Last night Michael made pizzas.

As I’ve said before, it’s tough to get good pizza here in PA. There are a few decent places to go, but none of them are close to my house. I’ve tolerated the local pizza but complained often.

I was all supportive when Michael began to test his own dough recipes for pizza. He’s now to the point where he’s got a nice recipe for the dough and with the pizza stone we got around Christmas he’s been successfully making pizzas that I’ve really been enjoying. These pizzas? I had pepperoni, mushrooms, and hot red peppers. Mmmm pizza.

In other food related news, we had a few friends over Saturday night for a fondue party!

See, the best man in our wedding got us a fondue set for a gift. His reasoning was quite thoughtful, when going out to eat we’ve regularly ordered crab dip, which is technically a type of fondue. But gosh, actually making fondue is quite a chore, and one we didn’t want to do without guests to enjoy it with!

So Michael picked up three bottles of red wine, chopped up some farm cheese, chimay cheese and a swiss to munch on with some fresh bread and we got ready for our fondue party. He wrote about it here, including specifics about what cheeses were used and what wines he purchased.

was the first one to show up. He’s been quite busy lately and we really haven’t been able to see him as much as we’d like. It was really great to have him drop by for a couple hours so we could catch up.

Bob arrived shortly after MJ, bringing along a loaf of dark rye and two more bottles of red wine (woohoo!).

We mostly just chilled out and talked for the next couple hours while Michael tended the melting cheese. There are some things we’ll do differently next time with the whole fondue thing – apparently fondue isn’t just melted cheese, there are other components that make it less likely to separate and resolidify too quickly (the bottom the pan we melted it in was caked with cheese that took Michael a good 20 minutes to remove). Even so, I sure had a fun time with it, and the melty cheese was delicious!

Later in the evening MJ had to head out and our friends David and Constance came over. David and Constance missed out on the fondue, but Michael made up a batch of french fries (and some cheese fries!) that we could all enjoy. We then spent the rest of the evening, until after midnight, just chilling out and watching Penn & Teller’s Bullshit.

OK, you’re probably getting sick of these entries now ;) But I just have one more before getting back to regularly scheduled blogging.

Caligula and Simcoe are starting to get along, last night they even sat near each other on the couch and fell asleep while we had some friends over.

Yesterday Michael updated the DNS so that Simcoe now has her own subdomain. I spent a couple hours this morning updating it – so we now present:

Simcoe.Bevilacqua.us

Finally, Simcoe also has a catster page.

EDIT: Oh, if you add Caligula or Simcoe as a friend on Catster, please let me know who you are in the little friend request note – I don’t like to add complete strangers and apparently you get a lot of friend requests there now when you add a new cat. If I declined your request and you do know me it is just because I didn’t realize who you were :)

I just got home from the vet with Simcoe. She did not enjoy the visit, I heard her meows from the back as they were taking blood – ouch!

She tested negative for FIV, but is suffering from an upper respiratory infection.

OH NO AN UPPER RESPIRATORY INFECTION!!!

Actually it’s just a cold, quite common in kittens and nothing to be worried about when properly treated. Caligula should be safe from it since he’s had his flu shot and is currently in the age/health range that is least susceptible to these infections. But Simcoe is on antibiotics for the next three weeks and has to go back for a checkup in two weeks to make sure she’s getting better. Poor kitty, but this is why we do a vet visit right after getting the kitten home :)

Last night I drove up to Allentown to pick up Simcoe.

The woman who breeds them was very nice and lived in a nice house. She breeds the Siamese “for fun” (they don’t have papers) and Cairn Terriers as show dogs, she introduced me to her grand champion male Cairn Terrier – he was a delight!

Out of the two litters there only ended up being two females. We spent about 10 minutes chasing the kitties around the room before we caught the girls, one of which I fell in love with almost immediately. That’s my Simcoe!

Now I know you didn’t really want to read about my journey to get her, you just want pictures.

Her and Caligula are slowly adjusting, there is still some hissing and growling (from both of them!). Regarding the introduction thing, I’ve always just put the cats together immediately, used my judgment (if I thought they’d really hurt each other I’d intervene) and they’ve been fine. But I figured I’d consult Google to see what “conventional wisdom” says.

I found the following strategies:

* Bring the new cat in, open the carrier and introduce the cats, they will be fine (yay I’m right)

* Keep the new cat in its own room with litterbox, food, and bedding for a couple hours, then introduce it to the resident cat

* Keep the new cat in its own room with litterbox, food, and bedding for a day, then introduce it to the resident cat

* Keep the new cat in its own room with litterbox, food, and bedding for a week, then introduce it to the resident cat

* Keep the resident cat in its own room for a day while the kitten explores the house, then introduce them gradually

* Keep the resident cat and the kitten confined to rooms, switch rooms every day or so for a week and they will get used to the scent of each other

Worst of all, pretty much all sites say that they are correct and doing something different will TOTALLY TRAUMATIZE UR CATS!!111one

Oh brother.

Cat people are impossible.

I think I’ll stick with my “know my cats and act accordingly” strategy. I have no doubt that they’ll be fine within a couple weeks.

As I mentioned about a month ago we’re getting a female Siamese kitten.

Well, the day has finally arrived! Tonight Michael and I are making the trek up to Allentown to pick up the newest addition to our family.

I’m so excited.

I’ll be sure to take a zillion pictures.

I got a new job!

Goodbye Corporate Accounts Payable, hello Debian systems administration, bookkeeping and working with clients. Yay!

For the uninitiated, I got out of working with computers full time as a job about 2.5 years ago because the local economy became less than friendly to web developers and people without direct professional experience with Linux. Even so, I’m delighted (and perhaps quite lucky) that the company I will be working for took notice of my community work, five years of hobbyist experience with Linux and, in general, were willing to evaluate me on more than just the professional work my resume.

The deal was closed on Tuesday and I’ll be starting my new job February 5th.

It feels so good to be getting back into doing what I really love!

I’ve been busy and not reallly in the mood for writing.

First, to follow up with the previous post about the Ubuntu-Women meeting. We had the meeting and I’d say it was a fantastic success. spearheaded organizing these meetings and really took the reins when it came to directing the meetings. She’s a wonderful asset to the project and I’m glad to be working with someone who is so determined to learn and share what she’s been learning within the Ubuntu community. I went through the logs for the day and took notes – notes available here along with logs for the whole day.

I’m also working to get the PhillyChix going again. I attempted to mail the list last week and discovered that it was down. I tried to mail Sam (who runs the list) and found her mail is down, I then emailed her husband and got a bounce from his address too – ack! So I figured I’d finally purchase phillychix.org (it’s just pointed at our apache server now) and within the next couple weeks I’ll be working with Michael to set up a mailing list and getting the website moved over from princessleia.com/phillychix/ to it’s real new home.

Speaking of women and local linux stuff, last night we had a MontcoLUG meeting (unfortunately the MontcoLUG site is down because the guy who owns the domain let it expire and hasn’t gotten around to setting up the DNS again). There were only five of us there, but I should have expected a low turnout so shortly after the holidays. Plus, Michael couldn’t come along because he wasn’t feeling well, instead I brought along a woman I work with who has expressed interest in Linux in the past. I did a presentation on Women in F/OSS, slides here. The talk went well, even if I couldn’t get my hands on a projector for the meeting and had to print out copies of my talk (which meant people were looking at me instead of the projected notes – eep! At least there were only four of them…). There was a nice discussion about the general entry level of getting into FOSS and how the Women stuff can pretty much help everyone. Oh and our host, Lee, made some fantastic chili, yum.

Lyz, Kris, Karen, John, Lee

Another thing I did this weekend was record some sections for the 62WestWallabyStreet.co.uk’s Wallace and Gromit’s Cracking Podcast (you can find it on iTunes or do what I do and just grab the XML feed, I read the news in the latest one, episode 7 “Brilliant Bumper Bonanza” (toward the beginning of the podcast) and also did the “American Cheese Corner” (at about 41 minutes into the podcast).

Sunday was not such a fun day. I must have slept weird Saturday night because when I woke up Sunday I had probably the worst stiff neck I’ve ever had. While Michael cleaned the whole house all I managed to do was fold some laundry and do some dishes. I am such a wimp for camping out on the couch with a heated blanket and a book all day just because of a sore neck, but it REALLY hurt! Later in the evening Michael gave me a couple upper back and neck massages that helped a lot, but I was still pretty miserable when I went to bed Sunday night. Unfortunately all this lousy pain made it fairly impossible for me to get the work done that I had intended to do, sigh. It’s still not completely better, and driving to work yesterday was a pain in the neck (amazing how often you turn your head while driving – ouch!).

Michael and I finished watching all four seasons of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! and now can’t wait until the next season starts, it’s such wonderful libertarian and skeptic pr0n ;D I also watched the last three episodes of Tochwood. I enjoyed them for the most part, and was delighted by That Sound at the end of the finale! Squee!

Just a note to continue spreading the word about the Ubuntu-Women IRC Meetup day today.

The Ubuntu-Women group will be having a meetup in IRC in #Ubuntu-Women on irc.freenode.net on Thursday January 11, 2007 and into Friday the 12th.

Please see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWomenIRCMeetup for more information.

I’ll be at work during the first session, so I won’t be able to make it. But the 10PM EST session tonight I’ll be there for. Feel free to drop by any time today even if you’ve never been involved with Ubuntu-Women, even if you just want to support us (or me) with your presence.

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day. Sunny, temperature getting up to about 70F. We had the windows open, took down the Christmas tree, ventured outside to take down all the Christmas lights, brought Caligula outside for a bit while we washed both the cars with buckets of soap and water and the garden hose.

This is all very strange, since it’s January and the average high temperature for January 6th according to weather.com is 38F. The record high before yesterday was 63F, set 14 years ago. I’m not complaining right now, it was nice to be able to get these things done while it was warm out, and the winter car washes you get at the automatic car was places just aren’t as good as scrubbing the car yourself with sponge. But I do want it to snow sometime this winter.

Yeseterday I also managed to get some computer work (professional and personal) done, which makes me happy.

On the personal work side I manged to get the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin installed on 13thHour.net to combat the spam problem. For the entire life of the WordPress-based site I’ve had all comments by non-members moderated, I’d check the moderated comments every month or so and have to delete everything because it was all spam. Then I realized that the site was pretty dead, all I was doing with it each month was deleting spam on old posts! So I decided 2 things:

1. I would start using the site for dumping funny/interesting sites/podcasts I encounter – it’s relatively #13thHour based, since we talk about everything and often post links in channel.

2. Make comment feature usable.

So I started looking around for solutions that wouldn’t be too difficult to implement (I didn’t want to have to bug Michael to edit the apache config or install more software on the server) or get around for normal humans. The Match Comment one seemed like the best option, and it fit my criteria. I’m going to keep it all moderated for about a week to see how well it works, it’s been about 20 hours now and I haven’t had any.

Unfortunately I was suffering from a nasty headache yesterday and didn’t get much else done. All evening I sat around with Caligula and zoned out in front of the television. Headaches suck.

This morning I got up and was almost completely headache free – yay! I spent about a half hour this morning setting up the scripts and crontabs for ircstats for #13thHour and the ircstats for #Deep13.

And now I’m going to stop writing and enjoy the fire Michael made in the fireplace. Perhaps I’ll play around with getting the National Digital Forecast Database XML Web Service running with R2D2…

This past weekend we celebrated New Years with a couple friends of ours who had come up to spend a few days at our house. I had Thursday and Friday off from work to entertain them while Michael worked.

Kevin brought up a couple growlers from his local brewery, Four Sons Brewery, filled with their Pale Ale and Amber Ale. Both were enjoyable and full of character, and contrary to my normal stance on Pale vs. Amber I enjoyed the Amber ale more. He left us one of the empty growlers to keep – woohoo!

While Michael was at work on Friday I took the guys out to Max & Ermas in Oaks. The food was good, but the service was lousy – very unusual for that location! The waiter started off fine, one of those jump-on-your-table-and-be-too-excited types, but then he turned horrible. He neglected to check on us after our food was delivered by someone else and I sat for almost 15 minutes with an empty soda glass. He pretty much ignored us while we were eating after I finally got my soda refilled. Then he brought the fresh cookies for dessert too early, before Kevin was finished with his meal. And then without asking if we wanted more he brought the check, which was our signal to get out rather than ordering a couple beers to round out the meal, fine! It was about 3 in the afternoon and there wasn’t a lack of available tables in the place, so he wasn’t trying to clear us out for other diners. He got a lousy tip, which is really a shame for him, since I’m a great tipper.

Unfortunately Michael started coming down with the flu Friday afternoon at work. Saturday he was not feeling well, but was feeling good enough to decline my offer to drive and drive us all himself to Victory Brewing Company for a late lunch and tour of the brewery! We met up with Bob and a couple friends of his at the Brewery and had a blast during the tour.

Throughout the weekend Kevin and I were plopped in front of the TV (or his laptop screen) watching I, Claudius, a 12 hour BBC mini-series from 1976. I am not sure what I was expecting from this – but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it! This wasn’t some lousy made-for-TV movie, this was a well-structured film with some notable actors: John Hurt as Caligula, Patrick Stewart as Sejanus, Sian Phillips (Rev. Mother in Dune) as Livia, John Rhys-Davies as Marco. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching the excess and absurdity of Caligula, as if I needed re-enforcement of the idea that I should name a cat after such a fellow (What? Cats are excessive and absurd!).

It was also interesting to be able to follow the historical accuracy of the film by referencing the I, Claudius Project:

The goal of the I, CLAVDIVS PROJECT is to create a web resource which provides source materials and analyses for the BBC production of I, Claudius. Each episode is documented to show what is supported by ancient evidence or by the Graves novels and what is not.

The project has been going on since 1998 and is still in progress, as is evident from the detail of the documentation in the earlier episodes in relation to the later ones. Still – what a fantastic resource!

We also got to watch the 4th season (and a few episodes of other seasons) of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! which was a nice bit of libertarian blabbering that I thoroughly enjoyed and mostly agreed with. Plus both Kevin and I are big Penn fans (he a bit more than I) and during a week without Penn Radio we needed some sort of Penn fix.

New Years Eve was spent enjoying growlers from Victory, various movies and shows on the MythTV box, and just hanging out together. Michael (still suffering from the flu) made pizzas for all of us, with me helping out chopping up things for the pizzas and running around doing little tasks so he wouldn’t have such a huge burden. The pizzas turned out great and we ended the evening with way too much leftover cheese and snacks.

New years day was spent “recovering” from the night before. Michael was finally starting to feel better (yay!) and we decided to head out to Sly Fox for some food around 5PM – but they were closed. I had called earlier to make sure they were open, and they had indicated that they would probably close earlier than the normal 9PM, but didn’t think they’d close before dinner. Sigh. We ended up just going home and having some veggie burgers, fries and leftover snacky foods. In retrospect this was probably the best plan of action, if we had ended up at Sly Fox I’m sure we would have brought home more beer, stayed up late and I would have been feeling miserable this morning. As it was, I was able to get to bed by 9 to read and was asleep by 10.

This morning the guys left and I went back to work.