Tonight I tried a new recipe that I found online. It was for Chicken & Broccoli Manicotti. Once I figured out what manicotti was I was ready to go. We picked up the needed ingredients at the grocery store on Sunday and tonight I made it up.

Success! But I didn’t take a picture because I was hungry. It actually looked just like the picture from the recipe site (miracle!) but without the garnish. I’m really happy it came out well, even if a bit of work is involved in getting it prepared. Oh and the manacotti weren’t as hard to stuff as I had thought %)

I was talking about food with some people this morning. We got talking about poptarts because a Swedish friend of mine is coming to the US in a couple months and he’s very excited about “getting poptarts for cheap.” Apparently the only way he can get them in Sweden is from some import store and they’re really expenaive there. So I said “I don’t like poptarts unless they’re drown in butter.” I got disgusted reponses from everyone. Sheesh, I thought it was a fairly common thing, they’re too dry otherwise.

Actually, I don’t eat poptarts anymore, after they’re covered with butter they’re still not very delicious, and that’s too much bad stuff (fat, calories, etc) to waste on something that’s not wonderful.

So how about bubbly milk? Everyone knows milk tastes better after you shake it up and there are bubbles. No? Well it’s true.

At least I don’t put ketchup on my eggs.

Our MythTV box is up and running. Michael spent a good part of the weekend working on it (details here, it’s really cool). So now I can watch any movies from our digital library on the tv with a remote *glee*

This also means that the media server is stable again. I always run irssi from our media server, but when Michael took it down to move it and turn it into a Myth box I started chatting from a friend’s server, and R2 was offline for most of the week. Now I can run everything locally again. Best of all, the media server is on Gentoo now, and has a much newer version of irssi than the debian stable box had, and it supports connecting to servers with SSL! So now both me and R2D2 are using SSL to connect to Xelium.

For R2 I just use the /connect -SSL fire.xelium.net 6697 method, since his irssi session is pretty simple, he only joins one server and two channesls, but my irssi configuration is a bit more complex, so I needed to edit my ~/.irssi/config file:

servers = (
{
address = "fire.xelium.net";
chatnet = "xelium";
port = "6697";
autoconnect = "yes";
use_ssl = "yes";
}

So now I am a secure connection!

In other IRC news, we’re adding as an IRCop on Xelium this week. It’s been a long time in coming, he’s been quite helpful to the network, and has a good head on his shoulders. And right now we need another oper, we’ve all been so busy (or sucked into WoW) lately.

Today was my last day at the temp work assignment that I’ve been at for over 4 months. I have a few options now, I need to call a company in Huntingdon Valley tomorrow, and the temp agency is going to set me up with an interview later this week. I shouldn’t be unemployed for long, but a few days off are nice, especially in the middle of winter when I am going a little crazy.

A friend of mine recently loaned me the first four books of the Harry Potter series. I kept meaning to read them, but was reluctant to buy them when so many people had copies. This friend loaned me the UK Editions. UK Editions? Apparently they’re different, most notably the title of the first is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone rather than “Sorcerer’s Stone.” So I finished reading the book and couldn’t figure out what they could have changed, plot points? Names? Oh no, they didn’t “translate” it into American English did they?

Yes! They did!

I found this page which describes the differences. I HATE WHEN THEY DO THIS! Now I realize I might speak and understand English English better than your average person because I love britcoms and have lots of brit friends, but this book isn’t hard to read, and most of these British words and terms are easy to figure out (changing room vs locker room, car park vs parking lot, sweets vs candy, dustbin vs trashcan). Why do we need to Americanize everything? Why not expose people to a bit of British culture? You’re reading a book, which means you’re not entirely opposed to putting forth some effort to entertain yourself (rather than just sitting in front of the television). Rawr.

Yesterday I was looking for something to work on, and pulled my IRC Hacks book off the shelf. I had a Hack #55 bookmarked that gave info about how to write a currency converter IRC bot. The problem? The example is in java, so I shelved it until I had time to figure out what they were doing. So yesterday I went to work on it. It used xmethods.net‘s Web Services. What the heck is a Web Service? How would I use it with Perl? I was excited to discover this article that not only explains it, but gives an example of how painfully simple it is with SOAP::Lite.

use SOAP::Lite;

print $result;

I say “painfully” simple because I’ve casually been looking for a currency conversion method for R2D2 for over a year. Everyone I’ve talked to about it said their scripts, or ones they know of used xe.com to get the current rates. But as far as I can tell xe.com says “NO NO NO!!!” to automatically leeching their info with scripts, and I don’t want to break TOS with my little bot. But this solution is so simple! And perfect! And why didn’t I know about it before?

<@pleia2onEarth> !convert eur usd
<@R2D2onHour> 1 eur is worth 1.3104 usd

I’ll probably spend some time today editing the script a little so it can do actual currency amounts too.

*wanders off*

EDIT: Well that didn’t take long, I’ve updated the script with the currency amount conversions. Now I can do:

<@pleia2onEarth> !convert 100 usd sek
<@R2D2onHour> 100 usd is worth 692.1200 sek

It still works the old way too.

The whole script can be found on the modular r2d2 page, or by clicking here.

I was sitting at work earlier this week, people came back to the office after their daily lunch trip and someone had bought a strawberry shake.

A strawberry shake is something my father asked for while we were visiting him at the hospital. Annette went to go get one, asked at the cafeteria, at the breakfast lunch stand, she was gone for about 20 minutes. She came back with all she could find, a strawberry yogurt drink. He hated it. Here he was, in his hospital bed, less than a couple weeks to live, and all he wanted was a strawberry shake, and I didn’t get it for him. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of guilt, and almost burst out crying there at my desk.

I attributed this near outburst to being so tired, and being moody, but I suspect there is more to it than that. It wasn’t about a strawberry shake, I think I’m guilty about not being there until the end. For having the feelings I had, for not visiting more, for not calling more, and for rationalizing all the reasons for these things. I didn’t think I’d feel guilty, I guess this is a part of the mourning process.

When I got home that day I pulled an envelope out of the mailbox, it contained my father’s Death Certificate and his Obituary.

“Carl A. Krumbach

SOUTH PORTLAND — Carl A. Krumbach, 53, of South Portland, died Tuesday, December 7, 2004 at a Biddeford nursin facility.

Carl was born in Englewood, N.J., the son of Otto and Jean “Lohman” Krumbach. He grew up in Ridgewood, N.J., where he was educated and a graduate of Ridgewood High School and recieved his bachelor’s degree from Bethany College in West Virginia in 1973.

In 1978 Carl established the James W. Cater Jr. Communications Scholarship at Bethany College, which continues to present annual awards to a deserving student at Bethany.

At age 19, he and his brother journeyed around the world and kept a journal of his travels. Carl worked as a Corporate benefits Consultant for Metropolitan Life and Unum for 16 years.

He is a member of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Gorham.

Survivors include three children…”

Receiving this in the mail was an interesting ending to this day.

Man, I’m tired.

I haven’t slept well this week, I don’t know why. I cut out all caffeine Tuesday in an attempt to sleep better, but it hasn’t really helped (and it’s made it quite hard to make it til 5pm at work). I thought I’d be exhausted enough wednesday night to sleep well, but I didn’t. I don’t really have more than usual on my mind, I’m not worried about things. I know I was taking NyQuil for my cold for a while, maybe my body is saying “GIMMIE QUILLY 2 SLEEP KTHX!”

Zzzzz….

There are so many things I want to write about, but I can’t stay focused, even catching up on email tonight was a struggle.

*Yawns*

Maybe it has something to do with the weather. It’s been warm (near 70 today, IN JANUARY!), humid and gloomy out.

Going to snuggle now.

So I finally say Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2. They were fun to watch, definately Tarantino movies though, which makes them hard for me to rate on a 1-10 scale. They’re on the high end, but I really can’t decide if I just liked them or loved them. Maybe I’ll need to watch again in the near future (they say you notice more things the second time anyway).

We also picked up a couple fish this past week. They’re a couple of White Skirt Tetras. I decided that I really like tetras, they’re decently sized fish for our 35 gallon tank (grow to about 2 inches), they’re pretty, they school, and the angelfish don’t bother them. I’m really happy with how our little fish community is coming along, Michael is doing a fabulous job with it (he takes care of the fish, I take care of the cat).

Speaking of the cat… I read an entry of ‘s, where she talked about catster.com. I quickly learned that it was a site for showing off your cat, and it gives you the ability to make little blogs for your cat. Ahh cat blogs! Now Caligula already has his own subdomain, but how could I resist giving him a catster site so he could link up with his friends? I couldn’t! So now Caligula has his own catster.com site: www.catster.com/?105180.

While surfing the web yesterday I discovered an IFilms.com page which gave a 3 minute glimpse into the “Making of Wallace and Gromit” the Movie! After watching it I updated wallaceandgromit.net and then I went off to read livejournal entries. I then began to wonder if there was a wallace and gromit community. There must be! But I can’t seem to find one. Very strange, Wallace and Gromit tend to have a pretty geeky cult following, and many of the people I know on livejournal are geeky. Well, I decided to start one of my own (wallaceandgromit was too long by one letter). I was going to update the community with all the posts I had posted on wallaceandgromit.net over the past year, but apparently you can’t backdate on communites. Oh well. I’ve updated it with the latest one, and I’ll continue to update it with whatever I put on wallaceandgromit.net. Of course anyone can post news and information, and I think with the release of the film in October of this year the piles of information coming in is going to become unmanagable for just me %)

Besides making kitty websites and wallace and gromit communities yesterday, we went over to Michael’s mother’s house for a “family gathering” … which I’m not terribly fond of. I only knew a few people, and I tend to be shy in big groups anyway. We felt obligated to go though, since we hadn’t seen Michael’s mother since before Christmas, and we needed to exchanged gifts. Family gatherings are always exhausting, even when I don’t mingle much, and this was no exception, but we did get our gifts %) His mother bought us a very nice set of silverware (we have what I like to call “the bachelor set” right now, they don’t exactly match), and some nice knives. Yay! She even bought Caligula a few gifts. A stuffed animal cat that meows or purrs when you touch it (he kept attacking it when we brought it home), a “Thing in a Bag” which makes noise and make Caligula go crazy trying to figure out what’s going on, and his favorite (ok, my favorite)… a remote controlled mouse!

I also got a movie of him playing with it (sorry for the lousy quality, the filesize would have been huge, or the movie really short if I had done it at a high quality): http://caligula.bevilacqua.us/movies/caligulaMouse.avi

Now I need to go get ready to go out from some Mexican food
with friends %d

*wanders off*

I often write book reviews for publishers so they will send the Philly Chix group more free books. I thought for a while that them sending books for “just a simple review” was a loss on their end, but I’ve wisened up a bit. Reviews aren’t “simple” for most people, with a job and other hobbies reading a whole book and taking a look at it objectively is time-consuming. Now that I have a job and my free time is eaten up before I can blink, I realize this.

Anyway… I write reviews, and I really enjoy it. Recently I wrote a review for Unix Shells By Example, and the publisher asked me if she could use a quote from my review on their website. Cool. Then earlier this week she sent me a mail asking if I’d be willing to contribute “A few sentences” about what I use linux for for their catalog at the Linux World Expo next month. Cool! I quickly wrote a blurb and today she mailed me back:

Elizabeth, precisely!! This is excellent. You certainly do have a talent for writing.
[I can't say that about all computer gurus! :}

*goofy grin*

Perhaps a compliment such as this wouldn’t make most writers excited, but it did me, probably because I never seriously looked at myself as a writer. I always struggled in school to be successful in “Language Arts” and I never got very good grades. Looking back I think my trouble was mostly that I lack the type of creativeness needed to write fiction. If I read through my old reports, I wasn’t such a bad writer, and one of my English teachers even got a non-fiction story (about my cousin and I) published in our yearly school magazine. Still, the “I suck at english” idea has suck in my head for years, no matter how much I’ve worked on improving my skills.

Maybe all that hard work is starting to pay off.

Now I just need to become brilliant in a technical field that doesn’t have a good book and hit this publisher up for a book deal %D! Hehe…

Bedtime now.

*wanders off*

Well, this year isn’t starting out as wonderful as I wanted it to, but it’s not all bad.

Sunday I was feeling restless, I think it was because it was the last day of my vacation. So I asked Michael if he was in the mood to go out to dinner. It was up to me to find a place to go.

So I hit restaurant review sites, clicked through a few until I stumbled upon The Epicurian in Phoenixville. It actually had a website (all restaurants should!), with a menu online, and best of all an extensive beer list! So we decided to check it out.

The drive there wasn’t difficult, but downtown Phoenixville isn’t the nicest place in the world so I got a little worried. Luckily The Epicurian sat away from all that in a nice looking plaza.

The food and drinks were delicious! I stuck to my favorites of “Delirium Tremons” and “Lindeman’s Peche” for drinks, but Michael tried a couple ales that he hadn’t tried before. For dinner I had the “Spinach Fettuccini & Crab” yum yum! I was happy with how much crab they put in it, as I’m used to places being stingy with it, but I could only finish about half of it, it was quite a plateful. Michael ordered the Filet Mignon, which looked really tastey. I couldn’t pass up dessert, and so I finished off my dinner with a slice of 5-layer chocolate cake (half of which came home with me).

It was a great meal. My only complaint is the beer pricing was a bit more steep than I’ve seen elsewhere (like The Drafting Room), but I blame that on there being less of a demand for it out as far as Phoenixville, The Drafting Room locations are closer to the city. At least they had the brews I wanted! %)

I rarely stop reading a book in the middle because I dislike it (the last one was Preternatural, awful awful!). I guess I’ve been lucky recently to have good recommendations from friends so I don’t often stumble upon bad books. When I saw a copy of The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling on the bookshelf at my friend’s house I asked what he thought about it. “I don’t know, I haven’t read that one yet.” I decided to give it a shot, it sounded really interesting (see wikipedia entry here). It is alternative history, has all sorts of characters I thought would be interesting, the whole premise of computers being developed in the 1800s was very interesting, and Gibson is one of the authors! I started reading it on New Years Eve.

It’s horrible.

I thought it was just going to be a slow beginning, but I’m 160 pages into it and I just don’t care about it. The authors have me so swamped in techno-babble and silly details that it’s difficult to even keep track of the plot at times (this is common with Gibson, but this book isn’t good enough for me to care to spend the time to sort it out). I kept reading hoping it’d get better, and then I hit amazon.com to read reviews. These people actually finished the book and most had feelings that echoed mine, and no, it doesn’t get better. The research is detailed, so it felt like it could have really described a 19th century world, and I was amused at the use of Historical figures, but I need a good plot.

Very disappointed.

So I picked up Robert Asprin’s Myth-ing Persons instead. Yay it’s fun! I love these Myth books.

We took down the Christmas Tree yesterday. We’ll be finding needles until next Christmas no doubt. Caligula seemed sad to see the tree go, he loved hiding under it and attacking the lower branches.

This morning I woke up to find that BirthdayBot (a Perl script that queries a mysql database of birthdays and if it finds a match it logs onto IRC an changes the topic in #13thHour to a Happy Birthday $nick! message) didn’t work last night. I just dropped the script into my home directory on minute and set up a crontab so it’d run daily. It’s been running, but today was the first day it actually had to go in and change the topic in #13thHour for a birthday (happy birthday !). It gave me an error relating to the module about binding to an address on the current computer. After some digging I discovered that it’s a weird thing that older perl scripts do, so I went ahead and upgrade the Net::IRC module. And now it all works again. *pats BirthdayBot*

Today is my last day of vacation, and we don’t have any plans. I’ve finished up the computer projects I wanted to finish, and did a lot of little things I wanted to do on this vacation, so I’m content.

Now I’m going to go read for a bit. *wanders off*

Oh I hurt. But it’s all good, I had fun last night.

We arrived at and ‘s place around 8. I bought my desktop system, and Michael brought his laptop. It seems laptops were the popular choice for this lan party, only two of us had desktop systems out of about a dozen people. Sheesh. The game of choice for the evening was original UT, yay! I played a bunch early in the night (and won lots because I rock), but then after I’d had a couple beers and a fruity drink I decided to stop playing before my winning record was broken ;) Around 11 I gave my online friend Steve a call (drunk dialing!) because he was housesitting and I figured he could use some company.

There was lots to drink. Our traditional fruity drinks, ice, strawberry mix, vodka and tequila, all mixed in Nita’s new fruity drink maker. I passed on the grappa but had a few shots of Slivovitz (a plum brandy, 100 proof!), boy that stuff was good. I seem to recall telling my fellow partiers that I “felt like I was in outer space” after having my 3rd shot. That led to a conversation about planets o_O Gosh we were drunk. I ate lots of snacks, including the awful cheese puffs. Baerana brought some really yummie cheesecake and carrot cake. I enjoyed some of the carrot cake but passed on the cheesecake (wasn’t sure my stomach could handle it at that point). Best of all, we succeeded in getting drunk. He was really knocking back those fruity drinks, even some grappa and Slivovitz!

Ah good times, and Michael got a few pictures.

Some of the people were playing poker.

I (far left) was playing UT with people in the livingroom.

And this is Stark the kitten (never got a picture of her brother, he’s a bit skittish)

It was after 3 by the time we left. I was pretty drunk, yay for sober Michael driving us home! Thankfully I grabbed a bottle of water before leaving their house, so I was able to hydrate myself a little. When we got home I crashed on the couch until Michael suggested I move to the bed. I went to bed and fell asleep immediately.

What a great night %D I’m really glad they had us over.

I woke up this morning at 9:30. Got up, checked email, puttered around, and then went back to bed because I felt yucky. I got up for a second time around noon. Gah my day is mostly gone now! I think I’ll spend it snuggled up with a book and a cat.

Happy 2005 everyone!

*wanders off*