All moved, but not back online yet.

Posted on January 6, 2004

I’m in Murrieta now, living in a new house. This house is a two-story house, unlike the one-story one I’ve lived in most of my life.

People often talk about how hard it is to move. They must be refering to leaving behind friends, because most of my friends moved long ago, and I talk to all my friends online these days, so I didn’t have that to hold me back; I’ve had no problem at all in moving. In fact, moving to a new place was very easy. I mean, outside of all of the packing and unpacking, I can apparently adapt to any place with no trouble at all. When I was staying with my older brother in Mesa, Arizona, for two months, I was perfectly comfortable living there since day one. And the day I was back in my room back home, it was as if I had never left. And now being in a new house, a huge one with a second floor, in a new neighborhood, in a new place, all very much unlike my old room, home, city, it’s no trouble at all adjusting. I immediately fit right in.

My next door neighbor has a name. I didn’t realize neighbors had names. I thought they were just the people that filled the houses around your own, and that was that. I mean, I don’t know any of my neighbors from my home in San Diego, but here I’ve already met one neighbor, and I’ve seen his kids, and I hear he has cats (I still need to meet them), and he seems to know (or know of) other neighbors. It’s as if everyone knows everyone. It’s almost being like in Mayberry (look it up if you don’t know).

Now I know why Murrieta is such a small town compared to San Diego: they spent a lot more money on stars. Seriously. Murrieta has a million or a billion more stars hung in the sky at night than San Diego ever did. And graffiti hasn’t been invented yet here. But some things stay the same: whether San Diego or Murrieta, McDonalds’ McFlurry machine does not work. Never, ever! Or, if it does work, they don’t have any more ice cream for it. And did you know you’re not allowed to go through the drive-thru unless you’re actually in a car? You can’t just walk around and order. No matter, though. I’m not really a fan of McDonalds.

My older brother visited for Christmas and was here for a while. He got me a new mouse for Christmas. Can you guess which is my new mouse? There’ll be no more mouse ball troubles for me, I finally get a scroll wheel, and I get an actual third button (the scroll wheel button) to use rather than pressing the left and right mouse buttons at the same time to do a “middle click”. And in Linux, the middle-button aides in very fast copy & pasting.

I finally have a computer desk, a proper one, and have decided that I’ll put my manga and often-used books on one side of it. I’ve added more since taking a picture of it, but you can get an idea of what it looks like with some Sailormoon manga, etc.

It rained during Christmas, but that meant a beautiful sky the following morning. In my room in my old house, I would wake up, look out the window, and see ice plant on the slope that goes up to the next house. My view was a slope. Now, I have a gorgeous view out my back window (the top half, not the bottom half =) as well as being able to see other houses on my street out the front window. Yup, if that’s the house across the street, then the one I’m sitting in right now must look a lot like it.

The first Sunday after Christmas, my father woke me, and told me to get downstairs to the garage and help moves things out of there, because it was flooded. The plumber came out quickly, and soon found out that someone had flushed paper towels away. It seems whenever someone calls in about a flood like this in a new house, that’s the first thing to check, because the people that work on building the house often don’t realize that you don’t flush paper towels, and things end up clogging up, and within a week you get a flood.

I’ve had a lot of time to sit and play with KDE 3.2 Beta. I really love it. Before I left in December, some people asked me what was so special about “Scalable Vector Graphic” or SVG icons. Consider this: you make a set of icons for KDE, or Windows, or Mac, or whichever OS/desktop environment you use. Now, let’s figure that you make icons for files and folders, for shortcuts and symbolic links and for text files and HTML, video, and music files. And you make special icons for Konqueror or Internet Explorer or Safari, and other desktop-packaged programs. Now, let’s consider that that’s 600 different icons that you’ve made. Do you know the next step? You need to provide these at least at 16x16 pixels in size. Oh, and 8x8 pixels, for on the kicker/taskbar/whatnot. And 32x32 pixels in size for people that use ones that size. But what about the people with the huge monitors that use 64x64? Or at least 48x48 sized icons? And what about when people use 128x128 pixel icons? That’s already 3,600 icons that you need to make! But, what if you could make the icons scalable? What if you made 600 icons, and they could scale from 16x16 to 128x128, and look the exact same, with no pixelation or quality loss? That’s SVG. Microsoft’s Longhorn will use this technology, with their own version called MVG or MSVG or something, when it’s out in a few years, and KDE will have it using the “World Wide Web Consortium recommendation” (basically, “the standard”), SVG, this year. Oh, and I’ve got a screenshot, too.

While setting aside money for buying Pokemon games, I saw the new 2004 $20 bill. I’ve always thought that USA’s money was rather plain and dull compared to some of the other money out there, from other countries. This new $20 bill has more colour to it (blue’s added), and the paper’s green on either end with the whitish in the center. The blue on the left is a bird, one that any US American should know, holding a plant that should also be known (and if you live and America, and don’t know what bird or plant I’m talking about, ask your parents or look it up online — I’m sure you can find something on it rather quickly.) On the right is “Twenty USA” and “USA Twenty”. Left os that, there’s also our favorite USA bird in a “coat of arms”-style green stamp. All of these make it harder to make fake money and pass it around, because it’s harder to copy. If my scanner were’s “Windows-only”, I would scan this bill in. Oh, and on the back, there are little, gold “20” scattered about. As a final thought on the front, of the this $20 bill and the design just before it: what mustthey make the “The United States of America” that’s below/beside Preseident Jackson so microscopically small? My magnifying paper blurs it before it’s big enough to read, and I can only read it because of the shapes of the words, without seeing the individual letters.

December 31st, my mother, younger brother, and I went to Wal-Mart. It’s amazing how low their prices always are. Always. How can I ever again by a 20oz bottle of Dr. Pepper from a soda machine for $1.00, or a 45 to 65 cent can of Coca Cola, when Wal-Mart sells a 2 liter bottle of Dr. Thunder for only 50 cents?

While my brother and I waited outside for my mother to finish shopping and come out, I noticed the security guard, an old man in a little cart that he drives around the grounds, watching us. Time passed, and my brother went back into the store, while I watched as the security guard passed back and forth, and watched in my direction. More time passes. Finally my brother was back out, and my mother was at the register, so my brother and I went to wait by the car. When my mother came out, security was talking about a “couple of kids by the car”. My mother saw my brother and I, and asked if they security guy was talking about us. He was, and she told him, “Those are my sons by my car.” Yup, I just knew that guy was watching me.

After leaving Wal-Mart, there was a street with a sign that said, “No right (turn) on red (light), between 2PM and 5PM, Monday through Friday” — and about 12 cars did a right turn on the red light, while it was 2:40PM.

I accidently deleted my address book’s data file. Oops. Now I keep a backup of my bookmarks and my address book. Since I lost all of my contact information, I figured that this would be a perfect time to check out useing KMail instead of Thunderbird for e-mail. Mozilla Thunderbird’s great, and KMail’s young, but KMail was nicely fit into Kontact, and I’m too lazy to look into writing a Kontact plug-in for Thunderbird.

Kontact’s nice because it’s a program that fits other programs together into one — like making a suite of progams into one program. It’s nice to have e-mail, address book, my todo list, calender, news groups, notes and a summary of these, all in one place, without having multiple programs running seperately.

With the phone line usable on January 6th, I connected to the Internet briefly to check the local numbers for dialing in to the ISP that I used in San Diego. That means it’s long distance and 6 cents per minute. However, since my mother needed to check some things (and my father can take care for the phone bill ^_^ ), that means I can spend a few minutes as well downloading some pages to read offline, and to upload some things. I posted this update before uploading the images (due to being conscious of time spent at 6 cents per minute), so my apologies if any links don’t work yet. As for when I’ll be back online, Verizon’s DSL isn’t in this area yet, but we haev Comcast cable for television, so mayb there’s a change for Comcast cable Internet. I’ll get the Internet over a wireless router from another room, so hopefully that won’t be any trouble…