time to comemorate an arbitrary date again. happy new year peoples.

woke up early again and went to the doctor's office again. the doctor canceled. they forgot to tell me. i'm sorry, is this monday *again* ?

woke up early and went to the doctor. found out the appointment is tomorrow. ah monday.

I knew NWN:HotU would disrupt my otherwise normal life.

I must have done something today apart from playing NWN: HoU. It probably involved cleaning implements and my mind blocked it.

today was mostly play and keeping vasco happy.

oh that and trying to figure out transcode, lavtools, smil and eli.

xmas preparations, eating, drinking, merriment and shreding of gift wrappings.

D. Policarpo defende que a Igreja Católica seja mencionada na constituição como elemento unificador da cultura europeia. E que bem que a Igreja Católica tem unificado a Europa. Tem unificado as ditaduras fascistas, tem unificado a Irlanda, tem unificado os protestantes, tem unificado os hereges, tem unificado os judeus, tem unificado os muçulmanos, tem unificado os escravos, tem unificado a ciencia em fim, uma unificação imparavel ao longo de 10 seculos. Onde estariamos nós sem a mão orientadora da Igreja Católica Romana ?

oh a most succefull shopping run which is a wonder consider the time of year. no, not late gifts but groceries. much needed groceries :)

sal got a xmas gift, a ddr400 256M stick. that prompted me to say "hmmm, I might try to clock the older 333 stick at 400 and see what happens". for the record, 30 mins of memtest86 doesn't make for extensive testing.

finally went to see LotR:RotK. OMFG. I must say, peter jackson brought to life my view of the book.

vasco's log: today we went to the circus. it was loud and bright and there were strange animals. it was very fun. and then i fell asleep.

the day turned out to be remarkably bad.

ventured into trying to find out what was keeping the treo from beeping. enroled google and it found me this page about fixing a similar problem. today i proceded to opening the case and visually inspecting it. tomorrow, a fix probably.

my word. found out the speaker on the treo isn't working. on top of that one of the lights on twingo's dashboard is getting flacky. is today intl stuff stops working day ?
NWN:HoU however is working flawlessly. and it's fun too!

ohhhh just after my bitching yesterday Bioware released the HoU Linux client. However, due to my bad karma I only saw it just before going to bed. sigh.
otoh I now have all the needed cables and connections for the DV camera. woohoo.

today the amazon goodies arrived. but oh what a debacle it was.
seems like the lazy people at bioware haven't finished the NWN: HoU linux engine *yet*. I mean, I want to play damn it!
not only that my plans to move vhs to digital were foiled once again, this time for lack of a suitable scart plug. I must say that was annoying.

oh, and last but not least the plecos seems to be utterly blind now. blind fish are not happy fun fish.

somehow, I found the strenght in me to hack a couple of lines into balsa. blessed be the lazy!

I had a cunning plan. It involved moving content on crusty VHS to DVD via DV. However my plan was foiled by lack of a simple SCART cable. GAARRRR.

finally! oh finally! commited the bonobo stuff on balsa. it still needs work but it's there now! :)

after my bitching yesterday amazon told me today they're shipping my goodies. hoorahh. with any look the package will be here monday :)
speaking about bitching, I made a complaint about the ending of a show and public teve actually replied - and it was even a human. i'm impressed!

Today I discovered MSIE's parser was written by a cadre of drunken baboons in heat. Or maybe not. But the result is pretty much the same. No wonder it's rather dificult to find a week where at least 2 IE parser related user info compromising bugs don't surface.

I whish I could get my hands on the spammer that used my domain as From:. Really. That's all I can say without legal issues.

no rest for the wicked. really.

went on a cleaning rampage. dunno what came over me. I hope it's gone.

ohh holiday monday. la la la.
and that's all I have to say about that.

oh busy day, mostly busy playing with vasco but busy anyway!

some time ago (was it a month ago ? oh dear) I said, sure no problem I can get bonobo into balsa in no time. serves me right! turns out I not only was pretty clueless about the client/server stuff but also imagined I had much more free time than I actually do. anyway, I finally got the bonobo stuff to work today and should be smooth sailing from now on (huau, didn't I say this before ?)
also, note to self: when you're hacking in periods of 30 minutes make notes. It's not very productive wasting 10 minutes trying to figure out where you left off.

I made my peace with xmas again. Gifts upgraded, sorted and all around a quite busy morning.

After a couple of weeks of banging head on and off with balsa bonobo code I finally figured out why oh it was doing naught. It turns out I had a stupid typo on the .server file and it was being ignored by bonobo-activation-daemon. It was mostly stupid cause I made the same exact mistake once before and I went throught the exact same griding to find it. In fact, I think I prolly started with the same bad template this time.
There's some blame for bonobo-activation-daemon too. As usual when I'm stumped I start stracing pretty much everything involved and that's how I found out b-a-d writes a bunch of debuging info to stderr. "but it's a daemon!" you say. well, yes, there's no way anyone will ever see it. and that's where it says "you suck, your .server has errors".

extended weekend again woohoo!

I just can't win with xmas. Just after some stress and general suckiness nvolving not finding a particular gift geting solved I go grocery shoping and find a better version of said gift. GAR.
I don't foresee a fun saturday morning.

Estava alegremente na FNAC a consumir e peguei no CeDe novo do Rui Veloso, um duplo ao vivo. Ponderei o preço, estava a examinar a lista de faixas e reparei num pequeno autocolante que diz "contém proteção anticopia - não toca em computador" ou qualquer coisa nesse sentido. Dado que não aprecio dar dinheiro a pessoas que me tratam como um criminoso comum e se dão ao trabalho de produzir um CD que na realidade não é um CD (isto é, mentem) e que só toca em alguns leitores puz o dito disquinho na prateleira e voltei-me para BlindZero. Rui pá, se calhar até és um gajo porreiro mas vai para o raio que te parta mais a proteçãozinha.
(há o pequeno detalhe da dita proteção infrigir o meu direito de efectuar uma cópia de segurança como diz a lei, mas como não sou advogado não vou por ai)

went on an excedingly succefull shopping run at lunch time. exceding cause I the stuff I went for and then some!
Finally gave in and got myself a tripod for those eeerie 15s exposures. That and rugrat videotaping :) Also gave in and got the "Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii" DVD. I *had* a rather bad vhs copy of it and pretty much *lost* it. When I say lost I probably mean someone boroughed it and 'forgot' to return it. So that's a teen trauma and I'm excused.

As I should know (*sob*) MPEGing interlaced stuff from a DV camera can't bring anything good. Also, viewing a DVD on TeVe is fairly diferent from viewing on a PeCe screen. Also, you can't expect miracles from sub 100EUR tabletop players.
And, I so need a faster CPU. Processing video gets booring fast :\

it's colder. gar!

xmas is eshtreeemly pishing me off. where's the "endless supply of consumer goods for people who want to buy them" store ?

this evening's hacking time was consumed by pseudo legalese hacking. i must say grown up life despite bringing me some material goodness hasn't done very well in other chapters such as "unsuckiness"

oh work is back! with a vengence!
not only that, but it's damn cold. grrrr.

3 day weekends rule. tomorrow i'm getting up early for work and I'm not depressed. In fact, I'm actually fairly happy to start another week. while this is highly surprising employeers should learn from my experience.

pop goes the weasel. odd bits and pieces of stuff done and there goes the day. anyway, there was a relaxing amount of playing with vasco and I figured out why my dvds didn't work - my fstab was Wrong (i broke it myself! i'm so proud!) and they got mounted with filenames renamed to lowercase. (duh)
Meanwhile dvdrhelp says my tabletop nintaus only plays dvd-r and dvd+r, not rw. That kind of sucks and makes testing quite expensive. On the plus side, it does take the cheapest -r discs in the market :)
Another damn time consuming task is video editing. A pro can easily waste 3 days on 5 minutes of video and I see how. I'm an adept of the 1 hour of work for 15 minutes of result so it looks like crap in the end. Despite my lack of talent I'm getting fairly cozy with Cinelerra which is turning out to be everything they advertised. kudos to the heroine virtual people!

And mail nibled away at the rest of my time. I started xemacs, started gdb twice and that's my balsa hacking for today. sigh.

did I mention teve played the last B5 episodes this week ? boooh.