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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now for more exciting stuff, new kitten pictures!

Caligula and his sister feeding.

10 week old Caligula

He’s so cutey! We get to pick him up in two weeks! Yay! I can’t wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man, I’m tired. *wanders off*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“hmmm i dunno”
“not really”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I finally have a mailman who PICKS UP mail!

Back when I lived in Maine the mailman always would pick up mail if you had the flag up, I assumed this was half of his job. When I moved to upstate New York I quickly became used to never having the mailman pick up my mail. At first I thought it was just that mailman, but it was like that in a few towns I lived in. Then I moved to the apartment complex in North Wales, PA. Same thing, mailmen who expect you to use the big blue mailboxes. It was always such a pain to drop it off in the big blue boxes. But now we have a mailman who will pick up our mail at our house, it’s so wonderful %)

I had the day off from work yesterday. Spent the time doing cleaning and putting my toys and books on the bookshelves. I think I’m happy with it. I also experimented a bit with ways of putting up my still packaged Star Wars toys. This computer room is looking much better now %)

I’ve been on my laptop the past couple days. R2D2 is sort of dead right now. Michael put his cd-rw in it a couple months back so I could burn things on my computer, and it’s always acted a little funny. First it wouldn’t boot off a WinXP disk, then it started being really loud, and the other day it decided to stop working. Might be something as simple as a loose wire, but I’m not opening it up… it’s wintertime, which means that I’m the static electricity queen! So since that doesnt work it would have been more difficult to install an OS on it. I was sort of in the process of switching from debian to gentoo. So we’ll have to look at that this weekend and find out what the trouble is, and if I should order another drive.

Using my laptop so much for normal daily stuff made me remember some of the annoying things it does. The speed (333 mhz) doesn’t really bother me, and it’s got 160mb of ram now so it runs nicely, but it’s querky. Fluxbox in debian stable has focusing issues, especially with opera when I’m opening a new window. And my stupid touchpad, arrgg… I thought turning off the touchpad would be a simple bios option, but it’s not. I did some google searches yesterday afternoon with little luck, there are a few things I can try, a kernel patch that’s out there that works with a config tool *shrugs* I also discovered that all the sensitivity was a flaw in many of the touchpads of this era, which apparently is what mostly spurred on the development of config tools for it to decrease senstivity. I just had so many other things I wanted to do yesterday while I was home I really didn’t have time to mess with it as much as I wanted to. For the time being I TOTALLY HACKED IT by putting a post-it note over it. Someday I’ll get used to laptop hardware.

In other news, our “friend” bluefox83 of #13thHour finally crossed the line with me this morning. I’ve honestly tried to be tolerant of his existance there, but there are things he does constantly to annoy all of us. I think the most harmful is his tendancy to give computer advice even when he has no clue what he’s talking about. I really take pride in the fact that people can come to #13thHour and be helped in the right direction, and I appreciate being able to go there myself when I have problems, but his misleading statements and uninformed answers tend to be detrimental to that. The most *annoying* habit he has is refusing to RTFM. He’s trying to use Debian, and he just can’t read documentation, this is a problem. As much as I love Debian, and linux on a whole, if you are going to be doing a lot of work in it you really need to be the kind of person who can wade through documentation. I’ve given him many links and how-to’s for linux that would help him understand the basics that he seems unable to grasp. Instead of reading this he chooses to bother people in the channel for answers, and then complain that we’re ignoring him if we don’t answer. So this morning when he started asking about installing mplayer I foolishly tried to help: the log. Those of you not familiar with situati
ons with such users may get the wrong idea about me from this, I’m really not as bitchy as this makes me seem, he just brings out the worst in me. Those of you familiar with this particular user are probably wondering why we didn’t kick him out sooner %)

*Yawn* I’m going to go eat some breakfast now. *wanders off*

Last night we went right home after work. Michael changed the locks on the door (well, whole door knob and dead bolt) as the realtor had suggested, and I headed upstairs to put some bookshelves together. It was the same deal as my desk, a “Part A is used with screw 1H and inserted in…” but much simpler than the desk of course. I love doing those things %) It’s a big puzzle that turns into furniture at the end! The shelves were put together fairly quickly, and I put them in their proper place. Unfortuantely the floor in that upstairs room is a bit unlevel at places, and having bookshelves on the floors makes it more noticable %) I put a bunch of our books on the shelves, and starting putting my toys on some. I really suck at putting things on shelves for display, I have no knack for design. Oh well, it’s a work in progress.

I didn’t have any work to do today, but I came in thinking I did. Oh well, I was able to get a lot of my own stuff done today.

First I updated the Philly Chix site. Added a few new sections, a library of books we have to share, some reviews, and a section about what projects some of the Philly Chix are involved in, as well as books they are writing/written. I’m pleased with how that’s turning out. I’m happy with the changes.

Then I got caught up with some email. I’ve been much more active with personal email, communicating with more people that way. It always surprises me when I find people who don’t like email, I love email!

I did some more work on some other sections of my site, after someone asked if I’d put their picture on my Friends page I decided to redo the page, since it looked really awful. I’ve been redoing a lot of my site lately, I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely pleased with it.

I also spent some time making my desktop prettier. The old look was pretty awful, and made linux look horrible and archaic. It looks prettier now. Screenshot.

-!- R2Q2 [~null@X-2B032999.cust.oldcity.dca.net] has joined #null

That’s my second bot connecting from my home connection! This one is the IdleRPG bot. I connected R2D2 on monday, and he’s been completely stable. Granted, we haven’t been home to use our connection much, but it’s encouraging, Comcast hardly ever would stay connected for a whole 4 days.

I guess that’s it for now, I’m going home. *wanders off*

Everyone knows I hate Windows. I could list pages of reasons, but I’ve recently found myself in an unfortunate position.

I work as a web developer, and people at my job use Windows, myself and the network admin are the only ones who use linux. The people here are used to sharing Word docs, .psd (photoshop) files and other windows-centric files and having no problems. I’ve kept up with this onslaught of Windows files, and only had a couple problems. The first was that abiword can’t properly render Word docs, if text has underline and strikethrough it will only show one of them, which caused about an hour of wasted time. So I resolved to just use word on a win2k server I have an account on (set up in the first place for viewing things in IE). For win2k servers rdesktop works great, so it’s not been too much of a hassle, since all I do is view things on that box. Then recently the manager suggested I use Homesite, a Windows program used for writing HTML, since that’s what everyone else here uses. I have always pushed away from editors other than vim, but I said I might be able to use it via rdesktop if they really think it’d be a benefit. Then the other day I was sent a .psd file to start developing a website. I fired up gimp and opened the images, no errors, no problem. After creating the template for the site I noticed some interesting things that the original developer on the site had done that I didn’t see on my .psd files. Turns out that the newest Photo Shop does layering in a complex way that gimp can’t handle, I logged onto a nearby Windows box to open it and convert it to a filetype I could use and was annoyed to find that even the previous version of photoshop errored when trying to open the layers! I brought this fact to the attention of some of the people here and they said that in the future they’d send me flattened files.

This morning I found bluefish which seems to be a reasonable linux alternative to Homesite, so I am going to try working with that. So I am finding solutions, but is using rdesktop to get to a Windows box for all the other things a reasonable answer? Sadly, I barely use any linux-specific tools for my work. I love the stability of linux, I know how to use it (the last Windows OS I used full time was 98, not on a network, I don’t know how to use WinXP!), I like that my computer is fast while I multitask in linux (800 mhz, 256mb ram, it’d crawl while multitasking in WinXP, especially with programs like Photoshop running) and I like not having to worry about viruses. So where is the line drawn between the love of all things linux and the popular utility of Windows in my profession? Am I wasting more time with compatibility issues than I would be with the troubles and slowness using a Windows machine brings? I think Linux is still the lesser of two evils here, but maybe I’m just being foolishly stubborn. *sigh*

For now I’m going to continue to use linux.

Last night we headed out to the Home Depot for a few things. While we were there I wandered down the shelving aisle and came across some bookcases. Basic, but nice. So we picked a couple up, each 4 feet high, and should fit nicely in two spots in the computer room, I’ll put them together tonight.

Now I have work to do. *wanders off*

Sunday we decided to head out to do some shopping before dinner. We just needed to go to a couple stores to pick up little things, folders for organizing the bills in my desk, picture frames for some lithographs that I had kept packed away for years, dishtowels forthe kitchen. I don’t really like shopping, but the thought that our place would be so much nicer after having all these things made it a little better.

Afterwards we headed out to our favorite sushi place. We hadn’t been there in over six months because we began cutting back on how often we eat out. The dinner was amazing as always! We each got a Sapporo (a Japanese beer) and dined on seaweed salad, sashimi (sushi without the rice), and a couple yummie rolls. Then for dessert we had cheesecake, which was very good of course. I felt so good after that meal, it was a great Valentine’s Day (+1) dinner.

By the time we got home it was after six. We unpacked all the shopping bags, put away our newly aquired items, and I headed upstairs to the computer room to start organizing stuff with my new folders and putting pictures in their frames. I’m lucky Michael is so understanding about my crazy fascination with Disney cartoons and Star Wars! I framed three of my Disney lithographs, The Lion King, Sleeping Beauty, and Toy Story, and then put them around the room. It’s so nice to finally have a place for these. The lithographs came when I pre-purchased the videos from the Disney Store, they’ve been packed away since I bought them since I never had an appropriate place to put them, and a quick google search for buying them tells me that they run $25-40 each these days, pretty nice since the whole purchase price for the video+lithograph+extra thing (usually plastic watch) was $30 originally.

There are still boxes all around the computer room, we might go out this weekend and purchase a small bookshelf for our computer books, and maybe for displaying some of my toys. I’m trying to figure out what to do with all the Star Wars toys, back when I lived with my parents my bedroom was covered from wall to wall with toys and posters, in fact, I have pictures (1999):

Corner with shelves and more stuff

Computer Desk

Man, I loved that room. I still have a lot of this stuff, but I’m looking for a better way to display it all, especially those boxed toys. It’d be ashame to forever keep them packed away, what’s the fun in that?

Yesterday was a fairly typical monday. I’m starting a new project at work and that seems to be going fine so far.

Today I didn’t want to get out of bed, I’ve been so tired. We’ve been quite busy everyday, especially on our crazy weekends lately. I’m sure the cold weather hasn’t helped any, and this new commute to work means we leave at 6 am, while it’s still dark, and get homearound 5pm when it’s dark.

I guess that’s it for now, I have work to do *wanders off*