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!

Offline entry, posted Jan 21, 2004

We moved in with Michael’s mother on Sunday. I don’t enjoy moving, does anyone? Trying to carry things that are heavy and bulky for an entire afternoon isn’t any fun. Strangely, the couch and the desk weren’t even the heaviest things, it was the nice box of records that caused us the most pain, it’s small and amazingly heavy. On top of that there were flurries, 6+ inches of snow on the ground, and it was about 30 degrees out. I was so cold, and the truck was very slippery inside, I almost fell about a dozen times. Still, we got the whole move done in about 5 hours, and were able to return the moving truck by 5 pm. Both of us were exhausted, so we decided to head out to dinner at Joseph’s Pizza in northeast Philly, it’s closer to here than it was to our old apartment so the drive wasn’t too bad and they weren’t really busy. When we got back to Michael’s mother’s (ok, I’ll just say “mom’s” from now on) house we went to be fairly early.

Monday we woke up and headed to the old apartment for cleaning and picking up our computers. It took about half the day to do that. It wasn’t so bad. Then we drove around for a bit doing various errands, dropped some old clothes off at the Salvation Army, stopped at a used bookstore so I could trade in some of my books. Got about $16 worth of credit for the dozen or books I gave them, so I picked up The Courtship of Princess Leia and Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga, which I haven’t read yet. We got back to mom’s in the late afternoon, unpacked our computers, made some tacos for dinner, and again, went to bed before 11.

At 5 am on tuesday the alarm went off. I don’t think I’ve ever made a habit of getting up that early, and on top of it my whole body just ached from all the moving. I stumbled out of bed, took my shower, and we ended up getting to work before 7. We decided that this would be the best for now, working 6:30-3:30 so that we would miss most of the horrible traffic between work and mom’s. They had all sorts of things for me to work on. So I spent the day being quite busy, aware that I had two looming deadlines, so I really couldn’t slack off at all. By the time Michael got back from visiting a client downtown it was after 6, I had been there for 12 hours! The last couple hours I didn’t really work though, I get paid by the hour and I wouldn’t want to work more than the normal 9 hours unless it’s clear that a deadline wouldn’t be met otherwise. I read for a bit on the comfy couches, and dropped into IRC to see how everyone around was doing. I was tired, and achy, and just all around exhausted when Michael came back, so we decided to go out for Chinese. We had been to this Chinese place in the past, I’ve mentioned it before, it’s wonderful, they have a whole huge vegan menu in addition to their normal menu. Last time I stayed with the normal menu, but this time I decided to get an order of vegan sesame chicken. Boy was it good! It didn’t taste exactly like chicken, but the flavor was very nice, I might even go as far as to say that it was better than regular sesame chicken! After dinner we headed back to mom’s, and I was asleep before 10.

Wednesday was not bad. Hit some rough spots in coding that were really frustrating me, and I had started to get to the point where I didn’t even want to THINK about Zope anymore. I figured out what my limits were as far as python was concerned (zope is VERY python-oriented), and expressed this to my bosses, and they completely understood, luckily these troubles probably won’t come into play for a couple more months, in which time I can either learn more or pass the job off to someone else (another guy there knows a lot of Zope and is more familiar with Python, but he’s crazy busy right now, which is why I’m there). I got a bit of a break by doing normal, basic html stuff to update sites. Of course with each new problem I discover a few hours studying the issue gets me very far, and sometimes just getting away from the code a bit gets my thoughts of
f of that specific direction so I can get a fresh look at it and figure out a new way to tackle it. We stayed at work until about 5, Michael has been really busy with all sorts of things so leaving on time has been difficult. We got home around 5:30 and mom was making some dinner and offered to feed us as well if we were hungry. It was a great dinner, just thanksgiving leftovers really, but I was so hungry and tired that I just wanted something warm and tasty. I ate so much. We went to bed around 10.

Thursday was decent. In the morning it was pouring out, and warm, so the snow was all melting, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts in the morning to get coffee and bagels, and then as we were driving to the office we had to drive through an overflowing creek. Just about everyone was late for work, they ended up closing off the road except to people who worked there because cars kept getting flooded out as the water level increased drastically, they evacuated a nearby business park because it had started to flood. Luckily we were up high enough not to have to worry about that, but the guys sure had fun talking about the possibility. Many of the people in the office went home early because they had little cars that might have trouble getting there, especially in traffic. We stayed though, R4 can take it!

I was able to continue work on one organization’s website, get the basic html code done and looking good in IE, of course getting it to look good in mozilla was no problem, since Mozilla doesn’t do stupid things like IE does *ahem*. Luckily this company only requires pages to look good in IE and Netscape 6+, I winced when I looked at it in Netscape 4.7, but I wasn’t going to waste my time making it look better if it wasn’t required, I mean, I have my pride, but I also had deadlines and so much real work to do, fixing pages to look good in netscape 4.7 is amazingly time-consuming. We stayed until our scheduled 3:30 and then had to head off to Fort Washington.

We had been warned that the exit off of 309 and the turnpike there had been closed due to so much flooding, so we decided to take the long way around. By the time we got to the mortgage place a little after 4 they had left already, even though they claimed they were open until 5. So we just left the paperwork we needed to give them there. Then we headed to Chariot Solutions to have the Philly Chix meeting. The meeting was nice, we were there early so I got to just spend some time hanging out with Erin. We had planned to do a debian install, but all links for the images for the network install that linked on the debian site were broken! We could have looked around the web a bit more to find some, but after realizing that getting the gigabit NIC to work would be a bit of a pain we decided that it might just take too long. We figured that if we did want to do an install we could just use Red Hat or Suse, and that way the others would at least get a basic idea about the install. While waiting around Erin showed me “Magesty” a Windows game that had been ported to linux by a group in the UK (I guess), it’s very Warcraft 3-like, and looked pretty cool. Unfortunately it needs a pretty good system (was not too happy on Michael’s 700ish mhz powerbook), but it might be something to check out for linux lan parties! Around 6 we ordered some dinner, tons of food despite our small group, a few subs, two pizzas, fries. While waiting for the food another woman showed up. She worked at Chariot with Erin, and was the project coordinator for one of their current big projects I guess. She has been doing work in the tech field, coordinating and such since the 80s, and she is really smart, but she’s not too familiar with linux (she is somewhat familiar with other unix varients however). Another woman showed up a little after 7, she also works for Chariot and similarly is familar with some other unix varients, but not linux. While eating dinner (I was so hungry again! I ate half a sub and 3 pieces of pizza, hehe) Erin and I started explaining the basics of linux. We went through what a distro
is what the most popular ones are, what a window manager is, all sorts of choices for programs, then tried to explain what all the major directories were for (/var /dev /home …). Erin also got into licensing after BSD was mentioned, she’s really informed about them, which I assume is partially because she needs to be so they can properly license their java code, and she did an amazing job at explaining them. Around 8:30 we finally got to sit down to start a linux install. We decided to just go with Suse, since Erin and I had never tried it, and we figured it would be a quick and easy one to do. Well it was quick and easy, amazingly so! I was quite impressed, the hardwear detection was great, if you were completely new to linux you’d hardly need to know anything, the default options seemed fine to get a system up and running happily with KDE. The only part of the process that really took us any time was partitioning, since we wanted to explain what a partition was, and how they are used, and options for them. It was fun! By about 9 we decided to leave, I was exhausted, and it started to feel like this “cold that wouldn’t come” was finally starting to creep up on me.

Friday was a long day. Got up at 5 am again, I swear I wasn’t even aware until after my shower when I was brushing my teeth, one of those “Neat, I’m awake” moments. I felt terrible, this cold finally was taking it’s toll, probably aided by this crazy week and my lack of 8 hours of sleep per night. On our way to work we stopped by a Dunkin Donuts again, I just got a bagel since my body wasn’t interested in the whole coffee thing. I had a little trouble focusing at many parts of the day. The morning was quite productive though, I wrote my first little python script! It doesn’t do much, just a basic split, but I was pleased with myself. I had some work in the morning putting together content for a site that has the same basics as one I was working on earlier, and that was good. I am becoming more familiar with postgres, but I am completely unexperienced with putting together SQL queries on larger databases, I had one that took over a minute to return, oops. So I spent a good amount of time trying to slim down the query time by looking at the php scripts previously written for the site. I’m still a bit stumped, but as with everything else, I’m sure I’ll get it soon, and I’m not going to spend my weekend thinking or worrying about it. For lunch we got to have some chicken cheesesteak subs from a local deli, yum! Then Michael headed out to another client to help them with their network. That ended up taking longer than he expected, so it quickly turned into another 12 hours spent at work. I stopped actually working around 4, I had been working for over 9 hours, and I was really starting to feel crappy and have serious trouble focusing. I did some things online, updates to personal sites that needed to be done, some time spent with IRC friends, I replied to a couple emails that I needed to. As a whole I really don’t mind staying later than usual like that, I mean I had internet access and a warm place, here at mom’s I’d just be watching tv or reading anyway, but last night I was not feeling good, I just wanted to go home and go to bed. Michael finally got back around 6:30, he was upset about having to work another 12 hour day, because of all the horribly typical network admin nightmares “I clicked on this attachment that you told me not to…” “I decided to fix the network problem myself but then got pulled into something else…” etc. It was after 7 by the time we got home, 14 hour day! Neither of us were very hungry, Michael made me an english muffin and I had a cup of juice and headed up to bed. We watched tv for a little while, but I was just too tired and feeling lousy to stay up for long. Yay sleep!

I figure I fell asleep around 10, and I didn’t wake up this morning until 11. I think I got my sleep debt repaid! Heh. I still feel lousy though, horrible chest congestion and my nose doesn’t feel too good. I don’t have a sinus headache yet today, I can d
eal with just about every symptom of a cold and still function, but not headaches. I think this weekend will be spent snuggled with my laptop and a book. I downloaded a bit of documentation I’ll want to go through when my laptop was still online, so I have stuff I can work on. Not all Zope related, I’m not sure I even want to look at Zope stuff on my weekend, but if I get in the mood I have that option. I have a perl tutorial that I am interested in working my way through a bit more.

On top of this busy work week, the crazy weather, my cold, and deadlines, we’re trying to get through the closing of our new house. Our timing is amazing sometimes, don’t you think? I think I’m holding up pretty well, my moods haven’t gotten out of control really, and my stress level has stayed in a good place. We have our home inspection on tuesday. I told Michael that he should just drop me off at work that morning so I could get stuff done while he heads up to the house. I really wish I could go with him, I’d like to see my house again! And I’ve been part of this whole process, missing the inspection is disappointing, but I just have too much work to do. We’re hopeful that the inspection will go fine, and sometime in the next few weeks we will have a home of our own!

Christmas is in two weeks too. Gah. I haven’t gone shopping, or thought about Christmas cards. I don’t know if I will do too much this year. It’s nice that I have a job now, so I probably can spend a little on my close family (sisters anyway), but I’m afraid it might just have to get to them late. There is just way too much going on right now.

And now I think I’m going to venture out of the bedroom to find some food, probably take a shower as well since it’s nearly 1 pm. *wanders off*

We started looking for a house in August of 2002, when it came to our attention that our lease would be running out in December, because of how this community operates we would need to tell them if we intended to stay or sign another year-long lease by mid october. The race was on to find the perfect home.

Over those couple of months we dealt with a number of realtors, but kept being discouraged by not finding what we wanted in the areas we wanted for the price we wanted to pay. We went through a couple realtors because they just failed to listen when we told them what we wanted. Come on, if there is nothing just tell us there is nothing, don’t keep sending us to places we’ll hate, it’s just a waste of time! Eventually we found a realtor who was trying hard to find us what we wanted, that’s when we decided we could “settle for” a house in Telford. So we went through all the paperwork and decided to place a bid.

If you read my journal last year you know this story, we ended up being outbid. It was disappointing, and it was mid-october by then and we decided to sign another year long lease here and stay. Throughout this year we would scan through home listings every few weeks, usually not finding anything, or finding that they were sold/under contract before we even saw the online listing.

What we needed was a good realtor. Realtors have an obvious advantage to the casual home buyer because they have access to a huge database of homes for sale, apparently they pay for access to this database. If we were going to find anything we’d either have to drive around the areas we wanted and hope that the for sale signs would find us something or just hire a realtor to help us out. There are clear advantages to hiring a buyers agent. For one you don’t need to drive around for hours looking for houses for sale. More importantly though, these people do this for a living, they can help us with all the paperwork, they know what they are doing when bargining with the sellers to get the price down.

So this year when it came to the decision to either sign another year long lease or find a home we were determined to find something. Our plan was not to renew the lease here, if we didn’t find something before we had to move out of here we had the option of spending as long as it took to find a place with Myk’s mother. Not exactly a wonderful option, but it was the best we could see, this way we wouldn’t need to sign another year long lease, or worry about getting out of it once we found a house. This weekend we were planning on moving there.

We continued to actively look, and earlier this week Michael spoke with Tony Alcaro. He called to inquire about a house we had seen online, and it turned out to be under contract already. But this realtor offered to help us. Our expectations weren’t terribly high, we’d been through this before, and kept getting disappointed. We met him on tuesday night at a property near Lansdale, weren’t really happy with it, but he seemed like a good guy who wanted to help. He sent us dozens of properties to look at, and Michael picked out a few we wanted to see. One in particular stood out, it was in Schwenskville, which seemed to be a little further than we wanted to go, but we would give it a chance. We arranged to meet Tony on thursday evening.

We arrived just before the sun went down. The drive out there was nice, the location was amazing. The house is on the side of a hill, overlooking a stream, which is backed by a small mountain. Wow. Sure, there are neighbors, but the lot is .43 acres, so there is privacy. Trees, many trees. We were able to walk around the house. By the time Tony arrived we were already in love with the house. We got to see the inside, and it was so amazingly perfect! Some small things will need work, but the major things have been done already, new kitch
en, redone bathroom and laundry room, new roof. It has a fireplace! It has a loft! We wanted it.

We followed the realtor back to his office to fill out the paperwork to place the bid. The house had only been on the market for 16 days, so we hoped we get a bid in before anyone else did. Tony ordered a pizza for us all to eat while filling out the paperwork, and by 8:30 we had finished all the paperwork and were ready to head home.

Friday night Tony gave Michael a call, they had accepted our bid!

Tony Alcaro has been an amazing realtor. He figured out what we wanted and went ahead and was able to find it. He’s worked with us to get the price we wanted, helped us every step of the way. He’s just a good guy. His office is in Lansdale, and he does work all around this area, so if you want a house near here, go to him! He’s great!

Now we need to go through mountains of paperwork, get all the proper inspections done. Apparently the whole process takes about six weeks. We’ll be staying with Michael’s mother until it’s done, it’s wonderful that she’s letting us stay there for a few weeks, just one less thing we’ll have to worry about.

I’m so very happy!

It snowed yesterday. It’s snowing today. I’d say we got a total of at least six inches. The first snow storm of the season decides to hit on the weekend we are moving! Sigh. It’s ok though, we went out today and it seems the major roads are clear enough to get by tomorrow when we are moving the big stuff.

Of course I also started working again this week, so much to worry about! I have been doing ok though. I got a little stumped in places, but it’s all healthy hard work, and I’m not bored at all.

Having a lot to worry about is great. I’m no longer strictly focused on worrying about one foolish thing. And as a whole, I think that’s made my stress level even out to a point where I am actually quite comfortable, so strange how that works.

I guess that’s it for now, we’re going to have our last fire in our fireplace here tonight. In fact, since we’re moving all the furnature out tomorrow this will be our last night in the apartment as well. Crazy %) This will be my last night with internet at home (I’ll be online at work) for a few weeks! Egads! *grin* I’ll survive. It’ll be a very healthy break. Take care everyone, happy holidays! *wanders off for a while*

Today was my second day of work.

I’ve certainly been busy, I’ll be working full time there until the end of the year, after which they will review all the upcoming work and see if they actually want to bring me onboard as a full time person. A real job! That would be great. No, I’m not getting my hopes too amazingly high right now, even if I were brilliant they couldn’t bring me on unless there really is work for me to do. I really hope it works out.

I have started to learn a bit about my perfect challenging level, I could never be part of a profession that is high stress. But what I’m doing now with Zope is very good. I get stumped, I get frustrated (like I was for a bit this morning), but then I figure things out and it feels really good to dive into work and make amazing headway (like this afternoon, when I FINALLY found a solution). In addition to learning more about myself, even in just two days of steady work, I learned some other things:

– PostgreSQL is evil and my first impressions have almost made me cry. I am familiar with basic sql statements, what is this strangeness that Postgres uses? I will need to find more documentation

– Speaking of which, I finally know what people have been screaming about when talking about open source documentation. Maybe it does exist, but it’s sparse, often out-dated, and you have to resort to wading through YEARS of mailing list archives to find most solutions (that’s where I found a solution to my problem this morning).

– I also know what people have been screaming about when it comes to open source scripting. Some things in DTML just don’t make sense at all to me, so obscure and insane. Maybe they make sense to python people (zope runs on python), but I’m not a python person!

Yeah, that was my day.

I’m happy though, it’s very nice to be working.

Hmm… I didn’t even look in irc today, I must have an interestingly high idle time right now.

Myk’s home with dinner (Indian food, mmm!). I’m going to eat. *wanders off*

-!- You’re now known as PrincesSleigha2
-!- R2D2 is now known as R2einD2eer

It’s December 1st. I had plenty to do today, so it was actually a fast, pleasant, monday.

Got up, packed up some clothes that we won’t need for the rest of the week, packed up some knick-knacks from around the apartment, did laundry. also did more Zope stuff. I was able to get an account at freezope.org. You fill out an application form to get a zope site, and they review it and email you back in a couple days to say if they will allow you to have an account. I spent a bunch of time just drawing from notes and memory to build a basic site so I can feel comfortable building something specific before I go in tomorrow and actually have to do it as a job. I used the same “Ocean” theme as that I used for my “presentation” site for this page. It’s nice to have a public Zope site now, and I actually didn’t completely choke on making a simple, nice design:

We’re supposed to have flurries tonight and tomorrow. YAY!

I also found time today to play with some little christmas scripts for irssi, I wrote them last year actually, but I changed them a bit so they work better. It’s funny looking at them, I have no idea where I got the idea for some of these.

Going to work tomorrow. My posts will be becoming more and more sporadic these next couple of months, moving, working, craziness.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about moving and starting the new job. It’s stressing me out, I can’t help it. Sigh.

And some people just make it worse.

The LAN party last night wasn’t so great as far as LAN parties go, but all I really wanted was to get away from being stressed out and spend some time with friends. I hadn’t booted into Windows since installing my new hardware, so it had to yell at me. It was being bad about the sound drivers and I gave up. You know, I’m not sure I was even in the mood to play games anyway. So I went back to linux to play UT2K3… and of course the other people playing just had to have a few MB of patches that everyone needed to install to play together, and that was a dismal failure. It was after 11 pm when we finally all just resolved to play normal UT, with no patches, no extra maps, no problems. We played until about 12:30, I was so tired by then. Headed home around 1 am.

Today… I guess we’ll try to do more packing. Definately spend some time relaxing in front of the fireplace tonight.

We added a couple more opers to Xelium. Despite all the trouble we had with the addition (and later removal) of a couple new servers, it was nice to have other opers around to spot clone attacks and do stuff in #support. So we added Tech (previously an oper on one of the removed servers), and Peacimowen, a friend of Time’s and mine who we’ve known for years and know we can trust.

There are things I should be doing now. *wanders off*

Thanksgiving was great. We went over to Myk’s mother’s house and spent the holiday with his mother, grandmother, mother’s boyfriend and his son. The dinner was so so so yummie. I’m definately more comfortable around his family now, helped out making the salad and doing dishes. Feeling comfortable is good.

My starting date for working has been moved up to the second, so I’ll be working again beginning tuesday (still at Digital Wave, where I did the other contract work before). I have been using quite a bit of my spare time going over Zope things again and again, and exploring new things that I am unfamiliar with. I won’t know it all of course (and I won’t drive myself crazy thinking that I should), I’m sure being proficient in it takes months, but I am doing well. I won’t be too horribly nervous :) I am excited to be working, this is a great opportunity for me.

We’ve started packing, have to be out of here by the 8th. I’m not terribly excited to be moving, I just wish these things were happening at different times. I’ll be moving, I’ll be working, oh and there is a Philly Chix meeting a couple days after our move is complete. We’ve gotten a lot of the “stuff we don’t need in the next week” packing done today, went through some of my stuff today to see what I want to get rid of (this happens each time I move). I actually had about 9 empty pepsi cans from when they did the episode one promo. I don’t have a full set, what could I possibly want with a few dented cans?

I wonder if there is some sort of treatment for being a packrat, it seriously drives me nuts to throw out things sometimes.

It’s going to be a LONG december. Starting in about a week I won’t be online much for a couple of months, pretty much limited to access at work. That means I won’t be reading all of everyone’s journals anymore, I probably won’t even be posting much (maybe once a week? maybe less?). It’ll be a change, but it’s only for a couple months.

I could probably use a beer.

Were will we be moving? Why won’t I be online much? I’m pulling an “I am not talking about it here.” So please, don’t press the matter further.

Tonight is nice. I’m sitting here on the couch with Myk, we have a fire going in the fireplace, we’re both on our laptops.. ahh so relaxing. And we needed it after all the packing we did today. Myk (the anti-packrat) going through his boxes, I was making many hurried trips to the recycling bin and dumpster before it started pouring out this evening.

Myk also gave me a bit of a crash course in emerge tonight, mostly explaining things in debian terms “and this is like apt-cache search..” so it wasn’t too hard to understand. Why learn Gentoo? My box at work is running Gentoo, and it needs a bunch of things installed and so I’ll need to know how to do that. I do like trying out other distros anyway (Myk has been using it for over a year now), and this is a good way to make me do it, and still come home to my lovely debian boxes %)

So, lan party tomorrow. Should be fun. I really need a break from the worries of moving and working, even if I’ll probably sneak off sometimes to do a little bit of studying. It’ll be nice to hang out with friends.

I guess that’s it, going to snuggle with Myk in front of the fire now %) *wanders off*

I love food, so Thanksgiving is a good day for me. And it’s a wonderful excuse to eat lots of pie. Mmmm.

This will be my third Thanksgiving with Myk, yay!

The first one was spent when I still lived in New York. He came up to visit me for the four day weekend. That’s when he met a majority of my mother’s side of the family (not my mother though, she was in Maine). That was the first day I ever had Chimay, I had no idea the alcohol content in it was so high, so I got really tipsy really quickly. Luckily my family found it greatly amusing and all gave me coffee to recover, hehe. I had a really nice time though. My family loves Myk %)

Last year we just spent it here at home together. I made chicken, why not a turkey? Well there are only two of us, and I don’t know how to make a turkey! So chicken was just easier, and stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn bread. It was a nice, relaxing time, no social family things to worry about.

So this will be my first Thanksgiving with Time’s mother. I’m looking forward to it, we should have a nice time.

I hope everyone’s turkey day is nice %) *wanders off*

My home directory is up to two gigs again. I don’t know how this happens, I guess it’s not a serious problem as far as harddrive space is concerned (I have a 40 gig harddrive), but we do nightly backups and it’s a bit of a pain to have to backup stuff that I don’t actually need backed up. I should go through it and make some separate place (/crap) that won’t be backed up nightly. Exciting huh? Oh yeah, I find the most exciting things to write about.

It sucks when tutorials have errors. I guess this is the benefit of relying on books rather than online documentation for projects, the books generally go through more rigorous editing so you don’t learn things the wrong way. *shakes fist at buggy tutorials*

I got my first look at the Zope work I’ll be doing next month, starting on the 3rd (yeah, actual work, in an office, with my own work computer *Yay!*). I am confident that I know enough to be successful, it’s mostly converting some sites from php to zope. I will need to review some of my php knowledge during the break and so that I’m able to READ what I’m porting, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem. There is still more Zope stuff I will need to learn, but I have plenty of time to do that, and I WILL focus on it during this next week!

I got an email from my Uncle Paul today. He found my livejournal through one of his daughter’s livejournals. It was wonderful to hear from him. He’s still working for IBM, which is really cool. It seems they are doing good down there. I’m very happy that I’m finally in contact with my Krumbach-relatives.

Between work with Zope, and continuing to fix up my Perl irssi bot (it’s nearly done being reworked, I’m VERY pleased with how it’s turning out) I squeezed some fun time in and made a page about all my R2 units. I have had this idea for quite some time, since even I end up in the wrong place when sshing into one of my R2s, I can’t imagine someone not using them daily keeping them straight. So now I have a page describing them all:

What else did I do today? Had a fight with Enlightenment! I had the gimp open for something, and when I closed it X exited. I didn’t see any error messages, and assumed that I had hit control alt backspace accidentally or something (it’s possible…). A few minutes later I opened up gimp, edited something, then closed gimp. X exited again, no error messages. It was really odd. I ended up changing the window manager to fluxbox. Gimp exits fine. I logged in with another user into enlightenment, Gimp exits fine. So it was something in my ~/.enlightenment folder. But what? I haven’t changed anything except my background and some keybindings. I eliminated both those as the cause of my problem. Then I changed my theme. Aha! No trouble! It was quite a pain. Why do I go to all this trouble to mention it? It’s just odd, I’ve been using this enlightenment theme for over a year now, and I’ve never had any trouble, it’s one of the reasons I chose to use it. And this was a big waste of time in my afternoon! *grin* I spent over a half hour trying to debug this issue when I really wanted to be working on things. Oh well, I shouldn’t complain, this sort of thing is rare, linux doesn’t have half the problems I encountered on a daily basis with Windows, and in most cases you can’t fix those…

Otherwise I am quite happy with my system. This past weekend Myk installed RAID on his box (which he’s putting on my work machine too, he says it boots up in less than 10 seconds). So he didn’t need to worry about getting his CD-RW working each time he was reworking his system he decided to give it to me and take my regular cd-rom. Now I have a CD-RW! I will need to learn how to use this… and compile support for it into my kernel one of these days. Myk also gave me his amazing sound card with a front plate thing that has lots of knobs and sockets that I don’t know what to do with %) *touches
them* He decided that I should have it since I use my home workstation more than he uses his.

Last night we were sitting on the bed watching the West Wing on Bravo and I decided that I wanted cookies. We ended up driving out to the store to pick up some of that Toll House cookie dough that you just break apart and bake. Also went to Whole Foods and got a carrot cake for thanksgiving tomorrow. Their carrot cake is the best. We got home around 9 and I made up the cookies. Mmmm fresh cookies!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We’ll be heading over to Myk’s mother’s house for dinner tomorrow afternoon. It should be a nice day, I want turkey!!! Mmm turkey. His mother also mentioned to me this evening that they’ll have lots of desserts, yay!

Enough about food.

We were invited to a LAN party this weekend. Barry and Rae have the most frequent LAN parties out of all of us, and previously they were just on dial up. Well now they have cable, and a whole network set up (they have wireless too!). So I’ll actually be online when I’m at this lan party! How wonderful! I’m really looking forward to it, we havent done the lan party thing since last May, I kept getting thoughts about getting rid of my poor Windows partition due to lack of use.

Now that’s odd, I just closed gimp and lost X again. GAAH. I’m so glad vim saves things periodically, or all of this would be gone! Ok, I am going to stop using this theme. I wonder what made it break all of a sudden? I will have to do some digging and find out what has changed.

I haven’t written a long long entry like this in a while.

I don’t know what we’ll do for dinner. I really don’t know what I want. *wanders off*

I spent most of today cleaning and doing laundry (still a load in the washer actually). This is the only downside to having Cargo Kitty over for the weekend %) It’s ok though, I was able to get lots of cleaning out of the way that I’d need to do anyway before we move.

I was proof-reading a short english paper for a friend of mine from Finland this afternoon. Well, there is nothing like reading a non-native english speaker’s english paper to see how querky the english language is. It’s just funny when he’s describing the words to me, pulling out his hair because the present tense and the past tense of “read” are the same word, and yet they are pronounced differently. English must be difficult to learn. This guy’s paper was quite good though, I was pretty impressed, he just has trouble with prepositions, which seem to be a stumbling block for many people learning english.

I looked over R2D2 the ircbot’s script today to try an fix it. Boy did I do a lot of silly things. I started to clean up the script today, putting some subroutines together that were quite foolishly separate, working with all the matches to make sure the way I was comparing things made sense (in some cases I really have no idea what I was doing). I also discovered that since we moved one of the mysql databases off of the computer R2 runs from that his script has actually been broken, if someone used the ~search command he’d die. Oops. Well good thing no one ever actually used that command. I commented it out for now, I don’t know if I’ll put it back, seeing as how no one has used it since at least August… but but but it’s so neat to say my ircbot has a mysql backend %)

I did some “window shopping” (monitor shopping?) at LLBean.com today. I need a coat. I thought about shopping at L.L. Bean because I love that store and I know their quality is exeptional. I looked through many, and I think I might go with this one, probably with the Mariner color. It’s funny, while I was growing up I always thought L.L. Bean was a horribly expensive place, but it really is quite reasonable. I guess my mother was cheap with everything. Now while being cheap sometimes is good (soda at a grocery store is just as good as soda at a pizzeria, and half the price), when you’re talking about clothes you’ll want to wear for decades being cheap just doesn’t make sense. Thrifty, fine, cheap, bad.

I think I’ll make spaghetti for dinner. *wanders off*