o/` Something Corporate – Konstantine o/`

WallaceAndGromit.net officially got it’s 600th hit friday night, YAY!

I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday… just being lazy I guess… Friday Myk stayed home from work of course ’cause of the snow. We had a nice relaxing (lazy!) day. My father called around 4:30, we only spoke for a few minutes since there is only one phone at the rehab clinic and so he needs to share it with like 30 other people, but most of the conversation was about how my life is going. My father, 50 years old, in rehab for alcoholism, divorced, a shame to his parents… I love him but he has absolutely no right to judge me. The first three questions when I answer the phone? “Do you have a job yet?” “Are you going to school?” “What do you do all day?” *PL2 answers* Dad replies, “Aw, well that’s ashame, the longer you spend without a job the worse it’ll be for you to get one in the future you know… it’s hard to get far in this world without college… blah blah blah…!” I am so fucking sick of it. I am happy, I am healthy, I am financially secure, which is more than he was for most of his life. Sure, a guy takes care of me, but it’s not like I’m eating cookies and watching soap operas all day! It’s not like I am making absolutely no intellectual progress just because I don’t have a job. I am learning a great deal, why should I feel the need to justify that to him? It’s not fair! I understand that he is disappointed that his eldest daughter with the “most potential” is not running out into the world and building a sucessful career, but there is a point where his love for me should counter this disappointment! Does he think I am completely unaware of these things he tells me? I’m not stupid. Does he think that voicing this disappointment will help me? It only pushes me away further. I steered the conversation away from that, and he told me about a book he had just finished reading that he enjoyed, Swan Song, it sounds pretty interesting, I put it on my bn.com wishlist, maybe I’ll pick it up next time I am shopping for books.

After the phone call with my dad I was feeling reasonably depressed. Came into the computer room and just hugged Myk and told him. I just sighed and sat at my computer to watch the last episode of “The Office” that I had to cheer me up. It was funny, I felt a bit better after that, I shouldn’t let what my father says get to me, he really is just trying to help… I am sure he doesnt realize how much it hurts.

Later that evening we ordered in Indian food, and against our better judgement bought a case of beer as well, YAY! The indian food was excellent like usual, beer was great. Myk also rented the first two DVDs of Six Feet Under (HBO series, season 1.. just released). I had never seen any episodes before since I haven’t had HBO in *years* but I was pleasantly surprised. We sat there drinking beer (polished off half a case!) for 7 hours watching both dvds. Made me really want to buy it, since it was only a 2 night rental and so we wouldnt have time to watch the extras and commentaries, which I’d really like to see sometime. It was about 2 am when that was finally over, I was pretty trashed… wandered to bed *ZzzZzz* It was a good night.

Not terribly surprising I woke up with a hangover the next morning, not drinking enough water before I went to bed *oops* .. it was ok though, I can’t complain, it’s my fault… and at least it was just a headache I havent gotten sick to my stomach from a hangover in months. I chatted a little yesterday, then read… for some reason I was exhausted, maybe my sleep wasnt as restful as I thought? I fell asleep twice yesterday afternoon while reading! I took a bath and then went out to blockbuster to get another 3 eps of Six Feet Under (and bought a box of whoppers, yay for hangover munchies)… came home and I was still tired! Bah… made chicken and
stuffing for dinner and we watched the movie. I really wasn’t in the mood for drinking, Myk was tho, it was fun. The DVD ended around 8:30, at a cliff-hanger, after cursing myself for not getting the next dvd I got dressed (i was in my pjs by then) and went back out to get it, heehee. So I got home around 9 and we watched the last DVD of the season. Good stuff! I definately recommend it to anyone, I had watched OZ before (another hbo series)… and it was awsome, never seen The Sopranos, but I am sure that show is quite good too… I imagine these series’ are the only thing saving HBO, and they do an excellent job. Anyway, we went to bed a little after midnight. It was a great night.

Ah so it’s Sunday morning *looks at the clock* ok, afternoon %)

My mplayer install apparently didn’t go as flawless as I had hoped. I went to apt-get install imagemagick, and that’s fine, I go through with the install like normal… then a window pops up asking me about my mplayer config?! GAH! Paranoid I cancel the install and wonder what the heck was going on. MPlayer was working fine, what did I need to configure now? Maybe it was having trouble because I didn’t install the old mplayer from apt? I had never encountered anything like this. So I decided to grab the howto that I made up and try to figure out what happened, no help. I try to apt-get install xchat this time (i use irssi, but xchat is cool to have for testing things sometimes), same problem… and I notice that the mplayer version it is configuring for is the correct one on my system, so that was comforting. I went through the two option config (only one question really, about video output), I sorta guessed, assumed I could get back to it later if I fucked it up. And now everything works fine. I apt-get installed imagemagick and it worked… I have so much to learn still! Like why didn’t that config screen come up when I first installed the mplayer deb package? Why did it wait to scare me into thinking I had broken my system? Hehe.

Anyway, I have stuff to do today.. *wanders off*

A buddy of mine in #goddess sent me 6 episodes of this english comedy “The Office” This is a screenshot from one of the funniest scenes… these two guys who had desks near each other werent getting along, one put the other’s stapler in this jello, hee, great stuff.

No work for Myk today %) It’s nice… sooo much snow! YAY! The roads are pretty clear now, we might go out and grab some pizza or something for dinner later %)

*wanders off*

o/` What A Good Boy – Barenaked Ladies o/`

I don’t really have much to say today… I’m fairly tired. Last night we watched “The West Wing” and “Law and Order” (like usual) … PLUG was last night, but as normal lately it was badly planned … the last time we tried to go to a badly planned meeting no one showed up, that’s not worth driving 45 minutes in traffic.

I don’t know why I am so tired lately, I have always gotten 5-7 hours of sleep a night… Maybe it’s the placement of that sleeptime? Maybe 5-7 hours of sleeping in the daytime is better for me than 5-7 hours of sleeping at night? Bah! Maybe I’m just getting older ;) not so resiliant.

I played with mplayer today, was frustrated because taking screenshots of mplayer was seemingly impossible, until I RTFM *grins* I spent the better part of the morning playing with taking screenshots of pictures on mplayer… makes me sad that I put my stupid, old, slow dvd-rom drive in another computer, but it was either keep using the 24x cd (8x dvd) rom drive or use my new 48x cdrom, and since previously I barely ever used my dvd-rom it was a good choice *shrugs* it would have been cool to get screencaps from movies I have on dvd though.

I played with .bashrc a bit this morning… a friend of mine in #goddess was helping me out. It was kinda funny ’cause while I appreciated the help, it was all stuff I am sure I could have figured out once on the right track, I kept saying “thanks, i am sure I can figure it out now…” then he’d keep going *shrugs* it was nice of him anyway, I really do appreciate it, I understand so much more now.

Anyway, I’m prolly going to just go wander off and spend the rest of my afternoon chatting, yay for wasted time *wanders off*

o/` Sarah McLachlan – I Love You o/`

Install Adventures

09:18:29 -@PrincessLeia2- i should really install the new mplayer
10:06:50 -@PrincessLeia2- there is an mplayer in apt o_O
10:07:13 -@PrincessLeia2- but it’s not the one with quicktime support, it’s the one i already have
10:30:01 -@PrincessLeia2- hrm
10:30:09 -@PrincessLeia2- some things that mplayer needs are “not installable”
10:30:25 -@PrincessLeia2- mplayer-386: Depends: libdvdnav1 (>= 0.1.3) but it is not installable
10:30:41 -@PrincessLeia2- that’s not happiness
10:30:54 * PrincessLeia2 sighs and just reinstalls the old mplayer
10:33:08 -@PrincessLeia2- ugh, i shouldnt even have tried to get the new mplayer, i knew i’d screw everything up %(
10:33:56 * PrincessLeia2 tries to fix it
10:43:41 -@PrincessLeia2- ah, there… back to where i started
10:43:43 -@PrincessLeia2- heh
10:44:01 -@PrincessLeia2- i dont need stupid new mplayer anyway

This was this morning. Reading this from start to finish is actually quite funny… It took almost til noon to get my old mplayer reinstalled properly (/etc/codecs.conf had disappeared and didn’t want to come back when I tried to reinstall, I figured it out eventually…). So after this failure I mentioned in #goddess how much trouble I was having, and how I was giving up. Lucky for me my friend grifter was around and willing to help me install it, yay! It was an insane install %) Took over a half hour of stuff that he told me to do *ugh* … and almost none of which I would have known to do, I even made my own deb package instead of using one I downloaded %D … Now I can watch quicktime movies in linux!!! YAY!!! No more dependency on windows for that *happy dance*

I also got around to finally installing Open Office properly. For some reason I installed it only for my user, I am not sure what I was thinking, but that was obviously stupid. So I finally got around to getting the apt location for OpenOffice and apt-get installed it the right way. Luckily that went perfectly, I have absolutely no problems with it. %)

Fun stuff, I am so excited to have nice mplayer playing everything noew! I saved the log of everything I did in a txt file that I should edit later into instructions, I’m just having too much fun playing movies right now to do that %)

In other news, I got an email yesterday with the subject ‘help’ … now I get anywhere from 0-3 emails a month from people visiting my website, usually it’s “I can help you with completing this section…” or “I have a question about some subject on your site, can you help?” and most of all “I saw an mp3 on your mp3 list, could you send…?” … so I just assumed this email would be about something like that… I couldn’t have been more wrong. About a month ago I posted a section on my site called “Verbal Abuse – A Personal Account Of What I Went Through, it was basically talking about the crappy relationship I had with an ex boyfriend of mine. I didn’t try to draw special attention to it on my page, I even had the page created for quite some time before I linked it to my main page (a mix of laziness and reluctance to share it I guess). Anyway, at the bottom of the page I give my email address, as I am always willing to help people out of who have been through situations like that. The email I got called ‘help’ was from a woman who basically laid out her story for me (about 2 pages worth) and then asked me if I thought she was over-reacting, asked what my advice would be. The letter brought me to tears. Her verbally abusive boyfriend had many of the same tendancies of my ex, and I could see in her writing EXACTLY how she felt, and the memories just hit me. I spent almost 2 hours writing an email back to her, picking apart her mail and sharing with her my similar experiences, even all embarassing stuff (much more detail than I put on my website)… Anyway, she mailed me back this afternoon telling me she had kicked him out, YAY!!! She has much more strength than I did… I told her I’d continue email coorespo
ndence as long as she wanted, forever even… she seems like a really sweet person, I hope she’s able to get out of this.

Anyway, it’s getting late in the day *wanders off to do some laundry and read*

o/` Supreme Beings Of Leisure – Nothin’ Like Tomorrow o/`

I finished a book last weekend:

Pyramids, By Terry Pratchett, 323 pages
This is another book in the Discworld series. It takes place mostly in an “Egyptionesque” kingdom of Djelibeybi, where the new young Pharaoh Teppic (a trained assassin despite his royal lineage) has a few problems, among them being that his Old Kingdom is now a Lost Kingdom. As always, Pratchett’s characters are entertaining, while the story pokes fun at culture. I found this book to be a bit slow at first, and I wouldn’t say it’s one of Pratchett’s best, but it certainly was fun. I was greatly entertained by the camel.

I am about halfway through reading the third book in the coldfire trilogy. I can usually tell a good book when I can read 100 pages in a row, without paying attention to the page number… I did that with this book. It’s definitely worth pushing yourself through the first book, they get much better as they go along.

Yesterday Myk stopped at home during his lunch break to pick up a Debian CD… decided to take me back with him so I could take the Jeep and go grocery shopping (ugh)… I guess monday around noon is shopping time for old and disabled people, the store was full of them! Maybe some sort of bus dropped them off… I didn’t see one, but it was crazy. I got the shopping done though… I hate shopping!

It was really nice out yesterday, if I hadnt spent my afternoon grocery shopping (then leaving to pick Myk up from work at 3) I probably would have taken a walk. I never checked the *actual* temperature, but it must have been somewhere around 40. Today it’s all cold and rainy, no walks %( Anyway, it was a nice break from the cool weather.

So I recently downloaded the woody deb package for yahoo!’s official instant messanger. Apparently they recently changed their protocol, so the apt-get version of Gaim no longer supports Yahoo! .. I didn’t really care much at the time since I was all *anti-im* for a couple months, but now I want to use them again. Anyway, I had tried the linux version of Yahoo! Messanger last year, and it was pretty basic, not terribly stable, and I really didn’t like it… but since it has been a whole year I decided to give it another chance, it has not disappointed! Better email alert system, tabs for weather, headlines, mail, calendar, just like the windows version, and I looked in the preferences, and there is an option for skinning! I will have to explore that later. It’s been very stable as well, which is nice obviously. They still call this version “Beta” … I doubt they will ever get to an official stable release since it’s probably like, 3 determined yahoo! programmers working on this as an independent project in their spare time, hehe. Anyway, you can see a screenshot of my unskinned ymessanger here: Linux Yahoo! Messanger.

I was going to spend yesterday working on a mail script for irssi, so it can alert me in the statusbar when I have new mail (like bitchx does)… and then I discovered on the bitchx site that it had been done already! So I downloaded the script, it’s pretty nice. The only thing I don’t really like about it is i had to add another status bar for the mail section, and so now when I have no new mail it’s just blank *shrugs* I’ll get used to it… but when I get new mail it looks like THIS… yay %)

So there was a post to the Lan List yesterday… and a few of our friends are planning a lan party for February 15th, YAY! I love lan parties %) The day before is valentine’s day of course, and Myk and I are going out for sushi %d mmmm sushi, I can’t wait.

Anyway, I am going to go see if there is anything I can find to work on today, maybe I’ll add some useless new sections to my website ;) *wanders off*

o/` The Cure – More Than This o/`

Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you.
But the roses are wilting, the violets are dead, the sugar bowl’s empty and so is your head.

^^ in a fwd from MorganHorse … possibly the most entertaining fwd I’ve recieved in years.

So this weekend… hmm, it was fairly relaxing %) Saturday evening we wanted pizza, so we considered going to Unos, even drove all the way out there, and when we got there there was an hour wait! Gah! So we turned around and started driving home (realizing that most every restuarant would be that busy, it was a rainy saturday evening, where else would people go?), then stopped at Tony A’s, a local pizzeria, and ordered a pizza and wings. Then went to blockbuster and rented The Usual Suspects, Strange Brew, and Black Hawk Down. So we got our food, and drove home. We watched The Usual Suspects first… The movie is a few years old, but I had never seen it, and that’s sad since Kevin Spacey is one of my favorite actors. Besides some small problems (in the scene where they are raiding the boat there is a big explosion in the beginning, this is in a crowded harbor, and no police or anyone show up for quite some time…) I really enjoyed the movie. Then we got out the beer to watch Strange Brew… I broke one of my rules and decided to drink while Myk said he didn’t feel like it (rule: I never drink alone!), but after i had one beer Myk was like “mmm that looks good” and decided to have a few himself… it was a funny movie, and I just died laughing at the stupidest parts! Ah it was great. We flipped through channels for a little bit after the movie ended, watched some old Dr. Who (i really was drunk! hah! … I dont remember it being that cheesey…), then I went on IRC for about an hour to make a fool of myself, around 2 I went to bed. I had a nice night.

Sunday I spent reading and playing Final Fantasy 6. Around 8ish we decided to watch Black Hawk Down. It bored me. I respect the work, effort, meaning, great cinematography, good acting… but it’s just not my kind of movie. I was feeling pretty crappy too, and maybe that’s not
the sort of movie you should watch while your stomach is tied in knots %)

The woman upstairs leaves her fan thingy in her bathroom on all the time, it’s weird.

I installed a neat little mail script for irssi. When I get a new mail it tells me in a little section on the status bar… [Mail: 1 new] and stuff… it’s pretty nice. I had talked about writing on myself, but decided just to use this one since it’s fairly nice %)

I guess I’m going grocery shopping this afternoon. Myk is coming home for lunch, and I guess I’ll drive home with the Jeep to do shopping *oh joy* … I hate grocery shopping.

I hate mondays!

I guess I am going to go get a couple things done before Myk comes home for lunch… *wanders off*

It was quite a surprise to wake up to the developing story of the Space Shuttle Columbia losing contact with the ground. Even moreso when I saw the video of it breaking apart and the newscasters saying “it doesnt look good.” Just when the United States needs reassurances of our power, something like this happens. *moment of silence*

Crontab In Debian Stable

Now I’ll be the first one to defend linux’s wondefulness, but as with every operating system, there are tangable flaws. I completed the birthdayperl script (the one that queries a database to see if a birthday matches tomorrow’s date, and emails me if so) and went to put it into a simple crontab so it would run daily. I am doing this on our debian stable webserver/gateway, and for some reason the crontabs that I am testing just *don’t work* So after 2 days of utter frustration I discover the trouble.

First I thought “This is user error” … because I am not quick to blame linux when I know my experience is lacking. So I besides reading all the local documentation I could find on cron and crontab, I googled for a bit to make sure there wasnt something important I was missing. Nope.

Then I think maybe it is something with my script that is making it not work. Nope, it should run perl scripts fine.

Ok, maybe cron is crashing because something in my script is doing something bad. Nope, I am running it as a normal user, no one would release a system with that sort of major flaw.

How about if I restart cron after I put in the crontab! Nope, what is the point of a crontab? So a regular user can setup timed jobs without needing to consult the admin… “hey mr/ms admin can you restart cron?” “grrr!”

I was at a complete loss… finally last night we were testing some stuff out, and I just gave up and wandered off.

This morning I check my email and apparently the script ran! WTF? Unfortunately the script was a bit broken (hell I didn’t expect it to run!) and ended up emailing me like 50 times til the script crashed *oops* … but it was then I found the problem!

Apparently it takes a few minutes for the crontab to install. Stupid? Yes. Why didn’t I discover this sooner? Because I never even *thought* to wait more than 30 seconds or so to test the crontab .. I’d want to test it, so I’d set it up to work for the turn of the next minute, right? Why 5 minutes in the future? *mumbles something about how silly debian is* I love debian, but on redhat crontabs are installed within seconds (that was a major reason why i never thought of this solution, I had used crontabs in redhat in the past…)

Yep, that was my crontab adventure… At least it ended well and my birthday script works %)

*wanders off to get ready to go out for pizza*

Sometimes we make choices that we don’t want to make.
Choices that may hurt us, hurt friends, but in the end it’s for the better.

We cannot regret these choices.
But they may haunt us.

I am haunted.

Dont understand?
Dont care?
Dont ask.

I was just talking to myself anyway *sighs and wanders off again*

o/` U2 – With Or Without You o/`

I got a pirate paint brush through a trade on neopets yesterday, YAY! Noew firethrower13 (above, the neopet I adopted) is all “ARR!!!” I should make a new little webpage for him since he’s all piratized, hee… I spend too much time with neopets, *uses the excuse that they are to replace real pets she doesnt have*

Speaking of pirates, one of Myk’s friends gave us copies of Age of Mythology, Mech Commander 2 and Homeworld. YAY! New games! I will have to check them out this weekend %)

Mmmm games. I was talking to DarkonZero the other morning in IRC … and he just recently bought Final Fantasy: Origins *is so jealous* … it’s final fantasy 1 and 2, released as a playstation game. It got me feeling all nostalgic about old Final Fantasy games. Now true, I did just discover final fantasy a couple years ago, so I am not a fan from “back in the day” … but I still have love for even the old games. I decided the other night that I wanted to play FF5 … so I start playing from the start, la la la happy playing … *goes to save* I COMPLETELY forgot that the disk is damaged and prevents saving! The save screen is all froozy, I assume it saves the game, but you cant see the save screen, obviously it would be a mess if I wrote over some file I didnt want to %( So I sighed and took the game out and decided to play FF6 instead, mmm FF6… I never did finish it, I just didnt have time, between working, and my ex monopolizing time (on MY PS2 might I add), and just daily chores and errands that need to be done. So I think I will take the time to finish it this time, it gives me something to do other than reading on weekends, and I really do miss playing Final Fantasy… Ok, I guess it was a mix of playing NeoQuest and talking to DeeZ that made me want to get back to my beloved RPG’s %)

I am over my depression I had yesterday… I think I was just tired, I didn’t sleep well (surprise surprise) the night before. *Shrugs* Oh, I got my mail-on-birthday script done yesterday afternoon %) It wasnt too difficult actually, on wednesday I thought it would be impossible (i had a headache and couldnt focus) but it all made sense once I looked at again yesterday %) It looks like it’ll work fine.. *crosses fingers* … I’ll just have to make sure I keep an eye on it ;) yay perl

I hate AOL. I sent a fairly important email to my grandparents last friday (they sent me some money, so I wanted to thank them and touch base IMMEDIATELY). And yesterday I get “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender” msg because for some reason the mail was refused by the AOL servers, UGH! So I decided not to take the chance of that happening again so I just sent it from my Yahoo! mail account. Ugh. They mailed me back this morning, all excited about this trip I said we were planning to make to New England in the spring… I didn’t say which spring *g* jk! I think we are sorta trying to plan a trip, it’s just hard right now.

Right, so it’s 10 and I still havent gotten any cleaning done (my usually friday morning thing), I just don’t feel like it.. makes me very glad I got a lot done yesterday %) But I should end this entry so I can do it, and then take a shower *yawns* Maybe I’ll even find something to work on today or (as i suspect) I’ll just play games. *grabs the windex and paper towels an
d wanders off*