Since the final divorce papers were signed on November 4th, I’ve decided to start changing my name back to my maiden name everywhere. It’ll take forever, so I might as well start now.
The legal change will go through as soon as I receive the final paperwork and manage to drag myself to the social security office, then the real fun changes start (banks, creditors, bills…).
So you’ll now be seeing me around the community as Elizabeth Krumbach rather than Elizabeth Bevilacqua.
This week the power supply on my giant, server class, desktop died. It was a 680W supply, the board requires at least 650W, so it wasn’t going to be cheap to replace. Alas, after about 2 hours of testing I confirmed it was the power supply and had to hit MicroCenter Friday morning. Came home with a 950W supply – ok, maybe that’s over doing it, but it was on sale! And the sale made it be just as cheap as any of the decent 650-850W supplies on the shelf.. However, in the course of diagnosing the problem I realized one of my UPSs was reporting “Building Wiring Fault” and skipped out to Lowe’s to pick up an outlet tester. With it I discovered that only about half of the outlets in my apartment are grounded, including one of the ones I had computers plugged into. Sigh. This weekend I had to spend some time shuffling around my machines on healthy power outlets. I also dragged out my 1U to use for testing again, my desk is full of computers, and in the midst of this shuffling my living room looked like a computer warehouse exploded.
I hit Cabela’s on Saturday with a friend for fun and brought home a stuffed animal deer head for my wall. I can’t quite explain the impulse, but when I saw the silly thing it made me laugh a lot. I need to laugh more, so home it came.
So all attempts (ok, I didn’t try that hard) at making it look like an adult lives here failed. The Star Wars toys, Wallace and Gromit Toys, and Disney toys are now out of their storage boxes and decorating the tops of my bookcases in my living room. I linked giant resolution photos of each bookshelf so you can browse my expected, stereotypically nerdy library. Ooh fun.
And a picture of my TV. I pondered getting cable, but the $199 installation fee turned me off to that really quick – even if they offered to add the service itself to my business account for free otherwise. Instead I have a VCR, DVD player (pink!), PS2, and an Inspiron 7500 running Ubuntu w/ fluxbox as a media PC to keep me entertained… and so I get to do things like watch Star Trek TNG. Oh and I signed up for NetFlix.
Maybe I’ll get some ballpen balls.
I still have a bike in my living room though. Should do something about that at some point, I think one of my Christmas presents to myself will be an indoor trainer and set it up in my bedroom. Exercise AND having it not look so horrible sitting in my apartment (it’s got an indoor trainer, it’s supposed to be there!), hooray. Also considering getting a Wii (and Wii Fit, for exercise, I swear!)
I also saw Quantum of Solace on Friday evening, following dinner with my friend Mike at Rock Bottom in King of Prussia. Good dinner, good movie. Not enough gadgets, but I liked it a lot more than Casino Royale, which I thought was a bit slow and sometimes lame for a Bond film (really, the first car he drives in a movie can’t be a Ford).
And now the weekend is coming to an end, I’m sitting here on the couch with the cats snuggled up. Heading to bed soon.
The Debian Installer lenny release candidate 1 was released on November 12th, which inspired me to check it out and give the installation over ssh a try. Installation over ssh has been supported since the Etch installer, but I embarrassingly have to admit that I didn’t know about it until just recently, and it was just last month that I tried it out for the first time. So this post is more of a “Look, this thing exists and is neat and easy!” than a formal how-to for something tricky.
The screenshots and CD I burned were from Lenny (Testing) which I downloaded here this morning, but this is also supported in Debian Etch in a similar way.
Boot from the CD and in the Installer boot menu select “Advanced options >”
Then select “Expert install”
The installer will load up and you will be presented with the Debian installer main menu.
Since the default language and keyboard are fine to get me going (I can reconfigure them later once I get this going over ssh), I skipped these and went straight for “Detect and mount CD-ROM”. When it asked me if I wanted to Start PC card services I selected “No” since I’m not using any PCMCIA cards.
The next option on the menu is “Load installer components from CD”, which you want to select. Browse the list, but for my basic needs the only thing I needed to load up was “network-console: Continue installation remotely using SSH”
Now you’ll need to get networking going. Select “Detect network hardware” and then “Configure the network”.
Next you want to “Continue installation remotely using SSH”
This will generate SSH host keys and have you set a remote installation password. Once it has these set up you will be presented with a screen giving you an installer@ipaddress location for the install and an SSH fingerprint. Use these to ssh into the installer!
Finally – log in from your remote PC and complete the installation.
I went back and configured keyboard to confirm it was correct and languages so I could add a couple of locales, so don’t forget to do this if you need to change something about your configuration.
Last year was very, very busy so I never got around to it, but this year I’d like to send out Christmas cards again.
Drop me an email with your address if you’d like one: lyz@princessleia.com (Please put “Christmas card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately).
Typical disclaimer: Nope, I’m not a Christian, and the cards will non-religious in theme even if they happen to use the word “Christmas” – not going to bother restricting myself to just the “Happy Holidays” ones.
I’m trying to think of what I’m going to do for Christmas. This will be my first Christmas alone, but I don’t want that to mean I’m not going to bother doing anything. Seriously considering even getting a small real tree, I love having a real Christmas tree in the house, and so does Caligula :)
On Saturday the 1st the Philadelphia team of the Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo held our release party. Just like last year, we decided to celebrate the release with a Halloween influenced costume party at Drake Tavern in Jenkintown.
Drake Tavern is quite the hospitable place for our events, it’s a pretty family-friendly environment (Zoe was our youngest participant last year) and they gave us plenty of space and were tolerant of us spending a few hours there. We had several new folks show up (including one who trekked out from Pittsburgh!) and a few of us dressed up… I couldn’t resist a Leia costume, ssweeny as Indiana Jones, ChinnoDog as an executioner and jedijf, the primary organizer of the party, as a satanic priest.
More photos here: UbuntuPennsylvania.org Gallery: Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Release Party
As a whole, the party was a blast, but a very unexpected event very early on almost made it end very quickly…
Paraphrased from jedijf in IRC, here is what happened:
So a 14 year old kid who had frequented our IRC channel shows up with his friend and mom, Randy and I are the only ones there, standing outside on their deck above the Ubuntu banner so people know where to come. I am in costume as a priest with the pentagon chain, Ubuntu satanic edition! Randy is of course with his teddy bear. So the mom asks “When is everyone supposed to get here?” We tell her “around 3” but it’s now 3:20 ish and no one else is there. Some 20-somethings leave the bar to smoke and she decides this is not the right place for her son, says so and leaves with her son and his friend. I say “No problem,” I don’t want the kid to feel uncomfortable.
10 minutes later 2 Jenkintown police cars show up. They ask me what am I doing and why am I dressed like that. I say “It’s Halloween and we’re having a party” and the police ask for some ID. I point out the banner, explain that we we have reservations, but end up going to get ID and some CDs. The police officer checks Randy’s ID and tells him someone called in a complaint that we were trying to lure young boys. InHisName (another regular of the IRC channel) comes up with his son and the police take his son aside and talk to him. In the end I show the officer my ID and offer him CDs to take back to the station, he only accepted one.
Wow! I absolutely respect this mother’s decision to remove her son from a situation she was uncomfortable with, but taking the additional step of calling the police really says a lot about the culture of fear here in the United States. It was a bit upsetting. We’d rather not restrict attendance of our events based on age (and I’m positive the Ubuntu Youth folks wouldn’t be pleased with this either!), and probably won’t. However we are now more aware of what kinds of things can happen and it has gotten me to think what we can do to prevent this kind of situation in the future.
A couple weekends ago I went up to the Crayola Factory in Easton, PA with my friend Stephen.
The “factory” was pretty much a big activity center geared toward kids. There were some cool displays about the history of Crayola, and a little demo factory with a whole presentation on the basics of crayon and marker creation.
Retired colors: Prussian Blue, Flesh and Indian Red
A bunch more retired colors (for less political reasons) – Violet Blue is no more?!
This demo factory was pretty neat, there were cameras on what the fellow presenting was doing as he made a new batch of red crayons and some orange markers
And I got to wrap my own crayon! Prior to the invention of the automatic crayon wrapping machine they hired nearby families to manually roll them… I can only imagine the paper cuts, ouch.
After the tour we hit the Crayola store, where I got a big box of crayons, an 8-pack of nice dry erase markers and some pink silly putty.
The hoards of kids were a bit much, after the factory was some nice pub food at The Allentown Brew Works, where I enjoyed a tasty pumpkin ale, nom! Love pumpkin ale.
A while back I joked about trying to find dinosaurs in Philadelphia. At some point I was clued into the fact that there ARE dinosaurs in Philadelphia, they’re at the Academy of Natural Sciences! So I went a couple weeks ago.
jadoba was in town for the weekend so I dragged him along too.
..and he took one for the team.
I got to hold a live giant cockroach, which really wasn’t that horrifying, it was kind of cute. Even so, if I ever see anything like that anywhere in my living space I’m going to flip.
It wasn’t the most spectacular nature museum I’ve been to, but it wasn’t crowded (like when I went to the Smithsonian to see the dinosaurs) and their dinosaur exhibit was quite nice.
I also got to go to Reading Terminal Market for the first time, where I got some seriously nommy cookies and peaches.
So that makes two more Philadelphia touristy things down, how many more to go? I’ve still never been to Pat’s or Geno’s…
I’m getting all settled in to the new place. Comcast came through and installed internet on Wednesday morning, and by Friday I had reverse DNS working and was all geared up to start work again Monday. I took Wednesday through Friday off from work last week for some much needed R&R and adjustment to the new place. I was able to hit Target for all the basics I needed, so I’m doing pretty well on that front. it took ages to finally bring over all my stuff from the house, but I’m just about done now.
Some photos of the place:
A cute kitchen. I was able to squeeze my stuff in it thus far, and have been able to do a bit of cooking. I’ll probably be sad about lack of a dish washer at some point, but I’m just one person, washing dishes for one person isn’t that bad.
I couldn’t resist, I needed a shower curtain for my shower, and when I saw this one it was love at first sight. If i can’t live in a pink castle, I’ll have one in my bathroom! ;)
I set up my desk near my front door, near the cable outlet. I’m not sure how pleased I am with this so far, but I needed to put it in this room and I wasn’t impressed with my other options.
A TV?! Lyz has a TV? My friend Mike from NJ helped me move and had that spare TV and VCR sitting in his dining room, so he brought it along on moving day. I wasn’t going to accept it, but I do have a bunch of movies (VHS and DVD), and I could use something to hook my PS2 up to (and maybe a Wii at some point!). So yes, I have a TV, but no channels – I have no reception and didn’t pay for cable TV.
Bedroom! And I have a big (not too deep, but the length of the whole room) closet which was behind me when I took this picture. And as I describe below, my bed is now a bit different…
When I moved in I didn’t have a couch. I ended up moving my bed/couch futon into the living room to use that as a couch, as seen in the pictures – and bought a mattress and box spring. I didn’t actually intend to buy a mattress when I walked into Sleepy’s in Limerick (27 West Ridge Pike, next to the new Acme), I was just going to browse. Upon entering the store I was greeted by Chris Brown, one of their great sales people (friendly, well-dressed, very good at their job), who showed me around and had me try out a bunch of mattresses. Within a half hour I found myself getting a credit check to apply for financing. I started to panic at that point, should I really make such a purchase right now? So much change! So many financial responsibilities suddenly upon me! Noticing my panicking and figurative edging near the door, Chris gave his manager a call to see if he could get me a deal. That’s when when his manger mentioned a floor model of Kingsdown Body Blend Red/Blue (a mattress they sell for $1699 new) up at the Pottstown store he was trying to get rid of for $350, so rather than going with the lower end new, I went with that floor model. It was delivered yesterday and I slept on it the first time last night and it is, by far, the best mattress I’ve ever owned.
Updated bedroom photo w/ new mattress:
Woo a grown-up bed!! So now I have a couch too, which is easily changed into a comfy guest bed.
As I mentioned in my last post, I moved into an apartment this weekend. I took Nita’s recommendation of Highland Manor Apartments in North Coventry, where she lived several years ago. The price was right (I’m able to keep all living expenses – rent, internet, electric, basic food to less than half of my total net income), the location was desirable (nice area, less than 5 minutes from route 422), and for a one bedroom, the 725 square feet of room really is perfect – enough for me to live and work in, not too much so that I’ll get oppressively lonely.
Lonely… I’ve never lived alone before. Caligula came with me (Simcoe is staying with Michael, assuming they can handle the separation without too much drama), and I think that will help a lot. But I don’t think this will be easy to adjust to. It’s important though, I need to be alone for a while, no roommates or otherwise.
I’m hoping internet will be put in this week, dealing with Comcast right now to get a solid date for installation (they said they’d contact me before 11:30 tomorrow to give me a status update on the order, said there are some issues, grumble). I’ll be commuting to the house until it’s installed, and then will be taking a few days off from work to relax and adjust. So I’ll have a few evenings without internet (and right now I’m having a weekend without internet – am at Sly Fox on their free WiFi writing this…), but it should be good for me, will force me into getting my apartment in order since I’ll have nothing better to do. Oh, and spending some time with just myself is probably healthy right now too. My Inbox is a mess, I’m going to ignore it for now, will catch up when I’ve got things sorted out.
I had a cold earlier this week, and I don’t think I let it recover enough before exhausting myself with moving yesterday. I don’t feel well today and had to cancel going to a concert with my friend Mike all the way in Jersey this evening. So I think I’m going to leave the ‘Fox soon and go chill out with Caligula.
Yesterday I moved into my own apartment.
I’m not going to say much about it, but things haven’t worked out between Michael and I. We’re still friendly and I’ll be commuting up to the house for work until I get internet at the new place.
I’m completely heartbroken and recovery from this will take some time, but it’s time to work toward moving forward.
