I started playing Kingdom Hearts last night ( let me borrow it last weekend). And I must say, wow!

Before Kingdom Hearts was released, a close friend of mine was always sending me screenshots and I got pretty excited about it. Then I picked up Final Fantasy X, because I loved Final Fantasy games, they are a majority of my PS(2) game collection. I played about 6 hours into FFX and completely lost interest. Not just losing interest in FFX, but all of Final Fantasy, and all RPGs! I stopped playing video games often, mostly just when a new game came out or when I was at LAN parties. I figured it was because I had “grown out of” gaming, something that was pretty sad for me to admit. I simply assumed that FFX just happened to be the game I was playing when the love for gaming spark left my life, I didn’t think it had anything to do with the game itself

So last night when I put Kingdom Hearts into my PS2 I didn’t expect to be swept off my feet. I started playing through the intro, got to start playing the game and realized that I was having a blast! Each time a new Final Fantasy or Disney character came on the screen I’d get excited. I’m playing with all my most favorite toon characters! This is wonderful!

I quickly realized that it wasn’t gaming and RPGs that I was sick of, it was the complexity around games like Final Fantasy X. It was the stupid sphere system that I despised. I like Final Fantasy for it’s story and it’s characters and battles, FFX took the leveling up and abilities complexity too far. And I HATED blitzball, so that part of the game was a serious drag for me. I don’t want to devote my life to a game just to finish it, I want to sit back and play, to enjoy it, to fall in love with the characters. Kingdom Hearts is great for that, since I already hold a special place for these characters. *wanders off*

I started playing around with NES emulators again the other day. The last time I did it was probably over a year ago, and I was using debian stable versions so I never found one that was good AND had sound. I was looking through portage though, and discovered TusNES which has been working pretty good so far. Yay for 8-bit!

Other than that I spent a lot of time yesterday cleaning up home directorys on boxes I rarely use. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a complete slob when it comes to home directories, and I have yet to find a solution to this. I need to discipline myself more to put things in logical places, and actually delete things I don’t need (yay for being a packrat!). I still have the win98 install for win4lin in my home directory. Why? I don’t know! I should delete that right now! I need to get my backup scripts running again. We had nightly backups at the apartment, but then we moved here and I reinstalled my system (debian to gentoo) and I never got around to setting mine up again o_o.

I think I’m going to attempt an overhaul of princessleia.com again. I realized that I spend way too much time worrying about the implementation of a new design, and whether it will suck or not, that I don’t get to try new fun things, AND I get stuck with a design that I’m really sick of. So I just need to stop being so weird about it.

Last night we had some yummie Indian food, then went out to the local pet store to pick up some cat food and look at some fish. I’m not sure if I want to get lots of little fish or one big fish. The fish that most caught my interest were the Oscars, so this morning I did a bit of research online and found so many varied claims as to tank size, companionship and care that I’m a bit frustrated. One claims you must have at least a 40 gallons of water per Oscar, another says 50-80, one says they like living in schools of 6, one says they are best living alone. I’ll have to keep looking, the tank is 50 gallons and I want to make sure it’s big enough for whatever we choose to get. Anyone have any fish recommendations? %)

We don’t have plans today, and that’s perfectly fine, there are things around the house we want to get done. *wanders off*

Well I’d say that today was one of my most productive computer days in a while. I’ve been so caught up on spring cleaning and other projects lately. It feels really good.

Michael left me an email this morning telling me that he got the camera working in linux. Well damn, I really had meant to recompile my kernel and get that set up on my system. So I decided I’d do that this morning. I’d never recompiled my kernel in gentoo, and I quickly realized that my notes for doing it in debian would be somewhat useless. So I asked , who happened to be lurking in #13thHour at that time. He was very helpful so I was able to do things in the proper place (which is very simple actually, but I have a tendancy to make things complicated for myself by asking too many irrelavant questions). Michael helped me figure out the minimum I had to enable in my kernel (which was a bit different from his, since he has a USB mouse and keyboard, and I had absolutely no USB support). So I had to recompile about 4 times, but I finally got it working properly, installed gphoto2, recompiled my alsa module (yes, I know I should switch to 2.6…) and got everything working very nicely. I can now get photos off my camera in linux! No more going to icky windows, yay! It only took 2 hours.

Caligula got a bath last night. This is the second actual bath (more than just pulling him in the tub) that Michael has given him, and this time he wasn’t too horribly annoyed by it. He meowed, but actually walked around in the water on his own a little and decided it would be best if he didn’t try to tear Michael to pieces. After he got out of the tub I took some pictures, which I put on his website here. As I was updating his website I thought again about RSS feeds. Caligula’s site is a perfect place for me to play around with xml feeds! So I browsed some RSS feed creation tutorials, looked at the rss feed context of some rss feeds that are in my rss reader, and I ended up writing by hand a pretty basic feed. I might go further with it sometime in the future, but I’m happy with it the way it is. It’s located at: http://caligula.bevilacqua.us/rss.xml

*wanders off*

On Memorial day we finally got that bedroom painted. Yay! There are still some touchups that need to be done, but I’m already amazed at how great it looks. We’re not entirely sure whether we’ll make that into our bedroom again, and now that I know how great a room can look after being painted I’m quite tempted to tackle the second bedroom rather than just touching up the paint. We’ll see.

We also got out to the grocery store, and I finally got an onion, which I required for my potato salad, also picked up more potatoes, since the previous ones had molded. So yesterday I was able to start my potato salad. I used the following recipe:

I ended up using about 3.5 pounds of potatoes, and didn’t add black pepper because we don’t have any (nope, not even in a pepper shaker). My parents used to make a few batches each summer, I remember peeling and slicing the hot potatoes when I was younger. Well they don’t get any easier to peel! The skin comes off easy enough, but they are hot to handle, and you need to peel them when they are warm so the marinade gets soaked into them the way I want it to.

This morning the potato salad was finished marinading, so I was able to put add the mayonaise. I had some for lunch, yum! I am very pleased with it. And it still gives me heartburn, just like I remember. I definately made too much for just the two of us.

I’ll need to keep this recipe in mind for next month when we have our lan party (shooting for July 3rd btw). And deviled eggs, now that I know the secret to my mother’s (using brown mustard rather than yellow).

My next cooking project will probably be a cake. I’m actually quite a good baker (used to make cookies, brownies and cakes from scratch), but our oven is an old (from the 1970s) gas oven, and the temperatures are a bit off, honestly baking anything more sensitive than chocolate chip cookies scares me.

After finishing up the potato salad I decided to clean the kitchen floor. I usually mop it every week or so, but that didn’t seem to be getting it clean enough. So I spent a little over an hour scrubbing the entire thing. Caligula watched me do most of it, he seemed quite interested until he’d get too close and his paws would get wet. Unfortunately when I finished (with a bit of an aching back) I realized that it wasn’t terribly noticable. Ah! Oh well, at least I know it’s clean.

Caligula has gotten much bigger. I looked through the pictures of just a couple months ago, and oh my he’s grown! He’s all cat sized now. I got a quick picture of him sitting on the chair near my desk this morning.

*wanders off to pay bills*

I woke up yesterday morning after less than 6 hours of sleep. That’s when I wrote that last journal entry and got the pictures off the camera. I’m quite sure I still had a bit of alcohol in me as well because I wasn’t thinking so fast, and I know that wasn’t simply because of the lack of sleep.

So I took a shower and around noon Michael got me off the couch (where I was finishing Ender’s Shadow) and we started work on the house. It was a long day.

We got a bunch of work done spackling and sanding the bedroom that we’re going to paint. I know I keep saying we’re doing this, but it’s a lot of work, these walls are a bit of a mess because the previous owners put so many holes in them. Then we both got sleepy and took a nap. I woke up when I heard the fishtank filter being especially loud. I walked out of the bedroom and it had sprung a leak! So Michael and I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the water that had already spilled, and dealing with the water still coming out. It was a serious pain in the ass.

Then there was this smell in the kitchen. It’s been around for a few days, and I keep thinking it’s different things. The tuna fish dishes that are in the dishwasher? The broccoli in the refrigerator has gone bad? Well after our fishtank troubles Michael found the cause. The bag of potatoes that I bought less than a week ago for potato salad had begun to mold! A nasty wet mold that had actually leaked down the back of the refrigerator (the bag of potatoes was on top of it). So Michael had to pull out the refrigerator so we could clean up the mess. Ugh.

THEN while looking in the bedroom to prepare to paint, I realized that we’d need to move the radiator. Woo more learning about house stuff! So Michael figured out how to drain the water from them so we could move that one (which is still proving to be a pain). While he was doing that he decided to move the one that had been drenched earlier in the day by the fishtank. It’s in a rather useless spot, and we wanted to put the fishtank there (this picture shows where the radiator is). He got that one out with little trouble which was good because then we could pull up the carpet and do a complete drying of the floor so it wouldn’t begin to mold.

Around 7:30 we went out for dinner at a local pizzeria. Came home and did a bit more sanding in the bedroom. I need to do a bit more sanding today, but I think this afternoon will be good for finally painting, for real! I should take a picture of how it looks before the painting starts.

Oh, Happy Memorial Day!

*wanders off to begin day*

Yesterday began pretty slow, I read for a while and I’m very close to being finished with Ender’s Shadow, which is turning out to be really great. It takes place parallel to Ender’s Game from the point of view of another character. I was worried they’re be a lot of annoying overlap of the story but there really isn’t, and when the old stuff is rehashed it’s interesting to see it from another perspective.

Later in the afternoon we headed over to ‘s (Ed’s) for the wedding celebration for him and his wife Kelly. came down from Boston to join us, and brought along his girlfriend , who was a real pleasure to meet. They’re staying with mct and Nita, so of course they were there too, and Nita’s sister Dessica and her new husband. There was a lot of family of Ed and Kelly there, and of course Kelly’s friends, so plenty of people I didn’t know, so I pretty much stuck with the ones I did. Kelly did a great job with everything, lots of food and drinks and everything. We had cake and got to watch their wedding video, and just hung out and talked a lot. Had a really nice time. Since Ed will be selling his house soon, Michael suggested that we get up on the roof and watch the sun set, Darxus climbed up, then Michael, and then noticing how easy it would be I climbed up as well.

, ,

, , Kelly, , , , mct, Nita, Dessica

Most of the people had left by 9, so we figured we should get going, but then mct and Nita suggested we go back to their place and watch some movies. So we decided to meet at their place after stopping at home to get changed (we wore shorts, and it was a bit chilly yesterday). We grabbed some snacks and headed over to mct’s and Nita’s. Ended up watching Coupling that Michael had on his laptop. Nita made lots of fruity drinks. I didn’t really feel drunk, but I guess that’s just because we were hanging out and watching TV instead of sitting around and talking. We left their place around 2 because we were all getting tired.

Today I’m not sure what we’re doing. Maybe we’ll finally get around to painting %) *wanders off*

I have some seasonal allergies. I never had them while living in Maine, but when I moved away I started getting them. It’s not any fun, but since they aren’t particularly disabling I haven’t gone to the doctor for any sort of treatment. On days I feel all bogged down with congestion I take a couple Benadryl.

I was sitting in a Benadryl stupor the other day and I wondered, what about Benadryl makes me so sleepy? I asked in IRC, and people didn’t know. I did a couple google searches and I think I lost my train of thought and just gave up.

This morning I was going through some headlines and I discovered this: Why Antihistamines Put You to Sleep. Apparently there was a study to “Pinpoint Role of Histamines in Waking.” Aha! So now I know:

Detailed in the May 27 edition of the journal Neuron, the findings show that the cessation of activity in histamine cells causes loss of consciousness during sleep, while cessation of activity in other brain cells — those containing the brain chemicals norepinephrine or serotonin — causes loss of muscle tone in sleep. The findings also help explain why antihistamines, often taken to control allergies, cause drowsiness. — UCLA Newsroom

Last night Michael spent some time getting the fishtank set up and filled with water. It looks really great. As much as I want to get some glofish I am keeping an open mind, maybe I just want one big fish! It’s a 50 gallon (~190 litres) tank, so we have a lot of options.

Today we’re heading over to ‘s for a party. Yay! So I must shower and get ready for my day.

*wanders off*

Yesterday I spent a bit of time cleaning the screens in about half the windows. Last night Michael helped me figure out how to remove the rest of the screens. It’s pretty annoying that the old windows in the house are much nicer and easier to maintain than the newer ones. The newer ones have special new designs that in their first few years of life might actually make them easier to clean, but once they start getting older their complex parts start falling apart and you end up with a horrible broken window that’s a serious pain to even keep open. At least with these old windows there aren’t 50 different parts that can break. Anyway, I’m cleaning the screens of the evil new windows today.

I installed gkrellm2 for fun yesterday, it’s not a bad little program, much better than crazy bad epplets anyway, I should play around with some plugins later. I have also decided to start using xmms again. I had been using ogg123 and mpg123 for my media playing, but I realized that I really wanted to make playlists that mixed mp3s and oggs. I sort of wanted to stay with the command line, so I gave mp3blaster another shot, thought maybe the newer version in Gentoo would be better than the one in Debian. No luck, it still has serious resizing issues that just annoy me. I could just create playlists in the form of shell scripts that would alternate between using mpg123 and ogg123 for whatever songs I was playing. But that’s a bit crazy. Since I’m playing music from my own computer (not through a media server hooked up to stereo speakers) and I rarely quit x, and I have a fast machine that can handle 34245 programs being open at once, I figured I’d just load up xmms and use that. It’s turning out pretty nice, I forgot how nice it is to be able to click through directory listings to find what you want *grin* making playlists is pretty simple too. So with these changes in software usage, I took a screenshot.

Today is May 28th. My long lost broski pseudoplasmodium turns 21 today. I decided I wouldn’t depress myself with another futile attempt to google for him, I finally told myself that I’m very easy to find, and if he wants contact again it’s simple for him to initiate it. If he stumbled upon my website he could realize that I’m looking for him.

<nostalgia>

I met plas on irc.scifi.com back in 1998 around the same time I met Michael and Peacimowen, when I first got online and into IRC. We all had lots of fun in #13thHour back then, we’d watch MST3K together, X-Files, all sorts of geeky shows. Much less computer talk than there is now, and it was more windows-centric since Michael was the only one using any *nix.

In May of 1999 he became the first person from online that I met in ‘real life’. He started dating a friend of mine from High School and I went to spend the summer in Philadelphia (where I met Michael in real life for the first time) after graduating that spring. We still kept chatting together, and tried to make plans for Michael and I to take a trip up to see him in MA but it never panned out.

The last time I saw him in real life was on my 18th birthday when he and his girlfriend (my friend from high school) came over to my house to hang out. I should have caught the negative vibes from my friend as she saw that plas and I were very close friends (what did she expect?), but I didn’t and she asked to leave early (even before cake!). Finally plas and I gave in and they left. He dropped by IRC only
a few times after that day. Claimed he was busy or things had come up. The relationship between him and my friend ended, and she was apparently reluctant to speak with me again. I got her AIM nickname a couple years ago from another friend, and although she was civil she changed her AIM name that very week.

I still hope someday plas will just show up, email me, make contact somehow. But as the years pass my hopes dim. I should probably just let it go, but there are so few people in my life that I instantly connected with, and I have a horrible habit of losing these people. *sigh*

</nostalgia>

The configs on xelium are now all synced up to ban some of the latest file leeching software (bottler, IRC Ork) that’s popped up. We chose to ban this software because our first goal as an IRC server is to provide a place for community, NOT some server that people can connect to with software to just leech off the file sharers that we have here and there. We don’t want leeches scaring off actual community active people. It seems that this software has gotten quite popular in the past 6 months or so because of the crackdowns on file sharing groups such as kazaa.

That’s all for now. *wanders off*

I was in the grocery store on Sunday night to pick up a few things. One of the things I wanted was some yummie ice cream snacks, ice cream sandwiches maybe? I approached the freezer section and to my dismay saw a plethora of labels announcing:

FAT FREE!
LOW CARB!
LOW CALORIES!
DIET!
WEIGHT WATCHERS!

I swear there were more of these than regular foods. Now I don’t have a problem with people who try and use such things to lose weight, but I’m in the camp that believes moderation is the key. I mostly eat healthy foods, I avoid beef and pork where possible. But when I go out to dinner I splurge, when it comes to the occasional desserts I splurge. If I want an ice cream snack I’m going to have it 100%, all fat, carbs and calories included. It just doesn’t taste the same otherwise, and when I want something sweet, taste is always at the top of my list. Besides, in a decade or two there will be a new fad diet, maybe they will claim fat is good for you and vitamin C is the REAL evil.

So I decided they need a “fat full” section of the store, so I don’t need to scrutinize each label to make sure there is nothing “diet” about it. When did it become hard to eat normal food? I don’t remember it always being this difficult.

It’s nice and rainy today. *wanders off*

Caligula hates books. I read quite a bit, and when I’m reading I’m not paying attention to him. A couple weeks ago he started attacking the corners of my books with his teeth while I was reading them, I had no trouble shooing him away. Last week I saw him jump in my bookcase and try chewing on a book there, which I responded to by pushing all the books to the back of the bookcase so he couldn’t get behind them.

I really should have known that his next step would be actually attacking any books he saw lying around.

I always have lots of books by my bed, and yesterday he staked out a copy of Friday that I’m borrowing from . I am not sure why he chose this one to attack, it’s the only book out of the pile that I’d be upset if he attacked. Sigh. I’ll have to buy a replacement, which is actually not so bad, since I’m really enjoying this book and won’t mind having a copy in my library, I just feel bad.

But this did teach me a lesson! I won’t leave my books around where nasty little kitties can get their teeth on them.

Yesterday was good, I got painters tape put all around the bedroom we’re going to paint, got some more sanding and spackling done. Michael did a kickass job of getting the fishtank clean and repaired, it looks amazing now, see?

I noticed yesterday that there are actually things growing in my vegetable garden! The beans and cucumber plants have begun to sprout, yay!

Today. Well at least the weather is nicer. I’ve been working on a bunch of things online, I really should go get some more work done around the house, but I’m just so tired from the previous days…

*wanders off*