Has anyone else gone out to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World yet? Tom & I just got to go see it last night (thanks to my mom being in town to babysit!) and it was super fun. Definitely recommend. Seems like just the sort of thing all ye Sehti-ites would dig.

Anyone have photo-sharing tips? I've put up some links to guests' Picasa albums on our wedding website, though we're trying to figure out the best way to host the various photos that doesn't require people signing up for a service or downloading Picasa. Flickr's user interface drives me crazy, and I'm also not a fan of Shutterfly - after signing up for it I couldn't actually download any files, though their photo-to-product services are lauded. Oooh, C just told me about smugmug...trying them now...

(I tried combining them all into one album, but that was like 52-card shuffle because some timestamps were off of the cameras, though the idea of real-time many-camera angles seems cool. Also, if you've got a set of photos I'm happy to add them to the list.)

Of all the wedding-related stuff that's going on, the one that I'm the most worried about and has been the most time-consuming is the table seating. I keep revising it, thinking that people would prefer to sit with people they know rather than strangers, but then what's the point of having everyone together if they don't mingle with each other and start dating each other and then have babies? Yeah babies! In any case, it's been like one of those word puzzles where Tom is to the left of Jack but then Suzy needs to be in the middle of them and Jane and Suzy will fight if together but not if Bob is around.

Rules that I should have come up with a spreadsheet for and made C script:
Certain exes can't sit next to each other. I mean heck, certain family members can't sit next to each other.
Family and friends should mostly be kept separate.
As even of a male to female ratio as possible.
Everyone should each have someone that they know and feel comfortable with, but also someone they don't know that they may enjoy talking to.
Conversely, the people that have travelled the most probably want to sit with the people they know because they get to so rarely.
Parents sit with kids.
Singles sit with at least 2 people they know.
At least 1 outgoing person per table.
People that don't like kids can't sit next to them.
Commonalities sit together: entrepreneurs, climbers, athletes, geographic locales, etc.

But then I get side-tracked trying to figure out whether people would rather get to know other people in their same geo or ones that kayak, and it all gets overwhelming again.

So, the new optimization rule is this: you all get at least one person you know, and up to 7 you don't. I hope you still end up having fun! (If you don't, don't tell me because I'll feel personally responsible and then miserable.)

For those of you who played Braid, you may want to consider Limbo. Michael and I finished it last week. I don't like Limbo as much as Braid because I thought it lacked a story and the components of the puzzles became stale after a while. I don't think it deserves the perfect ratings it has been receiving but it's a 4 out of 5.

C found this thread on Reddit, and wow, self esteem +10 indeed! I also now realize that what I thought were obvious signals were not nearly as bold as I thought they were.

OMG, I love this. Ke$ha haters like Patrick probably should stay away.

A big stack of invitations (but not all of them) is sitting on our dining room table and freaking me out. It is freaking me out because:
1. They're addressed, stamped, and sealed. Now we have to finish the rest of them - the handwritten ones and the foreign postage ones. Our chicken scratch handwriting - blah.
2. I'm pretty sure the name/address aggregator script that C wrote to print out the address labels may or may not have disregarded some individuals choice in their married names. So, if you are a married person, and your address label says your "maiden" name + partner's name, or says Mrs. HisName, and that is wrong, I apologize. It certainly wasn't intentional, or even thought out. Proper address grammar blows.

I also just found this blog, which is amazing, and the specific post linked to back there may have my new strategy on married name changing. I don't think I am going to change it. Yet. But our kids may have some spanish patralineal/matrilineal system that I think is genius. The blog also has this post and another on money matters and marriage, in which it is nice to know that other people wonder how the hell this is going to work too. Oh, and my last link for the day is this article in the NYT, which is a crazy account into the world of marriage-counseling-before-you-need-counseling.

I've been doing this one-hundred pushups and two-hundred situps thing with a group of college people, and today is the 2nd day of it. I'm sore! But I think it's a fun, easy way to fight the never-ending battle of staying in shape, and definitely being held accountable is good motivation for me.

I have a built in excuse to stop though - if I stop fitting into my dress because my pecs get too big it is soooo off. Or if my goods start shrinking a la a certain girl we knew in high school that benched a bit too much. I'm definitely not willing to risk my bff(plural friends) for the sake of fitness. That would be crazy-talk.

Portal is a free download on Steam right now.

I was throwing things away earlier today, and I realized how much I've changed in the past 10 years. I used to find so much joy in buying things and bringing them home, and now I think it's awesome when I find something I can throw/give away.

When I was dating J, I really struggled with the shopping aspect of our relationship. We loved finding things on sale, which meant shopping more, which meant both buying and then giving things to Goodwill. A lot of girls would kill for a boyfriend who wants to go shopping with them and give them fashion advice, and at first I really enjoyed being pushed to be fashionable. For once in my life, I had all the right shoes and jackets for different occasions! But eventually I started resenting the superficial and commercial aspect of it. He was unhappy with my weight(which has been relatively stable for the past 10 years, so he was the only one unhappy with it), and we both were spending ridiculous amounts of money - money that he as a student shouldn't have had, and me knowing better shouldn't have spent. I remembered too well the days of my bio-lab dishwasher salary and living off of 20k pre-tax easily, and I was burning through my engineering salary. It didn't make any sense at all. (I am really lucky that I've always contributed at least 10% to a 401k, so at least I saved some money out of the 3 years we dated.) In any case, by the time the relationship ended, I was Done with shopping. I still enjoy finding cute things and buying them when necessary, but I don't ever want it to be the way I spend quality time in a relationship again. And I really don't want to be pushed to be more girly ever again.

I love that growing older has giving me this understanding of relationships. Sometimes you can enjoy someone, but need to go in different directions with your lives. Of course, I didn't know that was what was happening with J, I just knew I was unhappy.

One of the things that I immediately connected with C over was the lack of Things in our lives. I really liked the fact that he was not emotionally attached to Stuff, and didn't own much. He is a bit of the polar opposite of J in that sense, and I find it much easier to live with. As my dad says, "You can't have two spenders." (Aside: I hate grammar rules regarding punctuation, parenthesis, and especially addressing cards because it's outdated. Mr. and Mrs. John Smith? Bite me. Why does the female lose her name?) I worry so much less about us combining our finances than I used to with J, because I know and trust C's spending habits. There are none, and necessary items come from a drugstore/Amazon. It's awesome, and I've tried to adopt a similar mentality. I'll never be as austere as C, and my kitchen breaks all of the rules, but for the past two years I've been a saver and not a spender.

Today I was reading Unclutterer and found an article on how often you should throw away make-up, mostly because bacteria grows in it. I didn't want to read the time limits they listed, because I knew everything I had was over the limit. And when I look through my big red make-up box, I like seeing the pretty colors and shades in it. Even though I rarely wear anything inside it, my make-up box makes me feel feminine. Besides C and various emotional tendencies, my make-up box is the only other thing in my life that does this. I've known make-up goes bad since I was 16, and today was the first time I was ready to act on that knowledge.

So I took out the big red box, and pulled out everything that I haven't worn in years, and played dress-up with it. For the record, 5+ year old lip gloss and lipstick taste really f-ing foul. But green eyeshadow is still fun. And wow, I can't believe my friend bought me that Chanel make-up so long ago, with it's fancy velvet pouches and shiny compacts. And then there was that MAC kick I went on...this stuff is expensive!

And then I threw it all away.

Who's ridiculously late to this party? We just got a wonderful wedding gift, and of course immediately opened it and ran out and bought LittleBigPlanet. And now I'm completely confused why people are willing to walk me thru levels online, but whatever!

Txt, post, or email me usernames please - my system needs friends!

I've recently returned to the linux world. As a brief background, in undergrad I worked primarily in a linux environment, using the red hat distro for about three years. In that time, my workstation was linux, and I either had a dual boot or a separate computer that ran linux in my apartment. I was rather familiar with the flaws and limitations of linux for the standard consumer desktop, and was capable of running my own mail/web/whatever server without much problem.

In graduate school, I spent some time on a linux computer, but ssh-ing to a linux computer from a windows laptop was my primary work mode. I had almost no involvement in the administration or maintenance of the linux servers I worked on, as I had more buffers from that than I did in undergrad.

Fast forward to today. While I've ssh-ed into countless linux servers over the years, my last real experience managing and installing linux was back in 2003/4. My knowledge is, to be generous, rusty. But I find myself needing a linux server to accomplish some programming that I need done for my business, so I'm jumping back into the linux world.

I'll try not to bore you with silly details, but here are some observations I've had after returning to linux after six years.

1) Red hat ruled the roost back in 2003. Now ubuntu is the dominant distro. Back in 2003, I remember it as one of the many random distros available, such as mandrake, debian (of which ubuntu is an offshoot), suse, slackware, etc. Red hat, who focuses on enterprise linux now, released an offshoot called fedora back in 2003 or 2004, which has been in and out of favor over the years.

2) OS installs in general have gotten faster and more automatic. I remember old redhat, fedora, Win 95/98/XP installs that asked many often silly questions, and took over an hour to install. In the mid to late 90's, I believe I had a linux distro (caldera?) that while it was installing let you play a pacman clone because it knew it took so long. Now, both Ubuntu and Windows 7 go about their business installing an operating system quickly and with little need for user input.

3) Ubuntu linux has an awesome windows based installer called wubi. After you download wubi inside windows, you just double click on it to install ubuntu. First, ubuntu is automatically downloaded (~700mb), then it is installed onto your existing hard drive. You specify how much space to give it to operate, and it makes a file that size in windows (e.g. 15GB) that linux sees as a disk. After it is done installing, you have a true dual boot machine, but even better it (a) automatically mounts your windows drive so you can see all your windows files inside ubuntu (under /host), and (b) lets you uninstall ubuntu for whatever reason in the future under windows add/remove programs in the control panel. To be clear, this is a dual boot linux install, not a virtual linux install.

This install is not meant for serious servers, as it is susceptible to being corrupted by an unplanned powering down, but it is a great way to easily set up a linux computer to dink around on. I'm using wubi currently while waiting for my permanent linux server to arrive.

4) More things "just work" now than they did previously. Flash drives are automatically detected. I have a dual monitor setup, and it was really simple to configure in the monitor panel GUI. I haven't had to mess around with any drivers to make an ethernet card or video card work. It has been wonderful.

5) Much of the open source software packages have been greatly improved. Gnome, which is basically the (default) graphical interface for ubuntu, is beautiful now. The interface is sleek and intuitive, and looks professional. All of the "control panel" like settings have a GUI. You no longer need to know anything about the command line to install new packages. As always, firefox and thunderbird work the same in linux as in windows, so I have zero learning curve in that department.

6) Perhaps the second most impressive thing (behind gnome) is how incredible Open Office looks. I used to cringe when using OpenOffice.org (and StarOffice before it), because the interface looked and felt awkward. It had the basic functionality needed for an office suite, but the GUI was weird and I always felt like I had to struggle to use it. Now, the interfaces seem to be much cleaner, and I am seriously debating whether I need to have a copy of MS Office on all my computers as I currently do.

7) Installing and configuring many of the common apps that I needed is so much simpler. For example, I wanted an apache web server, with PHP and mysql (LAMP - Linux Apache Mysql PHP). This was done with a single command using apt-get. Many other critical applications, like mod_perl, R or firebird can also be installed with apt-get (I could use the GUI for these too if I wanted). Red hat had the rpm system, but I feel that ubuntu's apt-get (deb) packages overall have had a much higher success rate, and have limited the amount I need to configure things before they work. Again, things "just work" more often!

Anyway, I'm super impressed with the new desktop linux offering. If a few more critical apps would make it to linux (steam, illustrator, publisher/indesign, quickbooks), I would happily make it my primary OS, instead of just my programming OS.

For those of you that aren't my facebook friend, flickr friend, or don't follow my tweets, or haven't found out some other way, Betsey and I welcomed

Grace Kathleen Catchpole

into the world a little bit ago.

We're all doing great.

Pictures

I've been absolutely obsessed lately with Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series. The problem with it is that there's no good way to recommend it to people without them judging you some kind of sexual deviant. This is how I tried to explain what I was reading to C:

M: Well, there's this semi-orphan who grows up and finds out that she's marked by a god and is really into pain and submission...
C: So it's an S&M romance novel?
M: No! It's totally fantasy, because she's also trained to be a spy while being a courtesan...
C: There's a half-naked lady on the cover, and she's a courtesan? It's a romance novel.
M: It doesn't have nearly enough sex to be a romance novel!
C: ...

It is a romance novel in the sense that Twilight is a romance novel, except this heroine could actually have been conceived after the feminist revolution and isn't waiting for some freaking vampire to go save her ass all the damn time.

The blog that made me curious enough to borrow it from the library has a better, more humorous description of it here. However, even if you like the first book, you should stop after reading the second book. I've read the first four, and the plots get less and less believable, and this is a Fantasy series we're talking about. K.C. only likes the first two books as well - she got stranded at our place after the Iceland volcano blew up, and we were talking about these books, and I totally think she's a deviant now.

I heard this story on NPR recently.

Guess what it brought to mind?

So where did it go?