Monthly Archives: May 2005

Marty borrowed a few DVDs from the library, one of which was Bride of Frankenstein, which we watched last night. I thought the movie was really quite good, though not at all what I expected.

First off, the title was a complete misnomer- Frankenstein’s (the monster) bride only made an appearance for about the last 2 minutes of the movie (though she did have the best line in the movie: “Hissss!”). A much more accurate title would have been “Rrreturrrn of Frrrankenstein”, IMHO (imagine those as rolling r’s).

Secondly, all of the ‘famous’ Frankenstein scenes I’m familiar with (read: that I’ve seen parodied) actually come from this movie, not its predecessor. I take that to mean that this, overall was a much better movie, though I could be wrong as I haven’t seen the original.

Last night I decided to redye my hair (by myself, this time!) – see?

At about that time, happicow decided to reinstall Webby. I have no idea why, but it’s made my life for the past day more difficult than it needs to be, trying to get everything to the same state of usefulness it was at before. This is why my website has been on-and-off unavailable today (part of that was me breaking PHP, but that’s another story).

The most annoying part is that my crontab is gone now, so I have to try and figure out what all of the useful things I had in there were… why can’t user crontabs be kept in a place that makes sense, such as in user home directories? Bah.

On Saturday (after getting up early and biking to and from campus to get Beth her garden plot) I decided to go on over to the local Salvation Army to get some cheap cargo pants (that will hopefully be more durable than the shite Old Navy sells). I finally got a chance to ride in the elusive ‘bus‘ (actually a van, as I discovered) that departs from Varna 4 times a weekend (but never returns), which was a rather unpleasant experience. Luckily, there were two other passengers in the van with me, otherwise I would have felt really awkward…

Anyway, after that I caught another bus from the Commons, which ended up getting stuck behind a parked van for about 20 minutes before it could leave one of the stops (and when the van’s human came out to move it, the jerk didn’t even have the decency to pretend to look apologetic). Eventually I got to my destination and did my business (2 pairs of pants, <$8), and went outside to wait for the bus back to the Commons. Then it started raining.

It continued raining, even after I got to the commons, got a knish (fuel), and started walking the ~4 miles home (as I said before, no buses go to Varna on the weekend, and I couldn’t remember offhand which ones went to campus). If it weren’t for the rain, the walk may have actually been pleasant, actually. Buffalo Street wasn’t nearly as hard to walk up as it looks- my heart didn’t explode or anything! (Though my legs did get rather tired) By the time I made it home (about 1.5 hours later) I was thoroughly drenched, but I stubbornly/stupidly decided not to change into dry clothes before taking a nap.

I woke up a few hours later when Beth and Marty returned to Ithaca (he lives here now, and will be my co-worker come Monday) to have some pizza with happicow and them, and promptly realized that sleeping in cold wet clothes is a really good way to wake up cranky and miserable.

Predictably, I woke up Sunday morning sneezing and with a mild sore throat. Because of this I didn’t do much of… well, anything (save go shopping with the gang, clean Crumb’s cage, clean the bathroom, and make Zucchini Bread… okay. So maybe I did do *something*) much for the rest of the day. Thankfully, that seems to have passed now, because today I woke up feeling fit as a mildly congested fiddle.

Speaking of today, Beth wrote a perl script to graph her progress while biking. I swiped this, and improved/broke it in other ways. Here are my results:

It appears I am getting worse, not better :(

If you care about these things, read the code (which will obviously need to be modified for other people’s use, but I’m sure y’all can figure it out…). It parses a tab-delimited file in the following format:

<date>\t<where>\t<distance>\t<average speed>\t<time>\t<maximum speed (ever)>\t<total distance>\n

I used to have it display my maximum speed (currently 36.2 mph) as well as my average speed, but that wasn’t too useful (as it only ever went up, and only occassionally, at that), and made the graph rather cluttered.