this girl drives a tank

My Sister in Law gave me a bunch of her chickflicks to watch, like Two Weeks Notice , Four Weddings And a Funeral , How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days and a whole bunch of others, many with Meg Ryan in them ;-)

Last night I watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Matthew McConaughey is very cute in it, its a decent movie I suppose but not realistic as I can do it about 4 days :-(

I am backing up all my stuff onto my new computer, which is almost ready to use as my desktop, I think I will try Xfce as a window manager this time, I know I just put KDE on this one, but I've never used Xfce before, so nows a good time to check it out.

Once thats all done, I can set up my old desktop as a server, I got all my music on it now, about 30gb's or so, and lots of room for the new stuff to come, and will install the bot there too. I was thinking of running a webserver also but undecided on that.

My camera script is still ok, I just havent touched it this weekend cos of time, also, I need to find a better way to move massive amounts of files around, I use scp, because I am used to it and know the options, but in a local network, I dontneed the encryption, which adds alot of overhead to the procces. Moving all my mp3's took 12 hours! Sadly there is no way to turn off the cypher so I will have to come up with a better way to do this next time.

Remeber my freind who works at the computer parts distributer? Well she calls me this afternoon and says to come see her on my way home from work, so I go there and she hands me a box with an Asus P4s533-mx motherboard and an Intel Celeron 1.7ghz cpu, she said she will have DDR ram for me next week! I was pretty happy, its nice to get free stuff and even nicer to get free hardware!

So, Im told now that this new mobo/cpu will be faster for me than my desktop (P3 866mhz) I guess I could make the P3 into a file server and use this new one as my desktop.

I like rice alot with many different things, especially with fish or chicken. We dont use a fancy rice cooker for this, we simply use the good old microwave. You need to get good quality rice, most decent supermarkets will stock asian rice, imported in a large zipper topped bag.

So, for every part rice, add 2 parts of water into a bowl (i cup rice/2 cups water is plenty for 3 people) add a pat of butter, a bay leaf and a clove, and into the water, add a teaspoon of powdered chicken stock or one of those little gravy cubes. Then just nuke it with saran wrap covering it on hi for 10 mins.

This will cook perfectly almost every time as long as the water to rice is 2:1 Takes no time to prepare and is delicous ;-)

I played in my first match in ages today, and played TERRIBLY! Me and M1 lost 5-3 to Asinur and David_v 5-3, I cant belive how crappy I am! Anyhow, it was fun and great to play in a match finally.

I have had some succes with my silly little script, and learned a thing or two but there are still some features I'd like to add to it, but don't know how :(

Happy Thanksgiving Day to all you Yankee-Doodles!

I am still sick and stuffed up and dizzy etc..etc..all I want to do is sleep! Now Mom is worried, she dropped over yesterday afternoon and said if I am not better by today, its off to the Doctor, which is ridiculous as its only the Flu, but its no use to argue with her ;-) She then decided for some reason to make me a peach pie!! So I get up today and am looking at this peach pie on the counter and wondering what on earth I am supposed to do with it!

My roomate now has the game Halo and stayed up all night playing it, Sarah got up for work and he was still playing it at like 700am, she wasnt too impressed with him :-) Anyhow, I tried it a little bit, its quite good, and you get to drive different stuff like tanks and armoured cars etc..but as usual, way too many keys to remember for my liking, which is why bz is such a good game I think for people like me.

The graphics however in HALO are awesome as is the music, and sound effects, but I still find the opponents AI to be predictible, like you shoot one guy, and the rest of them stand there doing nothing, perhaps its because I play with the opponents set on "easy", It would be nice if I could set other bz players on "novice" when I play them.

I didn't get too far fixing my PC, I cant seem to flash the bios and without that it wont work, so I might ask my freind (who is a credit rep at a huge pc parts place) to get me a freebie motherboard, she's gotten me all kinds of goodies before, so I dont mind to ask her this favour.

I took the day off work as I felt really crappy, I guess some sort of Flu..Its nice to lounge around in pj's and fuzzy slippers, except the being sick part.

Finally I saw 3 teamates today! All 3 were on opposite teams from me and I struggled to shoot them :-) Nevertheless, It was good to play them for a change.

Didnt have the best weekend, I checked out this bar on Friday where I might work a few shifts in the future, but It is doubtful, we had a good time I guess, but the place is an absolute zoo, and far too crowded for my tastes, Its just too hard to work in those kinds of clubs, maybe i'm just getting old :)

I bought an 80gb hard drive, I have this old amd k6 350 computer here, It was the first computer I ever built I think, and I hoped to put all my mp3's on it and do some other stuff, like keeping jb off my back by installing BSD on it instead of Debian, Still not keen on that though as I know only enough to get by with Linux and absolutely nothing about BSD.

Anyhow, of course the new hard drive wont work, tried all the jumper settings and detecting it in the bios, but no go, Im thinking now with my luck, the bios doesn't support a drive that large, so I dont want to buy another stupid motherboard, I dont even have a floppy drive here, so I cant upgrade the stupid bios if that even will help, so I gave it a cold look and put it away for now.

Ive played a fair bit of bz lately and it seems the weekday evenings are as tiresome as they ever were, I wish there was a silent server whre you can only say "hi" "bye" and maybe "ours" "theirs" "sorry" "np"

This would be good I think and cut down all the childishness thats ruining bz. maybe also "wow, nice shot bzg!"

I miss playing with my teamates, who I hardly ever see, I guess theyre all busy too or play in the day when I'm at work.

I managed to sneak a copy of putty.exe onto my computer at work. This means of course I can now ssh into my home computer and run Irssi from there. In case I get caught I renamed it pretty.exe and will tell my nemises I thought it was a screensaver or something. Most likely though he will notice an ssh session coming from my pc and block it.

I tried it out on lunch break and it all works great, except theres this guy in our department who always wonders over to chat, which is fine, but he's the type that dosn't notice if your engrossed in something, and will stand there silently behind you! I feel like jumping up and sreaming "WHAT??????"

I can only use it at lunch as I'm too busy during the day anyway, so It's not as exciting as I anticipated, especially with somone peering over your shoulder. Maybe I should look into my addiction to IRC instead.

Good luck Paul in your job interview!!!!!

I have been criticized in the past for eating like a tiny little bird. Granted I am not a big eater but I like to think I eat my share. The thing is I dont eat steaks very often or roast beef, and hardly ever eat sausages or pork chops, and never eat veal, its not a vegetarian thing at all, I eat chicken and fish all the time and dont mind ground beef in stuff like spaghetti sauce or hamburgers.

Most days I eat breakfast at my parents on the way to work, usually a bowl of cereal and some toast or a bagel. Then I play one quick game of crib (its a card game, very popular on Canada's east coast) with my Dad, while my Mom unleashes her daily avalanche of embarrassing, annoying or downright "none of her buisness" questions.. ;-)

For lunch its usually a small sandwich, tuna fish or egg-salad, sometimes cold- cuts, and always some fruit, like a banana or orange, which I dip into yogurt. I buy a brand called Danone and it is not only fat free, but THE creamiest and yummy yougurt known to mankind.

My roomate is a chef, he usually has some wild and exotic dish cooked up for supper, and know makes special little baby-dinners (his term) for me as Im not much of a big eater in the evenings. I do enjoy food though and its one of those things you can say "even bad food is better than no food"

The last evening or so I have taken my other roomate's camera and tried to hook it up to my PC, the camera of course has windows only software, but it turns out the memory card can be read under linux, I have loaded the right kernel module, and am able to mount the usb device and read the info like it was a regular drive! Isnt linux great?!

Anyhow, now to make it challenging I have set forth the task of making a script that asks you what directory youd like to down load the pics too (with the default being the last one you used) or creating a new directory, and downloads them into that, then unmounts the camera and offers to open an image viewer.

That shouldnt be too hard. :-) I am going to try to do this without pestering my programming freinds. In part because I ask too much of them already, and I think its cool if I can pull this off myself.

We were at my freinds house and she'd just bought her dvd player, it was one of those half dvd player, half vcr thingys, so we watched a couple of movies and when I was leaving, I offered to drop them off at Blockbusters, she then sat there trying to rewind the dvd we'd just watched :-)

Here is a site that attemts the explain the Bible with Lego re-enactments, Its actually not a bad website!

If you fly from St.John's to Whitehorse, you'd cover most of Canada, about an 8298km trip, this Christmas I want to fly a measly 1100km, about an hour and a half flight, this is going to cost me $560 dollars, plus my Mom also, so $1100 roughly, just because it is Christmas and the Airline knows people are going to travel domestically, I could, on the same dates, fly from Toronto to Brazil, a mere 6068kms for about the same price, Florida is less than $200 at that time of year!

It isnt fair that they take advantage of us on the holidays but what can I do? Take the train? I would, but the train is about $70 cheaper and takes forever to get there..I could drive, its only 15 hours or so in the middle of a Canadian winter :) So I am stuck with Air Canada and their little extorsion scheme :(

On the good news side of things, it looks like the deal to sell our building isnt going to go through, so another year's lease is likely, meaning no moving guys and boxes and packing, and unpacking and new phone..new internet...email...lost snail mail..etc etc..etc..

I have updated xchat to version 2.0.5 , theres a couple of nice features, firstly "away" users are greyed out, no need to whois them to see if theyre alive, and secondaly, you now have channel and nick tab completion inside private windows as well as public channels, not really big changes but well thought out ones.

Also I tried K3b, a KDE'ish cd burning program (GUI) that promises to be as easy to use as cd burning under Windows. I think they're right. Roughly 5 mins after apt-getting it, I was burning an audio cd from some of my mp3's which I will play on my way to work ;-)

I realize there are command line tools for this, and I can burn iso's or any kind of data from the command line, but never had any success burning mp3 to audio in this fasion. The gui is nicer for me as it allows me to see the total minutes on a cd and nice stuff like that. (I actually got told today that real men use the command line and GUI's are for women! by a tank driving mole no less )

This weekend I'd like to see the movie "Mystic River" Link. I'm also thinking of going to the Dec 12th David Bowie concert, so that might be fun, Ive never seen him before and although some of his later stuff I found to be hit and miss, I think that show would be a great night out.

I'm really impressed with the Strokes new album, their music to me always has been less flat out garage band than say the White Stripes, but more nervous and edgy, and Reptilia is a pretty good example of that.

From the interesting band department, The Kings of Leon, three Tennesee born sons of a United Penticostal Evangelist and their first cousin, form a very compelling combination, its foot stomping music from four hillbilly hotties.

Kings Of Leon-Red Morning Light

Finally, somewhat dancey, (you knew youd get one of these ;-)) a band I really like alot called Underworld, they remind a little bit of Leftfield, and theres nothing wrong with that. This song's called Cowgirl

So the Matrix Revolutions.... I must be honest, perhaps it was because I loved the second one so much, that I had high hopes for the final episode, but for me there was a little bit too much Luke Skywalker and not enough Bruce Lee, the fight scenes and car/bike chases did it for me in the first 2 movies , and although the plot was still good, there was far to much of the machines attacking Zion for my tastes, the wave after wave of flying calimari machines at first was impressive, but after about 20 mins of it I was like "ok..ok..i got the point...there's LOTS of them!"

I wont dwell on it though, its still a pretty good movie, but the second episode for me is far better.

I settled on a python based bot that now lives in #project24 on freenode, I dont know anything about python, but when I asked the developer (jemfinch) if the bot was able to sit in #commits and echo any thing said with the string "project24" back to #project24, he said, "no, but I will write you a plugin" and in 5 minutes it was done, you gotta love that. The bots name is Guu, just use !list to get the various commands available, and !list "command" to get subcommands, its pretty straight forward.

Been a really busy week, with work, family stuff and a best freind expecting twin bundles of joy! I have not put much effort into writing down my comings and goings...

I have bought the newest Strokes album which is REALLY good and will post a song or two later on..I have also been buying clothes like there is no tommorow, which is a good thing, I had a terrible clothes budget this summer and intend to make up for that this winter.

Tonight I played some bz against some very good freinds, and couldnt understand why I didnt really get into it, Its not like it was before, less exciting maybe I dunno, andyhow, there was a player with a sorta fast reload and some suspect dodging that caused me to give it up for the night, I also agreed with some prodding to join the Canadian team in the International League, I dont know if I will play many matches or not, but the Idea of crushing the Germans and Americans is appealing :-)

I am shopping for an IRC bot, so far have tried infobot(perl based I belive), supybot (python based) and a ruby based one that I couldnt get to work, let me know if you find a better one.

I was asked out on a date last week, I agreed on 2 conditions, We go to see the 3rd Matrix movie, and secondly, that he dosent talk to me during the movie :-)