This was a most interesting weekend. Rachel's parents moved and Rachel wanted to go home to unpack. She also had her grandparents 60th (wow!) wedding anniversary yesterday, so it made sense for her to go. On top of that, it was smart for me to go since I could have used a few points with her parents and she wanted me to meet her friends. The weekend was a mixture of surpzingly good and then disappointing. I met her entire family. They are all pretty cool people. I guess that her grandparents like me, I'm "a nice boy" according to them. They are both very cool too. Her parents like me a lot more than they did before it seems too! I guess her dad likes me, which is surprising yet awesome. The disappointing part was that none of her friends were available, so we couldn't see anyone. That disappointed both Rachel and myself. But, life goes on.

I finished up my Java project, did I say that in the previous post? I decided it would be best for me to rewrite it entirely and it worked after 30 minutes of rewrite. Yay!

I am going to be setting up PSG sometime this week on my web site I think. I'm going to have to take the web site down for probably 30 minutes when this happens though. I will be posting before the anticipated downtime.

I asked Rachel a question about computers: what does she miss about computers? What is the one feature, one idea, concept that she feels is lacking that will make computers more enjoyable for her to use. She wasn't entirely sure, she knew she had some though. I brought up the concept of complete transparency of information. Why should I care a document was typed in Windows, DOS, Mac, Linux, OS/2, or whatever else? Same with the program or the version of the program.

I saw on Mozillazine that there are Phoenix snapshots available now. I looked around and was curious what Phoenix is. I guess that it is a browser from the boys at Mozilla similar to that of Galeon. I tried it out. Much simpler than Mozilla is. It comes with only a web browser and that is it. It doesn't have all the extra cruft. It was kind of unstable, so I am going to wait a while before I start to use it full time. It'll take a while before I'll totally ditch Galeon, but Phoenix is looking cool.

I finally finished up my P1 project for Java (CS122). I was having a hard time getting the code provided to work. So, I decided to rewrite it. 35 minutes later, I was mostly done :) I just need to upload it to his web site. Moral: Use your own work, not your teacher's.

I tried to get MT (MovingType) working on my laptop. However, I try to run one of their CGI scripts (Perl) and it keeps loading up a window in my browser that wants to save or view. How do I fix thaT? MT seems nicer than PSG, but PSG is easier to setup and already customized for my web site. The part that worries me is if I choose to move from PSG to MT or something else, then I'll have to merge all the data over to the new format. That is going to require a bit of work. A really cool idea would be an abstraction layer for converting bloggers: LiveJournal, Advogato, Blogger, PSG, MT, whatever else there is.

I saw on Mozillazine that there are Phoenix snapshots available now. I looked around and was curious what Phoenix is. I guess that it is a browser from the boys at Mozilla similar to that of Galeon. I tried it out. Much simpler than Mozilla is. It comes with only a web browser and that is it. It doesn't have all the extra cruft. It was kind of unstable, so I am going to wait a while before I start to use it full time. It'll take a while before I'll totally ditch Galeon, but Phoenix is looking cool.

I finally finished up my P1 project for Java (CS122). I was having a hard time getting the code provided to work. So, I decided to rewrite it. 35 minutes later, I was mostly done :) I just need to upload it to his web site. Moral: Use your own work, not your teacher's.

I tried to get MT (MovingType) working on my laptop. However, I try to run one of their CGI scripts (Perl) and it keeps loading up a window in my browser that wants to save or view. How do I fix thaT? MT seems nicer than PSG, but PSG is easier to setup and already customized for my web site. The part that worries me is if I choose to move from PSG to MT or something else, then I'll have to merge all the data over to the new format. That is going to require a bit of work. A really cool idea would be an abstraction layer for converting bloggers: LiveJournal, Advogato, Blogger, PSG, MT, whatever else there is.

Rachel is laying in bed, ready to sleep, so I must keep this short.

Today was the most interesting day in my Java class yet. He went over the history on how IBM got started, his sorting machine, his sorting methods, and all that. I found it to be actually interesting, in that geeky way. We're doing a sorting unit, so it fits. We learned about the bubble sort today. It's really simple and easy to learn.

I don't think I am going to work on developing kdjournal for a while. I don't have the time to make it a high quality product. Instead, I think I am going to use Project Steve Guttenberg. It writes to a flat file, so it's simple to setup. It took me 10 minutes to get a working setup, and it took me an hour to merge it 100% to my web site. I'll be uploading it in the next few days. Another blogger I am considering using is Movable Type. It has a slightly more restrictive license, which doesn't really affect me. It is more challenging to setup though. I couldn't get it to use the Berkely db library as it wants to. I may try it again in a few days.

I'll be gone this weekend. I'm going to be going to Rachel's house to hang out with her parents, friends, and help her setup her new house.

Anyways, Rachel is on her way out of the washroom, ready to sleep. NITE!

"So my teacher tonight [Shattuck] was writing groups on the board of groups of people who have low suicide rates. She put Jewish up on the board, but didn't write it with an 'h'. She said it looked funny, so she erased the 'w'." - Rachel