Thanksgiving was great. We went over to Myk’s mother’s house and spent the holiday with his mother, grandmother, mother’s boyfriend and his son. The dinner was so so so yummie. I’m definately more comfortable around his family now, helped out making the salad and doing dishes. Feeling comfortable is good.

My starting date for working has been moved up to the second, so I’ll be working again beginning tuesday (still at Digital Wave, where I did the other contract work before). I have been using quite a bit of my spare time going over Zope things again and again, and exploring new things that I am unfamiliar with. I won’t know it all of course (and I won’t drive myself crazy thinking that I should), I’m sure being proficient in it takes months, but I am doing well. I won’t be too horribly nervous :) I am excited to be working, this is a great opportunity for me.

We’ve started packing, have to be out of here by the 8th. I’m not terribly excited to be moving, I just wish these things were happening at different times. I’ll be moving, I’ll be working, oh and there is a Philly Chix meeting a couple days after our move is complete. We’ve gotten a lot of the “stuff we don’t need in the next week” packing done today, went through some of my stuff today to see what I want to get rid of (this happens each time I move). I actually had about 9 empty pepsi cans from when they did the episode one promo. I don’t have a full set, what could I possibly want with a few dented cans?

I wonder if there is some sort of treatment for being a packrat, it seriously drives me nuts to throw out things sometimes.

It’s going to be a LONG december. Starting in about a week I won’t be online much for a couple of months, pretty much limited to access at work. That means I won’t be reading all of everyone’s journals anymore, I probably won’t even be posting much (maybe once a week? maybe less?). It’ll be a change, but it’s only for a couple months.

I could probably use a beer.

Were will we be moving? Why won’t I be online much? I’m pulling an “I am not talking about it here.” So please, don’t press the matter further.

Tonight is nice. I’m sitting here on the couch with Myk, we have a fire going in the fireplace, we’re both on our laptops.. ahh so relaxing. And we needed it after all the packing we did today. Myk (the anti-packrat) going through his boxes, I was making many hurried trips to the recycling bin and dumpster before it started pouring out this evening.

Myk also gave me a bit of a crash course in emerge tonight, mostly explaining things in debian terms “and this is like apt-cache search..” so it wasn’t too hard to understand. Why learn Gentoo? My box at work is running Gentoo, and it needs a bunch of things installed and so I’ll need to know how to do that. I do like trying out other distros anyway (Myk has been using it for over a year now), and this is a good way to make me do it, and still come home to my lovely debian boxes %)

So, lan party tomorrow. Should be fun. I really need a break from the worries of moving and working, even if I’ll probably sneak off sometimes to do a little bit of studying. It’ll be nice to hang out with friends.

I guess that’s it, going to snuggle with Myk in front of the fire now %) *wanders off*

I love food, so Thanksgiving is a good day for me. And it’s a wonderful excuse to eat lots of pie. Mmmm.

This will be my third Thanksgiving with Myk, yay!

The first one was spent when I still lived in New York. He came up to visit me for the four day weekend. That’s when he met a majority of my mother’s side of the family (not my mother though, she was in Maine). That was the first day I ever had Chimay, I had no idea the alcohol content in it was so high, so I got really tipsy really quickly. Luckily my family found it greatly amusing and all gave me coffee to recover, hehe. I had a really nice time though. My family loves Myk %)

Last year we just spent it here at home together. I made chicken, why not a turkey? Well there are only two of us, and I don’t know how to make a turkey! So chicken was just easier, and stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn bread. It was a nice, relaxing time, no social family things to worry about.

So this will be my first Thanksgiving with Time’s mother. I’m looking forward to it, we should have a nice time.

I hope everyone’s turkey day is nice %) *wanders off*

My home directory is up to two gigs again. I don’t know how this happens, I guess it’s not a serious problem as far as harddrive space is concerned (I have a 40 gig harddrive), but we do nightly backups and it’s a bit of a pain to have to backup stuff that I don’t actually need backed up. I should go through it and make some separate place (/crap) that won’t be backed up nightly. Exciting huh? Oh yeah, I find the most exciting things to write about.

It sucks when tutorials have errors. I guess this is the benefit of relying on books rather than online documentation for projects, the books generally go through more rigorous editing so you don’t learn things the wrong way. *shakes fist at buggy tutorials*

I got my first look at the Zope work I’ll be doing next month, starting on the 3rd (yeah, actual work, in an office, with my own work computer *Yay!*). I am confident that I know enough to be successful, it’s mostly converting some sites from php to zope. I will need to review some of my php knowledge during the break and so that I’m able to READ what I’m porting, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem. There is still more Zope stuff I will need to learn, but I have plenty of time to do that, and I WILL focus on it during this next week!

I got an email from my Uncle Paul today. He found my livejournal through one of his daughter’s livejournals. It was wonderful to hear from him. He’s still working for IBM, which is really cool. It seems they are doing good down there. I’m very happy that I’m finally in contact with my Krumbach-relatives.

Between work with Zope, and continuing to fix up my Perl irssi bot (it’s nearly done being reworked, I’m VERY pleased with how it’s turning out) I squeezed some fun time in and made a page about all my R2 units. I have had this idea for quite some time, since even I end up in the wrong place when sshing into one of my R2s, I can’t imagine someone not using them daily keeping them straight. So now I have a page describing them all:

What else did I do today? Had a fight with Enlightenment! I had the gimp open for something, and when I closed it X exited. I didn’t see any error messages, and assumed that I had hit control alt backspace accidentally or something (it’s possible…). A few minutes later I opened up gimp, edited something, then closed gimp. X exited again, no error messages. It was really odd. I ended up changing the window manager to fluxbox. Gimp exits fine. I logged in with another user into enlightenment, Gimp exits fine. So it was something in my ~/.enlightenment folder. But what? I haven’t changed anything except my background and some keybindings. I eliminated both those as the cause of my problem. Then I changed my theme. Aha! No trouble! It was quite a pain. Why do I go to all this trouble to mention it? It’s just odd, I’ve been using this enlightenment theme for over a year now, and I’ve never had any trouble, it’s one of the reasons I chose to use it. And this was a big waste of time in my afternoon! *grin* I spent over a half hour trying to debug this issue when I really wanted to be working on things. Oh well, I shouldn’t complain, this sort of thing is rare, linux doesn’t have half the problems I encountered on a daily basis with Windows, and in most cases you can’t fix those…

Otherwise I am quite happy with my system. This past weekend Myk installed RAID on his box (which he’s putting on my work machine too, he says it boots up in less than 10 seconds). So he didn’t need to worry about getting his CD-RW working each time he was reworking his system he decided to give it to me and take my regular cd-rom. Now I have a CD-RW! I will need to learn how to use this… and compile support for it into my kernel one of these days. Myk also gave me his amazing sound card with a front plate thing that has lots of knobs and sockets that I don’t know what to do with %) *touches
them* He decided that I should have it since I use my home workstation more than he uses his.

Last night we were sitting on the bed watching the West Wing on Bravo and I decided that I wanted cookies. We ended up driving out to the store to pick up some of that Toll House cookie dough that you just break apart and bake. Also went to Whole Foods and got a carrot cake for thanksgiving tomorrow. Their carrot cake is the best. We got home around 9 and I made up the cookies. Mmmm fresh cookies!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We’ll be heading over to Myk’s mother’s house for dinner tomorrow afternoon. It should be a nice day, I want turkey!!! Mmm turkey. His mother also mentioned to me this evening that they’ll have lots of desserts, yay!

Enough about food.

We were invited to a LAN party this weekend. Barry and Rae have the most frequent LAN parties out of all of us, and previously they were just on dial up. Well now they have cable, and a whole network set up (they have wireless too!). So I’ll actually be online when I’m at this lan party! How wonderful! I’m really looking forward to it, we havent done the lan party thing since last May, I kept getting thoughts about getting rid of my poor Windows partition due to lack of use.

Now that’s odd, I just closed gimp and lost X again. GAAH. I’m so glad vim saves things periodically, or all of this would be gone! Ok, I am going to stop using this theme. I wonder what made it break all of a sudden? I will have to do some digging and find out what has changed.

I haven’t written a long long entry like this in a while.

I don’t know what we’ll do for dinner. I really don’t know what I want. *wanders off*

I spent most of today cleaning and doing laundry (still a load in the washer actually). This is the only downside to having Cargo Kitty over for the weekend %) It’s ok though, I was able to get lots of cleaning out of the way that I’d need to do anyway before we move.

I was proof-reading a short english paper for a friend of mine from Finland this afternoon. Well, there is nothing like reading a non-native english speaker’s english paper to see how querky the english language is. It’s just funny when he’s describing the words to me, pulling out his hair because the present tense and the past tense of “read” are the same word, and yet they are pronounced differently. English must be difficult to learn. This guy’s paper was quite good though, I was pretty impressed, he just has trouble with prepositions, which seem to be a stumbling block for many people learning english.

I looked over R2D2 the ircbot’s script today to try an fix it. Boy did I do a lot of silly things. I started to clean up the script today, putting some subroutines together that were quite foolishly separate, working with all the matches to make sure the way I was comparing things made sense (in some cases I really have no idea what I was doing). I also discovered that since we moved one of the mysql databases off of the computer R2 runs from that his script has actually been broken, if someone used the ~search command he’d die. Oops. Well good thing no one ever actually used that command. I commented it out for now, I don’t know if I’ll put it back, seeing as how no one has used it since at least August… but but but it’s so neat to say my ircbot has a mysql backend %)

I did some “window shopping” (monitor shopping?) at LLBean.com today. I need a coat. I thought about shopping at L.L. Bean because I love that store and I know their quality is exeptional. I looked through many, and I think I might go with this one, probably with the Mariner color. It’s funny, while I was growing up I always thought L.L. Bean was a horribly expensive place, but it really is quite reasonable. I guess my mother was cheap with everything. Now while being cheap sometimes is good (soda at a grocery store is just as good as soda at a pizzeria, and half the price), when you’re talking about clothes you’ll want to wear for decades being cheap just doesn’t make sense. Thrifty, fine, cheap, bad.

I think I’ll make spaghetti for dinner. *wanders off*

Well first off, on friday I got some more ram for my laptop. It’s a 512 chip, and it works with my laptop, however the laptop only will see 128 mb of the chip. I pretty much expected this, since all the documentation about my laptop has said “it can take built in 32 + 128” I’m actually quite amazed that it’s even seeing this 512 chip. So we’re looking for cheap 128 mb SODIMM, since it’s silly to waste this nice 512 chip when only 1/4th of it is being used. So far it seems we can get what I want for about $28 on newegg. Maybe for Christmas.

The difference in preformance is amazing. I knew it would be, but I really can *use* my laptop now, it doesn’t take forever for opera to launch, I don’t have to be annoyed by it being noisey because it’s using swap all the time, it’s just so much easier to use. It is ashame that it is limited to 160 mb though, 333 mhz is a fine speed for what I need this laptop for, 160 mb ram is the troublesome limit.

I spent lots of time playing with Cargo yesterday, he’s so great %)

I have mentioned this before, but I have been attempting to go through some “from the beginning” perl tutorials so that I could, and I remembered one of the linuxchix courses about perl. I grabbed all the lessons so far and starrted reading through them and realized a couple things. One, I know more perl than I tend to give myself credit for. Two, this is probably the best, most clear perl tutorial I’ve come across yet! It’s located here, and as the new lessons are released it will be updated. And while you’re there, check out some of the other courses, I have been very impressed with how good they are in most cases.

With my perl knowledge renewed and improved greatly, I think I’m going to try and tackle R2D2‘s irssi script and see if I can make it better, and make more sense. I knew mostly what I was doing when I wrote it originally, but I am sure there are many improvements I could make.

How’s Zope doing? Well good I’d say. I got through the 3rd (of 4) tutorials for TAL (template attribute language), and I think that’s enough knowledge for me to have a good idea what I’m doing with that. I’m very pleased with myself. And I also discovered yet another way to get IE to render text files properly, it’s just another “shove content type down IE’s throat” thing, but it works nicely, and it’s zopeish.

According to netsplit.de we hit 491 users yesterday on irc.xelium.net (it could have been a few more than that, that’s just the highest number when the netsplit.de bot attached). I’d say that’s pretty good! Hopefully we’ll get back to our healthy 500 number in a few weeks.

*wanders off*

Cargo is over for the weekend, it’s so wonderful having him around %) There is this little beanie lizard that I have that he “stole” last time he was here, he loves that toy, I keep seeing him walk by with it in his mouth like it’s something he caught, it’s so cute. Gah, he just drank out of my cup of water that sitting on my desk. Which is kind of funny since it’s a Rock-it Cargo mug, the company that owns Cargo. I wish I had gotten a picture. *Looks in the water mug* Eh… I dont think I want to drink this anymore.

Last night was nice. We ordered a pizza and some hotwings, and sat around and watched the first episode of Season 2 of “The Office” I thought it was pretty funny.

Last night also marked when we delinked those new servers added to xelium a couple months ago. I had trouble with the addition of these to begin with, I didn’t get along with the owner (she was one of those alpha female types), and there have been a series of incidents since then. I guess we just linked her servers too quickly (didn’t know enough about her). So we got together and decided that it would be best to let her go. It was a bit sad getting rid of all those new opers that were on her servers, there were some nice people in that lot %) Luckily there aren’t any hard feelings between us and those opers, they understood the problems.

Now I’m going to go play with the kitty more because he wants attention *wanders off*

Reading through the whole buffer of #13thHour when returning to my computer in the morning has become somewhat impossible, but sometimes I skim through it if I feel so inclined. I noticed someone with the nickname “Tchaikovsky” dropped by #13thHour last night, she used to go by Tearus. Now I remembered her, that she was a close friend of one of my ex’s, but I remembered little other than that. So I dug through my #13thHour logs from 1999 to remember (of course I have irc logs from 1999, what kind of packrat would I be if I didn’t?). It seems that when I broke up with that guy she left the channel with him, and we ended up not liking each other very much. According to what I can see in the logs this was never really resolved. Still, it was interesting to see someone from way back in the day finding us, since we aren’t on scifi anymore. And hey, it’s been four years since we last spoke, my ex is happily married with a son and I communicate with him a couple times a year, certainly Tearus couldn’t hold anything against me still.

Of course since I opened these old logs I HAD to do more searching through them %)

I started using IRC back in October of 1998. No, I wasn’t one of those people who has been online since 1994, I really wasn’t seriously into computers until 1999 (sure, I had a small interest before that). I wasn’t even online until 1998 (but I did have roadrunner cable internet, ph33r me). I used to drop by Scifi.com to play some Caption This! often, and while I was there one day I noticed that there was a java chat. My experience up to this point in chat had only been watching a friend of mine chat on AOL, which was horrible, so I was reluctant to join this, but hey, there were fun people on Caption This! maybe they’d be cool in chat too. I joined through the java chat client, I didn’t even know what IRC was.

I met a few very nice people in those last 3 months of 1998. I still email brak, Exeplis, and Camadon a couple times a year, I still communicate regularly with Locdog07, Peacimowen, Simba, and Aquarius. And of course, I live with Time (Myk). We had some fun times back then, I met all these people in a channel called #Tom_Servo (windows calls the log file #tom_s~1.log … *groan*). Good times, Peacimowen, Time and I even celebrated the 1998-99 new year together. Looking at the logs it seems #13thHour, in it’s official form (there was a channel or two before it where we all talked, but not called #13thHour) was created in January of 1999.

I’m done being nostalgic now, I’ll save those wonderful stories of meeting online people for another time.

I now have the whole second season (6 episodes) of The Office, the DVD hasn’t been released in the US yet, so my methods of receiving these episodes aren’t completely evil ;) This is the only way I can see them! I haven’t watched them yet though, maybe this weekend or later tonight.

Oh joy it’s friday! I did some cleaning this morning. Cargo is coming over for the weekend, yay! Now I’m going to do some work on some stuff. *wanders off*

I watched a great episode of Nova last night about the reversal of the earth’s magnetic field. In part of it they explored Glatzmaier-Roberts geodynamo model which showed the reversal. I thought “hey, that looks pretty cool, I should think about using that as my new background image since I need a change. So today I went looking around for these images. I played around with a few, how they played with wterm’s tranparency, how I could change the colors. And I decided to play around with The Gimp‘s filters a bit. I really really liked the output of the cubism + colorify, which made a sort of confetti-looking mess on my screen. In wterm I set transparency w/ blue tint, so I think it looks pretty cool now. I made a new pretty screenshot:

What else did I do today? I did a pretty good job of keeping to my learning schedule, for most of the day, then I decided to start doing some packing. Yeah, since I’m moving in 3 weeks I figured I should probably at least get some of that out of the way right now, so I’m not driving myself nuts doing it all at once. *Looks at her boxes full of books* I have so many books. I also have a pile I’m going to bring to the used bookstore sometime.

*wanders off to make dinner*

Today I got quite a bit of work done.

Recently I have been thinking of many things I would like to learn, I’ll come across something (CVS for instance) and say “you know, I really should know that” and stuff that thought into the back of my brain. Well I got a lot of it down on paper today, and decided I should make up a schedule for learning it. A daily schedule to follow will be very helpful for me, even if I don’t completely stick to it I have something to aim for, and since there is so much to do I’ll never be left thinking “I dont feel like doing $this, what should I do?” *plays frozen-bubble* I can keep in a healthy rotation. It turned into quite a productive and diverse day, I’m very pleased.

I also got around to cleaning up my desk, if I let it go for a couple days, especially in the midst of paying bills and working on a bunch of projects, the clutter starts building very fast and gets out of control. But now I can actually move around here again, and things will fit in my drawer.

We bought some Boy Scout popcorn a couple months ago and we got it yesterday. I don’t have any brothers, and never happened across any boy scouts when I lived at home, so I had never had boy scout popcorn before, and I’m not a huge fan of pre-popped and packaged popcorn. Still, we ordered a tin of “chocolatey caramel crunch” and let me tell you, they don’t skimp on the chocolate! These things are amazingly drenched in chocolate, it’s so yummie, I can barely resist grabbing a piece each time I walk by the tin in the kitchen. Good thing we only bought one tin!

Last night we finally did go grocery shopping (what else could we do while the cable was out *grin*?), now we have food, yay! *wanders off to make dinner*

I would have posted this yesterday if my net connection hadn’t died *stabs Comcast*

I hate Internet Explorer. It fails to follow standard techniques to determine the content type of a file. This caused a lot of trouble for me today, since Zope’s method of defining the content type is standard. My pages worked properly everywhere! Except for on Internet Explorer, which I didn’t test. It makes me so crazy, few things compare to my hatred of IE right now!

It’s funny how people will argue how simple it is to design pages for IE, who are these people? Bad coders I guess. Mozilla might have it’s querks, but you can depend on it properly rendering pages if you follow the rules. IE drives me up the wall because it fails to obey by standards set forth, and there is no place I can go where MS tells me all the stupid stuff IE does. What is so difficult about properly recongising a content type when it sees one? I HATE IE!!! STOP TRYING TO THINK FOR ME!

This made my day a little sad, and plus my stomach is protesting after all that lousy food I ate yesterday. But there have been a number of positive things happening as well, so it’s balancing out to be a decent monday.

Yesterday evening we met a some of our friends (mct, nita, n-tropy, kelly) at a movie theater. The theater was out in the middle of nowhere (Oaks, PA), it took about 45 minutes to get there, but it was a nice theater. We saw “Master and Commander” which I wasn’t all too thrilled to see, but we wanted to see our friends, since it had been a while. Turns out it was a pretty decent movie. I don’t really like Russell Crowe, but I guess I don’t like many leading action type guys. At the movie I ate lots of popcorn and drank a whole large cherry coke by myself. Afterwards mct, Nita, Myk and I headed over to TGI Fridays at the King Of Prussia mall. We wanted some “real food” after the popcorn, and of course, me in my infinite wisdom, decided to order a fried chicken sandwich with cheese, lettuce, tomato, and of course, extra mayo. It tasted great at the time. It was really nice spending some time with our friends, I missed them! It was nice to get out too. We never did go grocery shopping yesterday, so we don’t have much food, oops. We got home around midnight, I was so tired that I went almost immediately to bed. But it was a great night. Unfortunately I woke up this morning a bit sick to my stomache. Arg! I should have known better than to eat so much food that’s bad for me!

Myk and I joined the Bucks County Linux Users Group mailing list this weekend. I heard about it through Erin at the last philly chix meeting. Their meetings are much closer to where we are than the PLUG meetings, and if there are interesting meetings we might end up going to them more often than we’ve been attending PLUG (which has been hardly ever). I posted for the first time today, just a response to a post, which now means I have posted more often than on PLUG (why don’t I post on PLUG? I don’t feel very comfortable there I guess). It seems like a nice group, and still on the small side, so they are quite welcoming (to me anyway).

It’s funny how my comfort zones are established. It seems that once I get some sort of indicator that I’m “accepted” and/or respected in a place I’ll instantly drop a lot of my inhibitions. But it’s that first impression and hoping that people will think well of me that keeps tripping me up. I know I know, it shouldn’t matter what people think! But feelings (and anxiety) don’t always follow logic. I need to get over this someday.

Hey, who broke the internet? *pokes her modem* this outage is longer than most (started at 5:11 .. it’s 5:40 now).

I just went into the bedroom to turn on the TV and make sure the world wasn’t ending (oh, does that make me crazy?) and the cable is out too. THE SKY IS FALLING!

Oh, just called comcast, they are having an outage. I hate comcast.

I’ll post this tuesday. *wanders off*