Sun 09 Sep 2001

  • dinner: Had a very nice Boullabaise for dinner tonight with Christian. Zana had Mahi Mahi. We also has Oysters and Buffalo shrimp. It all was very excellent.

  • stray animals: While walking the dog with Christian and Zana, we ran into two dogs who had gotten loose. They were pretty friendly, though they mangaed to get the dog very excited. I dragged them up to a door, and managed to get the attention of their owner inside. She seemed to be relieved to get the dogs back, and didn’t know how they had gotten out.

  • stray animals (redux): I got a call from Christian soon after he left. He had gotten no further than the end of driveway, before he saw a white kitten in our front yard. We determined it was a stray as it had no collar. Christian took it home with him, and will bring it to the shelter tomorrow.

  • words: For some reason, I spent all day trying to remember the word ‘hemophilia’.

  • virtue (GTK+-HEAD): I wrote some documentation this morning. I saw Havoc did a little last night and the guilt got the best of me.

  • paper: I lost my work for my paper for ALS when I reinstalled my laptop earlier this week. Need to spend most of tomorrow rewriting it.

Mon 30 Jul 2001

  • Movie (Elizabeth): Very cool movie. Very very good movie. Sir Francis Walsingham was very cool. Or maybe it’s just Geoffrey Rush.

  • Hacking: Nautilus is so cool.

  • Dinner: We went to an Indian restaurant for dinner. They were playing a version of the theme song from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” on the Sitar, with Indian lyrics. Very bizarre…

  • Denim: Went to the Middle Eastern deli yesterday for lunch. There was a woman there with a fairly short, denim mini-skirt. When she got up to leave, she bent over to pick up her bag, leisurely mooning the entire restuarant. It was extremely surreal.

Fri 13 Jul 2001

  • movie (Alphaville): Watching alphaville. Odd, odd movie. A French version of 1984. Very odd. I need an Alpha 60 here. It would be fun to play go against it.

  • movie (Chinese Ghost Story I): Last night, we watched this. It felt like a cross between Princess Bride and Evil Dead 2 (in Chinese). It was quite a bit of fun, though.

  • fish: Brought quite a bit of fish back with me from the coast. On Monday we had grilled Swordfish with Papya and Pineapple salsa. Tuesday was Tuna steaks with a plum-wine and sake sauce, which we shared with Christian. We watched battlebots. It was cool. I want to build a battlebot.

  • GNOME: Spent today hacking on the control-center again. Felt very odd — a lot of things would have been much better nowadays. Unfortunately it was written before the days of gnorba, which meant that the control-center compares argv[0] of capplets against the filenames in the .desktop files to identify them. Blah. I had to add a bunch of symlinks to the sawfish capplet to make it work.

  • movie (Alphaville): Update. The Alpha 60 went nuts when posed a riddle. It could not handle the concept of happiness. These evil-computer movies are so predicatable. Why can’t they ever go nuts trying to comprehend the nature of something more mundane, like a pretzel.

  • dinner: Barbecued with Zana, Owen, Havoc, Amy, Alex and Anna. For something thrown together at the absolute last possible minute, it came out okay, though a big ‘ol hairy catepillar ruined Havoc’s Cheetos. The watermelon Owen got was extremely good. Amazingly enough, he also bought some Bubba Burgers (which were Bioengineered to be extra juicy or some such nonsense.) The came out pretty well, though.

  • movie (Alphaville): Loses something in the translation. Zana commented on the use of familiar/formal parts of speech. They didn’t make their way into the subtitle.

  • fruit: Mangos, Papayas, I always get them confused.

Sat 07 Jul 2001

  • dinner: Dinner at the Pilot’s House. I had a nice sea trout with a baked potato and a hush puppy. And two Bass Ales. I found out my dad worked as manual labor for Bass when he was a teenager…

  • beach: I went with my family to Ocracoke Island, today. It was a lot fun, though we were bitten badly by sand flies. I sat and read the Tailor of Panama a bit more, but gave up. I’m not enjoying it as much as I was expecting to. I borrowed my brother’s copy of The Moon is Down. Much more readable.

  • kite: We tried to fly Zana’s box kite at the beach at Ocracoke, but the wind was too inconsistent. We could get the kite thirty feet in the air or so, but had a lot of trouble getting it higher than that. There were a couple other people with kites at the beach, including a parafoil. That was able to get very high despite the bad wind. Perhaps I should invest in one. There was a stunt kite too, though they were unable to really get it in the air. I’m glad I didn’t try with mine.

  • gphoto: I’m unable to get my Digital camera to download uncorrupted images with any consistency. This is very frustrating. More research is needed.

Fri 23 Mar 2001

  • Movie: Saw Highlander 2 and Sliding Doors the last few days. Sliding Doors rocked! Highlander 2 was truly, amazingly bad. I had no idea how they managed to make such a crappy movie… It was redeemed by one point — I loved the little movie they showed on the plane. However, the rest was truly bad.

  • Hacking (AisleRiot): Ripped apart the code again, and this time (in theory) it’s correct. I’m still not 100% sure of it, though. I think I can start thinking about hooking up the game soon. Need to get it into CVS first.

  • Hacking (GTK+-HEAD): We’re getting to the end of the cycle. So much left to do! I realized today that I need to rewrite both GtkTreeStore and GtkListStore to take advantage of the sorting stuff. Pretty depressing, as the code there was pretty clean. Argh! Must put on a big effort next week to get the sorting API done for GUADEC.

  • Dinner: Peppers. Waitress had a cool leopard print tattoo on her neck. That’s not something you see every day.

  • Mir: The worlds biggest rock skipping contest and I miss it! It’s a pity that the coverage from CNN sucked so much.

  • Red Hat: We broke even. Pretty cool, huh…

Wed 21 Mar 2001

  • Movie (My Fair Lady): Where the devil are my slippers? Finally got our first movie from Netflix. It’s a pretty good service, though I’d like to see what the turnaround is before I renew it. I had forgotten how much I liked this musical, though I think it ends on a somewhat flat note (by modern standards, anyway.) Anyway, the DVD had a track with Audrey Hepburn’s voice on it. She obviously wasn’t as strong a singer, but it seemed to fit her character more (at least in the song they had — “Wouldn’t it be Loverly”.) Anyway, I think I’d like to see the whole thing with her singing someday. Maybe they’ll rerelease such a version…

  • Meetings: Eazel guys came to visit this morning. It was good to talk to them again, though I’ll prolly see at least Darin and Maciej again at GUADEC. We ate lunch at the blue Indian restaurant where much nerding took place. It started raining on the way back, and Bud impressed everyone with his foresight by pulling out an umbrella. It was very cold rain.

  • Hacking: Got very little done today with the meetings and all. I did fix some annoying sizing code during one of the slow parts of the meeting. That was pretty nifty.

  • Dinner: Went to Joe’s Crab Shack with Zana. I read a story in a book of short stories (“Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri) about an Indian woman who went to the beach and had Fried Clams with lots of Tobasco sauce. So Zana and I had plates of fried stuff. While there, all the waiters/waitresses/hosts did this odd dance routine and sang lots of songs. I’m glad we don’t do this at Red Hat. On the way home, we stopped at bn for books and coffee. Dangerous place; I bought the Diamond Age and a book by Jostein Gaarder, who also wrote Sophie’s World. Oh, and that book on Quidditch as a spur of the moment purchase.

  • Rain: The rain sucks. My roof leaks. I need to get this fixed tomorrow.