Caligula has a zillion toys, so this year we just decided to get him one toy, some cat grass and a delicious tuna dinner.
Yay new toy!
Attack!
Rawr!
Then Michael “prepared” a delicious plate of Eukanuba Morsels in Sauce with Select Tuna.
Hey food!
Eating!
Happy 3rd Birthday Caligula!
Just posting this as some notes as to getting abcde and lame setup on my machines.
/etc/abcde.conf
Uncomment:
# Paths of programs to use
LAME=lame
# MP3:
LAMEOPTS="--preset extreme --vbr-new --nohist -q 0 -V 0 -m s"
(options taken from the brain of Mischa, who regularly does releases for #gamemusic)
launch abcde: abcde -o mp3
I set this up on two of my machines, my primary desktop and the HP P3, both of them have been ripping this afternoon. Why? Because once upon a time we thought we thought it was a good idea to rip all our music as oggs to avoid all the patent issues and whatever with mp3s. Then we got mp3 players that don’t play oggs (we knew they didn’t play oggs, ogg playing mp3 players are rare and expensive!). Now we need mp3s, and our music better organized.
This is going to take weeks!
This morning I spilled coffee on myself, down the front of my shirt and onto my pants. I rock. I smell like coffee and the Tide instant stain-remover pen.
Last Friday was the company holiday party. I had thought about not going because of the disappointment of last year (not enough seats for dinner, lousy food) but we were assured that last years fiasco was a thing of the past and this year would be better. We arrived at Normandy Farm around 7:15 for the party and were not disappointed! The room reserved was larger than last year, there were plenty of tables, the food was much better. Unfortunately the entertainment, a band made up of some people in the company, was pretty loud and it was hard to talk to anyone. But they didn’t start playing until after we had finished eating so we could scoot out shortly after they began.
The weekend. Saturday we drove up to Varners Tree Farm in Trappe. The plan was to cut down our own tree like we did last year, but when we reached the tree farm we realized this would take way too long, the place was mobbed! We should have expected that, I took a half day off of work last year to get the tree, an option that wasn’t available this year because I don’t have time available to take off. They had live trees there, and spoke to someone there about purchasing one, but decided against it when she explained that they could only be inside your house for about a week – eep! I want my tree up for a month! Eventually we just decided to grab one of the pre-cut trees, it’s a tree farm, they pre-cut ones are very fresh too.
Our tree is nice, but I do like the adventure of going down to cut our own. Next year I’ll be sure to get that half day off from work.
Saturday evening we drove up to Quakertown to spend the evening with Michael’s family. At some point in the evening it was decided that it would be fun to get out the old 16MM films from back in the 40s of weddings and babies. It was all so Italian-American. I drank a lot of red wine.
Sunday I was dealing with the consequences of the red wine, haha! Actually I was fine by 10AM and went out to Dunkin’ Donuts to get bagels and coffee for Michael and myself. The day was pretty laid back, I did some reading, finished Infoquake which I really enjoyed. In the evening we decorated the living room and the tree.
…actually Caligula mostly got in the way
Yay Christmas tree %)
We’ll be sending out Holiday Cards this year again.
If you want one drop me an email: Lyz@PrincessLeia.com
Please include:
Real Name and online nick so I know who you are
Address (including country)
Michael spent some time this weekend working with eon, the little Sparc32 and HK-47, the SGI O2 we received as a wedding present. Eon is running Debian Sarge and set up with the proper Perl modules to run my irssi bot R2D2. The O2 is running Debian Etch and is set up for Michael to use with his ambient music radio show setup, now that it’s up and running with the SoundBlaster card. Very nice.
Eon is now on my desk, under my monitor.
As for me right now, I just stumble upon crappy x86 machines that need homes ;)
The last one I aquired, an old 366mhz Dell laptop, bit the dust this past week. We were able to salvage some of the pieces for use in my slightly younger Dell laptop. My test box R2Q5 has been acting up as well. So this week when a co-worker asked me if I wanted her old computer I said “sure!” All I knew about it was that she bought it “about 6 years ago.”
So I brought it home on Thursday night. I plugged it in and booted it up (just to see if it would work). It had Windows 98 installed. It loaded up the background image on the desktop – which looked horrible and made me slightly concerned that the onboard graphics card was toasted. I couldn’t do much with the computer because I quickly discovered that while the mouse worked fine, the keyboard didn’t. Rather than keeping myself up half the night trying to sort out what other problems this monster of an old HP machine had I decided to leave it to this weekend.
On Friday I asked my co-worker whether she ever had problems with the keyboard, she said “No, but the mouse didn’t work toward the end.” I figured, one of the PS2 ports was dead.
First I tried the LiveCD of Edgy, since I had it around. The machine didn’t like that much, it froze up before completing the launch of the installer. Then I found my Breezy CD and popped that in for a normal text install just to get it running and assess what I had. The Breezy install took about 40 minutes.
Once booted into Ubuntu, I was happy to discover the graphics card was fine – better than fine, the default resolution was at 1152×864 – not bad at all for an old onboard card! Windows 98 probably had a zillion viruses and other wonderful things that make it look so bad. It’s a 533mhz box, 128M ram, 40 gig harddrive. Aside from that faulty PS2 port, everything was working fine with it. I think my only complaint is the form factor of the case, it’s short and fat, making it not fit very comfortably next to my more standard-sized Dell.
Now I’m just trying to figure out whether this will be my new Debian test box (we certainly don’t need another production box around!) or if I’m going to keep R2Q5 around for that. I love R2Q5, but he’s certainly got his share of issues, weird behavior of the ethernet card and cdrom which are no doubt both due to the motherboard going bad. It does have the added bonus of an AGP slot, which this new HP lacks, but the HP has a CDR! Yes, I could put the CDR into R2Q5, but the weird behavior of the cdrom extends to ANY cdrom I put into it, wouldn’t be fun for it to die in the middle of writing a CD.
Ah computers.
It’s that dark time of year where I don’t see the sun.
Today:
6:30 AM: Leave home for work
7:00 AM: Arrive at work
7:03 AM: Sunrise
4:37 PM: Sunset
5:00 PM: Leave work
OK, so this week is special because it’s month end and I’m working overtime (coming in early). And I do have the option of leaving the office during a 45 minute lunch break, which I do every day during most of spring, summer and fall. Now it’s getting too cold to walk and the traffic around here is so bad I don’t want to drive during my lunch break.
At least last year I had a desk next to a window. Now I need to walk down the hallway, make a turn and walk down another hallway to press my face against a window.
I miss the sun during this time of year.
On the bright side, the company I work for lets us decorate our office for the holidays and on Monday I dove into our stash of decorations at work and transformed the room into some crazy happy Christmas wonderland. I have some singing penguins and a Christmas Furby on my desk, others have a variety of cute noise-making things on theirs. I might be an atheist who doesn’t observe the religious bits of this season, but I love the colors, decorations and lights.
So what is there to do on evenings so dark? This weekend I downloaded the first 9 episodes of Heroes. It had been recommended to me by a few people, and there was a lot of buzz about it at the science fiction convention.
The short review: I don’t like it.
The long review: It has a format very similar to Lost, a series you can’t really jump into in the middle of and each episode unto itself doesn’t have a stand-alone plot, it’s one giant story. I don’t like this format at all (is there a name for it?). While I enjoy development of characters through the run of a series and sometimes a small plotline running through a series (a la X-Files), I want to have a complete story told to me during a single show.
Also like Lost, I don’t really care about the characters. Finally by episode 9 I was starting to feel something for a couple of them, but I don’t think it should take half a season to start caring.
But it is better than Lost. The story has direction and there are hints dropped along the way as to where it’s going to let your brain work a little while watching it.
We won’t be watching any more of it. There were cliffhangers at the end of episode 9, but I’m just not interested enough to want to know the resolution.
I’m so picky when it comes to television.
Thanksgiving dinner went well at my mother-in-law’s. I ate so much stuffing.
Yesterday morning I made waffles with our new waffle maker.
It’s a very nice waffle maker (thanks again
The waffles turned out great. I’ll have to pick up some blueberries for next time and start experimenting with different recipes.
Unfortunately I made the mistake of starting to make the waffles before Michael checked his email for the morning (he had to work yesterday). He ended up having to spend a couple hours putting out fires on a server because of a datacenter screwup. No waffles for him :(
Around noon I got some paperwork together and headed over to the local Fast Tags office to file the paperwork to get my name changed on my license. It cost me $17 to do it through them, I’m not sure what the DMV would have charged me (if anything), but it’s worth $17 not to have to go to the DMV. After getting that done, I swung by the bank to change my name there. I then went by the local beer store to pick up a case of Wild Goose: Snow Goose Winter Ale that Michael had reserved earlier in the week.
When I came home Michael made a fire in the fireplace and we decided that we didn’t want to eat dinner at home. Michael called up David and Constance to see if they were interested in going out to dinner. Luckily they were! So we met them at our place and headed out for a fantastic meal at the Parc Bistro in Skippack.
Michael and I had been to the Parc Bistro while on the Skippack Strut this past summer, but never had gone there for a real meal. Their menu has all sorts of fancy dishes, as well as some wood oven pizzas. We all started our meal with some Lobster Bisque, which was good but I think it was a bit too buttery for my tastes. Our drink choices varied a lot more than our appetizer choices though, I really wasn’t in the mood for wine, in spite of their impressive wine list, so I got my hands on a Hopdevil from the tap, yum. David went with a bottle of the Grand Reserve Chimay. Michael started off with the Hopdevil and moved to a nice red wine that Constance also enjoyed. For dinner I couldn’t help but order from their wood oven pizza menu, boy do they make a good Buffalo Chicken Pizza(tangy buffalo sauce with grilled chicken, Longhorn Colby, celery and finished with creamy blue cheese dressing.)! Michael ordered the Day Boat Swordfish and Butter Poached Lobster (over creamy orzo pasta with mascarpone cheese, wild mushrooms, grape tomatoes, spinach and chive oil.), which I had my eye on but held off because we’re going to Maine in a month and I don’t want to spoil my craving for lobster before I get there ;D
By the end of the meal we were all too stuffed to have dessert (which is ashame, their dessert menu was IMPRESSIVE). I was also battling a nasty case of heartburn that snuck up on me, no fun. After dinner we headed back to the house and relaxed in front of the fireplace for a while, Caligula certainly was happy to have some friends over, he wouldn’t leave them alone. I don’t remember exactly when they left, but it was after 10 and I went to bed soon afterwards.
Today. At 9 this morning I called PECO to dispute a crazy natural gas charge on our bill, ten times what it usually is. I’m tempted to blabber on for a huge paragraph about how horrible the hour I spent on the phone with horrible customer service people was, but I’ll spare you. The charge is now “Under Investigation.” I blew off the steam from the lousy experience by helping Michael rake leaves outside this morning.
And now I am sitting on the couch with Caligula enjoying a quiet afternoon. Michael is making chicken and garlic mashed potatoes for dinner %d
The three days of work I had this week flew by, and now I’m enjoying a nice four day weekend. I wish I had more of these.
While I was away this past weekend Michael got to discussing our holiday plans (or lack thereof) with Morgana in Maine. She suggested that we come up for New Years again this year. I was hesitant at first, seeing as we JUST had a vacation, but in the end the possibility of heading up to Maine for some great company (and lobster) swayed me (ok, it was mostly the lobster).
I have off December 25th and 26th and was able to take off December 28th, 29th and January 2nd (couldn’t take off December 27th – it’s month end and there is stuff that needs to be done sometime that week). This will give us a nice string of days for driving and visiting with friends. I’m so excited! Even moreso when I learned that a friend who lives out by Erie, PA will be making the trek across PA on the 27th to meet us and ride up to Maine with us. It should be a fun New Years.
During a Doctor Who panel at Philcon the subject of Torchwood the series came up. TORCHWOOD THE SERIES? See, this is the problem with being a Doctor Who fan in the States – I had no clue such a spinoff existed! So on Monday night I grabbed the torrents for the 6 episodes that have been aired in the UK.
The verdict? It’s fun Scifi. I had to laugh at the whole “hot gang of investigators in leather and jeans hitting the crime scene!” cheese of it all, but it just can’t be taken too seriously.
Today is Thanksgiving here in the States. My mother called me this morning to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving and give me a status update on family stuff going on up there. It was nice to hear from her. This afternoon we’re heading over to Michael’s Mother’s my mother-in-laws house for dinner with the family. We’re bringing beer, some fresh beer bread and a pan full of cookies (cooked like brownies).
Mmmm so looking forward to turkey.
I was listening to the podcast of Marketplace Morning Report daily, which includes 2 daily shows that are each about 8 minutes long. Then I was listening to the ~20 Marketplace Takeout which had the “best clips” of Marketplace each week.
I love Marketplace, but I’m not sure any MP3 broadcast would make me sign up to Audible and pay to download them – there is too much other good stuff out there for free.
Well now the full ~30 minute evening broadcast is podcasting for free. YAY!!!