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 :)

After work on Friday the cats went to the vet. True to cat form, they acted the complete opposite from how they act at home. Caligula was behaving badly, hissing, growling, showing teeth. Simcoe was the picture of a good kitty at the vet. The only recommendation was that Caligula lose about a half a pound, he’s at 12 pounds right now, up from 11 last year. And that Simcoe gain a pound, the vet was somewhat concerned that she’s over 3 months old and still only 3 pounds, normally cats are at 4 pounds at this age, so “unless she’s just a small cat” she needs to beef up a little, honestly I’m betting on her just being a small cat, her parents were tiny. They both got shots that would make them sleepy for about 24 hours, and after all the terror Simcoe has caused since I brought her home I was glad for the break.

So the cats slept almost all day Saturday and I got a lot done around the house. I managed to get my office a bit more in order, I think it’s as good as it’s going to be until I get my ethernet wiring situation completely sorted out. Michael helped me get the new TV room more organized – it’s almost complete and photo-worthy! The best thing I accomplished yesterday was finishing another curtain, putting up curtain rods, and finally being able to hang my first set of curtains!

Much better than my ghetto curtain!. I’m impressed that they came out actually looking like curtains, but I need to work on measuring fabric, they didn’t end up perfectly even on the bottom, and I think it’s a bit obvious on the one that I made yesterday (Michael said it looks fine).

I should finish up the last curtain this afternoon, and hopefully Simcoe calms down a bit. A whole day of not getting into trouble yesterday? She woke up early today to start catching up.

Finally, yesterday I learned the sad news Penn Radio is over. It was pretty much my favorite radio show of all time, and I’m very sorry to see it go. The reasons? Penn said he’s too busy (no doubt, two TV shows, a Vegas show a few times a week, guest appearances, a family…). Throughout the show there were notes dropped about how we should “look for it coming back somewhere, in some form, sometime in the future.” I hope that’s true, even a weekly dose of Penn would be nice. And honestly? Since leaving the AP job I don’t have all day to zone out and listen to podcasts anyway, I was a bit behind on my Penn Radio shows. A weekly show would be fine with me. On the bright podcast side, Peter Sagal was on Penn Radio on Feb 19th. Inspired, I checked the NPR podcasts to see if they had started podcasting the only quiz show I’ve ever been in love with, the show that Segal hosts, Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!. Guess what? THEY HAVE!. Oh happiness :) I’ve been making curtains to the great radio voices of Penn and Segal.

Last month and gave us the gift of a three month membership to the Amazing Clubs: Beer of the Month Club (you two rock!). I was excited about this, but skeptical about the quailty. Were they going to ship us a box of lagers? Would this be real microbrews or some lousy microbrew attempt from Anheuser Busch?

Our first shipment arrived last Friday and it was a pleasant surprise. Real Microbrews! No lagers at all! But how were these brews?

Casco Bay Brewing Company – Pale Ale

From their website:

	Maine’s first and only bottled year-round American Style Pale Ale. By style, American Style Pales tend to have a slightly lighter body, a more assertive hop flavor and a crisper finish (the best example of an American Pale Ale is the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale).

My review:

For a microbrew, I wasn’t impressed. The taste of the brew starts out as a pretty standard issue American Pale Ale, but in spite of their claim that the finish is crisp, I found it to be more disappointing – even a bit skunky! Still, it’s drinkable, and I enjoyed one of these with dinner the other night.

Casco Bay Brewing Company – Riptide Red Ale

From their website:

	Our flagship, this Irish-Style Red Ale proudly won a gold medal at the 2000 World Beer Cup. A combination of 5 different malts and 3 hop varietals, carefully blended, results in a perfect balance. Full-flavored and medium-bodied, the Riptide Red provides surprising complexity for such an easy-drinking brew. The Riptide Red has an original gravity of 1.056 and a 5.4% ABV.

My review:

They did much better with this Red Ale. It is on the mellow side for a red ale, not very malty at all and the hops weren’t overly apparent and I wasn’t overly impressed with the finish. But it was a nice drinking beer, I’d drink it again if the opportunity presented itself.

Ithaca Beer Company – Nut Brown

From their website:

	The rich mahogany hue of the Nut Brown is the first thing you will notice. You’ll find subtle hints of both chocolate and coffee. We delicately blend chocolate and caramel malts with four others to make this flavorful, easy drinking beer. The malt character will appeal to those looking for a moderately dark ale, but the smoothness is what will surprise all.

My review:

I don’t like nut brown ales! It’s hard for me to judge something I don’t like in the first place, but based on other nut browns I’ve had in the past, this wasn’t a bad one. Michael said he enjoyed it.

Ithaca Beer Company – Apricot Wheat

From their website:

	Our easy drinking wheat beer is light in color and body … perfect for those looking for a lighter taste. The combination of wheat and barley give our Apricot Wheat a different malt character than any of our other ales. The hint of apricot gives this beer a fruity finish, making it a fun beer to drink.

My review:

This was the gem of the whole thing. It was no “hint of apricot” – this was, by far, the fruitiest wheat I have ever had, and since I like fruit more than wheat, a winner in my book! It’s like apricot with just enough wheat to remind you that it’s classified as a wheat. It’s also very light, I must grab a growler of this the next time we’re in upstate NY.

I’m impressed with this Amazing Clubs thing. So much that if their quality in brew choices remains good, we’re going to seriously consider renewing our membership after the three months, and possible signing up for more of their clubs (mmm chocolate of the month club).

I haven’t been making real updates lately. This is a mix of being busy and just not feeling like it. Mostly not feeling like it.

So Ubuntu. In November I finally made the leap, replacing Debian Etch with Xubuntu Edgy on my primary workstation. Of course being so used to the older stuff in Etch and doing everything entirely by myself all the time, I didn’t really dive into Ubuntu head first, I’ve eased my way in.

It’s been pretty fun bumping into things that work in Linux now. Ubuntu comes with very nice default options (and, ok, a pretty heavy default kernel) that make almost everything I plug into my computer work.

Like… my Sansa mp3 player. I hadn’t put anything on it from Linux since last year, and the last time I mounted it in Debian it wasn’t seeing the entire drive, so I just booted into Windows. This week I plugged it in to my spiffy Ubuntu machine. It immediately showed up as an icon on my desktop, which I could right click to mount. My whole drive showed up! I then fired up thunar and transferred the files to it. Very easy.

And burning CDs. I made a pile of coasters last summer trying to convince Debian to use my cd burner. Annoyed, I just booted into Windows when I needed an ISO burned. And mp3 to audio burning? I have given up doing that entirely, just put music on my mp3 player and plugged that into my truck (the only place I listen to real CDs). Recently Michael asked me to pop a blank CDR into my drive and cdrecord(1) an ISO for him – and it worked! Oh my! This week I made the jump to creating an audio cd from mp3s, I installed k3b and libk3b2-mp3 and was on my way – CD burned fine and I listened to it in my car this week. Yay!

These advancements are fantastic, I’m really impressed with how far Ubuntu has come. Hooray for user friendly Linux!

Oh and also about Ubuntu, the Ubuntu-Women project is still chugging along at a nice pace. We’ve been having meetings every other week, we were able to go to the Community Council to get more administrative access to parts of the project – I’m now a website Admin and a Launchpad Admin for the project, woohoo :) It’s been helpful to be able to update things, and doing things like adding more people to the planet has really made for some new people traffic on list. BTW, we need more website admins info here.

Oh and a have a zillion other projects I’m working on too. Some of them are even projects that can help me at work, which is a nice overlap. Just the other weekend I was diving into the possibility of creating RSS feeds for some of my sites, and then my boss presented me with a similar project. It certainly gives me more incentive to finally move along with my personal project, and then be able to bring that knowledge to work.

Computers aside, I have managed to find time to work on other stuff. Last weekend I bought some fabric from a local fabric outlet. Gosh, everyone was right when they said it was expensive, even at $3/yard (cheap outlet pricing, plus a half off sale on all wool) it cost me $24 to get enough fabric for the windows in my office. Granted, that’s much less than I would have paid for these curtains if they were premade, but I also have to consider it took me 3 hours to make the first, and about an hour to make the second – and that’s just one set of curtains, one window! I’ll keep going on this route though, it’s fun to make this stuff, I feel so good when it’s done. Next project is making curtains for the two windows upstairs.

I also finally got to have a meal at the El Sarape in Blue Bell. It’s a mexican place I’ve been wanting to try for quite some time. I called up Jane, a former co-worker from my Accounts Payable job, and we spent Wednesday evening catching up. I missed talking with her, she’s a lot of fun and quite a change from all the computery friends I have. Plus we had a fun time catching up on what has been going on in the office since I left, same old stuff, did I mention I’m so glad I left? I also got to fill her in on how much I’m enjoying my new job. Anyway, the mexican food was good for this area, and I’ll certainly be going back. I also need to give my former co-worker Kris a call, we have some hobbies that overlap and she is into all sorts of cool gardening stuff that I need to learn for the spring. Maybe some weekend sometime soon we can meet up…

This weekend we don’t have any solid plans. Plenty of little things that need to be done around the house that I’ll feel bad about if I neglect them again (like finishing putting together a sewing station in my office and moving all our movies up to the new TV room).

Right now I’m headed off to make some French Toast with the fresh bread Michael made this morning – yum!

Simcoe is a delight to play with and she is so cute when she’s sleeping.

But she’s also quite the kitten monster.

She destroyed Michael’s speakers (which would have been a real bad thing if we weren’t intending to replace them in the near future anyway):

On my monitor (you are not one of my toys!)

Just plain causing trouble in my office (perhaps needless to say, the cats are locked out during most of my working day)

On my lamp!

And now she’s all snuggled on my lap while I type this, giving me that “I’m cute, please don’t tell the world I’m a monster” look. Very sneaky!

Honestly I love this little kitten, but I won’t be sad when we finish training her and she turns into a more calm adult. I do like cats more than kittens.

I’ve been working from home for a week now, which was a welcome break from the usual commuting routine. I can’t begin to describe how great it is to work from home. I think a lot of it has to do with comfort level, I’m more productive when I’m comfortable and sitting at my own computer. Michael also pointed out that we’re both the type of people who prefer to work alone, I’m not going to get lonely without an office full of co-workers. Plus, not driving for 1-2 hours each day frees up that time for much needed R&R – which this week translated into more time playing with the kitties.

Oh and not having to commute in the snow is cool too. Both Michael and I worked from home most of last week, his Civic wasn’t dug out of the snow until Saturday.

For Valentine’s Day we braved the cold and snowy weather to drive the 5 miles into Skippack for dinner at the Parc Bistro. I love that place. Since neither of us had a commute, we had 5:30 reservations so we could get in early and really enjoy the evening. I started out the evening with a a Peach Martini (gosh I’m a sucker for these fruity martinis) and Michael ordered a bottle of Kris Pinot Grigio. We then ordered an appetizer of cheesy risotto with oysters – AMAZING! For an entree Michael went with their Charred 10oz. Filet Mignon – with truffled cognac sauce, foie gras butter, grilled asparagus and whipped yukons, while I went the usual seafood route of Pan Seared Diver Scallops – rolled in porcini powder, with whipped yukons and red wine butter sauce. Yum! After dinner I was pretty full, so we just chilled our for about a while, talked and enjoyed our drinks, it was after 7 by the time we ordered our desserts, Michael went with their Triple Chocolate Mousse Cake – Dark, milk and white chocolates layered over chocolate cake, sauced with raspberry coulis, and I went with a special they had of a heart-shaped truffle cake. It was all quite spectacular.

Now having written all that I want to go back, hah! They serve brunch.. this weekend we can go back and I can check out the Lobster Egg’s Benedict two poached eggs over grilled peasant bread with lobster meat, hollandaise sauce & lyonnaise potatoes… No, I should behave myself.

Throughout the week we were spending evenings doing work with the house. Our new couches were suppose to arrive the Saturday the 10th, so we moved the television and everything last weekend. It didn’t come that Saturday, they had to reschedule for Wednesday since they had a problem with a driver (or a truck, or something). Wednesday rolled around and we had a snow storm, so it was finally rescheduled for this past Saturday. It was Sunday before we had a nice setup worked out upstairs, but I’m quite happy with it now. Right now I’m sitting on one of my new couches with my laptop watching some MST3K. Mmmm comfy. Once we have everything set up and all the wire boxes put away for real I’ll take some pictures.

Saturday I also did some cleaning around the house and then went out to do some errands. Michael wanted a case of Hop Wallop, which sent me on a quest to find a beer store that had it in stock. The store down the street has very limited selection, we have moral qualms with the place next to Sly Fox in Royersford, they only take cash and have a poor selection at the store in Harleysville, and Skippack Beverage looks a little scary from the outside. Skippack Beverage was the only place I’d never been to, so that was my first stop. To my surprise the “scary” warehouse exterior hides a pretty decent beer store! They had a whole bunch of Chimay, a nice selection of Victory and other microbrews, and even a few Belgians I wasn’t familiar with (alas, none of my favorite Belgians). I grabbed myself a case of Hop Wallop and was on my way.

Sunday afternoon Michael set up the Mythbox and so we finally got to enjoy some movies together for the first time in a week. I made some chocolate chip cookies and we spent the afternoon watching Flushed Away (which I thought was pretty cute), not watching Happy Feet (we tried, it’s horrible), and then a few hours of I, Claudius (which I’d seen, but Michael hadn’t yet). It was a great afternoon and evening.

And now I’m going to enjoy a nice delivered dinner from a local pizzeria. I have lost a few pounds in the past 2 weeks since I’m no longer working in an office where I’m tempted for 8 hours a day with candy and other food that’s bad for me. But my craving for bad food hasn’t completely gone away… I was going to make tacos tonight but then had an overwhelming desire for a buffalo chicken cheesesteak, mmm….