sugardeath

I finally got mysql-server and mythtv to play together (and with me, and not sexually)! I wiped the old Debian install on Din and tried to install Knoppmyth, but it wouldn’t install LILO properly. I never did like LILO, Grub has always handled booting better in my opinion. Easier to use, too. I was then gonna try MythDora, but a Fedora / Red Hat system has never appealed to me… I like Debian-based distros too much, which explains why I just reinstalled Debian and gave it another shot. Worked fine this time. I got the thing running mythfrontend on bootup and everything. Now I just need a TV card to test things with.

I have a slight problem where Debian dumps me to an “oh shit” shell (what’s the real name for that thing?) because it can’t find /dev/hda. Everything is on /dev/hde, and it knows this, yet one step during bootup is looking for /dev/hda. I can make symbolic links for it and it works fine and everything, but they never stay.. so I have to do this on every bootup. There must be some permanent solution.

The differences between Debian and Ubuntu are amazing. I find that even if I chose to install all the extra Debian things I still had to do some work to get the system useable. Ubuntu, despite being based on Debian, just works. Then again, so did SUSE for the most part.

I uploaded photos of the Delta II rocket launch to Facebook. They’ll find their way here eventually, and when they do they’ll be in their full 2592×1944 resolution, not the crap by crap res that Facebook scales them too. Not that it matters much, though.. The shots didn’t really come out too well.

In other news, I added about eight hours of play time to my KOTOR save. I have become so dark sided that on my character sheet I don’t have just have a red glow behind me, I have a red glow that sort of explodes into a fiery.. thing. Black smoke all over the bottom and these hot ember like particles floating up. It’s neat. I wonder what it looks like when you become just as light sided.

My car died on me when I was on my way to pick up Dad from the Chevy dealership. Wouldn’t start until after Brian came to get me and we had picked up Dad. Thankfully a nice couple helped me push it into the Speedway at Riverland and Van Dyke. It died in the left turn lane JUST before the Riverland driveway. Started up just fine for Dad on his first try and gave us no more problems. He’s borrowing my car for the day tomorrow because apparently the van has this big electrical problem and will be at the dealership all day. I hope my car doesn’t give us anymore shit.

I just had to make a change to the pipe link plugin.. The regular expression was using \w to catch alphanumeric characters. “/” is not alphanumeric. A quick search on Google revealed that \W will catch nonalphanumerics. Just copy and paste what I had.. change one set of \w’s to \W’s and all is good.

Just my notes from my notebook, maybe I’ll expand at a later date.

Saturday - Sterling Heights, Michigan -> Dayton, Ohio
-Nice freeways/on ramps/exits (white)
-696 into Detroit is always fun
-Japanese steak house
-cook not as engaging as others
-walmart crowd is horrible; got new cargo pants
-Holiday Inn was decent

Sunday - Dayton, Ohio -> Mammoth Caves, Kentucky
-Wright Patterson Air Force Base
-Fighter pilot and Mars IMAX movies
-Dayton Steak ‘n’ Shake had same layout as Sterling Heights’
-Red Lobster for dinner
-Mammoth Caves hotel (thankfully we didn’t get the ‘rustic’ cabins)

Monday - Mammoth Caves, Kentucky -> Huntsville (?), Alabama
-Lunch at the hotel
-Really cute waitress. Had an emo haircut, hair dyed reddish, cute voice combined with a hot southern accent… braces too (she smiled a lot)
-Caves were cold, dark, wet, dry air (quite humid outside, though)
-Cave crickets (looked like spiders)
-some girl saw brian’s robotics shirt: “Thunderchickens? They’re from Michigan, right?”
-Southern accent is hilarious (except for the waitress, that was just hot)
-guy in restaurant was louder on his phone than he was to person across the table from him
-Brian drove the first bit to Huntsville, needs to work on driving a bit more…
-Haven’t seen any Michigan license plates, a few Illinois and Illinois Temp plates though
-Holiday Inn again. This time with wifi.
-Ate at Chick-Fil-A for dinner, cashier’s name was “Destiny.”
-I drove by two Piggly-Wiggly’s, the name amused David very much.

Not too sure about that Bio exam… but everything else should be pretty good. I hope. Ergh. Stupid school. At least IIT approved my scholarships for next semester. I have at least one more semester at IIT! -_-

Today is the first day of summer vacation, really. Though I will probably be on campus for another three days. It is currently seventy-two out, at ten in the morning. Forecast calls for “lower 80s.” Nice.

So much rain yesterday. It actually started pretty hard again after I got out onto Van Dyke and did not let up until Pontiac, basically. It was sweet.

Linda and I had a talk tonight… About these past few days. Half of me wants to try again next semester, and I think she does too. Half of me wants to move on. I am unsure… I mean.. I no longer harbor nearly as much anger as I did. No matter what happens in the long run, this is a good thing. I just do not know what….

This is what the summer is for. Clear my mind. Focus on other things. Work, friends, fun (Cedar Point with a bunch of ya? Either IIT kids in the area (Toro, Phil, Kevin) or teh Michigan kids. Most likely Michigan kids. Kevin says the four of us are going to New York to do sock puppet shows from the window of a car, anyway, as that is illegal in New York :-P)), SLEEP. MY GOD THE SLEEP. AND THE VIDEO GAMES. I would like to get back into Final Fantasy XI, but I need to finish Twilight Princess and.. and there is a LAN Party scheduled for the second of June! Happy! First real LAN Party since… a year ago? Wow. This makes happy. Ryan and Raúl (!) will be there. Bob and Eric, Jesse. Everyone. Fragging makes happy. Tony likes fragging. Have not played a good twitch game in ages. I will be home. In Michigan. There was a point when I did not want to go home. When I dreaded the end of the school year and the temporary loss of my new home. If everything works out as it should, I will be back here in three and a half months, and everything will be cool again. But everything WILL be cool in less than a week. There will be Sterling Heights and Shelby Township and possibly a visit to Ford to see all the highschoolers and.. happiness… I can not wait.

I have a plan. My exam schedule was previously posted. I do not have to show up to the scheduled poetry exam because…. well, there is no exam. I just have to make sure all of my papers are turned in by Wednesday at nine in the morning. This is what I will do. I will pack up my car Sunday and Monday with various things. Books, clothes, speakers+subwoofer, video games, TV?. I will empty out my desk. Sort what I need/do not need. Trash what I do not need. Pack what I do. Get dinner at 4:30PM and go to Psych exam (or go to Psych exam and get dinner shortly after 7PM). Drive home. Unpack. Study for bio. Spend the night. Study for bio. Eat some real food for once. Study for bio. Relax. Drive back. Study for bio. Sleep. Study for bio. Go to Bio exam. Get everything else in order. Pack up car and go home Thursday. Well, going home Thursday depends on what may or may not be happening this weekend. Is there going to be a final-big-party-woohoo-destressing thing, or is it just going to be a “see y’all next semester?” kinda thing as we part ways for three and a half months? Either way, actually, I may end up leaving shortly after my bio exam anyway. Then I have the weekend before I really start have to working. Use the weekend to relax. See people.

Then I will work my ass off all summer. I will work and work and work. There are a lot of awesome movies coming out this summer, so it should be a pretty good summer to make some money.

I watched some of the D&D game tonight. I never did roll a character for this campaign, so I am unable to play. Maybe next semester. Alex came up with a really neat concept for this campaign. Basically, all the player characters are villains and are placed in a big city. There are factions and groups within the city the player can become part of and.. basically they are given free reign. It is much more roleplaying based than previous campaigns have been, which actually makes me sad that I never managed to make a character (I think my dice bag fell behind my desk, am not sure).

I… I really need to start this eight page research paper on Nazi Eugenics. Once I get started.. it really will not be that bad. Then I can do the five page poetry paper on something Sylvia Plath. Jason and I are studying Java either Saturday or Sunday. I will read my Psych book at some point this weekend. I will study Bio any other time AND while at home Monday night/Tuesday. I really should have started earlier. But.. what can ya do? Next semester. I WILL be on top of things. I HAVE to be.

Wait a minute. My bio exam is Thursday. I do not have to show up to my Poetry exam on Tuesday. I have nothing on Wednesday. I can stay through all of Tuesday AND most of Wednesday! Huzzah! That will be a VERY nice relaxing time. A short little taste of what is to come. I like. Relax and read bio book. Two days. I can do that.

I am in a good mood. I am really glad we talked. I really do not know where things will go from here… Less than a week left. Try again next semester? See where we are at next semester… But I am glad we talked. It is a good thing that we were able to explain ourselves to each other. Comprehension may not be fully there yet, but realization is. It is a start. A good start. And a start is better than nothing. I think you asked how we let things get so bad? Probably by not really paying attention and pretending everything was alright. Live and learn, I guess?

I just… feel good about everything right now. Especially about exams, for some reason. I should be feeling hopeless despair because of them. Especially Java and Bio. I have not been doing so great in Java lately. That is my major! I need to do well. And I should be worried about Bio because the final is seventy-five percent of my total grade. I got a C- on the second exam, so I am hoping for a C+ or a B- on the final. I may not actually get that… but as long as I pass I should be happy. Bio is not critical to my major. It is just a requirement. I need to focus on the math and comp sci classes. That is where it is at for me.

Wavemon (command line wireless network monitoring tool for Linux) is fun to watch.

There are a lot of things on my mind, but for the first time in a while I think I am capable of dealing with everything.

I am smiling.

Actually, I grinned the biggest grin just yesterday. Apparently David saw Spideman 3 Thursday night. Before the midnight showings, but that is because he has an in. The awesome thing, however, was that he went with Alyssa’s sister. I hear they have been talking a lot lately, too. Much awesomes, dude.

I had a little Yoshi figuine that Jeff gave me last semester clasping the cord for my headphones. I just now noticed that only a single arm was left on the cord. His other arm was on my desk. Yoshi is no where to be found, however. Poor Yoshi is a lost amputee! Oh, there he is. Stupid messy desk.

What am I going to do with all these Bawls bottles? Roughly twenty-five are sitting on my desk. Do I take them home with me and return them at Farmer Jack’s for ten cents each, or do I just trash them all? I actually trashed two the other night in a fit of rage. It took an impressive amount to actually break the bottle! I threw one in the trash can in the trash room. Went in. Threw another and watched as it bounced off the rim, bounced off the cinderblock wall, and bounced twice on the tile floor before finally shattering. Blue glass everywhere. Very cool looking. Should have taken a picture.

Nazi Eugenics. Paper, go!

And going to bed at six in the morning is NOT conducive to having a good sleep cycle (I got up at 7PM on Sunday).

I called Linda around 11:15 or so at night (she lives in California, I figure eight on a Sunday isn’t such a bad time to call). Apparently it was =P Her friends were.. doing things.. I couldn’t quite hear all that was going on, but it sounded fun. They were trying to toss her into a pool, too. I’m jealous, too cold here for swimming!

Apparently I had plans on Saturday night that involved Jason, but were foiled by my pulling a double shift. Since I had no idea plans had been made, I had anticipated going to Alyssa’s and surprising her after work. And by surprise, I mean slap her three times for playing World of Warcraft (once from me, once from Brittney, once from Spoon).

A bunch of us totally need to hit up the Bangkok Pavilion sometime soon. The Thai place by school doesn’t have the best bangkok chicken, though I hear the rest of their stuff is pretty good.

I had David start transferring his custom Guitar Hero II iso to my computer via hamachi. It failed about five and half, maybe six, hours into the operation. So now I’m splitting the iso up into small, bitesized, one-hundred megabyte chunks. And then I laughed, because there was an option for floppy sized chunks, one point four megabytes of delicious floppy sized archives. I remembered when a game requiring seven floppies to install (SAM AND MAX! Never have found that missing seventh floppy) was HUGE. Now they come on DVDs. Sometimes two. With the smaller files, if the transfer fails again, at least I can start up again just about where it failed, instead of trying to retransfer the entire DVD image.

Anyway. It’s almost five. And staying up late is a bad idea. I had Sunday and Monday off of work. I wasted Sunday. I have lots of shit to do on Monday: read a poem, write a five-page paper, go to the Secretary of State and renew my license / get a vanity plate (SUGRDTH for the win), hang out with someone!, play some video games that I’ve been neglecting lately, and probably something else. I was planning on going to Ford to visit all the not-yet-in-college kids, but if I’m going to sleep at five, there’s no way I’ll be able to get there by seven-twenty. Maybe another day.

The robotics kids are leaving for another competition on Thursday. They went to St. Louis a few weeks back, but I think this one is just in Detroit or something. Then why is it the entire weekend? I’m confused.

Good night!