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*

I have all sorts of things to do today, but I have had so many things on my mind that I had to take a break and write.

Today I went out to the mailbox, seemed to be the usual bunch of junk, but then I noticed some church spam, then another piece of church spam, then a spam for an “Armageddon Bible Prophecy Seminar” … I don’t think I’ve ever gotten religious spam in such quantities before! Since this was my first good experience with church spam I thought I’d take a look at them…

1. From Graterford Bible Fellowship Church; To: Rural Route Boxholder

The Fellowship Flyer

This seems to be a pretty standard church flyer. Printed on a bright yellow piece of paper by a photocopier or something. This sort of flyer doesn’t scare me.

2. From Christ’s Church of the Valley; To: Rural Route Postal Customer

“What do a ton of your insanely stressed-out friends and neighbors have in common? They’ve found a seriously good church to help them balance life’s demands. It’s at the Regal 24 Cinema (no joke!) every Sunday. Walk through the door and you won’t find any boring rituals or talks about stuff in the 138th century B.C.” … it goes on and on.

Oh dear, it’s one of those progressive churches… and held in a MOVIE THEATER!!! It’s printed on nice paper with pretty shiny graphics. These churches scare me, and I really can’t see how anyone can benefit from attendance at such a place. I mean it’s great to have your church be enticing and fun, but despite their claims of being “faithful to the Bible” I’m always skeptical…

3. From: Northwest Evangelism Institute; To: Resident

Armageddon: Bible Prophecy Seminar

This one is scarier than a church in a movie theater. It’s printed on nice shiny big paper, and has flames on it with capital letters real big saying ARMAGEDDON. Inside is lots of pretty colors and graphics, and exclaimation points. And scary things about “The Middle East Conflict and World War III” OH THE WORLD IS ENDING! Sigh. This is so weird.

Yay for entertaining Spam! Enough of that.

Wait, more Jesus. I saw The Passion of the Christ on Sunday night. I did a lot of thinking yesterday as to whether I liked it at all. I was pretty sure I didn’t like it one bit. It was bloody and useless. I thought about writing a whole rant about all the things that bugged me in it, but then I realized that it’s not worth my time.

We went to the grocery store last night and picked up some “Lime Away” which is supposed to get rid of mineral deposits. This morning I decided to use it on the dishwasher. Washing a dishwasher? Yes, like I mentioned previously we have a pretty bad hard water problem, and it seems like the dishwasher has been left to build up this white mineral film for years. This buildup probably doesn’t let it run very well, and having all that stuff in there while it’s running makes our dishes get white deposits on them as well so they don’t look very clean. So I spent over 2 hours this morning scrubbing out the dishwasher and racks. It wasn’t fun, and even with the gloves, the little this lime away stuff touched my hands was enough to dry them out to the point of hurting. The dishwasher looks pretty good now, it’s nor perfect, but I was able to clean up most of the really bad areas. This morning I also spent a bunch of time cleaning other things, since I had time between scrubbing the dishwasher and sending it through rince cycles. It was a productive morning.

This afternoon I’ve mostly been paying bills, dropped into irc a bit, and thought of all sorts of things to do with my website. I have a long to-do list again, lots of fun things. I should go work on some of them… *wanders off*

Yesterday evening we had our friends Ed and Kelly over. They recently got married, so we wanted to take them out for a congratulations dinner. Besides, it had been a while since we had seen them, they wanted to meet Caligula, and they hadn’t see the house yet. We were planning on going to the Drafting room, but a quick call to make reservations scratched that idea, we couldn’t get anything earlier than 8:30, and we wanted to eat around 7. So we decided we’d try a brewery that we heard about in Pottstown, Ortlieb’s Brewery & Grill. The pictures made the place look nice enough, and we thought it would be nice to try some local brews.

We got there and it wasn’t too busy, we were seated immediately, which is amazing for this area at 6:30 on a saturday night. The menu looked good, but when we asked for a brew list the waitress informed us that they had run out of their most popular ale. All they had was their lager (gah, lagers) and a bunch of strange flavors of beer. Now we go to a brewery to eat and they don’t have their most famous ale that we went there to try? How is this possible? Since we were already there and we were hungry we decided to stay, at least they had Guinness on tap. The food was good, the service sucked. In all we felt really bad about bringing our friends there %( Still, we had a nice time, got to talk a lot, got to hear all about their wedding in Niagra falls. They also mentioned that they’d be headed down to Disney World in September, and the offered to let us come too and stay at their condo down there! YAH!! They want to go the week after labor day, so I think we’re going to seriously try to save up some money to go down too. The last and only time I ever went to Disney World I got heat stroke so bad that I ended up in the first aid place all day %( It’d be really cool to spend a week with them down there.

The restaurant didn’t even have good desserts.

After dinner we came back to the house and sat around the fire drinking tea. I made some cookies(easy premade cookie dough that just needs to be baked, hey it’s yummie and great for times like this!). It was really great just sitting around and talking, I needed real social contact. After a while we decided to show them an episode of Coupling, which they really enjoyed.

Caligula was really great and friendly through all this. He liked Ed and Kelly a lot, wasn’t afraid to walk on them or play with them or anything. I’m very happy about that, we’ll just need to make sure we keep having friends over from time to time so he is used to other people.

They left a little before 11. It was a good night.

Today, no formal plans, I think I’ll do a bit of reading. And playing with the kitty! Yay!

*wanders off*

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*