Back when I was in middle and high school, there was a service that hooked students up with penpals in other countries. This was in the mid-90s, before I had “discovered” the internet, and being able to write letters to someone in another country was exotic and exciting!

I chose to get a penpal from England, for two reasons. 1) I know they’d speak English 2) I enjoyed English humor

I received my little slip of paper with the name and address of a girl in England after a few months, I still have this piece of paper. I wrote her a letter.

Through my moving and her name change we’ve managed to keep track of each other over the years, even if our letters end up being months apart. We’ve both grown up a lot since that time I was in high school, have watched our lives play out differently, she’s now married with 2 children.

And even though the internet has brought people from all over the world into my house (sometimes literally), my penpal Lucy has always held a special place in my heart. She’s one of the few people I still have contact with from my High School days. But until now she didn’t have internet access, so I still received wonderful paper letters every few months. On Tuesday I got an email.

Subject: Lucy wants to talk to you!

Luckily I opened it instead of deleting it, it was one of the invites to use MSN messenger and to add Lucy! She had a computer at home now and was online! This is exciting news, I’ll finally be able to talk to my old penpal in real time, last night was the first time I was able to do this and it was great.

But I can’t help but feel like an era is ending. I’d clung on to this wonderful old letter-writing form of communication, and it’s now obsolete. Do kids even have the old penpal programs anymore? Are they all brought up in a world today where talking to people on the other side of the planet is natural? I think these are wonderful advances in technology, and the way the world should be. But there is an intimacy to be gained from paper letters that electronic communications lack.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and came to a conclusion. Our paper communication does not have to end, but it can change. Now that we both have online journals we can read about our everyday lives, but perhaps there are things we’d like to continue discussing in paper letters. Certainly we can continue to send each other paper photos and cards.

In closing, welcome to the Internet Lucy! It’ll be quite a chance to get to know each other better.

I’m totally stealing this idea from .

Tomorrow I’m buying some Christmas cards and will begin sending them out later this week.

If you want one, drop me an email: Lyz@PrincessLeia.com

Please include:

Real Name (and online nick so I know who you are)
Address (including country)

Don’t be shy! I want to send out lots of cards!

I had a decent week.

Wednesday night we finally got to watch Man with the Screaming Brain, which was pretty funny. I didn’t go into it expecting anything (hadn’t even heard of it until a visiting friend mentioned it), and I think that was important. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was a lot of fun.

Friday evening Michael went to the men’s sweat in Malvern and I went out to dinner with . Around 8 we met at Samuel Eaton’s in Skippack, neither of us had been there, but it was the only place I could think of that was between us that probably wouldn’t be over-crowded on a Friday evening. Pulling into the parking lot didn’t impress me much, I was pretty worried that the place would be a total dive after seeing the motel rooms off the back. But it turned out to be an ok place, not the best dinner I’ve ever had, but not a cheap place either. It was really great finally having some alone time with , we’ve both been quite busy over the past few months and haven’t had much time to talk. We stayed there until a little after 10.

Saturday morning we were up early for the Shaman class. It was a great class, a man from Peru was up to preform a “waking up” ceremony for the rivers and mountains in the area. It was all very interesting.

When we got home we just hung out for a while, had some wine and pizza, invited up. I stayed up and talked with for a while, but then my stomach started bothering me so I went to bed when Michael started his show at midnight.

And now it’s today, there is snow!

ended up staying the night, just left a few minutes ago and the roads look clear enough.

The exciting news for today is that Bitlbee went 1.0! Yay! Happy Bitlbee Day! Unfortunately I never did get around to helping review the documentation for the release, oh well.

Right now Michael’s making pancakes! I think he also plans to bottle the HopDevil clone that he brewed, once bottled it needs another couple weeks fermentation, but it should be ready around Christmas or New Years. My plans are to snuggle in a blanket with some blueberry tea and spend the day with my computer. There are lots of things on my To-Do list, and it’d be nice to knock a few more off.

It’ll be a good, much needed, relaxing day.

I was going to make the style of my wordpress site match the rest of my site, but then I realized that it would be amazingly time-consuming to do that and I don’t have that much time. So I grabbed a theme, made some alterations, and am using that now.

Behold: princessleia.com/journal/

I got Live+Press working for now, but it there are some issues I’ll need to work out (seems to be slightly unhappy with the script I am using to support lj user and lj-cut tags, and the lj-cut tag support is a bit weird…).

But right now I’m tired and going to bed.

I was going to wait to post about this until I had the journal up and running for public viewing, but I had so much fun last night I have to talk about it now.

[lj-cut]I started writing a Xanga journal a few years back, as the story goes, I made the journal so I could organize the reading of other journals on that site, I didn’t intend to actually keep a journal, this was before blogging was a big thing so I saw it as a “diary” and I wasn’t much of a “diary” girl.

But I was bit by the bug. Within a week I was writing regularly. My writing skills sucked, going back and reading those is somewhat painful. I’m amazed that people actually read that crap (thanks to those who put up with me in those early days!).

I moved to LiveJournal in the end of 2002 because so many real life friends were using it, then took himself and his coolness away from Xanga, and finally Xanga was getting worse with spam, 12 year olds (g8 site propz visit! mine xxxsweetanglexxx!!1), advertising and server problems causing downtime for days.

When I made this move (well, sort of move, I updated Xanga AND LJ for a few months) I realized that I was addicted. This is when I first considered moving the entire thing to princessleia.com. But I liked the LJ community, so I couldn’t leave that behind.[/lj-cut]

Over the past few years I’ve thought about running a blog from princessleia.com several times. There were a few things that came up:

1. I couldn’t leave LiveJournal completely, still have post there
2. Posting to LiveJournal AND my own journal is too much work when lj-specific tags and such are taken into consideration
3. I don’t want to fight the comment spam war on my server

But on the flip side, I was always uncomfortable with depending on a 3rd party to keep my journal entries safe, I had to start keeping backups locally.

When people started using WordPress with the LJ auto-update tool I thought that most of my problems would be solved. But it took me a while to warm up to it, Michael’s now been using it for months. The only oustanding issue was comment spam, well who says I need to enable comments at all? While driving home last night I decided I would have my blog on PrincessLeia.com!

That’s what I did last night.

First I had to export all of my entries to CSV XML. LJ only allows you to do this month by month, but at least they provide a tool for it unlike some services. I thought about only taking 2004-2005, since I was such a bad writer in 2003! But then I realized that I would probably always cut off anything written more than 2 years ago forever in my life because my skills have improved that much more. So I decided to start in the beginning of 2003. Close to 3 years of LiveJournal entries.

Then I used the livejournal import tool included with WordPress to pull all the entries into my fresh WordPress install. It was around mid 2004 that I began using LJ-Specific tags – which wordpress wouldn’t see! This was not such a problem for lj-cut, but it was a considerable problem for the lj user tags.

I thought about search and replace options which would allow me to replace lj user tags with a link to their livejournal or just their usernames or something, even asked some vim gurus what they suggested for the actual replacement method (use perl! use awk!). Then I thought about it. If importing your LiveJournal entries into wordpress is a popular enough practice for them to INCLUDE an import tool, someone must have encountered this problem before.

I hit up the wordpress site and found a hack that solves this problem. Not only does it solve the lj user problem, it provides a simple (but clever) lj-cut solution! I figured I wouldn’t use the lj-cut thing, but if it works, why not?

I excitedly imported all my livejournal entries. Happy at how well it was all going. Once complete I started browsing them. That’s when I real
ized something was not completely right! It was showing lj user tags from 2 years ago, but not most recent ones. Was it because I installed the hack at a certain time while importing? Was it some problem with the usernames it was displaying? Was it how I wrote the tags?

It was how I wrote the tags, LiveJournal let me be lazy! In the beginning I always included quotes, like <lj user=”time3″>. But then I realized it worked fine without quites, so I got lazy, and it turned into <lj user=time3>. The script only saw it with quotes! But lucky for me it used a simple regex to determine what it sees and replaces, so a quick edit to the regex makes it so it’ll see either.

By the time I got to this point it was 10PM and I went to bed. But I was excited, I hadn’t had a feel-good, successful computer project in a while.

Tonight the mission is to get my own design put in (same as the rest of PrincessLeia.com) and to get the lj auto-update script up and running. Then I can start giving the address out!

“Women are irrational, that’s all there is to that. Their heads are full of cotton, hay and rags. They’re nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating, maddening, and infuriating hags!”

Professor Henry Higgins in Lerner and Lowe’s “My Fair Lady”

For a long time, I couldn’t agree more.

And we all know that Eve was a trouble maker.

I didn’t even consciously realize until quite recently that I felt so strongly this way. Even more surprising was that I seemed to absorb this message but completely failed to grasp that in the end of the story, Professor Higgins had fallen in love with the woman he had “created” and that was the key to the whole Pygmalion tale!

I was predisposed to the view of women that Higgins held, when I heard it coming from him, the intellectual in the story, I immediately agreed. That stuck with me.[lj-cut]

While growing up, I was exposed to a number of intelligent, powerful men who were successful and had meaningful discussions that I could relate to. The women in my life were friends of my mother’s, who were generally less-educated, enjoying soap operas, shoes and gossip. The women on TV and in movies were nice to look at, but very few had brains.

I resented my whole gender for this divide. I loathed the times when I was forced to be with women rather than going to do the fun, smart stuff with men.

I had a tendency to focus on the virtues of men and shortcomings of women. Certainly there were lousy men and great women, but I wasn’t seeing them.

I lacked healthy female role models.

I wasn’t a total tomboy (obviously I enjoyed a musical here and there), but for a long time I automatically avoided things I felt were “too girly.” I never let a “bitchy mood” outside, those feelings were pushed down and absorbed. I wasn’t going to be just another moody, manipulative woman. I was always going to be rational (just like men are? HAH!).

When and how did this view start to shift? There were a few factors involved.

Self esteem. Once I was able to love myself I was able to throw off what others thought, including what they thought about how girly I am. Part of being me is being a woman, there is no denying this. It’s ok to like pink and want to feel pretty. Amusingly, the progression of my website design from dark and impersonal to bright and personal shows the transformation.

Gaining more female role models and friends. LinuxChix played a huge role in this. Not only was I able to find women to look up to, I found many female friends who shared my interests. Over the past few years I’ve been able to bask in this community and sometimes even forget that it’s not the norm. We love Belgian Ales! We compile our own kernels! We love books!

Emotional growth. There came a point where depression and lousy relationships had taken control of my life. When I turned 20 I vowed to break this cycle. Part of this meant I needed to start expressing my feelings and standing up for myself. So what if I get into a grumpy mood? Everyone gets in grumpy moods. Pushing them down might make those around me marginally happier, but it was destroying me. For me to be healthy I need to express those feelings and TELL people when they hurt me rather than absorbing it all until I get to the point of breakdown.

Spiritual growth. This is a recent development, but is helping me reshape the ideas of women I gained from growing up in patriarchal society. Eve’s “sin” was just part of the story, and where would we be without her release of knowledge? In spirituality of many Native Americans women are very spiritually powerful. The earth we stand on is a Mother. In the religion of my ancient ancestors the Goddess ruled equally with the God. Even Christianity itself has women who are powerful, but there seems to have been a movement to gloss over this fact.

Today I’m quite proud to be the woman I am, and while I still don’t have a clue about makeup application, I’m able to express myself in a feminine way without feeling ashamed. I don’t have to pretend to be some idealized version of a man to succeed.

This path has taught me a lot. There is still a divide in our society and I’m constantly reminded that there are a lot of people out there that don’t believe it exists anymore.

I don’t want to say that there is no “solution” to this divide, because it’d be nice to live in a world where it didn’t exist, and there has been much progress in the past century. But the problems I encountered with my entire world view can’t be fixed with some affirmative action or feminism.[/lj-cut]

I was able to get out of work at 2PM this afternoon so we could go to Varner’s Farm!

We learned about Varner’s last year when I was talking to a woman at work about how we used to cut down our own Christmas tree when I lived up in Maine, she informed me that you could go to Varner’s and cut down a tree yourself. Varner’s is only a 10-15 minute drive from our house, so it was welcome news. Unfortunately, last year I didn’t have a job that was flexible with hours, so we weren’t able to get out there in the daylight, when you could cut down your own, and the weekends were insanely busy. We ended up getting one of their cut trees, which was still fresher than most you’d find elsewhere.

This year I REALLY wanted us to cut down our own. We left for the farm as soon as I was home from work, and with the wind gusting and clouds threatening to rain we geared up to cut down our tree. We rode on a large wagon behind a tractor out to the tree field and went to look for our tree.

It didn’t take long, we browsed the rows of Blue Spruce, Fraser Firs, and Douglas Firs. We decided on a nice Fraser Fir.

YAY!

And yes, we get it early in the season. I love having a Christmas tree in the house (and so does Caligula). They’ll last for at least a month if you cut them fresh. Now we just need to get a half cord of wood and we’ll be set for a snuggly December.

Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, I spent the morning working on PrincessLeia.com. I had been saying I’d redo the CSS and convert it all to PHP for a very long time, but I was never motivated enough until now. I was able to get a majority of the site moved over to PHP that morning, so now each page has:

<Title variable defined in PHP>
<Link to standard Header>
CONTENT
<Link to standard Footer>

The pages exempt from this are ones that have their own navigation and style – sites unto themselves, like some of our vacation photos, the Star Wars sections and such, I haven’t quite decided how to tackle these, if I will at all.

As I mentioned previously, I’m using apache rewrite rules so that when someone goes to the .html page that was removed it automatically sends them to the .php page.

This is all very good, I am able to change the look of most of the site with simple changes in CSS and/or header/footer changes. I hope this will be the last overhaul of the site for a long time. It’ll be so much easier to maintain.

Yesterday evening I finished up the work on this, and with a small change in a CSS file set the theme of the whole site for Christmas. Yay!

After the website stuff on Thanksgiving, we headed over to Michael’s mothers. I didn’t want to stay long, as I knew I had a busy weekend ahead of me, but these family things always manage to take a while. We spent from about 4-7PM at Michael’s mother’s enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with her and Michael’s brother’s family. Then we headed over to Michael’s brother’s new house that they had just moved into, spent a couple hours there. By 9PM I was really dragging and we finally headed home.

Friday morning Michael wasn’t feeling well, so I ended up going to the Medicine Wheel and 12 Steps workshop in Malvern by myself. This was the first time I’d ever done anything there without Michael, so it was sort of weird, but also a good thing. The class lasted from 9AM until 5PM.

At 5PM I gave a call to let her know I was still up for coming over if she wanted me to. ‘s linux geek friend Matti (I hope I didn’t just butcher the spelling of that!) was in town from Boston, and I do love meeting more geek chicks, but keep managing to miss her when she’s down. So I headed over to Bae’s and met up with all of them. We ended up driving to Kennett Square for the best Mexican in the area. I had a really nice time, Matti is a cool chick. By 9:30 we were back at Bae’s house and I decided to head home and go to bed.

Saturday it was day 2 of the workshop in Malvern. It was a long day, after the class itself ended at 5PM we had a sweat lodge. It was after 9PM by the time I was on the road to come home.

Sunday was the final day of the workshop, it went from 9AM until 4PM, and at 4 they had the weekly Crystal Bowl Healing session, which I decided to stay for since I had planned on being there until 5PM anyway and had never attended a session. It was an interesting experience, but didn’t really do much for me, I think I fell asleep during part of it. At 5PM I headed home.

In all, the workshop was very good, and I’ll have to talk more about it when the knowledge has settled a bit. There is a lot going on in my brain right now.

Michael was feeling better when I got home Sunday evening, had made chili for dinner (yum!). I puttered around most of the evening, but was too tired to get any real work done. I kept getting distracted – “I should update my site for xmas.. with christmas tree clipart.. christmas trees! we should get our christmas tree this week I should check the budget to see how much we can spend… hey I need to balance the check book… why do I have this clipart book out again?” After a few cycles of this I gave up and went to zone out to some TV.

In all, a very productive long weekend, I’m glad I did everything I did, but I’m really looking forward to some relaxing time after work this week.

A year ago today I saw my father alive for the last time, we’re 10 days away from the first anniversary of his death.

It seems somewhat appropriate that I’m spending the long weekend at Jim’s The Medicine Wheel & Twelve Steps Workshop. The further insight into serious addictions and alcoholism that he’s providing in the workshop are invaluable to finally understanding my father and working toward forgiveness. And most importantly, I’m learning a lot that helps me directly.

Today is the last day of the workshop. To be honest, I’m exhausted and I really want some wind down time that I’m not going to get (back to work tomorrow!), but it’s worth it.

I was at work on Tuesday and a woman came over to our department (she only came over to our department because she went to EVERY department, we’re just A/P and have nothing to do with her email problems).

“I got an email from the government, I’m not sure what I should do. Do you think it could be real? Should I call someone?” She was telling everyone, quite concerned

“It’s a spam or a virus, don’t open it, delete it,” I automatically advised.

“But what if it’s real? It’s from the CIA I don’t think I am in any sort of trouble, but shouldn’t I tell someone?”

“You can tell IT if you want, since it’s probably just a virus or spam. If you were in trouble the CIA wouldn’t contact you via email,” I said.

She wasn’t convinced, talked about it all day. On Wednesday she got another and called IT around the time that the news had started coming in about Sober X.

I think this is one of the most amusing things about working in a normal office. When you work so far detatched from “normal users” as I have in the past, it’s sometimes hard to believe that there are so many people out there that would fall for these and cause the continued spread of them. But now I see how worked up people get, it’s very interesting, and sad how virus spreaders are able to prey on ignorance and fear.