Tag: writing

Ladies of the Internet, you missed your chance! By the time you’re reading this, my fiance Ariesna and I will have completed exchanging our wedding vows and will be shoving cake into each other’s faces1. I’ve known that this day was coming up for some time, but it hadn’t really sunk in what was happening until the rehearsal tonight2 at the church. The sun was shining down and flooding the church with light. My groomsmen were following me to the front of the church and would crack into “Whistle While You Work” or something equally silly. We got to the alter area and we waited for the bride’s maids to come up and finally for Ariesna to be walked up my her father. Then we were holding hands and she was staring up into my eyes with this smile that just radiated joy at me. I’m pretty sure the pastor said something or other to us, but I wasn’t really paying attention to him at that point. I did hear something about practicing our kiss and that part went really well. Then it was all over and back to my Mom’s place to finish up a few last minute things before I headed back to the apartment while Ariesna headed down to her parent’s place.

I’m sure that seems horrendously old fashioned but we’re not going to get to see each other until we show up at the church for our day of wedding bliss3. She’ll show up at the church and get changed into some sort of remarkably girly wedding dress that I’ve yet to see. I’ll show up fully outfitted in my kilt. Yup, a kilt. I’ve got some Scottish blood in my veins and over the past couple of years, I’ve become more interested in that side of my ancestry. Back in the early stages of planning these festivities, I decided too get a kilt and wear it at the wedding. Many of my male friends and family have mocked this decision, particularly after learning what the full outfit cost but I think it’s a good investment. Though I do have to wish I’d found those online kilt rental places earlier so I could have the groomsmen in kilts too. Perhaps then they’d not be so quick to make snide remarks about me wearing a “dress”. Oh and that reminds me, I’ve heard and read many a good quip as a reply to what is worn under a kilt. Most of them I just laugh off, but I’ve got one that works for me. When asked by my oldest brother what I planned to wear beneath my kilt; I told him if he really wants to know, he has to buy a ticket from Ariesna to find out. :p

I apologize if this post seems even more rambling than my usual babblings… But I’ve got my country’s 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped. So now I’m off to get some rest; because as you know, if you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.

1 Note: I am under a threat of pain of death if I get any cake on her dress; so I’ll probably be all nice and gentle when I feed her that first piece of wedding cake.
2 I’m writing this post shortly before midnight on Friday, 6 May 2005 but I’m going to change the date/time of the post so that it doesn’t appear until the wedding ceremony has begun. I may get my past/present/future tenses a bit mixed up because of this, but you’ll just have to cope with that.
3 And yes, we’ve already heard many, many, MANY times about the lady from Georgia who had her break down and ran away to Alberqueque. Rest assured safe guards are in place so we won’t be kidnapped and so that neither one of us goes any further insane than we already are. Thank you for being the 900th idjit to make that joke to us.

My internet connection went down over the weekend and I ended up taking a half-day of vacation so I could be around for my appointment with the repair guy from 1-5. *grumpf* Why can’t they make appointments like normal people (e.g. 3-4)? Anyways, as you can see my internet connection has finally been fixed and I’ve been catching up on my email and reading the blogs that I do. The following quiz was found via AWelkin:

Recently, I’ve been experiencing some problems getting iTunes & Windows to read/write from/to my iPod. Sometimes, both Windows & iTunes could see it but even then I could only transfer maybe 1 or 2 files before I’d start having problems. And occassionally, Windows should BSOD on me. I started browsing the Apple forums and found out I wasn’t the only one having this problem. But I’ve got an older iPod and my PC has onboard Firewire ports that I use to connect my iPod to. Finding somebody else reporting the exact same problems I was having was simple, but most times the solution mentioned was to switch from using USB connections to Firewire. After some more hunting around in the forums; I noticed that most people recommended using an Adaptec FireConnect 4300 to hook up your iPod to your computer. And yesterday while shopping for my brother’s birthday present at BestBuy; I noticed they had the card in the store. I thought about it but held off; as I hadn’t really tried out GTKPod under my Linux install yet. It started to work but my computer ended up freezing solid. I couldn’t SSH into it or get it to switch to another session to close out and had to power my computer off/on.1

So when that didn’t work; I decided I’d go back to Best Buy and get the card. I am ever glad that I did. Hooking up the iPod to the FireConnect 4300 works like a charm. Neither Windows or iTunes had any trouble reading/writing from/to the iPod and it feels like the music files get transfered over faster too. So if you’re having read/write problems with your iPod and you’re not using an Adaptec FireConnect 4300; buy one now!

1 I don’t blame GTKPod for this, as I’ve heard the 2.6.8 kernel has issues with Firewire drives and I am currently running a 2.6.8 kernel.

AWelkin posted an interesting meme on her journal a bit back and I finally got around to answering it; so I figured I’d push my luck and also post it here.

If you read this, even if I don’t speak to you often, would you please post a memory of me? It can be anything you want, it can be good or bad, just so long as it happened. Then post this to your journal. See what people remember about you!

Wet Leaf

Ariesna and I went out walking today. Partly because I have a couple dozen rolls of unused film collecting dust, but mostly because AWelkin will get a chance to see Iwahara-san & Keki-san at a conference this month. Why is that important? Well, they were fabulous to all of us who went on the trip to Japan last summer that I feel the need to extract some hospitality vengeance upon them. 😀

Around 1pm, we headed out and started today’s walking/photography adventures. We went over to the Iowa River & Power Company’s parking lot and I started taking pictures of the river, some trees the remains of the dam1. However the main reason we were there is I’d heard from a co-worker that there’s a big nest of eagles in that area. We’d probably been there about half an hour without seeing anything when some other people came up with binoculars. From what we could overhear them saying; they were coming to try and see the eagles too. So I asked them about the eagles and they pointed the nest out to us2. We chatted with them for a couple of minutes and they mentioned some other areas around town we could go to look for eagles. Then we started walking away and spotted an eagle a bit further up the river. I probably shot 15-20 pictures using my 35mm camera and I know some of them weren’t focused that well. Hopefully, at least one or two will turn out nicely. We left shortly after that and went to a couple of the parks over in Iowa City and then down by the Iowa River and the UofI’s Art museum. It was a lot more walking than we usually do, but it was a good time.

I only ended up using about 2 rolls of film (~50 total photos) but I also took some shots with my digital camera. The image attached to this post (and now added to the Gallery) was the last photo I took today, as we walked back to the car. I’m starting to feel a bit tired, so that’s all for now.

1 They’ve torn a good chunk of it down, but I’m pretty sure the plan is to rebuild it.
2 To give credit where credit is due, Ariesna had spotted it but from the description I’d gotten; I told her that was too small to be it. Besides, we hadn’t seen any eagles near it or anywhere on the river.