LateNightHacking Louis Journal

Auth

Hmm. I think I got gyped! My pedometer said I only did 2K steps when I did my walk today, when it usually comes out to 4K. I want my steps! :) I think it must have got twisted sideways so it stopped counting properly. Pbbb.

Well, today I did a lot of housework and not much work work. Actually, I started out with a big distraction. I was thinking about how I was talking about Sugarland's "Baby Girl" yesterday, and I thought I would try and download it. I fired up Xolox, which it the last P2P program I used. I don't actually download MP3s very often, maybe once every five or six months even. I get more music than I can listen to by sharing CDs with my sister over Christmas. :) So, I fired up Xolox which worked great last time, but it kept locking up after a few minutes without ever establishing a connection. So much for that. I uninstalled it and installed Limewire, which had gotten good reviews on CNet. It ran like a charm. I found the song I was looking for and started messing around trying to think of other songs I wanted. One amusing bit - I tried to download Jo Dee Messina's new song "My Give A Damn's Busted". Well, apparently Joe Diffie also recorded the song, and most of the ones out there are his version, even if they're labeled Jo Dee Messina. So now I have both. :)

Tangent: labeled and labelled, canceled and cancelled - for both words, both spellings are considered correct. (I just had to look up labeled to check.) I wonder if it's something to do with their etymology? Or just their spelling? Parceled/parcelled is another. [Middle English, from Old French, portion, from Vulgar Latin *particella, diminutive of Latin particula, diminutive of pars, part-, part.] Excelled is different. [Middle English excellen, from Latin excellere]) Canceled/cancelled: [Middle English cancellen, from Old French canceller, from Latin cancellre, to cross out, from cancellus, lattice, diminutive of cancer, lattice.] Labeled/labelled: [Middle English, ornamental strip of cloth, from Old French, probably of Germanic origin.] Well, nothing too obvious. They are all from Middle English. The ones with dual spellings did come from Old French rather than directly from Latin. Any more examples or counter examples?

Anyway, while searching, I stumbled The Last Unicorn in movie format. Well, I haven't downloaded movies before, so I gave it a shot. It was an interesting experience. There was a bit of "bit torrent" aspect to the download, because I would often be downloading from multiple peers simultaneously, and I noticed that people were at the same time downloading it from me as well. I also saw many requests come in for pieces I didn't even have yet. However, even with multiple peers, it took all day to download the 700M file. I've run speed tests on my DSL line proving I can get 150K/s down, but I was only getting data rates of 5K/s to 20K/s most of the time, even with multiple peers. I don't know if it's because my upload link was saturated (though I'm 90% sure that was not the problem) or everyone else interested in the movie was using a modem connection. :) It did finally come in, though, and looks surprisingly pretty good. Now I'm trying to burn it onto a DVD so I can watch it on my TV. :)

Back to my day. I did a bunch of cleaning. Now, I love my house. If I could, I'd take it with me wherever we move to next. My only beef is that it's so big, it takes forever to clean. (And there's no coat closet on the first floor and almost no access through to the back yard except through the house, but these are all minor flaws.) I spent a couple of hours just cleaning the master bath. :) I used to be able to clean my apartment in a day. Now I'm lucky if I can do a floor. :)

I also worked on Valentines Day preparations. I picked up the rose bouquet I pre-ordered (the artichoke-like things as filler greenery are a bit odd). The 99 Cent store let me down. I expected they would have Valentines gift bags or wrapping paper or something (because they always have a pretty good selection of that kind of stuff), but they didn't. And while I was looking all around for the gift wrap, some take-and-bake Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies jumped into my hands. I left there with cookies and no gift wrap, which was certainly not my plan going in. :) I baked the cookies, both the chocolate chip ones and the sugar cookies with red hearts in them we had bought earlier. I dug around in the holiday closet, and with a little creativity, made my goodies presentable in a little basket with red tissue paper. Into the basket went (milk-) chocolates, a small gift (Lost In Translation), a card, and a Beanie Baby bear holding a rose. Following Michelle's wise principle of "make it easy for me", I also wrapped the gift that she asked me to get for me.

Then Michelle got home! She liked the flowers and basket, and wanted to open things, so had me hide while she got the rest of my goodies. Then we opened everything up! I got a cute card, a box of chocolates, and two books - Discovering The Wonders Of The Wonderland Trail: Encircling Mount Rainier by Bette Filley, and The Complete Walker IV by Colin Fletcher and Chip Rawlins. These are to help me get ready for the Mt. Rainier hiking trip I want to do (and the Peru trip too). More reading material! I'm excited. I just want to mention, that's probably the shortest time I've ever waited between wrapping a present and unwrapping it - probably less than ten minutes. :) But I don't care, both are fun. :)

For dinner, we walked over to Kentucky Fried Chicken. See, we've had a hankering for KFC since we thought about getting it for the Super Bowl and the idea fell through. I had chicken strips, a biscuit, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Michelle had popcorn chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy. While the food was good, I think that there was enough frying oil in the air to satiate my KFC urges for another year or so.

We came home, Michelle watched The Apprentice and I surfed, we read for a little while, then Michelle went to bed and I called my parents. That's it for the day's activities.

Boy, with all the chocolates and cookies (not to mention a fancy Valentines dinner coming up), I think it may be March before we get back on the healthy diet bandwagon again. :)

As far as reading goes, I'm just getting started on Bachanalia. (What a great name for a book! Can't you just see a bunch of music lovers sticking Bach's Greatest Hits in the CD player (the dance party remix [17s, 247K]), cranking it up so loud the neighbors call the police, and having a wild night of drunken revelry and debauchery? Yeah, baby!) OK, well the book may not be able to quite live up to such a title, but it's an easy, interesting read so far. Much easier than The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which I just finished. That was a hard read in spots. Sometimes when the author was talking about something mystical, he seemed to run out of verbs and hope that if he just stuck enough noun phrases in you'd eventually get the picture: