I left work yesterday at 4pm. By 4:30 I was pulling up Woodland Ave when my cellphone rang.

“Hi, Beth[1]? I’m at your house.”

“Oh! I just pulled onto my street, be there in a sec.”

Michael came down when I pulled in the driveway (he’d been working upstairs) and greeted my aunt. The first news from her was that she had her purse stolen earlier that morning so she was thankful that we were putting her up for the night.

I gave her the grand tour of the house, garage and yard while Michael finished up some work. I think she really liked it, and apparently the pictures don’t do it justice at all, she said it was much bigger than the pictures made it seem.

We went out to dinner at Ortinos Northside, it was pretty good. We talked about family: the good, the bad and the downright wacky. It was good catching up, we’re all so busy and far apart that it’s rare that we get to sit down and talk about things.

After dinner we went back to the house and stayed up talking until around 10. I was pretty exhausted by then, it’s been a busy week. We let her stay in our room and set up a “bed” made of our spare blankets upstairs in the computer room. It actually turned out being fairly comfortable, and Caligula thought our blanket bed on the floor was the best thing ever, he was crawling through all the covers and attacking me while I was trying to sleep.

My aunt left around 6:30am this morning, among other things she needed to get a new driver’s license because of her lost purse, so wanted to get on the road early.

It was a good visit, and finally someone in my family has seen the house!

[1] Apparently I have nickname issues, different people in different parts of my life call me by different names. It can be confusing at times, especially when they get together and are all calling me by different names. Every time I sign an email I have to remember how I know the person and by what name they know me.

Yesterday evening when I came home Michael had the whole lawn mowed. It looks great.

Then he made dinner, chicken and veggie kabobs on the grill, yum!

He also did laundry and said he would do any other cleaning that needed to be done today.

Gosh I’m a lucky girl.

Last night I reinstalled Debian. I really wish I had taken notes last time I installed the system, since I’m going nuts trying to remember all the packages required to install the real nvidia drivers.

Why reinstall? I had two 80 gig drives in my system (Windows 40G, vfat 40G, Linux 80G), and we needed one to do backups with, since R2D2’s primary drive is starting his 120G drive is almost full. Besides I’d never use 160 gigs on my workstation, that’s what R2D2 media server is for.

We also needed to find a solution to our long grass problem. Our lawn mower died about a month ago, and Michael’s tried a bunch of things to fix it with no luck. We don’t have the receipt either, and didn’t follow up with those “send in receipt and registration card” things you need to do to be covered under the 2 year warranty (yes, we’ve learned our lesson). Now with my Aunt coming Thursday night we REALLY needed to get the lawn cut, I’d hate for family to finally visit and frown upon our long grass. At least it’s been a dry summer, the lawn isn’t as bad as it would have been last year.

Anyway, offered to let us borrow his push lawn mower! Yay! So we went over there to pick it up, and meet for the first time.

is a very small, cute person, cooked him good %) And he’s so big already, guess that’s what I get for waiting a month to see him.

So before thursday we need to: mow lawn, clean house, go grocery shopping. I’m going to have a busy night tonight. But it’s worth it %)

Michael and I moved into our house in January of 2004. His mother saw it the day we moved in, his father and brother finally saw it this summer.

No one in my family has seen it.

I’ve had a few aunts and uncles say they’d stop by while in the area. My mother drove through Philly on her way home from a trip once, didn’t bother to stop.

It’s somewhat disappointing. Buying a house is a huge thing and I’m so proud of our little wooded dwelling.

So on Thursday I’m getting my hopes up again that an aunt will drop by. My Aunt Meg was in Georgia visiting , , , and . She’ll be taking route 81 up through our area and wanted to know if we were busy Thursday night. She said she’d have time to stop and have dinner, see the house. Woo!

Hopefully this will work out, she’ll be calling me later and we’ll get some directions together and see when she wants to swing by. I figure we can take her out to Ortino’s Northside, since it’s nice an close.

I’ve had better weekends.

I got a lot of website work done, but I felt like a captive trapped in the upstairs Sunday. The heat was just as oppressive as Saturday, the only thing we did downstairs all day Sunday was make and eat dinner, after which I was all sweaty and had to go back upstairs (thank goodness Michael did the dishes!).

Saturday afternoon I went out to check the mail, and decided to figure out what the shiney thing at the end of our driveway was. It had been there for over a month, I figured it was some small piece of plastic or something, but as I approached I noticed it was a cat collar for “Merlin.” The collar had contact information for Merlin’s family. Merlin lives just a couple doors down, and I considered just walking over but instead gave the number a call. I got an interesting answering machine message:

“Sorry I\u2019m not here to take your call, I\u2019m out trying to make enough money to take care of all my cats!”

Oh great, a crazy cat lady! Regardless I left her my name, address and phone number, letting her know I had her cat’s collar.

She called me back Sunday evening, just as the sky was darkening and it was looking to rain. We met in my driveway, she was a thin, normal-looking middle-aged woman. She was surprised that I’d found the collar, and amused that it wasn’t even the most recent one he’s lost. Mostly she was really nice and happy to meet a neighbor. We spoke for a few minutes until the wind picked up and the rain swept in.

The rain. I was excited to have a thunderstorm. The weekend had been so miserably hot and the storm brought in some really intense winds. The thunder shook the house, the power flickered a few times before completely going out around 7pm.

So we abandoned out computers, shut down the beeping UPSes and headed downstairs. Luckily the rain had cooled down the air enough to make it tolerable. Michael got some candles and we made some cocktails. I spent the evening reading by candle-light and Michael played his drums. It was quite relaxing.

The power came back on around 9:15pm. It was somewhat disappointing. Our primary server for mail and web stuff shut down properly (it’s hooked up the UPS and so it knows when the power goes out) but some things broke when it came back up. Michael spent the rest of the evening working to fix that. I hopped on IRC to find our hub on Xelium completely down, but there was nothing I could do about it so I just went to bed (later finding out that just after the hub came back up the server was attacked by a botnet, arg! What a night!).

And now it’s Monday. The weather is cooler, it’s gray out. Mmmm perfect. I’m in a good mood.

This is now officially the hottest summer I’ve ever lived through. Maine certainly never got this hot.

I don’t do well in the heat, but over the past few years I’ve gotten better.

Yesterday was a bad one though. Most of the day I did ok, was doing work on some things, hiding in the air conditioned computer room. In the late afternoon I started feeling lousy, so we drove down the street to a nicely air-conditioned place and had a couple burgers. I felt great until we walked out of the restaurant. The heat hit me like a ton of bricks.

We got home, my head hurt. I took some advil and relaxed upstairs with my computer, hoping the headache would go away. Around 6:30 I gave up the fight, turned on the AC in the bedroom and went “to lie down for a bit.”

Michael came to check on me a couple times, brought me water and more advil. Around midnight he gave me some pajamas, since I had crashed in bed with my regular clothes on.

I woke up at 7:00 this morning. Yay me!

Hopefully today will be better. And I REALLY hope this is the last heat wave of the summer, it’s too much.

Our plans for Friday evening were ruined by the heat, so instead we ate some DiGiorno Pizza and chilled out with our computers upstairs in the A/C.

I needed a project.

I’ve had this DVD-ROM sitting on my desk for over a month. and gave it to us last month (thanks!) because we didn’t have one. The plan was to put it in our Mythbox, but Michael’s been so busy and the Mythbox has so many issues (currently the small harddrive might be dying) that he hasn’t wanted to open a can of worms by installing the drive until he has a lot of time to devote to it. I considered putting it in hour (my primary workstation) but it’s already got a cd-rw and 3 harddrives, so there is no more room.

The only other option was R2Q5. R2Q5 is my old workstation (and used to be Xelium IRC server), 450 mhz, 256M ram, 4M GFX card. I’d played DVDs back in Windows98 when I first bought the machine, so I figured it’d work OK. And I’d never played DVDs in linux, so I thought it’d be fun.

There are several media players that play DVDs in Linux, so I figured I could get at least one to run properly.

I started out with Totem because it’s installed in Ubuntu. I put the DVD in, and Totem froze up badly. It must have left things running after I closed the window for it because the whole machine was inexcusably sluggish after that, I could barely open a gnome-terminal. I finally just rebooted because debugging what went wrong was taking too long. Later in the evening I tried it again, this time launching it from a terminal so I could see the issues:

** Message: don't know how to handle video/mpeg, mpegversion=(int)2, systemstream=(boolean)false
** Message: don't know how to handle video/x-dvd-subpicture
** Message: don't know how to handle video/x-dvd-subpicture
** Message: don't know how to handle audio/x-ac3
** Message: don't know how to handle audio/x-ac3
** Message: don't know how to handle audio/x-ac3

I installed a bunch more codecs to see if I could find the right one. Googled a bunch. No luck. Totem has a GUI overhead though, so I figured it’d be to heavy anyway.

So I installed good ole mplayer. I got these errors:

X11 error: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)

MPlayer interrupted by signal 6 in module: flip_page
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.
successfully enabled DPMS
Xlib: unexpected async reply (sequence 0x7a)!

I really should have been smart enough to realize at this point that the “BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)” was the key to my issues.

Next I installed xine. That didn’t give errors so much as just failed to do anything when it got to:

libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_07_1.VOB at 0x0024ecc4
libdvdread: Elapsed time 0
libdvdread: Found 7 VTS's
libdvdread: Elapsed time 0

At this point I was slightly annoyed. I’d googled all over the place and gotten solutions about installing this or that codecs, making sure it’s the right version, and other such nonsense. Why is this so hard?

Then I used ‘s suggestion and installed ogle, which I’d never even heard of. That gave me a similar error that mplayer originally did:

X Error of failed request: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 141 (XVideo)
Minor opcode of failed request: 19 ()
Serial number of failed request: 58
Current serial number in output stream: 58

Duh. R2Q5 is an old machine, His graphics card is one we just found in
one of our hardware boxes and was good enough for when he was just a little old server. Who knows what happened to the 8meg card that I had in him when I ran DVDs ok in Win98. So I reduced the resolution to 640×480 and dropped the color to 16 bit. Restarted X.

Totem still had the same problem it did at bigger resolution. mplayer tried to play it, I could see some things, but finally crashes due to frame dropping (not unusual since I played the /dev/dvd, mplayer doesn’t much like dvd menus, I might have had more luck using dvd:// and finding the proper file to play, but I didn’t bother). ogle seemed to work, but the screen size was so small that half the picture went off the side of my screen, fullscreen mode was even worse. Finally xine worked, even with dvd menus, and after some moving around of the window it didn’t cut much of the movie off.

But it looked lousy. Jittery, not rendering well. It was watchable, but annoying. I went to the xine site’s speed fixes but I was already doing pretty much everything they suggested that was easy to do.

So R2Q5’s graphics card is too old. It’s not even worth the effort of finding a cheap old graphics card that’s slightly better than this one to use. Afterall, this is just my test machine and this was another test, the DVD-Rom won’t stay in this machine for long.

I wouldn’t call this adventure a complete failure though. I now know something about DVD playback in Linux, and although I’m a devoted mplayer user, I think xine will be my dvd player from now on.

I was adding ‘s cellphone number to my phone (just in case we decide to go clubbing in Philly sometime) when I realized that out of the 14 “Friends” listed in my phone I used IRC nicks for 9 of them. To be fair, 2 of them use their “real names” in IRC, so perhaps I could knock that down to 7. The other 5 (, , , , and ) I chat with in IRC but just chose not to use their IRC nicks because I know better in real life more I guess.

So, who else has a cellphone full of online alias’?

Dear 4th heat wave of the summer,

I hate you.

– Lyz

My printer has been very crankie today, keeps getting paper jams. This happens about once a month, it’ll have a day where it jams with every 5th sheet. It’s a good thing I’m in a mellow mood today.

I’ve been in a mellow mood all week. I think it’s just contentment. I felt great after getting so much done with 13thhour.net this weekend, and things are just going good. I even finally broke my “I don’t feel like reading” streak, currently reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, which loned me a couple weeks ago. Good book, I’m enjoying it.

Mostly it’s been an average week.

I got my hair cut on Monday, about 2.5 inches off. It’s nice and short again, I don’t need to put it up for it to be off my neck in the heat, it won’t take as long to blowdry, and won’t get tangled so much if I decide to drive with the windows down.

Mmm driving. I’m all used to driving the Rav4 now. It’s a nice little truck, but it does love to eat up the gas, especially when the air conditioning is on. OK, for what it is it doesn’t eat up the gas, but I’ve always driven cars, and they go for longer between gas station stops %) Not sure if we’ll go with another small SUV for our next car. We got the Rav4 because we wanted something we could bring big things home in, but more often than not we get things delivered anyway (like the dryer, since they took the old one too). And for driving in the mountains, but we don’t do that too much. Most importantly we got it because it handles well in the snow, but a nice AWD car could do that.

But we won’t be getting a new car until 2007 anyway, so I probably shouldn’t worry about it.

Work has been average. They have hot chocolate here at work, the little packets of Swiss Miss, it’s good, but not the best for me so I don’t like to drink it often. So the other morning I pulled out a packet of the No Sugar Added kind. I didn’t expect much, I am almost always disappointed and annoyed when I try any yummie thing that they try to make better for you. I was pleasantly surprised this time! It might taste slightly less chocolatey, but the normal stuff is pretty intense for just a small styrofoam coffee cup anyway. And this no sugar added stuff is not so bad for me, no worse than a coffee with loads of cream and sugar and caffeine.

The weather has been better. It rained Monday and Tuesday, today is slightly sunnier. They say it’s supposed to be hot again after this. This summer has been so hot and dry. I told Michael in mid July that we shouldn’t be all wimpy about the heat because the bad bit only lasts a couple weeks, but it’s been nearly a month now. Central air sounds better every day, maybe I should look into installation and energy costs. I know we’ve spent quite a bit just powering those silly window units this summer.

*goes to finish lunch*