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Merry Christmas! And Good Things :)

It’s Christmas Eve! This evening I’m snuggled up on my couch with some hot chocolate, cookies and a couple kitties watching Hogfather. Splendid. Tomorrow Baerana invited me over to her place to spend the Christmas afternoon with her, b2s and a couple of their friends. It’s so nice to have friends to spend Christmas with.

I got thinking holiday stuff early this season. On the weekend after Thanksgiving my friend Mike took me to the Wachovia Center (the first time I’d been to a big venue in Philly!) to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. And what a spectacular show! I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was in no way disappointed, it was diverse and fun and engaging. A really great night, made even better by a dinner at Monk’s Cafe just prior to the show.

In spite of the dark beach pictures in my last entry, the majority of my trip to Florida earlier this month was sunny, like when I took these photos in the community where my grandfather lives:

Since I moved here I’ve been pondering whether to sign up for a gym membership or get an indoor trainer for my bike. In the end I went with indoor trainer, which I ordered this past weekend – and it arrived this evening! It took a bit of time to put the bike on it since I wasn’t familiar with the mechanics of the bike, but it all came together nicely after some fiddling. I am going to go to a bike shop soon and see about getting a smooth rear tire for the back when it’s on the trainer, it’s pretty noisy with the mountain bike tire on there.

On the tech side, I did a migration recently taking a slightly older than current version of Drupal that was installed from a tarball and migrated it into a Debian infrastructure. I’m not quite on the Drupal bandwagon in spite of its popularity within the Ubuntu community, but I am a fan of handling security upgrades of webapps through the OS package manager. It was a fun project to tackle, I should convert my notes into a useful form. Maybe this weekend. I’ve also had some time to contribute to webcalendar. A major release came out a couple months ago, and though it won’t get into Lenny (past freeze time), there is some work to do to get it prepped for release in Squeeze. So I’ve triaged some bugs and started testing the new .deb, within which I found bugs WRT the database upgrades. What else… I’m loving gwibber for twitter and facebook feeds. I was using twhirl, but then an Adobe Air upgrade went badly and while it was broken I used the Intrepid version of gwibber, and fell in love. And Google streetmapped the house I grew up in! How cool is that?

Finally, I have some amazing friends. I’ve been going on about getting a pink laptop for over a year now, and when the netbooks started coming out I started drooling. When Dell released their Mini9 and promised colored ones, including pink, would be released with Ubuntu? Had. To. Have. And I said so, often. So earlier this month a few of my friends schemed to order one for me. On Saturday Mike gave me a card which contained a beautifully drafted insert containing specs for my pink Mini9. I almost cried, but opted for grins and squeals of excitement. How amazing of them! Thank you Mike! Thank you Stephen! Thank you :) It has been shipped and I’ll be driving to New Jersey to retrieve it from Mike on Saturday (almost a week ahead of schedule!). Glee!

Happy Holidays everyone!

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