o/` Aladdin Soundtrack o/`

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

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

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

o/` Bel Canto – Kloeberdanz o/`

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

o/` Duran Duran – Come Undone o/`

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*wanders off*

o/` Bjork – Possibly Maybe o/`

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

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

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

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

“Minesweeper” In Linux

irssi Basics

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

I also got a chance to upload my screenshots:

Enlightenment in Debian

LiteStep in Windows 2000

And I get to show off my pretty bash prompts!

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

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

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

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

#13thHour’s Rules For Ops

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

I finished a few books, so I have reviews:

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

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

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

I guess that’s it *wanders off*

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*