Wed 08 Aug 2001

  • toys: mkj and I got a cool powerball a few days ago. I don’t fully understand how it works. I don’t want to break it, but I do want to know how it lights up. Decisions…

  • work: Meridian Engineers meeting last night, where our new VP tried to work through some scheduling/resource issues. I don’t think that many of us feel like a lot of progress was made, though I feel like the managers were doing the best they could given their constraints. That’s all we can hope for.

  • nanotechnology: I finally understand why people on slashdot are so excited about nanotechnology. I finished the Diamond Age last night, and while I thought it had a weak ending, I thought it was an enjoyable piece of science fiction. Note the ‘fiction’ part guys…

  • sick: Two lovers were hanged by their respective families and friends in India this past Monday for having an intercaste relationship. I can’t believe it’s August 2001.

  • doomometer: We added a doomometer to our wall. It provides hours of entertainment. Well, minutes anyways…

Sun 05 Aug 2001

  • Code Red 2: interesting: # grep default.ida *|grep XXXXX|cut -c 12-28| \ sed -e ‘s/[- ]//g’ |sort -u |wc 57 # grep default.ida *|grep XXXXX|cut -c 12-28| \ sed -e ‘s/[- ]//g’ |wc 144

  • Code Red 2 (++): make that 58 and 145

  • CD: For some reason I am totally unable to make an audio CD. It’s starting to annoy me.

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.

Mon 30 Jul 2001

  • Blizzard: Came to visit for a week. It was fun to have him around. The dog especially enjoyed his company. After he left, I spent the afternoon and evening cleaning up. I even ironed a bunch of shirts.

  • Music: I broke down and bought a Moby album yesterday.

  • Hacking: I’ve been working on Nautilus the last week or so. Hopefully will get back to GTK 2.0 soon.

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.