Number Five is alive!

The movie Short Circuit is actually happening. Fascinating, yet terrifying at the same time.

iBank or LiquidLedger?

Been looking at what financial applications are available, and from what I can tell, LiquidLedger and iBank appear to be the best couple of financial applications around. They both openly advertise supporting OFX, which is a must in my opinion (automatic statement downloading is cool). Just not sure which of those two applications I should get. LiquidLedger doesn't have a trial period, so I can't really test it to see if I like it, though I'm leaning towards it over iBank. Anybody have experience with either applications?

ecto blogger & a birthday

I learned about ecto today from Robert, and it seems like a really neat blogging application. I'll give it a fair two-week trial before dropping the $18 for a license. From what I've seen of it so far, its nice. Has a lot of options and a nice clean UI.
So today I took my truck to the truck doctor for an oil change and general checkup. My truck is nice an healthy at its 9000 mile mark; a very comforting thought. Then Ngoc & I went shopping for birthday presents for Quynh & Thu. We drove up to Stanford & had dinner at a Japanese place called Gombei or something. The food was good; very filling. Afterwards we went to Chili's for desert, because it seems Quynh wanted something sweet. We had a nice time, both Ngoc & I. And so that was my Saturday.

GnomeNautilus

Many thanks to my younger sister Laura for this amazing photo. This is one from a series of still life photos she was doing for a class. I saw this one, and I knew it was destined to become a GNOME wallpaper. Isn't this just oozing with Apple-style class? I also have a JPEG copy for those of you who are bandwidth-impaired.

Battlestar Galactica

I just got finished watching a marathon session of the new Battlestar Galactica series. I caught most of a re-airing of the 2003 mini-series, which was followed by the series premiere of the "re-imagining". That's about 3 hours of non-stop BSG, though I enjoyed it. And in typical me fashion, I now want to see the original TV movie and the original TV series. The new series airs on SciFi Friday's at 10PM, and it seems I've got something regular on my schedule now besides work.
I don't know much about the series, and I'm a new-comer to the BSG universe, but it seems like a neat plot. Its got the "robots rising up against humanity" concept (similar to The Matrix), but without all the annoying super-cheesy cyber-punk neo-techno garbage. So it feels more along the lines of what I had hoped the Matrix would be, based on the Animatrix Second Renaissance Part 1 and Part 2. BSG also has a neat Star Wars space battle concept as well. Those two themes, put together, makes a rather interesting show. Interestingly enough, IMDB recommends Star Trek: Deep Space 9, if you like Battlestar Galactica. It turns out, DS9 is my favorite of the Star Trek series, so it should be no surprise I like BSG.
In other TV news, Matthew Perry did a guest appearance on Highway to Heaven. The episode is on right now. He's incredibly young, nineteen in fact.
I seem to be turning into a right regular TV buff. I think I get into good TV shows the same way I get into good movies. Ah well, its an acceptable past-time I suppose.

GNOME griefs - gnome-theme-manager

There are a few things about GNOME that have really been bugging me. I'll be posting my problems with them here, as they come to me. Tonight, I start with everyone's favorite, the GNOME theme manager.
This piece of junk has been buggy since GNOME 2.0. A long time outstanding bug is #102216 (icon themes install into ~/.themes instead of ~/.icons). It looks like Luis has marked this as a milestone bug for GNOME 2.10, though I still feel its about 4 minor GNOME releases too late.
Also, just recently, the theme-manager has started eating 100% of my CPU when it starts up. It looks like its trying to generate its theme previews, and while its doing so, it manages to make itself completely useless. It doesn't redraw its UI, but is still running. It responds to mouse clicks in the ListView and on the Buttons. I have to use gconf-editor to change my theme. Davyd just told me about "themes://" in Nautilus, but that's even worse. It generates its cute little thumbnails pretty quickly, but I can't actually use the themes in there. Double-clicking on them does nothing, and I can't change individual GTK, Metacity or Icon themes.
And on top of that, the recently released Smooth engine 0.6 seems to cause some problems with the theme-manager's thumbnail generation. Causes them all the be question marks, and sometimes even does the "eat all my CPU" thing.
And don't even get me started on the irritating Metatheme idea. I've never been a fan of that, and thought it was a bad idea to move in that direction (though I admit it does fit in with the "simplifying GNOME" goal). I think I'll have to write a decent theme switcher for those of us who are heavy theme users. With options to edit the current theme if its a Gtk or Metacity theme, to reload the current theme (so you don't have to switch to one, and then back again). Yes indeed, that sounds like a swell idea.

Drivel

Just read about Drivel 1.3.0 on Foot Notes, and so I decided to give it a try. So I'm posting this from Drivel.
Lets try some formatting and see how it does.
EDIT: Interesting, it seems it posts to Blogger, but doesn't issue a re-publish command. I suppose it saves them as Drafts or such. Oh well, I still don't mind using the web interface.

New Year's

On my drive home from my girlfriend's house tonight I saw, surprise, an accident. One of those ugly new cars was in the middle of the street, perpendicular to the middle divider lane; the driver-side door was open. Three younger looking (probably mid-20s) were on the opposite side of the street, and slightly up from them was a mid-sized SUV; I didn't catch the model, but its front driver-side bumper was a bit chewed up. I slowed down, didn't see much activity and saw no one lying on the ground; the girls were on a cell phone, so I drove on...
All this hype about New Year's Eve.. I don't get it. What's the big deal? I can kinda understand a small gathering, kissing your loved one at midnight and New Year's resolutions, but all the wild parties, silly TV extravaganzas and drunkeness I cannot understand. So anyway, I hope everyone had a safe New Year's, and here's to the best in 2005.