Yesterday morning we had a Verizon tech come out and check our line. There wasn’t anything drastically wrong with it, but I guess he just did some poking and tightening and now our connection is being much more well-behaved. Lets hope it stays this way.

…but we may not need that line to be stable afterall. The Verizon website now tells us we can get FiOS. Michael is calling tomorrow to ge the details on getting a business line to our house with a static IP (and confirming that port 80 is open on such static IP business accounts as this site says). They may be the evil empire, but we already have our land line and cellphones through Verizon. Come to think of it, if we get FiOS we won’t need the land line anymore, so a business FiOS line to our house will only actually cost us $40 more per month and it’ll be a hell of lot faster than what we have now %o

The time window for the tech showing up was any time between 8AM and 7PM (absurd huh?) so we didn’t make any plans for the day. The tech showed up in the late morning so our afternoon opened up. Michael ended up going into work for a little bit and I just decided to chill out at home. I spent a bunch of time fixing 13thHour.net, the profiles had been a bit broken since the upgrade to WP2 and once I got them back to pristine condition I decided not to mess with them further and haven’t re-added the fields for adding your own photo or birthday, I’ll add them to the MySQL table manually when people need me to.

In the evening we thought about heading out to Valley Forge for the Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers Public Star Party but the sky had clouded up. We decided to hang in.

First we watched the final two episodes of the latest season of Doctor Who. Daleks vs Cybermen!!! AHKLDSFS!!! And the ending was sad, I was a bit tearful. I’m so in love with these new Doctor Who episodes, it’s really some of the best scifi television I’ve ever seen.

After watching Dr Who we went outside to enjoy the evening by a fire in our back yard, and had a nice discussion about our favorite scifi stuff.

And toasted marshmallows.

It was a good night.

Today I decided to switch from using firefox to using Opera on my laptop. My laptop is 500mhz, which is perfectly fine for most things, but firefox loves to eat up the entire CPU when it does things like, say, load a page. This is pretty annoying. I remember when firefox first came out, as that fantastic lightweight answer to mozilla, but now it’s gotten pretty big. SO I installed Opera, and although it eats up my entire CPU sometimes (like when loading a lot of images or flash page) it does it much less often than firefox did, normal browsing only takes up about half of my resources.

Michael’s birthday was this week. We went out to Greater India for his birthday meal. It was a great dinner, and I asked the owner if she knew of any places to purchase indian dresses in the area – of course she said Iselin was the best place but then gave me a card for a woman in Harleysville who sells dresses, I emailed her this weekend and with any luck I’ll be able to meet up with her and find a dress I like without driving all the way out to NJ.

And a lot of other #13thHour birthdays were this week too.

Ash – July 5th
Michael – July 6th (this is also the birthday of my mother’s boyfriend)
(colin_) and Etudes – July 7th
Barenjager – July 8th

Unfortunately with our internet connection being so goofy lately R2D2 wasn’t running to give ops to the BirthdayBot that comes in to change the topic. Ack! Slacking off on the busiest week of the year! The next channel birthday is , it should be all working better by then.

And now it’s just after noon and it’s a very pretty day out.

It’s Michael’s birthday today.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MYN!!! %)

Last night he ended up working quite late and I decided to head down to the PLUG meeting with . The presentation at the meeting was about InfiniBand. I wasn’t familiar with the technology and so the talk, giving an overview of the history of the technology and its capabilities, was nice. The turnout for the meeting was relatively small, maybe 20 people, but I guess that’s how it gets in the summer.

After the meeting I got to finally meet , who lives doesn’t live too far from where the PLUG meetings are held. We all headed down the street to The Best House to get some pizza and beer. I stuck with a ginger ale and couple slices of pizza, no caffeine and no alcohol! We spent until about 10:30 talking about our latest projects.

On my way home I got to listen to Echoes on XPN, it was a nice end to my day.

Oh and Verizon is coming out Saturday to check out our phone line. Hopefully it’ll be something that can be fixed relatively quickly and my internet connection will get better, right now it’s getting worse each day.

I had a nice day yesterday.

Michael headed to the gym in the morning and I stayed home because 1) there were a zillion things I wanted to get done around the house and had been too lazy/hot to do all weekend 2) my gym clothes were dirty

So I spent the morning cleaning the house. I got to more of it than I expected considering the heat and then spent the early afternoon hiding in the air-conditioned computer room trying to keep cool while Michael made some food for our afternoon activities. Unfortunately our internet connection has been terrible lately (anyone I’m with on IRC with probably knows this!) and I spent more time doing writing than actually doing stuff online. We’re going to need to call Verizon and get them to look at our line, even the land line phone itself is starting to sound bad.

We headed over to the Malvern Sweat Lodge around 1:30 for a get-together Jim was having there. I had a nice time, lots of food, plenty of people I knew to talk to. We attended a sweat in the late afternoon, the first two rounds were for kids and I came in for the second two, more tough, rounds. Then there was the final round, a “warrior round” that was not led by Jim (he was too hot by then) but rather this other fellow who reminded me more of a Baptist preacher than a Native American shaman. Now there is nothing wrong with being excitable like a Baptist preacher, but because of the association it just doesn’t sit well with me, and their type of excitement has never been terribly appealing to me anyway. I made it through about 5 minutes of it before I had to get out because he made it so hot and I couldn’t breathe.

After the lodge I swam in the pool for a while. I don’t want a pool of my own right now, but someday when I am rich and have a castle and someone to take care of it for me – absolutely. I’d be in the pool all day.

We had some BBQ and left Jim’s around 7. I was pretty tired when I got home, sweat lodges do that to me. We watched some TV and went to bed.

I wish this morning had been similarly good. As I was packing up my gym bag this morning I realized that my purse was still in Michael’s car. Luckily I had my car keys so I could actually get to the gym and work but I didn’t have my pass to get in the work building this morning (had to call a co-worker to let me in). Michael had to take time out of his crazy busy day to drop off my purse to me at work. At the gym the hair driers were missing – when I asked at the front desk about them the woman said “They haven’t fixed those yet?! I’m so sorry!” AND THEN I got into work and learned that one of my favorite people here at work put in her notice. #$@$U#)9(D!! Actually I’m happy for her, but it’s sad to see her go.

Happy Monday – er – Wednesday! Oh goodie it’s already Wednesday!

As a general rule, I like beers of medium weight, typically IPAs but I do enjoy the occasional Guinness or other light stout. Unfortunately these beers are best enjoyed in the winter. Their weight can sometimes be a bit much for the summer, and so I began my quest for a light summer beer!

My first stop was with Lambics. I love lambics. But there are a couple problems with them:

1. Not many places make lambics
2. When you can find them they’re expensive
3. I really can’t drink too much lambic, they are too sweet

Now I don’t like lagers and I don’t like pilsners (Michael has been getting into pilsners lately and I just can’t get myself to like them). So it was tricky finding something light and delicious. Then I discovered the Saison. I first had one last year at Iron Hill‘s Magic Hat Summer Dinner, and enjoyed the citrusy taste of it, but never really got into them then.

Saisons are an ale that are lighter than the general ales that I enjoy. Wikipedia offers the following description of their taste:

Saisons have a spicy, herbal, earthy hoppy bite from the generous amounts of traditional noble hop varieties, including kent goldings, styrian goldings and hallertau. The yeast flavors add an unmistakable Belgian touch to these ales, and add a complex smoothness. Although saisons are almost always dry, the can also be winey and tart

It’s like a belgian ale, but toned down a notch in how heavy it is and spiced up a bit. These are fantastic! Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying different saisons. The three memorable ones I’ve tried thus far have all been from American breweries (perhaps unfortunate since it’s a Belgian beer with Belgian malts and hops!), and have all really been good. In order of delciousness they are:

Rogue FestivAle – This is the best Saison I’ve ever had. Perfect Saisonness on all accounts.

Sly Fox Saison VOS – Next best, and easy to get my hands on! I enjoyed a bottle of this this weekend.

Victory V Saison – I love Victory, so it was no surprise that this was a good Saison, but it didn’t knock my socks off like the Rogue and Sly Fox did.

Mmmm Saisons. I found my summer beer!

It’s Monday and it’s still my weekend! Woohoo! Michael had to go into work today though, it seems that people I know are split about 50/50 as to whether they have today AND tomorrow off.

Friday was a rough day at work, my eyes were ready to fall out of my head when I walked out of the office at 6:15, but one of the things I like about that job is that it was over at 6:15. I totally left work behind when I walked out the door.

Saturday I was feeling rather blue. We went to the gym in the early afternoon, I hoped physical activity would improve my mood but it didnt. On our way home we stopped at the pet store to pick up some cat food and were seduced by the fish department. Michael found some blue gouramis which are very nice looking fish and I fell in love with a GloFish. So we ended up leaving the store with a couple blue gouramis and a GloFish.

As you can tell, the GloFish doesn’t like to stay still for photos, it spends pretty much all it’s time swimming around the tank very quickly, crazy fish.

After the new fish were settled in Michael and I headed out to Victory to get some pizza and beer.

Sunday I was in a better mood, but that’s when the heat came. The daily high yesterday was in the 90s, and our tentative plans to clean out the tent (which has been drying in the room above the garage all week) and do some cleaning around the house were canceled. Instead we hid upstairs in the computer room all day.

But I got a lot done. Made some progress with the Ubuntu-Women group to get the wiki off the ground and I’m working closely with another woman in the project to get some edits done on the static parts of the website. It’d be nice to see that group really take off.

I worked on doing some organizing of all the bills and paperwork at my desk, finally got around to filing some of the stuff from past years. I also took a chunk of time out of my day to check out some financial software. Currently I’m just using a spreadsheet as a ledger to keep track of a budget and things. I’m good at keeping these things in my head so it’s not a bad system for me, but I always thought it would be nice to learn to use a more advanced program for personal finances. I tried out 3 programs:

gnucash – Turned out to be complex and clunky for something as simple as a personal account. I really gave it a chance and worked for about 45 minutes with it to see if I could get through the lack of user-friendliness and figure out how it works. Then it crashed. I gave up.

MyPhpMoney – There was a version of this in apt, so even with it needing apache to run I figured I’d give it a shot. Unfortunately the project seems to have been abandoned in 2003 and the scripts don’t work properly with the current version of MySQL. I still thought it might be worth running, so I spent some time tossing in fixes to the php scripts as I came across them in the program, but it got to be too much of a hassle.

KMyMoney – I wasn’t going to install this, I had to grab it from the unstable respository (there is an old stable version, no version for testing, and a recent version in unstable. Luckily the install went fine, didn’t need to install too much from unstable, and the program runs great. Plus, it looks nice, it is pretty easy to get running if you follow the first few steps in the documentation. It gives a variety of great reports and I’m quite pleased.

Unfortunately KMyMoney doesn’t really do much beyond “scheduled payments” in the form of budgeting. I’m not really sure what tools I would want for budgeting, but it does seem like my old spreadsheet will continue it’s life. I am considering using KMyMoney along-side it though, it’s just so nice (and depressing!) to see how much was spent in each area over the course of a month/year.

I also spent a bunch of time yesterday over at wikipedia – writing my first article!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sly_Fox_Brewery

An article on wikipedia about my favorite brewpub, to join the ever growing list of breweries indexed on wikipedia %)

I also *somehow* found myself over on the Egyptian Mau wikipedia page and decided that it needed a picture of a smoke-colored mau – Caligula has been wikipedia-ed!

And I dist-upgraded my computer. While upgrading there was an xorg warning about users having problems with the upgrade that made me groan. Of course x broke when I restarted it. I had to download the latest nvidia drivers and then run the module script like this:

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7182-pkg1.run --x-module-path=/usr/lib/xorg/modules/

so xorg would see the nvidia module and load it. Arg. It only took about 30 minutes of sorting out though, and I had the time to do it.

Oh and xfce4 got updated to 4.3.90 and ate all my settings x_X and I had to install xfdesktop4 to get my desktop and menu back.

Today I didn’t do much, there are a few more things on my todo list, but I’m not sure how far I’ll get with them.

I joined Ubuntu-Women when the mailing list began earlier this year. It was another in the growing tradition of -women groups in F/OSS. After a few false starts, the group began to gather a variety of women from all over the world in it’s pursuit to bring women together and get them more involved. I know plenty of women who are involved with F/OSS, but this Ubuntu group went to the furthest reaches of the planet and many very active women in F/OSS I’d never encountered before surfaced. This is cool.

But now I’m seeing that this group will have to face the same problem all -women groups face at some point or another: Staying friendly, on topic and not turning into another source of technical support.

On topic means sticking to the goals of the group, which generally are providing role models and working to dispel the myth that there are no women in F/OSS (yay I’m not alone!) and working to help women who may be less inclined to jump into technical discussions or use the tools (mailing lists, IRC, etc) to get involved. Ubuntu-Women is a fantastic starting point for getting women involved in general F/OSS, as the users of Ubuntu are so often new to the whole F/OSS world. I really enjoy teaching women the proper ways of navigating a mailing list or IRC channel.

The goal of a -women group is NOT to provide a private club for girls to hang out and keep themselves isolated from the rest of the project. So we come to the heart of the problem, whether technical discussions such as “how do I install $program?” be allowed on -women group lists.

I must respond with a resounding “NO!”

I am an avid supporter of LinuxChix (after all, I coordinate a chapter) and its network of support and friendship, sometimes I even find myself forgetting that there are so few women in F/OSS because I’m constantly exposed to a number of brilliant women through LinuxChix.

But -women groups are a different beast. By getting into technical help on the list we become counter-productive and open ourselves up to be flamed, perhaps rightfully so. Why?

1. We are further isolating ourselves rather than getting involved
2. We are duplicating a service already offered by official -user lists
3. We are providing a comfortable environment ourselves rather than joining the community and improving the atmosphere of acceptance as a whole

All these work AGAINST gaining equality for women in F/OSS, and this is where the groups can be dangerous.

Now the trick to this is remaining friendly while redirecting the technical questions that come to the list.

</soapbox>

I was hoping today was Friday, but it’s not %(

Things are still a bit soggy here. Yesterday on my way to work I had to turn around on one road because the creek had taken over the street for as far as I could see. Michael faired worse, as he was stuck in traffic for over 3 hours before he could give up and turn back home (he can work from home if he needs to). Luckily we don’t live in a flood plain and besides the hassle of having so many roads and bridges in the area closed we aren’t worried about the excessive rainfall.

I did see some sun yesterday. I took a walk to the library during lunch, first time I could do that in over a week. It smelled very… summery outside. The temperature was hovering around 82F, the grass was wet and I was brought back to summer when I was younger and could get my bathing suit on and play in the yard, then hop in the neighbor’s pool. Good times. I was brought back to reality by the honking horns of Lansdale traffic, and remembered that I was just on my lunch break and I had a stack of work on my desk rivaling the Empire State Building.

It has been a busy week. I’m not stressed out about it, all the vital stuff has been processed and now I’m just wading through “other stuff that probably should get in before month end” pile. By the end of each day this week I’ve been pretty tired. I’ve never been fully convinced until recently that a lot of accounting paperwork can make you physically tired.

I sure was tired when I wrote that last entry, it makes sense but I repeated myself some and fell into laziness and rambling.

I woke up this morning and the clock said 6:47. I groaned and got out of bed, feeling sore and like I hadn’t slept at all. I gave in and had a cup of coffee (I drink less caffeinated tea usually) late this morning after not being able to focus on my work due to sleepiness. Plus it’s raining today, I usually like rain but after being damp for 3 days it wasn’t terribly appealing. I’m now chilling out at work now during my lunch break, not going outside even though the rain has stopped for the moment. I am pretty sure I’m actually dry now, but I still feel damp. The forecast shows rain for the entire week.

Whine, whine, whine. It’s all worth it for the fun I had this weekend.

I realized the other night that we have no plans for the 4th of July weekend. The floating holiday at work is Monday, and we have off on Tuesday for the actual 4th, so I have a whole 4 day weekend with no plans! I hit the Beer Yard website to see what events were around, but none that I’d be interested in/are close enough exist. Does anyone local want to swing by for some BBQ sometime this weekend? Or know of anything fun going on that we’d be interested in?

I had a blast at the Gaian Mind Festival this weekend.

We managed to get two pictures out of the whole weekend (sorry !), but we were running around and having fun, and dragging a camera along when the chance of rain was always hovering was not the best option.

Friday night they had an opening ceremony for the festival and we did some dancing when the DJ sets came on. It was all based in a rock circle on the highest part of the camp. Tons of stuff that glowed with the black lights that were all over the place. I’d never been to such a thing so it was quite and experience. We had glowsticks and really got into the whole thing.

The rain was pretty intense Friday night, so heavy that it came through the tent. Everything got damp, but our tent is big enough so we were able to pull everything in from the edges so we didn’t get as wet as some of the other people in our camp did. Michael and I hit the bed around midnight, which was pretty early since the music and partying went on all night. But we didn’t get much sleep, the partying went on all night and the bunch of college kids who pitched a tent next to us were very noisey.

People were still dancing in the morning, which is when Michael shot this photo:

Saturday was pretty fun. The rain stayed away all day and we could enjoy the weather. We met up with a girl in our camp named Jessica (who was not with the wacked out college kids next to us) and went to a sweat lodge with her. That sweat lodge was the beginning of a new friendship! She is a really cool chick, my age and is really into a lot of the same things we are. It’s always great to meet smart people who you can just talk to without having to explain all your references, she just got it. She had been camping with some friends, but due to the rainy conditions they headed out in the early evening for another party and she ended up chilling with us for the rest of the weekend.

After the sweat lodge we went swimming. We spent a lot of time walking around the camp and hanging out by our camp with a campfire. We went to a talk on the year 2012 and the “impending global mind shift” which was interesting but not really my thing. We had dinner around 6 and then went back to the camp to enjoy the fire some more.

We got more neighbors in the late evening, a couple of really nice guys who turned out to be from Phoenixville. Jessica, Michael and I went with them to a black light show that preceeded the dancing and DJing of the evening. The rest of the night was spent hanging out with people at our camp, eating smores and going up to the rock circle to dance when the mood struck. I really got into the dancing that night, and there were many more people than Friday night. The vibe of the place was great and we had an awesome time. When we finally got to bed around 2AM I was still really into it all and wanted to stay out and dance but I was exhausted.

This morning we got up and showered. Packed everything up and then it started pouring again – arg! We had to walk up to the car in the upper parking lot in the rain, take down the tent in the rain and pack up the car. We were dirty and drenched by the time we drove out of the camp around 10:30AM.

On the way home we swung by Stoudts Black Angus Restaurant & Pub, right next to their Brewery. I was tired, but couldn’t pass up an IPA, which was good but not as dry as I generally like.

We got back home here around 4, parked the car in our driveway and took a 2 hour nap. It was only after the nap that we unloaded the car and I got a real clean shower. I feel civilized again now, but exhausted, hopefully this entry makes sense, hah!

What a great weekend, we’ll have to go back next year.

I was listening to NPR yesterday afternoon and heard an advertisement for the evening Marketplace program about female entrepreneurs. Marketplace is one of my favorite radio programs of all time, but the timing of it’s evening show (6:30 on weeknights) makes it so I rarely get to listen live, but I had to check this one out. Luckily because Public Radio has such fantastic web presence they have a page with the program to listen to in RealPlayer format, so I checked it out this morning: Marketplace: The gender gap in venture capital. It was a good report, even if it was all stuff I’ve heard before.

I’ve found that “breaking through the glass ceiling” articles fall into two general categories:

1. Women need to act like men to succeed

I don’t like this one, it makes me feel like as a woman I don’t have any useful skills and I have to pretend to be a man to succeed. It actually reminds me of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas that says “In order to enter into the kingdom of heaven, women must become men” but instead of the kingdom of heaven it’s “the realm of successful business.”

I’m not a man, I am not going to act like a man.

2. Women should use their inherently female skills to succeed

I might have reservations about this one, since it tends to be stereotypical, but it is the view I like to see in articles. This Marketplace report takes this view, certainly we need to be more assertive but we can still be successful just by taking advantage of our talents.