Older blog entries for dria (starting at number 123)

"I'm on vacation!" - Al Massey, explaining to Valdez (slimeball guerrilla leader) why he, an American journalist, is lurking around a little Mexican town that happens to be in the guerrillas' territory. A-Team, pilot episode

I am, in fact, going on vacation. La la la la foo.

Played hermit today. Worked on my narcissi^Wvanity site (soon to be put up at dria.org). It has a weblog, among other things. All hail PHP. Rasmus deserves a cookie.

In other news, nothing happened.

Okay, that's not entirely true. I went to a couple of movies, bummed around with the gang, and spent way too much time actually doing productive-webby things this weekend. No gaming at all. For shame. I'll regret that 'round mid-week when I'm sick of webbing and stay up past my bedtime again playing one-or-the-other addictive city-building game. Just you wait.

Later, I get to go on vacation. You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to that. Seems like all-but-one of the old gang is going to be in the same province at the same time, which, as far as I can tell, hasn't happened in the last 7 years. Someone should really warn the natives, 'cuz it ain't gonna be pretty.

Currently reading: The Winter King, by Bernard Cornwell. This is the first in yet-another-Arthurian-epic, this time known collectively as "The Warlord Chronicles". So far it's like a Fellini movie, which has turned out to be the theme of the weekend.

Currently listening to: well, nothing. Earlier I had David Usher's Little Songs CD on, and before that, more stuff by Our Lady Peace.

And at night, the ice weasles come.

Speed update, then bed.

1. My cat is home. He appears to be doing quite well. Hoorah.

2. Printer works. The USB cable did the trick.

3. Sim City 3000 Unlimited is the work of the Devil.

4. Hack hack hack. I haven't had this much fun working on something this mind-bendingly difficult in a long time. The difficulty is the result of me having to learn the technologies as I go, rather than the task itself. To a certain extent. Sort of. It's still hard...I'm quite convinced.

5. I'm going to Nova Scotia in a few weeks to attend a friend's wedding and to soak up another year's worth of general geograhic beauty. I've found myself humming silly Nova Scotian folk tunes recently, which is usually a sure sign of homesickness. Oddly, I didn't grow up there.

6. I watched shreds of the final episode of Survivor. This is the first and only (and last) exposure to that show I've had, but I had to watch at least a bit of it in order to fulfill my pop-cultural duties as a loyal North American. Thank god it's not a Canadian show. That would just be embarrassing.

7. Highlander IV (yes, 4; yes, a movie) opens on September 1st. At the moment, it looks like I'll be going by myself. Betcha $5 I don't have to line up for tickets. Screw you all anyhow, it's got Peter Wingfield in it, and that's all that matters.

8. The grocery store near my house closed a while ago...like closed its doors forever sort of closed. As a result, I'm down to a 1/4 box of mini-wheats, two cans of tuna, and a half packet of spaghetti (no sauce). This is seriously cramping my style.

That's all for now. Adios.

Something's seizing
You know you lost your mind
You know we all need saving
She found you late last night
You feel the madness gaining
You know you just can't win
You know this, you know this
You know this...

I'm just so
tired of waking up
on the ground.

Today. Spent a bunch of time cleaning my apt. Bought a Dirt Devil hand vac and a Cannon BJC 3000 printer. Printer seems to be okay. Parallel port works okay. Drivers installed okay (windows box).

LPT Error: Printer Not Responding.

Well hell. Tomorrow I get to buy a new printer cable (a USB one if I can find it). I think the problem might be associated with the 20 year old parallel cable I've been recycling since grade school. Blast.

In other news, I get to bring my cat home from the hospital tomorrow (not today like originally anticipated). The vet wanted one final day to see how he did now that they've taken him off the IV drip. That's okay with me. I'd hate to bring him home and have to take him back again.

One of these days I'm actually going to get some of the stuff done that I want to get done. Made a few small baby steps towards getting my weblog put together, but then randomness intervened and managed to destroy any semblance of productivity for the rest of the day.

That sort of thing seems to be happening more often these days, and it's really getting on my nerves. I want a week where I can just Do Things without a billion little details and errands and other randomnesses cropping up to ruin my concentration.

I have so much I want to do, and so blasted little time to get it done in. Blah.

I have been playing with PHP. I have also been fretting madly about my cat. I also spent $20 on photocopying (a lot of) D&D 3rd Edition character sheets, immersing myself in a massive high-school flashback. High-school was an awfully long time ago.

Grope the Mega.

Goddamn, I miss my old gaming gang. I also miss my cat. The latter, however, will hopefully be resolved tomorrow.

Then I get to work from home for a couple of days whilst I make sure he's okay. It's nice working for good people.

When I'm not playing with PHP, I seem to be playing with MySQL a lot. When I'm not playing with either of those, I tend to end up playing that bloody hyper addictive video game. Whatever you do, don't let Bast get pissed off.

My god, that works on so many levels.

For the record, I like PHP and MySQL. I've not quite advanced to the point where I'm terribly good at either, but I'm capable of hacking together enough web-gunk to build a passable site of sorts. Not bad for a week's erratic work, really. If inspiration strikes, I'll actually build actual things for actual websites. Wouldn't that be groovy.

I just ate a tunafish sandwich. I am now officially sick of tunafish sandwiches. Time to find a new default foodstuff.

"This dwelling cannot evolve because it does not have access to a second type of food."

At least they put a park around the corner.

Over the weekend I blew away everything on my laptop, repartitioned/reformatted, and reinstalled RH6.2 and Helix-GNOME 1.2. I'm really quite pleased. Of course, now I keep running into random crap like the fact I no longer have the Flash plugin installed for Netscape. Well foo. I also blew away my carefully-constructed mail filters. Not quite sure how I feel about that -- if nothing else, it's inspiring me to ditch another batch of random mailing lists that I feel compelled to be subscribed to, but which I never actually read.

My first 3rd edition D&D character creation (for purposes of trying to figure out the new rules) has turned out to be an Elvish Rogue (read: Thief). She's short and kinda wimpy, but dexterous as all git out. I had forgotten just how long it can take to create a new character. Right now I'm finishing up buying her gear. Then it's down to figuring out if I've got all the stats in all the right spaces and working up a nice character history. I think she'll be a city-bred orphan waif with a chip on her shoulder and an unhealthy love for the art of her craft, with an atypically strong religious bent (for a thief, at least).

Part of my PHP puttering is working towards building a weblog for myself so I can stop blithering about random stuff here. Maybe tomorrow.

Now that I think about it, I think my thief will have a pet rat named "Nimmet".

My cat is in the hospital and this is making me very sad and grumpy and difficult to be around. I want my cat back. More than that, I want my cat to get better and be healthy and happy. The apartment is very quiet these days.

Hoorah. Another advogato meta-discussion. Will wonders never cease.

[no, that's not sloppy punctuation, that is me exercising my grammatical license towards a specific yet oh-so-subtle end]

In more interesting news, I've discovered a host of other people who are maintaining diaries of their very own on this craziness we affectionately call the World Wide Web. Refreshing. Non-technical. Brutally narcisstic? Sure, why not? Twentyfirstcenturyschitzoidman. Here's a link. It contains other links. Hours of pure, unadulterated procrastination material lies rolling in ecstasy at your feet. Better than Survivor any day.

Reading: still mired in the tragic depths of Arthurian legend, waiting hopefully for the story to change, for the tragedy to be averted, for Arthur to rise up as noble and enlightened High King of Britain for an extended reign, Merlin watchfully by his side. But, but...if you took away the bit about the iceberg, would the story of the Titanic really be anything but the retelling of the first magnificent superliner? Would there, in other words, really be a story, or just several decades' worth of slick marketing brochures, hundreds of thousands of bright-eyed "trip of a lifetime" tourists with pictures to show their envious land-lubber friends, followed inevitably by a graceful retirement of the World's Largest Passenger Liner?

Had Arthur not been mortally wounded by his half-brother Mordred and spirited away to the shrouded isle of Avalon, would there be a story at all?

Playing: Pharaoh yesterday, and far too much of it. Discovered the "sandbox" scenario -- lots of resources, no enemies, no win conditions. It's just about building a city. It's really a great deal of fun. I'm going to learn how to use the scenario editor, I think, and build my own sandboxes. Just for fun.

It's Monday. Britian has been without Pax Romana for 1600 years. My cats are both doing well. The sun shineth, and it seems that the stifling humidity has decided to give us a break for the day. Could be too early to tell, of course. Weather is funny that way. Later, I'll probably find a software shop and pick up the Pharaoh expansion. I might even turn dria.org into a weblog so I can stop spewing my gibberings here.

I so rarely talk about anything related to Free Software, that it would seem appropriate.

May the Great Spirit watch over your refrigerator and keep it cold...world without end...adios.

Actually certified someone.

Doing laundry, adopted a new kitten to keep my other cat company (she's a cutie, named Nymue). Pictures of both my dearhearts here.

Reading piles of Arthuriana for no other reason than I've got lots of it, much of which I haven't read in years. Several current Arthurian series are also in the process of releasing the next book and/or finally wrapping up. I now have 47 books related to Arthurian legends, and a wish list of about that many more. God help me if I ever break down and start buying books online.

I'm trying to decide what to do with my day. I really should finish up the rebuilding of the Linuxchix site and get it all migrated over to the new server, etc., but it's a glorious day outside and The Gang is doing outside-social things. On the other hand, it's already afternoon, and I'm still trying to wake up. Hum. Groggy.

Things that make you go "hmm".

Hello to the FC gang, if you're out there.

Went to OLS, broke a tooth (temp filling in, root canal later), gave a talk about DocBook with dcm, damned near broke my toe, drank lots (not too much, unlike oh-so-many), met and talked with far too many Good People to list here (never mind link), had tons of fun.

Came home a day early (a week of that insanity is just too much), did laundry, made up with my cat (he always gets annoyed when I go to conferences without him), slept.

Future conference plans: none at the moment. OLS next year, for sure. I like the no-trade-show-all-techies aspect of it. I believe it can safely be said that a good time was had by all and no one died. Success!

I'm in Ottawa, at OLS, having fun and being generally random. Right now I'm waiting for some of my slackass friends to drag their butts outta bed so we can have breakfast (quickly becoming lunch).

I think my talk went well. I broke a tooth and had to go to the dentist immediately after we were done, so I wasn't in top form, but folks seem to think it wasn't horrible. Mostly because of dcm. He's fun.

[ed note on preview: I didn't break my tooth _during_ my talk. I broke it the night before, just to clear that up.]

Righto. Coffee...need coffee and lots of it right now. I'll post piles of photos when I get a chance (next week). There have been ample shenanigans.