Found another record that says Raffaele was born in Castiglione, Chieti. Good. :)

In Greek today I got an idea: to write short articles on various grammar topics in Greek and Latin, with numerous notes and sample sentences culled from several sources. It'd help me get the grammar down pat and would be a fun bit of scholarship as well.

I'm researching my Iavicoli line, which is from Torre de' Passeri, Pescara, Italy. One of my ancestors, Raffaele Iavicoli, was born in Castiglione, San Clementi, Italy, but I can't find out which province San Clementi has become. (At least none of the province lists have it, so I assume it's changed its name.) Pretty soon I'm going to start working on my Iorio line, which is from Napoli (Naples).

Went bowling and, on a complete fluke, ended up with five strikes (total score of 157, which is a lot better than my usual 50 or 60 :)).

School's taking up most of my time (midterms are this week and next and of course there's always homework). I've been doing a lot of family history and tinkering with OpenOffice, Scribus, and Inkscape on the side. OfficeTLE's Thai support is quite nice and functional. One of these days I need to spend a few hours updating this website, but so far I haven't had any time and it doesn't look like there'll be any for a while.

Used Scribus to make a 20-page picture scrapbook of my little brother's Eagle project. Usually a program would get bogged down with 90 megs of pictures, but Scribus is just as fast as ever. It's a beautiful program. :) (When I finish the scrapbook I'll export it to PDF, burn it to CD, and take it to the local Kinko's to have it printed in color.)

I really like the new way X.org does fonts, where all I have to do to install new fonts is put them in my ~/.fonts directory. And I can even have subdirectories within. Very easy and now I can organize my fonts. It's come a long way. :)

Check out this Honda ad. It's pretty cool.

Set up my Epson Perfection 1250 USB scanner to work with my Linux laptop. It actually took very little configuring, and I'll document what I had to do on my Linux page sometime. At any rate, I'll start scanning in my mission pictures sometime soon.

Started trying out Scribus (Linux desktop publishing program, like PageMaker) and Inkscape (vector-based graphics program, like Illustrator). Both have popped up since I left on my mission two years ago and both are pretty darn cool. I'll certainly be using both for my own DTP and artwork.

I'm trying to get PAF to work on WINE. The install crashes right after it unpacks the files, but I'll figure it out...

I've been busy with school. Decided to start studying Italian on my own in preparation for a family internship in Italy next year or the year after. I went to the city library today and got the Pimsleur CDs for Spanish and French (the Italian one wasn't in but they'll call me when it arrives). Good thing the library has them because they're really expensive and I'd never be able to afford them otherwise. :)

Because of all the homework I have to do, I haven't had much time at all for Thai cooking. But the sticky rice was indeed successful and I'm making some more right now. It's not quite as authentic as the sticky rice I used to eat in Thailand, but it's close enough. Ah, I miss Thai food... :)

TextKit.com is really neat and has a lot of good old Latin and Greek books online (scanned page images in PDF). Quite impressive.

Went to the Thai market and got some basic supplies for cooking Thai food (mortar and pestle, bamboo steamer for sticky rice, various curry pastes, coconut milk, etc.). Tonight I'll soak some sticky rice and steam it up tomorrow morning, and hopefully it'll work. :)

Today I realized that some of the things I've been planning to do just aren't important in the eternal scheme of things. In fact, I realized that I'd been seeking the accolades of men more than I thought, rather than seeking the applause of the host of heaven. So I'm shifting priorities around again, this time correctly. :) I've also been reminded of just how important service and thinking of others is -- without it, all our happiness disappears as well. Selfishness never was happiness.

This past week I've become slightly obsessed with Thai cooking. :) It started to disappear over the past few days, but today a friend gave me a Thai cookbook and now the obsession is back. I made sticky rice in the microwave a few days ago but that wasn't too successful. :) I suppose my main hesitation right now is lack of knowledge about which ingredients to buy. So I begin to study...

Audacity is quite a nice audio editor. I'd used it a little bit before, but it's progressed a lot and is extremely cool. I took one of the Book of Mormon MP3s (Moroni 10) and some of the instrumental tracks from the seminary CD and mixed them together, so you get audio Book of Mormon with nice music in the background. It was much easier to do than I'd imagined, thanks to Audacity.

Oh, the fact that I haven't mentioned 9/11 here doesn't mean that I've forgotten about it, by the way.

Still trying to get Postfix to work on my machine. I installed Thunderbird, though, which works and is pretty nice, so I can use that in the meantime. Signed up for Gmail, which is really, really cool. I especially like having so much archive space, and the 'conversation' grouping thing.

I've been doing some research on charsets and Unicode and all that sort of stuff, trying to figure out what I need to do to get Thai (and the other languages I'll be working with, like Greek) working nicely on Linux. I've found some success with mlterm so far but haven't really explored the other possibilities. Firefox does a fairly good job at displaying Thai text half the time, but it'd be nice to lock down the font because sometimes it chooses some that are too small to read. I'll write this all up when I figure it out, by the way.

Oh, I think I'm going to continue learning Burmese script. I started when I was on my mission but forgot about it until yesterday when I was in the library and found some books on writing Burmese. Fascinating stuff.

I'm finding some success with Thai on Linux in mlterm, a multi-language terminal emulator. It shows Thai correctly, which is really nice, and the font is the best I've seen so far. (xiterm works but the fonts are usually too small and the English stuff starts getting ugly, whereas mlterm manages to keep the English looking good too.)

Today I started rewriting the site. I'm paring a lot of stuff down, cutting out many of the links and other empty nothings. I didn't realize just how much there is to do on it -- it'll be the work of weeks, I suspect.

Got my wireless network card (NetGear WG511) today. I won't be able to test it out till I go to BYU on Tuesday. It'll be pretty nice.

Bought a small calling card from idphonecard.com so I can call Thailand. It seems to have good rates, at least as far as I could tell. (Another place I checked was thaitel.com and it seemed good too, but idphonecard looked better.) Haven't actually called Thailand yet, though. :) Speaking of which, I still haven't got Thai working nicely on my laptop. Gaim works okay, but I can't change the Thai font and so it's a small, hard-to-read one. Mutt refuses to do anything with Thai no matter what. ~sigh~ Vim can do Thai okay, but the tone marks aren't placed on top of their accompanying characters. Firefox does Thai fine. I installed the Thai fonts that come with Windows but I'm having trouble to get any applications to use them. Someday, someday it'll all be nicely set up on here... :) Sometime next week I'm going to try some of the Thai distributions and see how they get it to work. Oh, I'm still stuck at 800x600 on here -- I'll have to see if it's my version of X.org. (I have an Intel 82852 card which uses the i810 driver but it's not working, and I get weird freezes/X crashes with something about '[drm:i830]'.)

Last night I realized that I wasn't supposed to be taking Middle English and that God wanted me to take some more family history classes instead. So I signed up for those and now I feel much more at peace with myself and with the Lord. Personal revelation often comes to me in unexpected ways and times, but it's real and I can always tell when it's inspiration from God rather than my own thoughts. At any rate, I'm not feeling quite so stressed now, and I'm caught up on all my homework too, so this weekend will be nice (especially with the Labor Day holiday on Monday).

FireFox is really cool.

Cathy and I dropped Theatre History yesterday. I signed up for Middle English instead. :) So now I'm taking Greek, Thai, Middle Egyptian, Middle English, Family History, and New Testament. It's starting to feel a little overwhelming with the homework and all, but I'm sure it'll get better before too long. I'm finally starting to understand Greek accentuation, which is a relief (yesterday I was rather stressed about it because I just didn't get it).

Today was the first day of class. It was all quite good and I'm excited for the semester. At the moment I don't have a lot of time, though. I did set up postfix on my laptop so I can send e-mail directly from my machine instead of having to use a web client or go through some other SMTP server. I'm still trying to get Thai working nicely on Linux, though. I've had some limited success but it's still not clear.

I ended up dropping Italian so that I could take Theatre History 201 with my sister Cathy. And as a result, that afternoon hour was free and I was able to accept a job offer from Dr. Huntsman (to be a TA for his freshman Honors Book of Mormon class). So it all worked out quite well. I've spent the week getting my laptop set up (it's almost done) and that's about it, really. Watched Charly last night (my sister April's in it as an extra) and it was very moving.

I'll be updating this site over the next month or two, fixing broken links and adding my mission e-mails ('Adventures in Thailand') and all that. I'll also add an article on how to get Thai working nicely on Linux (once I figure out how to do it :)).

Oh, last night I was reading Wheelock's Latin for fun and had two observations. First, reading Latin was much easier than I remembered it being; and two, every time I tried to translate the English phrases into Latin, my brain translated it into Thai first. I had to force myself to think Latin instead of Thai. Hopefully I'll be okay with Greek and Egyptian this semester. :)

Back to normal life again. I came in off the plane on Friday at about 7:30 p.m. and have been adjusting to everything. Lots of stuff to do and I keep trying to do it all at once but I'm finding out that it's not quite possible. :)

So, I'm currently thinking about buying a laptop from PCLaptops. And once I do, I'll probably put the Fedora Project on it (which I guess is the latest and greatest, but oh boy do I feel like I don't know anything about computers anymore :)). On Saturday I booted my current laptop up and was trying to do some stuff in the Linux shell (cat, grep, pipes, etc.), but I couldn't remember how to do it. After a few minutes of failure, suddenly my fingers spontaneously typed in the right command. Finger memory is truly amazing. In fact, I've come back and played pieces on the piano that I haven't tried in years and I'm able to play them just as if I'd been working on them yesterday.

Bought my textbooks for fall semester on Saturday. I'm taking family history, New Testament, Greek 101, Italian 101, Ancient Egyptian, and Thai. It'll be fun. :) No, I haven't decided on a major yet, but it's looking like it'll have something to do with languages. ;)