I am increasingly finding myself displeased with a channel I chat in, #deep13. I by no means wish to put the channel down, or discourage people from chatting there by this post, but it’s causing me trouble and I need to vent about it.

I had dropped by the channel several times in the past, I knew about them from when they were on the scifi server “way back when,” was friends with one of their ops, Locdog. I joined the channel “for good” (24/7 attendance) a little over a year ago, sometime in the end of july/early august… I can’t be precise because I don’t keep logs there. I hung out with Locdog a lot, Ocean-Saurian was always nice to me, but I couldn’t help feeling like I wasn’t welcome. I hung on, and through my similar background with the channel (from “old scifi”) I met some cool people and had fun. In September or so the channel decided to move to their own server, and I talked Myk into linking his mostly empty irc server, Clockbot, to the small server that #deep13 had, and moved our channel, #13thHour there. Since then I’ve chatted a lot in #deep13, been high in the ircstats, and it was mostly fun. I won’t go into specifics of the problems I’ve been having, because that would be unfair to #deep13 (the last thing I need is to be kicked out because of a journal entry), but after all the time I’ve spent chatting there and working to make new users feel welcome, *I* am beginning to feel uncomfortable, ignored, and unwelcome there again.

I don’t what I’ll do. Maybe it’s just another phase of the channel and it’ll pass. It won’t really hurt me to stay there and idle for a while to see if things change. It’s just frustrating. I’m certainly not *against* a channel changing and evolving, I’m just realizing that I don’t often feel comfortable there anymore.

Stupid dumb IRC. Maybe I should just drop that channel all together and be done with it, my time might be better spent in #13thHour anyway, it’s been growing a lot lately, 18 actual individual users right now (and a few bots and duplicate users from other machines).

Ah today. Woke up earlyish, what did I do this morning? Chatted some I guess… did the email thing for a bit. I dunno, just wasted time. Finished reading Great Expectations again. I love that book, maybe because it’s so depressing, hah. I spend some time going through a bash scripting tutorial. It’s really something I need to learn how to do better, I’m using this guide and it’s very very good %) I have learned a lot just by skimming over a few sections of it.

Tonight we had that boca pizza. Ok, that pizza rocked! I am so pleasantly surprised! The pepperoni was almost like real pepperoni (oh how I’ve missed pepperoni!). And it’s actually much better than any other frozen pizza I’ve tried (including digiorno). I love pizza %) very happy that this was a pleasant boca experience.

Well I am going to head off to do a couple things before I go to bed. I didn’t sleep long enough last night, I want to catch up tonight. *wanders off*

o/` Star’s End Radio Broadcast o/`

I don’t think I’ve every written and entry this late (early?) before.

A friend was in #13thHour recently and talking about Litestep. Now litestep is an alternative shell for the win32 operating system. I tried it back in 1999 when I was here in Philadelphia for the summer. It was a nightmare to set up, Myk helped me (that was the summer we first met, were both dating other people at the time). And it was unstable. I kept it on my box but didn’t use it really because it was too much of a hassle, windows had too many problems as it was %) Well, he claimed it was more stable now, so Myk installed it and it looked pretty neat.

This morning I decided to wander into windows and try it out. I was really impressed with the install… it was seriously as easy as *click click click* No registry files to edit or anything! Kept my hands all clean, hehe. I was quite impressed with it once I got it running too, there are lots of cool themes. I even found a few that offer real transparency (screenshot here – sorry about the ads, it’s an angelfire site, I couldn’t wait to get access to my webserver ;)). This won’t make me spend more time in Windows of course, I’m still not a fan of it, but it definately will make being in windows a little less painful. Oh and it won’t hurt to show it off at the occasional lan party, hehe.

This afternoon we decided to go out and get a coffee maker. We decided on this one and we were able to pick it up at sears (which was a pleasant experience, unlike some other times). It was expensive, but our bit of research showed that it was pretty nice %) I don’t want to have another cheap one that breaks and spills coffee all over the kitchen on a monday morning! Hehe.

Went grocery shopping after we got the coffee maker. We discovered boca pizza. It has fake sausage and fake pepperoni on it, yay soy, along with lots of veggies. I’m looking forward to trying it, maybe for lunch tommorrow. Exciting huh?

I am going to bed now, it’s late. *wanders off*

o/` Sarah Mclachlan – I Love You o/`

Yesterday was a bad day. I had reason to be in a lousy mood, but the depression sorta took over and put me into a miserable mood. I wanted someone to talk to but the few people I trust enough to Talk we either not around or were busy. I made it through the day, but it was frustrating, I slept a bit, and buried myself in work mostly. Myk came home around 8:30 from work (late) and we were able to spend some time together and I felt much better. I should really figure out some way to overcome or avoid these depressed times, they suck.

I completely avoided IRC for most of the day yesterday (had and idle time of over a day *gasp*). After finally getting out of bed around 10 I decided to bury myself in the perl project. After a little while I decided that I’m not far enough along to tackle writing a module yet. I got confused about the variable exporting and stuff and yeah, I guess I gave up. I think I need to just learn more about perl in general before I start getting into that sort of thing. I have a terrible habit of jumping in the deep end, I need to work on that.

So I just decided to write it into the actual script I have running for the bot. Which makes it have this huge hunk of code in it… but it definately could be worse…:

-@PrincessLeia2- !forecast 19454
– R2A6- Forecast for North Wales, PA: Today Aug 08 Isolated T-Storms High: 82 Low: 68 POP: 30 % Sat Aug 09 Scattered T-Storms High: 80 Low: 69 POP: 50 % Sun Aug 10 Isolated T-Storms High: 82 Low: 70 POP: 30 % Mon Aug 11 Isolated T-Storms High: 82 Low: 71 POP: 30 % Tue Aug 12 Isolated T-Storms High: 84 Low: 67 POP: 30 % Wed Aug 13 Partly Cloudy High: 84 Low: 68 POP: 20 %

First it wgets the weather.com page based on the zipcode provided. If it finds a page then it starts parsing is to grab the info I need, and returns it into the script, then it deletes the file that it wgetted. Of course since writing the script I have had a few people come to me offering better ways in which this could have been done, but it’s fast and not *too* ugly the way it is right now. It returns the results in anywhere between 1 and 4 seconds, which is great considering that it must download a page.

At least I got that done yesterday… so it wasn’t a complete waste of a day.

This morning I got up, checked email and did all the normal morning things, then cleaned the apartment for a couple hours, did lots of extra little things like polishing the furnature and mopping the floors. Then ate lunch, spent some time paying bills. All sorts of fun stuff! I haven’t really done anything else today besides wander around people’s journal entries and stuff. I guess days after I complete a project are usually like this, intellectually lazy %)

We’re supposed to get thunderstorms all weekend (oh thanks weather forecast bot!), so that means we wont be going out walking or hiking or anything. Don’t have plans with friends either. Probably just a nice relaxing weekend at home… I say that often don’t I? Hehe. *wanders off*

o/` Craig Armstrong – Lets Go Out Tonight o/`

Hm…

Yesterday was fairly uneventful. I had a bit of a headache so most of the day I just chilled out and puttered around. A friend of mine has recently been playing a lot of minesweeper when she gets bored at work, so, missing that silly old game, I decided to wander around and check out some of the linux versions that were in debian stable’s apt. Mostly they suck. There are 5 of them, and after my disappointment I decided to make a webpage about them. Yep, minesweeper in linux reviews. Unfortunately I can’t post the reviews until I have access to the webserver again, so it’ll be a little while. It was a fun way to pass the afternoon anyway. Eventually my headache got worse and I had to lie down though, which sorta sucked. I am not sure why I got the headache, maybe allergies.

When Myk got home from work he saw I was feeling lousy and we decided to order out pizza. It was a good idea, the pizza was yummie %) We thought about getting a movie. A friend keeps telling me that I HAVE TO see “Rocky Horror Picture Show” … and I do agree, so while at the movie store we decided to pick it up to rent. A tuesday night, we can get in and out of Blockbuster in a few mintues to grab the pizza that’s waiting right? Hah, no. There was a line of about 4 people (which extended to 8 by the time we left) and two guys behind the counter. One was one the phone, then playing with videos that I assumed he was supposed to be putting away, while the other was slowly ringing people up. The guy ringing people up then gets a customer who wants to know if they have Sex In The City Season 2 to buy. So for the next 7 minutes both the guys behind the counter are scrambling around to see if they had it, or if they could get it, how soon, oh do they have it? Ugh… We ended up just leaving without renting the video. We would have waited if we didn’t have a pizza ready and waiting at the pizzeria… bleh, stupid Blockbuster, I pay too much to rent there as it is, you’d think they could at least have decent customer service.

The evening was nice despite not getting a movie. Good pizza, and we sat around and watched PBS for a while, Nova was on at 8, all about forest fires. I am a forest fire expert now! Hehe… I love Nova. My headache mostly went away, I think the caffeine in the soda I had with dinner helped. Yep, that was my lazy day.

So today I decided to embark on an adventure to write a perl module. I used `h2xs -X -n USA::Forecast` to create the basic skeleton of the module that I’m calling USA::Forecast. That’s about where my project is now *grin* I think I have a bad habit of getting in over my head and becoming flustered. I began reading through the Geo::Weather module because it did a lot of similar things that I want to do, but I quickly found myself drowning in not understanding. This isn’t terribly surprising, I’m really not very good with perl and I can just get by in most things I write. So of course I got frustrated. Then I realized that I could do it, I just had to make something much simpler. Not include all the error handling. Not include all the little “extras” that Geo::Weather has. Just create precisely what I need the script to do, one small step at a time. Ok, I can do that. I can add in all the extras later if I feel the need to, right now I need to focus on learning the basics! So I’m not as frustrated as I was earlier today, and I’m glad. Hopefully I’ll get a little done on it this afternoon, or at least learn something that’ll help me tackle the beast in the near future.

I don’t think we’re going to PLUG tonight. There have been bad thunderstorms all week, and if another one decides to come this evening it’ll be a real pain driving in Center City (as if it’s not a pain normally!). Yesterday evening there were a number of accidents because of the storms and people not watching what they were doing, I really don’t want to be
one of those statistics, especially since I *know* how bad the traffic on 76 can get at that time.

I guess that’s about it. *wanders off*

o/` Miranda Sex Garden – Inferno o/`

Cargo kitty went home this morning *sniff* I miss him already! I don’t miss the furry mess he made though, I spent the morning cleaning the apartment, I’m still doing laundry %) We had a nice weekend with him, he slept in our bed with us at night, mostly… sometimes wanted to keep us awake by jumping on the bed, hehe. He’s such an awsome cat, I’m glad we can have him over to play some weekends!

We never did get to go out to the park for a walk yesterday, it ended up raining *sigh* S’ok though, I had a nice relaxing afternoon anyway.

-@PrincessLeia2- !weather 19454
– R2A6- Current Conditions for North Wales, PA: Cloudy Temp: 79 F/26 C Visability: 1.2 miles Barometer: 29.95 inches and steady

-@PrincessLeia2- !weather 00000
– R2A6- Sorry, no weather for your location, please type !weather zipcode

I wrote up this bot this morning. It’s a pretty simple perl script for irssi, it uses a perl module called Geo::Weather which goes to a specific weather.com page (defined by the zip code you provide) and grabs the specific info from it. It’s nice and fast. A friend of mine suggested I write a forcast thing for it… but there are no modules out to do that! I’d need to do it from scratch *eeek* … I dunno, it might be worth it as far as a learning experience goes. *shrugs*

After a friend recently mentioned his interest in skydiving, I decided to try and contact my Aunt Meg, because she has been into skydiving quite extensively for the past few years, and she’d know everything there is to know for a beginner (she keeps begging me to go sometime *ugh*). I emailed her but the email was returned (bad address). So I emailed a cousin of mine that same day and asked her if she knew my Aunt’s current email address. She said she’d ask my grandparents… oh and by the way “Have you heard any news about Brad?” Brad is my Aunt Meg’s son, and probably one of my cousins who I know the least. Well I was a bit anxious to hear her reply, news? Good news? Bad news? Well yesterday afternoon I got an email back from her, bad news. Apparently he has nasopharyngeal cancer. He was living in California, but when they found out that he was sick he was moved to a hospital in Boston so he could be closer to family. The doctors are optimistic, although this is a particularly nasty form of cancer, he is young and they believe things will be alright. He’s currently undergoing radiation and chemotherapy to try and drive out the cancer, so it’s been a very stressful time for everyone involved. I am glad they are optimistic, but I still think it would be a good idea if Myk and I seriously planned a trip up to Boston and made time to see Brad… I may not be close to him, but family is family, and they can use all the support we all can offer.

So sad, I hate cancer…

Eh… now for something more uplifting. I saw on Reichelle‘s journal that she had done a little “100 facts about me” thing, that’s an interesting idea. I think while I do laundry I’ll type up one for myself, just because writing about myself is fun.

100 80 Things You May Or May Not Know About Me
1. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia … but from the age of 2 I grew up in Maine.
2. I am the oldest of 3 daughters.
3. My parents were married for 19 years before getting a divorce in 2000.
4. I moved out of my parent’s house 5 days after I got my driving license (I was 18).
5. While growing up I had a bedroom full of animals, mice, rats, hamsters, gerbils, chinchillas, guinea pigs… and we bred many them for a local pet store.
6. I’m allergic to rosehips.
7. I once had a seizure while in my high school english class, later found to be caused by the migrane/depression medication I was taking.
8. I have problems with depression, but I’m not taking medication for i
t.
9. I have lived in 4 states in my life, Georgia, Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania.
10. My father is an alcoholic.
11. My mother married the manager of an egg farm in Winthrop, Maine and now lives with him and my youngest sister in a house on the farm property.
12. I got online in 1998 with roadrunner cable internet, yes, cable in ’98, Southern Maine was a testing ground for it.
13. Although I have always had an interest in computers, it wasn’t until I got online in 1998 that the interest blossomed into something concrete.
14. I’m very shy in social situations where I feel the need to impress.
15. I can be very outgoing in business situations.
16. I belive in a “greater force” (god?) but I do not belong to any particular religion.
17. I have had 4 boyfriends in my life, all of which I met online.
18. I love to bake.
19. I enjoy knitting.
20. I love cats.
21. I own two web domains, princessleia.com and wallaceandgromit.net.
22. I have been unemployed since November of ’01.
23. I am part owner and administrator of the xelium IRC network.
24. I am co-coordinator of the Philly Chix, the Philadelphia Chapter of Linux Chix.
25. I currently use Debian linux on my main workstation, but started out on Red Hat 7.2 in late 2001.
26. I can hold my own with MySQL, I can vouch for “knowing some perl” and I’m pretty good with PHP.
27. A lot of people come to me for advice, all of which I give based on personal experience.
28. I was 17 the first time I got drunk, and was with my Aunt Elaine in Philadelphia at the time.
29. I have lived with a number of relatives since leaving home in ’00.
30. I worked at a gas station and supported myself for about 18 month while living in Seneca Falls, New York.
31. I have a phobia of birds.
32. I love to go out for dinner.
33. Sushi and chocolate are two of my favorite things.
34. I tend to be a bit of a late bloomer.
35. My favorite colors are pink, purple and blue.
36. I tend to be very hard on myself.
37. I love going to LAN parties with friends.
38. I used to like to draw, but sorta got out of it…
39. I have never been to a rock concert.
40. I’ve only been to one keg party.
41. The one time I went to Disney World I got sick because of the heat and was in First Aid the whole day.
42. I don’t know, and never have known, much about pop culture.
43. Carrot cake is my favorite kind of cake.
44. The only console game systems I have ever owned: NES, PS2.
45. I love to teach.
46. I am very interested in history.
47. I probably chat on IRC too much.
48. I tend to be a bit dependent and sometimes “clingy”
49. I have blue eyes.
50. I had long hair for most of my life, I cut off 18 inches in May and donated it to Locks Of Love.
51. I don’t like crowds.
52. I hate liars.
53. I tend to trust people quickly, which has hurt me many times in the past.
54. I graduted high school with a 93 GPA.
55. I love to swim.
56. I don’t like to drive.
57. I hate shopping, especially for clothes and shoes.
58. I often have trouble adjusting to change.
59. I am consistantly trying to improve myself as a whole person, I expend great effort in area.
60. I worry too much.
61. I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to some things.
62. I am a big Wallace and Gromit fan.
63. I am not a good leader.
64. I am not very musically inclined.
65. I read a lot.
66. I used to go down to see the ocean nearly every day while I was growing up.
67. When I drink beer it’s usually some sort of Belgian import.
68. I plan on visiting Europe someday.
69. I love to go hiking.
70. I don’t wear makeup.
71. I have trouble accepting compliments.
72. I have a large beanie baby collection.
73. I have a Camel, Penguin and Moose on top of my monitor.
74. I live with my boyfriend Myk, we’ve been dating for nearly 2 years.
75. I love fireplaces.
76. I was 17 when I had my first real “boyfriend”
77. I used to be a Girl Scout until my ent
ire troop quit.
78. I played with My Little Ponies until 8th grade.
79. I have had trouble sleeping as long as I can remember.
80. I can’t think of anything else!

Well that was fun, no one actually read that all did they? Hee. *wanders off*

o/` Soul Coughing – Screenwriter’s Blues o/`

I wonder what I did before I kept a journal. Where did I pour all these thoughts, ideas, and stuff? I probably bugged my friends directly with these things until they were bored to sleep. At least this way they can *choose* what to read, hehe.

I got new pens! I guess some people might find it strange that I still depend on paper and pens so much, but until I have a working organization system on my computer it will be very difficult for me to do otherwise. It’s much easier to just write something down on paper and shove it into my drawer, looking through physical paper is easier than looking through 500 text documents for something I named some silly name. And I guess I still learn better when I actually write things out. Oh and I really do enjoy writing things on paper, especially with cool pens. The other day I was looking in my drawer and pulled out a few of my pens. To my dismay nearly all of them were out of ink! So I went looking through some of my boxes for some pens, no luck. Yesterday we just decided to head to Staples and pick up some. I decided on the uni-ball fusion pens. Blue, Black, Pink, Purple. They are really nice %) And neat, the ink looks clear, but when you write with it it turns the right color. Ah technology, the great minds of the world working to create neat pens.

Yesterday’s dinner/lunch at Unos was nice. Decided against getting beer just because it was so hot out and I guess I really wasn’t in the mood. I was hungry though, ordered a salad, then an individual cheese and tomato deep dish pizza with green peppers, ate about 3/4ths of it, then went ahead and ordered a dessert… brownie bowl! This might not seem a lot to some people, but I don’t usually order 3 courses, usually it’s an appetizer OR a dessert. Well I guess needless to say I wasn’t hungry again all day, and I went to bed at 2 am.

I love having a laptop. I can’t really focus on “work” if I’m working in the same room as Myk, and neither can he, so it’s really nice to be able to be in different parts of the apartment. Last night I got to spend a bit of time replying to mailing lists, played a bit of trivia in #StarWars with some friends. It was fun %D I decided to go head to bed around 1:30, snuggled in bed, and Cargo followed and slept near my feet, I channel surfed until I was sleepy enough to fall asleep. It was a good day.

Today we’re thinking of going up to a park and taking a walk. There is a 40% chance of rain, hopefully it won’t %)

I did a google search for my name recently. It was after a thread on a mailing list I read that was about someone googling for a woman’s name before a date, and whether that was cool or not. Well I certainly wouldn’t have a problem with it. After saying this, I realized I hadn’t searched for “Elizabeth Krumbach” in a while. The first hit was My Linuxchix.org Profile. Cool. The second hit was my resume posted on PrincessLeia.com. AH! I hadn’t linked the resume directly to my website because I was still unsure if I wanted people to be able to access it and my information (address, phone number). Well google found the page and decided for me. I guess I should link it now *shrugs*

Well I’m going to go make some coffee and eggs and wake up Myk so we can get headed out to the park *wanders off*

We have Cargo Kitty over for the weekend again, yay!

This afternoon we’re going to head out for “lunch” (around 4 pm) with some guys Myk used to work with. It should be fun %)

Now I’m going to go play with Cargo! *wanders off*

o/` Peter Gabriel – Before Night Falls o/`

I didn’t really have plans today. Cleaned the apartment like I do every friday til about noon. Ended up talking with another op in #WheelOfTime for a bit, and we decided that it might be cool to expand the channel’s interests to other fantasy books. I haven’t talked to the actual channel founder yet since he’s never around, but I’m sure he’ll be pleased that we’re trying to recruit more users to the channel, even if we have to broaden the scope of what it’s about. So I did some work putting together a website today. I’ve been going through clipart and we decided to make the webpage sorta be like a typical hotel in fantasy novels. You know, a common room/tavern, rooms upstairs, small sitting room/library, a basement. Each section will be for different parts of the webpage. It’s coming together nicely %)

It rained this afternoon, big thunderstorm. It was fun, even had the UPSs beep a couple times.

Thanks to everyone that replied to the last entry. I was really upset when I got that email from my sister, both angry and sad, and this whole situation has really been hard for me to deal with. I talked to Myk about it for a little while last night, and he pretty much said the same thing most everyone else has said “you did the right thing, and it’s your sister who needs to get herself out of that situation” … exactly. Everyone in the family has already told Heather that she is not obligated to take care of my father, it’s all up to her now.

Yeah I guess that’s about it. *wanders off*

o/` Better Than Ezra – The Killer Inside o/`

I got an email from my sister last night. It was a reply to me emailing and asking how things have been with my father. Now I haven’t written anything about this situation in a while, so I’ll write up a little background for people who are new or just forgot..

My father is an alcoholic, he has been for decades. It was always his escape when things were going badly, and according to my Aunt Elaine he was told long ago by doctors that because of his other health problems this would kill him someday. Last year he was in and out of hospitals because, at 51, that finally seemed to be coming true. He was convinced that he’d die in a matter of months if he didn’t get help, so he was accepted into an alcoholics rehab home. Now he is out of rehab and was told by the doctors recently that the damage to his liver was too extensive for it to ever get better. He can’t get a transplant because alcoholics don’t qualify for them, so he was told that he only has a few years left to live.

Now I left home in Maine for good when I was 18 (early 2000), about 4 months after I moved out my parents got a divorced and my mother moved out, taking my youngest sister Annette with her. Heather (who was 16 and in high school at the time) stayed with my father. I was out living my life with relatives, an ex boyfriend, and then more relatives in New York, and eventually moved to Philadelphia to live with Myk in late 2001, and I’ve been here ever since. So I “abandoned” my family when there was the most turmoil. I think I would have gone crazy if I hadn’t %) The last few years at home were very difficult for me because I was *always* put in the middle of my parent’s arguments, I was the one who had to take care of things when my parents were unable to deal with it, and when I left I just wanted to get out. So sure, I was selfish and wanted to go out and try to make a relatively normal life for myself.

Fast forward to today. I’m happy in my life, things are going amazingly well, I keep in contact with my family, visit about once a year. Heather on the other hand is seems to be miserable. She is working, supporting herself, going to college full time, and now she has to “take care” of my father. In the email she sent me last night she made it clear that she was very displeased with the current arrangement. My father is now out of rehab and living in a sort of “halfway house” for alcoholic recovery people. He is on social security benefits because he is unable to work and since he is so sick my sister has been named the payee on his checks, she is responsible for handling his money. In addition to this, she is now sharing her car with him.

I don’t know what to do. I am torn between feeling some sort of “obligation” in being his daughter to go back and do something for him, and the chance that doing so would ruin the wonderful way my life has been shaping up. I guess my problem with it is that my father did this to himself. He was warned by doctors that he had to stop and he never did. He has hurt all of us for years and now he needs our help, how can I sacrifice again for him? I guess this sounds really selfish. Well then maybe I’m a bad person %)

Enough of that. I need something to get my mind off of all this.

Thanks to bj‘s suggestion, I tried xzgv. It’s a pretty basic image viewer, but *exactly* what I needed for viewing all those TIF files. This program is fast too, just click on the image name and it loads… it’s amazing, even faster than the silly windows software that it came with (granted, it IS from 1996…). I’m really glad I found something that will let me go through these images.

I never did get to figuring out why window maker was acting funny… of course, when I WANT to find out the problem it works fine, I used the laptop for 4 hours and it didn’t give me the error once! Oy.. %)

I am going to go find something to work on so I don’t feel all down about my
father’s situation. It’s a beautiful day out, maybe I’ll go outside with my laptop and relax in the sun… this is one of the days I wish I had wifi! *wanders off*

o/` BOA – Little Miss o/`

I was contacted by the owner of ufology.org.uk today. It’s a UK “ufo” site that has about 400 members on the mailing list, they talk about all sorts of paranormal UFOish things including personal experiences, articles, studies, etc. He wanted to ask me if he could put my extraterrestrials: an essay on the site (a link to it really). Cool! It’s nice that people are visiting my site, obviously all parts of my site. And I’m also glad that my website is on the T3 now, I’d hate to have another nightmare like the night that a link to the Philly Chix was posted to the PLUG list. Speaking of which, have I mentioned that there is an amazing difference in my connection now that the webpages are off of it? Gah… they really were quite bandwidth intensive, it was almost a continuous stream of substantial upload because of them.

While I was up in Maine a couple months ago my sister gave me some cds of clipart that she had kept for me. It’s 9 cds, from 1996, that we bought at some discount store back then. I wanted it because I could use a lot of it for website stuff (royalty free). The only problem is that all I had when I went up to Maine was one big suitcase, and after getting the laptop in there (which added a considerable amount of weight to my bag) I wasn’t able to fit all the reference books for the cds. The books are printed out versions of all 101,000 images, this is supplied because all the images have numbers like EAA0800T.TIF. Well I asked her to mail the books to me and she hasn’t, I’m not surprised, but I wanted to look through some of them yesterday so I opened up Opera. Opera doesnt view .tif files… ugh. So I started looking around for something that would. Gimp does, but I wanted to just quickly browse through images, not open each one of them up. That’s when I came across Plugger. I had heard of plugger before, when I was looking into the streaming media problem I have with linux. I think I installed it once and was displeased with it and forgot about it. This time I took a better look at it. I tried to install it in opera, but opera was being it’s crankie self (it probably requires opera 7 or something) and didnt work. So I tried with trusty old mozilla. I used the “test” website that the plugger people provide, and was quite amused to see video playing in plugger. I even had a conversation with myself in #13tHHour:

14:45:21 -@PrincessLeia2- plugger is neat
14:47:25 -@PrincessLeia2- works nicely in mozilla, i think i’m just going to give up trying to install plugins in opera ’cause they suck %)
14:51:44 -@PrincessLeia2- i can see avis and mpegs and pdfs and tiffs and all sorts of things in mozilla now, this is cool
14:55:35 -@PrincessLeia2- of course most sites still check for a plugin and act like i dont have one, bummer
14:55:46 -@PrincessLeia2- s’ok, i just wanted to view tiff files…
15:01:03 -!- Ash [~Sweet@2BDBBE03.A3B44621.72F9AF26.IP] has quit [Ping timeout]
15:01:47 -@Vehicle00- yoyoyoyo
15:05:48 -@PrincessLeia2- [plugger-4.0 defunct]
15:05:49 -@PrincessLeia2- heh
15:05:56 * PrincessLeia2 hits plugger with a stick
15:06:08 -@PrincessLeia2- i havent had this many zombies since redhat %D
15:07:11 -@PrincessLeia2- they all die when i get out of mozilla.. but it’s disappointing

The [plugger-4.0 defunct] processes showed up when I tried to open most things with plugger, including the TIF files. So I have a zombied process for each one of those silly TIF files I opened, ugh. I ended up emailing my sister and asking her to get going with sending me those books, it’s just too time consuming otherwise. I think I’ll keep plugger though, I guess there are times when I can and want to view things in a browser that I previously couldn’t.

We had tacos last night. How do you
have tacos without beef? Well Myk doesnt like refried beans, which is what my family always put in them while I was growing up, so we decided to try some of the Boca “meat” … of the same company that makes the Boca Burgers. Apparently it’s mostly made of soy. It cooks up really nicely, and I only need to use about a tablespoon of olive oil. It may not taste like ground beef, but it’s a very nice flavor! And I don’t like soy. Even if beef didn’t make me sick I think I’d be interested in eating this stuff because it’s so much more healthy. You get protein but without all the greasy mess that you’d get from the ground beef. I guess I’m also a bit paranoid about ground beef because I’ve watched too many shows about how the meat is processed. No thanks.

A friend of mine is now currently taking an “Intro To *nix” class, and yesterday he came to me with some questions about vim. I helped him out with some basic commands, but I was frustrated because just “telling” someone how to use vim is not really enough, you really need to use it. I was reluctant to give him a shell account on one of my boxes, because even though I do trust him I am afraid he might accidentally get into some trouble with it. So I went searching around for some free shells. I tried one that let you run an eggdrop, but it was really annoying because each time I hit “backspace” it would output a strange character, I never did take the time to figure out how you are really suppoed to backspace in it, deleted the account when I realized they had aliased vim to pico.. AH! Then I tried http://m-net.arbornet.org/. Like the first one you telnet in, create and account, then you’re able to ssh into it. So I set up an account, logged in, and it’s not so bad. Very very basic, but he’ll be able to create folders and files, edit things with vim. I set up his .profile file so he has a pretty bash prompt, set up his .vimrc so he has all the coolness of syntax highlighting. I didn’t look around too extensively, but it seems you can have mail there too, mutt is installed and there is a .procmailrc file… but they only give you 1 mb of space, so it can’t be used for much more than just learning how to use it. The only bad thing about it is that they only allow one session to access the account at once, which is a bit annoying, and was funny to figure out the first time… we were both logged in and then it disconnected both of us, hehe. I had him download putty and he seems to like it I think it’ll be a nice learning tool, and I’m definately going to use this site in the future, the next time I want to show someone what a shell account is and help them out with some basic things.

Well I’m going to go wander over to my laptop and figure out why Window Maker has been so crankie lately… sometimes I’ll be in a terminal and it’ll just close. There are all sorts of errors when I quit x after this happens, so I need to make it act up again and ask Dr. Google for some solutions, hehe. *wanders off*