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.

I have been writing about beer a lot, it’s just that it’s springtime and beer events keep coming up :) Plus, I haven’t really felt like blogging extensively about the projects I’m working on.

The local beer bar, Ortino’s Northside, is holding a beer event tomorrow night with none other than Lew Bryson! Lew is the author of Pennsylvania Breweries and so is one of my local beer heroes. The owner of Northside (a fellow we chat with often) told us of the beer menu, which was delightfully full of bocks. I couldn’t resist – bocks? Lew? I’m there! Not even the ham on the menu (no substitutes) would keep me away from this event. We bought tickets. More info over on Lew’s blog (Lew has a blog!? YAH!)

Also, I learned today that the Sly Fox Goat Race and Maibock festival is happening on Sunday May 6th. I’m so excited! Even better, that’s the weekend will be up visiting for a race in Philly. We had blast last year and it’ll be nice to see him again.

We’re having a pretty mellow weekend, and one mostly away from the computer. I am coming down from being sick and the weather is lousy so I spent half the day on the couch with the kitties reading. I started reading Saints by Orson Scott Card. I know plenty of people don’t like him, but I really enjoy Orson Scott Card as an author, even if his religion makes me run and hide. But I couldn’t help myself, I picked up Saints for 25 cents at a used book place because it had his name on it. The subject of the book? The fictional tale of Dinah Kirkham, one of the first influential women in the early days of… wait for it… the Church of the Latter-Day Saints! It’s fiction, there was no such woman, but it is said to be loosely based on some women of the time, and Card did research that gave him details of the time and the founding of the church to make his book interestingly accurate in other ways. Honestly when I realized what the book was about I wondered if this 700+ page book would be worth my time. I gave it a chance today and before I knew it I was over 100 pages in, it’s impressing me more than I expected. Perhaps I should have expected it, I always enjoy his writing.

I woke up this morning and I think I’m finally over being sick, just the tiredness remains. What a crappy week.

The cats are acting very weird this morning.

I had a bad day. Around midnight last night I woke up with an upset stomach which lasted throughout the night so I slept horribly. I finally got out of bed around 7AM, sat at my desk until I realized that the pain in my stomach was too bad so I shot an email off to my boss saying I was sick and went back to bed. Around 2PM Michael made me some vegetable soup out of some vegatable stock and some fresh vegetables. It was good soup, but it was clear my stomach was still weird so I went back to bed. Around 7PM tonight Michael got me out of bed by starting a fire in the fireplace, at which time I grabbed a book (and now my laptop) and camped out here on the couch and ate some more soup. I still don’t feel well, but it’s not as bad as it was this morning, at least I can sit up now without my stomach protesting. Ugh, yuck. Even worse? Michael just went to Whole Foods yesterday and so the refrigerator is full of delicious fresh food that I can’t eat. I hope I’m feeling significantly better tomorrow, we have fresh fish that I really don’t want to miss out on!

The weekend was nice at least. On Saturday I spent some time playing with a Drupal installation for a project I’m working with. I’m not terribly impressed with Drupal’s security record, but it’s not running on my server and keeping it secure isn’t my part of the project! I am not a fan of CMSs in general, the base tends to be overly complex and writing themes for them is often quite difficult. But now that I’m working with a project that actually has a use for much of the CMS (not another project where they are just using a giant CMS for a blog!) I’m becoming more impressed with it. Theme creation is also less painful than in other CMSs I’ve tinkered with, very refreshing.

Saturday evening we headed over to Bob’s house to celebrate St Patrick’s day and see how he was recovering from a recent surgery. We brought over wine and Michael made some fantastic thai chicken soup and some fresh bread. We had a nice evening, started to watch Jesus Camp and I was happy to see that Bob’s reaction to it was much the same as ours. I’ve been meaning to blog about Jesus Camp, but each time I sat down to do it I couldn’t really form my thoughts properly. Thankfully, Michael found a blog entry by David Byrne that articulated my feelings about it quite clearly – except I might have made pretty clear that the whole documentary was very hard for me to watch, it was so very depressing how these kids are brainwashed. Then again, I’ve always had a problem with the whole doctrine of “Original Sin” thing in Christianity anyway.

Sunday was nice too. I got more work done with projects. Michael got the PhillyChix Mailing List set up for me, yay! So I was able to get a mail out about the upcoming meetup with the DC Chix. I also ran some errands, including getting out to the store to pick up a tack board and a dry erase board that I now have hanging in my office. For dinner Michael treated me to some homemade pizzas – including a reuben pizza! The idea came from a special of the same name they had at Iron Hill a couple months back. Michael’s version was awesome, I want another… when I’m feeling better :) As usual the rest of the pizzas he made were great too, I’m so happy that he’s willing to put in the work to make pizzas at home from scratch, the local pizza places around here really can’t compare.

And now just 3 1/2 hours after I climbed out of bed I’m going back.

The weather is very messy today. This is the first ice storm I’ve experienced since I’ve moved to PA, and it’s sure hitting hard. There must be 4 inches of frozen ice pellets on the ground by now. At least it looks like snow once it lands, so if I ignore the ice pellet sounds hitting the window I can pretend that it’s a normal winter storm. I sure hope we don’t lose power.

Michael and I went to the PLUG West Linuxbiernacht 2007 last night. The 2006 event of the same name certainly drew a bigger crowd, but I was happy with the turnout of 10 people at this one. Most of them I’d met previously, but there were a few people I was meeting for the first time. I’m happy to report that I’m not as shy at these things as I used to be, much of that coming from being able to say I run the Montco Chapter, PhillyChix, and actually work with linux now. They are all fine talking points, so I am not at so much of a loss for what to say. But Linux? Local geeks? You don’t want to hear about that, you want to know what beers I tried!

1. Lindemans Pomme – This is the apple lambic from Lindemans, and they had it on TAP! I’d never tried it before, and honestly it was far too sweet for my tastes but had a nice sharpness to it. I’m glad I tried it but probably won’t again.

2. Delirium Tremens – The old standard, this appears to be my panic beer, the waitress was there, I was too overwhelmed by the selection of great beers, and just spit out “get me a Delirium Tremens!” Unfortunately I think the one I got was old, or otherwise mishandled.. the taste was slightly metallic! Ick! I should have sent it back…

3. Cantillon Lou Pepe Framboise 2004 – Now THIS was a treat! It isn’t your normal sweet framboise lambic, it had a wonderful kick to it that I was really impressed with. I’ll be keeping my eyes out for their other lambics.

4. Spaten Maibock – Again with the German brews I’m getting into. This was a nice maibock, perhaps on the sweet side, but I enjoyed it.

What else… just a lot of little things lately. We live in a cute 3 bedroom house that has a bigger kitchen than the one I grew up with, but doesn’t have enough space for all the cooking things we got as wedding gifts. The solution? A pot rack to hang from the ceiling! So we headed down to Le Butler’s Pantry in Skippack and picked up a nice one made by J.K. Adams of Vermont. It worked out better than we anticipated – freed up a lot of space and it looks really nice!

I also drove in Philadelphia for the first time last week. I don’t have a ton of experience driving in cities. I used to drive in Syracuse, NY fairly regularly, but that’s not a big city really. I used to drive the expressway through Rochester, NY from time to time. Nothing like Philadelphia. Getting into the city was not hard, I left from work (this was a work trip) and it was pretty much a straight shot into the city. Unfortunately there were some roads closed due to a fire and I had to round a few blocks to find my way. Leaving wasn’t as easy, I went completely the wrong way and ended up much further from the expressway than I wanted to be. It took me about 20 minutes to sort out where I was and where I needed to be going. All told, now that I’ve done it I’m less scared of it, but I am not going to make a habit of it. It took me a good half hour calm down after that drive :)

I’ve been working with lately to plan a PhillyChix+DC Chix meetup. After a bit of delay (all my fault, I’m glad she kept on me about it!) we finally settled on a meeting location and date. We’ll be meeting in Baltimore at the National Aquarium on Sunday April 1st. It’s coming up fast! And means I really need to get the new PhillyChix mailing list set up this weekend.

OK, it’s late, time for bed.

From the age of 14 to about 22 I regularly had trouble sleeping. I blame this initially on medication I was on in High School for my migraines (Amitriptyline, not good stuff, I blame everything wrong with me in high school on it, hah!). After I was off that I blame being a young kid who never kept a normal sleep schedule, when I was 18 and 19 I worked in a store doing 3rd shifts most of the week with a few 1st and 2nd thrown in here and there. When I moved in with Michael is when my sleep schedule finally started to get sorted out. I was settling down and learned that the key to fighting the insomnia for me was a regular sleep schedule. Friends may laugh when I hit the sack before 10PM regularly, and even bail on them at movie night before midnight sometimes, but it’s far too easy for my schedule to get messed up and cause problems.

But it’s been months (almost a year? or more?) since I’ve been up at this time of the night and unable to sleep without anything really bothering me. I fell asleep for a couple hours and then woke up around midnight. I don’t have more than usual on my mind, nothing was really bouncing around in my head as I was in bed not sleeping, I was just … not sleeping. So now here I am, writing in my blog (and chatting in #13thHour).

Michael and I have been watching a lot of MST3K lately as I grabbed seasons 9 & 10. I do love that show, and being a Mike fan I love and general lover of bad Scifi, the SciFi era show tend to be my favorite. We also finally saw Borat. It was stupid and some bits were hard to watch (naked fat man fighting with naked Borat – eerrgggghh yuck!) but it made me laugh several times and I guess that is the purpose of the film.

Tonight we went out to check out the new Iron Hill Brewery in Phoenixville. We’ve agreed that Iron Hill is our favorite brewery chain (is Sly Fox a chain? It’s got two locations, I am saying two isn’t enough to be classified as a chain), their brews are consistent, the food is always amazing, and the wait staff generally has a clue about the beer. Tonight I enjoyed a cup of the seafood bisque, a pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms and a dessert of chocolate espresso cake (oh gosh, maybe THAT is what is keeping me up!). As for beers I had:

IRONBOUND ALE – An American pale ale. – I’ve had this one several times, nice and hoppy!
MUNICH DUNKEL – German dark lager with pronounced roasted malt aroma and flavor and a crisp, clean finish. – You know how I always say I don’t like lagers? I’m starting to get into German Dark Lagers. These are such a different beast, more like a light porter than a traditional lager in taste and texture. This is one of their seasonal/special beers.
IRISH DRY STOUT – Classic Irish stout, black in color, roasty malt flavor and pronounced dry bitterness. Served on nitrogen for a creamy mouthfeel. – I don’t drink a lot of stouts, but the ones I end up loving are the lighter varieties. This paired amazingly well with the espresso cake, as our waiter said it would. This is another seasonal/special beer.

And our waiter tonight was good. He’s the sort who really loves beer and it’s always so nice to encounter others who do. Sometimes the wait staff in such places know their beers but don’t really have it as a hobby outside of work. We also brought home our first Iron Hill growler, somewhat odd that we never picked one up before, but I guess it’s because all the Iron Hill locations until now were 40+ minutes from our house and we were always out doing other stuff and leaving a full growler in the car is no good.

Now I need to get to bed.

My weekend was amazingly productive.

Yesterday I got a bit of cleaning done, but spent most of my day at the computer. Doing various updates to websites I maintain, catching up with emails that I had neglected (my inbox is almost empty!). I got caught up with blogs and news sites. I worked with to get svn access to PhillyLinux.org enabled and now I have the power to make changes to the website, woo! Once this was done I was able to upload the page about the new Montgomery County Chapter of PLUG, make a few other edits around the site and happily announce that MontcoLUG had merged with PLUG (too bad I didn’t use ispell before I sent the email! No one will notice…). I also finalized the meeting place for the May MontcoPLUG meeting, even if I’m still searching for a speaker (I really don’t want to do the talk again). Yesterday I also got some Ubuntu-Women work done, including getting the two new website admins set up on the Ubuntu-Women.org, which I’m grateful for – both of them have wiki administration experience that I lack and I really needed to delegate some responsibility, I have enough learning on my plate at the moment :)

Speaking of learning, it’s amazing how much I’ve learned at work since I started. And I’m so excited to be translating this new found knowledge into new projects. It’s really amazing what you’ll learn in a month of “getting hands dirty 40 hours/week job” that years of tinkering never made clear. Have I mentioned lately how awesome it is to be working exclusively with Linux? What was I thinking when I believed I could be satisifed with an accounting job?

Today I was equally as productive for most of the morning. I finished the last curtain for my office during the Ubuntu-Women meeting this morning, it’s so nice having a sewing machine table that I can plop down next to my computer so I can knock off some lines in IRC between stitches. I have quite a todo list for the UW group right now, but I’m resting peacefully knowing that most of it is organizational stuff that when completed will make other things run more smoothly. I have no illusions about my ability to put so much work into a project like this, I know I can’t keep up this pace forever. In the future I see big organizational projects coming one at a time, much easier to handle.

Today I also had a conversation with an acquaintance (who found me through my blog, how many people read this silly thing?) about a perl project and php project that is under way and they need help with. This comes with all sorts of strings attached and a serious committment to the project and the community in the long term, but it’s what I love, and I’m going to grab at every chance these next few months at least to brush up on perl and php.

Then perhaps because my brain was tired of learning and working and I came down with a pretty serious sinus headache this afternoon. It sucked. Most of it is gone away, but if I move too quickly I realize it’s still hanging about. I am not the biggest fan of this time between winter and spring.

Finally, I hate DST, I’ve been all messed up today and I can’t believe it’s 7PM already. I’m going to need to set my alarm clock in the morning so I don’t roll out of bed too late.

Before you get bored and stop reading, does anyone have a PCMCIA Wireless card they know works in Linux that they can sell to me? I don’t want model names in comments, I don’t want “Just get one with $chipset” – that’s how I ended up with my wonky wireless card that has mysterious firmware that only works with linux when it feels like it and has terrible range. Really, there was all sorts of information about my card working fine in linux. Except I ordered online and got the version 2 card – bad news, which I only learned after I received the card. I am just tired of reading the tiny fine print about version numbers and chipsets and want someone to hand me a wireless card that works. I’ll pay! For the card! For the shipping! If you’re local I’ll buy you a beer too! Anyone?

EDIT answered my plea!

Of course what prompted this was that my card stopped working in Ubuntu again. There is a bug in Dapper that caused me to stick with Breezy, but then the card stopped working in Breezy (what was it, a kernel upgrade? Probably…). With Breezy’s EOL coming up quickly I decided that I should give up on wireless for now and just do a big old update on this laptop and tweak the newer version of Ubuntu to get it to work. Or beg people on LJ and at local meetings for pcmcia wireless cards that work in Linux.

So I did the upgrade. Breezy to Dapper caused xorg to get uninstalled (boo!) but because of my experience running Debian Testing I’ve become an expert at fixing X, I had it up and running and the proper modules reinstalled in a matter of minutes, no big problem. Then I did the Dapper to Edgy upgrade, which went almost flawlessly – the exception being that XFCE forgot all my settings and I needed to set everything up again, annoying, but I sort of expected it.

This laptop is 500mhz with 128M ram, so I notice when things change too much where speed is concerned. The laptop boots up faster with Edgy, and XFCE4 is faster and prettier. I’m not happy with Firefox2 though, I was unhappy with the weight of 1.5, but 2.0 is worse. I ended up installing Opera last night, which I’m using now. I am not the biggest fan of opera for a browser I’d use every day (still too many rendering problems and I just don’t like some bits of it… plus I miss my google toolbar), but this laptop is just a toy and all I need is a basic browser that renders most pages ok.

The users are primarily idiots who have no respect for others on the web.

It was over a year ago that I realized most of my image bandwidth was going to people posting my images on myspace pages, so I wrote some apache rewrite rules. I then neglected to recheck these rules and was disappointed to see they weren’t working as well as I’d like.

This morning I fixed that, see? Hahaha :)