I heard on the news recently that “web logs” have, for the first time, been a “big thing” in a presidential election, and politics in general. Well it seems I got a taste of that with my last entry! It really is a wonderful platform for discussion, and I enjoy arguing with smart people %) Yay I’m a statistic!

I decided to post some of the entries I wrote offline. I think there are about a half dozen of them, all marked with a red “Offline entry, posted Jan 21…” note, and I made sure they were labelled as back-dated so they won’t fill up your friends lists ;) So you can wander to my main LJ page to see all my entries about Christmas and stuff if you feel so inclined.

This past weekend… hm, what did I do? Umm… We went to Unos on saturday afternoon to have some food with Bob. I guess that’s it, the rest of the weekend was spent just relaxing. I did some offline work on my websites, just tedious stuff that I could do while watching TV, I haven’t uploaded any of it yet because it requires some live tweaking, and creation of a number of symlinks since I changed the names of some files while switching them to PHP. I focused mostly on converting my 13thHour site to php, since the pages are almost all identical, and there are a lot of them, so it’s silly to have to edit the menu, for instance, 60 times when I want to make a change (well, I’d actually just use a perl script to change them all at once, but it’s still silly). I also decided that the Sailor Moon section of my page could use some work. I am not really into Sailor Moon anymore, I only put that section up on my site because I had it sitting around on my harddrive, and the design of it is pretty lousy. Well it turns out that it gets tons of hits, so I figured I should clean it up so it’s a bit more presentable, and make it in php. So sometime I’ll eventually get all these pages up on my site.

Hmmm, we went to the grocery store sunday night (the excitement never ceases!) and since it was “Eagles Game Sunday” the grocery stores were pretty empty compared to normal Sundays. We got the strangest cashier, we’ve gotten him before and I think I mentioned him here, he’s the guy that forces customers to interact with him. He asks “How are you?” and if you don’t respond he repeats himself “HEY HOW ARE YOU?” and when you do respond he tries to strike up a conversation. Well there were these two women in front of us, clearly of asian decent, and who didn’t speak very good english, well he’s laughing and telling them jokes about the eagles football game, and they are just nervously smiling and nodding while he laughs and laughs at his own jokes. In the midst of it he mentioned that he “doesnt like sports because in high school there were a lot of sports fans” The hell? This guy is like 55, and still sore about high school? So we finally check out, and as we’re loading the bags into the cart he takes the time to roll up our receipt, while he’s standing there rolling it for about 2 minutes he’s saying “Thank you for shopping Giant, we really appreciate … and have a nice evening… here you go!” It was all very uncomfortable. I know he’s just trying to do a good job and be friendly, but he goes WAY overboard.

On monday I went into work. Puttered around for some time, and then was told that it was a slow week for work that I could do and they probably wouldn’t need me until friday. Well that’s fine, I expected that after this last site launch that I would have some down time. I figured I’d come in anyway, since there is nice internet access there, and it’s generally more fun than staying here at ‘home’ anyway. So I spent monday pretty much just surfing the web, researching cats.

Cats? Yeah, we’re looking to buy a cat. I’ve been studying the breeds, their temperments, their care records, their cost and availability. I sort of settled on a Bengal cat, which I have had interest in since I saw my first pair back in 1995. They’re really great kitties, and have a “wild look” while being completely domesticated. I’m still looking though, can anyone recommend
any breeds that they prefer? I’m also looking at Maine Coon cats I am sure I could find a breeder in the area, but they are long-haired, and although I won’t dismiss a cat because of it’s hair length, I’m mostly looking at short-hairs. So any recommendations would be much appreciated %)

Now I realize that my choice to go to a breeder is frowned upon by a lot of people. I know all the arguments against it, so there really is no need to enlighten me, and I respect your position. All the cats I’ve ever had were strays/part of unwanted litters/cats people couldn’t keep, I’m just choosing to go a different route this time.

On tuesday I woke up with a bit of a headache, I decided that I’d rather stay in bed until it went away than go into work to play online. It was just a typical old sinus headache and went away after I drank lots of water and took some advil, so I spent the rest of the day just wandering around doing various things around the house. I watched a little bit of TV while working on my laptop, was able to catch an interesting phone interview on CNN with Mike Rowe (of mikerowesoft.com), and I watched a documentary on Attila the Hun. Whee! Then I decided to spend some time playing around with Michael’s mother’s computer, which is the only one online right now. Previously it was on Windows ME, but over the past few weeks Michael has taken it upon himself to turn this into a big conversion project, it’s now running Windows XP and Gentoo+KDE, it also got a ram upgrade and a nice external modem. It’s really quite amazing how great this is running! And while I’ve seen KDE, and poked around it briefly, I never completely realized how pretty KDE 3.1 is. And all the K-programs! Running in a KDE environment it’s all pretty cool. And kweather! What a great program, and not just because the author is a real life friend of ours, it’s a perfect replacement for the evil WeatherBug in Windows that was installed before. Transparency is very pretty, and Konsole is a pretty sweet term. Of course I’d never use KDE myself, but as a happy clicky GUI for people converting from Windows it’s many steps ahead of other window mangers (sorry Gnome). This is a real, good alternative for typical “check email and surf the web a little” users. I love linux, and Gentoo itself even continues to impress me. Right now I’m on this computer, and chatting, even with dial up this system is much more comfortable for me, I really really hate windows, and I don’t enjoy using it.

Ah computers. I did something really really stupid recently. I added a group to my home workstation, R2D2, for website access, so I wouldn’t have to be root to edit stuff in /var/www/ and it’d be all around better … well I created the group fine, added my user to it, everything is great. Then…

Wait, I didn’t just chown my whole system did I?
OH GOD.

Yep, a mistake in a command can do very bad things, I chowned my entire system to root. *bangs head on desk* Now as far as I know there is no easy fix for such an idiotic mistake. But how bad could it be? Hah, hah, HAHAHHAA. Postfix broken. MySQL broken, having to chown all my home directories back to their proper owners. I’m not sure what else is broken, since I haven’t been using the computer much, but I can’t imagine Zope survived either. So I thought about all this for a while, do I really want to take the time and go through my system fixing all the permissions, knowing full well that I will probably miss some and it could be a source of problems down the road forever? Bleh, no. This is a perfect excuse to reinstall my system, with Gentoo. *gasp!*

Yeah, for as long as I’ve been active in the linux community I’ve been a devoted Debian user, so it probably comes as a surprise that I’d consider switching, but I wasn’t kidding with how impressed I was with Gentoo. I started out in debian using testing, but then switched to stable because I was more comfortable with it’s security updates, and I really wanted a STABLE system, so unstable was pretty much out of the question. Well, needless to say stable
is old. I was living in the stone ages as far as software went, and although this didn’t really bother me before I started using Gentoo at work (“it works fine!” *shakes cane at new fangled things*), I quickly began to realize how this new stuff really was stable and good. Now I’m not too wild about compile times, but that’s a one time thing that I can handle. And I have a lot to learn with Gentoo, I am a total n00b, but I hear the docs are very good, so I’m not too worried. So Michael brought my computer into work Monday night to back it up and start the Gentoo install for me. I’m confident it’ll go fine, and I’ll have a spiffy system ready when we move into our new place!

Of course I’m going to continue to use debian on my laptop, and on servers, since I am comfortable with how it does those jobs. I do still love you debian!

This has been long. I’m going to go find some lunch and probably surf the web doing a little research on kitties and whatever else happens to grab my attention. *wanders off*

I have all sorts of things to talk and complain about today. I think it’s the weather, this bitter cold has got me into a tired mood. Weather, I’ll start off with that.

It’s been cold. When it first dropped into the 20s I laughed at the news people who were going on and on about the “bitter cold” I mean come on, I’m from Maine! In January the temperature barely rises above 20 %) Then it started to get REALLY cold, today I woke up and it was in the single digits outside, and windy, so we had a wind chill of about 10 below. *Shiver* that’s cold! But at least I’m not up north any further, I was talking to crypticreign yesterday and he said the temperatures are even lower up in Boston. Now I’m not usually one to complain about the cold, even when it’s this cold, but when I have to wake up at 5 am the LAST thing I want is to have to suffer in the miserable cold as well, cold and tired do not mix well %)

I ended up cancelling the Philly Chix meeting last night, getting down there around 8 probably would not have been too horrible, but by 10 or so I think the really low wind chill would have been something we wouldn’t be able to handle and be happy with, especially if we were unable to get parking close to the bookstore. We’ll resume the regular meetings next month.

But it could be worse, I heard on NPR this morning that in the White Mountains of New Hampshire the temps hit -44, with wind chills around -100. Gaah.

Maine is north, I bet it’s cold there too. My 14 year old sister is up there and I got a chance to talk to her yesterday, she had all sorts of interesting things to say:

$sister: have u heard anything yet?
Leia26: no
Leia26: about what?
$sister: about me getting aresseted and shit
Leia26: no o_o
$sister: wow dude i got lik 3 court dates now
Leia26: what did you do this time?
$sister: heraament…cimual conduct..asalt..tampering..trettening

At least she spelled tampering correctly. She wouldn’t tell me what exactly she did, I’m not sure I wanted to know. I really don’t understand how she’s become such a problem child %( maybe my other sister and I stole all the intelligence and “good girl” genes and didn’t leave her with any. Then again, she did have quite a difficult time growing up, she’s always been active, then my parent’s divorce, me leaving (we were VERY close when she was younger, I was “Bethy Mommy”), and her lack of disapline following the divorce (she lived with my mother, but they both wanted to stay on her good side by being the “nice parent”). It’s sad really, I hate to see my sister throw away her life like this. It’s not like I can do anything about it though, so I just sit down here in PA and sigh.

My other sister is in Alberta seeing her boyfriend. I sent her a quick email this morning to see how she’s doing up there.

So the football team here in Philly is apparently doing good, some championship game is on Sunday, do you know what that means? For the past two weeks at least 50% of each local news broadcast has been stupid football stuff, 45% about the cold weather, and 5% of other local junk. I can’t believe how mind-numbing the local news has become. Have you ever seen these interviews with football players? Especially after a game, they mumble about fate and how things were “meant to be” and how important football is, yadda yadda yadda… I can’t stand to watch it for more than a couple minutes because I’m just overwhelmed with the stupidity of it all, it really pains me to watch these idiots. They move between football and weather the whole broadcast, inevitably “showing” how cold it is by having some poor tiny weather person standing in the windy cold to report while they shiver. Are we really such a nation of sadists that enjoy watching this? Why on earth do they do it? And then they interview cold people on the streets “Boy it’s cold!” No kidding, can we move on? “Sure! THE EAGLES are headed…” *groan*

And then the national news at 6:30, it doesn’t matter what channel it is (CBS, ABC, NBC),
we usually choose NBC for whatever reason. Not only is it VERY US-centric and hardly ever covering anything but popular stories (Michael Jackson and our soliders dying in Iraq), but it’s riddled with commercials! The last 15 minutes of the half hour program is nearly all commercials, it very difficult for me to watch. I HATE commercials %)

I think I am going to give up trying to watch any of this news. I can get all my news via the internet and news radio anyway.

Do I have more to complain about? Oh yes! After this whole mars rover news we learned that Bush plans to put into action all sorts of new space plans. It’s no a coincidence that it’s an election year. How stupid does he think we are? Are we this stupid? All Bush has done during his years in office is spend money and cut taxes, does he live in the same economic world as the rest of us? It makes me so angry. Why not come up with a plan that’s remotely sane, say… “I’ll give every US Citizen health insurance” at least I could support that, even if I know he’ll never actually do it.

So now you may wonder, am I a Democrat or a Republican? Who am I voting for in November?

Neither. And I don’t know who I’m voting for.

Apparently most of my views are quite Republican/Conservative (in those online quizzes I always fall into this category), and I’m not a fan of big federal government, I don’t think illegal immigrants should have any sort of government benefits, I am loudy opposed to affirmative action, and I think all law-abiding citizens should have the right to a gun if they want one.

But I do hold many views that would generally be considered Democratic/Liberal. Separation of church and state is VERY important, I believe gays and lesbians should be able to marry and benefit from the same services as straight couples (as a committed yet unmarried woman myself I know all too well the benefits such couples lose out on), I’m pro-choice (I’d never have an abortion myself, but I don’t believe it can be effectively legislated), I don’t think cutting taxes is the answer.

Oh and I hate politics, but I think most everyone does.

Enough complaining for now. I’ve been bringing my laptop into work this week to listen to music. It’s been working out very nicely, not exactly the size of an iPod, but it’s cheaper :D And hey, I need a workout carrying this to and from work, since all my other excercise plans have fizzled and died this winter. *pats the good laptop mp3/ogg player*

More good news, we pretty much have all the paperwork and meetings done for getting our house! Insurance in place, mortgage rate locked in and all ready to go, it should be smooth sailing for our expected closing date of January 29th. YAY! %)

I guess I’m going to work on some things on my website, I am sort of in a design mood, so I’ll probably work on fixing some existing pages to make them prettier.

Take care everyone, and stay warm %) *wanders off*

http://www.city-data.com/city/Schwenksville-Pennsylvania.html (this site rocks).

This is the town I will be living in.

Population (year 2000): 1,693

Neat.

Of course the only picture on that site of the town is a view of the nuclear power plant cooling towers that are in nearby Limerick. Speaking of which, while visiting Michael’s friend Bill this weekend, he gave us a housewarming gift of KI pills. Ha. Ha.

I feel much better this week.

*wanders off*

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

Hmm, I went online and posted an entry about it already. Long days, a lot of stress, bad news concerning my health, it’s just been a mess.

Friday night we ended up staying at work until nearly 11 because Michael had so much work to do. People were coming to him all day with new projects that they wanted him to get done that day, on top of the other stuff he already had to do. My day actually wasn’t bad at all, I did a lot of basic html work which was perfect for how numb my brain was from the whole week %) and I had a bit of time online with my friends, got to update my website in a few places. For dinner we left work for a little while and went to our favorite Chinese place, Natural Village. I ordered “Phoenix and Dragon Fly Together” which was a yummie chicken and shrimp dish, but I ordered the vegan one, so no meat! I was very impressed again, the vegan shrimp really had a shrimpy taste! I keep being impressed by that place %)

I was exhausted when we finally did go home. Slept until about noon on Saturday morning.

When I got up on Saturday morning I took a shower and in the mid afternoon we headed up to Michael’s friend Bill’s house. Bill has a farm, but it’s more of a hobby farm, which is very cool. They have 4 buildings that I could see, three sheep, a few chickens, and 20 acres of land. It’s the “someday when I have enough money for my dream house” House. He’s go so much cool stuff %) He was having a little get together with a lot of his friends, so it was pretty busy and there were people everywhere. It was fun though, even if I was horribly shy. Bill and his wife are excellent hosts, very nice people, and of course there was lots of yummie food!

We ended up leaving around 9. On the way up we learned that he lived off of route 29, our new house is off of 29 too! So we decided to drive down 29 to see how far we’d be. Turns out it was only about 20 minutes, cool. We then decided to try and take 63 part of the way home, just because I was curious as to how far exactly our place was to Lansdale via 63. Well it ended up being quite a long ride home when we were done with it %) but it was worth it, I have a better idea of how the area is set up, and can now cross 63 off my list of commute routes! Ugh. Depending on traffic we’re really starting to think taking the northeast extention of the turnpike on our commute will be the best, even if it is 90 cents each way. Maybe we should get an EZ-Pass.

There is some cool news this week though. Sam, the woman I started the Philly Chix with, recently purchased philly-chix.org! Yay %) Michael is going to set up all the stuff on our side so that I can still host it, and we’re going to buy phillychix.org as well, probably sometime this week, so we’ll have both pointing to the site (this way we won’t have to worry about some pr0n site grabbing one of them). So finally we’re going to have a cool domain for the Philly Chix. Speaking of which, the next meeting of the Philly Chix is this week, on thursday. We’ll probably take the train from Glenside down into the city. Should be fun, and hopefully by then we will have the new site URL up and running %)

Have I mentioned that I recently found the Swenksville website? Well it’s horrible %) It seems that it’s hosted on some free ISP website, which is so sad! And the design could use quite a bit of work as well. If I were in a position to redo the site with them with a good domain name I would, but we really can’t afford to host another site right now. The site is very cool though, a lot of older photographs of the town from the early 20th century, and even a whole town history! I grabbed the town history as soon as I saw it and printed it out (all 11 pages). I read it last night, and it was so cool %) The original European settlers there were from Germany, George Washington stayed in the area once during the Revolutionary war, the borough was incorporated in 1903, originally there was a copper mine owned by the English, and a variety of interestin
g little tidbits and “we don’t know if this is true or not, but the story says..” sections. It was very interesting reading, even if I’m not really familiar enough with the “Families Of The Area” to understand some of the implied amusement in some sections. I also learned from this that the library in town is all volunteer, heeey I want to work at a library! I think that would be a cool volunteer job if they need the help, I could do that between contract jobs. I love history.

Today, well I said at the party last night that I was going to sleep all day (to which Bob replied “It’s good to have plans” hehehe), but I did actually need to get up so that I could get some sleep tonight. I guess we aren’t going to do anything. Michael mentioned that he might want to light a fire in the fireplace, that would be nice to snuggly by with a book or laptop %) I need to do some laundry too. I’ll find ways to occupy myself. It should be a nice relaxing day.

Not sure how much I’ll work this week, the two big projects I was brought on for in December are both at a point where I can do little more for them. I am sure I could find a way to occupy all my time if I do end up having to stay home, but I’d almost rather come into work with no work than stay here sans internet access. *shrugs* We’ll see.

I’ve been writing entries offline on my laptop a couple times a week, I’ll get around to putting them up once we’re settled in our new place just so there isn’t a huge hole in this journal, but for now since I’m online I’ll just give a brief update.

Things have been difficult. Not the house stuff, that’s all going well, but my entire situation right now. I’m excited about the house, I even have new pictures of the outside that we took for the insurance company (click here to see new pictures), yay! But everything else has been a bit rough.

I haven’t been sleeping the best lately, trying to get used to this early schedule is very difficult especially since I can’t bring myself to preserve it during the weekend as well. How could I go to bed at 10 pm and wake up at 5 am when I don’t have to? *sigh* This exhaustion has added a lot to my stress.

This week at work I experienced my first site launch. On tuesday I came in, already tired from a lousy night sleep the night before, and I learned that they expected to have a site launched with content they had just recieved by that night. So I came into work at 6:30 am and wasn’t able to leave until the site was in launchable condition, at 10:30 pm. Gah. I am definately not used to 16 hour days, I made foolish mistakes because I was so exhausted later in the night. But we got the site up and running. The rest of this week was spent running around fixing little problems with the site, I was cursing and Netscape6 and IE for quite some time as well. It’s all been very hard. I never realized how complicated it would be dealing with clients %) We want to make them happy, but sometimes things are confused, or I don’t get the information I need, etc. Still, I feel very acomplished, and I’m happy I could get this done, but it still took quite a toll on me. On wednesday I was so frustrated I couldn’t even look at a computer after work, and don’t even get me close to a webpage right now! Today I’m better though, I did some work to put up those house pictures on my website, and the lan party pictures from New Years Eve.

So I am very busy at work, and then I go “Home.” Since we’re living with Michael’s mother it’s not nearly as comfortable to having our own place. She’s doing everything she can to make us feel at home, I don’t think anyone I’ve ever lived with has done better, but there is always a bit of stress when you’re living with someone else like this. Every night this week I was a complete wreck by the time I retired with Michael to our bedroom. Tired, crankie, down. I just want to sleep.

The weather hasn’t helped either. Usually when I’m depressed taking a walk is very helpful, but the weather has been in the 20s most of the week, and taking a walk in that would probably just make me uncomfortable. This cold cold weather is such a waste without snow! But snow isn’t in the forecast anytime soon. *sigh*

I got a call from my doctor last night. I had an appointment last month, some follow ups to the a small procedure I had last year to remove some “irrelgular” cells (non-cancerous, but still potentially troublesome). They told me “if we don’t call you in the next 3 weeks you have nothing to worry about” … well this phone call was within those 3 weeks %( I was worried so I called last night, but the office was close already. Great, I already had enough on my mind last night when I was going to bed. So I called this morning, it’s not good news, there are traces of bad cells again. I need to go back in a couple months for a few more tests for more follow ups to see what we want to do.

I am not sure if my lack of broadband at home is adding much to my stress level, but it is another change that I am handling. I’m not used to being so separated from my online people. I can still drop by in IRC sometimes, but I can’t be as nearly as attentive as I was before. And I miss reading everyone’s journal’s all the time. I guess all of this is adding to the seclusion I am feeling right now.

I’m definately going
to be spending this weekend relaxing.

Gah this entry sounds so miserable. It’s just been a lousy week.

Oh and here are those LAN party pictures from New Years Eve. go to lan party pictures! *wanders off*

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

And as I expected things are starting off nicely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I made my website pretty for the holidays.

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

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