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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*wanders off to make dinner*

Today I got quite a bit of work done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll post this tuesday. *wanders off*

I got zope running on apache this morning, I was having a lot of trouble at first, using this how-to because it says to put certain info in one section of the httpd.conf file, but it really needed to be added in another, after the modules are loaded. Of course it took me a while to figure this out (I feel stupid about that now, since it makes perfect sense). As soon as I got this done I tried to make a page work with php. No luck. I tried a couple methods I could find to get it to work without success. I won’t waste more time with it right now, if it turns out we really need php (I sorta did this as a side project, I don’t even know if php is needed) I’ll push further into it and try to figure it out. I also discovered that the ftp server must be something that works with zserver. So while running on apache it doesn’t have FTP, but again, is FTP needed? If FTP is needed it might just be better to forget apache altogether and stick with the zserver, I can’t really see many advantages at the moment of using apache instead.

In any event, I got it running on apache, and that’s pretty cool.

Yesterday afternoon I spent more time doing Zope stuff, I’m on the last DTML tutorial, and it still impresses me, I understand so much more about how DTML works, and it’s much simpler than I was scaring myself into thinking. I’m pretty confident with my knowledge of it now.

Yesterday afternoon we took the car out for a carwash (carwashes are fun!), then we went out for dinner at Unos, and had pizza with our friend Bob. I had a really nice time, had a couple Guinnesses, ate a yummie brownie dessert. After, we went to the video store and picked up some old movies (Galaxy Quest and Starship Troopers). Came home, Myk and I watched the movies, then I watched some Dr. Who on PBS and went to bed around 12:30. It was a good day.

We really should go grocery shopping today… *wanders off*

I was looking around yesterday for more stuff I could do with Zope that would “look neat and impressive” and I discovered DevShed.com’s Zope Section. This is a collection of guides talking about the basics of DTML, to the basic of page templates (which I REALLY need to work on) to getting Zope to work with apache (I’ll get to this in a moment). I’ve been going through the DTML tutorials, which are amazingly well-done, the person writing them really knows how to teach and explain things. The Zope documentation that comes with Zope is good, but they jump right into full examples and while wading through all that sometimes the basics are missed and it’s easy to get confused. So this DTML tutorial I am using now is wonderful, I can just go directly to the DTML function I want to learn about and have it completely spelled out for me.

Now I wasn’t aware until finding this that it was possible to have apache and Zope play together, since Zope runs by default on it’s own ZServer. It’s a very very cool revelation! I am going to go through the tutorial today, and hopefully by the end of the weekend I can have my local apache server playing with Zope… and not too many things broken ;)

I’ve been talking about Zope a lot, but it’s really what I have been focusing on these past few weeks, and I can find little more to talk about %)

I don’t think we’re doing anything terribly exciting this weekend. Maybe grocery shopping, oh boy! Hrm… *wanders off*

It’s sunny today, but still windy. It’s not as windy as it was yesterday, the downed trees from that wind caused quite a problem for people driving home last night. Luckily we didn’t encounter any problems while driving down to the philly chix meeting last night.

Erin picked me up yesteday evening around 7. The ride down wasn’t too bad, typical route 76 traffic into the city, it took about 50 minutes. The meeting ended up going very well. Four of us showed up most of the talk ended up being about programming (a subject I can contribute much less to than linux), but it was fun. Maggie had all sorts of interesting stories to tell since she’s been into computers for decades, it was wonderful hearing her stories %) Even after Hanna had to leave, the three of us remaining ended up staying and talking for an extra hour, before we knew it it was 10 pm! Finally around 10 we decided we all needed to get home. The traffic coming home was a bit of a nightmare. First there was an accident on 76, so there was a TON of traffic as soon as we got on that. Finally got past the accident and the ride was fine, got on the turnpike, everything is going great, and then at the “2 miles until…” sign for our exit there was a WALL of traffic. Apparently for that two miles before our exit it was down to 1 lane (it’s usually 3). So those two miles took us about 25 minutes to get through. Finally we got back to my apartment at around 11:20. It was a great night.

I got to wear my new boots to the meeting, they are so comfortable! I thought the arch in the foot would feel too strangely high, it does at first, but once you start walking around in them you realize that it feels perfect. I am very happy with them.

While we were getting ready to leave the meeting one of the women mentioned that it was cold out, to which I blurted out “I’m from Maine, this is *nothing*!” Erin then said that I “looked like someone who would be from Maine.” When I asked her to explain the final answer ended up being “You have that L.L. Bean look” Of course at the time I was wearing an L.L. Bean jacket (which wasn’t clear from just looking at it), and that made me laugh. So here I am, falling into the stereotype of someone from Maine. I actually don’t mind that though, I do love L.L. Bean, and I’m happy to be from Maine, it gives me a wonderful excuse for being so naive.

I’m glad it’s friday. *wanders off*

I feel good today. This morning I was able to tackle the user security stuff that was driving me nuts in Zope. It seems my trouble had a lot to do with mozilla and opera caching too much information, so even when I restarted them the users weren’t working properly, so I’d change user attributes and it wasn’t reflecting it so I’d get frustrated. I ended up just telling mozilla not to cache anything and it’s working much better now. I’m happy. Progress yay!

The mood I was in yesterday was very funny. I can fairly accurately predict my “frustration points” in every project, but I can never do anything about them. I just have to relax and wait for them to pass so I can jump back onto the project with a fresh outlook.

I got my boots on tuesday. I haven’t really gone out except to take the trash out so I haven’t had a chance to wear outside yet, but just from trying them on they feel very comfy. They’ll get their first “outing” trial run tonight.

Yes, I’m actually going out tonight, for the philly chix meeting. Erin is good enough to give me a ride into the city (Myk can’t because he has plans after work with a friend of his). It should be a nice meeting, looks like at least five of us will show up, yay! So hopefully I can get rid of a few more of these books.

Want a wonderfully addictive and fun game to pass some time? Try frozen-bubble. There is a windows port and an OSX port, and of course several packages on the website for different linux distros (and it’s in debian’s apt, of course). The existance of this game came to my attention at the last Philly Chix meeting. Erin mentioned it and so I just HAD to install it the next day. But like often happens I was quickly distracted and didn’t actually start playing it until I got frustrated with Zope the other day and wanted something to turn my brain to mush for a while. It’s fun %)

It’s very windy out today. The power at Myk’s work went out for a while (and so our server was down too *eak*), and it’s gloomy out.

I spoke with my Aunt Elaine last night. Like I expected she’s not going to be able to make it up for thanksgiving, apparently she took a second job, so she’ll be working the day after thanksgiving, that leaves no time for a trip down here. It’s ok though, I am perfectly happy relaxing for thanksgiving, since early december is going to be very busy as we plan to move (no we didn’t find a house, we’re just moving somewhere less expensive). My aunt is doing ok, very busy, she’s working two part time jobs and going to school. She also has my cousin Chet to raise (hmm how old is he now? 10? 11? something like that…), he’s doing alright too. It was very nice to talk to her, I always feel happy after talking to my Aunt Elaine %)

Now back to work. *wanders off*

I think my trouble with writing this past week was my mood. Each time I had some time to write I just wanted to complain about something, and I complain too much, and often it’s stupid stuff. I haven’t exactly gotten out of the complaining mood, but I have progressed a bit so that my complaining isn’t so stupid.

I’m still getting over my cold, I’ll have this cough all season, maybe even through the winter, it’s just the way things are. This sinus headache that I’ve had for a couple days is because of the cold though, and it’s a bit of a pain, it’s very difficult to focus with a headache. Advil seems to be helping most of the time.

Been working very hard with Zope, the permissions are being a bit of a pain, but I will work through it. And I’m coming to a point where knowing how Python works is becoming vital. I’ve done a number of things that don’t require it, made good progress. But of course with every setback in learning I get frustrated again. I start thinking to myself “I guess I’m not smart enough to learn this” but no, that’s not true, I’ve tackled things harder than this, it just takes time and work. I think in every project I work on I get to the “I HATE THIS I AM DUMB” stage, and that’s what I’m in now. I just need to get past it, quick. So I focus on parts of Zope that aren’t as challenging and come back to the really hard stuff later. I do have a fairly nice presentation put together however, so I can do all the basic stuff.

I spoke with my mother this morning. Like usual she just went on and on about herself and things happening there, I barely got a word in, but that’s alright, I’m not terribly excited to tell my mother all about my life anyway. At one point of the conversation she told me about how my little sister Annette (14) snuck out her bedroom window and went downtown to hang out with her friends. I replied “Yeah, I used to sneak out my window and go to the park” (I was even more of a dork back then, and I really had no life, no friends that I would want to sneak out and see). Apparently my mother was surprised that I had done this, and claimed that she never knew. Huh, I assumed she did. Oh well. She also told me about how her brother (my uncle Dan) showed up at her place recently. He is a truck driver, and had a delivery up in Maine and decided to just drop by unexpected. She hadn’t seen him in nearly 3 years, and was shocked and very pleased that he showed up at her doorstep. I’m happy for her, she really never gets family from out of state (besides me) visiting, I think she needed it. The reason she called was to respond to an email I wrote her last week asking for my Aunt Elaine’s email address or phone number. I need it because she said she might come down for thanksgiving, and I havent heard from her in a while. From what my mother said money is quite tight for her, so I’m pretty sure she won’t be able to make it down, but I’ll give her a call this evening anyway.

Now I’m going to go back to work on stuff. *wanders off*