o/` Legend Soundtrack o/`

This laptop is so neat %) x only runs in 8-bit, but with the “default” theme in fluxbox it looks great (I tried a couple other themes and they looked *horrible*). I am absolutely in love with how this keyboard types, it makes a nice little clicky sound, and feels good… when I hit the proper keys *mutters at the key placement* So I am happy with how it’s running, impressed that the mere 32 mb ram, it’s pretty much using all the ram when x is running, plus a little bit of swap, I’m pleased! *hugs the laptop* (I’m using it to type this) It’s definately working out good for what I need… unfortunately I haven’t yet installed anything so I can’t really say what I think of gentoo’s emerge yet. I will probably install opera on here in the near future, I don’t have any browsers installed at the moment. I don’t think I’m going to go too much into installing text based things… I pretty much figure that most of the text things I don’t have already I will only need if I’m on the network (and online) and if i’m on the network than I can ssh into r2d2 or minute and use the text based things there %) Like links… if I want to go to a webage I just ssh to r2d2 and open up links there. It takes a lot of load off of what I need to actually run on here, it’s nice. I love linux.

The other day in irc someone asked me how many computers Myk and I have and what they ran. I actually had trouble answering him! I said 8, but then readjusted that total to 9, and got all messed up when listing what OS’s they all ran, hehe. So I think I will make a section on my page about the systems we have (Myk already has a section like this on bevilacqua.us but it only has our baic systems). For now I’ll just list them here, because I can:

R2D2 – Debian Stable/Windows 2000 – 2.0 ghz P4 – Lyz’s Primary Workstation
R2Q5 – Debian Stable – 450 mhz P3 – We plan to run this as the irc server, web server, and mailserver when the cobalt’s contract comes up for renewal (we dont want to renew it)
R2A6 – Gentoo – 333 mhz AMD K6-2 (Compaq) – Lyz’s laptop
Hour – Gentoo/Windows XP – 2.0 ghz P4 (Dell) – Myk’s Primary Workstation
Minute – Debian Stable – 733 mhz P3 (Dell) – Currently runs as gateway, firewall, webserver, mailserver
Clockbot – Debian Stable – 333 mhz AMD K6-2 (Compaq) – Print server running CUPS (yeah, it’s a bit overkill for a print server, but this computer has had a rough life, hehe)
Reducto – Gentoo – 700(?) mhz (IBM) – Myk’s laptop from work
The Cobalt – Cobalt Linux – 300 mhz AMD K6-2 (Sun) – runs irc.clockbot.net (otherwise known as clockbot.xelium.net), also runs our primary nameserver, it’s colo-ed and I’ve never actually physically seen this box
The Mac – No OS currently installed – 132(?) mhz – a friend gave this to us, havent had time to check it out yet

Yep, those are all our babies %) Not a bad variety!

Enough with computers already ;) I got a surprising call last night. My Uncle Dan, who I hadn’t talked to in over a year and a half called me! My Uncle Dan is the relative I stayed with (with his ex-wife and two kids.. but they were still married then) when I first moved to Brockport, NY (near Rochester) back in the beginning of ’00. He’s always been great to me, never talking down to me like my own father tends to still do, always treating me like my own person, and never afraid to let me know when I was out of line. It’s kinda funny how he ended up coming in and taking that role, since my father obviously wasn’t going to. Anyway, the last time I talked to him was when he had run off to Las Vegas to meet a woman he had met through a chat room, he thought I’d be sympathetic to his cause, since I had met people online.. but he left his wife and two children to be with this woman, and there are problems with that. Still, he’s family, and he’s done a lot for me so I cant very well turn my back on him. He divorced his wife (the one that he was married to when I lived with them) and now pays child support for his two children who he
isn’t allowed to see. And he married this new women, who has a few kids of her own, they all live in upstate NY. He called last night to let me know that he is often in the Philadelphia area! He spoke to my mother before he called me to get my phone number and find out where I was living. He drives an 18-wheeler, and I guess he has a route that takes him across NY, PA, and NJ. He often drives right past my turnpike exit! And since I live less than 10 minutes from the exit, it would be easy for him to stop by sometime. He said he’d give me a call next week when he is going to be in the area. Cool! It’ll be nice getting to see him again, it’s been over 2 years since I have actually seen him, and no one on my mother’s side of the family (my mother included!) has come to visit me here. He can go home and tell everyone what a beautiful apartment I live in ;) Hehe. Maybe we can take him out for dinner or something *shrugs* we’ll see.

Tonight we are going to go to a little pool party/get together with some of Myk’s former Co-Workers. I’ve met very few of them, so it should be quite an experience. We’re just going to hang out there for a little bit, skip the “pool” part of it because Myk still doesnt have any swimming shorts, d’oh! I think it’ll be a nice evening though. This weekend we’ll probably just spend chilling inthe AC, which is perfectly fine with me!

Went grocery shopping last night. The cashier was a guy I always see there, about 50 and takes his job WAY too seriously. He is always trying to help the customers as much as he can, always wanting to converse with them. Now I understand that he was just trying to be nice, and I like that, but it was a hot miserable day out, and I was in a lousy mood. Sometimes I don’t want to interact! But this guy was pretty insistant on wanting to talk with every customer, and I put up with it. I can’t imagine what happens when someone really doesnt want to talk to this guy, ugh. Someday the human element will be removed from shopping, and I’ll be very happy.

I actually got quite a bit of work done on the enlightenment how-to thing, I’m pleased with it so far. Of course I am not going to meet my goal of having it finished today, I keep thinking of extra little things I need to add to it, hehe. Still, it’s a great start! And it felt good getting some real work done for once. I’ll probably do a little more work on it this afternoon. And I also need to get caught up on email, oy! I am so bad about replying to people, probably because I seem to insist on writing 5 page emails each time, and I never can find the time to do such a thing ;)

I got a little burned the other day when I went to the pool, oops. It isn’t a bad burn, but I decided not to go to the pool yesterday (the temp was around 97, heat index over 100!) just because I was afraid I’d burn more. Last night at the grocery store I picked up some suntan lotion %) So now I am going to go put that on and head over to the pool. *grabs the all important suntan lotion and wanders off*

Spread the meme

o/` Pocahontas Soundtrack o/`

-!- Current Global Users: 391 Max: 401

Woohoo! We finally hit 400 users on xelium!

Yesterday was hot. In light of this I decided it would be a good day to go down to the pool. I had a nice time, and didn’t get burnt %) I went back to the pool today, and it was even nicer because there were hardly any people there, and I was the only one in the pool. It’s nice having a nice clean pool that I can go to whenever I want. But it is lonely… I need to drag Myk out to the store one of these days so he can get a bathing suit %)

On the laptop… x runs! And I am quite impressed with how nicely fluxbox is working with only the 32 mb of ram %) I havent set up a user account or anything yet, I’ll probably do that this evening. And I discovered why there is a 160 mb cap on the amount of ram it can have. Apparently the 32 mb is non-removable… gah! And there is only one extra slot for ram, the highest of which will work with it is 128 mb. Well that’s ok, for what I’ll be using the laptop for I don’t even really need to go much higher than it is now. I had a friend offer to send me an extra stick of 64 mb laptop memory, and Myk mentioned that he might be able to get one for cheap, so I’ll see… I can get ram from *someone* I’m excited!

Been doing some work on the englightenment how-to that I’m putting together. Which I should go work on right now since I’m in the mood to do it. *wanders off*

o/` Meat Beat Manifesto – She’s Unreal o/`

Hehe… this is from The Matrix Bastardization

Yesterday I pretty much spent the day reading. Actually finished Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. Tonight I’m going to start reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the novel that Bladerunner was based on, I picked it up at the bookstore where we held the first chix meeting).

-$nick- anywho. i’m not stalking PrincessLeia2. Nope, nosireebob.
-$nick- just came to say hello to her

… Eh? Turns out that this guy is a decent person to chat with. He found me through a bash.org quote of mine, did a search online for my nick, and found princessleia.com where I said that I chatted in #13thHour on xelium. But why come into a chat room and say “hi, i am not a stalker” ? Especially in such a creepy way… gah. I won’t look down upon him for searching for me after seeing a bash.org quote… I guess I could say I am guilty of doing similar things when trying to find out how to contact someone who somehow sparked my interest. I guess I’ll give him a chance, he added a link to my page on his own and that’s cool.

Today.. ah today I think I am going to wander into fluxbox (a window manager, I usually use enlightenment) and get a nice setup going, maybe play with keybindings a bit and see what I can come up with. So if x does decide to run on the little compaq laptop, then I’ll have a nice setup that I can just scp over. One thing about this laptop that I didn’t really take into concideration previously… the keyboard. Keyboards are keyboards, and I expect a keyboard on a laptop to be a bit different than one for a desktop, sure, but this keyboard is crazy. I don’t know what the designers were thinking… I found a picture of it so I didn’t need to fight with my camera:

Compaq Presario 1245 keyboard
check out the placement of the Ins and |\ keys! Next to the space bar! And the placement of Del Home PgUp and PgDn is enough to drive anyone crazy %) It’s going to take a lot of getting used to…

Well I’m going to go work on a couple things now, catch up on emails, webpage tweaks and desktop interface exploration. *wanders off*

First, book reviews!

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card, 592 pages
This is the immediate sequel to Speaker for the Dead, it picks up with Valentine travelling to see Ender on Lusitania. Years have passed since “Speaker” and Ender has established himself as a respected member of the community. Lusitania is dealing with the coming of the fleet sent to destroy their world, as well as internal struggles between themselves and the peguininos, and the newly discovered colony of “Buggers.” In another part of the universe, a father and daughter on the chinese planet colony called “Path” are charged with helping decide the fate of Lusitania. I enjoyed this book. Like always, Card made all the characters enjoyable enough so that when the story shifts to another portion you are not disappointed.

Swan Song, by Robert McCammon, 956 pages
Swan Song takes place just before and after a nuclear attack. The survivors struggle to make it through the years of nuclear winter that befall them. Some people cling to objects of hope, others with family, some with cope by inflicting violence. Some parts of this book get rather “surreal.” There are issues with objects being “magic” and there is a “demon” that preys upon people who have hope, and a young girl who can make plants grow from the dead and damaged earth. All these characters eventually come together after years of roaming the United States, and it all comes to a head where the fate of the world hangs in the balance. It was a sad book, a bit descriptive in some parts, but not overly disgusting or sexual, and so I can deal with this sort of book from time to time. I guess taking a look back at the book as a whole, I did enjoy reading it, gave me a lot to think about and be greatful for.

Moving on… I am feeling much better today. I think I discovered what spurned my depressed mood yesterday too. A woman came into #13thHour the other day whom I hadn’t seen in years. I missed seeing her come in, I was in the living room reading (Rubicant tipped me off to her presence in a private message I read later), but Myk got to talk with her briefly and when he mentioned getting my attention she said “no.. that’s ok” … a polite refusal to talk to me. I think we need some background here.

Once upon a time I dated a guy online with the nick Exeplis. He was my first “boyfriend” and I met him on the scifi server. He was a nice guy, had a steady job, and despite being 10 year older than me, he gave me attention that I hadn’t ever had before. As time when on I realized that we had little in common except that we were both lonely and shy. I met him in real life, and although I wanted things to work out, I just couldnt see past his age (he was 27, had a house and was ready to settle down, I was 17) and the fact that he had little to no interested in computers besides getting on to chat. After his second plane trip to visit me I broke up with him. Now since this woman was a close friend of his, she saw this breakup as a horrible horrible thing for me to do. Apparently Exeplis didn’t see it coming, and she took his side in absolutely despising me, but what could I do? Then I started dating someone else within a couple weeks. It was a rebound thing, I was depressed and he was there *shrugs* it happens! And she took this to mean that Exeplis never meant anything to me… it broke off some of the more transient members of #13thHour because I was such a horrible person for doing this to him. Gah, I was 17, what did they expect? The years went by, and Exeplis got married and settled down with a nice girl, they had a son, and we started talking again. I guess Exeplis and I do have a friendship now, I even helped him get back into touch with this woman!

So where does that leave me? I assumed she’d just steer clear of me and #13thHour. But no, she came into there, chatted pleasantly with Myk, had fun while I wasn’t around, and left. I guess this depressed me. I’ve tried to make ammends with her over the years, even doing small
favors to see if she would forget the past and move on. It hasn’t worked. Even when Exeplis is now my friend, she will not budge from her hatred (I’m sorry, strong dislike, hatred would be so un-christian) of me. I guess I shouldn’t worry about it, I mean it was really none of her business in the first place. I think it just annoys and upsets me that she still dislikes me… and that she has the nerve to come into my (ok, Time is the founder, but I would definately be labelled co-founder) channel dispite that.

Next! The concert yesterday was so cool! The drive out there wasn’t bad either, and we didn’t get lost! It only took about 2 hours to get there. Harrisburg is a very nice little city. And The Whitaker Center was a very nice place. The concert lasted from 2 pm til about 8 pm, with a 20 minute break… it was quiet a lot to sit through %) We had front row seats, which meant that they set up 3 rows of extra chairs, and we got to sit in the ones closest to the stage, I could touch the stage, in fact… I had trouble *not* touching it because we were so close to it! We could see the artists so close up, it was amazing! Jeff Pearce was cool, he really knew how to amuse and work the audience between the songs, and I did enjoy his set. Robert Rich was absolutely amazing! I was very close to pushing away the budget for the day and talking Myk into buying another one of his cds (we have several), he played through his whole hour long set without stopping, which caused a bit of discomfort… the seats weren’t exactly the most comfortable in the world, and at least with appluase breaks you got a suitable time to rearanged yourself into a more comfortable position without feeling guity that you are annoying the people around you %) After that set we got to have a 20 minute break to walk around. Then we came back to listen to Steve Roach. Myk is a huge Steve Roach fan, but last year he was disappointed when we went to a concert of his in Philly. He’s started using a guitar in his ambient work, and Myk doesnt like it… neither do I. And to be honest, most of Roach’s music bores me anyway… he played for nearly 1 1/2 hours with no breaks. By the end I was snuggled up with Myk half falling asleep because I was bored and uncomfortable. The last artist was Jonn Serrie. I didn’t really know much about him, since my ambient/space music knowledge is vastly limited, but he’s fairly famous… has done music for a number of planetariums and has done work with the likes of Lucasfilm Ltd. and NASA… cool stuff! I was quite captivated with his music, and he stopped between each song, which was nice. So I guess Robert Rich was my favorite of the night, but I was itching to pick up a John Serrie cd as well when the concert was over. Luckily I didn’t %) We left Harrisburg right after the concert, figured we could just get something here in North Wales for dinner… we got home around 10, much to our dismay we found out that nearly everything was closed since it was a sunday night, d’oh! We ended up eating in.

Today Myk took off of work (he planned to take it off because he knew he’d be tired after the trip to Harrisburg yesterday). It’s nice having him home on a weekday %) He’s cleaning and waxing the Rav4 right now… News with the laptop? Well the gentoo install didn’t go very smoothly. Myk ended up taking it last night and beating it into submission ;) Unfortunately I wasn’t around to see it, so my hand in the install is… well… I basically didn’t have a hand in it. My knowledge of the gentoo install is still practically null. I’m glad that Myk got the base install done for me (compiling x right now, not sure how it will work), yet disappointed that I couldn’t learn much from it. It’s just so hard learning to install gentoo on a laptop that is so old, the base compile takes so long that a screw up costs you days, and it would have been difficult for me to sit through all Myk’s work on it, just because he was working on several other things at the same time *shrugs*

Um… I guess
that’s it for now. I just stared Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil … I remember that I have seen the movie once, but I remember nothing of the movie. It’s good, and it’s been a long time since I’ve read a non-fiction book that read like a fiction. *wanders off to read*

We went to hang out with our friend Ed and his girlfriend Kelly last night at Kelly’s place. Didn’t stay long because we had to get up this morning, but we got to see all of Kelly’s kittys and her dog, it was fun %) Also got to see Ed’s mac, which was pretty cool, I have to say that the mac os is quite nice these days, the real transparency on any window was amazing.

I watched an episode of .hack//sign last night. I can’t decide if I like it or not.

Depressed, not sure why… I’m sure it’s just a silly girly mood and it’ll pass.

We’re going to the concert today, should be fun, I have no reason to be depressed…

Going to take a shower now and get going. *wanders off*

o/` Miranda Sex Garden – Falling o/`

My net connection went down for about an hour this morning (4-5 am) again, grrr… this is really starting to get me angry. Hopefully next time I can catch the outage and call comcast so they can troubleshoot… of send someone to physically check on the line and see what’s up.

It’s funny how dreams can somehow lead to a discovery about yourself. I had been having nightmares for a few months, and I took the advice of a woman I know from a mailing list who suggested that I start writing my nightmares down because they could be trying to tell me something. First I laughed at this, everyone knows that nightmares are completely random ;) But after a few nights I started noticing a few details that my nightmares had in common. So yesterday afternoon I went to lie down and take a nap, I had a nightmare that seemed to clarify what the rest were pointing at. Wow, when I got up from my nap I was able to seriously consider this. I went to bed last night and didn’t have any nightmares %) It was an interesting adventure in self-discovery, I never even realized I felt this way until I was confronted with it in a “dream world”

Today… dunno what we’re doing. A friend invited us over to “hang out and watch movies” this evening, but I dunno… I think we want to try to get to bed early so we can be on the road to Harrisburg at a decent time tomorrow morning. The concert is at 2 pm, and we want to get there fairly early, so we’re thinking of leaving around 10 am (it takes about 2 hours to get there)… that way we’ll have time if we get lost *grins* and we’ll be able to get settled into our *front row* seats. I’ve already mentioned it, but for the curious the concert is described here: Summer Solstice Space Spectacular.

It’s sorta warm and muggy out, I think I liked the rain better…

Well I’m going to go drag Myk out of bed and make some pancakes *looks at the time* Er, yeah, it’s still a good time for breakfast! *wanders off*

o/` Matchbox 20 – Time After Time_(Cyndi Lauper Cover) o/`

I really intended to post yesterday, just never seemed to get around to it since Myk took a half day *shrugs*

FUCKING COMCAST. Hi. Ok, so maybe it’s not their fault this time, but my connection was down again for most of the morning. I called their tech support and got a message about it being down in five counties because of an “Accident.” Ugh, well I waited on the line to talk to someone, and make sure I was credited for this downtime (hey, it might only be $1, but it’s something, and they need to know that we won’t put up with this!).

Yesterday morning I chatted a bit, and spent some time updating the #13thHour webpage, updated the long outdated “members” page, added a few more user profiles (including escapenguin and Vehicle00!), updated the “links” section. That actually took up most of my morning. I then watched the Wallace and Gromit short for this week “Shopper 13” it’s soooo funny! And Shaun is in it, BONUS! Hehe… Shaun rocks. I love Wallace and Gromit.

Since they have been releasing all these shorts for free on Atomfilms (unfortunately sponsered by microsoft so you can only see them with the proper Windows(TM) plugins *sigh*) I have been taking screenshots of them all as they came out. So I also updated the Pictures section of WallaceAndGromit.net yesterday, so now all Cracking Contraptions shorts have a bunch of screenshots to go with them. Ideally, I someday want to have ALL the Wallace And Gromit movies to have a bunch of screenshots. That would require the ability to use the DVD-ROM that’s currently in the printserver, and forwarding the output to my X display on my workstation. Hmmm… I am sure such a thing is possible, it must be! If all else fails I could just hook up the dvdrom drive temporarily in my system and do it the easy way. In any event I guess I’d need to recompile mplayer with dvd support, but that’s easy. Why do I have the DVD-ROM in the printserver? Well it’s from 1999, has issues playing a lot of dvds and it’s really slow as a cd-rom. So I’d rather have a 48x regular cdrom in my computer than a 8x dvd-rom…

Taking screenshots of all these movies moved me into a slow progression away from gimp and into using imagemagick. I would watch the shorts (in win4lin, going into actual windows would not allow me to take screenshots, they would turn out all *BLUE*), take a screenshot with gimp, crop the screenshot with the mouse drag drop click, and save it. Now this took time, I dreaded this process honestly %) But I run a fan site! I must keep up with these things if I ever want to expect visits to my website. So I did this, for nearly all of the screenshot taking. By the last couple weeks I was really frustrated with this, and that’s when I remembered imagemagick. It’s a command line “toolbox” of image editing tools. I used `mogrify` to crop my images like this:

mogrify -crop 447×256+690+429 image.jpg

This crops image.jpg to a rectangle the size of 447×256, and positions the start of the crop right 690 pixels and 429 pixels down. So I was taking the screenshots with gimp still, saving them, then using mogrify to crop them. This was still a bit of work, since the actual act of taking a screenshot with gimp requires more than one click. Am I lazy? Of course! But time is time, and the more time I spend screenshotting and cropping images for this website, the less time I have for doing other things.

Finally I remembered that there was an imagemagick tool to take screenshots. So by the time the last wallace and gromit short came out, I had this line ready:

import -window ro
ot -crop 447×256+690+429 image1.jpg

That takes a screenshot of the whole X window, then crops it and names it image1.jpg. One simple command line command and I did all that, the only thing i needed to change for each screenshot was the name of the file! I guess I’m still brainwashed to believe that if you are editing images in any way then “GUI is better!” but oh no, it’s not so! The quality of the images is the same as if I had done it with gimp (there are ways to change the quality from default in imagemagick). It was a fun experiment with these linux tools, and turned out well! *hugs her ImageMagick tools*

And as if I didn’t talk about my webpages enough in this entry, I’m pleased to announce that there is actually a webpage for xelium now. I pretty much gave control of it over to the owner of the domain xelium.net. I tried to tell him that I wanted a hand in it as well, but I didn’t get my hopes up… gave him the info I had and he ran with it. Oh well… he included some of my ideas, but I guess the end result is what counts, right? The Official Xelium Webpage is here:

http://network.xelium.net/

It looks nice, I’m pleased with it.

Last night Myk started the install of gentoo on my laptop again (I had a headache, and had seen the parts of the install he was doing before), so maybe by the end of the weekend I’ll have my laptop running on gentoo %o That’d be cool. Unfortunately we discovered that the dongle (stfu, that’s what it’s called!) / NIC card connection is kinda crappy. As long as the laptop doesnt move and no one touches it it’s fine, but the slighest bump to the dongle and it gets disconnected from the network. Oh well, at least it’s enough to get the install done, I can get a new NIC sometime.

Anyway, I am going to go see if I can convince myself to do some work on this rainy afternoon. *wanders off*

o/` Better Than Ezra – Extra Ordinary o/`

Yesterday I really intended on getting some work done on a page about enlightenment that I’m working on, but I just didn’t feel like it, and I got distracted. See, there is this guy on the IRC server who apparently wants to be an IRCop there someday. He seems a lot like Seti from ukscifi, not so much that he lies all the time, but he speaks down to me. Treats me like I’m just a girl, I’m not an admin on a big irc server, I’m not a linux user, i’m not a web developer. Now in some situations, that’s cool, but when I’m working on a webpage I *DON’T* need that crap from someone. I don’t need someone talking down to me and treating me like I don’t know what I’m doing. He suggested a couple times I should use a template, even offered to edit the html for me, wtf? It’s like he didn’t even listen to me when I said I develop webpages. AND consistantly when referring to the admins he said things like “well I figure the admin name, his server…” HIS? Ugh… It’s like he didnt even realize what an ass he was being. I like it when people are helpful, but not when they act like a condescending moron.

Yeah, I’m working on a page for the xelium network. I don’t know if it’ll actually be used, but it’s a step in the right direction, since I have time to work on it and apparently no one else does…

Today… I mostly got sucked into the world of IRC unfortunately. It’s just because I’m having trouble focusing, I don’t know what’s up, but it’s frustrating. I think I’m sleeping ok… bleh.

Spent lots of quality time with Myk last night, just relaxing and talking and watching a bit of “Good Will Hunting” which was playing on Bravo. It was a nice evening… of course we never got around to working with the laptop and gentoo. Maybe tonight, I’m really looking forward to it %)

Um… so I guess I’ll go try to get some work done, I should really close my IRC windows or something… *wanders off*

o/` Barenaked Ladies – Box Set o/`

Not that I want to dwell on the Matrix needlessly, but I am starting to see some sort of “coolness trend.” Apparently, being a hacker is cool. I am sure in 10 years when people look back at the early 21st century they will laugh at this “leet” culture, our sunglasses will be the 70’s bellbottoms. leet.

So hackers. I was recently wandering around some “Hacker” groups on some online journals, and I was very disappointed. I will never join one of these groups (no offence to my friends who are part of them). Why? Well for one, I’m not a hacker. Believe it or not, this is obviously not a prerequisite for any of these groups that I saw. Most of these people are sad, sad windows monkeys.

I complain about that a lot. It’s just that I honestly go looking for cool new people, and I keep running into morons and liars, I’m so sick of it.

I watched X-Men 2 last night. Wow. After the uber-disneyish disappointment of “Finding Nemo” and the complete disaster of “Matrix Reloaded” I was about to give up hope. I am glad X2 came through and kicked some ass. It had plot, well-developed characters, and enough action and speaking parts so that I wasn’t really bored with any of it. It was clever, and amusing, and you know… I think I liked it more than I liked the first. And Nightcrawler was so cool! So, X2 is good. I might even consider going to see it in the theater.

We also did some work on the compaq laptop last night. Myk was able to grab and unused NIC from work, so I don’t have to worry about that anymore. I really wanted to just put debian on it because I know how to use that, and I have never really had a laptop before, so I wanted something I’d be familiar with. But alas, Myk convinced me to try Gentoo. The install is a bit complicated, but Gentoo’s site gives very good documentation, it tells you everything you need to do in the crazy install (I’m sure the install would be near impossible without the documentation). But it was pretty fun %) Unfortunately the mirror we were using in the make.conf was a little b0rked. *sigh* so around 9 last night (after tons of “host not resolved errors) we decided to hang it up for the day %) Luckily, this morning Myk was able to change the mirrors on his IBM laptop and get everything working properly there, so hopefully when he comes home this evening he can show me what he did and we can get the base compile done on the system. It’ll take forever %) But I think it’ll be worth it. The harddrive is small, and I don’t need too many programs on it, so once the basic tools are there I doubt I’ll need to do anymore installing. And, as Myk pointed out, this is a perfect opportunity to learn Gentoo. Ok, ok, I give in… I will learn Gentoo! Hehe…

It looks like we should have about 5 people coming to the next Philly Chix meeting! YAY! It’s a few weeks away, but I’m already excited. Still wondering if we should have some sort of topic or ‘presentation’ this time, I guess we’ll see if anyone has any ideas when the time comes. And hey, by then I’ll have my little laptop up and running %)

It’s nice out today. It was nice out yesterday too. Sunny, breezy, upper 60s/lower 70s. I went for a walk yesterday during the day, and then again in the evening with Myk, it’s so nice… and we saw some bunnies %D It’s nice being able to have the windows open, I hate wasting so much power to use the a/c.

-!- Current Global Users: 290 Max: 328

Wow! Last night xelium got an all time high of 328 clients %) and hey 290 for a tuesday morning isn’t bad either. It’s cool that we’re part of a bigger network now, we actually get people from other channels into ours, and it actually *grows* .. unlike silly old psiblade.

Speaking of xelium, we are finally listed on Netsplit.de. YAY! Xelium’s Current Values

Well I am actually going to get some stuff done today, so I should end this now. *wanders
off*