It’s peony season, mine bloomed this week.

We’ve had a pretty mellow weekend. Saturday during the day I did some cleaning, in evening we went to the sweat lodge. It was a pretty crowded lodge, as is expected because it’s rare that it falls on a weekend. The weather was warm and humid, so the lodge got pretty hot and when Jim called for a break halfway through I decided that I should call it quits.

Yesterday we headed to the gym in the morning and then swung by the Montgomery Mall to pick up a few things. We chilled out in the afternoon, Michael was going through the pile of sparcs to see what was salvagable, a couple of them don’t have harddrives or ram. The sparc5 that I’m getting is a 100mhz box with a whopping 256 megs of ram. He also finished installing Debian on the little LX. In the evening we headed out to Sly Fox, where we were the only customers for a while and the bartender gave us the remote to one of the TVs which I turned to the Discovery Channel and we watched MythBusters while enjoying our beers and food.

Today is similarly a chill out day. Still a little cleaning to do around the house and this afternoon Bob is coming over to hang out and have a couple beers. The forecast says it’s going to get close to 90 and humid today, a forecast that I’m really not ready for, it’s only May!

Tomorrow I go back to work, but this is the last time today that I think about it.

Ubuntu Dapper Drake is scheduled for official release on June 1st. I generally wait a few weeks after a release to upgrade so that most of the bugs can be worked out or someone has posted about a particular problem already when I run into it. Not exactly the most community supportive thing to do when it comes to bugs and things, but I really don’t have the time to mess with things when they break. But this time I thought I’d try something different, I decided to upgrade to Dapper on Thursday afternoon. People assured me that Dapper was “solid” and I shouldn’t have any problems with the upgrade, but I wasn’t terribly optimistic this is an old laptop and things are bound to go wrong.

So I did the upgrade. At first I thought X was broken, but that was a mistake of my own. All my xfce4 settings were wiped out, which was slightly annoying but not a fatal flaw. There was, however, a fatal flaw – wireless. I did the upgrade using my wired card since it’s faster, and when I plugged in the wireless it wasn’t working. Same problem I had with Debian – it sees the card, it knows that it’s a wireless card, but won’t connect to the network. Bleh. That really is the trouble with the firmware on this card, I don’t exactly understand how it plays with the kernel to debug, so when it works I am happy and when it doesn’t I spend hours toiling with it until I give up. I am now wondering if I had done the upgrade with the wireless card how it would have behaved, and wondering if it’s not a problem with how the kernel was compiled, but the kernel version that’s the problem.

Whatever the problem, I really didn’t want to spend more time on it. Trying to downgrade back to Breezy would be more trouble than it’s worth since I didn’t have much on the laptop that I needed to back up, so I grabbed my Breezy disk and did a complete reinstall. Ubuntu supports releases for at least 18 months, so I can keep this laptop with Breezy for another year or so, in that time I might find a solution to this wireless thing. I don’t mind sticking with the software versions I have on here, the newer ones would probably slow down this old thing too much to be worth the additional bells and whistles anyway.

The other night I had a dream that we had a microwave. Michael and I have been living together almost 5 years and we’ve never owned a microwave. I haven’t wanted one, we don’t eat the kind of food that was designed to be cooked in a microwave oven and we prefer to heat up leftovers in the toaster oven. The rare times when I could use one for something like heating up refried beans I find ways around the need for a microwave, and it’s certainly not worth taking up a bunch of space on my counter for those rare occasions. But not owning a microwave is a strange thing for an American. When we were in West Virginia visiting the National Radio Astronomy Observatory we went on a tour where they explained the National Radio Quiet Zone and how anyone living within a few miles of the observatory wasn’t allowed to own microwaves, the presenter then asked if anyone in the room didn’t own a microwave and I was the only one who raised my hand. Later in the tour a woman with her young child came up to me to express her shock that we didn’t own one.

Another thing that’s unusual not to have here is cable television. When I tell people I don’t have cable it’s almost always automatically assumed it’s because I can’t afford it, indeed, most of the other people I know without cable have financial constraints that prevent them from having it. When I try to explain to most people that it’s because I don’t watch a lot of TV they either think I’m weird, or try to justify their tv watching and/or explain that they hardly ever watch it either but they’d really miss $show and $channel if they didn’t have cable. I really have never been much of a television or a movie person, I am pretty picky when it comes to what I watch.

I am watching a couple shows lately. I get the latest Doctor Who episodes each week from a friend in Europe. The new episodes lack some of the campiness of the old ones, seeing as they actually gave the show a reasonable budget this time. I’ve also been watching The Sopranos, picking up the DVDs at the library in Lansdale. It’s a good show, I’m really enjoying it, HBO does a great job with their programming. Finally, we just recently aquired the whole first season and most of the second season of Lost. I know a lot of people who really enjoy it, but I’m having trouble getting into it. The friend who sent it to us said that the first bit sucks (it really does) and that it gets better, but I’m not sure if I’m too jaded by the beginning to see that it’s improving or if 15 episodes in still counts as part of the first bit.

And finally, I’m feeling better than I was on Thursday. The saddle soreness has calmed down considerably, I hardly notice the pain anymore. My legs feel better, I wasn’t bothered to walk around yesterday in Rehoboth. Unfortunately my right knee has been bothering me since before we took the bike ride, it is the same knee pain Michael had a few weeks back (when he was in a similar stage of gym working-out-ness). I think I just pulled something in it and am taking it easy, I didn’t join Michael at the gym today. The weather could certainly be better, it’s creeping up to the 80s today (and tomorrow, and the next day – close to 90 they say!) with pretty significant humidity. Yuck. It might be time to put those window unit air conditioners in.

No plans for Memorial Day yet. The only plans we really do have this weekend are to go to the new moon sweat lodge tonight. Hm, I should probably do some cleaning of the house today.

Yesterday we spent a fantastic day in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware with and . Michael wrote an entry about where we went, with pictures.

We had a few goals on our trip to Rehoboth:

1. Finally hang out with and on their turf (well sort of, they live in northern DE and Rehoboth is in southern), in the past they’ve always come up to PA.

2. Visit the Dogfish Head Brewery

3. Go to a day spa for some relaxing services.

4. See the ocean (ok, this was my goal, I am in love with the Atlantic and hadn’t seen it in a year)

All were acomplished and we had a great time. The forecast had been for an overcast and rainy day, but the sun came out and the temperature rose a bit to make for a nice afternoon, even if it did get a bit humid. We certainly picked the perfect day for going down, we didn’t hit any traffic and the boardwalk wasn’t crowded at all. Dogfish Head was a nice place, good food, great beer, but they didn’t have growlers! We settled for picking up a couple Dogfish Head hats at their merchandise shop.

and playing in the ocean

A couple of rainbows we saw on our way home via Route 1 N, the second is a bit difficult to see in the photo, but it’s off to the left.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. Michael and I left home around 10AM to hit Tailwind Bicycle Shop in Schwenksville. They rented us a couple bikes, $15 each for the day and they weren’t the beat up sort of junkie bikes you might expect for rentals, they were new ones in the shop that they rent out. The Perkiomen Trail is right next to the bike shop, but we decided to head up to Green Lane and didn’t want to have to bike over Spring Mountain, so we put the bikes in the back of the Rav and started out at the Spring Mount Trail Head.

We rode from Spring Mount Trail Head all the way to Green Lane Park (map), a trek of about 5 miles. I felt pretty good after this, the trail had been pretty flat and the ride was fun. Then we started riding around Green Lane Park a bit, on hills and things and my right leg cramped up and we had to stop. After some relaxing by the lake we got back on the bikes and rode back to where we parked the truck in Spring Mount. I was pretty tired when this 10 miles was completed, so we headed home for some lunch.

After lunch I was still tired and a bit sore, but hey, it’s a day for biking! So we drove to the other side of Spring Mountain and hopped on our bikes for the 4 mile ride to Route 113. This ride was less flat than the one up to Green Lane, there were some steep hills and curvey parts of the trail to navigate. Luckily by this time I’d gotten a better handle on the gears of the bike so I didn’t have to walk the bike up any of the steep hills. During this part of the ride my shoulders really started to bother me, which seems to be a residual from the workout at the gym a couple days ago where I used free weights for the first time. I think the worst pain came from saddle soreness, ouch! We took a break when we got to 113 and sat on the bench, which actually felt comfortable, I really started dreading the bumps on the way back, and spent more time standing on the bike even with how tired my legs were getting.

We dropped the bikes off at the shop around 4:45. We then walked from the bike shop down the trail and approached Moccia’s Ice Cream Juction where I suggested we get some ice cream. A few minutes later we emerged from the shop, I had a chocolate raspberry chip scoop of ice cream on a waffle cone with sprinkles and Michael had a chocolate shake. They were delicious! We got back to the truck and got home shortly after 5. Once home I crashed on the couch, eventually made my way to the shower, and then put my pajamas on. Michael then suggested we go out for dinner, which would mean standing up again and getting dressed – hah! But I decided it was worth it, got dressed again, and we headed over to Ortino’s Northside, where I got a peach lambic and a nice pasta and seafood dinner. We got home from dinner and I got my pajamas on again and crashed on the couch, my whole body hurt! We watched a little TV and went to bed shortly before 10. In spite of my soreness it didn’t take me long to fall asleep.

All soreness aside, I had a great time. It was nice finally getting out there and riding the trail, I really pushed myself. While walking back to the truck with Michael, my ice cream in hand, I was really happy. We’re going to do it again, but hopefully I’ll be in better shape for it. I’ve only been going to the gym for a couple weeks, and a couple weeks of stationary bike rides at the gym, 5 miles at a time, doesn’t quite prepare you for an 18 mile trail bike ride.

And now we’re at this morning. I am very sore. It’s ok if I don’t move, sitting in this computer chair is comfy enough, but I am aware of the aches. I just went downstairs for a few minutes and I could barely walk. I think this means it’s a mandatory relaxation day, I want to be all healed up for our fun time in Rehoboth tomorrow with and . Of course Michael isn’t nearly as sore as I am, he’s going to the gym this morning and then plans on washing the car and cleaning the house. Yeah, I’ll help him out with the chores once I learn how to walk again.

May 10th, Michael’s car got hit by a propane truck while parked in the parking lot of LA Fitness

May 16th, we get the car back from the shop, all fixed up as good as new.

May 20th, Michael is driving with his friend Juilana to an afternoon wedding, he gets hit by an Accord making a left turn in front of him.

(wheel damage too but the tire is ok and it’s still drivable, alignment is all wacked though)

Luckily no one was hurt, neither the airbags in the Civic or the Accord went off and everyone was insured.

Now, Michael is one of the best drivers I know (perhaps the best). He’s avoided plenty of accidents with his defensive driving in the past, in the 8 years I’ve known him he’s never been in an accident, it was just an unlucky month.

We’re taking the car to the shop for an estimate today and hopefully the work can be done this week. Michael and I both have this week off, a planned vacation where we don’t actually go anywhere, so at least we won’t need to take time off from work to deal with the insurance company and car fixing stuff, that’s a little stress off the situation.

Michael went out yesterday and I had the house to myself. I thought about going out, but while making plans to meet up with a friend things just weren’t working out (which turned out to be a good thing, as Michael ended up needing my car in the afternoon). I spent most of the morning reading and around 11 I camped out upstairs to check out our new toys:

A friend Michael used to work with had been collecting old sun sparcs for a while, and just recently decided he didn’t have a use for them anymore. He knew that Michael was into sparcs (Michael installed Debian on one one of these machines back in the day) so he offered to give them to us. Woo little sparcs! It’s not clear whether all of them work yet, we suspect that a couple will just have to be used for parts.

I did some research into them yesterday, using information gleened from the wikipedia page on SPARCstation and this SPARC CPU names guide we have the following:

Two SPARCstation 2 – according to the site these are 40mhz, Cypress CY7C601 CPU, max ram of 128M, we have yet to discover how much ram we have in ours, both of these come with a floppy drive
One SPARCstation LX – 50mhz, microSPARC CPU, max ram of 96M and I think ours is maxxed out, this has a floppy drive (and this is my favorite because it’s so cute)
Three SPARCstation 5 – according to the site these are made in 70, 85, 110, 170 MHz versions, microSPARC CPU, and max ram of 256M, none of these have floppy drives

These are all 32-bit processors released in the early 90s.

I didn’t know a whole lot about sparcs, so I grabbed the little LX for inspection. Opened it up, and poked around, then looked at the monitor connector – it’s a Sun proprietary connected to connect to Sun monitors. When Michael came home in the early afternoon to pick up my car I told him of the non-standard connectors and he just said “oh, yeah, well we have a converter.” So after he left I went digging through our boxes of cables and connections, eventually finding it in the box we got with his Sun E250 server a few months back. Finally I got the little connector box set up and another monitor on my desk and booted the sparc, which dropped me into OpenBoot. I’d never seen the OpenBoot shell before, it’s pretty slick looking for the time it was made.

I then went looking for Debian install floppies for the little sparc. I couldn’t find any. I eventually found some for woody, but, eh, woody? I gave up after a while, expecting that Michael had a plan. It turns out that the Debian floppies for sparc never worked very well and Michael’s intention was to do an install over the network, which he’s going to show me how to do, yay!

Honestly I don’t know what we’re going to do with all of these, I’ll keep one for myself to play with, depending on how fast the sparc 5s are I’ll either keep one of those or the cute little LX.

Around 5 I called up a pizza place down the road that delivers and ordered a hoagie. I’m so happy that we found a place that delivers to us, we’ll have to try their pizza sometime to see if it’s any good (oh and we should get a menu too). The food came pretty quickly and I sat down at my desk with my dinner and fired up my Debian Unstable machine. It had been gathering dust next to my desk for quite some time, and I decided I’d install x and mplayer on it so I could watch movies while working on my primary system. The xorg install went almost perfectly, the only problem was with Xwrapper.config not being created, so until I added it with the allowed_users option I could only startx as root, I’m glad it was an easy fix that didn’t take me long to figure out. The graphics card is still that terrible old one with something line 8M video ram, so I had to turn the colors down to 16 bit and the resolution to 800×600 so the movies would play ok, even now the bigger movie files sometimes skip a bit but that doesn’t bother me too much.

Michael came home around 9 and needed some cheering up so we watched a few episodes of Harvey Birdman before bed.

It’s been a busy week.

Monday evening we went to a MontcoLUG meeting (photo). Lee Marzke hosted it at his house in Collegeville and by offering to show off his Asterisk@Home setup he became the de facto presenter. It was a good presentation, I’d seen his Asterisk talk at PLUG a few months back, but actually standing at the Asterisk machine and having the sit down and discuss points about the system was nice (even if I still hate phones). We got pizza and Lee had some Sly Fox beers to share, yum.

Tuesday we took Michael’s mother out for dinner at the Roadhouse Grille in Skippack for Mother’s Day. It was a fabulous dinner, we all ordered the red snapper special, had a bottle of red wine (“Red with fish?!” You say, but it was quite good, the fish was served with mashed potatoes and a rich sauce. Plus, I love red wine and so does Michael’s mother). We stayed for dessert and coffee, got caught up with his mother and how she’s been doing. It was a nice evening.

Wednesday night we attended the final class of our shaman class, which took the form of a sweat lodge. It was sad having to see the class come to a close, we’ll miss seeing everyone each month. But most of the people regularly come to sweats and other events at Jim’s farm so it’s not like we’ll never see them again.

Thursday night I hit the gym with Nita. I tried out the elliptical for the first time, I was pretty pleased with it, but after a half hour on the bike I was only able to hold out on the elliptical for 10 minutes. After the cardio stuff Nita went off for a free training session and I hit some of the arm machines. My poor arms really need attention, especially the left one. I think I’ll be spending more time on my arms than any other area for a while. When I got home it was close to 8PM, I made myself a veggie burger and sat down with Michael to watch a few episodes of The Sopranos.

Tonight we’re going over to and Nita’s place for movie night.

Because of all this business, I haven’t gotten around to do anything at home this week. My desk is piled with stuff I want to go through and work on. Michael is going to a wedding with his friend Juliana Saturday so that’ll give me plenty of time to chill out at home by myself with all my projects. I’m very excited about one project that Michael is picking up a key piece for this afternoon, but I’ll wait to share that until I have pictures ;)

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!