Offline entry, posted Jan 21, 2004
We moved in with Michael’s mother on Sunday. I don’t enjoy moving, does anyone? Trying to carry things that are heavy and bulky for an entire afternoon isn’t any fun. Strangely, the couch and the desk weren’t even the heaviest things, it was the nice box of records that caused us the most pain, it’s small and amazingly heavy. On top of that there were flurries, 6+ inches of snow on the ground, and it was about 30 degrees out. I was so cold, and the truck was very slippery inside, I almost fell about a dozen times. Still, we got the whole move done in about 5 hours, and were able to return the moving truck by 5 pm. Both of us were exhausted, so we decided to head out to dinner at Joseph’s Pizza in northeast Philly, it’s closer to here than it was to our old apartment so the drive wasn’t too bad and they weren’t really busy. When we got back to Michael’s mother’s (ok, I’ll just say “mom’s” from now on) house we went to be fairly early.
Monday we woke up and headed to the old apartment for cleaning and picking up our computers. It took about half the day to do that. It wasn’t so bad. Then we drove around for a bit doing various errands, dropped some old clothes off at the Salvation Army, stopped at a used bookstore so I could trade in some of my books. Got about $16 worth of credit for the dozen or books I gave them, so I picked up The Courtship of Princess Leia and Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga, which I haven’t read yet. We got back to mom’s in the late afternoon, unpacked our computers, made some tacos for dinner, and again, went to bed before 11.
At 5 am on tuesday the alarm went off.
Wednesday was not bad. Hit some rough spots in coding that were really frustrating me, and I had started to get to the point where I didn’t even want to THINK about Zope anymore. I figured out what my limits were as far as python was concerned (zope is VERY python-oriented), and expressed this to my bosses, and they completely understood, luckily these troubles probably won’t come into play for a couple more months, in which time I can either learn more or pass the job off to someone else (another guy there knows a lot of Zope and is more familiar with Python, but he’s crazy busy right now, which is why I’m there). I got a bit of a break by doing normal, basic html stuff to update sites. Of course with each new problem I discover a few hours studying the issue gets me very far, and sometimes just getting away from the code a bit gets my thoughts of
f of that specific direction so I can get a fresh look at it and figure out a new way to tackle it. We stayed at work until about 5, Michael has been really busy with all sorts of things so leaving on time has been difficult. We got home around 5:30 and mom was making some dinner and offered to feed us as well if we were hungry. It was a great dinner, just thanksgiving leftovers really, but I was so hungry and tired that I just wanted something warm and tasty. I ate so much. We went to bed around 10.
Thursday was decent. In the morning it was pouring out, and warm, so the snow was all melting, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts in the morning to get coffee and bagels, and then as we were driving to the office we had to drive through an overflowing creek. Just about everyone was late for work, they ended up closing off the road except to people who worked there because cars kept getting flooded out as the water level increased drastically, they evacuated a nearby business park because it had started to flood. Luckily we were up high enough not to have to worry about that, but the guys sure had fun talking about the possibility. Many of the people in the office went home early because they had little cars that might have trouble getting there, especially in traffic. We stayed though, R4 can take it!
I was able to continue work on one organization’s website, get the basic html code done and looking good in IE, of course getting it to look good in mozilla was no problem, since Mozilla doesn’t do stupid things like IE does *ahem*. Luckily this company only requires pages to look good in IE and Netscape 6+, I winced when I looked at it in Netscape 4.7, but I wasn’t going to waste my time making it look better if it wasn’t required, I mean, I have my pride, but I also had deadlines and so much real work to do, fixing pages to look good in netscape 4.7 is amazingly time-consuming. We stayed until our scheduled 3:30 and then had to head off to Fort Washington.
We had been warned that the exit off of 309 and the turnpike there had been closed due to so much flooding, so we decided to take the long way around. By the time we got to the mortgage place a little after 4 they had left already, even though they claimed they were open until 5. So we just left the paperwork we needed to give them there. Then we headed to Chariot Solutions to have the Philly Chix meeting. The meeting was nice, we were there early so I got to just spend some time hanging out with Erin. We had planned to do a debian install, but all links for the images for the network install that linked on the debian site were broken! We could have looked around the web a bit more to find some, but after realizing that getting the gigabit NIC to work would be a bit of a pain we decided that it might just take too long. We figured that if we did want to do an install we could just use Red Hat or Suse, and that way the others would at least get a basic idea about the install. While waiting around Erin showed me “Magesty” a Windows game that had been ported to linux by a group in the UK (I guess), it’s very Warcraft 3-like, and looked pretty cool. Unfortunately it needs a pretty good system (was not too happy on Michael’s 700ish mhz powerbook), but it might be something to check out for linux lan parties! Around 6 we ordered some dinner, tons of food despite our small group, a few subs, two pizzas, fries. While waiting for the food another woman showed up. She worked at Chariot with Erin, and was the project coordinator for one of their current big projects I guess. She has been doing work in the tech field, coordinating and such since the 80s, and she is really smart, but she’s not too familiar with linux (she is somewhat familiar with other unix varients however). Another woman showed up a little after 7, she also works for Chariot and similarly is familar with some other unix varients, but not linux. While eating dinner (I was so hungry again! I ate half a sub and 3 pieces of pizza, hehe) Erin and I started explaining the basics of linux. We went through what a distro
is what the most popular ones are, what a window manager is, all sorts of choices for programs, then tried to explain what all the major directories were for (/var /dev /home …). Erin also got into licensing after BSD was mentioned, she’s really informed about them, which I assume is partially because she needs to be so they can properly license their java code, and she did an amazing job at explaining them. Around 8:30 we finally got to sit down to start a linux install. We decided to just go with Suse, since Erin and I had never tried it, and we figured it would be a quick and easy one to do. Well it was quick and easy, amazingly so! I was quite impressed, the hardwear detection was great, if you were completely new to linux you’d hardly need to know anything, the default options seemed fine to get a system up and running happily with KDE. The only part of the process that really took us any time was partitioning, since we wanted to explain what a partition was, and how they are used, and options for them. It was fun! By about 9 we decided to leave, I was exhausted, and it started to feel like this “cold that wouldn’t come” was finally starting to creep up on me.
Friday was a long day. Got up at 5 am again, I swear I wasn’t even aware until after my shower when I was brushing my teeth, one of those “Neat, I’m awake” moments. I felt terrible, this cold finally was taking it’s toll, probably aided by this crazy week and my lack of 8 hours of sleep per night. On our way to work we stopped by a Dunkin Donuts again, I just got a bagel since my body wasn’t interested in the whole coffee thing. I had a little trouble focusing at many parts of the day. The morning was quite productive though, I wrote my first little python script! It doesn’t do much, just a basic split, but I was pleased with myself. I had some work in the morning putting together content for a site that has the same basics as one I was working on earlier, and that was good. I am becoming more familiar with postgres, but I am completely unexperienced with putting together SQL queries on larger databases, I had one that took over a minute to return, oops. So I spent a good amount of time trying to slim down the query time by looking at the php scripts previously written for the site. I’m still a bit stumped, but as with everything else, I’m sure I’ll get it soon, and I’m not going to spend my weekend thinking or worrying about it. For lunch we got to have some chicken cheesesteak subs from a local deli, yum! Then Michael headed out to another client to help them with their network. That ended up taking longer than he expected, so it quickly turned into another 12 hours spent at work. I stopped actually working around 4, I had been working for over 9 hours, and I was really starting to feel crappy and have serious trouble focusing. I did some things online, updates to personal sites that needed to be done, some time spent with IRC friends, I replied to a couple emails that I needed to. As a whole I really don’t mind staying later than usual like that, I mean I had internet access and a warm place, here at mom’s I’d just be watching tv or reading anyway, but last night I was not feeling good, I just wanted to go home and go to bed. Michael finally got back around 6:30, he was upset about having to work another 12 hour day, because of all the horribly typical network admin nightmares “I clicked on this attachment that you told me not to…” “I decided to fix the network problem myself but then got pulled into something else…” etc. It was after 7 by the time we got home, 14 hour day! Neither of us were very hungry, Michael made me an english muffin and I had a cup of juice and headed up to bed. We watched tv for a little while, but I was just too tired and feeling lousy to stay up for long. Yay sleep!
I figure I fell asleep around 10, and I didn’t wake up this morning until 11. I think I got my sleep debt repaid! Heh. I still feel lousy though, horrible chest congestion and my nose doesn’t feel too good. I don’t have a sinus headache yet today, I can d
eal with just about every symptom of a cold and still function, but not headaches. I think this weekend will be spent snuggled with my laptop and a book. I downloaded a bit of documentation I’ll want to go through when my laptop was still online, so I have stuff I can work on. Not all Zope related, I’m not sure I even want to look at Zope stuff on my weekend, but if I get in the mood I have that option. I have a perl tutorial that I am interested in working my way through a bit more.
On top of this busy work week, the crazy weather, my cold, and deadlines, we’re trying to get through the closing of our new house. Our timing is amazing sometimes, don’t you think? I think I’m holding up pretty well, my moods haven’t gotten out of control really, and my stress level has stayed in a good place. We have our home inspection on tuesday. I told Michael that he should just drop me off at work that morning so I could get stuff done while he heads up to the house. I really wish I could go with him, I’d like to see my house again! And I’ve been part of this whole process, missing the inspection is disappointing, but I just have too much work to do. We’re hopeful that the inspection will go fine, and sometime in the next few weeks we will have a home of our own!
Christmas is in two weeks too. Gah. I haven’t gone shopping, or thought about Christmas cards. I don’t know if I will do too much this year. It’s nice that I have a job now, so I probably can spend a little on my close family (sisters anyway), but I’m afraid it might just have to get to them late. There is just way too much going on right now.
And now I think I’m going to venture out of the bedroom to find some food, probably take a shower as well since it’s nearly 1 pm. *wanders off*