I’ve been keeping a web log for a year now. That’s a long time.

I discovered PhillyWIT this morning. It’s “A Philadelphia networking group for women in technology,” cool! I was able to sign up for their mailing list, and I emailed the president, who mailed me back and said I am welcome to post to the list about the Philly Chix! Awsome! The PhillyWIT list has about 400 members! Yay exposure! I’m writing up a little intro thing this afternoon to post to the list when I get a chance and hear back from someone else about linking the pages, yay!

Looks like escapenguin and Vehicle00 are going to be coming to PLUG tonight! YAY! This will be the first time I ever meet anyone from an online journal in real life! Everyone else I’ve met I met first on irc… %)!

I don’t play with my neopets as much as I used to, but I had like 980k neopoints, which is a lot. So I decided to bid on an auction for a Plushie Bruce Morphing Potion. So now my little Bruce (the one that looks like a penguin) is all plushie! So cute! Hehehe… I need a life o_o

Myk brought home an IBM Thinkpad last night. It’s about the same speed and everything as the Dell was, but it’s much thinner, so much lighter %) I guess he was going to try to install Gentoo on it today, cool! Laptops are so neat, and I have been exposed to their existance so much in these past two weeks, strange how things like this all happen at once…

I tried to make cucumber salad last night and it was a miserable failure… someday I will learn how to cook %)

Now I am going to go do some work and catch up on mailing lists. *wanders off*

*update* This was too funny not to share. As the only ircop on xelium (clockbot) during weekdays available for help, I often become responsible for answering questions about the server, the services, etc. This one was one of the best though:

-!- Guest990033986 is now known as $nick
-PrincessLeia2- $nick: to stop nickserv from changing your nick like that do /msg nickserv set kill off
-$nick- what does that do?
-PrincessLeia2- stops nickserv from changing your nick
-$nick- ah

See what I have to deal with? *giggles*

o/` Stabbing Westward – The Only Thing o/`

Well Myk got the extra computer we had running the other night. It’s the one I had thought about using as a “test box” until we realized that the contract we had for the colo box is running out in august and we needed a box to colo somwhere. So Myk took the case and put r2d2’s old motherboard in it (450 mhz p3) and set it all up. He used the cdrom drive from clockbot to install debian. Then he brought it to work and put it in the server room. So now that box (r2q5) is now on a t3 connection %) Eventually we are going to be moving our mailserver and webpages onto this box, yay! It’ll be nice to have my webpages on a fast connection again. The mailserver is important to move just because we don’t want mail to be down for days when we decide to move. Hmm, I’m not quite sure what we’re going to do about the irc server… we run that on the colo box we lose in august, and I’m not sure if it’ll be cool to run it on this t3… *shrugs* we’ll see… I’d hate to lose it now, we’re just starting to get a growing network %) …of course the other servers will still be there.

I finally got around to installing flash 6 today. Dunno why I waited so long, turned out to be a very simple script that puts the proper plugins into the proper directories. Now I can see wrongtrousersday.com without any trouble, but I have to use mozilla. Apparently the site will see the plugin in opera, start to load the page, and then stop because it’s confused… I guess I’d need to upgrade my version of opera to get it to work right *shrugs* I’m not going to do that, I hear opera 7 is a bit bulky… and I’m already used to using mozilla for more complex content anyway.

I have been so lazy today. I’m tired. I didn’t sleep well again last night, so I am having trouble focusing… *yawns and wanders off*

o/` BOA – Little Miss o/`

I was wandering through access logs, and found some neat google searches that lead people to my site:

1st hit:

mplayer win32
lyrics- tell me all your thoughts
Isabella d’Este quotes
usr/lib/win32 deb
bind windows keys
“miranda sex garden” live pictures
mplayer quicktime “how to”

2nd hit:

starwars quotes
keyboard binding linux windows keys
“Isabella d’Este” children
ornithophobia
cut off long hair donate

3rd hit:

xmodmap windows key
how do i get the windows key to work in redhat linux
do living organisms need sun to survive
mplayer debian testing

4th hit:

Skywalker family tree
vim keybindings
mplayer debian woody

And just for fun and amusement, I am the 7th hit for: Silent Stigmata women 1980s

This is just looking from looking through the access logs since yesterday! I can only imagine what I would find if I searched my logs further…

PLUG is on wednesday night. Myk and I are going (finally!) … I think the last time we went to one and other people were actually there (locked building back in novemberish, grr) was last June. It should be fun. I’m trying to convince escapenguin and Vehicle00 to come so I can meet them %) That’s be really cool! (so you guys coming? huh? huh? You know you want to!!!) But if not we need to go anyway to give a toshiba laptop docking station that we have to a guy on the list who said he’d be interested in it, and I wanna meet some of the philly chix who said they’d show up %) It should be a nice evening.

I think I started to get depressed because I was so worried about the trip to New England. I didn’t come to the realization of how much I hate flying until last night in bed. I mean, I knew I didn’t like it, but I REALLY don’t like it. I think my biggest issue with it is the whole “airport experience,” the people, the noise, the confusion. Luckily most of my fears were dampened by the call from my cousin Erica this morning. They have everything arranged to get me picked up at the right time and everything. I think I will also enjoy seeing family there in New Hampshire. They said it should be a nice relaxing night on saturday, which is good because the time spent with my parents will be a bit chaotic ;)

I spoke to my mother on, um… saturday night. It was a nice phonecall, she just wanted to know exactly what my plans were. I told her that they were the same as the details in the email I sent her, heh. And we talked for a bit. She told me all about how Annette is all growing up and wearing makeup, ugh %) And apparently Annette’s 8th grade graduation is on Monday night, the day I planned to spend with them! It’s a pleasant coincidence, and one I can use to convince my father that I do indeed need to go up to Winthrop to see my mother.

I spoke to my other sister Heather last night. She called for the same reason my mother called, wanted to know exactly what my plans where. And like with my mother, I told her that they were the same as the details in the email I sent her. My silly family and their lack of email capabilities %) Like they NEED to make a phone call because email isnt real enough or something. Naw, I don’t think that was Heather’s whole reason for calling, first she came into #13thHour (as PurpleDragon11) to see if I was around, she could have easily asked me then. I think she’s feeling lonely. It’s understandable, she lives in the room she rents with just a cat, and while in college she’s working, so finding time for a social life must be near impossible. Her boyfriend lives in Alberta, Canada and I am not sure she has many friends that arent online. I mean, I dont get out much either, but at least I have Myk. So I talked to her on the phone last night for nearly 2 hours! I don’t like phones, and mostly she told me about IGA (a small grocery store she works at), if it had been anyone else I would have ended the conversation much ea
rlier. *Shrugs* it was nice talking to her.

This morning was definately very Mondayish. Last night I got the coffee maker all ready for the morning so Myk can just turn it on when he wakes up. So the morning comes, he turns it on. 20 minutes later he comes back in the bedroom and said something like “Do you have any idea what happened to the coffee maker?” o_O I get up, look in the kitchen, and coffee and grinds all over the counter and dripping onto the floor, EEK! Myk needed to get ready for work so I helped him clean it up. I don’t know what happened to it, but it’s b0rked, so we need a new one *sigh* Luckily we still have a french press which can make coffee, so it’s not an emergency ;) It was a mess though! Ugh… not a good way to start a monday.

Myk brought home a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop from work this weekend. It’s nice %) Only 750 mhz, but it runs great on Mandrake 8 with fluxbox. I guess Myk found it with Mandrake installed at work. I don’t really know my opinion of Mandrake, I don’t think I’ll really get much of a chance to poke around with it on the laptop since I dont want to break anything %) But it seems nice enough. I got to sit on the couch and chat! Hehe…

I have been playing with gnumeric a bit this weekend. It’s a little buggy, at least the 1.0.8 version in debian stable is %) But it works well enough to keep a checkbook. I also had it set up with the budget for the next four months, looks nice, and it should work well.

Now I need to go.. um.. I dunno, the day is almost over! What did I do all day…? *wanders off*

o/` God Ate My Homework – Insomniac’s Nightmare o/`

Microsoft To Spammers: We’re Coming After You

This scares me. Not because I’m a spammer of course, but because of actions that AOL has already taken in the spam arena, and I can see that going much much further. As I have complained about before, AOL and Roadrunner (both owned by AOL Time Warner) now block my ip address for mail because it has been identified as a mailserver on the comcast network. Why would they block a legitimate mailserver running by someone? It’s a part of their spam prevention program. They assumed that anyone sending mail from a comcast cable connection was a spammer. Now we need to route all our mail through our colo box so we can send to AOL and Roadrunner people, which is a pain, and we are very lucky to have that box as a resource.

I hate spam too, but can you imagine the implications if Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! get together and combat spam like this? How far would they go? It’s quite possible that they’d compile a list of “trusted” mail providers and block out all others, where does that leave the person like me who helps small companies run little mailservers? How far will these companies get before people begin to complain? AOL has begun with little to no clamor from their users…

“MSN 12: Never have an email bounce again with our Trusted and Secure Mail System(tm)”

Maybe I’m paranoid.

Yesterday we cleaned out the bill drawer and got everything together to work out a budget for the next few months. Fun stuff. We want to start saving so we can get a house someday, and creating a budget and actually sticking to it is probably the best way to achieve this goal. I feel so old %)

I was… very awake yesterday. I’m not sure how else to describe my mood. We didn’t really leave the apartment, besides Myk’s trip up to Wawa to get some tortilla chips and phish food ice cream at 11:30 pm, hehe. Maybe it was the caffeine. I want to blame the caffeine because the “awake” feeling is a bit manic… and tends to come before a period of depression. Like a natural way of fighting it off.

We had a fire in the fireplace last night, it was nice. We used it to get rid of all the old paper we had from cleaning out our bills drawer, fun stuff! I got to burn all my Nice N Easy pay stubs, yay! And that fire was SOOO hot! I had to sit about 4 feet away from it, they lean forward to toss in paper so I wouldn’t be all toasted, hehe. It was a good way to dispose of things with our social security number anyway, short of buying a paper shredder. Unfortunately, that will probably be the last fire in the fireplace for the season *sigh* I miss winter already.

I keep forgetting to post this link:

Steve’s “Better Than Leia’s” LAN Party

This was made by a guy from #deep13. Yeas (also from #deep13) came to my LAN party last weekend, and we had been anticipating it and talking about it for days. Steve, living in Ohio, wasn’t able to come, and started acting all jokeningly jealous. So he took pictures and put them on this website, telling all about his “LAN Party” … it’s really funny!

And I discovered +S this morning. It’s a channel mode for some ircds, including UnrealIRCd (which xelium runs on), which strips color from all colorful messages sent to the channel! It’s better than +c because it doesn’t actually block the message (with +c set it will give you an error and tell you that you cant send colors). I was mostly concerned about +c because I don’t want to piss people off when they send colors to the channel and dont understand why they are now allowed. +S is good… and best of all, the person using the color doesnt even notice that other people can’t see it, since they can still see it fine. While on this “kill all colors” adventure, I also took the time to remove all colors from R2D2’s scripts. NO MORE EVI
L IRC COLORS! %)

Now I am going to go read or something. *wanders off*

o/` Fisher – Believe In Something o/`

A friend of ours sent an mp3 of some guy comparing the Bush regime to the world of 1984. While it was amusing, I am not quite at a point where I want to believe that. Maybe I’m just being unreasonably optimistic. Well they mentioned the “Ministry of Truth” (which, if you know the book, concerns itself with creating lies) and that made me remember something.

Airplane Collided With The Pentagon?

– Basically it talks about how no plane ever hit the Pentagon.

I believe I have posted this link before, and with it a disclaimer about how I don’t buy into conpiracy theories. But uuhh… this keeps getting to me! Why don’t we ever hear about this from official sources anymore? It’s never about the Pentagon, it’s always the WTC buildings that they talk about. At first I tried to write this off to it being a military building and so not surprisingly targeted, but they knew the WTC were targeted too! They had even been attacked before… Don’t you think if they were telling us the truth that they would also use flowerly language to talk about “The attack on our defense headquaters?” And here’s another impressive site about this whole coverup:

Where Is The Plane, Flight 77?

Now I don’t want to go as far as to say we flew one of our own, smaller jets, into the pentagon to intentionally make the tragedy worse, I mean killing our own government people? Maybe someone got into the pentagon with a bomb? Maybe somehow a van pulled up next to the building and set off a small bomb? These would be reasons for concern, understandable that the government wouldn’t want us to know about them, people would be very uncomfortable to know that someone looking to do damage had compromised security at the top defense faucility of our country. But to tell such a big obvious lie about a BOEING hitting the pentagon, and to even create false footage to back up their claims? That’s kinda scary.

I guess I shouldn’t start being paranoid that the US Government is out to take total control, I’m sure they lied to us for a good reason, I don’t think Bush is like Big Brother. But I do believe it’s important for more people to be aware that we are being lied to. Even I had never really knew about this until a crazy conspiracy theorist friend mentioned it… even then I sorta wrote it off because he’s always coming up with crazy stuff like this, but this time it seems to be true.

Next! %)

So I had another person come into #13thHour and make a scene about not being able to use his colorful mirc scripts.

Snippit from after he left #13thHour and was talking to me in another channel:

-$MircColorLover- you dont allow scripts in that room?
-pleia2- not in #13thHour, we never have allowed them
-$MircColorLover- thats the most fucking retarded thing ive ever heard
-pleia2- http://www.princessleia.com/13th/rules.html
-$MircColorLover- fuck the rules
-pleia2- colorful scripts are annoying
* $MircColorLover shakes his head
-pleia2- try going to a place like irc.freenode.net … they kick you for such things there
-$MircColorLover- then why have a chat room?
-pleia2- to chat
-$MircColorLover- well thats why i dont go there
-pleia2- we dont want to be annoyed by scripts, it’s our channel %)

…what is wrong with these kinds of people? Granted, they “grew up” on irc.scifi.com where colorful scripts are a big thing, but they get angry and unreasonable when we ask them to shut them off! They act like banning scripts is the most horrible sin we could ever commit! These people are so selfish! It’s horribly annoying to have someone posting colorful scripts of the mp3s they are playing in channel… for those of you not lucky enough to know what one of these scripts looks like, this is what this guy did in #13thHour last night:

Mp3 [[ !Kruge Me
tallica – St. Anger (The Real Thing!!!).mp3]] length [[ 7:33 ]] size [[ 7.24MB ]] bitrate [[ 128 ]] kHz [[ 44 ]] Quality [[ Joint Stereo ]]

Now, can you imagine having that sort of thing repeat in the channel everytime someone plays an mp3? Come on… who is the unreasonable one here? People make me so crazy…

I don’t think we’re doing anything this weekend. I say that too often. This time it’s really good because we have a busy couple of weeks coming up. It’s funny, normally I would be excited about the prospects of so much activity, but I just feel like I want to stay home now! I am so impossible to please.

I spilled soda in my bedroom last night. It was really dumb because I intentionally have these two cat stuffed animals set up as “Water Guardians” because I bring a glass of water to bed every night and I don’t want to knock it over. Well these stuffed animals work great, but for some reason yesterday evening I decided not to put my soda there, and accidentally knocked it over, ugh! Spent like a half hour scrubbing the floor to get it out so we don’t get ants. And worst of all it got my copy of Xenocide soaked! Makes me so sad %( I can still read it luckily, but it’s disappointing to have ruined it since it was in such good condition.

Yep, I’m going to go now, probably read or something. *wanders off*

o/` Trent Reznor – Videodrones: Questions – Lost Highway Soundtrack o/`

I love Wallace and Gromit. This is part of a screenshot from the new short at AtomFilms.com. It requires Microsoft’s plugin for the media *sigh* so you will need to be in windows to see it. Only 3 more shorts to go! They are releasing one each week. This one is one of my favorites %)

My father called around 9:30 last night. I never expect him to call this late, actually thought something was wrong at first. It was just my father being strange.

-dad- so you’re coming up next weekend
-pleia2- yep.
-dad- i’m really looking forward to it
-pleia2- mhmm.
-dad- we have a lot to talk about when you are here
-pleia2- yeah.
-dad- i’m glad you can come up
-pleia2- me too.

Most of the call went this way. I could barely hear him, and he wasnt really saying anything. I don’t know why he called. He did mention that he was concerned about my mother thinking my trip was just to see her. The hell? My mother lives in a real world where she has to work, she can’t take more than one day off to see me. Yet he still thinks that somehow in all her evilness she is going to turn this around and get upset because I don’t spend more time with her. TWO FULL DAYS THERE. That’s it. One I will spend with my dad, one I will spend with my mom.

This is just a perfect example of my mother acting more mature than my father. It doesn’t happen often, if you go by education my father is smarter, and sure, my mother and I have had our differences. But my mother has always ALWAYS insisted that no matter what happened in the family that she understood that my father would always be my father and she’d never try to stand in the way of us being close. Well now my father seems to be doing that. It’s one thing to complain about my mother to me, but to lay his suspicious paranoia on me? Come on, I know my mother. When he says that sort of thing it just pisses me off.

I guess I have other reasons not to be very excited about this trip. I don’t like flying. It’s not that I don’t feel safe, I realize that it’s safer than driving. I am not afraid I’m going to be hijacked, or something crazy like that %P I just dont like the feeling of leaving the ground so far behind. I am very fond of the ground. And I havent flown in years, not since my trip to florida in 8th grade… over 8 years ago! And I’ll be alone…

Tonight we’re having indian food and the last Duvel in the refridgerator w00t! And right now I’m going to go get some work done… or chat *wanders off*

o/` Nine Inch Nails – Reptile o/`

I managed to finish the #13thHour news section today!

#13thHour News

It’s still in the testing stages, so it might have some problems… but all #13thHour people are welcome to make posts and comments, it will be helpful to me, especially if you find a problem. I also welcome suggestions. Speaking of the #13thHour section, I know a few people I’ve met on journals have come to the channel recently. Do any of you want your user profiles in the members sections? Just email me if you want to be up there and I’ll send you the survey.

It really is nice outside today! I cant believe we had a thunderstorm again yesterday afternoon, ugh. Of course on nice spring days my cable internet often decides to crap out. Why? It is always fine during rain storms, snow storms, ice storms! But one a beautiful, sunny day my connection slows so much that I can’t even stay connected to IRC. Amazing. Maybe it’s trying to tell me to get outside more on nice days %P

And the services are back up on irc.clockbot.net YAY! Finally the service admins got off their asses. Of course these are different services than the last, and they confused me at first… I am so used to normal access lists!

Now I need to go see what I want for dinner. *wanders off*

o/` Garbage – #1 Crush o/`

Yeah, I ripped the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack today, purely nostalgia. I wanted to remember my teenage angsty years. This cd to ogg project takes a long time. I want to do it all from the command line so I’m using abcde, and it’s slow %) I havent been making oggs every day either, so that adds to the time it takes to do them all, hehe.

Hmm, even though Tony A’s pizza tastes nasty cold at least it heats up well. This “Tony’s Pizza Palace” pizza still tastes like cardboard and plastic when reheated. Yuck.

I’m nearly finished with the php nukeish section on the #13thHour page. It’s still not online, but I’m hopeful that I’ll finish it today and be able to start moving it over to be used yay! Just working on a few design things right now.

Played Diablo 2 for a bit yesterday. I never did get it working with wine so I had to boot into windows. It’s not so bad really, sure rebooting is a pain, but what do I lose? Uptime? It’s just uptime, no one cares, and it’s just a silly reason to comprimise my computer usage ;) My assassin is level 14, w00t.

Man, this pizza is really bad *throws it out*

It’s sorta nice out today, at least it’s not raining again. I like rain, but when it drizzles for weeks it starts to get in my nerves.

For those of you following the whole SCO owning unix issue, there was an interesting development today. Novell issued a press release (Here is the press release) saying that when they sole Unix to SCO they did not release all intellectual property rights too them, oops. SCO is aware of this, and have been trying buy those rights from Novell for months now, yet they still went forward with their legal actions against IBM. SCO is so fucked %D Now they are hated throughout their open source community, and their actions have cost in both money and jobs in tech, not to mention lying to their stockholders and customers. What a mess! They deserve it.

Well the gaming irc network that we linked with (ion.xelium.net) is back up now, now called ice.xelium.net. This is a great relief to us. We ended up getting a highest user count of 148 on irc.clockbot.net (clockbot.xelium.net), wow! And clockbot proved itself over these past couple weeks to be the most stable of all the services, I’m very proud of it. On the other hand, we really weren’t expecting this sort of load on our server, and were a bit upset that the other network admin took advantage of us by taking his time to fix his network. New services should be up soon, everyone will have to reregister everything.

Now I’m hopefully going to finish the #13thHour news section… *wanders off*

o/` Dido – Don’t Think Of Me o/`

First of all:

Lan Party Pictures

The LAN party on sunday rocked! Sometimes I am very disappointed by lan parties, but this was not one of those times… Things went nicely, it was a good balance of friends hanging out and gameplay. We had enough food, we had enough beer, and we still have a whole refrigerator full of soda. We even had a fire in the fireplace since it was so cool and rainy outside. We played UT, UT2K3, Total Annihilation, and Grant of course showed off some of the other games on his computer. I think one of the highlights of the whole party was getting to meet our online friend Yeas, who I have known from #Deep13 for quite some time. I guess we started drinking around 1 pm when Kam and Brian arrived, and it lasted all day, just sipping on beer and soda, I got a little tipsy at one point, but never drunk. We even had fruity drinks later in the night but they obviously didn’t contain enough alcohol %) Our friends mct and Nita came later in the night (around 10 pm) without their computers, and that sorta led us to wind down the lan part of the party. So we stayed up til around 4 am, people slowly leaving as the morning came closer, until MJ, mct and Nita finally decided to call it a night. When they left Myk, Yeas and I went into the bedroom (the futon was set up as a couch) and we watched some MST3K, w00t! Yeas had brought a whole bag for of MST DVDs %) Of course I fell asleep (I had been up since 7:30 am the previous morning) and soon after that they decided to go to bed, we put Yeas on the couch. The next morning I woke up around 10, what can I say? I sleep badly… I was exhausted! I took a shower while Myk and Yeas were still sleeping, and ended up playing Diablo 2 for a while in the computer room here. Finally around 1 pm Yeas woke up, and I took that opportunity to show him some neat linux things… you know, all the pretty things you show to someone you are trying to convert %D Then close to 2 pm Myk wandered out of bed. I made them breakfast, then Yeas went home *sniff*

Myk and I spent a couple hours yesterday afternoon cleaning up the apartment. It really didn’t bother me too much, I don’t like cleaning, but I have decided that I like being a host. We also had to move all the furniture back to where it was before. By then end of all this I was very VERY tired. We then hopped into the Rav4 and drove to Myk’s mother’s to return the chairs and table we had borrowed, more moving! Hehe. While driving home we decided to stop at Blockbuster and pick up a couple movies, we also planned to get pizza but Tony A’s (the pizzeria right next to blockbuster where we usually get pizza) was closed. We went home and went on yahoo to look for more pizza places in the area. Finally decided on “Tony’s Pizza Palace.”

Never buy from a place called “Tony’s Pizza Palace.” First I called them.

-pleia2- Hi, do you deliver?
-girl- no
-pleia2- ok, Myk do you
*click*
-pleia2- want to go pick up the… THE HELL, she just hung up on me! Bitch!

Owning a pizzeria is an art, which begins with the phone call. I should have known that the girl hanging up on me was a bad omen. But it was the closest and very easy to find, so we decided to get pizza there anyway. This time Myk called. Ordered a cheese pizza and 16 wings since they only sold them by the 8s. Who sells 8 wings? It should be a dozen! Crazy people. When Myk got home from picking it up I opened the wings bag and dumped them out. They were burned. “It’s ok, everything tastes good with blue cheese on it,” I said. They were ok, but not hot (as in spicy, but come to think of it they were only sorta warm temperature wise) at all, arent buffalo wings supposed to be hot? *sigh* The pizza was ok while it was hot, but as soon as it cooled down it was awful. That’s another part of the pizza art! Making sure pizza is good when it’s warm AND cold. The the only pizzeria around here that has acomplished this feat is Joseph’s, and they are over 30 minu
tes away! I am so tired of all this bad pizza.

While we ate the lousy pizza and wings we started to watch “Catch Me If You Can.” I liked it. Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t bother me NEARLY as much as he usually does. Of course I like Tom Hanks (unless it’s a sappy romance!) and Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen just totally rock in my book. After we watched it we put in “25th Hour.” Now I wasn’t sure what to expect, Edward Norton is awsome, and really the only reason we rented the movie. It was amusing to see Anna Paquin in the movie, I like her, even if it took me forever to realize what I knew her from (Rogue in X-Men). The movie had it’s moments, but it was horribly obvious that it was a Spike Lee Joint. I guess I will have to not recommend this movie. Some of the scenes dragged on for too long, parts of it were just needlessly boring. I guess I was very tired while watching it too, it had beed a long weekend, my attention span wasn’t what it should have been.

Right after the movie I went to sleep. It was a little after midnight, and I was exhausted. I actually slept well last night too! What a weekend %)

Now I am going to go work on some things *wanders off*

o/` Peter Murphy – Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem o/`

Well I havent written up book reviews in a while… so here goes:

The Fellowship Of The Ring, By J. R. R. Tolkien, 527 pages

I am writing this review upon finishing this book for the 3rd or 4th time, it’s that good… This is the first book of Tolkien’s famous Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The story continues from that of The Hobbit, in the sometimes magical world of Middle Earth. The story follows Bilbo Baggins’ nephew Frodo Baggins, on his adventure to take care of the One Ring Of Power. Frodo and his hobbit friends join up with a case of traveling companions (the fellowship) that includes an elf, a dwarf, and even a couple Men through a perilous journey that continually tests their strength. Few of the characters in this story are forgettable, and while this is a lot more “grown up” than The Hobbit (story-wise and narrative) Tolkien preserves his ability to tell a good story with captivating detail. Maybe you’ve seen the movie, but it doesnt quite do justice to this amazing tale! And they omitted a few wonderful characters… a must read!

The Case Of The Toxic Spell Dump, By Harry Turtledove, 367 pages

In the world described by this book, magic, faith, fantasy and legendary powers are real. The book centers around an EPA (Environmental Perfection Agency.. this is a lot of this sort of thing in the book) investigation into a toxic spell dump that is feared to be leaking. Now, the author works to show you a world parallel to our own, they have televisions, telephones, vehicles… but they were all created and maintained through some sort of magic. The cities are often similar, like the capital is D.St.C (district of saint Columbus). But if you think about the nature of this book too long, you realize that a world where magic existed would be nothing like our own… I think this major idea took away a lot of my ability to enjoy the book, as I tend to think a lot about books I read (unless it’s obvious humor, eg Terry Pratchett). The story was good, it kept me interested, and the parallels between our worlds really were amusing at times (at some points it got annoying…). Maybe I should stick with Turtledove’s alternative HISTORY books from now on…

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, By Stephen King, 224 pages

Despite my Maine background and interest in paranormal and scary books, I had not read a Stephen King book in a long time before this one. I was pleasantly surprised at how I enjoyed this book, as short as it was. It tells of a girl (a big fan of baseball player Tom Gordon, poetic liberty has been taken with this character in the book..) who is lost in the woods of western Maine. Even after search parties for her give up, this book tells of her determination, maturity, and skill that allows her to survive alone in the wilderness. It also explores the thoughts she has, imaginary “people” she conjures to hold onto hope and reality. As with most of King’s books, there is also a frightening force or being that feeds this girl’s fear. A good book.

The Two Towers, By J. R. R. Tolkien, 447 pages

As with “Fellowship” I have read this book several times. It continues the story of the groups of characters that are split up as the fellowship breaks at the end of “Fellowship.” It explores a bit more of the history and present standings of some of the nations in Middle Earth, where they stand, who their allies are, and what they will do to group together and fight the dark lord Sauron. There is a great battle against the orcs, the creatures called “Ents” are introduced and launch an attack of their own against Saruman, and surprisingly an old character returns! This is my favorite book out of the three, so much happens. When the book comes to catching up with Frodo he and Sam are helped by an unlikely creature, and we learn much more about Sam through this cooperative effort. Again, even if you have seen the movie, this book is a must read.

Now someday I might even
get around to post these to my book review sections %)

LAN party today! I’m so excited! We picked up the chairs from Myk’s mother’s house on friday. Spent last night rearranging some furniture so we would have space for all the computers. Then we cleaned up the corn on the cob, made up cold cut platters, sliced up lettuce and tomato. All sorts of fun stuff, when we have lan parties we dont mess around! This is going to be so fun! I booted into windows earlier so I could get all the updates. It’s funny how I only go into windows for games, so it seems like I only do updates there when preparing for a lan party.

Early yesterday was not so fun however. A couple friends said that they have run diablo 2 in wine before, and that it was possible. Hey cool! I installed wine (apt-get install wine) and it didnt work. I got frustrated, and by this time all excited about the possibility of playing d2 in linux, so when a friend offered to send me winex I said “Sure!” Well that probably wasn’t too wise, it was a warez package, and I should have known better than to trust this guy and his warez packages. Or at least I should have asked where he got it before installing it! To make matters worse when I went to install it I did dpkg -i win-TAB- (tab-completion) then hit enter. That was stupid. I had my win4lin installation deb in that directory as well, guess what? I broke win4lin! I didn’t really realize it at the time, so I noticed my mistake, said “ugh” then proceeded to install the winex package. Well, once I discovered I had broken win4lin beyond repair (it’s kinda touchy, if you rerun the installer it’s very very very bad!!!) I was upset. My exact words?

14:05:43 -@PrincessLeia2- fuck fuck fuck … i am such a retard
14:06:04 -@Kalends- What’s wrong?
14:06:28 -@PrincessLeia2- i just went to install something, and installed the wrong thing, and now i broke things, UGH %(!!!
14:06:37 -@Kalends- Damn
14:07:08 -@PrincessLeia2- it was just fucking stupid too… i just wasnt paying attention to what i was doing

I don’t swear often, when I do I mean it. I googled a bit, searched the win4lin mailing list, nothing was helping, it was beyond repair. I went back to bed. Myk woke up and I told him what I did, and said that he didn’t need to worry about it since it was my own dumb fault, and I didn’t really need win4lin anyway. Well he was more upset about the warez winex package, understandably so. It was he who found out that it was a package that should not have been trusted. Bleh. Of course I felt like a total dumbass now, and I was a bit humiliated. It was just a bad day, and I was so upset, so very very upset. But hey, everyone does dumb things sometimes right? %) Luckily Myk had the win4lin binaries on his system and he was able to repair mine. He’s so smarty %)

Anyway, I need to take a shower and do a few more things this morning before noon (when we said the party will start, people never really show up til 2-3, hehe). The last time I got really drunk was months ago… even at the new years lan party I wasnt *completely* gone (I could still stand with no trouble, hee), so I plan on getting fairly trashed tonight %)! W00T!!! *wanders off*