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Blinker fixed

Thursday, Sep 25th, 2008 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Given the impending storms I decided I needed to get Blinker handled today, otherwise I’d either be stuck at home with Blinker in the garage all weekend or risk rain water in the light causing electrical damage. It turns out she lost a fog light too – oops! But that was the only other damage. The shop had the headlights in stock and was able to hook me up with a used fog light that they only charged me the labor to install (score!). It cost about half of what my deducible would have cost, so that’s positive.

Shiny!

But quite a bit more shiny than the passenger’s side light. The guy at the shop recommended replacing the passenger’s side eventually too because of the fogging, but it wasn’t bad enough to be an inspection issue yet.

Phew, I am glad I was able to take care of this within 24 hours. No more worries.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Blinker 1; Deer 0

Thursday, Sep 25th, 2008 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Last night I hit a deer on Sumneytown Pike, just outside of Harleysville. I was fine, just shaken up, the car is a little damaged, the deer got a broken leg and limped off into the woods after chilling out next to my car for a little while, he probably won’t last long (I am sad about this, poor critter). I waited almost an hour for the police to show up, and finally called them back only to learn that they had no cars available and that I didn’t really have to file a report if no one was hurt and I could drive the car. I headed home.

This morning I surveyed the damage. You always panic with these things, knowing there is probably a ton more damage you don’t see, but in this case I think I lucked out. I was alert enough to slow down when I saw the deer so there is no damage to the body of the car, just the headlight. The headlight still works, and although the internal of it does have a small (cosmetic?) crack I think I’ll be able to get away with just replacing the plastic cover over the light and won’t have to file a claim with the insurance company.

Can still see some deer fur in that last picture, poor critter.

I was pretty upset last night, but this morning I’m thankful for about a thousand things. I am not sure I could have gotten off any better in this situation, avoiding the deer was impossible. Growing up in Maine, where you’re not a true Mainer until you hit at least 2 deer (and bring ’em home!), I learned all about how to properly handle the situation, swerving and/or slamming on brakes can cause much worse accidents, especially with other traffic on the road, and that knowledge served me well.

Filed under: Uncategorized

2009 Giant Rincon W

Tuesday, Sep 23rd, 2008 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve been planning on buying a bike for my birthday for some time, so Constance took me down to her brother’s shop this evening to look at bikes.

I tried out a few, but when they showed me the Rincon and I gave it a test ride, I fell in love. It’s a bit more than I wanted to spend, and the women’s in my size wasn’t in stock, but I figured it was worth the extra and waiting a few weeks to get what I really wanted (in seafoam green, as seen below – very pretty!).

Glee! ETA is Oct 20th, but they said it might arrive even earlier. I’m so excited!

Filed under: Uncategorized

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
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