Ah, weekend.

Friday night Michael and I drove down to Media for movie night at and ‘s place, also joined us down there. We arrived a bit late, so the pizza was there when we got there, and so we ate first. Pizza was good, a bit greasy (boy did I pay for it later). They also had some corn chips, bean dip from Trader Joe’s, and some great, spicy guacamole. After dinner we had some Trader Joe’s apple pie, yum! We thought about watching some movies (it was movienight afterall), but the apartment was a bit warm, so we brought chairs out on the porch where the breeze was nice and spent the evening talking.

It was a good night, didn’t get home until after 2am.

Saturday morning was spent doing nothing! The temperature outside was in the 90s, and I didn’t feel like cleaning the house. I did some laundry and puttered around on my computer, tweaking websites and making more customizations to my Debian install. I went to the bank in the early afternoon to deposit my first paycheck.

Around 3:30 we left to meet Bob at the Summer Magic Beer Dinner at the Iron Hill Brewery in North Wales. On our way over Michael wasn’t feeling so great because of the heat, and I wasn’t quite 100% either. We figured we’d meet up and see how we felt once in the A/C of the Brewery.

We ordered a couple sodas and a bread and cheese appetizer to calm our stomachs and get hydrated. They had a guy from the Magic Hat Brewery (horrible website) in Vermont there, and he had the whole hippie-vermont look to him, which was amusing. We ordered samples of the Magic Hat Anti Oxidant Acid Ale, which was insane, my first impression was that it tasted a bit like wine, but there were so many intense tastes that I never did manage to decide what it exactly tasted like, or if I liked it.

Then came “The Reserve Dinner.” It was amazing. One waiter said “I almost quit because of this!” (so he could become a customer). Our waiter said “I’m so jealous” when we were about halfway through the meal. And a couple servers bringing us our food said “save room for dessert, it’s wonderful.” The service was great, and I really enjoy servers who know about and love the food and drink they’re serving, and can get just as excited about it, really adds to the whole experience, you’re among like-minded people.

The appetizer was Caribbean Shrimp and Crab Fritters – fresh tomato salsa and spice green chile oil. Yum. We were almost finished when they brought out the first beer (which was actually the second, they didn’t have the first ready yet). The beer was Iron Hill’s Rauch Bier, which was my favorite of the evening, nice and light.

The main course was Hickory Pit Smoked Strip Sirloin – the sirloin, fried green tomatoes, tarragon potato salad and sorrel cream sauce. It was pretty good, a bit sweeter than I tend to like entrees, and we got the next beer (which was actually the first, finally ready), Iron Hill’s Saison. Again, a pretty light summery beer, which I thought was alright, but I managed to finish most of it %)

Then came dessert, Chocolate “Molten” Cake – raspberry chocolate chip ice cream, chocolate ganache and fresh raspberries. No description does it justice, it was heavenly, one of the best desserts I’ve ever had. Halfway through I was like “I don’t want to finish it! then this deliciousness will be gone forever!” Needless to say I finished it, but I took my time. Paired with the cake was Magic Hat’s Thumbsucker whose description was “This Vermont Imperial Stout’s bites if chocolate, toffee, and coffee marry perfectly with this dense decadent dessert” yowza. It was good, but so filling, I barely managed to finish half of it. We hung out a little while to digest and talk, left around 7.

I want to go again %D!

We got home around 8. When we pulled in the driveway we saw a dark gray cat with a blue collar that we’d never seen outside before. We slowed down and both said “um, that looks like… CALIGUL
A!” Michael stopped and I got out of the car to get a closer look (how could he have gotten out?!), the cat ran away from me, but had a guilty look while running to our front door, just like Caligula would have had. But as I got closer I became pretty sure that it wasn’t Caligula, it was too gray all over, and then it darted away from the house and toward the road. We went inside and there was Caligula, happy to see us, like normal. Phew.

I was exhausted and hot, crashed on the couch. Michael went outside to water the plants and then went into the basement, where a bad smell was coming from.

“I think something died down there. In the sump pump,” he said.

“Eww”

He got the flashlight and went down to further investigate.

At first he thought it was a dead rat, but it turned out to be a dead baby bunny %( He had to fish it out and get rid of it, yuck yuck, sad sad. Poor thing, must have fallen in and was unable to escape %(

After that I went to put away my cellphone and noticed I had missed a call, and had a voicemail. Oops, it rang while we were at the brewery, but it was so noisy there that I never heard it. The message was from , and were in town, staying with her and . They were going out to dinner and a movie, wanted to know if we wanted to come. We wanted to, hadn’t seen since October, but we were both too tired.

Instead we chilled out upstairs in the A/C and watched MST3K – Manos the Hands of Fate. I went to bed as soon as it was over.

Now it’s Sunday morning. No plans, but it’s hot again and I’m upstairs hiding in the A/C.

I should go take a shower. *Yawn*

If I have a “claim to fame” at all in the linux world it’s for my Debian Mplayer How-To.

It all started when I was running Debian Woody in early 2003. I spent an entire morning pulling my hair out trying to get mplayer compiled from scratch with the newly released quicktime codecs. There were no good how-tos. Finally I asked for help from some people I knew in a channel on freenode. A friend there walked me through the steps of where to put the codecs, and even how to make it into a .deb so installing and uninstalling it would be a breeze.

I then thought about how helpful the whole IRC log would be to people in my similar situation. I saved the log of his teaching, rewrote the entire thing, cleaned it up, made things clear, and voila! The first Debian Mplayer How-To was born.

After a few months it started picking up traffic. I did an update in March of 2003. It got more traffic. I updated in September of 2003, and that’s when a friend pointed out that it was the first hit on google for “debian mplayer”

Cool.

Then I switched to Gentoo for my primary workstation and let the How-To collect dust for all of 2004, and most of this year. With the exception of the live.com codecs I had up there (conflicted with newer g++ versions), it all worked fine. I have still been getting at least one email a month about it, and it’s not uncommon for new people I meet on IRC to ask me if I am “the one who wrote that debian mplayer how-to”

I felt bad about letting it collect dust, but I didn’t have a decent debian box or a whole lot of time for testing of the rewrite.

So last weekend I dropped Gentoo. Etch is now on my computer, and Thursday I opened up my How-To and installed Debian. But I grabbed the newest stable source for Mplayer (v1.0pre7) and newer live.com codecs. I ran into some trouble, which I eventually pinned down to not having vorbis-tools in the “apt-get install” line, oops. But other than that, it works.

Today I updated the site to reflect the changes I made in my own installed. I’m still using the older divx, realplayer, win32 and quicktime codecs, but I haven’t had any problems with these.

Yay! Finally updated!

While eating lunch my supervisor popped into my cube and said “It’s beautiful out, sunny, warm, not humid!” I finished my lunch and grabbed my bag to go for a walk downtown.

I had a half dozen old CDs in my bag that I wanted to get rid of, so first I walked down to a used cd store. The guy at the shop gave me $13 for the cds, fine with me.

I then walked to the thrift shop to browse the books.

While looking through the religion section I noticed a few Bibles on the shelf. I thought back to the introduction to a set of “Great Books of the Western World” I have where they explained that since everyone has a copy of the Bible they didn’t include it in the set.

Everyone has a copy of the Bible.

Well I don’t.

Since reading that I figured I should pick up a Bible, I’m not a Christian, but it’s a good book to have around.

So I grabbed a copy of the Good News Bible (Modern English) in hardback, a softcover of the King James Version, and a hardcopy of Who’s Who in the Bible just for fun.

I got up to the checkout, idly wondering what the woman at the counter would think of me.

She rang me up and the total came to 75 cents. 75 cents? Hardcover books are 75 cents, softcover are 25 cents, that’s $1.75.

My puzzled look gave away my thoughts.

“Because they are Bibles,” the woman explained.

On friday I was watched an interview of Shelby Knox done by David Brancaccio on Now. It was a good interview, and she was a very articulate young woman. They mentioned a P.O.V. episode that would be airing about her work to get sex education in Lubbock, Texas public schools.

This is an issue that I can get really passionate about. It drives me up the wall when conservative christians rally against sex education while STD and pregnancy rates are running wild (Lubbock has one of the highest pregnancy rates in the country). Too much “It’s not my kid having sex” and “It’s the parents job” going around, while kids are getting hurt.

But this documentary? It wasn’t what I expected.

Most of the facts that were communicated were just written on the screen, I missed most of them because my reception for that PBS channel isn’t the best. These statistics are vital to understanding the documentary, they should have been more prominently placed.

And they portrayed all those in the Baptist clergy seem cultish and close-minded. Is this reality? If so I’m glad I don’t live in the south.

The documentary mostly just wandered through the politics of the Lubbock Youth Commission, and made Shelby look like a weepy, attention-craving teenager. It was more a story about Shelby specifically rather than the issue.

I guess I just expect more from documentaries, especially ones tackling sensitive issues.

While taking a walk in downtown Lansdale Monday during my lunchbreak I stopped in the local thrift shop. I’m not much of a thrift shop person, but they have a lot of books, and even a scifi section that sometimes has good books, and at 25 cents each it’s worth it even if they aren’t.

Until now.

I wandered from the scifi section to check out their cookbooks (which turned out to almost all be about microwave cooking, a whole bookcase full, what’s up with that?) and drifted into the religion section where I saw The Transcendental Meditation TM Book : How to Enjoy the Rest of Your Life. Transcendental Meditation? I hadn’t heard of it, I’m a child of the 80s. The cover of this 300+ page book proclaimed “NEW EDITION OF THE BEST SELLER… Over 1 Million Copies in Print” I flipped through a few pages in the book, it had cheesy pictures and looked like it fell out of the 1970s. I looked at my watch, needed to get going back to work. So I grabbed a quarter out of my purse and bought the book. It’s just a book about a style of meditation right?

Last night to get sleepy I pulled the book out of my bag and started reading it. It appeared that the first few chapters were about the “TM System” and as I flipped through it and saw all their “scientific graphs” of how it boosts intelligence and all sorts of stuff.

Very quickly it began to feel like someone was trying to sell me something. Alright, it helps, move on to the meat of the book.

I flipped.

More graphs.

Flipped more.

More graphs and cheesy pictures.

What the hell?

Turns out that this is just a big ole book of propaganda. You have to spend a couple grand on a class if you actually want to learn TM.

What do you know, they were trying to sell me something.

And it’s all nonsense.

I did some googling today, and discovered their official site. Creepy. It’s a cult. Indeed, the 4th hit on google for Transcendental Meditation says The Transcendental Meditation program is a money-making cult.

Apparently: “Many know of TM because of the Beatles and other celebrities like Mia Farrow and Donovan, who hung around at the Maharishi’s ashram in the late sixties.”

See what I mean about being a child of the 80s? I totally missed this.

I mentioned this to Michael this evening, he mentioned that this is the kind of crap that makes New Age people look bad. He’s right. It’s sad.

And I want my 25 cents back.

This wine sucks.

Pinot Grigio is my favorite white, but this stuff tasted like cheese. Yes, cheese. It was horrible. We thought about just drinking it anyway, but after a glass each it was trashed.

Yuck!

I decided to get away from Gentoo due to lack of time. I only have a couple precious hours in the evening, and the last thing I want to be doing is constantly spending my time on system maintenance and compiling stuff. When I get home and want to play with new programs and install things I can’t wait 20 minutes for a program to compile, I want it now.

I’ve been going back and forth in my head about whether I should re-install Debian or Ubuntu. The recent move of Debian’s Sarge to stable was a big deciding factor, now that Etch is out I feel Debian is taking a step to a higher level, and I figured it was time to give it a go again. But I was afraid of the installation. I didn’t want to completely depend on Michael to install the system for me, and I didn’t want to screw it up and make a fool of myself, like the last time I tried to install Debian. The last time I tried installing it was a couple years ago with Woody, where the install asked all sorts of questions about hardware that, quite honestly, scared the crap out of me, and made me run to Michael and ask him to do it.

So what would it be? Scary Debian install or easy Ubuntu?

There were issues with both.

Ubuntu

Pros:
Uses apt – still very Debian
Easy to install, detects all my hardware with no scariness
Newer packages than Debian Testing
Looks pretty out of the box

Cons:
Smaller repository than debian
Once the system is installed I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the Ubuntu way of system administration
Default installation of Gnome, which I’d never use
Losing a zillion geek points

Debian

Pros:
Gigantic repository
I’m used to the “Debian-way” of system administration
Leetness

Cons:
The install scares the crap out of me

So I thought about it. I’d heard from Michael and others that the Debian Testing install was easier these days, but I was weary. Will it detect all my hardware? Should I just give up on using my USB mouse with Debian now so I don’t have the headache of recompiling my kernel before I get x running? Is this going to take a week to get working myself? Maybe I should just install Ubuntu, which I know would “just work” and I don’t need to worry.

But what am I?

Am I going to surrender my Linux geekiness because I’m an accountant at work now?

Never!

I enjoy tweaking my computer. I may think that the GUI login screen for Ubuntu is cool, but it means nothing to my geeky self unless I installed it myself. I was afraid that if I installed Ubuntu that I’d just reinstall my whole system in a couple months because I’d be annoyed with the Ubuntu way of doing things (I already decided that I’d enable the root account first thing).

So the choice was clear.

Debian. And a glass of 10 year old red wine.

I was worried about the raid0 that Michael set up on the system with the Gentoo install, but after taking a look at the partition table with Michael, I learned that I didn’t really need to use raid0. I backed up my Windows files in case it became unbootable and went to edit the partition table (which Michael helped me with, since the raid on the table still scared me).

40 gigs still goes to Windows XP on ntfs.
40 gigs of fat32 to share files between the two OSes
80 gigs of Debian (128M for /boot 2 gigs for /swap and the rest for /)

The install went flawlessly. The first thing I did upon reboot was boot into WinXP. It worked. I then booted into my shiney new Debian install.

I went through the setup, and chose not to install anything (there are options to install a workstation, mailserver, etc), opting for the manual install of every package. I got x going with the default nv driver, my USB mouse worked! Installed gcc, make, binutils, and other essentials, and then tackled the install of the real NVidia drivers. This is when I grabbed Michael again, it asked for kernel source and I wasn’t sure what package that would be, so he helped me out with that.

nvidia module loaded without a problem.

In fact, everything is running great. I was able to grab pictures off my digital camera without fussing with anything. I had backed up my /etc
/ from gentoo so was able to grab the correct xserver settings to get my screen resolution back to 1600×1200 (could go higher, but I can’t read things after that). I’ve bugged Michael a bit to help me set up some of the more trivial things, and still have a bunch of things to customize, but that’s all fun stuff.

It’s good to be home.

< SuaveIV> anyone want a Ubuntu 5.04 CD?
<+pleia2> I’m trying to decide if I want to go back to Debian or go to Ubuntu
<+pleia2> still leaning toward plain old Debian
<%EvilAshe> debian sounds sweeter
<%EvilAshe> use that
<+pleia2> k
<%EvilAshe> it makes me think of a cupcake

“I don’t have anything to wear to upcoming concerts.”

“Just wear shorts, that’s what I’m doing.”

“I don’t have any good ones anymore.”

“Don’t you have a pair of jeans?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go shopping tonight?”

“Sigh. I guess.”

This exchange took place last night after work. I needed clothes. So we headed to the Montgomery Mall, not too far from where I work.

In a perfect world there would be an L.L. Bean store in that mall, but alas, the closest ones are in NJ and DE. So I ended up at Strawbridges.

I should really not buy clothes during certain hormone crazy times of the month. As I mentioned to a friend last night “hormones warp mirrors.” I’ve been feeling particularly sensitive about my weight recently, since I was depressed for a couple weeks and being lazy, then that hot spell where I couldn’t go for walks. It’s summertime, I should be outside getting tons of exercise and working off the extra winter pounds! And I’m annoyed that the winter pounds are there at all, I need to get a gym membership or something.

Anyway, I managed to find a couple pairs of khaki shorts in my regular size (see, self, you haven’t put on a zillion pounds, size 8 still fits! Stop being crazy and annoying everyone by posting this girly “omg I’m so fat” nonsense in your journal!). And picked up a nice pair of jeans that felt good. I haven’t had a nice pair of jeans in years, but I liked how these ones looked. All these clothes were on sale, nice.

Michael picked up a pair of shorts and shirts too, and then we went to the Disney Store, yay! I got some cute pajamas and a Stitch T-Shirt.

In all it was a less painful experience than shopping usually is. I think that’s because there weren’t too many people around, and I actually was able to find clothes I liked rather quickly, which is unusual.

Ah, it’s friday. Off to work for me.

Why didn’t I know about this sooner?

Apparently it’s being released in Philly on July 8th, who’s coming with us? %D

EDIT Link to movie site: marchofthepenguins.com