Archives: July 2003
Saturday, July 26, 2003
Last Sunday we headed down to NJ with the plan to go fruit picking and recapture memories of our youth ;)
Unfortunately strawberries are apparantly "out of season" (could have fooled me looking at supermarket shelves) and the woman that Kit spoke to on the phone was most unhelpful about other alternatives. So instead we went and took out some boats and rowed around the water near Kit's mother's house. Was loads of fun, even if Kit did capsize his boat ;) though I guess that was part of the fun ;)
This week I also finished up the 2 fanlistings for Storm Constantine and Freda Warrington, Pitr finished the script for it and PreZ helped me to install them.
The night before we watched The Affair of the Necklace a supposedly true story set towards the end of Marie Antoinette's reign in France. Interesting story, pretty costumes, decent acting, though Hilary Swank's accent seemed to veer towards the very strange on many occasions.
@ 12:30 PM EST
Friday, July 18, 2003
Yes! Video card arrived on Thursday, and from the look of it they gave me a brand new one as a replacement, so I'm thrilled.
I managed to work some on the layout for the Freda fanlisting and I'm now fairly happy with it, which is good as I was a bit at a loss as to how to fit it all together, even though I had the stunning image by Ruby to use.
PreZ received the new rackmount case for goth.net and happily went on his way putting in the new motherboard, only to realise that this new mobo won't take goth.net's current ram because it's not registered ram. So he had to put everything back into it's original case, and we're now looking at the purchase of another batch of ram to get goth.net working in its new rack mountable case.
He would have needed to buy new ram anyway at some point because he wants to use goth.net's old mobo for another machine and had planned to upgrade goth.net's cpu's at some point as well. He'd just not counted on this purchase needing to be done so soon. God bless hardware compatibility ;)
@ 02:08 AM EST
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
So sometime on Thursday I should get my video card back, thankfully. It's very frustrating being unable to access your own things on your own system, especially when there are a number of things you were working on beforehand that you want to finish.
I recently applied for the fanlisting for Pirates of the Caribbean, it would be really nice if I'd get that one, but I'm guessing I don't have a hope in hell actually, especially with the popularity of the lead actors and the fact that it was a fantastic movie that will have endeared millions. Ah well.
Pitr did finish tweaking the phpfanbase program so it could be used with postgres, so I'll be able to install that when I have access to the 2 listings I was building. I haven't tested it out yet since he finished working on it, I'll need to do that soon.
Argh! give me back my computer, let me work on my projects!
@ 01:09 AM EST
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Saturday was mostly a veg out day... slept in too late to really head out to the mall to do some much needed shopping for such clothing necessities as new underwear, so we ended up doing a whole bunch of fuck all really.
Why is there never anything decent on tv on the weekend? Plenty of interesting shows and movies on during the week, but the weekend programming is destined to suck.
Sunday morning PreZ was on the phone to Cherie outlining all the possibilities she has for him to build her a new computer for a relatively low price, and he then invited her along to go to the Palisades mall as we were going to head off there shortly to get some of that overdue necessities shopping done.
So we met up with her there and roamed around the mall for a while, bought a few essential items as well as some non-essential stuff, such as the latest Sims expansion pack and the new Civilisation 3 expansion (yay, multiplayer/internet/LAN gaming!), had some food at the Outback steakhouse and headed back to our place afterwards.
More computer-part discussing was done and some regular chit-chat and we then decided to go bowling. The bastards at the bowling alley would only let us do one game but that was still fun. It never ceases to amaze me how the guy behind the counter (with a weird grapefruit sized growth on his hand *shudder*) still doesn't recognise PreZ, even though he's been bowling there on a pretty much weekly basis for about 2.5 years now. Not that PreZ sticks out like a sore thumb or anything, but he definitely doesn't look like everyone else and you'd definitely remember him if he came by once a week for 2+ years.
Had some coffee and pie afterwards, then mucked around at home looking at pictures and silly things online for a while before saying sayonara to Cherie and crawling into bed.
@ 09:49 PM EST
Saturday, July 12, 2003
We went to see the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen yesterday too...
I haven't read the graphic novel by Alan Moore, so I can't compare the two, though judging by the reputation of Mr. Moore and the reverence with which he's held by such superb authors as Neil Gaiman I'm pretty sure that his graphic novel was a damn sight better than this movie.
There's not really all that much that I can say about it. It looked very impressive from the ads and trailers that I'd seen, and that's definitely one of the aspects where it did deliver... visuals. It's stylistically gorgeous, unfortunately the beauty seems skindeep in this case.
@ 02:59 PM EST
Friday was somewhat of a busy day.
I spent the morning at the Dutch consulate applying to renew my passport. Not something that actually took very long, it was more the part where you wait in line with only 2 windows and a bunch of people in front of you who haven't gotten all their requirements in order before they decided to go waste people's time in front of the consulate staff. Urgh! But, in 2 weeks I can call to check if the passport is there and go to collect it if it is.
Then after I got home PreZ started battling the bureacracy of the BCIS, née INS, trying to figure out what the hell was going on with the paperwork. Seems that they didn't have our change of address on file, (even though we've sent 2 seperate batches of paperwork from the new address as well, god forbid you actually have everything updated in a database...) and also the USPS aren't allowed to forward INS mail. Nice of them to tell us... neither the BCIS nor the USPS in their little 'moving house' package ever mentioned that this kind of stuff wouldn't get forwarded.
So we sent in a change of address form, a year and a half after we actually moved... supposedly they'll be forwarding the held mail to us within 2 weeks or so. I can only imagine that there were deadlines or meetings in there that I might have missed. *sigh*.
Other than that had a short discussion with PreZ about the future of goth.net, some redesign stuff... we need to sit down with a notepad and just scribble down the things that need to change, what needs to be added and such.
I miss not having my graphics card. The replacement didn't make it before the weekend, so that will probably be monday or tuesday (fingers crossed for monday). There's loads of stuff I want to work on, including a number of site designs I've been working on. Not being able to do that is so frustrating. I could do a bunch of the xhtml stuff on here, no problem, but I can't photoshop on this thing, and currently I need to finish the visual side of the layout for the Freda Warrington fanlisting, as well as resize a number of images for the Freda fansite I have.
PreZ also signed up for the Amazon affiliate program, so if we get people to order through links on our site then we might be able to make some commission which would go towards goth.net and our other domains and the various costs associated with them. Paypal donations aren't bringing in anything in the way of revenue, this would be a better way of trying to get people to help out and support what we do.
@ 02:21 PM EST
Thursday, July 10, 2003
So Friday was the fourth of July, we spent it in much the same way as last year... down in NJ with plans to be on the beach that night and watch the fireworks. We were joined this year by Katie and Keith and also Chad, an internet friend of Cherie and Katie's. Before the beach we had food at Cherie's grandmother, who was kind enough to feed a bunch of strange kids ;)
Other than that we had a load of fun on the beach talking and watching fireworks. Sometime after 1 we headed off to a diner for some breakfast, then dropped Cherie and Kit off home and ventured back up to NY where we were in bed around 5am. A fun day.
Sunday we headed back down to NJ to pick up some stuff at the house of a co-worker of PreZ's, then on to Cherie where PreZ was going to try and set up her computer. Cherie had completely forgotten and as Murphy's Law would have it of course wasn't home. So we dropped by Kit's place instead, headed out for some food and then sweltered inside in front of Quills which is an absolutely fabulous movie. Geoffrey Rush is stellar in the role and the movie manages to make it poignant yet also has a lot of wit and humour infused into it.
Monday I FedExed my graphics card back to the manufacturer to get that replaced. They would have received it on wednesday... I can but hope that they second-day expressed it back, but I doubt it. So probably no videocard until after the weekend. Bleh. I'm currently using PreZ's old laptop which now runs windows, but it's not all that fast of a machine, and I'm frustrated that I can't work on various site projects anymore.
Speaking of site projects I acquired Ruby's permission to use her graphic from Freda Warrington's latest novel for the layout, which makes me very happy.
Yesterday was also the day Pirates of the Caribbean was unleashed on theatres in the US. I egged PreZ to go see it last night :) I lovelovelove that movie. Loads of fun and action packed and lots to drool about with both Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and the gorgeous Keira Knightley. Great fun indeed, and it's on the dvd wishlist already. Amusing to have Geoffrey Rush in two period movies in a single week.
@ 09:13 PM EST
Thursday, July 3, 2003
I wrote up most of an entry yesterday for my computer to chew it up and lock, so here goes another attempt...
I finished the layout for the Jewelfire site, though I need to add some more book covers and possibly a few other small things.
The layout and most of the content for the Storm Constantine fanlisting is also up, though that's still lacking in the member/database stuff, which Pitr is currently looking at. Thanks Pitr!
Waiting for permission to use a certain graphic for the Freda Warrington fanlisting, which gives me time to try and come up with a design for Bermon.net.
@ 08:49 PM EST