Archived news items from January 2005
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current news
newer old news from February 2005
There's not much to report from the last week. I still have a nagging cough that bugs me. I've (as of last night) logged 65 hours on Paper Mario. Last night's accomplishment was getting to level 80 in the Pit of 100 Trials and thereby obtaining the Bump Attack badge, which is pretty cool and will help a lot in allowing me to go up levels in the future.
Of course, I could have beaten the game a long time ago now, but I'm having fun just playing, and it'd be really cool to have enough badge points to wear all my cool badges at once.
Yes, I realize how much of a dork this makes me.
School is still going well, too. Anyway, I'm off to assault the next area: the Fahr Outpost.
I repositioned my cell phone wallpaper image slightly to avoid some of the text on my main display, and colored it green. The new image looks like this:
Also got to hang out with former roommate Bob Carlton last night, and we ate at Chuy's. It was good to see him.
With a little help from faithful reader Mackenzie, I've got a new 'wallpaper' for my cell phone. I created the image based on the signature "-g-" at the bottom of every page here and uploaded it to this site. Then Mackenzie got it off the page using her cell phone, which has regular web access for a nominal fee, and texted it to my phone. Which I could then set as a background image.
The image is 96 pixels by 65 pixels, because that's the exact size of the screen on my phone, and images of different sizes don't scale very well.
I got caught up on grading, so I'm hitting on all cylinders at school for a bit. Things are in a nice groove and I'm feeling all right.
Been playing plenty of Paper Mario: I've currently logged over 40 hours and am on "Keelhaul Key", which is the fifth star of seven. I'm not in any hurry, since it's playing the game which I enjoy.
Rented Supersize Me from this cool DVD kiosk at my local grocery store. You give it a credit card and choose a movie, and it spits out a rugged little case containing just the disc (no real DVD case, no liner notes, etc). Watch the movie, return it and feed it back into the same machine, and you're charged a mere $1.00 per day!
Supersize Me is very well-done and a good reminder that you lots of people do things all the time which aren't good for them. That is, just because "everybody does it" doesn't mean it's smart. I highly recommend the movie.
Just last night I watched a second $1 rental: Luther, which is about the life of Martin Luther, who unwittingly began the Protestant Reformation in early 16th Century Germany. The movie was good, and fairly historically accurate. Also worth seeing (especially for $1).
Oh, and I rode my bike to school today, which felt good.
Actually late Sunday night....
Hey, all. Busy few days. First of all, I bought a used Game Cube at my local Game Crazy and a copy of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. And I played that a lot on Wednesday.
Late Thursday night my brother and his wife and boys rolled into Austin to spend a few days. They stayed at a hotel a mile or so away, which helped with my sleep schedule, at least.
Mostly we just hung around, played some Paper Mario, went shopping some, and went out to eat a bunch. They left this afternoon.
Yesterday, we brought my computer up to the school so I could get some internet access for my recent install of Fedora Core 3, and thus install all the software updates and such for everything.
We didn't have time yesterday, but it's what I've been doing all afternoon and evening (and not grading, unfortunately). I've got mplayer working, and all the dependencies for mkxvcd.sh, which is no small feat.
Most recently I've been trying to correctly encode a ripped DVD (which I own, by the way) so that the resulting VCD will play smoothly on my stock DVD player. It's a slow process, because one "try" takes a little over an hour. Oof.
Anyway, since I'm still up, I'm going to grade a little while the latest try is transcoding, and then go home and get some sleep. Got school tomorrow.
December 2004
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