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Work, movie nights, linux streaming media, R2D2

I had a mostly lousy week at work. It dragged on, and with a holiday call schedule we were all going nuts. I’m just glad I won’t be there next week, when things are such to be much more insane.

Well it’s over now, and even though I was crazy busy at work yesterday, I was in a great mood when I finally left work last night. We ended up going over to ‘s place to hang out with him, Baerana and b2s for movie night. Drank some beer, had some pizza, enjoyed some Futurama episodes that I hadn’t seen. A typical movie night, much fun!

We did end up seeing b2s and Baerana last weekend too, at their place. Watched the Shrek movies (which are a bit too pop for me I’m afraid), and I got to see their bunny and borrow a pile of books. A friend of mine recently sent me The Mists of Avalon miniseries, and I hadn’t read the book, so I borrowed that one and started reading it this week. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it, being a fan of Once and Future King and afraid of cheap imitations, but this book is really good, putting it down has been a struggle %)

Last weekend I went to install RealPlayer in Gentoo. I’d had it installed in the past, it’s masked so I had to put it in /etc/portage/package.unmask. Then I went to install it. It seems that they make people directly download the package instead of having portage grab it. No problem. Except that the version was not the one in portage, hmm… So on to Gentoo forums I went.

I found this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_RealPlayer10Gold. Interesting that it used the rpms, but I don’t care, it worked great. Even includes the mozilla and firefox plugins without extra work.

I thought I’d explore more into in browser streaming media stuff. And was pleased to discover mplayerplug-in, a movie plugin that I’d never tried before. I played with it for a while, and unfortunately it still has trouble with some streaming media (won’t play the stuff on Yahoo!), but I was able to watch quicktime movies on apple.com, and that was neat. Then I went to pbs.org to see if it’d conflict with my realplayer plugin. It does. The movie won’t play! Arg! I am sure with more tinkering I could get it all figured out, but for now I uninstalled mplayerplug-in.

Maybe I’ll try again in another 6 months. Silly streaming media.

Since I’m not working again until the 29th, and we aren’t leaving for our trip to Maine until Wendesday I have some time to do some computer stuff, yay! I think my first order of business will be starting to rewrite my IRC bot, R2D2. Some of his scripts don’t work with newer versions of irssi, so if we upgrade the server he’s on he’d be all broken. When I started going through his script I said to myself “Wow this is ugly Perl!” So I figure that if I’m going to update the script to make it work in new irssi, why not revamp the whole thing? This is all just a bit excuse to play with Perl.

It’s such a nice gloomy day out.

*wanders off*

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 20th, 2004 at 11:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.