o/` Tears For Fears – Break It Down Again o/`

Spoiled American Brats. Maybe they just get on my nerves more than they used to, or maybe I really have been running into more of them. Just this morning this one kid in IRC started complaining and saying he hated his parents because they wouldn’t co-sign his college loans. When I asked him why he felt that was his parents responsibility he went on about how they made so much money and they could sign for just a small loan, finally he got really defensive and called me an idiot. Geez, touchy. Maybe I’ve just been lucky in the chat rooms I’m in, most people I know don’t take such discussion so personally. I’m so tired of kids thinking they are somehow “entitled” to these things. It’s not the end of the world if you have to go to a community college for a few years! I’m sure his parents were aware of this and just wanted him to appreciate everything he has for once. I’ve seen far too many kids not appreciate what their parents did to get them into college, and a number of whom just fail or get bored with it, and don’t realize what they are throwing away. I guess appreciation for everything you have is something people have to learn on their own.

/end rant

In happy news, Myk brought home one of those Herman Miller Aeron chairs.

Never heard of them? Look strange to you? Well… let me tell you, these chairs are amazing. Normally, even sitting in my normal comfy computer chair, I can tell I’ve been sitting in a chair all day when I get up. This chair is so different. It’s made of this “pellicle mesh” so when you sit down it contours to your body, but still gives you support. After a whole day of sitting in it you still feel good. It really makes all other chairs I’ve tried seem bad %) Myk is borrowing this one from work because they have extras. Why don’t we just buy a couple? The cheapest we’ve found them online is about $600 each *cringe* … they are nice chairs, with a nice 12 year warrenty, but I am sure spending that much on one chair has turned many people away from them. But I love this chair!

Yesterday I almost finished catching up on emails I’ve been putting off for weeks and months. There are a few people I only contact through email, so it is nice to respond in a timely manner, but I write such long emails most of the time to these people, so finding time to do it (sometimes I put aside a couple hours to write an email) is often difficult…

Tonight we have the second Philly Chix meeting. The list has been pretty quiet all month, so I am kinda worried that people aren’t as excited about it as I am. Still, I am hopeful that we will get more women coming to this meeting than the last (where we only had two).

*wanders off*

o/` Matchbox 20 – Last Beautiful Girl o/`

Well I’m back from vacation. We got back yesterday afternoon, but I said I was still on computer vacation so all I did was check my email and hop onto IRC and tell people I wasnt eaten by deer while in the Poconos.

On thursday we packed up our stuff and headed out around 8:30, so we got to the house up there owned by Myk’s mother’s boyfriend. Since we were the last ones there we ended up getting the bedroom with the twin beds, haha! Next time we’ll know to get up there sooner %) We spent the evening just talking with Myk’s mom, her boyfriend, and her boyfriend’s sister and her fiance (who were also staying up there for the weekend).

Photograph by Gary Fleeger, Pa Geological Society

On friday we decided to head over to Hickory Run State Park to check out some trails. I wanted to see the Boulder Field (pictured above). So we decided to take the Boulder Field Trail, which is 3.5 miles long and difficulty “difficult” (on a scale of easy-moderate-difficult). So we look at the map tacked to the board at the part of the park we stopped at. It seemed simple enough… of course I didn’t take into concideration that the trail was 3.5 miles ONE WAY… so we’d have to walk it back. Well, while we were walking on the Boulder Field Trail things were great, it was hot out, but not so bad in the shade of the trees. We left around noon and finally got to the end of the trail to the boulder field around 1:30. Crossed the boulder field, that took about 25 minutes… it’s a HUGE field, and carefully walking on boulders is not easy. So we get to the other side and want to look at a map to see where to go next… the map has been taken down (no doubt by some other wonderful tourist). Ugh! So we figure “hey maybe we can follow the road and get back to the car” … we followed the road about a half mile, but after the 10th car passed and kicked dust from the road in our faces we decided to turn around and try another trail. We ended up on Stone Trail. Stone Trail came to a dead end after 1.5 miles. Doh. We turned around and by this time our water was gone and we were quite tired. But what could we do? We decided to cross the boulder field again and go back down boulder field trail. Oy, it was tiring and we were both a bit dehydrated when we finished. Looking back we walked at 10 miles just on trails, plus what we walked on the road, and over the rocks… wow. I had never walked so much in one day before. Poor Myk had blisters, and my legs were absolutely *killing* me. It was after 5 by the time we got back to the car. We had suntan lotion and bugspray on, as well as dirt kicked up from the walk, we were so dirty! Hehe. We stopped at a gas station after leaving the park and picked up a gatorade and water, which were finished in just a couple minutes. Then drove back to the house, took showers, and had a nice BBQ dinner with everyone staying there, and a couple of neighbors. It was really nice, I ate a lot… and for dessert was this amazing cheesecake topped with blueberries and strawberries, wow! I really enjoyed that, it was an amazing end to the 4th of July. We didn’t see fireworks or anything because we were pretty much too exhausted to move %) We went to bed around 11 and slept soundly ;)

Saturday we woke up in some awful pain, haha! We decided not to do anymore hiking for the weekend, and ended up taking a drive up the see the Delaware Water Gap. It was nice up there, hot though… and route 80 near Jersey was so insanely packed with traffic that we ended up not staying long. I can say I’ve been there though %) We got to drive through Portland, PA… which was a cute little town, the main part of the town was about a block long, hehe, a few cute little stores. After some frustration with traffic we e
nded up driving back around 2. Decided to head up to Penn’s Peak Restaurant. It’s a restaurant on a peak (surprised?), and the view is something like 50 miles on a clear day! It was a little hazy out, but the view was still amazing. We had a nice dinner of buffalo chicken sandwiches, and I had some amazing carrot cake. It was reasonably priced too, which was great %) After eating we drove back to the house, took some pictures of the deer that were eating the corn we put out for them, and headed over to Myk’s father’s house.

We spent a couple hours hanging out with Myk’s father, it was nice seeing him again, he seems to be doing good. He asked if we wanted to go see the fireworks but we werent too interested since the bugs were coming out and neither of us were in the mood to soak in bugspray again. Instead we decided to just take a drive. Drove through downtown Jim Thorpe (it’s a town) and then just kept driving… ended up in Hazelton, a town on a road that wasnt even on our map (too far west). When it started getting dark and there was no sign of a road we recongnised we decided to just turn around and go back. It was a nice drive though, we got to see a lot of “small town pocono” %)

Sunday morning we got up and decided to leave a little before noon so we’d *try* to miss most of the traffic back into the city. It was Myk’s birthday on sunday, so his mother gave us a cake to take home (ugh!). The drive home was nice, and we didn’t get lost once! Hehe. Yesterday afternoon we pretty much just hung around here… got some laundry done, emptied suitcases, checked email. Then went out to get a pizza and a movie.

The movie we rented was The Pianist. I heard a lot of good things about it, and it was nominated for some awards, won a few. Unfortunately it turned out to be just another Holocaust movie. There was really nothing special or memorable about the film. Schindler’s List shocked and horrified us, Life Is Beautiful made us cry, what does the pianist have? It’s just another in this sick genre, I don’t know why it was nominated for anything. It had nothing original. It’s like people just give awards to holocaust movies because the WW2 holocaust was so horrible, not because the movies are groundbreaking in any way. I know that it was a bad time in our history that deserves attention, but I’m just so sick of it, I have become desensitized to even the most senseless murders in movies. So no, I didn’t like The Pianist.

Wow… while writing this I was chatting with my friend daiopowen. And I found out that he knew my cousin Audrey! He didn’t realize that my last name was Krumbach until this afternoon and he asked if I was related to her, crazy!

I think I am going to attempt to install debian on my laptop sometime this week. Since debian does not come with drivers for my pcmcia NIC I need to, um, preload modules during the install so it can properly do a net install… ugh, I’m so scared %) Myk said he’d give me a hand with it luckily, if I am in the mood I’ll document the steps I am taking to do it. Unfortuantely I don’t think I’ll have it ready for the philly chix meeting on wednesday, oh well…

Now I am going to go find something to do. I do feel a bit refreshed from that vacation, not really glad to be back ;) but I do have some things I want to work on. *wanders off*

o/` Better Than Ezra – Extra Ordinary o/`

We’re leaving this evening for the Poconos. Hopefully the irc server will be up and ready to go by this evening… deep13.xelium.net will be up and working properly even if clockbot’s upgrade doesnt go smooth enough, so just connect there if you have problems with the first instructions on: http://www.princessleia.com/13thHour.html

On to more serious things… I’m considering giving Christianity another chance. I have been horribly lost spiritually my whole life, and although I have explored many other religions I find I’ve come full circle and still am unsure as to what I want and need in my life. I’m sure I need something, I do feel some sort of emptiness. The biggest problem I have with christianity (aside from most of the followers…) is that even when I gave it a chance last time, I felt like I was lying to myself. As a historian I cant separate christianity from any other religions ever practiced. As a scientist I cant actually believe the creation story (unless it’s a metaphor?). And I find it difficult to rationalize believing in this despite many of the arguments Christians give me. I don’t want to push the chrisitan religion into a box to fit my needs (like so many people do), because that would defeat the purpose of believing in it. I stumple with dogma that confuses me, and the number contradictions that the bible seems to hold (which, no doubt, is why there are so many sects). This being said, I realize there are many intelligent people who believe in it. What do they realize that I don’t? Maybe they don’t take spirituality as serious as I do? Maybe they too lie to themselves and try not to examine it to closely? Maybe it’s just “what you are supposed to do” so they are active in the church? I’d appreciate feedback on this %)

My problem with my last venture into Christianity was that I was part of a Baptist church, dragged there by my mother. The church seemed to focus on the pathetic, unhappy, stupid, lost souls who had nothing else to lose. In this environment I was unable to ask the questions that I needed to ask and get a valuble response. “How do I know this is true?” I’d ask “because in the bible…” they’d answer. Well how about if I come to them with the pretense that I don’t believe the bible? They would stumple on questions and give me all these lines about faith, about how what I believe scientifically and historically is wrong and bias by unbelievers. I just got so tired of them deflecting my questions in such a way!

Luckily this time the guide we have to meet with us and answer our questions is an intelligent person, and I’m very curious as to his answers to my questions and inhibitions. I plan on going into this completely open minded. I am willing to put enormous effort into this because I honestly do want to find something that works for me. At the same time I must push myself to take it seriously and not get caught up in some sort of “religious fervor” that will make me lose my intellectual side, and ultimately cause me to fail in this.

Ok, enough seriousness… I found this amusing line in an irc channel I chat in (it was submitted to bash.org):

-Mot- Though i’m not gay, I’d rather be a flaming homo then a grammatically indept idiot like yourself.
-Azi- than
-Azi- inept

Now I know I don’t have perfect grammar all the time either, but at least I don’t make grammatical mistakes while telling someone I don’t! *chuckles* And normally I’d change names to protect the innocent, but there is no innocent here… Mot is an asshole, and soon after this he was banned from the channel %)

We bought bugspray last night. Ultrathon made by 3M… after a bit of research online we discovered that it’s probably the most suited to our needs %) I hate bugs! And the weather has been so perfect for breeding them, tons of them everywhere, I don’t think I would have enjoyed a hike in the woods much
if I was covered with mosquitos.

I’m going to go around and figure out what else I need to this trip this weekend. I’ll see everyone when I get back on sunday! *wanders off*

o/` Lost Highway Soundtrack o/`

Story Time!

Cellphone Shopping

We have a couple hundred dollars to invest in a cellphone, you’d think it would be easy to just go into a cellphone store and buy one right? We left home around 6:30 to start shopping

First we went to the AT&T store. It was difficult to find, we drove around for nearly 25 minutes trying to find exactly where it was. The parking lot of the plaza was designed by a madman. We finally get into the store, start looking at phones and half of the ones on display are out of stock! A salesguy finally approached us and asked how he could help.

-AT&T Guy- Hey, how’s it going? Can I help you with something today?
-Time- Uh, actually the phone I wanted is out of stock, and it seems most of the other ones are too
-AT&T Guy- Which phone where you looking at?
* Time gives model number
-AT&T Guy- Oh, that model was discontinued
-Time- I see
-AT&T Guy- Most of the phones are out of stock because we are getting new model phones in soon
-Time- OK
* AT&T Guy stands there looking at us
-Time- Uh, if I need anything I’ll ask, ok?
* AT&T Guy finally gets the message and walks to a different part of the store

Gah, why do they still have the phone on display if they are discontinued? It amazed me how horrible that store was! And so hard to get to too, I wonder how they stay in business.

Next stop, Verizon. The Verizon Store is in a big building right on 309, you can’t miss it. We only decided to try that store because it was easy to get to, and around the area that we were already in, and of course AT&T had failed us.

The store seemed nice enough, their plans were reasonable and so were the prices of the phones. Most importantly it seemed that their calling range was quite good, so sure, lets get a phone. We walk around looking for someone to help us, and it’s really busy and hard to tell who is a salesperson and who is a customer. Finally a salesperson stands near the front of the store and yells “Everyone, remember to sign in!” Sign in? People rush the sign in counter, by the time we wander over to it there are about 7 names on it before us.

-Time- We just want to purchase a phone and a plan, we need to sign in?
-Verizon Guy- Yep, but there are a few people on ths list before you and we close in 10 minutes
-Time- Fine.

We left.

Can you believe that? Sign in! The “Sign In” sign was written with a pen on paper and taped to the counter, we didn’t even see it until the guy told everyone to sign in and we had been there for a half hour already. And then the salesguy is all “we close in 10 minutes” … if we had waited those 10 minutes would he have just said “sorry we’re closed” and pushed everyone out of the store? I wouldn’t put it past them. It was horrible.

Flustered, we decided to check out Best Buy since it was in the direction we were going. By this time it’s aobut 8 pm. Best Buy had hardly anything, we left.

Then we decided to brave the mall. Since it was about 8:30 on a tuesday night we figured it wouldnt be too busy. We parked near Tweeters (mostly a stereo store). We ventured into the mall and went to RadioShack briefly, they had Verizon phones, but the prices of the same phones were much much higher, forget that. Next to the RadioShack was a Nextel store. This was probably the most pleasant service experience we had all evening. The salesguy was knowledgabe and amusing, and they had some nice phones. Unfortunately their calling area wasnt wide enough to suit us. *sigh*

We then found an “Authorized AT&T wireless dealer” kiosk. There were more phones here than at the actual store! There was one woman sitting in it who was on the phone, and another (apparently waiting for service?) leaning on the counter. The woman working there covered the mouthpiece of the phone to talk to us.

-AT&T Chick- Hi, do you have a quick question?
-Time- A quick question? Well we just wanted to purchase a phone
-AT&T Chick- Well I have a few customers and I can’t activate a phone after 9 pm
-Time- Uh, ok
-AT&T Chick- You might
just want to come back tomorrow I’m here from *gives time she is there*

Yeah right!

We decide to leave the mall, it’s a little after 9 by this time. While in Tweeters on our way out we see a little stand with cellphones. We decided, “hey we can just get this AT&T one and be done with it” so we grab a salesguy.

-Tweeters Guy- Hey, what can I help you with
-Time- Could I get this phone?
-Tweeters Guy- Are you interested in *name of some plan*?
-Time- Um, I am not sure, we just want a monthly plan and…
-Tweeters Guy- Ok, I’ll go in the back and grab it for you!
* Tweeters Guy comes back holding a prepaid cellphone box
-Time- No, this is not what i want, do you have this phone in stock with the normal monthly plans?
-Tweeters Guy- Well no, but…
-Time- Bye!

GAH! What is with all these places not having anything in stock? It’s crazy.

So we were driving home, upset of course because it was late… we had wasted a couple hours looking for a stupid cellphone! And we hate phones! It’s not like we were being picky or cheap or anything!

So we’re driving home and we pass the CompUSA that’s right around the corner from us. Myk asked me if I wanted to go there “sure, whatever” i replied… my head hurt from going in and out of air conditioning all evening, and I was just bored and upset with the whole horrible cellphone experience. So we go into CompUSA, the place is completely dead. We look at cellphones, finally decided on a Sprint PCS phone since the phone was nice, the plans were good, and the coverage was exactly what we needed. Got a salesguy to come over. He explained that they don’t actually activate the phones at the store, when you buy the phone you need to call a number in the box and they will activated it. That’s fine, we paid for the phone and then learned that we get a $70 rebate when we activate it, kickass!

By this time it was after 9:30. We decided to go get some Rita’s Water Ice %) It was yummie.

I got home and my headache was pretty bad, ended up eating the waterice and watching some tv then going to sleep around midnight.

The end.

So while we were driving around yesterday I heard this guy on the radio talking about spam. Now this person obviously knew nothing about computers. His argument was that there are laws in the works to ban spam because it’s “not advertising products that we find socially acceptable and the manner in which it’s delivered is new and different” He started saying that no one complains when they put commercials at movie theaters, or junk mail in our mailboxes (this is a lie, everyone hates these things!). I pretty much disagreed with everything he said. The reason people want to ban spam email might be because of the products being offered or the manner in which they are delivered, but the whole force behind laws around it is it’s more like how telemarketers arent allowed to call a cellphone. Just like a cellphone, with a computer you pay for the software, hardware, bandwidth, etc that the spam uses. Your money and resources are being directly consumed to process this junk mail. People who run email servers have a hard time because they must have resources to process the huge amount of unwanted mail, and companies are forced to pay their network administrators to install spam filters and make sure that using these filters will not use too much resources and cause slowness or problems on the network. This guy on the radio didn’t understand that, which means he didn’t understand the basis of which making laws preventing spamming were founded upon. Who let such a moron talk on the radio?

It’s getting late in the afternoon… I guess I’ll go now. *wanders off*

o/` Fisher – Good Intentions o/`

Last night… last night. Ah, we are upgrading the irc server to beta17 this week, and clockbot is moving to a new computer, ah! This means there is a server change AND a DNS change going on that will probably comprimise connections for a couple days. I emailed everyone who I had email for, but that’s not everyone, here’s the email I sent out for everyone who hasn’t seen it:

We are currently working to upgrade the irc server and move it to another location.

This email is also reproduced on the #13thHour Page … so hopefully everyone will be informed and I wont get tons of emails screaming about not being able to connect.

Even if I did get tons of emails about it, they wouldn’t be replied to until after the havok is over ;) Myk and I have decided to head up to the Poconos on thursday night for a relaxing computer-free cabin weekend in the mountains. Woo! His birthday is on Sunday, and he’s really been wanting to go hiking recently, so it’ll make for a nice birthday I think. And I could do with a computer break… even on my trip up to maine I came back into irc several times.

I don’t know if we’re going to go to PLUG tomorrow… we keep changing our minds. It’d be nice to meet the newest philly chick, but i will meet her next week, this week is just so busy. My uncle is supposed to call me sometime this week too to see if he has time to stop by and visit. If he calls tomorrow and wants to have dinner or something then there is really no chance that we’re going to PLUG. *shrugs*

I knitted a lot yesterday, and chatted. Actually learned how to knit and purl through a backloop by reading online documentation on it %) What did I do before the internet? It was a nice getting away from computer focus for a day, and I am proud of the progress i’ve made with knitting %)

Today I am really going to try and finish up that enlightenment thing. Yep, so I’m going to go do that now… I’ll try and get it done so I can post it here and have people offer comments and suggestions… *wanders off*

o/` Naked Eyes – Always Something The To Remind Me o/`

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh ugh…. UGH! Yesterday afternoon I was using my laptop in the bedroom, it was fine, I wasn’t online because we dont have ethernet cable that goes that far, but I was able to focus on writing 4 emails. These weren’t “hey how are you? I’m good, cya around” … these were some seriously long emails that I write to people who I don’t contact by any other means. After writing them to text files, I shut the laptop down and Myk and I went for a walk. I come back from the walk, go to turn it on, things seem to boot up fine, then I try to launch x. Segmentation Fault (I don’t remember the exact error with this). Now that’s weird… Then the laptop shut itself off. Gah! I reboot.

I get a grub error, the system hangs indefinately.

What. The. Fuck.

I grabbed Myk. The first thing he asked is if it had power, “of course” I said. So we walk into the bedroom and he says “hey babe, it’s not plugged in” AH! I didn’t unplug it intentionally, I must have stepped on the cord or something and it unplugged. Well, he put in Gentoo’s grub rescue disk and none of the usual methods of system recovery were working. Crap!!! My theory is that it couldnt launch x because it didn’t have enough power, and the battery b0rked and shut the machine down uncleanly. Maybe there was something going on that made it dangerous to shutdown uncleanly at that point? I don’t know, but my whole gentoo install is crap now… nearly a week of work and fighting to get that goddamned system installed and it’s corrupted. The strangest part is that I thought reiserfs would have been able to deal with that sort of unclean shutdown, I guess not. So all those emails I wrote yesterday are gone (they were just text files, I never got a chance to send them out), and my laptop is back to having no OS. I don’t even want to look at it right now because I’m so upset. *sigh* We might just throw redhat 7.2 on it so I have a laptop to bring with me to plug, but this is all very disappointing…

Now since computers make me so angry I won’t talk about them anymore in this entry %) I think I might spend the afternoon knitting. But first I have a couple stories to tell.

The Deck Phone Man

Our apartment complex is quite nice, it’s only 2 stories and each “unit” is 4 apartments, two downstairs and two upstairs. Most units are connect to one another, but we’re one of the lucky apartments to have an end unit. Well, about 4 units down a man lives upstairs who loves to talk on his phone on his deck. The first time I saw him doing it I didn’t think much of it, sure he’s loud and anyone walking by can hear what he is saying, but it was a nice day and he just wanted to stand outside while talking. After a few more times I just started laughing at the situation because it seems that he WANTS people to hear what he is saying. “Oh we just closed that deal for around 100k, haha! Yeah, I know, haha! Exactly. Yes, do you believe he wants us to get preseason tickets, haha! Yeah! Haha!” … I wish I was joking. One time I was sitting on the couch reading with the windows open, and the wind was blowing so I could hear *everything* he was saying, and it was really getting annoying. I guess it’s kind of sad because this guy must be so lonely, but at the same time he acts like a self-important asshole.

Krispy Kreme Adventure

Krispy Kreme is on the cover of Fortune Magazine. Upon noticing this Myk mentioned to one of his co-workers that it was ashame there weren’t any in the area. Quickly his co-worker corrected him, there is one in Northwest Philly. Armed with this information he suggested we look for a closer location sometime, sure. Saturday night we were hanging out in our apartment, kinda bored, restless, wanting to take a walk but it was too dark. So I say “Hey, let’s go on a krispy kreme adventure!” I went online to find the closest location, and unfortunately the one in Northeast Philly was the closest one, and that’s about a half hour away. It was about 10:00 so I figured I’d
call for their hours. The lobby was open til midnight, and the drive-thru is open 24 hours a day! So Myk and I headed down to the northeast to pick up some krispy kremes. Myk had eaten a krispy kreme doughnut before (at my Aunt Elaine’s when he came to visit me), but he had never actually been to one, so he had never seen the krispy kreme donut machine! He was impressed with the “krispy kreme experience” Hehe… and the place was busy! It was a little after 10:30 pm and we had to wait in line! It was worth it though, we got a 2 original glazed, two glazed devil’s food, and two cinnamon apple filled, and we each got a hot chocolate. The hot chocolate was more like warm chocolate when we got home, but in all it was a nice adventure. The cinnamon apple filled was amazing, usually apple filling in such things are very sugary, but in these they were actually pleasantly appley, mmm!!!

Yep, those are my stories for this past weekend %)

I read more books:

Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, by John Berendt, 388 pages
Written by a man from New York this true story takes place in Savannah, Georgia. The first half of the book deals with the author’s entrance into the world of Savannah, a world of style, grace, and scandal. The beautiful homes and successful families only hide the more grisley side of the town from visitors. The cast of characters includes a vast variety, and it’s amusing to see how they all view each other. The second half of the book deals with a murder in this beautiful place, for once money cannot buy the defendant out of his trouble and is forced to fight the court for years, through a series of mistrials, which are interestingly documented in this book. I really enjoyed this book, which is unusual since I rarely read non-fiction, and when I do it’s usually historcal, not something this contemporary. The author did a good job at dwelling on people and subjects long enough for the reader to understand, but not so long that it gets boring. And even that aside, the real life glimpse of a city like Savannah was very interesting. I’d recommend this book to anyone.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick, 216 pages
This is the book that inspired the movie “Bladerunner.” Unfortunately the last time I saw that movie was a number of years ago, and I don’t remember it much. From what I do remember this is quite different, but the message is the same. The earth has undergone a massive world war, most animals are extinct, and the survivng humans are encouraged to leave earth and live on space colonies. On these colonies there are androids who do work for the humans, and androids are not allowed on earth… but sometimes they escape. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter in charge of “retiring” a group of the latest model androids (almost indistiguishable from humans) that escaped from Mars. Along the way he meets a few interesting characters, one of which is Rachael Rosen, who he realizes he feels a physical attraction to. The journey this book follows is that of Rick Deckard, trying to separate what is real with what is not, what is human with what is manufactured, and struggling with the real moral differences. I really enjoyed this book, I only wish it had been longer.

I just started re-reading Return Of The King last night, got about 100 pages into it after my laptop borked and I was too upset to touch a computer. “Read! I can’t break a book!” I said when Myk asked what I wanted to do to cheer me up %)

I got an email from an old friend in Seneca Falls the other day. I never really expected him to contact me again, I had an old phone number of his but he has moved since using it so it was disconnected. It’s cool though, I’m glad we can still communicate, I gave him my phone number so he said he would give me a call sometime so we could actually talk. He is in the reserves and was called into active duty after 9-11-01 so I never really got to say goodbye to him when I moved away from Seneca Falls. And I’m glad he doesn’t seem to “take my ex’s side” and hate me l
ike some of the other people there probably do.

I guess that’s it. *wanders off*

o/` Robert Rich – Lifeblood o/`

Last night we went over to the little BBQ/Pool party that Myk’s former co-workers were having. It was nice, I got to meet a number of the guys that I’ve heard so much about… of course I am sure I’ve forgotten more names than I retained. I guess I wasn’t *too* shy, I just had nothing really to say since they were mostly just talking about funny stuff from work in the past. We stayed for a couple hours.

I got home and hopped on my laptop for a bit, escapenguin helped me begin to learn how keybindings in fluxbox work, so now I have a number of keys bound the way I want them to be, and Myk gave me a tar file of his fluxbox configs so I was able to search through those and pick out what I needed. Installed Opera 6.03 last night as well, it runs ok, better than anything else I’m sure, but I can definately tell when it’s open ;) It’s nice finally having a brower on it.

#13thHour has been pleasantly busy lately, which is nice. Even before we moved from scifi last september our user number had dropped a bit, and as soon as we moved we lost a regular or two, which was ashame, but we just couldn’t put up with scifi’s icky server anymore. I am pleased with how the channel has grown in these past few months. Part of it comes from people in #deep13 getting bored and coming to see #13thHour (most of the deep13ers know that #13thHour is my other major haunt on the server), but most of it comes from people visiting from xanga and livejournal. Just in the past 3 months I’ve had blueminder, lazzurs, sevenoverzero, radbatik (Tarist, the first xanga person to accept my invitation, last fall), Naru_Chan, escapenguin, d_annie (briefly, and I missed her! But we chat on the linuxchix server too..), ltzany (Vehicle00), KennyG (RanchNacho), and piplio. And about half of these people actually come in on a regular basis, 3 of them even made it to the “members” page! I hope no one in #13thHour resents the growth in the channel… I was just getting tired of going in there after sleeping and seeing that the last person that spoke in there was me, so inviting everyone to that channel I thought would be better than creating another. It’s nice too because most of the people listed are *nix people, or have an active interest in computers that surpasses that of most other people, so it’s been easy for everyone to get along (with the sometimes amusing exception of Naru_Chan, Time has already kicked him a number of times). Also, Peacimowen recently invited an anime group to the server, and we got at least one member from that interested in joining #13thHour. It’s nice watching a channel grow again… and I’m happy that I can actually chat with some of the people I met in journals %)

Speaking of #13thHour (have I bored you to death yet?), that woman who I spoke about in a previous entry (the one who strongly dislikes me because of crap in the past, but came into #13thHour anyway) came back the other night when I was around. I guess she didn’t expect me to be there, she seemed disappointed when she learned I was. I was very nice to her, gave her and her husband ops, acted very interested in what she was doing in her life and such… but I still have no idea
where I stand with her. The entire time she still seemed distant. We’ll probably never had the closeness that we once had, but I wish I could talk her into being more than “just civil” .. it’s frustrating to be at such odds with someone. I am considering writing her an email to ask her exactly where she stands and offer a sort of truce… I dunno, I’ll think about it.

Um, oh! Tsukiyo came into #13thHour last night. She was one of the original members, along with Myk, Peacimowen and me… and she’s been crazy busy with work and school nd life… so she hadn’t been around for quite some time, even made it only to “Rarely Seen” section of the page, hehe. It was great seeing her.

Um… enough about irc! I did some more catching up on emails (oh, so talking about emails is better huh? Hehe…), I got about 1/3 of the way through all the people I need to write to, that still leaves a lot of writing to do… good thing my laptop is perfect for such things! I will probably snuggle on the couch with a blanket and my laptop this afternoon and be typing away. Right now I’m going to go organize a few “enlightenment tips” on the enlightenment page while I have a few I’m thinking about. *wanders off*

o/` Legend Soundtrack o/`

This laptop is so neat %) x only runs in 8-bit, but with the “default” theme in fluxbox it looks great (I tried a couple other themes and they looked *horrible*). I am absolutely in love with how this keyboard types, it makes a nice little clicky sound, and feels good… when I hit the proper keys *mutters at the key placement* So I am happy with how it’s running, impressed that the mere 32 mb ram, it’s pretty much using all the ram when x is running, plus a little bit of swap, I’m pleased! *hugs the laptop* (I’m using it to type this) It’s definately working out good for what I need… unfortunately I haven’t yet installed anything so I can’t really say what I think of gentoo’s emerge yet. I will probably install opera on here in the near future, I don’t have any browsers installed at the moment. I don’t think I’m going to go too much into installing text based things… I pretty much figure that most of the text things I don’t have already I will only need if I’m on the network (and online) and if i’m on the network than I can ssh into r2d2 or minute and use the text based things there %) Like links… if I want to go to a webage I just ssh to r2d2 and open up links there. It takes a lot of load off of what I need to actually run on here, it’s nice. I love linux.

The other day in irc someone asked me how many computers Myk and I have and what they ran. I actually had trouble answering him! I said 8, but then readjusted that total to 9, and got all messed up when listing what OS’s they all ran, hehe. So I think I will make a section on my page about the systems we have (Myk already has a section like this on bevilacqua.us but it only has our baic systems). For now I’ll just list them here, because I can:

R2D2 – Debian Stable/Windows 2000 – 2.0 ghz P4 – Lyz’s Primary Workstation
R2Q5 – Debian Stable – 450 mhz P3 – We plan to run this as the irc server, web server, and mailserver when the cobalt’s contract comes up for renewal (we dont want to renew it)
R2A6 – Gentoo – 333 mhz AMD K6-2 (Compaq) – Lyz’s laptop
Hour – Gentoo/Windows XP – 2.0 ghz P4 (Dell) – Myk’s Primary Workstation
Minute – Debian Stable – 733 mhz P3 (Dell) – Currently runs as gateway, firewall, webserver, mailserver
Clockbot – Debian Stable – 333 mhz AMD K6-2 (Compaq) – Print server running CUPS (yeah, it’s a bit overkill for a print server, but this computer has had a rough life, hehe)
Reducto – Gentoo – 700(?) mhz (IBM) – Myk’s laptop from work
The Cobalt – Cobalt Linux – 300 mhz AMD K6-2 (Sun) – runs irc.clockbot.net (otherwise known as clockbot.xelium.net), also runs our primary nameserver, it’s colo-ed and I’ve never actually physically seen this box
The Mac – No OS currently installed – 132(?) mhz – a friend gave this to us, havent had time to check it out yet

Yep, those are all our babies %) Not a bad variety!

Enough with computers already ;) I got a surprising call last night. My Uncle Dan, who I hadn’t talked to in over a year and a half called me! My Uncle Dan is the relative I stayed with (with his ex-wife and two kids.. but they were still married then) when I first moved to Brockport, NY (near Rochester) back in the beginning of ’00. He’s always been great to me, never talking down to me like my own father tends to still do, always treating me like my own person, and never afraid to let me know when I was out of line. It’s kinda funny how he ended up coming in and taking that role, since my father obviously wasn’t going to. Anyway, the last time I talked to him was when he had run off to Las Vegas to meet a woman he had met through a chat room, he thought I’d be sympathetic to his cause, since I had met people online.. but he left his wife and two children to be with this woman, and there are problems with that. Still, he’s family, and he’s done a lot for me so I cant very well turn my back on him. He divorced his wife (the one that he was married to when I lived with them) and now pays child support for his two children who he
isn’t allowed to see. And he married this new women, who has a few kids of her own, they all live in upstate NY. He called last night to let me know that he is often in the Philadelphia area! He spoke to my mother before he called me to get my phone number and find out where I was living. He drives an 18-wheeler, and I guess he has a route that takes him across NY, PA, and NJ. He often drives right past my turnpike exit! And since I live less than 10 minutes from the exit, it would be easy for him to stop by sometime. He said he’d give me a call next week when he is going to be in the area. Cool! It’ll be nice getting to see him again, it’s been over 2 years since I have actually seen him, and no one on my mother’s side of the family (my mother included!) has come to visit me here. He can go home and tell everyone what a beautiful apartment I live in ;) Hehe. Maybe we can take him out for dinner or something *shrugs* we’ll see.

Tonight we are going to go to a little pool party/get together with some of Myk’s former Co-Workers. I’ve met very few of them, so it should be quite an experience. We’re just going to hang out there for a little bit, skip the “pool” part of it because Myk still doesnt have any swimming shorts, d’oh! I think it’ll be a nice evening though. This weekend we’ll probably just spend chilling inthe AC, which is perfectly fine with me!

Went grocery shopping last night. The cashier was a guy I always see there, about 50 and takes his job WAY too seriously. He is always trying to help the customers as much as he can, always wanting to converse with them. Now I understand that he was just trying to be nice, and I like that, but it was a hot miserable day out, and I was in a lousy mood. Sometimes I don’t want to interact! But this guy was pretty insistant on wanting to talk with every customer, and I put up with it. I can’t imagine what happens when someone really doesnt want to talk to this guy, ugh. Someday the human element will be removed from shopping, and I’ll be very happy.

I actually got quite a bit of work done on the enlightenment how-to thing, I’m pleased with it so far. Of course I am not going to meet my goal of having it finished today, I keep thinking of extra little things I need to add to it, hehe. Still, it’s a great start! And it felt good getting some real work done for once. I’ll probably do a little more work on it this afternoon. And I also need to get caught up on email, oy! I am so bad about replying to people, probably because I seem to insist on writing 5 page emails each time, and I never can find the time to do such a thing ;)

I got a little burned the other day when I went to the pool, oops. It isn’t a bad burn, but I decided not to go to the pool yesterday (the temp was around 97, heat index over 100!) just because I was afraid I’d burn more. Last night at the grocery store I picked up some suntan lotion %) So now I am going to go put that on and head over to the pool. *grabs the all important suntan lotion and wanders off*

Spread the meme

o/` Pocahontas Soundtrack o/`

-!- Current Global Users: 391 Max: 401

Woohoo! We finally hit 400 users on xelium!

Yesterday was hot. In light of this I decided it would be a good day to go down to the pool. I had a nice time, and didn’t get burnt %) I went back to the pool today, and it was even nicer because there were hardly any people there, and I was the only one in the pool. It’s nice having a nice clean pool that I can go to whenever I want. But it is lonely… I need to drag Myk out to the store one of these days so he can get a bathing suit %)

On the laptop… x runs! And I am quite impressed with how nicely fluxbox is working with only the 32 mb of ram %) I havent set up a user account or anything yet, I’ll probably do that this evening. And I discovered why there is a 160 mb cap on the amount of ram it can have. Apparently the 32 mb is non-removable… gah! And there is only one extra slot for ram, the highest of which will work with it is 128 mb. Well that’s ok, for what I’ll be using the laptop for I don’t even really need to go much higher than it is now. I had a friend offer to send me an extra stick of 64 mb laptop memory, and Myk mentioned that he might be able to get one for cheap, so I’ll see… I can get ram from *someone* I’m excited!

Been doing some work on the englightenment how-to that I’m putting together. Which I should go work on right now since I’m in the mood to do it. *wanders off*