A friend of mine is now living at a dorm in college, and he was very annoyed to learn that he couldn’t use mIRC. Apparently the school had blocked all IRC ports. Understandable, since filesharing on IRC networks has grown in popularity at colleges, I even know some people who really abuse their college connection by running IRC file servers. But of course this friend of mine just chats harmlessly in a couple channels. It was sad for me to learn that he couldn’t come in.

So I was on a mission! He’s doesn’t know anything about linux, but he’s smart and I figured he’d be able to figure out a shell account eventually. I got another friend to set up a shell account for him and began teaching the ways of shell accounts, irssi, screen and vim (yes, I even introduce newbies to vim, no need to get them starting off with bad habits *grin*).

I was thrilled with how quickly he caught on. I went through my usual repetitive teaching method of switching between each program, opening and closing vim, detatching and reattaching screen, all with a purpose of course, but getting him used to everything. It wasn’t long at all before I didn’t need to tell him each step. And he even exceeded my expectations by trying to add new things to his irssi config file that I didn’t specifically tell him to add. Some was incorrect and we had to debug, but boy is it great when people think for themselves!

I’ve spent so much time helping out newbies who email me about how-tos on my website, people in Xelium #support, linux newbies from manLinux.com, people who drop into the bitlbee channel… that i had completely forgotten how wonderful it is teaching something to a smart person. This is what I love about teaching, helping someone start off and watching them grow on their own, learning how to RTFM, and then someday coming back and teaching me stuff. Nothing more rewarding (and humbling) than having a student come back to you with more knowledge than even you have.

I had really tired of telling people exactly where the manual is, what bits to read, and still having them come to me asking questions that they wouldn’t need to ask if they had just read. I started to think that if I just copied the text from the manual into the email/forum/channel they’d finally get it through their thick skulls, because having someone spoon feed them the information is easier than just putting it on their plate.

Someone needs to make it clear that installing and maintaining a linux box is not going to be easy if you can’t even figure out how to burn a CD in Windows.

Yep, I’m bitter.

The Republican Convention starts today. There have been lots of protests. I thought about doing a rant about how annoyed I was with politics. But then I recalled a comic that a friend of mine showed me last week that summed up much of my current frustration rather well.

Source: http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=17519

Of course my gripes with the Bush administration go beyond the war, and crazy tax cuts. Which is why I wish the candidates would get finished with their mud slinging and move on. It’s really ashame that most voters respond better to mud slinging than anything else.

But I do have a confession to make reguarding voting.

I didn’t vote in 2000.

At the time I was working 45 hours a week at a gas station, living above a liquor store, and barely able to pay all my bills each month. That experience made me realize why so few people vote, who really cares whether George or John wins? The country will still leave them as part of the working poor.

But I will vote this year. PA is a battleground state so it’s important. I’m registered as Non-Partisan, but it’s quite safe to say

c/o aquateencentral.com

Much thunderstorming out, I’m going to go get a book and snuggle with my kitten.

*wanders off*

I sold my Magic cards today. I thought I’d feel a bit sad about it, but I’m not. This is nothing like when I sold all my My Little Ponies. I thought about selling my cards all on ebay, figured I might get about around $40 on ebay, *including* shipping, and I didn’t want to deal with it, shipping 1600+ cards is a pain. So I figured I’d head down to Collegeville Cards and see how much they’d give me for my cards. We got there around 2:30, and the owner was there to check out my cards. Hovering next to me was a guy who was a bit too eager to get his hands on my cards, and excitedly told the owner that he would buy a lot of my cards from him right away since they were sets he was looking to complete. I’m sure that helped me. I only had about 7 cards which were good rares, then about 100 crap rares, 50 foils, a few hundred basic lands, 1600 commons and uncommons. How much did I get for all this? $85. At least twice what I expected. Yay! Of course I payed much more than that for them all ;) but I don’t think I could have made off any better with any other reasonable selling route.

We did some shopping after stopping at the card shop. It was weird using actual cash for our purchases at Home Depot and the grocery store, we’re so used to using the debit card for everything.

Last night we went over to ‘s place. We brought along a few seasons of Red Dwarf (which he’d never seen), and hung out, had some beers, ate lots of pizza. I also got a chance to sign his key finally. We had a nice time, and stayed til almost midnight.

I’m going to go do some reading now.

*wanders off*

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*