Last Thursday marked 26 years on this planet for me. I spent the day hiding from the world at my boyfriend's house. Birthdays seem to make me more anti-social than I normally am, so I've taken to disappearing on the day of my birthday if I can. drwho4 had to work, so I was left alone to hide until he got home around five, then we went out for dinner and caught a movie. Dinner was at some local Mexican restaurant, and the movie was District 9. The former was okay, and I got free dinner on account of it being my birthday, the latter is probably one of the very small number of films I've seen that could qualify as hard Science Fiction.

My birthday party kinda had mixed results. I had more people show up for dinner than I expected to, and had a few people fail to show up for the karaoke that I had thought would. Also didn't help that we're in the middle of Back to School season at work... which leads to an excess of customers and not enough time and staffing to clean and do other administrative stuff, and where people were expecting to be out the door at 9:30, they ended up out over an hour late and missing 90% of happy fun karaoke time.

Those who did manage to join me for the karaoke and the dinner were greatly appreciated and much fun was had by all. Our waitress at the restaurant was absolutely awesome, took great care of us... and even gave me my birthday sundae without putting me through the singing stuff when I'd mentioned having a coupon for my birthday burger. :D Karaoke was at Amador Karaoke, which opened within the last half a year and they've been super friendly every time we've been in. There was Filking (awesome lyrics thanks to Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff), challenging gender roles and glow sticks. There will likely be some video evidence posted to YouTube, if you guys are lucky, I may even post a link or embed it at some point.

Here's a list of goodies I scored, vaguely in the order I received them:

• Sago Palm - from my mom. I'd had one before, but it got knocked off the wall outside my front door by a neighborhood cat, and the roots got damaged which caused it to die. The new one is bigger, and Mom included a pretty pot with kokopelli on it.
• Watchmen Director's Cut DVD - from drwho4, a self professed Homer Simpson gift... though one that I will most certainly enjoy. Hooray for big blue radioactive cock!
• 320GB internal hard drive - also from drwho4. This will be the drive on which my primary partition of my desktop machine will soon reside. Currently, the desktop's primary partition is on a 30GB drive that I've had in my machine since originally building it way back in 2001.
• A Toshiba Satellite L305-S5955 - This gift I will talk more about later in this entry. It was also from drwho4.
• 42 and Linux Inside Case Badges - from my friends who usually host friday night game night. The Linux Inside one has already been placed upon the above mentioned Toshiba Laptop. :D
• Digital Message Tape, small - from the same friends who gave me the case badges. The pen that came with it was dried out, but an ultra-fine sharpie works just as well.
• Cookies from one of my other game night friends.
• Peacock feather earrings and necklace - from my mother. I will likely have to take a picture wearing them in order to properly do them justice. I wore the earrings for karaoke, but will need to get used to the necklace before wearing it out.
• Munchkin Expansions, numbers 4 and 5 - from another one of my game night friends. This brings my Munchkin collection up to the core set, expansions 3, 4 & 5 and a set up level counter dice.
• 2GB of ram for my desktop computer - from the crazy person who is my Assistant Store Manager at work.
• Balloons - from the nice people at the karaoke place. One of them actually says Over the Hill on it, which amuses me so because I only turned 26.

So, as promised, on to the topic of the laptop. First and foremost, I named her Serenity, and she was freed of her Windows shackles pretty quickly. drwho4 handed her over after he got home on my birthday, and we decided to let her charge while we went out for dinner & movie, and I downloaded the kubuntu 9.04 install disc using his Apple laptop. Upon arrival home, an install disc was burned and install progressed quite happily. Wireless worked straight out of the install, and I installed updates and started adjusting settings pretty quickly.

Upon my getting home with her Friday night, I did start copying over files from my desktop computer. My custom purple KDE colors, my settings and config files for Firefox, search engine plugins and all those lovely goodies that make a computer happier. At work on Friday night, I picked up a pretty little Logitech V220 mouse with a blue scroll design on it. I've had the solid blue version on my desktop computer for almost two-thirds to three-quarters of a year now, so I knew it would be a happy fit.

I also attached stickers to Serenity to make her prettier. I have a nice Babyland sticker on her, the Linux Inside case badge and a Jinx horny skull. I will have to take pictures and show both Jinx and Babyland they are loved enough to decorate my laptop. :D I am also considering if there are other stickers that need to be attached to the laptop, but for now she's probably pretty good.

I am so proud of myself though, I have successfully both doing a remote desktop share and an ssh connection through the terminal to have my laptop remotely control my desktop. This bodes well for my being able to copy over files and use the desktop as a file server for my media and crap. I just need to keep playing around with it and learn how to make use of the video and audio streaming through VLC. :D

I do have a little bit more to go through on the topic of birthday... my dad's insisting on having a birthday-ish BBQ thing at his house next weekend... to celebrate mine, his and his parents birthdays (his is a couple days later than the BBQ, and theirs were back in July). I need to come up with birthday presents for all three of them... and I am still pondering solutions. Hopefully will be able to figure something out before Saturday. Have a couple ideas... just gotta see if I can make them work out.

John Barrowman has at once both ruined The Wizard and I forever, and saved it. I say ruined because now whenever I hear it I feel compelled to instead sing the lyrics to The Doctor and I instead, however I still flub it a bit here and there. I say saved, because I wasn't very fond of this song, even though I much love Wicked.

In other news, I have spotted a second Babyland sticker "in the wild" today. Sure, I've seen the stickers on various cars at Babyland shows, on the car of the friend of the ex, and of course on my cars (first Edward, now Chiana). The first Babyland sticker I've spotted "in the wild" was on a horrid yellow mustang of an 80s vintage. Today I spotted one on a white something or other (I think something ford, but couldn't get a clear view of the make/model due to traffic) on my drive home. I'm half tempted to post in babyland to see if the owner of the vehicle in a member of the community, but who knows. We'll see if I'm so inclined at some point.

Also, going to see The Dark Knight tonight on Intel's dime. Hooray for vendor spoils and swag. ^_^

Yeah, as is probably pretty damn clear to anyone who's so much as had a passing conversation with me as of late, I am totally going all out fangirl over doctor who. It occurs to me while I had many friends who've been responsible for planting the seeds of interest in going on about it so much, it was probably the Timelord Shuffle that was the final nail in the coffin lid. Since being exposed to the awesomeness of Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff and their brilliant filk, I've been most amused by what they've done to various songs. Even though I hadn't gotten involved in the Doctor Who fandom already, Timelord Shuffle wormed its way into a special spot right along delightfulness like Trills Just Want to Have Fun and Every Breath. So, honestly, I probably would have continued to hold out and not realize what I was missing if it hadn't been for this most awesome filk.

I really am insane and going obscenely fangirlish here. The Wizard and I comes up on random play in amarok, and what do I do? I start singing the lyrics to The Doctor and I instead. Yeah, haven't actually listened to John Barrowman's filk enough to get all the lyrics right, and grow frustrated... so off to Google and YouTube I go to find it to listen to. Pause The Wizard and I, listen to The Doctor and I, then go back to The Wizard and I, and be able to sing the "correct" lyrics now that I've gotten the filk out of my system.

I'm hopeless, but John Barrowman really is delicious. Yum.

Also, I suppose I should mention I'm totally in lust with his cover of Your Song, already a favorite song of mine because of Elton John... but now, even better. *grin*