o/` Miranda Sex Garden – Close to the Sky o/`

I love when Myk has a long weekend. It turned out to be quite nice, and eventful despite our lack of plans.

Saturday evening we decided to head out to Joseph’s for pizza. While we were there Myk noticed a message on his voicemail that was from our friend Doug, he was inviting us to a sort of impromptu lan party at Barry and Rae’s. It was nearly 8 pm, and since we were in Northeast Philly just sitting down to eat we said we’d head up after dinner just to hang out for a bit. So we had dinner, three-cheese spinach pizza, yummie! We hadn’t been to Joseph’s in over 9 months, I nearly forgot how good their pizza is! We don’t go down there often because it’s about 30 minutes away, and the traffic down there is never too nice, but it certainly is worth it sometimes.. mmm. After dinner we realized that we were really close to Krispy Kreme, so we drove over there to pick up a dozen doughnuts to bring to Barry and Rae’s.

Krispy Kreme is on Cottman Ave, which is also route 73, so we decided to take 73 all the way up to Skippack. Now where the Krispy Kreme place is is definately cityish, you’ve got billboards, lots of crappy cars, lots of crazy drivers, no skyscrapers because it’s not like downtown, but it’s scary place for me ;) and Skippack is a place I could definately delight in living in some day. It was amusing to drive down 73 out of northeast philly and see the progression from city to suburb to comfortable suburb. And it was kinda neat to see where my current home is in that progression, I don’t live in a bad area, but it’s simple to see that I do want to live further away. I guess I can eventually get used to the massive sprawl of philadelphia, but I’m not used to it yet ;) I still want to someday live further away, and maybe have a summer house somewhere, yeah! In the mountains…

We got to Barry and Rae’s at around 10, it was great seeing them, and Doug, Mega, n-tropy, Kelly, Sai. Of course we didn’t have our computers, so we hung out and watched The Two Towers DVD that they had. I love that movie %) I know that I was in awe of it the first time I watched it because it lived up to so many of my expectations, especially Gollum, for me Gollum MADE the film, he was so amazing. So this time I watched and tried to pick out silly details, bad parts of the special effects, and sure I found a few, and I found that some lines were a bit cheesey, but that cheese made me love it so much more! I think I still will wait til the whole trilogy is out before buying it in a cool DVD set, because I KNOW they are going to do something evil like release extended editions then and all those with the normal DVDs bought now will cry.

We had a nice time, left around midnight I guess and came home. I was tired and so I went to bed after watching a little lousy late night tv.

Monday (Labor day) Myk had off from work. We both got up relatively early (before 11) and did some computer stuff, reading, etc for a while. Then we thought that we should go for a walk, but it was sorta misty out, so maybe something else? We decided to head over to New Hope, which is a small town on the Delaware river, separating PA from NJ. There are lots of cute little shops there, a “magic” shop where we usually get frankincense and the little charcoal disks. It’s a really neat little town. On our way there we almost turned back at one point because it started raining a bit harder than a drizzle. Of course as soon as we were turned around the rain let up and we turned around again to go. So we got there around 3, walked around in the drizzle and some times when it rained a little harder. Went to a bookstore and I got to pick up Children Of The Mind, the next book in the Ender’s Game series that I needed. Some friends had offered to let me borrow it, but I see them so little and I really did want to own this book for myself since I’m sure I’ll read it more than once. Myk also bought me Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett, this is the next book I needed in the Discworld series, and I’ve ha
d a difficult time finding it in physical bookstores in the past. Yay! I love getting new books! *hugs them*

We had a really great time in New Hope, despite the rain. Even walked across the bridge into New Jersey briefly, we sorta wanted to go to a coffee shop, and I was reluctant to go to Starbucks because come on, I’m in cute little New Hope! I can find some place better than that! On the New Jersey side we found a cute little coffee shop, but they didn’t accept credit cards. Well damn, THEY certainly won’t be able to whine that Starbucks was the reason they went out of business if they do! Their problem is not moving with the times! So we didn’t get coffee, and I didn’t really feel like it once we crossed the bridge again. I guess we left New Hope a little after 5 because we wanted to head home for some dinner. Stopped at the grocery store and picked up a couple yummie boca pizzas and headed home to eat them. We just relaxed, watched the West Wing, played a little Warcraft 3, but I was so exhausted so we went and watched a couple shows on PBS.

Yeah, that was my weekend, all sorts of fun stuff!

And now it’s back to the week, at least it’s only 4 days even if today still feels like a monday. I spoke to my friend Eric today. We used to work together, and lived together for a time (as roommates) while I lived in upstate New York, he’s going to art school in Pittsburgh. He’s got his own apartment now, which he says is great, since he kept having trouble with roommates. He has a nice boyfriend now, and I guess in general he’s very happy, which is really all I can ask for for my friends. He mentioned that he might have some time off this fall and was thinking of visiting, that’d be really nice but I won’t get my hopes up ;) It was great hearing from him, he was just so busy last spring at school, then he was at home working and on dial up, so we lost touch for a few months.

I have a few things I want to do today, I want to take my weatherbot and morph it so it can also do UK, maybe even someday discover how to include canada in my weatherbot. *wanders off*

o/` Bel Canto – Dreaming Girl o/`

Yesterday was eventful.

In the evening I was making and early dinner when I heard some popping noise outside. At first we thought it was just some kids in the park near our place throwing little firecrackers. Then Myk went outside and saw that someone was throwing them from their porch out into the parkinglot, some were landing and exploding less than 20 feet from our porch! Myk went over to talk to the neighbor and ask the kids to stop it (it’s illegal), and he found it was some half drunk 40 year old “stereotypical white trash” guy throwing them. The hell? He got all pissed at Myk when he asked him to stop and started swearing. Eventually we called the cops, who slowly drove through the parkinglot and never stopped. We called the emergency people for the apartment complex since it was after hours and they never responded (they should have, I spoke to a woman from the leasing office this morning). And it seems that the guy that was throwing them didn’t even live there, he was a guest. I guess we’re going to head up and make a complaint at the police station later, at least this way we can have a paper trail if it happens again (the woman from the office that i spoke with this morning concurred), even if the jerk doesnt get in trouble for it this time. What was he thinking? Throwing firecrackers into a populated parkinglot on a SATURDAY? There were obviously people around to report him.

After all that annoyance we ate our half warm dinner. I read for a while, finished the second book in Card’s Homecoming series and started on the third. Didn’t do any computer stuff really, I wasn’t in the mood, just happy to relax with some books.

Around 9 we decided to head up to the martini party. It seems that I always forget how uncomfortable such situations make me… lots of people around my age, most of them I don’t know, hanging out and drinking in an apartment and porch. I’m not very social. I like talking to small groups of people in comfortable settings. So we didn’t drink, that was fine with me, I really wasn’t in the mood. Saw pinkee, mj and darkspur for a little while, we hadnt seen darkspur in a while, so it was cool seeing him. Unfortunately they had to leave because pinkee wasn’t feeling good (drinks + meds didn’t treat her well). That was a bit of a disappointment, since I wanted to hang out with them too. Bj and Sandi showed up of course, yay! %) It was really great getting to see them. Luckily neither of them were in a “party” mood at the moment either, so after spending a bit of time there talking we all decided to head up to get some food.

Bj, Sandi, mct, Nita, Myk and I all went up to have dinner at this little diner nearby. We had fun just sitting around and talking, catching up a bit. Sandi is a really fun person and I enjoyed talking to her, and bj has a sense of humor that I missed. It’s just not the same “being” with people in IRC, or in a journal. The food at the diner was ok, and service was ok, but I didn’t mind much, it was really the company that I enjoyed. It was a great night. I was a bit tired by 1:30 when we finished our food and left the diner. Stayed awake on the whole right home though. As soon as I got home I got into my pajamas and went to bed, fell asleep quickly. I didn’t even check my email or see who was in IRC! Hehe…

This morning I woke up around 10:30. I might go back to bed, I’m still tired %) and it’s a holiday weekend!

*wanders off*

o/` Star Wars: A New Hope Special Edition Soundtrack o/`

I’ve been listening to a lot of soundtracks lately.

Last night was nice, had some chicken for dinner, sat around with Myk and watched an episode of MST3K that we had on tape. Played around with my laptop for a bit, and Myk helped me fix up2date, silly breaking redhat. The kernel on that box is now 2.4.20 (it was 2.4.18 before). Made up a new boot disk, and I guess I ended up going to bed finally around 1:30.

This morning I got up around 9:30. I probably should have slept longer since we are expecting a long busy evening, oh well. I got up and puttered around for a while, chatted a bit, did the email thing. Then decided to make up a chinchilla page for my webpage. It had been on my todo list for over a year, and I just was never in the mood to design and develop even a simple page. Well, I was in the mood today. I am pleased with the results %)

I rearranged the main menu on PrincessLeia.com a bit so some of the sections aren’t so crowded. I have too much stuff on that site %) I also linked up a True Jedi Test that I created for my friend Ocean-Saurian (based on his questions and answers) earlier this week.

Tonight we are going to see our friend bj and his wife Sandi. They moved to Phoenix last November, and we haven’t seen them at least since then. It’ll be really nice to see them tonight, and spend some time with a few friends we don’t see often enough. I guess we’ll be going to a small martini party at one place, and then heading out for a late dinner. It should be a really nice (albeit late) evening. I’m looking forward to it. So far this is really the only thing we have planned for this holiday weekend. Maybe tomorrow we’ll rent a movie and have pizza or something %)

Now I go shower and wake up, since it’s after 2 in the afternoon eek! *wanders off*

o/` Hunchback Of Notre Dame Soundtrack o/`

I love Ciabatta bread. We bought some last night to have our boca burgers on, mmmm, it was a nice dinner. Also got a couple little chocolate cakes. We bought these things at a Whole Foods market, which specializes in having fresh and healthy foods, well these cakes certainly were fresh but they were horribly unhealthy! Wow, the chocolate in these “cakes” had the consistancy of the inside of truffles, seriously. So we each ate about half of ours and then had to stop ;) I got my chocolate fix though! Hehe.

I looked at the #13thHour Seti Team today. Wow, we have 13 members. Of course 2 have never returned any results and only 3 have actually returned results this *month* but it’s still pretty cool that people have found that page without any direct encouragement from me (it’s linked to the #13thHour page). *Pokes all the people who arent doing seti anymore* I set mine up so it starts at 7 pm and ends at midnight everyday… that way it doesnt usually interrupt anything I’m doing, up to 190 units now, yay!

Hmm, I cleaned the apartment this morning. I have a few things I’d like to work with on my webpage today, and I want to play around a little bit with the irssi perl scripts that I wrote, because i’ve discovered some problems that are worth fixing to make them look more presentable %)

*wanders off*

o/` Jack’s Lament – Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack o/`

A friend of mine asked me to help him install irssi this afternoon. What is he on? Redhat 9 *arrg* all I could think of was a few of my previous rpm experiences and I just *hoped* that irssi wouldnt require anything that wasn’t already installed. Of course it did %) He asked if all distrobutions were this evil, and I told him about debian’s apt and that redhat now had one. Other than knowing that redhat’s apt existed and that it’s repository was quite small I knew nothing else. I found this site which gives a very basic overview of what apt-rpm is (works a lot like debian’s apt, with apt-get install, apt-cache search, even a sources.list file), and I suggested that he give it a shot. He wasn’t able to install irssi from apt-rpm, but he could install the libs he needed so that his irssi rpm would install properly %) yay! Another irssi convert!

He was the perfect student too. I pointed him in the right direction and he did what needed to be done, only coming to me when there was a small problem or question he couldnt answer himself. He’s lucky he does this, I am so tired of people who come to me for help who aren’t willing to put any effort into it at all. I hate telling them that they just need to “RTFM” but it’s true, I’m not going to waste my time with someone who won’t even read a README %)

clockbot.xelium.net was decommissioned last night *tear* we have r2q5.xelium.net up and running on a new box of course, but clockbot was the original, it’s a little sad %) farewell old server!

I made a little section of my webpage about a friend’s cat Skorpan. He lives in Sweden, and is a very pretty Bengal Cat %) I have had exposure to Bengals in the past because the guy who gave us Dweezle the chinchilla was a breeder. His cats were big (healthy looking and about 15 pounds), so I was really wowed by these cats! From him I knew they were pretty expensive, so I never really thought about them until I saw the pictures of Skorpan… he’s so pretty! And doesn’t shed much, and they are great indoor kitties. Oh and there is a breeder here in Philadelphia! GangesCattery.com… they have an Online Kitten Application Form! Oh! … Not that I’m looking to get one *coughcough* at $500 each for pet quality (as opposed to one you wish to show) *wince* I do love kitties though %) Oh this is the page about Skorpan: Skorpan Page!. I need to make a pretty page like this for Cargo.

I guess that’s it. Allergies aren’t really bugging me today, yay! I think it was just the people cutting the grass that was driving my sinuses nuts. I am going to go figure out what I should make for dinner now. *wanders off*

o/` All About Eve – Tuesday’s Child o/`

They cut the grass outside today. This afternoon I broke down and decided to take some benadryl so I wouldn’t feel miserable. Of course now I’m drowsy and can’t think properly. I logged into r2q5 this afternoon and wanted to make it see my .dir_colors file so I had pretty directories. I spent over 20 minutes doing this, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, turns out I had completely forgotten about the “alias ls=’ls –color=auto'” line… oy %) I’m glad I wasn’t playing around as root much this afternoon, if I forget something silly like that with benadryl influence who knows what I’d do. That’s it, I ban myself from root when under the influence of alcohol, nyquil AND benadryl. Hee.

Ever have an acquaintance that loved to talk about lots of things to the point of becoming horribly annoying? Oy. I finally was annoyed enough to tell one of these types off this afternoon, and not entirely because of how annoying he is. See, he always came to me to tell me all about the “newest greatest thing” and how it was so much better than existing things. Like today, he messages me telling me all about some wonderful music encoder, TONS better than mp3 and ogg. He’s the kind of guy who goes to a message board on some website, reads the posts, takes them as fact and then comes to tell me all about it. In the music encoding world it’s difficult to say which encoder is “better” overall (you can argue all you want), and I was aware of this, so when he starts going off on this new encoder I told him that I didn’t care. He was insulted. Should I have just let him ramble on all afternoon when I wouldn’t read half of what he said? Should I have made myself care? No, no. He is just too touchy, it seems like every time I talk to him he is blabbing about some new stupid thing and if I EVER dispute anything he says he takes it personally and turns the “discussion” into a personal fight.

So I wanted to move on. I asked him how he was doing. He’s older than I am and he’s living with his parents, doesn’t have a job, doesn’t go to school, and doesn’t seem like he has any intentions of doing either. I don’t have a problem with someone doing that, but he started saying about how he was “picky” about what job he’ll take. I said that I’d work at a grocery store if I needed to, heck I worked at a gas station for 1 1/2 years to support myself and my unemployed ex. Sometimes you just need to work where ever you need to to survive. He started going on about having standards (sure, I won’t work at McDonalds either), and how he was his own person and when he does have a job he works only for himself, not to make his bosses or co-workers happy. Huh? When you have a crappy job you just have to deal with it. The boss says “I want this floor spotless” you do what you can to make it that way. He went off on how he has morals. Morals? What does not doing what you don’t feel like doing have to do with morals? Then he attacked *me* for being willing to keep a boss happy by working hard! Said that was “selling myself out” for a lousy job. His view continued even when I mentioned that taking pride in whatever work you do and doing it very well shows well, and they had intended to promote me at that silly gas station job. I really can’t comprehend what he point he was trying to get across, so I was left with assuming that he’s just immature and can’t take being an adult seriously. We’ve all worked crappy jobs, he just needs to get over himself. So I told him that and asked him not to talk to me anymore. I just didn’t want to deal with his crap. I don’t want to sit here and get insulted for taking every job I’ve ever had seriously.

Yay Benadryl influenced rants! I hate people so much sometimes.

In good news, PrincessLeia.com hit 15,000 hits last night %) YAY!

Finally got around to writing a tiny script that’ll run the script to update ircstats and then upload the results to the webserver, added a crontab so it does it daily. I was so lazy for not doin
g this earlier, it’s so easy and took only a couple minutes.

This is a picture taken from the Hubble when Mars was very close to the earth (closer than it’s been in nearly 60,000 years). Myk and I walked outside late last night and it was easy to spot, looked like a big bright star, very cool. I wish I had a telescope.

We watched Transistorized! The History of the Invention of the Transistor last night on PBS. It was quite good, I learned a lot of things I didn’t know %) I guess that’s one big thing I miss about not having the chance to learn computers via college, I am sure I would have learned stuff about the history of things, and I really really would have enjoyed that.

Now I go. *wanders off*

o/` Aladdin Soundtrack o/`

Today ahh… today. Allergies again, I should take some benadryl but I really wanted to get some things done, and I can’t if I’m drowsy. I decided that I wanted to rewrite the weatherbot. That Geo::Weather module is out-dated, and I could completely be rid of it and parse the page myself. I also didn’t feel like putting the module on the box that the R2D2 bot was on (I had R2D2 and weatherbot in the channel for a couple weeks). Now without the silly module I can put it all into R2D2… so R2 does weather, yay! Here’s the new script:

I also got around to updating the IRCStats ;) And I made an archives page for them, so I have IRC Stats for #13tHHour going all the way back to when we linked irc.clockbot.net up with the other servers this year.

I guess that’s about it, a productive day %) *wanders off*

o/` Bel Canto – Kloeberdanz o/`

Yesterday was a good day. It was beautiful out so we opened up the windows. I spent some of the afternoon reading, started the second book in Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series. I then went on my laptop and messed around for a while, dropped into chat a bit. For dinner we had tacos, they were good but I think it was a bit too much after all the eating out we did this weekend, I probably should have made something really mellow like chicken %)

I had a lot of fun with my laptop last night. I learned about exporting X displays. I never had more than one computer that I used as a workstation, but now that I have my laptop I can try all sorts of neat things. What I can do when exporting x displays is run X programs from a remote machine on my current machine, which is very cool because my laptop is very weak and doesn’t have tons of libs on it that i’d need to install certain things. So I did the following:

(lyz@r2a6) lyz $ xhost r2d2
ssh into r2d2
(lyz@r2d2) lyz $ export DISPLAY=r2a6:0.0
(lyz@r2d2) lyz $ opera

This will open up opera on my laptop (r2a6) and it will run from r2d2. It is so cool %) And sickeningly fast, it took about 20 seconds for opera to load on the laptop, and on this it’s almost instant… plus since it’s the same opera I use on my workstation I have all my bookmarks and settings set up the way I want them. Just for fun I decided to see what gimp would do if I tried to take a screenshot. It took a screenshot of my laptop screen! YAY! (hey this was a great revelation before I understood more about what the x exporting is actually doing)

It’s some fun stuff. As long as I’m on the network I can now use what I need to via r2d2, w00t! Having fewer limitations on my laptop is good.

So while playing with this I thought about the sound on my laptop. I never looked into it, I didn’t even know what kind of card it was! Apparently its an old ESS sound card that uses the sb module. ROCK! All I needed to do was load the module and I’m on my way %) YAY! Myk helped me set it up so it loads on boot (I never really played around with modules on redhat). I’m so happy… not that I really have a use for sound on it, but I *can* use sound if I need to. The hardest part about this task was after the module was loaded we realized I had *no* media players. Had to go find all the proper ogg things so i could install ogg123, it was funny %)

My allergies were bugging me last night so I was feeling a bit sick, summer allergies suck, it was such a nice day! Luckily that didn’t really spoil my day any, I just crawled into bed and went to sleep (it was around 11 anyway).

Today I have a couple things I want to play around with, probably hop on my laptop a bit and take advantage of the new found love there ;) Hehe… *wanders off*

Yesterday evening we met my cousin Melissa for dinner at The Drafting Room. She found it on time, even if MapQuest’s directions were less than perfect. Unfortunately it turns out she doesnt drink much anymore, doh! Finest beer place near here and she doesn’t drink. Oh well. We had a nice time, spent about 3 hours there just talking about family and stuff. It was great, I had a nice time. I do like meeting with cousins, it rarely has the stress that is often involved when dealing with older relatives, cousins are my age and grew up in the same crazy family %)

Most of the family news was good, except for the news about my cousin Brad, they still think he’ll beat this cancer, but it’s more progressed than they thought and it’s not the form they thought he had originally. Now they think the treatment might do quite a bit of long-term damage to him *sigh* still, he’ll make it and that’s really what the family is focusing on.

Didn’t do too much last night when we got home, went to bed around 1 because I knew I’d have to get up today to have lunch with another cousin.

This morning I got up a little after 9, showered, called my cousin Erica (also on my father’s side) and met her and her friend Matt around noon. We headed out to TGI Friday’s and had a nice lunch. Now Myk has met two people from my dad’s side, and I know they both liked him… they can report back to the family and say not only that he exists, but that he’s awsome ;D It was good to see Erica again, even if she did mention me coming to visit several times toward the end of lunch. Gaah, I just visited 2 months ago!

It’s good that I’m getting back into contact with family.

I am going to go read now, been reading Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series again, I nearly forgot how much I enjoyed it the first time. I need to get to a library or get some new books soon… maybe for my birthday next month. *wanders off*

o/` Depeche Mode – Enjoy The Silence o/`

*sneeze* Ugh… I’ve been doing that all morning.

This evening we’re going to head down to the Drafting Room in Exton to meet my cousin Melissa for dinner. It should be nice, the restaurant is pretty easy to find so hopefully she’ll make it alright. Hopefully we can find enough to talk about, I have been in too many awkward silence situations lately %) I’ll definately have to ask how her brother Brad is doing, I never did get around to emailing my aunt about that, ugh.

While I was making plans for tonight I got an email from another cousin of mine, Erica. She is also on my dad’s side of the family and it was completely coincidental that they were both here this weekend. She wants to go out for lunch tomorrow. Of course she’s busy tonight and Melissa is busy tomorrow so I couldn’t kill two birds with one stone %) Oh well, I’ll see what we are going to be up to tomorrow and see how Myk feels, I’d hate to drag him out of the apartment two days in a row to see family if he doesn’t want to, especially after the week he had.

I didn’t really get much done after I wanders off yesterday afternoon. Looked over the irc quiz I’m going to start working on, should be easy. I also looked at the code I used to make the original and had to laugh, it’s funny how much I’ve progressed in PHP, all my old stuff looks horrible to me now %) So I’ll be reworking that so it makes sense, hehe.

An old friend of mine, brak (john), has been dropping in #13thHour late at night recently… unfortunately that’s not when I’m around. It’s good to see he wants to come by sometimes, I miss him.

Now I go work on a couple things… *wanders off*