It took a week and a half, but my white G1 finally has a lovely pink case. I wasn’t a huge fan of the white G1 itself, but it certainly was the way to go with the pink case :)
More pictures here: http://princessleia.com/images/pinkg1/
Sorry sweetheart, I haven’t got time for anything else.
Saturday, Jun 20th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments
Well, it happened again. In spite of saying I’d blog more regularly – I haven’t! I haven’t actually been a hermit every day, either.
Going back all the way to the beginning of the month, when my friend MJ was in town we headed down to Philadelphia to see Star Trek at The Franklin Institute Omnimax. So it wasn’t optimized for the hugemongous Omnimax screen so it ended up looking a bit warped, and I’m glad I’d seen it prior to seeing it there so I didn’t miss anything, but it was quite a fun experience. And while mentioning MJ, I was quite pleased with myself to have gotten him in touch with the Ubuntu Ireland team while he was in Dublin so he could snag a couple pints with them. What an awesome team to extend such a welcome to a visiting American… or do the Irish simply use any excuse to have a pint? :) I will have to make it out to Dublin one of these days to see for myself, I’m jealous of everyone involved in said pint night.
Blinker is fixed again! Getting the mechanism in the door for the window ended up costing me a bit over $200 (ouch) but it’s nice to not be holding up the window with masking tape anymore, a week and a half of that was more than enough for me. Inspection on the car is due next month, I’m really hoping it’ll pass without too much trouble and that nothing else goes wrong with it for a while.
I’m in love with my G1. I was glued to it for the trip down to the Southeast Linuxfest last weekend so we had hours and hours to bond. Since I’ve never had a smartphone before just about everything is novel. Linux kernel on my phone? Squee! Maps on my phone? Glee! Traffic too? Beautiful screen? Yeah! Awesome interface! And the best? An excellent ssh client so I can hop onto IRC from anywhere. Oh, and when I’m on call at work I can easily forward calls to it and tunnel into work servers to check email. Oh, and it’s a phone too! Not a bad one, for that matter. Tomorrow I think I’ll skip down to King of Prussia to get a screen protector, and see if any of the shops down there have pink G1 covers before I start looking online. The only complaint about the phone is the backlit keyboard. On the black version of the phone it’s not much of an issue, I bet, but the white one has a grey keyboard which is a bit unfortunate in medium light: without backlight I can see keys fine, with backlight I can barely see them! But I figure as phone complaints go, this is pretty mild.
I did a talk on Contributing to Open Source Projects at PLUG North this month which I think went quite well. A huge thanks to MJ and David A. Harding for offering fantastic review of my slides prior to the presentation, their input and content additions really put the polish I needed into the presentation. I finally got around to uploading my slides here (they are actually somewhat useful if you check out Note view in Impress). Which reminds me, I hadn’t written a presentation in a long time, the last time I did I used S5. I was geared up to use that again until I read Emma Jane’s OpenOffice.org: an outline for preparing your slides, with the guidance from that post I had a very pleasant Impress experience, and I suspect I’ll be using it in the future. The only snafu? My desktop is running Ubuntu 9.04 with OpenOffice.org 3, while my mini9 that I did the presentation on is still running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with OpenOffice.org 2.4, the version difference caused my pretty pink bullet points to disappear on 8.04, which I had to scramble to fix prior to heading out to the meeting.
I finally picked up a Wii Fit a couple weeks ago. It’s actually been quite fun so far. Plus I’m riding my bike some and being pretty good about eating better (the Southeast Linuxfest weekend being a gigantic exception, wahoo southern food!). I’m really looking forward to when the pool here at the apartment complex opens, it’s almost July, what are they waiting for? I’d love to be able to skip down to the pool for a little while each nice day for a swim. Love swimming.
What else… okay, so I did spend pretty much this entire week hermited in my apartment with my cats. Except for today, when I had lunch with Stephen. Oh how I adore the swiss and mushroom burgers at Stoudt’s, and wrapping up the afternoon with a brownie and coffee ice cream sundae at The Udder Choice in Ephrata was awesome. Plus it was very nice to get out and get my mind off a recent break up that’s had me down.
Now I’m going to try and get some sleep and hope this miserable, humid weather goes away soon.
Southeast LinuxFest!
Friday, Jun 19th, 2009 by pleia2 | 4 Comments
This past weekend I rode down to the Southeast Linuxfest in Clemson South Carolina. I tagged along with Freenode reps Jonathan Simpson and Crissi, plus Andrew from the Pennsylvania Ubuntu LoCo team. I was able to take Friday off from work for the drive down to Charlotte, NC where we were staying, the drive down was long (ended up being about 12 hours) but Jonathan and Crissi had a powerstrip in the car so our laptops and cellphones could stay charged for the drive! Wahoo, G1 with IRC for the whole ride down! Plus they kept us somewhat occupied with lively discussion and proof-reading some of the freenode materials that would be available for the crowds.
Saturday morning we got up bright and early to head down to the Linuxfest in Clemson. On the way down there was a giant peach:
But other than that the drive down was uneventful. We arrived around 10AM and got the Freenode booth set up.
As for me, I met up with several people I’d only known online until then, caught up with some other Ubuntu people I’d met various places, and at 11 I skipped over to Amber Graner‘s “Why not You?” session where we talked about talking to people about F/OSS involvement, which was a great session and I was finally able to meet Beth Lynn Eicher who I’d only vaguely known until then through her involvement with WPLUG, and Jimmy Harris, a Florida LoCo team member who I’ve worked with on the Ubuntu USTeams project (so Jimmy, going to mentor for us? Pleeeease? :)). The only talk I ended up going to all day was Pete Graner’s Ubuntu Kernel talk after lunch, which was a very interesting and informative talk, after which I headed over to Amber’s second session of the day on Ubuntu LoCo teams. Again it was a great discussion with a lot of valuable insight to team planning offered by Jimmy, Amber, Mackenzie Morgan and others.
I’d say more, but Mackenzie and Amber have both written great entries that cover much of what I wanted to say. Most notably is something Mackenzie pointed out – the percentage of women attending! I don’t know how many actually were there percentage-wise, but there were noticeably more than other Linux events than I’ve attended, it was very encouraging. But here are their posts:
Mackenzie Morgan: Southeast Linuxfest Post
Amber Graner: My First Linux Fest: SELF (Southeast Linux Fest)
Photo by: Jeremy Sands / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
The much of the rest of the event I spent talking with people informally, which is when I bumped into Ian Geiser, a Philadelphia local who I’d for some reason lost touch with and hadn’t seen in how long? Over 5 years? He was speaking on KDE at the fest and tending the KDE booth! I’ve hopefully successfully convinced him to come out to PLUG meetings again …or at least do some social stuff!
After the event wrapped up we headed over to Rock Hoppers Restaurant & Bar for the SELF after party! Ian was nice enough to give Andrew and me a ride over there while Jonathan and Crissi parted ways with us and headed out to dinner. We sort of just chilled out in the back and had dinner and chatted for a couple hours until it was time to skip off for the evening (fairly early, but we did have to get back to Charlotte before it got too late). Good times :)
Sunday morning we slept in a little bit and then started the long drive home. Huge thanks to Jonathan for driving all day :) We got back in the Philadelphia area around 9PM, snagged some burgers at Red Robin and then headed home.
Pretty white G1, you are mine
Sunday, Jun 7th, 2009 by pleia2 | 7 Comments
Last summer I posted an entry “Tell me about your smartphone” where I outlined desirables in a potential smartphone. I never bought one – until this weekend. As requested, here are the details of what I ended up with.
After months of research and considerations it came down to two contenders, Nokia e71x and the HTC Dream (G1):
While I won’t jump in and say either one is perfect (there is no perfect), they both met my core requirements perfectly. I spent about three weeks being indecisive about which I would choose. The e71x is more compact and cheaper, the G1 has a form-factor I prefer and the very cool Android OS, but first gen? I played with them both, poured over comparison charts, blabbered about it in IRC with owners of each model.
When all the dust settled on Friday I headed off to an AT&T retailer to get the Nokia e71x. Due to my lack of credit they wanted a deposit of $500 for a plan (“pay as you go” is not very popular or reasonably priced in the US). Wow. I paid a $400 deposit on my Verizon phone but that was because I didn’t have many options at the time. The retailer told me that they could probably get it reduced to $350, with even the possibility of getting it waived and that they’d get back to me in 3 hours. They never called me. I could actually pay this deposit, but I skipped over to the T-Mobile store down the street to scope out my options for the G1.
The folks at the T-Mobile store were friendly and helpful, and after considering plans and all costs involved (the phone cost more, but they only wanted 1 months payment up front for a deposit and the plans were significantly cheaper for unlimited text and data) I went ahead and bought a white G1. They didn’t have the white one in stock so I’m picking it up tomorrow.
I’m looking forward to wasting hours this week playing with it, and I’m very happy with the choice. Woo, I finally will have a shiny new phone that does more than voice and text for my trip down to SELF on Friday! :)
Now to find a nice pink cover…
Filed under: ubuntu planet
Sisters, pink Wiimotes
Thursday, May 28th, 2009 by pleia2 | 3 Comments
My sister’s flight left yesterday morning, luckily no delays this time!
The night before we were at the North Coventry mall when Nita gave us a call to see if we wanted to hang out with her and her sister. Yes! So they came over and we all went out to dinner, where this photo was taken:
Later that evening we all headed back to my apartment for some Mario Party on the Wii. Which reminds me, I didn’t mention my new pink acquisition thanks to my little sis who shares my love for pink! While swinging by Five Below in the KoP mall earlier in the weekend to snag her some cheap sunglasses (she has a tendency to lose them), she found pink Wii controller and nunchuck covers! Squee!
Now I’ll probably have to get a pink skin for the Wii, and absolutely the pink cover once I get my Wii Fit balance board…
This evening I got caught up on a few things that had been lurking on my ToDo list. I really have been slacking on some of my projects and that’s unfortunate. Plans for the weekend thus far are pretty low-key. Tomorrow evening I’m planning on heading down into Philly to see a movie with a friend. Saturday is a bit up in the air, depending on the weather I’ll probably go on a bike ride then or Sunday. Whatever I do, it will be nice to get out of the apartment, having my sister here was a great break from the whole living alone thing, but now I’m back to it and gosh does this place get lonely.
Half-fixed Blinker
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments
I took Blinker over to my mechanic this morning (Scott Smith over at Smith Automotive). It was awesome that he was able to squeeze the repair in this morning and it didn’t cost me a fortune ($35 in labor, $30 for the part, yay I can pay my rent! …I’m only mostly joking).
The window? Well, I can’t afford to fix it at this moment since they’ll need to take apart the door to even diagnose it so I’m bringing it back on June 8th. Then I get to bring it back for inspection in the beginning of July. Blinker really needs to stop breaking and behave.
Tonight my sister and I will probably be chilling down at the North Coventry Mall and then have some dinner. I drive her to the airport tomorrow morning, and am a bit sad to see her go!
Filed under: Uncategorized
South Street and broken Blinker
Monday, May 25th, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments
Sad that I just posted about my fixed car and now I’m talking about it being broken!
Yesterday I decided to take my little sister down to Philadelphia for the day and to meet some of my friends. Another friend of mine is in town visiting, so the plan was to swing by and pick him up, then meet Nita and her sister Dannette down there. What actually happened? I am getting on the turnpike, roll my window down to grab the ticket and hear a “clunk” – oh no. My window refuses to go up. So I’m heading down the turnpike with my window open, panicking about what I’m going to do. I arrive where my friend is staying, explain the situation and he lets me put the car in the garage and drives us down to the city instead. It was nice of him.
I tried to put car worries behind me and we met up with Nita and Dannette at Penn’s Landing. Walked around the Landing and watched some kind of tugboat war for a few minutes before heading up to South Street. The novelty of having an “Annette” and a “Dannette” was not lost, especially when they are both nicknamed “Nettie” and would both look when said nickname was spoken.
South Street was fun, first we hit Jim’s Steaks to treat Annette to a Philly cheese steak (Pat’s and Geno’s were a bit far). I’d never been there, and finally gathered up the courage to get a cheesesteak with cheese whiz on it – and it was fine! I’m no fan of cheese whiz, but maybe there is something to these crazy traditional Philly steaks wit whiz.
The rest of the afternoon was more wandering through shops, then we wandered through society hill and back to the cars. At the garage we decided to head up to Oaks to see Wolverine! We arrived a bit early for the movie, so skipped over to Max & Ermas for some drinks and cookies.
The movie was fun and we left the theater around 10 and it was starting to rain. I still didn’t have my car back, and driving home in the rain with my window down wasn’t an awesome option, so we were dropped off at the apartment and made arrangements for me to pick it up this morning.
I picked it up this morning and fretted the entire way home over how to handle the window situation. I went with getting some pliers to pull up the window to see if I could get it on the track, if that didn’t work I’d use some online instructions to try and take the door apart to see if I can fix the inside myself. That fails? Go to the mechanic! My mechanic didn’t work today, so I was hoping I could at least get the window *up* so I planned to get some masking tape to hold it in place if all else failed.
So I pull into the Walmart parking lot and some smoke/steam starts coming out of the front of my car. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Look at the dashboard, the heat indicator says the engine is running hotter than normal, more smoke coming out, indicator for heat is visibly rising, my sister exclaims “that smells like coolant!”. I pull into a spot and pop open the hood – sure enough a hose has cracked and is spraying coolant all over my engine.
I almost cried.
But instead of crying I formulated a plan to fix Blinker enough to take her home! We hit the Walmart, snagged the planned pliers and masking tape, but added electrical tape, coolant, towel and duct tape to the list. Supplies acquired, we headed back to the car and wiped off the hose with a towel and wrapped the crack in electrical tape (I didn’t know what else probably wouldn’t melt… computer geek here!) and poured half a bottle of coolant into the tank. The 3 mile drive home was fine, while the tape held it visibly brought the engine temperature down. Upon getting back it was obvious that the tape wouldn’t have held for much longer, it had already started to leak.
Wow, so I still have a window to deal with! I move forward with my pliers plan, first trying with just pliers – but they kept slipping and I was worried I’d damage the window. Pliers wrapped in towel? Towel is too thick, couldn’t get a proper grip. Frustrated I started taking apart the door, but then became concerned when I reread the directions that called for a “door panel clip prying tool” which seemed to be important to not doing permanent damage to the clips holding the door panel on. I nearly threw up my hands at that point when I remembered the duct tape. I wrapped the pliers in duct tape and within 3 minutes had pulled up my window – hurrah! Unfortunately I couldn’t get it back on the track, and while trying I heard something *fall* inside the door – broken track clips? Sigh. At least I had the window up, so I secured it in place with my handy blue masking tape (as recommended here). Not exactly classy, but it’ll keep the rain out for now.
Great, fixed window but I can’t actually USE my car! I need my car to work by Wednesday morning so I can bring my sister to the airport! I am going to call my mechanic in the morning and see what he can do for me. I’m hoping he can do a quick fix job on the cracked hose (I’ll even provide replacement coolant, I bought enough!) and possibly take a peek at the window – even if I can’t afford to or he doesn’t have the parts to fix it properly maybe just prop it up so I can get rid of the masking tape. Cars!
I’m glad my sister is here, she’s keeping me sane through these car troubles and it’s great to have her in town in general. Today any potential plans were ruined by car issues, but we’ve had a fine time just chilling out with computers, tv, and a 2 mile walk down and back from the local Wawa for some soda and snacks. I missed family, I’m wondering if I should start making a more dedicated effort to stay in better contact and see them more often.
Filed under: family, philadelphia
Malls
Sunday, May 24th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments
My sister’s flight finally came into PHL Friday night around 11:30, so by midnight we were taking 76 through the city to head back to my apartment. I had planned on pizza that evening, but arriving back around 1AM left us with the options of a local diner or Wawa. Wanting her to have the “Philadelphia Experience” we headed over to Wawa and touchscreen-ordered ourselves a couple hoagies.
Yesterday we slept in a bit and eventually made it out the door around 11:30. First stop was right down 422 a few miles to wander around the Philadelphia Premium Outlets. The temperature was still nice enough to walk around the open mall, but by 1PM it was getting warm and we hopped back into the car to head down to the blissfully air-conditioned King of Prussia Mall. We snagged a quick lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon there. Around 4:30 we decided to head back, with a quick detour to hit the grocery store and a salon to get our eyebrows waxed. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such a girly day.
Once back at the apartment we settled down in front of the TV to play some MarioKart on the Wii! She had never played, but being the cruel sister I am I threw her in the deep end and we logged onto WFC to play a match against some friends. I was quite pleased with how quickly she picked up the controls and after a couple hours of playing she was really holding her own in the races (read: beating me). We then played a couple little games from Wii Play and ordered a pizza. The rest of the evening was spent with movies.
Today we’re heading down to wander around Philadelphia. It’s going to be another hot day, and the chance of showers this afternoon isn’t particularly impressing me. But we’ll throw caution to the wind and wander around South Street and Penn’s Landing anyway :) Plus we’re meeting up with a friend who is in town visiting from San Francisco, he used to live out here and knows the city far better than I do, so my sister won’t be stuck with just clueless me for a tour guide ;)
So far the weekend has successfully kept my mind mostly off my unfortunate inability to go to UDS. Still, reading about everyone’s travel plans has made me mope a bit! Hopefully I’ll get to go to the next one.
Delayed flight, fixed car
Friday, May 22nd, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments
I am supposed to be returning from the Philadelphia airport right now, with my sister. Instead I’m still at my apartment, refreshing the USAir Flight Status page to see when her 6:19PM flight is actually going to leave – right now they estimate it at 10PM, ouch. It was on time when she arrived at the airport, mechanical problems pushed it to 7:05PM… next I knew it had been pushed to 10PM. I feel bad for my sister, she’s had to sit in the dreadfully dull Portland airport all evening. For me this just means I have all this unexpected time this evening to work on things, and write in my blog!
Hopefully this super-late night won’t put too much of a dent in the weekend. Planning on just chilling out, possibly hitting the mall and meeting up with some people tomorrow. Sunday is Philly day (South Street, Penn’s Landing). Monday we were invited to a BBQ. Should be a fun weekend.
Oh, and Blinker is fixed! It’s amazing how satisfying this repair is. Since I bought this car a year ago (wow, it’s been a year, just renewed my registration tonight) it’s been making a noise related to the compressor, the complete failure of the A/C is only the latest manifestation of this ongoing problem. But now the noise is gone! Blinker runs beautifully and quietly! Well, as quiet as a 9 year old car with 150K miles on it will run :)
My sister’s flight finally departed at 10:04! Estimated arrival at 11:24PM, so I’ll be heading down pretty soon.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Wii, TV, Blinker and Smartphone
Monday, May 18th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments
I bought a Wii this weekend. It’s been on my “want” list for quite some time now but I kept putting it off due to financial considerations. I still had those considerations on my mind, but I needed some retail therapy. Nudge me via email to swap Wii and MarioKart codes :)
I ended up snagging the used Wii for $200 at GameStop, and since I had $60 worth of trade-in games I walked out of there with the Wii for $140 – not bad! Along with Wii Sports I snagged Mario Kart and Wii Play (extra controller!). I then spent the entire weekend playing games and watching TV. It was a good weekend, I needed the down time badly. And now I have a shiny fun console for when my sister arrives on Friday (I have a PS2, but few multiplayer games).
Now that I’ve finished Burn Notice and have watched the Dollhouse season finale (hooray for it being renewed!!) I needed something else to watch. I ended up watching all of The Big Bang Theory last week and watched the entire first season of Dexter this weekend. Both great shows. I really lost faith in the quality of television a few years ago, but I’m either lowering my standards lately or the quality of programming has improved significantly. I’m also very pleased with the availability of programming. The networks (and PBS!!!) now offer much of their popular programming for free through their websites, both hulu and youtube offer significant amounts of programming for free. Cable? Don’t even remotely need it, and quite honestly unless all of it is available on demand it would be pretty useless to me, flexibility is too important to me. Rushing to the TV at a certain time to catch a program? How quaint!
I’m bringing Blinker (my 2000 Pontiac Grand Am GT) to the shop tomorrow. I’ve taken it to a couple places for diagnosis and the consensus is that it’s got a bad A/C compressor. Estimates have been from $700-1000 for replacement, which is unpleasant but I’ve budgeted accordingly, the shop down the street gave me a quote of $770. The shop is helpfully within biking distance (walking too, it’s only 1.5 miles away) so that’s convenient. I made sure to stock up on things this weekend so even if it takes until Friday to be completed I’ll be alright without a car. And if all else fails I can ride my bike down to Wawa.
I’ve been looking at smartphones lately and finally decided upon the Nokia E71x with AT&T. This is the culmination of piles of research and a bit of “settling” for something less than perfect. The truth is that perfect doesn’t exist. The G1 came closest, but it’s a bit pricey and t-mobile is not a great option in my area, this Nokia is a nice second. I’ll be getting it in the next few weeks – yay! No more stupid phone! Oh, and pink covers and face-plates exist, that was a vital part of my research.
Spent this evening with a bit of Season 2 Dexter, a giant chicken burrito from a local Mexican place and then an Ubuntu Learning Team meeting (I’m now on the team board, hurrah!). I think I’ll be turning in early tonight, sleep is nice and I have to be up early tomorrow.
Filed under: life