Life

My mom and my little sister Jenna stayed the weekend with me in my new place. Jenna was so thrilled. She thought it was a special treat just for her, getting to see her big brother. We went swimming and she showed me how she’s now able to jump off the side of the pool and how long she can dunk her head underwater. Man, it was great. Being around my little sister can be so much fun. It’s just always hard to see her go.

I spent so much money this weekend on apartment stuff. I’m already cringing at the thought of the credit card bill. On the upside, the apartment now has lights in every room, I have a place to stick my CDs, DVDs and videos, and I have more “real” cooking utensils. Like, a can opener, and measuring cups that don’t bend when they have stuff inside.

In a few weeks, if all goes according to plan, they, along with at least one of my brothers, will be visiting again. Should be fun, but I’m going to have to lock the credit card up.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m way too oblivious. When I have nearly everybody around me pointing out how I’m not picking up signals from various girls, it’s bad. It’s even worse, though, when a couple of really hot girls are trying to get your attention and you don’t even realize it until your mom of all people points it out. I see it now, of course. Hindsight’s 20/20 and all. Ah well. I’m not looking to get into the mess of a relationship any time soon again anyway.

Work tomorrow, and more Galago and notification spec hacking. Both of which are going well, but need some work still.

Todd Berman is such a liberal hippie.

Yes, Daniel, perhaps we should set up a Planet Little Sister 😉

Two days ago, Jenna had her first ballet practice. We thought she’d be scared or something, like some of the other kids in there, but she ended up really enjoying it. She can’t wait for next week.

It was fun to watch, since she didn’t really know what she was doing, but attempted everything. I took some pictures, but since we were behind a window, they turned out rather grainy and blurry in some cases. I’ll nuke the bad ones later.

She’s begging me pretty constantly to push her on the new play area we set up for her in our back yard. I think I’ll have to actually do that soon, before she gets frustrated 😛

Today was a first for my little sister Jenna in a couple of ways. We went to the local bowling alley for my brother’s birthday party. It was Jenna’s first time bowling, and she had a blast. She used one of those little ramp things for kids, which I remember using in the past once or twice. However, unlike when I used one, she actually carefully aimed it. She did a rather good job, I’d say, since she got a number of strikes in a row, and a number of spares. She had it down pretty well.

After Jenna’s first strike, she jumped up and down with her arms in the air and shouted, “SCORE!” 🙂

Later, Jenna asked me to show her how to tie her shoe. She’s been eager to learn this lately, so I went to help show her. She insisted on actually doing it herself, but needed guidance in some parts. All in all, she had the process down, but just had trouble getting the shoe lace to move how she wanted it. With only minor help from me, she succeeded in tying her shoe. It was a Kodak* moment.

* Kodak is a trademark of Kodak. Slogan used entirely without permission. Please don’t sue me.

Well, finals week is coming up. I feel relatively confident in my ability to pass my finals, though regardless, I’m not looking forward to them :). Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to prepare for school-related things the past few days.

Accident

Last night, my grandparents got into a car accident while leaving town to take a trip to Sacramento. They’re alright, though in some pain. It doesn’t look like anything is broken though. When we saw the name of our local hospital on the caller ID last night, we tensed up. I’m just glad everything turned out as good as it did.

Fun With The Girls

I’m probably taking a few of the girls to the local Concert In The Park this Saturday. It’d be a fun night of music, food, and whatever. A few of us went out last Thursday for the Farmer’s Market. We shopped around, bought presents for my friend Dell, and got ice cream. The following day was Dell’s birthday, which ended up lasting 2-3 days for some of us. Great weekend. Hopefully we’ll manage to do that more often, especially with summer coming up.

Galago

I managed to hit a rather annoying bug in galago-daemon. While I’m certain it’ll turn out to be a very simple, couple-line fix, I haven’t had the time to go and actually fix it. As soon as finals are over, I plan to get things ready for a 0.1 release, and write up the protocol docs.

Yesterday at approximately 09:12 PST, my server died. This was bad timing, but wasn’t really unexpected. It’s about 8 years old, and has spent the last 5 or 6 years of its life running Linux. It has only been turned off 2 or 3 times a year, and those times were a result of power outages or hardware upgrades.

The timing was unfortunate, but I managed to get up and running again by the time I went to bed. Yeah, it took all day. I ended up turning my desktop into the server and just put the old drives in it. The server went from a 166MHz Pentium with 96MB of RAM to a 1GHz P3 with 512MB RAM. My new desktop is a 2.4GHz P4 with 512MB RAM. I went ahead and upgraded the video card and CD-RW while I was at it. It’s nice and fast so far.

I’ll have to give the old server a proper burial. It’s been good to me.

Updated: 5-May-2004, 14:40: That’s the last time I write a blog entry when I’ve been awake no more than 10 minutes, especially after getting almost no sleep. Hopefully now, some of the above will be more clear.

As I walked past AM/PM toward the bus stop to head to school this morning, I noticed a HazMat truck outside of AM/PM. I quickly decided against grabbing donuts from there for breakfast, and proceeded walking to school.

Forgetting this morning’s incident, I went into AM/PM just a short while ago with my little sister. As I walked in, I noticed that the far side of the building was covered in a giant tarp. I asked the guy what was up with the tarp.

“We’re getting a new Icee machine,” he said.

“Oh, okay. Why was there a HazMat truck outside?” I asked.

“I don’t know why it said HazMat on it, but they’re giving us a new Icee machine,” he replied.

Ah, the ant. They may be tiny, but they’re certainly productive! These small little creatures traverse long distances in order to seek out food for their colony. Working together, they’re able to pin-point where food is and set to work efficiently breaking it down and carrying it back home. What a sight to see. We could all learn a thing or two from them.

But now they’re in my vacuum cleaner.

Some may think living on an ant hill is a wise choice, and though it’s certainly more fun than living in a black widow-infested cave, the vanity eventually wears off.

Tip, ladies and gentlemen. Vacuum cleaners and Windex are not considered friends to the ants, as this colony is now figuring out.

I think I’ll take another shower. It feels like they’re all over me.

I’m on Spring Break as of this week, and it’s a much needed break. Unfortunately, it seems the only thing I’ve done with it so far is try to fix this computer. I decided to put the 2.6 kernel on here, and though it mainly worked, the changes in the keyboard driver and a few other things did nothing but upset me. I tried working around the Linux keycode to X keycode mappings, but I have no clue how the conversion is being done.

Figuring it had to be better than nothing, I grabbed the 2.6.4-mm2 patch and tried that out. The MS Office Keyboard scroll wheel support did nothing to support my scroll wheel, and instead prevented my “6” key and spacebar from working. So, I booted back into vanilla 2.6.4, and was met with minor but still annoying filesystem corruption.

A couple more days of hacking on things, and I’m now back to the 2.4 kernel. I’ll try 2.6.4 in a few more releases. I know my main problem is really XFree86’s fault, but it seems most distros don’t want to upgrade to the new versions due to licensing issues, and I don’t see any obvious fixes.

I decided I wouldn’t code until Spring Break is over, so I could actually have some fun for a change, and have parted most IRC channels and such. Monday, I went with some friends to a budget cut protest in Sacramento, which was a lot of fun. I took some pictures of that, but the memory stick became corrupted. So, I spent my entire Tuesday working off an image of the stick, trying to rebuild the partition tables. Last night, just before bed, I managed to get the images off. I’m not trusting that stick again.

Ah well, BBQ tomorrow, and a get-together with some of the girls Friday. Should be fun.. Just, now I feel like writing code, since I’ve been forced to do that all week anyway 🙂

It’s really hard when you can no longer be with someone you love, but it doesn’t make it any easier when you have to spend over an hour each night just trying to sleep, and when you finally do, you’re consumed by bad dreams. I wish sleep was purely optional. I feel like I haven’t really slept in weeks.

Oh, and I didn’t forget it or anything, but yesterday marked one year that my Grandma has been dead. Rest in peace, Grandma.