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.

Wow, that was quite a lapse in posting. I had a nasty cold last week that made me exhausted and very much not in the mood to use my computer when I got home from work. The weather was pretty cold and rainy, plus the whole daylight savings time thing made getting out of bed on time difficult. I even ended up taking off for half a day on Tuesday.

The only day I went out last week was on Thursday night when I was feeling a bit stressed out. Michael came home and asked if I wanted to go to Sly Fox and I said that I wanted a vodka tonic. So we headed over to the Roadhouse Grill in Skippack and had a nice evening munching on pub food (they make a great little pepperoni and mushroom pizza), and I got my vodka tonic, and a pineapple martini… and a chocolate martini with dessert. On the way home from there we picked up a couple new movies, The Chronicles of Narina and Memoirs of a Geisha.

Friday night Michael went to the men’s sweat and I got myself a sub for dinner and sat down to watch some movies.

Saturday we went to the Shaman class which went well and brought up some interesting things about culture and heritage that I think I’m going to have to sit down and write a series of essays about sometime. That evening the final sniffles of the cold disappeared and I was feeling much better. We ended up going to dinner with a woman from the shaman class who is opening a frame shop in the next couple months and wanted to get some advice on her POS system and website development.

Sunday was sunny, but a bit chilly for doing work outside. In the afternoon we decided to drive up toward Lancaster to go to That Fish Place. It was a good day for it. We bought some fish and cat supplies, visited the reptile room, and then ventured into the fish area to pick out some fish to bring home. We picked up a few nice looking little fish (I’ll need to take pictures, perhaps update the fish site too, it’s so outdated). In the evening we ended up going over to Max & Ermas in Oaks for dinner.

And now it’s Monday, the weather is beautiful and I’m stuck in the windowless office. At least it’s only a 4 day work week, hooray for having Good Friday off.

First off, I mentioned a couple entries ago that we went to the gatherings concert in Philadelphia last Saturday night. If you’re interested in reading a more in depth description of the concert from a fellow who knows a hell of a lot about music, pop over to read asphalteden’s review. He attended the show and it was a small venue, we probably walked past each other some time that night but we didn’t meet up. D’oh. Luckily there is a Robert Rich Gatherings Concert in a few weeks that we’ll be attending and he’s thinking of showing up for, we can meet him then.

Work was busy and exhausting this week, but fantastically productive.

Monday night I locked myself upstairs to fix whatever went wrong with Debian on my primary workstation. I’m not sure exactly what happened with the xfree xorg thing, when I installed my machine it was using xfree, but after two hours of fighting with getting x running properly monday night I emerged running xorg. I’m very pleased to say that I didn’t ask anyone for help during that two hours and the machine is running perfectly again. Phew.

Tuesday night we brought Caligula to the vet. He really hates going to the vet, he hisses and growls more during the yearly vet exam than he does during the whole rest of the year. But I really like the Limerick Veterinary Hospital. They are very thorough, his doctor brought him the benadryl shot he needs before vaccinations without us having to ask. And even though he hissed and growled the entire time, he made it through the exam and is a healthy two year old kitty. We also got a 3 month supply of Frontline so we can bring him outside with us when we’re gardening without having to worry about fleas and ticks.

Wednesday we were going to go to the monthly all genders sweat lodge, but we were both pretty exhausted from work and needed a break, we went to Sly Fox instead.

Thursday and Friday evening turned out to be for catching up on my own projects I am working on. I got news from Google regarding Gmail for your domain. I applied to be a beta tester about a month ago with wallaceandgromit.net, just as a personal domain that would probably only have 1 user. By some stroke of good fortune my request was granted! Michael pointed the MX records for the domain at Google friday night and yesterday I was able to start using my new gmail for wallaceandgromit.net. So now I have elizabeth@wallaceandgromit.net powered by gmail. I gave michael an address too (mostly so he can check out the service) as well as a guy who emails me regularly to help out with finding Wallace and Gromit news. I’m looking forward to seeing what this service develops into, it’s not very customizable at the moment.

Yesterday the plan was to spend the day outside, but I only managed to spend about an hour out there with Caligula before it began to rain and I came inside. It cleared up later in the day and Bob dropped by so we could go out to dinner. He hadn’t been to Sly Fox yet, so we headed over there and chilled out at the bar for the evening. We had a nice time and learned about their growler club, you get a card and have it stamped each time you fill up the growler, when your stamp is full (8 growlers) you get a free one. Free beer! Hooray!

Now I need to get dressed and head outside to clean my car.

I’m having a very busy week, and the weather is beautiful and I need to get out of cubicle-land so I’ve been going on walks during my lunch break rather than catching up on email and LJ.

So if you’ve emailed me or anything in the past few days and I haven’t responded it’s because I’m swamped with other things. I’ll try to catch up on Sunday or something.

Oh, and I’m in a much better mood than I was on Monday and I was able to fix Debian after locking myself upstairs for 2 hours determined to fix it :)

I am in a terrible mood today :\

I don’t think there is a particular reason for this mood, but the catalyst was probably waking up with a sinus headache. I don’t want it to be allergy season already.

Last night I was doing some upgrades and installing some pretty basic packages on my primary workstation and apt blew up. It’s now got dependancy errors and is stuck with what seems to be a conflict between xorg and xfree. I can’t start x, in fact, the program “startx” is gone. Arg. I messed with it some this morning and got nowhere. I’m very much annoyed that this happened now, after having a perfectly running system for 9 months, right when I’m doing work that requires a properly functioning Debian system. I’m hopeful that the solution actually is a simple one that I just didn’t see this morning with my headachey head. If not, I hope there will be some Debian people around this evening whose brains I can pick for ideas on how to fix this.

Stupid computers.

I just got back from taking a 25 minute walk, it’s nice out and I thought it would good to clear my head. There is a building near our office that had these huge beautiful dogwood trees that bloom around now, and I always love walking under them. They’re gone now. Probably got too big for the urban redevelopment program or whatever crap they have going on in Lansdale (wow, see? bad mood). No doubt they’ll be replaced with shrubs or something. This crappy mood I’m in had me almost in tears over the loss of these trees.

Ok, done complaining now. Stupid moods x_X