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Liberty Bell Still Jailed

Tuesday, Sep 23rd, 2008 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

– BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor, November 11, 1755

We need Ben to come back and talk to the current governor.

Following 9/11/2001 it was decided to take the Liberty Bell off the street and enclose it in “Liberty Bell Center”. At first glance it doesn’t look like a horrible idea, we’re all about making deities out of our national symbols in this country and this is in keeping with that. I first saw the bell in 2005 when the Philly and DC LinuxChix met up and we went around to see the sights.

I was shocked at the process to see the bell, this is what I wrote about it at the time:

They now have security, metal detectors and x-ray machines that everyone has to go through to get to the bell. It’s absurd! The detectors are so sensitive that you need to take off belts, watches and anything that even has the smallest bit of metal. We all decided that this security nonsense is not worth it, people need to stop being so scared. Once you go through that and put your clothes back on, you walk through this building that has lots of informative displays, complete with lamps shaped like the liberty bell. It all had the post-modern feel that I’m not a big fan of. Eventually we got to the bell.

3 years later, nothing has changed, except that I refuse to go through such measures to see it now.


Long line on a Saturday waiting to enter the center


Sign outside the bell “visitors and all personal property are subject to a thorough search”

You are subject to a thorough search prior to seeing a national artifact that represents liberty? They’re doing it wrong.


Near the entrance to center, with armed guard


The glass prison, you can just barely see the bell from the outside

It all makes me sick. One article I read claims that the security measures are renewed yearly, so they can be revised. I hope this is the case, and that we’ll soon snap out of our paranoia about terrorists… bombing? breaking? kicking? licking? our silly broken bell. Is there a Liberate the Liberty Bell group yet? There should be. Let’s start one.

And just as a final note, putting American flag bunting on fences doesn’t make keeping Independence Hall fenced and guarded any more American.

Filed under: philadelphia, reflection

Public Domain Movies

Monday, Sep 22nd, 2008 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

On a recent trip to MicroCenter I found myself in the DVD section looking at a whole shelf full of old, public domain movies, for $.10 each. Ten Cents. That’s cheaper than you can buy the DVD cases for. Getting some old movies along with the cases? Cool.

I loved MST3K (we all know that) and getting and excuse to watch these old movies was a big part of that. Plus it was just hard back in the day to get your paws on these old movies without paying a lot for them. Not so hard these days, I’ve legally downloaded a number, but finding them on DVD was a treat.

I grabbed a handful of DVDs (15 in total), each having 2-5 movies on them, for a total catch that gives me a library of the following (ones I’ve seen before in italics):

Filed under: Uncategorized

Pumpkin Season!

Sunday, Sep 7th, 2008 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I love the fall. The tropical storms sweeping up the coast, fewer days when air conditioning is required, the start of breweries releasing pumpkin ales.

I haven’t been going out as much lately, been hanging in and getting work done on projects. Even so, I’m tired, I need a vacation. I might talk to my boss this week about taking a long weekend for my birthday at the end of the month.

In the meantime, projects!

Following my article in Full Circle Magazine, where I mentioned Gourmet Recipe Manager I decided to lend a hand with it by offering to package it for Debian. The fellow who runs the project has been very helpful, so I’m excited to say he went ahead and added me as a Packager on the project. This weekend I went through the debian/ directory in CVS (first time using CVS for me) and was able to commit some changes to bring the lintian warnings in the package down from 37 to 16. It still needs some work, and after a couple of hours working with the unstable tarball I decided to hold off on packaging that until it goes stable.

Speaking of sourceforge, I’m also now a Packager on the LedgerSMB team. I uploaded my first .deb to the project on sourceforge late last week. Luckily they use svn ;)

All this Debian packaging, huh? I’ve been backing away from advocacy a bit these past few weeks and going back to focusing on the technical stuff. I seem to go in phases with F/OSS stuff, and the past year and a half I’ve been on a pretty solid advocacy streak. I missed the technical stuff, and after being away from it for a while I’m finding a lot of enjoyment in diving back in. Learning a lot again, becoming more familiar with the whole Debian packaging infrastructure past “phew it works” and into “I *get* how it works”. It’s actually got me considering starting the New Maintainer process in Debian sometime soon. We’ll see how I progress over the next few months.

On Saturday I had lunch at Capone’s in Norristown with Connor Imes, who just recently moved to the area from CA for work. He’s done a considerable amount of work with the Ubuntu Beginners Team, and I took the opportunity to try and nag him and the team into doing some classes for Ubuntu Classroom. We’ll see where it goes, if anything I got to meet a cool new local and to enjoy a Dogfish Head PunKin Ale.

Saturday evening I ended up skipping down to Union Jack’s to meetup with one of the help staff of DarkMyst where I enjoyed a Southern Tier PunKing and a slice of chocolate cake. They also had that crazy Banana Bread ale on tap, which is good, but so wrong, it really tastes quite like you’re drinking banana bread. Today I got snagged into helping a bit with the DarkMyst website, which needs to be redone a bit.

I started playing with VirtualBox this weekend. Aside from Xen at work, I’ve never actually played with much virtualization softwalre. VirtualBox is a treat, I grabbed the .deb from their site (the one in the Hardy repos is a bit old) and had little trouble getting a Debian Testing w/ Gnome and Windows 2000 install up and running. Fun stuff.

What did I do today? I don’t remember, I slept until almost noon and frittered most of the afternoon away after enjoying a breakfast of pancakes and eggs that Michael made (yay!). This evening was pizza from the last local place we hadn’t tried. Result? They had a good beer selection, but the pizza isn’t great, and their hotwings are abysmal. Pity.

Tired, now sleep.

Filed under: beer, computers

Cat Pictures

Saturday, Aug 30th, 2008 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I got to the end of my immediate white list ToDo list today, look!

Getting backups configured was an important thing on my list and I was able to complete that today – got a bunch of images backed up to another harddrive on my desktop, as well as backups to DVD and backups synced to my backups server. I ended up loading all my photos into F-Spot, my favorite piece of photo organizing ever – in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever actually used any kind of photo management before this, it was all just filed by date and browsed through with a web browser. Yay F-Spot :)

Oh right, so I’m browsing through photos and I recall I haven’t posted many kitty pictures of late, so I shall now bombard you.

Filed under: animals

Ubuntu-US-NJ LAN, PLUG Logo, FCM and LedgerSMB

Saturday, Aug 30th, 2008 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

Last weekend I attended the August 2008 LAN Party hosted by the Ubuntu NJ folks. There were two parties, one in North Jersey and the one I attended in Cherry Hill, across the bridge from Philadelphia. I got a bit lost on my way out (oops) but arrived shortly after 5 for BBQ and a few good hours of Urban Terror. The North Jersey contingent hosted the server on a huge server with a nice internet connection, and Joe‘s FiOS gave us a nice pipe for being connected to them. Jim provided the all important Oreo Cake and Brian supplied us with… relatives? Yep, halfway through the first Urban Terror match I made the comment “what’s with all the Quigs?” He brought two of his brothers along to the party, wicked.

More photos are over on the Ubuntu-US-PA gallery: 20080823 – Ubuntu-US-NJ LAN Party, Cherry Hill

There was also Armagetron fun to be had, but I ended up bailing on that to chill out for a bit on the sidelines, eat some cake, and take some photos. All in all, a very fun night – excellent work guys!

Also in local Linux stuff, I mused aloud recently about the need for a PLUG logo. I didn’t expect a response, so I was delighted when fellow PhillyChix member Stephanie Fox messaged me to offer her design skills for a logo. She pulled through brilliantly! In less than 2 weeks she had an amazing Ben Franklin Tux logo that everyone in the LUG was happy to embrace (even if they did bicker about licensing).

While I was at it, I also created a LinkedIn group for PLUG (wow, up to almost 40 members!)

I now have my first Full Circle Magazine article out there. It’s a column for the Ubuntu Women team on how to get women in your life involved in Ubuntu. Download here, my article is on page 29. Unless you want the cliffnotes version, which is: “Just like anyone else, we’re humans too!”

I also did two releases of the LedgerSMB .deb on Alioth on the tails of the 1.2.15 release this week. I finally made the decision to include postgres 8.3 support in the .deb with a 1.2.15-2 release I deployed Thursday night since they’re so close to Official support within the core LedgerSMB project and I had a request for support in the package. I’ve deployed it on a testvm at work and it’s chugging along nicely. I was also nudged by Fabian Rodriguez after my last LedgerSMB post, he pointed me in the direction of Bug 150374: [needs-packaging] ledgersmb get added to the repositories, which has some folks interested. Hopefully this will go somewhere and I won’t continue to be the sole packager in Debian, and getting it in Ubuntu too? Even better!

Filed under: computers, events, plug, ubuntu planet

Nugget Hops!

Thursday, Aug 28th, 2008 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last year was a disappointment for hop growing, but this season we were blessed with a single very active hop vine that produced some HUGE hops! Michael cut it down this afternoon:

Maybe making some beer this weekend?

EDIT: This is more hops than we’ve ever gotten from 3 vines, just from one! Michael just brought me this photo:

Filed under: beer

Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine in Ashland, PA

Thursday, Aug 28th, 2008 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Anyone who has been reading my blog of late knows I’ve been doing the local touristy thing this year. My latest conquest? Coal Mines.

I knew Pennsylvania was a big coal state, but didn’t really think about the fact that there would be retired coal mines open for tours to the public, and was only clued into their existence by a Radio Times broadcast on July 2nd about fun things to do on less than one tank of gas in eastern Pennsylvania.

The drive up to Pioneer Tunnel took a little under 2 hours, and was a pleasant drive the whole way. We arrived to the surprise of an entire Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine Pioneer Day festival being in full swing! Parking was a bit tricky, but once we found some we walked up toward the festival, got our combo tickets for train and coal rides, and hopped on a train.

If not for the completeness of experience factor I’d say skip the train ride. It’s a very short ride, was crowded (ok, maybe that was partially due to the festival!) and probably the least exciting part of the day. But it was nice seeing the top of what the strip mining operation did, and learning about the history of the area and nearby Centralia, where a coal fire has been burning for over 40 years under the town, that was pretty fascinating.

…the view was nothing to sneeze at either, and the weather was amazing. Oh and Michael snapped a photo of me on the train that I not only don’t loathe – I actually Like! Score!

After the outdoor train ride, it was onto the carts for a trip down into the coal mine! Once inside we were in for quite a treat, a fantastic tour where, among other things we got to see a portion of a petrified tree – most of which was removed for display in the Smithsonian.

And what coal mine tour is complete without some explosives and a canary?

A shot of Michael standing in front of the huge pile of equipment the miners were expected to haul up the shafts with them each day, and a photo of one of the still-working escape shafts – yikes!

In all, the tour was well worth the ticket price and the drive all the way up to Ashland – even if there isn’t much else up there.

Back up topside the festival was winding down by around 5PM. I snagged some of the last Funnel Cake of the day, yum yum!

..but what is that down the hill? Michael spotted them before I did…

LLAMAS!!! Aaaah :) I love llamas, they were available for petting!

Also, some cute goats :)

The last stop on our adventure for the weekend? Yuengling Brewery. It was unplanned, there is no brewpub (boo!), we knew they would be closed for tours by that time of the day, but we were in the area and decided to swing by to snap a photo before heading home. To be honest, Yuengling is sorta my slumming beer, I’ll go for a Black and Tan if nothing else reasonable is on the menu, or their Lager in a real social pinch, but it is a famous brewery with all kinds of history, so it’s worth a real visit at some point.

That weekend I also finally got to meet Nick and Karen over at Sly Fox in Phoenixville. It was cool to finally meet up – hurrah for more friends in the area!

What are my grand plans for the long Labor Day weekend? Well, I’m on call and have to work for a couple hours on Sunday(!). But our friend Ian is in town for the weekend! So we’ll be hanging out, probably have a fire outside. Shooting for a pretty mellow holiday weekend. Michael took a few days off of work this week too, so I think talked him into taking some of recipes I marked in Eating Well and giving them a go. Yum. Oh and I think I’ll get some sleep too, haven’t been doing that enough lately.

Filed under: events, travel

Brew at the Philadelphia Zoo!

Saturday, Aug 23rd, 2008 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On July 26th Michael, Bob, Mike and I attend the first Brew at the Zoo at the Philadelphia Zoo! In the years past it was held at the Norristown Zoo, which was fun but they have much cooler animals at the Philly Zoo – when I heard it would be held in Philly I had to go.

We arrived toward the beginning, hit a couple beer booths and then went to explore the zoo. It was quite a treat to be at a 21+ event in the evening, the crowd was pretty mellow, the weather was beautiful and the animals were awake! The $40 ticket price was worth it just for such a great visit to the zoo.

Bald eagle and prairie dogs – not near each other, luckily ;)

Elephants! They are leaving to zoo soon because they can’t afford to keep them and upgrade their habitat for an appropriate happy lifestyle. Sad sad, I loved seeing the elephants at the zoo. The other photo is a fishing cat that looked a bit like Caligula :)

Puma! Too bad the action shots didn’t come out, it was evening and the pumas were all creeping up on each other and attacking each other. And a photo of the red pandas. Love red pandas…!

There were peacocks wandering around the zoo. The first photo has a picture of a baby peacock too, the other showed how really wandering around they were – access to dippin’ dots and m&ms if they so wish! ;)

The last time I was at the zoo all the big cats were gone off to other zoos while Big Cat Falls, their new habitat, was being built. The biggest treat to this trip was Big Cat Falls being open and being able to see all the big cats. The tigers were my favorite, it was a warm day and the tigers were really into being playful and jumping in the water.

Biggest treat was the cats and not the beer? OK, the company was great too, aside from the friends we went with we met up with with a bunch of other people we’ve gone to other beer events with. The food was good too, they had a lot of free food this time around, it lasted throughout the festival. The beer? Microbrews rock, but the lines didn’t, and neither did the breweries running out of beer. You’d end up spending a half hour in line for a taste of beer, and when it came down to it I’d much rather be wandering through the reptile house with a bottle of water than standing in line – so we did. Not even a buzz by the end of the night, but I had a great time anyway. Hopefully next year they’ll sort out the issues and the event can go better overall.

Filed under: beer, events

My Network! (and a little ledgersmb)

Thursday, Aug 21st, 2008 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

When I moved back into the house we decided to give me my own network (along with my own external IP address) – yippee! First thing I had to get? A spiffy reversal, as seen on R2D2’s hostname:

-!- R2D2 [~astromech@alderaan.princessleia.com] has joined #rainwreck

From there I built my network.

R2A6: Laptop (Ubuntu Hardy)
R2D2: Primary desktop (Xubuntu Hardy)
HAN-S: Secondary desktop, mostly a movie player (Kubuntu Hardy)

..wait, Xubuntu, Kubuntu AND Ubuntu? Yeah, I kept finding it was useful to have one of each around between what I prefer, what I support at work and what I support in the community. Or I might just be insane, the jury is out.

R2Q5: Backups and IRC Bots (Debian Sparc Etch)
R2B1: Firewall (Debian i386 Etch)
R21U: 1U Testing server (Debian i386 Sid)

Hey look, Debian and Ubuntu tie!

Plus my Linodes, a printer and a VoIP phone. On Monday evening I got Nagios2 configured for all the machines it made sense to monitor.

Nice.

DNS, DHCP, all looking spiffy. I still lack a good backups infrastructure, which really bit me Tuesday evening – oops. Must get this online…!

elizabeth@r2d2:~$ ping r2q5
PING r2q5.alderaan.princessleia.com (192.168.42.3) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from r2q5.alderaan.princessleia.com (192.168.42.3): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=8.02 ms

Yahoo!!!

Simcoe helped with none of this.

Oh, and for those of you keeping up, I released the Debian package of LedgerSMB 1.2.14 on Alioth this evening along with a better README file (thanks for your help jadoba), so far tests well – have at it! The LedgerSMB folks are close to a 1.2.15 release with some big fixes, so if you’re interested in testing be sure to hop on over there and pitch in.

Filed under: computers, plug, ubuntu planet

Mini-Golf

Thursday, Aug 14th, 2008 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I love mini-golf, lousy at it, but love it. It had been years since I’ve gone, but this year my friend Stephen and I were able to hit a few courses through the spring. The first was Village Greens in Strasburg on a day that was a bit too cold to be playing mini-golf, a fun course – not too fancy or expensive, not too run down. Very fun, and there were cute little waterfalls, I’ll have to go back.

The next was Dutch Gardens in Ephrata. It was run down and quite old, but it was very inexpensive (especially since we went on a day when they were doing a $1.50/game promotion!). And hey, mini-golf of all kinds is fun, even when old.

Then there was Garden Golf and Go Karts in North Wales. This is one of those really nice, expensive places that I’ve only been to a few times. It was crowded, but the weather was beautiful and the course was very nice.

Finally there was Dinosaur Park Mini Golf in Niagara Falls! It’s no secret that I love this kind of campy attraction. And after a sunset ride on the SkyWheel this was the perfect late evening thing to do.

Not sure where my next mini-golf adventure will be, but I really did love the campy-ness that was dino golf. Themed mini golf wins!

Filed under: Uncategorized
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