Entries tagged with geekery

Current Mood: pleased

Entry tags:

Comic Con!

I'm exhausted from this past couple weeks (short version: gave notice at my job and celebrated my last day on Wednesday, lost my debit card on friday right before heading to the airport, flew to San Diego for Comic Con, have had 3 hours of sleep/night for past 3 nights.) But I kinda figured, what better way to celebrate my current unemployment with a trip to San Diego and the chance to geek out over comics, Warren Ellis, and Winchesters, than venturing down to San Diego for Comic Con?

I was able to get a primo front and center seat for the Supernatural panel by sitting through an intriguing Q&A session with Laurell K Hamilton (whose books I have never read and man is she intense!) and an absolutely hilarious Family Guy panel (Seth MacFarlane et al. are adorable and v. v. funny, now I can't wait for the new season to start.)

My photos from the Supernatural panel are up on flickr here.

( My highlights from the panel: (possible spoilers, absolutely nothing specific) )

In short: Jensen is a very, very pretty man. I was bummed that Jared didn't make it (he was filming SPN until 6am the ~~night~~ day before and missed his flight) Kripke and the writers all rock hardcore. I love how dedicated they are to producing quality tv each week and how all of them are just super excited about where the show is going in the coming seasons. It's pretty clear that they all love their jobs and the show, and it's pretty awesome that they've been picking up such awesome writers (like Ben who started writing in Season 2 and said that he fell in love with the show during season 1.)

Also: I shook Warren Ellis' hand! eeee!

Current Mood: good
Current Location: work
Current Music: none :( i need to bring mp3s for this computer

Entry tags:

new job

I've been ridiculously busy this week because in the midst of graduating from college I also got a new job and have already started. It's just data entry (read: incredibly, horribly boring) but it's for a non-profit I've volunteered with for years and they're paying me $12 an hour so I'm really not complaining. The most obnoxious thing is that the internet sometimes doesn't work. Very frustrating! But the guy I'm workingclosest with is a friend of mine and I have a couple of other friends working here too so it all evens out I think.

In other news, I saw the x-men movie last night and ( spoilers! )

Current Mood: bouncy

Entry tags:

os x programs I cannot live without

Of the free and, they will nag you but not charge you variety:

Acquisition. For p2p file sharing, good for music downloading.
Adium. A good instant messaging program, works with AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
Azureus. for bittorrenting.
CharCounter. A nifty, no frills little app that counts characters and words when you cut and paste into it.
Cocktail. A general purpose maintenence utility. os x has a set of maintenence scripts set to run at like 4 or 5 am but most people shut their computers down or put them to sleep at night so cocktail will let you choose when to run them (and more.)
Firefox. Great web browser; useful extensions: flashblock, tabs mix plus: saves your sessions in case of crashes and more.
igetter. A good download manager for os x.
mplayer. A nice, simple media player for avi files.
Quicksilver. The best thing to happen to os x ever. especially if you're on a laptop and you're completely reliant on your keyboard and track pad. This tutorial might be helpful.
Smultron. A really nice, non processor intensive html and text editor (unlike dreamweaver if all you want to do it edit html.) I love this app a lot.
vlc media player. Another media player, much like mplayer but it can sometimes be useful to have both just in case one doesn't want to play a fil and another one does.
xjournal. My favorite of the available downloadable livejournal clients.

Lastly, it's not free but it is a good ftp application: transmit.

Do you guys have any other os x program recs? I'm always looking for new nifty computer programs.

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Le Tigre - Phanta

Entry tags:

geekery,
help!

whew

So I had like, 18 tabs open in my browser yesterday of stuff to read and fic to rec from the last couple of days and I had my computer plugged in at the infoshop I work at and one of the other volunteers needed the plug and instead of just closing my laptop and unplugging it he shut it down. *headdesk* So annoying! I had a bunch of projects open too!

It occurs to me that most of my posts lately have been locked, and the majority of them have been media posts. So I thought maybe I should take this time to remind everyone that I have a filter for uploaded media and if you're not on it (if you can't see this post you're not on it) and you want to be leave a comment here and I'll add you.

I've been working these last few days coding fic and working on websites for

neery and

stillane. And I'm all sorts of pleased with the outcome. So head over and check out the newly updated killerstar.net (and then tell me if you notice anything amiss because I've looked at it so much it all blurs.)

I had a dream about fandom this morning right before I woke up, except it wasn't so much a dream as a brainstorm while I was sleeping. Mostly it involved a plan to create an archive for fan vidders. Sort of like youtube for fen. With dreamhost's super cheap hosting plans with 20gigs of space and a terabyte of bandwidth every month I think it's totally doable and I'd be willing to work on it, but uh, it'd be a huge project and I know thismuch about webdesign. But it's such a shame that so many vidders have to use temporary sites like yousendit to host their vids and it's be awesome for fandom to have a resource like an archive for them. So. If anyone else thinks it's a good idea and wants to help? I'd be all for it.

Lastly, I'm going to upgrade from 10.3.9 to 10.4 in a little bit. My computer's been crashing applications left and right and making these horrid, horrid whirring noises like my hard drive is attempting to launch into space when I have more that 3 applications open so I'm hoping the clean install will help. With my ridiculous computer history though (2 fracked hard drives in 7 months! yay apple!) wish me luck.

eta

anitac588 reminded me and I had meant to mention this: I'm going to be reccing Stargate SG-1 and SGA fic on Mondays for the rest of the month over at

sg_recs. It's a new community and it looks really promising and you all should go add it to your friendspages because everyone needs a good recs community. Things to expect from me: SG-1, SGA, and crossover recs and media.

Current Mood: ecstatic

Entry tags:

well shit

lj tells me that it's been two weeks since my last update. I've had somewhat inconsistent computer access these last couple weeks, coupled with not having much at all to say. I've been keeping up with my friendslist as much as possible though, so there is that.

I saw the new Harry Potter on Saturday. I don't think it'd be much of a spoiler to say that I loved it. I thought the guy who played Crouch Jr. was weirdly hot. As was Cedric's innuendo to Potter about taking baths.

I have an enormous amount of awe for whoever wrote the wikipedia articles on the Stargate universe. It's--well it's completely astounding the amount of detail that's gone into the creation of those pages. The scope of the articles is pretty impressive: there's the Stargate Portal, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, List of Stargate Planets, Alien Races in the Stargate Universe (with subpages for the asgard, nox, goa'uld, jaffa, tok'ra, ancients, wraith) and individual articles on the main casts of both shows. I love that people took the time to do this. Wikipedia is the best thing to happen to the internet since, well, since nothing in my opinion it is the coolest thing about the internet.

And speaking of Stargate Atlantis: my download of the new episode is 98% done! The torrent is here at mininova in case you need it. I'll be uploading the episode as soon as my download finishes. Yay for Canada getting the new episodes a month early!

Entry tags:

(no subject)

OMG I just spent the last 4 and a half hours of my life playing Sim City 2000 thanks to

freedomfry and Macintosh Garden an old school mac game warehouse thing. So awesome! They have oregon trail and carmen sandiego and all the sim cities!

The party last night was pretty awesome. One of my good friends went as Axel Rose and because I couldn't find a single grey pleated skirt, I went for the porn star look instead, which really morphed into me as Tawny Kitaen (aka that chick from all those whitesnake videos.) It was awesome. I was Axel's girlfriend for the evening, and I was definitely rockin the MASSIVE hair and a shortshort skirt with a fucking awesome pair of black leather stiletto boots with really pointy toes and really high heels. Results of the evening: v. v. big hair, aching feet, much fun. Other "celebrities" seen: The gordon's fisherman, tom sellack, james joyce, suzie sioux, courtney love, wendy o, debbie harry, a pregant mrs. federline, prince charles and camilla, betty boop, and a bunch of other people I can't remember.

On the agenda tonight: more dancing and slighlty lower heeled shoes.

In fandom type news: I'm reccing The West Wing for

crack_van in August. I've got some stories bookmarked and whatnot already, but I'mm going to have to brush up. Any of you have any suggestions?

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Entry tags:

tags, laziness, recs poll

There's something about switching styles that's a bit like moving into a new house. Everything has to be just right, and you spend hours figuring out where to put things. I've been resisting s2 styles since their implementation, mostly because I had everything organized just right under my s1 style. But the tags broke me. They're were just too useful to ignore. So. new style. check it out:

theantimodel.

I'm using flexible squares with a whole lot of customizations. I recommend checking out

s2flexisquares if you're thinking about switching, there are a lot of helpful add ons detailed there. Also,

wistfuljane is a font of knowledge and helpfulness. Check out her post on tags. So far I've got 2005 fully tagged. It took a while, I'm not exactly looking forward to finishing the job, but it will do my OCD brain good to have a greater level of organization. For your reference: you can check out all of my tags on my journal's frontpage. I've got links to all the media I've shared by fandom as well as recs and polls and whatnot. So. If you ever see anything listed under media that you missed, feel free to ask me to reupload it.

Other things: If you have a mac and you aren't using xjournal I think you're missing out. The new version supports tags, very cool!

I really meant to go to critical mass tonight. It would have been cool, but I lost track of time doing all the lj configuration. I kinda suck. Especially since my out of town friends actually came down for the ride. Clearly, they are more dedicated than I.

I have a flickr account. If any of you are interested. I usually post real-life pictures and stuff there. I posted pics of last month's critical mass over there in case any of you are interested.

I have a fic recs journal (

anti_recs) and hmmm, I think I started it because I didn't want to spam my flist with random posts of names and links, but lately I've been making much more traditional recs posts over there. And for sake of organization (having all my recs separated into one easy to find place) I'm going to keep posting them but I think I'm going to start posting them here too.

[Poll #519758]

Entry tags:

last of the x-men

Here's the last of the first season of X-Men cartoons. Previous posts with links for the other episodes can be found on the frontpage of my journal. Please right click, save as, and drop a comment if you download!

[ ~~X-Men 1x11 - Days of Future Past (Part 1)~~ ] -- avi, 89mb
[ ~~X-Men 1x12 - Days of Future Past (Part 2)~~ ] -- avi, 84mb
[ ~~X-Men 1x13 - The Final Decision~~ ] -- avi, 60mb

Current Mood: cold

Entry tags:

spring class schedule, more x-men

I start school on Monday, I'm actually fairly excited about it considering that I've been off for a month and a half. It was really nice to have a break after such a stressful semester but I think I'm ready to go back. If only I could actually finish reading The Amber Spyglass before Monday I'll be able to consider my break a major success.

My class chedule next semester is going to suck time-wise because the classes are spread out awkwardly but I think the subjects are going to be really awesome. My schedule:

Monday:
10:10-11:50: California Government and Politics
Tuesday:
12:20-2:00: Individual Rights and the Constitution
7:00-9:45pm: Intro to Political Theory
Wednesday:
10:10-11:50: California Government and Politics
Thursday:
12:20-2:00: Individual Rights and the Constitution
4:00-6:55pm: Marxism, Feminism, and Social Change

I'm going to go watch Chicago with my mom now, neither of us have seen it before, but I did get to see the play in London. Sadly, not when Kevin Richardson was in it. That would have been extra cool.

More X-Men cartoons. I'm posting these in blocks to avoid bandwidth problems. Please right click, save as, and drop a comment if you download!

[ ~~X-Men 1x07 - Slave Island~~ ] -- avi, 89mb
[ ~~X-Men 1x08 - The Unstoppable Juggernaut~~ ] -- avi, 58mb
[ ~~X-Men 1x09 - The Cure~~ ] -- avi, 58mb
[ ~~X-Men 1x10 - Come the Apocalypse~~ ] -- avi, 58mb

Current Mood: lusting over the internet

Entry tags:

x-men!

So. The X-Men cartoon series rocked, and I desperately want to buy this but I can't rationalize the purchase, not after buying Seasons 2 and 4 of Angel just last week. So in the meantime, I uploaded the other episodes of the first season of the x-men in my friend's college dorm room and HOLY SHIT I am still in shock about how fast the connection was. It took less than a minute per episode. I think I'm going to try to convince her to let me move in, I could sleep under her desk or something. It'd be worth it.

I'm going to be posting these in blocks to avoid bandwidth problems. Please right click, save as, and drop a comment if you download!

[ ~~X-Men 1x04 - Deadly Reunions~~ ] -- avi, 89.89mb
[ ~~X-Men 1x05 - Captive Hearts~~ ] -- avi, 57.77mb
[ ~~X-Men 1x06 - Cold Vengeance~~ ] -- avi, 89.94mb

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: X-Men- 1x01 Night of the Sentinels

Entry tags:

recs and media

Recs copy-pasted from my recs journal (the poorly named)

anti_recs:

None So Blind by

pun. Master and Commander: Stephen/Jack. The M&C universe fascinates me, O'Brien was a really brilliant writer, and very specific in his character's voices, which is why it's so hard for fic writers to get it right. But

pun does it masterfully (excuse the bad-pun (omg another one!)), her voces were, I thought, spot on and while this is a fairly short story, I thought is was a great take one Jack and Stephen's dynamic.

Jeeves and the Blessed Indiscretion by

astolat. Jeeves and Wooster: Jeeves/Wooster. This was written for the Yuletide challenge this year, and someone on my flist recced it. Until then I hadn't any clue that Jeeves and Wooster fanfic even existed, but color me pleasantly surprised.

astolat is an incredibly talented writer in any fandom (her webpage is here) and Jeeves and Wooster is no exception. This story is perfectly Wodehouse in every turn of phrase. If you've ever picked up one of the Jeeves and Wooster books or seen the tv series you must read this story.

And the same thing goes for Wooster's School for Wayward Girls by

yahtzee63. Jeeves and Wooster: Jeeves/Wooster. This was also written for the yultide challenge and it too is brilliant.

I would now like to point out

flambeau at this point because she's the only other Jeeves and Wooster writer than I know of and her stories are also great. Webpage here.

And now onto the media (right click and save as please!) also comments telling me you're downloading are always appreciated.

[ ~~Tegan And Sara - Walking WIth a Ghost~~ ] -- mp3. From Amazon's descrition of their album So Jealous: They are, yes, identical twin lesbians, and they do occupy the space--more like a vacuum, really--between the riot-grrl menace of Sleater-Kinney and the un-fun folk of Indigo Girls. This song is really fun, I like their sound a lot.

[ ~~The Killers - Somebody Told Me~~ ] -- mp3. From Amazon's description of their debut album Hot Fuss: The Killers match postpunk guitars with an overlay of synthesizer that recalls '80s New Wave without burying their sound in nostalgia.

[ ~~The Killers - Mr. Brightside~~ ] -- mp3.

From

eisakay: Michael Rosenbaum on Tony Danza's show yesterday

[ ~~right click~~ ] -- mpg, 56.48mb

From

fuskeez here's JC from I Love The 90s: Part Deux. All six clips edited into one file with thanks to

kari3124 for posting the separate files originally.

[ ~~JC - I Love The 90s: Part Deux~~ ] -- mpg, 25.5mb

Also from

fuskeez but originally from

kirsch a small piece of JC on Best Week Ever. They used an old clip of him to play against the story of Eva and her vibrator.

[ ~~JC- Best Week Ever~~ ] -- avi, 3.36mb

And finally something a little different, but some of you comic geek types might enjoy it. One of my friends gave me the first season of The X-Men cartoon. I don't know how many of you were into it but I watched this cartoon every. single. saturday for years so this is like, the ultimate cool for me. I uploaded the first three episodes in case anyone's interested. And if you are please, please please let me know you downloaded them because I can upload the rest of the episodes.

[ ~~X-Men 1x01 and 1x02- Night of the Sentinels~~ ] -- avi, 151mb
[ ~~X-Men 1x03- Enter Magneto~~ ] -- mpg, 73.9mb

Enjoy!

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: the west wing

Entry tags:

comic geekery and Orlando Bloom pictures

Bought Astonishing X-Men vol. 1 today, and eee! the nice comic book lady gave me a flier about Wondercon and Joss Whedon along with cast members of Serenity and Kevin Smith are going to be there! Dude I am so going. And two of my friends who love Firefly are going to come too, very exciting. You Northern California people should think about going!

I'm waiting for the Desperate Housewives torrent to be posted, in the mean time I'm downloading the pilot of Numb3rs, who knows if it's any good.

edie22 says that today is Tony Lucca's birthday, so a big happy birthday to him!

Orlando and Johnny Depp at the Golden Globes! So cool to see them chatting!

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EDIT: to round out the geekery in this post: Mac users? If you haven't ever heard of Quicksilver you must go check it out, it's a launcher that allows you to open applications, webpages, files you name it using the keyboard. It's ten trillion times better than the Launcher that comes with 10.3, it's free, and it learns from the commands you use most often. Seriously, go check it out rightthissecond!

Along with Quicksilver you should also go download Windowshade for os x, it's a nify program that lets you customize your windows allowing you to minimize them as a bar (a la os 9), to the dock, make them transparent or, coolest of all: make a window stick to the front of the screen while still being able to use the windows behind it. Very useful for say, quicktime windows playing something in the forefront and browsing the internet in the background. It's a very cool program.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Dresden Dolls - Coin-Operated Boy

Entry tags:

but I turn him on and he comes to life automatic joy

-I've finally filled my icon quota. I never thought I'd know what to do with 50 icons, so I'm pleased.

-That guy I played pool with last week? The one from my english class? Is a really bad writer. We had to exchange papers and type them up to email our prof. His is pretty miserable. I mean honestly, first he tells me that he doesn't like to read, and then he spells warrant, certain, and response wrong every time he uses them. Added to this, he actually wrote in favor of the Patriot Act. Ugh. I'm not even sure I'll be able to look at him next week after all this.

-I watched Footloose for the first time today. Oh man. So classic! I really feel that modern dance is missing out on a lot of quality moves. For instance, no one performs flips and uses gymnastics anymore. There is also a distinct lack of solo!emotive!dancing! going on in public these days. Very sad.

-

andrealyn gave me the coolest christmas present ever. She dedicated her new West Wing story to me! You all must go read it because it's Sam and Josh and Donna is in it and it's brilliant. The Bad Case of Loving You Go read!

-I have been listening to this song for the past week straight. I first heard in on Radio KOL, The Kingdom of Loathing internet radio station. KOL is the funniest online game ever, and the radio station is basically on par with any college radio station, except you can email in mp3s of songs you want to hear and they'll play them. Oh man, I'm so addicted to radio kol. It's awesome. You should all play the game and listen to the radio station too. Er, back to the song, my original point. It's by a band called the Dresden Dolls. Their website is here; you can download several songs from that site, also check out the video for this song, it's really good. Here's the song I'm talking about (rightclick save as).

[ ~~Coin-Operated Boy~~ ] -- mp3, 5.47mb

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Radiohead - Karma Police

Entry tags:

firefox geekery, and movie thoughts

ashlle1 posted about this the other day and it's by far the coolest thing ever if you're into computer geekery and awesome Firefox tricks. So, we all know that Firefox (and Camino) are the coolest browsers out there, right? Well, they just got that much cooler, check this out (completely copy-pasted from

ashlle1):

The TIP is for Firefox users. I don't know if this works in Mozilla or Netscape, and it likely doesn't work (the same way) for any other browser. But! Ye olde Firefox users, hear me! Have you learned the magic of the special bookmark keywords? Here's how it works:

You bookmark something, as normal. Let's say the LJ Update page, for giggles. Then you go up to the Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks option. Click on the entry of the page you just bookmarked, and click on properties. It should give you a dialogue giving you options for name, location, keyword, and description. You can name it however you like, but hey, typing in the HTTP address is too hard. Soooo, let's give this a keyword. Mine is "lj.update", but yours can be whatever you want (and will remember). Type it in, press okay, and go back to the main browser. Now anytime you want to make an LJ entry, you simply type "lj.update" or your keyword of choice in the address bar, and bam, there you are.

Too hard to get to your friends page as it is? Save time! Bookmark it with a keyword of 'fl', and in no time you can be hitting the refresh key, waiting for updates.

Let's make this a step more advanced. Oftentimes I like to look up things on Amazon or the IMDB, but entering from the main page just takes far too long. Granted, you can download a plugin (at least for Amazon.com) that'll allow you to search the site, but what about the other sites? Let's use IMDB as an example.

Go to the IMDB site, and perform a search for anything. Let's say Adam Brody. [note: just search for adam for this example] When the search page comes up, bookmark it, and follow the same procedure as before to get to the properties of the bookmark you just made. Now, look in the location string. You should see, somewhere in that HTTP, Adam. Replace Adam with %s. No quotation marks anywhere. Then give it a keyword - 'imdb', say. Now say okay, and go back to your browser. In the address bar, type in 'imdb Viggo Mortenson' or who/whatever you'd like to search for. You should immediately be taken to your search results - no extra steps necessary.

A similar process applies for any site you like. %s refers to the text string you enter after your keyword. For example, I have http://www.livejournal.com/users/%s bookmarked with the keyword 'lj', and from there, I can go to any LJer's journal (lj ashlle1) or their friendslist (lj corialis/friends) or their friendsfriends list (lj ashlle1/friendsfriends) or their archives (lj lestrange/calendar) or what have you. I have a similar search string at Half.com, Amazon, IMDB. You could do it for Schnoogle, where you'd simply have to type in the author name. Basically, any site that has a regular search string or hierarchical structure can have this applied to it.

In other news, I saw movies this weekend:

Finding Neverland is a wonderful movie. I loved Johnny Depp; and the movie was really well shot. Also, Dustin Hoffman played the least Hoffman-like character I've ever seen. So yeah, go see it, it's a great story.

I also saw National Treasure this weekend. It was, well, not necessarily a good movie, but it was damned entertaining and good fun. Sean Bean was wonderful as always. And if you can ignore the historical innaccuracies and concentrate on the fun, you'll enjoy it. Then again I'm a huge sucker for psuedo-archaelogical, adventure stories.