o/` Johnny Cash – Hurt o/`

I played around with the google API today. It was lots of fun %) I ended up writing a script for my irc bot. Not that it’ll be used much, but it’s really the only perl thing I currently have running that I could test it on..

-PrincesSlaya2- !google princessleia2
-R2D666- About 639 results results for your query. Displaying top:
-R2D666- PrincessLeia.com: http://www.princessleia.com/
-R2D666- PrincessLeia2's Xanga Site: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=PrincessLeia2
-R2D666- PrincessLeia2's Random Mutterings: http://www.livejournal.com/users/princessleia2/

Yay!

Last night The West Wing wasn’t on. I was puzzled by this so i went to the NBC website, and at the top, in red letters, it said “Tonight’s episode of the West Wing will air on October 29th.” Those meanies.

I did laundry today, and the dishwasher situation seems to be a bit better with us not using heated dry. Even the plastics came a bit cleaner… but I’m not sure if it’s good enough yet.

I like nice people. Sometimes I get so caught up in how annoying some people are that I forget how many great people were out there. Today I emailed someone about a script they had written, and their reply was very nice and helpful. It made me feel really good. I guess it only takes one moron to make my day bad, and sometimes I forget that the majority of people I encounter on a daily basis are good.

Speaking of frustration.. the services are down on xelium because one of the IRCops decided he would play with OperServ. It really wasn’t his fault, the services crashed because of a silly bug with one of the commands he tried (it should have been harmless). But it did annoy me that he was playing with it in the first place. Oh well.

I guess that’s it, I need to go make dinner now. *wanders off*

I cleaned the dishwasher with bleach, tried all sorts of things. Then Myk did a lot more cleaning last night. It still smells bad *sigh* I did some more dishes, tried once again to clean the plastic that was in the dishwasher when the spatula burned. Not much luck, they still all stink, after HOURS in soapy water. I think we’ll probably just spend a couple bucks and replace it all. Stupid burning in dishwasher! We’re going to turn off “heated dry” for a week or so and see if it eventually stops smelling so bad.

Also spent a bit of the morning cleaning the bathroom. Then I took a bath, it was very nice %)

We decided to go out to dinner last night because the burnt smell in the apartment was so bad and I had to spend my whole day with it. Ended up going out for chinese because neither of us had eaten chinese in quite some time. We drove to “Natural Village” Chinese Restaurant, in Huntingdon Valley. It was a nice place, they even had a huge vegan menu! All sorts of interesting dishes that I didn’t even know they made vegan, vegan seafood, vegan ice cream. I decided to just go with normal chinese food though, ordered Sesame Shrimp. It was so good %) A bit sweet, maybe I’ll ask for it to be more spicy next time.

I got a fortune cookie , it didn’t spam me. My fortune was: “From now on your kindness with lead you to success” … If only!

We were listening to NPR last night on our way home from dinner, and managed to catch an interview with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. Cool! It was a great interview (even if the interviewer seemed to not understand much about computers). Myk found an archived stream of it, and I highly recommend listening if you have google interests:

rtsp://real.npr.na-central.speedera.net/real.npr.na-central/fa/20031014_fa_02.rm

Ah, speaking of google:

Thank you for verifying your Google account. Your account is now activated. Currently, this account can be used to access Google in Your Language, Google Answers, Google Web APIs and Google Groups.

Joy! This is an account to use the Google API. I learned about the existance of this through the Google Hacks book, which provides perl scripts as examples for how to use it. Which is quite lucky for me since I do a lot of stuff in Perl. I was emailed a developers key which gives me access to 1000 google searches per day through whatever scripts I feel like writing (like one for my IRC bot if I felt so inclined). Why use the API instead of LWP::UserAgent like I used for R2’s weather script? It’s against google’s rules to use such automated “scraping” of pages, and abusers could get themselves blocked from google. I’m not really worried about that, but I do respect Google enough to want to go by their rules… besides, this is fun! I will have to play around with it this afternoon.

I got a chain letter in the real mail today from someone I’ve never met (I have a vague idea who the person is, but I still have never met her). No wait, it says “This is NOT a chain letter. It’s just for fun.” Well it walks like a duck… I didn’t know people still did these things, how cute! I’ve never passed along a chain letter.

I was going about replying to emails yesterday, and I realized that my mailbox was a mess. Not only was it poorly organized, but it was full of junk I didn’t need.

(elizabeth@r2q5) ~ $ du -h mail/
23M mail

I am a huge packrat, and my mailbox is no different. Luckily text doesn’t take up much space… I did some reorganizing today so that I can actually find things when I need them. Deleted A LOT of stuff, including a few bulky emails that had attachments. Now my mailbox is much more manageable.

(elizabeth@r2q5) ~ $ du -h mail/
12M mail

I am sure I could slim it down further by deleting a lot of sent mail.

DCC SEND from Matr|X [0.0.0.0 port 0]: “x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x [0 bytes]

Apparently this is how mIRC is crashed by this mIRC exploit. This moron thought it would be fun to try it against IRCops. He was banned very quickly. I wish mIRC users would just upgrade their clients so these script kiddies would give up and go away and stop bothering those of us who use non-vunerable clients…

I’m going to go work on some things now. *wanders off*

o/` Peter Murphy – Socrates The Python o/`

I didn’t do much on Sunday. Did some reading, did some knitting while watching TV. At 8 we watched TCM because each sunday this month they’re showing older horror movies, this week was “Horror of Dracula” and “Dracula, Prince of Darkness” … the first was good, but the second movie definately could have used some work ;) but I enjoyed the evening.

Over the weekend Myk took the time to test his increased pcmcia skills to install debian on my laptop. We moved away from Redhat for many reasons, I don’t like the package management system, they are dropping up2date support at the end of the year… Debian is just so much better once it’s installed. Now I have fluxbox running on my super debian laptop %) I’m so happy. I spent a bunch of time on Monday customizing things and it’s really running great now, I’m so happy. No more Red Hat! screenshot from r2a6 laptop running fluxbox WM

The evening on Monday started out normal enough, ate dinner, relaxed watching some tv and knitting. Then Myk went to go grab something out of the clean dishwasher (we run it after dinner), and a horrible smell came from it. Oh no. Turns out that our plastic spatula had fallen down to the bottom of the dishwasher were the heat elements are. I didn’t even realize this could happen! But it burned the spatula pretty badly, and our apartment was left smelling horribly of burnt plastic. We made sure all the windows were open so that the smell would go away. Then some nasty old car drove by and there was a smell of gasoline coming in the windows *groan* could the night get more smelly? Indeed, we seem to have some skunks living near here, and they decided to come out last night. I almost laughed at how horrible our luck was. Myk decided to do a bit of cleaning on the dishwasher (the whole thing stunk, as well as all the dishes we had tried to clean!)

I went to bed around midnight, I felt fine. Then around 2:30 am I woke up sick to my stomach. I think it was the horrible burnt plastic smell (I tend to have a weak stomach when it comes to smells I don’t like, a major contributer when I get carsick). Got up sick another 2 times before I decided to just sleep on the couch (it’s more convienent and I wouldn’t wake up Myk). It was a horrible night, I didn’t sleep much, I’m tired today. I do feel much better this afternoon, I think I might go for a walk to get away from the smell though o_o

It seems mIRC was exploited, some thing with DCC that would cause mIRC to crash. We had a bit of trouble on the server last night because script kiddies were coming onto the server to do harm, and people were coming into #support, “OMG WTF MY MRIC IS BREAKING!!!11” I’m glad I am not around much in the evening %) My patience would have run out quickly with these people (the other IRCops had sent out global messages warning people about this issue, and telling them to upgrade). I guess the problem was that mIRC users (at least these ones) are not particularly tech saavy, so when an exploit is found they aren’t on a happy security mailing list, or surfing tech sites so they just don’t realize that their software can be taken down so easily. And I think many of them are lazy, or don’t understand, since there WERE global messages. It’s frustrating. I’m glad I use irssi and stay up to date with security updates.

I need to catch up on emailing some friends now… and clean out my mailbox. And finish cleaning the dishwasher, bleh…

*wanders off*

o/` Tears For Fears – Head Over Heels o/`

Yesterday was uneventful. The LAN party was cancelled because the host was sick %( We just stayed home, I did lots of reading. I have a pile of about six books I’m reading, ranging from classic mythology to programming, to history to Frankenstein. I find that I get “burnt out” from one subject quite quickly (another reason I am afraid I’d have difficulty learning in a college environment), so if I switch around between subjects several times in an hour I can absorb much more and keep interested in all subjects. It was a very good afternoon for reading, I had the windows in the bedroom open and it was warm and sunny. For dinner we had some boca pizzas. Later in the night I decided to watch some tv while knitting, even watched some Dr. Who. Went to sleep around 1 am. It was a good day.

Today… don’t have plans besides going up to the grocery store to pick up some rolls and veggies. It will probably be a day like yesterday.

“Auto-rejoin after kick” is a very bad feature in IRC clients. See, sometimes I just want to kick someone because they are idling and doing something annoying (like posting a repeating away message). I don’t want to ban them, I just want them to leave until they decide to turn off their annoying script. But if they have that stupid auto-rejoin on kick option enabled then I HAVE to at least temp ban them to get them out. Then there are scripts that will attempt to rejoin indefinitely, I HAVE to ban these people so they wont come back until they decide to contact me and tell me that they have turned off their annoying repeating scripts or whatever.

I just needed to complain about that, I feel better now.

Now I’m going to go shower and wake up… *wanders off*

o/` Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack o/`

Yesterday I felt very good. No more depression that was bugging me this past weekend and earlier this week, yay! With that new found good mood I took the time to explain the “politics” of the xelium IRC network to the new ircop (yes, the one I complained about). After talking to her about things we both sorta apoligized for everything that happened between us. I am sure it was partly my fault, I got upset with her about how she was treating me and decided in my mind that she wouldn’t last on our network. So I guess I went looking for reasons to complain about her, and I’m sure she noticed that and it fueled her anger even further. Oh well. Things are ok between us now.

After dinner last night we headed out to the mall to do some clothes shopping. I don’t think I was quite clear enough yesterday when I said that I hated shopping for clothes. I REALLY hate it. In the past it wasn’t even so bad as it was last night. I’m trying to get “adult” clothes, instead of just grabbing some khakis and a t-shirt I needed some nice shirts and pants. And I needed to buy woman’s clothes.

-PrincessLeia2- I don’t know what size I wear
-Time- What size are the pants you’re wearing?
-PrincessLeia2- these are men’s pants.
-Time- Gaah…

So the first hurdle was figuring out what size I wore. Now I’m sure this has been complained about tons of times, but the sizes on clothes for women don’t make sense. “Size 8” … I guess that’s sorta what I wear, but “size 8” seems different in each brand of clothes I looked at, and they never listed the pant length or waist size on any of them. This doesn’t make sense! That means I HAD to try on everything. I am happy that I have nice clothes now, for a few months here I was thinking I might need “Queer Eye for the Straight Girl” to come help me out ;)

It was hot at Macy’s, and they sell water bottles.

I actually got a bit of work done today. I mentioned that friend from IRC yesterday who sent me that weather script, I said he “found” the xchat weather script but I misunderstood… apparently he found it written for a webpage in PHP and he ported it to perl in xchat. I finally got a look at it today, and it was quite nice. He wrote his own perl module to deal with most of the complex stuff, and then had a nice tight looking xchat script that called to it. I was impressed, and it’s really cool to know someone else who does scripting for irc clients in perl. In his script he used LWP::UserAgent … which is tons better than the wget/grep mess than i was using with weather.com pages. So I decided to use the LWP::UserAgent module as well. It’s working out very nicely, and now R2 has his weather script again!

-@PrincesSlaya2- !weather 19454
– R2D666- Current Conditions for North Wales, Pennsylvania at 7:20 PM EDT October 10, 2003: Scattered Clouds Temp: 63 F Humidity: 72% Barometer: 30.15 Wind: NE at 5 mph
-@PrincesSlaya2- !temp 19454
– R2D666- Current Temperature for North Wales, Pennsylvania: 63 F

Wutherground.com doesn’t provide forecasts in happy text format unfortunately, but it’s updated much more often than the weather.com pages, and I’m much happier with it. Best of all I don’t need to worry about the page changing it’s HTML format every other day, like weather.com did to cause my script to end up breaking. I added the !temp thing because sometimes I just want to know the temperature and dont want to fill the channel with the whole weather report. Anyway, I think I’m happy with the script now, so I replaced the old broken one that I had on my site before, now I have the good one up, you can check the html version of the script here.

I also got around to rewriting the imasheep bot in #goddess. It’s written better now, and responds to actions. I added that to my irssi scripts and themes section. I’m quite happy about how much it’s cleaned up now, can see
it here. I was going to do my !help/!commands thing on R2 today too, but I sorta got sidetracked and didn’t feel like it. It’s funny because that’s probably the easiest of all the things I attempted today. Oh well. Maybe I will have some time after writing this.

Our friend Barry called, he wanted to invite us to a LAN party at his place tomorrow. I think that’d be fun, and I don’t think we really have much planned anyway. I’ll talk to Myk when he gets home (went out with the guys at work tonight).

I went to the Rogue website today. Rogue is an Oregon brewed beer, and one of the select few American beers that I like and truly enjoy. Dead Guy Ale… mmmm. I discovered (from the guy at the beer store who knew my favorite) last year that around halloween they released 64 oz glow-in-the-dark bottles of Dead Guy Ale. Apparently they do this every year! Now we need to find a distributer around here that sells them. I’m definately getting back into a beer-wanting mood, I think it’s the cool weather.

Now I’m going to go… do something… it’s late, so probably just chat… *wanders off*

o/` The Cure – A Forest o/`

Since I last posted Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California. I’d rather not get into my thoughts at this, I think two quotes in IRC recently sum it up quite well:

–Time– The government should just put the polls in the local Blockbuster video stores since that’s how most people choose fucking canidates these days anyway.

–sevenoverMURDER– I’m all for Arnold as governor.. Conan was hilarious last night

*grin*

Yesterday I spent working on a number of things, did I get anything substantial finished? Of course not. I called up the electric company, phone company and cable company to see how early I could schedule things to be turned off and stuff for our move in December. Most of them said I need to call less than 30 days before I need things turned off. The woman at the electric company was very nice on the phone, I am so used to lousy customer services that this took me by surprise and it was quite pleasant. The phones at the phone company are all automated, respond to your voice commands, it got quite confused with all the numbers even though I am sure I was saying them clearly, why not give an option just to type them in on your phone? It would be much easier. It’s funny how “polite” the machine tries to be. I got the standard *horrible* customer service when I called Comcast, the guy on the phone was half asleep and mumbling a lot, his monotone voice was just screaming “is it 5 pm yet?” Oh well.

Last night we headed to Fort Washington for the philly chix meeting.

There were only three of us there, but we had a really nice time. The company Erin works for, Chariot Solutions, was the host and they even paid for our food! The meeting ended up lasting from around 6:30 until a little after 8:30, and toward the end our boyfriends/husbands started wandering in and we all talked for a bit. I even got to get rid of some of these books that had been piling up under my desk… hehe.

When I was getting the pictures of the meeting off of the digital camera I also found some other ones on there. A few of which were taken when it was apparently too dark in the room (the flash on the camera stopped working some time ago). One of these pictures was of me playing with Cargo kitty in our livingroom in front of the glass sliding door out to our porch. Since it was mostly just silhouettes of me and cargo I wondered what sort of neat things the default filters in Gimp could do to it. I was pleasantly surprised by some of them, especially:

Filters are neat. And while playing with these I took notes on which ones I was using, which ones I really liked for this sort of thing, and somehow it developed into a couple hour mini-project. I was just going to keep it in it’s own little directory for my own future reference, but I figured it would be easier for me if I actually put it in HTML form, and if I’m going that far, why not just put it on my website? So it’s up here now.

I was speaking with an acquaintance of mine recently about religion. I am not completely sure what his relgion is exactly, he claims they “REALLY follow the Bible” which apparently means that they respect both old testament and new testament customs (thus celebrating some “Jewish” holidays, like Yom Kippur just a few days ago). In the past I’ve really had to put on armor in such discussions, but this person was calm, and respectful and very open-minded, how refreshing! He spoke to me about what he believed, and was quite civil and non-preachy about it. T
his is what I need from people telling me about religion. For once I walked away from the discussion in a good mood, feeling somewhat enlightened. And he said that I “Made his Day of Atonement” for being so open-minded, yay!

I met someone new this week. He’s been hanging out in #13thHour this week, found us through my website and apparently he lives in the area. He tried to get his SO interested enough to come to the chix meeting last night but failed. I was talking to him yesterday and he was playing with an xchat weather script that he found. He said it used a “machine readable” feed from wunderground.com. Joy! He sent me the xchat script. This would be a great alternative to the horrible wget+grep script that I had on R2 previously, since it kept breaking and crashing irssi when the webpage didn’t act the way I wanted it to. I havent even looked at the xchat script yet, but I’ll probably have a look later this afternoon.

We have to go shopping for clothes tonight. I HATE shopping for clothes! But I DO need some nicer shirts if I’m going to be working part-time at a real business. I guess this isn’t as bad as finding “replacement” clothes, since no new pants or shoes are ever as cool as the ones I currently own.

*wanders off*

o/` Stabbing Westward – Crushing Me o/`

I worked on R2D2 the irssi bot a little today. A friend of mine discovered how to get it to respond to actions, the key was that actions are a ctcp, I had never fully explored this theory. So now:

* PrincesSlaya2 pats R2D666 on his bot head
* R2D666 beeps and blinks happily

Yay %)

Next I’m going to add a !commands and/or !help command, maybe tomorrow.

I got another shipment of books from Prentice Hall/Addison Wesley … mostly more copies of what we got before. So many books! This is fun. I also signed up the group as an Apress user group, this promises to bring some books as well.

I am becoming more bitter. I was thinking about this recently, talked to Myk about it for a little while the other day, and decided that it’s probably a bad thing. It was funny at first, and I could usually laugh off how annoyed I was with things, but it’s turning into a horrible habit. I know that the company I keep has added to this, many of the people close to me share in my ranting and hate sessions. And it’s fun, we complain about things that people do to make us angry, I guess these ranting sessions really help us get out some of our pent up anger, and justify it because we have people agreeing with us. But then I walk away from these still angry. Some days I just wish that nearly everyone would die (which could be looked at as a good sign, I am no longer lacking self esteem and wishing I would die *grin*). I guess we all get in moods like this, but I don’t like it, and I can tell I’m more easily annoyed that I used to be. Maybe this comes with age. Maybe I’m just becoming lazy. Being bitter is so much easier to get into a habit of being than being nice is. I guess finding a happy medium is good. Being too nice makes you get walked all over. Being too bitter causes serious social problems.

Maybe I should spend some time offline and alone, I guess there is such a thing as too much interaction with others. Maybe I just need to stop and take a good look at myself again and figure out where this anger is really coming from. Maybe I am just more normal now, I have always been known as being “nice” this could be quite natural.

Maybe I’m crazy and think about my emotions too much.

*wanders off*

o/` The Cure – The Walk o/`

Friday after I posted my entry I got a knock on the door. When I got to it no one was there but there were a couple boxes on my doorstep. Puzzled, I brought them inside and saw that they were addressed to me. From “Pearson Education” I decided to just go for it and open them. Inside each box was 4 books:

“Open Source Network Administration” By James M. Kretchmar
“The Art Of UNIX Programming” By Eric S. Raymond
“J2EE Security For Servlets, EJBs, and Web Services” By Pankaj Kumar
“Next Generation Application Integration” By David S. Linthicum

Neat!

Apparently they are care of the same woman I contacted a few weeks ago about getting coupons for the Philly Chix. I guess Prentice Hall is wanting to become involved with LUGs (like O’Reilly has). I’ll be bringing them to the next meeting this week and sharing them with my fellow chix. Being a LUG coordinator is so cool.

On friday night we ordered pizza and wings and decided to dig through some of Myk’s movies. He has Bladerunner! And not the Directors Cut! I had been looking around for the non-director’s cut for quite some time because I had never seen it… It was great to be able to watch it, and a whole new experience since reading the book, things were much more clear to me. We really need to get it on DVD sometime.

Saturday was pretty slow. Around 4:30 we headed out to find some dinner. Most places were too busy, so we ended up grabbing a quick dinner at our local Drafting Room. I quickly remembered why we usually drive the 45 minutes to the Exton one instead of going to this one that’s 2 miles from home %) The service and food were mediocre, there was just no love! We finished around 6:30 and headed off to Center City Philadelphia.

We were going to St Mary’s for a Michael Stearns Concert. The traffic was terrible, but we were able to get there by 7:35, when the doors were opening at the church. Got great seats. The concert began around 8:15, and it was really great. We brought a big pillow because the pews are too hard to sit on for 2 hours ;) So we were quite comfortable during the whole thing. During the concert Stearns had a screen up that showed images/movies etc that went along with his songs. It was quite enjoyable, I never felt like I wanted a song to end (which has happened a few times in the past at ambient concerts). It really was a wonderful time. Concert ended a little after 10.

I went to bed soon after we got back home because I was tired and my stomach hurt a little (I assumed it was because of the cheese on my dinner).

On sunday I woke up with an upset stomach, was pretty much in bed all day. Myk was so great to me, even did the grocery shopping %) When he came home he made me dinner (soup and crackers) and a bath. Even though I was sick Myk really did make the day bearable.

I was depressed some this weekend as well. Crazy brain chemicals. I’m feeling better now, but boy do those down times suck. Makes me feel like such a crazy woman %(

This morning I woke up still feeling sorta bad, I went back to bed for most of the morning. Got up around noon because I was thirsty, and after some water I decided I felt well enough to have some juice and some lunch. I think I was just tired and dehydrated this morning, feeling quite a bit better now, stomach isn’t upset anymore, YAY!

My cousin Erica called this afternoon. She told me about taking my sister Heather (20) out to the mall and to get a haircut. I guess Erica has sorta adopted Heather as a charity “makeover” case, she is trying to get her to sorta grow up a bit, take care of herself better, look and dress more like an adult. I am not sure what happened with Heather and I, but we do have the same basic problem, somewhere in the teenage years we “missed” something. Neither of us cared too much about our appearance, and so we never got into the habit of wearing makeup or dressing decently. Luckily I have begun to grasp my adultness (even if I still won’t wear makeup) and work
on improving myself… and I’ve always had much better hygiene habits than Heather. I’m glad Erica is giving her some help, someone needs to be there for her.

Erica also invited us up to New Hampshire for thanksgiving. That’s the 4th thanksgiving plan we’ve had proposed to us this year! I politely declined, saying that we did have plans, and telling her that we were quite busy around then (we sent in the notice that we’re going to move out of here at the beginning of December, so we’ll be moving *somewhere* whether it be another apartment, or our own home..)

The rest of the afternoon I spent just doing a few things around the apartment. There were a bunch of boxes in our living room from when we brought things home from Myk’s mother’s, so I cleaned those up (saved the boxes, they will be good when we move…) and I put all of our CDs with cases together, it looks much nicer in here now.

Now I’m going to go check email and stuff *wanders off*

o/` Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack o/`

Myk bought me this soundtrack for my birthday. I had it once before but a roommate of mine swiped it and I didn’t notice until after I had moved out. I was disappointed, but it’s great to have it again! I made oggs of it the other day, now I can listen to it over and over again, yay! I got the best presents.

The West Wing was on on Wednesday night. The only show all week that I really look forward to, and this week was important, the last 15 minutes of the show I had been waiting for for *months!* and guess what happened? Somehow our signals got crossed on the channel, or someone at NBC screwed up, or *something* and so during those pivotal moments there was the audio for some lousy reality show over all the west wing stuff!!! AHH!! It was horrible. We could barely hear the West Wing, and were forced to listen to stupid reality TV people pick a date or something. I can’t believe people watch that crap %) and I was very upset that I was subjected to the audio of it… especially since it was all over my favorite program.

Yesterday was lousy. Myk was really busy with work. And I was working on a bunch of things… throughout the day I noticed GLines (network wide ban) on the IRC server. The first one seemed ok to me, and the new op explained it, but then someone came on the server asking me why his buddy (a xelium regular) had been banned. Turns out that our wonderful new Oper has history with these guys. She then GLined him too. It started a discussion with her that became quite heated. She has little respect for us or the network. She certainly has no respect for me, was horribly insulting when I tried to explain to her how we run our network. But today we drew up some Oper Rules that we will have to go by (it was suggested that we come up with this list BEFORE linking other servers, but it never happened). I had to apologize to those that she banned, and the bans were removed… Anyway, we’re giving this chick a second chance, if she blows it then her servers are gone. I don’t really want to think about it anymore though.

Last night turned out to be nice though. We went over to Myk’s mother’s house for dinner. She made yummie chicken and shrimp rice. It was very nice. For my birthday she got me some rice and a traditional rice steaming pot and basket from Thailand. Neat! It requires planning for the rice to be cooked in it, but it’s very nice, I’m looking forward to trying it. After dinner Myk’s mother decided that since we were there that she should take the opportunity to give Myk some of his stuff she had in the attic of his. Turns out that she had his “Lost” collection of The Cure tapes! … this collection has gained almost mythical status to me since he’s talked about it, and how disappointed he was that he lost it. It was a great discovery %) And it made the day end nicely.

Today has been ok. Cleaned the apartment like usual, paid bills, did some little things that I needed to catch up on. The day went by quickly, but I’m not in a particularly good mood. Not exactly depressed… but I am feeling a bit… disconnected. I am glad it’s Friday.

Tomorrow night we’re going into the city to a Michael Stearns concert. If you don’t know who he is don’t fret ;) he’s an ambient artist. We’ve gone to a couple ambient concerts in the past couple years, and they’ve all been nice. I’m really looking forward to it.

Well I need to get going now… *wanders off*

For my birthday one of my presents from Myk was Google Hacks. It’s so cool. After Myk gave it to me I was so excited that I just had to do some google searches with some of the things I had learned. I didn’t know about “link:” searches, so I tried it on some of the pages on my website. I found a couple sites linking to my how-tos! That’s so cool… I’ve never had any contact with these people and lo! My mplayer how to and enlightenment guide are linked places. So cool. There is tons more in this google book that I will have to explore, it’s very interesting. I’ll be sure to talk all about the cool new things I find.

Looking for houses is depressing. When you’re younger you always think “When I get a house it’ll have… I’ll have… and then it’ll have…” But then you grow up and realize that you’re not a millionaire and quite probably never will be. So you’re house won’t be huge, it won’t have all of the things you want in it, you won’t have 20 acres. Coming to that realization is difficult. I guess everyone goes through it, settling for a bit less than they expected. I see it with many people, when I was younger I saw people’s parents disappointed with their purchases, and I thought to myself “why did they make such a huge purchase without getting exactly what they wanted?” Well I guess because it’s near impossible when you’re an average middle-class family.

I asked my father why they never decided to buy a house. He blamed my mother. Of course HE had planned on getting a house, HIS plans are always perfect (although never executed), it’s just that damn woman! Oh well.

I compiled the #13thHour ircstats for September this afternoon. An amazing 74795 lines last month, that blows our previous record of 60613 away. The channel is doing good.

Now that it’s October we all put our halloween nicknames on in #13thHour. In the past I’ve been PrincessEvil2 … but this year I thought I’d be punny and go with PrincesSlaya2. Myk is FrankenTime again, and this year at the suggestion of my friend Shampoo (ShamBOO for halloween) I made R2D2 be R2D666. Hehe. We celebrate for a whole month, and it makes this month just a little more funny. I also updated princessleia.com so it’s looking a little halloweenish.

I have things to do now *wanders off*