o/` God Ate My Homework – Insomniac’s Nightmare o/`

Microsoft To Spammers: We’re Coming After You

This scares me. Not because I’m a spammer of course, but because of actions that AOL has already taken in the spam arena, and I can see that going much much further. As I have complained about before, AOL and Roadrunner (both owned by AOL Time Warner) now block my ip address for mail because it has been identified as a mailserver on the comcast network. Why would they block a legitimate mailserver running by someone? It’s a part of their spam prevention program. They assumed that anyone sending mail from a comcast cable connection was a spammer. Now we need to route all our mail through our colo box so we can send to AOL and Roadrunner people, which is a pain, and we are very lucky to have that box as a resource.

I hate spam too, but can you imagine the implications if Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! get together and combat spam like this? How far would they go? It’s quite possible that they’d compile a list of “trusted” mail providers and block out all others, where does that leave the person like me who helps small companies run little mailservers? How far will these companies get before people begin to complain? AOL has begun with little to no clamor from their users…

“MSN 12: Never have an email bounce again with our Trusted and Secure Mail System(tm)”

Maybe I’m paranoid.

Yesterday we cleaned out the bill drawer and got everything together to work out a budget for the next few months. Fun stuff. We want to start saving so we can get a house someday, and creating a budget and actually sticking to it is probably the best way to achieve this goal. I feel so old %)

I was… very awake yesterday. I’m not sure how else to describe my mood. We didn’t really leave the apartment, besides Myk’s trip up to Wawa to get some tortilla chips and phish food ice cream at 11:30 pm, hehe. Maybe it was the caffeine. I want to blame the caffeine because the “awake” feeling is a bit manic… and tends to come before a period of depression. Like a natural way of fighting it off.

We had a fire in the fireplace last night, it was nice. We used it to get rid of all the old paper we had from cleaning out our bills drawer, fun stuff! I got to burn all my Nice N Easy pay stubs, yay! And that fire was SOOO hot! I had to sit about 4 feet away from it, they lean forward to toss in paper so I wouldn’t be all toasted, hehe. It was a good way to dispose of things with our social security number anyway, short of buying a paper shredder. Unfortunately, that will probably be the last fire in the fireplace for the season *sigh* I miss winter already.

I keep forgetting to post this link:

Steve’s “Better Than Leia’s” LAN Party

This was made by a guy from #deep13. Yeas (also from #deep13) came to my LAN party last weekend, and we had been anticipating it and talking about it for days. Steve, living in Ohio, wasn’t able to come, and started acting all jokeningly jealous. So he took pictures and put them on this website, telling all about his “LAN Party” … it’s really funny!

And I discovered +S this morning. It’s a channel mode for some ircds, including UnrealIRCd (which xelium runs on), which strips color from all colorful messages sent to the channel! It’s better than +c because it doesn’t actually block the message (with +c set it will give you an error and tell you that you cant send colors). I was mostly concerned about +c because I don’t want to piss people off when they send colors to the channel and dont understand why they are now allowed. +S is good… and best of all, the person using the color doesnt even notice that other people can’t see it, since they can still see it fine. While on this “kill all colors” adventure, I also took the time to remove all colors from R2D2’s scripts. NO MORE EVI
L IRC COLORS! %)

Now I am going to go read or something. *wanders off*

o/` Fisher – Believe In Something o/`

A friend of ours sent an mp3 of some guy comparing the Bush regime to the world of 1984. While it was amusing, I am not quite at a point where I want to believe that. Maybe I’m just being unreasonably optimistic. Well they mentioned the “Ministry of Truth” (which, if you know the book, concerns itself with creating lies) and that made me remember something.

Airplane Collided With The Pentagon?

– Basically it talks about how no plane ever hit the Pentagon.

I believe I have posted this link before, and with it a disclaimer about how I don’t buy into conpiracy theories. But uuhh… this keeps getting to me! Why don’t we ever hear about this from official sources anymore? It’s never about the Pentagon, it’s always the WTC buildings that they talk about. At first I tried to write this off to it being a military building and so not surprisingly targeted, but they knew the WTC were targeted too! They had even been attacked before… Don’t you think if they were telling us the truth that they would also use flowerly language to talk about “The attack on our defense headquaters?” And here’s another impressive site about this whole coverup:

Where Is The Plane, Flight 77?

Now I don’t want to go as far as to say we flew one of our own, smaller jets, into the pentagon to intentionally make the tragedy worse, I mean killing our own government people? Maybe someone got into the pentagon with a bomb? Maybe somehow a van pulled up next to the building and set off a small bomb? These would be reasons for concern, understandable that the government wouldn’t want us to know about them, people would be very uncomfortable to know that someone looking to do damage had compromised security at the top defense faucility of our country. But to tell such a big obvious lie about a BOEING hitting the pentagon, and to even create false footage to back up their claims? That’s kinda scary.

I guess I shouldn’t start being paranoid that the US Government is out to take total control, I’m sure they lied to us for a good reason, I don’t think Bush is like Big Brother. But I do believe it’s important for more people to be aware that we are being lied to. Even I had never really knew about this until a crazy conspiracy theorist friend mentioned it… even then I sorta wrote it off because he’s always coming up with crazy stuff like this, but this time it seems to be true.

Next! %)

So I had another person come into #13thHour and make a scene about not being able to use his colorful mirc scripts.

Snippit from after he left #13thHour and was talking to me in another channel:

-$MircColorLover- you dont allow scripts in that room?
-pleia2- not in #13thHour, we never have allowed them
-$MircColorLover- thats the most fucking retarded thing ive ever heard
-pleia2- http://www.princessleia.com/13th/rules.html
-$MircColorLover- fuck the rules
-pleia2- colorful scripts are annoying
* $MircColorLover shakes his head
-pleia2- try going to a place like irc.freenode.net … they kick you for such things there
-$MircColorLover- then why have a chat room?
-pleia2- to chat
-$MircColorLover- well thats why i dont go there
-pleia2- we dont want to be annoyed by scripts, it’s our channel %)

…what is wrong with these kinds of people? Granted, they “grew up” on irc.scifi.com where colorful scripts are a big thing, but they get angry and unreasonable when we ask them to shut them off! They act like banning scripts is the most horrible sin we could ever commit! These people are so selfish! It’s horribly annoying to have someone posting colorful scripts of the mp3s they are playing in channel… for those of you not lucky enough to know what one of these scripts looks like, this is what this guy did in #13thHour last night:

Mp3 [[ !Kruge Me
tallica – St. Anger (The Real Thing!!!).mp3]] length [[ 7:33 ]] size [[ 7.24MB ]] bitrate [[ 128 ]] kHz [[ 44 ]] Quality [[ Joint Stereo ]]

Now, can you imagine having that sort of thing repeat in the channel everytime someone plays an mp3? Come on… who is the unreasonable one here? People make me so crazy…

I don’t think we’re doing anything this weekend. I say that too often. This time it’s really good because we have a busy couple of weeks coming up. It’s funny, normally I would be excited about the prospects of so much activity, but I just feel like I want to stay home now! I am so impossible to please.

I spilled soda in my bedroom last night. It was really dumb because I intentionally have these two cat stuffed animals set up as “Water Guardians” because I bring a glass of water to bed every night and I don’t want to knock it over. Well these stuffed animals work great, but for some reason yesterday evening I decided not to put my soda there, and accidentally knocked it over, ugh! Spent like a half hour scrubbing the floor to get it out so we don’t get ants. And worst of all it got my copy of Xenocide soaked! Makes me so sad %( I can still read it luckily, but it’s disappointing to have ruined it since it was in such good condition.

Yep, I’m going to go now, probably read or something. *wanders off*

o/` Trent Reznor – Videodrones: Questions – Lost Highway Soundtrack o/`

I love Wallace and Gromit. This is part of a screenshot from the new short at AtomFilms.com. It requires Microsoft’s plugin for the media *sigh* so you will need to be in windows to see it. Only 3 more shorts to go! They are releasing one each week. This one is one of my favorites %)

My father called around 9:30 last night. I never expect him to call this late, actually thought something was wrong at first. It was just my father being strange.

-dad- so you’re coming up next weekend
-pleia2- yep.
-dad- i’m really looking forward to it
-pleia2- mhmm.
-dad- we have a lot to talk about when you are here
-pleia2- yeah.
-dad- i’m glad you can come up
-pleia2- me too.

Most of the call went this way. I could barely hear him, and he wasnt really saying anything. I don’t know why he called. He did mention that he was concerned about my mother thinking my trip was just to see her. The hell? My mother lives in a real world where she has to work, she can’t take more than one day off to see me. Yet he still thinks that somehow in all her evilness she is going to turn this around and get upset because I don’t spend more time with her. TWO FULL DAYS THERE. That’s it. One I will spend with my dad, one I will spend with my mom.

This is just a perfect example of my mother acting more mature than my father. It doesn’t happen often, if you go by education my father is smarter, and sure, my mother and I have had our differences. But my mother has always ALWAYS insisted that no matter what happened in the family that she understood that my father would always be my father and she’d never try to stand in the way of us being close. Well now my father seems to be doing that. It’s one thing to complain about my mother to me, but to lay his suspicious paranoia on me? Come on, I know my mother. When he says that sort of thing it just pisses me off.

I guess I have other reasons not to be very excited about this trip. I don’t like flying. It’s not that I don’t feel safe, I realize that it’s safer than driving. I am not afraid I’m going to be hijacked, or something crazy like that %P I just dont like the feeling of leaving the ground so far behind. I am very fond of the ground. And I havent flown in years, not since my trip to florida in 8th grade… over 8 years ago! And I’ll be alone…

Tonight we’re having indian food and the last Duvel in the refridgerator w00t! And right now I’m going to go get some work done… or chat *wanders off*

o/` Nine Inch Nails – Reptile o/`

I managed to finish the #13thHour news section today!

#13thHour News

It’s still in the testing stages, so it might have some problems… but all #13thHour people are welcome to make posts and comments, it will be helpful to me, especially if you find a problem. I also welcome suggestions. Speaking of the #13thHour section, I know a few people I’ve met on journals have come to the channel recently. Do any of you want your user profiles in the members sections? Just email me if you want to be up there and I’ll send you the survey.

It really is nice outside today! I cant believe we had a thunderstorm again yesterday afternoon, ugh. Of course on nice spring days my cable internet often decides to crap out. Why? It is always fine during rain storms, snow storms, ice storms! But one a beautiful, sunny day my connection slows so much that I can’t even stay connected to IRC. Amazing. Maybe it’s trying to tell me to get outside more on nice days %P

And the services are back up on irc.clockbot.net YAY! Finally the service admins got off their asses. Of course these are different services than the last, and they confused me at first… I am so used to normal access lists!

Now I need to go see what I want for dinner. *wanders off*

o/` Garbage – #1 Crush o/`

Yeah, I ripped the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack today, purely nostalgia. I wanted to remember my teenage angsty years. This cd to ogg project takes a long time. I want to do it all from the command line so I’m using abcde, and it’s slow %) I havent been making oggs every day either, so that adds to the time it takes to do them all, hehe.

Hmm, even though Tony A’s pizza tastes nasty cold at least it heats up well. This “Tony’s Pizza Palace” pizza still tastes like cardboard and plastic when reheated. Yuck.

I’m nearly finished with the php nukeish section on the #13thHour page. It’s still not online, but I’m hopeful that I’ll finish it today and be able to start moving it over to be used yay! Just working on a few design things right now.

Played Diablo 2 for a bit yesterday. I never did get it working with wine so I had to boot into windows. It’s not so bad really, sure rebooting is a pain, but what do I lose? Uptime? It’s just uptime, no one cares, and it’s just a silly reason to comprimise my computer usage ;) My assassin is level 14, w00t.

Man, this pizza is really bad *throws it out*

It’s sorta nice out today, at least it’s not raining again. I like rain, but when it drizzles for weeks it starts to get in my nerves.

For those of you following the whole SCO owning unix issue, there was an interesting development today. Novell issued a press release (Here is the press release) saying that when they sole Unix to SCO they did not release all intellectual property rights too them, oops. SCO is aware of this, and have been trying buy those rights from Novell for months now, yet they still went forward with their legal actions against IBM. SCO is so fucked %D Now they are hated throughout their open source community, and their actions have cost in both money and jobs in tech, not to mention lying to their stockholders and customers. What a mess! They deserve it.

Well the gaming irc network that we linked with (ion.xelium.net) is back up now, now called ice.xelium.net. This is a great relief to us. We ended up getting a highest user count of 148 on irc.clockbot.net (clockbot.xelium.net), wow! And clockbot proved itself over these past couple weeks to be the most stable of all the services, I’m very proud of it. On the other hand, we really weren’t expecting this sort of load on our server, and were a bit upset that the other network admin took advantage of us by taking his time to fix his network. New services should be up soon, everyone will have to reregister everything.

Now I’m hopefully going to finish the #13thHour news section… *wanders off*

o/` Dido – Don’t Think Of Me o/`

First of all:

Lan Party Pictures

The LAN party on sunday rocked! Sometimes I am very disappointed by lan parties, but this was not one of those times… Things went nicely, it was a good balance of friends hanging out and gameplay. We had enough food, we had enough beer, and we still have a whole refrigerator full of soda. We even had a fire in the fireplace since it was so cool and rainy outside. We played UT, UT2K3, Total Annihilation, and Grant of course showed off some of the other games on his computer. I think one of the highlights of the whole party was getting to meet our online friend Yeas, who I have known from #Deep13 for quite some time. I guess we started drinking around 1 pm when Kam and Brian arrived, and it lasted all day, just sipping on beer and soda, I got a little tipsy at one point, but never drunk. We even had fruity drinks later in the night but they obviously didn’t contain enough alcohol %) Our friends mct and Nita came later in the night (around 10 pm) without their computers, and that sorta led us to wind down the lan part of the party. So we stayed up til around 4 am, people slowly leaving as the morning came closer, until MJ, mct and Nita finally decided to call it a night. When they left Myk, Yeas and I went into the bedroom (the futon was set up as a couch) and we watched some MST3K, w00t! Yeas had brought a whole bag for of MST DVDs %) Of course I fell asleep (I had been up since 7:30 am the previous morning) and soon after that they decided to go to bed, we put Yeas on the couch. The next morning I woke up around 10, what can I say? I sleep badly… I was exhausted! I took a shower while Myk and Yeas were still sleeping, and ended up playing Diablo 2 for a while in the computer room here. Finally around 1 pm Yeas woke up, and I took that opportunity to show him some neat linux things… you know, all the pretty things you show to someone you are trying to convert %D Then close to 2 pm Myk wandered out of bed. I made them breakfast, then Yeas went home *sniff*

Myk and I spent a couple hours yesterday afternoon cleaning up the apartment. It really didn’t bother me too much, I don’t like cleaning, but I have decided that I like being a host. We also had to move all the furniture back to where it was before. By then end of all this I was very VERY tired. We then hopped into the Rav4 and drove to Myk’s mother’s to return the chairs and table we had borrowed, more moving! Hehe. While driving home we decided to stop at Blockbuster and pick up a couple movies, we also planned to get pizza but Tony A’s (the pizzeria right next to blockbuster where we usually get pizza) was closed. We went home and went on yahoo to look for more pizza places in the area. Finally decided on “Tony’s Pizza Palace.”

Never buy from a place called “Tony’s Pizza Palace.” First I called them.

-pleia2- Hi, do you deliver?
-girl- no
-pleia2- ok, Myk do you
*click*
-pleia2- want to go pick up the… THE HELL, she just hung up on me! Bitch!

Owning a pizzeria is an art, which begins with the phone call. I should have known that the girl hanging up on me was a bad omen. But it was the closest and very easy to find, so we decided to get pizza there anyway. This time Myk called. Ordered a cheese pizza and 16 wings since they only sold them by the 8s. Who sells 8 wings? It should be a dozen! Crazy people. When Myk got home from picking it up I opened the wings bag and dumped them out. They were burned. “It’s ok, everything tastes good with blue cheese on it,” I said. They were ok, but not hot (as in spicy, but come to think of it they were only sorta warm temperature wise) at all, arent buffalo wings supposed to be hot? *sigh* The pizza was ok while it was hot, but as soon as it cooled down it was awful. That’s another part of the pizza art! Making sure pizza is good when it’s warm AND cold. The the only pizzeria around here that has acomplished this feat is Joseph’s, and they are over 30 minu
tes away! I am so tired of all this bad pizza.

While we ate the lousy pizza and wings we started to watch “Catch Me If You Can.” I liked it. Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t bother me NEARLY as much as he usually does. Of course I like Tom Hanks (unless it’s a sappy romance!) and Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen just totally rock in my book. After we watched it we put in “25th Hour.” Now I wasn’t sure what to expect, Edward Norton is awsome, and really the only reason we rented the movie. It was amusing to see Anna Paquin in the movie, I like her, even if it took me forever to realize what I knew her from (Rogue in X-Men). The movie had it’s moments, but it was horribly obvious that it was a Spike Lee Joint. I guess I will have to not recommend this movie. Some of the scenes dragged on for too long, parts of it were just needlessly boring. I guess I was very tired while watching it too, it had beed a long weekend, my attention span wasn’t what it should have been.

Right after the movie I went to sleep. It was a little after midnight, and I was exhausted. I actually slept well last night too! What a weekend %)

Now I am going to go work on some things *wanders off*

o/` Peter Murphy – Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem o/`

Well I havent written up book reviews in a while… so here goes:

The Fellowship Of The Ring, By J. R. R. Tolkien, 527 pages

I am writing this review upon finishing this book for the 3rd or 4th time, it’s that good… This is the first book of Tolkien’s famous Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The story continues from that of The Hobbit, in the sometimes magical world of Middle Earth. The story follows Bilbo Baggins’ nephew Frodo Baggins, on his adventure to take care of the One Ring Of Power. Frodo and his hobbit friends join up with a case of traveling companions (the fellowship) that includes an elf, a dwarf, and even a couple Men through a perilous journey that continually tests their strength. Few of the characters in this story are forgettable, and while this is a lot more “grown up” than The Hobbit (story-wise and narrative) Tolkien preserves his ability to tell a good story with captivating detail. Maybe you’ve seen the movie, but it doesnt quite do justice to this amazing tale! And they omitted a few wonderful characters… a must read!

The Case Of The Toxic Spell Dump, By Harry Turtledove, 367 pages

In the world described by this book, magic, faith, fantasy and legendary powers are real. The book centers around an EPA (Environmental Perfection Agency.. this is a lot of this sort of thing in the book) investigation into a toxic spell dump that is feared to be leaking. Now, the author works to show you a world parallel to our own, they have televisions, telephones, vehicles… but they were all created and maintained through some sort of magic. The cities are often similar, like the capital is D.St.C (district of saint Columbus). But if you think about the nature of this book too long, you realize that a world where magic existed would be nothing like our own… I think this major idea took away a lot of my ability to enjoy the book, as I tend to think a lot about books I read (unless it’s obvious humor, eg Terry Pratchett). The story was good, it kept me interested, and the parallels between our worlds really were amusing at times (at some points it got annoying…). Maybe I should stick with Turtledove’s alternative HISTORY books from now on…

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, By Stephen King, 224 pages

Despite my Maine background and interest in paranormal and scary books, I had not read a Stephen King book in a long time before this one. I was pleasantly surprised at how I enjoyed this book, as short as it was. It tells of a girl (a big fan of baseball player Tom Gordon, poetic liberty has been taken with this character in the book..) who is lost in the woods of western Maine. Even after search parties for her give up, this book tells of her determination, maturity, and skill that allows her to survive alone in the wilderness. It also explores the thoughts she has, imaginary “people” she conjures to hold onto hope and reality. As with most of King’s books, there is also a frightening force or being that feeds this girl’s fear. A good book.

The Two Towers, By J. R. R. Tolkien, 447 pages

As with “Fellowship” I have read this book several times. It continues the story of the groups of characters that are split up as the fellowship breaks at the end of “Fellowship.” It explores a bit more of the history and present standings of some of the nations in Middle Earth, where they stand, who their allies are, and what they will do to group together and fight the dark lord Sauron. There is a great battle against the orcs, the creatures called “Ents” are introduced and launch an attack of their own against Saruman, and surprisingly an old character returns! This is my favorite book out of the three, so much happens. When the book comes to catching up with Frodo he and Sam are helped by an unlikely creature, and we learn much more about Sam through this cooperative effort. Again, even if you have seen the movie, this book is a must read.

Now someday I might even
get around to post these to my book review sections %)

LAN party today! I’m so excited! We picked up the chairs from Myk’s mother’s house on friday. Spent last night rearranging some furniture so we would have space for all the computers. Then we cleaned up the corn on the cob, made up cold cut platters, sliced up lettuce and tomato. All sorts of fun stuff, when we have lan parties we dont mess around! This is going to be so fun! I booted into windows earlier so I could get all the updates. It’s funny how I only go into windows for games, so it seems like I only do updates there when preparing for a lan party.

Early yesterday was not so fun however. A couple friends said that they have run diablo 2 in wine before, and that it was possible. Hey cool! I installed wine (apt-get install wine) and it didnt work. I got frustrated, and by this time all excited about the possibility of playing d2 in linux, so when a friend offered to send me winex I said “Sure!” Well that probably wasn’t too wise, it was a warez package, and I should have known better than to trust this guy and his warez packages. Or at least I should have asked where he got it before installing it! To make matters worse when I went to install it I did dpkg -i win-TAB- (tab-completion) then hit enter. That was stupid. I had my win4lin installation deb in that directory as well, guess what? I broke win4lin! I didn’t really realize it at the time, so I noticed my mistake, said “ugh” then proceeded to install the winex package. Well, once I discovered I had broken win4lin beyond repair (it’s kinda touchy, if you rerun the installer it’s very very very bad!!!) I was upset. My exact words?

14:05:43 -@PrincessLeia2- fuck fuck fuck … i am such a retard
14:06:04 -@Kalends- What’s wrong?
14:06:28 -@PrincessLeia2- i just went to install something, and installed the wrong thing, and now i broke things, UGH %(!!!
14:06:37 -@Kalends- Damn
14:07:08 -@PrincessLeia2- it was just fucking stupid too… i just wasnt paying attention to what i was doing

I don’t swear often, when I do I mean it. I googled a bit, searched the win4lin mailing list, nothing was helping, it was beyond repair. I went back to bed. Myk woke up and I told him what I did, and said that he didn’t need to worry about it since it was my own dumb fault, and I didn’t really need win4lin anyway. Well he was more upset about the warez winex package, understandably so. It was he who found out that it was a package that should not have been trusted. Bleh. Of course I felt like a total dumbass now, and I was a bit humiliated. It was just a bad day, and I was so upset, so very very upset. But hey, everyone does dumb things sometimes right? %) Luckily Myk had the win4lin binaries on his system and he was able to repair mine. He’s so smarty %)

Anyway, I need to take a shower and do a few more things this morning before noon (when we said the party will start, people never really show up til 2-3, hehe). The last time I got really drunk was months ago… even at the new years lan party I wasnt *completely* gone (I could still stand with no trouble, hee), so I plan on getting fairly trashed tonight %)! W00T!!! *wanders off*

o/` Stabbing Westward – Shame o/`

I guess this just wasnt meant to be my week to get much acomplished.

After writing that entry yesterday I went and took a shower. I got out of the shower, walked into my bedroom and saw a BIG spider. ACK! Ok.. I’m not as afraid of spiders as many people, usually I’ll be able to bring them outside and let them go, as long as they dont run too fast or try to jump on me. I left the spider alone and walked into my closet. Another one! AAH!! I was a little freaked out at this point. We spend quite a bit to live here, and keep the place very clean, and I can’t seem to figure out where they come from. Our working theory is that since the neighbors upstairs just moved, and new people moved in, all the spiders in the building have been disturbed and started coming down. Of course after being scared by two huge spiders I don’t think very clearly. I got dressed, brought both the spiders outside, and proceeded to move all the furnature in my bedroom and clean. I went over every INCH of that room with the vacuum, got all the tiny cobwebs out of corners, all dust out from behind the tv and out from under the bed, moved all my stuffed animals, washed my sheets and comforter. Yep, I was freaking out. About halfway through I realized how insane the whole adventure was %) But continued because I couldnt really do anything else since I already had everything moved. Besides, it’s not a bad time to do such a thing… the lan party is this weekend, and unlike last year, our bedroom will also be occupied by gamers!

Turns out we’re going to have at least a dozen people here (including ourselves), which is a lot for a one bedroom + small den apartment! Looks like we’re going to need to move the furnature in the livingroom, I don’t know where we are putting everything %) Our bed is a futon, so that can be set up as a couch for people to use the tv for movies and console games (Yeas is bringing MST3K movies, I have a ps2, n-tropy is bringing his xbox, woo!). One person is bringing a card table, and we’re going to Myk’s mother’s to pick up some folding chairs. It should be really fun %)

Last night we went out to the beer store. Picked up a case of Duvel.. 12 750ml bottles, woo! Plus we picked up some Lindenmens Peche (Peach Lambic!)… mmm!!! I’m so excited! Then we went to the grocery store, got tons of rolls for sandwiches, about 4 pounds of turkey and chicken cold cuts, 2 pounds of cheese slices! Pretzels, soda, eggs (for the morning)… and of course Fruity Drink Mix! Vodka + Strawberry Margarita Mix + Ice == yum and drunk! We are probably going to go get a small bottle of Vodka tomorrow %) Hmm… oh we still need to get corn on the cob too *writes that down* And games… I guess a couple people are bringing their ut2k3 disks so people can install it if they dont have it. I don’t know how much game playing I’m going to be doing, I tend to do more socializing (and drinking!) and less game playing at LAN parties that I host… which will be ok, since I know a couple people won’t be able to bring their computers… plus mine is fairly fast and people might want to use it instead of theirs if it’s just sitting here.

Yay LAN parties %)

And more good news! I have finalized a meeting location for the first Philly Chix meeting! It’s at a bookshop in philly called “The Last Word” .. I called the owner this morning and he was more than happy to accomidate us, even sounded excited! And he had no problems with us coming in and plugging in a computer if we need to :) So the first meeting for the chix will be June 11th at 8 pm! *is so excited* … of course that is also the day after I come home from my vacation in Maine, it’s going to be a crazy-busy week that week %) But that’s ok… the only issue I have now is where to put Myk! I have no idea how this bookshop is set up, and I have a feeling the only place in the store for people to hang out is in the back room where we will be, well of course it’s a women’s only thing, eek! Well it won
t be like a PLUG meeting, more like a couple grrls getting together to talk, so maybe he can just sit on a couch on the other side of the room with his laptop… oh his laptop!

Ok, so it’s not actually *his* laptop, it belongs to the company he works for… But he brought it home last night to check it out. It’s a 500 mhz Dell, with 128 mb ram… 13″ and it’s not very light %) but it’s nice! And has Mandrake installed on it. *Me wanty* hehehe… laptops are so nice, and my exposure to them is so limited, it was cool getting to look at one last night.

There was a thread on one of the linuxchix lists yesterday about wisdom teeth. Hmm, I don’t know where mine are. I remember when my friend Leslie got hers out, we went to Wendy’s and got frostys. But I’m nearly 22 and there are no signs of where mine could be. Sometimes I have tooth aches, but nothing that would have anything to do with wisdom teeth, I think I just might have a cavity %) But I cant find any place in my mouth where the wisdom teeth are hiding, nothing poking through my gums (not that there is room…). So I started asking people in irc about their teeth. It seems that some people are born without wisdom teeth! Other have them come in fine, many have to get them removed, and I even learned of two people whose werent able to come in, and just stayed “stuck” under their gums… not doing any harm by being there, and removing them would require some serious reconstructive surgery. In light of all this interesting information, I think I should go to the dentist. I havent been in a few years anyway, which is bad! But I fear what they will tell me! Anyway, it would be interesting to discover where my wisdom teef0rs are.

I couldn’t sleep very well last night. Ended up getting out of bed around 4:30. I hate this… Anyway, while I was in bed trying to fall asleep I was thinking of things, like how likely it is that I will get very upset with my father the weekend I’m in Maine and create a problem between us. It’s just that I’m so sick of how he treats me. So sick of saying “yes dad” and trying to impress him. I think the only thing that would make him happy is if I got a $50k/year job and went to school in the evening so someday I can make $500k/year. I am considering writing him a letter that he’ll get before I go up there explaining how I feel, so that he won’t start bothering me with topics that’ll just piss me off (“you should get married” “you should do something with your hair” “you should get a real job” “you should go to college” .. etc etc). *Sigh* I dunno…

Hmm… so I cleaned the apartment this morning. Oh joy… did some serious uber-cleaning so it’ll be spotless for the party. Even cleaned all the base boards, it all took a few hours. But it needed to be done, I havent done such a complete cleaning in a few months, and I know people are going to be all over the place at the party, especially on the floor if it’s anything like last year! Finally finished and got a shower by 1 pm… and of course I’ve been chatting and writing this since then, yay for me. Ok, done writing this now, it’s boring (for both you and me). *wanders off*

o/` Evanescence – Taking Over Me o/`

So did I get the work done yesterday that I wanted to? Sorta…

I got a couple emails written, one to my pen pal in England. She has been using her mother’s computer to email me instead of sending letters *shrugs* I HAD to email her back so she knew I got the email at least ;) Ended up being a quite long mail, since we havent had contact since before valentine’s day, and so much has happened since then. Then I emailed a friend of mine in Belgium, she’s really cool, I should be better about emailing her! We swap stories and interesting facts about each other’s countries %) It’s really amazing how different our countries are…

As for the #13thHour page… bleh, nothing really was done. Which is ashame because I really had every intention of working on it. I dunno what’s wrong, I just couldn’t focus again… grr!

We’re getting ready for the LAN party on sunday. It should be fun… not exactly sure who is showing up though. *shrugs* hopefully as fun as last year! I think we are going to skip the whole BBQ thing since we arent sure if the weather is going to clear up, I guess we’re going to do a cold cuts platter so we can have sandwiches… and chips, pretzels, hmmm, I need to make a list.

Today I really am going to get work done, for real! No IM’s to disturb me, no nagging emails that need my attention, hehe.. *wanders off to do some work*

o/` Eurythmics – Here Comes the Rain Again o/`

-$nick- Leia, do you know much about hackers?

This was the first question on my voyage to become cited in a research paper.

Now usually when people come with me asking questions about “hacking” I want to scream something like “JUST BECAUSE I USE LINUX DOESNT MEAN I KNOW HOW OR HAVE INTENTIONS OF HACKING” … because people seem to have this idea in their head that people who use a unix-type enviroment have green and black screens and spend all their time hacking (thank you matrix! hehe). Well I held off on this near reflex reaction because the guy mentioned that he was writing a research paper and just needed some help being pointed in the right direction. Namely, he wanted information on “some famous hacker” … well assuming Kevin Mitnick would have the most written (especially in ‘newbie friendly’ form) about I pointed him that way. He came back… “what does a sniffer do?” So I explained what port sniffers do, then went into how certain protocols (like ftp) are cleartext so a ‘sniffer’ can read everything, including the password… then explained what ssh is, and how it was encrypted… there is a bit more to it than I explained, but I was going for simple ;) For those of you not familiar with this, it’s all fairly basic. If you are going to run your own webserver that can touch the outside world it’s important to understand these things, you don’t want to be ‘hacked’ because someone sniffed your ftp password. So he thanked me for the help and wandered off. Later he came back, apparently just about to finish his research paper, and asked me what companies do to stop hackers, and what companies do to stop piracy. I assumed this again was just info needed to be pointed in the direction of a real source.. and actually joked “I can see the bibliography now ‘some girl in irc'” … well to my surprise he replied “I do have to site you somehow…” eek! Hehe… so I gave him my real name and the title Linux Systems Administrator… and now I’m cited in a research paper! Three times! Hehe…

Moving on… I recently have been thinking about how easy it is to become intimidating. Now I have always been a very shy person, scared of most everyone ;) so the thought of becoming somehow intimidating to other people is very strange to me. I’m quiet, I’m shy, I’m not some super genius, I work very hard for what I do and know… I’m just me! I don’t look down upon people who ask for help, I enjoy helping people, and delight in seeing their sucesses, and I’m patient enough to help people through troubles they run into. It’s weird when people say “Oh you’re the Lyz of princessleia.com!?” … and then somehow feel they need to make an impression on me. As a shy person I can understand that. I mean you should see how much work and time I put into even the most simple mailing list post just so I don’t look like a moron! And it really is all defensive, I’m never trying to actually impress people with knowledge, I honestly just don’t want them to write me off as stupid. I don’t know why I have a fear of everyone thinking I’m stupid… I think it’s just my own insecurity problems %) … so now with this PhillyChix thing, I have named myself “Co-Coordinator” … merely because I need something to put on my resume, but I guess that is a bit scary, hell I might be shy talking to the co-coordinator of a local lug! Very silly…

Yesterday a friend of mine started a “book club” … it’s just for a few of us locally, basically just to work out a system of sharing our books and then talking about them I guess. We’re all interested in scifi and fantasy mostly, so it’ll have a lot for me at least if I can borrow books from a friend instead of buying them or taking my chances that a library will have them. Sounds like a good idea… maybe it’ll even last, it’s difficult to do these things with friends because so many people always decide they don’t want to follow through…

I also got a bit of work done on the new #13thHour s
ection. It’s not online yet, but it’s a lot like PHP Nuke… different icons for different subjects, and stuff. The whole point of this project is knowing that I CAN do it, and of course learning more in the process. It’s going well… Hopefully I’ll have it finished by the weekend (if I’d stop wasting my time on things like journal entries, hehehe…).

I also need to get caught up on email … I’m afraid I’m very bad with email. I mean sure, if you email me with a question I’m right on top of it, but with people who I only am in contact with via email I tend to slack off… just because I’m rarely in the mood to write a 3 page email! Hehe… but yes *looks at the clock* I will write emails from now until 2 pm. from 2-6 I’ll work on the #13thHour page. *wanders off*