2 Bit Hacker

Well, life seems to be going pretty good at the moment. Andrea seem fairly happy this weekend. We watched Three Kings are her house on Friday night, after poking around Best Buy (where I got to play with the digital camera I want to get.) She still hasn’t found some of the fonts that I accidentally deleted when fixing her computer, which sucks, and I feel bad about. Hopefully we’ll do something tonight when she gets back from her uncle’s house.

My stepdad has lowered my rent for next month by about $400 so I can buy the Sony DSC-P50 2.1 megapixel digital camera that I want. That was pretty cool of him, I thought. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it in time for the trip I’m planning. (Where to? It’s a secret.) I plan on filling out the pictures area of my website a little better once I get it, and probably get better pictures of some of the people on my friends list.

Dave, Derrick, Jason, and I had a pretty good D&D session yesterday, though Derrick’s cousin caused us to start late, and for Derrick to leave early, which sucked. I’m still trying to find a place that sells the flat glass beads that I lost, they were useful as counters and stuff when we played. They’re probably hidden in my room someplace.

Hmm… while I was writing this, I wandered over to the Chessex website, and it looks like they’re the ones who made the glass beads, they call them “Gaming Stones.” I think I might order some. yay!

Well, I found out there’s another Spike & Mike’s animation festival in Boston. Unfortunately, it started last Friday and ends Thursday, and I just heard about it today via their announce list. Fortunately however, it looks like I might be going to see the last showing, 9:30 on Thursday. Jason and Dave have shown an interest, and Derrick seemed somewhat interested. I’ll ask Matt as soon as I see him, he’ll probably want to go, Nick too, if he’s still in town. However, Andrea is working that night and won’t be able to go. I’m sad about that, but I’m also happy to be going. Paradoxial, eh?

After work today I was fooling with the design of my homepage, and decided to make everything the same style as my embedded livejournal. I got the picture page converted over, and I think it looks pretty nice. The friends page broke for some reason though. The XML::Simple module doesn’t seem to get along with the new version of Apache and mod_perl I installed, I think. I’ll probably end up going back to have the data in a MySQL database instead of in an XML file. It sucks that it broke, but at least it gives me something to meddle with for a while.

After breaking my page, I decided to head over to CompUSA and look at digital cameras. They had a Sony DSC-P50 on display, and it looked pretty good. No batteries though, so I couldn’t play with it. I’m hoping my parents will pay for part of one for my birthday. It would go well with my new Clie. Also, I looked around for USB Memory Stick readers, but they only had the Viking model, which I’m not sure will work in FreeBSD. eBay has some Sony ones that are going fairly cheaply, so I might try and snag one of those.

Also, picked up the new issue of PSM. I really should get a subscription. They have a preview of Final Fantasy X, which looks pretty good. There’s also a Rune sticker to add to my clipboard. yay!

Andrea and I saw Swordfish last night. It was a horrible horrible movie. I suggest that no one ever see it, unless they’re trying to work their way slowly from bad movies to good movies, and they started with Battlefield Earth. I’m not sure why I insist on seeing hacker movies. I know I’ll hate them. I end up hating all of them.

Speaking of which (writing of which? nah,) Andrea rented Antitrust today for some odd reason. I thought she didn’t like the movie, but she went and spent money to see it again. I don’t understand. She seems sad or depressed tonight, which makes me sad, because I don’t like to see her unhappy. It turns out she’s working the next two night, so I probably won’t see her for a while, and I feel bad that I didn’t go see her tonight. I’m not sure if she’s working Friday night or not. I hope she isn’t, so that we can go out and do something. Maybe play minigolf or something.

I made another entry early this morning, but it seems to have gotten lost. This causes anger. It was a long entry written around 2am, and now I can’t remember a damn thing that it said.

It’s Sunday and I’m back at SimPro working again. Hopefully this dialer stuff will come together today and everybody will be happy. If it does work, I finally get my Sony Clie to replace my Palm III, which I’m going to give to Andrea.

Yesterday I also worked, and resolved a stupid little problem with an empty field in a XML file being translated to an empty hash ref in perl, which broke things when my script assumed it was a scalar and tried to insert it into a database. I should probably do better type checking everywhere.

We also eventually played D&D last night. Jason decided to push it back to 8pm without bothering to tell me or Dave, claiming he told Derrick to tell us. That’s why he’s a bastard. But we did eventually play, and it was fun. Hopefully my mage will go up another level at the end of the next session.

Derrick came up with the idea that since the X-Files is becoming crappy anyway, what with the whole Scully’s baby is Jesus thing from last season, that the 3 Lone Gunmen ought to take the guy from their series and befome the Four Horsemen. He and I figured that the annoying dumb guy can be War, the tall guy with long hair can be Famine, Frohike can be Pestilence, and Byers can be Death. It would be funny, and might save the series.

Anyway, I should work now. Hopefully this will all be done today, and I’ll be able to have dinner with Andrea tonight. I’d like to go see a movie or something with her, but she has to go to work at 7am tomorrow to setup for a sale or somesuch.

Derrick is bugging me to make an entry, so I am. We are playing D&D. It is fun. Dave is sick. Pla. Jason is a bastard. I will entry more later.

Why can these things never behave the way they’re supposed to? Working with serial devices must be the worlds worst experience. I can’t think of anything else computer-related that’s ever given me this much trouble. Oh well, I’m making progress, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

I did manage to do some things today, though they are mostly useless. After work today I embedded my LiveJournal into my website, it’s over at http://www.chocobo.cx/chip/journal.html for anyone who cares enough to want to see what I accomplished.

And I had dinner with Andrea this evening, we went to the Ground Round, which was tasty enough. I think the waitress wasn’t too pleased to be serving someone so late, but oh well.

I think I should probably be getting home and sleeping now, it’s pretty late, and I have to go to work tomorrow.

Well, in addition to having a fairly good day of work, I managed to find some nifty icons from Final Fantasy 6 which I used to make a custom set of mood icons for here. I’m not entirely happy with them yet, but I think I’ll work on it for a bit more and it will be good.