October 2004

Murphy’s kicking my ass

Life

I got back home today from a trip back to my home town. I attended my great grandma’s funeral. The funeral was nice. Well, as nice as funerals can be, I guess. While in town, I took the opportunity to visit my former college and my friends and family.

This morning at 6:00, I woke up to get ready for the 7:55 Greyhound bus to Sunnyvale. We ended up transferring twice. The first time in Sacramento, and the second in San Francisco. Each bus was late, of course. We ended up roughly two hours late by the end of the trip.

Finally, I got to Sunnyvale, carrying a very heavy backpack, a heavy suitcase, and a bag of misc. stuff. I got a map of bus routes and quickly realized I would have had to make several transfers, and then walk 15 to 20 minutes home carrying the bags. Not a good option.

I ended up calling a taxi. My home wasn’t too far away, so why not? Problem the first: The driver only knew a few English words. Problem the second: $2.50/mile. Ouch. I’ve never paid for a taxi before, so I don’t know what’s normal, but watching that meter move up sure was depressing.

So, $20 later, I’m home. I carried my heavy bags into the pizza place and ordered a pizza and a drink. Then I went to my apartment and realized I couldn’t find my keys. While searching, I noticed that my contact solution spilled over everything. I moved the bag it was in to the side, and continued to search. I then proceeded to knock my soda all over my backpack and coat.

I decided to go downstairs and get a spare key and then my pizza. The pizza was burned, but still edible, mainly. I continued back to my apartment with the spare key. There I found a small group of ants at my desk. There’s no food around there, and they don’t appear to be carrying anything in particular, but they there are nonetheless.

To top off the day, as I was cleaning up the place in preparation for guests that are coming tomorrow or the next day, I went to take out the garbage. As I was walking outside, a squirrel run in the tree above me (at 10:22 at night!) and dropped something next to me. Damn squirrels.

Tomorrow’s going to be much better. 🙂

Blue sky, I’ll meet you in the end

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I was woken up this morning with the news that my great grandmother passed away in the hospital during the night. It’s definitely not how a person would like to be woken up, but I’m glad nobody waited to tell me. I’m going to be heading back home Friday, and will be attending the funeral Tuesday. I won’t be in contact much until Wednesday or Thursday, if people need me.

Panels Packed of People Presence

Leave a Comment / Gaim

Calum’s blog post showing a bunch of talking heads on his panel is pretty cool. I have the presence part of this already done in Galago’s gnome-presence-applet. It doesn’t display a talking head, but it displays service indicators and first/last names. It wouldn’t be hard to make it optionally display an avatar instead. The messaging wouldn’t be there until a future release of Galago, though.

A Galago release is imminent now. Just a few things left to do.

Better than a kick in the pants

Leave a Comment / Gaim

There’s nothing better than finally fixing a bug that has been a problem for over three months. Well, except finding a number of other bugs that would end up being hard to find down the road, and fixing them. Galago-daemon is now far stabler, and I would trust it to have my children, er, maintain my presence, or something. Yeah. Anyhow, one major step closer to a release. There’s just one important thing left, which is username normalization.

Also, it seems IBM has shipped my new ThinkPad. Hurray! Can’t wait. Except I have to. So, perhaps sleep is in order, since I’m starting to become delusional. I will be pissed if it turns out I dreamt fixing those bugs. 🙂

Picnic in the Park. Er, College.

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So Sunday was the VMware picnic, which turned out to be a blast. Mainly because my little sister was there, along with my mom and one of my brothers. Although at first shy and a bit nervous, as my sister Jenna said, she soon warmed up and started participating in the events. The bounce house was of course one of her favorites, although she was quite thrilled to get a hole in one in the little golf game booth and to get two balls in a row in the ball toss game. She picked out her prizes and proudly showed me what she had won. Unfortunately, it seems her bag got switched with someone else’s during the day, and she lost her prizes.

Jenna didn’t want the day to end, but we eventually dragged her back to the car (not kicking and screaming, though, as she’s pretty good about that). Soon it was time for them to head back home, which is always a sad moment, but it was a fun visit. Jenna called just a short while ago and told me how much fun she had. Apparently, she wouldn’t stop talking about it at daycare today.

Oh, and she drew me a picture as a present. Such a cutie. I’m going to have to get pictures of the fair put up, and scan in her drawing at some point.

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