Fansites are much more fun to run when it’s a cult thing and news trickles out every month or so, each tidbit an exciting morsel of knowledge.

With the release of the Wallace and Gromit movie I can’t keep up. Just this week I missed the news about the World Premiere! Had to post about it after it happened. I get emails from all sorts of people now giving me new leads about toys and books being released, and although I greatly appreciate their emails and attachments, it’s just too much. I wonder if I should have arranged for some of the people who email me info to write up some articles themselves so I could just drop them on the site as-is. Maybe setup the site to run on wordpress with the lj plugin so I wouldn’t have to update the site and community separately. Or somehow figured out a way to assign different sections of the site to different people so that my movie images section wouldn’t be so pathetic. I have new pictures! But putting them up takes time – cropping, resizing, uploading, linking – especially when more news is coming in almost daily and my entire day of computer time is limited to a couple hours after work. I have other things to do too!

OK, you’re right, I love it. But when I saw 10 WnG related articles in my inbox, plus 2 other fans emailing me last night and I didn’t have time to make updates until the time between my shower and driving to work this morning (and still didn’t get it all updated!) I felt flustered.

Apparently this near burnout on fansites is not terribly uncommon. There is a pull to think “Hey it doesn’t even matter, it’s just a bunch of fake characters, why do I work so hard on this?” and the “I love this! And hundreds of people read this site!”

Lucky for me this is just a passing moment. The flood of news isn’t as overwhelming as it might be for something more popular. I can’t imagine how those comic book fansite people keep up when their comic is made into a popular movie. Unless Wallace and Gromit explodes into US theaters, shaking the world and creating something phenomenal (which I doubt, you know how American audiences are), the busy times for my site will soon pass.

Once it’s passed I’ll probably get bored and wish it was back. Wallace and Gromit rock, and I love them!

Yesterday evening I picked up and we went out to the KOP Mall. As I mentioned in my last entry, I wanted to see if I could find some Wallace and Gromit toys. I guess I was really looking for an excuse to get out of the house. After this busy summer, having a weekend were we have nothing planned made me restless.

After getting slightly lost in Norristown (AHHH!), we made it to KOP around 5:30. Parked and walked around the mall for a bit.

Ugh malls.

I need to get tattooed on my arm “you don’t like malls” or something, since I hate them and yet I still see them as a viable option when I want to just hang out with someone. We only spent about an hour in the mall before I got annoyed with the people and screaming children.

I need a mall that doesn’t have any other people, or clothing stores. Just the stores I want, all close together.

Right, that’s why I have the internet.

We didn’t succeed in finding any WnG toys, not in the toy store, or the comic store, or a movie store. Very disappointing. We did see a poster for the movie though.

For dinner we headed to T.G.I. Fridays. It was nice getting to just hang out with , usually we have with us as the driver. But now that I have my own car I can go pick her up myself! We got to talk about all those great girly things that we can’t talk around with the boys around %)

Today is another planless day. I suggested that we head to Skippack and browse the little shops there this afternoon because it was so nice out, but Michael’s allergies got bad and he wasn’t feeling well %( So instead I prepared the new Xelium website for launch – just in time for one of our main servers on the network to go down, thus postponing said launch, d’oh! I also finally got cups working perfectly, turns out I didn’t have the cupsys-bsd package installed, which includes the lpr layer for cups, with that installed I had no trouble printing from firefox. I also finally got around to installing the google firefox plugin, which I only did so I could check out PageRank. And while redoing the Xelium site I decided I needed a more recent picture of myself, which I’m also using for my default lj icon now, slightly larger one is: here (yay Linux Cookbook!).

And now?

<@LeXy> i think im going to wrap up in a blanket and watch scifi or a movie with giant bugs

She’s got the right idea.

*grabs blanket and heads off to watch some bad scifi movie*

Yesterday was uneventful. Friday night we had Bob and over for movie night, unfortunately my allergies were acting up and I didn’t really enjoy myself. Michael suggested that I take some of the 24 hour Claritin D that we had (normal Claritin doesn’t do anything). We watched MSTed Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders and by the end of it I was nodding off – but still congested! Damn that Claritin D!

I was pretty much a zombie all day yesterday, stuck in the antihistamine sleepiness funk. I worked on a couple things, set up a syndication feed for 13thhour.net, here: . I did some updates to wallaceandgromit.net, spent time playing around with the CSS on princessleia.com (no progress made though). I tried getting CUPS working on my computer, but after messing around with it for 2 hours and still not being able to print a test page, I got tired of it and figured I’d finish later. Then I attempted to tackle the “playing midis in linux” problem, which has been bothering me since a friend asked me how to do it last week. It’s strange that I’ve never attempted to play them, and even stranger that I can’t figure out how, how-tos that exist either scare me with their talk of keyboards and sequencers (I really just want to play this little sound file!) or say “just use playmidi” … which obviously doesn’t work, or else I wouldn’t be searching for pointers. Arg.

In all, I felt pretty unsuccessful and useless, so I read for most of the day. Idly wandering upstairs to check my email now and then. I finally finished Life of Pi and read about 100 pages of Lakota Woman (which takes forever to get into). What else did I do all day? I don’t know, I was groggy. We didn’t end up going to the sweat last night because my grogginess probably wouldn’t have gone over well there. We’re starting the Shaman course next week, so we’ll be going to a sweat lodge then. I made veggie burgers for dinner and went to bed around 9:30.

I wouldn’t say yesterday was a bad day, or boring or depressing. I was in a decent mood. It was just slow, very relaxing.

Today I was more awake. mentioned on Friday that she was going to the Allentown fair today and if we wanted to join her. I seriously considered it, but I’m not really much of a fair person. Too many people, everything’s overpriced, and I don’t really enjoy activities at them. So what else was there to do today? Not much. Michael did his radio show from 4am until noon, so he’s napping right now. Which leaves me with more alone time all afternoon.

I got cups to print a test page after mentioning to Michael what a bitch it’s been. He gave me the notes he still had from the last time he set up and told me that it’s a particularly frustrating one to get working since it’s an old, cheap HP. Apparently the default HP DeskJet Driver I was trying to use for it wasn’t the right one, and downloading a ppd file from linuxprinting.org was the best route to go.

My next task is going to be getting other software to use the printer and print properly, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out quickly enough.

Around 5 I’m going to go pick up and we’re going to KOP for some window shopping. Mostly I just want to see if Wallace and Gromit toys have hit the shelves here in the US, I keep getting emails from fans in the UK about all the cool toys they’re buying, and since I don’t generally go to malls, I haven’t a clue what we have here.

*wanders off to get printer working properly*

On our way out of work yesterday I was talking to the woman in the next cubicle about Indian food. She’s never been to Greater India and we thought it might be fun to go during lunch sometime next week. While on the subject of food she mentioned a grocery store up the street called “Assi Plaza.” I’d driven by the store a hundred times, it claims to be an International Food plaza and I was always vaguely interested, but afraid it was going to be a dive.

“Oh no, it’s very clean, and they have lots of fresh fruit, fresh fish, a whole aisle of seaweed for making sushi. Oh you’d love it. Let’s go!”

Let’s go? OK.

She drove the both of us through the traffic of rush hour Lansdale, and we soon arrived at the North Wales Assi store. I was still skeptical until I walked in the store – it’s a real supermarket! The vegetables and fruit were shockingly inexpensive (left with 4 bags of very fresh fruit and veggies for about $10). And the fish, oh the fish! We’d always gone to Whole Foods for the freshest fish, and knew that downtown Philly is really where you go when you want the super fresh stuff, but my co-worker explained that the excellent selection and freshness meant that she doesn’t make that monthly trek down to Philly for fish anymore. The fish is priced quite reasonably, and they had lots of great looking squid. Mmmm! I got so hungry.

Then there were the huge bags of rice, the curry being sold by the pound. All sorts of brands of soy milk, almost an entire aisle devoted just to seaweed. Tempura flour. A whole lot of sesame, ginger and soy marinades, soy sauce by the gallon! Anything I could imagine needing for my Asian food cooking needs, including dishes, woks and other cooking tools. I almost felt bad that my co-worker had driven me, I could have spent hours in there, but I also wanted to show Michael. In addition to all the groceries, they had a separate part of the store with little cafes that made sushi, korean and chinese foods, and little stores that sold other asian products.

Wow.

The culture shock was quite something too, I felt so white. Almost everyone else shopping in the store was Asian (including my co-worker, she is from the Phillipines). The music was certainly not in english, they graciously labelled most things with the english names as well as the native language equivalent. The whole store just felt very non-american, with perhaps the exception of it’s supermarketness. My co-worker explained that it’s the only such market in the area, so people come from all over, often as far as New Jersey, to shop there. Gosh I’m lucky to work only a few miles from there.

I’ve been listening to economic commentary about the rising prices over the summer. Besides the drop in SUV sales, the general public hasn’t been too upset over the prices so far. Polls have indicated that people aren’t changing their driving habits that much.

It’s been a grand debate as to when the prices would get to a point where people do start screaming. I heard a commentary recently claiming that they’ll climb past right $3/gallon without a whimper. When I heard it I generally agreed.

It seems we were wrong. What was today’s hot office topic?

“On my way to work I saw a gas station selling regular for $3.05 per gallon.” Saturday I filled up the Rav, it was $2.61.

Two separate conversations were overheard about changing driving habits “Maybe I can share the car with my wife, I’ll just take the bus home at night” “I should carpool with $co-worker, we live in the same neighborhood, it’s silly for both of us to drive in.”

If this is happening in my small office, it’s probably happening all over the place. I’d say we’ve hit the critical point, people really are going to start changing their habits if prices don’t come down soon.

*cheers*

Disclaimer: Don’t think my happiness over the change in habits is mindless happiness that doesn’t take into consideration the serious economic issues in industries nationwide because of this. And I’m not insensitive to the people who barely make ends meet and will be severely hurt by these rising prices. But it was inevitable, and I hope that this spike can hit the industry and government hard enough that they’ll wake up to the reality of how dangerous our dependence on a non-renewable natural resource is.

I was combing my hair before my shower when I looked in the mirror and saw a big, dark spider up in the corner above the shower stall.

Ugh.

I don’t mind spiders much, but this one was big, with giant fangs. But it was up too high for me to practically reach it before a shower. I figured it would stay in it’s spot and I could get a glass and let it go after the shower.

It didn’t stay in it’s spot.

I am not sure why it decided to move, but it walked along the wall, and as the wall got wet from the condensation it sometimes slipped, and would fall a few inches on it’s spiderweb thread. Each time scaring me. So I continued with my shower, and as soon as the soap was out of my hair I got out.

Then I got dressed and got the camera so I can share it all with you:

Haha! Now you can have nightmares about giant shower spiders too! I didn’t measure it, but I’d say it was at least 2 inches long.

And rest assured, I did eventually get a glass and released it outside.

We went drum shopping today. Real life shopping for Native American drums is one of those things that is somewhat hard to do because of the difficulty in finding local resellers. There are music stores in the area, but mostly they just have modern instruments. We went to a really nice drum shop in New Hope last year and figured that would be our best bet. A little after noon we hopped in the car and headed out there.

It was humid, and although the temperature only got into the mid 80s, walking around New Hope was sweaty work. We were unable to locate the drum shop, which we’re pretty much convinced has moved or closed down because it wasn’t where we remembered it being. We walked around New Hope a bit, visited a couple “Native American Trading Posts” neither of which had what we wanted, and what they had in stock had prices that scared us out the door (I was expecting to spend a few hundred for a couple drums and blankets, but not as much as they were charging!). We probably should have expected such high prices and tourist-oriented things (not real drum-circle type drums) in New Hope. Still, it was a disappointment.

We left New Hope and tried to think of other stores in the area. We were both tired and stopped at Starbucks before deciding to head to George’s Music in North Wales on the off chance that they’d have something. They didn’t, and the guy we asked had no clue what we were talking about when we explained “uh… definitely not in stock, but maybe something we could special order?”

At that point we had pretty much given up, we’d just shop online.

But it was disappointing, so I suggested we take a small detour on our way home and check out what the lovely shopping town of Skippack had. Our hopes weren’t high, but as we drove in we saw a sign for a store called Dreamcatcher. We stopped and parked.

What a wonderful store it is! It smelled lovely, and had a decent selections of the exact drums we were looking for! I picked out a big, nice-sounding, thin-skinned drum, and Michael picked up a smaller thicker skinned drum. We also wandered in back where they had some really pretty (and quite affordable) woven blankets.

So we walked out of there with 2 woven blankets, the two drums, and a couple drumsticks. Plus we picked up a couple fliers for drumcircles that they hold, and other special events. Nice! We didn’t know that Skippack had such a community, it’s only 5 miles from our house!

And now for pictures:

Caligula almost immediately claimed one of the blankets for himself

Large drum

Medium drum

Apparently the size and thinness of the large drum causes it to be particularly sensitive to humidity, oops. Within about 20 minutes of being inside our humid house the skin started to loosen. Michael assured me that this sort of thing was normal and that it can be put back into playing condition with a hairdryer, and of course he was correct, I looked online for other care tidbits and found this:

Natural rawhide drums loosen in times of humidity and tighten when heated. The native people heat the drums in front of a fire before using, to ensure maximum sound quality. The tighter the hide, the stronger the sound will be. In a modern setting, a hair dryer is the quickest and easiest way to dry a drum for
use. Simply start in the center and work toward the edges of the drum. It only takes two minutes, restores the hide to the proper tension and can be repeated as often as necessary to be enjoyed for many years.

Hopefully we’ll be able to attend a drum-making class in October, it’d be fun to make our own too.

I’m so excited!

Gosh it’s been a busy weekend. Going to veg out to some Red Dwarf now.

Today I finally went to the Philadelphia Zoo.

I like zoos. I know a lot of people have issues with them, but I don’t as long as the animals are well taken care of. And it means I can see cute fluffy things I wouldn’t normally be able to see. It’s all about the cute fluffies.

Like the firefox!

I met up with and around 11 and we went out for food, then drove into Philly to the zoo.

The weather was so nice, not too hot, and quite sunny. We bought our tickets and went into the zoo.

First saw a Red Kangaroo (so cute! but it lived with emus, ew), went into all the little houses, the reptile house was awsome, snakes and turtles are my favorite, and they had some amazing specimens. While leaving the reptile house we noticed that the sky had gotten dark and cloudy.

We figured a little rain wouldn’t hurt, so continued our tour of the zoo. Saw the hippos and when getting close to the elephants, the sky opened up and it started pouring. had brought along an umbrella (she’s such a girlscout! We didn’t think it would actually rain), but after a few minutes of the three of us squeezed uncomfortably close beneath it, and the start of horizontal rain, we put it away and figured it wasn’t worth it.

We got wet, but it was still fun!

The elephants were some of my favorites. The two asian elephants seemed to love the rain and took the opportunity to play in their pool. Swimming elephants are GREAT! They came pretty close to the edge of their enclosure (causing some kids to scream with fear of how close), and they’d dive in the water, splash around, and just be all around entertaining. It was great to watch, I’d never seen elephants be so unprovokingly playful.

Then we saw the primates, the best part being the gorillas, where the zookeepers had put identical crates on the gorilla side of the glass and the people side. Watching from above the similarites between young children climbing on the boxes and young gorillas what surreal. I’m sure this was intentional.

Then we got to see the penguins! Yay! They were happy in the rain too, swimming in a “flock” around their pool. I wanted to give them hugs %)

The rain was still coming down in spurts, but we got around to see the bears, a snow leopard (so cute!), 3 adorable cheetahs, and possibly my favorite animal in the zoo – the red panda (firefox), who was so cute in it’s little enclosure! His fur was wet, but he was so fluffy and cute that I wanted to give him hugs too. Unfortunately the big cats (lions, tigers) were living at another zoo while their enclosures were being redone, so we didn’t get to see them.

By the time we had finished seeing all the animals the rain was really coming down. About halfway to the main gate I realized that I was completely drenched from head to toe, and that we had no towels or anything to dry up with before getting into ‘s car and sitting on his leather seats, d’oh!

I had a really great time though, the rain managed to clear a lot of people out of the zoo, so it wasn’t as crowded as it would have been otherwise. And and put up with my wacky personfications of like, every animal we saw. They’re fun to go to zoos with!

And now Michael and I are going drum shopping! And it’s raining today too, but I’m bringing my raincoat this time ;)

My brain was feeling toasty (no, not from the beer, it was from the long boring week I had!). So I wanted a mind-numbing project. In order to get in the brain numb mood I decided to play some mahjongg.

I play the gnome version of mahjongg (in gnome-games package), because it works nicely. But the tilesets included are boring. I wonder if I could download more?

Have you ever tried googling for gnome mahjongg tilesets? It didn’t take me long to get annoyed and give up, I wanted to relax afterall.

I wonder how hard it is to make my own?

Not too hard. I opened the existing PNG one: /usr/share/pixmaps/mahjongg/smooth.png and edited it. It took me from…

21:24:48 <@pleia2|odin> cool, it seems pretty easy to make gnome mahjongg tilesets..

until

23:20:18 <@pleia2|odin> behold: http://princessleia.com/images/journalpics/caligula_mahjongg.jpg

Ok, so I chatted and goofed off too.

You can download the caligula mahjongg tileset here: http://princessleia.com/tools/caligula_tileset.png

You just drop that into /usr/share/pixmaps/mahjongg/ and start up mahjongg, then choose it from the tileset list.

When we first went to Ortino’s Northside both Michael and I had a good chuckle over the Monty Python Holy Grail Pale Ale from Black Sheep Brewery in North Yorkshire, UK. We didn’t order any though, since we figured it was all about the label and the beer would suck.

Tonight I finally broke down and bought a bottle.

And you know what? It was nothing overly exciting, but it was pretty good.

We also discovered that there is a gas station and little beer store on 29 about 3-4 miles from our house. Good to know. The beer store carries Victory (picked up a case of hopdevil) and a couple other good small brewery labels alongside the ever-present mountains of Coors Light and Budweiser. Apparenty they were pretty cleaned out because of the folk festival too, I’ll have to check back when they’re more well-stocked.