I didn’t end up doing much at all today:
– Finished Christmas Cards
– Caught up on reading journals and some email
– Read for a bit
– Played with the cat
– Helped Michael shovel the driveway
– Consumed hot chocolate and delicious chocolate coconut cookies that Michael made
– Took a nap
The house could use some cleaning, the laundry should be done, and so many other little things that I just didn’t do. For once, I don’t feel guilty about this.
You know what I love?
Snow.
You know what I love more?
Snow that closes the office!
SNOW DAY!!! YAY!!!
[lj-cut]
After all the talk yesterday about how they never close the office due to snow I didn’t expect this.
I called the Inclement Weather Hotline at work this morning when I got up at 6:15 – they claim to update this 2 hours before the office opens, and the office opens at 8:15. The message was “We are operating under normal business hours.” Sheesh – not even a delay? Is the snow just much worse at my house?
I had good intentions, I showered and dressed. Then looked outside and said “NO FUCKING WAY!” They hadn’t even plowed our street. I called the Weather Hotline again. This time it was: “You’ve reached $company, today is January 10th.” Eh? It’s BROKEN!
So I called back 10 minutes later, “Today is December 9th, 2005. Due to inclement weather, the office will be closed today.”
Gosh, what am I going to do with myself all day? %)[/lj-cut]
This morning around 5:30, Caligula meowed in my face. I got out of bed, gave him food and water and went back to bed. That cat sure has me trained well.
At 6 the alarm went off, I got up and turned it off.
The next time I woke up it was very bright out, I looked at the clock, 7:17. Eek!
This is why my bedtime is 10PM, I didn’t get home from the PLUG Meeting last night until about 12:30. But I’d say it was worth the sleep loss. Thank goodness for coffee.
I left work at the normal time, met
The talk was given by Mark Jason Dominus on Classic Unix Security Problems (slides here). Of the half dozen or so PLUG meetings I’ve ever attended this was the best. MJD is a great presenter, I already knew a lot about everything he was talking about (which surprised me, since I thought I was a total security n00b), but he made it very easy to pick up the things I didn’t get before the talk. And he’s funny, which always adds to a talk. I just wish the talk had been longer %)
After the talk, we all walked over to The Best House, the default “after PLUG meeting place.” I got to talk with a few people, met a co-worker of
By the time I got home Michael was already in bed, Caligula was also sleeping somewhere, I didn’t bother looking for him, just brushed my teeth and went to bed.
I bought WallaceAndGromit.net back in 2002. The site replaced a section on princessleia.com about Wallace and Gromit, I just got the domain because I thought it was a great one and was surprised that it hadn’t been taken.
Really, I’m just a girl who made a fansite and happened to get a good domain, I wouldn’t have called myself an expert.
For a long time, I ran the only active Wallace and Gromit fansite on the web (I looked for others often). I guess that’s why people came to me when they had questions about Wallace and Gromit, and I did get some very amusing ones.
“On the DVD, during the opening of The Wrong Trousers, the commentary references something in the scene that is related to an older project. Were they referring to the pickle on the wall? Was the older project an Aardman project or just something Nick Park did?”
…the pickle?
Whenever I got emails like this I would laugh, but honestly try to answer the question. I saw it as “faking” being an expert. Certainly these people emailing knew more about Wallace and Gromit than I did, if they paid such close attention to pickles!
I also began to feel a sort of obligation to keep up with Wallace and Gromit news once my site started picking up more traffic. It was fun, and interesting, but certainly driven by a feeling of civic duty. I was constantly surprised when I was contacted by editors of real magazines and big websites who would tell me about recent Wallace and Gromit related stories in their publications.
Then, last week, I was contacted by a college student writing a paper for his school newspaper. He asked for a 100-200 word response to why I thought Wallace and Gromit had such popularity and staying power. With very little effort I threw together a 200 word reply.
That’s when I realized it, I really have become an expert!
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
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
And now it’s today, there is snow!
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
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:
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]