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*

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!