o/` Jack’s Lament – Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack o/`

A friend of mine asked me to help him install irssi this afternoon. What is he on? Redhat 9 *arrg* all I could think of was a few of my previous rpm experiences and I just *hoped* that irssi wouldnt require anything that wasn’t already installed. Of course it did %) He asked if all distrobutions were this evil, and I told him about debian’s apt and that redhat now had one. Other than knowing that redhat’s apt existed and that it’s repository was quite small I knew nothing else. I found this site which gives a very basic overview of what apt-rpm is (works a lot like debian’s apt, with apt-get install, apt-cache search, even a sources.list file), and I suggested that he give it a shot. He wasn’t able to install irssi from apt-rpm, but he could install the libs he needed so that his irssi rpm would install properly %) yay! Another irssi convert!

He was the perfect student too. I pointed him in the right direction and he did what needed to be done, only coming to me when there was a small problem or question he couldnt answer himself. He’s lucky he does this, I am so tired of people who come to me for help who aren’t willing to put any effort into it at all. I hate telling them that they just need to “RTFM” but it’s true, I’m not going to waste my time with someone who won’t even read a README %)

clockbot.xelium.net was decommissioned last night *tear* we have r2q5.xelium.net up and running on a new box of course, but clockbot was the original, it’s a little sad %) farewell old server!

I made a little section of my webpage about a friend’s cat Skorpan. He lives in Sweden, and is a very pretty Bengal Cat %) I have had exposure to Bengals in the past because the guy who gave us Dweezle the chinchilla was a breeder. His cats were big (healthy looking and about 15 pounds), so I was really wowed by these cats! From him I knew they were pretty expensive, so I never really thought about them until I saw the pictures of Skorpan… he’s so pretty! And doesn’t shed much, and they are great indoor kitties. Oh and there is a breeder here in Philadelphia! GangesCattery.com… they have an Online Kitten Application Form! Oh! … Not that I’m looking to get one *coughcough* at $500 each for pet quality (as opposed to one you wish to show) *wince* I do love kitties though %) Oh this is the page about Skorpan: Skorpan Page!. I need to make a pretty page like this for Cargo.

I guess that’s it. Allergies aren’t really bugging me today, yay! I think it was just the people cutting the grass that was driving my sinuses nuts. I am going to go figure out what I should make for dinner now. *wanders off*

o/` All About Eve – Tuesday’s Child o/`

They cut the grass outside today. This afternoon I broke down and decided to take some benadryl so I wouldn’t feel miserable. Of course now I’m drowsy and can’t think properly. I logged into r2q5 this afternoon and wanted to make it see my .dir_colors file so I had pretty directories. I spent over 20 minutes doing this, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, turns out I had completely forgotten about the “alias ls=’ls –color=auto'” line… oy %) I’m glad I wasn’t playing around as root much this afternoon, if I forget something silly like that with benadryl influence who knows what I’d do. That’s it, I ban myself from root when under the influence of alcohol, nyquil AND benadryl. Hee.

Ever have an acquaintance that loved to talk about lots of things to the point of becoming horribly annoying? Oy. I finally was annoyed enough to tell one of these types off this afternoon, and not entirely because of how annoying he is. See, he always came to me to tell me all about the “newest greatest thing” and how it was so much better than existing things. Like today, he messages me telling me all about some wonderful music encoder, TONS better than mp3 and ogg. He’s the kind of guy who goes to a message board on some website, reads the posts, takes them as fact and then comes to tell me all about it. In the music encoding world it’s difficult to say which encoder is “better” overall (you can argue all you want), and I was aware of this, so when he starts going off on this new encoder I told him that I didn’t care. He was insulted. Should I have just let him ramble on all afternoon when I wouldn’t read half of what he said? Should I have made myself care? No, no. He is just too touchy, it seems like every time I talk to him he is blabbing about some new stupid thing and if I EVER dispute anything he says he takes it personally and turns the “discussion” into a personal fight.

So I wanted to move on. I asked him how he was doing. He’s older than I am and he’s living with his parents, doesn’t have a job, doesn’t go to school, and doesn’t seem like he has any intentions of doing either. I don’t have a problem with someone doing that, but he started saying about how he was “picky” about what job he’ll take. I said that I’d work at a grocery store if I needed to, heck I worked at a gas station for 1 1/2 years to support myself and my unemployed ex. Sometimes you just need to work where ever you need to to survive. He started going on about having standards (sure, I won’t work at McDonalds either), and how he was his own person and when he does have a job he works only for himself, not to make his bosses or co-workers happy. Huh? When you have a crappy job you just have to deal with it. The boss says “I want this floor spotless” you do what you can to make it that way. He went off on how he has morals. Morals? What does not doing what you don’t feel like doing have to do with morals? Then he attacked *me* for being willing to keep a boss happy by working hard! Said that was “selling myself out” for a lousy job. His view continued even when I mentioned that taking pride in whatever work you do and doing it very well shows well, and they had intended to promote me at that silly gas station job. I really can’t comprehend what he point he was trying to get across, so I was left with assuming that he’s just immature and can’t take being an adult seriously. We’ve all worked crappy jobs, he just needs to get over himself. So I told him that and asked him not to talk to me anymore. I just didn’t want to deal with his crap. I don’t want to sit here and get insulted for taking every job I’ve ever had seriously.

Yay Benadryl influenced rants! I hate people so much sometimes.

In good news, PrincessLeia.com hit 15,000 hits last night %) YAY!

Finally got around to writing a tiny script that’ll run the script to update ircstats and then upload the results to the webserver, added a crontab so it does it daily. I was so lazy for not doin
g this earlier, it’s so easy and took only a couple minutes.

This is a picture taken from the Hubble when Mars was very close to the earth (closer than it’s been in nearly 60,000 years). Myk and I walked outside late last night and it was easy to spot, looked like a big bright star, very cool. I wish I had a telescope.

We watched Transistorized! The History of the Invention of the Transistor last night on PBS. It was quite good, I learned a lot of things I didn’t know %) I guess that’s one big thing I miss about not having the chance to learn computers via college, I am sure I would have learned stuff about the history of things, and I really really would have enjoyed that.

Now I go. *wanders off*

o/` Aladdin Soundtrack o/`

Today ahh… today. Allergies again, I should take some benadryl but I really wanted to get some things done, and I can’t if I’m drowsy. I decided that I wanted to rewrite the weatherbot. That Geo::Weather module is out-dated, and I could completely be rid of it and parse the page myself. I also didn’t feel like putting the module on the box that the R2D2 bot was on (I had R2D2 and weatherbot in the channel for a couple weeks). Now without the silly module I can put it all into R2D2… so R2 does weather, yay! Here’s the new script:

I also got around to updating the IRCStats ;) And I made an archives page for them, so I have IRC Stats for #13tHHour going all the way back to when we linked irc.clockbot.net up with the other servers this year.

I guess that’s about it, a productive day %) *wanders off*

o/` Bel Canto – Kloeberdanz o/`

Yesterday was a good day. It was beautiful out so we opened up the windows. I spent some of the afternoon reading, started the second book in Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series. I then went on my laptop and messed around for a while, dropped into chat a bit. For dinner we had tacos, they were good but I think it was a bit too much after all the eating out we did this weekend, I probably should have made something really mellow like chicken %)

I had a lot of fun with my laptop last night. I learned about exporting X displays. I never had more than one computer that I used as a workstation, but now that I have my laptop I can try all sorts of neat things. What I can do when exporting x displays is run X programs from a remote machine on my current machine, which is very cool because my laptop is very weak and doesn’t have tons of libs on it that i’d need to install certain things. So I did the following:

(lyz@r2a6) lyz $ xhost r2d2
ssh into r2d2
(lyz@r2d2) lyz $ export DISPLAY=r2a6:0.0
(lyz@r2d2) lyz $ opera

This will open up opera on my laptop (r2a6) and it will run from r2d2. It is so cool %) And sickeningly fast, it took about 20 seconds for opera to load on the laptop, and on this it’s almost instant… plus since it’s the same opera I use on my workstation I have all my bookmarks and settings set up the way I want them. Just for fun I decided to see what gimp would do if I tried to take a screenshot. It took a screenshot of my laptop screen! YAY! (hey this was a great revelation before I understood more about what the x exporting is actually doing)

It’s some fun stuff. As long as I’m on the network I can now use what I need to via r2d2, w00t! Having fewer limitations on my laptop is good.

So while playing with this I thought about the sound on my laptop. I never looked into it, I didn’t even know what kind of card it was! Apparently its an old ESS sound card that uses the sb module. ROCK! All I needed to do was load the module and I’m on my way %) YAY! Myk helped me set it up so it loads on boot (I never really played around with modules on redhat). I’m so happy… not that I really have a use for sound on it, but I *can* use sound if I need to. The hardest part about this task was after the module was loaded we realized I had *no* media players. Had to go find all the proper ogg things so i could install ogg123, it was funny %)

My allergies were bugging me last night so I was feeling a bit sick, summer allergies suck, it was such a nice day! Luckily that didn’t really spoil my day any, I just crawled into bed and went to sleep (it was around 11 anyway).

Today I have a couple things I want to play around with, probably hop on my laptop a bit and take advantage of the new found love there ;) Hehe… *wanders off*

Yesterday evening we met my cousin Melissa for dinner at The Drafting Room. She found it on time, even if MapQuest’s directions were less than perfect. Unfortunately it turns out she doesnt drink much anymore, doh! Finest beer place near here and she doesn’t drink. Oh well. We had a nice time, spent about 3 hours there just talking about family and stuff. It was great, I had a nice time. I do like meeting with cousins, it rarely has the stress that is often involved when dealing with older relatives, cousins are my age and grew up in the same crazy family %)

Most of the family news was good, except for the news about my cousin Brad, they still think he’ll beat this cancer, but it’s more progressed than they thought and it’s not the form they thought he had originally. Now they think the treatment might do quite a bit of long-term damage to him *sigh* still, he’ll make it and that’s really what the family is focusing on.

Didn’t do too much last night when we got home, went to bed around 1 because I knew I’d have to get up today to have lunch with another cousin.

This morning I got up a little after 9, showered, called my cousin Erica (also on my father’s side) and met her and her friend Matt around noon. We headed out to TGI Friday’s and had a nice lunch. Now Myk has met two people from my dad’s side, and I know they both liked him… they can report back to the family and say not only that he exists, but that he’s awsome ;D It was good to see Erica again, even if she did mention me coming to visit several times toward the end of lunch. Gaah, I just visited 2 months ago!

It’s good that I’m getting back into contact with family.

I am going to go read now, been reading Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series again, I nearly forgot how much I enjoyed it the first time. I need to get to a library or get some new books soon… maybe for my birthday next month. *wanders off*

o/` Depeche Mode – Enjoy The Silence o/`

*sneeze* Ugh… I’ve been doing that all morning.

This evening we’re going to head down to the Drafting Room in Exton to meet my cousin Melissa for dinner. It should be nice, the restaurant is pretty easy to find so hopefully she’ll make it alright. Hopefully we can find enough to talk about, I have been in too many awkward silence situations lately %) I’ll definately have to ask how her brother Brad is doing, I never did get around to emailing my aunt about that, ugh.

While I was making plans for tonight I got an email from another cousin of mine, Erica. She is also on my dad’s side of the family and it was completely coincidental that they were both here this weekend. She wants to go out for lunch tomorrow. Of course she’s busy tonight and Melissa is busy tomorrow so I couldn’t kill two birds with one stone %) Oh well, I’ll see what we are going to be up to tomorrow and see how Myk feels, I’d hate to drag him out of the apartment two days in a row to see family if he doesn’t want to, especially after the week he had.

I didn’t really get much done after I wanders off yesterday afternoon. Looked over the irc quiz I’m going to start working on, should be easy. I also looked at the code I used to make the original and had to laugh, it’s funny how much I’ve progressed in PHP, all my old stuff looks horrible to me now %) So I’ll be reworking that so it makes sense, hehe.

An old friend of mine, brak (john), has been dropping in #13thHour late at night recently… unfortunately that’s not when I’m around. It’s good to see he wants to come by sometimes, I miss him.

Now I go work on a couple things… *wanders off*

o/` Duran Duran – Come Undone o/`

Well luckily I did manage to get to the Philly Chix meeting wednesday night, my friend mjoseph (boyfriend of another one of the chix) offered to drive me since he was going so he could take his girlfriend home. Great! It was really nice of him to go a bit out of his way to pick me up. The meeting was really nice, five people actually showed up! It’s a new record %) A couple women brought their cameras so we had pictures! stargirl was nice enough to post the pictures on her livejournal so I swiped (with permission!) them for the chix page.. So now we actually have 6 active members in the group, I update the site to reflect this and then signed up for O’Reilly’s User Group program, which requires the user group to have five or more members. It has yet to be approved but I’m hopeful, since we met the requirements.

Usually I don’t post quizzes and things, but this was funny…:

o/` Peter Murphy-All Night Long o/`

Updated the #13thHour page a bit yesterday, I’m adding some new members to the members page as soon as they get around to filling our surveys, separated the pictures sections a bit so that members who don’t come around much anymore are on a second page (as most people just want to see pictures of people the know and chat with often of course).

I spoke with my cousin Melissa yesterday afternoon, they changed their plans and decided on going to Hershey Park on Friday (she wants chocolate now), so said it would be better if we met up for dinner on Saturday. That’s cool, will probably work out better that way anyway, so Myk won’t need to rush home from work and head straight out to dinner. Melissa said she’d bring her new digital camera so she had “photographic evidence” that Myk exists, since no one on my father’s side (besides my father) has ever met him.

The Philly Chix meeting is tonight. Unfortunately Myk woke up to a bit of a mess at work and I am sure he’s horribly stressed out over it. I’m not going to push him if he doesnt want to go into the city tonight, sometimes it’s just too much. At times like this I wish I had some more real life friends so I didn’t have to depend on Myk so much to get me out of the apartment…

The op rules for #13thHour seem to be going over well. It IS sad how they were needed. As far as I knew most of the people there now had chatted in other channels before and understood that it’s a privilege to have operator status. I guess I am just too nice sometimes %) Hopefully most of the annoying problems that keep popping up in the channel will go away now that everyone has clear boundries to follow. I am also frustrated that the last section about giving respect to Myk and I was needed, I mean come on… we run 1/4th of the irc server, Myk has put HOURS into making sure that is always up and running, we have been with #13thHour for nearly 5 years, and people can’t learn to respect that at all? *sigh*

I am going to get some things done today… clean up my home directory a bit more, I am *sure* there is stuff I dont need there. Probably move some stuff off of my Windows partition since I’m running out of room there (too many games installed). I should put all my images directories together. It’s all such a big mess %)

I also want to get another poll written in php, a friend of mine wrote up the questions and I am writing up the poll, it shouldn’t be too hard, I want to do a few things differently than I did with the IRC Quiz I think, just so this is more of a learning experience %)

Hmm… I probably will post some of my irssi perl scripts today as well, along with a couple themes (mine and r2d2’s), yeah… that’d be good.

*wanders off*

o/` Bjork – Possibly Maybe o/`

Myk spent a great portion of the weekend getting stuff all set up for our server, and created r2q5.xelium.net to replace the server on the cobalt which goes away at the end of the month, they are both connected now so the /map looks like:

clockbot.xelium.net (11)
`-ice.xelium.net (164) 1
|-r2q5.xelium.net (61)
|-mainstreet.xelium.net (42) 4
`-deep13.xelium.net (127) 37

Luckily most of the people are off clockbot, so it shouldnt be too much of a problem when it’s finally shut down. I’m glad we’re able to keep the server, I would have been disappointed if we weren’t able to… I’m quite attached %)

Well now that this is all set up I can edit my webpage again, YAY! I uploaded a couple sections I worked on in my spare time:

“Minesweeper” In Linux

irssi Basics

I’ll upload my irssi scripts and themes later this week when I have a chance and put that on an irssi “extras” page.

I also got a chance to upload my screenshots:

Enlightenment in Debian

LiteStep in Windows 2000

And I get to show off my pretty bash prompts!

Ok, I’m done… I’m just really excited about having access to my webpage again %) It’s been *weeks*! Hehe. Of course I understand and greatly appreciate all the work Myk did to get this all moved over, he’s so awsome %)

This past weekend was a nice one. Didn’t really do much, read some, wrote some, played with Cargo a bunch.

So this “friend” that I spoke of in this entry now thinks I should forgive him. Yesterday he came to me and asked what he could “do” to “fix” things between us. I told him that I couldn’t even consider forgiving him if Myk still had a problem with him, who am I to forgive someone who was acting like a jerk to Myk? So today he says “I have apologized to Myk, now come back to $mychannel please!” … what? No, he can’t mess around with me like that and expect me to come running back, does he realize that he actually did hurt me? I guess not. I think he’s just hurt that I left and took half the channel population with me(not intentionally, he was being a jerk, people wanted to leave). I don’t know IF I’ll forgive him. I hate being walked on, and this “easy forgiveness” policy of mine never fails to hurt me, I don’t need that. I have wonderful friends who have always been there for me and deserve my time much more than someone who seems to have no respect for Myk and me.

In light of this, and other problems that have arisen in #13thHour of late, I finally got around to writing up a list of op rules:

#13thHour’s Rules For Ops

I felt this was needed… some things were getting out of hand and I got sick of talking to each op individually about their infractions. And I guess it was a bit unfair to the ops to give them power without knowing the rules that went along with it.

I finished a few books, so I have reviews:

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams, 306 pages
I am writing this review after the second time reading this book. I really enjoy all of Douglas Adams’ books. This one centers around a man, Richard MacDuff, who is wrongfully accused of murdering his boss. He encounters a college friend of his, Dirk Gently who is now the sole detective of “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The book follows the “adventures” these two men have while trying to work out Richard’s innocence before he is found by the police. Of course this book has all the strange twists, turns and odd experiences that we all have come to exp
ect from Adams, and it makes for a very enjoyable ride. We encounter a time machine, an “Electric Monk” whose job it is to believe when people aren’t able to, and a horse in a strange posession that makes people do the strangest things… I really loved this book.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, 531 pages
This review comes after I have read this book a few times. I am not sure what draws me to it, maybe the overall depressive attitude that the main character has about the world, maybe it’s the characters themselves. I’ve always been sadly captivated by the character of Estella, a beautiful woman who at a young age had the ability to love driven out of her, so that she is in a position to make the life of our main character very difficult. Even though this book is over 150 years old, I still feel that there are parallels you can draw between the life of the characters and a situation today, indeed the most recently movie version of this book does just that. The author did a wonderful job crafting this book so that it covers nearly the entire life of the main character. Pip, the main character, grows up as a poor orphan, raised by his sister. A variety of trivial experiences as a boy lead to him having a “Benefactor” who provides him with all the means he needs to become a gentleman. I love this book, and this comes from someone who generally has little knowledge of many of the “classics” in literature.

The Long Dark Tea-TIme of the Soul, by Douglas Adams, 307 pages
This was my second time reading this book. It comes after Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (but reading them out of order is ok, their plots are completely different). Dirk is caught trying to figure out why his latest client has been murdered. The book takes a number of coincidental turns (as is often the case with Adams’ books), and the same characters keep running into each other under strange circumstances. Immortal gods, a coke machine, and an eagle that won’t leave Dirk alone are only part of the story. It was an amusing book, and gets into the story fairly quickly so it’s not difficult to get into. Another very amusing book by Adams!

I guess that’s it *wanders off*