It’s so nice out today.

I’ve had a nice, productive week. Wednesday morning I was almost to work when I encountered a detour on route 63, the main street of the town I work in. Great. I was late for work because of the increased traffic and I had to hit the backroads that I’m not familiar with. The rest of the day went like that too, problem after problem at work. I remaind was in a surprisingly good mood through it all, everything that happened was out of my control, why worry/get annoyed by it?

That night Michael and I headed over to the Roadhouse Grille in Skippack for their wine and cheese tasting. They do this every Wednesday night and we’d never gone to one. I was happy we did! The wines were excellent, the cheeses were wonderful and strong. After the wine and cheese we had a light dinner and headed home around 9PM. It turned out to be a very nice, relaxing evening.

Yesterday we learned some good news from Verizon (our telephone company). Michael was out taking a walk and apparently stopped to chat for a moment with the Verizon folks working on the phonelines. He asked what they were doing. “Installing Verizon FiOS,” they said. OMG FIBER AT MY HOUSE! Currently we have DCA.net DSL, and pay a reasonable amount for the perks of being able to run servers and have several static IPs. But lately we’ve moved a lot off our connection, we’re no longer running a mail server there, most of the websites have been moved off, and going back to a strictly residential internet connection would not be terrible. The cheapest FiOS business line with a static IP is $100/month, which is pricey but might be worth it if they don’t block ports. We’ll see when it’s actually installed and starts being offered.

On my way to work this morning I encountered a detour, guess which road? Route 63. This was far from the other detour I encountered on Wednesday and completely unrelated, but it was funny that it was the same road making me late for work. I ended up feeling lost on all sorts of crazy back roads with lots of fellow commuters. Just when I started looking for a place to pull over so I could call my boss and tell her I’d be late I popped out in a familiar place and was able to get to work only 10 mintues late. My boss laughed when I told her what happened. Damn that route 63!

I’m not sure what the plan is this evening, I sorta want to stay in, but I sorta want to see people too. We had hoped that our DVDs of Bleak House would be here by now and we could have that for movienight, but apparently the demand for it has overwhelmed WGBH and our copy won’t ship until March 27th. Eep! Still, I asked Michael to swing by Hatboro Beverage to grab me a case of Lindemans Peche Lambic for tonight, with the excuse that I “need to try out my new lambic glasses” that I picked up at the Beer Yard last weekend.

We don’t have solid plans for the weekend either, but the weather has been beautiful so Michael and I might find some place to do some hiking. I’d love to open up The Magic Room too and spend some time up there this weekend.

Mmm happy Friday.

Yesterday I was productive – hooray! I spent the morning working on several things, and realized that while I was working on these other things it wouldn’t take too much time to toss the Debian install on the laptop and see if it would work since a bunch of time in any install is waiting anyway.

So I plugged in the wireless card and booted up the laptop with the Debian etch net install cd in. The install cd saw the wireless card, which was pretty exciting, but the firmware was not there for it to use it and connect to the network. This was to be expected, Ubuntu does the same thing. But I was hopeful that this would all work out since there is an atmel-firmware package for Debian and that’s all I needed to install for Ubuntu.

So I got the Debian install up and running with x, ended up installing some Gnome libs so I could get the happy-clicky-connect-to-wireless app running. I installed the atmel-firmware package and was further encouraged by websites that said “In Debian just `apt-get install atmel-firmware`!”

I spent nearly 2 hours fighting with it after `apt-get install atmel-firmware` didn’t work. And then I gave up. I don’t understand how modules and firmware play together and others I spoke with about the problem didn’t seem to understand either and we were all just poking around in the dark trying random things. I did learn a lot though, so I wouldn’t say my time was wasted.

I don’t think the issue is additional software that needs to be installed per se, since a very basic Ubuntu install still can get wireless working. It’s not the version of atmel drivers, since Debian and Ubuntu use the same one. As far as I can tell, there are two options that remain: 1) Debian and Ubuntu load and use firmware somehow differently that is unrelated to the identical Gnome connect to wireless program I used 2) There is a difference in the default kernel between Debian and Ubuntu that makes it so the firmware does not work in the default Debian kernel but works fine in Ubuntu. The next step when (if?) I decide to tackle this project again will be carefully reviewing the default Ubuntu kernel options and duplicating them in a custom Debian kernel.

So, defeated, I reinstalled Ubuntu. I finally took the advice of and did a server install rather than a regular install. Oh gosh I love the server install! The laptop only has a 3 gig harddrive and with a default Ubuntu install I was using about 2 gigs of it. The server installation doesn’t install Gnome, or even xwindows, and just gives you the basic tools for a CLI system, and takes up less than 400MB. From there I installed xwindows, XFCE4, the Gnome administration things (I do love that silly connect-to-wireless app and it didn’t depend on much), Firefox, Gimp, and a couple other programs I need on the laptop. All said and done? I’m using less than 800MB, sweet.

Even better, the laptop is running great. It’s really surprising how much resources Gnome takes up just sitting around, XFCE4 really blows it out of the water. Firefox opens up quickly, I can have a few programs open at once without really noticing. In the end, I’m happy with it now and I think the only reason I would switch back to Debian is to regain lost geek points.

Today I will be productive.

Thursday night I was very happy to not have work the next day and spent the evening trying to burn a Debian iso. I booted into Windows to do it, since I haven’t sorted out burning in Linux yet and was very annoyed to discover that whatever burning program I tried failed. I can’t burn a CD in Windows? What is wrong with me? This worked before! I pondered hardware problems and problems with the iso, and in the end just gave up the task very frustrated.

On my day off Friday I cleaned the house and went grocery shopping in the morning. At noon I drove down to visit and . We went out to Bennigan’s for lunch then swung by Best Buy so I could pick up a CD cleaner disk, which suggested might solve my CD burning problems. I hadn’t been in a Best Buy in a long time and had forgotten how annoying checkout is there:

“Do you have a Best Buy card?”
“No.”
“Because you are shopping here today you’re entitled to get 8 issues of $stupid_magazine for free, are you interested?”
“No.”
“Your phone number please?”
“No.”

FFS CAN I PLEASE JUST BUY MY THING?

After that we went back to the apartment and watched a bunch of episodes of The (American) Office. I am a big fan of the original and when watching the pilot of the American one I was miserable – it was awful! So even after they got their own script and people were telling me “it’s great” I didn’t watch it. But they were right and it’s pretty funny. The sense of humor is much different and it feels like an entirely different show, so I can disconnect it from the show I love and enjoy it for what it is. We also watched some episodes of The Colbert Report, which has it’s moments but isn’t as good as The Daily Show. I left to go home around 10:30PM.

Saturday was spent at our shaman class. I “finished” my creation story, and hearing everyone else’s was quite a treat. Of course our homework now is to rewrite the story more in-depth. I’m looking forward to exploring this further.

After the shaman class I suggested we swing by The Beer Yard which was only a few miles from where we have our class. Lew Bryson mentioned it in his PA Brewery book and said it is one of the best distributors in the state. He was absolutely correct, it was like beer heaven! Choosing which beer to take home was very difficult. I ended up getting a case of the Allagash Belgian Style Dubbel. The Allagash is brewed in Portland, Maine (represent!) and they really know how to do their Belgians, I’d tried the Tripel in the past but figured I’d take it easy and go with the Dubbel this time. I’m so excited to have found a distributor around here that sells it, before I either had to go to Maine or hit a good local pub and hope they had it in stock.

Once we got home last night I ordered a couple hoagies from the local pizzeria enjoyed a bottle of Allagash Dubbel and watched some MST3K. I went to bed pretty early.

Today my plans are to hunker down and get some work done. was right about my CD burner just needing a cleaning and I burned a Debian Etch iso and am currently burning an Ubuntu Breezy Badger iso. The plan is to finally install Debian on my laptop, and if I can’t get everything working properly and need my laptop back to a working state I’ll throw a server installation of Ubuntu on it. I’m not sure if I’ll get to it today but at least I have the disks ready. Perhaps next weekend.

Now to get to work!

On Tuesday night Michael took me out to dinner to Sly Fox. We had a pretty typical meal there and I got the old standard Pastrami Rueben that I love so much. We both tried their new Cascade IPA, which was very enjoyable.

I spent the evening just chilling out, took a bubble bath and did a journey for the “creation story” we’re writing for our shaman class. I went to bed around 10.

Wednesday night I stopped at home to get changed and headed over to ‘s place to catch a ride with him down to the PLUG meeting.

The meeting was good, unfortunately I ran across the problem I had read about in so many forums about the power of my Belkin wireless card in Linux. I could get signal for a couple moments, but then it would drop again, people around me didn’t seem to have any trouble. Amusingly, part of the discussion in the beginning of the talk had to do with how lousy wireless support for Linux is, indeed, this card is said to work much better in Windows. Sigh.

After the talk we headed over to The Best House, where I got to spend time catching up with . It was great to see her, she’s been so busy lately and it had been over a month since we had time to sit down and talk. And as much as I hate to perpetuate the myth that chicks don’t care to talk about computers, we did spend a fair amount of time talking about friends, family and manicures.

While riding back to ‘s place he and I were talking about Linux distributions and I started pondering the state of my laptop. I put Ubuntu on it because I was lazy, and I always intended to switch to Debian. I think it is time. I’ll see how much time I have this weekend (have errands to run and might have plans with friends on my day off tomorrow, and then Shaman class on Saturday. I want to have at least 8 hours set aside for it – Sunday perhaps? Next weekend?). Ubuntu has treated me well, and a backup of /etc/ is going to be a great help when installing Debian, but Gnome and all the things Ubuntu comes with really leech from the performance of the little laptop. Debian will treat it much better.

I’m at lunch now and have about 3 hours left of work before my 3-day weekend. It’s raining out, the bad winter storm people were all moaning about never materialized. I’m looking forward to 5 o’clock.

I spent all that time working on WP+LJ+Xanga stuff last night and forgot to eat dinner. Perhaps forgot is the wrong word, I didn’t eat anything yesterday until 3PM when I had some leftover pizza and just wasn’t hungry until after 9PM. I didn’t want to eat anything we had in the house, so I called up the Chinese place down the road and we ordered some late dinner.

After dinner I enjoyed the obligatory fortune cookie, and this was my fortune:

Say what?

Now, I’ve gotten spam on the back of my fortune before, but this is a whole new breed, this is spam poetry! It doesn’t make any sense!

This morning I got up and decided to finally tackle a little project I’d wanted to do for a while, making the BitlBee quickstart guide into a webpage. I love IRC, but reading the quickstart in IRC was always somewhat cumbersome to me. There used to be a page linked to the Bitlbee site that had a version of the guide, but that’s gone now. I got to work on it around 9:30. Michael woke up a little after 10 and made coffee, which is when I took a break to get a cup for myself. The coffee cup I used was one that I got from Michael’s mother and it has bees on it. Hmmm, bee coffee cup and bitlbee… I should use one of these bees on the site! So I took a picture of the cup and with some simple Gimp editing I created this bee for the site. Lovely! And then it was back to work formatting the guide. I finished up around 11:30 and how have this: Bitlbee Quickstart Guide (Online Edition) & Notes. Yay!

I have a few other things I want to work on today, and then around 4 we’re heading over to Bob’s place with a crockpot of beef stew. Bob “found” some Chimay in his apartment so I’m looking forward to enjoying some of that, should make for a nice evening.

Last night we had some friends over for movie night, and we all sat around and watched Danger Mouse.

I hadn’t seen Danger Mouse in years and seeing the cartoons I loved when I was litte now continually disappoints me. So I didn’t expect much from Danger Mouse, just another thing to get nostalgic about but not actually enjoy anymore.

But I was wrong about Danger Mouse. Afterall, he’s the ace. He’s amazing. He’s the strongest, he’s the quickest, he’s the best!

The show is punny and delightful to watch.

This morning I finally upgraded WordPress on my journal, it’s now running 2.0.1. I was very pleased with how simple the upgrade was.

I’m not terribly happy with the state of LiveJournal plugins for WordPress. I used Live+Press for a little bit, but recently just went back to manually posting in both places. When I upgraded today I asked Michael what he was using to cross post and he pointed me at LJXP but my lj user tags wouldn’t show up. I don’t need all the bells and whistles that came with Live+Press, but I do love those silly lj user tags.

And that’s what I spent 3 hours working on this evening. I learned a few things about WordPress2, the first being that the WYSIWYG editor is useless for someone like me and should have disabled it as soon as I upgraded. After reviewing bits of the LJXP script I discovered that the WYSIWYG eats the lj user tag – it had nothing to do with LJXP! ARG! As a side note, I have to point out that I use wp-ljtags.php to display the tags on WP, very simple and still works like a charm on WP2.

I commented all $postHeader stuff in LJXP, since I don’t want a big blurb at the top of every post announcing that it was “Originally posted on PrincessLeia.com blahblahbal.” And all the poking of PHP I did for the LJ thing helped me in the next step of the project – cross posting to Xanga. Now, I abandoned my Xanga journal in 2004 because I liked LiveJournal better and didn’t have time to manually cross post, but there is this plugin now to post from WordPress to Xanga. It’s buggy, doesn’t properly “update” or “delete” posts, but since I do all my editing in vim I don’t really need to edit my entries via the wordpress interface unless I discover a mistake after posting. Well, since I’m using an lj user tag, Xanga won’t understand it. So I wrote the following to have Xanga Crossposter convert lj user to a simple clickable link to the person’s LJ.

# Change lj user tag into link
$content = preg_replace(‘[<lj user=\”?(.+)\”?>]’, ‘<a href=”http://www.livejournal.com/users/\1/”>\1</a>’, $content)

Voila!

We’ll see how things go over the next few weeks, but I’m hopeful that it’ll all work well. Oh, and just so I don’t feel like I wasted my day and didn’t even use my new tools, here’s an lj user tag: !

I used to love winter. All that darkness, the cold, the snugly feeling you have when you’re cooped up in the house for weeks.

But things have changed.

I had an excuse in 2004 for my winter being lousy – we were living with Michael’s mother until the house settlement, I had just started a challenging job that made me tired, and I was made wacky by a change in BC pills.

I had an excuse in 2005 for my winter being lousy – I was getting over the death of my father.

But this year? No excuse. In fact, this year is starting off great. I’m wondering if in 2004 and 2005 I was just looking for excuses for my winter seasonal weirdness. Now I’m learning that I’m just another one of those people who gets feeling all disconnected in the winter.

I want to go on walks during my lunch break and go home and play in my garden. One lesson I’ve learned from the class in Shamanism that Michael and I attend is that when one loses touch with the earth we don’t feel right. That’s an explanation that I can accept. When I was a kid when I was still outside all winter playing in the snow in my snow suit, I don’t go outside much in the winter as a grown-up.

I don’t think the solution is to move to a warmer place, there is something about the world when it snows that I’d miss greatly, and I can’t stand the heat. But I do need to find a solution.

Maybe start growing some plants indoors?

What do you do to stave off that disconnected feeling you get in the winter?

I spent the day being sick and uninteresting with my second stomach bug of the season. But instead of talking about how I spent all day in bed, I thought I’d share something more interesting, the version reply of people in #13thHour right now:

Aquarius: mIRC v6.16 Khaled Mardam-Bey
auphi: mIRC v6.16 Khaled Mardam-Bey
Baerana: Trillian
colin_: xchat 2.4.3 FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p1 [i386/451.00MHz/SMP]
crypticreign: irssi v0.8.10 – running on Linux i686
DarkSol: mIRC v6.16 Khaled Mardam-Bey
DarKrow: Colloquy 2.0 (2D16) – Mac OS X 10.4.4 – http://colloquy.info
Etudes: mIRC v6.16 Khaled Mardam-Bey
madragoran: xchat 2.4.5 Linux 2.6.15.1 [alpha/476.00MHz]
mjoseph: irssi v0.8.9 – running on Linux i686
Nerezza: mIRC v6.16 Khaled Mardam-Bey
Peacimowen: irssi v0.8.9 – running on Linux i686
pleia2: irssi v0.8.10 – running on Linux i686
R2D2: irssi v0.8.10 – running on Linux i686
Seph-Angel: mIRC v6.16 Khaled Mardam-Bey
shade: mIRC v6.17 Khaled Mardam-Bey
ShellGhost: mIRC v6.16 Khaled Mardam-Bey
Steve: irssi v0.8.9 – running on Linux i686
Tech: X-Chat Aqua 0.15.1 (xchat 2.6.1) Darwin 8.5.0 [Power Macintosh/1.67GHz]
The_Llama: irssi v0.8.10 – running on CYGWIN_NT-5.1 i686
Time: irssi v0.8.10 on Linux sparc64
Vex: irssi v0.8.9 – running on Linux i686

Statistics:

IRC CLIENT
9 irssi
8 mirc
3 xchat
1 trillian
1 colloquy

ARCHITECTURE
18 x86
2 ppc
1 alpha
1 sparc64

OPERATING SYSTEM
10 windows
9 linux
2 mac
1 bsd

Not bad.

A woman in an adjoining office to ours learned this past weekend that a nephew she is very close to was killed in combat. It’s been a somber day here, one woman who has a son in Iraq was moved to tears and worrying.

I don’t know the woman who lost her nephew, but a couple co-workers were talking about it and said that he had been stationed in Africa.

“Why are we in Africa, anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s all so sad.”

And that’s when I turned around and said:

“You know what’s really sad? That he died, and we don’t even know why he was there.”

Apparently my comment struck home, and when one of the co-workers called to express her condolences she asked why he had been stationed there.

The answer? “Unspecified Terrorist Threat.”

Since Michael was going to New Jersey on Friday I asked him to swing by the Porterhouse Restaurant and Brewery to grab a growler of the Belgian Frostbite that I love so much. He went out of his way to get there, and when he arrived he learned they had RUN OUT OF GROWLERS! Egads! How does this happen? He was able to get a 6-pack though, which was enough to make me happy. We held movie night and Bob brought over a couple bottles of Victory Golden Monkey, another belgian style ale that I love. And then last night we went out with Bob to John Harvard’s in Wayne. It’s one of the last on breweries in Southeastern, PA in Lew Bryson’s book:

Triumph New Hope
Porterhouse Restaurant and Brewery
Crabby Larry’s Brewpub, Steak, and Crab House
Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant, North Wales
General Layfayette Inn
Sly Fox Brewhouse and Eatery, Phoenixville
Sly Fox Brewery and Pub, Royersford
Rock Bottom, King of Prussia
John Harvard’s Brew House, Wayne
Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant, West Chester
John Harvard’s Brew House, Springfield
Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant, Media
Victory Brewing Company
McKenzie Brew House

I wonder if we should visit all the local chain locations for continuity. Regardless, Triumph and McKenzie we still have to conquer.

Now on to my review of John Harvard’s!

It’s a chain, started in Massachusetts in 1992. I try not to hold the chain thing against any brewery, Iron Hill and Sly Fox are technically chains now and they have some great beers. I really like the atmosphere of John Harvard’s, the tables are nicely spaced so it’s not too noisy. The food was good, I got a cup of lobster bisque, stole a bunch of Bob’s Pub Nachos, enjoyed an entree of their delicious old-fashioned chicken pot pie and finished with a brownie sundae (brownie had nuts in it though, meh). And it was all typically priced for upscale pub faire, Michael’s burger was about $9, my pot pie was $11.

As for the beer, Bob got a sampler which helped get an idea of the place. I was struck by how amazingly smooth all their brews were, but was disappointed by a lack of character.

Their featured beer, the “Munich Helles” dark German Lager had nothing to it, very weak.
Their IPA had far too much of a citrus taste for me to properly enjoy it.
Their ESB was good (and I’m not much one for bitters) with an interesting hoppy finish that doesn’t taste much like the beer itself.
Their Belgian Trippel was average, and strangely light in color for a trippel. Still, this is the beer I had two glasses of and took home in a growler.

In all? If I happen to be on the Main Line and need to grab a bite this is not a bad option, but it’s brews certainly don’t live up to some of the great breweries in this area.

And now I have 3 microbrewed belgian style ales in my refrigerator. Rock.