I got my first video game console in the late 80s. My parents never wanted us to have one, they rotted the brain and all that, but after spending a month one summer with my cousins in New York I couldn’t imagine going home and being without Super Mario Brothers 3 and Tetris. My aunt and uncle sent me home to Maine with my own Nintendo Entertainment System. Woohoo!

Over the years my sister Heather and I collected dozens of games for it, picking them up at flea markets and garage sales. We had the console repaired in the mid 90s and as far as I know, Heather still has it and plays with it.

That NES was the only console I ever owned while living in Maine, we couldn’t afford to buy any of the newer systems. Heather eventually got a GameBoy, but I went the way of computer gaming, indulging in Loom, the Monkey Island series, Doom and Rebel Assault.

When I was 18 I moved to New York. My console love was reignited by the discovery of Final Fantasy on the PlayStation. The PlayStation2 was about to come out, so I saved up the $300 (not an easy task, I was supporting myself working as a gas station clerk) and was able to get my hands on one of the coveted machines when a friend who was lucky enough to reserve one was unable to pay for his. The one of the fantastic things about the PS2 was that it was backwards compatible; I got all those Final Fantasy games that came out for the PS and could play them on my nice new machine.

In 2001 I moved in with Michael. My video game love was still intact, and we hosted LAN parties at least twice a year. Again my gaming habits were moving away from the console and games on the computer that I could now play with opponents.

But in the past year or two I’ve grown away from any sort of gaming. Getting Diablo 2 and Doom 3 running in Linux was a fun task, but then I really didn’t feel like playing it. I’ve had my Debian system installed for over a year now and I still haven’t gotten around to installing UT. Michael and I used to play WarCraft3 often, but now I’m not even sure if we have a copy.

I started to think I’d grown out of gaming altogether, and I didn’t have time for video games anymore anyway. My free time was now spent working with Debian and the Ubuntu community, being a mentor to a couple people learning Linux at any given time, offering tech support via IRC and mailing lists, writing documentation and how-tos, organizing local LUG events, keeping up with the fan sites I run. I was being quite productive with my time, and it felt really good for a while.

But lately some of this work I’ve been doing with my free time has felt more like a chore and less like a labor of love. While I know I never will stop contributing to F/OSS or doing many of those things I enjoy doing, I’m going to get burnt out if I don’t take it easy. And with my full time job being so busy I just want to come home some nights and veg out. I greatly enjoy spending time with Michael watching the latest television show we grabbed from BitTorrent, but some nights it’s just not satisfying and I feel lazy. But what else is there to do?

Then my grandmother sent me a puzzle in the mail, which I received after a particularly tough day at work. I was exhausted, but sat down on the floor with it, waiting for Michael to finish up his work so we could go out for dinner, and completed the difficult puzzle in about 20 minutes. This made me feel GREAT! I missed doing puzzles! And puzzles were a big element of what I loved about my favorite video games.

Then made a post where he mentioned the upcoming release of the pink (and black) Nintendo DS. Pink? Oh goodness. I remember when I was living in New York and they came out with the pink Game Boy Advanced – I wanted a GBA pretty bad, but financial issues prevented me from getting one. So I started looking into the DS. Besides being cute (grin), it is backwards compatible with the GBA games! I could get those GBA games I was drooling over back in 2001. And the games for the DS itself are pretty appealing as well, many of them sequels and continuations of the GBA games I wanted. Oh and I miss all those Nintendo characters, getting some of the legacy games that were released would be pretty cool too.

So last night while Michael was working on his latest batch of homebrew, I dusted off my PS2 and fired up Kingdom Hearts (which is actually ‘s, he borrowed FFX from me and I borrowed Kingdom Hearts over 2 years ago and we never unborrowed them – HAH!). I quickly breezed through the part of the game I’d been stuck at and spent about 3 hours figuring out other stuff. Figuring out puzzles for the sake of figuring out puzzles, what a delight!

I think this is what I’ve been missing. I haven’t really grown out of video games. They’re a fantastic escape that my brain still needs.

I’m going to go ahead and get that Pink DS for my birthday. Obviously I’m already working on a game list, but anyone have more game recommendations?

Kitten Caligula stares out window
Originally uploaded by PLeia2.

I don’t remember signing up for Flickr, but I did for some reason a couple months back.

While going through a ton of images on my desktop this weekend I decided that there were some previously published and unpublished photos that I wanted to keep in an accessible place. I could use my Flickr account!

So I did, it’s here.

I am really liking Bloglines. I now have my account set up with about a few blogs feeding into it. I also discovered that I can use it to keep track of podcasts, previously I was just opening up the raw XML and digging out the mp3s – obviously using some sort of front end that can parse the xml for me AND tell me which ones I haven’t listened to is a much easier way to do it.

There’s even a bloglines feature to make your blogroll public, which I did. I’ll probably be adding a bunch more when I remember/come across other blogs that are out there that I want to read. Oh and if you once told me that you had your own blog on your website but aren’t on my list – remind me!

I took the day off from work today. Work has been really burning me out lately and I needed to take a day to just chill out and get some errands done. I spent the morning quite productively.

• Cleaned out the Rav4 – I keep my car very neat, but it needed a visit with a vacuum and some Windex
• Paid bills
• Went to the driver’s license place in Harleysville to get my new license
• Took the Rav4 to the car wash
• Stopped by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription
• Folded laundry
• Did dishes

My new driver’s license picture is not too bad:

There was a security guard at the DMV facility where I got my photo taken whose job it was to tell people coming in to take a number and have a seat. After my photo was taken I heard snoring, he’d fallen asleep in his chair. Nice.

The rest of the day has been spent with little things. I’m cleaning up the home directory on my primary desktop – fun fun. I’d let it get a bit out of hand and it was up to 20 gigs when it really only should have had about 12 gigs of real stuff. I’ve slimmed it down even further now, hopefully I’ll be able to get it under 5 so we can automate regular backups again without it taking forever.

My little sister Heather got married yesterday!

I spoke with her last night, she was attending her reception held at her in-laws house. There were a few snags in the day (including a bit of a snafu with the cake) but she seemed happy and ready to leave the family behind to get going on their honeymoon. They’re going camping in the mountains for a couple weeks, and rounding off their trip by going shopping and browsing at the West Edmonton Mall, which includes a water park, amusement park, over 800 stores, a couple hotels… I’m sure she’ll have a great time.

I don’t have pictures yet, she gave my mother a digital camera during the ceremony to take pictures, and they did the disposable camera thing for guests. I’ll put a bunch of them up on my website when she sends them to me in a few weeks.

…and I’ve never met her husband Randy. In fact, I didn’t even know his last name. It seems very strange that I didn’t know his last name, and I’m sure it gave the impression that we are really out of touch. We’re not, we talk often! But trivial things like last names sometimes don’t make it through. His last name is Day, so now she’s Heather Day. That’s a nice name, and certainly easier to spell and pronounce than Krumbach (well, I don’t think Krumbach is difficult, but it’s amazing how people can mess it up).

I’m so happy for her %D

I updated my Debian MPlayer How-To yesterday for MPlayer v1.0pre8. I’ve been meaning to do that since pre8 came out back in June, and I’ve gotten about a half dozen email in the past month asking when/if I was going to update it. I ran into one problem when compiling, which made me feel quite silly, especially after google couldn’t help me and I had to find the missing .h file myself ;) MPlayer v1.0pre8 is nice, I’m glad I made the upgrade, the first noticable difference was while encoding an .avi for a fellow who emailed me about his trouble with it in pre7, an upgrade to pre8 made a significant difference in quality.

I also set up a Bloglines account yesterday. I know a bunch of people who have blogs that I don’t read just because they’re not on LiveJournal or Xanga. I used to have rss2email set up but then sort of neglected that and it died a quiet death. I’m hoping that by putting all the stuff into Bloglines I’ll finally keep up with it. And it’s the best online reader I’ve found out there, I never could get used to the interface of Google Reader.

And finally, I’ve been in a bit of a crankie mood. I noticed it last night when I was reinstalling XP Home onto my computer (no, I don’t actually use it! We like having XP installed somewhere at home, and my desktop is the only one fast enough and available for the purpose). Windows always puts me in a foul mood, but this was worse than usual. Then grub didn’t want to play nicely and I just got pissed off. Michael is helping me restore the whole system (read: doing it all himself and explaining to me what he’s doing, I get -100 geek points, SEE I’M NOT REALLY SO SMART WITH COMPUTERS</insecurities>).

This morning I made blueberry pancakes, that helped my mood some. Hooray for oodles of natural sugar! But my allergies have been driving me nuts for the past week, not fun.

We have some plans for later today (Labor Day in the US, no work!), but for now I’m just chilling out here with Caligula.

I finally got home from work last night around 6:30, which wasn’t too bad, I was the first one to leave in my department because my boss told me I had done enough and sent me home. After being there for over 10 hours I wasn’t going to argue.

Michael was finishing up some work when I got home, so I sat down and solved a puzzle my grandmother had sent me. I love puzzles, and solving them after a long day of paperwork is so relaxing. I like jigsaw puzzles too, but I worry that if I start one Caligula will steal the pieces, chew on them and hide them all over the house.

Around 7:30 we went out to Sly Fox. To our delight, they had just tapped a couple new beers:

Simcoe IPA
Black Raspberry Reserve

Oh My Gosh. THESE ARE AMAZING!

We didn’t notice the Simcoe IPA on the menu until later in the evening, but after a sampling of it we brought it home in a growler. I’d never heard of Simcoe Hops, apparently they’re the hot hybrid hop in brewing right now. There is a good article on Philly.com about them, and according to the article “Dogfish Head Brewing’s Sam Calagione said his brewers were using Simcoe before it even had a name, when it was known only as “Experimental Hop No. 555.” That’s great.

I had two glasses of the Black Raspberry Reserve with dinner, and I’m still shocked that it is over 7% alcohol. I’m going to need to do some research into the difference between raspberry wheats and raspberry lambics – based on taste alone, I’d call this a lambic, but they called it a wheat ale, and the label says fruit ale. The smell is very sweet and full of raspberry, but the taste is much more bitter, which is what I love in raspberry beers. It finishes cleanly and doesn’t have any weird tastes to it. I brought two bottles home, and cursed myself for not bringing along the second growler so we could get that filled up instead (would have been cheaper, but I do love these raspberry reserve bottles so I’ll survive ;))

Ah month end. I’m sitting here on my lunch break writing this, taking a break from the mountains of paperwork I have on my desk. It’s been the roughest month end I’ve experienced here to date. We’re still short-staffed, I’ve been working at least 9 hours per day all week – which will be nice when I get that overtime pay, but is just making me tired right now.

Wednesday morning I woke up at 5:30 with a stomach ache – a very bad stomach ache, it hurt to move. I spent a couple hours going back and forth from my bed to the bathroom. Finally around 8AM I woke up and moved, and my stomach didn’t hurt! So got showered and dressed and went to work late. Upon arriving at work all I heard was “Is it morning sickness? *giggle*” and then “Oh yeah, there is a stomach bug going around, I had it, $co-worker had it, $co-worker2 had it, the worst of it only lasts for a few hours but boy does it HURT!” The new hire seems to have caught it now, she came into work late this morning (imagine our relief when we got the call from her, she didn’t quit, she’s just sick – phew!).

Last night, after a 10 1/2 hour day at work, Michael made a delicious dinner of breaded chicken and mushroom ravioli, which I greatly enjoyed. I then took a nice long bath. Around 8 I plopped in front of the newly installed Mythbox and watched a couple episodes of Dead Like Me with Michael. One of the temps that was working here recommended it after she saw it on SciFi and so I grabbed a torrent of the first season. It’s not a bad show. It is sad and funny, very reflective and introspective about death without getting preachy (quite a feat). The apathy of the main character gets on my nerves sometimes. Some episodes we’ve watched have dragged, but there have been some great ones too. I went to bed around 10.

I got myself out of bed at 5 this morning to get to the gym before work. The weather has cooled down significantly from the height of the summer heat, which has made going to the gym so much easier. No more humidity! No more sweating before getting to the gym!

The remnants of hurricane Ernesto are scheduled to hit us this afternoon, I didn’t pay much attention to the forecast until I got to work and everyone was talking about it, so of course I didn’t bring my raincoat. It’s going to be a soggy weekend. I am not too broken-hearted about it, the only plans we have are attending a wedding reception for one of Michael’s co-workers and that’s an indoor event. My sister is getting married this weekend too (!!!) but the forecast for where she is in Alberta is calling for sunny weather all weekend.

It’s been a rainy weekend.

Friday evening I went out to get my hair cut. I also uncharacteristically stopped at a couple department stores for some idle shopping. I ended up buying a bigger purse (which I needed) but also browsing some other departments. It was nice to just be away from work and home alone for a while.

Yesterday was spent playing with computers. Michael is redoing the MythTV box, the Gentoo Unstable install on it has been somewhat unstable for the past few months, and he wanted to move it over to stable, compile it with DVD support and install another harddrive.

I spent the better part of the day working on my laptops and generally goofing around with other little things. Michael brought home some old laptop harddrives that I tried out to see if they still worked – alas they were trash. I spent some time fighting with my wireless card in Ubuntu Dapper, and finally gave up – but I was helped by the fact that a bug report exists for my problem (thanks to Romana for finding the link to that report for me). Hopefully it’ll be remedied before support for Breezy ends, but for now I’m still using Breezy on these laptops so the wireless will work.

So I grabbed the Breezy CD and installed the server version on both laptops. Once that was completed, I apt-get installed the following packages (plus all their dependencies, which were many):

xserver-xorg
xinit
xfonts-base
xfce4
atmel-firmware
ssh
gnome-system-tools[1]
firefox
aterm
gimp

And the laptops were ready to go! Wireless runs great on both of them.

I made their desktops very basic looking:

– R2A6
– R2B1

I grabbed the background images from this site, which has reasonably high res photos of droids without other stuff in the image.

[1] When I first checked out standard Ubuntu I discovered the network-admin tool, included in the gnome-system-tools package, which is a happy-clicky-gui tool that I use to find and connect to wireless networks. If anyone has a better recommendation for what I should use for this purpose, PLEASE let me know, I haven’t really looked around.

We had a nice weekend with DarkSol (Ian).

He arrived Friday evening around 6PM, the drive up from VA took him about 6 hours. After chilling out for a bit we all piled into the Civic and went over to Sly Fox for dinner. Ian isn’t much of a drinker, so after a bottle of pilsner at home and a pint of Route 113 IPA at Sly Fox he was pretty much done for the night. We got our growlers filled and went home to watch some MST3K, I ended up going to bed around 10 (I’m and old lady).

Saturday morning Michael made a delicious rosemary French Toast breakfast, and we spent most of the day just hanging out in the computer room, talking and working on our computers. In the evening we went out to Ortinos Northside for some food and beers, I was dying to have some of the Delirium Tremens (my FAVORITE beer!) that they had just tapped. We weren’t disappointed, the food and the beers were delicious, Ian even got to try a lambic. When we returned home we sat out back around the fire pit for a couple hours.

At 10 that night Michael and Ian did a join radio show on AKA Radio. I stayed up for some of it, but ended up hitting the sack around 11:30.

Sunday was similarly low-key, Ian and Michael slept in past 10. We actually woke Ian up (we’re terrible hosts) to offer him some breakfast around 10:30 – he had a bit of a hangover, oops! But not surprising, since he had at least 5 reasonably high alcohol content beers Saturday night, quite a bit for someone who doesn’t normally drink.

Instead of going home Sunday evening, we insisted that he spend the night again and leave on Monday morning. The picture below was taken Sunday afternoon, I wanted to get a better one after I saw Caligula’s glowing eyes in this one, but the boys loved it too much.

So the only sights he saw were of some great PA beers, but I think a nice relaxing weekend was what we all needed.

Of course less than a week after Michael spends lots of time to detail all the machines on our network, I bring home another to add to his list :)

I’m friendly with some of the IT guys at work, and the other day one of them was cleaning out one of the “old computer junk” closets. I happen to notice that he’s throwing a bunch of Dell laptop docking stations into a box, so I stopped to ask what was going to happen to all of them.

“We just throw out the docking stations, why, do you want one?”

“My personal laptop is old, but I’ll bring it in tomorrow and see if one of these stations will work with it!”

On Friday I brought my laptop in and went into the warehouse where the piles of old computer junk was piled. Alas, all the docking stations I found were for Dell Latitude notebooks, not Inspirons. Dejected, I walked passed the IT office, said “nope, only Latitude docking stations out there, no Inspirons.”

One of my IT buddies got up and pondered this, “I think there still might be one in the other building, wait here.” So he went to the other building, and came back with a Dell Port Replicator II, the docking station for the Inspiron! ROCK!

“Do you need a power supply too?”

Sure.

So he goes and gets the power supply, and returns with a power supply in one hand and a laptop that looks very similar to mine in the other.

“Here’s the power supply, and this is an even older Inspiron than yours, but you might want it for parts?”

It was a Pentium 2, I don’t need more old computers!

“Really, if you don’t take this we’re going to throw it away. I think it’s got a 4 gig harddrive in it that could be used.”

I was persuaded, my Inspiron only has a 3 gig harddrive, I figured that even if it was too old to be useful I could pop out the harddrive and use it in my laptop.

I spent some time on my lunch break pulling up the specs on this Inspiron 7000 and found this site – it’s a pretty decent machine! 366mhz, 128M ram (only can upgrade to 192). It was slightly beat up, doesn’t lock closed properly when you close it, but if this machine actually runs it could be a perfect machine to set up with a wireless NIC in the magic room.

So after confirming that I wouldn’t get in trouble for walking off with company propery (“Nope, it’s been off the books for years, we didn’t even realize it was still around”) I brought it home.

This morning I put in the Ubuntu Dapper Server install CD in and installed it. Got it running with XFCE4 and all. It runs great, these old Dell laptops are great! And even better, it doesn’t have a 4 gig harddrive – it has a 10 gig harddrive! So I’ll probably be putting this harddrive in my laptop to replace the 3 gig one. The only disappointment is with Dapper itself, it still isn’t seeing my Wireless NIC – a flaw I hoped was fixed since the official release, looks like I’ll be sticking with Breezy on my laptop until I find the solution.

I totally scored.

And now DarkSol is sitting next to me using the laptop :) I’d hate to make his visit a side note on an entry about computers, so I’ll blabber on about our weekend with him visiting later %)

I’ve been taking walks at lunch these past few days because it’s been nice, but today it’s a bit more humid than I’d like so I get to finally write in this. Besides, MorganHorse needs something to read when she’s bored at work.

I’ll start with beer. This week I tried some new beers, two of them ended up being quite good.

First was the Three Floyds Gumballhead. Michael talks about it here. It’s a wheat, but it’s dry-hopped, which gives it much good hoppiness. Crisp, a little sweet and goes down easy, very good summer beer. It was on tap at Ortino’s Northside and we brought home a couple bottle-conditioned bottles, I’m not sure which I like more, I’m actually leaning toward the one on tap because it’s sweeter.

Second was the Sly Fox Pub Ale. While IPAs and Belgians are on the top of my list as far as beer styles go, I do enjoy the occasional English-style pub ale, Boddingtons is a favorite and so is Monty Python’s Holy Grail Ale (which I bought as a joke, but have since had in bottles AND on tap – it’s good!). This Sly Fox Pub Ale ranks right up there with these favorites as far as I’m concerned. It has “little bubbles” from the nitrogen that’s pumped in while it’s being poured (a la Guinness and Boddingtons), and has a finish that seemed similar to a Maibock, very refreshing for a pub ale. I don’t order dessert every time we go out, but I couldn’t resist pairing this beer with a slice of carrot cake.

I also tried the Shipyard IPA since it was on special in bottles and I’d never tried that Maine brew. It wasn’t very good as far as IPAs go, watery and pretty weak overall, but at $2.50/bottle I wasn’t expecting much from it.

Now audiobooks! I have been hitting the library for audiobooks these past few months, and early this month the Lansdale Library got in a whole pile of new ones, hooray! I decided to pick up Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. Anyone who knows me probably knows that “chic-lit” is not my style, but I guess it was curiosity that drove this choice. This was a highly acclaimed novel in the genre (with several sequels) and addressed a shopping addiction that I can’t relate to at all. As you might expect, I hated it, but I listened to the whole thing. This week I picked up The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova which is about a young woman who is tracking down Dracula, it’s cheesy in an “I’m trying to be dark and serious” way, still not generally my style, but it’s turning out to be fun to listen to.

Now movies! We watched What the Bleep Do We Know!? last night. It was recommended by some people I like and respect as a good film attempting to unite Quantum Physics and Spirituality, so I went into it expecting it to be pretty good. I was horribly disappointed. There were glaring factual errors that even I could pick out, and even some of the things that weren’t outright lies were presented in a misleading way. The leap they made from Quantum Physics to Spirituality was just that, a LEAP. I remember when I first learned about Quantum Physics, by reading Discover magazine in High School – I got that “OH MY GOSH I CAN WALK THROUGH WALLS… wait, I can’t *ponder for 3 years*” But then you get over it because there is not enough evidence to draw conclusions about the nature of reality and all that; this movie didn’t get over it and drew all sorts of wacky conclusions. I’m not trying to say that the movie was all off-base and wrong, it certainly had good moments, but I tire of people trying to link science and spirituality in such a poor manner – it makes them both look bad.

Fabric, there is a fabric outlet within walking distance of my job. I never paid much attention to it because I didn’t care about fabric until I got my sewing machine. I went there earlier this week, and wow! Lots of fabric! Much of it is $1-2 per yard, the nicer stuff is closer to $5 and up – these are not bad prices for fabric I think? I just ended up spending a few bucks on a pile of fabric remnants ($3.50), a pile of buttons ($1.50), a 6″ zipper ($.25) and a package of purple lacing ($.75) – all stuff to practice with. I’ll be making clothes for my stuffed animals for months – hahaha!

Oh, and this week Michael updated Bevilacqua.us to showcase all our computers, Check out the Clockbot Network here.

Finally, (DarkSol) is coming up tomorrow %D I’m excited, between work and family events this week things have been a bit stressful so I needed something to look forward to.

Since I’ve been lazy, stressed and tired all week, there is a bunch of stuff I need to get done this evening before DarkSol arrives tomorrow. Quick cleaning of the house, laundry, mending a fitted sheet to use with the spare bed (with my sewing machine!) and probably half a dozen other things I am forgetting about. Michael is hitting the grocery store today so we’ll actually have food here when he shows up (thank goodness, Michael also mowed the lawn yesterday <3).

And now my lunch break is over *back to work*