It’s supposed to get up to 87 today. It’s been like this all week, hot, damp, and thunderstorms in the evening. I HATE this weather. We live in a damp area anyway, and on days like this I just want to go and hide in the air conditioned rooms forever. Then of course when I leave these rooms the heat and humidity feel so much more oppressive. Bleh, yuck.

I’ve been working on a few websites these past few days, making updates that I need to make, worked on the xelium site, made some changes to wallaceandgromit.net so that the news is on the index page. I’m working on a page for our Oscar fish, Munch, thinking of giving him a subdomain like Caligula has.

Lunchtime. *wanders off*

This morning the power went out for over an hour and a half. I was able to shut down my computer, and Michael’s once I realized it would be more than a flicker. Shut down the power switch on our Windows box (poor thing isn’t on a UPS though!). I left the firewall (minute) running, figuring that since I had shut down every box I could get to it from internally that a hard shutdown by myself would be just as bad as the power in it’s UPS dying and it shutting down that way. And by leaving it running it would have a small chance of surviving the outage. After an hour and 30 minutes the UPS on minuge stopped beeping. Two minutes later the power came back on. I waited around a bit before turning my computer back on, figured it was safe and logged onto minute. I was able to resume my screen session… the box never went down! Woohoo! The DSL modem, switch, and minute all survived over an hour and a half on that UPS. It was great.

During the outage I was completely without a telephone because we hooked up that new cordless one, which is all neat and electronic and needing power. I did some looking for our corded telephone, crawling around in the storage areas and was able to find it finally. Michael said we’d probably want to plug it in somewhere up here, so I hooked that up today. Right now it’s a cord coming out of one of the doors to storage, and the phone is sitting on top of my computer, I’m sure michael can find a prettier way of setting it up when he has a chance. But now, for the first time in oh so long, we have two phones in the house, one of which can work during a power outage.

I played with Caligula a bunch today, he’s very playful, but still a little congested, and he’s not very hungry. It was getting quite warm in the house, so this afternoon me and Caligula retreated to the comfort of this air conditioned computer room. I spent the afternoon poking around some of google’s stuff. I noticed that they ran blogger,com. Free to sign up, why not? So I decided to play around with it, it’s almost completely customizable (still has a little banner ad at the top) and it definately has some issues (like being unable to properly count the number of posts I have, my timezone is different so it doesn’t count ones it sees as “posted in the future”). But I decided it’d be a nice place to keep my book reviews. There is an XML feed, but it’s sort of broken, you can go to it and view it as xml, but when fed into my reader it gives me errors.

While writing book reviews I thought of the website I had for #Andor (a Fantasy and Scifi book channel on Xelium). I had never liked it, not even when I first created it, and kept meaning to get around to redesigning, but I just had no inspiration. So this afternoon I decided what the site needed was dynamic content! New stuff that changed! We needed book reviews. Now I could have gone and written a php backend, played with .htaccess files, given logins, set up a database, etc etc etc and spent 3 days on this project that no one would appreciate, and I have no guarentee would even *use* Or I could take the easy way out. I set up a LiveJournal Community, . Since I had created this, I needed to add a link to the website. Well the #Andor website was crappy and there was no place to add a link that would be easily visable. So I scrapped the whole thing (well, it was only a single page anyway) and created a whole new page. It’s simple and boring, but it gets the point across and is quite clear. #Andor’s new site is here: http://www.princessleia.com/irc/andor/

So I wrote up a bunch of book reviews of books I’d read recently for my new blogger site, and posted those and some other reviews of books I enjoyed on the livejournal community.

I was in IRC and a friend of mine who is spending a couple months in Sweden came online. She’s been keeping a blog of her adventures there, and in her post today she described “Swedish Oddities” wh
ich is some strange stuff about Swedes and Sweden that she’s noticed while she has been staying there. I think the funniest one on her list was:

When eating cereal, the milk is always poured in the bowl first, then the cereal is added so it is floating on top.

What are they thinking? What an odd way to make up a bowl of cereal! I’ll have to try it and see if it makes as big of a mess as I believe it will…

Michael should be home soon, need to make some dinner. Probably tacos. And we have ice cream for dessert, yay!

*wanders off*

We picked up Caligula from the vet last night around 6:30. I didn’t realize that I recognised Caligula’s meow until then, when they were bringing him up the hallway and I heard his little mew and I knew that was my kitty. Poor guy was all sleepy and out of it. He certainly wasn’t happy about where he was. He did good though, and the vet tech said they had a nice day with him because it’s such a treat to have a rare type of kitty staying there. We brought him home and it seemed he was still recovering from the ketamine. Last night he spent the entire night sleeping in our bed with us.

This morning we got up and Michael brought me to the doctor’s office at 10. I had my stitches removed, and it didn’t hurt at all! The doctor was impressed with how quickly it’s healed up, and how good the stitches were put in. It bled a bit when he took one out (pulled some scar tissue with it) so he told me it’d be good to put Neosporin on it for a few more days. Yay my whole ordeal is finished and as positively as it possibly could be!

I’ve spent a lot of time downstairs with Caligula today. When we got back from the doctor’s he was coughing a little, and his purr and meow were a bit weird, like he was congested. His eyes were a bit teary and he was sleepy too. Of course I got all worried and called the vet %) She assured me that it’s not terribly uncommon for that to happen since he’s still working the ketamine out of his system. As long as he’s sounding better tomorrow we should be fine. It’s still hard to hear my poor kitty all congested and gooey-eyed %(

I logged into Yahoo! this morning to check on the settings of a Yahoo! Group I’m maintaining for a project, and I was surprised by Yahoo’s new mail login, and what’s this… 100 mb of space? Hah! Spooked by gmail it seems. Now that invites for gmail are all over the place it seems that Yahoo is afraid of not being everyone’s favorite portal. I admit that I’ve had, and used my Yahoo! account since 1999, and I have generally been pleased with it’s portal options, I have My Yahoo! all customized, and sometimes it’s just easier to look there. But Google News is quite nice, and I’m using Yahoo stuff less and less. But this sparked my interest in Yahoo’s plans, I found this article which seems to indicate that Yahoo! will begin cycling dormant yahoo accounts so that people can use them once again. That’s pretty cool of them. It’s interesting that advertising on a free email account can pay for 100 mb of storage per user, I’ve certainly never clicked one of their ads.

Now I’m going to go spend some time with my kitty. *wanders off*

Just got a call from the vet, Caligula made it through surgery fine, he’s doing well and we get to pick him up when Michael comes home %)

It’s Caligula’s 6 month “birthday” today. We gave him some kitty milk this morning to celebrate.

I hope he enjoyed it all, tomorrow he goes in to be neutered.

Michael cleaned the gutters yesterday, I helped a little by holding the ladder and bringing the hose around. The gutters had these “gutter guards” which we discovered to have many uses:

1. Providing a home for mean bugs
2. Making sure water doesn’t get into the gutters
3. Providing a wonderful sunless environment for all sorts of interesting ecosystems

So these gutter guards suck. They made the gutters completely useless in the job they were intended for. There would be so much junk that did get through the guards that the water would simply run off them and land on our heads while we left the house. I think the bugs were the most annoying discovery of all. From now on we’re going to keep our gutters the old fashioned way! Keeping them open and cleaning them yearly. It’s not a huge house, and our ladder can quite easily reach every gutter that needs to be cleaned.

Last night my head was feeling ok, so we decided to go to the Moody Monkey with , Kelly and a friend of Kelly’s. I had a nice time talking with them, and although the service was pretty lousy their beer list was extensive, and even included a bunch of belgians. I ended up getting some Lindeman’s Framboise (a raspberry lambic) which they had on tap, it’s always so wonderful to find places that have it on tap. It was close to 9:30 when the pain in my head started coming back (probably moving my face a lot while laughing or something) and I poked Michael and told him we should get going so I could put some ice on my head (which I had been instructed to do “4 times a day for the first 3 days”). Just before leaving the restaurant I noticed that a bit of the lambic had dripped onto my lovely NRAO t-shirt, seems our lousy waitress had neglected to wipe the bottom of my glass before serving it *sigh*

When I got home I scrubbed the shirt a bit and then started a load of laundry. The washing machine was acting weird, it kept stopping at the wrong points, just was having tons of trouble. This morning I checked it and it never even finished the load. So Michael decided to take a look at it. And he was able to fix it %D! Yay! I was a bit worried that the old thing was dying (as if we needed another unplanned expense this week!). No worries though, I was able to do laundry without trouble today. Right after fixing the washer, he decided to take a look at the dryer, which had a bit of a squealing problem, and he was able to bring down the noise it makes a lot.

Munch (the Oddworld name we decided on for the fish, suggested by n-tropy) is eating now, yay! So hopefully he’ll survive. He’s very scared though, he’ll swim around and be a happy fish while we’re not around (or he thinks we’re not around) but as soon as one of us walks by his tank he retreats into hiding behind his castle. Silly fish, hopefully he’ll grow out of it once he’s more used to living with us.

That’s about it. *wanders off*

My head is feeling a bit better this morning. It’s just a dull ache as long as I’m sitting still, hurts when I squint or yawn or cough, or do other things to move the muscles around it. Michael picked up some antibiotic gel that contains some pain reliever, so I’m sure that’s doing a lot to help it. No sick feeling or headaches beyond just the cut itself, and the cut is looking much better since I was able to shower and clean it a bit last night (ouchie!). Everything seems to be healing properly %) I called the doctor’s office in downtown Schwenksville yesterday afternoon and made an appointment to get the stitches removed on tuesday, no plans to leave the house before that either, unless I put on a hat.

And for everyone that wants a picture, this is all you get.

Michael was so great to me yesterday. He took the day off of work (not just to take care of me, he didn’t get to bed until almost 4 am friday morning!) He jumped up to get anything I needed, even went outside and mowed the lawn (I had been planning on doing that this weekend). Caligula stayed home too, we changed his appointment to Monday because getting him to the vet hospital between 7 and 8am was pretty much out of the question (he has no clue how lucky he is!).

One good thing did happen yesterday while I was lurking around IRC and complaining about how my head hurt (I did take a nap, but all that was on TV was Reagan’s Funeral and I had nothing better to do). My friend offered me a gmail account! They aren’t so horribly rare since this week, because it seems that everyone on the system got 3 invites, and even new users are getting invites (so I was able to give Michael one too). Of course I generally use my princessleia.com address for my mail, and I’ll continue to do that, but I also have maintained a pleia2@yahoo.com address since 1999, I use that for newsletters I know will be spammy (webmd, bizzarre news), html emails (comics, starwars.com). I also like to have an email address outside of the clockbot network so that I can test things. Gmail has some good ideas, I’m excited to see how it progresses %)

I got the photo from the phillychix meeting off my camera last night:

pinkee and pleia2

It was pinkee’s last meeting (she’s moving to Ohio) and our one year anniversary. Too bad more people didn’t show up. And that photo was taken about 3 hours before my little accident. It sort of morphed into a pseudo-meeting since both our boyfriends were lurking around on their laptops, and we both felt fine about letting them join the conversation.

We don’t really have plans for today, probably just putter around the house doing little things. The weather is nice but I’m not really up for outdoor adventures this weekend.

*wanders off*

The short story: It was late, the bathroom floor was wet, I slipped and hit my head on the bathroom floor.

the long story: Our new fish wasn’t doing so well, so after getting home from the philly chix meeting Michael decided to change a bunch of the water in the tank (maybe we had been overzealous preparing the water? maybe some of the funk from the radiators was still in the hose when we filled the tank up?). It was my job to get Caligula out from under his feet, so I went to play with him in our bedroom. Around 11 I got tired and decided it was time to go to bed, but I had a little bit of a sinus headache (oh the irony), so I got up to get some advil. I didn’t have my glasses on, and was in my pajamas in a sleepy mood, and when I stepped into the bathroom I slipped and fell on the slimey floor.

Head hit, scraped my elbow, bruised my knee. At first I felt ok, put my hand to my head and Michael came in and was like “Oh my god! You need to go to the hospital!” I told him that I thought I felt ok. He told me I’d need stitches, and I nearly cried because I’d never had stitches before, tried to insist that I was fine. Then I felt nauseated and dizzy, when I got up to put some normal clothes on I nearly fainted so I had to sit down. Michael was running around grabbing things so we would be ready at the hospital, we scrapped the getting dressed idea, didn’t bother to wash off any blood (it was still bleeding, head wounds are evil like that). So I went in my pajamas. A few minutes after I got in the car my nauseated feeling went away, a few more minutes later I noticed that my elbow was hurting, then the cut on my head made itself known and that hurt a bit.

We got to the hospital and mostly just waited. We were there from about 11:30pm til 2:30 am. Everyone was quite nice, but having the shot for the local anesthetic didn’t feel nice, that was the first time in the whole ordeal that I cried, and said to the doctor “That doesn’t numb, that hurts!” The doctor was asking me star wars trivia when he was putting the stitches in (I had a ROTJ t-shirt on). I was tired and not really in the mood for that *sigh* Still it wasn’t an altogether horrible experience.

I never did get to see my cut while it was open, good thing too because I probably would have gotten sick if I looked at it right after it happened (when I was still feeling nauseated), and although I was curious I’m sure it would have hurt more if I knew how bad it really was.

Other stuff happened yesterday too, had my regular doctor’s appointment in the morning, went to work with Michael because it was silly to drive home, had the PhillyChix meeting in the evening (don’t really feel up to getting pictures off the camera right now).

I graduated high school 5 years ago today. I was going to write a rambling entry about where I’ve been these 5 years. But I don’t feel like it now. The numbing from ice I put on my head earlier is wearing off, and the advil isn’t doing much for the pain, so I’m going to go lie down and watch movies all day or something. Going to lie down now. *wanders off*

We picked up a bunch of fish supplies the other day while we were at the pet store. Some stuff to make the tap water safe for fishes, some other stuff, and a testing kit to test all sorts of chemical and ph levels in the water. So last night the water was looking good and we decided to head to the store and get a fish. We pretty much decided on getting one, big, “Real Pet” fish. At the store we really liked the Red Oscar, so decided that he would be our new pet. We also bought a castle for his tank and some ph lowering chemicals (our ph was a bit higher than the petstore, so they suggested we bring ours down a bit).

He’s about 6 inches long. Apparently they grow to 14 inches at most. He doesn’t have a name yet, but we’ll think of something soon enough.

I booted into Windows today to play with LiteStep a bit. I installed it about a year ago, and had it on my win2k partition. It worked good enough for what I needed it for since I wasn’t in windows much. This time I wanted to play around with it to see if I could possibly install it on my computer at work and use it there (less painful than normal windows perhaps). So I downloaded it and installed, no trouble, the default theme is much different than what litestep used to use (new default theme), it’s pretty cheesey. I tried about a dozen themes, all of which had special “modules” to download, most of the time the module downloads didn’t work, so the theme broke. It got pretty annoying, only one out of all the extra themes I tried worked, “Zerobox” which looked like one of the *nix *boxes (fluxbox, blackbox..). It loaded up fine, but then the fonts in the menu were too small, so I got annoyed and just uninstalled litestep. I’ll just use windows the way it is.

While I was in windows I was able to install the gimp. I am very pleased with how easy it is now, you really don’t need *any* knowledge to install it.

So for all my Windows friends who want to install or just try out gimp, a wonderful FREE image editor, first go to: http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/.
Click on “Stable Version”
Download GTK+ 2 for Windows
Unzip, Install.
Download The Gimp for Windows
Unzip, Install (using the defaults on all options is fine, I took a screenshot while installing: see here

And that’s it! I played around with it a little, and it’s definately different than the linux one, but the reasons for the differences are understandable. And I took a screenshot.

It’s hotter out today than yesterday, it’s in the lower 90s right now, I’m hiding out in our air conditioned computer room. Saved Caligula from the heat earlier, so he’s sleeping behind me on the chair.

*wanders off*

After a couple friends decided to redo their own websites, I took a nice long look at princessleia.com and decided to take another stab at redesigning it. I pretty much scraped my entire old design. Since the site started out as a php nuke site (late 2001 as princessleia2.com)) the design kept being a morphed version of that three column layout. As I added more content I just added another things to my increasingly massive “main menu.” There really was no way of shuffling that main menu to a usable state. The last time I tackled this redesign project I thought about creating an extra page for each subsection, but then got stuck on how to design that subsection. I eventually dropped that idea and redid the design, which looked pretty cool but I had once again fallen into the “too dark” trap! This time I think I did much better. Implemented the sub-page menus in a nice way. Dare I say I’m happy with this new design? Well I’ll say it fits my needs at the moment, and I like it much better than the old design! You can actually find stuff now %)

While I was finishing up some parts of my site before making it live this morning the phone rang. We’re on a no-call list, and our relatives don’t call much (certainly not during the day), so I assumed it was for “Linda” or “Frank” I was right, apparently they have an overdue video at Hollywood Video. As if Verizon didn’t give me enough to complain about, it seems we got someone’s old phone number. We first learned the extent of this after getting a few calls for them, and then when we called up the local pizzeria it turns out this couple was still listed on caller ID for our number! We made sure this was quickly remedied, but, ugh, stupid Verizon! These days our phone rings about once a day for “Frank and/or Linda” and I have started telling the callers that this must be their old number but isn’t anymore. So far it hasn’t slowed down the daily calls.

I hate phones. But Michael did get our static problems fixed! The wiring for the phones in this house is pretty old, so with DSL using the phoneline, even with a filter, the static was sometimes so bad that you couldn’t talk on the phone. Once I even quit IRC so that I could call up the vet to make an appointment for Caligula without IRC traffic cluttering up my conversation. So Michael spent a bit of time going through some of the phone wiring in the house, removing extra bits that we didn’t need. Then on monday we recieved our new cordless phone that we ordered after seeing it on spoofee. This new phone sounds much nicer than the old cheap corded phone we picked up for a couple bucks at Target after our old one died. And this new one has an answering machine, which is nice since my family gets very annoyed by my lack of one since I’m “never around.”

Caligula went to the vet last night. It was a pre-surgical exam since he’ll be six months old on sunday and needs to be “fixed.” We went to the Limerick Animal Hospital and the vet was wonderful. She was pretty excited to see a Mau, since she is so used to dealing with regular tabbies all the time. She was very pleased with his health and said that we could make an appointment as soon as we’d like. So on friday morning Caligula goes to the vet for surgery. Poor guy, he gets extra treats and snuggles this week.

I was sitting in #Support on xelium the other day, and one of the people I know there asked me about linux (it’s actually just IRC support, but it was more of a friendly request). I started talking about the different distros and after a few minutes he said “Ok, now in english?” Ack! I was always quite good at switching from “advanced” to “medium” to “newbie” user knowledge in my brain when explaining linux stuff, but this time my brain got stuck on medium. That’s the second time it’s happened recently. I still don’t have much trouble switching to “newbie” if I stop for a moment and actually THINK about who I’m talking to. But the furth
er away I get from my Windows using past, the more difficult I’m finding to find parallels between things in linux and windows to help me explain things.

It’s hot out, I’m going to turn up the a/c and chill with Caligula for a bit. *wanders off*

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*