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.

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. 🙂

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.