I guess I’ll start out with the review of the crappy book I read this weekend


The Shipping News, By E. Annie Proulx, 337 pages

This book tells the story of a man, born and raised in New York, who after losing his adulterous was killed in a terrible car crash, decides to retreat with his two young daughters to an old family home in Newfoundland. It’s a pretty typical tale of someone who is at “rock bottom” and takes a chance at being
content. As a Pulizer Prize winner I guess I expected more, but even 100 pages into it I started guessing that the reviewers fell asleep while reading it and just dreamed it was a good book. A little harsh? Maybe. I think it’s just one of those books that they will make kids read in high school and pull all
sorts of deep meaning out of, which we all know to be complete bs! The characters were boring, story-line predictable, and the setting couldn’t have been more dull. I only finished it because it’s one of the last books on my shelf I hadn’t read…


I hate it when books suck.


I went to amazon.com to see what other people thought, and I found that half of them agreed with me, and the other half said it was so great and critized the others for not recognising great prose when they see it, Pulizer suckups… This one guy (who I agree with obviously) said: “the book should have been titled The Misadventures of a Loser who Obviously Cannot get through anything in life and who doesn’t even try” heh… I also found out the are making, made? A movie about it… there is a trailer *goes to watch trailer* Right, so I booted into windows to see the trailer, and before it even started I was startled to learn that Kevin Spacey was cast in the main role… now maybe if a Kevin Spacey *type* character was in the BOOK I might have liked it more, but he doesnt fit the role at all! The character in the book was a fat, clumbsy, loser of a man; I can’t see spacey being that… in the trailer he definately was not fat. And the character of Wavey is NOT portrayed well either (through the trailer anyway). I think the only character well-presented was the dead wife of Quoyl, a character that could have been played by tons of different hollywood whoreish actresses. And apparently the movie is on DVD already… with the impressive cast list I’m surprised I had never even heard ot it… Anyway…


I got my bathing suit in the mail on saturday, and it actually fits pretty flatteringly, why do I still think I’m fat all the time? Maybe leftover self-image issues from high school. Speaking of high school, I took the link to that CEHS thing off my site. No one responded, maybe for the better, it was a dumb idea anyway, there are only a couple people I knew in high school I’d like to talk to, the rest can probably go into the “i hate you” catagory. Damn high school sucked.


So Myk was working on minute a lot this weekend, it’s a faster machine for second (uh, yea, for some reason the faster the computer gets the higher incrimint of time we name it (second, minute, hour.. seems backwards huh? It is.) so it should work better as being the gateway/firewall on our network… I spend time reading a lousy book, which put me in a pretty crankie mood all day saturday, and when I’m crankie I usually look depressed and feel like doing nothing. I did play UT for a little while tho, that was fun… it’s nice to have a bunch of real people come together and play sometimes. I guess all we did other than that was go out for sushi last night, then watch adult swim *shrugs* it was late by the time finished dinner at the sushi place so the bookstores were closed *sigh* guess what I’m reading? Yep Celestine Prophecy, and already I disagree with it… it might progress well and my issues with it might be resolved somehow with more explaination, so I guess I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.


I did a lot of thinking this weekend, since I had all sorts of time to think in between terrible pages of The Shipping News and realized how this point in life really sucks. Between childhood/school age and adulthood, trying hard to grasp at something real, trying hard to finally grow up and do something that matters. I think every one of the people I know who is my age is feeling that at the moment. Maybe it’s the crappy economy, maybe ’cause it’s summertime and we are thinking back to summer vacation and knowing that we dont/wont have it anymore. Whatever it is it’s very nice to know that I’m not alone in my “depression” of being lost. I do have an advantage however… Myk. I am not alone through this, and although he’s older than me he’s not so much that he forgot what it’s like to go through this… and having someone love you is definately helpful when looking into the vast expanse of “wtf am I going to do for the next 60 years of my life?” And he makes enough to take care of me, which leads me to another point. I’m a woman so it’s more socially acceptable to be a “housewife” and work from the home if my career plans don’t work out. Then again if I was a man maybe I’d have some sort of natural drive to pursue a career.. *shrugs* I’ll never know, I have no idea what it’s like being a man, that would be weird. Anyway, I guess all i’m saying is that it seems pretty common at my age to be depressed about not going anywhere, not making progress… but everyone grows up eventually and finds their place, we can’t ALL be failures.


Oh I did end up working on that starwars section of my site… It’s cleaner looking anyway, even if it’s not terribly pretty, I am thinking of creating a new CSS file for sites like the SWS one and the MSG one, ’cause the blue links just look awful… *shrugs* I never got around to cleaning up the MSG pages, I did upload some mp3s tho, I should remake my MSG mp3 section.


Anyway, it’s almost noon, I should probably find something to do today. I thought about going swimming this afternoon, but it’s already over 90 degrees, so I am not looking forward to walking across the complex to the pool… We’ll see.

I finished Redwall tonight, it was pretty much what I had expected, and like always I wrote up a review:

Redwall, By Brian Jacques, 351 pages

This is the story of a battle between the peaceful creatures of Redwall Abbey and the feared hoard of Cluny The Scourge. Mice, moles and badgers make up the cast of heros introduced in this story to battle the fiece rats and weasles attacking their home. Basically a simple take of good prevailing over evil, and a likely hero bringing all sorts of former rivals together to fight for the good. I think I would have liked this book much more back when I was younger and less cynical. The ending was fairly predictable, and the climax disappointing, don’t get me wrong, it was a nice, fast paced read, and fun… but again I think my tastes for literature have matured beyond this point. I have read Martin the Warrior (another book in the series), and at the time, when I was a sophmore in high school, I thought it was quite good, so I’d recommend this to younger readers I guess %)

Yep.

So today instead of making my Star Wars section pretty I ended up chatting all afternoon. A friend of mine needed some cheering up ’cause he’s feeling the “i am 20, I am lost, i make no progress, i suck, oh and i’m unemployed!” depression thing. And an old friend of mine stopped into #13thHour, and so I decided to talk to him as well, that left about 5 minutes sporatically (ooh spelling!) each hour to work on the page, what does this mean? It means I hardly got anything done, and my starwars pages are terribly unbalanced now with their appearances, yay! Heh.

In other news a comment in my friend Leslie’s weblog about the acronym “lol” started me thinking about this one friend I have who is pretty smart, but insists on saying “lolirl” when he is actually laughing out loud so people can hear him… I approached him about it telling him that it seemed redundant to say that, but I am not sure he “got” what I was saying, maybe he isn’t as smart as I thought %) In any event I think I simply chuckle when I say “lol” … the “LOL” and “lmao” are saved for actual prolonged laughs “in real life” … as well as the “rotflmao”, where I am not actually rolling on the floor, most likely I am just laughing so hard I can’t breathe. I know I know I should stop… waaay to much enlightenment from this blog today %P

I think I might actually go do some work on that starwars site now.

http://www.timetravelfund.com

This website a friend of mine from #13thHour has caused so many funny conversations about time travel since discovered I HAD to share it with the world. It’s a group that takes $10 from each person participating, and puts it into this “fund” so 500 years or so in the future when they discover time travel the people from the future can come and get you to bring you to the future… Yep, you even get a neat little certificate to put on your wall saying you are part of the project (is $10 worth just that conversation piece?).. Very strange… people are so funny! Their theory is the $10 will be worth a few billion in 500 years (oooh the wonders of compound interest) and you’ll be taken to the future and live a comfortable life (as long as you recover from future shock and all that). Silly? Of course…

So I was doing something yesterday and I started wondering where the expression “every cloud has a silver lining” came from, because it definately is odd.. And I went looking for it can stumbled on tons of other idiom origins that were really interesting. I ended up collecting a bunch and putting them up on my website:
http://www.princessleia.com/Idioms.html. But I am sure you wont want to go all the way to my site so I’ll mention a few of the more interesting ones here…:

Sleep tight:

Before box springs were in use, old bed frames used rope pulled tightly between the frame
rails to support a mattress. If the rope became loose, the mattress would sag making for uncomfortable sleeping. Tightening the ropes would help one get a good night sleep.

Clean bill of health

This widely used term has
its origins in the “Bill of Health”, a document issued to a ship showing
that the port it sailed from suffered from no epidemic or infection at
the time of departure.

Close but no cigar

Carnival games of skill,
particularly shooting games, once gave out cigars as a prize. A
contestant that did not quite hit the target was close, but did not get
a cigar.

Don’t you feel enlightened now? Well you should, and you will be moreso if you go to my site.

I still havent figured out how to get my bot to respond to actions, I think i need to learn more about the parsing methods of irssi to figure out how (haven’t I mentioned that before? Blah..). And right now I’m really not in the mood. I think I will work on my starwars page today though. It’s really lacking in beauty, hehe… there are lots of kewl things I could do to make it look better, so I think I’ll do that today.. maybe work on making my Miranda Sex Garden page prettier too.

I guess that’s it for now… bbl

So my youngest sister Annette came into chat today, which isn’t anything unusual, she usually says silly strange things, gets offended by everyone and is all around strange with the people I chat with. But she is only 13 so I don’t pay much attention to it. So anyway today she was in chat and I knew already that she listened to rap (eww) but today she’s like “do you call people people or homies?” ugh… then said: “you know how black chicks talk?? thats kinda how i talk now” Gah… there is no hope for her. Wanting to “talk like a black chick” how she puts it is like wanting to talk like a southerner… assuming a completely different dialect to be cool. Very strange, especially since she lives near Augusta Maine… I am so glad I was sheltered in a preppy school.

In other news I got the “about r2d2” page up, you can check it out here About R²D². It took quite a while, going through logs to find some old stuff that he did, since I totally forgot what kind of bot he was at first. But I put up zip files of all 3 versions: mirc, xchat, and irssi… and I put up txt files of the perl scripts (as if anyone is interested..).

So last night I slept very well… I didn’t even hear Myk get up this morning, or the shower, or anything, I woke up at like 9:30 .. so strange. I dunno what I’ll do today… I should really learn summore perl, I have recently looked into Gimp Perl scripts, but they are difficult, and I have a terrible time focusing on a project if it doesnt have a very good chance of being needed in the near future (like how I needed r2..).

So yesteray was my sister Heather’s 19th birthday I forgot to put up a happy birthday heather thing on this site… not like she’d see it anyway *shrugs* I didn’t forget her birthday tho, I made her my own little ecard (’cause ecard sites suck… its just a way to get email addys to sell to tons of spammers). Didn’t get her a present tho ’cause she didnt tell me what she wanted (i asked her about a week ago to give me a list of books and cds she wanted… she never did). See I don’t want to get her something she doesnt want, ’cause she and my father are moving soon and they won’t have room for much stuff… So speaking of that, yeah, they are moving. No more old house.. Apparently the landlord is selling the house and they have 2 months to find a new place %( Sucks… it’s such a weird feeling knowing I will never be in the house I grew up in again… Luckily I got all my stuff out of the house (least I hope I did…) the last time i was up there.

*Yawn* Damn I shouldnt be tired o_O Anyway… I’m gonna go find something useful to do so I don’t feel like a complete bum… maybe I’ll play with shellscripting or something, yeah… bbl…

Take the “How Do You Use Magic?” test! Written by Brimo

Neat.

I didn’t end up getting much done yesterday. I got into one of those “everything fucking sucks” depressed moods when Network Solutions/Verisign kept jerking me around… I swear, when I finally officially own princessleia.com I am moving it to another company, Verisign SUCKS!!! It’s such a pain on the phone with them too ’cause you can hear their hold music just fine, but when the operator gets on you have to ask them to repeat what they said 34254 times before you can hear them. Ended up telling me that I had some password that started with HQ(which i dont, never did) and since I didnt recognise it they couldnt change my secondary domain server, ugh! I have to send them a fax, with my noterized signature on it to change it… fucking pisses me off… I dont have the time or resources for this! It was so hard hearing the person on the phone I didn’t even bother to inquire again about the status of the domain switchover of princessleia.com .. sometimes I think it would have been better to let it expire and then buy it, heh. They told me like 3 weeks ago that the request had been recieved… I don’t know what’s taking them so long. Anyway, talking about this is just upsetting me %) moving on…

I did some work this morning on my irssi bot.. I wanted to get him to read actions as well as regular messages, but I cant seem to find any examples of scripts grabbing info from actions, so it’s been difficult, I sorta gave up for the day ’cause it was bugging me too much. I did go for a walk this morning, which was nice ’cause it’s been too hot lately, we opened the windows last night for the first time in weeks, it was sorta damp, but mostly cool… I didn’t sleep well tho, bleh, i need like perfect conditions to sleep well, lol %)

I guess I’m going to finally go write up the “About R²D²” thing I’ve been meaning to write for about a week now… I’m gonna upload all his scripts too, from mirc to irssi, should be interesting %)

bbl…

Well my hatred of clothing shopping finally won out and I bought a bathing suit online. I wasn’t going to, since bathing suits are sorta the kind of thing you want to try on before you buy them… but I really don’t feel like going to stores in the end of July only to discover all they have left for bathing suits on the rack are size 4 bikinis, ’cause who buys a bathing suit in the middle of the summer? Oh well, I checked with the return policy of this one place and it seemed pretty good so I spent like $50, I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much on a bathing suit, but I didn’t want to get one from a crappy no name online company, that’s scary. Anyway, the reason for getting one was is that we have a pool here at the apartments, and it’s been hot, so I want to go swimming. I paid extra for quick delivery, so it should be here by friday or so… what can I say, I’m an impatient young american. The sucky thing is that I tried twice last night and the website was all “our site not working, come back later” and now when I look at my online bank statement it shows charging me 3 times… “Debit pending” of course, so hopefully when the bank realizes it was a mistake those will go away… I called the company this morning anyway to make sure they only charged me once. Gah, I wouldn’t be to happy losing $100 by some browser mistake, I’d lose all faith in internet shopping.

Speaking of which, I just finished the Third Wheel of Time book last night and wrote up a review:

The Dragon Reborn, by Robert Jordan, 701 pages

In this third book of the Wheel of Time series there was a lot of moving
of characters, it was very well written so that you are equally
interested in all the characters movements. I find that in some books
one set of characters is more interested than another and I always pull
myself through reading the uninteresting stuff to get the the
interesting stuff. Not so with Jordan, he really makes an effort to make
the whole story flow very well. Unfortunately, with this book I find
what flaw people have with Jordan, this book was about 700 pages long
and very little happened. Or hardly anything very important anyway, he
manages to take up a lot of space to write a small progression of the
story. I personally don’t really have a problem with this, not now
anyway, but I’m afraid I’ll learn to dislike it as the series
progresses. Some people have said that he created this series so that he
could write it for his entire life, he is very good at describing
scenes, and developing characters, but it takes so long. Anyway, the
plot is pretty much all the characters growing in their chosen tasks,
and all end up chasing different people all to this city of Tear. The
climax occurs toward the end when The Dragon Reborn takes a vital step
toward world proclaimation of his status. So in all? I
liked it, breezed through it in a little over a week, I’ll probably be
heading out for book number four in a couple weeks.

So I just looked up on my bookshelf and saw a book I hadnt read yet Redwall I’ve actually read another in the series but not this one, they are fantasy stories whose characters are animals *shrugs* It’ll be a nice break between WoT books. Hopefully I’ll get to the bookstore before I’m done with this so I wont have to do something silly like reading the Celestine Prophecy next or something. Then again I am sure I could look through my piles of books and find a few things I havent read… The problem is that I have a terrible habit of acquiring like, the second book in a 5 book series or something, I cant read that ’cause I havent read the first, and even if I decide to go on without reading previous I sorta get committed to a series *shrugs* I am gonna go wander off and see if I can get some work done, since it’s after 1 and all I have done today is unsucessfully tried to change my secondary domain name, bleh.

Well I actually left the house this past weekend. Last week our cable was all screwy.. lost channels 23-46, which are pretty much all we watch… thought something had broken when they installed the cable next door so we had ppl come out and check out line, they said it was fine so I called back today and they told me that we had been getting standard cable when we were only supposed to get basic, heh… 7 months and they discover this now? Well it’s freaking $30 extra a month to get what we’ve had the whole time living here… who knows if it’s worth it, we hardly watch tv… but when we want to we don’t want to just get crappy channels! UGH! H8 @ Com(munist)cast!!! Oh well… We went out friday night to get a movie, rented A Beautiful Mind since we hadnt seen it… turned out to be a really great movie, I was very impressed, ‘specially since I dont like Russell Crowe much, but he did a really great job. Then on saturday I was like “Myk, we have to do something tonight” ’cause I was terribly bored. So we went to this arcade in philly called Jillians… Hmmm it’s not only an arcade, it was a big place, arcade, bowling alley, dance hall, pool area, bar, lots of stuff, it was a kewl place and we hung out in the arcade the whole time… played a bit of skeeball (very badly I might add).. and air hockey a few times, that was kewl, and we played this virtual bowling game… you could bowl through cities, or the woods, or in a regular alley, we played in the woods and i kept screwing up and hitting trees n stuff, it was… interesting, but fun. I’ve never been a big arcade fan ’cause it was expensive, but this place wasnt too bad, and they use these neat credit cards to play games, each card has points on it and you use that instead of carrying around quarters or tokens. Anyway it was a good way just to have fun.. afterwards we went to Friday’s … were they screwed up our order ’cause they seemed to have a cook there that liked to put bacon on everything even when I asked them not to, heh, I DONT EAT PORK! %) We got home around 10ish and Myk was msg’ed by someone on IRC (a guy we sorta know from PLUG) asking us if we wanted to hang out for a bit that night. So it was 10ish, and we werent at all tired so we got some directions and drove out there, ended up being almost an hour away, hehe… but it was kewl spending time with real people. I had never met Ian’s (Ian is the guy’s name…) fiancee before, and she seemed really nice. Apparently she works as an electrical engineer… and he works from home from what I gather. And he’s a KDE developer (KDE is one of the window managers for linux… like Gnome, or Enlightenment… yeah). So we spent a couple hours over there, mostly Myk and Ian talking about computer stuff that I barely understood. Heh, they asked me what I did and I didn’t know what to say, just looked at Myk and was like “uh… not much… I don’t have a job…” Myk was like “she’s learning perl!” Gah, I hate when people ask me what I do, I feel like such a failure. I guess they know I use linux, so Ian was like “you should just tell people you are a consultant” lol… I guess I could, and maybe someday I’ll even get paid for my advice so I wont be lying! But for now I’m a charity consultant, hehe. I guess I was pretty shy again, I can’t help it %( Plus I felt pretty dumb ’cause I know Ian and his fiancee graduated from college, and Myk was totally involved in the conversation. I think they tried to get me into the conversation when they started talking about books, Ian’s fiancee is an Orson Scott Card fan too, so that was kewl.. but for the most part Ian was bragging about reading big books at age 12 n shit. Not that he’s a bad person, he’s really smart and nice, just has that “i graduated college, that means I am so smart” additude that I have found among some college grads. Anyway, we had a nice time there, it’s cool getting to know new people *shrugs* Ended up leaving there around 1:30ish… came home and chatted for a while before bed. Sunday was not so eventful… got up around noon, chatted, my allergies were acting up really bad so I ended up going to read around 3ish, took some Benedryl that made me feel all froozy, and it didnt make my sinus headache go away like it said it would! I just sorta napped a little til Myk came in and asked if I was ok. I took some tylenol finally for the headache, and felt better… we ordered pizza and channel surfed the channels we do have for an excuse to snuggle on the couch. We watched some of these new Law & Order shows… they suck %) Then ate some ice cream and watched Adult Swim on the cartoon network… I went to bed around 1..

So it’s today now… and currently 11:41, I think today I might actually write up that r2d2 history thing for my webpage… I also want to write a little thing about platform independent webpages and why they are so important (I have a lot of discussions about this with people who seem to think everyone uses IE). But right now I am gonna get back to what I was saying earlier about the college grads vs. non college grads thing. I have noticed, in the field of computers anyway, it’s pretty easy to see who graduated from a nice college and who taught themselves everything they know. It’s very interesting seeing the difference. I’ve found that the college grads tend to be a bit more cocky, and talk about things differently… strictly text book… while those who teach themselves attack problems, and explain them much differently. I think if i were to have a teacher for anything in computers I’d prefer someone who didnt go to college. I mean I have friend who are at the same level, some went to college, some just have certifications, and the ones who didnt go to college understand “newbies” much better. Since they were there and they know what it’s like not to have someone take them by the hand and teach them everything they need to know. SO I am thinking I wont go to college afterall… It’s really impressive how much some people have acomplished, one of our friends didnt even graduated high school and he’s doing well.. another didnt go to college and he doesnt have trouble finding jobs because he has so much experience, even Myk didnt get a degree, he just got certifications, and he’s doing very well. *shrugs* I guess college could help, but if I really put my mind to it I can learn everything on my own, and not owe thousands of dollars when I’m done %)

*yawn* anyway I gotta go eat lunch…

It’s like 6 am when I am starting this… can’t sleep. I got up at around 5:15 after I awoke from a bad dream and realized I wasnt gonna fall back asleep. I hate bad dreams. In this one some perv messaged me in chat and Myk saw it and freaked thinking I knew this person for some reason. I dunno why I’d have a dream like that, it as really fucked up… maybe I’m paranoid. Or it’s just a backlash from when I was dating my ex and my every move was suspicious to him. I would never cheat on Myk tho’ … I’m crazy about him.

Anyway, I was depressed again yesterday afternoon. Dunno what it was, I think it started ’cause I realized I hadnt been out of the house since last friday. Sometimes I think something is seriously wrong with me for having all this depression, it definately sucks, i have everything i want… But I did discover how great Radiohead is when you’re depressed… i have a bunch of Radiohead mp3s… a bunch I got after that week I spent in rochester with my friend Pete. See one night we were at his friend’s house drinking screwdrivers and smoking up… I got so messed up that night, and his friend had just gotten some radiohead singles and was playing them, I was totally loving it. We also watched this movie that was all ambient music with random scenes of stuff, I swear I wouldnt have enjoyed it so much if I wasnt fucked up %) Anyway it was a fond memory so I got the radiohead mp3s to remember it by.. getting on with it…
Myk came home, and then left again last night to go to Beer Club… it’s a bunch of home brewers that get together.. myk only went ’cause the guy running it has a linux system and was having trouble with it. When he came home around 9ish he brought home chinese, and complained that the people at beerclub were a bunch of alcoholics.. hehe. Anyway, by that time i had a bit of a headache, ick, and we just ate dinner and watched Toy Story (Myk had never seen it… and for some reason the cable was out…). Then I went to try to read, but with a headache it was kinda difficult… *shrugs* I just decided to go to sleep… so I guess i must have fallen asleep a little before midnight… must have been too early since I am up now %)

But I think I am gonna go back and snuggle with Myk for a little while before he has to get up for work… bbl.