Last year I only read a half dozen books. That’s like a drought to me, when I think back on the year I want to say “I didn’t read anything last year!” and frown. Looking back I had a lot going on last year, between work (full time + contract), planning a wedding, and diving into projects like Ubuntu-Women it’s no surprise that I didn’t find much time for reading.

But I love reading and this year I’m working to make time for it. I’ve started reading most nights before I go to bed. I’ve found that an 30-60 minutes of of reading before I sleep works wonders on how well I sleep and how satisfied I feel in general. While I’m still behind what I was reading in years past, I’ve managed to get through about 6 books so far this year, already hitting last year’s number. Yay! As for what I’m reading – it’s a lot of scifi and fantasy, with some history mixed in for fun. I mentioned Saints by Orson Scott Card a little while back, I’m almost finished with it and it’s a fascinating “sort of historical” look at the early days of the Mormon church that has me engrossed.

I love books.

I got at 5AM this morning, far too early. But I was in one of those wonderful moods where I should clean out my inbox and catch up with things and mails I tend to put in the “this is an easy/fun little thing, I’ll do it later when I’m unwinding” category. It’s surprising how little I end up finding time to just unwind – usually it’s when I’m upstairs with my laptop listening to Michael do his radio show on Friday or Saturday night.

Michael and I went to see Grindhouse (annoying official website) recently. It was one of the best movies we’ve seen in the theaters in a very long time! The audience was pretty awesome too, laughing at all the appropriate grotesque parts. As with most people, I adored Planet Terror, it’s now up there in my top 5 zombie movies ever. Death Proof was a bit less fun, but only because the middle dragged on for so long, just girls hanging out talking …zzZZzzzZ, the climax mostly made up for it. The “fake” trailers were a riot, Werewolf Women of the S.S. and Thanksgiving almost had me in tears laughing.

And, how can this be? There is another movie in theaters we want to see! That never happens. Hot Fuzz is now at our local theater! It’s a movie made by the guys who did Shaun of the Dead and the reviews have been fantastic. Maybe we’ll go this weekend.

fuse is one of the coolest things ever. I do some of the accounting at work and all the scripts written to generate invoices were created for local use. Going into the office just to write invoices is silly! So my boss dug up this article Mounting remote filesystems using SSH. Very cool stuff – it’s still a little slow (it’s pulling data from a DSL line that has other stuff running on it) but way better than something crazy like ssh -x – which also runs the application remotely. With fuse I just yank the documents as needed and can run the programs that manipulate them locally. The more I learn about what can be done with fuse the more I like it, the gmail stuff is pretty cool.

Speaking of gmail, a while back I posted a link to Google GMail Loader over on 13thHour.net (where I tend to dump cool links when I have time). This past weekend I checked it out. It’s a neat idea in theory – it parses archived mail (like in mbox format, it supports a few formats) and then forwards it to gmail. Woo I can keep all my emails archives up on gmail, they’d be searchable and since gmail automagically adds the contacts I’d have an impressive addressbook too!

The downsides? It forwards, you just specify an address. Makes it easier than normal to mailbomb someone if you’re willing to get your IP flagged by gmail for spamming, but don’t tell people I told you. It forwards, rather than bouncing! So the received time isn’t preserved. You have to open the email itself to see the time and date. It only sends to your Inbox, I put up filters for the “To:” field to filter everything within gmail (not sure if this is fixable). It uses the python GUI which is clunky and a bit ugly. I should check out the command line version.

Ubuntu released 7.04 (feisty fawn) this week! I’ve had several people ask me if I’m using it yet, and the answer remains “No.” As much as I’d like to have the time to run a beta system and submit bugs and be a good contributer, I honestly don’t have time. Plus I use my machine for work and it would be very bad if I broke it one day and had trouble getting my work done (even if I’ve never broken Ubuntu that badly before…). I’ll upgrade in a couple months when the dust settles and the repositories let me download at disgustingly fast speeds again :)

Some of you may have noticed that Xelium is now using XBL for it’s blacklisting/glining. This is an aggressive step on our part, it has a lot of unfortunate false positives, and have already been snagged by it. Here are some tips: Identify your nickname on connect! We have it set up to only warn us if you identify within a certain time period and are on a flagged IP. Contact me on AIM: Leia26 or on other IRC servers listed in my LJ profile if you get glined – our glines for this only last for a day but if you want to get on an identify immediately I can remove the ban for you.

I didn’t say much about my experience with packaging webcalendar in Debian aside from the basics, but I have to say that my experience went something like this:

* Overwhelmed!
* Calmed down by my previous sponsor and who pointed me to the proper documentation
* Still a bit overwhelmed, this is quite a learning curve
* Very happy found a co-maintainer (who is a Debian Developer)
* Very very happy I have a very active co-maintainer (he probably did more than I did when all is said and done)
* Scared of being torn apart by the Debian security community, put on riot gear
* Oh no, I made a mistake!
* Thankful the mistake is “no problem *at all*” according to the fellow that caught me on it

To be honest I’m hitting the documentation constantly, especially when handling bug reports and feeling a bit apprehensive about some things. I’ve made progress though, and as a whole IRC has been an invaluable tool in connecting with the real humans in the project. I still need to take up my mentor’s suggestion of joining #debian-security and explaining that part of my day job is tracking security problems and reporting bugs. Getting friendly with them would help a lot.

Oh and Debian Women rocks.

Finally, I’m working on a project over at DarkMyst. I think it’s still “top secret” so I can’t really discuss it, but we really need people experienced with Drupal (or if you know PHP and can spend the time and get up to speed real quick) to hop on board. If you’re interested email: Ryan [at] DarkMyst.org (and Cc: Lyz@PrincessLeia.com so I know to expect you). Trust me, it’s a cool project and there are a bunch of great people working on it.

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 :)