Some days when looking for a job seem horribly dismal and depressing.

Some days when looking for a job are kickass and happy.

I’ve had far too much of the former, but yesterday I had my first of the latter, and that put me in a really good mood. Of course I still don’t have a job, but my outlook is a bit brighter than it was before.

Late in the afternoon I was talking to Baerana (b2s‘s significant other) in IRC and she asked me if Michael and I wanted to come over for dinner to eat Chili. Chili has beef in it %( I politely declined, but was disappointed, so I mentioned it to Time. “Can we BYOF?” he said. Excellent idea! So I offered to bring some tacos (w/ homemade tortillas), and we planned to meet around 6 at their place in Media. I’d met b2s before, but it was a first for meeting Baerana, she’s great! I’ll have to find some way to convince her to come to a philly chix meeting sometime, since she has super linux brains. And we also got to meet Nibbler Bunny!He’s so adorable %) I love rabbits, and he’s a nice one, and he’s a houserabbit so they let him run around everywhere.

We had a really nice night, and they fed us ice cream and cookies. Yay!

Today I spent most of the day cleaning. I did my bi-yearly washing of the comforters too, they were so covered in cat fur! Caligula doesnt shed much, but when he does it’s often when he’s snuggled with us in bed. I was so happy to pull it out of the dryer all fur-free. I put folded it up and put it on the bed and went to do other things. I came back about an hour later to put the clean sheets on the bed and I saw this:

He’s lucky he’s cute. Couldn’t he at least wait until I had finished making the bed? %) Cats!

I installed gimp2 from unstable the other day. It’s pretty nice. Very clean looking, and when you write text on an image it actually writes it *on the image* so you don’t need to figure out sizing and then put it on the image. Also, the antialiasing of the fonts is so much better, no more clunkly looking fonts on my images.

My laptop is doing good. Today I fixed the resolution, so now it’s 16 bit and running at 1024×768, woo! Michael discovered that there is a neomagic driver out now, which allows for this better performance, back when I was running Debian it was running with 8bit graphics and only 800×600. *Pats laptop* this laptop is such a pain, but some days it does it’s job properly.

We’re heading over to ‘s now for pizza and movie night, woo!

*wanders off*

After noticing that many employers listed “javascript” among the required scripting tools they were looking for I thought “Self, why don’t you know any javascript?”

Answering this question goes back to my early days of making webpages. My first website was made on angelfire.com in 1998. It had some very cheesy elements, those horrible tiled backgrounds that came with every angelfire site, I used the marquee tag and put images in it, and tables confused me. At one point a section of my site was made out of FRAMES! Oh the horrors of those early websites. But I was determined to learn more, so during the summer of 1999 when I first travelled to Philadelphia to watch my cousin for the summer I wanted to spend some time learning more web stuff, like javascript.

I printed out tons of stuff that summer, HTML Guides, mIRC help file (for mirc scripting back when R2D2 was an mIRC bot), and this big huge javascript tutorial. I got most of my objectives that summer completed, but javascript hounded me.

The trouble was compatibility. Javascript is happy with Netscape, and does stupid things or nothing on older versions of IE. Then IE had it’s own “JScript” which was quite similar to javascript, but didn’t work in Netscape. Grr. After wading through a few pages about javascript frames and layers, trying them out and realizing that I had to write twice as much code to get things working properly with Netscape AND IE, I gave up. I threw all these javascript tutorals into a folder and forgot about them, because JAVASCRIPT IS CRAP.

Fast forward 4 years. PHP has taken the place of a lot of stuff that javascript used to commonly handle. I push away silly stuff like layering and evil frames, Who needs javascript? Javascript is so last Millennium!

Then it’s 2004 and I’m working at a web development company, I keep coming across bits of javascript in their code. It’s just simple stuff to detect browsers where php is not enabled, or making pretty image buttons that have mouseover effects, or making certain size popup windows. It was all simple stuff, but I harbored my hatred for javascript, so I didn’t pay much attention to it, just copied what I needed to copy and hacked my way through those bits.

So now I’m looking for a job, and they want javascript. FINE! So I sat down with a javascript tutorial today.

Wow. Javascaript is easy.

After all this work I’ve done with perl and php in the past couple years javascript isn’t looking nearly as scary. So after just a day devoted to exploring common, modern javascript I feel confident that I have a good handle on it, at least enough to survive using it on any sort of site. Yay!

I mentioned this adventure in javascript to a friend of mine and he concurred that there was a crazy javascript/jscript/vbscript bundle of evil back in the day that turned a lot of people off to any sort of <script>. Interested in this conflict I came upon this article, which is a very interesting article about javascript, including *why* it’s called JAVAscript:

All right, let’s hear it for marketing!

I installed xfce4 on my laptop today, it worked on my first try starting it, and it runs pretty well. Then I thought “ooh I should take a screenshot.” But then I realized that I don’t have any screenshot software installed, and firefox won’t be done compiling for another 7 years or so, so I pulled out my camera.

And since I can’t take out my camera without taking pictures of my kitten:
Caligula sleeping during the day so he has enough energy to jump on my head tonight while I’m trying to sleep.

I decided to spend some time this morning playing around with WordPress. I figured the experience with such a packaged php blog system would be good, having blogs imbedded in webpages is a popular thing.

First thing I needed to do was get an apache server with php and mysql. Unfortunately for me no such box existed that I can play with, so I went ahead and installed them here on my workstation. I won’t be able to share my lovely internal blog system, but I don’t really intend to host one myself right now (princessleia.com gets too much spam for me to want to deal with it).

Installing apache2 + mysql + php4 was pretty easy in Gentoo, except I forgot the mysql USE flag the first time and had to recompile mod_php. Then there was just one line in one file to edit get php working, which is a bit less than I had to do previously (of course the last time I set this up it was about 2 years ago on debian stable, and that was apache 1.something). Then got wordpress going.

I can see how this could nicely be morphed into the center of a whole website, editing the style is very easy, and editing the html for the pages can be done in the browser itself.

*wanders off*

The following image is a screenshot from a section of http://objective.jesussave.us/kidz.html

I am really not sure what to say, except they forgot to mention the part about how we eat babies.

Yes, this site is serious, Michael clicked around it a bunch last night to make sure it wasn’t a joke. The spinning sheep head at the top still makes me laugh.

It’s sad how Christian groups like this do more harm to their cause then good by spreading incorrect and offensive information about other groups of people.

Of course now that I made a post about it they can say “HAH! See you’re bitter!”

EDIT: Apparently there is a bunch of net chatter about whether this site really is real or not. Still, it’s worth sharing for sheer amusment %)

The battle with my laptop + NIC is finally over!

Final giant hurdle was earlier this week. Michael went ahead and started installing gentoo, and on one of the bootups it was going crazy kernel panicking. Then he couldn’t mount the drive or do anything to make it respond properly. Wheehoo dead harddrive! So he had a spare laptop harddrive and ended up putting that in and doing the Gentoo install on that. For the install he put his wireless card in it “just to get it going” and things went great. So now my laptop has a basic gentoo install on it with a wireless card.

What of the other NIC? Michael got it working basicallywith a kernel patch, proper firmware and tweaking on his box. He said he might try to duplicate the process on my box, but there were so many little things that were annoying with the process that he doesn’t want to do that just yet. Fine with me %) Yay I have a wireless laptop! Next step is to get a window manager on there and compile the proper apps.

It’s so nice to have my laptop talking to the world again. It’s rather useless when I can’t move files off it.

Of course since all our NICs are working nicely and happily again Michael’s power adapter for his laptop dies. Doh. Had to grab a replacement yesterday on our way to a wedding of Michael’s cousin (who I had never met).

Well it wasn’t a wedding exactly. They were married last year, but I guess it was a tiny event, so this was a “Renewal of Vows” and a reception at a hotel in Bensalem for family and friends to attend. It was nice, even if it was a family event where I had to meet all sorts of people I had never met before (and attempt to remember at least half their names, it helps that there are a lot of Jenns and Elizabeths). The food was pretty good too. We stayed from about 6-9, since things were winding down a bit by then.

On the way home we stopped at krispy kreme, which recently opened a store in Montgomeryville. People who work at the Montgomeryville Krispy Kreme are much nicer than the ones in NE Philly, but I guess that can be expected. Mmmm doughnuts.

We got home and I watched Dr. Who, finally the last episode of Trial of a Time Lord! I’m so glad I found a PBS channel that plays a couple episodes a week, there are so many that I’ve missed.

Oh, I realized I never mentioned it, but we did end up getting Munch a new tank the other night. Looks similar to the old one, but it’s a little skinnier, which means the lid from the old one doesn’t fit properly, arg. Still, it’s probably a good thing we got the new tank when we did, Munch was looking all miserable and pale. He’s feeling better and eating again now. Yay Munch!

*wanders off*

I only had these cards out of this bigger box for about 2 minutes before he decided to climb in it and get comfy. At least he’s not eating the box.

Also got this picture when I printed up an invoice, he was stalking the printer, I thought he was going to grab my paper in his teeth and run off with it when it was done printing.

It seems I spoke too soon, he’s now trying to eat the cardboard box.

I ended up with a pretty bad headache yesterday and got nothing done. I hate days like that, headaches are horrible and boring. You’re in pain and terribly bored, watching tv is the only reasonable option, and most of the time that hurts your head too. So Michael came home last night and just ordered a pizza and we watched some tv. Bleh, I hate headaches.

This morning I woke up headache free, and realized what slacking off on a day of housework looks like. I never even took out the trash (Michael did)! Ugh.

I spent some more time revamping wallaceandgromit.net to brush up on my php skills. Made the menus more dynamic, which I’m quite happy with. I’m also pulling together a portfolio of websites I’ve worked on, which should be a nice suppliment to my resume, and I should have one anyway.

Someone in IRC menioned Vampire the Masquerade this afternoon (actually referring to the computer game version), and that reminded me that I have a few V:tM books on my shelf. Two version of Ravnos Clanbook (v2 and 3 I believe), a copy of “World of Darkness: Gypsies” and a copy of the “Book of Nod.” I highly doubt I’m going to be playing this game ever again, so I hopped on ebay to see how much I could get for these. The clanbooks seem to sell at around $3-10 each, didn’t even find a copy of WoD:Gypsies, and the Book of Nod is fetching about $4. I should probably sell these. Then while thinking in that same vein, I pulled out my Magic cards. Mostly they suck, but again, are they going to do anything but gather dust on my shelves for the rest of my life? It’s fun to pull them out and look at every year or so, but I’m sure someone else could enjoy them more. I’m considering putting them up on cardshark.com (which I’ve bought through before) and trying to sell them, or maybe find a card shop in this area who can give me an estimate to the worth of my rare and foil binder and boxes full of commons/uncommons.

It’s a little sad realizing that such gaming days are over. I’m just not interested it in anymore, and the people I used to play 8 hour RPG sessions with, and ride to tournaments with are in New York, and I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.

Going to make dinner now.

*wanders off*

It was not a good weekend.

On Friday (the 13th, appropriately) Michael and I were sitting upstairs relaxing and watching some Red Dwarf after Michael’s tough week. I decided I wanted to eat a brownie, so we walked downstairs and I heard a water noise.

THE FISHTANK HAD ANOTHER LEAK!!!

F#@$#!!!

Ok, so we somewhat expected this would happen, we noticed the glass separating and the caulk stretching, Michael intended to fix it this weekend.

So at 9pm we’re covered in fish water cleaning up this watery mess, and just glad that we caught it in time. It was after 10 by the time we had finished cleaning up, and we were both in a pretty lousy mood and went to bed.

Saturday morning Michael started to fix it, and while he was putting the caulking on it one of the panes of glass cracked

F#@$#!!!

This is not something that can be repaired. It was near the bottom of the tank, so too much pressure would be on it even if we tried to patch it, and it’d look awful. We’d need another tank, over $100. Sigh.

The rest of Saturday Michael went to help pack to move, and I stayed home and mowed the lawn. It just wasn’t a very happy day. Sunday was not so perfect either, I just wanted to crawl into a cave and sleep.

We did decide that I need to seriously look for a real job, for a lot of reasons: savings, happiness, success, independence. I might get into it more in a friends-only entry sometime.

So this morning I got up and started looking for work. I have a recently created resume, which still needs some work, but at least it’s up to date. I logged onto a few job hunting sites and started exploring what skills are currently in demand. I decided that I need to definately brush up on my PHP skills, I haven’t touched them in far too long and I know I’ve gotten rusty. I need to pull together a portfolio of sites I’ve done the primary work on, and I need to through my current sites and make sure they’re looking good and properly validating.

This afternoon I spent a bunch of time moving wallaceandgromit.net from all .html to all .php. I had put off doing this because I was afraid of breaking external links to the site, but it’s something I needed to do and better do it now than sometime close to the movie release date next year, when I expect more traffic. I redid the look of the news articles so they’re looking much more spiffy, and I went through and validated the site’s HTML and CSS. I’m considering putting a mySQL backend to the news to get me back into using mySQL again, but we’ll see.

While at the philly chix meeting last week Erin mentioned a mozilla web developer extention that she particularly liked. I surfed through mozdev.org and found it, aptly named Web Developer Extension. And I must say, I’m quite pleased, it does lots of cool stuff. Simple to validate a page, ways to make it put borders around table cells (good for when tables get out of hand), ways to see the page without images and styling, ways to see it easily in different resolutions (by resizing the brower to proper sizes), a way to populate form fields (nice for testing forms and you don’t have to fill them in for each test!) and all sorts of little neat things. It’s very nice.

We need to buy a fishtank tonight, Munch hates living in a bucket.

*wanders off*

I had a good day yesterday. I ended up going into work with Michael because I had a philly chix meeting in the area at night, and having Michael drive all the way home to pick me up is silly. I parked myself at a computer in the corner and intended to do some reading and catching up on emails and reading journals all day. So I was sitting there and one of the managers dropped by and asked if I was interested in doing any work. Ah! They haven’t called me since May to do any work, but I come in for a non-work day and they have work for me. Of course I accepted. It was only about 2 hours of work, but I was glad to do it. And it felt good to do a little work again.

After work was the philly chix meeting, which was much fun. I got to tell them about my laptop woes, and all sorts of fun stuff. Most exciting (for me anyway) was when we were talking about ways to find artists (photographers, writers, cartoonists) and I mentioned the e-volution audio project, and that it needed writers. Duh, I was sitting next to a published author! Gwen published a book a few months ago, and she said she’d be delighted to turn it into a script! On top of that she knows a lot of good scifi writers who’d be interested in writing for a radio show. Kickass!

Gwen, Erin, Maggie, Lyz

It was getting late when we finally got home last night, but I felt good.

In other news this week…

I was able to boot my laptop without the kernel panicking by booting it without the NIC inserted (of course as soon as I put it in after booting it panicked). So I got the files off it that I wanted, some info about where the firmware unpacked to, the .config for the 2.6.7 kernel, and I’m still planning on going the gentoo route with the little thing. *pats laptop*

I finished updating my system the other day, and was annoyed to find out that my new version of firefox (0.9.3), which I use for an RSS reader, was a bit broken. It seemed to have some issues with upgrading while extentions were in it, since all my extentions disappeared, and things looked very broken (like the section on the left where I had control of my RSS reader was still there, but it wouldn’t close). This led to a host of other problems, like the address bar not working, back/forward/stop buttons not working. I ended up deleting all my preferences files (backed up bookmarks.html), uninstalling and recompiling firefox (which was probably silly, there must be a cache somewhere or something I could have cleaned out) and starting it up without importing anything from anywhere. That worked, finally. It’s annoying that this happened. But then I remember that I love this environment, and having an environment that I like and not having to deal with spyware and crap is good.

I’ve actually been quite busy with a few projects, which is feeling good. Getting things acomplished definately does a lot to improve my sometimes hopeless moods.

Now I am going to make some tortillas for tacos, yum yum! Brownies for dessert %d

*wanders off*

I haven’t really been in the mood to post lately. Not much to say really.

We recently changed our diet a bit. As I’ve probably mentioned, this past winter was a bit rough for me, just stressful with so many changes going on, buying the new house and all. I got into bad eating habits, too much chocolate in an attempt to counter my lousy mood, not being active enough because I felt down. Over 5 months I put on about 6 pounds, and I felt really crappy about it.

So a few weeks ago we began changing our diet. No more soda, no more fruit juice, no more daily desserts. Cutting back on processed foods, and learning how to cook.

I’m already finding that I feel much better about myself, and I’m enjoying food much more again. It feels great to sit down to a taco dinner with yummie tortillas that I just made, that don’t contain lard or any other scary things that were in the packaged ones we used to get. Making the switch to drinking only coffee, tea, milk and water has been much easier than I had expected, but then again I do love water more than the average person. The loss of chocolate has been a bit harder, so I have ended up buying a couple brownie mixes since we started this %) But even these brownie mixes are better for me than buying the (amazing but so very-bad-for-me) brownies from the local grocery store bakery.

As for my laptop. Well, the NIC worked in windows until we did a windows update, HAHAHA. So this weekend Michael decided to try Fedora Core 3 with 2.6.7 kernel on it to see if it’d work “out of the box” and skip lots of headaches. No such luck. On monday I did some work on it with the help of a friend of mine to weed out all the possible trouble, and learned that the driver is broken in 2.6.7 and the kernel would need to be patched. But then Fedora got all weird on me and wouldn’t let me recompile the kernel (some gcc bug which is apparently fixed with gcc upgrade, HAH). So I pretty much gave up on Fedora. I tried to boot it up today to see if I could at least grab a few things off it, like my .config, but it kernel panicked on bootup. Which is very annoying because I wasn’t even able to touch the kernel yesterday, didnt touch anything in /boot and I really don’t think I did anything traumatic to it…

I think I’ll grab Michael’s help to install Gentoo (stage 3) on it, with a patched 2.6.7 kernel. Maybe maybe maybe this laptop will someday have wireless!

I’m still kicking myself for not doing more research into chipsets it might use before buying it. Sigh.