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*

I was watching TV the other night, and a commercial for AOL came on. Like any self-respecting geek I have no love for AOL, but what did interest me was their new offer, free anti-virus software. I went to their site, and it’s not just a cheesy anti-virus scanner that they created, they’re actually giving away subscriptions to McAfee Anti-Virus to their members. Good! Finally! I’m surprised they didn’t do this earlier, afterall it’s their network that is abused when trojans start sending spams from Aunt Tilly’s Dell.

This reminds me of of a conversation I had a few months back on a mailing list. I was arguing about whose fault the virus epidemic is. These LUG members pointed their finger at “stupid users” but I was reluctant to blame them. People just aren’t warned in a proper manner how dangerous their computer is. My grandfather knows that you click this icon to do email, and that icon to go to his favorite game site. Beyond that he really doesn’t understand computers, when porn started pouring into his inbox he was overwhelmed. When popups attacked him on dial up he got annoyed. Eventually he got rid of his computer.

I don’t blame my grandfather for this. I blame the industry for giving him keys to a car and not telling him that he could get into accidents with it.

So I started thinking about how we can educate the public, but my only method of telling the world about things is the internet, doh! The people in most need of information wouldn’t be able to find this, even if they were told about it many wouldn’t even know where to put the address (what is an address bar?). So it’d need to be printed information, distributed… but by who?

I thought perhaps the computer stores should give it out to their customers, but telling people that owning a computer is a responsibility might turn them off to buying one. And who reads the documentation that comes with a computer? Only geeks. So the manufacturer wouldn’t be a good giver of such information.

“It’s the ISPs who must do this!” I thought. I think it’s really in their best interest to educate their customers, so why aren’t they? Do they think people will be scared off? I think it just needs to be taught properly, presented to the customer in a manner that says “here are the (basic) problems, and these are the steps you need to take to prevent them, we will help you” Or perhaps it’s too expensive? I think in the long run educating people when they first log on is a better investment than dealing with complaints and all sorts of junk from viruses on your network later.

Anyway, AOL took a step in the right direction, good job.

Still, when any family member is looking into a new system I say “Get a mac!”

Tonight we’re going to a New Years LAN party at a friend’s house. Mmm new years lan party.

*wanders off*

We got into the car yesterday afternoon to go to our friends house, turned on NPR and got going. We happened to turn it on in the middle of this report “‘Law and Order’ Star Jerry Orbach Dies”. Because it was the middle of the report, we didn’t realize what the point of it was, and were all “yeah Jerry Orbach is the man!”, while they went through his list of acomplishments in his life. Then it came “Jerry Orbach Died tuesday night of prostate cancer at the age of 69.” BUH WHAT!? I had no idea he was sick. He’s one of my favorite actors %( RIP Jerry Orbach.

We finally arrived at our friend’s place around 3, and then decided to walk to the used bookstore (only about 6 blocks away, and it was beautiful out).

The used bookstore was so much better than I expected. Every single book in the shop (hardcover, soft, originally expensive, cheap…) was $2. And they had a good scifi section! I was able to pick up every one of Robert Asprin’s Mything series that I didn’t have (a wonderful, punny series btw). I also picked up Living with Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, which I’ve finished already (and will write a review of). And The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, which has been recommended to me by about half a dozen people. I got my hands on a nice hardcopy of Great Expectations to replace my worn, falling apart, held together with packing tape copy. Also a few other books, some scifi, one about fish. I love used bookstores! We picked up two bags of books for under $30 %)

Too bad that bookstore is an hour from our house, good thing we have friends down there who give us a good reason for driving an hour to see a bookstore. I just hope they stay in business.

After the bookshop we went back to our friend’s house and had some delicious chili. It was more meaty than I expected, but I eat meat now, it’s all good %) Oh yes.. it was good. I helped myself to two bowls of it.

Today Michael got his new laptop (and I won’t steal is thunder by saying anything more about it). Because he’ll be using it as his primary workstation from now on we decided to move our computers around a bit. I get Michael’s Dell (named hour, with 2 gigs of ram, 160 gigs of harddrive space! But otherwise identical to my system), and my system will spend most of it’s time in our TV room. We figure we’ll be putting MythTV on it, and using the SoundBlaster Live front plate and remote, we’ll be able to easily watch digital movies in the TV room without hauling one of our systems down there %D It’s a bit big for just that role, but this way it’s still a working, useful PC, and we can still bring it to LAN parties and each have a system there %)

I’m very happy about this arrangement. I spent the afternoon cleaning up my home directory on R2D2 and moving it over to the Dell, then moving them around the computer room. *pats hour*

Now I’m going to go make some dinner.

I feel as thought the quality of my blog has gone down. I don’t have as much time for it as I used to, so when I sit down my thoughts tend to pour out in a jumbled mess. This jumbled mess isn’t helping my writing skills any. I think I am going to try to take more time and put more thought into these entries from now on.

I am excited about the new year starting.

This past year has had a lot of wonderful things happen, we bought a house, got a lovely cat, I started working again, we’ve met some new interesting people. My life rocks %)

But it’s also been difficult at times. With a new house there are all sorts of stressful problems have occurred, and unexpected expenses. Then I’ve had to watch my father’s health deteriorate, and my sister get into all sorts of trouble with the law. I watched my other sister start failing in college and then be force to take time off because of my father’s illness, I watched my mother’s marriage fall apart and the subsequent mess after that. Then last month I had to see my father withering away in a hospital bed, and this month I had to deal with his passing.

The end of this year has really got me down, and it’s not been so easy keeping myself from being depressed. But I’ve had some long conversations this week, and worked through some of the difficult things.

I’m feeling MUCH better now %)

I was going through some old journal entries today, and discovered this one. It’s when I had finally decided on the breed for our new kitten. When I saw this entry I was especially struck by the picture of the Mau I had posted. It’s a photo of an award-winning smoke colored mau, and he is nearly identical to Caligula. I’ve seen lots of pictures of adult smoke Maus, they come in a variety of shades and markings, so finding one so similar to my kitty is amusing. It made me think back to when we bought him, the breeder had mentioned that they considered selling him to someone who would show him because she believed he had that potential with his well defined spots and nice coloring. I assumed she told this to everyone %) </bragging-about-caligula>

Today we’re planning on going to Media to meet up with some friends. A new used bookstore opened up near them, and they are making some of their much talked about chili. Now that we’re eating beef again I can enjoy it! Since we’re supposed leave around 1 I should probably go get showered…

*wanders off*

Over the Christmas holiday weekend I spent some time eating fish, snuggling by the fire, reading, and fighting with gentoo unstable.

Apparently Gentoo Unstable is normally fine to use, but over the past couple weeks I’ve encountered a few problems that were making me crazy. I considered reinstalling to get back to stable. I even thought of going back to Debian.

Not to say that I don’t enjoy wrestling with computer problems from time to time, but I work a lot now, and some days I really don’t want to have to fix things.

The first problem was my sound. It’d been a bit broken (had to manually modprobe rather than from startup script) for a couple weeks, and neither Michael nor I had the time to try and fix it. Eventually I found the problem was with module-init-tools and my kernel version (yay gentoo forums!). I fixed it by downgrading module-init-tools (although now Michael tells me there is a fix out). Next I had problems while updating, compiles of a few programs (pango, gtk+, mozilla) failed me with freetype errors. I couldn’t find a solution from the forums, but ended up downgrading the freetype package, and that seemed to fix things.

We don’t have many plans for this vacation week, mostly just relaxing, reading and playing with computers %)

Oh and it snowed last night %D About a half of an inch, yay snow!

I haven’t been feeling very “me” lately.

It’s probably because this month has just been lousy. When things get lousy I get lazy and eat food that’s bad for me, I stop doing things I enjoy and end up sleeping and watching TV. Although these things feel right at the time, they end up just making me feel more lousy in the end. When I went to the doctor a couple weeks ago I learned I had put on 6 pounds. That’s no good.

Now I have a week off of work, I hope that I can fix myself in that time, and maybe this cold will finally go away!

Enough depressing stuff.

Tonight we’re going to Michael’s grandparent’s place for the traditional italian seven fish on Christmas Eve dinner. Mmmm seven fishes.

I love Christmastime, and it’s the first Christmas in our new house! The first Christmas with little Caligula!

So I’m thinking about what I want for Christmas. It may seem late for that, but since we don’t actually celebrate Christmas as Christmas, why be on time? It’s just an excuse to buy a new toy. After talking to a friend of mine who recently got a palm I remembered… hey I want a PDA that reads digital books! So that is now my quest, to find a good one for under $200. I don’t need all sorts of bells and whisles, just the ability to hold a few books in text format, decent battery life, and I’d appreciate the ability to sync it up with linux (although having to boot into Windows wouldn’t be the end of the world). And I want to buy new, none of this ebay stuff, I don’t have time to deal with problems that might arise from such a purchase.

Any suggestions?

My nose won’t stop running, I keep getting sinus headaches, I’m coughing my lungs out, everything aches.

Goddammit I have a cold again!

Even worse, this week is a crazy busy week at work because of the holiday, more calls to make, less time to make them. Oh and if I call in sick to work my co-workers will hunt me down and murder me for leaving them with so much to do :D

Today we had the lamest office party ever. We had to provide the food (except for some cold cuts, which the boss complained were not given to us on a discount because we bought in bulk). And since we’re so busy, we needed to work the whole day. Bleh.

Now I’m gonna go watch Nova *yay*

Last night’s dinner at La Famiglia Ristorante was great. I wasn’t so sure how it’d be, because I have only casually met a couple people from that office, and I’m horrible shy with people I don’t know. We got there a few minutes early, only one other guy was there. Soon enough more people arrived, and we enjoyed a few glasses of Chardonnay from the open bar. I got to meet some of the people Michael works with at the company. Had to sit down often though, heels were a horrible idea! We encountered two other women who were complaining about how their shoes hurt their feet, sheesh. Dinner was amazing, and so was my bottomless wine glass (which made walking in heels even more of a challenge). We got to go down to the wine cellar and it was huge, they said there were over 20,000 bottles of wine, ranging from $10 to well over $1000. Nice. Dinner was delicious, and we had good company at our table, it was fun. I sat next to a guy from the New York office who told me all about how much New York has cleaned up since 9/11. Later in the evening I tried some Grappa in a cute little grappa glass, which I had tried before at a friend’s house, but this had a bit more flavor to it, wow it’s some crazy stuff! Dessert was nice too, it was all nice. I guess I was quiet for most of the night, so my shyness did show up, but I had a nice time. We left a little after 11, and I was pretty toasted. Yay for bottomless wine glasses! And so ended my first corporate office party.

Today I spent the day making cookies (which I took pictures of, but they’re unaccessable at the moment). Made some Sugar Cookies and some Christmas Sand Tarts. Yum yum! Then I made some spaghetti sauce, which we had with dinner. It was a good day, and I was happy to get a lot acomplished that I kept putting off. Never did get around to doing Christmas cards though. Oh well.

While I was thinking about Christmas cards, I also decided to start looking around for some stores that made prints of digital photos. I’d heard that pharmacies are really trying to make their digital processing services more popular, and I ended up on the CVS website. It’s pretty cool, you can either go into the store with some sort of digital media (flash card, floppy disk, cdrom, even some photo taking cellphones) or submit the digital photos online with a nice little form, and then go to the store to pick up the photos the next day. This page explains it. And for only 29 cents per print! I’ll get some nice photos together and try out this service.

We got our first accumulated snow tonight!

We have a nice fire going downstairs, I am going to go down and enjoy it for a bit.

*wanders off*