theaters would be packed, so we decided to go out for a drive. We headed up to Easton, which is further north, and right on the PA/NJ border.
Yeah, a bit of depression, despite the whole wonderful house thing, there is a lot on our minds right now, and it’s difficult sometimes when things are so crazy. I think both of us are suffering from “lack of me time” as well. I am so used to having entire days to myself, working on my own projects and just being *alone* and Michael is used to having at least the drive home alone, and of course having our own place. It’s difficult for us to be together all the time. Things will be better when we have a house though, it’ll be our place to monopolize, we won’t have to feel imposing when we take over more than just our own bedroom.
*Pokes the laptop* Hrm. I think some of this hardware is buggy, I get some very strange things happening that shouldn’t happen on a basic stable debian system such as this. And has anyone with warm hands ever used a touchpad? I find that sometimes the warmth from my hands is so great that just the movement of my hands on the keyboard over the touchpad is enough to move the mouse around on my screen. Very annoying. Then again, the positive things about finally having even a slow laptop like this one FAR outweigh the things I complain about *hugs R2A6* like the fact that I can sit in the livingroom here and write this.
The rest of the computers are now in the basement again, but they are all hooked up. The other day Michael decided he wanted them online so he set up his mother’s computer as a dial up gateway and put the router downstairs with ethernet running from her computer to the basement. It’s definately a setup that takes advantage of the resources we currently have, but I haven’t really utilized it. I prepared myself for this time offline, and I lined up a lot of things to work on offline, so I’m not going to cling onto a dial up connection as if my life depended on it %) It doe
sn’t, and it’s difficult to bore me these days, I’ve expanded my horizons from the computer, I can read, I can write, I can knit, I can just sit and think without my brain turning to mush.
This morning when I got up I went downstairs and plugged my laptop into the network, grabbed a bunch of music off of the music server… Gah I’m now using 1.8 gigs (out of 3) o_o Hm, well what else was I going to use it for? I also grabbed some logs of #13thHour and this afternoon I’m going to go through some of them and compile a new “quotes from #13thHour” page, since the current ones aren’t a very accurate picture of the users in the channel anymore, I think the last one I made was in 2002.
I spoke with my father last night, he seems to be doing alright, he sounded more awake than I did at 10 pm, so that’s a good sign. I learned from him that my grandfather was recently in the hospital, some sort of intestinal blockage and they were concerned that he might not make it, but he did and they were able to take the appropriate measures to insure he’d be ok. My grandfather is really an amazing man, he’s seen it all and lived to tell the tale. It’s ashame that I had no idea about this until now, I wish the communication in my family was a bit better. My father also mentioned a book he’s writing, and he asked if there was some way for me to put the first chapter online. So I said I would put it on my website, then I showed him my website (he’s online with RoadRunner now). My father really doesn’t know much about computers, I think it’d be safe to say that my mother knows more. It’s understandable since he hasn’t really had access these past few years, and even back when I lived at home he didn’t use the internet much. He also had valid complaints about how much things change, the commands and things he used back then don’t work now, Windows 95 is a whole different world than WinXP! That bugs me, you’d think they could manage to keep things more consistant, like unix has %) He also complained about how all his system resources are always being used, and that his pentium computer seems faster for word processing because of all the spyware and other evil that is running on his new computer, and his new computer is something like 1.6 ghz. That makes me so angry! He also has some sort of stupid spam program in IE that pops up popup windows constantly where ever he goes, he was just looking around MY site and he was getting popups! My site certainly doesn’t have them. Rar! See my previous entry for more of this rant ;) He said he’s a bit concerned about the spyware issue, and as much as I don’t want to add to anyone’s paranoia, it is a problem. I won’t even do online banking on a Windows PC that I’m not sure is secure (ie Michael or myself put everything on the system and KNOW what’s there, and it’s behind a firewall I’m happy with). Now the chances that someone will actually steal my social security number and credit card info are slim, it is a very valid fear. Sigh. I wish there was some way I could be the happy computer fairy and put all my family members on linux and have the time to admin the boxes so they wouldn’t need to worry about all the Windows crap. You need very little knowledge to use a properly configured linux box, you need quite a bit to control the spam and spyware of a Windows system.
Ok, I’m done complaining about Windows for today.
But I’m not done complaining about Microsoft %D Internet Explorer is evil. You know that change font size option? Yeah, well it sucks. I define fonts in both pt and px in a CSS file and IE acts retarded and can’t resize either of the fonts. *KILL KILL KILL* Why would IE have such a lousy function? Mozilla is wonderful at enlarging fonts. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go into each page and write out font tags for each bit of text. So while a huge deadline is looming on the horizon I’m forced to spend 2 hours looking for a solution. Use em instead of pt or px, use % instead, use in instead… every place has a different solution and I had very little luck. It is very frustrating, I h
ave a TON of work to do, and I really don’t have time to rewrite everything because IE has such backwards ways of doing things. I even asked one of the smartest HTML guys in the company and he was puzzled by it. I’ll have to talk to my boss on monday. My job would be so much easier if IE was as predicably well-behaved as mozilla %)
I guess I’m going to head off and work on a few things I wanted to work on. Michael seems to be getting a bit of a cold %( so relaxing at home this weekend would be very good. *wanders off*