A journal and sounding board for a geek girl in Silicon Valley.

Thought for the day....

<JFK> The most common form of marriage proposal: "YOU'RE WHAT!?"

Discuss amongst yourselves.
posted by Ciannait at 11:08 PM

So it happily turns out that my roommate has not told us to "FOAD". He should be back on Tuesday. The reason for his oh-so-long vacation boils right down to CheapTickets. Apparently when you want to change your reservation, you have mail your ticket back in, wait five to seven days, and then wait for them to mail you a ticket back. So don't do it, he says.

Jon just got his car fixed this week, to the tune of $1021.23. (Ow, that hurt.) So to celebrate we're going up to Walnut Creek tomorrow to look at apartments and then on to Sacramento to hang out and pay his rent. On the upside, the car runs much smoother now. All I have to do is get my own. (Especially if we'll be moving to Walnut Creek...)

Misha's been rather clingy since we returned from Minnesota. She yowls when we first come home until we give her lots of attention, then she curls up right next to us to nap. If she doesn't chill out soon, I'm going to take her to the vet - I'm worried something else is wrong and she's trying to tell us.

I am an absolute game junkie. Went out with Gilbert last night, to replace my monitor cleaner thingies which he had so valiantly "liberated" from my cube last week. I made him buy me some more (because damn, they work well) and I also picked up the Age of Empires expansion, The Conquerors. I'm going to have to fight Jon and Neal, both AoE addicts, for the CD, I can tell.

Fall is officially here. California is getting no colder. I miss interesting weather, but I know it wouldn't agree with my leg. (Arthritis already.)
posted by Ciannait at 9:10 PM

It's been a fun couple of days. We've been doing a bunch of bill-paying, so we're really broke, but it's a good thing. I'd forgotten how much less stressed I am when I don't have bills hanging over my head.

I was slightly surprised by the reports that Apple's earnings are lower this quarter, which sent their stock into a tailspin in after-hours trading. Jon worries about the long-term availability of the G4 Cube, which he wants very much. (He's jealous of my G4. That's okay, I'm jealous of his PowerBook.)
I'm still extraordinarily impressed by Mac OS X, even with its odd little quirks. I ended up having to reformat and reinstall to get Classic to behave under Mac OS X - it doesn't load Classic correctly if you have more extensions than God. Also, its Firewire support was more than I was expecting, but wasn't quite up to snuff. Jon said, "Oh, it's not supported, let's just unplug it" (even though it has partial support) and tada, it kernel panicked. I was quite impressed.
Otherwise, I only have a few problems with it, mostly that some network settings require a reboot and that there's no "Restart" option in the Special menu in the Desktop. After playing with it for a while, my reaction was "Screw Linux, I'm never going back." The UNIX kernel is tight, and the "Terminal" program, after tweaking with the PATH, does everything I'd want from a Linux machine, not to mention the gorgeous Aqua interface. I play with buttons and scrollbars just to watch Aqua in action. It's a beautiful thing.

Turns out I'm not going to Minnesota for the Solas concert after all. After checking airfares and impending bills, I decided that it would be better for me to just go to the Berkeley Solas performance instead. So I'm dragging Gilbert, who kindly volunteered for the duty. :) I'm so excited, I love Solas. I'll miss seeing another Celtic music concert with Matthew-lamer-without-a-webpage, but I'm glad they're playing out here.

I also got the Shoutcast stream back up. I'm still unsure what the issue with the beige G3 was, but it had one. I also added the new cd's I bought to the playlist. I'm happy to have the stream working again, but imagine my surprise when the stream was at five listeners most of the damned day. (Since the stream's at 192kbps and I only have a 1.1M SDSL line, I set the maxlisteners to five.)

My roommate is MIA. He said, last week, that he'd be back from DC yesterday, but I have seen neither hide nor hair of him, and I'm beginning to worry. I'm sure I shouldn't, that he's fine, but still. I worry. (And not just because rent's due soon. :) I imagine he wants to get back to his Diablo2 character, so I hope to see him soon. :)

We have some very odd naming conventions at our house. Jon's domain, pbp.net, used to stand for "pr0n beer n pizza" but I objected. (The website said that those were the three things any single guy needed and well, Jon's not single anymore. ;) So he changed it. (I didn't ask him to, mind you.) The naming convention for machines used to be beer and pizza. (No machines named "asiacarrera" at OUR house.) So now that the domain stands for something else, should I then name my machines things like "summit" and "leinenkugels"? He was joking that I should find a Celtic god of Junk, so we could name the HP NetServer that. (It's a P90, and big as a filing cabinet.) That would certainly fit into my current naming scheme - it goes with tirnanog.net, which I still haven't moved over to Concentric (now XO, what's up with that?) yet. (I have machines like "boadicea" and "oisin" and "danu".)

I'm looking forward to the weekend, which I can spend cleaning the apartment and relaxing. :)
posted by Ciannait at 5:58 PM

It's been awhile, again.
And once again I'd written up a nice long blog only to have it eaten. This time it was eaten by the sucktitude that is IE5.5b2 that comes with OS X. Unfortunately, there's no Carbonized Netscape yet, and the Carbonized Mozilla is from M16, which in Mozilla terms is ancient history.
So I'm stuck blogging on the Athlon.

Our trip to Minnesota was a whirlwind. Even so, I didn't get to see half the people or places I wanted to. And Jon and I both ended up not feeling well, and we were both cranky for a lot of the trip. Still, I got to drive him around to a lot of my old haunts. What with that, and driving to Duluth and back for kitty-cat's wedding, we managed to rack up around 600 miles on the rental car. I could've sworn I'd heard that it was only an hour or so up to Duluth, so I managed to miss the entire wedding ceremony. I was sobbing by the time I saw K, so I scared her half out of her wits.
We also got to hang out with Damon and his new girlfriend Danielle. Damon's one of my favorite people in the world, and so I'm very happy that he's found a nice girl like Danielle. :) She and I have a lot in common, so it was fun to hang out with them at the BFM, which Jon insisted on going to both because he had no pants for the wedding and because I forgot to pack him (and me!) shirts. We spent way too much money, on Birkenstocks for me, Irish stuff for me, pants and an Atari tshirt for him, and chocolate from the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. (I just want to say that all the folks at the RMCF at the BFM are really super nice.)
Then on Sunday I went to see the Tannahill Weavers with Matthew (a lamer who doesn't have a webpage). A good time was had by all, even if I did almost crash the rental car (whoops). I'm hoping to make it back in about two weeks to see Solas play. I adore Solas, so it should be a good time.

It was good to be back, and back at work today. I actually did stuff, and got stuff accomplished. I have to be in fairly early tomorrow morning, though - I have a silly all-hands meeting in which I get to be bored stiff. I should charge the Palm Vx and take it in so I can play Dope Wars. (I wish the Palm version of Dope Wars let you create drug cartels like the PC version does.)

Other things in life are being somewhat stressful, but nothing I feel like going into here. It's largely just-back-from-vacation stress.
posted by Ciannait at 11:49 PM