Well, I spent the past few days up at my mom’s house in Maine celebrating Thanksgiving. I drove up on Wednedays, and came back on Saturday. Mom prepared a great Thanksgiving dinner, including juicy turkey, mashed potatoes, lima beans, stuffing, and the like. It was all great. The turkey was a free government turkey, which my mom got from the place she was working. We had some doubts about how it would turn out, but it ended up being one of the best turkey’s I’ve had.
Pretty much the entire time I was up there, Ralph tried to find a moose for me to take a picture of. I’m led to believe the moose are equipped with some sort of camera detecting radar system, as they all managed to hide for the 2 days we were looking. About the closest I came was seeing a deer on the way back on a highway off-ramp. Ah well, maybe next time.
Speaking of pictures, I took another bunch of the cabin while I was up there, and got the uploaded to my gallery.
Overall I had a good time, it was relaxing to get away from the apartment and work for a few days and not really have anything to do. I’ve got a ton of leftovers that I was sent home with in the fridge. Those should last me about a week, I think. Now I just need to start planning my next trip out to Indiana and Michigan later this month. 
Random Junk
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve made a few changes to my journal page. Recently I’ve been playing with a bunch of plugins for MovableType, and decided to use some of them here. The book image and my new book page use the MTAmazon plugin to grab the image links and book information directly from Amazon. The book collection itself is managed using the BookQueue plugin, which let’s me scan most of my books in using my Cuecat barcode scanner, which is pretty slick. For some reason though, paperbacks don’t use the same barcode scheme as hardcover books, so they can’t be scanned. The Netflix info is gathered by part of the Netflix Suite of plugins.
I’m also working on a couple of new plugins based on the Netflix Suite to pull information from my game and DVD collections on IGN and DVD Aficionado. I’ll write more about those once I get them working. The game collection plugin is half working at the moment, and I hope to get it together by the end of the week.
Geek Stuff
Andrea and I went to see Master and Commander this afternoon. For a movie that’s getting so many good reviews it seemed rather mediocre. I went into it expecting an action film, and while the action was good, there were only 2 good action scenes, and they were seperated by about an hour of drudgery. It wasn’t that it was bad, it’s just that is was paced way too slowly for my liking. Ah well, can’t win them all.
Guess I’ll go back to watching The Perfect Storm from Netflix, though it seems like there’s a conspiracy that keeps interrupting me everytime I sit down to watch it.
Random Junk
Thanks to Gizmodo, I now know where to get the solution to one of my biggest complaints in movie theaters. Granted, it’s illegal to use one, but still, I really really want one of these.
Random Junk
Guess that’ll teach me for testing things on my own LiveJournal. I was working on some modifications to my ljcrosspost plugin for MovableType, and I messed up and deleted my last entry, along with it’s comments. I should probably do my testing on another journal. Ah well.
Anyway, I’ve worked out some additions to ljcrosspost that I think will be pretty useful. The first one is pretty simple, just allowing you to specify a text-formatting plugin to run on the entry before it gets sent to LJ, like so <$MTLJCrosspost user="pla" pass="pla" filters="jive"$>. Nothing too special there, but it got me thinking. I decided it would be nice to have full control over what gets posted to LiveJournal, so I added a new tag, LJCrosspostEntry. This one let’s you specify exactly what to post, like so:
<MTLJCrosspostEntry user="pla" pass="pla">
<$MTEntryBody$>
<p>Crossposted from <a href="<$MTEntryLink$>">here</a></p>
</MTLJCrosspostEntry>
I also added another new tag that let’s you insert a link to the LiveJournal entry from the MovableType entry, <$MTEntryLink user="pla"$>. It’d be nice if it didn’t need that ‘user’ in there, but I kindof messed up in the way I store the plugin data, so it needs it. Ah well.
I still have some testing to do on this version before I release it, but I think it’s looking pretty good now. I still want to add a way to set LJ moods and music, but that’s about it.
Geek Stuff
So I went out and bought the new Castlevania for PS2 today. Been playing it for a little bit, and so far it seems pretty cool. I think I still perfer the older 2D games, like Symphony of the Night. Still not used to the whole 3D thing, though this one seems much better thought out than Castlevania 64 on the N64. I’ll try to remember to write up a bit more on it once I finish it.
Also today, Andrea came by to pick up her gift, a Finding Nemo DVD. Turns out she already bought it a few days ago. Figures ☹ What’s she doing buying things so close to her birthday anyway?
Gaming
This past week seems to have flown by, yet it already seems like the whole Texas trip was ages ago. Odd. Anyway, I did get some stuff around the apartment done this week. I finally rearranged the living room and cleaned up the kitchen. I’m going through the place one room at a time and trying to make it all presentable again. I let it slip way too much when the cat was around. Next up is my bedroom, which is now littered with little piles of books and clothes and computer parts. I’ll work on that Sunday, if I have time.
Friday night I went with a few friends to see Matrix Revolutions. I thought it was better than Reloaded overall, though the ending is pretty cheesy. I won’t go into specifics, so as not to ruin it for others, but overall I was pretty disappointed with the lack of depth in a lot of the plot. So many things were started and hinted at in Reloaded that just got dropped completely. I think they must have run into money issues after the second one didn’t live up to expectations, that they just had to do what they could and get this one out the door. If that is the case, then it’s kindof sad. Perhaps the whole thing was better left as just The Matrix.
Today I was supposed to head up into Maine for a wedding, but decided to skip it. I felt pretty sick this morning, but it seems to have cleared up over the day. So instead I lounged around the apartment for a while, then did some of the aforementioned cleaning. I think I like the new living room arrangement, feels a lot more roomy. Just need to run a vacuum over it and it should look pretty good.
Oh, and looking at the clock I see it is now Sunday, so I can wish a Happy Birthday to Andrea. Hopefully my gift to her this year will go over better than last year’s mistake.
Random Junk
