I’m not sure what our plans are for today, there are a feuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigho0000000000000000000000000000ytygtdfkkkkkk

Ok, lets try this again without a kitten mauling me to get my bagel.

I’m not sure what our plans are for today, there are a few possibilites. We invited a couple friends over to see Caligula and our new house and then to head out to have a nice dinner. If that doesnt work out there is an Ian Boddy Gathering Concert downtown that we’d be interested in seeing. And of course there are other friends we can probably find to come over and drink beer with us if neither of these things work out. I want some real socialization! %)

Our Swedish friend sent us the final episode in the Nova Evolution Series. This one was entitled “What About God?” I didn’t have high hopes for it, but it turned out to be very interesting. Now I’m not going to go into a long rant about how Christians are dumb, so no worries. But I was quite shocked to realize that there is still such a big Christian movement against evolution! I kept wanting to ask these people if they thought the world was flat as well, and the earth was the center of the universe. I guess being brought up in a home where what little religious education that came from my father stressed that there was no trouble with the evolutionary theory and the opening chapter of Genesis. Days described were not literal days, a number such as “millions of years” really has no place in our mind, we just can’t grasp that, so wording it as “days” makes us humans much more able to understand what was going on. I took all of this for granted.

When I began watching this episode I was shocked and saddened that there were Christian groups stressing literal 6 day creation! They would sing songs about how evolutionary theory was wrong and evil and “of the devil,” and parents were so concerned about their children being taught it that they’d try to shelter them as much as possible from the entire theory. For the most part these people really had no information about evolution besides what their preacher told them, and they were encouraged NOT to study more about this. How can people be like this in our day and age? Do they just give up thinking?

I was pleased to see a great deal of the show focus on students at a Christian College who were quite intelligent talking about their views about how evolution can fit into Genesis (like I was taught). In fact I’d really like to sit down with one of them sometime to have them tell me more about what they believe. I have a great deal of respect for these people.

Of course I’m not Christian, and in my mind putting evolution into the genesis box is just rationalizing. But this is acceptable in my mind, completely dismissing scientific truths is not.

*wanders off*

I have a crankie DVD-ROM drive. It’s always been crankie and I didn’t remember how crankie it was until this morning.

I had this computer built for my by a local computer shop up in Portland, Maine in the spring of 1999. I bought it with an old DVD rom drive, which probably cost me about $70, and it only does 4x dvd and has trouble playing new multilayer disks.

I spent the summer of 1999 with my aunt in Philadelphia, this was the first time I met Michael in real life, we had known each other online for about 9 months. That summer I was there my DVD-ROM stopped working, the drive wouldn’t even open. I rebooted, nothing. Windows couldn’t even see the drive. I left it alone for a while, and eventually shut down my computer because it was annoying me.

When I turned my computer back on the drive worked fine.

Fast forward 5 years. It’s March of 2003 2004 and I’m ripping some oggs from a CD. I sat back and watched the first episode of Coupling while it was ripping, and was surprised that i wasn’t done making the oggs when I was done watching the show. The encoder was having trouble with the last two songs. So I let it run for a while until it was done. Once it finished I played the two songs it had trouble with. No sound. So I figured the cd was screwy and tried to open the drive. It wouldn’t open. I tried all sorts of things, and it just wasn’t seeing the drive anymore, so I decided to boot into Windows. Windows couldn’t see the drive. I booted into linux and during bootup tried to open the drive, no luck.

For the past two days I’ve ignored the problem. After the issues with the cdrw earlier this month I just didn’t want to think about this at all, stupid cdroms!

This morning the power went out for a few minutes and Michael was up to shut down my system.

When I got up I booted up, still ignoring the problem. Then a friend of mine wanted to try out xchat for Windows, so just for fun I booted into windows to try it out since I never had before. While booting up I heard a noise from my DVD rom drive, so I pushed the button to open it and it opened.

Now I don’t know enough about hardware to understand what’s going on. Why would a full shutdown work to solve this stupid problem and not a simple reboot? What could be controlling this craziness with the drive?

*wanders off*

A friend of ours from Sweden is always sending us movies and shows he finds amusing. His taste is generally consistant with ours so it’s always enjoyable to us. However, when he offered to send us the first two seasons of Coupling i was skeptical. I became familiar with it through some news article about a failed attempt to make an US version since it had been popular in the UK. I didn’t have high hopes for it since it’s a comedy that centers around sex, and anyone can make sex jokes, and they get old quickly. Well it turns out that the show is really funny, I found myself in tears at some parts, I think they did a really nice job. But it does seem that it wouldn’t take much to turn the show into something really stupid, which is probably what happened in the failed US version.

Caligula had his first vet visit with us last night at 7:30. We got there on time, but completely forgot his vaccination record, so Michael went back home to pick it up. While he was gone I took Caligula out of his carrier when the receptionist there asked if she could see him. We were sitting in the waiting room when a vet tech came out to ask a few questions. Caligula was terrified and when she went to pet him he hissed at her and began growling! I’d never seen that from him before! He calmed down pretty quickly and let her pick him up to be weighed (3 pounds, 2 ounces). The vet was really great, he answered all the questions we had and was a really nice guy. The vet said it would be fine for Caligula to get his rabies vaccination, and he was really good about it, didn’t wiggle around a lot, just let out a loud meow. He was fine afterwards. At the end of the exam the vet assured us that he was a normal healthy kitten, who purrs very loudly and is very talkative. Yay Caligula! We’ll have to go back in a couple weeks to get the last shot of his vaccinations and the vet suggested a test for FIV and feline leukemia, and then again when he’s 6 months old to be neutered. We got home around 9 and he got lots of treats for being so good.

Today I spent a bit of time working out how I’m going to set up the menu on my new site design. I’ve decided against using divs. They are just too unpredictable at this point in time, it’s so much work to get them to work nicely in all browsers, IE is a special pain since it has limiter proper support for CSS, and NS 4.7? Forget it. If I’m going to cut off NS 4.7 as an audience I better have a very good reason for doing so, and I don’t yet. But don’t fear! I vowed to stop abusing tables so much. It’ll be a very simple table layout this time, no tables inside the content area, all that formatting will be done with CSS in p and div tags.

I also got around to installing a custom 404 page on princessleia.com that I had been meaning to put up forever.

Tonight: Cloudy with rain and snow this evening, becoming all snow, heavy at times, overnight. Low near 30F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. 4 to 6 inches of snow expected.

Yay snow! Tomorrow is supposed to bring about another inch, so it’ll be a mess in the morning. Luckily Michael can work from home if it’s as bad as they are predicting.

Michael is now bringing home a chicken cheesesteak stromboli (I’ve been wanting one for about a week) and since we’re not sure how mobile we’ll be tomorrow he’s picking up a case of beer for the weekend, yay!

*wanders off*

Caligula seems to be calming down more. He still walks around an meows a bit, but not nearly as much as before. For the most part he’s letting us sleep through the whole night now, when he does wake up he leaves the bed and room to go play. He seems to be quite fond of sleeping on my lap while I’m on the computer. Unless of course work emails me and I need to do real work, then he’s walking all over me and getting in my way %) He loves the little toy mouse that we got him, and already is starting to play fetch with us from time to time, it’s so cute! And he needs to learn the difference between people food and kitty food. He climbed up Michael’s leg about half a dozen times during each dinner we’ve had at the table since bringing him home. Last night he wouldn’t leave us alone while we were eating brownies in bed while watching an MST3K tape. This morning I dropped a piece of my pistachio muffin on the desk this morning and he ate it.

Pistachio muffins rock. I think they’d be more popular if they weren’t bright green. Bright green is a weird and somewhat scary color for a muffin.

The weather here is so weird sometimes. Yesterday it was near 60 so I had the windows open. This morning around 7 am it began snowing. I had to go out and shovel around noon! There actually isn’t too much accumulating (probably about an inch on the grass), since the ground is so warm and it keeps switching from snow to freezing rain. It’s nice though, spring starts this weekend, we needed one last jab of winter %)

I was finally bugged enough yesterday by my Swedish broski Tech to make the weather script on R2D2 international, so now:

[@Peacimowen] !weather ottawa,ontario
[@R2D2] Conditions for Ottawa, Ontario at 1:00 PM EST March 16, 2004: Overcast Temp: 21 F/-6.11 C Humidity: 33% Barometer: 30.32 Wind: ENE at 10 mph
[@Tech] !weather stockholm,sweden
[@R2D2] Conditions for Stockholm, Sweden at 7:00 PM CET March 16, 2004: Partly Cloudy Temp: 45 F/7.22 C Humidity: 75% Barometer: 29.95 Wind: WNW at 6 mph
[@PrincessLeia2] !weather antwerp, belgium
[@R2D2] Conditions for Antwerp, Belgium at 8:20 PM CET March 16, 2004: Clear Temp: 50 F/10.00 C Humidity: 94% Barometer: 30.39 Wind: SE at 5 mph

Yay! So far it seems to be more complete for the United States than any other country, and while you can do !weather london, england, you must use United Kingdom for all other weather queries in England. And unfortunately I haven’t found a way around the problem of more than one weather station in one city, as is the case with Tokyo, Japan and Rome, Italy besides hard coded exceptions for such locations, which I’m reluctant to do because I really have no clue how many cities world wide would have this issue on wunderground. Oh and I also added the celsius conversions for all queries %)

I’m very very happy with that weather script now, I bumped the version up to 3.0 because this is such a drastic change. After a few days of it working properly in #13thHour I’ll post the revised script. It was surprisingly easy with the tr/// perl operator to convert the spaces to _, and luckily wunderground.com doesn’t care how many _’s are in the URL!

While messing around with this yesterday I was playing around in IRC and decided to version #13thHour. We’ve done quite a good job of surpassing mIRC by irssi as the dominant client (version reply here). Woo! And you’ll notice there is one bitchx user. Well, after seeing how many people were using irssi he decided to try it out, and now he’s hooked. He’s been playing with scripts for half the day, mwahahaha!

I’ve had a little work that I could do from home these past two days, so that’s been g
ood. They’re now reviewing a big project that was put on hold recently, and hopefully they’ll have a good idea when I can come in to work on that again.

That’s it for now. *wanders off*

We left home to pick up Caligula a little after 1 on the afternoon of Saturday the 13th. The drive out there was a bit longer than we expected because of the horrible Philadelphia traffic, but the drive through New Jersey really wasn’t bad at all. We had no trouble finding the breeder’s house (thanks to their great directions). We arrived there a little before 4.

So I met my first Maus! After reading that some are a bit shy around strangers, I was pleasantly surprised to find their cats were very well socialized, and quite friendly. Roger and Lisa are really great people, and were very forthcoming with all sorts of information about Maus, and their care. I am so happy with our choice of breed and breeder!

The ride home wasn’t too bad. After cat-sitting Cargo Kitty so often we’re used to the meowing when kept in a carrier for more than just a few minutes. Caligula meowed for the first 20 minutes or so, fell asleep for a bit, woke up and meowed a bitmore and we’d talk to him. The ride home took about 2.5 hours.

The first 20 minutes he was in our house (we’re keeping him in just a couple rooms downstairs for now) he was really scared, running away from us when we came near, afriad whenever we moved, and he kept meowing. We were really calm with him and after a little while he came over to sniff us, then started walking on us. In about an hour we were able to play with him, and when he decided to take his first nap it was on the couch with me!

When it was time for me to go to bed I crawled under the covers, and much to my surprise so did he! He loves climbing under the covers and snuggling with us. So we let him come in our bedroom last night. He’d wake up from time to time meowing, would leave the bedroom and walk around the livingroom, then come back to sleep with us again.

He’s still walking around meowing this morning, but as long as we’re giving him lots of attention he seems to be fine.

All the pictures we took last night are now located here!

I’m going to go play with him now %) *wanders off*

We decided to go out for sushi last night. Rather than driving all the way to Jenkintown to go to our usual sushi place we decided to head to a local place in Skippack, Tokyo Japanese Restaurant. The service was good, the food was good. We’re infinately spoiled by the perfection of the place in Jenkintown, but I think this place really is a nice alternative. The atmosphere was really nice too, a really nicely designed building, a deck outside and a wooden bridge over pools and little falls of water that you had to cross to get to the entrance. I was impressed. We ate the usuals, octopus, eel, mackeral, white fish and tried a really yummie eel tempura roll called a Y2K roll, it was really tastey. I love fish.

After dinner last night we decided to head out to the Home Depot to pick up a few things. We ended up buying a lawn mower while we were there, and a rake. So as soon as the weather improves we’ll be starting our work on our mess of a yard, woo!

I decided to get rid of the guestbook on princessleia.com. Spam was beginning to be a problem that I just didn’t want to deal with anymore. It’s sad that spam has to interfere like this, I’ve already been spammed in my livejournal about a dozen times. Spam, spam, spam! Ah the price of freedom.

I had a dream the other night that had a friend from a journal in it. The dream wasn’t about them, I was at a fair in New Hampshire with Michael and a bunch of friends and this journal person just happened to be among us. The interesting thing is that journal and email is really the only contact we’ve ever had. Never spoken on the phone, never chatted. I think this is a first for me. Maybe I just felt so comfortable with this person that it was only natural that they’d end up with my good friends in a dream? How well can you know someone through journals? Journals definately are a one-sided view of someone, only the information about themselves that they choose to commit to text, and you have the same “lack of physical contact” issues that arise with anyone you meet online. And without actual real time interaction can you really know that any given person on your friends list is actually a Friend? Anyway, it was a nice dream and I woke up happy.

Today we’re getting Caligula! The breeders said that 3pm would be a good time for them, which works out perfectly with our weekend schedule, we’re planning on leaving here around 1 or so. I’m so excited! We’re bringing along the digital camera, so hopefully we’ll be able to take some pictures of his family too %) I’m going to go take a shower and make sure the place is nice and clean and kitten proof now. *wanders off*

It’s bamwv nickname day in #13thHour. This means we take our initials + state, providence, or country code and make it our nickname. So our channel list included:

eakpa
mdbpa
jcymi
sadsc
jdjse
kcfde

It actually looked a bit like a botnet ;) And Bamwv hasn’t even show up yet! Gah!

I ditched poor wterm and now I have Eterm running. I ran into a couple issues with it resuming screen sessions on Debian boxes, which was resolved by setting $TERM to something other than Eterm. So now I have:

Eterm -f white –trans –tint magenta –scrollbar off -c blue -v –buttonbar off –font ‘-b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-*-*-m-*-iso10646-1’ –term-name rxvt

The font is a bit larger than I would have used previously, but with my nice new desk my monitor is further away from me than I’m used to, so big fonts are fine. Eterm is really slick looking, even if it’s heavier than wterm. At least all my keys work now.

I’m feeling a bit better today. I held off taking DayQuil to see how bad my cold still was, around noon I had to take it because I was getting too congested, so at least I got to spend half the day completely clear headed.

Tomorrow around 1 pm we’re going to leave for our trip to South Jersey to pick up Caligula. It’s about 2 hours away, so we’ll get there around 3, hopefully be happily home by 6. Yay kitten!

I’m going to go make dinner now. *wanders off*

I’m sick.

I went to bed on tuesday night coughing and feeling a bit low. Yesterday morning it was pretty clear that I had a cold. So I spent the day curled up with a bottle of DayQuil. In the evening I was feeling all achey and hot, it wasn’t a good night. I feel a little better today, but still exhausted and achey. Mmmm quilly. It doesn’t look like I’ll make it to the Philly Chix meeting tonight. That’s very sucky. Usually when I don’t make it to a meeting the meeting turns into a miserable failure. Sigh…

Michael purchased this carrier for Caligula on tuesday night. It’s a Samsonite Pet Traveler. It’s quite nice, soft, and sturdy. He also picked up a nice collar, one of the nice break away ones. So I’ve updated Caligula’s Website with his new stuff. Yay only two more days!

Gentoo’s version of wterm misbehaves over ssh a lot. It gets very crankie about the backspace, home and end keys. I like wterm because it gives you the cool ability to shade the background with colors (now mine’s shaded magenta, which looks so cool on my background). aterm has similar issues. I might just have to go back to boring old xterm %(

Mmmm quilly.

We get to bring Caligula home in 4 days! Yay! We’ve been looking at carrier cases for him, since we’ll need one to bring him home (all the way from south jersey) and for vet visits and such.

I renewed princessleia.com for a couple years this morning. The EUR USD exchange rate is even worse than when i renewed wallaceandgromit.net a few months ago. If this doesn’t improve I’ll find myself a new registrar… in 2006!

As promised, a new screenshot. This uses this background (151k) from nasa.gov.

I’m starting to get used to typing on a normal keyboard again. It’s funny how quickly I got used to that laptop, and how I hardly needed to press down on the keys. Then there is the odd location of some of the keys, I keep hitting windows instead of control, and alt instead of insert. Crazy laptop keyboards!

I was chatting with my old buddy Locdog07 yesterday, and he was talking about his comics. He draws a few webcomics, has them hosted a few places on the web. Now until then I only knew about The Tongue, but he’s got a few more that at least *I* think are much more amusing. G.F.C. and The Fairer Sex, I spent a bit of time yesterday afternoon reading through the archives and was greatly amused. Too bad he doesn’t have RSS feeds or when updated mailings for these, I’d hate to fall victim to my laziness and miss them. Oh well, there are always archives.

But speaking of webcomics, my cousin recently asked me if I would link his comic to my page. “Sure!” I said. Of course, he’s my cousin! He deserves a link right? Well I looked at his site today, and his comic sucks. Now what do I do? Bleh, I should not agree to give people links before I see their stuff, I need to have some standards, even if they are family.

While waking up I spent a bit of time talking to one of my fellow opers on Xelium. He recently bought a house and we’ve been having funny conversations lately about “house stuff.” I’m sure logs of our conversations would make for amusing reading, we’re both in our early 20’s and sitting around gushing about weed trimmers and new shower doors. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who was (is) crazy excited about home ownership. Apparently my excitement is normal, and it’s great to be able to talk to another friend going through the same thing %)

My little Swedish broski Tech (also an ircop on Xelium) complained today about my weather script in R2D2. It’s only for the US. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this, wunderground.com does provide internation weather, but it’s just SO much easier to confine the bot to US zip codes. Lazy? Yep. So now I’ve taken another look at it, and I don’t think it’ll be too difficult to impliment. I’ll need to specify “zip code or city, country” and where ever there is a space I will need to replace it with an underscore when it reads the webpage. Yeah… this is a good project, and R2D2 is in enough channels with internation users that it’d be useful %)

We had flurries this morning, I’m glad. The warm weather last week got me all worried that our winter might be over, I’m not ready for winter to be over! I love winter. Spring makes me sneeze.

*wanders off*

The install of all the programs I need is going well. I was able to install tons of stuff today and test is all out since I didn’t have work. I haven’t heard from them this afternoon, so I guess I won’t work tomorrow either *sigh* Well I have stuff to work on here anyway.

I got all the backups off of our backup server, so I’m working on getting my home directory in order again. I can’t explain in words how much I missed enlightenement! And a fast system, the one I use a work is less than half as slow as this one, I am quite pleased with compile times on R2D2 *hugs her computer* So I’ve got all my E keybindings back in place E menus set up the way I like them. I did some searching this morning through enlightenment themes, and although I found some neat ones in the end I just decided to come back to trusty old darkone. Why do I even try looking for new ones? This one is so perfect %) (I’ll post pretty screenshots tomorrow). I wandered over to nasa.gov to check out what sorts of pictures they had and was pleased to find the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive. Woo! This has tons of great pictures, many of them very hi-res that make really cool backgrounds. All of nasa.gov is cool, they have an amazing assortment of huge hi-res images all over their site, mmm bandwidth %)

Since the biggest channel on Xelium is an mp3 swapping channel (all legal of course) I decided to take a bit of an interest in the “culture” of this file sharing. Anyone who is willing to devote as much time and money (servers for sharing) will have all sorts of ideas about how to perfectly rip an mp3, and how definately NOT to rip an mp3, and their discussions get quite heated. Of course I had no idea what anyone was talking about, so I asked one of them to explain to me in simple terms how he likes mp3s ripped.

-@Nerezza- 192 VBR-0 APS

Uh huh. So I never did figure out what the APS part was (didn’t really have enough interest to), but apparently the only things that were important were 192 VBR-0 which apparently means something like, rip at at least 192bps, but it can be variable (Variable Bit Rate) of the highest quailty up to 320. Very interesting! Of course I don’t swap mp3s, and I don’t have any intention to really, but it’s good to be at least mildly knowledgable about the state of popular music swapping formats %) Still, these people are quite odd, they really do spend quite a bit of money monthly to pay for servers where they feed hundreds of mp3 leechers, why? I guess it’s the same reason we run an irc server.

*wanders off*