journal for 2002-12-25
merry christmas
Well, I really took my time writing another entry, didn’t I? The worst thing is that, the longer I put it off, the longer it will be and the more I’ll leave out. I’ll start with Christmas stuff.
christmas stuff
Today is Christmas, meaning that most of our presents were exchanged last night. I’m happy with my haul, and happy with what we gave. I think it all went over well, and that’s good. I took some pictures of the whole event, including the gifts I was given, and they’ll all go in my Christmas pile today or tomorrow.
I was going to itemize stuff, but I’ve decided against it. I got some good music, including Kraftwerk and DEVO (very Christmassy!); some good movies (Cohen Brothers, Scorcese, Eastwood); some great books (I’m very eager to read Design Patterns), and other weird and neat stuff. Heide gave me the Linux Kernel Map poster from thinkgeek, and it’s absolutely immense. Maybe it will go over my workstation at home. I don’t think there’s room at work, where I’d originally planned to put it. Carmita and Kip gave me this bizarrecool folding meterstick that is labelled with a timeline and historical events rather than centimeters. Heide also gave me a “No, I will not fix your computer.” shirt, apparently over my dad’s strenuous objections. That makes it even better.
We had our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, with a really tasty clam soup. Tonight, we’ll have a ham. Things weren’t feeling very Christmas-like this week, but dinner helped, and presents helped, and now we have snow covering everything. It’s our first white Christmas in a very long time. It may even be ten years since the last noticeable snowfal on Christmas, here; maybe more.
All told, it was good.
Steve wasn’t around; he “had to” work, which is relatively reasonable, I guess. Anyway, he’ll be down on Friday, and we’ll exchange presents with him, then.
my poor gameboy advance
Well, I’ve mostly given up on seeing my GBA again. After an incredible ordeal dealing with the horrific Portablemonopoly.NET, I finally began filing complaints. The initial response was laughable, but supposedly the guy is finally returning my goods and money. I’ll believe it when I see it.
In the meanwhile, I’ve ordered a new, modded GBA from YourHappyPlace. They have great reviews, and the guy is in Easton. If I don’t get my GBA, I can camp out on his lawn.
I’m actually expecting it soon. He predicted two-week turnarounds, and my estimated ship date is now up, at 2003-01-03. I will be elated if that goes through with no problems. I haven’t gotten to play Metroid Fusion yet, and I recently discovered that I did pre-order Zelda for the GBA. I guess EBX just didn’t feel like calling me.
Speaking of EBX and Zelda, I’m going to be irked if I pre-ordered to early to get a copy of Zelda:OoT for GCN. That’s just silly.
programming
I’ve been working on changes to iGal. I spent a long time looking for similar programs, but nothing was as easy to use, and lots of it wanted to (IMHO) waste cycles by generating thumbnails and slides on the fly. My only problems with iGal was that it didn’t have any kind of subdirectory handling and it was really HTML3-ish.
I started by making it more XHTML and CSS friendly, and that’s gotten me started on more fundamental changes. I send Eric Pop (the iGal author) an email, but I don’t expect he’ll want to use my branch as iGal 1.4, so I’m tentatively calling it jGal. R1 will, at least, handle subdirectories (it will generate files like my own image gallery list), more complex configuration files, and better internal code. The iGal source is really goofy, in my opinion.
I’ll probably make a page for it around here somewhere, when it’s readier for release.
I’m sure there was other stuff I should mention, but it’s all become a blur. I’ll write it down tomorrow, if I remember.