We got our digital camera today, woohoo! Next day shipping rocks. I unpacked it and ran off to take a few test shots: which are here. I’m quite happy with it so far, it’s so much better than our old camera %) And you can take little movies! I got a little movie of Caligula playing with his fluffy yellow ball, it’s great. Of course the real test will come this week while we’re on vacation.

So I spent most of the day packing and doing cleaning around the house (don’t want to come back from vacation to a mess!). We made arrangements so Caligula can stay with Michael’s mother while we’re gone, hopefully he won’t cause too much trouble for her %) We still need to stop at the store for some things but on a whole I think I’m pretty ready to go.

Now I need to figure out some sort of dinner from the little food that we have left. Really need to go grocery shopping when we get home. *wanders off*

We ordered the Canon PowerShot A70 last night, it should be here by tomorrow. Yay!

I haven’t really talked about this trip we’re taking.

Michael wanted to take a vacation because he’s been so busy lately. OS migrations at work, moving into the new house, he’s been working full time all the way through this. Last week he posted a link to a lodge in West Virginia and if I wanted to go. Of course! Then he said he wanted to go very soon, so we started getting our things together to quickly plan a trip. This brings us to my need for the quick search and delivery of a digital camera. Today Michael made final plans at three different Bed & Breakfasts that we’ll be staying at during our trip. We’ll be driving down through Maryland, staying at a B&B there and doing some hiking at a state park. Then we’ll spend the rest of the week (5 nights) in West Virginia at a couple more B&B’s, visiting a few more parks, caverns, waterfalls… wonderful hiking places. I’m very excited. We’ll be leaving this Saturday and driving home next Saturday.

For the entire trip I’ll leave all computers and internet at home. I’ll bring the books I checked out of the library, that should be enough. Yay for relaxation away from the hum of my harddrive!

I got some new books from Prentice Hall today for the Philly Chix group. One of them is called Linux: Programming by Example. I thumbed through it, I think it’ll be useful, but the thing that makes it notable is the cover. It has a purple lightsaber on it: see? It made me giggle.

Is there a synonym (read, real word) for bookaholic? I think I might be one. Books in .txt format are fine if I have no other option, but I do so love books. I love what’s inside them, I love how they feel in your hand, I love flipping through the pages of a new book and smelling that new book smell. Mmmm books.

I must go back to finalizing our plans and routes to take. *wanders off*

I like to take pride in my searching abilities, but when it comes to doing research for products and actually shopping online, I suck. I don’t know what the trouble is, but Michael can hop online and within 20 minutes find what I can’t find for 3 hours of searching and wading through reviews. Part of my trouble is that I get stuck on one track and start blocking out other options. It’s really a horrible habit. Maybe some of it has to do with not taking enough breaks while searching. After a while I just get so numbed to reviews, and it’s gets frustrating because you have half a dozen reviews that say “this camera rocks!” and then you come across two that say “I hate it.”

Just for fun and comparison I decided to look up some reviews of this old HP one that we have, and some people actually said they liked it! It was comforting to discover that it is a particularly bad camera, and lots of people had trouble with the flash stopping working, and it being a battery hog.

Anyway, after all the recommendations (thanks to everyone) I was able to get on the right track with exactly what I wanted. DCRP Reviews are amazing! They provide picture gallerys of shots from cameras, a lot of different sorts of tests. There were also all sorts of normal user reviews that I could scan through for each camera. Remember back in the olden days when product research wasn’t so easy? Me neither.

I was quite interested in an Olympus recommended by Sam, but then Michael mentioned his preference for compact flash cards (apparently we do have a couple small ones around).

I went to that camera review site with a list of a few recommended cameras that used CF cards.

The Canon s410 (which is the newer version of s400, recommended by a bunch of people) is nice. Unfortunately it’s expensive ($379.94 at amazon, I did price checking elsewhere, but amazon proved to be a pretty good basic indicator), and I really wasn’t sure we wanted to push the $400 mark if we didn’t have to.

I looked at a relatively higher end Nikon Coolpix 4300 that brinkecw suggested. Well this is a pretty nice camera, 4 megapixels, but the price tag was $343.88 at amazon. I also discovered that it doesnt take AA batteries, it takes either a rechargable battery pack, or a 2CR5 Photo 6 Volt Lithium Battery. I want to stick with AA batteries in case I am stuck at a lan party with a dead camera and need some quick replacement. Sorry Nikon!

Michael dropped by spoofee.com and saw that they had a Canon PowerShot A70 for $218.39! 3.2 megapixels, which is fine, getting more for under $300 is difficult. I checked out the DCRP Reviews and was quite pleased with the one for this camera. I went through and read user reviews, and the only issue people really seem to have with it is that it’s not very durable (broke when they dropped it). That’s reasonable, I think I can handle that.

Of course now that I had seen the A70 I HAD to check out the A80 *drool* this is a pretty slick camera! Quite simliar to the A70, but it was 4 megapixels, more durable, less redeye trouble, and had a couple trivial features that I didn’t really care much about. Price tag at amazon: $339.94. We agonized over it, and in the end decided that it really wasn’t worth the extra money.

I spent a bit of the afternoon going through reviews of flash card cameras without much more luck. Apparently the Canons really are the best out there in the $200-400 price range, even compared to Kodak, and most of the Nikons are pretty sad in co
mparison.

So we’ll talk about it tonight, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be going with the Canon A70. And since the price of the camera + next day shipping is STILL cheaper than trying to find the camera at a store, we should have it here by friday %)

Enough about digital cameras. If I look at another hi res digital test picture today I’m going to be ill.

Yesterday I did as planned, some yard work in the morning, showered, ate lunch, and then walked up to the library. I love libraries so much. Libraries make me want to lock myself away forever and just read. I want to check out 2318903 books and fill my head with everything that’s in them. Well since that’s not possible I picked up a Second Foundation, a sociology book, and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary which I have been wanting to read since it came out but kept forgetting about it. Since I needed a break from Foundation (reading them too quickly) I decided to start on Professor and the Madman last night, and so far I’m quite pleased with it.

Last night we left the windows open again, it got cold. I’m not sure how cold it got last night, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the 40s. As a result, our little temperature sensative kitten snuggled under the covers the *entire* night. It was so adorable. When Michael got up this morning to get ready for work Caligula kept crawling out of the bed, following him for a bit, and then coming back to snuggle under the covers with me. When I got up out of bed he followed me (and my comforter, it WAS cold!) upstairs and snuggled in with me again. Even though it’s warmed up he’s been like this most of the day. I was even able to trim his claws! I love having a cat.

That’s it for now. *wanders off*

I was outside this weekend doing yardwork, and I was so pleased with how everything was looking that I put our nice new e2 batteries (they say they work well in high drain devices) in our HP Photosmart 215 camera and headed outside. I tried to take a couple pictures, then gave the camera to Michael, who snapped one then said “Hmm.. it’s still at 100, I don’t think it’s working right.” Then he got a Compact Flash error. Crappy. I don’t know exactly what happened, or why, but it seems that our flash card might be dead.

Now as you all know, our digital camera sucks. It’s old, and it was inexpensive, and it’s HP. First of all, to be expected with cheap cameras, the pictures are fuzzy and turn out horrible if the subject is moving at all. It eats batteries like crazy (I guess this is fairly typical of all digital cameras though…). But even worse, the flash no longer works, and the power input for a cord is so flakey that we can’t even use it. We’ve dealt with these issues because when you’re on a budget a digital camera is quite a purchase if it’s not absolutely necessary.

The death of this flash card was the end of it though. I’m NOT buying a flash card for this horrible thing. We’re planning a trip to West Virginia next week and I don’t want to be without a camera! So later this afternoon I’m going to spend some time scanning digital camera review sites to find something. I’ve been out of the market for so long.

So any suggestions would be quite welcome, I just have a few conditions:

1. removable media (whether it be flash cards or whatever)
2. good picture quailty
3. works with linux (our HP one didn’t and it was a cause of much cursing)
4. under $400 (I’d probably like to stay in the $200-300 range, but if there is a camera that it’s so amazing as to break that barrier up to $400 I’m willing to consider it)

I won’t be shopping online, just because of time restraints.

Now I’m going to head outside and work on getting the big rocks out of the soil that I’m putting back in the hole where the rhododendron used to be. This way it’ll be easier to dig up when we finally decide on the perfect tree %) I want to get this bit of yard work out of the way so I can shower and walk down to the library this afternoon to return Foundation and Empire which I just finished (btw, I totally saw that ending coming!). *wanders off*

No posting about the events all weekend, oh dear. This won’t be interesting or thoughtful, just a rundown of events really…

It was a beautiful weekend, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t cooped up with the computer. Saturday morning I went outside and started working on the veggie garden. First I had to rake it, since it had a lot of leaves on it. Around noon Nita dropped by with her sister because they were in the area, thinking back I must have looked a mess %) Well I stopped and talked to them for a bit. After they left I was thinking about the evil rhododendron in our yard (fuzzy picture here). Why is it evil?

1) I don’t like rhododendrons. Don’t ask me to explain, I can’t, I just don’t like them.
2) It had grown without much care given to it, not much pruning, so it was a bit of a mess (might be hard to tell from the picture because it’s far away and from the wrong angle..)
3) It attracts bugs. I’m not sure why this is, but there were always tons of nasty flying insects around the silly thing.

So we decided that it’d come out, this weekend. But before doing any of that we needed some things at the Home Depot, like gloves. So I went inside and got cleaned up and we headed out to the Home Depot. On the way out there we passed Ott’s Tree Farm. Now this is a huge tree farm and flower shop, I mean huge, you don’t even see the scale of it from the road because the lot is huge and continues out back. Well it was quite impressive, and we got to look at some trees that we might want to replace the rhododendron with. It was a really amazing shop, I’m glad we stopped by it, we’re definately going back once we pick out a tree (still undecided… any suggestions? max height 40 ft, no fruit trees, and we want non-flowering but colorful leaves!).The trip to the Home Depot was uneventful, but I was able to check out a raspberry bush and see that it’s definately raspberry bushes that are growing in my garden.

After the Home Depot we came back and I did a bunch more work, there are so many rocks in the ground. Michael decided to take the power saw to the rhododendron, and now it’s no more! He spent most of the evening cutting it up so we can use the trunk and branches.

Sunday I started off by cleaning out all the garden plots in the front of the house (facing the road). It took a little over an hour, and disppointingly not much is growing in them right now *shrug* there isn’t much light over there. Then it started to get hot, which is very frustrating. I decided to go inside for a bit and do a little cleaning in there. So that’s how most of the day went, I cleaned out the area around the mailbox, then when I was hot I went inside, did some raking of leaves along the driveway, and then went inside when I was hot. Toward the evening I was getting tired and got all clumsy with the garbage pail I was using to bring leaves to the leave pile in back and hit my shin pretty hard. I decided to call it a day %)

Michael spent the whole afternoon working on getting the rhododendron stump out. It was quite a job, especially since there were so many rocks in the soil, you can’t just dig and get it out. But he eventually did it %) Yay!

Today… well I had planned to go out early and do some yard work, but instead I decided to focus on some house work while I was doing all my laundry. I cleaned up the kitchen and then mopped the floor. I put the mop in the sink and headed up stairs when I was done. Michael had some suggestions on where to spend our upcoming vacation (a week away from it all that’s still being planned…). So I sat up here for a bit calculating expenses to see what would work well for us. After about a half hour I figured the floor would be dry so I went downstairs. I looked in the kitch and the mop was on the floor and the faucet was on a little, overflowing the sink! EGADS!

The only explaination I can think of is that the mop fell out of the sink and hit the handle on the faucet. Since the sink was already almost completel
y full this caused problems. I ran and got a few towels and cleaned the mess up pretty quickly, but it had gone into my drawers, and a stream of it got under the big stove. *Groan* so I had to remove all the drawers, clean them out, wash everything inside, throw out a lot of paper and cardboard stuff. Then I went ahead and moved the oven and cleaned under it. It’s probably a good thing I did, since I knew it was a mess under there and just never got around to cleaning it. Well cleaning up all that took til after noon. Then I had to mop the floor AGAIN, this time not leaving the mop in the sink. By the time I was finished cleaning and doing the laundry I wanted to do it was about 1 pm. I had lunch and then decided that 85 was too high of a temperature to do yard work in. So I’ve spent the afternoon working on little things and waiting for it to cool down. Now it’s cooled down, so I’m going outside, yay!

*grabs the rake and shovel and heads outside

A swedish friend of mine has been sending me films in swedish, and guess what… he’s got a bunch of Disney full length animated features! YAY! For those of you not aware, back in the day I was a crazy Disney animated feature fan (live action sucked, with only a couple exceptions). I spent a lot of time watching these films over and over again, so the fact that he had some of my favorite disney films in swedish was great! While writing bills and working out the budget yesterday I turned on Ringaren i Notre Dame, and it was quite an experience. Apparently Disney actually went through and did this themselves, the dubbing was great, songs dubbed and everything. Well I got to be all excited each time I picked out a word! And since I pretty much memorized the english version, I was able to start picking up phrases. Even though I am still a super swedish newbie, I think this is an important immersion step for me. I can start getting used to the sound and structure of the language.

I got a mail this morning from that kid who pissed me off a couple months ago for his continued stupid questions and outright insults when i was trying to help him, bluefox83. I hadn’t really given thought to letting him come back, since I really didn’t want to deal with his newbie whining and bitching anymore, but I figure this email is sincere enough, and reflects the newbie to real user stage that we all go through:

Hi,

I just wanted to write you and both, apologise you and thank you. first,
I’ll apologise. It was rude and cosceded and bullheaded of me to go off
on you for not just handing me all the answers i wanted you to give
me…it was a good thing you did that though. You gave me the kick in
the ass i needed to get started learning linux, i’m starting to move
into bsd to broaden my knowledge, but debian (the real debian, not
libranet) is my main distro (and favorite!). Thank you so much for the
kick in the ass, and the shove out the door.

sincerely,

bluefox83

So I’m running this by a few people who I know were particularly annoyed by his presence, and we’ll see where it goes. Maybe I’m just being too soft again. But hey, if it’s true that’s great…

It’s nice out. I’m going to go take a shower and then we’ll head out to a lawn and garden store to pick up some tools I’m going to need. And definately some gardening gloves! My poor hands are still recovering from my first few days in the garden, who knew that soil could dry hands out so horribly? Well, I didn’t. Oh and I need some batteries for my camera so I can take pictures of the pretty flowers that have come up *makes a list*

Going to do that now *wanders off*

Well I finally settled on using the RSS Reader Panel for Mozilla Firefox. It’s working great, although it definately has it’s limitations. Then I tried to open up Mozilla today, since I’m still so attached to it and firefox opened up. Oh flooby. So after asking around and finding out if anyone else had this trouble a friend of mine helped me search the gentoo forums for a solution (he had the problem as well, but just uninstalled mozilla and ignored it). Eventually we found this post which says you just need to change the a sym link. Sigh, crazy Firefox eating Mozilla! Anyway, I took a lovely picture of my RSS Feed reader in action here (using the firesomething extention in this screenshot, so it’s “Mozilla Seavulture” hehe.

Caligula hurt his tail on Wednesday. I’m not sure how, it must have happened while he was playing when I was taking a nap (wasn’t feeling well). I noticed it in the evening when I was petting him, he got all annoyed and ran off. I tracked him down and found the trouble was a bit of a lump in his tail. He seemed very upset and wouldn’t let me touch it, and when he walked he wouldn’t hold his tail properly. I got worried and told Michael, and since it was too late to do anything else we decided to just keep an eye on it and try to get a better look at it later. On Thursday I ended up going into work because the Philly Chix meeting in the evening and it’s close to work. So while at work I was able to do a bunch of googling into kitty tail injuries, most suggested that he had broken his tail, oh no! My poor Caligula! Luckily the information online also said that with his symptoms (just crankie about it being touched and holding his tail improperly) were very minor and cats can easily recover from such things. I asked a bunch of friends, and even the breeder what their experience/recommendations for such things were and everyone said that I should just keep and eye on it so it doesn’t get worse and it’ll heal fine on its own. This morning it seemed to be a little better, he was laying on it this morning while on my lap, and he’s started to hold it a little more normally.

The Philly Chix meeting last night was great. Erin was there, Maggie, Gwen. Although we tended to drift away from linux quite often I had a really nice time, at the end of the meeting we were engrossed in a conversation about religion. It’s nice to get together with other smart people, whatever the excuse may be %)

This person I know in IRC comes up to me yesterday afternoon and says “Hey, a friend of mine needs help with debian, do you have some time?” So sure, I wasn’t do much so I thought I’d give him a hand. Turns out this kid is an idiot. He somehow got debian on his xbox, and it’s quite shocking what he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to use vim, in fact, he didn’t know you could launch programs from xterm. I’m serious. Either the install of debian on the xbox is stupidly easy or someone else did it. Well his problem was that sound wasn’t working for his user, of course this was because he wasn’t added to the audio group, so he asked me to log in and fix it for him. He gave me his root password. Now, this is an xbox, can you guess what his root password was? xbox. I told him to change it as soon as I logged out, who knows if he did because I decided that it was time for me to get out of there. *Groan*

Wow, #null has lots of people in it:

#null: Total of 50 nicks [4 ops, 0 halfops, 0 voices, 46 normal]

#null is the idle rpg on Xelium. It seems that a couple of the more popular people on the server discovered it and invited their friends, and as soon as it hit 3
0+ users more people started to notice it’s existance. It’s funny how these things grow. I’m also in an IdleRPG on freenode which has about 200 players, yay! I am a bit annoyed at the guy who runs it though, I finally got to first place and he used his admin powers to speed himself up. Come along now, cheating on an IdleRPG? So sad.

I was going to go to the library today but since they open at 3:30 today I sort of ran out of time. Sigh. Maybe tomorrow. But now I must go figure out what I want to eat for dinner. *wanders off*

I haven’t written anything interesting lately.

I was going in circles with my checking email, reading news and journals, and organizing my home directory (I got it so it’s mostly just tons of directories now *sigh*). So I decided I needed a new project. In light of all the RSS Feed icons I’ve been seeing lately, and an RSS discussion at the last Philly Chix meeting, I set out to rationalize learning all about RSS feeds. They’re everywhere these days, and although I thought it might waste more of my time daily, I do spend a bit of time browsing news and personal sites that have rss feeds, so I’d probably save time AND get more information if it’s all centralized. See, that wasn’t too hard. So I began my as yet unfinished quest to find a good rss feed reader.

First I tried newsmonster, which was developed to live inside mozilla. Well I couldn’t even get it to connect to the sites, and I really wanted a stand alone thing anyway. I tried liverea because it was in emerge and although it was masked I decided to take a chance with it since it only had two dependencies. Well it works great in the beginning, but then:

Connecting to www.xanga.com…
Downloading http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=princessleia2…
Segmentation fault

I tried to add a few more feeds and it kept Seg faulting. No wonder it was masked! So I looked at straw, 32 dependencies! I poked emerge to install it and went to shower and grab food, came back a bit later and started it up. It worked great, I was quite happy with it, then I tried to click on a link to open up a browser for where the feed was from, no go. I enabled more info about the posts, tried to click on the site to open a browser, I get a Gnome Preferences error. I googled for this a bit, but had little luck.. I might look more if it seems like this is my only good option for an rss reader. So I’m still looking. Also looking for cool rss feeds, so if you know of any cool ones, I’d really be interested %)

So now I’m going to go look for more readers or try to fix straw… *wanders off*

We’re headed over to Michael’s mother’s soon for Easter dinner. Yay!

Yesterday was a pretty typical Saturday. Michael spent a bunch of time cleaning the inside of the Rav4, and we decided to bring Caligula outside on our deck for a bit. We put on his special collar and a lead we picked up from the pet store, he had access to a little bit of grass, but for the most part just got to explore the concrete porch and amuse himself with flying moths. I sat out there watching him and reading for a while.

In the evening we decided to get pizza from “Moccia’s Train Stop” which is within walking distance from our house. We “discovered” that it was a pizza place after we walked by it on our walk the other night. Picked up a nice white pizza with spinach, and oooh it was good! They use a nice thick, soft crust, and the cheese is yummie, spinach is fresh (even if they could have put a bit more on). So it seems like this’ll be a nice place to get white pizza at! We’ll have to try their regular cheese sometime. While eating we started to watch Gothika. For a horror movie it was nicely scary, lots of *jump out and scare you* moments. The special effects were sometimes great and sometimes horrible (scenes with fake fire make me want to cringe a bit), the acting was mostly fairly good, and I was pleased with the cinematography. I didn’t like the ending though. *Shrug*

That’s it for now, must get ready to go to Easter dinner. *wanders off*

Wait, don’t freak out. My nickname is now pleia2 on xelium now (where #13thHour is).

I’ve always been pretty against nickname changes in IRC, I’ve known too many people who come in with a new nickname every 12 months (or less!) and wonder why people don’t know who they are. One of the former opers on xelium changed her nickname weekly, so we kept thinking she had added another oper when it was just her (and got confused when she DID add another oper…). I never wanted to be difficult to find by people who wanted to find me, and I never wanted to confuse them. So I kept with the same nickname I started using back in 1998 when I first joined scifi, PrincessLeia2. Back in 2002 when I joined freenode I decided to join up as ‘pleia2’ (which has been my yahoo email name since 1999, and was always my alternate irc nickname) because by then I had sort of felt I had grown out of the ‘PrincessLeia2’ nickname, people just assume you’re young if you clearly have “Princess” in your nickname. So, whenever I joined new public servers I’d be ‘pleia2’

I realized the other day that xelium was really the only server left that i was PrincessLeia2 on, so I changed it.

I don’t feel bad about it, like I’m abandoning my principles against nickname changes, because this is just a shortened version of something that was too long. And most people are taking it well, I think a majority of #13thHour people are aware that I used pleia2 as an alternate nickname anyway, and it doesn’t take much detective work to figure out who I am.

Hah, writing a whole journal entry about a simple, subtle nickname change.

We went to the movies last night with mct and Nita, saw Jersey Girl (Kevin Smith’s new movie). Now I can’t really tell if I liked it or not, Kevin Smith movies are on a whole different plain of movies so I can’t view it through a critic’s eyes. It was like the sappy bits of Chasing Amy stretched out a lot, and it made you want to cry every 20 minutes or so. Rar! It entertained me though, and didn’t bother me, so while it’s definately not hitting my favorites list, I don’t feel like I wasted my time. Besides, I haven’t actually paid to see a movie in a movie theater since November (oh I love the internet), it was fun to go out.

Now I must start my day. *wanders off*