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

First off, it was a year ago today Michael and I got engaged. Hooray!

It’s gloomy out and I’ll probably be spending most of today working on the computer. I have a whole pile of projects to get to work on, so many that I’m sitting here staring at IRC overwhelmed because I don’t have my priorities straight. So, priority 1) write journal entry in order to get brain working 2) write a list of things I want to get done so I can prioritize and tackle things properly.

Michael took me down to South Street yesterday, he wrote about it here.

South Street is a part of Philly with lots of little shops and things. The last time I was there was in 1999 on a double date with Michael, and the airheads we were both dating at the time. It has changed since that last visit, the neighborhood has really gone down hill. Such is the way with cities I guess, but it’s a real shame. We only stopped a a couple of stores, 611 Records so Michael could pick up some vinyl and What’s on Tap?, a store specializing in beer and related merchandise. What’s on Tap? was going out of business, so we got a nice deal on a couple of pint glasses and a set of wine glasses. When we asked why they were closing shop the guy at the counter replied “the neighborhood has changed,” confirming my thoughts about the state of the area.

After that we headed over to west Philly to grab some food, and ended up at Marathon Grill. I was not impressed. Their beer menu had some good microbrews on it, but when we tried to order them they seemed to be out of stock of everything. No more Hopdevil on tap. No Dogfish head in bottles. I ended up getting a Guinness which was certainly the worst guiness from a tap I’ve ever had. The food was ok. Service was mediocre.

In spite of these things, and the drizzle that followed us around all day, I had a nice time. After eating we headed over to The Last Word Bookshop on Walnut street, which is a great little bookstore that I don’t visit often enough. A very strange thing happened while I was there. I was browsing the scifi/fantasy section, and suddenly thought that I should look for The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny. I can’t remember who recommended it to me so long ago, but it’s a book I’ve been meaning to pick up for years. I’d never seen a copy in a used bookstore, so when I was pawing through books on the floor I was shocked when I laid my hands on it. Wow!

After picking up some books we headed over to Bucks County Coffee Co. for some coffee before the concert. The place felt just like a Starbucks, same chairs and everything, it was kind of creepy. I enjoyed a cup of cafe mocha and we sat down at a table with our new books until it was time to go to the concert.

The concert was good. I think my only complain was that some of the images shown on the screen during Michael Bentley’s preformance were a bit much to take visually (flashing, waving stuff) and I had to close my eyes. But I like to close my eyes at those concerts anyway to imagine the ambient landscape for myself, and Bentley’s music is good for that. I really enjoyed Saul Stokes’ performance.

The concert wrapped up shortly before 11 and we made our way out of the city to be home by midnight, in time for Michael to do his show. I stayed up until 2AM doing email and generally puttering around online.

Now on to that list of priorities…

I’ve wanted to write rants/essays about a few things this week, but once I sat down to actually write them, things didn’t turn out right. So instead I will consolidate them into bullets.

• The intention to make a “game for women” is insulting. Instead game developers need to take a long hard look at how games are marketed, how they portray women and what their prize structure is like in their games.
• The Linux world is becoming increasingly filled with people who don’t know how to RTFM – this is good because it means linux is now accessible to the masses, anyone can install it! But it’s also bad because there is a very loud minority who believe they are entitled to help from anyone who knows more than them and who have no intention of ever learning how to RTFM.
• What is with women who choose nicknames like “linuxgurl” and “geekgrrl” and “techchick”? There have always been some, but it’s become an annoying epidemic.
• I love Yoplait Mountain Blueberry Yogurt.

This week has been busy with many things. I never mentioned that I had fun at the PLUG West Linux Beer Night. Their plan seems to be to start making real meetings in Malvern regularly, with presentations and all. I actually posted to the list to say I greatly enjoyed the informalish beer night itself, so hopefully they’ll want to plan more of those too. Mmmm beer and linux talk.

Last night I ran a bunch of errands after work, perhaps most importantly of which was finally getting the Rav4 to a car wash. When I got home Michael and I headed over to Sly Fox. It appears we are Sly Fox regulars now, half the hostesses now know what our favorite table is and I think we’ve had all the waiters/waitresses at least once. I finally tried their Abbey Xtra, which was a very light and smoothe Belgian that I enjoyed two pints of. Unfortunately they were out of their special Cascade IPA, so we brought home a growler of 113 IPA instead which I’ll be “diving into” this evening.

At work today they finally announced to everyone in the office that I’m going to be taking the job at the corporate office up the street, so today has been full of congratulations, this has made for a cheerful friday.

This weekend Michael and I will be headed down to the city for a Gatherings Concert with Saul Stokes and Michael Bentley. Michael just formally introduced me to Saul Stokes’ work this week, I’d previously heard some of his stuff but never knew who it was. I’m not familiar with Michael Bentley, but I expect it will be be a good concert. We had actually planned on spending the day down in Philly, visiting south street to do some shopping and grabbing dinner at somewhere nice down there, but the weather doesn’t seem to be on our side for that. We’ll see.

I read a friend’s blog this morning and she mentioned that Rita’s gives everyone a free regular waterice on the first day of spring. Oooh!

It was snowing on my way to work today, and it’s only 39F outside now, but I wasn’t about to miss a free waterice. After trying unsuccessfully to recruit some co-workers to join me, brushed off the laugh from my boss (“you’re walking? you’re going to freeze!”), I walked to the local Rita’s, which is a little less than a mile from the office.

It was cold :) But now I have my cherry waterice and I’m happy! At least I didn’t have to worry about it melting on the walk back to the office.

Tonight Michael and I are going to PLUG West Linuxbiernacht. We haven’t been to the Drafting Room in far too long, it should be fun.