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*

Well I never did end up doing anything particularly interesting this weekend. Unfortunately that was mostly because I was sick. Yep, I got caught by the demon of colds. I probably should have expected it, with the change in weather and all. Today I’m feeling a bit better, I could actually breath a little better when I woke up this morning, and I didn’t have a headache anymore. I took some DayQuil as soon as I got up and started getting congested again, bleh. DayQuil says it’s non-drowsy, but they are such liars. *gets out her cane* I remember a time when medicines never made me drowsy! Sigh. At least the Quilly makes most of my symptoms go away, and I’m not coughing a ton and making my head hurt. Cold, drowsy and have no appetite, bleh. I hate colds! I didn’t eat breakfast (that’s not terribly unusual) but I did make myself eat some lunch, so that’s good.

Despite not feeling so great I was able to get some work done with zope. I have a page (fictitious domain name) which shows how you can use Zope with DTML, or make an identical page with plain HTML, and I also showed it connecting to a MySQL database. I was able to push my way through learning a bit about zope user security today, which is a bit complicated, but not altogether impossible to learn. I am annoyed that it seems to automatically make text-based files (.html .txt etc) into dtml documents when I upload via ftp… I can’t find a way to easily change a dtml document into a “file” where I can define the content-type, the only way to do it is completely recreating the file, by selecting file, then copying and pasting the contents from the original into this new one, and defining the content type (text/html text/plain etc). So maybe I will just have to encourage people to use the web interface instead of FTP for certain things. I’ll have to poke around some more, but I think I know the basics well enough to get around.

*blink*

I keep zoning out, so I think this is a good time to end this. *wanders off*

I guess I just haven’t been in a writing mood lately.

Yesterday, let’s see. I got up, did the weekly cleaning for a couple hours, did some more studying zope stuff. Took breaks to look through my mp3s, I had a lot of crap in there, and there was some stuff that I never listen to but I keep for, well, why did I keep them? Oh yes I’m a packrat! Many got the cut yesterday. I also went through and got rid of many that I had already made oggs of. The mp3 folder is down to 6.2 gb. The ogg folder seems to be at 5.6. I should rip more cds so I can get rid of more of my mp3s.

I think this is why I haven’t been in a writing mood, I have nothing to write about. My life has been very dull this week. We’re trying to figure out what to do for Thanksgiving. My Aunt Elaine called me a little over a month ago and suggested that she should come down for Thanksgiving, but she’d need to look at her finances and get back to me. Of course she hasn’t gotten back to me, and she has moved so I don’t have her new phone number, arg! I emailed my mother to see if she had my Aunt’s contact info, and she hasn’t emailed me back. Sigh.

So I was hanging out in #Andor the other day. In one day two people wandered into the channel after a search for `wheel of time irc` (apparently we are the 4th hit). That’s pretty cool, since the channel has been pretty dead lately, that’s why we widened the scope to all fantasy and scifi books. It’s pretty cool having more activity there. So a couple of the people there chatting on another server are in this “Idle RPG” they kept talking about it, and pasting attacks and seemed to be quite amused by it, so I asked them about it so I could see what it was all about.

The Idle RPG is just what it sounds like: an RPG in which the players idle. In addition to merely gaining levels, players can find items and battle other players. However, this is all done for you; you just idle. There are no set classes; you can name your character anything you like, and have its class be anything you like, as well.

Hmm, interesting. I downloaded the source for it and it’s a long perl script. You just make some changes to it so it joins the proper server with the proper nickname and then just run it. People log in and just sit in the channel. So on xelium we have it in #null (you get penalties for talking, parting, quitting, so we thought that was an appropriate, if geeky, name). So you’ll see:

-@R2Q2- PrincessLeia2, the Aes Sedai, has attained level 18! Next level in 0 days, 02:24:37.
-@R2Q2- PrincessLeia2 [74/134] has challenged peacimowen [145/146] in combat and lost! 0 days, 00:10:07 is added to PrincessLeia2’s clock.
-@R2Q2- Barenjager, the Demon, has attained level 5! Next level in 0 days, 00:21:00.
-@R2Q2- Barenjager [11/18] has challenged bluefox83 [5/11] in combat and won! 0 days, 00:01:28 is removed from Barenjager’s clock.

What’s the point? Well, there isn’t one really. Just one more channel to join when you hop onto IRC.

Speaking of IRC, there has been good stuff and bad stuff happening. We got attacked by another botnet last night. It’s really frustrating. I’m not sure if someone is provoking people to use the botnets to attack, or if this is just the price of running an irc server. If it keeps happening we’re going to have to consider taking it down (the rest of xelium will still be up, so we wouldn’t lose a place to chat). It would suck, but having mail and web sites is much much more important to us. On the good side, we can now edit the xelium website when we need to. It hardly gets any traffic, but it’s nice to have a good updated site to direct people to when we are showing off the server. And now that the help section is greatly expanded we can even point people to easily navigable help files for the services (easier than /cs help commands..) as well as lists of all channel and user m
odes. Oh and it’s not so mIRC/Windows-centric anymore, I made sure of that! We now recommend clients to download for more than once OS, and instead of saying “Basic mIRC Stuff” I dropped the “m” and made it applicable to general irc clients. I’m quite happy with it now.

I’m boring myself with this entry, too much IRC crap, I think I need to get out. Maybe tomorrow or monday I’ll have something more interesting to write. *wanders off*

I didn’t say anything yesterday, so I probably should today.

I spent a lot of time today with Zope. Ignored IRC more than usual (by actually making myself not have it open) and focused completely on stuff I needed to work on. I got it playing nicely with MySQL, it’s all pretty neat. I have a revised the page I made, took some notes. I have the basics of the database stuff down I think now, at least as far as querying and returning results. I think tomorrow I’m going to focus on page templates.

In one of the channels I lurk in on xelium I noticed that I really have strong feelings of dislike for a certain person. I don’t really know him that well, but it was just “something about him” that drove me up the wall. It was the same feeling I feel for a couple other people that I have since distanced myself from. It was only today that I realized the connection between these people that I thought I so randomly disliked. They are all the kind of person who will read some news site with message boards, then think they are an expert on a given subject, they will then come into IRC and either bring up the subject themselves or wait for us to talk about it and then they’ll come at us with their opinions and arguements. These are the type of people who take the “Intel vs AMD” fights seriously, and they cannot be pursuaded from their views. In the end of whatever argument if they lose they will just get pissed off and say “whatever” or they will sign off or leave without saying a word. This sort of personality just conflicts with mine so severely that I can’t stand being around these people. Yeah, that’s my big complaint about people for the day.

It’s raining out. It started raining tuesday night. Last night it rained a lot and there was thunder and lightning. I think this weather has cheered me up a lot. When you’re down you don’t want happy summer weather, or happy cheerful music! So I’m feeling good today, and feeling very acomplished.

I can’t think of anything more to write though, and this has been a long enough break. *wanders off to work on things*

Today started off nicely. I got two emails about my mplayer how-to, both thanking me for it. One of them was an offer from someone to host a french translation on their website! It was quite flattering. They emailed me back this afternoon with a link to their page: http://ernest.cheska.net/mplayer/mplayer.shtml. Unfortunately for some reason I can’t get to this page from home. I can get to it fine via my shell accounts (looking at it through links) but it always times out from here, how odd. A friend of mine was good enough to take screenshots of the page and send them to me so I could see how it looks. I’m impressed, it puts the poor design of my how-to to shame! Hehe.

I did the email thing, read some stuff, did some more Zope stuff, then went to go empty out the dishwasher and clean up a bit. This is where my day started going badly. I started to get a bloody nose when I was emptying the dishwasher. This in itself isn’t especially notable, I get a few each year, but the timing of this one was weird, I always get them in the springtime or when I have some sort of cold. It’s neither, I felt perfectly fine! It was a pretty bad bloody nose though, made me feel all sick to my stomach. So I didn’t feel so great. I cleaned up the bathroom and then took a bath. When I got back to my computer ssh was all laggy to the server, and then I watched my connection fail completely. It did this about 4 times today long enough for R2D2 to fall off of IRC. It started getting very annoying.

Other stuff happened to annoy me today, but I won’t get into it.

It’s cooler out today, in the 60s, and dark, very cloudy and foggy.

I did manage to get my first Zope page made today. It’s very very basic, but even this much will help me start understanding how it all works, screenshot. This uses hardly any html (only a couple br tags and the beginning and ending html and body tags). It was kind of neat using the DTML to make these, but annoying at the same time, I know HTML! So I kept wanting to use that %) The progress I’m making is still slow, but steady.

Oh, I ordered new boots last night. I HATE shopping for shoes more than most shopping (that’s saying a lot). I think it’s because I have big feet (size 10 1/2-11 womens), so they don’t always have good ones that fit me. But after the trip to DC where walking all day made my feet hurt a lot I realized that I needed shoes that weren’t sneakers, but were more comfortable than my boots. Michael now has two pairs of birkenstocks, and he said that they’ve been wonderful. They’re expensive, but I was willing to give them a chance. So we ordered a pair online last night from birkenstockexpress.com. I got some nice girly boots, the Marino. They look nice (and girly, unlike the first ones I looked at). So I think I’ll be happy with them, they should arrive in about 10 days or so.

I’m going to go try and cheer up, and get some more work done now. *wanders off*

Today has been a stupid day. Not entirely surprising, since it’s a monday, but still frustrating. I spent most of the morning cleaning the apartment, all day doing laundry, and what else? Not much. I can’t seem to focus on one thing for more than a few minutes.

Maybe it’s this abnormal weather that’s making me restless. It got up to 81 today. Happy November PA!

I watched To Kill A Mockingbird on TCM the other night. I had seen parts of it before, in english class my freshman year of high school we watched some of it after reading the book. I remember absolutely hating that book. I think it was because I really struggled with how it was written, possibly the written accents (hm, I believe there is a word for this) made it difficult for me to understand. I also know that I was rushed in reading it. “Read three chapters tonight and be ready for a quiz!” was the quickest way for me to learn to despite a book. Myk suggests that since it was a book that would have seemed so foreign to me (I hadn’t been exposed to deathly racism, I didn’t understand southern mentality) I might have just not understood. This is true. I felt so wronged when I read that book, it was so unfair. I couldn’t believe it.

I’ve decided that I will get ahold of a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird and give it another chance.

Now this got me to thinking, if a school can make someone like me despise a book, what would it be doing to a child like my sister Annette? Is there a better way to teach kids and make sure they learn? Maybe the only way to get through to each child is to give them complete attention and tailor all lessons to fit their precise needs. I wish this was remotely possible.

I should look into getting more ram for my laptop. It tops out at 160 mb (32 built in, and can hold up to a 128 mb chip). It should cost less than $30 for that 128 mb chip if I can get my hands on some decent Compaq Presario compatible dimms (I hear these compaq presarios are crankie). This 32 mb it has now just isn’t cutting it. 333 mhz is plenty for a system doing what it’s doing, but I’m consistantly using nearly all my ram and a great deal of swap. I think this system would be much happier with more ram. And maybe then it would take under 20 seconds for opera to launch!

I’m actually not complaining. Despite it’s querks, having this laptop has been so indescribably cool. Yesterday I swept the porch and brought my comfy computer chair out there and spent the afternoon writing (wrote about 11 pages of a sorts of autobiography made of up memories, hey I’m getting old and I don’t want to forget! *grin*). It was wonderful. And it’s nice having another system around that I have full control over, so I can test things between it and my workstation. *hugs her laptop*

Well I should probably attempt to make the most of the rest of my day. *wanders off*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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