2 Bit Hacker

Been awhile since I last posted. Not too much going on at the moment. I’ve been spending a lot of time with Andrea. She’s started working on a scrapbook of our trip with her parents to NYC last August. She’s done two pages so far, and I think it’s looking pretty good. Speaking of trips, I finally broke down and bought a scanner to digitize Matt’s pictures from our trip to Europe. I’ve got a few sets of them scanned so far, and have stuck them in my gallery. I’ve got 3 or 4 sets left to do, but it shouldn’t take me too much longer.

In random computer project news, I ended up ordering the TV-out card for the motherboard in the HTPC. It seems like people are having much better luck doing TV-out with the nVidia drivers than the open source Matrox stuff. Matrox supplies binary drivers for X windows as well, but they don’t allow overscan on the TV output, which is required to fill the screen. Also, the hard drive in my laptop has been acting up. It starts making a clicking noise after a while, then eventually just stops spinning. Been playing email ping-pong with Sony about it, hopefully I can get a replacement drive out of them. In the mean time, I’ve ordered a replacement drive from newegg, which should be here tomorrow or Thursday. Fun fun fun.

This upcoming weekend is FoRLAN 8, up in Lewiston, ME again, same location as last time. Should be fun. I’m going to be heading up on Friday morning, hopefully getting to the site around noon. A full weekend of nothing but games…. wheee!

Another birthday come and gone. Didn’t really do anything special for it. Spent some time hanging out with Matt in the morning/early afternoon, and spent the evening with Andrea. She gave me a bunch of stuff, including a popcorn bowl, some popcorn, candy, a couple magazines, Pulp Fiction, and Devil May Cry. Well, pictures of the last two anyway; they havn’t been delivered yet, but hopefully they’ll arrive soon.

I spent the 4th with Andrea, we went down to Methuen to see Finding Nemo again. It’s a good movie, though it seems to go a lot faster the second time around. Stayed for the credits this time, which is kindof funny. They have a bunch of the characters doing stuff. It’s funny.

Saturday I was supposed to go over to my mom’s house for a cookout, but they lost water on the 4th, so they cancelled the family cookout. Turns out that their water pump died, and they had to get it replaced. It’s somewhat funny, since they lost water on the 4th last year too, when one of their neightbors decided to fill his pool from the garden hose, taken the water table down under their pump. Anyway, I endup spending the day with Matt, since he suddenly had to go to Texas. We wandered down to Nashua so he could buy a new Boston hat, so as to represent the area while away, and ended up having dinner with Chris at Margarita’s.

Sunday I went over to my mom’s house for the cookout, but I was the only one who showed up, so we just had sandwiches and sat around talking for a while. She and Ralph have decided to buy a set of cabins up in Maine, so they’re selling the house in Milford and moving up there sometime soon, it seems. It’ll be kindof weird not having them close by anymore, and I’ll have to drive 7 hours up to see them. I guess most of the family thinks they’re nuts, but I figure if it’s what they want to do, then they should just go for it. Hope it works out.

Other than that, not much going on. I’ve been helping Andrea out with an Access database for her job. Access has got to be the most convoluted thing I’ve ever dealt with. I could do what needs to be done in Perl and MySQL in a tenth of the time it’s taken to figure out in Access. Ah well. She’s also become addicted to what has to be the stupidest show I’ve ever seen, Paradise Hotel or somesuch. I’ve had to sit through 2 episodes now. It makes my brain hurt and my arms want to throttle everybody involved with it’s production.

Also, Dave and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean last night. It’s definitly one of the better films I’ve seen this summer. Just can’t beat pirates, I guess. Arr. I’ll probably write more about it later, and maybe compile a list of things I hate about movie theaters, if I feel like ranting.