Over the past few days, I’ve moved more sites over to the new Linode server. Among these was one of my favorite nonsense sites, Destroy Mornings. For those who aren’t familiar with that one, here’s a brief history.. One morning I got up for school. I was a bit upset about this and, having some time before class, registered destroymornings.com and built up a website. Or rather, one page of a site. The links on the sidebar never went anywhere, and perhaps they never will.

Anyhow, it gained a rather large community on Orkut, and people talked about how much they hated mornings. People have bugged me for a couple years now to create merchandise, so the other day, I did. There’s now a Destroy Mornings store, hosted of course by CafePress. I ordered a mug and a t-shirt, which should be here in a couple of days. They should turn out well, I hope.

I’ve also been working on some more art in my DeviantArt gallery. My favorite recent additions are Hey, Look What I found, Spiral Brush (created by the wonderful program Fyre), and Rules for Dating, #1.

As is pretty obvious, I haven’t done a whole lot of open source hacking lately. This is mostly because a lot’s been going on at work and in other areas of life, and at the end of the day, I find myself relaxing by just working on fun stuff. Though the past couple of days, I’ve been itchin’ to hack on Galago some more, so I think I’m going to devote a good amount of time to that soon.

Another recent fun toy has been Ubuntu. Man, what a wonderful distribution. It’s what I’ve been waiting for in a Linux distro. Excellent work guys! This is going on my girlfriend’s new PC this week 🙂

So this weekend has been a bit on the boring side. I need to figure out what there is to do in Palo Alto, and where to meet some people… But some good did come from this. I registered a Linode account and have moved Planet IM to it. Planet IM has been dead for a while, due to a loss of accounts and such on the server it was hosted at. Now that I’m in control of it, things should be a bit smoother.

I reformatted my laptop a couple of days ago and switched from SuSE to Ubuntu. It was getting too hard to keep GNOME up-to-date on SuSE. So far, Ubuntu seems very nice. I was hesistant at first, due to the hype, but I’m rather impressed for the most part.

Oh, and I finally watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It was a pretty good movie. I think I’m the last person on the planet to actually watch it, though. Ah well.

I’ve been working on experimenting with some different forms of art recently. Trying to find out what I’m good at.. I registered a DeviantArt account in December (chipx86.deviantart.com) and have been posting various things, including a really screwed up short story that my brother and I wrote a while back called The South Side. The nice thing is that even though it’s hard to get inspiration at first, various ideas form over time, and it becomes more enjoyable. I’m sure that’s the same with anything.

So now I’m transitioning Galago’s site and SVN to the new server. I’ll probably have it done tonight, if I don’t find something else to do.

My post from June 14, 2004, Galacy Scam, seems to now be #4 for a Google search of Galacy, #1 for Galacy Scam, and #1 for Integratel Scam. Probably due to this, a few people have been commenting. It seems their shadey business practices (altering phone conversations, billing us for services we don’t have, etc.) are still going on. I’m rather glad that my previous entry is getting some attention, so that others will have a place to turn to and know they’re not the only ones getting scammed, especially since thecomplaintstation.com has appeared to be down for some time. I just want to see Galacy/Integratel shut down.

… Rather, in 10.5 hours from now, here anyway.

I finally fixed the comment spam issue, I think. Maybe I’ll feel more motivated to post. I’m running MT 3.14 and the latest MT-Blacklist plugin, and this time it’s actually working. I must have broken something last time.

So Christmas went very well. I had a wonderful Christmas Eve with my beautiful Jamie. We went to see Christmas lights around town and opened presents. Her real present still hasn’t arrived, but it was finally shipped, so I’ll be getting that to her once both of us are on vacation. She just left for a trip to Utah, and I miss her already.

Christmas itself was the usual crazy yet fun event it always is. We opened presents here and at two sets of grandparents’ houses. I got a copy of Metroid Prime 2, Taiko Drum Master, some beer and wine, a nice robe, and a bunch of other things.

On top of that, I picked up a copy of Katamari Damacy and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Not having a PS2 around here, I won’t be able to play Katamari Damacy until I get home, but I’ve started Chain of Memories and I have to say, it has me very confused. I’m not sure what I think of the card-based battle system, or the plot, but I guess I’ll get used to it.

My stepdad got one of those little UFO toys that flies in the are to wherever you point the antenna. It was pretty fun until he dropped it into the water. Then it got scary. Despite technically being off, it would randomly start to fly around the room. We were very amused. And it seems we have another very confused toy. The RoboSapien burps every time we change the channel on the TiVo.

Tomorrow I head back home to Palo Alto. In a way, I’m looking forward to it, but I’ll miss everyone. At least I have some fun toys to play with in my upcoming limited spare time.

It’s my birthday! I’m finally 21. Now I can go drinking and stuff, even though I probably won’t much. There probably won’t be much celebration until I head back to visit family and friends, but I’ve already received a very nice birthday card with singing chickens, which I love 🙂 If you feel the extreme need to buy me presents, I have a few ideas ;). Not that I expect anything, of course.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled planet.