I met my first genetically engineered fish the other day. It was a Red Glow Danio, or GloFish, according to the local pet store website:

New on the market. These fish actually glow in the dark under black lights or atinic blue lights. These fish have been genetically altered using jellyfish and/or anenome DNA. You can be among the first in the country to own these fish!

I heard about these fish last year, there was a big uproar about them and California banned them. My first thought was “I want one!” As soon as that thought was half finished I started thinking about the ramifications of this. All of a sudden visons of Brave New World and Gattaca floating in my mind. I also thought of an argument against animals genetically engineered for our benefit, when does it stop? When do we start creating legless, beakless chickens because it’s more convienient for food and egg production? I’m no fan of chickens, but there is a point where it just becomes creepy. What is that point? Who decides? Ah these are interesting questions that it seems my generation is already beginning to struggle with.

Still, I love zebra fish, and GloFish are damn cool. If I was in the position to invest in fish they’d be at the top of my list.

While writing this I did a quick search to find an article about California’s ban on them, and it turns out that just yesterday there was news about them reconsidering the ban: DFG commissioner’s wife lobbies for GloFish – SACRAMENTO — California regulators voted Thursday to reconsider the nation’s only ban on biotech household pets after one commissioner said he was intensively lobbied by his wife, a household aquarium owner who wants to buy the outlawed fluorescent fish…

The pet store we were at was just a nice local one in Harleysville. It was large for just a local non-chain store, it smelled like a pet store, and they had all sorts of great stuff. Both Michael and I feel much more comfortable giving our money to a place like that than the huge Petsmart or Petco chains in the area (remember my fear of cookie cutter chain stores?), and supporting local business is good. They use an old credit card machine that has a noticable dial up connection to process requests, and dozens of hand-written notes decorated the area around the register with various prices and PLUs. When I noticed they had a website I expected the kind of poorly designed local store website that I usually see. Boy was I in for a surprise. Their website is finsfeatherspawsclaws.com, and not only is it beautiful, it’s up to date! Specials of the *week*! Someone really takes time to handle this website, and I’m impressed. Yay for local shops with kickass websites!

I was checking the forecast this morning, hoping Sunday would be nice enough to do a bit of hiking around some trails here, and I saw this:

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? It’s April! No more snow %( my poor flowers. It’s supposed to get back up into the 50’s on Tuesday. Maybe next weekend will be better for doing some hiking.

But now I need to make a few adjustments on my system before the LAN party this evening. Yay LAN party! I’m so excited. *wanders off*

I should have learned long ago that I can’t “just read the introduction to” a Douglas Adams book. I’m a Douglas Adams fan, his books have me in tears from laughing so hard. When I found a copy of Salmon of Doubt at the library last night I HAD to take it out and push back my plans for other books. When we got home I sat down on the couch to read the first few pages, and I was sucked in. I was practically walking around the house doing a few things with my nose stuck in the book, I even laughed out loud at some parts. Then it hit me, he’s dead. Of course I knew this, I remember my shock the day it happened, and I had just read all the introductions talking about how he had passed on and the reason for the publishing of the book, but it wasn’t until I was deep in his adventures that I realized how horribly sad it was that there will be no more. *Wipes eyes on trusty towel*

I tossed all my design ideas for princessleia.com. I just got frustrated. I think my trouble is mostly that I compare my own design skills to people who are really good, I do that in all aspects of my life and I really should stop. But in my mind too often either my designs are too dark, or too light, or not “me” enough, or they just suck. So rather than redoing the whole front page and risking I’d make it worse I just did a bit of tweaking. I got rid of the light purple on the top, because it bothered me and moved it all to the dark purple surrounding it all. I can be happy with that design for a while. I also went through and reorganized the stuff in the menus, so it’s much more sane. I decreased the font size as well, since 14px was a bit large.

Now I need content for the middle. My site has tons of stuff, but what to put in the center of the main page? Right now I have a boring old history that I doubt anyone ever reads. I used to have an updates thing, listed all my previous updates, I might go back to that. Or I might do some sort of a “who what when where why…” questions about the site. Hmm….

Tomorrow evening we’re going to a friend’s for a LAN party. We’re actually going to go to this one, we haven’t seen these friends since last year and we’re really looking forward to seeing their new place.

Well I need to do some stuff *wanders off*

I said that Caligula was getting bigger, but then I went over to see Cargo this afternoon. Cargo is freaking huge! I’m so used to having a kitten that a cat is quite a shock %) I guess I can rest assured that Caligula has plenty of time still as a little kitten.

I’m at work right now, finished up about 4 hours of work they had for me. It was nice coming in again actually, and I’m glad I came in today rather than yesterday, since I got the work done quicker than we thought I would. Now my revisions and questions go back to the client for review and answers, hopefully they’ll get a response quickly and I can come in for some work next week too. I did up my time sheet for March today, less than 10 hours %(

I was recently reading through a nearby LUG list. They started this whole thread about viruses, I jumped in for a bit of it but left quickly when I saw the whole thing turning into a flame. Well one thing bothered me, they kept saying “virii” instead of viruses. Is this some sort of slang that just got out of hand? Do they think that made up word makes them sound smart? I decided not to mention this to the list since it was already enough of a flame, but I HAD to rant to someone. So I hit up a grammar nazi friend of mine and started ranting. He laughed and said that it was probably good that I didn’t mention it to the list, since it was an annoyance of his as well and the last time he decided to say it on a list he got horribly flamed by people who “informed” him that it was acceptable jargon in a tech conversation. Anyway, to help me with my battle against the virii he sent me a wonderful link: http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html. It goes through and actually explains why virii is not a word. Yay!

Well it’s about time to go home now. *wanders off*

I had a sinus headache most of the day, which was a bit of a bummer. It’s almost gone now. I hate headaches like that, advil doesn’t touch them and I feel very tempted to nap. If I nap I’ll never sleep tonight. If I stay awake, what is there to do? Since blabbering on IRC was just making it worse I decided to surf (do people still say that?) over to the PBS website to check out what sorts of Frontline episodes they had to stream. Michael showed me how to unmask the realplayer for Gentoo and tweak some things to get it working properly (a soft link and edit to the plugins directory). So now realplayer is working nice and I can view embedded realplayer stuff, yay! Actually while I was trying that out yesterday I also decided to grab plugger. I’ve tried plugger in the past with little luck, this time it broke on me again, launching several instances of mplayer, going defunct, and totally messing with the realplayer plugin, so I uninstalled it. Sigh, plugger…

So I spent most of the day watching old Frontline episodes. That’s a great show.

I’m going into work tomorrow, and of course because of mad planning skillz that’s also the morning the Rav4 goes in for some work. Graaah. It’s fine, since the car appointment is early and won’t cut into my day much, but I could have gone into work today instead. When I said I’d come in on Thursday I was hoping that today would be nice enough to do some yard work or go to the library. Nope. Again it didn’t even get to 50, and it’s rainy and yucky out.

I actually have excellent planning skills. It’s quite strange that I’d forget something like that. Especially since it’s the second time I’ve made such a mistake in the recent past. I must be losing my mind. What year is it again?

Caligula is getting bigger. When we got him on the 11th I had no trouble just picking him up with one hand to move him, now it requires two and he’s not happy at all about it.

I did a bit more yard work yesterday. I decided that I like gardening but I don’t like yard work. The gardening part where I dig in the dirt, even get cuts and sore hands, digging out leaves and other junk, that’s fine. But once that junk and leaves needs to be piled into a garbage can and dragged out to the leave pile, that’s no fun! The hauling leaves and stuff to the pile part took up most of my work yesterday. I came back inside a little before 4 pm because it was getting cool and windy. I took a long hot shower and afterwards was quite sore. We relaxed, ate some boca pizza, and watched the last three episodes of Coupling.

I was going to do some more work outside today, but the temperature didn’t even get up to 50, and it was cloudy. Besides, from all the digging with my hands yesterday my hands even hurt when I type. A break is good. And it seems like it’s going to rain all the rest of the week…

I finally get to go into work for a bit on Thursday. For most of this month I’ve just been working a couple hours a week from home.

I’m so exhausted. I couldn’t think of why, but then I realized that all the work I did outside yesterday probably tired me out beyond what 8 hours of sleep could repair. I’m probably going to go to bed at 9 tonight, like an old woman!

But now I need to figure out what I’m having for dinner.

I watched the 3rd Matrix movie last night. The first 1/3 of it sucked, I was groaning the whole time while they did much of the same crap that made me hate the second one so much. All standing around and talking, trying to be all profound by speaking slowly and saying stupidly obvious thingszzZZZZzzzz. There was this one scene where they killed a bunch of guards in a pillared cooridor, wait, didn’t they do that in the first one too? Gah. But then the movie got better, the characters shut up, Neo and Trinity were sent away and we got to enjoy some good special effects and scifi-ness. There were some pretty neat scenes in there and I can appreciate it for that. They didn’t completely screw up the ending either! So it wasn’t horrible like the second, but I can’t say that I loved it either. At least I don’t feel like I wasted my time with it.

After writing that entry yesterday I went outside and played in my garden. At first I wasn’t sure how to approach it, it was quite a mess, and the only gardening tool I had was a rake! So after thinking for a bit and adding a few things to a Home Depot shopping list I decided to just dig in, with my hands. Turns out this was probably the best method, even with a case full of gardening tools I would have gotten my hands filthy. So I started digging a little after noon, and quickly realized that I often don’t know the difference between a weed flower and a good flower. So I started looking for signs that certain things were weeds, like random growth, growing too close to plants I KNOW are good flowers. I think I did ok, might have some stray weeds in there, but I’ll read up on things. So any gardeners out there? Sure I can do a google search for gardening, but it’d be nice to have some experienced people point me in the right direction.

I never thought I’d be someone who could enjoy gardening. At my parent’s house all we had was a tiny garden in the front yard, and that was a chore to keep tended. I watched my neighbors spend all summer preening and caring for their huge flower garden and just didn’t see that it was “worth” all the work put into it. Well I completely missed the point! And I didn’t understand until I was elbow deep in dirt yesterday, gardening is fun! It’s like programming/scripting, you enjoy doing it AND you get a neat result at the end! I think this might be my next obsession.

I’ve sort of worked out a plan for the gardens, I’m going to clean them out, with the possible exception of the one behind the garage, because it’s weird to plant flowers in a dark place behind the garage. Then I’m going to see what decides to pop up out of the soil, some of them should be nice flowers that I’ll be happy with, and I suspect that some plots won’t have any flowers, and some might have flowers I don’t like. All summer I’ll spend time learning about gardening and watching how my garden grows. Then come fall I can start planning what I want in my garden next year.

I took pictures!

This is after I cleaned out one of the plots on this side, the rest are still covered in leaves.
The rest of the pictures are here. Yeah, I decided to make a part of my webpage about my garden.

After all this yard work we decided to go up to the Home Depot to pick up some things we needed, picked up some hedge clippers, a little garden shovel, a garden hose, a spade shovel… and we managed to finish off that $1300 gift certificate we got at the closing of our house! Amazing how fast that went. Afterwards we decided to go to Giant, a grocery store chain in the area that we used to shop at. I just wanted to pick up a couple things, like boca ground “meat” which they don’t see at Henning’s (our new grocery store). Well within about 5 minutes of being in Giant I remembered that I HATE grocery shopping, we picked upthe boca meat, and tried to do a little more shopping, but the atmosphere was just too horrible. We went to try and check o
ut, and ALL the lines were long, they have something like 15 cash registers and only 7 were open on a Sunday evening? What were they thinking? Well we weren’t going to stand there for a half hour for a one item, so we put it back and left. Ugh, Giant sucks. We made it to Henning’s around 6, and got through all the shopping that we needed to do fairly quickly. I love Henning’s, it’s the most pleasant grocery store I’ve ever shopped at. It is a single store, family owned since the 19th century, it’s grown with the community. The feel in the store is nice, and instead of having pop music and advertisements playing in the store they have some neutral musak. The store doesn’t have that disinfected “clone” feel that chain stores have (often every grocery store of the chain is identical in layout, it’s creepy). And the people at the checkout aren’t insane, they’re usually high school kids and older women, who are quite pleasant and don’t try to talk to you. All in all it’s very home-like in that store, things are just right, and there are never huge crazy lines. It all adds up to make my shopping experience as pleasant as possible.

Hehe, grocery stores.

Well the forecast seems to say that it’s going to rain Wed, Thu, Fri… so today and tomorrow are my only days this week that I can spend doing more work in the garden, so I’m going to get working on that now. *grabs shovel and rake and wanders off*

We didn’t end up going to the LAN party yesterday, we just though it’d be better to hang around here and enjoy a relaxing saturday. Besides, we never got around to buying UT2k4, and that’s probably what they would have wanted to play the whole time (rightfully so). Michael built a fire, and I spent a bunch of time reading, I’m nearly finished with Foundation. I’ve had this book for years, but I’ve never read the whole series, so next time I’m at the library (hopefully tuesday) I’m going to pick up their copy of the trilogy. It’ll be good to have the first Foundation book still fresh in my head. Great book.

The weather this morning is not nearly as nice as it was yesterday, but we’re going to see if we can start some yard work, get a list of tools we’re going to need to complete it properly. We might even head out for a walk on the trails around here if we are in the mood and the weather warms up enough. Hopefully it’ll be a productive day. But for it to be so I have to get off the computer and start it… *wanders off*

(More kitten pictures)

Today has been nice. This morning it was a bit cloudy, but come afternoon the temp was up to 72 and it was sunny out. I needed to return some library books before monday, so I grabbed my Intel laptop bag (sans laptop) and walked up to the library after lunch.

The walk was nice, I wish I had brought the camera with me! Unfortunately when I got there the library was closed. It’s friday, it doesn’t open until 3:30! It was only about 2, so I dropped my books in the outside dropoff box and turned around to go back home. It’s about a mile (says mapquest) from my house to the library and I really needed the excercise, this winter has not been an easy one, and that means I’ve gone to get brownies more often than I should %) Good thing I don’t gain weight easily (*ducks*), the only thing I need to worry about is being out of shape.

This weekend a friend of ours is having a LAN party, so we’ll probably head over to that tomorrow, yay! We haven’t been to a LAN party since New Years.

Now I am going to go see what I’m making for dinner. It’s friday and I’ve got an insane craving for a sub sandwich… *wanders off*

Did more cleaning with that wonderful Lime Out (I said Lime Away before, but I was mistaken). Last night Michael did some great work with it on the bathroom sink and the showerhead. This morning I did the sink again when he said it might need it again, and it looks really nice! All that yucky mineral buildup was gone, no need to replace any of the faucent afterall! Yay!

After cleaning I decided to have some fun with programs. Now that I’m using Gentoo instead of Debian stable, I can play around with many more newer packages! I thought I’d try the Diablo 2 install with wine again. It was more successful than my first attempt, I actually got through the install! But after all that work it wouldn’t see my dvd drive when I started up the game, so it could see the play disk it needs to start. Sigh. I tried a no-cd crack, but then it wouldn’t even try to launch. I can probably play around with it more to figure it out, but for now I’ve given up again.

So I decided to install scummvm. Some friends in #goddess told me about it a few months back, and of course there is a version of it in emerge.

* games-engines/scummvm
Latest version available: 0.5.1
Latest version installed: 0.5.1
Size of downloaded files: 1,122 kB
Homepage: http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/
Description: Reimplementation of the SCUMM game engine used in Lucasarts adventures
License: GPL-2

This means I can play The Secret of Monkey Island! Ok, so it’s a very old game that I first played on my 486, but I love the Monkey Island games. They are so amazingly full of puns. I nearly died laughing when I played the PS2 game released a couple years back. I love this stuff. Well I finished this game a long time ago, and I thought it might be fun to try again since I’ve forgotton most of it, and hey, it’s a great old game!

Yah grog!!!

Today I was sitting in #13thHour and Michael pasted a screenshot where he uses nickcolor.pl in irssi. This colorizes the nicknames in the channel. I recalled xchat having a similar function, but when I asked Peacimowen he denied that there was one. Hrm. So I dug up an old screenshot from early 2002 which certainly uses it. Would they really take it out of later versions? Skeptical, I installed xchat2. Much to my surprise I couldn’t find the option anywhere in the options! How horrible of them! On top of that I’m really not at all happy with xchat2, they slimmed it down a lot and took out all sorts of things, what were they thinking? Screenshot.

Which reminds me, earlier this week I installed Opera 7.23 (I’ve just been using Mozilla lately). It’s horrible. The whole lure of old opera (circa 6) was that you could have a quick, slim browser that did just the basics, but did them well. I don’t need it to support java, or even flash, I just want basics on slower machines. The first time I opened up Opera 7.23 it choked up so bad that my window manager began to crawl while I browsed, this is Enlightenment on a 2.0ghz machine with 512mb ram, it’s not a bad box! I really couldn’t believe it. escapenguin mentioned that it might be because it tries to load the whole page before displaying. Bleh. I’m glad I installed 6.03 on my laptop. RIP Opera, you served me well for so many years!

Going to make dinner now. Boca pizzas I think. *wanders off*

I decided to take some time today to write some scripts for R2D2, now he has:

You can look up what country an internet country code stands for:

-@PrincessLeia2- !country aq
-@R2D2- AQ: Antarctica

And vice versa:

-@PrincessLeia2- !code Antarctica
-@R2D2- AQ: Antarctica

Then I decided to do some more standard-metric conversions (before just had C to F), now he does conversions of inches and cm and kg and pounds:

-@PrincessLeia2- !weightcon lb 130
-@R2D2- 130 in is equal to 59.0 kg

-@PrincessLeia2- !lengthcon in 65
-@R2D2- 65 in is equal to 165.1 cm

These were all easy little scripts, but I had been meaning to add them for a while.

Played with Caligula a bunch this morning. I wonder how long a cat’s day is. You know, how humans have a natural 25 hour cycle, it would seems that cats have a short and inconsistant one. Some nights he’ll sleep with us, some nights he wants to stay up after we’ve gone to bed, some mornings he wants to sleep on my lap, others he just wants to attack.

I’m going to have baked potatoes for dinner. Yum yum. *wanders off*