o/` Nine Inch Nails – Reptile o/`

I managed to finish the #13thHour news section today!

#13thHour News

It’s still in the testing stages, so it might have some problems… but all #13thHour people are welcome to make posts and comments, it will be helpful to me, especially if you find a problem. I also welcome suggestions. Speaking of the #13thHour section, I know a few people I’ve met on journals have come to the channel recently. Do any of you want your user profiles in the members sections? Just email me if you want to be up there and I’ll send you the survey.

It really is nice outside today! I cant believe we had a thunderstorm again yesterday afternoon, ugh. Of course on nice spring days my cable internet often decides to crap out. Why? It is always fine during rain storms, snow storms, ice storms! But one a beautiful, sunny day my connection slows so much that I can’t even stay connected to IRC. Amazing. Maybe it’s trying to tell me to get outside more on nice days %P

And the services are back up on irc.clockbot.net YAY! Finally the service admins got off their asses. Of course these are different services than the last, and they confused me at first… I am so used to normal access lists!

Now I need to go see what I want for dinner. *wanders off*

o/` Garbage – #1 Crush o/`

Yeah, I ripped the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack today, purely nostalgia. I wanted to remember my teenage angsty years. This cd to ogg project takes a long time. I want to do it all from the command line so I’m using abcde, and it’s slow %) I havent been making oggs every day either, so that adds to the time it takes to do them all, hehe.

Hmm, even though Tony A’s pizza tastes nasty cold at least it heats up well. This “Tony’s Pizza Palace” pizza still tastes like cardboard and plastic when reheated. Yuck.

I’m nearly finished with the php nukeish section on the #13thHour page. It’s still not online, but I’m hopeful that I’ll finish it today and be able to start moving it over to be used yay! Just working on a few design things right now.

Played Diablo 2 for a bit yesterday. I never did get it working with wine so I had to boot into windows. It’s not so bad really, sure rebooting is a pain, but what do I lose? Uptime? It’s just uptime, no one cares, and it’s just a silly reason to comprimise my computer usage ;) My assassin is level 14, w00t.

Man, this pizza is really bad *throws it out*

It’s sorta nice out today, at least it’s not raining again. I like rain, but when it drizzles for weeks it starts to get in my nerves.

For those of you following the whole SCO owning unix issue, there was an interesting development today. Novell issued a press release (Here is the press release) saying that when they sole Unix to SCO they did not release all intellectual property rights too them, oops. SCO is aware of this, and have been trying buy those rights from Novell for months now, yet they still went forward with their legal actions against IBM. SCO is so fucked %D Now they are hated throughout their open source community, and their actions have cost in both money and jobs in tech, not to mention lying to their stockholders and customers. What a mess! They deserve it.

Well the gaming irc network that we linked with (ion.xelium.net) is back up now, now called ice.xelium.net. This is a great relief to us. We ended up getting a highest user count of 148 on irc.clockbot.net (clockbot.xelium.net), wow! And clockbot proved itself over these past couple weeks to be the most stable of all the services, I’m very proud of it. On the other hand, we really weren’t expecting this sort of load on our server, and were a bit upset that the other network admin took advantage of us by taking his time to fix his network. New services should be up soon, everyone will have to reregister everything.

Now I’m hopefully going to finish the #13thHour news section… *wanders off*

o/` Dido – Don’t Think Of Me o/`

First of all:

Lan Party Pictures

The LAN party on sunday rocked! Sometimes I am very disappointed by lan parties, but this was not one of those times… Things went nicely, it was a good balance of friends hanging out and gameplay. We had enough food, we had enough beer, and we still have a whole refrigerator full of soda. We even had a fire in the fireplace since it was so cool and rainy outside. We played UT, UT2K3, Total Annihilation, and Grant of course showed off some of the other games on his computer. I think one of the highlights of the whole party was getting to meet our online friend Yeas, who I have known from #Deep13 for quite some time. I guess we started drinking around 1 pm when Kam and Brian arrived, and it lasted all day, just sipping on beer and soda, I got a little tipsy at one point, but never drunk. We even had fruity drinks later in the night but they obviously didn’t contain enough alcohol %) Our friends mct and Nita came later in the night (around 10 pm) without their computers, and that sorta led us to wind down the lan part of the party. So we stayed up til around 4 am, people slowly leaving as the morning came closer, until MJ, mct and Nita finally decided to call it a night. When they left Myk, Yeas and I went into the bedroom (the futon was set up as a couch) and we watched some MST3K, w00t! Yeas had brought a whole bag for of MST DVDs %) Of course I fell asleep (I had been up since 7:30 am the previous morning) and soon after that they decided to go to bed, we put Yeas on the couch. The next morning I woke up around 10, what can I say? I sleep badly… I was exhausted! I took a shower while Myk and Yeas were still sleeping, and ended up playing Diablo 2 for a while in the computer room here. Finally around 1 pm Yeas woke up, and I took that opportunity to show him some neat linux things… you know, all the pretty things you show to someone you are trying to convert %D Then close to 2 pm Myk wandered out of bed. I made them breakfast, then Yeas went home *sniff*

Myk and I spent a couple hours yesterday afternoon cleaning up the apartment. It really didn’t bother me too much, I don’t like cleaning, but I have decided that I like being a host. We also had to move all the furniture back to where it was before. By then end of all this I was very VERY tired. We then hopped into the Rav4 and drove to Myk’s mother’s to return the chairs and table we had borrowed, more moving! Hehe. While driving home we decided to stop at Blockbuster and pick up a couple movies, we also planned to get pizza but Tony A’s (the pizzeria right next to blockbuster where we usually get pizza) was closed. We went home and went on yahoo to look for more pizza places in the area. Finally decided on “Tony’s Pizza Palace.”

Never buy from a place called “Tony’s Pizza Palace.” First I called them.

-pleia2- Hi, do you deliver?
-girl- no
-pleia2- ok, Myk do you
*click*
-pleia2- want to go pick up the… THE HELL, she just hung up on me! Bitch!

Owning a pizzeria is an art, which begins with the phone call. I should have known that the girl hanging up on me was a bad omen. But it was the closest and very easy to find, so we decided to get pizza there anyway. This time Myk called. Ordered a cheese pizza and 16 wings since they only sold them by the 8s. Who sells 8 wings? It should be a dozen! Crazy people. When Myk got home from picking it up I opened the wings bag and dumped them out. They were burned. “It’s ok, everything tastes good with blue cheese on it,” I said. They were ok, but not hot (as in spicy, but come to think of it they were only sorta warm temperature wise) at all, arent buffalo wings supposed to be hot? *sigh* The pizza was ok while it was hot, but as soon as it cooled down it was awful. That’s another part of the pizza art! Making sure pizza is good when it’s warm AND cold. The the only pizzeria around here that has acomplished this feat is Joseph’s, and they are over 30 minu
tes away! I am so tired of all this bad pizza.

While we ate the lousy pizza and wings we started to watch “Catch Me If You Can.” I liked it. Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t bother me NEARLY as much as he usually does. Of course I like Tom Hanks (unless it’s a sappy romance!) and Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen just totally rock in my book. After we watched it we put in “25th Hour.” Now I wasn’t sure what to expect, Edward Norton is awsome, and really the only reason we rented the movie. It was amusing to see Anna Paquin in the movie, I like her, even if it took me forever to realize what I knew her from (Rogue in X-Men). The movie had it’s moments, but it was horribly obvious that it was a Spike Lee Joint. I guess I will have to not recommend this movie. Some of the scenes dragged on for too long, parts of it were just needlessly boring. I guess I was very tired while watching it too, it had beed a long weekend, my attention span wasn’t what it should have been.

Right after the movie I went to sleep. It was a little after midnight, and I was exhausted. I actually slept well last night too! What a weekend %)

Now I am going to go work on some things *wanders off*

o/` Peter Murphy – Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem o/`

Well I havent written up book reviews in a while… so here goes:

The Fellowship Of The Ring, By J. R. R. Tolkien, 527 pages

I am writing this review upon finishing this book for the 3rd or 4th time, it’s that good… This is the first book of Tolkien’s famous Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The story continues from that of The Hobbit, in the sometimes magical world of Middle Earth. The story follows Bilbo Baggins’ nephew Frodo Baggins, on his adventure to take care of the One Ring Of Power. Frodo and his hobbit friends join up with a case of traveling companions (the fellowship) that includes an elf, a dwarf, and even a couple Men through a perilous journey that continually tests their strength. Few of the characters in this story are forgettable, and while this is a lot more “grown up” than The Hobbit (story-wise and narrative) Tolkien preserves his ability to tell a good story with captivating detail. Maybe you’ve seen the movie, but it doesnt quite do justice to this amazing tale! And they omitted a few wonderful characters… a must read!

The Case Of The Toxic Spell Dump, By Harry Turtledove, 367 pages

In the world described by this book, magic, faith, fantasy and legendary powers are real. The book centers around an EPA (Environmental Perfection Agency.. this is a lot of this sort of thing in the book) investigation into a toxic spell dump that is feared to be leaking. Now, the author works to show you a world parallel to our own, they have televisions, telephones, vehicles… but they were all created and maintained through some sort of magic. The cities are often similar, like the capital is D.St.C (district of saint Columbus). But if you think about the nature of this book too long, you realize that a world where magic existed would be nothing like our own… I think this major idea took away a lot of my ability to enjoy the book, as I tend to think a lot about books I read (unless it’s obvious humor, eg Terry Pratchett). The story was good, it kept me interested, and the parallels between our worlds really were amusing at times (at some points it got annoying…). Maybe I should stick with Turtledove’s alternative HISTORY books from now on…

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, By Stephen King, 224 pages

Despite my Maine background and interest in paranormal and scary books, I had not read a Stephen King book in a long time before this one. I was pleasantly surprised at how I enjoyed this book, as short as it was. It tells of a girl (a big fan of baseball player Tom Gordon, poetic liberty has been taken with this character in the book..) who is lost in the woods of western Maine. Even after search parties for her give up, this book tells of her determination, maturity, and skill that allows her to survive alone in the wilderness. It also explores the thoughts she has, imaginary “people” she conjures to hold onto hope and reality. As with most of King’s books, there is also a frightening force or being that feeds this girl’s fear. A good book.

The Two Towers, By J. R. R. Tolkien, 447 pages

As with “Fellowship” I have read this book several times. It continues the story of the groups of characters that are split up as the fellowship breaks at the end of “Fellowship.” It explores a bit more of the history and present standings of some of the nations in Middle Earth, where they stand, who their allies are, and what they will do to group together and fight the dark lord Sauron. There is a great battle against the orcs, the creatures called “Ents” are introduced and launch an attack of their own against Saruman, and surprisingly an old character returns! This is my favorite book out of the three, so much happens. When the book comes to catching up with Frodo he and Sam are helped by an unlikely creature, and we learn much more about Sam through this cooperative effort. Again, even if you have seen the movie, this book is a must read.

Now someday I might even
get around to post these to my book review sections %)

LAN party today! I’m so excited! We picked up the chairs from Myk’s mother’s house on friday. Spent last night rearranging some furniture so we would have space for all the computers. Then we cleaned up the corn on the cob, made up cold cut platters, sliced up lettuce and tomato. All sorts of fun stuff, when we have lan parties we dont mess around! This is going to be so fun! I booted into windows earlier so I could get all the updates. It’s funny how I only go into windows for games, so it seems like I only do updates there when preparing for a lan party.

Early yesterday was not so fun however. A couple friends said that they have run diablo 2 in wine before, and that it was possible. Hey cool! I installed wine (apt-get install wine) and it didnt work. I got frustrated, and by this time all excited about the possibility of playing d2 in linux, so when a friend offered to send me winex I said “Sure!” Well that probably wasn’t too wise, it was a warez package, and I should have known better than to trust this guy and his warez packages. Or at least I should have asked where he got it before installing it! To make matters worse when I went to install it I did dpkg -i win-TAB- (tab-completion) then hit enter. That was stupid. I had my win4lin installation deb in that directory as well, guess what? I broke win4lin! I didn’t really realize it at the time, so I noticed my mistake, said “ugh” then proceeded to install the winex package. Well, once I discovered I had broken win4lin beyond repair (it’s kinda touchy, if you rerun the installer it’s very very very bad!!!) I was upset. My exact words?

14:05:43 -@PrincessLeia2- fuck fuck fuck … i am such a retard
14:06:04 -@Kalends- What’s wrong?
14:06:28 -@PrincessLeia2- i just went to install something, and installed the wrong thing, and now i broke things, UGH %(!!!
14:06:37 -@Kalends- Damn
14:07:08 -@PrincessLeia2- it was just fucking stupid too… i just wasnt paying attention to what i was doing

I don’t swear often, when I do I mean it. I googled a bit, searched the win4lin mailing list, nothing was helping, it was beyond repair. I went back to bed. Myk woke up and I told him what I did, and said that he didn’t need to worry about it since it was my own dumb fault, and I didn’t really need win4lin anyway. Well he was more upset about the warez winex package, understandably so. It was he who found out that it was a package that should not have been trusted. Bleh. Of course I felt like a total dumbass now, and I was a bit humiliated. It was just a bad day, and I was so upset, so very very upset. But hey, everyone does dumb things sometimes right? %) Luckily Myk had the win4lin binaries on his system and he was able to repair mine. He’s so smarty %)

Anyway, I need to take a shower and do a few more things this morning before noon (when we said the party will start, people never really show up til 2-3, hehe). The last time I got really drunk was months ago… even at the new years lan party I wasnt *completely* gone (I could still stand with no trouble, hee), so I plan on getting fairly trashed tonight %)! W00T!!! *wanders off*

o/` Stabbing Westward – Shame o/`

I guess this just wasnt meant to be my week to get much acomplished.

After writing that entry yesterday I went and took a shower. I got out of the shower, walked into my bedroom and saw a BIG spider. ACK! Ok.. I’m not as afraid of spiders as many people, usually I’ll be able to bring them outside and let them go, as long as they dont run too fast or try to jump on me. I left the spider alone and walked into my closet. Another one! AAH!! I was a little freaked out at this point. We spend quite a bit to live here, and keep the place very clean, and I can’t seem to figure out where they come from. Our working theory is that since the neighbors upstairs just moved, and new people moved in, all the spiders in the building have been disturbed and started coming down. Of course after being scared by two huge spiders I don’t think very clearly. I got dressed, brought both the spiders outside, and proceeded to move all the furnature in my bedroom and clean. I went over every INCH of that room with the vacuum, got all the tiny cobwebs out of corners, all dust out from behind the tv and out from under the bed, moved all my stuffed animals, washed my sheets and comforter. Yep, I was freaking out. About halfway through I realized how insane the whole adventure was %) But continued because I couldnt really do anything else since I already had everything moved. Besides, it’s not a bad time to do such a thing… the lan party is this weekend, and unlike last year, our bedroom will also be occupied by gamers!

Turns out we’re going to have at least a dozen people here (including ourselves), which is a lot for a one bedroom + small den apartment! Looks like we’re going to need to move the furnature in the livingroom, I don’t know where we are putting everything %) Our bed is a futon, so that can be set up as a couch for people to use the tv for movies and console games (Yeas is bringing MST3K movies, I have a ps2, n-tropy is bringing his xbox, woo!). One person is bringing a card table, and we’re going to Myk’s mother’s to pick up some folding chairs. It should be really fun %)

Last night we went out to the beer store. Picked up a case of Duvel.. 12 750ml bottles, woo! Plus we picked up some Lindenmens Peche (Peach Lambic!)… mmm!!! I’m so excited! Then we went to the grocery store, got tons of rolls for sandwiches, about 4 pounds of turkey and chicken cold cuts, 2 pounds of cheese slices! Pretzels, soda, eggs (for the morning)… and of course Fruity Drink Mix! Vodka + Strawberry Margarita Mix + Ice == yum and drunk! We are probably going to go get a small bottle of Vodka tomorrow %) Hmm… oh we still need to get corn on the cob too *writes that down* And games… I guess a couple people are bringing their ut2k3 disks so people can install it if they dont have it. I don’t know how much game playing I’m going to be doing, I tend to do more socializing (and drinking!) and less game playing at LAN parties that I host… which will be ok, since I know a couple people won’t be able to bring their computers… plus mine is fairly fast and people might want to use it instead of theirs if it’s just sitting here.

Yay LAN parties %)

And more good news! I have finalized a meeting location for the first Philly Chix meeting! It’s at a bookshop in philly called “The Last Word” .. I called the owner this morning and he was more than happy to accomidate us, even sounded excited! And he had no problems with us coming in and plugging in a computer if we need to :) So the first meeting for the chix will be June 11th at 8 pm! *is so excited* … of course that is also the day after I come home from my vacation in Maine, it’s going to be a crazy-busy week that week %) But that’s ok… the only issue I have now is where to put Myk! I have no idea how this bookshop is set up, and I have a feeling the only place in the store for people to hang out is in the back room where we will be, well of course it’s a women’s only thing, eek! Well it won
t be like a PLUG meeting, more like a couple grrls getting together to talk, so maybe he can just sit on a couch on the other side of the room with his laptop… oh his laptop!

Ok, so it’s not actually *his* laptop, it belongs to the company he works for… But he brought it home last night to check it out. It’s a 500 mhz Dell, with 128 mb ram… 13″ and it’s not very light %) but it’s nice! And has Mandrake installed on it. *Me wanty* hehehe… laptops are so nice, and my exposure to them is so limited, it was cool getting to look at one last night.

There was a thread on one of the linuxchix lists yesterday about wisdom teeth. Hmm, I don’t know where mine are. I remember when my friend Leslie got hers out, we went to Wendy’s and got frostys. But I’m nearly 22 and there are no signs of where mine could be. Sometimes I have tooth aches, but nothing that would have anything to do with wisdom teeth, I think I just might have a cavity %) But I cant find any place in my mouth where the wisdom teeth are hiding, nothing poking through my gums (not that there is room…). So I started asking people in irc about their teeth. It seems that some people are born without wisdom teeth! Other have them come in fine, many have to get them removed, and I even learned of two people whose werent able to come in, and just stayed “stuck” under their gums… not doing any harm by being there, and removing them would require some serious reconstructive surgery. In light of all this interesting information, I think I should go to the dentist. I havent been in a few years anyway, which is bad! But I fear what they will tell me! Anyway, it would be interesting to discover where my wisdom teef0rs are.

I couldn’t sleep very well last night. Ended up getting out of bed around 4:30. I hate this… Anyway, while I was in bed trying to fall asleep I was thinking of things, like how likely it is that I will get very upset with my father the weekend I’m in Maine and create a problem between us. It’s just that I’m so sick of how he treats me. So sick of saying “yes dad” and trying to impress him. I think the only thing that would make him happy is if I got a $50k/year job and went to school in the evening so someday I can make $500k/year. I am considering writing him a letter that he’ll get before I go up there explaining how I feel, so that he won’t start bothering me with topics that’ll just piss me off (“you should get married” “you should do something with your hair” “you should get a real job” “you should go to college” .. etc etc). *Sigh* I dunno…

Hmm… so I cleaned the apartment this morning. Oh joy… did some serious uber-cleaning so it’ll be spotless for the party. Even cleaned all the base boards, it all took a few hours. But it needed to be done, I havent done such a complete cleaning in a few months, and I know people are going to be all over the place at the party, especially on the floor if it’s anything like last year! Finally finished and got a shower by 1 pm… and of course I’ve been chatting and writing this since then, yay for me. Ok, done writing this now, it’s boring (for both you and me). *wanders off*

o/` Evanescence – Taking Over Me o/`

So did I get the work done yesterday that I wanted to? Sorta…

I got a couple emails written, one to my pen pal in England. She has been using her mother’s computer to email me instead of sending letters *shrugs* I HAD to email her back so she knew I got the email at least ;) Ended up being a quite long mail, since we havent had contact since before valentine’s day, and so much has happened since then. Then I emailed a friend of mine in Belgium, she’s really cool, I should be better about emailing her! We swap stories and interesting facts about each other’s countries %) It’s really amazing how different our countries are…

As for the #13thHour page… bleh, nothing really was done. Which is ashame because I really had every intention of working on it. I dunno what’s wrong, I just couldn’t focus again… grr!

We’re getting ready for the LAN party on sunday. It should be fun… not exactly sure who is showing up though. *shrugs* hopefully as fun as last year! I think we are going to skip the whole BBQ thing since we arent sure if the weather is going to clear up, I guess we’re going to do a cold cuts platter so we can have sandwiches… and chips, pretzels, hmmm, I need to make a list.

Today I really am going to get work done, for real! No IM’s to disturb me, no nagging emails that need my attention, hehe.. *wanders off to do some work*

o/` Eurythmics – Here Comes the Rain Again o/`

-$nick- Leia, do you know much about hackers?

This was the first question on my voyage to become cited in a research paper.

Now usually when people come with me asking questions about “hacking” I want to scream something like “JUST BECAUSE I USE LINUX DOESNT MEAN I KNOW HOW OR HAVE INTENTIONS OF HACKING” … because people seem to have this idea in their head that people who use a unix-type enviroment have green and black screens and spend all their time hacking (thank you matrix! hehe). Well I held off on this near reflex reaction because the guy mentioned that he was writing a research paper and just needed some help being pointed in the right direction. Namely, he wanted information on “some famous hacker” … well assuming Kevin Mitnick would have the most written (especially in ‘newbie friendly’ form) about I pointed him that way. He came back… “what does a sniffer do?” So I explained what port sniffers do, then went into how certain protocols (like ftp) are cleartext so a ‘sniffer’ can read everything, including the password… then explained what ssh is, and how it was encrypted… there is a bit more to it than I explained, but I was going for simple ;) For those of you not familiar with this, it’s all fairly basic. If you are going to run your own webserver that can touch the outside world it’s important to understand these things, you don’t want to be ‘hacked’ because someone sniffed your ftp password. So he thanked me for the help and wandered off. Later he came back, apparently just about to finish his research paper, and asked me what companies do to stop hackers, and what companies do to stop piracy. I assumed this again was just info needed to be pointed in the direction of a real source.. and actually joked “I can see the bibliography now ‘some girl in irc'” … well to my surprise he replied “I do have to site you somehow…” eek! Hehe… so I gave him my real name and the title Linux Systems Administrator… and now I’m cited in a research paper! Three times! Hehe…

Moving on… I recently have been thinking about how easy it is to become intimidating. Now I have always been a very shy person, scared of most everyone ;) so the thought of becoming somehow intimidating to other people is very strange to me. I’m quiet, I’m shy, I’m not some super genius, I work very hard for what I do and know… I’m just me! I don’t look down upon people who ask for help, I enjoy helping people, and delight in seeing their sucesses, and I’m patient enough to help people through troubles they run into. It’s weird when people say “Oh you’re the Lyz of princessleia.com!?” … and then somehow feel they need to make an impression on me. As a shy person I can understand that. I mean you should see how much work and time I put into even the most simple mailing list post just so I don’t look like a moron! And it really is all defensive, I’m never trying to actually impress people with knowledge, I honestly just don’t want them to write me off as stupid. I don’t know why I have a fear of everyone thinking I’m stupid… I think it’s just my own insecurity problems %) … so now with this PhillyChix thing, I have named myself “Co-Coordinator” … merely because I need something to put on my resume, but I guess that is a bit scary, hell I might be shy talking to the co-coordinator of a local lug! Very silly…

Yesterday a friend of mine started a “book club” … it’s just for a few of us locally, basically just to work out a system of sharing our books and then talking about them I guess. We’re all interested in scifi and fantasy mostly, so it’ll have a lot for me at least if I can borrow books from a friend instead of buying them or taking my chances that a library will have them. Sounds like a good idea… maybe it’ll even last, it’s difficult to do these things with friends because so many people always decide they don’t want to follow through…

I also got a bit of work done on the new #13thHour s
ection. It’s not online yet, but it’s a lot like PHP Nuke… different icons for different subjects, and stuff. The whole point of this project is knowing that I CAN do it, and of course learning more in the process. It’s going well… Hopefully I’ll have it finished by the weekend (if I’d stop wasting my time on things like journal entries, hehehe…).

I also need to get caught up on email … I’m afraid I’m very bad with email. I mean sure, if you email me with a question I’m right on top of it, but with people who I only am in contact with via email I tend to slack off… just because I’m rarely in the mood to write a 3 page email! Hehe… but yes *looks at the clock* I will write emails from now until 2 pm. from 2-6 I’ll work on the #13thHour page. *wanders off*

o/` Stabbing Westward – Waking Up Beside You o/`

Real hackers know how to RTFM.

My dad called me this morning. I am sure everyone is sick of hearing me complain about my father, so I won’t be offended (hell, I wont know) if you just decide to skip this entire paragraph. Now he was notified that I will be coming up soon, so this conversation was merely to criticize my life, not beg me to come to visit. First it was “so you are planning on doing an internship this summer..?” I explain to him about that. “So do you have a real job?” … a real job?! I again said I was up for consulting, and I know a few people who have circulated my name in their company for various tasks, so I might have something real in the near future… Then it’s “so what else are you doing” … I tell him I started a computer users group for women, he is competely uninterested. Now honestly, I have been very active lately! This is a lot of new stuff I hadn’t told him yet, and still his tone seemed to be still disappointed. Why? Because I didnt go to college? Because I didn’t take his advice and take a job as a secretary so I could “work my way up” in a company like it’s the 1970s?! So then, continuing his critique of me and my life he asks: “So how is your weight?” … The hell?! No wonder I have so many issues! Not only is he concerned about my work life, personal life, and social life… but he must also attack my appearance! Grr…

So my ticket is bought for my trip up to New England:

Flight: from Philadelphia, PA (PHL-Philadelphia Intl.) to Boston, MA (BOS-Logan Intl.)
Depart: 7-Jun-03 at 9:30 AM
Arrive: 7-Jun-03 at 10:45 AM

Flight: from Boston, MA (BOS-Logan Intl.) to Philadelphia, PA (PHL-Philadelphia Intl.)
Depart: 10-Jun-03 at 6:30 PM
Arrive: 10-Jun-03 at 8:01 PM

Yeah, to Boston. We planned badly, this ticket is about $150, while the one into Manchester, NH or Portland, ME would have been about $500… ugh. I am not looking forward to flying into Boston… I guess family will come pick me up at the airport, but still, it’s just another leg onto a 4 day trip, and it’s going to be tiring. I’m going to try to stick to the plans I have, probably email my sister Heather today sometime to see what her thoughts on my trip plans are…

I saw “Sleepless In Seattle” last night. It was on TBS or something… and it had been on my “I should see but don’t want to pay to rent it” list. Now how did it get on that list? It was a HORRIBLE movie! I don’t know why people ever say it’s good, there was nothing good about that movie. The acting was nothing spectacular, the plot, come on now! Ugh… 2 hours of my life that I will never get back… I watched it til the end because I thought there was a chance it would get better, or surprise me in some way… nope.

This morning I took some time to make up the new section on my site about linux applications I use:

My Favorite Linux Apps

Enjoy!

Now I’m going up… *looks at the clock* ugh… so much of my day was spent organizing this trip to New England… wasted my whole day %( Well I can get a couple things done if I stop writing in my web journal.. hehehe *wanders off*

o/` Aphex Twin – Cliffs o/`

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01:00:12 -!- BirthdayBot changed the topic of #13thHour to: ` – . – ` – Happy Birthday Syntopicon!!! – ` – . – `
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Woohoo! This is that perl birthday script I wrote a few months back… this was it’s first real test %)! And it works… I assumed it would, but pretty much forgot about it until I woke up this morning and saw that it had properly done it’s job. YAY!

Last night turned out to be really nice. Usually evenings with family suck… I mean sure they are possible to tolerate, but it’s rare that I actually can say I enjoyed myself. I didn’t really know anyone but Myk, his mother, and his mother’s boyfriend… but I wasn’t too shy, and I was able to talk to people like a normal person, and I think I made a good impression. It didn’t even bother me too much that I had to admit to being unemployed several times *shrugs*

So yesterday I got a call from the guy I made the seawinds realty website for. Apparently he “doesn’t have the time” for it right now, and asked me if I could take it down for a few months so he doesnt need to pay for it while. Now I am horribly disappointed by this, but since we never had an actual contract, and I never really set up any official rules as to any of this, I can’t tell him no, so I agreed. Oh well, I’ll know better next time I do a business deal, must have all rules outlined FIRST!

Now there is this girl on one of the lists I’m on… and it’s really sad and frustrating the way she acts. See, she came into an irc channel where I hang out and starts causing a scene… first she was trying to help someone, and they said “thanks anyway I can handle it later, I’m in a bit of a hurry” and she freaks out and is like “is my answer not valid? Why did you ask for help if you didnt want it?” (she DIDNT ask for help on the actual problem..) … and goes on like this for like 15 minutes until finally people just started ignoring her. This sort of thing has happened several times, in irc, on the list, and apparently in places I haven’t seen. Just recently she felt she was being discriminated against because she thinks that she was “not considered for ops in the channel because of past issues” Come on now… this is a group of very mature people, and she starts out complaining she doesnt have ops? It was certainly the LAST sort of argument I expected to see in that channel. Anyway, I guess she’s about 19… and has had this attitude about taking things so personally for YEARS. It’s actually kinda sad… I mean someone says something and it comes out wrong, they apoligize and move on right? Well she just wont let things go… her life must be miserable! Can you imagine taking everything so personally? Maybe she’ll grow out of it…

Speaking of lists… I was thinking about when to have the Philly Chix meetings, and I was like “oh right… how will I get to these?!” They will be in the city, so I could probably take the train in north wales, then take a trolly in the city. Of course Myk was like “hell no!” hehehehe… So he said he could probably drive me down for the meetings (and my friend Nita too if she wants to come). He was like “I can just wait outside, oh I know, I’ll be your bouncer!” hehe! I feel really bad about making him wait outside %( but I can’t drive into the city by myself (I’m not on the insurance, and I’m too freaking scared!)… and all lameness surrounding a key organizer not attending a meeting aside, I really want to go to the meetings!

Hmm… today I will probably read a lot. Don’t really have any plans to go out, which is ok… I want a boring old relaxing day %) Myk was working on getting oracle installed on clockbot (the computer, not clockbot.net). And he said he’d give me an oracle user account, YAY!!! So I will start to learn how to use o
racle %) Not that it is a whole lot different than the databases I am used to dealing with, but it’ll be cool to have experience with something a bit bigger and more widely used in corporations %)

Now I am probably going to go crawl back into bed because Myk is there and it is so snuggly and warm *wanders off*

o/` BOA – Deeply o/`

I should make a section on my website about the applications I use… I used to have one, but I’ve moved away from using many of the gui applications I gave props to. No more xchat, no more xmms… and I believe I said there that I used gnome-terminal. Anyway, I took that section down because it was so outdated and I didn’t feel like doing anything with it. Maybe I will do that on monday… Pages like that are cool ’cause they give people a whole new glimpse into what someone else’s desktop environment is like. Plus, I think what a person uses as far as software can reflect a lot on what type of person they are…

Yesterday evening the women in #linuxchix started talking about Belgian beers. Well of course this is a conversation I HAVE to jump into because of my love for them %) They eventually got to lambics… oh how I love lambics. And of course since it was a friday night I just couldnt help but ask Myk if we could head out to The Drafting Room for dinner. Myk agreed (come on, how could he resist? Hehe) but it was 6:30, hmm… the Spring House Location is about 3 miles from our apartment (dangerously close!), but it’s a friday at peak dinnertime… and we know from experience that the Spring House one is awful during busy times. So we opted to drive to the Exton Location… sure it was nearly an hour drive, but it’s worth it! We got a really cool waitress, and although we were stuck between a birthday party and a baby shower, it really was a nice evening. I started out with some of the Lindeman’s Framboise (raspberry lambic) from the tap, and we got an appetizer of Belgian Cheese Fondue… oh yum! The bread was a bit salty, and we didnt really want to complain but our wonderful attentive waitress somehow noticed that we werent completely pleased and brought out some unsalted bread for us %) It was really great. Then I got the Grilled Chicken Breast sandwich… it’s so good, has brie on it! I ordered a bottle of Lindeman’s Peche (peach lambic) … which isnt nearly as sweet as the other ones, which makes it my favorite for most occasions. Then came dessert. I was so full! But how can i resist chocolate cake labelled “chocolate indulgence”? So I got it with a capuccino. It was freaking huge! A couple of the women at the baby shower table noticed it and were like “Oh my goodness!” *insert other womanly chocolate envy comments here* hehehe… I ended up eating about half of it and taking the rest home. It was a very nice dinner %) We got home around 9:30.

Tonight we’re going to Myk’s mother’s house for her boyfriend’s birthday. It’s just a little surprise dinner, nothing big, and his mother is really nice… I don’t often feel uncomfortable around her, and I do think she likes me. It should be a nice evening.

I had a lot of really weird dreams last night. I guess I didn’t sleep well since I remember having so many weird dreams, it sucks… I wish I could sleep! I have tried so many things, and I was sleeping good for a few months, but it’s going back into sleeping badly -_-

Must resist having the chocolate cake in fridge for breakfast, hehehe.

Well I’m going to go take a shower and try to wake up… make some coffee so I start feeling like a normal human being. *zombies off*