I heard on the news recently that “web logs” have, for the first time, been a “big thing” in a presidential election, and politics in general. Well it seems I got a taste of that with my last entry! It really is a wonderful platform for discussion, and I enjoy arguing with smart people %) Yay I’m a statistic!
I decided to post some of the entries I wrote offline. I think there are about a half dozen of them, all marked with a red “Offline entry, posted Jan 21…” note, and I made sure they were labelled as back-dated so they won’t fill up your friends lists ;) So you can wander to my main LJ page to see all my entries about Christmas and stuff if you feel so inclined.
This past weekend… hm, what did I do? Umm… We went to Unos on saturday afternoon to have some food with Bob. I guess that’s it, the rest of the weekend was spent just relaxing. I did some offline work on my websites, just tedious stuff that I could do while watching TV, I haven’t uploaded any of it yet because it requires some live tweaking, and creation of a number of symlinks since I changed the names of some files while switching them to PHP. I focused mostly on converting my 13thHour site to php, since the pages are almost all identical, and there are a lot of them, so it’s silly to have to edit the menu, for instance, 60 times when I want to make a change (well, I’d actually just use a perl script to change them all at once, but it’s still silly). I also decided that the Sailor Moon section of my page could use some work. I am not really into Sailor Moon anymore, I only put that section up on my site because I had it sitting around on my harddrive, and the design of it is pretty lousy. Well it turns out that it gets tons of hits, so I figured I should clean it up so it’s a bit more presentable, and make it in php. So sometime I’ll eventually get all these pages up on my site.
Hmmm, we went to the grocery store sunday night (the excitement never ceases!) and since it was “Eagles Game Sunday” the grocery stores were pretty empty compared to normal Sundays. We got the strangest cashier, we’ve gotten him before and I think I mentioned him here, he’s the guy that forces customers to interact with him. He asks “How are you?” and if you don’t respond he repeats himself “HEY HOW ARE YOU?” and when you do respond he tries to strike up a conversation. Well there were these two women in front of us, clearly of asian decent, and who didn’t speak very good english, well he’s laughing and telling them jokes about the eagles football game, and they are just nervously smiling and nodding while he laughs and laughs at his own jokes. In the midst of it he mentioned that he “doesnt like sports because in high school there were a lot of sports fans” The hell? This guy is like 55, and still sore about high school? So we finally check out, and as we’re loading the bags into the cart he takes the time to roll up our receipt, while he’s standing there rolling it for about 2 minutes he’s saying “Thank you for shopping Giant, we really appreciate … and have a nice evening… here you go!” It was all very uncomfortable. I know he’s just trying to do a good job and be friendly, but he goes WAY overboard.
On monday I went into work. Puttered around for some time, and then was told that it was a slow week for work that I could do and they probably wouldn’t need me until friday. Well that’s fine, I expected that after this last site launch that I would have some down time. I figured I’d come in anyway, since there is nice internet access there, and it’s generally more fun than staying here at ‘home’ anyway. So I spent monday pretty much just surfing the web, researching cats.
Cats? Yeah, we’re looking to buy a cat. I’ve been studying the breeds, their temperments, their care records, their cost and availability. I sort of settled on a Bengal cat, which I have had interest in since I saw my first pair back in 1995. They’re really great kitties, and have a “wild look” while being completely domesticated. I’m still looking though, can anyone recommend
any breeds that they prefer? I’m also looking at Maine Coon cats I am sure I could find a breeder in the area, but they are long-haired, and although I won’t dismiss a cat because of it’s hair length, I’m mostly looking at short-hairs. So any recommendations would be much appreciated %)
Now I realize that my choice to go to a breeder is frowned upon by a lot of people. I know all the arguments against it, so there really is no need to enlighten me, and I respect your position. All the cats I’ve ever had were strays/part of unwanted litters/cats people couldn’t keep, I’m just choosing to go a different route this time.
On tuesday I woke up with a bit of a headache, I decided that I’d rather stay in bed until it went away than go into work to play online. It was just a typical old sinus headache and went away after I drank lots of water and took some advil, so I spent the rest of the day just wandering around doing various things around the house. I watched a little bit of TV while working on my laptop, was able to catch an interesting phone interview on CNN with Mike Rowe (of mikerowesoft.com), and I watched a documentary on Attila the Hun. Whee! Then I decided to spend some time playing around with Michael’s mother’s computer, which is the only one online right now. Previously it was on Windows ME, but over the past few weeks Michael has taken it upon himself to turn this into a big conversion project, it’s now running Windows XP and Gentoo+KDE, it also got a ram upgrade and a nice external modem. It’s really quite amazing how great this is running! And while I’ve seen KDE, and poked around it briefly, I never completely realized how pretty KDE 3.1 is. And all the K-programs! Running in a KDE environment it’s all pretty cool. And kweather! What a great program, and not just because the author is a real life friend of ours, it’s a perfect replacement for the evil WeatherBug in Windows that was installed before. Transparency is very pretty, and Konsole is a pretty sweet term. Of course I’d never use KDE myself, but as a happy clicky GUI for people converting from Windows it’s many steps ahead of other window mangers (sorry Gnome). This is a real, good alternative for typical “check email and surf the web a little” users. I love linux, and Gentoo itself even continues to impress me. Right now I’m on this computer, and chatting, even with dial up this system is much more comfortable for me, I really really hate windows, and I don’t enjoy using it.
Ah computers. I did something really really stupid recently. I added a group to my home workstation, R2D2, for website access, so I wouldn’t have to be root to edit stuff in /var/www/ and it’d be all around better … well I created the group fine, added my user to it, everything is great. Then…
Wait, I didn’t just chown my whole system did I?
OH GOD.
Yep, a mistake in a command can do very bad things, I chowned my entire system to root. *bangs head on desk* Now as far as I know there is no easy fix for such an idiotic mistake. But how bad could it be? Hah, hah, HAHAHHAA. Postfix broken. MySQL broken, having to chown all my home directories back to their proper owners. I’m not sure what else is broken, since I haven’t been using the computer much, but I can’t imagine Zope survived either. So I thought about all this for a while, do I really want to take the time and go through my system fixing all the permissions, knowing full well that I will probably miss some and it could be a source of problems down the road forever? Bleh, no. This is a perfect excuse to reinstall my system, with Gentoo. *gasp!*
Yeah, for as long as I’ve been active in the linux community I’ve been a devoted Debian user, so it probably comes as a surprise that I’d consider switching, but I wasn’t kidding with how impressed I was with Gentoo. I started out in debian using testing, but then switched to stable because I was more comfortable with it’s security updates, and I really wanted a STABLE system, so unstable was pretty much out of the question. Well, needless to say stable
is old. I was living in the stone ages as far as software went, and although this didn’t really bother me before I started using Gentoo at work (“it works fine!” *shakes cane at new fangled things*), I quickly began to realize how this new stuff really was stable and good. Now I’m not too wild about compile times, but that’s a one time thing that I can handle. And I have a lot to learn with Gentoo, I am a total n00b, but I hear the docs are very good, so I’m not too worried. So Michael brought my computer into work Monday night to back it up and start the Gentoo install for me. I’m confident it’ll go fine, and I’ll have a spiffy system ready when we move into our new place!
Of course I’m going to continue to use debian on my laptop, and on servers, since I am comfortable with how it does those jobs. I do still love you debian!
This has been long. I’m going to go find some lunch and probably surf the web doing a little research on kitties and whatever else happens to grab my attention. *wanders off*