In the last couple years of my father’s life he put a great deal of effort into writing a book. There were several drafts of a first chapter, at least one draft of the second and countless notes. When we spoke on the phone he’d tell me about this book and always said he would get me a copy of the first chapter that he wanted me to review. He also asked me to put it online to share with the all the people on the internet who were into sci-fi and fantasy.

Unfortunately he never gave me the copies, he had computer troubles and in the later months of his life getting to the post office to mail anything was a serious hassle. After he died I inquired about his computer, hopeful that I could salvage the data on the hard drive, but I was not around to be involved in such things and I don’t know where the computer ended up.

Last summer my grandfather sent me a lot of writings he (my grandfather) had done. I was very interested in these things, and delighted that they had come to me. When my grandfather passed away just 4 months later I was even more happy to have them, a piece of my grandfather that would live on in the pages he wrote. At the same time I was sad that I didn’t have a similar thing from my father. That’s when my Aunt Elaine let me know that she had saved all his drafts and notes from the book he was writing! She said I was welcome to have them and spent time organizing all the papers, a task for which I’m grateful for.

Yesterday the box of my father’s papers arrived. We didn’t have much time at home before we had to head out for the evening, but I emptied the box and explored the contents. Pages of drafts, some printed, some hand-written in that oh-so-perfect handwriting that my father had. I didn’t have time to read much of it, but I knew my father spent a great deal of time on it during those last days of his life, and there is a certain power to that.

I figured I’d read the papers, post what he had written and some of his notes online and be done with it, but I can’t help but feel this story calling to me to be finished. But how could I finish it? I write a lot, but I don’t write fiction. The only written pieces that have been published anywhere are non-fiction, even in school the only story of mine published in the yearly school writing book was a story about my cousin and I when we were young. I can’t finish this story, I don’t write fiction! I’m terrible at it!

But am I really as terrible at it as I think? I haven’t tried to write any fiction in years. The last time I tried I was a pretty lousy writer in general. I haven’t put thought into writing fiction in a long time; I’ve never felt suitably inspired. Perhaps this is the inspiration I needed, I wonder if writing some fiction will do me good in my overall writing repertoire.

Sunday afternoon Michael and I went out to King of Prussia to hit CompUSA. Michael bought a SanDisk Sansa e140 Digital Audio Player 1 GB about a week ago from NewEgg for about $80 with shipping. We figured we could see how he liked it and buy me one if it was any good. After fiddling with Michael’s for a bit on Saturday I decided that I wanted one and couldn’t wait.

It plays MP3s and WMA files, no oggs, but I’ll survive (and re-rip a bunch of stuff). It also has an FM radio tuner, which is a nice addition. It acts pretty much like a flash card reader when you plug it in via USB 2, which means I can mount it as SCSI in Linux and just cp files over (it works similarly in Windows, very simple, no drivers).

It came with the things in the picture above:

– stock headphones, actually not that bad, quite an improvement over the discman headphone days

– a short USB cable, which is too short to be reasonable since the USB ports are on the back of my desktop, but luckily it’s the same type of USB cord that our digital camera uses so I use that. I’m keeping this short cord here at work, since I have a USB port on my monitor and it works fine with that.

– a plastic carrying case, which is pretty cheap but does the job (what do you expect to be packaged with a $80 player?)

– an armband, nice for the gym

– an expansion slot for a 2 gig flash card

It runs on one AAA battery, and claims to give you 17 hours of life that way, which I can’t say much about, it certainly does last a while. We picked up rechargable batteries for them. No charging through USB like other players have.

Navigation is reasonable, there isn’t playlist customization and you can’t delete via the player interface, but you can play according to “artist, album, song title, genre, year, date loaded, and more” assuming you have your ID3 tags properly set up. For the FM radio you can set up 20 stations as presets. It doesn’t resume from the spot where you stopped a song when you turn it off, but I’m not really bothered by that yet (although this might change if I start dropping mp3 podcasts on it).

I can’t say I have any real complaints. I threw a bunch of stuff on it Sunday night for the gym on Monday morning, and when I got to work I copied those files onto my work machine (more music for work! yay for my mp3 player playing USB storage device) and moved some music from my work computer onto the player (I ripped a bunch of CDs here at work in WMA format to listen to here).

And so now I’ve joined the 21st century. Michael said he’s glad we waited until the technology got good enough so that you could get a reasonable player for under $100, and I can’t agree more.

Diablo 2 holds a special place in my heart. When I was living in upstate New York with a few roommates in 2000 I became hopelessly addicted to it like I never had any game before, or since. My computer was the only one in the house that could play it, I used to have people in my room at all hours of the day playing it – sometimes I’d even wake up in bed and find some of my male roomies in my room playing it! I wasn’t bothered by this, I was mad about the game, spent hours playing it, for a few months all me and my roomies did was sleep, work, eat and play D2. When the expansion pack was released, we headed to the 24 hour Wal-Mart to be the first in line to snatch up our copy. And yes, it even got so bad that one of my friends bought things for the game on ebay for us all. Sick? Sad? Sure, but we had tons of fun.

When I left New York my copies of the game came with me. A lot changed in my life in 2001, I moved in with an Aunt, and then down here to Philadelphia with Michael. He introduced me to Unreal Tournament, a game that got him into. In early 2002 I switched to Linux, further contributing to the dust collecting on my poor Diablo 2 cds.

Every year or so since 2003 I tried to install Diablo 2 with the Lord Of Destruction Expansion Pack in Linux with wine. I didn’t try too terribly hard, just set aside an afternoon to see how far I could get with an installation. It has mostly worked for a basic install, but because wine could not properly read the cdrom drive I always needed to go out and find the nocd crack. This meant braving warez sites, something I generally don’t like to do. Plus, warez sites rarely had the most-super-duper-up-to-date nocd patches, so you couldn’t get onto battle.net – BNet is what makes D2 so much fun!

And so it’s been. Each year I get a bit further in the install process. When I was sitting at my desk this afternoon looking for something to do, my D2 disks called to me.

I quickly stumbled upon old directions that hadn’t worked in the past, and then came to WineHQ.com’s Diablo II – Lord of Destruction 1.x page.

What works
Everything, including copy protection.

EVERYTHING? Surely this is too good to be true…

I gave it a shot on my Debian etch workstation with wine 0.9.11. After some false starts, I finally got it all loaded up and to my surprise IT ACTUALLY WORKS! EVEN WITH BATTLENET! AFTER THREE YEARS OF TRYING!!! GLEE!!! No cracks, no problems, just my copy of D2 playing nicely with wine in Debian.

Sadly, I’m not actually in the mood to play it now – HAH!

My arms hurt. Michael and I met at the gym last night. I started off on the bike for 6 miles, then Michael showed me around some of the arm workout machines that he liked to use. I’m slightly less scared of all those crazy machines for exercising now ;) My arms sure did get a good workout.

We hit the hot tub, then I headed home to make dinner while Michael went to spend some time in the sauna and then planned on coming home after me. Unfortunately when I was driving home I got a call from him, telling me that someone had hit his car in the parking lot. You can read his entry about it here (photo). Long story short, the guy who hit him was still there and was really great about the whole thing. We sure lucked out.

It has shifted our schedules some though, I had to take about an hour off from work in the middle of the day today (in addition to a lunch break) to pick him up at the body shop after he dropped off the Civic. And of course Michael had to take a significant amout of time out of his day to deal with the insurance companies and such. Luckily Michael could work from home today and tomorrow, we’ll have to carpool on Monday, but it’s not such a horrible thing. The shop said his car would be ready by Tuesday, which is good, otherwise we would have had to consider getting a rental (it’s unclear whether the other insurance company would reimburse for it, and we’d rather not get one if we can survive without it anyway).

My sister Heather moved up to Canada last weekend, she’s now living in the house that her fiance bought a couple months ago. I got to talk to her tonight for the first time, and she seems to be settling in nicely, hopefully she’ll send me a picture of her house soon. I’m happy for her.

Now off to clean up my once again messy desk…

We went to the Maibock festival on Sunday and I’m very glad we did.

We took route 29 all the way to the festival because of the need for sunblock and hitting our bank. On our way Michael noticed a very interesting looking car behind us, he switched lanes and let it pass us, it was a black Lamborghini. I’d never actually seen one driving on a road before, what a lovely machine.

We arrived shortly after noon, each of us picked up a 23 oz souvenir mug filled with beer and a Bockwurst on a roll. I went for the Helles Bock, which I was told was a bit hoppy for a Bock, but that’s how I like it. We met up with Kathy and David, a couple who we met at a Belgian beer tasting last weekend, and spent the day with them. Around 2 made it up, finished with the Broad Street Run and ready to see some goat racing! By then I was finishing off my second Helles Bock and we had an enjoyable time watching the goat races, where Han the goat won the right to have a Maibock named after him.

The German Oompa music was a delight, I felt very German there with my German style beer in hand. People there at the festival were a generallyfriendly bunch, which was great to see. The weather was absolutely perfect, sunny, warm. I’m very glad that Michael had the bright idea of getting some sunblock on the way there, as I would have been burnt to a crisp otherwise – as it is it’s pretty obvious where I missed putting lotion on. And my beer drinking arm (hah!) is a bit red, having held it in the same position with my glass all day, directly in the sun.

After the race we each got a glass of the newly named Han Maibock and sat down in the parking lot to enjoy it and chat. In a conversation spurred on by my ownership of PrincessLeia.com we found out that Kathy is on the board for the Patrick Stewart fan club. She’s pretty heavily into the sci-fi thing, which was great to hear about.

I also found a goat in my Maibock. You know how you get a little silly when you get tipsy, well I was staring into my glass and saw a goat made out of foam! I showed it off, everyone was quite amused.

Around 5 David and Kathy got a couple six-packs and headed out. Michael, and I went inside to get some more substantial food for dinner. We parting after eating and went home, where I promptly drank 25 gallons of water and took a nap ;D When I finally got up I watched the latest episode of Doctor Who and chilled out with Caligula.

, , Kathy, David (Michael was playing photographer for this one)

Michael is hosting the rest of the photos from the day here.

Monday morning I got out of bed at 5:30, thanks to that fantastic kitty I have. So I packed up my backpack and headed out to the gym. It was a good morning, 5 miles on the bike, then about a half hour of swimming laps in the pool. I spent about an hour and a half there, including time taken to shower and everything, not bad for a Monday morning. I figure I’ll go to the gym two mornings and one evening a week, at the very least. I’m hoping I can either meet up with Michael or Nita on that one evening.

I’ve now been to a rock concert. Sort of. It’s strange how someone my age would never have gone to a rock concert. I just don’t like crowds, and never had anyone to go with when I was in High School due to the being a nerd thing. As I got older I just got away from loving rock music, and since getting involved with Michael he’s been introducing me to a whole new world of musical artistry, and we’ve been hitting ambient and electronic concerts for the past few years. In fact, the first non-orchestra concert I ever went to in my life was Steve Roach and vidna Obmana when I was 20.

So the Thomas Dolby concert will probably have to be classified as my first rock concert. I mean, he is rock, right? Even though there is no guitar and he’s got a electronic setup to die for. He certainly leans away from rock and into electronic. I guess it’s hard to say. In any event, I loved it, so it certainly wasn’t some traditional rock concert.

On Friday after work I swung by the Lansdale train station to pick up . We met Michael at home, and the three of us headed up to Ortino’s Northside for dinner where, due to an unfortunately injury a few days ago, couldn’t enjoy a beer with us. D’oh! But it was close and the food was good, so there were no complaints – plus they still had the Oud Beersel Kriek on tap, yum. After dinner we drove out to the Sellersville Theater for Thomas Dolby!

, ,

We got to the theater around 7:30, found our seats. Michael and I ended up seated in B-1 and B-2, which is in the second row of actual theater seats, there were some tables in front of us as well, we’ll certainly have to work on getting a table seat next time. was up in H-row, having bought his tickets a few days after us.

The theater was packed with an interesting assortment of people, hipsters, normal middle-aged suburbanites, goths, bikers, yuppies and geeks all together for Mr. Thomas Dolby – what a sight! The concert started off with an opening band, Carey Ott, which failed to impress me, they weren’t bad musicians per se, but they are on the pop side and I just don’t enjoy that sort of thing. I was happy when Thomas Dolby finally came out. He started withLeipzig, and after some technical difficulties (and t-shirts thrown at the audience as an apology for the trouble) the concert continued without a hitch. He played an awsome concert, no new songs, but he played some of the classic old ones, I Live in a Suitcase , Windpower, Europa and the Pirate Twins… and of course She Blinded Me With Science. My only complaint is that the show was too short, but I guess I’ve been spoiled by 2-3 hour single artist ambient/electronic concerts.

What a night!

Saturday we spent the day at our last Saturday session of the shaman class. It was rather unstructured and we spent a lot of time chatting about shamanism in general, as well as some Carl Jung style talk about the unconscious mind. The plan is to meet for the last time at our final Wednesday class in a couple weeks and have a sweat lodge. I’m sorry that this class is almost over, it was fantastic, I really learned a lot. I’ll miss the people, and the safe circle we created, but I’m sure I’ll run into most of them at sweat lodges and parties at Jim’s.

After the class we went home and chilled out for a bit. came by around 6 and went out to Victory Brewery. The wait for a table was only about 15 minutes, and once seated we enjoyed a great meal. I went with the Golden Monkey belgian ale of theirs that I love so much (even if it’s 9.5% alcoholness goes right to my head – hah!) and a pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Oh and we tried their Jalapeno Crab Poppers, which were very yummie. is staying in Philly for the Broad Street Run today, it was nice that we were able to work our schedules to meet up.

Today we were planning on going to the Maibock festival at Sly Fox in Phoenixville, but we’ll see how things go. I wouldn’t mind chilling out at home and doing some work in the garden, and Michael’s knee is bothering him (not because of the gym, because of a run on a hilly road near our house recently).

Speaking of the gym, I’m now officially one of those geeks with a gym membership. Michael went to the gym on Thursday to “see how much it would be to add me” and signed me up right there. I haven’t been yet, didn’t want to go Friday morning since I’d be too tired for the Dolby concert by the evening, so the plan is to go for my first time early Monday morning.

They’re replacing the roof at work, it started yesterday. We had to park our cars in the back lot, which is not such a bad thing, a little walking never hurt anyone (and honestly, most of the people here need to do a little more walking). The parking inconvenience is nothing compared to the banging that’s been going on for the past two days. Luckily I’ve been able to escape the worst of it by putting on my headphones.

I completed that server install I mentioned on Monday. I encountered the typical difficulties[1] one would encounter on an on-site install, it took much longer than expected and at times was very frustrating. In the end I kept my cool and it was a success, I was happy to have had the experience. Best of all, I felt really good about the completion of it, job satisfaction is good. I’m even more convinced now that going back into IT would be the right move for me.

I’ve been seriously considering joining a gym over the past couple months and finally decided that I will. Michael signed up at LA Fitness a couple weeks ago, and has pushed me in the direction of joining him. Nita has been suggesting I join for months now, and when we got together a couple weeks ago she said she’d be willing to hit the North Wales gym to join me occasionally (regularly?). I’ll be getting a guest pass for the North Wales location next week and a woman I work with said she’d get a guest pass too and accompany me, cool.

I went to Curves the other day as another option, there is one less than 2 miles from my house and one a couple blocks from work so I figured I should at least check it out. I was not impressed. First of all, the woman who runs the location I went to is overweight; not a very good selling point! Then the whole thing is more like an “exercise routine” than a gym, there are workout machines and you go around and spend something like a minute on each for a half hour, then do some stretching. No showers, no classes, $34 per month. Egad! How can these be so popular? I suppose it’s the convenience of them, and people feel good about doing at least SOMETHING when it comes to exercising. But for $34/month I might as well join a real gym.

Tonight I need to hit a store and get some clothes for the gym some sort of gym bag.

I bought some sandals from birkenstockcentral.com last night. I haven’t owned a pair of sandals in a few years, as I generally just wear sneakers all summer and we don’t often go to pool/beach places. But now we attend sweat lodges regularly, so it’s nice to bring something along for my feet so I don’t need to run around barefoot all evening. A shoe-loving woman at work learned of my interest in Birkenstocks and pointed me in the direction of the website, and the bargains area where I was able to find some very nice ones for $40 (originally $109) plus shipping, and I was able to track down a coupon code to get 5% off, yay for getting new Birkenstocks for under $50!

[1] Of course I didn’t know they were “typical” difficulties at the time! It was only after sharing my story with fellow techies that I learned that just about every on-site install has its share of problems.

It’s the first of May. This year is going by too quickly.

I’m already looking forward to the weekend. We’ll be attending the Thomas Dolby concert Friday night. From what we’ve read, this is going to be a really great concert, even if almost everyone I tell either says “Thomas… who?” or “Haha, he’s still around after that one hit in the eights?” Luckily we were able to find a local to enjoy his obscurity with us, is coming up from Philadelphia, I’ll be picking him up at the Lansdale train station at 5 Friday evening.

Saturday I’m going to the last Saturday shaman class, unfortunately Michael got roped into a big server migration at work this weekend so I’ll be going alone. That evening I’ll be meeting up with who will be in the area for a race, hopefully Michael will be done with his work by then to join us. I really need to decide what brewpub or beer bar to go to, I’ll be coming from Malvern, but I haven’t been impressed with any places in that general area. will be coming from Philadelphia, but I really don’t want to drive to the city, especially if I’m going to have a beer with dinner.

Sunday we’re considering going up to Sly Fox in Phoenixville for their Thrilla in Pheonixvilla, which is a day long event with food, beer and a goat race, where the winning goat gets a Maibock named after it. That should be fun, but we’ll have to see how tired we’re feeling after the rest of the weekend stuff.

But for now I plod along at work. This evening I have some contract work to do, heading down to West Chester to do a server install. I’m thinking about going to the PLUG meeting on Wednesday night, I’ll have to ping some people to see if I can find a ride down.

Oh, and there is a Belgian beer and exotic cheeses tasting going on there today that I’m not going to..

Right, like I’m going to resist a Belgian beer an exotic cheese tasting less than 5 miles from my house.

We went, it’s all Michael’s fault, whatever tiny bit of will-power was preventing me from going was pushed to the wayside with his “are you SURE you don’t want to go?” comments.

But I’m glad we went. We always meet intelligent, interesting people when we go to these things, it’s fantastic to meet a couple of fellow hiker, home-brewing, beer lovers! They told us of several beer festivals and things that we are certainly interested in. Somehow we got on the topic of where we’re going for a honeymoon and they had the fantastic idea of going to the Grand Canyon – something I hadn’t really thought of but which would be so perfect. And finally, Linux was mentioned toward the end of the evening, they aren’t techies, but appreciated the idea behind Linux and were happy to learn that it’s become more user friendly in the 5 years since they first tried it, we shared our email addresses and pointed them in the direction of Ubuntu.

Now I’m forcing myself to finish this glass of water, because I know I’ll have a miserable morning tomorrow if I don’t – yay for tipsy journal entries after returning from a beer tasting!

Friday was month end at work, what a nightmare. It could have been greatly lessened if my co-workers had properly prepared me for it – “What? You haven’t sent an email to all the locations telling them it’s almost month end?!” …I didn’t know I was supposed to! So I spent the whole week helping everyone else out and was completely slammed on Friday. I stayed at work until 6PM. When I finally got home Michael took me out to Sly Fox where I enjoyed their Newport IPA and a Pastrami Reuben.

Saturday was a beautiful day. As expected I got Michael to haul out the lawn mower and get it started so I could mow the lawn. It’s a lawn mower that we got used after ours died unexpectedly late last season, and this was my first time using it. Our old one was a push mower, the kind I’ve always used, and after mowing our hilly yard I was pretty much useless for any other tasks that day. This new one is a self-propelled one, what a difference! I was able to finish the whole lawn in 2 hours and the only thing that ached were my thumbs from holding the handle that controls the propulsion.

After mowing the lawn Michael brought Caligula outside and we did a bunch of random yard work. I hopped online and learned that you’re supposed to get rid of the daffodil flower stalks once the flower has died, keeping just the green leaves of the plant exposed to feed the bulb all through the season. Similarly, it’s best to remove the heads of tulips when they are done blooming. I went through my garden flowers doing this, the garden looks great. And I was delighted to see my Bleeding Hearts plant in full bloom. Michael spent a bunch of time going through the mulch around the trees, in all I’d say it was a very productive yard day.

Michael made steak for dinner and afterwards I went up to the Magic Room to hide out and do some writing on my laptop. Oh, and tit turns out that wireless works up there.

<@pleia2> oh gosh, I sometimes wonder what color my hair is
<@pleia2> because I didn't have wireless in front of the house, I simply assumed I wouldn't have it all the way out here in the garage
<@pleia2> so I've been sitting here for about a half hour just chilling out and doing some writing on my laptop
<@pleia2> without thinking about it I used dict, got the word I needed spelled correctly, went back to my work HEY WAIT ASECOND I NEED INTERNET TO USE DICT
<@pleia2> wireless works fine up here, heh

Yay me.

Later in the evening Michael came out to the Magic Room and asked if I wanted to go out with him to Ortino’s Northside for a beer. The plan was to check out the Victory HopDevil on the handpump, but then I saw they had Allagash Tripel on tap! Michael got the hand pump HopDevil, so I was able to enjoy some of it’s tiny bubble goodness, but I really was into that Allagash Tripel. We hung out there for a couple hours, I had some very yummie carrot cake that went well with the Allagash Tripel. Oh, and there is a Belgian beer and exotice cheeses tasting going on there today that I’m not going to.. must resist… resisting….

Speaking of beer, the nugget hops have sprouted.

This morning I got up around 7, caught up on email and got some work done on my primary workstation. There have been a lot of little things it’s been doing lately that are not fatal errors, but are annoying. Fixed some bootup errors, installed a new kernel, recompiled nvidia module against the new kernel, got alsa running (this wasn’t in the plan, but sound stopped working when I upgraded the kernel and I figured that fixing OSS again wasn’t worth it).

It’s another nice day, should be topping out in the mid 60s. I was thinking about washing the car today, but it might still be a bit chilly for that. For now I’m going to go find something to eat.