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

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

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

I got a couple sections created on my website:

Ornithophobia – The Phobia Of Birds

What I Did For Locks Of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

o/` Portishead – Wandering Star o/`

Stupid daylight savings time, I want my hour back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Leia, why do you always date geeks?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

o/` BOA – Little Miss o/`

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

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

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

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

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

The reason I can’t email my friends on aol:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/894113.asp?cp1=1

FUCKING AOL!
FUCKING COMCAST!

*sighs and goes back to work*

o/` Sister Hazel – Your Winter o/`

Yesterday… hmm. Well I got the webpage basically done, I uploaded it to the cobalt webserver, now I just need Myk to turn on mysql so I can setup the database and stuff, yay!

We (well Myk did, I helped a little) did some touchup painting around the apartment yesterday, the recaulked the bathroom, wee fun! Actually, we should have waited to do it on a warmer day, so we could open the windows, paint and caulking fumes in a closed space == not good %) Anyway, it’s amazing what a little plaster, paint, and caulking will do. Of course Myk’s immediate responce to this was “wow, I could drill a hole in the wall for ethernet, and just fix it up before we move out! Ugh… men %) Anyway, we neglected to read the caulking instructions completely (I’m infamous of that), and after it was all caulked I picked up the bottle and said “errrm… this says ‘do not expose to water or mositure for at least 24 hours'” Doh! Myk was able to take a shower this morning, being careful to try to not get the caulking wet, drying it where needed… I think I’ll just take a little bath %) Sucks to only have one bathroom at times like this, heehee.

On monday night I was feeling kinda crappy, had a bit of a headache, and I knew if I fell asleep too quickly then I’d wake up too early, so I decided to watch some tv to keep me awake (and it was less painful than a computer or book when having a headache). Anyway, nothing was on (how unusual?) .. so I ended up watching the Discovery Health Channel… which is usually pretty gross, it’s often either a surgery or a pregnancy, ugh. But this time it was a special on Obesity, which turned out to be quite interesting. It’s amazing how some people are just predisposed to being heavier than others, and it made me feel quite guilty about my laziness %) I mean granted, growing up I developed fairly good eating habits, last night when I felt hungry I immediately went to get a salad without a second thought, and I generally do like to eat a lot of healthy things. Then again I go to Friday’s for dinner, get a fried chicken sandwich with an “extra side of mayonaise” *grins* So I’m watching this show, and I notice that some people really are more active and eat about the same as I do, and they gain weight, and it’s really sad. I couldnt weigh morethan 150 pounds if I tried (that is how much I weighed in high school because of medication I was on, I’ve lost quite a bit since then), and even now, with little activity, I seem to stay a nice healthy weight… and that made me realize that I could be really in shape, and look really awsome if I just expended a bit of energy every day to getting in shape. I see all these people who try so hard and just cant be fit, and it would be so easy for me. I should really start some sort of exercise routine… the metabolism that makes me thin won’t last forever ;)

A guy dropped by #deep13 yesterday who reminded me of my ex boyfriend in his political views. He was basically one of those people who believes all the liberalist propaganda on sites like guerrillanews.com … now I am not saying that some of what they say isn’t true, but mindlessly believing it all is just as bad as becoming an MSNBC zombie. And yet he attacks us for watching real news networks, saying that we dont “understand reality” because we are “brainwashed” by corporate news media. Not only that, but everyone in power in america is evil, the voting system is horribly flawed and just doesnt work, and a silly string of other conspriacies. I can’t stand these people! At the end of this debate he made it came out that basically he’s in favor of a communist dictatorship… of course he wouldnt admit that was the type of government he was proposing when I pointed it out to him. And on top of all this “anarchist” stuff, he said that if he were elected he’d “legalize marijuana” … so I asked why not to legalize all drugs, and I got the same sort of crap I get from everyone in this position… with which I argued back with my normal arguement about alcohol being lega
l, and killing people, and destroying families. Now you may not agree with my postion, most people don’t %) But this guy was calling for anarchy, and yet would take a stand to say illegal drugs should stay illegal! And he obviously was not educated enough to fight this point, because he didn’t even know that cocaine was ever used for medicinal purposes %) Anyway, I guess my biggest problem with him is that I agree with him on some points, I have done research in a variety of places (not confining myself to just corporate, american, news, but not excluding it like he did) and there are reasons for my points of view.. but people like this guy make us all look like fools! Especially since they don’t realize that the system that they “want to bring down” is the system that allowed them to become fat and complacent AND have the time to complain, I doubt they’d be happy if they honestly brought anarchy down upon us, or have any idea what that would mean.

Now that I am done complaining about other people, I must complain about something about myself that bothers me. On saturday I was bringing my computer out to the truck for the lan party, I unlock the car, put the computer in, and turn around, and a group of about 5 or 6 black kids (midteens) walk by, and the first thing I think? “Woa, I better lock the truck!” … As soon as I thought that I felt bad, then quickly tried to justify it, and tell myself that I would have acted the same way no matter what race the kids where… but in all honesty, I don’t know if I would have, and that upsets me. What has caused this sort of unconscious racism? I have had friends of all races, in my mind I know that everyone is the same! But then I have reactions like this… is it because I grew up in a sheltered town in the state of the union with the least minority? Is it somehow because of my parents, the way I was brought up? Is it because of the media leading me to believe that certain races are more apt to commit crimes than others? Am I just afraid of all people in this area? I don’t know, but it makes me really ashamed…

I found another person who uses debian but “cant use apt” … now tell me, what is the biggest ‘selling point’ of Debian? Well apt of course! Without apt it’s just another boring, old, pain to use linux distro… so I am assuming he is just using debian because it “looks cool” for him to doso *sigh*

Ok, I need to get to work now, hopefully this’ll be done today %) YAY! *wanders off*

o/` Lost Highway Soundtrack o/`

I am so sick of meeting bitches. You know, I try so hard to seek out fellow female geeks, and I think “hey, #linuxchix is a nice room filled with fellow smart women” … and for the first few days it was fine, but now it feels like everytime I say something it is somehow attacked *sigh*I might just leave that room. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but I’m just not comfortable there anymore… I’m sorry I’m not a freaking super genius!I went there because I thought I might learn something… *sighs*

I guess I’m in a lousy mood, I havent been feeling good, maybe it’s stress, maybe I’m sick again, maybe the crazy weather has got me feeling weird… the smallest things are upsetting me, maybe I just need to get away from the computer for a while and relax.

*Just thinks happy thoughts instead*

On sunday we went out to the store (to get soap, since we had run out) … we decided to pick up some stuff for chicken sandwiches too. Then while driving home Myk decided that he wanted to go out to eat. It had started to snow (strange!), so we didn’t want to drive all the way to the sushi place. So we headed toward the Indian food place. Got there around 4:50, they weren’t opening til 5. So we decided we should just go somewhere else. Decided on the Drafting Room, and while we were about halfway there I realized i wasnt really in the mood for beer. “Maybe wine, hey if we turn around now we can go to the Indian food place and it’ll be open!” … but we couldnt get any wine because the Indian food place doesnt have a liquor license (they don’t give enough out around here…), and it was sunday, no liquor stores open. Oh well, we decided to just go get indian food and remain free of alcohol. The food took a while. While we were waiting a guy came in with a handful of balloons, and they set up tables for what looked was going to be a birthday party. Oh geez. This is a very nice restuarant, described as “Fine Dining” on the sign, entrees starting at about $12, but it’s a small place… still I was hoping that this birthday party wouldnt prove to be annoying. Our food is brought (about 45 minutes after ordering, but this food is *Good*) and that’s when a truckfull of 20-something year olds pile into the restaurant and sit down at the birthday table. I try to ignore them, eating my food, such yummie food! Then one person from the birthday table says “woo! Goodie bags! *BBZZZTT* Kazoos! YEAH!” … oh god. The rest of my meal consisted of trying to talk to Myk, while next to us there is a party of people who were quite possibly older than me, blowing in kazoo’s playing with assorted noise-makers. And this party was thrown by a couple parents. Now could you imagine being ~22 and having your parents throw you a birthday party like that? Could you imagine going to a nice restaurant and acting like an 8 year old? They had no respect for anyone around them, and I *know* the owner was torn between her need to keep other patrons happy, and the huge check she’d be getting from this party. *sigh* It sucked.

So after that we decided we should get a movie and go home to relax. Ended up renting “Lost Highway” which I had never seen. We went home, snuggled in bed, and watched the movie.. which turned out to be quite good. It’s one of those movies that I owned the sountrack to before the movie, ’cause it’s such a kickass soundtrack %) Yeah, so I went to bed after that, it was a good night.

Yesterday I got a call from the guy I’m doing the website for. He actually called while I was writing up an email to him… and I sent him a demo of how the site would look and work, and a non-functional admin page so they could get an idea of what I was working on. I told him it’d be mostly done by friday… at least finished enough so that he could start using it… maybe a few finishing touches, and edits if anything breaks.I bought the domain yesterday, and it’s actually up and running now (no site yet, just ‘under construction’ sign), and today I finished basically all of the backend. Tomorrow I will spend putti
ng it all up on the webserver and setting it up. Thursday will be spend debugging, testing, and working up a small how-to use the site. Friday the guy is coming over to the apartment so he can get an introduction to how everything works. YAY!

Anyway, I am going to go get a couple more things done so the server is all ready for me to upload everything tomorrow *yawns* I might take a nap too, I’m not feeling so hot. *wanders off*

o/` Tricky – She Makes Me Wanna Die o/`

I’m actually a cat person, not a dog person… like these pictures might lead you to believe.

PL2 And Pogo 1
PL2 And Pogo 2

Unforutnately the batteries in the digital camera died after Myk took these pictures, so we never actually got any decent ones of the lan party, sigh!

We got to the lan party around 3:30, no one was really there yet, and it had started *pouring* out, so we decided to wait til the rain let up a bit to bring the computers in. Around 4:30 a couple more people showed up, and we decided, despite the unrelenting rain, that we’d bring the computers in (by “we” I mean the guys, they don’t often let me help). So of course as soon as we got the computers inside the house the rain stopped.

Now R2D2 is not a a huge computer, it’s not a full tower, and his insides dont make him a monster to carry… in fact I don’t have trouble carrying him, but he’s not a tiny computer either, so travelling to lan parties always takes a bit of work, and yes, after 8 hours of gaming, the last thing I want to do is drag my computer home, hehe. (Picture of R2D2 On My Desk). Luckily my monitor is a tiny 13 inch… and even if I got a bigger one sometime in the future, I’d rather bring this one to lan parties %) Myk’s 19 inch is huge and too heavy for me to carry alone.

So we ordered pizza, Barry and Rae always have tons of snack foods… rice crispy treats, brownies, chips, dip, pretzles, mmmm I ate so much, heehee. Didn’t help that I positioned my computer right next to the food, was that on purpose? %D Anyway, we started off with playing a bit of Battlefield 1942… despite my lack of practice, and generally sucking at that game anyway, I didn’t do bad *shrugs* and it was fun. Then we ate food, I played with the dogs (actually, I played with the dogs several times during the evening, heehee). Then played some Homeworld, which was ok… I have only actually played it once, and I suck really bad at it %) So of course I was the first one to die, but it was cool, I got to learn more about playing the game than I had previously known… after I died I pulled out the camera to take pictures of people playing and noticed that the batteries had died. I should really get rechargable batteries for that thing, it eats batteries so quickly *sigh* Anyway, then N-Tropy pulled out his gamecube and showed me the new Zelda game. Now I havent played Zelda in years, so I can’t call myself a fan anymore, but after seeing this game, I fell in love with Link all over again ;) It’s done all cartoony, and so it’s really cute! Definately the kind of game to get me back into console gaming again… it was so smooth too, and had the awsome little details that make games like that so cool.

So now I want a gamecube *grins* … of course there are games I want and just can’t afford for the playstation 2 as it is *sighs and pats her poor little ps2*

Well after drooling over the Zelda game for a bit I went back to playing games… we wanted to play some ut2003, but not everyone had it installed, so we wasted about 45 minutes messing around with seeing if anyone had the disks, seeing if anyone actually wanted to play, and finally decided that a few of us would play normal old UT, while the rest of the people there wanted to play their new Rainbow 6 game, which they didnt have extra copies of, and apparently you need the cd in constantly (no jump-starting), to play.. so we couldnt play anyway. UT is always fun tho %) I am a UT fiend! And actually did well in a couple matches ;) … I miss my sniper rifle that I don’t get in ut2k3 *weeps* … so old UT is definately more fun for me %)

Anyway, I am going to go read for a bit… prolly wont do anything else today, relaxing is good. *wanders off*