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*

o/` Bjork – Pagan Poetry o/`

Yesterday I spent a good deal of the day working on the webpage for the #StarWars channel on xelium. It’s not a big channel, 6 regulars and a few people who drop by only from time to time. The owner knew nothing about making a webpage, and when he asked if I could make up something I said I could. Well it’s nothing too special, and I required him to do some work on it too, so he wrote up the little intro, the history, and his profile. I am getting infinately frustrated with people who say “hey sure, help me with a website” and then they wander off and don’t give it a second thought until I’m done. While I like working on webpages and working to make my design skills improve, I dont appreciate my work being taken for granted, I really did spend 6 hours working on something and I expect the person I’m helping out to put forth some effort as well.

#StarWars

I offered to help my friends Yeas and HeavyJay with a php administration tool for their comic website. The owner of the webserver (mjoseph, a real life friend of Myk’s and mine who decided to start chatting in #13thHour) said he was willing to give shell accounts to 3 of us so we could all have access to the webpage. The two comic creators are just going to be doing work to design and basic HTML of the site, and I’ll be putting in the proper php code. Now the two creators of the comic have both dabbled in linux before, but one of them just with gui redhat and the other with gui mandrake. Never really seeing the command line much. So a shell account is a whole new experience for them. I spent a lot of time yesterday helping them both out with some basic shell things, then got them into irssi with screen (although I think I need to clarify exactly what screen does *sigh*). Anyway, it was kinda fun teaching a few people how to use irssi, hopefully they are willing to teach the next group of people who need irssi training… it gets tedious, especially with people who have never used a command line chat client.

Myk upgraded irc.clockbot.net (part of irc.xelium.net) to Unreal beta17 last night, yay! Turns out there was a flaw in 15… so it’s good that that was resolved. The server is doing surprisingly well, just hit 470 users the other day. I guess my only problem with it right now is the other admins. The guy who made the website never updates it (specifically to add more channels to the channels list..). And two of the other admins hardly *ever* listen to me when I talk. Case in point, they noticed that most people were connecting to deep13 and started to write it off as an mIRC mistake (apparently once mIRC sucessfully connects to an IP for a server it saves the IP, so peopleconnect to irc.xelium.net, get deep13’s ip, and connect to that one EVERY time). But then I pointed out that the bot from netsplit.de also connects to deep13 more often… did they listen to me? No, instead they puttered around for 30 minutes, until one of them noticed the same thing and said almost the same thing I did. Of course as soon as HE pointed it out they started trying to figure out what was wrong… it’s like they didnt even see what I said. I won’t let it get to me, it doesnt really matter if I get along with the other admins as long as everything gets done, it just wasnt the best thing to hear on a day when I was feeling sorta down anyway.

On a lighter note:

-$friend- oh i met a fan of yourz leia
-PrincessLeia2- oh?
-$friend- yeah i said something about princessleia.com
-$friend- and they were like yeah my friend was showing that site to me it was really cool
-PrincessLeia2- hehe neat!

Cool. It always makes me feel good when random people that either me or my friends run into turn out to know about my site. I mean… I know it gets a lot of traffic, but it’s very rare that I get feedback from strangers about it. Really makes me want to add more to it. I was thinking of writing an irssi help section since even though there is an irssi documenta
tion project “in the works” I think people would really benefit from a quick help guide on some of the basics and features of irssi. I think I will also mirror the enlightenment how-to on my webpage, so I need to get around to making that “pretty” enough and organized so people can use it. I have lots of things to work on! And I really want to, so that’s good… I think that vacation to the Poconos helped getting my creativeness flowing again %)

*wanders off to get some work done*

o/` Jonn Serrie – Star Shower o/`

I was going to write something thoughtful, but I decided that I’m not really in the mood.

Yesterday was decent. Finished Return Of The King for the nth time. I have been rereading the books preparing for the movie at the end of the year that I’m really looking forward to. I think it’ll be the only movie I actually go to the theaters and see this year. I hate being continually disappointed by movies that use bad special effects. The Lord of the Rings movies have been consistantly breathtaking, I’m really pleased. I’m so tired of big movies coming out that have special effects that are so cheesey that the distract me from paying attention to the plot of the movie. But I guess for many of these hollywood blockbuster factories “Quality” isn’t too important to them.

A couple friends of mine are putting together a new webcomic. It’s a cool idea, and the first one is really amusing, I am looking forward to more. Another friend offered to host it for them, and I’ll be helping with the php backend, woo! It should be pretty cool, the artist of the comic is currently working on the webpage layout, which promises to be quite nice.

I took the time to write up some “adventures” that Myk and I have had in the past year and a half yesterday afternoon. Wrote about when the squirrel got into the apartment, wrote about our curtain shopping adventure, and edited the cellphone shopping experience that I posted in this journal recently. I think I will put them all into an “Adventures” part of my website. I need to find some pictures that would be appropriate for each story and stuff… hopefully I’ll get them up by this evening.

My allergies are driving me nuts today. It’s a nice day out so I decided to turn off the AC and open some windows (ok ok, the nearly $200 electric bill I got in the mail today DID have some influence on turning off the AC). As soon as I opened the windows I had trouble breathing, ugh, stupid allergies! Turns out that the allergy alert for grass today is “High” and I’m particularly allergic to grass. Maybe I should just close the windows… I wish I had been smart and picked up some allergy medicine when Myk suggested it at the store on Sunday, but I really wasnt having trouble til today, ugh.

Oh well, I’m going to go get some things done *wanders off*

o/` Enigma – Principles Of Lust o/`

I recently got into a conversation with a friend of mine concerning his girlfriend who is in a wheelchair. He told me that another friend of his had known her online, known about her and was actually emotionally attracted to her, until he found out she was in a wheelchair. My friend was disgusted with this additude, but I tend to disagree. I think it takes an especially compassionate person to fall in love with and seriously have a relationship with someone who has a disability like being in a wheelchair. It’s a great responsibility, and I believe some people just realize that they could not deal with such a thing from the start. Sure, if at some point in your life together your wife/husband gets into an accident and they must be in a wheelchair then you are responsible for loving and caring for them, but I can understand many people not wanting to start out with that premise. It’s sad, and unfair, but I guess it’s just the way life is, and I think it’s good for people to be honest with themselves about what they can physically and emotionally handle in a significant other.

Yesterday I wasn’t doing much, I wasn’t feeling so great, probably because of allergies and it put me in a lousy mood. Spent a bunch of time reading, did some knitting. We eventually went grocery shopping because I was hungry and we had hardly any food in the house. I took the grocery opportunity to buy some chocolate and chips because I was in a crappy mood, and of course when I’m in a crappy mood I eat to comfort myself %) For dinner we had Boca Burgers and some french fries.. the french fries were another “mood buy” we had never bought french fries the whole time living together. I love food.

While Myk did some work on his computer I used his laptop (IBM Thinkpad) to ssh into r2d2 and work on a history of the world timeline. I got through the whole timeline in the “World History for Dummies” book, and now I’m looking through a few more history books I have to suppliment it. It was kinda amusing actually looking through the for Dummies book, it had a lot of mistakes! In one part it claimed something was “3,300 years old” when in other places it said it was actually 5,300, in another part it used “principal” where “principle” clearly should have been, and in some of the timeline stuff the BC dates were out of order… I guess they weren’t kidding when they called it “for Dummies.” Maybe I’ll work on that more this afternoon.

*wanders off*

o/` Peter Gabriel – The Feeling Begins o/`

I learned more about GPG today. Enough so I felt comfortable generating my own key (Public Key). My friends madragoran and mjoseph helped me out summore. I was able to send a signed and encrypted email to mjoseph and madragoran sent me one that I was able to decrypt. Yay! I guess my problem was really understanding how everything worked, I am so paranoid about using commands that I dont understand, especially for something like encryption. I think I will take some notes and make them public about things I’m learning about pgp.

The weather today has been odd… over 80, then a quick downpour, back up to the 80s… ah the summertime. I wanted to go swimming but I have no idea if it’s going to rain again, bleh.

I’m tired. I had a sinus headache this morning while I was doing the weekly cleaning of the apartment. It went away but certainly wasn’t a nice way to start off a day. I’m so glad it’s friday… this week has felt so long.

This weekend, hmmm… Myk has to go in to work for a bit tomorrow to work on some things with the network that he cant do while people are working… so we havent really planned anything. I think we are just going to spend the rest of the weekend hanging out at home, maybe rent a movie or something.

Wow, what a lousy entry… *wanders off*

I had a gpg key last year. Myk made it for me and said “here is a gpg key” … at the time (Aprilish 2002) I was so preoccupied with other things that I just put it into the “I’ll learn it later” pile. Of course that’s obviously a bad idea. In that time we moved our mailservers and guess where my private key was? Yes indeed, it’s gone now, and it’s been signed by a number of people in PLUG. Luckily it expired. From what I’ve been told that means I don’t need to worry about it anymore, good. So now I decided I will get back to learning about GPG.

I basically knew nothing about it. When Myk helped me out last year with GPG commands I retained nothing, and I was uing pine (i use mutt now, and gpg stuff in there is different). So I headed over to gnupg.org waded through the how-to’s … and then when I thought I had a basic grasp on some of it, I wandered into #13thHour to pick the brains of my friends. This is the log I would break it down and chop it up to get only the relavent statements, but 1. I don’t have the time today 2. I don’t think enough people reading would be interested enough if i did for it to be worth it. Maybe I’ll add a section to my website sometime about exactly how to do gpg stuff. Anyway, it was a very informative afternoon. From what I learned from reading the gpg site, and from questions I asked in IRC I have a much clearer picture of what I’m doing. I might even be brave enough to create a key tomorrow, hehe.

What prompted this renewed interest in GPG was the suggestion of one of the Philly Chix of having a keysigning at last night’s meeting. It’s a good idea, and as one of the organizers I think it would be important for me to participate. Besides, I had interest in it anyway, this just gave me the push I needed %)

(from left) Kristin, Lyz, Samantha

It was a nice meeting, we had 3 people instead of 2, yay! Another woman who keeps saying she’ll come wasn’t able to make it because she had just returned from vacation. So I’m hopeful our next meeting will have more. We just need one more active member to be concidered a real users group by O’Reilly (http://ug.oreilly.com/), so hopefully we can gain a recruit from somewhere.. maybe my friend Nita can be convinced to actually join the group… The laptop in that picture is merely a prop %) Myk was using it while we were having the meeting, and just gave it to me when he took the picture, hehe. It was nice getting to talk for a while, I already knew kristin, so it was a pretty friendly meeting.

We got to the meeting on the train, just because we werent in the mood to fight traffic. Of course I am horrible about trains, I don’t understand them at all %) It really is confusing, online the schedules say one thing, and in reality they do different things and the lines confuse me and I always ask “this one is going to _____ right? The train guys are really nice and always helpful. I would have gone alone, but I was very scared about going into center city on a train alone. Myk said he’d come with me each time if I want him too, I guess it wasn’t *too* bad, so I might be brave enough to go alone next time ;) The ride in wasnt bad, we took the 7 pm train out of Glenside, got into the city around 7:40, and the walk to the store was about 15 minutes, so I got there just before 8, yay! Unfortunately the trip back wasnt as simple and well planned. We thought we’d have to take the R1, but really to go back to Glenside that late from that station we had to take the R2, which got there soon after we did, and we didnt take it. Ended up taking another train to the next station to catch the R5 so that we wouldnt have to wait another 30 minutes for the next R2 *arg* We got back to Glenside a little after 11:30, so we got home
around midnight. It was a long night, especially since the meeting actually ended at 9 pm, and I was exhausted.

Well I have about an hour before I need to make dinner. I’m probably going to go dig around some more gpg stuff and get some notes together so I have a quick reference to how to do everything. *wanders off*

o/` Tears For Fears – Break It Down Again o/`

Spoiled American Brats. Maybe they just get on my nerves more than they used to, or maybe I really have been running into more of them. Just this morning this one kid in IRC started complaining and saying he hated his parents because they wouldn’t co-sign his college loans. When I asked him why he felt that was his parents responsibility he went on about how they made so much money and they could sign for just a small loan, finally he got really defensive and called me an idiot. Geez, touchy. Maybe I’ve just been lucky in the chat rooms I’m in, most people I know don’t take such discussion so personally. I’m so tired of kids thinking they are somehow “entitled” to these things. It’s not the end of the world if you have to go to a community college for a few years! I’m sure his parents were aware of this and just wanted him to appreciate everything he has for once. I’ve seen far too many kids not appreciate what their parents did to get them into college, and a number of whom just fail or get bored with it, and don’t realize what they are throwing away. I guess appreciation for everything you have is something people have to learn on their own.

/end rant

In happy news, Myk brought home one of those Herman Miller Aeron chairs.

Never heard of them? Look strange to you? Well… let me tell you, these chairs are amazing. Normally, even sitting in my normal comfy computer chair, I can tell I’ve been sitting in a chair all day when I get up. This chair is so different. It’s made of this “pellicle mesh” so when you sit down it contours to your body, but still gives you support. After a whole day of sitting in it you still feel good. It really makes all other chairs I’ve tried seem bad %) Myk is borrowing this one from work because they have extras. Why don’t we just buy a couple? The cheapest we’ve found them online is about $600 each *cringe* … they are nice chairs, with a nice 12 year warrenty, but I am sure spending that much on one chair has turned many people away from them. But I love this chair!

Yesterday I almost finished catching up on emails I’ve been putting off for weeks and months. There are a few people I only contact through email, so it is nice to respond in a timely manner, but I write such long emails most of the time to these people, so finding time to do it (sometimes I put aside a couple hours to write an email) is often difficult…

Tonight we have the second Philly Chix meeting. The list has been pretty quiet all month, so I am kinda worried that people aren’t as excited about it as I am. Still, I am hopeful that we will get more women coming to this meeting than the last (where we only had two).

*wanders off*