o/` A Perfect Circle – Judith o/`

An aquaintance of mine uploaded the entire “Mer de Noms” (A Perfect Circle) album for me, YAY! I already had a few of the songs, but it was nice to get them all… oh shh you anti-mp3 sharers, I probably would never have bought the album even if I did have the money… it’s pretty run-of-the-mill rock, I only pay for things which are unique.

I went to check my account balance yesterday… $30.. about what I was expecting. So I decided it would be a good idea to close out my account. There was virtually no chance of me getting anymore money in the near future, so that $30 would just slowly be eaten away by monthly account fees, and I much rather put it to good use. So Myk came home around 12:30, got the mail… and I got a letter from my grandparents, I looked at the envelop, then just tossed it on my desk and said I’d read it later. We went to Fleet Bank, closed out my account, then realized we had almost 2 hours until my doctor’s appointment. So we went back home, I took the chance to open the letter from my grandparents, and out falls a $500 check. EGADS! The letter said that they had helped all the “kids” (grandchildren) in the family, and they were giving me a check to try to “catch up” with the rest of them financially. I REALLY didn’t need it though! I guess they thought I did because I kept trying to put off a visit up there. But in the letter they said this is “no strings attached” and they would “send more money for a trip up to see them if I needed it” Well… even if we DID need money to visit family I wouldn’t admit it to them, so I guess I am just going to save this money under my matress or something. Of course since I just closed my account I will have to find a place to cash it *doh!* … since it’s a fleet check I guess I’ll just go up to Fleet on friday and pay the $2 or whatever fee to get it cashed… Or Myk and I can open a savings account together with it *shrugs* In any event, we should really start planning a trip up to see my family in New England.

So of course we got lost going to the doctor’s appointment, I cant direct my way out of a cardboard box %( We always get lost. Anyway, on the way there we were listening to NPR and they mentioned that January 22nd was the 30th anniversary of the verdict of Roe v. Wade… GAH!!! Of course, I pick THAT DAY to go to an openly pro-choice gynecologist. That didn’t do anything good for my nervousness already surrounding this sort of checkup %) But the visit went well, I’m healthy %)! And I actually weigh 5 pounds less than I did last year… how can that be?! I ate like 10 cookies a day and drank lots of beer for the whole month of december! I havent taken a walk (because of the cold) since November!!! … bah, I guess a good diet (and good metabolism) have a lot to do with good health and weight… I realized yesterday that I haven’t even been to a McDonald’s in over a year! Nor any other fast food places (besides subway and getting pizza … does that count as fast food?)… amazing. Anyway, I’m glad I’m healthy, and the visit was very inexpensive, Health Insurance is neat!

After the doctor’s visit I was feeling pretty crappy (the checkup is quite uncomfortable, and a bit painful you see…). But I asked Myk if we could stop by a used bookstore that I saw on our way there. Of course it’s in a tiny little shopping center with 3 parking spaces for each store, but we found a space and went into the store. I’ve seen better used book shops, but this wasnt bad. The front room was almost completely filled with romance novels (this is normally the case in used bookstores) and in the back they had a fairly good selection of scifi/fantasy.. it wasnt stellar, a lot of crappy scifi (obviously the person running the bookstore wasn’t a major scifi/fantasy person), but I found a couple good books. Picked up Speaker For The Dead and Xenocide (books 2 and 3 in the Ender’s Game Saga … Orson Scott Card, now I just need books 4 & 5 to complete it). And the third Dune book, Children Of Dune, and I wandere
d over to the horror/suspense section and grabbed a couple Dean Koontz books, mostly because I had *never* read any of his books, and they were recommended to me… The Door To December and Intensity. I decided after having this small handful of books that I should leave before I spent too much %) I love bookstores! Hehe… and now I really am set for a while, no ordering from bn.com for quite some time, YAY!

We got home around 5:30 and I took a bath, it was nice %) Then we ate dinner and then watched the second DVD of SciFi Channel’s Dune “Special Editon Director’s Cut” that I got Myk for Christmas (we had watched disk one a couple weeks ago..). I read for a little bit.. I’ve been reading A Brave New World again, and I forgot out great that book is, I guess it’s because the last time I read it I was in high school and I guess I felt I was focusing on how to write essays and pass tests about the book instead of enjoying it. Then around 9 we watched “The West Wing” … great show, then “Law and Order” …those are pretty much the only television shows I watch on a regular basis, I used to watch Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network but just got bored with it, and I sometimes watch CourtTV’s Forensic Files when I don’t feel like reading or I have some sort of headache or something preventing me from reading.

All in all it was a good day yesterday, I was very happy %) Not like icky Monday and Tuesday. Heh, I do still want beer tho %) We have been avoiding buying beer lately because we’re trying to save money… and since we wont buy a case of beer that costs less than $35 a case (we are beer snobs) it is an expense that is large and easy to cut. S’just I miss beer so much! Hehe… I was in IRC yesterday (no way!) and talking to a friend of mine, I said “we havent had beer in the house since new years!” he casually responded “Leia, that’s only 22 days” gah! It’s not like I’m an alcoholic or anything, I just like the taste of beer, and unplugging from the world sometimes %) Then again we HAVE had beer at restuarants twice since newyears *shrugs* maybe I do have a problem and just don’t want to admit to it %P … At least it’s not like the daily drinking habit I got into the summer of 2001 when I was trying to break up with my ex. And it’s legal now. Seriously though, I am being careful, I know I have always had trouble with one sort of addiction or another, and I DON’T want to end up like my father(ruined life, divorced, in rehab).

And now, as if my post today isn’t long enough, a quiz! It’s not as lame as normal ones… it was actually quite interesting, I got the link from blueminder … it’s a personality test, the results are a group of 4 letters that describe you based on answers in the quiz. I’m an INTJ – Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging, just like Gandalf the Grey, Professor Moriarty, and Hannibal Lecter, yay! Hehe.

Anyway, I am going to go figure out what I should do today *looks at the time* gah, almost 10 already *wanders off*

o/` Better Than Ezra – The Killer Inside o/`

Another day…

I have a doctor’s appointment at 2:45 this afternoon *ugh!* … it’s one of those yearly ‘female’ things, so I am looking forward to it less than I would a normal doctor’s appointment, bleh.

Yesterday turned out to be another crappy day. Myk said I have been acting weird the past two days, I guess I have been quiet, not depressed really, just… off. We watched part of “The Evil Dead” last night with Bruce Campbell’s commentary (we rented the DVD on saturday), funny stuff! Oh and we rented the Goodfellas too, I had never seen it before, great movie. Anyway, I decided to take a bath yesterday evening and that made me feel much much better, I came out of that realizing I need to lighten up, and I really shouldn’t worry about everything so much.

Unfortuantely, despite being fairly happy when i went to bed around 10 last night, my night was filled with nightmares. I only remember 2 of them… the first was really dumb, it was about our firewall/gateway/webserver box crashing. YES! I had a nightmare about THAT!!! I guess I hadn’t lightened up as much as I had hoped I would. I woke up sad, and then ashamed at myself for being saddened by something like that… The next was another one of my normal nightmares about “someone I love dying” This time it was Myk… apparently I was an alien (don’t ask me, I don’t have any idea where that came from) and Myk and I had just come home from a night out. We walked up the stairs, and I walked into our room and then turned around to see something come out of the closet and shoot Myk in the head… blood everywhere, ALL OVER me… No doubt the excess blood usage of my dream I can attribute to Evil Dead %) Anyway, the guy with the gun got away, and then my alien friends came to pick me up… I was in total shock by what had happened, and a friend of mine took me in the bathroom to get cleaned up (like nothing bad had happened!) and I started shaking and crying, absolutely wailing… then I woke up. I woke up scared and upset… so for the rest of the night I was snuggled really close to Myk, hehe. I HATE NIGHTMARES!

Did you know if you play Scorchy Slots (Neopets.com) too much in one day your pets refuse to play it anymore that day? I imagine you didn’t know that because it takes a very long time to get to that point, is this how they deal with slot addiction? Hee… never let me loose in Vegas. I did really good with scorchy slots tho! I won lots of great stuff, made like… 30,000 neopoints at LEAST yesterday, hee… *sigh* %)

I messed around with a test ircbot yesterday afternoon, didn’t really acomplish anything, but as always I did learn a bit more about perl, which is always good. Unfortunately when I went to close my bot’s irssi session I accidentally closed mine instead DOH!!! Second day in a row… Anyway… I also edited some of the pages on my webpage, made them a little prettier… worked on my Books section a bit… instead of being 1 page of 45435 reviews, it’s now 3 pages, the first is navigation, a list of authors and books, when you click on one it goes to one of the two corresponding pages. Exciting huh?

Myk got irc.clockbot.net up and running again last night. I guess we aren’t going to host the services just yet, the owner of the stupid windows services says that they will be stable now, so it’s only a matter of time %) farking windows! Hee… Anyway, it’s nice having our wonderful fast ircserver back, and it’s just one less thing to stress our home connection.

Hrm, I just recently realized that I have fallen into a morning pattern… on a normal day I’ll wake up around 7, make the bed, take a shower, toast my bagel while emptying the dishwasher, say “morning” in irc, eat the bagel while checking email (first princessleia.com email, then yahoo), check to see if there are any comments on xanga or livejournal, read everyone who I am subscribed to’s entries (yes, I read them all), make comments,
check on my neopets, all the while checking into irc every couple minutes. Then around 8:30 or so I begin my daily entry. Around 9-10 I finally finish the entry and post it. Then I sit back and try to figure out what I will do all day. Figuring out what I should do all day is really the difficult part %)

I guess I am going to wander off to figure out how I’ll spend my day now *wanders off*

We turned our old print/scan server into a Debian box recently, so it’s only a print server now. I was very disppointed that I wouldn’t be able to use my scanner without a lot of moving and booting into windows, but Win4Lin really is awsome. For those of you who don’t know, win4lin runs windows 98 in a terminal in linux (if you don’t know what that means there is no hope %)), Myk and I both have it installed on our computers, I can open up win4lin and do anything I would normally do in windows (assuming it’s not too graphically intense, even on Myk’s souper computer it gets slow even with a *background image* on the desktop, so no games). Well, we found out recently that it also sees parallel port devices, so we were able to get it to see the scanner, and use it!! Kickass!!! So for my first test I finally got around to scanning my license (it is a decent picture for a license picture), yay!

o/` The Cure – More Than This o/`

Yesterday evening was one of those times when I just needed to cry for no apparent reason, yay for being a girl. It was just one of those days when I couldn’t do anything right, I spent 2 hours on something stupidly simple, I quit a screen session and irc connection that had been up since December 20th! I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow that I am a bit stressed out about I guess, mostly because I don’t know how much it’ll cost… I shouldn’t worry about money so much, but I can’t help it!

So remember that wonderful 20 gig cobalt at the nearby CoLo that we thought we had to get rid of? Well as I think I have mentioned previously, if we cancel it we will be billed for half of the remaining payments, so over $500… $500 for nothing! So yesterday we decided just to keep it until the contract expires in August. We’ll be moving our IRC server back there, and probably hosting the ircservices until August. Hopefully by then we will know what is going on concerning Myk’s job and stuff, so we can find a permanent home for the services (it shouldn’t be too difficult, the problem we have currently is the services run in Windows only, the database is probably a freaking text file, and there are no stable windows boxes to host them on, so we need to migrate the services to a Unix services packages, and everyone will have to reregister everything, which sucks, but we dont have a choice). Anyway, we will be keeping our webpages on our home connection, because moving them back for ~6 months is not worth the work.

I am trying to find a project to work on. I talked to Myk about it and we didn’t get very far in our discussion because we got off on a tangent of course, so here I am, another day wasted. But then I ask myself, what does it mean exactly to waste a day? Is spending a day reading wasted? Is spending a day playing video games or chatting on IRC more wasted than if I spend it working on a webpage that doesnt extend my abilities in HTML or PHP? Is spending a day learning about history I missed in school wasted? I think this is the biggest problem with this “rut” i am in. I don’t know what to label an “acomplishment” so I go in circles. And I really do want to do work in Perl, I really do want to do more with MySQL, I want to make my page better with more PHP, but I just don’t know where to begin! The guestbook and poll were very sucessful ventures, I need something like that. Or an idea for a cool script for my IRC Bot. I need ideas before I drive myself crazy with inactivity. On the bright side my Neopets get a lot of attention in times like this %D

Hrm, so this morning I was talking to someone about my website (rather abstractly, because he asked) and I decided to see how big my site is… 124 MB YAY! Hehe… maybe I will just do some useless work on princessleia.com today to pass the time…

I finished Dune Messiah yesterday. I’ll type up the review eventually, great book though, I can see why this series is so popular, I really love it.

*wanders off*

o/` Stabbing Westward – Perfect o/`

*sneezes*

I hate mondays

Saturday morning a friend, Bob, emailed Myk and asked if we wanted to go to a computer show around 2ish. Sure. Apparently he had heard it closed at 4, but it wasn’t too far so we should get there in time to spend a while there. Bob came and picked us up in his new BMW (whee!) and we droveout toward the convention center. We pay the toll to get off the turnpike, and there is TONS of traffic on the other side! We look to the right, and there is MORE traffic! Bob says “uh, I think that is where we need to be” At this point it’s about 2:35. So we’re sitting in traffic, and we hear on the radio that the sale at the convention center is open til 9! It’s worth sitting in this traffic ’cause at least we will get there before 9. We finally get onto the off-ramp in the direction we need to go around 3:15 (about 700 ft from the toll booth, not joking) and then we sit in a little faster moving traffic until about 3:45. Finally we get to the convention center, find a parking space and walk through the doors of the computer show at 3:53. “Closing in 7 minutes!” we hear. NO!!! We turn around and leave, ’cause even though it’s only open another 7 minutes they were still wanting to charge the $6 admission fee. Turns out the computer show is just part of the bigger sales show going on, and the rest of it lasts til 9, but not the computer show.

Personally I’d really rather pay 3 times as much at a store or online dealer I can trust for my computer parts. The last computer part I bought at a computer show was speakers and a subwoofer for my system. They lasted about 6 months. I hate computer shows anyway, the dealers always ignore me and focus on trying to sell things to the guy I happen to be with… seriously, I thought I was just being paranoid again but I did several tests to confirm my suspicions. Anyway, after the failed computer show venture we decided to go to Unos (Bob is the guy we often go to Unos with on saturdays). I had two beers (satiated my beer craving, yay!) and a chicken sandwich. It was yummie.

Then we went home. I finished Wyrd Sisters, wrote up a review, and actually got around to updating my Books page, which I hadnt done in a few weeks.

Wyrd Sisters, By Terry Pratchett, 265 pages
This next book in the Discworld series focuses on three witches, Gytha “Nanny” Ogg, Magrat, and Esmeralda “Granny” Weatherwax. The small woody kingdom that they call home is taken over by a foriegn duke and the witches are asked, for the first time ever, to pay taxes. When they refuse it’s obvious to the duke that these women are evil! Personally, I prefer the Discworld novels that concern themselves with wizards, but I really liked this book. The amusing antics of the witches, combined with a wonderful cas of characters, which included a dwarf playwrite, a lost prince, and a very uncontent Fool, make for another fun-filled glimpse at the life on the Disc.

Yesterday I spent most of the day reading. Started Dune Messiah, almost finished it too, I think I only have about 40 pages left. It’s good, but not a whole lot happens, I can definately see how the new scifi channel’s “Children Of Dune” movie can absorb the second book’s important parts pretty easily, Messiah would definately not make it’s own movie (scifi miniseries) without being boring. I think I’ll read Brave New World next. I havent read that in a while, and that time was under “school reading pressure” hehe… I enjoyed it even under those circumstances, so I think I will really enjoy reading it again. Then there are … hmm 8 books on my shelf I still havent read, yay!

Bleh, my net connection sucks this morning. It’s stable… but I am lagging 3-6 seconds on every ircserver I’m on %( And surfing the net is crazy-slow … I will just hope it’s someone surfing our sites and not our connection flaking out for the first time in a month.

Anyway, I am going to try to work on some stuff and *hope* my connection doesnt go to hell %) *wanders off*

o/` Tool – Parabola o/`

I recently have been having a bit of ‘trouble’ with this friend of mine. He comes to me for advice, and obviously goes to a lot of people for the same advice, which in itself is no problem, but he seems to do it AT THE SAME TIME as he is talking to me. He gets irritated when I do not respond quickly at times, yet leaves 10 minutes between his responces and mine! I honestly want to be of help, but I can’t help but feel he is taking advantage of me. I spend time thinking about his problems and offering honest advice and he is barely there to respond to what I say! Now I wouldn’t be saying this if it was an occasional thing, and I haven’t brought it up in the past because I feel moderately guilty about feeling this way. I really am willing to be of help to anyone, because I know what it’s like to depend on the comfort of a few close friends. But this friend seems to try to draw tons of attention to himself, and then take evertyhing he hears and everyone he hears it from for granted. I understand he is going through a confusing time, and I suppose everyone has ways of dealing with it, but all he is doing now is pushing me away… should I be honest with him about how I feel? I am very afriad that he will take it the wrong way and end our friendship… but I am also afraid that I might snap one day with his endless pleadings for advice and tell him “I DON’T FUCKING CARE” … when that is totally not what I feel. Bleh.

*shivers*

The apartment feels so much colder when I wake up on mornings when Myk is home. Probably because I am forced to leave a nice warm bed to wake up (warmer than it would be if I was in it alone anyway)… so the air is so much crueler (is that a word?) when I wake up… plus I have the option of going back to that wonderful warmness *frowns at her cold feet*

#13thHour was fairly busy yesterday afternoon, had something like 14 people there, so I found something to do, yes chat! And I did a bit of updating to the #13thHour Site, added a section so it’s easy to get to R2’s information database (the password protected one) and gives instructions on how to access the bot through IRC. It’s all very simple, but you wouldn’t believe how much explaination it takes %( especially since I need to be VERY clear about everything, or my non-computer friends will be completely lost, they are so lucky I am patient… speaking of which…

I met another person who “can’t read the readme.” She is running Windows XP and got a virus through Kazaa (ugh!), and came into IRC and said “I have a virus and I can’t get rid of it.” First I ASSUMED that she had attempted to get rid of it, but all she did (using norton) was quarentine the files. So I went to the Symantec website, found the virus description and fix, and pasted the URL in channel. Now if you have every been to the Symantec website, you’d know that their “get rid of this virus” instructions are VERY straight-forward, to the point of saying “click start, then run, then type regedit” … so even a monkey could fix their problem. But this chick just couldnt get it “I read the instructions but I don’t understand” … now I don’t know if this was because she was just a flaming idiot (I dont know her well) or because she was afraid to edit something that she had never seen before. So I literally copied each step DIRECTLY FROM THE WEBSITE and pasted it in channel so she could get rid of her virus. It was so absurd. I don’t know why I bother wasting my time with people like that, cant freaking think for themselves.

Anyway, this problem of inability to “read the readme” is fairly widespread. I guess that’s what really deterred me from making my guestbook setup happy and user-friendly for people to download. The last thing I need is some idiot asking me how to read the instructions I very carefully wrote. And here I had been downplaying some of my acomplishments because all I did was read the readme, HAH! Now I know it’s a talent… /end extreme sarcasm

I also did a bit of editing to my .muttrc file (mutt is a text-based mail program). All I really wanted to do was change some of the colors from green to magenta (like irssi, and lilo, and my lyz@r2d2 prompt in terminals…). It was surprisingly simple %) Pretty Happy Matching irssi and mutt

I started doing a bit of ‘promoting’ for WallaceAndGromit.net. It basically consisted of going to a bunch of Wallace And Gromit sites, signing their guestbooks, and emailing the site owners to ask permission to link their site to mine… I ask to link anyone now after an incident were someone (strangely enough) did not want their site to linked to a “high traffic site like princessleia.com.” Why would someone make a website if they didnt want hits? *shakes her head* Anyway, I was very disappointed to find out that there are virtually *no* new Wallace And Gromit sites! Even the ones out there are full of broken links, and havent been updated in years. It’s sad really… Hopefully with the full length movie coming out in 2005 there will be a surge of new sites %) And maybeI will get a bit more traffic to my site (470 hits since October 15th … I guess that isn’t terrible maybe I am just spoiled by the success of princessleia.com).

Anyway, I am gonna go find something to do (and try not to crawl back into bed
*must resist call of bed*

o/` Hooverphonic – Magenta o/`

I don’t think this will be a long entry, I don’t have much to say.

Last night I was very very tired, I really dont know why I’ve been so tired the past couple weeks, I think it’s ’cause we are trying to go to bed earlier (10ish) and getting up at 7, I am probably just trying to get used to this new schedule. Watched some TV, read a little. It snowed sometime during the night.

Woke up this morning, there was only about a half of inch of snow outside, but still enough to make things look pretty. I cleaned the apartment.. did a bunch of extra stuff too that i don’t do every week (cleaning the whole stove, waxing some of the furnature) .. so it basically took all morning. At least it saved me from the problem of figuring out what to do all morning or feeling like I’ve wasted my time %) And I learned fast that there is a positive side to having a dry apartment, the floors dry really fast!

I don’t think we are going to do anything this weekend. The whole “trying to save money” thing really prohibits much activity. But that’s ok, another relaxing weekend at home is perfectly fine with me.

Of course, as is my terrible luck, after all that work for the test site for ukscifi.net (you can view the work I did here: http://www.princessleia.com/ukscifi/) the owner of UKScifi says “well, I like your design, but I want to incorporate my current site with it… etc, etc, etc. I KNEW this would happen, he probably wont even use my design, or he’ll just steal things from it to make his site better *sigh* I guess I should have expected this… Well, I DID… but I guess I just wasnt being realistic. On the bright side, Myk still has bevilacqua.us that needs to be made into a site (currently it just points to clockbot.net), so maybe I can do a bit of work on that %)

Yeah, I guess that’s it. I dunno what I’ll do this afternoon… prolly surf the net and chat or something, since I don’t feel much motivation to do much else… *wanders off*

Stupid dumb Bush, he is going to cause a war. I don’t want war %(

o/` Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s Over o/`

I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I am very annoyed by people who have problems using email. Like my sister Heather. I email her a question, simple, like asking my mother’s phone number or something, and she’ll never reply! I had to get her attention on instant messanger, or on IRC, or when she decided to call me on the phone. What is this fear of email!? Then there are people like my mother who will call me instead of using email, knowing full well my hatred of phones *sigh* Then of course there are the people I write 3 page emails to, and they thing an appropriate responce is saying “hi” on IM… rar. Then there are people who actually send emails, and they send them in HTML … or they have a facination with sending fwds, no matter how many times I ask them not to. I mentioned in IRC this morning that I should write an email ediquette book, then I found out that it’s been done, I think that book should be issued with the purchase of every new PC…. hee

It’s nice and cold out, currently about 24, so it’s not the painful cold like we used to get in Maine. When I lived in Maine we lived right next to the coast, and so it was always windy, and in the winter it was the kind of wind that doesnt bother going around a person, it tries to go directly through them, chills to the bone. The wetness in your nose freezes and unprotected lips chap in 13 seconds. I don’t know if I miss that sort of cold, but this temperature is prefectly fine, I can definately say I will miss this cold weather if we move to florida. Florida. *sigh*! I guess a guy from the facility down in FL sent Myk some pictures today of the area, says it’s a nice area, and housing is nice and fairly inexpensive. We still don’t KNOW we are moving yet… but it looks like they are getting ready to make an offer and hope he accepts. I still don’t know exactly what I think of this all, “weary but willing” would be a good term for it.

I am helping the admin of ukscifi design a new website. I don’t know why exactly, but I am pretty sure it’s a mix of being bored and being vain. I am not a big fan of the admin there, he is a liar, and I dont like liars… but having MY WORK on ukscifi.net really draws me to this project… it’s a fairly popular website. I just hope the admin goes through with this project and all my work yesterday and this morning will not be useless.

Uh, I guess that’s all I feel like writing for noew *wanders off*