• Archives

  • Categories:

  • Other profiles

To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars!

Monday, Jul 6th, 2009 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I spent the long holiday weekend in San Francisco with MJ. So I’ll start there, for those of you not hovering over twitter MJ and I started dating this weekend :)

.

MJ and me after fireworks on the 4th

We’ve been close friends for years, and in spite of the distance this progression in our relationship makes me very happy.

But on the trip itself! I started work an hour early on Thursday so I could skip out at 3PM and drive to the airport, I flew out on a non-stop 5:55PM flight arriving in SFO around 9PM. MJ was clued into into the fact that flowers and food are the direct route to my heart, he had a vase of beautiful, mostly pink, flowers for me back at his place. And the next morning? Breakfast at The Crepe House on Polk, where we split a delicious crepe entrée and an amazing fruity dessert crepe.

From there it was off to the Asian Art Museum to check out their Lords of the Samurai exhibit. The exhibit was fantastic, and after we spent some time on the 3rd floor exploring the beautiful Indian and Persian exhibits they had. From there we headed out to Yerba Buena Gardens and explored the surrounding area. The garden itself is stunning, must have a picnic there someday!

Dinner was at MJ’s favorite local sushi bar, where he knows the sushi chef and got us an amazing assortment of exciting rolls and some spicy mussels that I fell in love with, finishing off the meal with some fried green tea ice cream. Yum yum!

Saturday was the 4th of July. The day began down at the Ferry Building Marketplace where we had lunch at DELICA rf1 Japanese delicatessen (hm, a lot of Japanese on this trip). It was beautiful out and we were able to grab a spot outside where we could take in the beautiful view of the bay, watching the ferries come in. Wow, I miss the ocean so much. After lunch it was over to Ciao Bella Gelato for some gelato. Um, wow, yum! I’ve been having so much good gelato lately.

Later, we decided to head down to Pier 39 for the 4th of July festivities. The place was quite crowded by the time we got off the super crowded bus down to the pier, but not so bad to be too uncomfortable. We snagged some take-out dinner of fried calamari and shrimp and clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl at Sabella & Latorre’s on Fisherman’s Wharf.

From there we found a great spot to stand and watch the 9:30PM fireworks display, and were even able to peer across the bay and watch a bit of the Sausalito fireworks.

The fireworks wrapped up and we wandered around the wharf for a bit before heading up to to Ghirardelli Square for some yummy ice cream sundaes. From there we walked back to the apartment to pick up the car and drive over the Golden Gate to see a view of the city at night from there. Beautiful view, terribly romantic :) We didn’t get back until quite late.

Sunday morning I headed back to The Crepe House, because I really couldn’t get enough of that place, and I had arranged to meet up with, Megan Gruber, a girl I knew from High School and who recently found me on Facebook. We hadn’t really talked much in the past decade, and I think since leaving Maine she’s only the second person I’ve seen from those days (my close elementary-middle-high school friend Leslie being the other). It was fun meeting up, swapping stories about what we’ve been up to and what we’re doing now. Eventually we parted ways and headed back.

Sunday night I caught the very very sad redeye back to Philadelphia, with a layover in Las Vegas where I won $2.25 in slots ($12 in, $14.25 back – woo!), and touched down at PHL shortly after 6AM. Luckily MJ was able to snag me first class tickets on my way home (thank you!) so sleeping for much of the second leg of the trip was possible and I was able to work today. Tonight I got to have snuggly and playtime with my kitties, who my friends Jon and Crissi stopped by to check on Saturday, I sure missed them, but I’m missing MJ and San Francisco already.

Filed under: events, life, travel

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Chipotle and Gelato

Wednesday, Jul 1st, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Following my Saturday trip up to NYC, I spent Sunday with Stephen down at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We spent all their open hours there, from 1-5PM, and what a great little museum! I never even knew it was there!

Sadly after charging my camera after my NYC trip, I completely forgot the battery in the charger when I went down to Philly, I spent the entire museum visit with just the camera on my g1. I’m not the biggest fan of using cellphone for cameras, but the g1 didn’t do so bad! I actually shrunk all the full-size photos in this entry a bit.


Skeleton in Ancient Egyptian exhibit


An ancient Greek on a laptop ;D


Necklace from the Painted Metaphors Exhibit

At 5 we were shooed out of the museum and drove over to the new Chipotle in University City for dinner. Earlier in the day I had twittered about being downtown and my friend DarKrow dropped me a tweet to meet up, so he joined us for dinner. After dinner he introduced us to the best gelato I’ve ever had at a chain called Capogiro Gelato. I ended up with a cone of their Tiramisu and Chocolate Banana. Following that I headed home.

This weekend I’m heading out to San Francisco for a long weekend visit with MJ. I’m flying out Thursday evening and taking a redeye home Sunday night/Monday morning. Plans? Sushi! 4th of July celebrations! Snuggles! Samurai (…in a museum)! OK, maybe won’t get to everything, but it should be a fun weekend :)

Filed under: philadelphia

Sunny NYC

Sunday, Jun 28th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Yesterday I left home around 9AM to head over to New Jersey to meet up with my friend Mike who I was traveling up to New York City with. Plans to head up there came together when I learned my friend Wilmer of the Bitlbee project was going to be up there. Then learned via twitter that Nikkiana would also be in town! Mike was headed up for different reasons anyway so going together seemed to make sense.

The work Mike was doing in the city required use of his car, so for the only the second time in my life I got to ride a car into NYC (the last time was with my grand parents, YEARS ago, even they normally took the train). This was the first time I’d ever been through the Lincoln Tunnel, and was delighted to learn that I still had cellphone reception there, so I twittered from under a river! We parked on 7th Ave, touched base with our respective friends and then headed to Burgers & Cupcakes for lunch. On the way down 7th we saw this smashed car, yikes!

Burgers & Cupcakes was awesome. We had planned on hitting a burger joint that Mike’s friend recommended, but then learned they don’t open until 4PM. By then burgers were on our mind so Friday night we were searching for burger places to eat at. What could be better than burgers and cupcakes?


I snagged a salmon burger, which while not your typical giant-american-burger was immensely satisfying. They had a burger and milkshake special so I couldn’t help but order a chocolate shake to go along with it. And dessert? A delicious carrot cupcake.

After lunch Mike left for his engagement I had some time to kill before meeting up with Nikki and Wilmer. I wandered around 7th Ave for a bit, then got bored and headed toward 6th. To my surprise a long stretch of 6th was shut down for vendors of all sorts, and made for a lot of fun to walk through.

I met up with Nikki around 2:30 and we continued the wandering. Having known her only online until then via Ubuntu stuff it was very cool to meet up and talk in person finally. We snagged some $1 lemonades and enjoyed wandering. Around 3:30 I found Wilmer finally (grin, we were supposed to meet at 2!) and he joined us. We headed toward the Empire State Building to see about going up to the top, but the wait was a bit long so we satisfied ourselves by taking pictures of it instead. It’s a very big building.

Unfortunately Mike’s plans changed unexpectedly and caused us to have to leave the city around 4:30PM – d’oh! I think next time I’ll see about parking my car at a train station in NJ and braving the trip up myself.

In spite of the shortened trip, I am very glad I went up and was able to see people for a little while. And New York City! I quite like Manhattan, going up is always a fun adventure. Plus, now that Nikki is up there I have at least two friends in the city who I’d be comfortable calling to meet up, fun!


pleia2 and nikkiana


Wilmer and pleia2

Today the weather is beautiful yet again! And I’m going down to Philadelphia with Stephen to go to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I just learned it existed a few weeks ago and have been trying to find a day to go. Then I think we’ll be hitting Chipotle for dinner, yum!

Filed under: travel

Mannaz, Uruz, Wunjo

Monday, Jun 22nd, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I’ve discussed my use of Rune Stones infrequently in the past. A little over five years ago I wrote an atheism essay* for my website where I said:

My father (and grandfather, apparently) were interested in Runes. While I was in high school I had made my own set of runes. I saw the Rune stones for what they were, not some magical all-knowing oracle, but a method in which to focus my mind on my current place in life. A tool to relax me and organize my thoughts so I could evaluate them rationally and in perspective. This really helped me relax and be settled!

I’ve pretty much backed off from all things “spiritual”** this past year, it wasn’t fitting into my work flow, the whole divorce threw me so off-balance that I needed quite a bit more than reflecting with a pile of rocks to get my thoughts sorted. But tonight I needed some “relax and settled” and for the first time since last year I pulled out my father’s Runes*** and did a quick three stone cast (past, present, future) and the results are the subject of this blog entry.

As is typical when I need to do a cast, I was in a receptive mood this evening and reading it was simple and accurate (I believe readings should always be simple and accurate when you’re feeling receptive, any stone in any position will probably coincide with something going on in your life if you pause to think about it). In this case it was even quite hopeful. Deep down I am quite hopeful about my future, as tough as things have been and sometimes continue to be. And as much as the “sitting around thinking” self-reflection and talking with friends has helped me get through the very difficult time I’ve had these past couple years, I think it’s time for me to reach back and tap back into some of the “spiritual” tools I’ve lost touch with. They help me focus my self-reflection more, and now that I feel I’m starting to be at a stable spot in my life (much less grabbing at anything to hold on) I think cultivating such focus could be helpful again.

I am glad I reached for that bag of Runes tonight :)

* While I am still technically an atheist, these days I instead refer to myself as a secular humanist. This is primarily because I am not defined by my lack of faith in God, I am defined by the philosophy outlined in secular humanist doctrine.

** So since I’m a secular humanist, I don’t believe in the supernatural and using the term “spirituality” is often misplaced for me. But I am not sure what else to call these things that other people believe are spiritual tools (like Rune stones) but which I use for self-reflection under the assumption that there is nothing spiritual about it and the random chance of something like rune stones just has me focus my thoughts on specific elements of my life that can be applied to the cast.

*** My father’s Runes? Why not the ones I made in high school? I still have the ones I made, but an unfortunate accident caused several of them to crack. Making a new set of Runes for myself may be in my immediate future. Does anyone know of a kind of material that can be shaped (or etched) and fired (well, baked) at home that would be pretty decent and durable? I no longer have access to a free kiln like in high school (even something for pay… I wouldn’t even know where to begin!). I’m willing to consider materials that aren’t clay, one of my four sets of Runes are made out of glass.

Filed under: spirituality

Pink G1!

Sunday, Jun 21st, 2009 by pleia2 | 7 Comments

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/

Filed under: pink, ubuntu planet

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.

Filed under: beer, philadelphia, plug, Uncategorized

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.


Photo by Andrew Keyes

Crissi and Jonathan, representing freenode!

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)

Ubuntu LoCo Teams BOF

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!


Photo by Andrew Keyes

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 :)


Clockwise from left: Chris Crisafulli (itnet7), Nick Ali (boredandblogging), Jimmy Harris (pak33m), Andrew Keyes (andrew), Elizabeth Krumbach (pleia2), CrissiD, Ian Geiser (geiseri), Ian (ik)

Photo by Nivex

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.

Filed under: events, plug, travel, ubuntu planet

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.

Filed under: family, pink

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).

Blinker in shop

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
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »