I spent a better part of the morning cleaning the bathroom walls. As I might have talked about in a previous post there was a bit of mold growing near the ceiling in the bathroom since we moved in that has been a serious pain to clean. It’s semi-gloss paint, and in the past I’ve tried Windex, Clorox Bleach Cleaner, Scrubbing Bubbles, a mix of a little household chlorine bleach and a little water, dishsoap and hot water. It was getting quite frustrating, since nothing was really working. So today I was determined to tackle the problem again. I decided I’d try some of the concentrated orange cleaner that we use to clean the tile floors, and that actually didn’t do a bad job for getting the newer dark spots up, I spent a little over an hour with this and once I had gone over each area at least twice I got off my chair and looked around. It was definately cleaner, but you could still tell there was mold up there.

So, frustrated, I came upstairs to have a bit of a talk with Dr. Google. I went through all sorts of message boards that suggested all the things I had already done. I knew there was some sort of mold remover you can use, but apparently it’s not for painted surfaces. Then I came across a post that suggested a mix of at least half household chlorine bleach, half water. This was a MUCH stronger bleach concentration than I had used in the past, and definately stronger than they generally recommend you using. But I was really at the end of my options for getting rid of this mold that NEEDED to be removed. I decided to give it a shot.

I got out some nice plastic gloves and grabbed a sponge and some very bleachy water. To my delight and surprise it did the trick! So I spent about 45 minutes scrubbing all sorts of areas around the bathroom that needed it. Afterwards the whole bathroom stunk of bleach (well, still does) and so did I, and I took a long shower. I’m very happy with it all. Now we can consider going about repainting it, with mold resistant paint!

This afternoon I ate some lunch and sat down to do some more research about summer flowers, and weeds. I mentioned my search in IRC, and the woman I know who is a botanist has this week off, so she had some time to spend helping me out with my garden! I went outside and took a bunch of photos, then let her look through them so I could find out what was weeds and what was real plants. Turns out that everything I “wasn’t sure if it is a weed or not” is a weed. Tons and tons of weeds in my garden! So I think tomorrow I’ll go outside and pull lots of weeds. We had a nice long talk and she suggested a whole bunch of flowers that I can put in various parts of my garden, how exciting! Lots of purple and blues and whites that I think I’d really like, all perennials. She also suggested leaving a couple plots open for annuals that I might enjoy. I also got to ask her all sorts of questions about caring for plants after their flowers fall off (apparently daffodil’s can have their dead flowers removed when they die, but they need the green parts to continue to absorb sun energy to make it through the winter), and told me that tulip bulbs usually only last about 5 years, I had no clue! She also recommended that I pick up (or borrow from a library) the Pictorial Guide to Perennials by M. Jane Coleman Helmer and Karla S. Decker Hodge. I think I just might %)

Now to go make dinner. *wanders off*

It was a pretty typical Sunday. I did some work in my veggie garden and it seems the only things that are growing are the cucumbers and green beans, and they are growing all over the place, hee. Still no veggies yet, but I still need to wait a couple weeks. I hopped online a few times to figure out exactly what everything was (“oh good cucumbers DO have yellow flowers!”). I still didn’t have a ton of luck identifying everything, so I cleaned out everything I knew was weeds, and left some of the other stuff, I’ll see how it all grows and I’ll be much more prepared for next year.

I actually did significant work on Munch’s webpage. It’s really just a small page, but I kept changing the layout because I wasn’t happy, then needed to look for content and take some photos. I will share when I’m done and it’s set up on it’s nice little subdomain. While I was looking around for random Oscar information I came across a website about them that a woman in the Philly area made, and she had a couple stories about going into Wal-Mart stores and being horrified by how they kept their fish. I don’t really recall the fish department there so I started doing some searches and it seems that Wal-Mart has this horrible horrible reputation for caring for their live animals! Now I dislike Wal-Mart anyway, for several reasons, but neglecting animals is just not cool. So Wal-Mart now is officially on the “stores I hate” list.

I wasn’t really on IRC much today until this evening, just because I was doing all sorts of research online (and I get distracted by things that interest me on website often and end up looking at supernovas when I plan on searching for green beans). But one of the server owners on Xelium left me a message asking if I was interested in becoming an oper again. They told me that they had considered adding all of us from R2Q5 back, but figured that Michael was too busy (which is true) and our other two opers never were too involved in the first place (madragoran has work and his own server to oper on, and somewhat surprisingly Peacimowen is just too busy). So I figured I’ll probably accept. Being a normal oper is definately less work than being a server owner, no worrying about configs, no need to help write up regexs to ban certain scripts, and best of all, no worrying about having to deal with ddos attacks, that’s the owner’s job!

I finished The Secret of Life today, great book, perfect ending. And finally finished The Metaphysical Club (and loaned it to Vehicle00) the other day. I’ll definately have to read it again after I do a bit more research into the people involved with 19th century philosophy. I was able to keep up with the civil war ideas, and the science ideas, but philosphy, gosh I hardly knew anything about Holmes and Dewey, or Pierce or James. I’m sure I would enjoy the book much more if I had bit more background, it was just too much information too quickly for me to swallow, even though it took me over a month to read the book (nearly all of which was wading through 19th century philosophy).

I’m going to go get sleepy now. *wanders off*

When we first got Munch he had a rough couple of weeks. During these weeks he didn’t eat too much and I started to get worried. I did some searches online to find out the cause, and all I could find relating to them eating was to be careful not to overfeed them, because they love to beg. Well this certainly wasn’t my Oscar! I even put off the development of a little website for him because I was worried he wouldn’t make it.

Well I have some good news, he seems to be doing fine now! I fed him a bit in the middle of the day yesterday because he looked hungry, and today every time I walk past the tank he’s begging, just like a regular little Oscar! Yay Munch!

Caligula is doing much better too. He seems to have completely recovered from his surgery, his cold has cleared up, and from the way he’s been eating I’m quite sure that his teeth aren’t bothering him much anymore. He’s back to his old self again, even if he still is a bit annoyed with me because I have to give him liquid antibiotics until they are completely gone, and he hates that. He helped with laundry yesterday, tried to attack me to get some of my lunch this afternoon, and is sleeping on my lap right now so I don’t think he holds too much of a grudge anymore.

I’m glad this week is over. Going to make spaghetti for dinner now *wanders off*

*Takes a deep breath* Yesterday was quite a day. Everything I have to say is important, so I’ll just take it chronologically.

I was going through email on Tuesday, and rediscovered an email sent to me about 3 weeks ago with instructions on how to install UT GOTY Edition in Redhat and Slackware. That made me decide to update my Installing Unreal Tournament GOTY Edition In Linux How-To. I put his stuff on an additional page, and that inspired me to look into installing it in gentoo. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was very simple to do in Gentoo, the installer is in emerge, the umodpacks are in emerge! All you need to do is unmask a couple UT packages, emerge, and follow the simple directions (put in cd, mount drive, etc). But just for consistancy I wrote up some directions and put them up on the site. I love Gentoo!

Unfortunately I was in a terrible mood most of the day yesterday. Not really depressed just… feeling upset. It was a lot of things that got to me, and I’m sure recieving the big bill from my emergency room visit didn’t help any. It’s great how the medical community rapes people who lack medical insurance.

By the time Michael got home I had managed to improve my mood a bit. I read for a bit, and a little after 7 we ordered a couple pizzas and waited for , (Vehicle00), and (Kati) to show up. They arrived around 7:30. The plan was for Michael to install Gentoo on Vehicle’s box. Kati brought some knitting because the guys thought it would be great for us to knit together (or something?). I must admit that some of my bad mood all day was due to this, I am really a beginner at knitting and I was afraid that Kati was some master knitter, and I am often crazy-shy around people I don’t know. I ended up deciding that I’d just tell her right off that I was lousy at knitting and hadn’t done it in 6 months. To my surprise this was the perfect approach, apparently she’s something of a beginner too! She was worried about the same thing I was. We really didn’t have trouble talking (except maybe I laughed too much, damn nervous habits!). She’s a really great person, I was happy with how nicely we got along. I spent a lot of time talking with Vehicle too, he’s cool in real life %) escapenguin was definately the person I saw the least, since he was mostly hanging out with Michael (“Probably telling geeky shell jokes,” Vehicle speculated). But everyone enjoyed playing with Caligula, who is doing much better, and I was thrilled to see him running around and jumping again.

Time, pleia2, Vehicle00, escapenguin, Kati

The evening was long, more work on Vehicle’s system needed to be done than Michael previously thought, so it was around midnight when we were all saying “oh crap it’s late” and decided that they’d head home and Michael would drop off the computer sometime later this week when it was finished.

Sometime during the night Xelium got attacked. Not too sure exactly how it happened, but we decided to shut down R2Q5. To be honest I’m a bit relieved, there are too many risks with running an IRC server these days, and I have so many other projects to work on, I don’t need to be worrying about a silly server. Being an all-powerful IRCop really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Besides, it’s great to have r2q5 back home with us, if Time doesn’t have other plans for it I might be able to use it as a fun testing box! What does bother me (and seriously pisses me off) is that people attack
IRC servers in the first place. It’s really fucking lame.

R2Q5 is home now.

And just in case you’re worried, #13thHour is fine, it’s still on the Xelium network. Rather than connecting directly to r2q5.xelium.net (or irc.clockbot.net or clockbot.xelium.net) you will have to connect via either: fire.xelium.net or odin.xelium.net We’ll have irc.xelium.net working properly again once the DNS pool is updated to reflect the servers still on the network.

*wanders off*

Well I was hardly online at all this weekend. Michael had a bunch of work to do on both Saturday and Sunday and we had a bunch of errands to run. Saturday morning I gave the vet a call because Caligula had a bit of a cough. We figured it was from the medication at first, but I was quite worried because watching a kitty cough is so sad %( The vet asked us to bring him in that afternoon, so at 2pm we were in the vet’s office. We were also a bit concerned because it seemed like he actually had physical difficulty keeping food in his mouth to chew it. So the vet took a look at him, and it seems he must have caught a cold from one of the animals when he went in for surgery earlier in the week. She also discovered that he’s teething! Poor guy, what a week! He’s on some antibiotics for the cough and it seems to be clearing up.

After taking him to the vet, we decided to go out to the mall because Michael and I needed some clothes. A bunch of stores were having big sales, so we picked up a few things we didn’t plan on, and Michael got me a copy of Brother Bear, yay! I ended up getting a bit of a headache from standing near the cologne in Strawbridges for too long. We decided to drop by CompUSA to look at wireless NICs for my laptop. We figure we can wait around until spoofee has a wireless router for a reasonable price. So until then my laptop is still offline, which makes it rather useless since I can’t move files to and from it. We figured we’d look for a wired NIC while we were there… and it seems they didn’t have any. CrapUSA. My head was bothering me a bit more, so we hopped over to Barnes & Noble to get a couple White Chocolate Mochas, mmm. I picked up a copy of Friday to replace the copy of ‘s that Caligula ate. Then went into Michael’s work for about half an hour so Michael could do some physical work on some boxes. It wasn’t until after 9 that we left and headed home, on the drive home my headache came back pretty badly, when we finally got home I took some advil and crawled in bed. Michael made us some Boca Pizzas, and by the time they were ready my headache had subsided a bit and we sat down and started to watch Brother Bear, then Dr Who.

Yesterday was pretty slow, I got about halfway through The Secret Of Life by Paul McAuley which is turning out to be a great book, nice mix of science and science fiction (it’s written by a biologist). I’ll definately have to read more of his stuff in the future. I also picked up The Metaphyscial Club again, the first two (of five) parts were really great and a breezed through them, getting into the civil war, and science in the 1900s, but these last 3 parts are pretty deep with philosophy and sociology that I know very little about, so it’s a lot to take in. Still interesting though.

We did some grocery shopping then came home and had some baked potatoes for dinner. Then sat down and watched Brother Bear with Tuke and Rutt’s commentary (the moose, voiced by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis respectively), it was pretty funny %) And watched lots of bonus features, yay!

Today has been a nice day, I think I’ll go for a walk. *wanders off*

Apparently I’m quite stubborn when it comes to important change on my desktop. It took me months to switch to Gentoo after Michael said it kicked ass. It’s taken me a little while to try out the xfce4 window manager, despite Michael raving about how cool it is. I think I just don’t want to waste my time with disappointment if things don’t work the way I want them to. My buddy b2s from #13thHour said that he recommended it a couple months back.

Well they were absolutely right, it kicks ass. I haven’t fallen in love with a window manager this quickly since Enlightenment. I’ve always used enlightenment on my primary workstation, maybe it’s time for a change.

Oh, and it has a cute mouse mascot.

I still have some xfce4 customizing to do, but here’s a screenshot of how much I’ve played so far:

http://www.princessleia.com/images/MyImages/screen/xfce4-2.jpg

Now to work on keybindings…

And a quick note, if you want to try this out make sure you’re going with xfce4. I accidentally installed the regular xfce package in gentoo earlier and it was a pretty horrible window manager…

It’s supposed to get up to 87 today. It’s been like this all week, hot, damp, and thunderstorms in the evening. I HATE this weather. We live in a damp area anyway, and on days like this I just want to go and hide in the air conditioned rooms forever. Then of course when I leave these rooms the heat and humidity feel so much more oppressive. Bleh, yuck.

I’ve been working on a few websites these past few days, making updates that I need to make, worked on the xelium site, made some changes to wallaceandgromit.net so that the news is on the index page. I’m working on a page for our Oscar fish, Munch, thinking of giving him a subdomain like Caligula has.

Lunchtime. *wanders off*

This morning the power went out for over an hour and a half. I was able to shut down my computer, and Michael’s once I realized it would be more than a flicker. Shut down the power switch on our Windows box (poor thing isn’t on a UPS though!). I left the firewall (minute) running, figuring that since I had shut down every box I could get to it from internally that a hard shutdown by myself would be just as bad as the power in it’s UPS dying and it shutting down that way. And by leaving it running it would have a small chance of surviving the outage. After an hour and 30 minutes the UPS on minuge stopped beeping. Two minutes later the power came back on. I waited around a bit before turning my computer back on, figured it was safe and logged onto minute. I was able to resume my screen session… the box never went down! Woohoo! The DSL modem, switch, and minute all survived over an hour and a half on that UPS. It was great.

During the outage I was completely without a telephone because we hooked up that new cordless one, which is all neat and electronic and needing power. I did some looking for our corded telephone, crawling around in the storage areas and was able to find it finally. Michael said we’d probably want to plug it in somewhere up here, so I hooked that up today. Right now it’s a cord coming out of one of the doors to storage, and the phone is sitting on top of my computer, I’m sure michael can find a prettier way of setting it up when he has a chance. But now, for the first time in oh so long, we have two phones in the house, one of which can work during a power outage.

I played with Caligula a bunch today, he’s very playful, but still a little congested, and he’s not very hungry. It was getting quite warm in the house, so this afternoon me and Caligula retreated to the comfort of this air conditioned computer room. I spent the afternoon poking around some of google’s stuff. I noticed that they ran blogger,com. Free to sign up, why not? So I decided to play around with it, it’s almost completely customizable (still has a little banner ad at the top) and it definately has some issues (like being unable to properly count the number of posts I have, my timezone is different so it doesn’t count ones it sees as “posted in the future”). But I decided it’d be a nice place to keep my book reviews. There is an XML feed, but it’s sort of broken, you can go to it and view it as xml, but when fed into my reader it gives me errors.

While writing book reviews I thought of the website I had for #Andor (a Fantasy and Scifi book channel on Xelium). I had never liked it, not even when I first created it, and kept meaning to get around to redesigning, but I just had no inspiration. So this afternoon I decided what the site needed was dynamic content! New stuff that changed! We needed book reviews. Now I could have gone and written a php backend, played with .htaccess files, given logins, set up a database, etc etc etc and spent 3 days on this project that no one would appreciate, and I have no guarentee would even *use* Or I could take the easy way out. I set up a LiveJournal Community, . Since I had created this, I needed to add a link to the website. Well the #Andor website was crappy and there was no place to add a link that would be easily visable. So I scrapped the whole thing (well, it was only a single page anyway) and created a whole new page. It’s simple and boring, but it gets the point across and is quite clear. #Andor’s new site is here: http://www.princessleia.com/irc/andor/

So I wrote up a bunch of book reviews of books I’d read recently for my new blogger site, and posted those and some other reviews of books I enjoyed on the livejournal community.

I was in IRC and a friend of mine who is spending a couple months in Sweden came online. She’s been keeping a blog of her adventures there, and in her post today she described “Swedish Oddities” wh
ich is some strange stuff about Swedes and Sweden that she’s noticed while she has been staying there. I think the funniest one on her list was:

When eating cereal, the milk is always poured in the bowl first, then the cereal is added so it is floating on top.

What are they thinking? What an odd way to make up a bowl of cereal! I’ll have to try it and see if it makes as big of a mess as I believe it will…

Michael should be home soon, need to make some dinner. Probably tacos. And we have ice cream for dessert, yay!

*wanders off*

We picked up Caligula from the vet last night around 6:30. I didn’t realize that I recognised Caligula’s meow until then, when they were bringing him up the hallway and I heard his little mew and I knew that was my kitty. Poor guy was all sleepy and out of it. He certainly wasn’t happy about where he was. He did good though, and the vet tech said they had a nice day with him because it’s such a treat to have a rare type of kitty staying there. We brought him home and it seemed he was still recovering from the ketamine. Last night he spent the entire night sleeping in our bed with us.

This morning we got up and Michael brought me to the doctor’s office at 10. I had my stitches removed, and it didn’t hurt at all! The doctor was impressed with how quickly it’s healed up, and how good the stitches were put in. It bled a bit when he took one out (pulled some scar tissue with it) so he told me it’d be good to put Neosporin on it for a few more days. Yay my whole ordeal is finished and as positively as it possibly could be!

I’ve spent a lot of time downstairs with Caligula today. When we got back from the doctor’s he was coughing a little, and his purr and meow were a bit weird, like he was congested. His eyes were a bit teary and he was sleepy too. Of course I got all worried and called the vet %) She assured me that it’s not terribly uncommon for that to happen since he’s still working the ketamine out of his system. As long as he’s sounding better tomorrow we should be fine. It’s still hard to hear my poor kitty all congested and gooey-eyed %(

I logged into Yahoo! this morning to check on the settings of a Yahoo! Group I’m maintaining for a project, and I was surprised by Yahoo’s new mail login, and what’s this… 100 mb of space? Hah! Spooked by gmail it seems. Now that invites for gmail are all over the place it seems that Yahoo is afraid of not being everyone’s favorite portal. I admit that I’ve had, and used my Yahoo! account since 1999, and I have generally been pleased with it’s portal options, I have My Yahoo! all customized, and sometimes it’s just easier to look there. But Google News is quite nice, and I’m using Yahoo stuff less and less. But this sparked my interest in Yahoo’s plans, I found this article which seems to indicate that Yahoo! will begin cycling dormant yahoo accounts so that people can use them once again. That’s pretty cool of them. It’s interesting that advertising on a free email account can pay for 100 mb of storage per user, I’ve certainly never clicked one of their ads.

Now I’m going to go spend some time with my kitty. *wanders off*

Just got a call from the vet, Caligula made it through surgery fine, he’s doing well and we get to pick him up when Michael comes home %)