o/` The Cure – The Walk o/`

Friday after I posted my entry I got a knock on the door. When I got to it no one was there but there were a couple boxes on my doorstep. Puzzled, I brought them inside and saw that they were addressed to me. From “Pearson Education” I decided to just go for it and open them. Inside each box was 4 books:

“Open Source Network Administration” By James M. Kretchmar
“The Art Of UNIX Programming” By Eric S. Raymond
“J2EE Security For Servlets, EJBs, and Web Services” By Pankaj Kumar
“Next Generation Application Integration” By David S. Linthicum

Neat!

Apparently they are care of the same woman I contacted a few weeks ago about getting coupons for the Philly Chix. I guess Prentice Hall is wanting to become involved with LUGs (like O’Reilly has). I’ll be bringing them to the next meeting this week and sharing them with my fellow chix. Being a LUG coordinator is so cool.

On friday night we ordered pizza and wings and decided to dig through some of Myk’s movies. He has Bladerunner! And not the Directors Cut! I had been looking around for the non-director’s cut for quite some time because I had never seen it… It was great to be able to watch it, and a whole new experience since reading the book, things were much more clear to me. We really need to get it on DVD sometime.

Saturday was pretty slow. Around 4:30 we headed out to find some dinner. Most places were too busy, so we ended up grabbing a quick dinner at our local Drafting Room. I quickly remembered why we usually drive the 45 minutes to the Exton one instead of going to this one that’s 2 miles from home %) The service and food were mediocre, there was just no love! We finished around 6:30 and headed off to Center City Philadelphia.

We were going to St Mary’s for a Michael Stearns Concert. The traffic was terrible, but we were able to get there by 7:35, when the doors were opening at the church. Got great seats. The concert began around 8:15, and it was really great. We brought a big pillow because the pews are too hard to sit on for 2 hours ;) So we were quite comfortable during the whole thing. During the concert Stearns had a screen up that showed images/movies etc that went along with his songs. It was quite enjoyable, I never felt like I wanted a song to end (which has happened a few times in the past at ambient concerts). It really was a wonderful time. Concert ended a little after 10.

I went to bed soon after we got back home because I was tired and my stomach hurt a little (I assumed it was because of the cheese on my dinner).

On sunday I woke up with an upset stomach, was pretty much in bed all day. Myk was so great to me, even did the grocery shopping %) When he came home he made me dinner (soup and crackers) and a bath. Even though I was sick Myk really did make the day bearable.

I was depressed some this weekend as well. Crazy brain chemicals. I’m feeling better now, but boy do those down times suck. Makes me feel like such a crazy woman %(

This morning I woke up still feeling sorta bad, I went back to bed for most of the morning. Got up around noon because I was thirsty, and after some water I decided I felt well enough to have some juice and some lunch. I think I was just tired and dehydrated this morning, feeling quite a bit better now, stomach isn’t upset anymore, YAY!

My cousin Erica called this afternoon. She told me about taking my sister Heather (20) out to the mall and to get a haircut. I guess Erica has sorta adopted Heather as a charity “makeover” case, she is trying to get her to sorta grow up a bit, take care of herself better, look and dress more like an adult. I am not sure what happened with Heather and I, but we do have the same basic problem, somewhere in the teenage years we “missed” something. Neither of us cared too much about our appearance, and so we never got into the habit of wearing makeup or dressing decently. Luckily I have begun to grasp my adultness (even if I still won’t wear makeup) and work
on improving myself… and I’ve always had much better hygiene habits than Heather. I’m glad Erica is giving her some help, someone needs to be there for her.

Erica also invited us up to New Hampshire for thanksgiving. That’s the 4th thanksgiving plan we’ve had proposed to us this year! I politely declined, saying that we did have plans, and telling her that we were quite busy around then (we sent in the notice that we’re going to move out of here at the beginning of December, so we’ll be moving *somewhere* whether it be another apartment, or our own home..)

The rest of the afternoon I spent just doing a few things around the apartment. There were a bunch of boxes in our living room from when we brought things home from Myk’s mother’s, so I cleaned those up (saved the boxes, they will be good when we move…) and I put all of our CDs with cases together, it looks much nicer in here now.

Now I’m going to go check email and stuff *wanders off*

o/` Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack o/`

Myk bought me this soundtrack for my birthday. I had it once before but a roommate of mine swiped it and I didn’t notice until after I had moved out. I was disappointed, but it’s great to have it again! I made oggs of it the other day, now I can listen to it over and over again, yay! I got the best presents.

The West Wing was on on Wednesday night. The only show all week that I really look forward to, and this week was important, the last 15 minutes of the show I had been waiting for for *months!* and guess what happened? Somehow our signals got crossed on the channel, or someone at NBC screwed up, or *something* and so during those pivotal moments there was the audio for some lousy reality show over all the west wing stuff!!! AHH!! It was horrible. We could barely hear the West Wing, and were forced to listen to stupid reality TV people pick a date or something. I can’t believe people watch that crap %) and I was very upset that I was subjected to the audio of it… especially since it was all over my favorite program.

Yesterday was lousy. Myk was really busy with work. And I was working on a bunch of things… throughout the day I noticed GLines (network wide ban) on the IRC server. The first one seemed ok to me, and the new op explained it, but then someone came on the server asking me why his buddy (a xelium regular) had been banned. Turns out that our wonderful new Oper has history with these guys. She then GLined him too. It started a discussion with her that became quite heated. She has little respect for us or the network. She certainly has no respect for me, was horribly insulting when I tried to explain to her how we run our network. But today we drew up some Oper Rules that we will have to go by (it was suggested that we come up with this list BEFORE linking other servers, but it never happened). I had to apologize to those that she banned, and the bans were removed… Anyway, we’re giving this chick a second chance, if she blows it then her servers are gone. I don’t really want to think about it anymore though.

Last night turned out to be nice though. We went over to Myk’s mother’s house for dinner. She made yummie chicken and shrimp rice. It was very nice. For my birthday she got me some rice and a traditional rice steaming pot and basket from Thailand. Neat! It requires planning for the rice to be cooked in it, but it’s very nice, I’m looking forward to trying it. After dinner Myk’s mother decided that since we were there that she should take the opportunity to give Myk some of his stuff she had in the attic of his. Turns out that she had his “Lost” collection of The Cure tapes! … this collection has gained almost mythical status to me since he’s talked about it, and how disappointed he was that he lost it. It was a great discovery %) And it made the day end nicely.

Today has been ok. Cleaned the apartment like usual, paid bills, did some little things that I needed to catch up on. The day went by quickly, but I’m not in a particularly good mood. Not exactly depressed… but I am feeling a bit… disconnected. I am glad it’s Friday.

Tomorrow night we’re going into the city to a Michael Stearns concert. If you don’t know who he is don’t fret ;) he’s an ambient artist. We’ve gone to a couple ambient concerts in the past couple years, and they’ve all been nice. I’m really looking forward to it.

Well I need to get going now… *wanders off*

For my birthday one of my presents from Myk was Google Hacks. It’s so cool. After Myk gave it to me I was so excited that I just had to do some google searches with some of the things I had learned. I didn’t know about “link:” searches, so I tried it on some of the pages on my website. I found a couple sites linking to my how-tos! That’s so cool… I’ve never had any contact with these people and lo! My mplayer how to and enlightenment guide are linked places. So cool. There is tons more in this google book that I will have to explore, it’s very interesting. I’ll be sure to talk all about the cool new things I find.

Looking for houses is depressing. When you’re younger you always think “When I get a house it’ll have… I’ll have… and then it’ll have…” But then you grow up and realize that you’re not a millionaire and quite probably never will be. So you’re house won’t be huge, it won’t have all of the things you want in it, you won’t have 20 acres. Coming to that realization is difficult. I guess everyone goes through it, settling for a bit less than they expected. I see it with many people, when I was younger I saw people’s parents disappointed with their purchases, and I thought to myself “why did they make such a huge purchase without getting exactly what they wanted?” Well I guess because it’s near impossible when you’re an average middle-class family.

I asked my father why they never decided to buy a house. He blamed my mother. Of course HE had planned on getting a house, HIS plans are always perfect (although never executed), it’s just that damn woman! Oh well.

I compiled the #13thHour ircstats for September this afternoon. An amazing 74795 lines last month, that blows our previous record of 60613 away. The channel is doing good.

Now that it’s October we all put our halloween nicknames on in #13thHour. In the past I’ve been PrincessEvil2 … but this year I thought I’d be punny and go with PrincesSlaya2. Myk is FrankenTime again, and this year at the suggestion of my friend Shampoo (ShamBOO for halloween) I made R2D2 be R2D666. Hehe. We celebrate for a whole month, and it makes this month just a little more funny. I also updated princessleia.com so it’s looking a little halloweenish.

I have things to do now *wanders off*

Ever have a day where it feels like everything you do or say is making you look like a moron? I’m having one of those days…

I spoke to both my parents last night. My mother seems to be doing fine, ‘cept that she had to get off the phone when her husband asked who she was on the phone with and then complained that the dinner was getting cold. I have heard that he is fairly controlling, and from his tone even through the phone it seems to be true. But hey, that’s my mother’s choice, I’m not going to worry about it, nothing I can do anyway. My father is doing alright, out of the hospital and living in the motel again. My frustration grew as the conversation progressed, he started giving me all this advice, then asking if I understood what he was saying. I know he means well, but it just comes off as talking down to me. Myk’s mother also called to wish me a happy birthday, we’re going over to her house on thursday night for dinner, it should be nice.

*wanders off*

o/` BOA – For Jasmine o/`

-!- BirthdayBot changed the topic of #13thHour to: ` – . – ` – Happy Birthday PrincessLeia2!!! – ` – . – `

I’m 22 today.

Yesterday we went out to the Whole Foods market near our place to get salad stuff and rolls, and ended up picking up some pumpkins. It’s not too early, last year we got them about 2 days before halloween and so we didn’t have them for very long, was so sad.

I played with Cargo a lot yesterday. It really was a great weekend %)

R2’s forecast script is broken again. I sorta expect this since a simple change in the html or design of the weather.com page could cause issues… but it’s still annoying. I guess I am torn between liking the challenge that it presents and just being annoyed because I don’t always want to fix the silly script.

We’re thinking about adding a couple more servers to xelium. I guess some guy is offering 9 servers, claiming “The servers are on a dedicated OC pipe binded by an optic table” … that would be good, and hopefully we can trust him. 9 is too many though, he is not bringing new users, so we’ll still have around 325 users. 9, plus our existing 4, 13 servers for 325 users? It’s not needed, and would only increase the chance of many netsplits.

The weather finally decided that it would be fallish. We had the windows open all night and it was COLD! … even now it’s only about 60 degrees.

I have a tendancy to dislike, and even look down upon people in IRC who speak in “AOLese” .. you know “hi how r u? ur great lol, im goin 2 go 4 dinner nw, kthx by” I just assumed that they “spoke” like this because they were stupid. Then the other day an acquaintance of mine tried to convince me that it was just “chat slang.” He claimed that since it’s generally accepted in the chat community (what chat community? AOL? MSN?) so perfectly respectable people might choose to chat this way. I thought about this. So he claims they aren’t really dumb enough to actually need to communicate like that. Ok, that’s believable. But I still hate them and think they are dumb for conforming to such stupid and annoying methods of chatting. Seriously. I need a translator for what some of these people say in AOLese, like the translator in “Airplane!” who spoke jive… hehe.

-$stupid- ppl tell me im 2 wierd 4 my own gud if dey fink i am dey shud tlk 2 u

It took me like a minute to read that, and it really wasn’t worth it. My ignore list is growing.

I’m actually in a great mood, these people just drive me batty.

Oh it’s that time of year again. What time of year? House hunting time! We have been seriously thinking about it recently, we want to move to somewhere a bit closer to Myk’s work, and to somewhere cheap so we can save up money for a nice house in the future. And where we are now it’s impossible for me to get a real, consistant full-time job (not close enough to public transportation), living somewhere where that would at least be an option would be very nice. So we’re starting to look, our lease here runs out in early December.

I guess that’s about it *wanders off*

Today is Myk and my second year anniversary. Wow. Two years %) That makes me so happy.

Yesterday was great.

First Cargo kitty woke me up around 8:30 (ok, that wasn’t so great). So I got up and played with him for a while. Hopped on my laptop and *finally* got caught up on email mailing lists that I habitually forget about (I had over 350 to read). Got through them all, replied to a couple that were only a day or two old. It was a nice relaxing morning.

I spent a bunch of time reading in the afternoon. Once we were all showered, dressed and awake (um, around 3:30, yay weekends!) we decided to head up to the Drafting Room in Exton. Myk wrote up a pretty inclusive description of what we ate there: Myk’s LJ entry. Yeah, it was an early birthday dinner %) (didnt want to go on sunday because it would be football time and there is a bar there, didnt want to wait til monday because we’d have silly time constraints with it being a weekday). The food was amazing. Mmmm bottomless mussels! And the beer was excellent… swordfish and shrimp, oh yummie! And the chocolate cheese cake… *drool* The evening there was spectacular, I couldn’t have imagined a better dinner %)

After dinner we picked up some movies from blockbuster and headed home. We sat down and watched “Treasure Planet” first. It’s a Disney movie. The first full-length animated feature of theirs that I didn’t see in the theater since I started my obsession with Aladdin. It was kinda sad for me that I broke that “record” of seeing them all in the theater (sometimes multiple times, I think I saw Pocahontas 4 times in the theater..), but Lilo and Stitch was also released that year, too much Disney release for one year! I did enjoy Treasure Planet though, not nearly as good as most of their films, and in the beginning I really disliked their use of CG animation, but toward the end it started to grow on me. Then we watched “Rocky Horror Picture Show” (talk about variety, Disney cartoon then RHPS, hee). Ok, I know I said I didn’t like musicals, but I actually enjoyed RHPS. It was a bit disturbing, a lot campy, and they were poking fun at SO MANY things. It was funny. And apparently it has been released on DVD… but Blockbuster only had it in VHS, how annoying, the only reason I go to blockbuster is because they usually have all of the latest and greatest.

I went to bed around midnight because I was so tired. It was a great day!

Cargo kitty decided to wake me up at 8 this morning. I would have just tried to hide under the covers and go back to sleep, but he was making a lot of noise so I just decided to get up and play with him so he didn’t wake up Myk too. I played with him a bunch this morning, so maybe I can get an hour more of sleep this morning if he wants to settle down %) Now, when I have a cat of my own there will be certain rules about waking me up and being in my bedroom ;) It’s hard to train cats, and training a cat like Cargo is especially so, since he goes to so many different people’s homes, with all different rules. Still, he’s a great cat, he loves to play, and sometimes he’s absolutely batty %) I love him so much *hugs Cargo*

On Friday I communicated with one of the newest members of Philly Chix and she offered “officially” to be the driver on our trip to DC. Woo! We’re planning to have the trip on October 25th (saturday). It should be nice… just trying to now figure out how many people want to go. Running a group like this is a bit difficult sometimes %) I really have to nag at some people to get them interested, hehe. I hope this all works out, I’m really excited.

I discovered yesterday that the release date for “Wallace and Gromit in Project Zoo” was pushed to October 3rd. Not a big change, especially since I can’t get it right away, but still, the sooner it comes out the sooner I can hear more about it ;) It looks like a really great game.

Today I will spend playing with Cargo Kitty. *wande
rs off*

I think I’m finally happy with the design of PrincessLeia.com. Almost. Yeah, I it. I think. Ugh… Well it’s staying the way it is for a while anyway. I like it.

Yesterday afternoon I was also able to redesign, moved, and renamed all the files in my section about Star Wars. It looks much better now, and it’s done in php so I don’t need to worry about all the crazy menu updating on every page that I used to. I love php. Today I got around to doing some redesigning of my Tribute to Leia. I’m not sure if I like it, but that also is in php now, so I have all the love of includes.

I cleaned the apartment this morning.

I guess sometime this weekend, maybe saturday? Myk and I are going to go to the Drafting Room for bottomless mussels and beer, w00t! I dunno if it’ll be a sort of anniversary/birthday or just birthday or just yummie dinner out yet, but I’m looking forward to it (%

Yeah. *wanders off*

o/` Vangelis – Tears In Rain – Bladerunner Soundtrack o/`

I spent a great deal of time today redesigning PrincessLeia.com. I never liked the former design. Maybe it really did suck, maybe I just looked at it too much. I really am pleased with this new design though.

Yes. It’s pink and purple. I might reconsider the link choices because people have been screaming about their hatred of pink since I put it up. I like pink…

I’m in a design mood today and I should probably take advantage of it and clean up a few of my less than beautiful sections of my webpage.

“Square Enix announced today that existence of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children an computer-generated animated feature which will debut on DVD sometime in 2004.”

http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=90
http://www.the-magicbox.com/game092503a.htm

*Gasp!*

There have been rumors floating around about this, but they werent confirmed until today. Now I want to go replay FF7…

Myk brought home Indian food last night, yay! It was great. Then at 9 we watched The West Wing season premiere. It was good, I’m so happy the new season of that has come, it’s such a great show.

I’m not going to talk about my family, it’s not something I want to think about right now.

I guess that’s it. *wanders off*

o/` Stabbing Westward – High o/`

Today is very Mondayish. Not good, not bad. I sorta feel like I didn’t get enough sleep, but I don’t remember sleeping badly last night. It’s probably just the cloudy weather. I’m happy though, in a moderately sleepy sort of way %)

Last night our friend n-tropy and his girlfriend kelly came over. They brought board games. First we played Balderdash, which I had never played before and I admit I was not very excited to try it because I’m horrible at lying. Luckily we were all new to it, so by the end of the game Kelly and I were racing for the win ;) Played .com Monopoly for nearly 4 hours too, that was fun. I was the second to become bankrupt, it came down to Myk and Kelly by the time 10:00 rolled around and they decided to head out. It was a great night, nice to have some friends over, it’s been a while.

My birthday is in a week. I’ll be the big 22. Crazy. I was thinking today what I imagined myself to be at this age, and I realized that I never really had any idea. While I was a teenager I was very very depressed, so I just expected the future to be equally is dismal and I never really thought about it much except with dread. It’s amazing what a couple years can do %) I never thought I’d be this happy.

There has been some activity in a channel that my friend Peacimowen and I have been hanging out in for quite some time, #Andor. Originally it was just a Wheel Of Time channel, but we’re trying to expand it to encompass other books, and maybe sometime get a sort of “reading club” together so we can read books around the same tiem and then discuss them. Anyway, one of the newer members of the channel thought it would be fun to bring in an eggdrop “AI” bot that “Learns” to communicate by listening to what people say in the channel. We’ve all talked to it a bit, and sometimes it’s responses are really funny… here are some of the best lines today (aemon is the AI bot):

-@PrincessLeia2- aemon: moogles are cute white fuzzy final fantasy animals
– aemon- PrincessLeia2: You are the biggest dunderhead of all animals.

-@PrincessLeia2- aemon: don’t be mean
– aemon- PrincessLeia2: A chromosome is a person who manufacturers bread.

-@Peacimowen- aemon: Who is Peacimowen?
– aemon- Peacimowen: Peacimowen is the dragon reborn

– aemon- Peacimowen: R2d2 is a small marsupial peculiar to australasia.

– aemon- Peacimowen: A dog is a heavenly body which orbits a star.

– aemon- Peacimowen: A planet is a body fluid that carries food and obtaining energy and vital substances from within the body.

AI bots are funny.

After I cleaned the bathtub this morning I started filling it up for a bath (my back hurt a little from leaning over a game board for so many hours last night). While waiting for my bath to be ready I decided to once again go through some of the apache access logs and find out what people have googled for to find my pages (for “hit #” and link I simply used google.com defaults, with the exception of listing 100/page instead of 10):

First Google Hit For:
mirc random response scripts
idioms of the 1800s
hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy quotes
sailor moon wavs
hotkeys in redhat 9.0
living things and what they need
hotkeys xsession
r2d2 theme
“katherine blake” Miranda
keybinding settings enlightenment

Second Google Hit For:
thick curtains
enlightenment menu file
IRCstats
ewok sounds
February 17, 2003 snow storm

Third Google Hit For:
Jedi test
Luke Skywalker family tree
starting enlightenment
koala cookies
what’s the funniest thing on the internet
minesweeper linux

One amusing thing I did discover while going through these was the amazing number of hits that my page on Isabella d’Este (over 150/week) gets . Who would have thought? I simply put this page up with a few other short papers I wrote in high school. A few google searches proved that I have some info on that page that might not be found elsewhere, at least not so much of it together. Very interesting.

The main page of princessleia.com just hit 16,000 early today %)

*wanders off*