Month: January 2003

I got a warm fuzzy feeling last night after reading the latest collection by Warren Ellis. It’s basically a print version of the last year and a half’s worth of the mailing list he sends out periodically (with illustrations, though). I paid money for what is basically the collected ramblings of an Englishman.

But, oh, is it ever worth it.

In that, he mentioned Nowhere Girl, which I had read at one point, and hasn’t updated since, but I urge everyone to read. It’s an ongoing online graphic novel, and quite well done.

In other news, the organization of my Magic: the Gathering cards is coming along. They’re mostly sorted into sets, now it’s just a matter of sorting within each set and putting them into their binders.

Because bigdumbthing is planning on moving back to Berkeley to become a “student” or something like that, I either need to find a roommate to replace him, or find another place to live (which would leave poor Leon with having to move back in with his parents). I’d really like to find a place to buy instead of rent. Not building equity is for chumps.

I have accepted the fact why my hair does that thing. I have more forehead than I used to. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it provides less traction than other hair, so my bangs fall down. I should get a new hairstyle or something (well, I need a haircut in any case), but anything other than the way I’ve been combing it for the last 25 years looks weird.

I finally got caught up on online photos. One last album in 2002, and two more in 2003. Most recent one is from the Wagyu beef event on Saturday… which was a lot of fun, and a lot of meat.

I’ve been learning MySQL at work, and I don’t know how I managed to do some of the things I’ve done without a relational database. I had written the first part of this project the way I’ve been doing things (Perl tied hashes), and I was able to rewrite the whole thing in a fraction of the time, with half the code, using MySQL.

Of course, the fact that there was a MySQL server already set up and running on the server made things easier…

Yesterday… Super Bowl for most people… was “spend the day in and out of bed, trying to work, but having a migraine” day for me. I hate being hungry, but having an upset stomach and knowing that if you eat anything, it’ll tip over the edge.

Stuff’s happening.

I’m organizing my Magic: the Gathering collection.

I’m working.

I’m on decongestants.

I’m about to leave work.

I’m done.

So, I konked out at 5pm last night, and then woke up at 4am this morning, so I got in early yet again. It’s weird to be at work, and actually have lunchtime be a halfway point, instead of something you do right after you finish checking your email.

I finally got my GameCube keyboard controller. It only took… oh, let me check my email records… 9 weeks. That’s funny, it seems like longer. The company (which I won’t even link to) was so horrible in their customer service, that I thought I wasn’t going to get it at all. Now I can play PSO and keep up with the text-spamming 14 year olds.

I also got my Megatokyo volume 1 in the mail today. I was expecting something larger, but it’s a manga book, so it’s manga-sized. It looks really spiffy…

Since when did the post office not take unused postage as payment for stamps?

Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into something I have to do on a regular basis.

Remember when I stayed up all night to get my sleep schedule back on track?

Here I go again.

Yes, I know this is from last week, but… Best. Strong Bad Email. Ever.

I got to play DDR Extreme on Saturday. Uhm…. yeah.

Yesterday was fun. Everyone was talking about Apple’s new stuff. They still are. Yeah, the new Powerbooks are great, but I don’t think this iteration’s for me, I’m happy with my current one. I think it’s a Goldilocks thing… the 12″ is too small, the 17″ is too big, the 15″ is just right. Maybe in six months, they’ll update the 15″ model.

But the real treat that I found was the quickly mentioned official X11 for OS X public beta. Yes, XDarwin’s been out, but this one just looks nicer because the X windows have the standard Aqua interface. This prompted me to figured out a bunch of X11/ssh issues and get my setup working again, so I can pass X windows between my home machine and work machines all nicely now.

I also just bought Quicktime Pro so I can export DV Streams from MPEGs and Quicktime Movies and play with iMovie.

Last night, I swear that the person in the next house over was doing some sort of carpentry in their kitchen. AT THREE IN THE MORNING!

This might have something to do with the moving van that was double parked outside this morning… (It’s a good thing I wasn’t parked on the street today, or I would have been trapped.)

Yay. We possibly have new neighbors who build cabinets in the wee hours of the morning.

It’s become a more common phrase that I’ve found myself uttering. Someone will ask me to do something, and I’ll say “but I’m in the couch!” With my laptop on my lap, a blanket over my legs, and the remote control within reach, there are few reasons why I ever need to get up.

Monday at work was another weird one-day-work-week sort of day. I took my CDs out of my car and double-checked to make sure I had all of them encoded into MP3s. It turns out there were a few albums that I hadn’t encoded yet, and I ended up encoding about 10 or so CDs while I was working, bringing my collection up to 4595 songs (12.89GB or 9.9 days of continuous music). I still have to rate them with iTunes, though.

Getting my NES games out of storage stirred up an odd urge to play Zelda II, so I’ve been playing that off and on the last few days, just finished it now. For some reason, though, I couldn’t find it in the box of NES games, (along with a few others I know I own, like Super Mario Bros. and Final Fantasy. There were two games I owned, Guardian Legend and The Legacy of the Wizard, that I bought used when I was in college, and my brother lent out to a friend and never got back, but other than that, I don’t know where they could have gone. I would say they might still be in a box in my mom’s attic, but I’m pretty sure I got all of my boxes out of there a few years ago. But I’ve got the ROMs, and I did pay for them at one point, so I feel no guilt.

These last two weeks have been very disorienting. Between the off days at work, I have trouble telling what day of the week it is. It’s a good thing that Fox isn’t running new episodes of 24 during the holidays, otherwise I’d have missed both of them, because I thought they were Saturdays, not Tuesdays. I’m not as bad as bigdumbthing, though. His concept of “the weekend” is “that time when the other people are around more often.”