The Gentoo install on R2D2 is complete enough so that I can mess around in X and install programs I’m going to be needing.

While the Gentoo install was finishing last night I sat on the couch with my laptop connected to a long ethernet cord. When I booted up it decided it didn’t want to see the network. The dongle seems to be attached to the NIC at a bad angle. I tried to move it around to fix it, no luck. I HATE THAT DONGLE. I guess it’s just been bumped one too many times. At least the timing was nice, I can use R2D2 now. And I guess I don’t have much important stuff on that laptop that I need to get off of it, so I’ll just have to get another stupid dongle.

We have many ladybugs. Not swarms of them, just a couple flying around every night. The other night I caught two of them and let them go outside. While holding one of them I looked at it, and it’s a bug. I picked up this bug in my bare hands and brought it outside. I think ladybugs and catepillers are the only bugs I do this with. Why? I don’t know, I guess growing up I was taught that ladybugs and catapillers are nice and other bugs are gross.

Today.. it’s nice out, maybe I’ll go for a walk. *wanders off*

I spoke with my father the other night. He sounded alright, and went on to tell me all the things going on with the family. I have been out of the loop as far as immediate family stuff goes, so when he started talking about my mother’s pending divorce I was shocked.

Ok, not really shocked, I figured she’d get one eventually, but I was surprised that no one had mentioned this to me. She’s moved out of her husband’s house and is now living in an apartment with Annette (littlest sister). It’s a bit sad that she can’t seem to find happiness with anyone, but I guess that’s just part of who she is. The real miracle is that she stayed married to my father for 20 years. I’ll have to doublecheck with my sisters about the exact details of the divorce and such, but it’s all so weird.

My family makes me feel so utterly normal. It’s wonderful.

Michael had to go in for a root canal on thursday evening. One of his teeth broke earlier this week %( so he decided to work from home yesterday, since driving while on prescription pain medication is not usually wise.

Well we’ve found the root of my lilo problems, hardware. So Michael took my system apart yesterday afternoon. It really needed it, the poor thing has been knocked around, wires loosened, drives bounced, with all the moving it’s gone through these past few months it’s a miracle nothing was irrepairably damaged. So now it seems to be acting better. We decided to just go through and start from Stage 1 instead of 3, so Michael is showing me through the install, and familiarizing himself with the updated documentation. It’s fun, I can’t wait until it’s all up and running again, I’ve gotten so used to this slow old laptop %)

Xelium… well it’s had some problems this week. It’s probably because of the growth this past weekend. Two botnets (one I mentioned in the last post), a whole bunch of turks (turns out they pointed their irc.domain… to us, so tons of their users were coming to our server. With the botnet attacks happening at the same time, their inability to communicate with us, and their continual “Session Limit Exceeded” notices we decided to remove them. They seemed upset by this, messaging us and asking if we speak turkish, and telling us things in their garbled english. Really, if you’re going to bring a few dozen users, and break our rules reguarding the number of hosts that can connect you really should have at least one person who speaks the language our well enough to communicate properly. Anyway, around the time of the second (quite large, our max user count is up to 801) botnet attack our hub decided to get very crankie. It dropped the connection to the linked servers, and began refusing connections for users. We’re not sure if it was actually the botnet that hit it too hard and made things act up, it seems probable. So for now the hub is not linked, and we’re using another one of the servers as a hub and services. It’s holding up well enough, but we’re keeping our eyes on it.

I need to go get some cleaning done now, and start my day. *wanders off*

It’s my youngest sister Annette’s birthday today. She’s 15. I emailed her this morning, and when she hopped on AIM this afternoon I got to chat with her for a bit. I hadn’t spoken with her in some time, so I thought it’d be great to catch up. Turns out she was expelled from school, but since she doesn’t live close enough to another district they gave her a tutor for 3 hours per day. I used to be really annoyed by the fact that kids like her could get free tutors from the state, since it’s like they are being rewarded (through better education) for misbehaving. Now that I have a sister in this position I see things much clearer, she has a lot of difficulty learning, so although a tutor would be a better education for ME to her it’s about the same as what I’d recieve in a classroom.

In addition to being expelled, she’s now on a sort of probation from the state because of her criminal activities. She now needs to stay out of trouble for a certain amount of time, if she gets in trouble she gets sent to a youth center for 30 days. She learned this while at court this morning, yep, in court on her birthday.

-$littlestSister- do u know why i went to court?
-Leia26- i lost track
-$littlestSister- asullet and trezzing (threating)

While talking to her my other sister messaged me (why do I even log on?)

-$middleSister- did you get dad’s email?

Subject: This is Dad… Call me, Please!

Sigh. He sent me a mail to an older email address that I don’t check nearly as much as my princessleia.com one. Of course I don’t have long distance on my phone (who uses phones?). I gave my sister my phone number, so he can call if he wants. Assuming we have the phone plugged in, and we’re home, and we’re within range of hearing it it should be fine! Heh.

Family! My more distant family doesn’t bother me, in fact I often enjoy hearing from them, but my immediate family can be such a pain sometimes. Especially when they nag me when I’m busy.

I had to kill a botnet on Xelium this morning. It started around 6:30 and I killed the last bot around 13:00. It wasn’t actually a problem, I caught it when I got online this morning before there were many bots, and I was able to kill them one by one as they joined. The fact that there was a botnet or that I killed it is rather irrelavent unto itself, since this happens from time to time. What really gets to me about this is that these malicious botnets are constructed by the infection of a bunch of vunerable Windows machines. In the process of killing these I noticed that a great many of them are on broadband. This annoys me to no end. It’s quite simple to set up Windows to update itself so that you aren’t vunerable to every problem out there. I guess it’s just not stressed enough to new computer users how vitally important Windows updates are, even with the last huge worm last summer that caused pretty serious problems, for whatever reason Microsoft and the media both failed to stress the fact that an update the month before could have prevented this. And anti-virus software is out there! There are free versions that can prevent many of these computer infections from taking hold, you just have to learn to use them. Maybe I’m just having trouble seeing this whole thing from a regular user’s point of view. Well it’s their loss anyway, every infected host that logs onto Xelium is banned forever, and I don’t feel bad about it.

Or maybe I should just blame Windows for making such a buggy OS that’s vulnerable to all this.

I should append every single entry here with “Oh and I hate Windows and spam.”

-!- mode/#13thHour [+b *!*@*.tr] by PrincessLeia2

Also on the irc network this morning I noticed a few “Session Limit Exceeded” notices. This means that more than 4 hosts from one location are trying to connect at once. I looked into the hosts that were doing this, they were all from Turkey. I joined the channel they were all in, I couldn’t read the topic of course, and they seemed to just be people talking away in their turkish language. When I tried to talk to them t
hey met my inqueries with their own language which I couldn’t understand. I ended up wandering over to another server to ask the only Turkish speaking person I know (who also speaks english) what these people were saying. Seems that the topic of their channel said something about their server being down. So they were visiting our server, that’s fine. But then they started joining channels, and private messaging the users in turkish. Then they joined a channel I was in and started talking to each other. It’s all very odd. I have no idea what their intention is. Are these just harmless people looking for a new network but don’t happen to speak english? Or are these a bunch of trolls who like to go around to irc networks like ours and drive the people crazy? There seem to only be about 20 of them, but it’s enough for strangeness.

I’m going to go find some stuff to work on now so I feel somewhat productive. *wanders off*

ssh -X is so wonderful. Of course I’ve known about it and used it before, but today I was really able to utilize it for work purposes. I’m able to do just about everything I can at work here at home. So today, even though I’m on my old laptop, I really had no trouble doing the few hours of work I was sent. Yay! This is so much better than going into work for 9 hours and only working for 3.

I’d never done a Gentoo install before, I yesterday I started one. Well I think I can be comfortable in the fact that I was successful with the Gentoo specific elements of the install, Michael helped me out with the kernel, and lilo is now being crankie. I’m taking a break from figuring out the problem, I’m sure it’s something silly I’m just not seeing. If not I can always try grub.

It’s been really nice out these past couple of days, for the second day in a row we have the windows open. It feels really good to be able to air this place out, before moving in it was completely closed up and not lived in for about 3 months. Even having us living here for a month hasn’t completely aired it out.

I’m not getting headaches much anymore. For a long time while living at the apartment in North Wales, I’d get headaches that I’d try to explain away as allergies, or being dehydrated, or just being tired, but now that I’m living here I realize that’s really not the case. I have a feeling the change in heating has made a dramatic difference. We no longer have the electric forced air heat, we now have oil heat that uses these big radiators, so it isn’t nearly as dry in here. I actually feel really healthy %)

I finally walked up to the library in town yesterday. The walk up there was interesting, you get to see so much more when you walk instead of drive. It was able to notice how old Schwenksville is. Not just old, but falling apart, mainstreet (which really is the only Main Street in town, remember pop of around 1000) is pretty bad looking, houses with roofs crumbling, even the road itself has been patched quite a bit. I got to the library a little after 1 pm. It’s off of mainstreet, where the houses look nicer, and the library building itself seems to have been built in the 1950s but it’s well-kept. I thought I could just go in and head for the Science Fiction section. Hah! Science fiction section? Nope, you have fiction and non fiction, as well as a huge children’s section, small section of best sellers, books on tape, and movies. Their selection of books is pretty typical for a library it’s size, decent but not very inclusive, I can get caught up on a bunch of older books I need to read (like the foundation trilogy, and dragonriders of pern) and I’m sure I’ll have fun borrowing books from their reference section. Their movies section is surprisingly good too, a lot of new ones, I won’t need to go to the video store for months! Hehe. I took out a couple books and started walking home a little after 2 (the sky was looking like it would rain, so I figured I should get going). On the way walking home. Michael was driving by, just coming back from the city, saw me, and stopped to pick me up, it was a nice surprise.

That’s it for now. *wanders off*

This past weekend could have been better. But there were some cool things about it.

As I mentioned previously Michael finished completely installing the new shower door and putting the caulking around it all. This meant that we couldn’t take a shower all day saturday (and scratched our plans to go out anywhere), but now it’s so great. For the first time living here I am very comfortable taking a shower in there. No more gross old caulking, it’s beautiful and clean now. The new shower doors are so much nicer (no doubt more expensive) than the previous ones.

As I also mentioned in the previous post, Xelium was crazy busy. At first it was scary, we jumped from our usual 500 users on a weekend to 650, and although the servers seemed to be doing fine (two very short splits, neither of which had to do with the user load), we knew that if such growth kept up we’d have some problems. Luckily two of the other opers have (or will have) other servers with nice connections that can handle an ircd for the network, it’ll be nice when at least one of them is in place. And the growth has slowed, right now, on a monday morning we’re back down to 530 %) It seems a couple channels have moved to us, possibly due to the mircx shutdown, but I think most of the growth has come from our biggest channels getting bigger through advertising. Yay!

Now more boring stuff about the rework of princessleia.com! I mostly suck at design, but I always insist on doing it myself, so I struggled for a while yesterday afternoon to come up with a nice design. I ended up with this. I was quite pleased with it, until I realized that it may be a nice design for some person, it’s not for me, it doesn’t accurately reflect me at all! It’s probably just too bright and pink. I was trying to get away from everything being dark and black, and I went too far. I’ll play around with the colors today, maybe will get rid of the graphing paper look completely and replace it. But this is all done with css and divs! It looks great in mozilla and opera (don’t have a box to test out IE yet, and I don’t have NS installed here). I also redid how I organize the page, instead of having all the pages listed I just have their group listed, you can click on the group name and go to a list of all the pages there. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll do that yet, maybe wish some php magic so I don’t need to create a bunch of separate menu pages.

Today and all of this week I’m sort of working from home. That pretty much means that they will send me stuff to do, and I’ll do it when I can get to it during the day. It’s a nice situation %) I don’t need to spend my whole day stuck at work for less than an hour of work/day. In light of this I think I’m going to stop being so lazy and walk down to the library here in Schwenksville tomorrow (today they don’t open until 3:30, I don’t want to end up being there after dark). I really want to see the library, it’s only a mile away, hopefully it won’t rain.

It’s supposed to be very nice out today though, after lunch I might go out into the yard and do a little bit of cleaning (as much as I can do without the proper tools anyway) and exploring. There is a tarp under a bunch of the rocks near the driveway that can probably be (re)moved, and I’m sure there are a few other things I can find to do out there so the yard doesn’t look so bad.

Hm, that’s all I have to say. *wanders off*

I didn’t have much work to do at work yesterday, and so I took the opportunity to dive into Designing Without Tables Using Css (site). Now this book has it’s problems (namely that it’s actual lack of content when it comes to advanced designing without tables using css *grin*) but I needed to brush up on all of my CSS knowledge. So the first few chapters quickly go through the basics of CSS, which I skimmed through mostly, but I did pick up a few things a jot down a few notes. Once I got to chapter 5, where they give you an example of a site identical in design as princessleia.com, and teach you how to do it in divs. I pulled out my browser and trusty vim and started doing some CSS. The objective here was to make the page look the same in divs as in tables. Well I worked on this for quite some time, the book was helpful, but there are some issues with the placement of the footer that really started bugging me. One fix is a javascript hack, another is a different way of formatting the divs (which I should probably explore more throughly). Neither of these sounded like a good fix though. When I resize the browser the divs act in an unpredicatible manner. And I opened my page in Netscape 4, it completely broke. I’m going to need to do more searching online for solutions, maybe this book just doesn’t take certain elements into consideration, I’ll need to look into it more.

I’m really not happy so far with my experience with divs. I’ll do some more looking into it, but I’ll really need to take a step back and evaluate what I really am trying to acomplish. Tables are bad for accessibility, and as someone who has always taken pride in my pages being viewable to anyone anywhere, I was saddened by the realization that it’s probably a pain for a blind person to see. But now with this new hatred of divs by Netscape I’m going to need to work really hard to get this to work. Maybe I’ll redesign my site. I think it needs it, it’s had the same basic 3 column layout forever. And if all else fails I can keep the tables design, it works great everywhere I’ve tried, except for the ease of accessibility, and how many people really go to my site with a screen reader? And if they do don’t you think they’d be used to improper rendering and abuse of tables? But how many people really use netscape 4? We’ll see.

Now for more exciting stuff, new kitten pictures!

Caligula and his sister feeding.

10 week old Caligula

Michael spent hours last night getting the caulking in the bathroom perfect. I must say it looks really great! The old caulking job was horrible, looked like someone had just smeared it around all the parts of the tub that needed it.

We took a nap yesterday evening because we were both sleepy, it was only for a couple hours, but I woke up from it around 11 completely awake. This probably means that despite all my attempts at becoming a normal person who is awake during the day I’m still nocturnal. I’m never as awake during the day as I felt last night! Sigh.

This afternoon we’re going to head out to Unos to have lunch/dinner with our friend Bob. We haven’t done that in a while, and with all these busy weekends, we could use a break.

I was thinking last night while lying in bed and trying to sleep about how much better I’m feeling now. We’re finally starting to get settled into our home, my work load has lessened a bit, we’re back online with an amazing net connection (using my irssi bot as an indicator, it hasn’t dropped at all in 2 weeks). I can work on my websites again, I can spend time talking to my friends again, even the few fr
iends I have “in real life” I spend more time with online than physically. Where would I be without the internet? Since the end of high school it’s completely shaped my life. Every state I moved to was at least partially because of someone else online, all my closest friends I met online before I met them in real life (if I met them in real life). And despite my lack of showing it while out with people, I’m quite a social butterfly, and I’m much happier when I have contact with my friends regularly like through IRC. How would I have regular contact with friends otherwise? Would I even be able to have the close friendships I have now? I think I’d be lonely.

Speaking of communicating with friends online, the irc server is doing very nice, right now:

[r2q5] -!- Current Global Users: 576 Max: 700

We finally broke our 666 max user count that we had had for so long, unfortunately like last time it was because of a botnet. Luckily the botnet didn’t do any harm this time, it was probably just some person messing around. Still that 576 real users count is awsome! I think we did gain a few small pockets of people from mircx’s shutdown. It’s times like this of growth that are so exciting about having this irc server %)

I guess that’s it for now, I am going to go back to playing with divs for a while %) *wanders off*

I decided to try and install mplayer on my laptop. The install went flawlessly, although the compile of mplayer took about 45 minutes, gah! It only took about 2 minutes on my 2.0 ghz home computer. I wanted to do the install because a friend of mine was sending me some older Nova episodes that I was interested in seeing. And I guess I really wanted to have a way to keep my debian mplayer how-to alive! With my primary workstation moving to gentoo this laptop would be the only non-server in the house I’d get to test on. Well after installing it I tried to run it, it was so choppy! And no matter what I play I get:

************************************************
**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************

Sigh. I should have expected that. My poor little laptop!

I did a couple hours of work from home yesterday. It’s nice working from home, but working on my laptop is definately limiting. The resolution itself is enough to make it frustrating. But this laptop has been quite good to me these past couple of weeks *hugs it*

I did go into work today, was able to do work for about 6 hours, yay! We’re converting one of the sites made recently completely into divs defined through css, and it’s quite a learning experience for everyone involved. Tables weren’t really designed to be entire page formatting tools, but they sort of turned into that as the net developed, but now more and more sites are getting away from them because they’re such a nightmare to maintain. Well it looks like I need some practice, I’m quite unfamiliar with divs, and the css involved with putting them together to form the layout of a page. I have no clue how links or lynx will handle the divs. So I decided to redo the front page of princessleia.com. If it looks like crap then I just won’t use it, but it’ll be a wonderful learning excercise. I’ll probably start this weekend, and work into next week if I have to. There is this awsome CSS book at work that I’m going to see if I can borrow for a few days.

Next week. My manager guy is on vacation so he won’t be around to give me work. That means I won’t really have any work so I am going to stay home all week. He said that whoever is handling the content updates might send me a few things to work on from home.

We went to the Home Depot and went looking for a replacement door. We ended up just buying a whole new set of doors for the shower. It’s much nicer than the cheap one we used to have. So Michael has been working on putting it up this evening. This weekend he’s going to do some re-caulking work that needs to be done. Of course we had planned on doing all this since the job done on it wasn’t very good, we just didn’t expect to have to do it so soon.

I just realized that the shirt I’ve worn all day is on backwards. Luckily you can’t really tell, but I sure feel silly.

Man, I’m tired. *wanders off*

Tonight I was sitting at my desk with my laptop, chatting in IRC and surfing the web, and I heard a loud bang from downstairs.

It sort of sounded like someone had knocked on the door really hard, and I thought maybe Michael had come home and needed me to unlock the door because he was carrying so much. So I ran downstairs and to the front door. No one out there. I looked out the windows, no footprints in the snow, so no one else was around. I then started walking from room to room to figure out what could have fallen to make that noise. Everything seemed in it’s place. Then I got to the laundry room and heard a popping noise. I turned on the light, hoping it wasn’t some horrible water leak or something. Nothing.

I followed the noise into the bathroom and turned on the light.

We have two glass doors on the shower and one was completely shattered. They require tempered glass for shower doors (I learned this through a later google search), so that the glass will stay in the frame even when it’s shattered. There the glass was, in the frame, in hundreds of little pieces. Last I checked it was still cracking, an hour later.

I mentioned this in IRC, and there were all sorts of theories, sudden change in temperature in the room, change of air pressure, “Magic Hammers” (I don’t know either, something about gnomes wielding them), and of course Syntopicon’s theory of spontaneous crystallization. I’m not sure what the real cause was.

In any event, we now have a broken door on our shower. Of course this happens on a night when Michael is working late (he’s still not home and it’s just after 10) so heading out to the Home Depot is out of the question. For now I taped up some garbage bags. I’ll take some measurements of the door when I get the tape measure so we can hopefully get a replacement very soon. Ugh.

I love owning a house, but times like these make my head ache %) *wanders off*

I was sitting around this morning listening to another Hooverphonic album (Hooverphonic Presents Jackie Cane) that a friend of mine sent to me yesterday. The friend who sent it to me was from the US and that got me wondering if they were popular here in the States.

My exposure to music these days is limited to what friends online tell me about. I don’t listen to music radio, too many commercials and I can’t skip what i don’t like, and lag and/or bad quailty from internet radio stations usually just annoys me, and I have never been into MTV or VH1. For whatever reason most of the people recommending music to me are not from the US, so I hear all sorts of great stuff that the horribly commercialized and US-Centric FM radio stations won’t play. It doesn’t really matter to me if they get popular here and I usually don’t notice until someone points it out to me or I hear a song playing in a store.

I asked in #13thHour, and I got two responses about their popularity:

“hmmm i dunno”
“not really”

Maybe they are just US-popular in geeky circles where we are more aware of the international world?

It started snowing this morning soon after I got up, the first real sustained snowfall since we moved in! Actually, although it’s still white and somewhat fluffy it seems to be mixing with sleet. It’s too warm out for it to stick on the ground, but it’s nice anyway. Warm and snuggling in my new house with snow falling outside! It’s been a good day. I’ve been doing lots of little things, cleaning up directories, moving around files, surfing the web a bit, and I feel somewhat unproductive because there is little to show for what I’ve done all morning.

I think I’ll make baked potatoes for dinner. But right now I’m going to go find something to work on so I feel productive. *wanders off*

My laptop touchpad is all better now! Michael helped me sort out the ancient documentation for tpconfig to figure out what exactly I needed from the kernel for it to work properly. So tpconfig installed easily from apt, and then a recompile of my kernel so that the proper option was selected (since it was a custom kernel A LOT was shut off). And now when I boot up it runs the command to disable the tap-click, which solves all my problems with it. This way I can still use the touchpad, but it doesn’t randomly click while I’m typing. Yay! Thanks Michael %D! As for the focusing issue with fluxbox, it’s not as bad as it was last week, and I decided that I can just deal with it. I haven’t really found any better window managers in apt for a system such as this one, and I’m already so used to fluxbox. I’m way happy with this laptop, except for the dongle… *shakes fist at the often loose dongle*

The irc.mircx.com servers shut down this weekend (details). I don’t chat there, and actually don’t know a lot of people who do, but it was brought to my attention by a few people as a “great way to get new channels and users.” I decided against it. The reason it was taken down was because of attacks, and a guy I know from another server explained the situation now very well:

-$friend- god, i hate irc
-$friend- mircx dies so we might get users
-$friend- but then everyone moves to rizon
-$friend- but then rizon sucks and a few servers go down
-$friend- so then everyone moves to efnet
-$friend- now people are ddosing efnet’s main hub

Do we want to be any part of that? No! I’m happy with our network, it’s had 400-550 users for a couple months now and that’s a nice stable number. If new people want to come to the server that’s great, but I’m not going to go out advertising the server to gain users and draw attention to ourselves. Ah the joys of running an irc server.

I didn’t go to work today, and an email this evening tells me I am not needed tomorrow either. Oh well, there is plenty I have to do here at home. It feels really great being online at home again with a stable box to depend on. My bots are back home, which means they are logging and generating ircstats for a few channels (#13thHour, #andor, and #starwars), and I use crontab to scp them up to the server. I was also able to use the php from the idle rpg site to make a much nicer site for #null, the idlerpg on xelium. It felt good to get a bunch of this stuff done, finally some time to work on these computer things that are important to me %)

Other good news, I was contacted by the admin for ufology.org.uk a while back about possibly re-publishing an article of mine on his website that’s currently on my website. I thought it was cool but he never got back to me. Well tonight he did! To confirm that it was alright. And now I have it up on a popular ufology site here. I wrote it a few years ago, so my grammar makes me blush at times, but I’m happy that it’ll get some exposure now.

It’s getting late and there are brownies downstairs calling my name, I will go now. *wanders off*