We left home to pick up Caligula a little after 1 on the afternoon of Saturday the 13th. The drive out there was a bit longer than we expected because of the horrible Philadelphia traffic, but the drive through New Jersey really wasn’t bad at all. We had no trouble finding the breeder’s house (thanks to their great directions). We arrived there a little before 4.

So I met my first Maus! After reading that some are a bit shy around strangers, I was pleasantly surprised to find their cats were very well socialized, and quite friendly. Roger and Lisa are really great people, and were very forthcoming with all sorts of information about Maus, and their care. I am so happy with our choice of breed and breeder!

The ride home wasn’t too bad. After cat-sitting Cargo Kitty so often we’re used to the meowing when kept in a carrier for more than just a few minutes. Caligula meowed for the first 20 minutes or so, fell asleep for a bit, woke up and meowed a bitmore and we’d talk to him. The ride home took about 2.5 hours.

The first 20 minutes he was in our house (we’re keeping him in just a couple rooms downstairs for now) he was really scared, running away from us when we came near, afriad whenever we moved, and he kept meowing. We were really calm with him and after a little while he came over to sniff us, then started walking on us. In about an hour we were able to play with him, and when he decided to take his first nap it was on the couch with me!

When it was time for me to go to bed I crawled under the covers, and much to my surprise so did he! He loves climbing under the covers and snuggling with us. So we let him come in our bedroom last night. He’d wake up from time to time meowing, would leave the bedroom and walk around the livingroom, then come back to sleep with us again.

He’s still walking around meowing this morning, but as long as we’re giving him lots of attention he seems to be fine.

All the pictures we took last night are now located here!

I’m going to go play with him now %) *wanders off*

We decided to go out for sushi last night. Rather than driving all the way to Jenkintown to go to our usual sushi place we decided to head to a local place in Skippack, Tokyo Japanese Restaurant. The service was good, the food was good. We’re infinately spoiled by the perfection of the place in Jenkintown, but I think this place really is a nice alternative. The atmosphere was really nice too, a really nicely designed building, a deck outside and a wooden bridge over pools and little falls of water that you had to cross to get to the entrance. I was impressed. We ate the usuals, octopus, eel, mackeral, white fish and tried a really yummie eel tempura roll called a Y2K roll, it was really tastey. I love fish.

After dinner last night we decided to head out to the Home Depot to pick up a few things. We ended up buying a lawn mower while we were there, and a rake. So as soon as the weather improves we’ll be starting our work on our mess of a yard, woo!

I decided to get rid of the guestbook on princessleia.com. Spam was beginning to be a problem that I just didn’t want to deal with anymore. It’s sad that spam has to interfere like this, I’ve already been spammed in my livejournal about a dozen times. Spam, spam, spam! Ah the price of freedom.

I had a dream the other night that had a friend from a journal in it. The dream wasn’t about them, I was at a fair in New Hampshire with Michael and a bunch of friends and this journal person just happened to be among us. The interesting thing is that journal and email is really the only contact we’ve ever had. Never spoken on the phone, never chatted. I think this is a first for me. Maybe I just felt so comfortable with this person that it was only natural that they’d end up with my good friends in a dream? How well can you know someone through journals? Journals definately are a one-sided view of someone, only the information about themselves that they choose to commit to text, and you have the same “lack of physical contact” issues that arise with anyone you meet online. And without actual real time interaction can you really know that any given person on your friends list is actually a Friend? Anyway, it was a nice dream and I woke up happy.

Today we’re getting Caligula! The breeders said that 3pm would be a good time for them, which works out perfectly with our weekend schedule, we’re planning on leaving here around 1 or so. I’m so excited! We’re bringing along the digital camera, so hopefully we’ll be able to take some pictures of his family too %) I’m going to go take a shower and make sure the place is nice and clean and kitten proof now. *wanders off*

It’s bamwv nickname day in #13thHour. This means we take our initials + state, providence, or country code and make it our nickname. So our channel list included:

eakpa
mdbpa
jcymi
sadsc
jdjse
kcfde

It actually looked a bit like a botnet ;) And Bamwv hasn’t even show up yet! Gah!

I ditched poor wterm and now I have Eterm running. I ran into a couple issues with it resuming screen sessions on Debian boxes, which was resolved by setting $TERM to something other than Eterm. So now I have:

Eterm -f white –trans –tint magenta –scrollbar off -c blue -v –buttonbar off –font ‘-b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-*-*-m-*-iso10646-1’ –term-name rxvt

The font is a bit larger than I would have used previously, but with my nice new desk my monitor is further away from me than I’m used to, so big fonts are fine. Eterm is really slick looking, even if it’s heavier than wterm. At least all my keys work now.

I’m feeling a bit better today. I held off taking DayQuil to see how bad my cold still was, around noon I had to take it because I was getting too congested, so at least I got to spend half the day completely clear headed.

Tomorrow around 1 pm we’re going to leave for our trip to South Jersey to pick up Caligula. It’s about 2 hours away, so we’ll get there around 3, hopefully be happily home by 6. Yay kitten!

I’m going to go make dinner now. *wanders off*

I’m sick.

I went to bed on tuesday night coughing and feeling a bit low. Yesterday morning it was pretty clear that I had a cold. So I spent the day curled up with a bottle of DayQuil. In the evening I was feeling all achey and hot, it wasn’t a good night. I feel a little better today, but still exhausted and achey. Mmmm quilly. It doesn’t look like I’ll make it to the Philly Chix meeting tonight. That’s very sucky. Usually when I don’t make it to a meeting the meeting turns into a miserable failure. Sigh…

Michael purchased this carrier for Caligula on tuesday night. It’s a Samsonite Pet Traveler. It’s quite nice, soft, and sturdy. He also picked up a nice collar, one of the nice break away ones. So I’ve updated Caligula’s Website with his new stuff. Yay only two more days!

Gentoo’s version of wterm misbehaves over ssh a lot. It gets very crankie about the backspace, home and end keys. I like wterm because it gives you the cool ability to shade the background with colors (now mine’s shaded magenta, which looks so cool on my background). aterm has similar issues. I might just have to go back to boring old xterm %(

Mmmm quilly.

We get to bring Caligula home in 4 days! Yay! We’ve been looking at carrier cases for him, since we’ll need one to bring him home (all the way from south jersey) and for vet visits and such.

I renewed princessleia.com for a couple years this morning. The EUR USD exchange rate is even worse than when i renewed wallaceandgromit.net a few months ago. If this doesn’t improve I’ll find myself a new registrar… in 2006!

As promised, a new screenshot. This uses this background (151k) from nasa.gov.

I’m starting to get used to typing on a normal keyboard again. It’s funny how quickly I got used to that laptop, and how I hardly needed to press down on the keys. Then there is the odd location of some of the keys, I keep hitting windows instead of control, and alt instead of insert. Crazy laptop keyboards!

I was chatting with my old buddy Locdog07 yesterday, and he was talking about his comics. He draws a few webcomics, has them hosted a few places on the web. Now until then I only knew about The Tongue, but he’s got a few more that at least *I* think are much more amusing. G.F.C. and The Fairer Sex, I spent a bit of time yesterday afternoon reading through the archives and was greatly amused. Too bad he doesn’t have RSS feeds or when updated mailings for these, I’d hate to fall victim to my laziness and miss them. Oh well, there are always archives.

But speaking of webcomics, my cousin recently asked me if I would link his comic to my page. “Sure!” I said. Of course, he’s my cousin! He deserves a link right? Well I looked at his site today, and his comic sucks. Now what do I do? Bleh, I should not agree to give people links before I see their stuff, I need to have some standards, even if they are family.

While waking up I spent a bit of time talking to one of my fellow opers on Xelium. He recently bought a house and we’ve been having funny conversations lately about “house stuff.” I’m sure logs of our conversations would make for amusing reading, we’re both in our early 20’s and sitting around gushing about weed trimmers and new shower doors. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who was (is) crazy excited about home ownership. Apparently my excitement is normal, and it’s great to be able to talk to another friend going through the same thing %)

My little Swedish broski Tech (also an ircop on Xelium) complained today about my weather script in R2D2. It’s only for the US. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this, wunderground.com does provide internation weather, but it’s just SO much easier to confine the bot to US zip codes. Lazy? Yep. So now I’ve taken another look at it, and I don’t think it’ll be too difficult to impliment. I’ll need to specify “zip code or city, country” and where ever there is a space I will need to replace it with an underscore when it reads the webpage. Yeah… this is a good project, and R2D2 is in enough channels with internation users that it’d be useful %)

We had flurries this morning, I’m glad. The warm weather last week got me all worried that our winter might be over, I’m not ready for winter to be over! I love winter. Spring makes me sneeze.

*wanders off*

The install of all the programs I need is going well. I was able to install tons of stuff today and test is all out since I didn’t have work. I haven’t heard from them this afternoon, so I guess I won’t work tomorrow either *sigh* Well I have stuff to work on here anyway.

I got all the backups off of our backup server, so I’m working on getting my home directory in order again. I can’t explain in words how much I missed enlightenement! And a fast system, the one I use a work is less than half as slow as this one, I am quite pleased with compile times on R2D2 *hugs her computer* So I’ve got all my E keybindings back in place E menus set up the way I like them. I did some searching this morning through enlightenment themes, and although I found some neat ones in the end I just decided to come back to trusty old darkone. Why do I even try looking for new ones? This one is so perfect %) (I’ll post pretty screenshots tomorrow). I wandered over to nasa.gov to check out what sorts of pictures they had and was pleased to find the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive. Woo! This has tons of great pictures, many of them very hi-res that make really cool backgrounds. All of nasa.gov is cool, they have an amazing assortment of huge hi-res images all over their site, mmm bandwidth %)

Since the biggest channel on Xelium is an mp3 swapping channel (all legal of course) I decided to take a bit of an interest in the “culture” of this file sharing. Anyone who is willing to devote as much time and money (servers for sharing) will have all sorts of ideas about how to perfectly rip an mp3, and how definately NOT to rip an mp3, and their discussions get quite heated. Of course I had no idea what anyone was talking about, so I asked one of them to explain to me in simple terms how he likes mp3s ripped.

-@Nerezza- 192 VBR-0 APS

Uh huh. So I never did figure out what the APS part was (didn’t really have enough interest to), but apparently the only things that were important were 192 VBR-0 which apparently means something like, rip at at least 192bps, but it can be variable (Variable Bit Rate) of the highest quailty up to 320. Very interesting! Of course I don’t swap mp3s, and I don’t have any intention to really, but it’s good to be at least mildly knowledgable about the state of popular music swapping formats %) Still, these people are quite odd, they really do spend quite a bit of money monthly to pay for servers where they feed hundreds of mp3 leechers, why? I guess it’s the same reason we run an irc server.

*wanders off*

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*