The other weekend I was browsing the Ubuntu Planet after I posted about password stuff and saw this. Three posts in a row by women. How about that!

About a month and a half ago I left TekTonic and got myself a Linode VPS instead. There were a few things that spurred this change:

• Linode allows you to run an IRC client, TekTonic does not, which became a more important issue than I thought it would be
• Reliability was an issue with TekTonic, I didn’t care much, it was $13.50/month and I didn’t expect perfection, but the night I gave up and switched I was really in the mood to work on one of my sites, and it was just impossible, that annoyed me
• I met one of the Linode guys (yes, that’s what I’m going to call you) at PLUG a couple months back, he was cool, we chat in IRC often, and he nagged me until I switched (haha)

So it’s been over a month now. I LOVE this Linode. Plus I now have a lovely reversal, as demonstrated here on IRC:

-!- pleia2 [~lyz@your.worshipfulness.princessleia.com] has joined #irc-security
<@tr> no conceit in that host :P
<@pleia2> :)
< ScoT> modest as always
* PinkFreud has the sudden urge to worship pleia2
<@PinkFreud> no idea why

Almost enough for me to do away with my Ubuntu Member cloak on freenode. Hahaha.

Now that we’ve all gone web 2.0-y – what have you done with all the old static content on your website? Did you do nothing and just leave your site the way it was? Did you just leave it flapping out there on the internet and replace your main page with a blog, perhaps a menu to the old stuff? I have stuff going back to the first website I created a decade ago, I don’t want to delete it, but traffic has been dropping steadily these past few months, and I never really update anything but my blog anymore.

About a year and a half ago Michael and I had the opportunity to help editing a chapter of Carla Schroder’s Linux Networking Cookbook. I was disappointed to discover upon picking it up in the bookstore that we weren’t credited – it turns out she lost track of some of the people helping out, and as soon as she realized she missed me she shipped me a signed copy of the book – yay!

Aidy, you have a fansite. (Isn’t it lame when people put inside jokes in public blog entries? Yeah, sorry.)

I was supposed to get the truck back on Tuesday, they called Michael and told him it wouldn’t be done until Thursday or Friday. Thursday or Friday? OhDearMe. I’m not going stir crazy or anything, and I don’t expect I’d go anywhere if I had it anyway, but there is something about not having a vehicle that will make one restless.

My laptop is not doing well. One of the hinges started to go on it (as these old Inspiron’s are notorious for, it’s a miracle mine’s survived this long) and when I closed it to put it in my laptop bag a couple weekends ago I noticed it wouldn’t latch. I expect it not latching caused the screen to get bumped in a bad way during normal travel wear, because this week I booted it up the other evening and there were a couple lines going down the screen vertically. This evening I booted up and was greeted to this (and in console: this). From the look of it, the mess is confined to that space – like there is a crack inside the LCD that’s letting it fill with icky leakiness. Still, it seems this old thing really is on its way out :(

I wish my stuff would stop breaking.

I’m trying to have a PhillyChix meeting in April. I posted to the list for suggestions but you know how these things go, I’m just going to need to choose a venue and a date and hope it works out. Any suggestions? For this meeting we won’t have a presentation, pretty much just meeting up and chatting about Linux, so a restaurant is fine.

I started using Opera instead of FireFox. There are some annoyances – I miss the It’s All Text plugin for using vim in email, the aggressive caching can get on my nerves at times, and I’ve bumped into a few sites that simply don’t work properly Opera (one of my bank websites, for instance). It is nice not to have to restart the browser every few days due to it deciding to eat up have my RAM though, and the CPU load isn’t as bad as FireFox was. I’ve been opening FireFox for a few things, but that hasn’t been so bad. I’ve pretty much switched to Opera entirely on my laptop since the difference was so significant. Maybe I’ll stick with Opera, at least until FireFox decides they want to be a slim browser again, the Mozilla browser runs faster than it now on my machines (gasp, shock).

What else… oh yes, I should use my Google Calendar more, so I don’t overschedule things.

Just because I should rejoin the land of the living, doesn’t mean I will. In addition to just going out with friends, I have been involved in some local Linux stuff in February (I know, I’m a 3rd of the way into March already!).

First was the PLUG meeting on February 6th. Peter Bailey, a “Linux Technologist” from Dell flew in from Texas and was able to schedule his trip to coincide with the meeting. His talk was split about halfway between server and desktop/laptop offerings, leaning toward servers a bit simply because there were more questions in that direction. I was pleased with the talk, and gave me a lot to think about with regard to Dell’s Open Source initiatives. The talk had a great turnout, about 45 people! No doubt some were drawn by the promise of free pizza ;) and we really lucked out by having a very unseasonably warm February evening so were able to take advantage of the outdoor seating at the tiny corner pizzeria we go to after meetings – about 25 people came along for pizza. Huge thanks to the HostMySite.com guy, Tim Dodd, who I worked with to make this meeting a reality. Photos: attendees and Peter presenting.

On the 16th I threw an Ubuntu Pennsylvania LAN Party. Pretty much everyone brought some sort of alcohol along with their computer, and we ended up having a blast. 2PM was when people started showing up and we got a couple servers up with games. We ended up primarily playing Armagetron (not really my thing), Open Arena (oooh, it’s like UT! Deathmatch and Capture the Flag!) and Urban Terror (oh this was fun!). Pizza, chips, cookies, beer, liquor, gaming, oh my! It was getting pretty late when the laptop running Urban Terror crashed and we declared it time to drink more. It went “downhill” from there :) Most of us got properly smashed, and one party attendee decided the next day that he never wanted to see an Irish Carbomb ever again, after getting very sick as the night wore down (I sure had a nice time with them though). Somewhere along the way Michael thought it would be funny to take a video of the drunk people (OK, I uploaded it, I thought it was funny too), and as much as I hate to admit it… the influence of horrible flash movies on drunk people causes us to do odd things, like “THIS IS SPARTA!” (the sober people chose not to participate) oh dear me. OK, so the party wasn’t all roses. One of the attendees got into a car accident(!) on the way over – no injuries but he did a number on the car he was driving… and still came to the LAN party. And I already mentioned the one person getting pretty sick, poor guy …and poor the rest of us, the house only has one bathroom! And the next day was spent cleaning the house – most of which Michael did since obviously I wasn’t feeling fantastic ;) All the rest of the party photos are here.

The Monday after the party was a PLUG North meeting which I swung by to catch up with some people and see Walt Mankowski’s Natural Language Processing with Perl talk again (not the first time I’ve seen a talk at Central and suburbs… the venues are quite different and make for enough of a difference in the talks that it’s actually worthwhile, for me anyway, to see the same talk in both places sometimes).

And now I’m going to get showered and dressed for real…

It’s drizzling out this morning, but I really had my heart set on a cup of coffee so braved the dampness and walked the short walk down the street to the local Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s funny living in a place where I can walk to a Dunkin Donuts, the Plymouth Meeting area is certainly a big change for me. This week without a car has made me appreciate my job, my friends and this location a great deal. I’ve been able to have friends swing by and pick me up fairly easily – in fact am living closer to many of them than I was before. I miss the house a great deal, and while on the phone with a friend of mine late last night, I was able to positively reflect upon the whole Life I have up there in Schwenksville, it’s good to have non-judgemental friends. My time here has been very good for reflecting and I’m slowly finding myself emerge from this knot of tangled emotions and starting to regain perspective. Some days I really wish life had an instruction manual.

Being here hasn’t all been quiet reflection in my room though. Working, sleeping and essentially living in this room for the past two weeks hasn’t come close to driving me insane yet, but I have had to afford myself some luxuries to make it work. This week I dropped $25 on a DVDRW from NewEgg so I could start making my way through Nita’s large movie collection from the comfort of my room. I’ve wanted a DVD reader for my desktop for ages, and when the sale on this one came up I figured I should just go for it. It was delivered yesterday and I popped it into my machine shortly after work. The installation was a breeze, and it only took me about a half hour to get all the stuff properly installed in Ubuntu to get DVDs playing (a half hour might seem excessive and you are probably laughing at me, but I have never used a dvdrom with Linux before, and had no experience with the various Linux DVD playing applications. Plus I had to set the region encoding on it! Give me a break :P). I do have to admit, while I love mplayer still, I think VLC has gained another convert for DVD playback – DVD menus! Intuitive graphical controls! Be still, my heart.

Last weekend was a good one, I went to D&D Experience in Arlington, VA! We all met up Friday night at one friend’s apartment, crashed for the night and were up before the sun to get on the road down to DC. The ride down was a breeze down 95 and we arrived shortly after 9AM. We hit the press room and were able to meet up with the press liaison and got our schedule for the day. We had interviews with 4 Wizards of the Coast employees and an 11AM press-only preview game of 4th Edition. So we spent the day wandering around the Con, going to our engagements and having a blast. I totally chickened out on the press game though. See, I haven’t played D&D in about 7 years, and that was when 3rd Edition had just come out – in short? We were playing 2nd Edition. I skipped 3rd and 3.5 entirely! I really didn’t want to embarrass myself by sitting down at the table with a bunch of gaming site press folks who have played intently for years… and make a fool of myself in front of our DM, who was none other than James Wyatt. OK – maybe I missed out on a fantastic opportunity, the guys I was with were downright giddy to have played under such circumstances. And I sorta feel like I let my gender down too – just being a chick that came along or whatever. I did have an official “job” though, and that was Staff Photographer for AllRPG, so I made myself useful and snapped over 150 photos while the guys played for an hour and a half, normal people only got half hour games! The AllRPG folks are still sorting through photos, hopefully I’ll have some to post next week. We ended up leaving the Con around 4:30 after interviewing one of the gaming developers who was working on the online version of 4th. What a day! Sunday was not nearly as nerdy, but we did hit a comic book store and then came down to a gaming store here in Plymouth Meeting before I was dropped off at home.

..so wait, what were my impressions of 4th? Will I play it? Based on the feedback of the people I went with, and lots of others attending the Con, the attention paid to speeding up the game and fixing a lot of overly complex/time-consuming mechanics of the game will be greatly beneficial to both the learning curve (which apparently got quite steep with 3.5) and general fun in gameplay. From what I understand it’s still possible to get as detailed as you want, but you have the option to hit the ground running much more quickly than with past releases. Cool. I’ve been invited to two campaigns in the recent past, and might end up joining one once they adopt 4th, no sense in learning 3.5 edition rules at this point.

Today I’m heading out to King of Prussia with a friend. Will probably spend the day wandering around the mall, grabbing some food. I’m looking at the movies playing, I’m not terribly keen on seeing any of them, but might end up seeing Juno – which has a description that doesn’t interest me in the slightest, but everyone is saying it’s a must see. Plus, it’s either than or The Other Boleyn Girl, which I fear might be too much of a chick flick… haha!

*yawn* Should probably attempt to join the land of the living now.

I’m sick, sort of. I seem to have had this cold, in some form, for over a month now. It’s struck in different forms, the first of which was a flu where I was running a fever and had to take off 2 days of work. Since then it’s been a series of 1-2 day colds, all strung together with a hacking cough that won’t quit. I saw a doctor last Monday about the cough, he attributed it to allergies (I was feeling fine otherwise at the time) and put me on a couple nose sprays and some allergy medication. Maybe he was right about it being allergies and I’ve just been hit with another cold, but after calming down a bit for a few days the cough is back to it’s full glory and my entire body aches like I’ve got the flu. Not fun. I’d attribute all this sickness to my deteriorated mental state at the moment, but I keep bumping into people who are stuck in the same “on and off sick for a month, I am never this sick, this cold season is terrible” boat. The sore throat that’s come along with this latest manifestation is really not cool, I hate having a sore throat!

I got an estimate for the damage to the truck. About $1,750. Ouch. It turns out that the headlight did snap out of place (thus needs to be replaced) and the wheel was hit (there is a small dent) so they recommended that be replaced as well. Indeed, yesterday while I was coming back from a client site I tested the alignment on a straight road and it was pulling to the right a bit. Sigh. The doors and hood are fine, which is good, but a fair amount of replacing will need to be done. I filed a claim with insurance and will be taking the truck to the auto body shop next Tuesday – and hopefully have the truck back by Friday, I’ll be without a car for a week, but it’s not a huge deal. Oh and I’m out the $500 deductible, which is a bummer.

As I’ve mentioned, Michael and I are going through a separation. He was living with his mother, but that didn’t work out and this past weekend I moved in with Nita, who had a spare room in her house that she offered to let me stay in. I’m immensely grateful for her kindness, I’m very lucky to have a friend like her. It’s not been without stress, but I’m happy to say that I wasn’t impacted too badly as far as work is concerned (my voip phone was set up relatively quickly, and ssh tunneling is working to get into work machines).

Last night Nita ordered pizza and her, her sister (who also lives here, with her husband) and I had a movie night here at the house. It was fun, I hope we do it often. Tonight, if I don’t feel like a flu zombie, I’m planning on heading with Nita to the bar at Rock Bottom, where she’s meeting up with some bartender friends. Tomorrow night I’m heading over to a friend’s place to crash for the night before waking up at the break of dawn on Saturday to head down to Arlington, VA for D&D Experience – I’m part of the press team for AllRPG.com for this event as their staff photographer (article here). And no, being on the press team for some RPG website is not some new hobby exactly, I’ll see how this goes and we’ll take it from there, should be a lot of fun though.

And I’ve been up to lots of other stuff too. Last weekend a friend picked me up for an evening down in the city. We ended up meeting some friends at Monk’s Cafe – a famous Belgian beer bar in Philadelphia. It was absolutely no replacement for actually going to the essentially Belgian beer event (with some F/OSS stuff thrown in) that is FOSDEM, but it did quench my thirst for a good Belgian beer after all my FOSDEM-bound friends kept going on about Belgian beers. I only had a couple beers, the Monk’s Sour that I’ve read so much about, and absolutely deserved all the praise doled out to it. And a strawberry lambic that I fell in love with and hadn’t had the opportunity to order before. As far as the beer list goes at Monk’s – I’m happy to say that I’ve seen better ones. Why happy? Monk’s used to be the local be all, end all, for Belgian beers. That’s no longer the case, all sorts of beer bars are popping up around with extensive beer lists, no longer is a trip into the city required to get good beers! Although, those award winning fries they have there at Monk’s are probably worth the trip from time to time, and there is no beating that atmosphere.

Not that I have time for such things (I really don’t), but I do have them. Now spurred on by a recent rush of friends joining LinkedIn, a strange increase in my usage of MySpace (by increase I mean “used to never use” and “now login sometimes” – I blame Nita) and LinuxChix networking a lot lately I decided to post these links here.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethbevilacqua

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=722073031

http://www.myspace.com/pleia2

http://www.last.fm/user/pleia2/

..yes, someday I’ll make a new profile picture.

Saying I had a bad week doesn’t quite cover it, and it ended in this discovery:

http://princessleia.com/images/accident/

It was parked, a hit and run. I’m not precisely sure when or where it happened (between snow yesterday morning and darkness when I was out last night I didn’t notice it right away).

OK, it’s not that bad, and it could have been far, far worse. The truck is drivable without issue. The light is a little loose but still works fine. The hood isn’t dented, the tire and wheel are untouched. I’m just really shaken up about it because this is the first time I’ve ever had real damage on one of my vehicles and I have so much else going on that I really, really don’t want to deal with this right now. When it rains, it pours, eh? Poor R4. Perhaps even worse, I’ve been beating myself up about it. Maybe I should only park in very safe parking spots and driveways and never venture beyond safe suburbs, maybe I should have been more observant so I could have discovered it immediately and made the appropriate police report. Maybe I should live inside a plastic bubble so I never catch a cold. Snap out of it Lyz, these things happen, it’s part of life. There, I feel better now.

I’m going to get an estimate Monday to see if it’s worth filing a claim for ($500 deductible and all). It really doesn’t look bad, but as we all know with cars you can see a repair estimate soar over $1000 before you can catch your breath.

Tonight I’m going out with some friends, who are picking me up for an evening down in the city. Thank goodness.

My lapse in up-to-date blogging has caused me to post quite late about this. I’m hosting an Ubuntu US PA LAN Party at the house tomorrow.

Details here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/Philly/PhillyLAN

I switch between drinking coffee and drinking tea every year or so. The last switch away from coffee was part of a diet thing – I can drink earl grey tea straight without sweetener, whereas coffee I have to add cream and sugar (I won’t use artificial sweeteners). The other issue is caffeine content, I don’t typically drink more than one cup of coffee, and I can drink two cups of tea.

Lately I’ve been drinking 2-3 cups of coffee. I love sugar cubes, in spite of them being completely impractical, they don’t mix into the hot coffee as quickly as plain, granular sugar does, but they’re much more fun. I’m sleeping a bit less, which has led to a tolerable level of sleepiness during the evening but sometimes I nap and have enjoyed much more productivity, staying up working on projects. Living alone has afforded me a more flexible sleep schedule, no worries about keeping someone up or not coming to bed at a reasonable time. I’m on IRC too much and in too many channels, but I’m grateful for the companionship there and I don’t expect this total IRC junkie status to last forever, just while I’m feeling lonely.

Cranberry apple juice is the best. Some of the ones I’ve had in the past were too sour but Apple and Eve’s Naturally Cranberry is fantastic. I discovered it while Michael was recovering from surgery and was told that cranberry juice would help with some of the post-hospitalization recovery.

Wicked Danita
Originally uploaded by radio_free_rlyeh.

I was at WickedFaire over the weekend with Nita. I ended up not completely cropped out of this photo of Nita. Not the best picture of me online… but at least one exists, I had fun that day.

…even if I felt overdressed. I never wear shirts like that one (oh my gosh – low cut on me?!) but most of the women there, well, were dressed more like Nita.

EDIT: And here’s another picture! Thanks Nita.