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

I read a lot of books. Most mornings before work I find some time to squeeze in a few pages, some evenings I read myself to sleep. On weekends I usually spend a couple hours a day with my nose in some book.

But last night when I went to read I groaned.

Wait, brain, why are you groaning? You read all the time! You love to read!

Because nothing is interesting! My brain said.

That’s funny. I have a zillion books, have bought many more in the past few months. Fantasy books, Scifi books, computer books, history books, classic books.

But my brain is right, nothing has felt interesting lately. The Dragonriders of Pern Trilogy was the last great thing I read. It started off slow, but got better as it went along, by the time I got to the end of the third I said “wow this is great.. OH CRAP IT’S OVER!”

I picked up Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson a few weeks ago, looked good but I’m having trouble getting into it, even after 100 pages. And there are a few computer books that I’ve been reading, but I’m not really in the mood for them lately.

Last night I read a bit in Michael’s Shaman book, but just wasn’t as hooked as I had been when I picked it up last.

I’m sure it’s not the fault of these books, I just haven’t been in the right mood to take a book seriously.

I think I need to pick up some more Terry Pratchett or Dan Brown so my brain can take a break from seriousness and just have I-can’t-put-this-book-down fun.

Our tickets came today! %D

Last night I started to get a sore throat, then a cough.

Ugh, allergies. Hot weather always makes them worse.

I stayed in the air conditioning most of the evening, and around 10 decided to go to bed. I was feeling pretty crappy so I went to find the Benadryl.

We had none.

Arg. Ok, I’ll take some NyQuil, at least that’ll knock me out and stop the coughing.

No NyQuil.

Sheesh!

So I slept horribly last night. When the alarm when off at 5am I was already awake. Eventually dragged myself out of bed around 6.

Leaving the air conditioned bedroom was terrible! The shower I took was a relatively cold one.

And now I’m at work. I was miserable when I came in, but the dry cool environment here has helped my chest congestion, I’m not coughing as much, so my throat and chest don’t hurt as much. But I’m exhausted, I want to go to sleep.

We’ll pick up some Benadryl on the way home tonight, which I’ll take immediately and be a zombie for the rest of the evening, yay!

I’m glad this doesn’t happen often. The hot weather can leave now!

I am so beat, I want to take a nap.

On Friday afternoon I received some packages in the mail (it was quite a week for packages!). One was from my grandfather, a whole box full of papers, must be a couple hundred, that he’s written over the years with a focus on european roots and paganism. Very interesting stuff so far, but it’s going to take some time to go through. The second package was a couple CDs I ordered last week, I finally got Jonn Serrie’s Lumina Nights and the Mediaeval Baebes’ Worldes Blysee. My ears were very happy.

Friday night was fun, we had a couple friends over and watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I’d never seen. Great movie. Michael fired up the grill for beef and turkey burgers which turned out great. I love having a grill! I had a glass of wine, but it was just too hot out and my stomach wasn’t in the mood for drinking more than that. let me borrow her scanner, which was really nice of her, and kept me busy this weekend.

Saturday morning I spent getting the scanner going. It’s a nice canon scanner, that is powered by USB (cool!), but as far as I could tell, doesn’t have support in linux. I installed the driver in Windows, and then started looking for free OCR software. I discovered gocr, which managed to turn this:

Still wistful, I foresee an awakened heroic consciousness in almost any child unleashing

into:

Still wi8tfui, I fore8ee an awakened he,oic con8ciou8negg tn gimogt gny Ehi’ld yniegg

Eek. It’s a TCL script, and takes forever too, very disappointing.

I finally settled on SimpleOCR in Windows, which touts itself as “The only Royalty Free OCR API. The only free OCR application.” The version you can download is free and it’ll always read typed documents, but only gives a 14 day trial of their handwriting recongnition software (which sucks anyway, from what I read). Fine with me, all I’m doing is scanning typed documents.

What am I scanning? I might have mentioned a while back that I have a collection of short publications that my grandfather published in the 80s about European-Americans. Called “Heritage Trails” it was an attempt to revive European heritage in the US, and offered articles about European ethnic roots, ethnic recipes, and contact information for ethnic groups across the country. I was a great little publication, and before the internet came along, publications like this served an important role in bringing like-minded people together. But aside from glancing at it from time to time, I never paid much attention to it until recently when I started looking into pagan stuff again. These were some great articles! I must share them with the world!

And so started my quest to put these online. There are a total of 80 pages, only in paper form. I thought about just sitting there and typing them all out, but after doing this for two articles I realized how insane this was, and that’s when the scanner borrowing offer was made %)

Once I got SimpleOCR going I started scanning the Heritage Trails, page by page, and getting them converted into text.

In the late morning Michael and I went out to do some yard work. We continued clearing the weedy rock pile from the end of the driveway, and moving the rocks to border one of the trees in the back yard, but it was so hot out. I was barely out there for an hour when I called it quits. Michael stayed out there until about 3pm, and it showed, he got a ton of work done out there. He also decided to order some mulch, so we calculated how much we needed and were able to schedule a delivery for Sunday.

While Michael was still outside working on the yard, I chilled in the A/C and scanned stuff. I pulled out a bunch of family photos to scan as well to break up the day a bit.

After Michael was all indoors and showered, we decided to meet up with Bob for dinner (too hot to cook at home!). So around 4 we left for Unos. The meal was less than impressive, the drin
ks I ordered doubly so (can you put more than a drop of liquor in this, please?), but the company was good, and made for a nice evening. When we got home I hopped online. Michael opened a bottle of red wine and we worked on our computers until it got late. Around 11 I went to bed.

This morning I got up around 8, puttered around until the phone rang around 9. It was the mulch store down the road, asking if it was ok if he dropped the mulch off in 10 minutes. I said it was and rushed downstairs to wake up Michael and get dressed. The mulch delivery started our day of yard work.

I got to work on the garden plots, which I needed to weed, then mulch.

They look so much better, they were so overgrown with weeds, hopefully the mulch will keep that under control. I also spent part of my time out there putting mulch around a couple trees and mulch around the mailbox. I went in around noon, it was too hot.

Michael worked on the back yard, which was the difficult shovel and wheelbarrel work. He filled in all the rock-surrounded plots in the back yard.

It looks so good. Afterwards he did some weeding in the front and put a bunch of mulch in the empty garden plots in the front of the house. He didn’t come inside until after 3.

I finished my Heritage Trails scanning project, and got to work on the website. I already had a skeleton version of it up, but hadn’t filled in much content yet. The very much under construction page can be found here: http://princessleia.com/heritage_trails/

It’ll take some time for me to edit all the articles, SimpleOCR is good, but it still makes mistakes, and I’ll need to read through all of the articles and compare them to the hard copies for accuracy. Then I need to format them in simple HTML (just put paragraph tags around the paragraphs, the rest of the site is a php-driven template). Anyone want to help? %D

*Yawn* Now I think I’ll go start getting dinner ready, if I stay in this chair much longer I might fall asleep.