journal for 2002-12-14
so much christmasness!
my second present
Ok, first things first: Gloria gave me one of my Christmas presents early, and it is phat. She gave me a Canon PowerShot S200 digital camera, which is the camera for which I’d been longing. The Boss has one like it (but with less piexels), and I’d played with it a bit. It’s about the size of a deck of cards, and takes good pictures.
I haven’t gotten it working with Linux yet, but I figure I’ll figure gPhoto out, eventually. I do wish the camera supported USB mass storage, though. Once I find a nice CF reader that works under Linux, I’ll pick that up. The Win32 software that came with the camera is pretty goofy. I don’t know why people always want to make software look like hardware. Even when it looks really cool (which is rare), it’s just confusing. I guess it makes sense when emulating simple things like a CD player or a mixing board, but the digital camera software doesn’t look like anything. It’s just weird.
Anyway, the point is, I have a camera, and it rules. I’ll link to one of the pictures taken with it, once they’re sorted and put into galleries.
iqe party
Yesterday was IQE’s holiday (Christmas) party. It was really weird.
The party was held at the “Fearless Fire Company,” which seemed like a private club or ballroom. Inside, it looked a lot like my middle school gymnasium. There were a lot of tables set up, cafeteria style (but with tablecloths) and the food was served from a buffet. I felt like we were in a mess. “You take what you want, Private, but you eat what you take.” The two main choices were roast beef (soaking in jus) and roast turkey (soaking in broth). The turkey was much less bad than the roast beef. There were a good number of employee-provided deserts; I think I like ours (spice cake cupcakes) best, although there were some killer brownies.
Nothing really great happened. There was free beer and wine, and a few employees had a few too many drinks, but only Ryan really overdid it. Even he, though, didn’t manage to do anything too embarassing. While it was amusing to see him grinning like an idiot, he got home before he did anything stupid. I’m glad, but I was really hoping to see some lampshade wearing or table dancing.
gingerbread men
In addition to cupcakes, we made gingerbread men, yesterday. We gave some to the upstairs and downstairs neighbors, and only later thought that maybe we should’ve tried them first. Fortunately, they were great. Having eaten two, I can back the testamonials of our neighbor and letter carrier. They were Fine.
We’ll probably make some more before Christmas.
getting things done
I need to get things done. I’d like to actually work on Acropolis, and I’m getting embarassed that I’ve just ignored it for so long. Also, I’m thinking that I’ll write another Brief Guide. I find myself giving the same explanation for DNS all the time, whether I’m helping friends or answering questions in #djbdns. It’s surprising how many people want to run DNS but don’t even understand the basics of how it works.
For now, though, I’m going to Amxing and see Totakeke.