o/` Tangerine Dream – Cottage (Legend Soundtrack) o/`

I got a spam email with the subject “NEW Portrait of Pope Available Now!!” … is this sorta like email spam redemption? I get this and it should make up for all the pr0n email I get at my yahoo! account.

Yesterday was pretty slow, finished Guns Of The South finally. It wasnt that it was a bad book, quite the opposite, it was just one that couldnt be comletely ‘digested’ without taking your time. And I guess I sorta needed a “break” from reading too, and that gave me the opportunity to spend some time doing other things between chapters. I wrote up a review last night, I should really get to putting those up… I have like 6 now that I havent posted to princessleia.com … and 3 I havent even posted here *ugh* I so lazy.

I hate allergies! I think they are worse than last year, or maybe I just remember them differently… bleh.

Man, I really have nothing to write about… havent much lately, very odd. *wanders off*

o/` Lacuna Coil – A Current Obsession o/`

Two quick ways to make a first impression to me that’ll make me dislike you:

“The USA is evil”
“Linux sucks use BSD”

Ok, there are LOTS more ways, but these are pretty key, and someone said them this morning. He came into the chat room and said “tx” after someone opped him.. now keeping with the general spirit of the room i said “texas?” (people have been *Kicked* from the room for using “aol’isms” hehe, all in fun..) And he says “no, it means thanks, not texas, texas is in the usa nad the usa is evil” … erm? I then went to defend the US, ’cause dispite it’s problems, and it’s tyrannical leaders, at least i’m not dying of starvation in the middle of the wilderness, far from it. This beautiful, overly plentiful country has treated me well, despite issues with our foreign policy %) And of course he just didnt want to talk about it.

So he is “writing his own version of BSD” uh huh. And while someone in the room was working on installing linux on one of his boxes, this guy goes “you should install BSD, linux sucks” .. erm… I am sure you have encountered this sort of person %) As much as I dislike windows, I don’t recommend it for everyone, if I see you can benefit from it I’d recommend it to you, but I dont tell everyone that their operating system sucks. And the BSD elitests bug me the most… just because they seem to be worse than most linux people, almost everyone I’ve met who uses BSD loves to say “linux sucks” and their reasons are usually pretty lame, and include arguements like “linux is not unix” and “linux allows script kiddies to use a powerful os” … both of which could lead to stupid endless debates.

Speaking of mindless debates, I am SO sick of Intel vs. AMD … why won’t people get over themselves and agree that it’s a personal preference?

Today we are going to Unos to have lunch with a friend of ours, it’s cool… we havent been in a while, and I want pizza and beer! Hehe…

I was looking at towns along the border of PA and NJ, since Myk’s new work is only about 6 miles from the border. Apparently there are some really nice towns on the PA/NJ border, if you can find them, afford them, and they are close enough to a bridge (a river separates the states there). We thought about New Hope, but even that is about 16 miles from work (a bit far, especially considering traffic) and it’s expensive to live there… I looked at Yardley, but again, expensive, even though it’s only 8 milse from work. We will really need to drive into the area to see what there is in person, it seems that only the really expensive apartment complexes can afford to advertise online (not that I blame them). So we’ll see, maybe we can luck out and stay living in PA.

Anyway, I am going to go make breakfast and take a shower *yawns and wanders off*

o/` Rammstein – Weisses Fleisch o/`

Well we have some great news, Myk is being promoted! YAY! The company he works for has been pretty crazy this year, not knowing whether they want to stick with all windows stuff, or go to all linux, or keep with the mixture that they have… and been very undecided when it comes to who they want to keep, who they want to lay off, and what facilities to keep open, it’s been some stressful time. So Myk got called last night from a higher up manager who said they had decided they want to use linux across the entire international company. Wow. Myk is in a *key* position for this because he’s one of the few ‘linux people’ in the company, so he knows about linux, and is trained to work specifically with all their equipment, yay! So instead of losing his job in September, he is being promoted, and we are going to have to move to New Jersey in the near future. Apparently they wanted to make this change to save money, the company just doesnt have the money to pay for all the microsoft licensing required to continue using Microsoft products.

I guess I am not terribly excited about the prospect of moving to New Jersey. Each time I tell someone about this, their response is “to Jersey? Ugh” Hey, well at least we don’t need to move to Texas! *knocks on wood* And hey, I’ve never lived in New Jersey before. I will miss the couple of friends I’ve made here, sure we’ll be able to see them, but not nearly as often. On a whole this news is very good tho %) I’ve moved tons in the past few years, I should be used to it by now *mutters something about just getting her PA license a couple months ago*

So I emailed a woman from the linuxchix group who I guess has tried to start a linuxchix chapter in Philadelphia. There isnt any information on the site, and so I am not sure if there have been actual meetings, but I think I can get at least one friend of mine to come with me if this woman has any plans for the group. If not I’d be cool just to get to know her anyway, chix are cool %)

I finally got around to writing that Perl script yesterday, yay! It wasnt really that difficult, most of it is stuff I had done before, and I just had to do a bit of messing around with NET::IRC ’cause I hadnt used it in a while. Anyway, I am sure anyone who knows more perl than me would laugh insanely at this script, but it works, so I will post it anyway:

Birthday Topic Script

If you can’t tell by looking at it, it queries a database, checks if any birthdays match $today and if it does, it connects to #13thHour on irc.clockbot.net and changes to topic to reflect whose birthday it is. It’s cool ’cause then I dont need to worry about finding a timer (if one exists, which i am starting to doubt) that irssi would be happy with. This script runs daily at 1 am, with a simple crontab entry %)

I guess that’s it… *wanders off*

o/` Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s Over o/`

I recieved an email a couple months ago from a woman in need of help from her abusive boyfriend (she got my email off my website, story here: Journal Entry About It (under all the mplayer stuff). Anyway, I emailed her a few days ago to see how she was doing… apparently she couldn’t get completely away, but since the cops had showed up at her house one day after one of his outbursts (he broke a window…) and from what she said, the state has the ability to press charges against him in this for domestic abuse (even though his anger was directed at an object instead of her, it was clear he was angry at her from witness statements). So I guess she’s still with him, she gave a statement, but is afaid to do much else… luckily if things turn out right he could get up to a year in prison for what he’s done to her. Currently they are still living together, she realizes she needs to leave, but wants to keep the peace until his court date. It’s sad that she is still there, but it’s apparent from the tone of her email tha she has every intention of leaving. I lived with my ex for a while after things were over, I know how difficult it is to leave.

Maybe I’ve addressed this before… but so many people ask, how can someone stay in an abusive (emotional/verbal or physical) relationship? It tends to happen to people who are either emotionally weak, or have something serious to lose if they end the relationship. In my case, and the one of this woman, we seem to be both fairly emotionally weak. It is *very* easy to bring us down to a point where we think we deserve or “cant do any better” than the abuse inflicted upon us. In my case I made a mistake early in the relationship, and my ex used that as an excuse to vent all his anger at me, call me names, and break things. I was at such a low point finally, that I’d even make excuses for him, and rationalize staying. And in all honesty, would I have stayed with him if I hadnt found out that Myk had an interest in me? (Myk and I had been friends for a few years, and I had always been attracted to him) Probably. Maybe someday I would have broken the pattern of abuse and reconciliation, but it would have taken years, I would have wasted the “best years of my life” with someone who continually hurt me.

Enough of that. It’s raining out, I like rain.

I felt better yesterday after going to bed for a little bit. I think maybe this sickness in the early morning (shh, I know what you are thinking, it’s not THAT) is linked to my allergies, it happened a few nights last year around this time too. *Shrugs* I can’t really think of any other explaination. Still, I was feeling fine when my friend Nita called and said she was in the area and asked if I wanted to do anything. She ended up coming over and we spent a bunch of time just talking… it was really nice %) Mmmm real life, hehehe.

Before Nita came over the day was going pretty crappy, even after I started feeling better. First I *completely* forgot that someone was coming by to replace our smoke detector battery and replace our airfilter n stuff, so I was still in my pajamas when he came, luckily he let me get dressed real quick before I let him in *ugh* … then I think I restarted both my irssi sessions something like 3 times accidentally, just doing stupid stupid things… It wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t feel like an idiot in front of all those “real life people” we chat with on freenode (well, I dont chat there much ’cause I’m so shy…). It’s amazing how I can have a screen + irssi session up for six months, and then multiple times in one day accidentally kill it, ugh. I didn’t really get anything acomplished yesterday, in fact… I honestly don’t know *what* I did yesterday before Nita came over, hmmm… just random useless things I guess %)

A friend of mine from #Deep13 (who dropped into #13thHour after I suggested it) got a copy of Redhat 9 from a LUG and wanted to install it on his co
mputer. Well, he has a really slow computer, 233 mhz I think he said, and just a little graphics card, 64 mb of ram. Well, linux should run on this, even graphics if he runs something like twm. Well, I gave him *very* good details as to how to install the system, gave him a bunch of pointers, and assured him that “linux is not windows” … he even spent a couple days reading up linux stuff, so I can only assume he knew all the risks and difficulties going in! Well, yesterday, a little before noon, he logged off irc to attempt the install. He hasnt been back. Eeek! I can’t help feeling a little guilty if things arent working out, but if he did things properly he should be able to just take out the linux harddrive and boot up on the untouched windows one… unless he overwrote hda1 during the install instead of hdb1. And then it’s really not my fault! I am just hoping he comes out of this whole linux adventure with his interest in linux intact %) If something bad happened he might be so frustrated that he gives up.

Speaking of keeping interest intact… he went to his first LUG on monday night. Now Linux Users Groups can have elitest members who want to be assholes and never even look in the direction of a newbie, but there are always friendly people around to help you out if you require help. I even suggested to him that he ask a few people at the lug for assistance (I also told him about install-fests, where he might get linux installed for him). So he went to the local LUG, which happened to be the Penn State LUG, since he goes to that school. Well, just with a quick glance at the website you know something is odd… Nominations? Elections? President, V. President, Treasurer, and Secretary of a LUG? Now I’m all for organization in a LUG, I understand how frustrating it is when a LUG lacks organization, but this sort of obvious attention to this sort of grade schoolesque “LUG Politics” is enough to turn anyone off the group. Now I am sure these “elections” are not all bad, many LUGs might have them… but it was obvious from my friend’s description of this LUG was it’s basically a bunch of CS majors, who decided it would be ‘leet’ to get a lug together. He said that not only did he feel ignored, but he was grossly unwelcomed by these people, and that’s really sad. I tried to convince him that not all LUGs are like this, but he seems turned off to the whole idea now %( Stupid mean linux users.

Ah linux… oh, I finally submitted a chix profile to LinuxChix.org I am now one of the chix! http://www.linuxchix.org/content/chix/ekrumbach … I guess I waited til now to submit because I wanted to get a feel for the group. And my frustration a few days ago with the irc chat was basically just me being too sensitive. Myk had to reboot the webserver (where my chat clients reside) and I just didn’t rejoin the chat server because I wasnt really ready to go back *shrugs* I rejoined yesterday and it turned out to be ok %) Besides, their lists go down quite often, and it’s nice to be in IRC to see what the status of those is.

I really want to get to work on that birthdaybot today… ugh, I’m just not in the mood. I guess I’ll go take a shower and try to get myself to wake up a bit more, that’ll help %) *wanders off*

o/` Supreme Beings Of Leisure – Truth From Fiction o/`

We had a nice evening at Myk’s mom’s yesterday, she’s such a great cook too, so we got a really yummie chicken dinner. We got to show off the new Rav4 too… it was all good, despite the snow. She also let us take home some wood (she used to use it for heat, but replaced the woodstove and doesnt need it anymore). We got home around 8 and made a fire since it was kinda cold… The snow pretty much went away ’cause it was just sleet and rain in the evening (which made for an interesting drive home). It was amusing hearing all the accidents yesterday on the traffic report, like people forgot how to drive in the snow already or something.

So did I get all three tasks on my list done yesterday? Well, 2 out of 3. Updating my resume was important, and I did that first. And struggled with the idea of putting my resume on my website. Who would actually read it there? Is it worth all these visitors to my webpage having my address and phone number, just for the slim chance that someone worth my time would look at it and offer me a job? I doubt it. We did decide on a name for our consulting business… well, most of it… it’ll have the clockbot theme, so “clockbot web consulting” or something like that *shrugs* we already have clockbot.net … and clockbot is already associated with the two of us.

I got a couple sections created on my website:

Ornithophobia – The Phobia Of Birds

What I Did For Locks Of Love

They are just little “essay” sites *shrugs* but both of them I had been meaning to do for a while, and it made me feel acomplished. As for the birthday net::irc bot… didnt even touch it. I just ran out of time… and for once #13thHour was fairly busy yesterday, so I was sucked in by that a bit more often than I should have been. Still, it was a generally productive day for a Monday.

I slept terribly last night. Finally woke up around 3:30 feeling really sick to my stomach, tried to convince myself I was fine, but I was sweating and couldnt fall back to sleep… so I had to get up, yuck. I still feel crappy this morning, had a piece of toast for breakfast, what a mistake that was… I guess I’m just going to drink water til my stomach calms down, I hate this.

On that note, I’m going back to bed *crawls under the warm covers on her bed*

o/` Miranda Sex Garden – Are You The One? o/`

I dunno, I think it might be too warm for snow, it’ll probably just turn into a mess of freezing rain *holds out some hope*

Well if the weather doesn’t get too horrible, we are going to Myk’s mother’s tonight… we havent seen her in a while, and it’s nice to drop by sometimes, and she hasn’t seen my haircut. *Sigh* as much as Myk denies it, I can’t help she doesnt particularly like me, or at least resents the fact that I don’t work… I dunno, maybe Myk is right and she just wants to see him happy, no matter who he is with. Myk *did* make sure to emphasize to her that I had a consulting job, so I am starting to “pull my weight” of sorts around here… and I think she was pleased when she heard I had actually had my hair cut, geez, how bad did my long stringy hair really look? Heehee… I guess I do look significantly better now, not so lazy anyway. But it should be a nice evening.

I watched a show about phobias last night, specifically two people who had snake phobias, and from their reactions, I believe that my dislike and fear of birds has definately morphed into phobia. I don’t think I’ve ever liked birds, I cant really say when my dislike turned into fear, or when it turned into a real phobia… My sister had zebra finches when I was younger, I never much liked them, and I hid under my blankets on my bed screaming whenever one would get out. Now I cringe when I hear geese honking as they fly by. Geese, chickens, turkeys, and crows especially bother me for some reason… but I like ducks and penguins, figure that out! I don’t understand it myself. When I told Myk that my fear of birds was definately a phobia he laughed and said “no kidding!” … erm, I guess my fear was more pronounced than I cared to accept %) Anyway, I watched these snake phobics, and it’s funny how they act, and try to rationalize their fears (of course with snakes it’s easier to agree, they really can kill you)… but I would have thought that some of their reasons for the fear were silly, if I didnt understand the phobia so well myself. Myk will try to talk to me about birds, and when I get to a point where he makes a good point about how harmless they are, i’ll make up some foolish excuse like “they have beak fangs!” And it’s absolutely silly, but I just cant *deal* with birds! And of course all my friends in real life know about this fear of mine, and LOVE to joke about it when we go out places… lucky for them I don’t mind %D hehe. Man, I hate birds. I guess I might want to get over my fear someday, it’s hard to take a relaxing walk when a bush full of little birds sets my heart racing and my palms sweating…

Ah, so I captured another person into liking (or at least listening to) Miranda Sex Garden! After reading the MSG part of my site, lazzurs asked for a few mp3s. This isnt the first time I’ve exposed people to the band, and it makes me really happy that I made that fandom section of my site for them… it’s probably the section I get the most email about %)

I need to think of a name for our (Myk and I) consulting business, I am horrible with these things… Myk recommended “Bevilacqua Consulting” but I’m not a bevilacqua! Heehee, I’m still a Krumbach… maybe something like Bevilacqua and Krumbach Consulting, maybe something that doesnt have to do with our names at all *shrugs* I need to find that fine line between creatively stylish and cheesy… and try not to cross it.

One of the psiblade servers went down this weekend… well, the services went down too (like they do almost daily, ugh), and CA2 has been gone for a while, but CA1 was taken down by the admin because one of his opers decided to be a lamer… see, on deep13.org, someone attempted to hack the oper’s account, and in response, the oper decided to track this person down, and resorted to some lame ascii text floods or something to piss this kid off. Well, in fear that this kid would take more anger after coming after the oper and attack the ircserver, the admin took it down for a couple days. Ugh.
Of course this made irc.clockbot.net much busier than usual. It was really stupid. SO last night, the admin for irc.mst3k.org decided that it was ok to put the server back up, and luckily he decided to remove the oper status from the reckless person who caused this whole thing %) Which isnt a bad thing, now we have 3 servers (TX, PA, and CA1) and 4 ircops… which is more than enough (one for TX, one for CA1, and co-admins Time and I for PA). Yep. IRC servers are a big pain, especially this one.

I’m sick of this area. I have lived in various parts of Maine, New York, and now Pennsylvania, and I have to say, I don’t like it here in Pennsylvania. I’m not sure I liked New York either. I guess I was really spoiled by how small, yet civilized, Maine was… and I miss that. Here I don’t even know my neighbors! And that’s sad… there is just a severe absense of ‘cool’ people around here, or maybe we just don’t know where to look. Over the past year a number of our friends have moved out of the state, and seem much happier with their new friends *sigh* Well Myk is looking for jobs outside of the state, and even though we are going through some rough financial time, he is discouraging me from getting a job because we are planning on moving before the end of the year. Ugh %)

Hello lyz, welcome to NetHack! You are a chaotic female human Rogue.

Anyone else ever play this game? It’s one of those games that I feel I should have somehow known about and didnt, hmm. I’ve been messing around with it for a little bit after a friend said I should install it. Bah! I don’t have the time to get addicted to an old text game… Damn that N-Tropy! Hehee.

To avoid playing with NetHack all day, I am writing up a small list of things I need to acomplish today, and will be sad if I dont… I should really do this every day, it would help a lot I think:

1. Update resume (to reflect sea-winds realty job)
2. Get at least 2 sections of my site done that I keep saying I’ll do and havent
3. Start work on the the perl net::irc module again, so I can make my birthdaybot (comes into #13thHour and changes topic for birthdays, or somehow logs on and nudges R2D2 into doing it). Yeah, this is the only way I found to do this, since I’ll need to use a crontab so it’ll query the database daily, and there are no ‘timers’ in irssi… (and sleep crashes irssi)

Yep, I have a lot to do… Wow… the snow has started, and it really is snow, and it’s actually sticking to the ground! %D! I love it. *wanders off*

o/` Portishead – Wandering Star o/`

Stupid daylight savings time, I want my hour back!

We didnt end up going to the mountains yesterday, just had too much ‘stuff’ we really needed to do here (egads, taxes are due in 10 days!). So we ordered pizza and got a movie. We have been getting pizza at this ‘ok’ pizza place next to the video store, and last night decided to get a white pizza with spinach (my fave) and were pleasantly surprised at how really really good it was. Mmmm pizza!

So we rented AI last night. I saw it in the theater when it first came out, and I *loved* it… despite so many people I know saying it was awful. I guess AI flopped so bad was because: 1. the ad campaign sucked 2. people went to see this “Steven Spielberg” movie and ended up seeing a movie very reminicent of our dear Stanley Kubrick. The Stanley Kubrick people, who knew that this was “his movie” of sorts, were probably turned off by Spielberg’s touch. I dunno, it brought up some really interesting ideas, and was very emotional… picked out some of the human flaws, and the Flesh Fair was just awsome! Exactly how people would be, the Flesh Fair acts like it’s got some moral ground to stand on, but in reality it’s just people who want to see carnage and destruction. I could go on and on about parts I loved in that movie… does anyone agree with me? By looking at the reviews on imdb.com it seems that people either loved it or hated it *shrugs* … Teddy rocked.

So I was thinking “hey i need to do an update on my site” (the updates are listed on the main page) … and that’s when I had remembered (how could I forget?) that I wrote a php admin thing to handle updates, that’s so cool, I’m so glad I wrote that %) No more repeditive html code for *that* part of the page, sometimes easy is good.

Looks like we are getting snow (or a ‘wintery mix’) tomorrow! YAY!

I really need to get to work on some of these “on the shelf” projects. I feel really bad that I talk about making all these sections of my site and I never ending up doing half of them…

I am going to make some coffee, as it’s noon already *grins* maybe I’ll get something done today (like I ever get anything done on weekends…) *wanders off*

o/` Frank Sinatra – Fly Me To The Moon o/`

“Leia, why do you always date geeks?”

I can’t believe I was asked this! Where else am I going to find an intelligent, nice guy, but in the vastly untapped resource of male geeks?

We might go up to the mountains (the Poconos, about an hour and a half away) today to see Myk’s dad and an aunt and uncle (met his dad once, never met any other of his dad’s side of the family). Myk’s family owns a cabin in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate NY (I have never been to it).. and they want to work out who has the cabin during what times in the summer. *Shrugs* Whether we go or not really depends on if we feel like it, and when we finally “wake up” for the day ;)

So did I ever get around to working with some Perl yesterday? Yeah a little… wrote a little irssi script for a room I chat in on freenode. See a friend of mine there is obsessed with me visiting him in Belgium, so I kept telling him I was “saving my pennies” to go… so I wrote a script so that he can check “how many pennies I have saved” heehee %) Ah I love making foolish scripts! And it was a good break from the professional webpage stuff I’ve been messing with all week %)

I don’t eat enough when I consume a lot of caffeine. Caffeine tends to be an appetite surpressor (in me anyway) and I am hardly ever hungry anyway… So since I only eat when I’m hungry (and even then only til I lose interest in the food) I don’t tend to eat much when I have a lot of cafeine. I should really find a happy medium between my caffeine and food consumption, this isn’t healthy. Maybe if I ate out more I’d eat more! I love eating out… I love food when I’m not eating it at home as a need %)

So I havent heard from my mother yet, I got an email back from my Aunt Elaine right after I emailed her with the results of the tests, and then she called me %) Should I be surprised? I guess not, and my mother wonders why I am closer to Elaine! And someone tried to call last night while I was taking a nap, it might have been my mother… i guess she’s not trained enough to know that contacting me through email is the best method, even if its and email to arrange when to call. I hate phones so much.

I guess I’m going to go off and figure out what we’re doing today *wanders*

o/` BOA – Little Miss o/`

I think I need to work on my self esteem. My social paranoia makes people think I’m really qwirky…

This morning I met with the guy that I’m making the webpage through (he’s sorta a middleman, since he lives in the area). He liked the site, I showed him how everything worked, explained it all… it’s actually a lot of very simple things, but it’s *A LOT* of very simple things, so I have no doubt I’ll be getting calls from him in the next few days asking how things work %) Hopefully he’ll be happy with it and not need *too* many changes to be made.

I think I will play with Perl a little this afternoon, poor Perl has been neglected for too long! Speaking of which, that birthday script I wrote is still doing really good, I should consider packaging that up as a project for people to be able to download, hmm. Of course I still have about 20 half finished projects on the shelf that I should get to before talking about starting another %D

Yesterday turned out to be a fairly uneventful afternoon and evening, same old… ate dinner, read for a while *shrugs* I did speak with my aunt tho, and she told me that she had cryotherapy done to get rid of irregular cells, more than once, ugh! And here I was hoping I’d be lucky and only have to go through this once ;) Anyway, she has a lot of scar tissue, and had to have her son via c-section. Bleh! Anyway, I made the appointment today, I’ll have the procedure done on May 7th.

Anyway, I am going to go work on some stuff. I’m so glad it’s friday. *wanders off*