I haven’t really been in the mood to post lately. Not much to say really.

We recently changed our diet a bit. As I’ve probably mentioned, this past winter was a bit rough for me, just stressful with so many changes going on, buying the new house and all. I got into bad eating habits, too much chocolate in an attempt to counter my lousy mood, not being active enough because I felt down. Over 5 months I put on about 6 pounds, and I felt really crappy about it.

So a few weeks ago we began changing our diet. No more soda, no more fruit juice, no more daily desserts. Cutting back on processed foods, and learning how to cook.

I’m already finding that I feel much better about myself, and I’m enjoying food much more again. It feels great to sit down to a taco dinner with yummie tortillas that I just made, that don’t contain lard or any other scary things that were in the packaged ones we used to get. Making the switch to drinking only coffee, tea, milk and water has been much easier than I had expected, but then again I do love water more than the average person. The loss of chocolate has been a bit harder, so I have ended up buying a couple brownie mixes since we started this %) But even these brownie mixes are better for me than buying the (amazing but so very-bad-for-me) brownies from the local grocery store bakery.

As for my laptop. Well, the NIC worked in windows until we did a windows update, HAHAHA. So this weekend Michael decided to try Fedora Core 3 with 2.6.7 kernel on it to see if it’d work “out of the box” and skip lots of headaches. No such luck. On monday I did some work on it with the help of a friend of mine to weed out all the possible trouble, and learned that the driver is broken in 2.6.7 and the kernel would need to be patched. But then Fedora got all weird on me and wouldn’t let me recompile the kernel (some gcc bug which is apparently fixed with gcc upgrade, HAH). So I pretty much gave up on Fedora. I tried to boot it up today to see if I could at least grab a few things off it, like my .config, but it kernel panicked on bootup. Which is very annoying because I wasn’t even able to touch the kernel yesterday, didnt touch anything in /boot and I really don’t think I did anything traumatic to it…

I think I’ll grab Michael’s help to install Gentoo (stage 3) on it, with a patched 2.6.7 kernel. Maybe maybe maybe this laptop will someday have wireless!

I’m still kicking myself for not doing more research into chipsets it might use before buying it. Sigh.

Yesterday was not such a good day. Lots of things went wrong and made me feel like an idiot. I thought about posting but it would have just been a miserable, sarcastic rant about how stupid I am.

So as the crappy day wound down I thought I’d do some cooking, and hope I didn’t screw that up too badly. I searched around for some new tortilla recipes to get a good idea how much I should add to the ones I wanted to make, since the last time they turned out way too dry.

I was very very happy when my tortillas turned out amazingly good! Crazy what a little more water added will do ;) I was so pround that I took a picture. And to think I’ve been buying ones from the store all this time! Nasty ones that have stuff like lard in them, homemade are better and cheaper (even if they take some effort).

So that cheered me up, and then the weather turned cooler, so I was in a much better mood all evening, yay!

This morning was good, and refreshingly cool. I spent some time working with the manLinux.com guys to get things going with their site (the domain is new, but group has been around for a little while). It’s a fun documentation project that I can exercise my mad documentation skillz on and actually have people read them. I’ve been able to recruit a few friends to the project too, so I have people to work with. Still recruiting by the way, so if you’re interested just let me know.

Since it was so nice out I decided to finally deal with the big rusty barrel that’s in my back yard. I have a lovely back yard but there is no ignoring the big rusty barrel that the previous homeowners used for burning things. Inside there were all sorts of wires and junk, and as much as I hated this ugly barrel in my nice yard, I kept making excuses not to deal with it.

I ended up taking a trash barrel and it’s lid so I could dump the barrel over and go through the junk inside. I couldn’t just throw it all away (too much) and I couldn’t toss it all in the back (too much metal, plastic and glass). So I started sorting it out, throwing the dirt and ash in the leave pile out back and putting the other junk in the trash. Apparently I’ve watched too much CourtTV, because I half expected to find a body at the bottom of the barrel, but I had no such luck. I obviously amused myself by taking pictures of this ordeal. I even had a neighborhood cat drop by to be my audience (this is the cat I call Caligula’s girlfriend, because it’s the first “wild” cat he met, and is always hanging around (I took this just yesterday) and making Caligula get all puffy tailed). So I spent a couple hours with this lovely barrel, it wasn’t much fun, but once I was finally done and dragged it over to the garage I felt much better. Of course the batteries in the camera were also dying (I take so many pictures these days) so I decided I’d wait until I had the yard properly cleaned up (weeds that had grown around barrel taken away, rocks that “decorated” area round barrel removed) before I take a final lovely picture of my back yard.

That’s about it. Michael’s working late tonight so I think we’ll order a pizza tonight, mmm pizza, maybe even some soda (which we recently removed from normal our “at home” diet).

*wanders off*

I got up a little after 6 this morning, made myself a cup of coffee and wandered upstairs. I decided that I was going to tackle my laptop’s wireless issues once and for all.

7 hours and a burned knoppix 3.4 cd (which didn’t work with my card either) later I was actually further from my goal than when I started. I managed to uninstall all pcmcia stuff only to realize too late that I didn’t have the debs backed up anymore so my testing was done for the day HAHAHA. I rock. My only hope now is either burning the debs to a cd, or using knoppix + Michael’s card to get the debs back on my laptop. Bleh. There are a couple how-tos I might try tomorrow, but they both require entirely new kernels, possibly patches, which I’d also need to move over to the laptop.

I’m quickly losing my faithfulness to debian on this laptop. At this point I’m not sure I care what distro the stupid thing runs on, as long as it works. Windows still is not an option, because I’d hate it, I know it is possible to get this card to work in linux!

I shouldn’t beat myself up over this, this is a tricky card even for really smart linux people, and what do I understand about modules? Very little. What do I understand about PCMCIA? Uh, that’s a thing for laptops right? So I probably should have tried something a bit easier for my first venture into poorly documented module meddling in debian. But I wanted so badly to get this working %(!

I was a bit frustrated after spending so much time on this, especially since toward the end I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. Mostly I wanted to throw my laptop out the window and shoot it a few dozen times.

So I went to Mars 2145.

YAYAYAY DOOM 3!!!

I installed Doom 3 on my Windows partition this afternoon. It’s nice to have a Windows game now and then so that harddrive doesn’t die from lack of use %) And boy did my computer have a work out! This game is so crazy, my geforce3 could handle it but it was choppy at times. And load times, oh boy, 2.0ghz p4 + 512mb ddr ram was not enough to lower load time for levels to under a minute (estimate, I didn’t actually count, it felt like a while…). Still, it was quite playable, even if it was a pretty dark game.

a couple more shots here

And of course I got to kill things, which is what I was in the mood for.

I’m currently baking some potatoes to make some twice baked potatoes (without the bacon) for dinner. Yum yum!

So now I must attend to those. *wanders off*

EDIT: These Doom3 screenshots were taken at lowest graphics intensity for the game.

It’s still in the 80s. I put aside cleaning yesterday because it was just too hot to do any without being miserable, but pushed myself into doing a couple hours worth. It wasn’t any fun. I really don’t mind cleaning, but when it’s in the mid 80s it’s definately not my favorite thing to do.

Michael patched up Munch’s tank, and yesterday we were able to fill it back up, put the proper chemicals in it and get the temp back to a normal temp so Munch didn’t have to live in the bucket anymore. He was very swimmy happy to be back in his tank. I’m glad he reacted well to the whole thing being cleaned out, I’ve read so many things about taking care of fishes that stress letting the water sit in the tank for a week and all this stuff, but we couldn’t keep him living in the bucket for too long. So I’m just happy he survived the whole ordeal. Michael was careful to put aquarium caulking not just on the new leak, but re-enforced all the corners with it so this sort of thing hopefully won’t happen again.

Today Michael spent some time going through xfce4 applications and telling us which ones were cool, so now I’m reaping the benefits of that, yay!

In this bit of a screenshot I have xfce4-weather and xfce4-xmms-controller (NOT xfce4-xmms). That tooltip for the xmms app is when I mouse over it, it gives me control to clear and see the playlist and stop/pause/skip/etc controls of what’s playing. xfce4-weather is the really cool one though, it seems to work very well (not like the weather epplet for Enlightenment, or kweather, which can be crankie). It can scroll through lots of weather information, has a picture of current conditions and mouse over tooltip tells you current condtions, a left click on it will pull up current conditions and a forecast tab! Woo! Apparently it uses “xoap.weather.com” to grab it’s information, which is pretty cool, because xoap is xml feeds! Like for me: http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/19473. I don’t think this would port well to international weather, and it estimates your location (Says I’m in Pottstown in the xfce4 app for whatever reason…) but it’s neat that they have something like this (even if it has a “This document is intended only for use by authorized licensees of The Weather Channel. Unauthorized use is prohibited.” warning on it…).

I want it to be fall now.

*wanders off*

We were pretty busy late yesterday. Around 4 we headed out to Michael’s brother’s house, where they were holding Michael’s nephew’s birthday party. So many little kids and family members whose names I can’t recall. We had a nice time though, even if I find it difficult to be very social at such things. Ended up staying ’til around 7, when we left to drive to Media.

Media is a big town near Swarthmore College, I’d never actually been to the town of Media, but that’s where b2s (from #13thHour) lives and we were meeting him for dinner at the Iron Hill Brewery. Ended up being a nice meeting, he’s really cool, and I learned much more about him than I had previously known (he’s reasonably private online). The food there at the Brewery was pretty good, even though I found myself not too in the mood for beer that I ordered (I blame heat and humidity). It’s always fun meeting new people from this area, I always feel like I don’t know enough people around here. After dinner b2s gave us one of his old wireless routers, woo! So now at least Michael’s laptop is on the wireless, mine needs to get all set up and working properly.

pleia2, Time, b2s

Erm, I forgot my camera.

We didn’t get home til after 10 last night, I was pretty tired and was in bed by midnight. Michael stayed up setting up the wireless, and then it seems that a bit after 3 am Munch‘s tank sprung a leak! I slept through the whole thing (can’t hear much when the AC is going in our bedroom), but Munch is currently living in huge bucket, which he is swimming around but clearly isn’t very happy about. Sigh. Good thing he’s a versatile fish. It smells like fishwater downstairs %(

Speaking of leaks, it’s raining and our roof is still leaking a little. The biggest problems seem to have cleared up, and the leaks are still confined to just the storage areas (except for around the chimney), but we’ll probably need to talk to a roofer to see what to do about the smaller leaks… bleh.

Heat + Humidity + Tiredness + Leaks == crankie pleia2

I’m doubt becoming crankie rather than simply depressed is a step in the right direction. Neither feels very good. But the change from holding all my frustration inside and having it hurt me with depression to venting a bit is quite nice. There’s nothing I can do to prevent these problems, I guess I just need to get through my crankiness and deal with them.

And then I look across my desk and notice this. Which made me laugh.

I’m “Seeing Bugs”[1] so I should probably go back to bed.

[1] Michael calls it “seeing squirrels” but for me it’s always spiders and bugs, not squirrels. It’s when you see something moving and small out of the corner of your eye that’s not really there, and means you’re sleepy or your brain isn’t otherwise functioning properly. I wonder what the real term for this.

Last night we ended up going over to ‘s place to hang out for a bit. The only time we’ve been seeing him in the recent past is at philly-chix meetings because he drove his former girlfriend to them. Now that she’s moved to Ohio we had no excuses to visit! So we just made up one. I made brownies, and mj had beer and pizza. Besides I had never seen the inside of his place.

We got there a little bit before 7, I took mapquest’s directions which took us through downtown Norristown, oops (on the way back we made sure to take Germantown Pike, much easier!). I got to meet mj’s cat Boots, she’s so cute and loving %) He also showed us the MythTV box that he’s putting together, it was pretty cool, now I want one %) We had yummie pizza and great beer and brownies that I added too much water to when I was making them (doh! Fine introduction to my cooking! They were ok though). Talked for a while, and had a really nice time. We need to just “hang out” with friends more often.

It’s been a hot yucky day today. I hate hot days.

*hides in the air conditioned rooms*

Today I spent some time with cygwin. I’d say it’s a great attempt at putting unix stuff in Windows, but it’s far from perfect. The tool for installing it and adding packages is neat, but I ended up with some version problems after I installed screen and irssi. screen and irssi started up fine, which was pretty neat to watch for a few minutes, but when I detatched from the screen I couldn’t get it back, then I started up links, quit links, and my screen session died. Hmm. Strange things. I suppose if I were willing to devote more time to understanding how it all worked I would be happier with it, but right now it’s not terribly important.

I got into a conversation recently about how good those horribly buttery biscuits from KFC were, and decided to do some googling to find out of there were recipes out there to make similar ones. There are all sorts of recipes out there for “Fake KFC Biscuits” so I was looking through them, until I found this KFC Press Release, which is about a book released that had recipes of all sorts of “top secret recipes” and the article includes a recipe for making “Kentucky Biscuits.” I figured from how basic the recipe was that it was not the real KFC biscuit recipe, but it seemed basic enough to give a try.

Well they definately weren’t KFC biscuits, but they were pretty good! And all that I needed to make them was flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, milk and vegetable shortening. So I figure I made 9 biscuits for about 25 cents. It’s not too much work to make the dough either, just mix all the stuff together and knead it for a few minutes, flatten the dough out and cut out the biscuits. Oh and they are heart shaped because I don’t have biscuit cutters, just cooking cutters, hehe. Yum yum biscuits.

Unfortunately I spent a better part of the day doing it. The biggest problem I had was figuring out how many colors you really could reasonably use (16) and what colors you could use for the text. Eventually I found these out and didn’t have any trouble throwing together a boot page:

Someday when I’m feeling creative I’ll make a better one.

But I did have the time to write up a how to, to explain how I did this!

Installing a Custom Lilo (Bootsplash) Bitmap Image

BTW: If you feel this intense need to comment and tell me all about the wonders of grub, save your time. Really, I was all excited about this and everywhere looked I had clowns telling me to use grub. I use lilo, the end.

While I was at it I also took a picture of the custom bios screen (this is an option on my Asus p4s8x motherboard), you can see it here.

Didn’t do much else today, never even bothered to turn on IM. I wasn’t feeling so great, and a sore throat I had last night has carried into today.

I think I’ll make rice and veggies and biscuits for dinner.

*wanders off*

This weekend was pretty good. It wasn’t hot, so Michael and I got a lot of stuff done. The roof is almost completely patched now, only need a bit more super heat resistant roof caulking stuff to patch up the remaining hole around the chimney.

I’m finally getting a new network card for my silly old laptop. I looked at corded cards, one identical to my old one I can get on ebay for about $30 shipped, and for that price we decided that going wireless would be the best option. So I looked through a big list of cards, some USB, lots of pcmcia and cardbus. To my disappointment many of the pcmcia cards (no cardbus on my laptop) were either expensive or just not carried by major sellers anymore. I found a few that were good and being sold by NewEgg:

Netgear MA 111 USB Device, $36.99 (and $10 mail in rebate). – I seriously considered this, but I read a bunch of reviews of crappy windows support. Why is that so bad? Because if I were to get a USB wireless card, I’d want to use it on my workstation too, probably for lan parties, and at lan parties I’m in windows. If it works crappy in windows that wouldn’t be so good. Wasn’t sure we wanted to deal with USB lan in linux either *shrugs*

Belkin F5D6020 PCMCIA card $38 – This is good for a pcmcia card, and I found a few how-tos online, even for different chipsets it might have.

Microsoft MN-520 PCMCIA card $37.99 – Shockingly, this card has great reviews for it’s linux compatibility, and it’s pretty cheap.

In the end I decided to go with Belkin, on principle. I don’t want to give Microsoft more money than I have to. So yesterday Michael ordered the card from newegg. Yay!

A local friend of ours has a linksys router he wants to get rid of, so we’re planning on meeting him on friday night. We’ve never actually met, he dropped in #13thHour one day a few months back, so we’ve communicated via IRC and email for a while. Should be fun, I think we’ll go to a brewery or something. Yay for meeting new people!

I was sitting in my bed yesterday evening, reading a new Linux book, when Caligula ran into the bedroom and jumped into the window, all puffy tailed. He was watching something that was in my garden, I assumed it was a bird, or a bug, or a chipmunk, squirrel maybe? But he kept examining this creature, so I got up and looked out the window.

A big fat groundhog.

EATING MY CUCUMBER PLANTS!

I was a bit annoyed, but then thought to get my camera, because even evil garden-eating groundhogs are supercute.

I got a picture of him running away.

I’ve looked a little online for some animal repellant stuff, most contain rotton eggs. The trouble with rotton eggs is that my garden is right next to my bedroom window. I’ll keep looking at my options, maybe there is some non-nasty stuff I can find at the Home Depot or something.