Today is the 3rd anniversary of the death of my father. I made it through most of the day OK, but I don’t think this anniversary is getting easier. I miss him.

Today I spent a bunch of time working on my Sparc on Debian. It went something like this. I don’t want to talk about it, except to say – hey the Rescue bit of the Debian Sparc Install CD works great (once I learned it existed), and I’m going to be better about running `silo` after making changes to /etc/silo.conf.

Stop laughing.

On Saturday I was looking for something to do, since I didn’t want to rake the leaves like I should have. I ended up heading up the street to the brand new Philadelphia Premium Outlets. I’m not much of a shopper, and even less of an outlet fanatic, so my trip was driven by boredom, curiosity and the need for some new pants and perhaps a new black skirt. Right, clothes shopping.

First of all – hello it’s DECEMBER and people are Christmas shopping! I got to the mall and it took me about 10 minutes to find a parking space – the lot was simply filled up, all the way to the edge all the way around the mall. I finally found one and walked to the mall. It’s a very nicely laid out outlet mall, open outdoor walkways and a very sensible plan, which even though it was chilly out, made for a fairly stress-free shopping trip. I went into a bunch of stores, really determined to complete my task. I tried on lots of clothes but nothing was clicking with me. I ended up wandering into KB Toys halfway through my shopping trip, the only toy store in the whole mall, and made my only purchase of the day. D’oh.

I couldn’t help it though, I’m a lousy clothes shopper by myself. But toys? Well how could I resist – these were the McFarlane 6″ Curse of the Were-Rabbit Action Figures! I was so excited when they were announced but then let things get away from me and never bought any. Even better? They were marked down considerably and I snagged the 3 I bought for only $4 each! Would have bought all the ones they had there but I was trying to behave myself, I really don’t need more toys.

And while on the subject of toys, I made one purchase in the vendor room at PhilCon this year, a Giant Microbe: Beer & Bread Yeast. He now lives on my monitor, have yet to name him though.

I need someone to go clothes shopping with so I’ll behave myself.

I spent the weekend before last at Philcon, The Philadelphia Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Nita and her younger sister Dannette let me crash in their hotel room for the weekend, which was awesome of them. We arrived Friday night and I let them “dress me up” for the evening. The major reason behind my spur of the moment attendance at the con was generally feeling lousy about myself lately and not getting out enough – so what’s better for feeling lousy than dressing up and looking good at a con? I let them have their way with eye makeup and lipstick, and borrowed some of Nettie’s clothes. I am unconvinced that the makeup did me much good (or it could be my general loathing for makeup), but I did like the clothes. I should probably do some shopping soon, standard issue sysadmin t-shirt and jeans really aren’t doing much to make me feel fantastic about myself. After dressing me up (Nita has pictures, must nag her again for them), we had time to catch a couple panels, around midnight I went back up to the room to sleep while Nita and Nettie had other plans for the late night (which I skipped simply because I was tired).

Saturday was fun. It started out with breakfast buffet in at the hotel with some of the con organizers Nita knows. I quickly diverged from Nita and Nettie’s panel choices and went to a bunch on my own. I bumped into waltman (who I know from PLUG) sometime during the day and after hitting a few panels we snagged a local university professor he knows from his SciFi book club and the three of us went out for dinner at Nodding Head Brewery. I had one of their BPA (Bill Payer Ale) and some chicken fingers, which I enjoyed, it was a very nice little brewery. Upon arriving back at the hotel after dinner I wandered around for a bit, ended up bumping into Bill, a former co-worker of Michael’s whose house I’ve been to a couple of times. After chatting for a bit it was time for the Masquerade, where costumers in the community showcase their creations. Last year I wasn’t too into the Masquerade, so I didn’t have high hopes, but I was pleasantly surprised this year. Following the Masquerade was the musical guest for the con, Voltaire, which turned out to be one of the highlights of my weekend. His music is goth and morbid (which I can be very very into if the mood strikes, and it was striking that night), but he can geek out with the best of them and had a pile of SciFi inspired songs that, while sometimes perverse, were quite a lot of fun. It was really ashame the concert was only an hour long, especially when I learned he was prepared to play longer and the time slot for his show was just short. I’m really sorry I missed him play at Dracula’s Ball over Halloween, but the intimacy of the con show was great and lacked the hoards of goth fangirls that I’m sure generally accompany his shows. Of course Saturday was the night for con parties, but after a whole day of conning I was ready to hide in the hotel room. Events like this where I’m with a lot of people really exhaust me.

Sunday! I woke up before Nita and Nettie, who had stayed out past 4AM. I went to a couple panels before our 1PM hotel checkout time. In the early afternoon I ended up meeting Voltaire and buying one of his CDs, which he signed. Nita and I also got our pictures taken with him (Nita, I need piccys!). We caught some late lunch and the rest of the day was pretty much spent hanging out with people. I finally got to meet drkmage1016 in the gaming room at the con, Nita knows him from gaming and who I’ve known him just via LiveJournal for a couple years now. A bit embarrassingly, when I said “Hey, I know you…” he realized who I was and went ahead and introduced me to the rest of the table as some Linux guru, hah! I went ahead and mentioned that I’m the contact for PLUG now too, and that’s when one of their table mates turned around and took notice – it was none other than Eric S. Raymond. What an introduction! I knew he was at the con, he’s a local and I’ve seen him around town a bunch of times. So I ended up chatting with ESR, his wife, and a couple of folks who he spent the con with for a bit, and he said he might be willing to do a talk for PLUG in the near future, hurrah! Sunday wrapped up with Nita being invited to a dinner with a bunch of the con organizers, to which she was able to get Nettie and I invited to as well. By the time we had this dinner around 8PM I was beat from another full day of human interaction and didn’t talk much, but it was an enjoyable dinner anyway. After dinner a bunch of us piled into Nita’s car for the ride home, she ended up giving rides to a couple of people, including Mark Wolverton, who I had the pleasure of being squished next to in the back seat.

It was after 11 by the time we got back to Nita’s, and I was so tired that she let me crash in her spare bedroom. Thanks again Nita! Fun weekend, I’m really glad I decided to go.

Another weekend spent out with friends (I’ll post about PhilCon soon)!

I left home on Saturday around 2PM, after a morning of goofing off online and being lazy (which I have been doing more than normal lately). I headed down to the King of Prussia Mall where I met up with PinkFreud who was driving in from Jersey to see Beowulf in 3D in the IMAX. I’ve known him for ages on IRC through #irc-security which I found via the irc/unity mailing lists, so it was nice to meet up and have some dinner, trade SysAdmin stories and catch a movie. I was pleasantly surprised by Beowulf, I guess I didn’t know what to expect, it was very enjoyable. I’m glad I saw it in the IMAX with 3D too, that was very fun.

Delaware was my destination on Sunday, when I took a drive down to Wilmington to meet up with my friend Ashley who I know via the PhillyChix. We mostly just hung out and talked, I briefly met her girlfriend, and we grabbed some pizza. It was a really fun afternoon, and it turns out I desperately needed some girl chat time from someone outside of my normal friend group, and a fair amount of Linux geeking out happened too! Before I knew it 7PM had rolled around and I made the trek home.

Yes, I did get some computer stuff done this weekend too, I played with my Sparc Ultra10 a bit. Michael ordered me a gig of RAM for it off of ebay and now this machine is blazing! The plan was for me to learn Solaris, perhaps get samba set up, Windows installed on the SunPCI card and a couple other projects. After wading knee-deep in Solaris documentation for a few days I quickly realized that “learning Solaris” was going to be a bigger task than I honestly have time for right now. I should probably be spending my time learning how to set up samba (or playing with exim, or a thousand other useful things) on Debian so the next time such a project rolls around at work I have a clue what I’m doing. So I’ve changed my mind about learning Solaris, put it on the shelf for now, and after a talk with a woman at PhilCon who is running OpenSolaris I’m thinking I might go that route when I attempt it again anyway. I ended up tossing Debian on the Sparc, the base install was completed pretty quickly and I’m quite pleased with the result, in spite of having to remove the Creator3D card, which isn’t supported out of the box by Debian (or Ubuntu) and I’m suspecting might require a recompile of the kernel, but I haven’t looked into it. I installed samba on it, will configure it soon, and am now sorting out whether I want to make it a backups machine for my desktop or toss a bunch of music onto it. I am very happy with how this machine is running, Sparc64 is very nice.

Been busy! I promise to update properly soon.

1. 3 LUG meetings scheduled within 8 days, one of which I missed due to extraordinary traffic (accident shut down a major expressway in the area).

2. A couple much needed evenings out with friends, and lots of time recovering from my wisdom tooth surgery.

3. Wisdom teeth surgery spots are feeling good! I was off the big drugs by Sunday and switched to just Advil through Wednesday. Now I’m pretty much back to eating and feeling like a normal human again.

4. Last minute, I decided I’m going to PhilCon this weekend, anyone else?

5. I quit quit drinking. It’s too much a part of my life and I have too much other things going on right now, keeping a couple vices around is probably good. Besides, going to a tech meeting, being the only female, and then ordering a salad and water while everyone else chowed down on meat and beer really is too much (tongue in cheek here, but I did get a fair amount of playful teasing).

6. A whole lot more, including a lot of growth and change in my life over these past few months.

I had was going to write a bunch about this weekend we had, but now it’s been a couple weeks and it really just ended up being a nice relaxing time that both of us really needed. So – photos!

I got the wisdom teeth out yesterday morning. I’m happy to report that my first experience with general anesthesia was not a bad one, everything went smoothly. The only unfortunate hiccup that happened was misreading of my x-rays. Apparently when my dentist sent them over the sticker was on the wrong side, leading the surgeon to believe the bottom tooth that needed to be taken out was on the right side of my mouth. Not so! He went digging on that side of the mouth and didn’t find it and had to go to the left side. So only 3 teeth out, but 4 stitched up wounds. I go back next week to get the stitches removed.

Recovery yesterday wasn’t so bad, I was pretty woozy the whole day but fairly confident I’d be perfectly fine until around 6PM when I guess the local anesthesia started wearing off and it felt like someone kicked me in the face. Ouch. Michael took care of me yesterday, encouraging me to drink a lot of water and in the evening he made me the most delicious chocolate and banana milk shake. The Oxycodone isn’t as useful as I had hoped, I slept badly because of the pain and as they warned me I woke up several times with the sockets pussing and drool on my pillow (which I covered as they suggested since that’s normal). Yuck. So I didn’t much sleep last night, and I’m still in a lot of pain. This morning isn’t terribly fun so far, I’ll be going back to bed or to zone out in front of the TV once the Oxycodone kicks in again.

Pain aside, I’m very happy this is over – no more wisdom-tooth induced toothaches and headaches!

The weekend of the 20th Michael and I headed to West Virgina for our anniversary. It was a pretty mellow weekend, got to take a hike on Sunday, eat lots of amazing food and after finding Raiders of the Lost Ark in the video collection we took advantage of the free satellite broadband connection and snagged the rifftrax for it. The weather was beautiful for the weekend and we took a bunch of pictures, which I’ll get around to sorting and posting soon.

Last week I finally scheduled the date to get my wisdom teeth removed – November 9th. Earlier probably would be better, as I ended up with a pretty terrible headache Friday morning which caused me to hit the Vicodin the surgeon gave me specifically for when the pain prior to surgery got too bad. Yikes, that’s some drug, I took it in the morning and still wasn’t quite right when I went to the gym that afternoon (and come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t have gone to the gym…). Alas, they didn’t have any openings at the surgeon until the 9th, so another few days of waiting for me, at least the pain isn’t too bad every day, but it is enough to be annoying. I went to get a cleaning at the dentist today – teeth are all squeaky clean now!

Saturday I did a presentation on Ubuntu Women for Ubuntu Open Week. It was cool being asked to do a session and I think it went quite well, log here.

Saturday evening I met up with Nita, her sister and her sister’s husband to head down to a Halloween party down in Philadelphia. I had a nice time, but my aggressive shyness showed up and I wasn’t terrible social. Arg, I thought I was doing better! Toward the end of the night I got tired too, and since I had a lot on my mind I got a bit mopey. We left the party around 2AM, so it was after 3 before I arrived home.

Sunday I got some work done (making up time for that headache that ruined my Friday!) and then headed out do run some errands and do some shopping. When I got home I got ready for the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Release / Halloween Party. In spite of the fear of sounding like a total nerd, I ended up having a blast, sitting at the rowdy end of the table with Matthew Rosewarne and Brian Stempin who I know from PLUG (Haha! Now you both have Google juice saying you were rowdy at an Ubuntu release party!). Too bad we were sworn to secrecy about the topic of conversation, some fun stories were shared. Jim’s wife took a bunch of pictures. I’m the one dressed as a witch (and someone-who-shall-not-be-named asked if I was dressed up as one of the founders of the Ubuntu Women project, to which I replied “Yes, and I have come to take all the fun out of Ubuntu!” See, we have a sense of humor!). We ended up staying quite late, they closed the dining room and were nudging us to the bar when we finally wandered out shortly before 11PM.

Tomorrow night we’re headed to the Keswick Theater to see Sinead O’Conner, hopefully will have time to hook up with our friends David and Kathy for dinner who also snagged a pair of tickets for the show.

Now I should head to bed so I get enough sleep!