family

hectic

Posted on by grahams

This weekend was hectic…. Friday night and I met up with her friend Lisa who was in town for a conference. She invited us to a grill party in Allston. Lots of standing, so my leg was a little barky, but it was a great time.

Saturday we spent most of the day cleaning the apartment, and I worked on fixing the PC, which had a under volt on the power supply’s 3.3v rail. I replaced the supply, but the crashing persisted.. It seems now that the video card is overheating, so I turned down the settings on the game I was playing and it seemed to improve the sitchmo. I guess ultimately it will need to be replaced, but that’d require a PCI Express motherboard, so it will have to wait.

Today we continued cleaning, in preparation for Coco’s parents’ visit this week. After cleaning ended, we went over to ‘s family’s pool for a quick bit of swimming and grilling before racing back to Harvard Square to see Sir, No Sir! with the film club.

Take me back, Journal, I’m sorry!

Posted on by grahams

I’ve neglected the hell out of my journal lately… Some of that is because nothing is going on… But I have also just been lax, I will try to be better, but… no promises… :)

My sister, came up this weekend for a weekend of frigid Boston fun… We had a few things lined up to do, but we ended up indoors most of the weekend due to the extremely low temperatures.. We hit up Bartley’s, Candlepin Bowling, Pool at Flattop Johnny’s, and the film club. Hopefully she enjoyed herself, and hopefully she will come back when it is warmer out and we won’t be so shut-in.

We caught “Why We Fight” last night, and while it was quite “preaching to the choir-y”, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The discussion after the movie was a bit heated, though, as it tends to get after these political films…

I think I’m finally getting over this cold… I’ve felt good for the past few days, although I am still a little congested, I can at least think, etc. I had my sister bring up a bunch of old CDs because I recently realized that there was a big hole in my email archive from when I was using BeOS. So I got BeOS running on an older machine and restored my old email from backup. I had to go through some hoops to get the BeMail format mail into something Mail.app under OSX could import, but once I figured it out it was a no brainer. It’s amazing what 5 years can do for your knowledge of an OS, it took me quite awhile to get my bearings in BeOS again… I had a little nostalgia, but it is definitely pretty dated by today’s standards.

Holiday Weekend

Posted on by grahams

Travelled back to NJ this weekend to spend the holiday with family and friends, and it was a surprisingly nice trip, including very little in the department of travel headaches. and I left her office in Cambridge around 2pm on Friday and landed in Hopatcong around 7pm.. We hit a bit of traffic, including the tail end of the friday rush hour on Route 80 in NJ, but other than that it wasn’t too bad. I did get busted for speeding in lousy CT (i hate that state), but one $244 fine later (and no points on my license) means it could be worse… It’s part of the gamble of speeding…. Anyway, we spent alot of time on the boat, swimming, and playing with the dogs… came up from the dirty south, which is good because I don’t get to see my littlest sister much anymore, and now that she’s moving into the dirtier south, that situation will probably only get worse. We also caught War of the Worlds sunday afternoon which was OK, even if it did remind me how dire the theatre situation is around my hometown.

We made it back into Boston in the early evening last night, and the trip was pretty painless… We made it in four hours, and didn’t really hit any traffic… We got back in town and didn’t do much of anything, as I was whiny and tired… Corinna worked on homework and went to the store to get dinner, and at 10:30p we went up on the roof to watch the Boston fireworks, which were great.

Beginning of one thing, end of another….

Posted on by grahams

My first day was fairly cool yesterday, but it was spent mostly trying to build the tree (which I finally successfully completed) and filling out paperwork (which I haven’t quite finished yet). I did the ride home, and started some laundry after I got there.

As I was leaving the laundromat, my mother called me to inform me that my Grandma had passed away. While I am none too happy about this, I have to say that if I had to go, I would want it to be chilling on the couch in my own home, under my own care, on a beautiful spring day, with the windows open, watching some television. She passed away peacefully and on her own terms, which is all she ever asked for. I am happy it worked out the way she wanted.

I am not going to be able to go home for the funeral, mostly because it is my first few days of work, and I am broke, but I can’t say that I am unhappy about that. I hate funerals (i can’t imagine that anyone enjoys them), but more importantly, I hate the idea of funerals (and as far as I can tell, my grandma did as well)…. My grandmother’s passing leaves a void in my life, but I don’t believe that mourning is in order…. She lived happily, died happily and in peace… Needless to say, it was a long night last night….

Neat!

Posted on by grahams

My Parents gave me an Archos Jukebox 6000 Portable MP3 Player! It is a 6GB MP3 Player and USB Hard Disk. Unlike many portable MP3 players, you can copy onto and off of this device without limitations. It seems to work great, and the installation was a cinch (jack in the USB cable, show it the drivers, and voila: new drive letter). Another cool thing about it is that you don’t have to use special software to put MP3s on it. It shows up as another drive on your system and you just use Explorer like you would any other drive. It took me about 3 minutes to copy over an album or so of music, so it is fairly fast given it is a USB device…. So far I like it more than the other similar devices I have seen: Namely the Personal Jukebox or Creative’s Nomad Jukebox. The PJB is awesome, has a huge screen, but it expensive, and the Nomad just seems thrown together (just ask soco :). Neither of those devices suck, but I think that the Archos unit is definately the best bang for your buck.

Way-cool!

Software

Posted on by grahams

Ok, I really haven’t worked on any code since the last time I worked on AliveJournal (which I need to work on again). Today, I got fed up with that and started hacking again. This time, it is something which I consider substantial. I don’t use Winamp skins with SoundPlay, mostly because I like the way the BeOS native interface looks. But every time I have toyed with the idea, it really bothered me that the playlist skins were not supported. So that is what I am doing, and it is fun and I am learning and relearning alot about BeOS programming again.

Meeting my mother and grandparents for lunch tomorrow, which should be interesting..

Snipers do it quickly and quietly

Posted on by grahams

Enemy at the Gates was very enjoyable, even though I was sitting next to a marine who wouldn’t shut up every time there was a historical inaccuracy (and there weren’t that many, but he still made a big deal out of them). It was , John (the marine), A friend of John’s, and Amy, and after the movie we dropped off John’s friend and went to the Budd Lake diner for a while to chill. It was a fun time, even if I did end up smelling like smoke as usual. I also had an opportunity to talk to Amy for awhile, which was cool….

Time to go wake up and get the day rolling. Going out to dinner to celebrate my father’s birthday (which is Monday) tonight (because my sister Aimee has to go back to school tomorrow).