Yesterday I spent a bit of time cleaning the screens in about half the windows. Last night Michael helped me figure out how to remove the rest of the screens. It’s pretty annoying that the old windows in the house are much nicer and easier to maintain than the newer ones. The newer ones have special new designs that in their first few years of life might actually make them easier to clean, but once they start getting older their complex parts start falling apart and you end up with a horrible broken window that’s a serious pain to even keep open. At least with these old windows there aren’t 50 different parts that can break. Anyway, I’m cleaning the screens of the evil new windows today.
I installed gkrellm2 for fun yesterday, it’s not a bad little program, much better than crazy bad epplets anyway, I should play around with some plugins later. I have also decided to start using xmms again. I had been using ogg123 and mpg123 for my media playing, but I realized that I really wanted to make playlists that mixed mp3s and oggs. I sort of wanted to stay with the command line, so I gave mp3blaster another shot, thought maybe the newer version in Gentoo would be better than the one in Debian. No luck, it still has serious resizing issues that just annoy me. I could just create playlists in the form of shell scripts that would alternate between using mpg123 and ogg123 for whatever songs I was playing. But that’s a bit crazy. Since I’m playing music from my own computer (not through a media server hooked up to stereo speakers) and I rarely quit x, and I have a fast machine that can handle 34245 programs being open at once, I figured I’d just load up xmms and use that. It’s turning out pretty nice, I forgot how nice it is to be able to click through directory listings to find what you want *grin* making playlists is pretty simple too. So with these changes in software usage, I took a screenshot.
Today is May 28th. My long lost broski pseudoplasmodium turns 21 today. I decided I wouldn’t depress myself with another futile attempt to google for him, I finally told myself that I’m very easy to find, and if he wants contact again it’s simple for him to initiate it. If he stumbled upon my website he could realize that I’m looking for him.
<nostalgia>
I met plas on irc.scifi.com back in 1998 around the same time I met Michael and Peacimowen, when I first got online and into IRC. We all had lots of fun in #13thHour back then, we’d watch MST3K together, X-Files, all sorts of geeky shows. Much less computer talk than there is now, and it was more windows-centric since Michael was the only one using any *nix.
In May of 1999 he became the first person from online that I met in ‘real life’. He started dating a friend of mine from High School and I went to spend the summer in Philadelphia (where I met Michael in real life for the first time) after graduating that spring. We still kept chatting together, and tried to make plans for Michael and I to take a trip up to see him in MA but it never panned out.
The last time I saw him in real life was on my 18th birthday when he and his girlfriend (my friend from high school) came over to my house to hang out. I should have caught the negative vibes from my friend as she saw that plas and I were very close friends (what did she expect?), but I didn’t and she asked to leave early (even before cake!). Finally plas and I gave in and they left. He dropped by IRC only
a few times after that day. Claimed he was busy or things had come up. The relationship between him and my friend ended, and she was apparently reluctant to speak with me again. I got her AIM nickname a couple years ago from another friend, and although she was civil she changed her AIM name that very week.
I still hope someday plas will just show up, email me, make contact somehow. But as the years pass my hopes dim. I should probably just let it go, but there are so few people in my life that I instantly connected with, and I have a horrible habit of losing these people. *sigh*
</nostalgia>
The configs on xelium are now all synced up to ban some of the latest file leeching software (bottler, IRC Ork) that’s popped up. We chose to ban this software because our first goal as an IRC server is to provide a place for community, NOT some server that people can connect to with software to just leech off the file sharers that we have here and there. We don’t want leeches scaring off actual community active people. It seems that this software has gotten quite popular in the past 6 months or so because of the crackdowns on file sharing groups such as kazaa.
That’s all for now. *wanders off*