o/` Will Ackerman – Sound Of Wind Driven Rain o/`

My entries have been so boring lately. Anyway, yesterday was relaxing, finished The Hobbit … I really am determined to get those reviews typed up tomorrow, and update my reviews page on my website. In the evening we rented Pulp Fiction and ordered some pizza (white pizza with spinach again, mmm) and buffalo wings. Pulp Fiction was really good, I had never seen it before… lots of crazy things tackled in that movie… and while Bruce Willis still annoyed me, I found myself not as replused as I usually am to John Travolta. I was more impressed with the movie than I thought I’d be, Quentin Tarantino rocks.

After the movie Myk and I played some ut. He has the ut server back up on ut.clockbot.net … just regular old ut. I really missed that game! I think I have finally decided that I don’t like ut2003. I mean sure, it’s a good game… but I miss my sniper rifle! And I guess it’s just ut + prettier … and I don’t need the game to be that much prettier, especially if to make it prettier you sacrifice preformance… I’ll enjoy it in 2 years when the hardware catches up with the game %) Anyway, yeah, ut… I love ut.

Went to bed around 1… I was tired. Today we arent doing anything. I’m trying to decide if I want to leap right into re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring or if I should read another book first (maybe Xenocide) *shrugs* Wow my life is boring %D

I am going to go do my daily rounds of checking mailing lists and sending emails where they need to go… so I hope everyone has a nice Easter with family, friends, pets, your computer or whoever you are spending it with %) Take care! *wanders off*

o/` Peter Murphy – The Line Between the Devil’s Teeth o/`

Last night was really nice. Myk’s mother came over with her boyfriend, and we all headed out for the Indian food place down the street, yummie. Dinner was great, Myk’s mother brought a couple of bottles of really tastey red wine, and everyone enjoyed their meal (she and her boyfriend had never tried that sort of indian food). The service was great, as usual, and we really had a nice time. After, we came back and sat around drinking coffee and talking til about 9:30. After they left we cleaned up, watched some tv and went to bed… I wasn’t feeling so great, still am not, i wonder if it was something I ate, I hope I’m not getting sick or something.

Myk’s mother also brought us some home made chocolate cake, mmm, I love chocolate cake.

Probably will just stay in this weekend, no real plans with anyone for easter *shrugs* most friends are out of town or busy because of the holiday. That’s ok, I am completely happy just staying home and snuggling with a comforter and good book. Speaking of which, I am rereading the lord of the rings books, starting with The Hobbit … I actually started rereading “the trilogy” a couple years ago to anticipate the movies, but I sorta lost interest because I didnt have the time then, but I do now %)

I really dont feel like being at the computer anymore right now, I think I am going to go finish up a couple things and go lie down. *wanders off*

o/` Mediaeval Baebes – I Am Eve o/`

-@Time- survival is relative to your blackmarket worth.
^^ from this morning in irc, it makes me laugh

I chatted with my 14 year old sister Annette yesterday afternoon. I noticed that her “buddy icon” on aol instant messanger was of Eminem, *sigh* I also realized that I have no exposure or knowledge of wigger slang, I’m not sure this is a good thing or a bad, but I couldnt understand what she was talking about sometimes (bad grammar and spelling aside). She had to explain most of the phrases and words she used, it was a very confusing conversation %)

I spoke to my mother recently, and I don’t remember exactly what the conversation was about, but I said something like “Bah, at 10 years old I wasn’t really world-aware” to which she responded “sure you were, you were taking care of Annette.” *Sigh* I was trying to forget such robbing of my childhood, MOTHER! Funny that she’d make a point to remind me of that tho, but it got me thinking… maybe having to take care of my youngest sister so much is what caused me to have this forever attachment to “cute things” and toys, like I was forced to grow up fast, so I’m making up for it now. Heh, I dont think I’ll ever fully grow out of this *takes the stuffed animal camel off her monitor and snuggles it*

Anyway, I was talking to a friend recently, and he asked about the position of some country in Europe, and I instantly pulled up a map. That made me regret not knowing it off the top of my head, and I mentioned that, and how I was sick of being one of those “dumb americans.” … “You care too much what other people think” … what does that have to do with learning geography? I thought about this, and wanting to learn, wanting to know everything %) has nothing to do with what other people think. I just hate feeling stupid, and if I don’t know much about a subject, then I feel stupid…

This week was pretty awful for sleeping. See, the biggest problem with Myk and me is that we both are light sleepers and insomniacs. Myk takes medicine to fall asleep, I just try to be tired as I can before I go to bed.. but we both still move when we sleep, so we wake each other up. Bleh, it sucks, so sometimes we get weeks like this one, where we lose so much sleep from this. It’s frustrating, and there are few solutions. I like sleep so much, why must it elude me so!

So redhat sucks. I had a really bad day yesterday (lack of sleep was a big factor), and I am trying to help a friend of mine with his newly installed redhat 9… and I just can’t seem to get anything right. I am sure I looked really stupid. I guess my trouble was pretty much my lack of redhat knowledge, and I shouldn’t be ashamed of that, why would I need to know about redhat 9? The only redhat I ever used was 7.2… So here I am, on a debian box, trying to think like a newbie, and KNOWING that redhat had happy-clicky programs for everything I want to do, just know knowing what they are, it was very frustrating… I mean I know how to change window managers with .xsession and .xinitrc, but i dont know where to begin to look for the redhat happy clicky way %) So anyway, we wanted to try a new window manager, since his computer is waaaay too slow to run gnome reasonably (233 mhz, 64mb ram, eek!). I had thought fluxbox would run ok, and be pretty (instead of wtm, ugh)… so blueminder found an rpm for it, and we helped him go about installing. We got problems with dependencies, ugh. I wasnt really in the mood to deal with that mess %D So when he mentioned that he found an easy desktop switching utility I suggested he try another window manager that he already had installed (KDE or twm), decided to try out KDE ….. 10 minute later “I’m in windows, i got errors when i tried to go to KDE” ugh! I so I ask myself “how do we change window manager back? But I had no experience with the graphical login, or how it worked so when Tarist wandered back in (he’s used
rh9) I inquired as to an easy solution to this problem of switching back to a working wm. Of course I felt stupid, and felt bad… but i also had to go because it was getting late, so I left Tarist with him. Bleh, anyway, as soon as I came out of my crappy mood slump I had thought of a bunch of ways to switch it back, I just wasnt in the mood for it earlier, heh. Anyway, times like that make me feel dumb %D … oh and Tarist introduced me to Redhats apt rpm system, it sucks… ok, I am sure it works great, but it hardly has anything in it! %)

Bleh, I’m tired, and I have wasted most of today… I must get more than I think done early in the morning, ’cause the couple hours of cleaning on friday mornings always seem to ruin my ability to be productive for the rest of the day… *looks at the time* arg. Tonight Myk’s mother is taking us out to the Indian food place down the street, woo! It’s sorta an early easter dinner, since she’s spending Easter with Myk’s brother. It should be nice %) *is so excited* I love that place, I love indian food! … but right now I need to stop messing around here, and maybe poke around the FreeBSD shell account that a friend of mine gave me on his box, just so I could get a taste of BSD ;) (I expressed interest a couple weeks ago *shrugs*). *wanders off to work on some things*

o/` U2 – Where The Streets Have No Name o/`

Yesterday I ended up doing a bit of work on the journal section of princessleia.com, I’m up to November now, woo! I think I will spend some time today doing that, ah repeditive mindless work… It’ll be worth it in the end tho. I took a walk too, and it was SOOO hot out, I guess it got up to about 83 yesterday, of course you wouldnt believe that now, looking outside at the gloomy cool weather ;) yay for strange spring weather.

Not yay for my allergies tho, I am actually doing ok today, but yesterday evening was awful, I was hot, and ended up being a bit crankie because of my stupid allergies (I didn’t take benadryl yesterday during the day, since it makes me so insanely sleepy!). Went to bed around 11.

Today has been fairly boring, wrote up some instructions on how to use the irssi script mail.pl .. it doesnt describe itself very much, so I had to go through a bunch of trial and error to get it running in the first place (and a few irssi restarts, doh!), so I figured before I give it to Time to use I should write some instructions so he doesnt have to waste the same amount of time I did. It sets up a bitchx like mailchecking system, only it’s much cooler, you can add a bunch of mail folders, and customize it a ton, and it checks all mailboxes at a regular interval (default is every 60 seconds, but you can edit that), anyway, it’s a great script, and I almost don’t know how I lived without it %D

Man I’m tired… I woke up early this morning and wasnt able to fall back asleep *sigh* S’ok, as long as I stay awake til 10 pm, I shouldnt have any trouble sleeping tonight, in the meantime… *zombie*

o/` Tabitha’s Secret – Dizzy o/`

So it got up to 79 degrees yesterday, today it’s supposed to break the 80 mark, ugh. I took a walk yesterday afternoon ’cause it was nice out, and decided to wear shorts instead of my usual pants. Ah! The seasonal “trying on last year’s clothes” exercise. To my surprise the shorts not only still fit, but they seemed bigger on me than last year. Hrm. I think this is because I stopped eating breakfast over the winter. I just wasn’t hungry for it… so I stopped eating breakfast, and although I stayed fairly inactive, I managed to lose weight. But I’m still not terribly fit or “healthy” … I decided that I really am going to try to get in shape this summer. I won’t set outragous goals ’cause that’ll just frustrate me, but I think it would be good to take at least 3 walks per week (1-2 miles) … I would say “every day” but on weekends it’s hard ’cause Myk is home, and I figure 1-2 days a week will have weather that makes it difficult to take a walk (rain or over 90 degrees). I am definately going to go swimming more this year. We have a pool here at the complex, and I only used it once or twice last year, I really regret that, I won’t have a pool forever! And I love to swim, it’s a great way to have fun and get exercise at the same time. Right, so walking more and swimming more, and I have started eating breakfast so I have the healthy energy to do this… if I decide that I need to do more to suppliment my life I will, but those are very achievable goals.

So I had a 50 minute .wav from the teamspeak conversation we had yesterday, and I wanted to chop it up into a few bits that I thought were amusing. I discovered audacity. It’s not too bad, and it’s cross-platform, which is cool… *shrugs* it may lack some cool features that sound editing stuff in windows has, but it did what I needed it to do, and that makes me happy. So I have a directory of clips (converted to ogg) of some friends and I talking yesterday, woo!

Teamspeak Sound Clips

So I think, in lieu of finding a project to work ok, I will get back up to speed with putting journal entries into that mysql database of mine, I got really lazy about that, so I’m only up to october of last year, doh! Dunno what else I’ll do… maybe finally get caught up on those book reviews… *wanders off*

o/` Jack’s Lament – The Nightmare Before Christmas o/`

So last night I finished Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. I love his books, but I go through them so quickly, that one only took me two days. Ordered a couple more books from barnes and noble last night, used up most of the rest of that gift certificate I got from my mother for christmas… a Harry Turtledove book, and damn, what did I order? *looks* oh and Swan Song… a book my now sober father has recommended. Speaking of my father, I haven’t spoken to him in a couple months… woo, 2 months without his nagging about my work, educational and marital status!Parents!

So I hate Comcast (my cable company). We have established this I think… but they do the most annoying thing now on tv. Maybe they’ve always done it and I just didnt notice, or thought it was a mistake til I started watching a couple shows regularly… but you know how sometimes cable companies cut off commercials done by the cable stations to put their own in? Sometimes adverising themselves, sometimes selling the time to local companies? Well comcast does that, but their timing is ALWAYS off, so they end up cutting off the cable tv commecial about 2 seconds after it begins to put in their commericials. What does it matter? Well I don’t watch commercials, but don’t you think a big cable company would try to avoid mistakes like this? Well, I wouldnt have even brought it up if they didnt start doing something worse, they are letting their commercials go into the shows! Not very far… but enough to annoy. I have never had such an unprofessional cable comany, who would have guessed I’d run into this problem living near a big city? Bleh Comcast.

googlism.com is leet.

So I was flipping through channels the other night, trying to find something to zone out to while I was trying to fall asleep. And I happened upon a marathon of “The Bachelor” … has anyone ever seen this show? Just by watching for a few minutes I could just feel my individuality melting away, and the raw human need to pry into someone else’s life taking hold. It was creepy, I felt so fake. Luckily I changed the channel quickly enough to come back to my senses, I think I ended up just turning off the tv and going to sleep. Reality shows are strange.

So we were at lunch with our friend on Saturday, and I guess I neglected to mention an interesting conversation that began after Myk had talked for a bit about his beer-making. Someone got up to use the bathroom or something, and when they came back bob asked “have you ever tried wine?” … well *instantly* both Myk and I assumed he was talking about the linux software “wine” (runs windows programs in linux). Myk started talking about how we never had much luck with wine, and winex was probably better and… “I meant the liquid, uh, have you ever tried to make it?” Hehee! It was amusing, we are such geeks.

It’s supposed to get near 80 today, my allergies are driving me nuts, this is going to be a long spring, I gave in already this morning and took some Benadryl.

I chatted with radbatik (Tarist) and ShellGh0st today on Teamspeak. I think I have mentioned this program before, it’s really cool, there are both windows and linux clients, that play happily together, all you really need is a mic and your soundcard properly configured, and it works great. We didnt have someone to host a private server, so we all just joined one of the public ones, ran into almost *all* europeans there, it was pretty interesting. Made a little #13thHour and got to talk to each other. Fun stuff.. we had never heard each other’s voices before. And it was cool ’cause I was even able to easily record a lot of the conversation (once I ‘discovered’ the record feature). I was quite impressed with the program %)

I went for a walk yesterday, and somehow ended up at the store buying Cadbury Creme Eggs… oh how I love easter %) Creme Eggs make lif
e worth living, hehehehe. It was nice yesterday too obviously %) And I had decided on taking the walk after I worked on a little irssi perl script. See this guy in #goddess was a total linux newbie, and apparently he’s been private messaging everyone asking for help (so he doesnt have to look like much of a clueless fool in the channel). Well he starts asking me questions about emerge (Gentoo’s package management getting system thing, like apt in Debian), and I tell him that I dont use Gentoo and dont know how to use emerge. He is puzzled by this, apparently his friend uses linux, and this friend thought Gentoo was a good distro to start a total windows monkey on, HAH! Anyway, after he found I was unhelpful with the Gentoo thing (I told him to man emerge … RTFM!), he asked me how to use remotes in irssi. “Remotes?” I asked. “Yeah, ever used mirc? Well, in mirc…” he trailed off into some mindless explaination of mirc remotes. Oh god. I then tried to explain to him that irssi was nothing like mirc, and all the scripts are written in perl. And then, against my better judgement, I agreed to make him up a script that would do the auto-opping thing he needed to be done. Now I only agreed to this because I had wanted to write something similar for myself, and it was “so easy.” Anyway, under the influence of the Benadryl I took that morning, I went ahead and began working on the script, it should have taken 10 minutes, from empty file to finishing testing, but an hour later I was pulling my hair out trying to debug it! Eventually I realized that on Psiblade (or maybe it’s an irssi thing?) if you op someone, and they are already opped, you wont *see* the person being opped again. So this script had been working from the beginning! I just couldnt see it. I was ready to kill something! Heehee. Plus I looked like a complete fool in front of this newbie ;) Oh well, it was cool, I finished the script, gave it to him, then decided I needed a walk (to clear my head, and shake off the drowsiness brought on by the Benadryl). I felt really stupid tho %)

So anyway, this kid who asks everyone for help, is of the growning bunch of “helpless leeches” I’ve been encountering lately. I honestly don’t mind helping someone out with their linux problems, in fact, I enjoy it. But when someone cant “read the readme” or figure something out that is only a simple google search away, I get annoyed. Once or twice isnt bad, but these people expect others to set up their system completely for them, help them do *everything* And of course they have no intention of passing this new found knowledge on, I *KNOW* they will just end up going into some other chat room and start bragging about how much of a “leet h4x0r” they are. I KNOW that this kid I wrote the perl script for is going to make minor cosmetic changes to it and call it his own in 2 months. I guess there is no getting rid of these sorts of leeches, I could just tell them all to RTFM, but I am afraid I’ll go too far and end up getting carried away and saying that to someone who legitimately requires some help from me, oh well, s’just frustrating, I hate wasting my time helping people who wont help themselves.

Anyway, it’s after 1, I havent done anything today, ugh. Happy Tax Day! *wanders off*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

o/` Rammstein – Weisses Fleisch o/`

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

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

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

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

Birthday Topic Script

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

I guess that’s it… *wanders off*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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