o/` Stabbing Westward – I Remember o/`

I just looked at the top 10 movies on Yahoo! out of those 10 only one got an A-range score by critics, Finding Nemo. Yes, after 9 weeks it is still on the top ten (#8) and probably the best movie in the theater right now. What a horrible movie season! While I do agree that Disney and Pixar make amazing movies together, I would have to say that Finding Nemo is at the bottom of that list as far as how good it was. Crazy.

A girl I know came to me recently with an interesting group of questions. She was talking about her relationship with her boyfriend, and although she didn’t get into details she was asking me a little about sex. Now at this point of the conversation I told her I was uncomfortable discussing any sort of details on that subject in my own life. I made this clear because usually in discussions with people I find it helpful to offer “I know how that feels because I…” examples. Her response was quite unexpected. She accused me of being “prude” and said she was offended because she was willing to tell me these things and I “Obviously didnt trust her enough” to tell her about such things. She refused to believe me when I told her that I don’t discuss such things with any of my friends (the exception being Myk, of course), and said “no one is like that anymore” … and made a comment that meant “It’s socially acceptable to be open about your sexuality, so we should be.” Of course I was deeply offended. I was trying to help this girl out and she starts attacking me because I don’t feel comfortable sharing more about my sexuality than “I’m a heterosexual monogamous female.” It was really unfair, and definately put a great strain on our friendship.

In other wonderful social news, I’m part of a group that relys on trust a great deal to exist and that trust has recently been broken. Most online things are like this. You have to trust that the people you are communicating with are telling the truth, all you usually have is “their word” that what they are saying is the truth. Often times when people are lying they are eventually caught, sometimes not, and sometimes they just come out and admit it on their own. In this case the person eventually came forward and admitted that he had been lying. Where does this leave the group? He betrayed our trust to become deeply involved in the community, and lied time and time again! We all now feel insecure because of his actions, and honestly it’s all a bit creepy. There is really no excuse for that sort of behavior, and I don’t think I could forgive him.

It really annoys me when people lie, there are few things I hate more. I want to make friends, I want to be emotionally close to them, but each time someone else betrays that trust I give it makes it harder for me to give it again, and that’s unfair to the good honest people out there. I don’t care about your age, gender, race, sexual preference, taste in music, finances, or if your clothes match. I promise not to make judgements about any of these things, just *DON’T* lie to me. One lie can turn into many. One lie will make me question everything you ever say. One lie will make me find it difficult to get close to you, ever. I wish more people would understand this.

Sometimes people really upset me, at least it’s a beautiful day out %)

Well I’m going to go work on some things. *wanders off*

o/` Moby – When It’s Cold I’d Like To Die o/`

Well, the webpages are moved and set up on the new box. You can definately tell that they’re on a T3 now %) I’m very excited about this! Of course I won’t take advantage of it in any way, but it’ll be nice for people who want to (for instance) use our UT install directions and mplayer instructions because both of those have big files to download… and it would have been a pain using my crappy cable connection… not to mention the crazy lag I’d get, already I am noticing a difference. Strange to have it on another box after all this time! I’m so happy. Myk’s setting up my user soon, so we will get the mail and stuff moved, yay!

“I do benefits for all religions — I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.” – Bob Hope

I hope it worked out for him, he died yesterday at 100. I was just talking in IRC to a friend and I realized quickly that I might actually get to live that long. Wow. Living til the year 2081, that’d be crazy… and yet, somehow it doesn’t seem far enough in the future, I want to live til 2300! Ok, the genes in my family aren’t that good, but no cancer, heart trouble, strokes, run in my family. So if I can beat this depression and pull myself into being more of an optimist, and avoid accidents, I really can live for a long time, and look good doing it… one of my grandmothers is 80 and looks 60, she just went golfing a couple weeks ago.

Today… ah today. I finished the irssi mini-how to. Once I get full access to the webserver box I’ll be putting it up. There is a bit of work I want to do on my site as well, it’s so funny how often I work on my webpage, I didn’t notice until one day Myk says “hold off on work on it, I backed it up and will be moving it” Gah, hehe… I have a whole list of things %) I am going to get caught up on some emails today too. I was going to yesterday but I just wasn’t in the mood really.

Yeah… *wanders off*

o/` Great Expectations Score o/`

On friday night Myk spent a bunch of time on my stupid Compaq laptop. We had both done a bit of research into what it would take to get Debian on it, and it turns out that it would have been a bit of a nightmare. Even getting past the NIC problems, we would have been stumbling at every part of the install and it would have taken days. I would have needed help from Myk, and he doesn’t have the time for it right now. So he decided to try to put Red Hat 8 on it. Now, before you wince and scream about the evil of huge redhat installs and RPMs… just hear me out. Myk was able to get a *very* slim redhat install on here. I wasn’t around when he did it (I wish I was) but in many previous redhat versions this really wasn’t too possible. Now sure, I have mozilla installed, and some Netscape apps, and gimp, which I didn’t really need, but amazingly the install was a little under 700 mb. And I am not really concerned about being able to add more programs, so while I’d never consider using an RPM based distro again on my primary workstation, I think I can deal with having it on my laptop. All I *really* need out of a laptop is a terminal and ssh, I can use programs on other boxes through ssh, so I was never too concerned about that. In all honesty having x run was really a bonus.

So I’ve got WindowMaker running on it. I was a little weary about it, and immediately did all I could to get all the icons off my screen. But now I think I am actually liking it. Once I learned my way around the config tools I was pretty pleased with the results. I still prefer fluxbox and enlightenment of course, but I am not about to go through the dependency nightmare it would take to install either.

Maybe someday we’ll take the time to install debian, but for now at least I have a working laptop, and that’s all that’s important. *Watches herself lose “geek points” for giving up and going with Red Hat*

Yesterday Myk and I sat around playing with our computers (me configuring and naming R2A6, the laptop). Around 4 we decided to head up to N-Tropy’s girlfriend’s place where the party was. I hadn’t eaten all day so almost immediately hit the snacks table. We were going to bring beer, but at last minute we decided that we weren’t really in the mood for drinking… we’ve been really healthy and active lately, and neither of us wanted to spoil that completely. Nita and Darxus showed up after about and hour and a half, it was cool seeing Darxus again because we hadn’t seen him (besides in IRC) since before he moved to Boston back in November. A number of other people that I knew showed up as well, and it turned out to be a really nice night. Ate lots of junkfood, tried to make some pina colada drinks but they turned out to be a bit of a failure because the mix we bought wasn’t very good.

We got to play Disney Trivia, which turned out to be a very close game, everyone came close to winning. We had teams, Nita and I were on a team and for most of the game were losing pretty badly. Some of the questions were really hard, and we all got our fair share of them, but we kept getting ones having to do with the parks, which we knew nothing about, lol. It was fun though, and somehow Nita and I actually ended up winning in the end. After the game I got to see Nita’s laptop. N-Tropy sold it to her that day, so she was installing some stuff on it. It’s a Compaq laptop, and it’s a Pentium (so, probably around 133 mhz or so), but what I was really impressed with is the display! My Presario screen looks like crap, her older Compaq looked amazing. When I mentioned this N-Tropy said that his Presario laptop (a bit newer than mine) has a really horrible looking screen too. I imagine that when Nita’s was built that they were going for quality, and when the Presarios were pumped out it was part of the “Dot Com Boom” and they were able to get away with selling crap. Oh well, at least I can see the text on the screen, and that’s the most important part.

Today we need to go grocery shopping, we have no food except dinne
r food… I’m hungry.

I started reading Great Expectations again. I really like that book and haven’t read it in a long time. It’s falling apart because it’s old and I picked it up at the dump back where I grew up (there is a small “swap shop” at the dump in Cape Elizabeth, lots of junk, and a couple bookshelves of books). I used to have the most recent remake of the film on VHS, but I left it at my aunt’s one summer and never saw it again, it’s ashame, I really should buy that again… I have both the soundtrack and the score which I enjoy, and I did like that movie.

Well I’m going to go make some coffee out of the last few beans we have *wanders off*

o/` Peter Murphy – No Home Without Its Sire o/`

I finally broke down and gave my livejournal name to a few people I’ve met in real life through Myk. I’ve explained before my rationalization for being so shy about it. I’m an expert rationalizer. It wasn’t until a discussion with Myk the other night that I realized they really were just excuses to hide how shy I was, and they were bordering on being a bit crazy. I’ve known these things for a while, but he helped me sort out my thoughts a bit and every excuse boiled down to “I’m paranoid about what people will think of me.”

Now this paranoia really is silly. Does it really matter if someone doesn’t like me? Does it matter if they don’t think I’m smart? Does it matter if they think my entries are stupid? No, no of course not.

I learned recently that this sort of “worrying about what people will think” is another symptom of chronic depression. I should have expected that. I have been told by several people that I’m far too hard on myself. I don’t feel like I’m ever acomplishing enough, I never feel smart enough, I never feel like I’m doing enough that’s “Worthwhile.” I’ve actually become much better at dealing with these things, and I certainly no longer have the absoulte self-loathing that I used to have. I can mostly do away with most of the depression if I keep myself busy and focused on being positive instead of being so negative like I was before. I still can’t help that deep down feeling of these things however. Somehow this leads me to believe that everyone who gets to know me will see these things too, despite past experiences. Bleh. I’m still resisting seeing a doctor about this, looking back at all the progress I’ve made through this depression I think it really might be possible to deal with without any sort of crazy medicinal intervention, especially since my life really is great. I have a beautiful home, I have wonderful friends, I have an amazing boyfriend.

Speaking of being down, I’m so glad it’s friday, this week has been so long. Our friend N-Tropy is having a party tomorrow, which will be nice because I want to get out and see friends. I’ve had a great time with Myk these past few weeks, but sometimes I get lonely for other social contact. This will definately cheer me up, and give me a break from being shut up inside with my computer %)

This morning was fairly productive. Cleaned the apartment like I do every friday morning, paid some bills, made a couple of the albums I have into oggs. I started making all my cds into oggs a couple months ago, but sorta quit because I got a bit lazy. Now that we’re moving all sorts of things around I want to get as many old mp3s deleted as possible, and replace as much as I can with shiny new oggs %).

My youngest sister (Annette, soccergurl, she’s 14) proved to me yet again how unlike me she is this week. On Wednesday she went to a Nelly concert. Nelly apparently is a popular rapper (“Not as good as 50 Cent,” my sister informs me, 50 Cent? My lack of knowledge about pop culture is no joke.). Ugh, rap. She won front seat tickets from a radio station. I hate rap. I never called a radio station. I have never been to a rock/rap concert. How can I be related to her? *chuckles* To top it off she decided to come into #13thHour briefly to stur things up a bit, which she is always successful in doing. Most of the people in the channel are pretty mellow, and when she comes in it becomes a crazy mess with her AOLese.

Bah little sisters. Heather, who came into #13thHour yesterday asking for computer advise, ended up buying another Gateway. Why did she waste my time asking my opinion if she had already decided? I guess I shouldn’t care so much, as long as she doesn’t come to me complaining when things start breaking %)

I’m going to go try and work on a couple things now, maybe the irssi mini-howto. *wanders off*

o/` Miranda Sex Garden – Sleeping Beauty o/`

One of my sisters is turning 20 today, and so is Jodilicious. Cool. I still havent met anyone with my same *exact* birthday. Happy Birthday Heather and Jodi!

I was able to talk to Heather today. She came into #13thHour this morning to ask for some advice on buying a computer. She wanted me to choose between Gateway and HP *wince* I told her that for the lower end machines (cheap) she should probably go with Dell. I doubt she’ll listen to me though, she’s quite attached to her gateway for some reason. I think I’d go with HP/Compaq before a Gateway though, and I told her so. I guess what she is looking for is either a new computer for my father, or getting a new one for herself and giving my father her current computer (Gateway, 1.2 ghz I believe).

I guess she’s doing ok, I should email her to ask how her whole Canada trip went, seems she’s already back into working and helping out my father. I’m glad she’s helping my father out with everything, but at the same time I hope she isn’t planning her life around what he’s doing. I mean for a while there her excuses for things always included “well dad needs…” But like I’ve mentioned before, I’m in no position to recommend this to her, since in her eyes I am sure I just abandoned the family.

The webpages will be moved to the T3 soon. I am not sure how this all will work out, but I’ll definately be happy to have all my bandwidth back on my home connection. And it’ll be nice to have our mailservers running on a more stable connection.

I am going to go find some stuff to work on now *wanders off*

o/` The Cure – Play For Today o/`

“I’m not supposed to tell you this but…”

This began some rather shocking insight today about a friend of mine. I sorta laughed it off and moved on in the conversation like it hadn’t been said, but it’s always awkward when news is delivered this way. Sometimes I wish people wouldnt do this. Of course I’m interested in knowing everything about everyone I know, but I’d rather learn things from the people themselves, or not know at all. I guess I’m guilty of leaking secrets of other people at times, we all are, but I have really worked on just shutting my mouth. I want people to feel they trust me, and if someone says “Dont tell so and so…” I won’t (and if it’s a situation where I can’t promise that I let them know). Anyway, yeah strange news about a friend, something I never expected really, and I can’t let it influence our relationship at all because I’m not supposed to know. Arg.

I’m having a bad week. My weeks are usually lousy when Myk is super busy at work, and this is one of those weeks. I think it’s because his mood rubs off on me and influnces me in a bad way, I hate seeing him stressed out or super busy, and it makes me feel bad. Of course this doesn’t do anything to make him feel better, in fact I’m pretty sure it makes things worse. This week has also been a bit of a pain because that Sprint thing, and then another customer service experience this morning. The cobalt went down, I don’t know why, but I called the place that hosts it to ask what was wrong. I felt like a complete moron on the phone, My usually handles things with these people, and I totally lived up to “being a woman” because I didn’t know what to say when he asked certain questions about it. Bleh. Eventually they said they’d send someone out to figure out what was wrong, and just ended up rebooting it. Luckily that seemed to fix things and Myk was able to get things fixed on the box (stupid crankie cobalt) so that doesnt happen again, but if it hadnt worked I would be stuck trying to explain the crazy conversation I had with the tech support.

Didn’t really get much done today. I woke up late because I had a bit of a sinus headache, then dealt with tech support for the cobalt. By the time I was showered and dressed it was noon. Spent the afternoon playing around with irssi. I’m going to post the themes I use for both r2d2 and myself on my webpage eventually. I will probably post the scripts I use and the ones of mine that are also on irssi.org. I’m thinking also a brief introduction to irssi as well… I considered writing a fairly extensive tutorial, but I don’t think I’m up for that, maybe just some quick things I’ve done and learned about it.

Look, free ice cream on thursday: http://www.coldstonecreamery.com/secondary/calendar.asp?pk_calendarid=3&link=detail

Too bad I can’t go since it’ll be after 8 by the time Myk gets home on thursday…

Going to go make some dinner now and try to salvage what’s left of my evening *wanders off*

o/` Frank Sinatra – As Time Goes By o/`

Yesterday and this morning I spent time finishing up the rough draft of the php backend for the comic webpage. Now I need to write up some way to do the comics archive. I am not completely sure how I’ll do it yet, but that’s ok because I have plenty of time to think about it before the webserver is completely ready.

I checked the mail yesterday and was very surprised to see a little post card from Sprint PCS (the people we bought Myk’s cellphone from). Much to my dismay it was a notice informing us that we did not properly follow the mail in rebate instructions, they said we had forgotten to send in a receipt. Well, of course I had sent it in, I know how picky these mail in rebates are and I am always very very careful about making sure I have everything. We had a photocopy of the receipt, but I was at a bit of a loss because I DID send them the original. So I was upset, and I decided to give them a call. I used the number on the card, and after passing through several levels of “for this press 1 for this other thing press 2” menus I finally got to speak with someone. I have never had such an annoying conversation with someone before! I’d say “I sent in the receipt” she’d say “you need to send in the receipt” … I think I’m just bad with dealing with people in such situations. So I finally got so upset that I just hung up and decided we’d just go out to CompUSA and see if they could print us up another receipt. So, I told Myk last night, and he decided to call up Sprint today. HE got through to them and they admitted that it had been a mistake on their part and we’d be getting our rebate afterall! ARG! Myk must just be better at dealing with these people on the phone than I am, I think I get upset too quickly and unsure as to what to say to get results. Sure makes me feel lousy though. Stupid Sprint.

Myk went into work today and saw that there were protesters outside with a 20 ft inflatable rat. It was funny when he first mentioned it, and then he said something like “If I were to buy a 20 foot inflatable rat, where would I go?” Just to satisfy my own curiousity I did a google search and found this:

http://www.advertisingballoons.com/characters.htm#animals

This place advertises an sells huge inflatable animals. In the section with the rats it said:

“10 to 20 foot Construction Rat Balloons. These inflatable rat balloon designs are used by Labor Unions when on strike to protest non-union sites.”

Very interesting! It was something I had never heard of before. I’ve never lived in a situation, or really been involved with people who would know anything about union things. It was a like a whole strange world opened up to me, hehe. After a bit more digging I found that the adopted the rat as a mascot a number of years ago… I didn’t learn more than that really, why they chose the rat or anything, maybe referring to the people who contracted non-union workers.

We had a thunderstorm last night. It’s crazy how this season has been, when it rains it’s very very heavy downpours. I love thunderstorms, and we should have more tonight…

*wanders off to get a few things done*

o/` Mediaeval Baebes – Lick The Maypole o/`

-!- BirthdayBot changed the topic of #13thHour to: ` – . – ` – Happy Birthday Escapenguin!!! – ` – . – `

I love perl scripts that remember birthdays for me. Happy Birthday escapenguin!

Well I didn’t end up snuggling up in a comforter and reading all day yesterday. Funny how whenever I predict something like that in my web journal it never comes to pass.

In the morning I made french toast and coffee for breakfast. Most of the afternoon I sat around reading, finished rereading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and began on Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul which I had also read previously.

At about 4 pm Myk said that he wanted to go for a walk. We decided to drive up to Nockamixon State Park, which is about 45 minutes from our apartment. Parked at the marina at the Lake there and took a nice walk, nearly 6 miles. The temperature wasn’t too bad, mid 80s, but most of the time we were either in the shade of the forest or getting a nice breeze off the water. And I felt really good afterwards. It was nearly dusk when we left the park.

Myk has family in that area, so he decided to show me his grandparent’s house. This was completely unplanned, so as we pulled into their driveway I was making sure I looked alright, I had never met them before! Things went well though, I think his grandparens like me, his grandmother said we “looked good together” so I guess that’s a good sign. They were pretty surprised to see him because it had probably been at least 2 years.

We left there and went home, had some soft tacos, played some Warcraft 3, and I decided to try and go to sleep around midnight. It was hard! I hate it when I have to try and go back to a normal schedule after such a crazy weekend of sleeping in.

I wasn’t online much at all this weekend, just dropped into IRC a couple times to say “Hi” and give ops to the appropriate people. Jodi dropped by #13thHour last night, which is ubercool %) And I guess my fears that “Old #13thHouries” would be turned off by the recent activity were pretty unfounded, everyone I’ve talked to has been quite pleased with the recent activity. lazzurs even decided to wander back in, yay! It’s been fun %)

I was thinking recently about how lonely I’d be if I wasn’t online. I think that’s why “typical housewives” are so into daytime tv… most daytime tv deals with over-acted, unrealistic soap operas and talk shows that exploit people’s crazy problems. So I’m thinking by being interested in these fake soap opera lives, the woman might not feel so lonely. And by watching these talk shows they stop from being depressed “At least I don’t have…” Maybe I’m completely wrong, but I guess I could see myself considering watching this horrible daytime television if I wasn’t online. It’s funny how truly secluded I am from the world. I mean, I rarely get phone calls, and Myk is really the only one I go out with on a regular basis. Now I go to Philly Chix meetings monthly, and we’ve been trying to make it to PLUG meetings more often, and sometimes we have lan parties, but as for day to day physical human contact with people other than Myk, I really don’t have much. So thanks to all my friends online for breaking my seclusion and making me feel like I had *some* sort of social life… %)

I had really strange dreams last night. Nothing “solid” enough about the dream to recount here I guess… but odd. In one of them there was a guy who I know but I can’t seem to place his face and it’s driving me crazy, I’m sure it’ll come to me at the most random time and surprise the hell out of me as to why I was thinking of him.

I’m going to try to get most of the backend done for that website today, not sure what else *shrugs* maybe some more work on my webpage. *wanders off to work*

o/` Loreena McKennitt – Dantes Prayer o/`

Someone called me Hermione this weekend and I didn’t know what they were talking about. I should really read the Harry Potter books sometime.

Myk has been setting up the new webserver, R2Q5, this weekend. It’ll be running as our mailserver, webserver and IRC server eventually, which is a bit of a relief, it will reside at his workplace on a T3. Either our Comcast connection is getting worse, or the amount of traffic on our websites has increased, probably both, but Myk has had to shut off the apache server often this week so he could do some work online. That’s pretty unacceptable for pages that get so much traffic, and it makes me sad to have my pages down %(

On thursday night Myk ended up staying at work until after 2 am. Because of this, his boss told him not even to bother coming in on friday, nice. I got up around noon on friday, did the normal friday cleaning of the apartment, went back to bed around 1:30 and proceeded to sleep until after 5 pm. We decided it would be good to get up then. So we got up, realized we were hungry, and headed out to Unos. It was a nice dinner. Afterwards we went to the video rental place and picked up a couple movies I had never seen, “Young Frankenstein” and “Citizen Kane” (seriously, I had never seen either one!). Ended up watching Young Frankenstein, it was really great. I think I went to bed around 3 am.

Saturday I woke up around 7. I crawled to my computer like I always do when I wake up and chatted for a bit, until I realized I wasn’t feeling so great and I went back to bed. I got up a little after 11:30, made coffee and breakfast (pancakes!), then curled up on the couch with a book. I took some Benadryl, hoping that would help me feel better, and ended up falling asleep on the couch. I don’t know how long it was, but eventually Myk came into the livingroom, saw me sleeping on the couch and woke me up so I could sleep in the bed, so we both took a nap til around 5 pm, so much for a normal sleep schedule this weekend! When we got up I took a shower and Myk made some dinner out of leftover unos pizza and the salad I had made for him if he had needed to go into work on Friday. Around 8 we watched Citizen Kane… a great movie, I am quite amazed that I had never seen it before. Then we watched part of an audio commentary by Ebert, which pointed out some of the subtle things done in the movie for certain effects and made me all the more impressed about the movie. We drank some tea and had some oreo chocolate cake and then decided to play some Warcraft 3. By then it was about 2:30 and I decided that I should probably try and get some sleep. Watched some old cartoons on the Cartoon Network for a little while and fell asleep a little after 3.

It’s been a good weekend. Today I think I’m just going to snuggle up in a comforter and read all day.

In the few minutes I’ve had this weekend on the computer I was exploring a vunerability concerning PHP and SQL…

-mjoseph- you’re careful about SQL injection, right?
-PrincessLeia2- sql injection?
-mjoseph- uh oh

Now didn’t I feel like a dunce! Well it turns out what he was talking about was a cross-site scripting exploit which I had indeed heard about, but only recently because I read the Debian Security Announce list (something I suggest all debian users to subscribe to!), and debian released a php4 fix for it just this past week. And after looking into it a bit I found out that I really didn’t need to worry about it anyway. The problem is mostly an issue when the mysql username is passed through GET. I never use GET for anything sensitive, and even with POST I never use the username, that’s kept, with the password, in a static init file. So things are going good with the backend, hopefully I’ll have it done and working on the site by friday.

I guess I’ll go make some coffee and breakfast now *yawns and wanders off*

o/` Legend Soundtrack o/`

Xelium hit 500 users today… currently at 515. Nice.

#13thHour has been doing quite well lately too. For the longest time I’d go in there and be able to read everything from when I was gone quite easily. Now… gah the buffer sometimes barely reaches that far %) I am not sure how all the “Old #13thHouries” think of this… some of them seem to be taking it fine and talking anyway, Time doesn’t seem to mind. *Shrugs* I think it’s cool… now people don’t always have to come in, see it’s dead, and leave. We had a user count of 22 the other day… I think that’s some sort of record, old days included.

I did a bit of work on my website today. Rearranged some of of the sections in the main menu, added an IRC section with a link to xelium, as well as a couple places I chat in. And I finally got around to formatting that enlightenment page! Also made my “stories” about the cellphone, curtain shopping, and the squirrel that got into our apartment into webpages. So here are some links to the new sections:

Curtain Shopping

The Squirrel

Cellphone Shopping

Enlightenment How-To

Tomorrow I should definately get some work done on the backend for the web comic, since I keep putting that off to work on other things. But it really does feel good to get things acomplished again. Being stuck in a rut sucked.

*wanders off*