Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

And as I expected things are starting off nicely.

The LAN party on New Years Eve was fun, we got there around 8, were able to hang out with all our friends, eat some yummie pizza and snacks, and I brought along my laptop here so that I could install xv and vorbis-tools. Around 10 or so we started playing some UT, YAY! We played some of the cool Chaos maps, nothing like being able to kill your UT opponents with a sword or crossbow ;) Around midnight we all went into the living room and watched the ball drop. Watched a bit of Jay Leno and then went back to play a bit more UT. We stayed until after 2, when we decided that being up for over 20 hours in one day was enough, I was so tired. I took some pictures while we were there (yeah, I took them, so there aren’t any of me %P), they are still on the camera though, silly not having much internet! Oh well I’ll get them online eventually.

We got home from their place by taking rt 73, it took under 25 minutes, nice. No wonder 73 is so crazy busy during rush hour, it’s really the most direct route from where our work is and our new home is. I think I need a map of Montgomery County so I can get a better idea of where we are and all the roads we can take to get to home. I’m still figuring on about an hour commute.

On New Years Day we sort of wanted to go out and do something. Most things were closed, and we knew the movie theaters would be packed, so we decided to go out for a drive. We headed up to Easton, which is further north, and right on the PA/NJ border. It was a great drive, all we did when we got up there is drive around, they have a Crayola Factory! Since there were pretty signs pointing people in the direction of it I can only assume that it’s a neat factory designed to hav visitors, I think I’d like to go sometime %) It was cool to see Easton though, it’s a nice little city, reminded me a lot of Harrisburg. When we got back in town we decided to try and go out to the Drafting Room for dinner, but it was closed. So we just came back home and had some leftover pasta. I’d say it was a nice day though, even if a bit of depression was creeping into both Michael’s and my mood.

Yeah, a bit of depression, despite the whole wonderful house thing, there is a lot on our minds right now, and it’s difficult sometimes when things are so crazy. I think both of us are suffering from “lack of me time” as well. I am so used to having entire days to myself, working on my own projects and just being *alone* and Michael is used to having at least the drive home alone, and of course having our own place. It’s difficult for us to be together all the time. Things will be better when we have a house though, it’ll be our place to monopolize, we won’t have to feel imposing when we take over more than just our own bedroom.

*Pokes the laptop* Hrm. I think some of this hardware is buggy, I get some very strange things happening that shouldn’t happen on a basic stable debian system such as this. And has anyone with warm hands ever used a touchpad? I find that sometimes the warmth from my hands is so great that just the movement of my hands on the keyboard over the touchpad is enough to move the mouse around on my screen. Very annoying. Then again, the positive things about finally having even a slow laptop like this one FAR outweigh the things I complain about *hugs R2A6* like the fact that I can sit in the livingroom here and write this.

The rest of the computers are now in the basement again, but they are all hooked up. The other day Michael decided he wanted them online so he set up his mother’s computer as a dial up gateway and put the router downstairs with ethernet running from her computer to the basement. It’s definately a setup that takes advantage of the resources we currently have, but I haven’t really utilized it. I prepared myself for this time offline, and I lined up a lot of things to work on offline, so I’m not going to cling onto a dial up connection as if my life depended on it %) It doe
sn’t, and it’s difficult to bore me these days, I’ve expanded my horizons from the computer, I can read, I can write, I can knit, I can just sit and think without my brain turning to mush.

This morning when I got up I went downstairs and plugged my laptop into the network, grabbed a bunch of music off of the music server… Gah I’m now using 1.8 gigs (out of 3) o_o Hm, well what else was I going to use it for? I also grabbed some logs of #13thHour and this afternoon I’m going to go through some of them and compile a new “quotes from #13thHour” page, since the current ones aren’t a very accurate picture of the users in the channel anymore, I think the last one I made was in 2002.

I spoke with my father last night, he seems to be doing alright, he sounded more awake than I did at 10 pm, so that’s a good sign. I learned from him that my grandfather was recently in the hospital, some sort of intestinal blockage and they were concerned that he might not make it, but he did and they were able to take the appropriate measures to insure he’d be ok. My grandfather is really an amazing man, he’s seen it all and lived to tell the tale. It’s ashame that I had no idea about this until now, I wish the communication in my family was a bit better. My father also mentioned a book he’s writing, and he asked if there was some way for me to put the first chapter online. So I said I would put it on my website, then I showed him my website (he’s online with RoadRunner now). My father really doesn’t know much about computers, I think it’d be safe to say that my mother knows more. It’s understandable since he hasn’t really had access these past few years, and even back when I lived at home he didn’t use the internet much. He also had valid complaints about how much things change, the commands and things he used back then don’t work now, Windows 95 is a whole different world than WinXP! That bugs me, you’d think they could manage to keep things more consistant, like unix has %) He also complained about how all his system resources are always being used, and that his pentium computer seems faster for word processing because of all the spyware and other evil that is running on his new computer, and his new computer is something like 1.6 ghz. That makes me so angry! He also has some sort of stupid spam program in IE that pops up popup windows constantly where ever he goes, he was just looking around MY site and he was getting popups! My site certainly doesn’t have them. Rar! See my previous entry for more of this rant ;) He said he’s a bit concerned about the spyware issue, and as much as I don’t want to add to anyone’s paranoia, it is a problem. I won’t even do online banking on a Windows PC that I’m not sure is secure (ie Michael or myself put everything on the system and KNOW what’s there, and it’s behind a firewall I’m happy with). Now the chances that someone will actually steal my social security number and credit card info are slim, it is a very valid fear. Sigh. I wish there was some way I could be the happy computer fairy and put all my family members on linux and have the time to admin the boxes so they wouldn’t need to worry about all the Windows crap. You need very little knowledge to use a properly configured linux box, you need quite a bit to control the spam and spyware of a Windows system.

Ok, I’m done complaining about Windows for today.

But I’m not done complaining about Microsoft %D Internet Explorer is evil. You know that change font size option? Yeah, well it sucks. I define fonts in both pt and px in a CSS file and IE acts retarded and can’t resize either of the fonts. *KILL KILL KILL* Why would IE have such a lousy function? Mozilla is wonderful at enlarging fonts. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go into each page and write out font tags for each bit of text. So while a huge deadline is looming on the horizon I’m forced to spend 2 hours looking for a solution. Use em instead of pt or px, use % instead, use in instead… every place has a different solution and I had very little luck. It is very frustrating, I h
ave a TON of work to do, and I really don’t have time to rewrite everything because IE has such backwards ways of doing things. I even asked one of the smartest HTML guys in the company and he was puzzled by it. I’ll have to talk to my boss on monday. My job would be so much easier if IE was as predicably well-behaved as mozilla %)

I guess I’m going to head off and work on a few things I wanted to work on. Michael seems to be getting a bit of a cold %( so relaxing at home this weekend would be very good. *wanders off*

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

It’s New Years Eve, we’re going to head over to Barry and Rae’s for a LAN party soon.

This past weekend we went up to the Poconos. It was a nice short trip, very relaxing %) Got to spend some time by the fire, hang out in the nice mountain air up there. We also got to watch “Pirates of the Caribbean” … which despite good reviews from people who I *thought* had similar tastes in movies as me was quite disappointing, it was just another Disney live-action movie. Not that it was horrible, it was just quite sugary-sweet and predictable. Oh well. In the morning we slept in for a bit, I read for a little while, then we headed out around 1 in the afternoon. Decided to go up to Penn’s Peak (pennspeak.com) for lunch, and unlike last time, we were greatly disappointed in the quality of food %( The clams and pasta I ordered was WAY too salty, I mean, you’d think that would be obvious, since we were on top of a mountain in an almost land-locked state, but hey, they had a lot of seafood on the menu! I thought it would be ok. We left there around 2, got home by 4. The rest of the day was just spent hanging out here, watching some TV and relaxing on our last day of vacation!

Monday was work again. I’m not complaining, except for maybe the waking up at 5 am part ;) This week has been good for work so far, I haven’t been swamped with work, or bored too much. Unfortunately I am getting a taste of what it’s like to be in this business and deal with clients! There is a launch date for this one site, which is fine, I can get all the work done… if I had it! They are promising a great deal of content 2 days before the launch. So while I have a bit of time to putter about right now, I know I’ll be completely buried in work come Monday. At least *I* know that I’m managing my time properly. Still, it’s fun to know I’m working on “real” websites. Oh and getting paid is neat %)

On monday we also went to go see Return Of The King. I wasn’t expecting to go so soon, but around 2:30 Michael messaged me and said “3:50 showing of ROTK tonight?” Oooh! It was great! Of course I do have my problems with it ;) We all know what a huge Christopher Lee fan I am.. and there were no parts with Saruman! AH! I LOVED the scene in the book where Gandalf confronts him in Isengard! I was quite disappointed that they didn’t have that part in the movie %( Maybe they will do it more justice in the extended edition. And of course the ending… the Shire was untouched when they went back! Gaah. It annoyed me a little, since people watching this without knowing about the books will think that the Shire stayed untouched, which is untrue, and it was important that it was untrue! All of middle earth was influenced by the attack from Mordor. I do understand WHY they took it out, besides making the movie an hour longer it would have ruined it as a popular entertainment thing, the climax of the movie had come, there was no room for final battles. But maybe they could have shown the hobbits doing repairs and maybe a story or two about the villians that invaded, just to show they weren’t untouched. Oh and Arwen still bothers me, but Ewoyn kicks ass! Now I get to talk to everyone in IRC all about it, which is entertaining, and I get to use all that LOTR knowledge that I’ve been storing in my head for so many years unused.

Today was a good day. I got to bed around 9:30 last night, so I woke up somewhat refreshed, I was able to stay focused all day, and I’m not falling asleep right now ;) I even had time to take a few breaks and hop onto IRC to see how everyone was. Got to talk to escapenguin for a little bit, actually saw Yeas for the first time in WEEKS (well, he’s been gone too!). And ice.xelium.net, the HUB of the xelium network decided to go down too, so I got to play IRCop for a bit until that was fixed. Mostly Tech took care of the problem though, he jumped in to get all the servers hooked up to deep13, he sent out global messages. I’m so proud of him %) and I’m SO glad we made him an IRCo
p again, I wouldn’t have had the time today to do all of that. Oh and he’s 14, 14! My little sister is 14 and she can barely use a calculator *sigh* I do miss being online so much, but this limited access does mean I don’t get *too* lonely %) I notice that I am feeling a bit isolated though, not having the time to even peek at people’s journals and stuff right now, I miss that. I hope everyone’s doing ok %)

So a LAN party tonight. While I was packing up to go, some of the guys were sitting down on the couches (which are in front of my desk) and one of the owners of the company asked me if we had plans for tonight. I said we were going to a LAN party and he laughed and called me a “Super Techno Dweeb” hehe! I smiled and said “Thanks!” I was quickly assured by another boss that it WAS a compliment %) Strangely, I don’t think I’m too much in the mood for games. Well, unless it’s UT, it’s difficult to find a time when I won’t be excited to play UT. That’s fine though, I’m packing up this laptop too so I can hop on their lovely cable connection and do some updates, install some packages that I don’t have for whatever annoying reason, do some updates. And most of all I get to see my friends! It’s going to be a fun social gathering on New Years Eve. We’re not going to drink though, we’re out of beer, and I’m not really interested in getting smashed on hard liquor. Besides, the hosts don’t drink, and I’ve always felt a bit weird drinking when there are a lot of people abstaining, especially the hosts.. that’s why I make sure to drink lots when I host! Hehehe.

I’m in a great mood. Things are going good for us, 2004 you will be a good year! *packs up the computers and heads off*

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

Christmas Eve we headed into work for a little bit so Michael could get some information he needed for the mortgage paperwork. We left there around 4, came back to Mom’s, and then headed out to Quakertown where Michael’s father’s side of the family was celebrating. I had a nice time, it was nice to meet more of the family, and they had yummie food. Every year they have a “seven fish” dinner on Christmas Eve, mmm fish! Since the purchase of the new home was so recent we were also able to tell everyone about it, everyone was quite happy for us. We stayed there until about 9:30, but before we left Michael’s grandfather showed us his wood shop when we asked. He built the garage tht it’s housed in, he also built his house! I was quite impressed with what a craftsman he was, his shop was beautiful, drawers of every size nut, bolt, and screw you could imagine, all carefully organized. And all sorts of tools, from tiny to huge. After exploring the wood shop he graciously offered to help us out with any repairs we might need in our new home. He’s a really wonderful man.

When we got home it was around 11, Mom suggested we open the gifts from her that night since Christmas would be so busy and she wanted us to be able to take our time and enjoy opening the presents. We recieved all sorts of wonderful gifts! Some of it was for the new house, which is very exciting. A fireplace poker set which also holds wood in it, a rice cooker/steamer that I’m dying to try out, some pajamas (yay!), a set of glasses (we had asked her earlier where she bought hers, since ours were a bit cheap and had almost all broken in the past two years), some flavored tea. It was really great of her to buy us all these things, on top of letting us live with her, she didn’t need to do so much! It was a wonderful end to our Christmas Eve.

On Christmas we woke up around noon. Most of the afternoon Michael spent getting together more paperwork for the mortgage. By the later afternoon he had everything we needed and we decided to head over to his brother’s house. There we got to see his brother and his wife and some of her family, their children, Michael’s father and his girlfriend. Dinner was great, Michael’s brother fried a turkey, and it came out nice and juicy, they also had pasta, salad, bread, and a few other side dishes. Michael and I brought some Duvel beer, which was really yummie, even if no one else there was interested in drinking any of it. After dinner Michael’s father gave us a gift certificate to the Home Depot %) Woo more house stuff! He also looked over the inspection report (he has been doing construction and repairs for years) and gave us some advice and pointers as far as how to proceed and exactly what the issues with the house were, it was really nice to be informed of these things. He even offered to come down to see the house next month and take a look at it for us. Later Michael headed upstairs to do a bit of work on his brother’s computer, I stayed downstairs and played with his niece and nephew for a little while. I would have spent more time talking with the adults, but I’m just so shy! We left there a little after 9.

This is probably our most social Christmas yet %) Last year we stayed home together with our tree and small gifts for each other. Both routes definately have their merits, we’ll probably do a mixture of both next year, I want to spend a nice warm Christmas in my own house with a real Christmas tree and a nice warm fire in the fireplace, but it’ll also be nice to see some family.

I’m so happy we’re getting a house. And I keep thinking of things that I love about it. We got so lucky. There are all sorts of things we were willing to give up and we didn’t need to, we got a nice big driveway, a nice garage, a big wood-burning fireplace. I can’t wait to move in.

Yesterday was decent. I slept in again, but Michael got up a little earlier to head out to drop off papers to the Mortgage company, when he got home we decided to go for a drive. We
drove pretty far, eventually ending up near our new house, drove around the area a little to try and get a sense of the area. We did some walking around downtown Skippack, then headed to TGI Friday’s to get some food. It was a fun afternoon. We got home around 4 and Michael’s mother was leaving to go to her John’s place (her boyfriend) for the night, she mentioned that she’d be going up to the Poconos with him this weekend as well and offered to have us join them. How could we pass up a nice trip to the mountains to round off my Christmas holiday week? We couldn’t of course! So we’ll be heading up there this afternoon. It should just be a relaxing evening and night up there, tastey food and some beers with great scenery. We’ll probably drive back here sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening.

Hmm, I’m sitting here on the couch in the livingroom, I turned on one of those news channels, MSNBC, and I saw something quite disturbing a few minutes ago. They did a “quick headlines” segment, and of the top four stories, “Michael Jackson Speaks Out” got the most screentime. Now I realize that the celebrity stories, especially this one, are what get many people to stop surfing and watch these channels, but one of the other stories was about an earthquake in Iran that killed at least 20,000 people. 20,000 people dead, and people care more about a pedofile pop star? I fail to understand this. It’s so sad.

In the past couple weeks I’ve become more and more aware as to how bad the spam problem is in Windows. Back in 2001 when I used Windows full time the problem wasn’t that bad, popups were annoying, but not intolerable, the spyware existed, but you were aware that you were installing something when it hopped onto your computer. I didn’t even recommend that casual users, even on broadband, use software firewalls, the problems just didn’t warrent wasting the system resources on it. Today things are much different. Each time Michael has gone on one of his family member’s computers he has had to clean up all sorts of spyware and other sketchy programs. Even on dial-up! And installing this sort of spyware has become quite sinister, most recently I saw a windows messanger (the internal program, not the one you chat with your friends on) window pop up, and if you hit OK it’ll install something! And have you ever read the Terms and Conditions of these things? Always long, and by the end you pretty much give up any rights to anything on your computer. The most disturbing part is that even a smart person can fall into the habit of just clicking OK to every message that pops up in Windows, they often do look like legitimate updates. I learned recently that my grandparents down in Florida got rid of their computer because the spam, spyware, and all-around issues with running a Windows system were too much of a hassle. I understand that now. And it makes me angry! Even for a dial up connection you should probably run a firewall, and how would a normal person know that? How could they tell what is a good Windows firewall an what is just more spyware and spam? Hell, how I would I know without asking Windows techie friends of mine? Even much of the the stuff that AOL and MSN provide as a service to protect their customers is pretty bad.

I wish I could afford to buy everyone in my family a Mac or have the access to them that would allow me to administrate a linux install on a regular x86 box, I hate to lose touch with them because Windows is so prone to problems. And boo to all of you who say the linux desktop is not appropriate for non-gamers who don’t know much about computers, I think they are precisely the market we should be targeting. Most of my family just surfs the web, checks email, and chats on instant messangers (be it AOL, MSN, Yahoo!). All of these things have several solutions in linux-land! If I set most of them up with a Gentoo system running KDE most of them wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference, except for when they notice their computer isn’t being bogged down with popups, spam and spyware.

Well I guess I’m go
ing to go pack and overnight bag for our trip to the Poconos, and leave the computers at home! Yay! *wanders off*

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

It’s 56 degrees out and drizzling, not exactly the perfect weather, in fact, this bedroom is rather warm instead of it’s usual chilliness. I guess part of that has to do with all the computers up here now too. Michael got a little bored the other day and wanted to do some work on his box, and I wanted our media server that had all our Christmas music on it, so we brought up our workstations and the media server and networked them all. My laptop is on the network now as well, yay! I have Christmas music! *listens* It’s nice having the computers here even if they aren’t online. And I’m discovering all the things that I don’t have installed, and it’s not as easy as “apt-get install..” to remedy that. I don’t have xv (needed for how we set backgrounds in fluxbox) on my laptop OR my workstation, I don’t have ogg123 on my laptop, which I could have sworn I had and unfortunately I don’t have the debs on my workstation. Oh well %) I should make a list of things to install when I get a chance.

This week off has been nice. Mostly I’m enjoying sleeping in everyday! Even two weeks of waking up at 5 am to go to work wore me out ;) I will get used to it eventually, but it’s great to have this week to recover. Besides, I am still getting over that lousy cold. Ah since I haven’t made an offline entry in a couple weeks I never mentioned that…

I had been getting a cold for a couple weeks. Everyone says that’s how this one strikes, it’s long and drawn out. Finally last monday while I was at work I started feeling really horrible. I stayed at work that whole day, somewhat afraid of doing otherwise. Why afraid? Well I finally get this awsome chance at a job doing what I want to do, and I don’t want to blow it by being sick! Turns out I didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter, I couldn’t concentrate enough to work toward the end of Monday, and everyone could see I wasn’t feeling good. The bosses told me to just go home until I was better. The next 3 days I spent in bed watching TV. Went back to work Friday and got some stuff done, I still wasn’t feeling 100% but at least I could sit at my desk and get some things acomplished.

So work. There is some stuff I just can’t do with Zope yet. But I made that pretty clear to my employers, and the other guy there who knows about Zope is going to handle that. I feel bad not being able to acomplish these more complicated things in a timely manner, I probably *could* do them eventually, but I don’t have the time to learn it all right now. I am enjoying what I’m doing though.

The house. Well we got the inspection done on the house. There are a few repairs that need to be done, some insulation fixed on the inside of the roof, bricks replaced in front of the fireplace (the current ones aren’t “firebricks”) and a ventilation shaft from the basement. Luckily the seller has agreed to pay for the repairs! This was really great news for us. Hopefully they will be done in January so we can be ready to move in by early February.

I spoke with my mother yesterday afternoon since it was her birthday. She seems to be doing alright, working quite a bit though, 12 days straight as of yesterday. She has today off, but will have to work on Christmas. Just part of living at a farm I guess. Heather is going up to spend today, tonight, and part of tomorrow with them, and they are going over to Jerry’s sister’s house for Christmas Dinner.

Heather is headed back up to Canada to see her boyfriend from Alberta in January. I’m glad she’s happy with him, even if he does live half a country away. At first I was reluctant to strongly support her, but now I see that she really needs to move on with her life and get away from that silly Maine county. Canada is a nice country, and at least she’ll get healthcare! I guess she’s been pretty busy otherwise, working, going to school, still doing things from time to time for my father.

I’ll probably pick up some gift cards for my sisters after Christmas. I thought about rushing out t
o the stores this past weekend to do it, but why bother? They wouldn’t get to them in time for Christmas anyway, better to just wait until the crowds die down if they are going to be late.

Today we might head up to see Michael’s grandparents. Tomorrow we’re going over to his brother’s for Christmas dinner. It should be nice enough, even though I don’t know any of them too well. Gah, I hate being so shy! I feel so socially awkward in any situation with many people I don’t know.

Oh well I’m going to go find some food. *wanders off*

I’m at work. Michael had to come in to do a few things, and my options were either stay home with his mother and do Christmas decorating, or come into work and play online. It wasn’t a difficult decision. I have had a few hours of internet playtime! Unfortunately for my journal people most of that was not spent writing this, or visiting journals, I chose instead to hang out in IRC, and work on my websites.

But here we go, a brief rundown of the past few weeks.

We had a snowstorm on the weekend we were moving. It was cold, and icy, and a real pain to move. It could have been worse, we were done moving in less than 7 hours.

I worked the week we moved, it was fine, I’ve learned a lot in Zope while using it, and it’s really cool to be working on real business websites. I like my job.

We had the home inspection done this past tuesday. There are a couple problems with the house, but nothing major. We’re now getting a contracter to give us an estimate on how much it will cost to fix the minor problems, that will be presented to the seller who will decide with us what they will be paying for and what is for us to pay for. All in all it’s coming along nicely. Depending on how these repairs work out, we’re shooting for a January 29th closing date.

Living with Michael’s mother really isn’t all that bad, she makes us dinner often and we get up early enough not to interrupt her schedule any. Still, I’m REALLY looking forward to having our own place again, I feel like I’m living in a hotel room.

I caught that miserable flu that has been sweeping across the US. I was out of work for 3 days this week, it wasn’t any fun. I finally get a chance at a job and I catch the flu! I’m still getting over it, after being awake for a few hours I start feeling sleepy and achy, and the cough isn’t gone yet. I’m actually getting into the sleepy, achy, time now.

We haven’t seen Return Of The King yet (because I’ve been sick), but I’m really looking forward to it. Of course all our friends here have probably already seen it, hrm, well we will go alone if we need to, we didn’t see Two Towers until the January after it’s release, and it was just Michael and I.

I made my website pretty for the holidays.

At work I am using Gentoo. It’s pretty neat. I think I am mostly seduced by the fact that I have stable, NEW applications to use… I’ve gotten so used to the old stuff that’s in debian stable. I don’t think I’ll quickly get used to the install times with emerge, compiling everything from source is so time-consuming. Still, I think I’m happy with my system *pats r2b1* I’ve got it running fluxbox… oh and I took a screenshot, it’s here. Gentoo is neat.

I guess that’s all I really feel like writing now. Take care everyone. Happy Holidays!

Offline entry, posted Jan 21, 2004

We moved in with Michael’s mother on Sunday. I don’t enjoy moving, does anyone? Trying to carry things that are heavy and bulky for an entire afternoon isn’t any fun. Strangely, the couch and the desk weren’t even the heaviest things, it was the nice box of records that caused us the most pain, it’s small and amazingly heavy. On top of that there were flurries, 6+ inches of snow on the ground, and it was about 30 degrees out. I was so cold, and the truck was very slippery inside, I almost fell about a dozen times. Still, we got the whole move done in about 5 hours, and were able to return the moving truck by 5 pm. Both of us were exhausted, so we decided to head out to dinner at Joseph’s Pizza in northeast Philly, it’s closer to here than it was to our old apartment so the drive wasn’t too bad and they weren’t really busy. When we got back to Michael’s mother’s (ok, I’ll just say “mom’s” from now on) house we went to be fairly early.

Monday we woke up and headed to the old apartment for cleaning and picking up our computers. It took about half the day to do that. It wasn’t so bad. Then we drove around for a bit doing various errands, dropped some old clothes off at the Salvation Army, stopped at a used bookstore so I could trade in some of my books. Got about $16 worth of credit for the dozen or books I gave them, so I picked up The Courtship of Princess Leia and Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga, which I haven’t read yet. We got back to mom’s in the late afternoon, unpacked our computers, made some tacos for dinner, and again, went to bed before 11.

At 5 am on tuesday the alarm went off. I don’t think I’ve ever made a habit of getting up that early, and on top of it my whole body just ached from all the moving. I stumbled out of bed, took my shower, and we ended up getting to work before 7. We decided that this would be the best for now, working 6:30-3:30 so that we would miss most of the horrible traffic between work and mom’s. They had all sorts of things for me to work on. So I spent the day being quite busy, aware that I had two looming deadlines, so I really couldn’t slack off at all. By the time Michael got back from visiting a client downtown it was after 6, I had been there for 12 hours! The last couple hours I didn’t really work though, I get paid by the hour and I wouldn’t want to work more than the normal 9 hours unless it’s clear that a deadline wouldn’t be met otherwise. I read for a bit on the comfy couches, and dropped into IRC to see how everyone around was doing. I was tired, and achy, and just all around exhausted when Michael came back, so we decided to go out for Chinese. We had been to this Chinese place in the past, I’ve mentioned it before, it’s wonderful, they have a whole huge vegan menu in addition to their normal menu. Last time I stayed with the normal menu, but this time I decided to get an order of vegan sesame chicken. Boy was it good! It didn’t taste exactly like chicken, but the flavor was very nice, I might even go as far as to say that it was better than regular sesame chicken! After dinner we headed back to mom’s, and I was asleep before 10.

Wednesday was not bad. Hit some rough spots in coding that were really frustrating me, and I had started to get to the point where I didn’t even want to THINK about Zope anymore. I figured out what my limits were as far as python was concerned (zope is VERY python-oriented), and expressed this to my bosses, and they completely understood, luckily these troubles probably won’t come into play for a couple more months, in which time I can either learn more or pass the job off to someone else (another guy there knows a lot of Zope and is more familiar with Python, but he’s crazy busy right now, which is why I’m there). I got a bit of a break by doing normal, basic html stuff to update sites. Of course with each new problem I discover a few hours studying the issue gets me very far, and sometimes just getting away from the code a bit gets my thoughts of
f of that specific direction so I can get a fresh look at it and figure out a new way to tackle it. We stayed at work until about 5, Michael has been really busy with all sorts of things so leaving on time has been difficult. We got home around 5:30 and mom was making some dinner and offered to feed us as well if we were hungry. It was a great dinner, just thanksgiving leftovers really, but I was so hungry and tired that I just wanted something warm and tasty. I ate so much. We went to bed around 10.

Thursday was decent. In the morning it was pouring out, and warm, so the snow was all melting, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts in the morning to get coffee and bagels, and then as we were driving to the office we had to drive through an overflowing creek. Just about everyone was late for work, they ended up closing off the road except to people who worked there because cars kept getting flooded out as the water level increased drastically, they evacuated a nearby business park because it had started to flood. Luckily we were up high enough not to have to worry about that, but the guys sure had fun talking about the possibility. Many of the people in the office went home early because they had little cars that might have trouble getting there, especially in traffic. We stayed though, R4 can take it!

I was able to continue work on one organization’s website, get the basic html code done and looking good in IE, of course getting it to look good in mozilla was no problem, since Mozilla doesn’t do stupid things like IE does *ahem*. Luckily this company only requires pages to look good in IE and Netscape 6+, I winced when I looked at it in Netscape 4.7, but I wasn’t going to waste my time making it look better if it wasn’t required, I mean, I have my pride, but I also had deadlines and so much real work to do, fixing pages to look good in netscape 4.7 is amazingly time-consuming. We stayed until our scheduled 3:30 and then had to head off to Fort Washington.

We had been warned that the exit off of 309 and the turnpike there had been closed due to so much flooding, so we decided to take the long way around. By the time we got to the mortgage place a little after 4 they had left already, even though they claimed they were open until 5. So we just left the paperwork we needed to give them there. Then we headed to Chariot Solutions to have the Philly Chix meeting. The meeting was nice, we were there early so I got to just spend some time hanging out with Erin. We had planned to do a debian install, but all links for the images for the network install that linked on the debian site were broken! We could have looked around the web a bit more to find some, but after realizing that getting the gigabit NIC to work would be a bit of a pain we decided that it might just take too long. We figured that if we did want to do an install we could just use Red Hat or Suse, and that way the others would at least get a basic idea about the install. While waiting around Erin showed me “Magesty” a Windows game that had been ported to linux by a group in the UK (I guess), it’s very Warcraft 3-like, and looked pretty cool. Unfortunately it needs a pretty good system (was not too happy on Michael’s 700ish mhz powerbook), but it might be something to check out for linux lan parties! Around 6 we ordered some dinner, tons of food despite our small group, a few subs, two pizzas, fries. While waiting for the food another woman showed up. She worked at Chariot with Erin, and was the project coordinator for one of their current big projects I guess. She has been doing work in the tech field, coordinating and such since the 80s, and she is really smart, but she’s not too familiar with linux (she is somewhat familiar with other unix varients however). Another woman showed up a little after 7, she also works for Chariot and similarly is familar with some other unix varients, but not linux. While eating dinner (I was so hungry again! I ate half a sub and 3 pieces of pizza, hehe) Erin and I started explaining the basics of linux. We went through what a distro
is what the most popular ones are, what a window manager is, all sorts of choices for programs, then tried to explain what all the major directories were for (/var /dev /home …). Erin also got into licensing after BSD was mentioned, she’s really informed about them, which I assume is partially because she needs to be so they can properly license their java code, and she did an amazing job at explaining them. Around 8:30 we finally got to sit down to start a linux install. We decided to just go with Suse, since Erin and I had never tried it, and we figured it would be a quick and easy one to do. Well it was quick and easy, amazingly so! I was quite impressed, the hardwear detection was great, if you were completely new to linux you’d hardly need to know anything, the default options seemed fine to get a system up and running happily with KDE. The only part of the process that really took us any time was partitioning, since we wanted to explain what a partition was, and how they are used, and options for them. It was fun! By about 9 we decided to leave, I was exhausted, and it started to feel like this “cold that wouldn’t come” was finally starting to creep up on me.

Friday was a long day. Got up at 5 am again, I swear I wasn’t even aware until after my shower when I was brushing my teeth, one of those “Neat, I’m awake” moments. I felt terrible, this cold finally was taking it’s toll, probably aided by this crazy week and my lack of 8 hours of sleep per night. On our way to work we stopped by a Dunkin Donuts again, I just got a bagel since my body wasn’t interested in the whole coffee thing. I had a little trouble focusing at many parts of the day. The morning was quite productive though, I wrote my first little python script! It doesn’t do much, just a basic split, but I was pleased with myself. I had some work in the morning putting together content for a site that has the same basics as one I was working on earlier, and that was good. I am becoming more familiar with postgres, but I am completely unexperienced with putting together SQL queries on larger databases, I had one that took over a minute to return, oops. So I spent a good amount of time trying to slim down the query time by looking at the php scripts previously written for the site. I’m still a bit stumped, but as with everything else, I’m sure I’ll get it soon, and I’m not going to spend my weekend thinking or worrying about it. For lunch we got to have some chicken cheesesteak subs from a local deli, yum! Then Michael headed out to another client to help them with their network. That ended up taking longer than he expected, so it quickly turned into another 12 hours spent at work. I stopped actually working around 4, I had been working for over 9 hours, and I was really starting to feel crappy and have serious trouble focusing. I did some things online, updates to personal sites that needed to be done, some time spent with IRC friends, I replied to a couple emails that I needed to. As a whole I really don’t mind staying later than usual like that, I mean I had internet access and a warm place, here at mom’s I’d just be watching tv or reading anyway, but last night I was not feeling good, I just wanted to go home and go to bed. Michael finally got back around 6:30, he was upset about having to work another 12 hour day, because of all the horribly typical network admin nightmares “I clicked on this attachment that you told me not to…” “I decided to fix the network problem myself but then got pulled into something else…” etc. It was after 7 by the time we got home, 14 hour day! Neither of us were very hungry, Michael made me an english muffin and I had a cup of juice and headed up to bed. We watched tv for a little while, but I was just too tired and feeling lousy to stay up for long. Yay sleep!

I figure I fell asleep around 10, and I didn’t wake up this morning until 11. I think I got my sleep debt repaid! Heh. I still feel lousy though, horrible chest congestion and my nose doesn’t feel too good. I don’t have a sinus headache yet today, I can d
eal with just about every symptom of a cold and still function, but not headaches. I think this weekend will be spent snuggled with my laptop and a book. I downloaded a bit of documentation I’ll want to go through when my laptop was still online, so I have stuff I can work on. Not all Zope related, I’m not sure I even want to look at Zope stuff on my weekend, but if I get in the mood I have that option. I have a perl tutorial that I am interested in working my way through a bit more.

On top of this busy work week, the crazy weather, my cold, and deadlines, we’re trying to get through the closing of our new house. Our timing is amazing sometimes, don’t you think? I think I’m holding up pretty well, my moods haven’t gotten out of control really, and my stress level has stayed in a good place. We have our home inspection on tuesday. I told Michael that he should just drop me off at work that morning so I could get stuff done while he heads up to the house. I really wish I could go with him, I’d like to see my house again! And I’ve been part of this whole process, missing the inspection is disappointing, but I just have too much work to do. We’re hopeful that the inspection will go fine, and sometime in the next few weeks we will have a home of our own!

Christmas is in two weeks too. Gah. I haven’t gone shopping, or thought about Christmas cards. I don’t know if I will do too much this year. It’s nice that I have a job now, so I probably can spend a little on my close family (sisters anyway), but I’m afraid it might just have to get to them late. There is just way too much going on right now.

And now I think I’m going to venture out of the bedroom to find some food, probably take a shower as well since it’s nearly 1 pm. *wanders off*

We started looking for a house in August of 2002, when it came to our attention that our lease would be running out in December, because of how this community operates we would need to tell them if we intended to stay or sign another year-long lease by mid october. The race was on to find the perfect home.

Over those couple of months we dealt with a number of realtors, but kept being discouraged by not finding what we wanted in the areas we wanted for the price we wanted to pay. We went through a couple realtors because they just failed to listen when we told them what we wanted. Come on, if there is nothing just tell us there is nothing, don’t keep sending us to places we’ll hate, it’s just a waste of time! Eventually we found a realtor who was trying hard to find us what we wanted, that’s when we decided we could “settle for” a house in Telford. So we went through all the paperwork and decided to place a bid.

If you read my journal last year you know this story, we ended up being outbid. It was disappointing, and it was mid-october by then and we decided to sign another year long lease here and stay. Throughout this year we would scan through home listings every few weeks, usually not finding anything, or finding that they were sold/under contract before we even saw the online listing.

What we needed was a good realtor. Realtors have an obvious advantage to the casual home buyer because they have access to a huge database of homes for sale, apparently they pay for access to this database. If we were going to find anything we’d either have to drive around the areas we wanted and hope that the for sale signs would find us something or just hire a realtor to help us out. There are clear advantages to hiring a buyers agent. For one you don’t need to drive around for hours looking for houses for sale. More importantly though, these people do this for a living, they can help us with all the paperwork, they know what they are doing when bargining with the sellers to get the price down.

So this year when it came to the decision to either sign another year long lease or find a home we were determined to find something. Our plan was not to renew the lease here, if we didn’t find something before we had to move out of here we had the option of spending as long as it took to find a place with Myk’s mother. Not exactly a wonderful option, but it was the best we could see, this way we wouldn’t need to sign another year long lease, or worry about getting out of it once we found a house. This weekend we were planning on moving there.

We continued to actively look, and earlier this week Michael spoke with Tony Alcaro. He called to inquire about a house we had seen online, and it turned out to be under contract already. But this realtor offered to help us. Our expectations weren’t terribly high, we’d been through this before, and kept getting disappointed. We met him on tuesday night at a property near Lansdale, weren’t really happy with it, but he seemed like a good guy who wanted to help. He sent us dozens of properties to look at, and Michael picked out a few we wanted to see. One in particular stood out, it was in Schwenskville, which seemed to be a little further than we wanted to go, but we would give it a chance. We arranged to meet Tony on thursday evening.

We arrived just before the sun went down. The drive out there was nice, the location was amazing. The house is on the side of a hill, overlooking a stream, which is backed by a small mountain. Wow. Sure, there are neighbors, but the lot is .43 acres, so there is privacy. Trees, many trees. We were able to walk around the house. By the time Tony arrived we were already in love with the house. We got to see the inside, and it was so amazingly perfect! Some small things will need work, but the major things have been done already, new kitch
en, redone bathroom and laundry room, new roof. It has a fireplace! It has a loft! We wanted it.

We followed the realtor back to his office to fill out the paperwork to place the bid. The house had only been on the market for 16 days, so we hoped we get a bid in before anyone else did. Tony ordered a pizza for us all to eat while filling out the paperwork, and by 8:30 we had finished all the paperwork and were ready to head home.

Friday night Tony gave Michael a call, they had accepted our bid!

Tony Alcaro has been an amazing realtor. He figured out what we wanted and went ahead and was able to find it. He’s worked with us to get the price we wanted, helped us every step of the way. He’s just a good guy. His office is in Lansdale, and he does work all around this area, so if you want a house near here, go to him! He’s great!

Now we need to go through mountains of paperwork, get all the proper inspections done. Apparently the whole process takes about six weeks. We’ll be staying with Michael’s mother until it’s done, it’s wonderful that she’s letting us stay there for a few weeks, just one less thing we’ll have to worry about.

I’m so very happy!

It snowed yesterday. It’s snowing today. I’d say we got a total of at least six inches. The first snow storm of the season decides to hit on the weekend we are moving! Sigh. It’s ok though, we went out today and it seems the major roads are clear enough to get by tomorrow when we are moving the big stuff.

Of course I also started working again this week, so much to worry about! I have been doing ok though. I got a little stumped in places, but it’s all healthy hard work, and I’m not bored at all.

Having a lot to worry about is great. I’m no longer strictly focused on worrying about one foolish thing. And as a whole, I think that’s made my stress level even out to a point where I am actually quite comfortable, so strange how that works.

I guess that’s it for now, we’re going to have our last fire in our fireplace here tonight. In fact, since we’re moving all the furnature out tomorrow this will be our last night in the apartment as well. Crazy %) This will be my last night with internet at home (I’ll be online at work) for a few weeks! Egads! *grin* I’ll survive. It’ll be a very healthy break. Take care everyone, happy holidays! *wanders off for a while*

Today was my second day of work.

I’ve certainly been busy, I’ll be working full time there until the end of the year, after which they will review all the upcoming work and see if they actually want to bring me onboard as a full time person. A real job! That would be great. No, I’m not getting my hopes too amazingly high right now, even if I were brilliant they couldn’t bring me on unless there really is work for me to do. I really hope it works out.

I have started to learn a bit about my perfect challenging level, I could never be part of a profession that is high stress. But what I’m doing now with Zope is very good. I get stumped, I get frustrated (like I was for a bit this morning), but then I figure things out and it feels really good to dive into work and make amazing headway (like this afternoon, when I FINALLY found a solution). In addition to learning more about myself, even in just two days of steady work, I learned some other things:

– PostgreSQL is evil and my first impressions have almost made me cry. I am familiar with basic sql statements, what is this strangeness that Postgres uses? I will need to find more documentation

– Speaking of which, I finally know what people have been screaming about when talking about open source documentation. Maybe it does exist, but it’s sparse, often out-dated, and you have to resort to wading through YEARS of mailing list archives to find most solutions (that’s where I found a solution to my problem this morning).

– I also know what people have been screaming about when it comes to open source scripting. Some things in DTML just don’t make sense at all to me, so obscure and insane. Maybe they make sense to python people (zope runs on python), but I’m not a python person!

Yeah, that was my day.

I’m happy though, it’s very nice to be working.

Hmm… I didn’t even look in irc today, I must have an interestingly high idle time right now.

Myk’s home with dinner (Indian food, mmm!). I’m going to eat. *wanders off*

-!- You’re now known as PrincesSleigha2
-!- R2D2 is now known as R2einD2eer

It’s December 1st. I had plenty to do today, so it was actually a fast, pleasant, monday.

Got up, packed up some clothes that we won’t need for the rest of the week, packed up some knick-knacks from around the apartment, did laundry. also did more Zope stuff. I was able to get an account at freezope.org. You fill out an application form to get a zope site, and they review it and email you back in a couple days to say if they will allow you to have an account. I spent a bunch of time just drawing from notes and memory to build a basic site so I can feel comfortable building something specific before I go in tomorrow and actually have to do it as a job. I used the same “Ocean” theme as that I used for my “presentation” site for this page. It’s nice to have a public Zope site now, and I actually didn’t completely choke on making a simple, nice design:

We’re supposed to have flurries tonight and tomorrow. YAY!

I also found time today to play with some little christmas scripts for irssi, I wrote them last year actually, but I changed them a bit so they work better. It’s funny looking at them, I have no idea where I got the idea for some of these.

Going to work tomorrow. My posts will be becoming more and more sporadic these next couple of months, moving, working, craziness.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about moving and starting the new job. It’s stressing me out, I can’t help it. Sigh.

And some people just make it worse.

The LAN party last night wasn’t so great as far as LAN parties go, but all I really wanted was to get away from being stressed out and spend some time with friends. I hadn’t booted into Windows since installing my new hardware, so it had to yell at me. It was being bad about the sound drivers and I gave up. You know, I’m not sure I was even in the mood to play games anyway. So I went back to linux to play UT2K3… and of course the other people playing just had to have a few MB of patches that everyone needed to install to play together, and that was a dismal failure. It was after 11 pm when we finally all just resolved to play normal UT, with no patches, no extra maps, no problems. We played until about 12:30, I was so tired by then. Headed home around 1 am.

Today… I guess we’ll try to do more packing. Definately spend some time relaxing in front of the fireplace tonight.

We added a couple more opers to Xelium. Despite all the trouble we had with the addition (and later removal) of a couple new servers, it was nice to have other opers around to spot clone attacks and do stuff in #support. So we added Tech (previously an oper on one of the removed servers), and Peacimowen, a friend of Time’s and mine who we’ve known for years and know we can trust.

There are things I should be doing now. *wanders off*