Work has been unusually quiet for month end, I know I’m going to get completely slammed on Friday with stuff to enter before the end of the month; no doubt it’ll be after 6 when I finally leave here tomorrow. And I haven’t been sleeping well this week, which doesn’t help me get through these long days. I hate weeks like this.

We don’t have plans for the weekend but the weather is supposed be very nice and we’ll probably spend most of it doing yard work. The lawn needs its first cutting of the year already and the gardens need attention.

Last night Michael was gone most of the evening, working late and then ate dinner out. I spent the evening doing updates on my computers and doing lots of little tasks that I’ve been meaning to get around to. I also took a break for a bit to do some house cleaning and laundry; it’s so much easier when no one else is around. In the late evening I watched a Nova Evolution special on the conservative Christians who reject evolution entirely and believe in literal six day creation. FSM represent.

Tonight we’re planning on heading down to a sweat in Malvern. I’m really looking forward to it, today is the perfect day for a sweat.

Gas prices are getting high again, over $3/gallon. I’ve had to adjust the budget, but it’s not exactly a lifestyle cramp, I think the worst part about it is hearing the constant chatter in the office about where you can get the cheapest gas. I wonder if this search for the cheapest gas around has something to do with our hunting instincts. I mean, paying 3 cents more per gallon when filling up the 12 gallon tank on your car will only cost you 36 cents more, it’s hardly worth waiting in line for gas (been to a Wawa station lately?) or dramatically altering your route home to go to some inconvenient station, let alone all the time you are spending at the water-cooler chatting about it (or time spent blabbering in a journal about it, d’oh). Then again, I tend to think the same thing about pinching pennies when it comes to grocery shopping, pouring over the fliers and going to 3 different grocery stores all over town to get the best deals isn’t exactly the way I like to spend my free time. I guess it’s a hobby.

I would love a nap right now.

The tea thing is going well. I’m still quite taken with Earl Grey, with the occasional green tea mixed in each morning. In the evening I’ve been occasionally enjoying Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Tea.

My father used to drink Sleepytime Tea, and whenever I smell it I’m brought back to those good memories of my father. Memories of him drinking tea and reading; telling me of his ham radio days or some science fiction book he particularly enjoyed. Of all the things that I still believe built a foundation for my love of all things geeky, and thus shaped the early parts of my life.

I didn’t actually like to drink Sleepytime until just recently, even though I’ve really tried to like it over the years. I guess I always associated drinking it with being smart and interesting like my father was on his best days, and that’s what I always wanted to be.

The weather was delightfully weird yesterday. There was a wonderful thunderstorm in the morning, I got up around 5:30 morning to throw a load of laundry in the drier and spent about an hour reading in the living room and enjoying the thunderstorm. With Michael going to the gym so early each morning I am afforded some much needed alone time to enjoy such things. On my way to work it started to get sunny. Shortly after arriving at work another thunderstorm came through, even in our windowless office we could hear the thunder. It’s went on like this all day.

It’s nice enough out now to start enjoying the Magic Room again. My lousy-in-Linux wireless PCMCIA card for my laptop won’t get signal all the way out in the garage, but perhaps that’s for the best. I can spend a bunch of time out there just doing writing without being interrupted.

I think I’ve finally beaten that winter time funk that was plaguing me this year and have gotten back into being more productive and planning things. Yesterday I mailed both the PhillyChix and MontcoLUG lists to get meetings organized for May.

I’m very much looking forward to something for the PhillyChix, it’s been far too long since we’ve gotten together and Hanna lives near a nice sushi place in Center City that it looks like we’ll plan on meeting at. And in case I haven’t mentioned it here before, we’ve opened up the PhillyChix a bit, men can come if they are accompanied by a woman, I figured this would help get some of the more shy Chix out. So any guys reading this who have a women they want to get into Linux, or knows one who might be too shy to come to a meeting alone – come! I’ll post the date and more details once they’re worked out.

As for MontcoLUG, I took Michael’s suggestion and posted to the list about the possibility of having a meeting at the Royersford Sly Fox. Sly Fox came to mind because they have private rooms for groups (not that we’d need one for such a small group, but it’s an option), they have beer, and they have free Wifi.

In not so good news, our angelfish died yesterday. It was sick for a couple weeks and even though we thought it was getting better we found it swimming upside down Sunday night. Yesterday morning I checked on it and it was hardly breathing :( Michael emailed me yesterday afternoon to tell me that he had buried it. Poor fishie, I’m rather upset about this, he was a big, fun fish who would chase your hand if it got close to the tank. Sigh.

The Robert Rich concert last night was fantastic.

The plan was to head down with Bob, who showed up at our house around 5:30 so we could eat dinner. Unfortunately he got a call from work about 5 minutes before we were leaving and had to go in to work and couldn’t come to the concert with us *pouts*

We arrived in Philly around 7:20, found a parking space reasonably close to St. Mary’s, where the concert was being held. We got great seats right up front, the show started shortly after 8PM. Michael wrote about it here you should read it, he has lots of pictures and some video clips of the show taken with our digital camera.

The show lasted until after 11, but the time flew by, Robert Rich is great in concert, and I’d say was one of the best Gatherings concerts I’ve been to, certainly one of the most well-attended. We were able to pick up a couple of his more recent albums, Bestiary and Electric Ladder.

Today I met Nita at the King of Prussia Mall so I could do some clothes shopping. It was great to get together with her, I haven’t seen her at all since the last PLUG meeting we went to. I don’t much like clothes shopping (read: HATE HATE HATE), but it wasn’t such a bad experience going with her, I’ll have to make a habit of dragging her along on shopping trips. We got to talk a lot, which was great since I haven’t been very social lately. She helped me pick out some nice business casual shirts that I could wear to work, I swung by a music store and grabbed the March of the Penguins Score, which I’ve wanted for months. We also checked out a Sam Goody that was going out of business, everything was 90-95% off so I picked up the Doom movie score, figured if Clint Mansell let me down on this one it was OK, since I only paid $1.79 for it. We had lunch at TGI Fridays, talked about getting together for movie night sometime in the near future – of course she’s busy next weekend and I’m booked the weekend after that, d’oh! I headed home around 2.

An amusingly side note, she went to the Trenton Computer Festival yesterday, a festival that I just learned about Friday night when a friend I know from the irc-security list and subsequent channel on NightStar. While she was there she met some of the Princeton, NJ LUG people, and when she told them she was from the Philly LUG they asked if she knew me – I’M GEEK FAMOUS! Oh geez. Apparently it was the Debian mplayer How-To again. It’d be amusing to know someday how many people have used it over the years, several thousand certainly since I keep running into them. I’ll have to go to this TCF next year, I have discovered that several Philly people I know attend, and so I’d probably be able to hitch a ride with someone.

Tonight we’re headed over to Michael’s brother’s house for dinner, I should go get ready

I wasn’t in the best mood yesterday. It was the culmination of a lot of things, including working some things out with Michael before the wedding, working overtime for an audit at work, feeling like I’m getting nowhere with my healthier eating/exercise/diet thing, never seeing my tulips open.

So when Michael called me last night to tell me he’d be home late, I decided to run some errands and pick up some things I needed at Kohl’s before going home. Kohl’s is on my way home from work, I am not one to care a great deal about stores and this is really no exception, but they seem to have pretty nice stuff and decent prices.

I went into the store knowing I needed a bathroom scale, to cure/aid my feeling of getting nowhere with my diet. There were lots of scales, mostly digital ones that require batteries, all pretty much doing the same things like calculating BMI and keeping track of changes in weight. I picked up the most basic scale I could find – no batteries, no spiffy digital display, just a basic dial scale. I was happy to discover that the price tag of $29.99 was not accurate due to their giant store-wide sale, and I ended up getting the thing for $16.99. While I was there I decided to browse the store a little, and left with some new socks (which I needed) and a couple pairs of earrings. In all, I spent about $30, and it improved my mood slightly.

I came home and frowned at my tulips again. I’ve been going into work each morning an hour or more early, and getting home around 6 all week, so while we’ve had BEAUTIFUL weather all week and I’ve been seeing plenty of other tulips blooming on my walks at lunch, but I haven’t been able to enjoy my own blooming tulips. Knowing that it’d be a generally rainy and miserable weekend and I probably wouldn’t see them now either I decided to pick some flowers. I went out back and picked some of the wild purple flowers growing all over the place, they’re probably weeds, but they’re pretty anyway. I then grabbed one of the last pretty daffodils and one of my several yellow tulips. I put them together in a vase and put them on the kitchen table – pretty!

This morning I woke up and Michael wasn’t here, apparently he went to the gym. I’ve just been chilling out this morning, will probably tackle my bedroom closet this afternoon to do some much needed spring cleaning. Tonight we’re heading down to the city for a Robert Rich concert, which should be a lot of fun, he’s fantastic in concert we haven’t seen him since 2003.

Tomorrow the plan is to hang out with Nita for a bit. I’ll be nice, I haven’t seen her in far too long and I need to get out of the house for a while without Michael, I think we’re starting to drive each other crazy ;)

Michael emailed me earlier today to tell me he’d be home late and not to wait for him for dinner. I’m sitting here eating some fish sticks and french fries.

On Easter things went pretty much as planned, we had Michael’s mother over and Michael roasted a whole chicken, made stuffing and broiled potatoes. He also prepared some cheese, crackers, bread and hummus for an appetizer. I ate too much and drank wine.

Over the weekend Michael learned of a Thomas Dolby concert coming up in the area and we got tickets. It’s being held in Sellersville on Friday May 5th. The location struck me as slightly odd as I didn’t think there was anything in Sellersville ;) but it’s great because it’s not far from where we live. Oh and I’m not allowed to tell weirdedsel because he was so excited about the same tour but then he learned it was at a 21+ venue. Poor boy.

Last night I attended a PLUG West meeting. I drove to Collegeville after work to meet at the townhouse of a guy I know from MontcoLUG who offered to give me a ride down. It turns out that he lives about 5 doors down from where smolas used to live.

The PLUG West meeting was held at Unisys in Malvern. The topic was on “Mission-Critical Enterprise Linux” presented by the Unisys guys, and mostly focused on Xen development work they’ve been doing. They also went into benchmarks they did on their crazy huge servers. In all it was a very interesting talk and we met in a very posh meeting room, they even fed us soda and cookies and we got printed nametags. After the presentation we got a tour of the Linux development segment of their giant server room which was quite a treat.

Today was a day.

Tomorrow evening we’re having our second to last Wednesday night Shaman class.

Once upon a time we had friends over for an evening of movies and drinks. Being the ambience suckers we are, we lit some candles in the bathroom that evening.

Apparently one of the wicks was too long on one of the candles, and late that evening it was noticed that it was creating smoke – too much smoke, it had made a smoke line going up the wall and to the ceiling of the bathroom. We didn’t realize how bad it was until the next morning.

Michael cleaned up most of the really bad stain from the wall and worked on the ceiling a bit. But you could tell there had been some smoke damage in there. Over these past few weeks we’ve both been tired and busy, neither of us having the time to clean it, until yesterday.

I got out the gloves and the bleach and went at the ceiling. It didn’t help. I used PURE bleach and it didn’t help. Dejected, I opened the cleaning supplies closet and looked for something that would help me do the job. I eyed the Mr. Clean Magic Erasers. I’ve posted about these in the past, they really do work for getting hard to remove stains off of walls. So I figured I’d try them on the smoke stains.

It took an entire eraser and about an hour of scrubbing, but it looks so much better now. You can hardly notice that there was any smoke damage unless you examine it closely and know what you’re looking for.

But the bathroom does need a new coat of paint. Michael and I both took off a week from work before Memorial Day weekend and this will be one of the projects. The bathroom is a light green color now, I’d like to just paint it off-white. And certainly go with the Perma-White Mold & Mildew-Proof paint, they clearly used nothing of the sort for the paint that’s currently in there.

And now I’m all sore from all that scrubbing. Scrubbing smoke stains off a ceiling for an hour while perched on the edge of the bathtub is not so easy on the shoulder muscles.

I cleaned the rest of the house for the rest of the afternoon and Michael did a big grocery shopping run (we hadn’t gone in 2 weeks!). While he was gone I ended my cleaning day with a long shower, then puttered around the house in my bathrobe, painted my nails and was lazy. It was wonderful.

Today is Easter. It totally snuck up on me this year, usually I have time to drool over the candy and bring out my bunny toys to decorate the mantel. None of that this year. We’re having Michael’s mother over for dinner, Michael is making a chicken. We also picked up a copy of Evil Dead 2 for later this evening, afterall, Jesus is the most famous zombie in history, and it’s his day! (Shush, I’d say this is less blasphemous than rabbits and eggs on Easter!)

I looked outside this morning and noticed my tulips had bloomed. It’s such a beautiful day out.

Oh, and Michael picked up a carrot cake from Whole Foods yesterday. Yum!

About a month ago Carla Schroder gave me the contact information for a fellow over at O’Reilly who was looking for linux people to write for the O’Reilly weblogs. I sent some writing samples and information about my experience with linux to the editor and to my delight was accepted into the linux blogging group.

It doesn’t pay anything, but I’ve always enjoyed writing the types of articles that O’Reilly was asking for. Previously I posted them on my website, to be seen by a reasonably-sized audience once they were indexed by google, but I figured that getting more friendly with O’Reilly would be a good thing and I’d get more immediate traffic for things I write.

Finally last week I got an email saying my account had been set up and I could start writing things for it. Yesterday I wrote my first weblog entry:

Text-based Communication in Linux.

It’s pretty much the same material I presented at a MontcoLUG meeting a couple months back.

Michael and I decided last weekend to slow down our beer consumption. Beer is probably my biggest vice as far as calories go right now, and avoiding it shouldn’t be that hard – right?

It’s funny how becoming being a beer connoisseur has changed our dining habits. Last weekend we were looking for a place to eat after coming back from Lancaster, and immediately my thoughts went to finding a good brewpub, or what good beers the places we considered had on tap. I had to remind myself that we were not doing the beer thing, gosh there really was a time when I always ordered soda at restaurants.

And we gave in after a whole no-beer week, yesterday we treated ourselves to an evening at Sly Fox – and didn’t bring along the growler! I was delighted to find myself not really in much of a beer mood, one pint of 113 IPA with my Reuben was more than enough.

I’ve also changed my habits when it comes to what I listen to on my commute to and from work everyday. For a while I had a pretty set schedule of listening to NPR in the morning and XPN in the evening. But lately I’ve grown increasingly annoyed with the news. I’m not sure if it’s a change in the news itself or if it’s a change in myself. It’s probably me growing old, bitter and sick of politics. Listening to it no longer enlightens me and makes me thoughtful, it upsets and frustrates me. SO I’ve given up on it, no more listening to that crap in the morning that makes me annoyed.

So what would I listen to? I’ve been frustrated lately because of my lack of time I could devote to reading. I hadn’t much exposure to audio books, and figured this would be a good opportunity to start checking them out. On Monday evening Michael and I walked up to the Library to check out their selection of audio books. Honestly? The selection sucks. I picked up the audiobook of Myst: The Book of Ti’Ana figuring that’s length (only two cassettes) and subject (fantasy) would be a good place to start with the audio book thing, I could get a feel for how I like them, and how it is to listen to them while driving.

I was pleasantly surprised with how well my trial went. The audiobook was a good one, not too hard to follow and it doesn’t distract me from driving at all. There are times when I have to stop it or rewind it to catch something I missed while some jackass in an intersection decided to cut me off, but these distractions were to be expected. I finished both cassettes in 3 days, which surprised me until I thought about it, I spend about an hour of each weekday commuting to and from work, that’s a lot of time.

On Wednesday I headed up to the Lansdale Library to check out their books for sale. I had some time after browsing the books to wander into their audiobooks area – and boy do they have a selection! 3 aisles of audiobooks, and not just lousy best sellers, they had a lot of good books. I knew I could get them through my local library via the library loan system, but figured I’d ask directly if I could check them out there, and to my delight they were happy to set me up with an account! The Library is only half a mile from my office, so it’s a nice quick walk to get there, and I do always like walking more when there is some sort of goal, I think I’ll be frequenting their audiobooks section these next few months.

And while I’m talking about changes, I decided last night to crosspost my shaman.princessleia.com posts to my LiveJournal.

It’s very gloomy out today, such a perfect day to work inside.

I have been seriously inactive these past couple weeks, but things I put in motion a few weeks back have come to fruition and it’s a great feeling.

First off, I got an email today, my first Debian package is now in the unstable repository. Glee!

R2Q5, my 450mhz P3 that previously was being used as a sound recording server has been reinstalled with Debian unstable as a test station. Michael set it up to dual boot with Gentoo so he could work on it as well. Debian and Gentoo on the same old box, quite the blasphemy huh?

Well, I booted up the machine this evening specifically to run updates and check out my new baby.

elizabeth@r2q5:~$ apt-cache show dglog
Package: dglog
Priority: optional
Section: web
Installed-Size: 80
Maintainer: Elizabeth Krumbach
Architecture: all
Version: 1.0-1
Depends: perl-modules, libcompress-zlib-perl, perl
Filename: pool/main/d/dglog/dglog_1.0-1_all.deb
Size: 11394
MD5sum: df4847d0f477da9dcd46b4eb955f8131
Description: CGI log analyzer for DansGuardian
A CGI log analyzer for the web content filter DansGuardian.
.
Homepage: http://www.tiger.org/technology/dg/

And there it is!

It really is just a perl script that can be used by users of DansGuardian, so a very small subset of the Debian population confined mostly to companies and organizations who need web content filtering. But it gave me a wonderful taste of the complex process involved in packaging something for Debian, even something as simple as a perl script.

Also, about a month back announced he was going to give up working on Deep13.org. It is the website for the channel #deep13 on xelium, and irc.deep13.org is one of the original servers that irc.clockbot.net back in the day (the thrilling history of the server linking can be read about here). #Deep13 was one of those old school SciFi channels, along with #13thHour, and one of the few that still survives. I actually became a member in 2002, and have been a regular contributer of MST related content for over almost 2 years. It was only natural for me to take the next step and do the routine maintenance and updates that it would need. Rob decided on the weekened of April 1st that I was indeed the right person for the job and handed the keys to the site over to me.

Now the only access for this site is via sFTP. No ssh. This was troubling at first, I’ve never worked on a site without ssh access before! But it led me on a quest to find a good way to edit the sites. I started with the simplest GUI solution, install gFTP and click away. Unfortunately I quickly discovered that gVim does not play nicely with gftp’s edit option (it won’t save), and I absolutely loathe gEdit, which does work with gFTP. I installed BlueFish, but was annoyed with the complexity. I don’t need a web development suite! I need something that would mimic editing via ssh.

I’m familiar enough with ncftp to be happy with that as an ftp interface, but it does not come with any sort of edit option. So I did a google search for: nctfp edit and found: NcFTP – Remote file editing with the NcFTP client – a patch that would allow me to use vim in ncftp! Brilliant! I installed it on my laptop and it works like a charm. I’m very pleased. I’m doubly pleased to discover that Gentoo, which runs on our server, comes with a version of ncftp with the patch already applied. Very nice.

And now I need to get to bed.