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*

Happy Halloween!
I love this holiday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now back to zope stuff. *wanders off*

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

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

More pictures here!

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

*wanders off*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*wanders off*

Last night was uneventful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Went to sleep around 12:30.

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

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

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

-!- Current Global Users: 333 Max: 666

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

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

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

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

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