o/` Dishwalla – Counting Blue Cars o/`

Well the doctor’s visit went about the way I expected, it hurt a lot and I felt terrible after. We ended up going out for lunch after, which turned out to be less than nice because I just was so uncomfortable… I ate lunch though, and it was good (chicken sandwich at friday’s) … Myk even offered to order some chocolate cake after, and I declined so we could go home. Yeah, I turned down chocolate cake, I must have been feeling lousy! I was in bed most of the day yesterday. We ordered pizza and wings in the evening, they were yummie %) Watched some tv, the west wing was on… and it was really good, then watched law and order. Went to sleep around midnight.

I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night, kept moving to get comfortable… if i stayed in one position for too long it would hurt *sigh* the advil has been helping a lot though. I feel better today, but I’m still planning on going to lie down soon… but again, this is pretty much what I expected, and what everyone told me it would be like, so I shouldnt complain too much. I need to go back in in 4 weeks for a checkup to make sure it’s healing properly, then again in a few months so they can make sure all the bad cells were removed.

I managed to get into contact with another one of the linuxchix in the area, and we’re going to work on getting a chapter started in philadelphia! As I believe I have mentioned, there is already a woman who claims to be running the chapter, but we have had no luck getting ahold of her (the other woman I talked to said she emailed her a *year* ago and never got a response… i emailed her a month ago). So we figure that we can start one up. I mentioned it to my friend Nita this morning, and she seems to be interested %) Even if it’s just a small gathering in a coffee shop and nothing formal, it’ll be cool. And maybe we’ll even get around to making a site or something for the chapter. Even with only 3 members it’ll be an outlet for us to bring other women, and hey… maybe even have a tiny group like that will make other linux women come out of the woodwork %) I can hope. I’m excited! This is so cool %)

I was invited to a “Stitch and Bitch” party held by the woman who is helping me learn to knit %) It’s next friday, I hope I’m feeling well enough to go, sounds like fun, it’s like a knitting circle or something! Hehe, snacks, soda and coffee, woo! And hopefully I wont be insanely shy…

I guess that’s it for now… I’m going to go takes summore advil and lie down for a little bit. *wanders off*

o/` Aphex Twin – Windowsill o/`

Well I finally got around to changing to logo on all my princessleia.com pages… it was a bit of a pain because it wasn’t a matter of simply replacing the image file, the original logo is a .gif and the new one is a .png. So I did a little exploring, and found a nice one like perl command that would do the job. I wanted to replace /logo.gif with /logo.png in all .html files in the given directory

perl -pi -e “s/\/logo.gif/\/logo.png/g;” *.html

It worked great %) And saved me tons of time, editing the files manually would have been crazy… is this a good time to say “take that windows!” *chuckles*

I can’t stand labeling. This morning I was sitting in IRC and this girl comes in and started talking to this guy who was complaining about “women” … she was agreeing with him, saying “yeah women suck” then of course saying “but not me” … they went on to say about a hundred more horribly stereotypical bad things about males and females (to which they were mostly exempt of course) until i finally got annoyed and stopped paying attention. I wish people would be content just to say that everyone is different. Sure, we all fall into “catagories” … but you can’t just slap a label on someone and expect it to stick. Every person, once affixed with a label, will say “Ok, I guess I am that, but…” I mean you could easily say I am a female geek, I’d agree, but there are certain characteristics of geekdom that I dont fall into. *shrugs* It just got annoying, especially when they bring out there ‘stats’ “ok, but 95% of them are like that” … whatever.

Tomorrows PLUG meeting is going to be about `diff` .. unfortunately we are (yet again) unable to attend. Tomorrow morning I’m going to the gynecologist and having the procedure done to remove those abnormal cells. They told me that I should get someone to drive me since I’d be in no position to drive myself home, and to relax for the next few days so it heals properly. Well that sorta kills any possibility of going into center city for a linux meeting %D

Last night we went to Myk’s mother’s for dinner. It was nice, she’s a great cook %) Had a couple Coronas (beer)… I had never tried them before. They weren’t too bad.

I was really tired last night, ended up being so exhausted at 11 that I fell right asleep. Yep, exciting day %D It rained, rain is always nice… luckily it rained *after* my walk.

Anyway, I’m going to go work on some things *wanders off*

o/` George Winston – Cast Your Fate To The Wind o/`

The merger with the xelium servers is seeming to be a success. Some friends who left clockbot because of how “dead” the server was are coming back, impressed with all the new people that xelium brought, and the stability of the new services. I dunno about the new opers yet really, there are two of them, and I have only seen one of them talk, and it was a… less than flattering statement on his part *shrugs* still, if they have a thriving network they must be doing something right %D I haven’t ventured into any other rooms yet. I don’t know… it’s really a gaming network and I don’t game much anymore *shrugs* I can probably wander into some rooms and find a comfortable place… but then I think “wait, I don’t have time for more chat rooms! I think I’ll just hang out in my rooms and if new people wander in, cool… if not.. that’s ok too. Of course i have little hope that #linux will be very successful on a gaming net ;) (I think I mentioned that tho…).

So I was fairly brief yesterday when talking about the lan party, I was tired, ended up going back to bed after I posted that, hehe. Anyway, the party started off slow, this one guy was having the worst time connecting to the LAN, people were messing around with his computer for a couple hours before they finally realized that he had some sort of software firewall installed. It was frustrating because Myk went over to see if he could figure out the problem and was like “what is all this crap you have running?” … he never did give a straight answer, and Myk gave up (frustration with Windows comes quickly). Yeah… and this guy hardly even knew what the firewall was, said he got nimda once and so someone told him to install that… something about how he didnt like/trust anti-virus software. Erm… He’s one of those people who knows virtually nothing about computers, but can somehow afford to spend money on them all the time, he talks… oh he talks, but he never knows what he is talking about. He’s the one who bothered us at a weird lan party last year in a creepy part of town… when we got club sandwiches from a local sub shop he said “wow, these are worth the $5 you pay for them, it’s real turkey, they cook it right at the place” … we still make jokes about “Real Turkey” .. and tend to call him “real turkey” when referring to him. When we first met him he put his hand on my shoulder and looked at Myk and said “wow man, you are so lucky to have a girl that games, my wife left me because i spent too much time on the computer *blah blah*”… DONT TOUCH ME. Ugh, he’s creepy… not the kind of person I’d like to be in a room alone with, and luckily the situation never arose. There are a bunch of cool people that were there though, Mike was really cool, and Ed was nice… and I already knew Brent of course. And it was funny to see everyone pick on me because I was doing so well in ut2k3… I wasn’t shy either, which is something I should explore…. I guess it was one of those situations where I didn’t feel I needed to impress anyone.

Yeah, I love lan parties. We are going forward with our plans to have one memorial day weekend, on the Sunday. Anyone in the area is invited %) I guess it wont totally be a lan party… pretty much LAN + drinking + BBQ + drinking + talking + drinking… well you get the idea, last year we had one, and it was a blast, one of the best parties i’ve ever been part of %) So of course we have to repeat it, and we’re having it on sunday because we expect most everyone to be off on monday (it being memorial day and all), and we expect it to be an all night thing… as I said, there will be drinking, and we don’t want to let anyone go home right after having a few drinks %)

*looks at the time* ugh… I dunno what I’ll do today, I think I had plans on things to do but I’ve forgotton them all, hee… I mentioned something to the other xelium opers about putting together a little site for the network, I think I’ll just put together a template that other people can add to if th
ey want to, since I have no idea what sort of content they’d want. Just *something* to go up in place of the nothingness they have now %)

Tonight we’re going over to Myk’s ma’s for dinner, woohoo! She always makes really yummie food %)

But right now I am going to go try to get some work done ;) *wanders off*

Lan Party Pictures

The lan party yesterday was a lot of fun %) Played mostly ut2003… which was cool, I did good… beat 7 guys 3 times in a row (I was the only girl there… *sigh*). They were beat by a girl, hahahaa! We tried to play Age Of Empires 2… had it installed and everything, but their cracks didnt work and they didnt have enough cds to share. S’ok, you have to kill sheep for food in that game! AH! Speaking of animals people eat… I saw the cutest thing yesterday. We were driving to the lan party and drove through a farmish area… and we saw two baby cows running across a field, awwwww. Made me very glad we brought boca burgers %) I can’t eat beef anyway… (makes me get upset stomach).

The guy having the lan party had dogs too… we took pictures, but I booted into windows and the camera is acting funny, it’s saying there are no pics on the camera, grr %( … maybe it’s the batteries, brand new batteries yesterday and I have a feeling they are dying already, ugh. I just don’t feel like dealing with windows and that crappy camera right now, hopefully it didn’t do something evil like actually delete all the pictures on it or something %) Anyway, the dogs were so cool, medium sized, really sweet… and very very well trained. I played with them a lot %) Anyway, we got there around noon and left around 10:30… we were both tired, and they wanted to play Metal of Honor, which we dont have, and I didn’t really feel like installing it just to shoot myself in the foot (because i had never played it and I was so tired).

I did however learn that visine eye drops are awsome. I always get itchy allergy eyes, and usually I just suffer with gooey fuzzy eyes. Yesterday we got some visine, and wow, what a difference!

Today we arent doing anything really… I actually think I want to go back to bed, hehe. *wanders off*

The problem with being any sort of administrator in a friendly community, is sometimes you have to put on the admin hat when someone gets out of line. It’s especially frustrating because more often then not, the person who has created the offense takes it personally. To create a comfortable environment for everyone you must set up some rules of conduct, and sometimes those arent things you can write down in the rules. Do I want to make a rule in #13thHour that you can never mention sex? No, because then people will be paranoid about joking around, or having something being taken the wrong way. Is there a line that people should learn not to cross when touching this subject? Yes. At the end of the day I want everyone who comes in there to feel comfortable… not to be afraid to speak their mind, but contributing funny, kind, intelligent conversation.

This is just an example (and what prompted me to make this little rant). I have encountered many situations before, and I hate dealing with them because people tend to just leave when they feel they have offended. Do I want them to? Of course not, but it’s my responsibility to deal with problems. I try to be as nice as possible, but it almost always is taken the wrong way. What DO I expect when I express concern over behavior? Just stop it. Once I asked a girl in the room to turn off her mp3 script because the colors were obnoxiously annoying, she left for weeks because she was so upset. Why was she so upset? It was a script, it annoyed people, I asked her to turn it off… She ended up crying and thinking I hated her… that *I* HATED HER! Because I asked her to turn off her mp3 script… another example? A chatter was continually using foul language. Now do I want to make a rule that you can’t swear? Absolutely not, I swear from time to time, I dont want people to lack freedom… But using offensive language so often, for no reason, is unacceptable.

*sigh*

There is a fine line between being a good admin and becoming an over-aggressive one. *wanders off*

o/` Enigma – Gravity of Love o/`

I spent most of the day cleaning the apartment and making cookies.. yay for fridays. I did lots of extra cleaning, that’s why it took so long %) And I made the cookies for the lan party tomorrow, yay! Hopefully the lan party will be fun, I don’t think I’ll know many people there, so I’m a bit worried I’ll be bored if people decide to play games I don’t have… we’ll see. It’s a BBQ too, so I could always hover by the food if I get in the mood. Of course the lan party wont be online either, which is disappointing, but he just has dial up, and I can’t imagine how awful it would be if we tried to give any sort of net connection to the network ;)

irc.clockbot.net merged with the xelium servers last night. Of course the merger didn’t go as smoothly as we would have liked and we had about 8 hours of downtime *oops* Just a communication breakdown between admins caused the DNS to get screwed up… but it was fixed, and when I woke up this morning we were all linked, yay! I really appreciate the time Myk spent on it… things have been crazy this week with him getting a new job, driving to the old job in New Jersey, getting everything settled for the new job. It’s really amazing that he had time to deal with the silly IRC server %)

They fixed vendetta so now I can play it with my little glibc 2.5.5 woo! Fixed it quickly too, I’m pleasently surprised %) … not that I have time for it, must resist gaming!!!

Worked on the clockbot.net site a bit today (still locally)… finished writing the php form that people will fill out to email me to request a quote… was stumped for a bit on some permissions issues, which was frustrating… but I figured it out (it was fairly easy in the end, I dunno what I was thinking), but it’s cool. I’ll work on each of the sections in more detail sometime, since they don’t sound very professional at the moment %)

Oh, yesterday I updated the real princessleia.com … so it’s all prettier now, woo! I think I like it… it’ll probably take a few days before I know for sure, if I really like it, hehe.

Anyway, yeah, busy day… should be a nice weekend. Now I go finish laundry *wanders off*

o/` Pocahontas Soundtrack o/`

Last night was uneventful. Sometimes allergy medicine does different things to me.. last night was one of those nights where it made me insanely drowsy. Myk came home and took a nap because his allergies were really getting to him (he’s got a dr’s appointment on friday, yay!)… so I was on the computer, completely zoned out, trying to form coherent sentances in IRC, failing miserably, until I went to wake up Myk… of course he didn’t want to get up, so I snuggled with him for a while… nodded off a couple times… finally around 9 pm I got myself up and we watched The West Wing, then Law and Order. Afterwards I read for a little while, it was nice… and I was fairly tired so it didn’t take long to fall asleep, and I slept really well, which is good ’cause that doesn’t happen often.

I think I am going to make an “adventures” section of my site… I got the idea from a friend of ours who has some of his adventures on his website. What’s an adventure? Just the kind of story you tell friends to get them to laugh or be amazed. Like our curtain shopping experience last year, or when the squirrel got into our apartment… It’ll be cool to have a detailed record of these ‘adventures’… since I’m getting old and my memory is failing (haha).

So someone in IRC just mentioned McDonalds. Wow, McDonalds. It’s funny, I havent been to one in over a year… so in my mind they just stop existing, or become a joke (people don’t really eat there!). Why did I stop eating at McDonald’s? A variety of things. First of all I could afford better food ;) … I don’t really like the *taste* of McDonald’s food (besides random girlish cravings), and it’s often so greasy that it makes me ill anyway… plus I stopped eating beef, so that kills about 3/4 of the menu there (if you believe their burgers are made of beef, which is arguable), and did you know that there is beef fat in the stuff the fry the fries in? *shrugs* So yeah, I don’t really like it there. And it’s horrible for you %D I am trying to stick to a healthy diet… fast food places are easy to avoid.

I took a nice walk yesterday, it was sunny and very nice out, and I noticed, yet again, how blindingly pale my skin is. I am not one of those people who can’t get a tan… I just never really cared, what kind of geek would I be if I had a tan? Hehehe… maybe if I had a laptop I’d get outside more often. *Pulls self back into reality* I really should get outside more. I do enjoy being outside, maybe I’ll take some time this summer to do some reading on the porch, or on the grass outside, there are places where people sit out and relax on the lawn, and I should take advantage of this nice area while I can!

On the bright side, someone I know from Virginia pointed me to the direction of a Virginia state website that talked about a new anti-spam law that’s was just signed into existance. Lots of states have anti-spam laws, but this one makes it a felony! I saw that yahoo! had caught wind of this story today, so I am sure you have all heard it by now. But how cool is that?! 1-5 years in jail, fines, AND the authorities have the right to seize any hardware pertaining to the spam business… plus the fact that it’s a felony, and your record will have that blemish on it for the rest of your life. It’s very cool though, spam has gotten insanely out of control, and anything the government can do to regulate it would be appreciated by internet citizens worldwide. And maybe then ISPs can stop doing stupid things like blocking IPs of people who run mailservers just because they assume that spam is being put out by them (grr!!!).

I am really not sure what I will do today. I might try to pull myself into a designing mood so I can work on my sites, I really do need to get caught up with that… I’ve been so lazy.

Speaking of being lazy, yesterday afternoon I was sorta wandering around my computer aimlessly, and then someone posted an ebay url in irc. Now I’m a recovering ebay-aholic, so it’s never good to paste these things! Anyway, the au
ction was for a quad processor alpha, which interested me but it was HUGE and way out of my price range (hell, everything is out of my price range, my savings consists of 65 cents)… but I decided to do some poking around ebay for a cdrom drive. What’s frustrating is that I just need a crappy old drive, and shipping costs on any computer equipment is expensive. I can’t really go to a store and buy a decently priced one, I’d be lucky if I could get my hands on *just* a cdrom anyway, since everything is all about writable cds and such now. I want to spend like $10 on a 24x drive someone has stuffed in a box somewhere. But who do I ask? I don’t really have many real life friends… and the few people I do know who might have such a thing I have never actually spoken to beside a wave and hello in passing, gah I dunno… maybe something will turn up, getting my test box up and running isnt all that important anyway… and if it comes down to it I could just borrow a drive from another computer just for the debian install *shrugs*

A bunch of friends are now playing vendetta (http://vendetta.guildsoftware.com). So they finally convinced me to install it on my system, cool… it’s just a small shell script you download (after registering… and yes, you can play on windows too) and install as root, then just run vendetta. So I did that.

(lyz@r2d2) lyz $ vendetta
update.rlb: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.3′ not found (required by update.rlb)

Flooby! I need glibc 2.3 … I have 2.2.5 because that’s what debian stable has. Can I upgrade? Sure! Is it worth it? Absolutely not %) It’s just a game, I just wanted to check it out, the last thing I need right now is something to waste my time even more. Luckily this issue has been addressed, and they are fixing it so they dont require 2.3 … hopefully sometime next week I can start playing %) Oh wait, I said I don’t have time for it… oh I am so torn!

Anyway, I need to go take a shower and get some stuff worked on. *yawns and wanders off*

o/` A. Badalamenti – Haunting and Heartbreaking (Lost Highway Soundtrack) o/`

I’ve been doing a lot of media editing this morning. First I watched “The Turbo Diner” … the Wallace and Gromit short for this week at atomfilms.com. Then I took a bunch of screenshots for it for my site… like I did with Auto Chef. That reminded me that I still need to take shots of the soccer one (it used to be available for download, so I have it downloaded). I will do that later %) Then, I dont quite recall what reminded me, but I took some time to chop up the Lost Highway Soundtrack mp3 I had (a friend in Belgium sent it to me, whole soundtrack as one mp3). I used Audacity to do this, which let me open the mp3 (66 mb worth) and save it as .wav files… I’m encoding it to ogg right now. I’ll see how much quality I lose, if it’s too bad that’s ok, all I’ve wasted is time. I know I have mentioned the audacity program before, but it really is cool, and simple.. great for someone like me who just wants to chop up music files and knows nothing about the actual music %) Yay for free linux apps!

Last night we got some pizza, it was yummie, I’m going to go raid the ‘fridge soon so I can scoop up some leftover pizza for lunch %d .. but yeah, we just relaxed last night, Myk was really happy about the new job, I was excited for him of course. He’s starting there monday %) YAY! We’ve even started to look at places in the area to live. It’s near Hatboro, which means we can probably get an inexpensive 2 bedroom apartment (1 room for us, one for the computers of course!)… or maybe even rent a house. We have quite a bit of time to look (don’t plan on moving til December)… I’m sure we can find a nice place %)

I got an email from someone this morning about my “Binding Windows Keys In Linux” section of princessleia.com. It’s always so cool when people email me like that, especially if it’s about the linux stuff.. this time it was just an email thanking me for having the site up for help, and to tell me that the Red Hat directions that I had up work for 7.3 and 9.0 as well (I mentioned on the site that I had only tested it for 7.2). So I updated the site to reflect that and emailed him back to thank him for testing it on other versions. Yay! I just wish someone with a keyboard unlike mine would give me some feedback!

Did a bit more work on the clockbot computing site yesterday. Still having trouble finding direction when it comes to how it should look unfortunately… I showed it to Myk, and he was pleased with what I had so far, but it’s just not good enough! I wish I was more creative… I posted that screenshot of princessleia.com’s test page yesterday, but now looking at it, I really don’t think I like the border around the logo n stuff *shrugs* I’ll keep playing with it I guess.

*wanders off to eat lunch and work on stuff*

o/` Cinderella Soundtrack Prologue o/`

I finished making oggs of my disney soundtracks, something like 600 mb of oggs %) Hehe.

Well we wont be moving to New Jersey *leaps for joy* … Myk got a call yesterday from a guy we know from PLUG, and he wanted to get Myk into the company he works for for an interview. Myk went in for the interview this morning, and came out with a new job, woohoo! It’s closer than Jersey would be, but we’re still planning on moving once the lease is up here, hopefully we can find a place close to shops where I could get a job. Anyawy, this is great news, I’m so happy, Myk is so smarty %) He’ll be starting as soon as next week.

I’ve done more work on clockbot.net (on the home lan, the site still points to bevilacqua.us) … not sure really what to do with it. I could make a simple design like I did for bevilacqua.us … but I sorta want to show off my “skills” as a web designer. Unfortunately I’m not very artistic, and *all* my sites are pretty basic, doh! I want something that’ll look really nice, but I’m having trouble getting ideas. I might just go ahead and work on the php form (use to get estimates on website/hosting stuff) since I’m not in a design mood *shrugs*

I did get a little more done on the test page for princessleia.com … Click Here For Screenshot.

So clockbot.net/mst3k.org (PsiBlade IRC Network) is going to be merging with another IRC network. I have my issues with this, since the other network is a gaming network, with mp3 sharing rooms (arrrgg warez spam!)… and the server is usually about 150-200 users strong, but it could be a good thing. They tried to assure me that warez spammers have not been a problem (and they are dealt with swiftly), but there is the loss of that “family feel” that we have on the network right now *shrugs* I also understand that the “family feel” also might drive new people away… who wants to inhabit a dead network of mostly existing friendships? At least with a bigger server there is always some place people can go for activity. It’ll be cool being an ircop on a big server anyway ;) So the merger will occur sometime this week we hope.. of course everyone will need to reregister their rooms and nicknames, since we’ll be using their services (stable unix services, not like the crappy, incomplete, unstable, windows ones we have now). It’s a good change I think… and if not we could always go back, it’s not like linking is impossible to undo.

I went for a walk earlier today, wanted to “take a walk before the thunderstorms started” … I came home fairly wet. Damn rain coming before my walk was done! It’s ok though, I like rain.

Hmmm, I guess that’s all I feel like writing about. *wanders off to get some work done.*