I spent almost all day working on the linuxchix site for philadelphia. I’ll post a link here when it’s near finishing, I’m very pleased with how it looks, and how clever it is %) The woman who is working with me on creating this group is wonderful, she’s not someone who says “yeah lets start a group” and then wanders off… we’ve been mailing each other several times a day, and even had a brainstorming session this afternoon on irc. So far, we’ve grabbed the interest of two other women who are involved with PLUG (philadelphia linux users group), so, 4 so far! I’m going to do my best to promote this, and maybe something will come of it. Maybe we’ll even manage to get our own domain name someday %) I’m excited about this. And after a bit of discussion we decided to make the group women only. It’s been a touchy subject with linuxchix, the linuxchix.org mailing lists and chat, even the members profiles list includes men, but it is up to the individual chapters to decide whether theirs will invite everyone, or narrow it down to female only. I think our philadelphia chapter can get away with being female only. PLUG is already a very active group, and we are members of it, just sometimes intimidated by the men.. and we agreed that we dont want our linuxchix chapter to turn into PLUG2 … we want an open, comfortable forum for not only us, but other women who might be too afraid or shy to join a group with men in it. YAY!

I spoke to my mother yesterday, since it was mother’s day. For once it was a stress-free conversation %) She didnt nag me about every little thing, never even asked when I was getting married or coming to visit! Hehe… of course the call was only 10 minutes long since she was leaving for dinner %) At least she can’t say I never call.

I am feeling much better, I seem to be healing ok, the only time this weekend I was in any real “discomfort” was after a mile long walk yesterday evening, I probably shouldnt have done that %)

Yeah, so it’s late and I’m going to figure out what I’m making for dinner now… *wanders off*

o/` Vangelis – Tears In Rain (Blade Runner Soundtrack) o/`

I went to bed at 1 am, woke up at 6:30 am… why? Insomnia, I hate it! An awful night sleep…

Yesterday afternoon we headed out to Unos to meet with our friend Bob like we do a couple times a month. It was nice. Bob asked me a bit about the “computer stuff I do” and mentioned that he might have some contract work for someone good with php and databases. I dunno… I expressed interest, but a real company offering me work is just so scary! I really plan to brush up on my php skills though, if this ever works out and I do get a temporary job there, I will need to know more than I do now! Maybe I can get the experience I need from working on the #13thHour site…

In other news… I am sick of being lied to.

It seems that the more I wander into the linux/bsd/open source community, the more I run into assholes who think it’s cool to impress me by lying. I guess I can sorta see that they believe bragging about their acomplishments would somehow impress me… but don’t they realize that if I am telling the truth about being a geek that I’ll see right through their claims? I try not to outwardly confront them, usually I entrap them into some sort of lie and finally get them to admit themselves that they don’t really know what they are talking about… but sometimes that’s impossible, and they just keep up this front of knowing it all, when it’s obvious they dont. Can’t they just admit defeat? I’d have much more respect for them then… In fact, if a guy came along, and honestly said “I used Mandrake once, I am a total newbie” then I’d be more impressed then with someone who might know a bit more but lied! It just *feels* like people who lie to me take me for a fool, like I won’t figure it out! Bah… if you don’t understand something then just ask, don’t try to fake your way through a conversation with me. Men! *grins*

Speaking of which, another one of those so loved snippits from IRC! ($nick = name changed to protect the moron … pleia2 is me of course):

-$nick- woa
-$nick- pleia2 == girl
-$nick- ??
-pleia2- yeah
-$nick- wow, I’ve been asking you all these linux questions and I had no idea you were a girl! :)
-pleia2- heh
-pleia2- what does my gender have to do with asking linux questions?
— insert long pause here —
-$nick– I just have a totally different view of you now

I am sick of this sort of thing. I need to start being more agressive with my recruiting of female linux users so we can break this horrible stereotype someday %)

Anyawy, before i complain more I am going to go wander off and read, maybe make myself a little breakfast…

o/` Barenaked Ladies – When You Dream o/`

We never did get to meet up with that friend last night. It was rainy and the friend he was bringing to NJ just wanted to get home… bleh whatever. Since the drafting room is fairly dead in the morning (er, closed) we realized there wouldnt really be anything for him to do… and he said he wouldnt want to bore his friend (apparently him and his friend went to NJ to drop off this girl). I’m disappointed, but it turns out that I started feeling really lousy again last night, so I guess it’s all for the best that we didn’t go out for an evening of drinking %)

I got almost nothing done yesterday. Ok, that’s not really true… I chatted, I explored some interesting programs in apt, and I cleaned the apartment.

I discovered xteddy. It’s very silly, just puts an image on your desktop (default is a teddy) … it doesnt do anything, you can move it around your screen and stuff *shrugs* It’s cute but not useful at all, in fact it gets a bit annoying because if your mouse is over the bear your keybindings wont work, hehe. I also discovered Festival … it’s a speech synthesis program. Remember those old ones where you’d type some words and a horrible old computer voice would recite them for you? Well it’s just like that! And it’s cool ’cause that is what I was looking for… an old cheesy obviously artificial computer voice for a project I’m working on. I was really happy to find this… for a while I was afraid I’d need to wander into windows for it.

I also went back into the world of console emulators. Specifically, NES. I discovered NEStra. It’s better than iNES in that it WORKS (something is wrong with iNES in debian stable’s apt, it is all broken, maybe the roms are imperfect and making it misbehave? I dunno… the roms work fine with nestra). It’s not as cool as iNES because it doesnt have sound. Oh that’s disappointing… but I suppose it’s not horribly important, it’s so cool that I can play these old games in linux!

I have played with console emulation in the past. Downloaded zsnes back when I used redhat… so i could play super nintendo games (since then i hear snes9x is better *shrugs*), but i had a lot of trouble with the keybindings in that, and a lot of things just didnt want to work, so I stated to lose faith %) NEStra is great tho. And NES roms are very easy to find… Of course I own the games! Well… I did at one time, honest! *grins* … I suppose there isnt a task force set up to eliminate NES rom sites because no one makes substantial money off them anymore. It was amazing how small these games are… the rom for Super Mario Brothers was a mere 40k! Mario 3 was 384k … wow, those were the days…

And of course nothing can replace old nintendo tetris, that was one of the first roms I got %) It’s an addiction that is never fully cured. I won’t disclose how much time yesterday was spent playing it %)

#13thHour on irc.clockbot.net is looking very healthy lately. It’s an old channel (created in late 1998), and started to lack the “new blood” needed to keep a channel alive. It was really sad… I love that place, but it was turning into the room that Time and I talk to each other through when he’s at work, heh. But by inviting people I know from other places, it’s really brought back some activity. I’m just hoping that will continue… and that more people invited their friends will continue. It’s really cool that escapenguin invited his friend Vehicle00 to the channel… and everyone seems to be mostly getting along… even Naru_Chan most of the time ;) (Peacimowen I am sure still has hi
m on ignore because of his occasional crudeness). Of course Peacimowen also hates my good friend ShellGh0st %) And of course Tarist has been with #13thHour about 9 months %) It’s nice.

In light of this recent activity, I’m thinking of setting up a new section of www.princessleia.com/13thHour.html … the main page there usually tells what’s up, but I’d like to have something more involved, maybe postings can be made by room users? Maybe constant welcome sections for new people? Log snippits? Funny things? *Shrugs* any ideas? %) It would give me something cool to work on… and more practice with php stuff, woo!

Now I am going to go figure out what I’m doing all day. Probably crawling into bed and reading, yay for hibernating all weekend! Hehe *wanders off*

o/` All About Eve – Pieces Of Our Heart o/`

My aunt elaine is dating a mobster.

Ok, so it’s not proven yet. She met this sweet italian guy online and just yesterday met him in real life. He drives a Jaguar, has a lot of money, and works in construction but “wont tell her what the company name is” … hmm. I guess he’s a really sweet guy (charming away those italian guys tend to be *winks at her italian Myk*), and seems very interested in a relationship with my aunt elaine… but it’s fun to speculate about what he really does ;) I mean he drives a jaguar! While it’s not my luxury car of choice (I have many bad things to say about your dear jaguar!), it is expensive… Now a little BMW Z… *drool*

Anyway, my aunt elaine (she and I are very close, I’ve lived with her a couple of times, she’s like a second mother) called because I emailed her because she wanted to know about how everything went at the doctor’s on wednesday. Yeah. So I got to talk to her for a while, despite my dislike of the telephone it’s always good to hear from her. I found out that a relative of mine has HIV… Not a relative that I am particularly close to, but family, we’ve spent time together, laughed together, drank together, and I love her as family should… it’s very upsetting. I was quite depressed when I got off the phone, especially because of the other issues involved… which are not appropriate for discussion on a public web log (privacy issues). In light of that, I won’t talk about it anymore, but it is horribly depressing…

How do I move on from that? *sigh*

I am feeling better today. Yesterday evening I was feeling pretty lousy, I don’t think the advil is working as good as it was previously, took longer to work so I was in pain for a bit. The worst part is that it’s not a dull ache pain, but a sharp pain… My aunt elaine (who has had this procedure done too) said that this is completely normal, and should “Only last for a few days” only! ONLY! Gaah… I really REALLY dislike pain. Luckily the doctor said that most women who have this done will not have to repeat it in the future *hopes* %)

A friend of mine from #goddess messaged me last night. I was in bed already, but Myk was up and ended up taking to him. Apparently he’s going to be coming through the area this evening to drop off a friend in New Jersey… and was curious if we’d be interested in meeting. Well sure, cool. So Myk talked to him, he should be calling sometime today so we can work out a plan as to when he’ll be coming. He lives in west PA (north of pittsburgh) and has to work out with his friends whether they want to meet and hang out for dinner and drinks on their way to NJ (which would mean tonight), or if he just wants to stop here on his way back home (tomorrow morning). Whichever he chooses would be cool *shrugs* We’re thinking of going to The Drafting Room, where I went for my 21st birthday, yum! They have an awsome beer list. Anyway, it’ll be cool to meet this friend, meeting people from online rocks.

I dunno if I have talked about this before… probably have, but I forgot, so you will all have to suffer through my redunancy (or just not read this). I was thinking about how strange the line has become between “real life friends” and “online friends” .. there are some people who I met online first, but the reason for meeting them online first was because they were real life acquantances of my real friends (I met N-Tropy online before I met him in real life… and there are still some people in the chat room I chat in with ‘real life people’ that I havent met in real life yet). I met TorchDragon online through ICQ because he noticed I lived in the area and was looking for new people to invite to a big LAN party he was hosting, and THEN met him in real life randomly at a local CompUSA he ended up working at (it was strange… I had no idea he was working there)… so would I consider him an online friend? I mean he DID contact me because I lived in the area and there was a good chance that we’d meet sometime. Then of course ther
e are people who I just know from IRC and web journals… no question that those people are “online friends” … but all these catagories of people make it hard for me to make a definate list of how many “people I’ve met from online” Not that it matters… it’s just interesting how the real life/internet life “worlds” have become so hazy for me in the past couple years.

Today… what am I doing today… I cleaned the apartment this morning. I do it every friday, and I felt good enough to do it… plus if we are meeting an online friend it’s good to make a good impression by making sure the apartment sparkles %) Then again I tend to be a bit of a neat freak, so the apartment wasnt actually dirty or cluttered before I cleaned it, he probably wouldnt have noticed the weeks worth of dust buildup, or the water marks on the kitchen counter ;) I think I am going to mess around with some perl scripts I guess… I need to do that often so I don’t lose my touch… *wanders off*

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*