I’ve been sick these past few days.

It started on Thursday night, diarrhea, YUCK! I went to bed early because my stomach was feeling awful.

Friday I went into work, wasn’t feeling the greatest and let my boss know I might not feel up to staying the whole day. I felt ok all day, and stayed until 5. Michael picked me up and we headed over to ‘s place for movie night. I had a beer and some pizza, and my stomach didn’t protest too much, so I thought I was all better.

Saturday morning I woke up dehydrated with diarrhea AGAIN. Throughout the day I was taking ImmodiumAD and trying to make myself feel better because we had plans with some friends in the evening. So I kept telling myself I’d be fine and we could still go out with friends, but after lunch I didn’t feel so good, and after dinner I just felt awful. We had to cancel our plans.

So yesterday evening was the worst of it. I on my computer and my stomach was killing me, so I went downstairs to watch some tv, lying down hurt, sitting up hurt a little less. I finally broke down and took some Advil, which I had been reluctant to take before because it can be hard on the stomach. Eventually that made me feel good enough to go to sleep.

I hate when my body gets all broken like this! Apparently it’s one strain of the latest flu going around… which I hadn’t been directly exposed to, Michael had (and he’s fine!).

But this morning I feel better. Not quite 100% yet, but close to it.

When I wasn’t feeling miserable yesterday I was able to spend some time working on our internal phonebook. Michael found the old database for our previous phonebook, and I was able to dig up the PHP files. What a mess those php files were! And no formatting! But they worked, and I spent some time putting together CSS and making the pages look nicer. It’s functional now, but there are still some things I’d like to work on with it.

And today… we don’t have plans, at least I’m feeling better.

As I mentioned in a previous entry I want to start managing my time better so I can work on projects. My first step has been compiling a list of projects I want to work on, and I did that this week.

• Write new Address Book for internal use. This would be something running on our home apache server, only accessible from the network. Using PHP and MySQL it’ll have a place to display and sorts addresses, as well as edit the entries. I’ve written one in the past, but it was ugly and didn’t have as much functionality as I wanted.
• Write a “gallery” creation script. I know there are a zillion out there, but I want my own with all the perfect settings. I feed in high res pictures from my camera, it creates large, small and thumbnail images, then puts together a skeletal html page that displays them. I’ll write this in perl or bash scripting.
• Redo the #13thHour site. Some content is out-dated and I’ve had that same design for years. I want to redo the members section completely (surveys are lame) and all the quote pages are old… I probably don’t have time to put together a new quotes page, but I’ll send logs to any #13thHour people who wants to… volunteers?
• Redo Xelium site. This has been a project I’ve wanted to work on for months, but it just hasn’t gotten off the ground, each time we get together to plan things and start we all end up getting busy and the idea rots. We need to really start this someday.
• Improve CSS on princessleia.com. I want write up different CSS “Themes” for different holidays and seasons, so it’s not hard to do (I never even got around to making a V-Day theme this year!).
• #13thHour URLs page. I thought this up last night at movie night when mentioned yet again that he never clicks the links posted in channel. I could write a script to go through R2D2’s logs and grabs urls (and possibly the date and time they were said, but grabbing the date would require some script-foo). Then either put it on the #13thHour site as an RSS feed (optimal, but would require date grabbing) or as a plain html page. I’d tackle this with perl or bash scripting.
• Continue with my OS Experimentation on R2Q5. I want to try an Ubuntu install, a regular debian unstable or testing install, OS Warp 2 install.

I also want to get further into a few excellent computer books I have.

• The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks – I just got this one this week, it’s very nice to have an actual CSS book in my hands finally, the online guides just weren’t doing it for me. And this book has some nice chapters and compatibility notes.
• Perl Core Language Little Black Book – Just got this one this week too, thought I’d pick up the “little” (term used loosely, it’s 500 pages) one to see how I liked it before I got the big one (1328 pages). I keep picking it off my shelf and opening to random pages, I keep finding useful things, so getting more involved with this book would be good.
• Unix Shells by Example – As I’ve mentioned in the past, this is my favorite shell book, but I’ve only actually learned and used a few things, there is much more I want to get into, and I’d like to try out some of the different shells.

Now I’m off to work on some things. *wanders off*

So I have this 45 minute lunch break, during this I’ve been catching up on Livejournal entries, reading theregister.co.uk, boingboing.net and browsing news.google.com… but that is getting old already, what else is out there? What are your favorite news/blog sites?

The other night I was in an IRC channel where one of those ultra-liberal, Michael Moore worpshipping, “The US Sucks” guys[1] was babbling about something. I rolled my eyes and then the song “Sister Suffragette” from the Mary Poppins soundtrack played. That got me thinking.

When the US was founded women and blacks were not treated as equals, and in spite of all it’s wonderful ideals, this country has never been the utopia people today seem to want to think it was. Even I have caught myself saying what a horrible mess this country is in now. But when you take a look at our history we’ve been in a lot worse places as far as civil liberties were concerned (just this past century we’ve had Wilson’s Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during WWI, concentration camps for Japanese in WWII, both Red Scares…). In fact, we’re more informed as a public than we’ve ever been before. Anyone with access to a computer can get a dozen different views on any political subject with a simple google search. And anyone has a chance to have their message heard by dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of others with web publishing.

Now this doesn’t mean that I think the Bush administration is doing good things. No doubt the Patriot Act will be listed with the Espionage and Sedition acts of the past (but certainly of a lesser caliber). Bush is definately pushing this country in the wrong direction as far as civil rights go. The Patriot Act and his aggressive opposition to gay rights, is all bad. What our country needs, has always needed, is progressiveness. In just 200 years we’ve changed this country to something the founding fathers wouldn’t have believed (but which I’m sure some of them would have been proud of).

So the system is a bit broken right now, but it’s nothing we haven’t lived through before. I don’t think this country will be turned into box of oppression anytime soon, there are too many people fighting it. And although I roll my eyes at the extreme liberals who troll around IRC looking for a fight, they’re part of it too. They still have the right to say the things they say (and write about, and make successful documentaries about). When they don’t, it’s time to start getting worried. And even then, we’ve been through it all before.

[1] These people are a topic unto themselves. They have the money and free time to chat on IRC about how much this country sucks. They’re not starving in a 3rd world country or being subjected to an oppressive dictator who’d throw them in prison for saying the things they’re saying. These people just drive me nuts!

So at this new job I’m not doing techie stuff, so my techie fun time is squeezed into the few minutes before work and the couple hours of free time afterwards. So I’m trying to play around with my schedule to fit the most fun stuff in as possible.

I figure I sleep about 8 hours per night (I wish I could cut this down, but the only way to sleep less and not be a zombie is by using caffeine and sleeping pills, which is not a reasonable solution).

I spend 1 hour in the morning getting ready for work: shower, making lunch, etc.

Let’s say 2 hours for commuting.

8.75 hours at work (including 45 minute lunch break, which I’m on now).

1 hour preparing and eating dinner.

Techically this leaves me with 3.25 hours of playtime hours per day. Gosh, that’s not much! Especially since some nights we go out to dinner, some days we have errands to run, and a few nights a week I like to catch my favorite tv shows (Nova on tuesdays, West Wing on wednesdays). And most importantly, there is quality time I want to spend with Michael. So on an average day I get, at most, 2 hours of fun computer time. An hour of that is spent doing email and catching up with friends on IRC and in journals (although I can check journals during this 45 minute lunch break), and once I’m able to tear myself away from that (not an easy task!) I often don’t have enough time to get into any of the projects I want to be working on. Because I don’t have much time I end up getting discouraged and being completely unproductive during the work week. That makes me sad.

I need to fix this.

I think I need to better organize my projects so that I can spend a half hour here and there on them instead of giving up on them. It’s OK to not finish a project in one sitting!

My first step is going to be making a list of all my current projects. Websites I’m working on, half finished shell and perl scripts I have on the shelf, and of course, my “playing with other distros and oses” project.

But right now I need to get back to work.

It started yesterday, I felt like going shopping. Shopping? What the hell? I don’t even like shopping.

Well I didn’t go shopping, friends are busy.

So instead I pulled R2Q5 out of storage to survey him. R2Q5 used to be collocated and we used it as a mailserver, webserver and IRC server, we brought it home in August. Since August it’s been sitting around doing nothing.

R2Q5 had everything to work as a real computer again except a working harddrive, so Michael found me one a voila! I have a computer to test new distros on! It’s only a 450 mhz p3, but it’s got over 300 mb of ram and isn’t a bad little computer.

I got it booted up and decided to mess around with Fedora because I have a bunch of Fedora disks laying around (and a huge Fedora book). First thing I did was update the whole system with up2date, then I played around with it and figured out how to use yum (gosh that’s slow!). I wasn’t impressed with how much time it took me to figure out what sources I should use for yum, not even in the books I have. The box completely locked up while installing firefox from yum, that wasn’t cool. But I got xfce4 running on it and was quite pleased with myself. Then I got back from dinner and the whole thing had locked up again, arg! I’m not sure if it’s Fedora or R2Q5 itself yet, but I think I’m going to try an Ubuntu install soon and see how that works out. Michael also suggested “for a challenge” to see if I could get OS Warp 2 running on it *grin* that might be a fun project.

Michael granted my shopping wish this afternoon by taking me out to the Montgomery Mall. He picked up some clothes he needed and I ventured to find some music. Ended up with the My Fair Lady Soundtrack and the Mary Poppins Sountrack, both of which I’ve had on vinyl but the quality was just awful. I also picked up Disney’s Micky Donald and Goofy “The Three Musketeers” CD for a few bucks at the Disney Store. Yay new music!

When we got home I made dinner, finally got to try that Mushroom-crust Quiche recipe that I’ve been wanting to try all week.

Mushroom-crust Quiche served

Mushroom-curst Quiche “top”

Success! It was delicious, the two of us ate the entire 9in pan full!

1) Melt 3 Tablespoons of butter in a frying pan and cook 1/2 pound coursely chopped mushrooms until they are limp, then add 1/2 cup breadcrumbs and 2 Tablespoons wheat germ. Mix and press mixture into well-greased 9inch round pan.

2) In the same pan melt 2 Tablespoons of butter and cook 7-8 green onions chopped onions until soft, spread over mushroom crust. Spread 1.5 cups (6oz) of Colby Jack cheese over onions.

3) Mix together 1 cup cottage cheese, 3 eggs, 1/4 teaspoon thyme and 1/4 teaspoon marjoram leaves until smooth. Pour into crust. Sprinkle with paprika to taste.

4) Cook at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.

5) Remove from oven and let stand for 10 minutes on a wire rack. Serve!

Yummy.

Last night was movie night. Michael invited his friend Bob, and b2s came up (but not Baerana because she was feeling a bit under the weather), and I also was able to contact who decided to drive up from Delaware.

Earlier in the day Michael and I had gone out to get some beer, and decided on Dogfish Head 60 Minute Ale. It’s local brewery (Delaware), and boy is this was some good ale! I’m glad we tried it. For dinner we ordered a few pizzas, and then settled down to watch some MST3K and Black Books.

Michael went to bed around midnight and Bob went home, so I stayed up until about 4am with b2s and escapenguin talking about all sorts of things. It was really fun %) Yay movie night!

Over the past week I’ve overindulged a bit. Steakhouse last friday with friends, pizza Saturday, then a dinner out with Michael on Monday to celebrate my getting the new job.

To celebrate we ended up a the Road House Grille in Skippack. Michael went for the steak, but I was impressed with their seafood selection and ordered a seafood pasta (Jumbo Lump Crab Meat, Shrimp & Scallops with Fresh Basil & CherryTomatoes in a Roasted Red Pepper Cream Sauce over Black Fettuccine). It was a delicious meal, and there was so much seafood on my plate! Possibly more than actual pasta. Yum. But after dinner I was so full of rich food I decided it was time to take off of eating out for a few days ;)

When we went grocery shopping on Tuesday I picked up the ingredients that I needed to try a few new meals, one of them was Tandoori Chicken, which we had last night:

First I had to prepare the Tandoori Marinade:

3/4 cup low fat plain yoghurt
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup finely minced onion
2 teaspoons minced ginger root
2 teaspoons minced garlic
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons ground bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon red pepper powder

Just mixed all these ingredients together. Then put the 1 pound of skinned chicken breasts in the dish, covered and marinated in the refrigerator for a few hours. After a few hours I took it out of the refrigerator and put it all into an 8×8 baking dish with 2 tablespoons of melted butter. Put it in the oven, uncovered, at 400F for 15 minutes, then lowered it to 350 for another 25 minutes.

When it was done I was surprised to see how it had gone from a nice creamy sauce to a more watery one. I prepared some parboiled rice to go with it, but since the sauce wasn’t creamy it ended up being runny and a bit to spicy for that type of rice (which isn’t dry enough to soak up the liquid). I also made up some Onion Kulcha, but that didn’t come out too well, probably because I don’t have a cast iron skillet to cook it properly, and again, with the watery sauce it didn’t make a very good side. How disappointing! At least the chicken was good, I just need to find better sides.

We also picked up a box of No Pudge brownie mix. I’m not really into the whole “No fat” “Low fat” thing, rather disillusioned to the growing national obesity rate when we have more fat reduced/free foods than ever. So I always eat fat full things and know full well what I’m putting in my body. But hey, these no-pudge brownies had a cute pig on the cover and we were buying yoghurt (the only thing you add to the brownie mix) anyway, so we decided to give them a shot.

I made them up last night (except I used the low fat yogurt I bought for the Tandoori Chicken, so they’re “low fat” instead of “non-fat”) the verdict? They aren’t the same as normal brownies, have a darker chocolate taste to them and it seems like something is missing. But they are yummie chewy and great for being low in fat.

I hope google doesn’t become evil, they do so many cool things.

On Tuesday they launched maps.google.com/ for the US. It’s got the best maps I’ve ever seen online. And they’re so slick! Not done with flash or java, it’s a very impressive piece of web craftsmanship. I want to box up it’s excellence and keep it all to myself! I spent quite a lot of time last night playing around with the maps.

I got my latest box of books from O’Reilly, and one of the books is the Second Edition of Google Hacks. It’s so much different than the first! The first spent a lot of time focusing on the Google API (which is great, I use it now in R2D2, but the second edition goes into less programming oriented things and more images, news, groups, and gmail! I dove into the gmail section as soon as I got the book.

I knew about GmailFS, the linux filesystem for gmail, but I didn’t know about GmailDrive. So I tried out GmailFS but couldn’t get it running (I’m sure I’ll figure it out, it was written with Debian in mind and Gentoo might do something different with mounting, or python script placing, or something…). I then thought I’d give Gmail Drive a shot, so I booted into Windows.

All you do is download the zip, extract, and run the .exe. You’re then presented with:

Oh, it can’t be this easy.

But it is! Just type in your username and password, and you have a gmail “drive” as seen here. Then you can move files to the “GmailDrive” like any other drive, within limitations. Since it stores the files as attachments there is a filesize limitation, and there is a filename length limit as week.

I moved an mp3 and one of the default images that comes with XP onto the GmailDrive (see here). Then logged into gmail: see. I opened up the “mail” that had the Sunset.jpg: see. Just like a normal attachment! Very cool.

What’s the point? Well none really, I don’t need more storage space, and there are probably tons of security concerns. It was just a geeky fun thing to do %)

Yesterday, while we were our shopping, called us an invited us to a “Super Bowl Party” at our friends Barry and Rae’s place.

Since we were in the area anyway, we went to Whole Foods to pick up some cheeses to bring to the party. We picked up some: Black Mountain Cheese (UK), Wallace & Gromit’s Wensleydale (UK), and Chimay Cheese (Belgium). Mmm cheese! Also picked up an herb and garlic cheese spread, a couple types of crackers, some sesame bread and tomato hummus. When I got home I put it all on a platter and around 6 we headed over to our friend’s place.

The Super Bowl was on TV, but no one was watching it the whole time, most of us played games. Uno, Disney Trivia, Scrabble. The cheese went over well and we all had a nice time. It was nice to see everyone.

This morning I had a job interview. It took about a half hour, during which I learned a great deal more about the position, and was confident that the job would suit me. It’s just an office job, but I can use my brain! And it’s for a big company, which the woman interviewing me said there was much room to grow within. That’s what I wanted to hear.

After the interview I called the temp agency and told them I was interested in taking the job if they’d hire me, and this afternoon I got a call back saying that I start on February 14th. It’s still through the temp agency, and technically it is a temp job, but it’s an indefinite assignment and most of the jobs the temp agency sends there end in hiring. Yay!