Yesterday was nice. I did some reading, learned some more about Zope, the documentation on it is quite extensive, I’m very pleased, but it also makes it a bit difficult to choose exactly what I want to learn ;)

We called a friend of ours to see if he wanted to go out for food, but he was busy, so we decided just to go grocery shopping. At the whole foods market we picked up some fresh catfish with cajun spices on it, and also a carrot cake, because they looked so so very tastey! The whole foods market is in the plaza that’s within walking distance of my apartment and there is a movie theater there. I noticed they were playing Brother Bear so of course I begged Myk to take me to see it %) He said that we could, and we planned on going to the 9:30 showing that night.

Got home, had the fish for dinner, it was SO good! Played with Cargo, had some carrot cake, and then around 9 we headed off to the theater. The theater was not busy at all. There were maybe a dozen other people at that showing of Brother Bear, only one kid who was quiet the whole time. The movie was pretty typical of Disney’s animated movies, the animation was good, the story was a “coming of age story” which included the sad parts, and the happy parts and much to my delight, funny parts that were actually funny to an adult audience! Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas did the voices for the moose Rutt and Tuke, they did a sort of McKenzie Brothers routine for them, two bumbling Canadian brothers. It was delightful! I’d say the movie is worth seeing just to see the moose %)

It’s so amazingly nice outside. Yesterday it was in the 70s, and it’s in the 70s again today, not quite what I’m used to for November weather %) Maybe I’ll go outside with my laptop and take advantage of the last warm weekend of the year. *wanders off to enjoy the weather*

I got an email back from my cousin Melissa. She gave me the phone number of her friend who needs a website, so I called and left a message. He called me back and said he’d be ready to let me know about his ideas and ask questions he needed to ask sometime next week. It would be neat if this worked out.

My mother also called last night. I had emailed her the halloween pictures and she had to call and tell me that she would never get used to me with short hair. I guess she liked it though. I guess she’s doing better, she changed anti-depressants and now things are looking up. Annette (14) is doing worse though. She’s a freshman in high school now and is currently on her second 10-day suspension of the year. I have decided that being suspended is dumb, she looks forward to all these days off, and last year the school wa stupid enough to let her move on to the next grade even though she was suspended so often and her grades were horrible. My mother even said “she might be the one who never finishes high school and drops out at 16.” How can she say this? She claims that she is still helping Annette, but even conceding that this is a possibility is a weakness and could hurt Annette if she knew my mother thought it. My mother should be fighting with all the strength she has to make sure Annette stays in school and eventually graduates. I guess Annette is going to be seeing some sort of doctor and possibly put on medication so she can stay focused. My feelings are mixed on this, I am really not around her enough to know if her acting out is just a “normal teenage thing” or an actual medical problem. I’m worried that the doctors just prescribe ADD drugs so often that they don’t even bother making sure that’s the cause, and could potentially be doing more harm than good. It’s just so sad, and there is really nothing I can do about it. *sigh*

We had pizza for dinner, I had a few beers, watched Halloween then some Frankenstein movies (1930s), and we even got two trick or treaters! One was a pop star and the other was a jedi, and since I was dressed up as a witch their mother took a picture while I was handing out candy to them, it was cute. It was a nice Halloween, I fell asleep around 11ish I guess.

I woke up around 3:30 am because I was thirsty (damn beer!). Got some more water, went back to bed and realized I couldn’t fall asleep. So I got up again around 4 and hopped onto IRC. Sent some emails, chatted a bit with the other crazy insomniacs that were up at that time. It wasn’t until around 6 am that I was tired enough to go back to bed. I fell asleep, Cargo kept waking us up because he wanted to play, but I managed to sleep until about 11.

You know what really annoys me? “I could care less.” I’ve heard it said by many people, just recently that exact phrase was said by a character in the West Wing. What is wrong with this phrase? It doesn’t make much sense, the correct phrase is “I couldn’t care less” which makes much more sense. Now everyone stop saying “I could care less” before you make me crazy! Oh, and while I’m at it an acronym is something like “GNU” or “GUI” … not “PHP” or “HTML” those are just abbreviations. Acronyms are always pronouncable words that an abbreviation makes up. Of course I am sure I make grammatical errors often, so this isn’t really an elitist thing, these just bug me.

I’m done now. I dunno what I’ll do today. Probably just read for a while. *wanders off*

Happy Halloween!
I love this holiday.

I emailed a few members of my family this morning to show them the pumpkin carving pictures. First my cousin Audrey emailed me back. Audrey, her sister Barbara, her brother Alex, and her parents lived in Georgia. Growing up in Maine we didn’t see them much. In fact, I have only met them a couple times. One summer, I believe it was around my freshman or sophmore year in high school, my sister Heather and I spent a month at my grandparent’s house in New Jersey. There we spent the weeks with Audrey and Barbara who came up. Audrey and I shared a room ahd Heather and Barbara shared one, so we quickly got to know each other. It was a great summer, and the best exposure I got to any of my cousins on my father’s side. Oh and of course I have a picture: picture of me and my cousins, from the left, Barbara, me, some guy who lived near my grandparent’s house, Heather, Audrey.

I got back into contact one day when I decided to play with google and do searches for “Krumbach” (there arent a whole lot of us in the US). That’s when I found Audrey’s email address. So that’s how she got on my “holiday to-email list”. Today in her email she mentioned to me that she kept a journal. A livejournal! YAY! So now she’s on my friends list %) And she seems to write a lot. Maybe it runs in the family? My cousin Barbara has one too, so she’s on my list as well. How cool.

Then while looking through Barbara’s friend list I found her brother’s Livejournal. And it turns out that he’s a linux geek! YAY! He uses Gentoo. It’s so great to discover how cool people you are related to are %) And now I finally have a family member who won’t meet me with a blank stare when I tell them what I do for a living.

I also got an email back from my cousin Melissa. She mentioned that she had a friend who needed a webpage and asked if I “do that” … well of course! So I gave her links to some work I’ve done and some basic pricing ideas and asked her to definately email me back if this friend was interested. It would be cool if this works out, even if it’s just a simple website.

Amazing what can be uncovered from a simple email to relatives showing them halloween pictures!

Every year for halloween these past few years (since ’97 I guess) I dress up as a witch (with the exception of 2000, because I had to work *sigh*). Sadly, even though I’ve done this quite consistently, I don’t have a “set” costume for this, and I never actually go out, it’s just for handing out candy really. In 1997 I dressed up in my father’s graduation gown for my witch costume, and I went to school wearing it (that’s where the picture was taken). In 1999 I dressed up in an actual store bought witch dress to hand out candy, this is a picture of me and my younger sister that year (she was a vampire). Ah fun times. I love halloween.

This morning I spent cleaning the apartment, then did some more looking into Zope. As far as I can tell DTML is Zope-specific. And it’s pretty clever! I’m now quite confortable with the basics. I think I’m doing pretty well with learning this stuff. I’ll definately need to devote some time this weekend to it. I installed zope-book from apt onto my laptop a couple days ago, so I can snuggle in my bed or on the couch and learn these things, yay!

Tonight we don’t really have plans. I think we’ll stay in, give out candy (if we get any trick or treaters, only one came last year, and he wasn’t even dressed up). We’ll probably eat some pizza, and drink a couple of the glow-in-the-dark Rogue Dead Guy Ales that we have %) It should be a nice, relaxing night.

Now back to zope stuff. *wanders off*

An old friend emailed me recently. I had remembered her quite fondly, and then as I got back into exchanging emails with her I realized that she wasn’t like I had remembered at all, and we were never really as close as I remembered. I guess it was just because she was one of those “irc friends from back in the day” that I felt so close to her. Strange how memories are like that.

We carved our pumpkins last night, it was fun. Moved the TV into the hallway so we could see it from the table we were carving our pumpkins on (we didn’t want to miss the new West Wing episode!). It took a few hours to carve them, good times. Of course we had to take pictures:

More pictures here!

It was a great night.I guess that’s all I have to talk about right now. Tomorrow is Halloween, yay!

*wanders off*

I’ve now officially been in this relationship with Myk longer than I’ve ever been in any other romatic relationship (I had already long surpassed the longest time “happy in a relationship” mark). 2 years, 1 month, 1 day. That makes me feel really good.

Last night was again quite uneventful. We were going to carve pumpkins but then ended up taking a nap, oops. We’ll have to do them tonight %)

I walked up to the shopping plaza earlier today because I got so annoyed with a notebook I have. I learn better when I write things down with a pen and paper, so when I’m learning new things I like to take notes in this way. The notebook I had was one of those ones that just has the paper glued to the spine, and much to my dismay, pages fall out quite often. It sucks. So I resolved to just get one of the spiral bound ones. I went to Staples and of course they only sell expensive ones, or cheap ones in a 6 pack. So I decided to buy a 3 pack of smallish ones. They are cute and college-ruled just like I want them to be. And since there are 3 of them I can use one for Perl, one for Zope, one for misc. other stuff. It’ll work out nicely. *hugs her new notebooks*

While I was walking back from the shopping plaza I noticed a half deflated balloon on the ground. This reminded me of when I was in DC. We stopped at a McDonalds on our way to the meeting because we needed to use their bathroom (we drank coffee and soda on the way down). This was the first time I had been in a McDonalds in over a year, and I noticed there were balloons. The balloons had a McDonalds logo on one side and on the other it had a choking hazard warning. This is the same warning that I saw on the balloon while walking home this morning. Is this very common now? I didn’t think our species had gone that far into decline.

I finished the Zope tutorial this afternoon. A lot of DTML stuff that I really have never been exposed to. I’m going to need to find some sort of DTML tutorial and at least get the basics down so I can tell what is Zope-specific and what is not. But the learning process is going slow and steady, I think I can get pretty good with it within a couple weeks if I keep working with it, I might need to play with it on a server with mail though, so I can test some of those features (one whole lesson dealt with mail). I can definately see why some people might want to use this.

I watched the West Wing last night. On Bravo they are playing all the episdes, and I just saw the season finale for season 2 last night. Wow. “Two Cathedrals” is right up there in my top 5 episodes. Not just because it makes me cry. They had some amazing scenes in there, even one I had seen before in a documentary about the show. Man, I love the West Wing. They are even going to be releasing it on DVD! Season one is set to be released on November 18th. Yeah, I think I’d have to say that The West Wing is one of my favorite shows ever.

*wanders off*

Last night was uneventful.

This morning I did some work with some mysql databases. Then dove into messing around with mplayer.

You see, yesterday I got an email about mplayer, he turned out to be mistaken in his critique of my how-to, but he did make a valid point about one section of the how-to that was a little confusing. So I resolved to completely tear it apart and redo it. While I was at it I decided to grab some other codecs as well and figure out where to install them. I asked my buddy grifter for some pointers, he sent me a tar file with a few new codecs and some helpful tips on how to put it all together. So I waded through this mess of new things and instructions, implemented changes into my own how-to to reflect the new things, and finally when I had it all together I uninstalled my current install of mplayer. I followed the directions to the letter to install it again, and behold! My mplayer now supports realplayer, as well as streaming realplayer, and it has some more updated codecs in it. I’m very very pleased. Even got gmplayer to work happily, even if I still will never use it %)

The howto is here: http://www.princessleia.com/MPlayer.html

I installed zope this afternoon. I’m writing this after going through some of the intro docs and clicking around a bit. Got a little swamped with it so I’m writing this now. It won’t be so bad learning all about it.

That’s about it. Maybe we’ll carve pumpkins tonight. *wanders off*

I went back to bed after writing that entry yesterday. Didn’t wake up until Myk got out of bed at 2 pm. I did some reading, finished Frankenstein and I’m almost done with Witches Abroad. Then around 3:30 we headed up to see a house that a friend of ours is selling. It was still a mess because they are in the process of moving, so we’re going to go back next week and look at it again. Afterwards we had to drive pinkee and her son Thomas home (because by letting us come so late to see the place they had missed the last bus). We were hungry so decided to take them out to pizza at Joseph’s (it’s very near the house, it’d be so great to live near Joseph’s! hehe). It was so yummie %d And I had never really gotten a chance to spend any time with Thomas (he’s 12ish I believe). He’s a really cool kid %)

After dinner we drove them home, then headed home ourselves. By the time we got home it was almost 7. My! Where had the day gone? I read for about an hour then turned on TCM for the Hammer horror films of the night. They played The Devil’s Bride and The Devil’s Own. They were quite entertaining.

Went to sleep around 12:30.

This morning I got the pictures off the camera. Only two came out, and I won’t post any of other people until I get their permission and am able to put them all up on a little “DC trip” section of the philly chix website. The hippie posters one wasn’t on my camera, so I’m waiting to get that from Erin, but here’s one of me that turned out ok:

I made a couple changes to my guestbook today. Most notably I made it so it emails me when someone leaves a message in it. I’m not sure why I didn’t have that feature to begin with. This way I’ll be alerted immediately when someone makes an entry, and if it’s spam I can take care of it quickly.

After that botnet attack on one of the servers this weekend we got a new high user count for the server:

-!- Current Global Users: 333 Max: 666

*chuckles* How appropriate for this halloweeny month. Our max user count previously was 531, and that was actual users. Typically we’ve had max around 400 these days.

In other xelium news, one of the channels that had a couple dozen users decided to leave today. The owner claims that they are leaving because :

Although #Gamealbums was small we brought and introduced more people to mIRC and to xelium than any other chat room did. Little credit was given to #Gamealbums or the site for our help. The admins did little to reward our efforts.

First of all, it’s a lie that they brought the most people. They were not the biggest channel on the network. Their channel was smaller than both of the other game music channels on the network, it was often the size of #13thHour. Second, they annoy me by using “IRC” interchangeably with “mIRC”! hehe. And what are we supposed to do to “reward” a channel anyway? We have their website linked to the xelium website. What this channel owner was upset about was never getting IRCops (he became notorious for sucking up to all of us to get them), and our position that we would not get involved in a fight between them and another game music channel. I’m not concerned about this channel leaving. In fact, this gets rid of many headaches, now we don’t need to worry about the bickering between this game music channel and the others. And it doesn’t matter much anyway, our user count hasn’t been hurt because many of their users also go to the other game music channels, and won’t leave the server completely. Crazy IRC.

I have some things to do now. *wanders off*

The trip to Washington DC to meet the DC Chix was a bit of a failure.

We were able to get out of the Philadelphia area around 10 am like we had planned. Most of the drive down was very easy, and it being a Saturday morning the traffic was minimal. Around 12:20ish we arrived in the DC area. According to our directions from Mapquest at this point we were only about 4 miles from where we needed to be. It turns out that the Mapquest directions were completely useless. We got off at the exit we were told to, were unable to make a left where it said we should, so we went with the road (right) for about 5 miles. The directions said that our first turn would be in less than 3 miles. So we decided to go the other way. 5 miles in that direction still didn’t yield us any results. So we asked at a gas station, the guy said we were in the right direction the first time. We then went across the street to pick up a map. The map seemed to tell us something different from what the gas station guy said, so we decided to use that and try to at least get into downtownish DC with it.

Around 1:30 we were completely flustered we had been driving around lost for over an hour. The roads didn’t seem to make sense where we were (the map was much different from reality, or there were mutiple roads of the same name…). We stopped once again and asked a jogger where the station was. He gave us excellent directions, we were finally able to get on Connecticut Ave. (where the station was). There was traffic. Around 2 pm we made it to the station. We looked at both entrances, upstairs and down, with no luck. Apparently they had waited until 1:45 and then given up on us to go out for lunch. I don’t blame them, it is a long time to wait, especially when you are waiting to eat.

It was very unwise of us not to get each other’s cellphone numbers. I went to bed friday night thinking “I should just email them once more and ask” but I figured they wouldn’t respond by 9:30 am so it would be useless anyway. Well at least if they had responded later than that we could have had someone check our email and gotten the cellphone numbers! Gah, just poor planning.

Around 2:30 we decided to leave the station. We drove until we found a place to park (not an easy task). Then called our significant others to see if they could check our email, and send out a couple to the chix (including our cellphone numbers) in case we could still salvage the meeting, even tried to look up their numbers. No luck. So we decided to find somewhere better to park and walk into the city to find some food, we were so hungry!

Ended up at a seafood place called McCormick And Schmick’s. Apparently it’s a chain, but I had never been to one so it was fine with me. The food was really good, the service was excellent. I had a grilled samon club without bacon. We thought about having dessert, but it was nearly 4:30 already and figured we’d better get going if we were to get to any Smithsonian museum before they closed at 5:30. We stopped to take pictures near the White House. There were a number of protesters scattered around, TONS of police, and roads closed, but we walked around everywhere and it never caused a problem for us, pinkee and I even got our picture taken in front of the white house near some protest signs, it was funny. I’ll post the pictures tomorrow or something, my desk is a bit overrun by stuff right now so I can’t exactly get to my desktop to do what I need to do (I’ll get to this later).

Around 5 we got to the Aquarium. It closes at 5. Around 5:10 we got to the Smithsonian American History Museum. Walked around for about 20 minutes, got to see and exhibit on time (clocks, watches, time in general) which was amusing. Then the museum closed at 5:30. While looking through the museum booklet we saw that there were IMAX theaters that were open late. So we walked next door to the Natural History museum. They were playing an IMAX movie about going deep into the water to investigate the Titanic. Ugh.
So we decided to head over to the Air And Space museum so we could see a cool space one. Around 5:50 we get to the Air and Space Museum. Turns out that the last IMAX movie for the night was letting out. The brochure that we had was only for summer hours *groan* This was very disappointing.

Our feet hurt, we had endured much disappointment, and we were all a bit tired. Instead of walking to a metro station we just found a cab (which turned out to cost about the same for the 3 of us). The cab took us back to the car, and around 7 pm we started driving out of DC.

The drive home was nice and easy. We got back in the Philadelphia area around 9 and my companions were feeling a bit hungry so we decided to go to a Thai restaurant that Erin loved. I had never had Thai before, but I’m always up for new things, so we decided to go. The place was called “Thai Pepper” and I’ll have to get the location info from Erin because I still don’t know much about the area that it was in, so I can’t even say what town %) It was very very good. I got a spicy dish called “Sizzling Seafood” … and it was quite a dramatic sizzling. Yum. The service was some of the best I’ve ever had! These people were so wonderful. I ordered a Sapporo (japanese import beer, we have it often with sushi) and a glass of water with my meal, and it was all very nice. I’ll definately have to go there with Myk sometime.

Erin dropped Kristin off at home, then brought me home, so I guess I was home a little before 11. No one was here.

I knew Myk had his friend Bob over for the day so they could work on one of Bob’s systems and hang out and drink beer and be guys. So when I noticed Bob’s computer stuff here, and Myk’s car still here I figured they had gone out somewhere. The had taken over my desk to work on Bob’s computer, so I got onto my laptop to do some things. First I emailed the DC chix to explain what had happened. Then I went into IRC. Massive G-Lining was happening, and shade was the only Oper around. He explained that it was a botnet. There is some sort of virus/worm/thing that infects computers and so they attach to an irc server as a bot. This happens all at once, so you have hundreds of bots connecting from all different hosts so that the server gets overloaded and crashes if no one takes care of it. It was quickly realized that this botnet chose to only join one channel, so the channel was made secret, and everyone who tried to enter it was glined. This glining went on for hours. It sucked. It wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to come home to.

Around 1:30 I realized that I really was exhausted and even though Myk wasn’t home yet I needed to go try and get some rest. I watch TV until about 2:30 and then went to sleep. Myk came home later, I don’t remember it very well, I think I told him that “the trip was a failure but I had fish, lots of fish.” And then I went back to sleep.

Woke up this morning at 8:30 (new time). I couldn’t sleep anymore, but now I am feeling quite drowsy, I might go to bed for another couple of hours so I’m not a zombie today.

Yesterday was full of disappointment and frustration. Luckily I had a very nice time spending it with pinkee and Erin, none of us got crankie or too outwardly upset during all the frustration and so we were able to have a plesent time. Even make jokes about our situation and how unlucky we had been all day. The food was also very good, and we all know, good food make me happy %) It really wasn’t a total waste of a day, I had a nice time with them, we got to talk about geeky stuff, joke around, we all really get along well. Of course we could have done this all spending a day in Philadelphia, but then we would have missed the protesters! *grin*

I am so tired. I am going to go lie down for a bit longer, it’s warm and snuggly there. *wanders off*

o/` Tangerine Dream – Legend Soundtrack o/`

Late yesterday afternoon I got a chance to talk to a friend of mine on the phone. He calls me about once a month, tells me about how his life is, how his girlfriend is, how college is. It’s nice, even if we COULD just talk online. I don’t like phones much, and usually prefer talking online, but it’s a nice change every once in a while. During the conversation we started talking about food, specifically pizza and wings. Now it’s well known that most of the time when I talk about food I will end up wanting it. I love food.

So when Myk came home from work I suggested we get some chicken wings. I was bored with the crusty wings that we get at the pizzeria near here, so we decided to order from “Wings To Go,” a new place that keeps sending coupons in every flier we get in the mail these days. We ordered 20 (another one of those crazy places that doesnt sell by the dozen). Myk went to pick them up, and while he was gone I put a couple “pepperoni” boca pizzas in the oven. When Myk came home he brought the wings, and the sauce was dripping from the bag. OH JOY!!! I havent had wings that dripped with sauce for so long! It was a very nice tastey dinner.

This morning I got up and started doing final organizing things for the DC trip. All the plans seemed to go well, but then we found out that there is going to be an anti-war protest in DC tomorrow. UGH! Of course we’re still going, but this could complicate things, make traffic down there a nightmare. Sigh. I think we’ll have a nice time though, I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll be sure to take pictures.

This will be the first time I’ve been to DC since I was in 7th grade. That’s when I went with my sister’s Girl Scout troop (another girl my age who had a little sister in the troop went too, so I wasn’t completely out of place). It’s been a long time.

*wanders off*

o/` Portishead – Wandering Star o/`

It’s been a very thursday thursday.

Last night we watched the West Wing. It was on and NBC didn’t do anything to screw it up, yay! It was a nice evening.

This morning I caught up on some email. Someone in #13thHour was trying to install prboom (a clone of Doom) in Mandrake. He was having all sorts of trouble. So just for fun I installed it in debian (it’s in apt). Had it up and running in a couple minutes. Yay Doom! I first played Doom was on a friend‘s computer way back a long time ago. My parents couldn’t afford a computer good enough to play Doom. We had many fun afternoons of Doom-playing. This brings back great memories %)

I guess he finally got it almost working, said that it was too small, which is true, the default screen is 320×200.

-$nick- how do i increase the size of the screen?
-PrincesSlaya2- RTFM!
(note: I don’t say this often, but this kid drives me insane with his reluctance to do so)
-PrincesSlaya2- man prboom
-$nick- so i would tell it prboom -height 800 -width 600
-PrincesSlaya2- try it
-PrincesSlaya2- you got your height and width mixed up btw ;)

This comment led into another chatter in the channel piping up and saying:

-$nick2- I thought there were more pixels going height wise than width wise

Oh dear. This began a conversation where this person actually wanted to argue that pixels are rectangular and there are more for height than width. After a couple minutes I asked if he was just joking around with me. He said no, and stood by his theory. After about 10 minutes I gave up trying to “prove” to him that I was right because it was stupid and useless. Eventually (after 2 other people in the channel supported me) he conceded that I was correct, and blamed his lack of sleep. I honestly hope it was just his lack of sleep. I hadn’t had a conversation that stupid in weeks.

I was hanging out in the Oper channel on Xelium like usual, and one of the younger Opers was just talking and talking and then said “I wonder how old the youngest father is.” Of course in this world of the internet no one should ever “wonder” anything so simple! And I can never resist going to google. I got to thinking about how much it would suck to go back to a world without the internet (this being one of many reasons). I’m so used to having billions of pages of knowledge at my fingertips. Maybe we don’t have access to as much depth in some subjects as you’d find in a library, but for the most part, you want to know something, you can just go online. It’s great.

Oh, by the way, the youngest father was 12. The youngest mother was 5 years and 8 months old. Freaky.

Yeah, that’s about it for now. *wanders off*