I got up at 5:30 this morning, and stumbled into a conversation about Aphex Twin, specifically the Richard D. James album, which took an interesting turn.

< Bibliomaniac> I am now very interested in hearing it. I really enjoy the Ambient Works CDs. pleia2, you heard these albums before?
<+pleia2> Bibliomaniac: yeah, we have two copies of volume 2, heh
<+pleia2> just my boyfriend has volume one though
<+pleia2> he’s really really into ambient
< Bibliomaniac> Oh sweet! I am really really into ambient. What other artists does he listen to?
<+pleia2> Bibliomaniac: a lot of Steve Roach, Robert Rich
< Bibliomaniac> I am engrossed with ambient. WHOA!
< Bibliomaniac> YOu serious? I have most all of Roach’s and Rich’s albums.
<+pleia2> %o!
< Bibliomaniac> Yeah, Vidna Obmana, too.
<+pleia2> yeah!

Wow neat. I think this is the first time I’ve randomly run into an ambient fan, and it was in the #GameMusic channel that I don’t talk in much in. So I spent a while talking to him, and to my surprise I think I was actually able to hold my own in the conversation. I did mention to him that I hadn’t been learning about ambient music for too long, and several times said “…of course my boyfriend would know more…” but I surprised myself with my competence. See, I shouldn’t downplay my knowledge so much, I know more than I think I know. So while we were talking I decided to make up a list of all Michael’s CDs. Then, list in hand, we decided to share some music. He sent a few Jonn Serrie albums, and was nice enough to rip them in ogg! Yay I love Jonn Serrie! Also sent some Liquid Mind, which I’ll have to check out after listening through this Serrie.

Then since I had made a list of Michael’s CDs I decided to make a list of my own too. That’s when I realized that I have a lot of crap. So I removed a bunch of crap from my collection that I don’t listen to anymore (I should sell it or give it away), and kept some crap in because I sometimes might be in the mood for it, and ended up with my list.

I might put together some sort of database for this CD stuff. I looked around a bit and the only linux app I could find that might reasonably do this was KmusicdB, which requires lots of KDE libs, and uses postgreSQL. That would be too much of a pain I think, especially since I’d want Michael to be able to use it too. Maybe on a local box running apache I can write my own with mysql and php, at least that would be easy to put on a website someday if I felt so inclined.

There was a little bit of touchup painting to do in the spare bedroom, so I spent some time today and did that. It’s looking nice, except for behind the radiator. The wrench broke while Michael was trying to unscrew it. Yeah, wrench broke, stupid thing. So we’ll need to get a nicer new wrench and move the radiator when we have a chance. The room looks good though, the bright blue was just too much, white is good!

It’s been raining here all day long. I almost had forgotten that it rains during the day too, since all season I’ve gotten used to “hot and sunny during the day, thunderstorm in evening” cycle. It’s nice to have a rainy day sometimes, and somewhat amusing, since now we have a moat:

I think I’ll make some Boca Burgers for dinner. Yum.

*wanders off*

Bill One: from the hospital

EMER RM WO/DOC LEV 3 – 502.00
TRAY/SET-SUTURE – 114.50
SUTURES – 32.50
NEOMYCIN/POLYMYX/BACITR – 1.00

Bill Two: from the ER doctor

DR. HARRIS / ER EXAM-2 – 79.00
DR. HARRIS / WOUND REPAIR – 233.00

Bill Three: from local physician

SUTURE REMOVAL – 55.00

Grand Total For 7 stitches: $1017

Isn’t this a bit excessive?

I went outside yesterday afternoon to check the mail and when I was coming in I was distracted by my veggie garden. It had veggies growing in it!

Green beans!

So I decided to pick some.

I was pretty surprised with how well they had grown, considering that all I had really done to nuture the beans was plant the seeds and do a little weeding. The cucumbers are growing too, not large enough to pick yet, but I figure in about a week ago they’ll be ready.

Now that we had lots of fresh beans, we decided that we should have a yummie fresh veggie dinner. Then called and suggested we do a bit of a pot luck dinner. So we invited them over for an evening dinner.

Since we had most of the afternoon to kill we decided that it’d be good to start painting the spare bedroom. We were able to get the first coat on in a little over an hour. We’ll probably finish that up today, then I can spend Monday doing final touches. We’re pretty sure now that we want to turn that room into a “media” room, with the TV in there, a computer that will be able to play movies from our network on our TV, maybe pick up a couple loveseats.

So we finished up painting, got cleaned up and started making our part of the dinner. Michael headed out to Limerick to the Dutch Oven Bakery, which has amazingly yummie baked foods. Everything came together nicely around 6pm for them to arrive. They brought some super yummie turkey enchiladas (which I definately need to get the recipe for). We had a nice evening with them, ended up driving out to Sellersville in N-Tropy’s new car (which has an mp3 player!) to see a house they are putting a bid on, it’s beautiful! Hopefully they’ll be able to buy it %)

After talking with N-Tropy, I once again had my interest sparked by NetFlix. We don’t watch a whole lot of TV (and don’t have cable), but many nights it’d just be nice to relax and watch a movie. Blockbuster is so expensive, renting is a pain (always busy), bringing movies back is a pain. I think $22/month might actually be quite reasonable for NetFlix.

In other news, the documentation that I wrote up for Bitlbee was accepted, yay! It’s now in their -devel version (as of 20040710), and I get to be in a CREDITS file. Please excuse my geeky excitement %) It’s pretty neat to be involved in a project like this, even if my contribution is only the documentation sort, I really should get more involved in other projects. This week I’m definately going to emmerse myself in all things XML.

*wanders off*

These past couple days have been pretty productive computer wise, which is good because it’s been too hot to do much around the house.

I got GPG set up and working nicely with mutt yesterday afternoon. I had tackled this about 8 months ago, learning lots about GPG, but then we moved our mail and I never got around to setting it up again and learning more. Well after a few snags and a 45 minute “Help!” session with we were able to figure out any problems and questions I had. Seems I have only signed one key too, I should go to a keysigning sometime.

After about a half dozen emails with the head developer of BitlBee, I ended up joining their IRC channel on OFTC a few days ago. They seem like a nice group of guys, and it turns out they needed some help with documentation. Hey I love writing documentation! So I offered to help them polish up their quickstart guide, which apparently had been put together a while back and never really edited because it was pretty sufficient. So I spent some time this morning working on it. Still have a bit of work to do putting it in XML format, but it feels good to be somehow contributing to a real project that I love and want to see continue.

I definately need to learn more about XML, and DocBook, definately need to learn more about DocBook if I’m going to be writing much documentation.

I also spent a bit of time making little edits on my website after pointed out a grammatical error in my Jedi Test. Well it’s not *my* fault, Ocean-Saurian wrote it! But I probably should have proof read it first. Anyway, he then said that a bunch of his co-workers were browsing my website, that reminded me that my site gets traffic (imagine that), so I should probably go through it and make sure lots of things aren’t broken. A few images were broken because of moving stuff around a while back, so I was able to fix that stuff. And it’s funny, as I was going through it I realized how much I’ve changed and grown up. A few of those pages are only slightly modified versions of stuff I had on my first webpage back in 1998. I just kept moving from site to site until I have the whole crazy pile of stuff that is princessleia.com.

Today Michael set up a little subdomain for Munch, so I was able to move the little page I was working on for him to there today. It’s not nearly as exciting as Caligula’s, but he’s a fish. Mostly fish just eat and swim. I could probably add a few more things to his site, I’m sure I will sometime. Should be resolving by now: http://munch.bevilacqua.us/

I want chocolate.

Today is Michael’s () birthday. Happy Birthday Michael! Since we went up to the Poconos this weekend and did the yummie dinner and cake thing there we aren’t really planning on anything today. Maybe just order a pizza or something.

Yesterday was horribly horribly hot and humid. I hate that sort of weather.

I did a bunch of updates to the #13thHour site today. Added a few profiles, edited the birthday list, edited links.

Also did a bit of work on the e-volution audio project. Our friend Chris (Yeas, who we know from IRC and met at a lan party last year) came back to IRC and he’s signed on the project as the Voice Talent Manager, woo! I set up some forwarding accounts for email, so things are looking a bit more professional. It’s coming together nicely, two stories are near completion and are slated to start being recorded sometime in the next couple weeks. Really the hardest thing about this project right now is not stepping on each other’s toes as far as duties are concerned, and finding time to discuss exactly what we want.

I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday night. First of all, I’d like to say that I am happy that Michael Moore was able to enter popular culture, it’s good for an alternate viewpoint to make headlines. So I can respect him that much. And I liked Bowling for Columbine, even if I don’t entirely agree.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is the type of film that makes me re-think the meaning of “The Truth.” It was clear that he used A LOT of propaganda tactics (hurt children, long scenes of weeping/upset people, extensive stereotyping), which led me to wonder who this was directed at. As a fairly political and historical saavy person I picked these tactics out right away, and although I won’t say I was unaffected by them (some of those war pictures are heartbreaking), I knew exactly what he was doing. I also believe that he probably needed to do much of this, to get his message across he needed to show people upset, he needed to show horrible war footage of children being hurt. It made the film really impact the people watching it, makes them remember it, makes them really see what war does.

I don’t believe all the stereotyping was necessary however. You figure that this film was intended for “regular” people, right? So, they showed this montage of clips with the Bush’s shaking hands with various arab men wearing their traditional arab dress. In this montage, Moore made no attempt to identify these people, it was just a whole bunch of “Bush shakes hands with dark skinned men in middle eastern costumes, look how evil Bush is.” I couldn’t identify them, so how can other people? Oh I see, we’re saying that any dark skinned man in a kaffiyeh is automatically a bad guy who the Bushes shouldn’t be associated with. Isn’t that the sort of message that Moore shouldn’t be proliferating?

Then there was the list of countries who supported us in the invasion of Iraq. The message was that they were small, insignificant countries that didn’t have a military, and Moore chose to take stereotypical footage from each one and use it to describe them. COME ON NOW! Why not show cowboys killing indians for our military then? Oh right, this is propaganda. I think he would have been much more effective to show the real truth about these countries, rather than old stereotype footage. Old stereotype footage makes me feel like I’m being lied to and manipulated.

As for the “truth” of the whole thing, I don’t know. I’m not horribly shocked by any of what he presented. Money and power are ALWAYS somehow linked. What did we expect when we elected a big US oil guy for president? That he wouldn’t have business and personal ties to other big oil families in the world? I think some of what he presented was coincidence as well. Just because a company some of the top US officials are involved with stand to make a lot of money from a catastrophe doesn’t mean they were involved (this was never said, but for some reason I felt it was implied). And it seems Moore made the corporations look evil (by listing a few) simply because they stood to and intended to profit from the terrorism. What do you expect? They are huge wealthy companies, we live in a capitalist society, do we think they will be charitiable? To a point, sure, but there is a bottom line to look out for. I don’t blame them for holding conferences, the services they provide are needed, why not come together to talk about it? I guess that’s easy to spin into “Corporations get together to make money off Mr. Johnson’s death on 9/11!”

I gave up on The Truth. I won’t try to pull apart pieces of what Moore said. Just like any angle of this situation, Moore has spinned it to produce a result. He has his sources, Bush has his sources, the NBC has their sources, Al-Jazeera has their sources. How can I tell who is telling the truth? There are problems with all their methods of reporting. Everyone has an agenda and a starting place in their mind for how to report something. Even if I had the money and resources there is no way for me, or anyone, to know the whole Truth of the world today.

So while I continue to watch NBC w
orld news (which is pretty childish, but the best 6:30pm US pop media news) and BBC world news, and read various news articles from around the globe, I realize that The Truth is simply what I choose to piece together in my head. Different, often opposing, viewpoints that I must think about and sort out to form a picture of what seems to me to be the most plausible explaination. At least I can sleep at night knowing that my opinions are educated and I’m not some sheep who follows what I read/watch on my favorite program or from my favorite pop culture figure.

Did I like the film? Not really. But I do think it has it’s place, and I’m mostly happy that it was released.

We went up to the Poconos Saturday afternoon, just stayed the night really, but it was nice. Michael’s mother got to give him his birthday gifts (his actual birthday is on Tuesday) and she fed us yummie food. We watched “Secret Window” which they had rented. Was pretty boring and predictable, the idea of the film has been done MUCH better in other films. I suppose I can’t really say more without spoiling it. It passed the time though, I think the worst part is that a neighbor was over watching it with us, and she’s the type who loves to talk through movies “Oh my gosh, is he dead? do you think he’s dead, he’s probably dead, I bet he’s dead.” I wanted to slap her and tell her to shut up.

Yesterday we moved our bedroom furniture into the bedroom we painted recently, now we’re getting ready to paint the other one. I started to spackle last night. We did some grocery shopping and had subs for dinner while we watched Clerks. That movie never gets old.

Today… not so sure what I’ll do Michael has the day off. Maybe some reading. Maybe take a nice long walk around some of the trails if the weather decides to hold.

*wanders off*

I love having a cat. Caligula has been sleeping on my lap for half the afternoon and it’s so cute. And nice to have a little soft critter to snuggle. Pets rock.

Tomorrow morning we’re going up to the poconos to do some hiking and relaxing. We’ll be coming back on Sunday because we don’t want to leave the animals alone for too long. We had planned on having a LAN party instead, but just so many people had other plans. I guess I should have expected that.

I finally saw Bubba Ho-Tep last night, because so many people said it was so great. It was funny, Bruce Campbell rocks, and who wouldn’t want to see a movie where Elvis and JFK take on a mummy? I’ll be watching Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight.

So Bitlbee. I haven’t been this excited about a piece of software in a while. I am going to keep using it. Apparently what people told me about signing up with AIM is not true, “Leia 26” is exactly like “Leia26” and it’s just a formatting option, even if you sign up with “Leia 26″. In Bitlbee I just add whatever name it is without the spaces.

I still get errors like:

16:09 -@root- serv_got_update() for unknown TOC handle Leia26:
16:09 -@root- loggedin = 1, type = 16

sometimes. It’s quite random, sometimes I’ll get a screen full of them when I log on, and sometimes I won’t get any. Doesn’t seem to influence the abilities of the client though, since these people still join the channel, and I can still chat with them. So this is a bug I can live with, for all I know it’s just AOL’s servers being screwy anyway.

I was so happy with all these improvements that I set up my own server:

USE=”msn, oscar, yahoo” emerge bitlbee

Done. Have I mentioned lately that I love Gentoo?

It’s just an internal server, running on my box behind the firewall, but I’m definately more comfortable using this than a public server.

This is so great %) Today I spoke with a cousin I hadn’t talked to in months because I wasn’t on AIM for so long. Woo!

In the past I only used the irssi away function when I went on extended vacations, so I really knew nothing about it. But now with IM I really need to be able to set away when I leave the desk. So I discovered this afternoon that you can set away on just one server! In one of the channel windows of the server you want to go away on just:

/away -one away reason

Yay for irssi.

*wanders off*

First of all, we finally got e-volutionaudio.com up on the web. This is pretty exciting, it’s a project that Steve, Evan and I have been working on for a couple months. It’s going to be a radio show website, our team will be writing radio “screenplays” and then having our group of professional voice actors (who actually do commercials and stuff!) preform the stories for us. And of course all sorts of fun sound effects and everything. I’ve always been interested in this sort of radio show, used to have tapes of “old time shows” of horror, and drama, and mystery when I lived at home. Writing for one is fun too, I will get to see my story come alive!

What we need now are more writers. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Drama. Any stories that would adapt well into a 20-60 minute audio play. We need people who can write stories, and people who can adapt stories into screenplay, and people who’d be happy just writing original stories AS screenplays. So spread the word! It’s a good way for both e-volution audio and the writers to be promoted.

I was sitting in a LUG channel on freenode this morning and I gave a gmail invite to one of the guys there. Email conversation got into what mail clients we used, that got into one guy mentioning that he used MS Outlook (hey you’re in a LUG channel buddy!), then us being like “omgz h8 @ M$” and then mentioning Instant Messangers. I used to use AIM and Yahoo! all the time, but somewhere along the way I started disliking them. I completely stopped using Yahoo! And over the past year or so I stopped using AIM for the most part. It just got to be annoying and distracting. I think it’s partly a psychological thing, I have conditioned myself to ignore IRC when I have stuff to do, but I can’t do that with IMs. IMs interrupt what I’m doing, and then if I take a while to respond people get all annoyed with me. So I just keep it off, problem solved.

Well one of the guys in the channel suggested I try bitlbee. It’s pretty cool, there are public servers which interact with the instant messaging services for you so you can have IM in IRC (they say AOL, ICQ, Yahoo!, Jabber and MSN work). I tried it out with AIM today. I was very very impressed at first, getting all excited about it because it really is just like another IRC server, the directions were very helpful and good, I really didn’t have any problems once I stripped HTML from the messages.

Then this afternoon I ran into some trouble. From what people tell me, AOL allows users to sign up with a space in their name (what were they thinking?). Well bitlbee doesn’t like this much, and gives me all sorts of errors. I’ll need to dig into this a bit more and see if there are fixes, because otherwise this really isn’t going to work out. Sigh… I was so excited too.

Or maybe I could just ignore people who decide to sign up with stupid spaces in their names!

I worked on my garden a bit today. Turns out that I’m really bad at moving plants %\ But I was able to clean up a bunch of weeds and move a few plants.

This afternoon I decided to go for a walk. I walked into town and brought a couple dollars worth of rolled pennies that had been sitting in my desk for over a year and took them to the bank. Then I took this free Propel Fitness Water coupon I got in the mail to the store to redeem it. Let me tell you a story about Propel. It sucks. Take everything good about flavored water, and everything good about real water, remove it, and give you a nasty sugary water tasting bottle of nastiness. I don’t know what they are thinking. I guess because I’m such a fan of real water that I can’t understand why people would want “special water with sucrose syrup.” It wasn’t refreshing at all after my walk, I dumped most of it out and got a glass of real water.

That’s it for now *wanders off*