Love you myn (%

I came into work this morning and frowned at all the stuff I had on my desk. Spent most of the morning going through it and waiting for the morning mail to come so we could move on with our normal daily work (yay for fiscal month end). Now my desk is piled with so much stuff to do, and it seems like everything I process has some sort of problem that I don’t want to deal with. Dammit people, do things right! Learn how to count.

And it’s hot in here. They were having electrical problems this morning, no air conditioning, probably won’t be fixed until tonight or tomorrow. It’s still cooler in here than it is outside, but it’s just as humid, yuck.

I walked downtown to the gift shop during lunch where I knew they would have the gift I discovered this past weekend that I thought Michael would enjoy for this birthday. Unfortunately the shop is closed until July 11th! The owner is on vacation! Aah! Crap! His birthday is tomorrow and all the other shops in Lansdale suck and wouldn’t have what I am looking for anyway! Now I feel bad. I should have planned better.

*puts head on desk*

I’m exploring firefox extensions.

What do you use and why do you love it?

The weekend has been productive. Saturday was spent doing a lot of cleaning the house and organizing our bedroom and the new dresser. Michael spent the day outside working on the yard, finally got rid of the rest of our big mulch pile. He also attempted to clean the huge old rug that we had in the bathroom, but we ended up just throwing it away because it was too unmanagable.

In the evening we went out to Bed, Bath & Beyond to pick up some new bath mats. They are so nice and soft on my feet! While I was brushing my teeth Caligula walked into the bathroom and stopped on the first mat and started pawing and digging in it, it was adorable, I forgot how much he loves rugs of that kind. For dinner Saturday night Michael grilled some fillet mignon that we had picked up at the Whole Foods market, accompanied with a bottle of Francis Coppola Merlot, it was a delicious dinner.

Sunday was a beautiful day, and I didn’t want to stay home, so I hopped on IRC and asked some friends what their plans for the day were. said he wasn’t busy until the evening, and invited us over to her apartment. had plans to play D&D with friends, but the plans fell through and he was able to spend the day with us too.

I got to stop at CVS before lunch to make some prints of photos at one of the kiosks. I’d read about the Kodak kiosks, and there is one at the pharmacy next to where we grocery shop, but I’d never used one before. I’m impressed! They’re easy to use, and you can get photos from all sorts of different kinds of media, and it prints the pictures right away, the whole process only took about 10 minutes – most of which was just me clicking through the photos on the disk and seeing which ones I wanted and how many. Now we finally have some prints to give to our mothers!

Went out to lunch at Bennigans, then stopped at Trader Joe’s, which is a nice store, but I still prefer Whole Foods. We went back to the apartment and hung out all afternoon, got to play with Nibbler, who was in a great mood. Around 7, when had to leave for a baseball game and Michael invited us up to our house to enjoy the firepit. So drove me back up to our house, and we spent the evening at the firepit talking, had some grilled chicken for dinner. It was a great evening. Around midnight I left the guys to the fire to go to bed, it had been a busy day and I was so tired.

And now it’s the 4th of July. I emailed some friends to see if they had interesting plans, but haven’t heard back. So for now our plans are just to hang out at home and relax. Fine with me.

I love 3 day weekends.

While we were at Whole Foods the other night browsing the cheese section, I saw an oven thermometer. The temperature on our oven is off, usually about 50 degrees over, but it changes with what temp I set it at, very tricky, especially since I’m not the most experienced cook. Several people have suggested that I get an oven thermometer (or new thermostat), but I always forget when I’m at the store and never made it a priority. For $7.99 I couldn’t pass up buying this one.

When I used it the following night the results were amazing.

I made the buttermilk biscuits that I always make, but they came out perfect! No burnt bottom, no half-done insides, just perfectly browned all over.

After this success I decided to make a loaf of banana bread. I make breads often for breakfasts (yummie!) but up until now I had to be very careful when baking them, since the temperature was so goofy. Almost every time I ended up with a burnt bottom to the loaf.

My bread came out perfect!

I’m so happy! I think I’m going to tackle some more complex baking projects now that the temperature is sorted out, until now I was even afraid to bake a cake from a mix.

The other purchase was a dresser. It’s a used one, little beat up, but it wasn’t expensive and has a nice big mirror on it. And I needed it, right now my clothes are piled inside and on top of some plastic storage containers, and beside looking awful (even if they are in the closet where only Michael and I see them) the clothes piled on top sometimes are too appealing for Caligula to pass up at naptime. I hate finding furry clothes when I get dressed in the morning %) And I’m starting to get too many shirts for this method of storing to be reasonable, wrinkly clothes aren’t good in the morning either, I hate ironing, and would rather re-wash a shirt than iron it.

I figure we’ll keep this dresser until we get around to buying a whole new bedroom set, I’ll be nice to have a new bed too, but there are more pressing house expenses in the near future.

I went, I saw, I heard, I got the t-shirt.

I got out of work on Monday at 3 so we could hop on a train to Philly for the Meat Beat Manifesto show. The train ride was typical, when we left Market East Station we went directly to dinner at the Independence Brew Pub down the street. Dinner was great, we each had a glass of their IPA, which was good, a pretty standard IPA.

When we were finished with dinner I told Michael that I wanted to see Chinatown, since I’d never seen any chinatown (gosh I’m a country girl). So we walked down there and walked around for about 20 minutes. But it was hot, and we ended up going back to the brew pub to sit at the bar until the show.

While at the bar Michael started talking to a fellow who sat down near us with a laptop. He was really interesting to talk to, was in the city for some sort of educational conference. We talked about our work, and were we were from. Turns out that he owns a software development company in the area, working on educational software, he was mostly going to the conference to make connections to get more funding. Cool. When we told him about the concert we were going to see he asked if they were “like Tangerine Dream?” which got him telling us about a concert of theirs he went to in Manchester on Bonfire Night in 1976, nice!

We left the pub just before 7 to get to The Troc. There weren’t many people there when we got there, and the opening band wasn’t great. Here is a hint for kids starting a band: pretend guitars and basses don’t exist, I’ve heard EVERY SINGLE SOUND a guitar could ever make, and it’s BORING. At least they didn’t sing.

By the time Meat Beat Manifesto came out after 9 there were a lot of people there. We sat upstairs (21+ there), had a couple beers and enjoyed the show. And what a show it was! See Michael’s post about the show for the stage setup and his impressions. I’d never been to a MBM show before, they had a couple screens up for sort of video show to go along with the music. It was excellent! I got all geeked out when they did the songs with old b-movie scifi clips and samples (some of which I recongnised, prince of space! The brain that wouldn’t die!). And it was loud, sounded amazing, was all-around really fun. I’m so glad we went! After the show I told Michael that I wanted to go again %) Yesterday when we were coming home from work I even said “Well Balitmore isn’t *that* far away, probably wouldn’t be a much later night if we went to their wednesday show…” hehe.

We caught the last train to Lansdale (11:55) and got home around 1:30. I was exhausted, and crashed in bed immediately. Had to wake up at 6am for work, I’m such a wimp about lack of sleep, was attached to high caffeine drinks all morning %) But it was so worth it.

I felt sore when I got out of bed this morning. After leaving the air-conditioned bedroom I started feeling awful. My stomach was killing me and I just wanted to go back to bed. Alas, I have no sick days and figured it was just the heat making me feel lousy.

The cool car ride into work made me feel a bit better, and we stopped for Bagels on our way through Lansdale. I was still feeling a bit off when I got into work, my supervisor said I wasn’t looking the greatest.

“What a shame! You’re going to that show tonight!”

“Not tonight, tomorrow, on the 27th.”

“Today is the 27th… I just checked my calendar, I have you marked down as leaving at 3 today.”

“Oh my gosh, you’re right, I’m so daft sometimes!”

Now, I would have figured it out myself when I sat down to do my first invoice and noticed the date, but boy did I feel dumb, why did I think it was tomorrow?

As the morning went on I started feeling better in this nicely air-conditioned office. It’s lunchtime now and I feel fine. Yay!

So Michael’s going home to pick up a change of clothes and our tickets. He’s picking me up at 3pm and we’re taking a train down into the city. And then we can enjoy an evening of Meat Beat Manifesto at The Troc!

So we have tons of books, movies, and CDs. I’d like to catalog them somehow, but all the F/OSS that I’ve found either is clunky and under-developed or much more than I need (I’m not an actual library afterall).

I’ve gone through this several times, still no solutions.

Any suggestions before I decide to write my own in PHP?

Ah, weekend.

Friday night Michael and I drove down to Media for movie night at and ‘s place, also joined us down there. We arrived a bit late, so the pizza was there when we got there, and so we ate first. Pizza was good, a bit greasy (boy did I pay for it later). They also had some corn chips, bean dip from Trader Joe’s, and some great, spicy guacamole. After dinner we had some Trader Joe’s apple pie, yum! We thought about watching some movies (it was movienight afterall), but the apartment was a bit warm, so we brought chairs out on the porch where the breeze was nice and spent the evening talking.

It was a good night, didn’t get home until after 2am.

Saturday morning was spent doing nothing! The temperature outside was in the 90s, and I didn’t feel like cleaning the house. I did some laundry and puttered around on my computer, tweaking websites and making more customizations to my Debian install. I went to the bank in the early afternoon to deposit my first paycheck.

Around 3:30 we left to meet Bob at the Summer Magic Beer Dinner at the Iron Hill Brewery in North Wales. On our way over Michael wasn’t feeling so great because of the heat, and I wasn’t quite 100% either. We figured we’d meet up and see how we felt once in the A/C of the Brewery.

We ordered a couple sodas and a bread and cheese appetizer to calm our stomachs and get hydrated. They had a guy from the Magic Hat Brewery (horrible website) in Vermont there, and he had the whole hippie-vermont look to him, which was amusing. We ordered samples of the Magic Hat Anti Oxidant Acid Ale, which was insane, my first impression was that it tasted a bit like wine, but there were so many intense tastes that I never did manage to decide what it exactly tasted like, or if I liked it.

Then came “The Reserve Dinner.” It was amazing. One waiter said “I almost quit because of this!” (so he could become a customer). Our waiter said “I’m so jealous” when we were about halfway through the meal. And a couple servers bringing us our food said “save room for dessert, it’s wonderful.” The service was great, and I really enjoy servers who know about and love the food and drink they’re serving, and can get just as excited about it, really adds to the whole experience, you’re among like-minded people.

The appetizer was Caribbean Shrimp and Crab Fritters – fresh tomato salsa and spice green chile oil. Yum. We were almost finished when they brought out the first beer (which was actually the second, they didn’t have the first ready yet). The beer was Iron Hill’s Rauch Bier, which was my favorite of the evening, nice and light.

The main course was Hickory Pit Smoked Strip Sirloin – the sirloin, fried green tomatoes, tarragon potato salad and sorrel cream sauce. It was pretty good, a bit sweeter than I tend to like entrees, and we got the next beer (which was actually the first, finally ready), Iron Hill’s Saison. Again, a pretty light summery beer, which I thought was alright, but I managed to finish most of it %)

Then came dessert, Chocolate “Molten” Cake – raspberry chocolate chip ice cream, chocolate ganache and fresh raspberries. No description does it justice, it was heavenly, one of the best desserts I’ve ever had. Halfway through I was like “I don’t want to finish it! then this deliciousness will be gone forever!” Needless to say I finished it, but I took my time. Paired with the cake was Magic Hat’s Thumbsucker whose description was “This Vermont Imperial Stout’s bites if chocolate, toffee, and coffee marry perfectly with this dense decadent dessert” yowza. It was good, but so filling, I barely managed to finish half of it. We hung out a little while to digest and talk, left around 7.

I want to go again %D!

We got home around 8. When we pulled in the driveway we saw a dark gray cat with a blue collar that we’d never seen outside before. We slowed down and both said “um, that looks like… CALIGUL
A!” Michael stopped and I got out of the car to get a closer look (how could he have gotten out?!), the cat ran away from me, but had a guilty look while running to our front door, just like Caligula would have had. But as I got closer I became pretty sure that it wasn’t Caligula, it was too gray all over, and then it darted away from the house and toward the road. We went inside and there was Caligula, happy to see us, like normal. Phew.

I was exhausted and hot, crashed on the couch. Michael went outside to water the plants and then went into the basement, where a bad smell was coming from.

“I think something died down there. In the sump pump,” he said.

“Eww”

He got the flashlight and went down to further investigate.

At first he thought it was a dead rat, but it turned out to be a dead baby bunny %( He had to fish it out and get rid of it, yuck yuck, sad sad. Poor thing, must have fallen in and was unable to escape %(

After that I went to put away my cellphone and noticed I had missed a call, and had a voicemail. Oops, it rang while we were at the brewery, but it was so noisy there that I never heard it. The message was from , and were in town, staying with her and . They were going out to dinner and a movie, wanted to know if we wanted to come. We wanted to, hadn’t seen since October, but we were both too tired.

Instead we chilled out upstairs in the A/C and watched MST3K – Manos the Hands of Fate. I went to bed as soon as it was over.

Now it’s Sunday morning. No plans, but it’s hot again and I’m upstairs hiding in the A/C.

I should go take a shower. *Yawn*

If I have a “claim to fame” at all in the linux world it’s for my Debian Mplayer How-To.

It all started when I was running Debian Woody in early 2003. I spent an entire morning pulling my hair out trying to get mplayer compiled from scratch with the newly released quicktime codecs. There were no good how-tos. Finally I asked for help from some people I knew in a channel on freenode. A friend there walked me through the steps of where to put the codecs, and even how to make it into a .deb so installing and uninstalling it would be a breeze.

I then thought about how helpful the whole IRC log would be to people in my similar situation. I saved the log of his teaching, rewrote the entire thing, cleaned it up, made things clear, and voila! The first Debian Mplayer How-To was born.

After a few months it started picking up traffic. I did an update in March of 2003. It got more traffic. I updated in September of 2003, and that’s when a friend pointed out that it was the first hit on google for “debian mplayer”

Cool.

Then I switched to Gentoo for my primary workstation and let the How-To collect dust for all of 2004, and most of this year. With the exception of the live.com codecs I had up there (conflicted with newer g++ versions), it all worked fine. I have still been getting at least one email a month about it, and it’s not uncommon for new people I meet on IRC to ask me if I am “the one who wrote that debian mplayer how-to”

I felt bad about letting it collect dust, but I didn’t have a decent debian box or a whole lot of time for testing of the rewrite.

So last weekend I dropped Gentoo. Etch is now on my computer, and Thursday I opened up my How-To and installed Debian. But I grabbed the newest stable source for Mplayer (v1.0pre7) and newer live.com codecs. I ran into some trouble, which I eventually pinned down to not having vorbis-tools in the “apt-get install” line, oops. But other than that, it works.

Today I updated the site to reflect the changes I made in my own installed. I’m still using the older divx, realplayer, win32 and quicktime codecs, but I haven’t had any problems with these.

Yay! Finally updated!