I haven’t felt like writing lately, but I have to mention a few things.

My graphics card died this morning. SUCK. I have an old ATI card in my computer for the time being. Hopefully I can get a replacement soon, I miss my 1600×1200 dearly and the whole machine is slowed down by this old card :\ Will probably just pick up the cheapest agp geforce I can find.

My cousin Melissa came up recently! She was taking a road trip to New England and dropped by to spend breakfast with Michael and I. It was nice to see her, she got us caught up on family news and everything before heading our around noon.

I’m the new Debian Maintainer for WebCalendar! I’ve been working with my co-maintainer on it for a few weeks, it was a bit of a mess when we adopted it. There were 16 open bugs, half of them we closed, a few sent upstream and a couple more to be closed in our next released. The learning curve is pretty intense, but my co-maintainer is pretty awesome and my sponsor from dglog is still available to answer all my dumb questions. I’ve also hopped on the debian-mentors mailing list. I’m getting better at navigating all the Debian documentation, but it all seems a bit disjointed.

Beer! Tried a few new ones over the past few weeks. I was really impressed Victory Sapphire Bock I had on tap at Victory recently. It’s a hoppy bock that has this amazing clean finish. Sly Fox has a new ale on top, the Amarillo IPA that I enjoyed and kicked myself for not bringing a growler with us to the brewery that day! They also have the Sly Fox Helles Bock on tap, which was my favorte Bock until the Sapphire came along – will have to get myself a pint of that next time we’re up at Sly Fox.

And now I’m off to pick up my dinner from the pizzeria up the street.

Her favorite toy is a yellow fluffy ball, which she has in her mouth heading for my desk to interrupt me while I’m trying to work!

Simcoe and Caligula on a (yep, that’s a cord) electric blanket! Spoiled critters.

Simcoe loves the fireplace

Mugshot!

And yes, as others said over on Michael’s blog, she changed colors. Apparently Siamese do that until they’re adults.

She’s still evil, but it’s so hard for me to say that right now because she’s snuggled on my lap at the moment. So cute.

It’s snowing. Not some flurries that don’t stick to anything – real actual snow.

My poor poor daffodils!

My daffodils have had a tough season. They started to come out of the ground back in January when we were having spring-like weather for a few weeks. Then some snow came, then an ice storm, then it got nice again and now snow in April.

I’m not really complaining about the snow, summer can wait as long as it wants to come! But it make it so I couldn’t go to the gym or run the errands before work I wanted to run – no sense in going out in the sleet and snow with crazy drivers if I didn’t absolutely need to.

Last Saturday Kris from my old job came over. She’s really into gardening and gave me a few shade and wet ground loving plants (woo!) as well as a few nice flowers that I was able to get planted earlier this week. It’s nice to finally have a “real life” person to consult about gardening things. That evening we all went out to dinner up at Ortino’s and I introduced her to the lambic – she chose the peach and was suitably impressed. Woo another convert!

But the primary reason she was coming over was to spend the night so we could leave Sunday morning for the drive down to Baltimore for the joint PhillyChix/DC Chix meeting.

We left Sunday morning at 6:30, swung by Dunkin Donuts for some breakfast and hopped on the expressway. We took 422 to 202 to I-95 down into Baltimore, it was a simple drive and getting to the Aquarium in Baltimore was pretty easy (even if there was some construction at the exit). The drive down only took a little over 2 hours, so after parking we were there to meet Lauren, Katie and Raven shortly before 9AM.

The National Aquarium was great! I’d never been to Baltimore before, so it was all quite an experience – and I took pictures.

There were tons of fish, but I didn’t get pictures of many because they were dimly lit and moved too much for the little digital camera I brought with me.

Sea Anemones! I love these things.

There were plenty of turtles.

There was an impressive Australia exhibit, this photo catches some of it’s glory – as well as some giant bats hanging from the ceiling!

This frog was the best. They have a big frog exhibit this summer, frogs are great.

A photo of Baltimore Harbor from inside the aquarium.

I squealed like a little girl when I saw this, and then I felt silly. I had heard about the campaign to dress up the mailboxes, but I don’t go into cities much and didn’t expect to actually see one.

I love aquariums.

Katie’s pictures from the day are here and Lauren’s are here. Lauren’s include a group shot!

Uploaded by elwing on 5 Apr ’07, 6.49am PDT.
Kris, Lyz, Katie, Lauren (Raven not pictured)

We left the aquarium around noon and headed to the Capitol City Brewery. This is the second time we’ve had a meetup and the second time we’ve ended up at a brewery. It’s all my doing, and I’m the only one who really drinks beer. I need to stop hijacking meetings like this :P Actually everyone enjoys brewery food even if I was the only one drinking beer. I ended up with a Amber Waves Ale: An American original West Coast style or California ale. Ours is medium bodied with an intense floral hop character featuring variants grown in Oregon and Washington. This beer style is a recent development in the craft brewing industry. I was quite impressed with it, and brought a growler home to Michael. Oh and I had a crabcake sandwich, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in Maryland. The conversation was great too – we even talked about Linux a little ;) It’s just so relaxing to kick back with an awesome group of women from time to time, I look forward to our next meetup.

It was almost 2PM by the time we left the brewery and I decided it was time to head back so I could get home at a reasonable time and hopefully miss some of the traffic on 95. The ride back was a bit slower than the ride in, we did hit a bit of traffic, but we were back at the house before 5PM.

The other Linux event I attended this past week was the PLUG meeting in downtown Philly. I don’t generally get down to these, but I had a very good reason to this time – Michael was presenting! He did a talk on “Cross-Platform Digital Audio Streaming” and I really enjoyed it. Slides here and a photo here. Yay myn :) After the meeting we had a keysigning – which I hadn’t done in FAR too long. Then we dropped by the Best House with the rest of the PLUG group to chat for a few minutes before driving home. We managed to make it home by 10:30.

And Debian 4.0 released was released today! Woohoo! We only have two sarge machines here at home (work is another story, as my co-worker so helpfully reminded me in IRC this morning, hah!), and we’ll probably wait a couple months to bring those up to etch, but it’s still nice to see Etch finally go stable, it’s been almost 2 years since sarge did.

While I’m blabbering about Linux, I might as well mention that I was in the rare mood of wanting to “make my desktop pretty” yesterday and have quite a lovely pale purple setup right now. I also added hooks that will allow good access management to the dozens of servers at work, I love XFCE4.

Finally, Happy Easter everyone, I managed to get my Robin Eggs and Cadbury Creme Eggs yesterday, so I have been munching on them all morning – so bad! But so good… My chocolate intake has gone down since leaving my old job, so I figure it’s OK for me to indulge myself today. I also picked up some young gouda, port wine cheese and Deli-style rye Triscuits to enjoy while watching zombie movies this afternoon.

Oh, and there are flurries out today, a white Easter? My poor daffodils!

Just like last year, we’re celebrating Easter by honoring the most famous zombie in history with a day of zombie movies.

I grabbed the following movies:

White Zombie (1932) – A young man turns to a witch doctor to lure the woman he loves away from her fiance, but instead turns her into a zombie slave. – Woo it’s got Bela Lugosi!

King of the Zombies (1941) – During World War 2, a small plane off the south coast of America is low on fuel and blown off course by a storm. Guided by a faint radio signal, they crashland on an island. The passenger, his manservant and the pilot take refuge in a mansion owned by a doctor. The easily-spooked manservant soon becomes convinced the mansion is haunted by zombies and ghosts. Exploring, the 3 find a voodoo ritual in the cellar, where the doctor is trying to acquire war intelligence by transferring personalities into his zombies.

Nightmare Castle (1965) – A sadistic count tortures and murders his unfaithful wife and her lover, then removes their hearts from their bodies. Years later, the count remarries and the new wife experiences nightmares and hauntings. The ghosts of the slain return to exact their bloody revenge, until their hearts are destroyed.

All three of these are in the public domain and can be downloaded for free over at Archive.org: Movies and Film.

And we’ll probably wrap it up with Shaun of the Dead.

I also need to run out to the store to pick up some Whopper Robin Eggs and Cadbury Creme Eggs.

It has not been a good week for women in Tech.

Probably a quarter of the people in my friends list are women in tech, and so probably aware of what’s been going on this week, so I suppose this entry isn’t for you! There are no shortage of opinions online already, so lucky for me I can just link to events and responses! No work for me, some wonderful women have already said what I wanted to say :)

March 26th – Kathy Sierra posted her Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations) blog entry detailing how she received graphic and sexual death threats that made her afraid to leave her house.

Wow. Let’s not qualm about details (detractors from women issues have done plenty of that), this is a promienent women in tech who was taken down by misogynistic slanted threats.

Carla Schroder summed it up nicely (if emotionally!) here: Open Season on Women. The anger and emotion behind the post adds so much to it!

March 26th – Myriam Schweingruber posted to the Ubuntu-Women mailing list about the private email asking for her personal information and pictures after posting on the German Ubuntu list. Clearly not close to the same caliber of the previous event, but and example of the sort of thing that happens every day to those of us who are active in FOSS communities.

March 28th – Caroline Ford Left Ubuntu-UK. There was a posting of a sexist joke on the mailing list and her response to the list that she felt it was a breach of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. Following this someone posted on her journal asking her to leave the Ubuntu UK planet because she swore in a journal entry that was posted on the planet (I read her journal, the swearing seemed so appropriate to me that I had completely forgotten about it!). Men swear all the time on Ubuntu planets, she appears to have been singled out after the incident on list. Unfortunately the online archives of this thread about Caroline on the U-W Mailing list archives are not up to date so I can’t post to much about the U-W resonse, but the group will probably be going to the Community Council about this incident (there is no need for Caroline to waste more time on this – that’s what the U-W project is for!).

For all these events I’ve seen a lot of men saying things like “I don’t know what to do, I just ignore these people, they’ll go away” for all of you I give you this great blog entry that posted in IRC last night:

What some folks can do, if they choose. Just go read it, I tried to quote part of it to give you a sense and I found myself quoting the entire thing.

Today was cooler than yesterday, but still a nice day. After work ended around 4 I got on some heavy gloves and hit my gardens! I spent about an hour cleaning out leaves and the dead plants from last year, by then Michael was home and we went inside to plan dinner. It was nice getting outside, and although even thought I didn’t get a lot done out there it is starting to look more like springtime out there.

I needed the exercise out there in the yard, I haven’t been good at getting to the gym lately. The trouble is that it’s such a hassle to get there on days when I’m working from home (almost every day). A 35 minute drive to the gym, 35 minutes home, getting home at 8AM to start my work day. It takes a ton of willpower to do that, and I so often lack that willpower at 5AM.

But I wasn’t going to let this turn me back into being unfit! Instead Michael and I checked out the YMCA near our house. Michael suggested it a few weeks back when I was wondering about getting rid of my membership to LA Fitness, but I was skeptical – the Y? But this YMCA is pretty state of the art, it was built last year and when I went to the website I was already half convinced that I should join.

Spring Valley Branch YMCA is a full service YMCA with two indoor pools, indoor water slide, hot tub and sauna, a wellness center, youth fitness area, child watch babysitting, mega outdoor pool with two slides, toddler pool, splash pad, playground, indoor track, gymnasium, and a cafe.

Spiffy. The “tour” we got was mostly self-guided, but we saw enough to be convinced. It’s only 4 miles from our house and has everything we got from the LA Fitness plus more. I’m so excited about the pools. If Michael and I sign up together it’s only a few dollars more per month than the LA Fitness membership.

I think the only downside is the number of kids I almost ran into while visiting it on Sunday, but when I’ll be at the gym early in the morning and I don’t expect a lot of kids to be there.

The other consideration is the sweet deal I had when I had to go into the office – I could ride down early and miss most of the traffic, hit the gym and be to work by 8AM. Dealing with the traffic is not an option, so now I’ll be heading down just as early but dropping into the Starbucks down the street from the office to hang out with a book and/or laptop for an hour or so before work, should work out just as well.

So it’ll work out, Michael and I are cancelling our memberships to LA Fitness in favor of the YMCA. Too bad it takes such an absurd amount of time to cancel our memberships with LA Fitness, we have to MAIL the cancellation forms to California for processing, and they have to be postmarked at least 30 days before an automatic payment for them to stop it. Plus when we signed up we paid for the first and last month, so even after we get it cancelled we’ll have another month of membership out there. Sheesh, what a racket.

Today was beautiful. The sun was out with just a few clouds, the temperature got up to 77 degrees. I’m so glad I have a job working from home so I can open the windows and enjoy at least the breeze while I’m working, it makes me feel so good. Spring isn’t my favorite season, in fact it’s place is at number three, with summer being the worst, fall being the best and winter plunking down at number two. But I always enjoy the change of seasons and I love flowers!

Hopefully the weather will be nice on Saturday so I can get outside and clean up in my garden a bit. Even a couple hours of getting my hands dirty would be great for my soul right now :)

We had a great time last night at the Bryson dinner at Northside. We met up with our friends David and Kathy, who we hadn’t seen since before the wedding. They’re great people to have a few beers with, it was nice to catch up.

The dinner was great. Started off with some potato chips made at the restaurant and some sort of cabbage dip, then we had a wonderful cheese plate, then steamed vegetables with some bratwurst, then an open-faced freshly smoked ham sandwich with gouda and a side of scalloped potatoes (I ate about half the sandwich, not really into ham…). For dessert we were treated to a scoop of chocolate sorbet made with a chocolate stout and a kind of spice cake – yum! And the beers? According to Lew’s site they were:

Anchor Bock
Zum Uerige Classic Alt
Penn Marzen
Troegs Sunshine Pils
Victory Donnybrook Stout
Stegmaier Brewhouse Bock

They were all light beers, which is not at all what I’m used to drinking (I like big beers!) but I was surprised with how much I enjoyed these. The exception perhaps was the pils, but I don’t generally enjoy pils, this one wasn’t too bad though. They also served them in wine glasses, so the portions were smaller than the typical pints.

Even better, Lew himself introduced all the beers, standing in up in front of everyone and explaining things about them. Throughout the meal he also went around to all the tables to sit and talk with everyone which was quite a treat. We got him to sign our copy of Pennsylvania Breweries and got a picture with him.

And Kathy and David got their picture taken with Lew too!

There are going to be three more Lew Bryson beer dinners up at Ortinos this year so I’ll be keeping up with their schedule and we’ll send out “beer mails” accordingly.

Earlier this month I talked some about all the great things that are working in Linux now.

I started using Linux in early 2002 when Michael installed Redhat 7.2 on my computer. I was dual booting with Windows 2000 at the time, but with Michael’s help (and the help of a few friends online) I was weened off of Windows in just a couple months. But Linux wasn’t ready for primetime in 2002, I still needed Windows for some things and would reluctantly boot into it from time to time.

This has been the case for the past 5 years. Somewhere along the way I “upgraded” to Windows XP, which I disliked even more than Windows 2000. I stopped customizing my Windows install at that point, not even a desktop background. When I went into windows it was for a single task to be completed, or to test out some hardware that wasn’t working in Linux and I wanted to confirm it was a Linux problem and not a hardware problem.

I got up early Friday morning and before work managed to solve the final problem that had me booting into Windows semi-regularly: printing. I knew printing would work (it worked before some random upgrade), but CUPS is still such a beast and Michael knows a lot more about our network printing setup than I do. Luckily the solution ended up being an easy configuration one that I fixed pretty quickly. What freedom now! I don’t need to reboot for printing!

So what do I need to boot into Windows for? Not my mp3 player, not burning CDs, not printing. Seeing how websites I design look in IE? Ah, but Michael said he’d solve that one for me by tossing Crossover Office (yep, we bought it, worth every penny!) on my machine and getting it running with IE in the same setup he has on his machine.

That pretty much just leaves “so we have a Windows machine somewhere in the house” which still includes cross testing hardware and such. I guess it’s not a horrible purpose, since my machine is the only one stable, fast and available as a partial Windows machine. So no, I won’t be saying goodbye yet, but I won’t be booting into it nearly as often. And Vista? It will probably never see the light of day at my house, I am confident that by the time XP is EOLed Linux will be at a point where I will have no reason to keep Windows around at all.

And I could stop there, but I read a blog entry last night that really made me smile. A few months back Don Crowder over at Don-Guitar.com dropped me a kind note about my website. We’ve loosely kept in touch since then, Don is a very interesting fellow and so is his wife Lisa. They run the ezine Don’s Batch (RSS feed here). It’s a great little (actually, quite big!) old-style ezine with links Don and Lisa find in their daily travels on the net, as well has contributions from their pretty large reader base. I skim through it regularly and find interesting things, I especially enjoy the Linux section they have now which often has a lot of links to resources for people new to Linux, and I’m always interested in seeing those. Anyway, the entry that made me happy? The right to choose an Operating System – it gives a quick outline with Don and Lisa’s adventures in Linux over the past couple years. It’s always interesting for me to read such journeys, especially since Don and Lisa strike me as such normal people who were just out to find a reliable, inexpensive alternative to Windows – and found it! To be fair, Don has spent quite a bit of time with it and turned into a bit of a geek, so this isn’t an “Aunt Erma” story, but it’s still a nice story that highlights some of the great things about Linux vs Windows community and cost-wise.

Finally, last week I published and article over on Debian-Administration.org:

Software RAID5 and LVM with the Etch Installer

So far the comments have been good and/or helpful. No one has said anything bad! Yay! Actually, I didn’t really expect people to say bad things, I didn’t know about this site until my boss told me about it a month ago, and I’ve since been impressed with the quality of the posted articles and the feedback they receive. It’s been added to my RSS reader.