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 06 Jul 2001

  • kite: I got to fly my kite!!!! It wasn’t very windy, so I got to practice low speed flying. It was very tough to keep in the air, as it continually stalled and fluttered down. I managed to get Edward to fly it for a while, too. He thought it was pretty cool. Tomorrow we’re going to Ocracoke Island — with some luck I can fly it again then.

  • sports (windsurfing): My dad and I tried windsurfing today. I hadn’t been in many years, when I did it in Mission Bay with the Readheads. We were pretty incompetent, but managed to get the hang of it eventually.

  • definitions (hang of it): In this case “hang of it” means we were able to go forward pretty well, with a minimum of time spent in the very warm water. We were unable to tack very well, though, as we kept getting further and further away from the beach chairs.

  • tennis (wimbledon): All of the people I was cheering for lost today (though I think I have a mild preference for Henman, and he’s winning.) Suck.

  • book: While not windsurfing, I read the Tailor of Panama. I’m having trouble associating with such a congenital liar, though.

Wed 04 Jul 2001

  • openh323: What a crappy packaging system! Alex got gnomemedia to work today, and it was pretty cool. We tried to make RPMS of this package, and it took forever. No autoconf/automake, no concept of actually installing packages. Just a bunch of Makefiles. Blah.

  • kite: I’m going to fly my kite this weekend!!!!

Sat 30 Jun 2001

  • meta: Apparently getting a Wavelan card has totally shot my ChangeLog habit. I find that it never occurs to me to update it when I’m not at my old computer. With a little effort I can hopefully start it up again. I wonder if cross posting this on Advogato would make me try to keep it up more, or just make me look lame.

  • life: A lot seems to have happened in the last month. GTK+ 2.0 API freeze is coming up RSN, and I spent all day working on it. I’ll probably spend most of the day tomorrow too working. My parents came to town for the day, on their way to the coast for a week. Zana and I will join them next weekend — it’ll be good to get a small break.

  • yakk: Yakk mentioned that everyone says what they do, and not what they feel on their weblogs. I know I have a separate, non-public ChangeLog for that. I suspect that many others do as well.

  • music: I’m really enjoying Amnesiac. Only have to wait a few more years before Radio Head’s next album comes out… (-:

  • gegl: A few weeks ago, my stuffed GEGL arrived. It is very cool. Bex is a goddess.

  • Free Software: I have a s3kr3t pl4n! No one can know about it, but it’s going to be very cool!

Sun 10 Jun 2001

  • hacking: Man, it’s been a while since I’ve entered any diaries. I’m tired. I just got AisleRiot2 to draw the old freecell style cards. There’s a screenshot of a random game written in Scheme using the new engine at http://jrb.webwynk.net/files/Screenshot-Test_scm.png I took it with the very nifty screenshooter. GNOME is sooo cool nowadays…

Wed 30 May 2001

  • walk (fireflies): I took the dog for a walk tonight. The fireflies are out in full strength, such that wherever I go I see a few. There is a field next to a power substation nearby that has been completely overrun with these fireflies, such that it looks like someone through a whole bunch of glitter into the air and let it settle slowly. I sat with the dog for five minutes, just watching them, listening to the bullfrogs. I hope they last for most of the summer.

Wed 30 May 2001

  • hacking (GtkTreeView): Started adding keybinding support. I should have done this a long time ago — it was a lot easier then I thought.

  • wireless: Got 2 cards and a base station. Now I can use my laptop wireless from anywhere in the house. It’s very cool…

  • federico: Congratulations, dude. I hope you guys are always happy together.

Mon 28 May 2001

  • lunch: Memorial day today. Christian came over and we barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs. Additionally, we made a mediocre green salad, and a very nice pasta salad (Shells with seedless summer tomatoes and pesto.) We asked him to bring the beverages, and he responded by bringing a whole lot of beer, some nice pink lemonade, and Coca Cola. We ate too much then tried to go see Shrek. Apparently a lot of other people had this idea and the movie was sold out. We changed plans and ended up at the Open Eye Cafe for coffee. Then we came home and watched episoide two of Monty Python’s Complete Flying Circus.

  • theonion: I think that the only thing currently that is as funny as Monty Python on a regular basis is The Onion. Zana got me Our Dumb Century (ISBN: 069452199X) recently, and it totally rocks my world.

  • hacking (AisleRiot): Not much work today. Maybe tomorrow evening…

  • hacking (simple-screenshot): I’ve now made gnome-core depend on gnome-print. My mother would be proud.