o/` Loreena McKennitt – Dantes Prayer o/`

Happy 10th Birthday Debian!
Yep, today is Debian’s birthday. The PLUG Picnic next weekend is partially celebrating this as well. I don’t think we’re going to the picnic, last year it sucked, and it’s in a scary park in the city %) They are also having a “bar night” … but we can’t go to that either since that night is when my cousin will be in town and we want to go out to dinner with her.

Now wait, before you think I’m a big geek (hah!) for remembering Debian’s birthday, I must state for the record that the only reason I remember the exact date is that it’s my father’s birthday today as well. I called him this morning to get the hassle done and over with. I was pretty scared about calling, hoping I wouldn’t catch him at a bad time, or when he was “not quite with it” as my sister says. Luckily he has one of his sisters up visiting, so he was awake and alert when I called. It was a short conversation since they were heading out to lunch, but it was pleasant. I told him I had been busy with things like the philly chix stuff and he asked if I got paid for it, but that was all he really said about my current situation. He did ask when I was coming to visit again, geez, I just visited 2 months ago! Maybe once I get a job he’ll be less nagging about me visiting all the time. I’d say it was an altogether painless conversation.

Well it looks like our mail has all been moved, YAY! No more depending on crappy Comcast connection to do mail! Things have been moved and changed around a lot, so in the next couple days if you find irc.clockbot.net is acting funny just connect directly to clockbot.xelium.net or to irc.xelium.net

Last night was great. Cargo is over for the weekend, we got pizza and rented Solaris. Solaris was ok, apparently it was a remake of some 1970s film, maybe the 1970s one was the one I was supposed to see %) I still need to watch Blue Velvet, maybe tonight. The same friend that sent me Blue Velvet also sent me “Bowling for Columbine” it doesn’t come out on DVD til next week %) So we’re definately watching THAT tonight, maybe we’ll bring one of the computers into the bedroom and hook it up so we can watch it on the tv, that would be much more comfortable.

So what else will we do this weekend? Myk needs to do some work, so I’ll probably spend some time writing, and reading and probably do some knitting because I haven’t in a while and I don’t want to forget how %)

I watched a show on PBS earlier this week (big surprise huh?). It was “Scientific American Frontiers: Mysteries of the Deep” and it was really interesting. I was especially captivated by Bob Ballard, who was this totally awsome guy… he’s one of those people who just has tons of brilliant ideas that make you want to say “oh I could have thought of that” because they seem so obvious. And his long interviews in this episode proved him to be one of those rare brilliant people who also have humor, social skills, and are very comfortable to listen to. Well I wanted to find out this guy’s name so I could look more into stuff he’s done because it’s super interesting… where do I go? Searching the PBS website of course! I got to the main Scientific American Frontiers Website and was pleased to find the same great PBS websites that I have so recently come to expect… and I found something else:

“Welcome to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN FRONTIERS Video Archive. Every episode of the series, from 1990 to the present, is available for online viewing. Just enter the title or topic you’re interested in below. You can choose to watch individual stories or an entire show right on your computer. Enjoy!”

No way!

Well, I probably have to go into Windows to view them… but I’ll just *try* plugger since I have it installed. Oh my god it works!!! It didn’t work when I tried it with the windows media player, bu
t when I said realplayer it works %) I have realplayer version 8.0.3.421 installed, and although it opens up several realplayers, has an error, AND does the usual plugger crap of creating zombied processes… it does actually work! I can watch any of these episodes now, that rocks.

*wanders off*

o/` Bel Canto – Rumour o/`

I watched a show on PBS (this link is worth clicking on, PBS really impresses me with how they provide relatively extensive websites for some of their programming) the other night about how a fungus growing on rye might have been the cause for many of the salem witch trials, and the deaths in thousands of similar cases across Europe. I had heard this theory of Ergot poisoning but had never actually watched a show completely explaining the theory. Anyway, during part of the show they were walking through a very old house in France and he said “watch your head, people were shorter when they made this house.” That comment made me wonder. Why were people shorter? Was it because their diet was worse than ours today so people had their growth stunted? Was it some sort of evolution where tall == good and we have been “bred” to be taller than our ancestors? Was it something else that I’m not aware of? Well, I have the whole wealth of knowledge from the internet in my den, so I decided to surf around.

After a couple google searches and coming across too many midget pages, I discovered some relavent pages. There is apparently some debate surrounding whether people really were shorter then. I found this page:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Mark_Gist/height.htm

He makes some very interesting points… which include pointing out that the average height in the United States today is 5’8″ (I looked this up, it’s actually 5’9″ according to this CDC study, but the point is still clear). And:

“in centuries past, houses had much lower doorways, not because their inhabitants were shorter, but to reduce the circulation of cold drafts. (References from several periods and social classes support this.) The same is true with beds. In prior centuries people habitually slept semi-reclining, propped up on bolsters, and their beds were shorter. Numerous illustrations from the 14th-17th centuries bear this out”

Hm. Of course I won’t base my entire idea on what some guy says on his webpage, but it certainly gave me something to think about. Then again I could just give up and go with teenmstie‘s theory:

“Well, people were still much more isolated back then than they are today. Its possible that some people in one area were tall, some in another area were tall, they got together, made midget pr0n, and normal size people were born.”

I watched this interesting thing happen yesterday afternoon:

16:12:11 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: Barenjager (~zappa@…) [Ping timeout]
16:12:18 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: Ruecian (~Ruecian@…) [Ping timeout]
16:12:37 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: Lizard_Axe (LizardAxe@…) [Ping timeout]
16:12:37 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: Xoria (~knsad@…) [Ping timeout]
16:13:10 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: Wakatu (Un00bs@…) [Ping timeout]
16:13:10 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: Ritler|Sleep (Ritley@…) [Ping timeout]
16:13:53 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: tortau (duh@…) [Ping timeout]
16:13:53 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: NightsB (lwejkhfadh@…) [Ping timeout]
16:14:43 [clockbot] !clockbot.xelium.net *** Notice — Client exiting: Mojoooo0 (mojojojo@…) [Ping timeout]

Puzzled by this I wondered if it was a server thing? Hm. What had gone on? coincidence?

Nope, you’re looking at what happens when power goes out in the northeast! It was about a half hour before I learned of the power outages, and then had to look back and laugh. Luckily none of the IRC servers on xelium were in the outage area so we didn’t have an
y trouble. And I didn’t either, yay for Philadelphia not losing power!

Today I, um… gosh %) Oh I cleaned the apartment a bit. We’re having Cargo Kitty over this weekend so I’m saving some of the cleaning for Monday, it’s silly to dust today when I will have to do it all over again on monday. This afternoon I was able to talk to my cousin Melissa on the phone, I saw her when I was visiting family back in June and she is visiting a friend in Philadelphia next weekend! She’s coming in thursday, and thinks it might be fun if we could meet somewhere and go out on friday… and she’s going to Hershey Park on Saturday and asked if we’d be interested in going as well. I’ll have to talk to Myk about it, and make sure we aren’t busy or anything… at least going out for dinner on friday would be nice. My cousin is calling on Monday so we can work out some real plans on what to do. Finally a member of my dad’s side of the family will get to meet Myk and see how wonderful he is %)

Tonight is going to be pizza and movie night. A friend of mine on IRC dcced me “Blue Velvet” woo! So we’ll probably rent a couple movies, and watch Blue Velvet. It should be a nice night, especially with Cargo here, yay!

*wanders off*

o/` Mono – Life In Mono o/`

I have this friend. Over the past few months we’ve gotten to know each other better. Spent some time helping him set up a channel on xelium and have had a lot of fun. I’ve talked to him about issues he’s had with a girl he’s attracted to (but can’t have). I’ve helped him promote his channel so some trivia nights he had over a dozen people in there. I even spent a couple days putting together a webpage for the channel AND decided to host it on princessleia.com for him. Unfortunately this was not enough to prevent what happened this afternoon.

He starts talking about things he wants to add to the site. Ok, that’s fine, I said, but it all has to wait until I have access to the webserver box again. I have been intentionally avoiding this subject with Myk because he’s been extremely busy with work and hey, on weekends I’ve taken up his time with other things. So I told my friend that he’d just need to be patient. Well, the next time Myk says something in #13thHour … (nickname has been changed to $friend to protect the bad):

-@Time- I’m at my wits fucking end with this windows server bullshit.
-@Peacimowen- heh.
-@$friend- Time, you have to give Leia user access!!!
-@$friend- Pleasee!
-@PrincessLeia2- $friend: dont be bad %P
-@Time- $friend: What are you talking about?
-$friend- Me and her want to update the website, but we can’t!
-@PrincessLeia2- i told you he’d get to it when he had a chance %P
-@$friend- I know, I just want to remind him.
…
-!- $friend was kicked from #13thHour by Time [“I’ll make a note”]

First of all, in #13thHour kicks don’t mean that we’re crazy angry… usually it’s just like “haha, you jerk” in a friendly way… If you are seriously in trouble you are banned as well!

So now he gets all mad about how unreasonable this is. I tried to explain to him that it’s perfectly reasonable action for someone who is stressed out and put in this position, I probably would have done the same. “Hey, I see you’re stressed out, I just wanted to remind you that you still need to do $morework” … you just don’t do that! It’s almost comical that he respected a positive response. Of course this friend didn’t understand this, and continues being upset and saying how Myk was wrong and how he hates #13thHour and how it’s all unreasonable and wrong. THEN he apparently got into a “conversation” in private message with Myk, where he said (among other things) “Yeah, makes me wonder what Leia sees in you, if I were her I would’ve dumped your ass long ago.” Ouch.

After all I did for this guy and he decides to treat me like this. How did he think he could insult Myk like this and stay my friend? You know, even if Myk wasn’t right in this situation, don’t come to me to bitch about his actions! I will argue to the death to defend him, and if you continue to insult him I just won’t be your friend anymore. How could I? Having friends that Myk does not exactly “love” is one thing, but once words of agressive dislike are exchanged I need to make a choice. And of course there have been times when Myk has given people another chance, but sometimes I need to decide that people don’t deserve that second chance. I don’t know what will happen in this situation, I’ll let things cool down for a couple days.

Stupid day.

I am feeling a bit better today, woke up ok… ate breakfast and felt miserable, had a really mild lunch and my stomach seems to be happy with that. I don’t quite feel 100% yet, but I do feel much better than I was. I spent a bunch of the day chatting and cleaning up files on my computer… my home directory was a huge mess, so I got everything sorted into folders and then started sorting those folders out, but it’s a big job… I have about 200 text files in my txtfiles directory that I need to go through, and my Images directory oh dear, I don’t even want to think about that, over 4000 of them … a lot of which are unorganized. What I need to do is devise a good file organization system and force myself to use it, the problem I have is either not organizing
things at all or I put them into folders that have broad names like “text” or “images” … and then I can’t find anything. Yes, I need to do this, organization like this would be a good project for me. Then maybe I could use it for organizing my real desk, hehehe.

And it turns out that after I went to lie down yesterday afternoon the Philly Chix talked in the IRC channel and decided to post-pone the meeting until next week. Only two people would have shown up, and one of them was just too tired from work, and the other had no problem with waiting, cool! So I didn’t miss the meeting afterall %) Of course this means I need to go into the city next week, hehe. And now all you chix who have excuses will need to come up with new ones! Hah!

Well it’s late, Myk should be coming home soon… I’m going to finish up a couple things and then go make dinner *wanders off*

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

‘LovSan’ Worm Crawls Into Philly’s City Hall – Many Workers Sent Home After Virus Infects Computers

*chuckles* Nothing like a worm like this to show how little most people know about computers.

Well, thanks to escapenguin I now know that the -sh option in wterm (shaded transparency) actually works. Previously I thought it was completely broken because when I used it I used it with -bg black it doesn’t work. Well apparently if you try other colors, like -bg blue or -bg magenta it works. Oh you know what I chose %) Magenta YAY! Actually the rose on my desktop (in this screenshot) is now fluorescent pink. I’ll be sure to make a pretty showing off desktop in the near future that includes it, hee.

I slept a little better last night, but not much. Then I woke up this morning feeling terrible, bad stomach ache, it’s stayed with me all day making me miserable. I am not having a good week. And I really am not feeling up to taking the train into center city to go to the chix meeting tonight %(

When Myk got home yesterday and saw I was horribly exausted again he asked “Do you think it’s the coffee?” Oh dear… The past 2 nights I hadn’t slept, and those were also days I had coffee. Damn. I never realized how much caffeine influences me these days, a cup of coffee at 10 am can make me unable to sleep at 12 am. Bleh!

I have spoken to 3 friends in the past couple days who are having relationship troubles. It’s really hard to watch. One friend decided to date a close friend of his who had a rocky past, well her past caught up with her emotionally and she broke up with him because she got scared. Another seems to have gotten involved with someone and didn’t realize that he’d need to outline the boundries of the relationship and now she’s seeing another guy as well, he is now just laughing it off, doesn’t want a relationship with her anymore… but it’s pretty obvious that he’s really hurt by it. And my other close friend was in a long serious relationship that has hit some stormy weather. This one is the one that cuts deeply, he’s a close friend and I hate to see him in such restless agony.

Well on a more amusing note, I went to usps.com today (I actually forgot why once I got there) and the following warning popped up:

Warning, you are using Opera Version /6.03 (Linux 2.4.18 i686
The recommended browsers to view this page are:
– Internet Explorer 4.0 or better
– Netscape 4.0 or better
– Mozilla 1.0.1 or better
– Opera 5.0 or better

Heehee. *wanders off*

o/` BOA – Anna Maria o/`

Yesterday was ok. After my burst of caffeine that I had earlier in the day I quickly became to realize that I really hadn’t had much sleep the night before and I was exhausted. I spent most of the afternoon having trouble focusing on anything. I was working up the design for the #WheelOfTime website and I couldn’t even think clear enough for that! Gah… I sat around chat on xelium for a bit. Surfed the web a little, but that couldn’t keep my interest. So I just wasted away the afternoon trying to resist taking a nap.

While hanging out in #13thHour I had the “pleasure” to see one of my friend struggling with some sort of worm that was causing Windows XP to reboot at random intervals, sometimes a minute apart. Another friend began to help her out when someone else showed up in the channel with the same problems. Strange, I thought. But I am horribly inexperienced with worms, the last time I got one was in 2001 and I just reinstalled. So I sat back and chuckled. Well after watching this play out for a while I saw someone in the xelium #support channel report the same problems on his system (why he came to IRC support I still don’t know…). I informed him that it was a virus or worm. That’s when another IRCop piped up and reported that two of his friends were having similar troubles! Well I didn’t really put any effort into helping, I honestly don’t know enough windows to even know where to look for the problem. I know of at least one person who just decided to give up and reinstall his C drive and hope the other harddrives weren’t infected. Then another friend of mine ended up dropping by #13thHour last night saying she had the same problem. Bleh.

Well it turns out this was an RPC DCOM worm (Washington Post News on it). Spread rapidly all day yesterday and by late last night there were virus scanner patches and fixes out to deal with it (apparently the windows patch had been released previously?). It’s neat that I could watch this thing spreading, and laugh. The best part is that even if I had been using Windows I would have been fine, secure firewalls are good!

Damn Windows. I certainly don’t miss these problems %)

My father’s birthday is on Saturday. I am not sure how I want to approach this, maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing. I have his cellphone number, maybe I should get ahold of Heather first and see if they have plans that day… or maybe just call him up and risk the chance of catching him at a bad time. I’ll just call, ask about the weather, briefly ask how he is, and wish him a happy birthday. I don’t think I can afford to get more involved than that. Ok, this should be simple. It’s just a phone call. I can’t cop out like I did on Father’s Day.

The Philly Chix meeting is tomorrow night. Looks like Sam will show up, and “stargirl” who is a woman from the uk who is in Philly for the summer. It should be a nice time and I’m looking forward to it. I’m not really looking forward to actually getting into the city, but that’s no big surprise, trains are expensive take forever, and driving is stressful. I need a teleporter, I wonder if they sell them on thinkgeek %D

I need direction again. Last week I spent working on that perl weatherbot, and now I’m starting to feel like I don’t have anything to do again. I guess I can keep on learning about bash scripting, I’ve learned some very interesting things just after reading through parts of that scripting tutorial that I mentioned in a previous entry. You know, speaking of shell scripting, that reminds me. This morning my friend Ocean-Saurian (who is taking a required intro to linux class for college) came into #deep13 asking how to run a script. My first response was ./scriptname because that’s how I had first learned. Then I went ahead and explained the requirements for running this way (had to be executable, had to define what shell/program to run it with with #! so it didn’t make a mistake and use the wrong shell). Then
I told him about the `bash scriptname` way to run the file. That’s when he said his teacher told him that they could run it just by typing the file. Hm. I quickly explained $PATH and said that if it was in a $PATH then sure it could be executed just by typing the name. Well apparently what he actually meant was typing /full/path/to/scriptname. Right. OS came back later and told me that is teacher didn’t know about the ./ way to run a script. Um… seriously? I find that difficult to believe, where did this TEACHER learn his *nix from? Scary.

Hm today… dunno what I’ll do. It’s only 10 am now.. I’m sure I’ll figure out something. *wanders off*

o/` Klaus Schulze – Totem o/`

I hate mondays.

Luckily this monday I have coffee, that coffee maker makes good coffee. I gave it up for a while after our coffee maker broke, and I felt good. But I really do love the taste of coffee, and it’s such a wonderful warm happy feeling when I wake up and have a cup of coffee. Of course now I’m caffeinated and I am not sure what to do with this energy… I’m sure I’ll think of something.

So IRC… I decided just to give #deep13 a chance, I’ll hang out there a few more months, really give it the benefit of the doubt. I have narrowed down my IRC attendance to 4 servers and 15 channels though. What? *grin* this is progress! It’s not like they are all big channels, and I don’t end up on top of *all* the ircstats.

Last night I watched some Bravo. The West Wing is going to be on Bravo every weekday night at 11, and starting tonight they are going through all the episodes starting with episode 1 in season 1, yay! It’s the only network show I watch often, I really enjoy it. So on Bravo this past weekend they were showing lots of “West Wing hype” things. I watched half of “Wag the Dog” and then a Bravo special on the real west wing that drew parallels to the show, then an “Inside The Actor’s Studio” with Martin Sheen. Now I’m all excited for the West Wing’s new season! It’s such a great show.

Well, I should go find something to work on today. *wanders off*

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*