Dylan’s Rants

I mentioned in my previous post, I went to Dragon*Con with Spoony, Possum, and
William. Along the way kidnapped Syrra and PB, and all was well. Except for PB
shredding a tire on the interstate. Ooops.

There we were, Friday night, waiting on the interstate for a tow truck.
Possum fell asleep in the driver’s seat. I fell asleep in the “shotgun” seat.

When I awoke, the sun was rising. The tow truck arrived a little while later.
The driver deserves mention. He was a fan of the guy that designed the Aliens in
the movie Alien, Giger or something. By “fan” I mean he was covered in tattoos
in that style.

PB’s truck was towed to Tifton. PB and I rode in the tow truck, and everyone
else piled into William’s car.

Once there, we found the tire place was not open yet, but there was an open
restaurant nextdoor, so we decided to have breakfast.
Everyone except William — he slept in his car, with the car running.
The time was about 7:00AM.

With PB’s tire fixed, we started off again.

This Labor Day weekend I went to Atlanta, Georgia for Dragon*Con, and also to
meet Muffin.

I left on Friday with spoony, possum, and William.
William drove, since he finds my spoony’s car too small.
We wanted to avoid I-275 because the traffic there was thick, so we went north
on 49th St / McMullen Boot. We turned east too soon, and ended up circling
around tampa for an hour or two. The street signs in Tarpon Springs are not very
truthful.

Our first stop was in Valdosta to meet with Syrra and PB. They assumed we were
just stopping by to mean say “Hi”, but in fact I had
planned to kidnap them and bring them along.

Everyone piled into William’s car — which was crowded and wrong on many levels.
Possum got moved around the most, since he fits almost anywhere.

William’s car did not appreciate the weight of all 6 of us, but we drove to
Moultrie anyway. Syrra and PB watered their cat, got some clothing, we were off.
We decided to head back to Valdosta. Syrra and PB would take their truck, and
that would be fine.

Except the truck got a flat tire 30 miles out of Valdosta.
We sort of were stuck on the interstate waiting for a tow truck until the wee
hours of the morning.

Last night I managed to get openc2e
building with cmake. It seems to work on gentoo and debian, and it mostly works
on OS X. My current goal is to allow hassle-free building on OS X with macports.

In addition, there are a few problems building on FreeBSD. I have not really
attempted that yet, since the only person likely to use a freebsd build right
now is me.

Windows building should be greatly simplified.

I forgot to mention this, but Helen visited us last month — on July 14-15 (Saturday morning ’til Sunday evening).

We played some DS games (Mario Kart, and Worms), went to the movies (the new Harry Potter movie), and convinced Helen of the absolutely necessity of using GnuPG.

Since then I’ve had strep throat (again!), and lots of stuff has been going on, but I wanted to record (and remember) the fun we had.

I learned quite a few things:

1. “I’m not fast” means “I do not feel strongly about it”
2. Australians in the movie Undead do not talk funny, they “talk right”

I also remember Helen remarking about strawberry pop-tart flavored cappuccino: “America is so funny”.

Fuzzie prompted me the other day to start archiving / mirroring Creatures community websites, so their content will be preserved for future generations.
I have around 600M of stuff downloaded so far.

Please feel free to add to the list of things that need to be archived.

It seems the server I keep at my parent’s house, odin, is having disk corruption. I shut it down yesterday, and sometime today or tomorrow I should attempt data rescue. I don’t think anything would be lost even if the disk is totally trashed, but it’s the principal of the thing…

This effects the cosine sine server, since it ran on odin.

We watched the rest of BPS, and then Boondock Saints. Good
movie! Sometime between the two, Spoony went to sleep. I think
Helen did not fancy Boondock Saints very much, but she stayed up
for the whole thing. I stayed up a bit longer, playing some
dragonball Z game with Josh. PB then started playing Vice City, and
I was proceeded to be beaten at Mario Kart DS by Syrra.

At 3:00AM, we all called it quits.

Spoony woke me up with great effort. In my tired stupor, I tried
to explain that because of the bag of remotes, I did not need to
wake up. I do not remember this very well.

I managed to (finally) take some photos. I always forget such
things. I’ll upload them soon.

We got Helen to the airport in good time, said our goodbyes, and
came back home. Syrra and co. were still sleeping in our living
room, so we went back to bed. I think we all managed to wake up at
11:00 or noon.

Apparently, we did not close chibi chii (our not-quite-adult
cat) with us, so Josh had to defend himself with a broom all night
long. He said he didn’t remember doing so at all.

After everyone was showered or otherwise clean, we set out in
Josh’s car to get lunch and pocky. The first oriental market we
went to was closed, so we went to the (much larger) one on 34th
street. There was pocky and numerous other … things. Including
some unlabled jerky / dehydrated meat. I was going to get it, but I
chickened out in the end. It was probably just beef, but I didn’t
feel like experimenting. We ate lunch at Marbo, a very good
Californian-Chinese-American restuarant.

Of course, there was the incident with the egret and josh’s car,
which deserves its own seperate entry.

Morning: There are siners sleeping in my house!
We all stayed up until about 3:00AM watching BPS and talking.
Everyone but me is still asleep.

We have a schedule of sorts for today. We are going to eat
breakfast at IHOP, and then go to the swampy park near my parent’s
house. With any luck, helen will get to see an aligator, the
quintessential animal of Florida (I think, anyway).

After that, we will stop by my parent’s house to be polite and
suchlike.

Continuing south, we shall go over the Skyway (Helen wanted to
see it) and to Anna Maria Island, so Syrra can see a beach. She has
never seen one before.

PB also wants to stop at a Goodwill (a sort of thrift store) to
see if they have any computer parts.

Evening: We did everything on the schedule,
even though it was cold, wet, and cloudy. Helen must have brought
the weather from England with her. At the park, helen took photos
of PB and I comitting a misdemeanor, among lots of other photos.
She also took a picture of the IHOP!

I think we all had entirely too much fun at the Goodwill,
playing with various hats and things. I think both Spoony and Helen
bought some books.

Morning: Helen’s flight arrives tonight at
around 11:00 pm, spoony and I are going to pick her up. Also, Syrra
and PB are driving down from Georgia. Luckily we have two air
mattresses.

Evening: We have Helen now, and we are back
home. Syrra and PB were waiting in our driveway. And they brought
their friend Josh with them.

Helen brought us chocolates and other candies that boyfriend Joe
picked out. They’re good.

I think we are going to watch some Battle Programmer Shirase,
since neither Syrra nor Helen

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