this girl drives a tank

My Christmas pics are all downloaded thanks to my little script that seems to work ok, although I'd like to have do some error checking, also, It doesnt check if the camera is powered on, not sure how to do that. And I am not sure how I'd get it to fire up an image viewer of your choice, or the Gimp. But, it works basically and I'm happy about that.

You can see it here.

My ISP announced they will upgrade my service from 3mb to 4mb with 800kbps upload for free!

This is great news, as my 3 meg service is severely strained ;-) Well actually its just fine, but one shouldnt look a gift horse in the mouth.

Which reminds me, last time i said "its the cat's meow" and some people mentioned to me they didnt know what that means. Well it means its great, its the Bee's Knee's , its wonderful...etc.

Its good to be back from my holiday, but i did have a great time, even got some snow again the last couple days. The return flight wasnt as bad this time, on a much bigger jet.

I am going to make some sort of comment system for this blog, I had tried in the past with poor results (slow page loads) but will give it a second effort. The nanoblogger author seems to have it working on his site without problems.

Im also in the proccess of registering my own domain name..although all the good ones are taken it seems.. velvetpants.ca is available though ;-)

We had a great day today, despite it being a green Christmas, it was still a good one. I got my usual haul of clothes, books and cd's, and it still is amazing fun to watch kids rip open gifts without a care in the world. We then went out visiting various friends and relatives and of course at each house your offered plenty of food and even more drink! For once I didnt have to be the designated driver, and was able to actually get tipsy a little ;-)

It is odd to see my relatives use of the internet, having a 28.8 connection for me is limiting, but they seem to think its the cat's meow. When I ask them wouldn't it be nice to have a faster connection, they tell me "what for?"

I really dont have a good answer for them, they dont play bz online thats for sure, and dont have any sort of servers running, just send the odd fax, send some email and browse a website or two. It reminds me a lot of when I first started using the internet, I had dial up too and thought it was wonderful at the time. Anyway, I know that if I *had* to go back to dial-up, I'd survive I suppose, but at the same time, I do appreciate my fast home line a lot more now after this trip!

So tommorow there was to be a ski trip, but thats washed away with the rain, so I hoping to get out of the family visiting thing and sneak off with my cousins to see a movie in town. I dont think Im up for more food and drink.

Lord of the Rings wouldnt be bad but we are so far into the sticks, I dont think it is even playing out here :)

It has rained really heavily here today, so I confined my self to the house and did some geeking. My photo script is now workable, it will ask you what directory you'd like to download the pics to, create it if neccesary, then copy the pictures over from the digital camera. Thats pretty good I think, I can now ask for help with the other stuff, like making sure the dir you choose is writeable and some other minor things.

Also, I found a file called /etc/ppp/options with a line:

# Require the peer to authenticate itself before allowing network
# packets to be sent or received.
# Please do not disable this setting. It is expected to be standard in
# future releases of pppd. Use the call option (see manpage) to disable
# authentication for specific peers.
auth

I have no idea what this does, but commenting out the "auth" allows me to use my modem under linux, I can now do all the stuff I need without having to go to Win XP. Yay.

Tonight its going to be aother of those feasts. I struggle to keep up, but it seems I am constantly eating or nibbling on cakes and cookies and all that good stuff. The big meals I find harder though, so much food! There is a scale in the bathroom, I havent yet dared weigh myself, but I think I might before I leave tosee how much I have to work out in the Y when I get back. I dont mind honestly, I accept that we all gain a few pounds over the holidays.

Well have a great day tommorow!

The flight down here was ok, except I am not a good flyer, I get quite nervous and Mom saying stuff like "What was that noise??" and "Oooh, did you feel that?" really didnt help much.

I wasnt happy that Dad didnt want to come with us and felt a pang of sadness saying good bye to him at the airport, I will miss the little Christmas things we do together and already look forward to coming back.

It has been quite mild here so the snow is disapearing rather steadily, so we spent the day skidoo-ing (that means racing around the woods and fields on snowmobiles) I havent driven one in ages, we used to have 2 and I was allowed to drive one when my brothers were in their rare charitable moods.

I also managed to get some mall time in, which is always a treat ;-)

I did get my modem working in linux but using kppp, i couldnt connect :( , however in windows xp, with the same username and password it worked fine :( so here I sit typing in windows. Oh well.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, Patlabor's IT guy has been an ass again and ssh access was down for a while, and I have had a pretty busy week with it looking to get busier every day now until the "big" day.

I wont have much time to write anything here until after the holidays, so until then, if I do not see you, I hope its the best Christmas ever for all of you.

I am REALLY looking forward to getting out of town for while, Its so nice not to be in a big city for a change.

Anyhow, have a safe and fun Holidays, I will see you in the new year. Here's a smooch :x

:-)

Yesterday I didnt do alot, Im still sick and getting these horrible flu chills followed by hot flashes, its really gross. I did manage to set Samba up on my server, then copied over all my mp3's and set up networking in WinXP and Win98 for my roomates. So that was somewhat a succes as I'd never really looked at Samba before.

Today I did a bunch of laundry and cleaning and then got Guu the irc bot working again, this time it seems to run a little bit better, last effort wasnt the most succesful, it seems her database was corrupted.

I am beginning to see bandwith as it truly is: an impossible dream, I used to think my 3 meg line was awesome, I could run bzservers on it all the time with no problems, but now with my roomies heavy into kazza, I cannot run servers as I'd like to. I would like also to share my mp3's with freinds via ftp server or some sort of private p2p app, even a shoutcast thingy who knows? All the while leaving me enough bandwith to play bz too. So really i need 3 3meg lines, not one. If I sound greedy and spoiled, its because I am. ;-)

I cannnot belive my immune system, once again I find myself sick as a dog, again with the flu, this version is not much fun, its the one where all your joints ache and your stuffed up and coughing all the time. Last night I got home from work, and made a hot toddy, thats a packet of extra strength Neo Citran, a shot of rum, tea spoon of honey and a little sprinkle of nutmeg. I was pretty much asleep before i even put the mug down. The whole night was either sweating or shivering, lovely eh?

The thing that really pisses me off was tonight is the David Bowie concert, which i have no intention of going to in this condition, however, in some strange twist of irony, it turns out that the concert has been postponed, the reason? the Flu of course :-\

Are you in that Christmas zone yet? Humming and whistling along to elevator & mall muzak? I think I am, its not too early now to end your phone conversations with "Merry Christmas!" or to buy gifts for people you've already shopped for, but these are little extra gifts that you see at the last minute and cannot resist. Im in that zone now and am looking forwarad to the holidays, even though I have to go to the airport, get on a plane, sit there, get off at another airport etc etc.. I do not mind at all.

I know some of you find it a bit too much and we all get stressed out sometimes worrying about silly stuff and dealing with all those shoppers and traffic and parking at the mall, but its a time of year that is magic for kids and for us adults, I think a time to be a kid again.

I got my new motherboard tonight, and this time the ram works, it sees the full GB of DDR ram now and its such a huge difference in speed over my older SDRAM. Also She gave me a keyboard that she uses at work, and I must say the key strokes are really soft and muted compared to most kb's.

It is an Aopen KB-858, and best of all theyre like $12.00. I didnt get anywhere with FreeBSD, and am presently installing Debian back onto my old PC. Its weird now how the debian installer is a breeze to me and comfortable to install, I can remember being frightened to death about it, I find it as easy as any Windows install I ever did. So anyhow, all my music will be stored on this old PC, I will share it with my roomates with (yet to be learned) Samba and probably set it up as an NFS server with my other linux computers. Still undecided as to run a webserver or not, but most people tell me if you do a few simple things, you can remain relatively safe from the evil crackers.

I watched the part 2 of the Tomb Raider movies, I have to admit being an Angelina Jolie fan, she's kinda cool, and does a great job of the Female Action Hero, part 2 wasnt really a great movie, it was good most of the way, but the end had some sort of unrealistic monsters and poor effects which kinda took away from the film.

I'm really looking foward to seeing "Big Fish" with Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, Albert Finney and Jessica Lange. Supposedly one of the best Tim Burton films ever.

It looks like there is something wrong with the freebie motherboard I got, even though it is brand new, I will not recognize all the ram. So I called my freind who got it for me and she was all apologetic! Anyway, she has another one for me which I will pick up tommorow.

She dosent know it yet but I have booked her and myself a full day in a downtown spa, we will get the pampering we truly deserve, I chose a Thai style massage which supposedly are awesome, and we we will get to lay around in bath towels with mudpacks on our faces yakking about boys whilst we are pedicured and manicured ;-)

I attempted to install Freebsd on my old desktop, managed to get all the partitioning correct and it suddenly rebooted :-\ I have no idea whats up with that and cant be botherd tonight to investigate.

Its been an up and down week, I had, almost 2 years ago leant some money to a boyfriend at the time, it was a relatively large sum to me, and now 2 years later he is still putting off repaying me. At this point I am ready to tell him to just take the money, if he needs it that bad, keep it, walking away from it, would at least let me never see him again, but it bugs me that he will be free from paying me back. Anyhow, it was making me grumpy just thinking about it :)

I got my new RAM for my desktop, 2 512mb peices, but the motherboard only recognizes one. I put my ram into my roomates pc, he has the exact same motherboard and bios revision, and it worked fine, recognized the full 1 gig, so maybe my motherboard is broke.

Then I had some vmware problems and in order to fix that, my kernel needed recompiling (gcc was a newer version after upgrading to Sid, than what my present kernel was compiled against)

So last time i tried this disaster ensued. I wasnt too optomistic about it this time either. However, Proton told me about using the ? to get help on every option, and Tupone very kindly stayed on irc as i pasted any question i didnt understand to him, and he told me what to do! The first time it didnt work, as I left out some networking stuff, which didnt allow for dhcp to work, but the second time was succesfull!

So happily Ive learned something, and am at the least, not scared to try it again if needed.

The next thing to do is put some sort of OS onto my old desktop. and of course fix this ram thing.

We decorated the Christmas tree last nigh, we have 400 lights on it ;-) It was fun though with alot of wine and eggnog.

Tonight I managed to get Debian upgraded from Woody to Sid on my new desktop, also I copied my Vmware directory from my old PC to this one, installed Vmware here and was able to run Windows right where it left off from my old PC which I thought was a bonus. Bzflag will buid no problem now in Sid, but last night when the system was still Woody it wouldnt build.

So everything is sort of back to normal in computerland. I looked at my logs from a test webserver I ran for a few days and there are still tons of connections testing to see if its a windows server, and doing other creepy things. I wanted to put all my mp3's online for friends to download and also, I have many pictures of family stuff I wanted to put in a gallery for my relatives to see, but I am not sure how to set it up so that it secure, and am worried about crackers and stuff. I guess no webserver is safe, but Debian.org's mirrors recently got rooted and if those guys cant keep their server secure, what chance do I have? So I might scrap the webserver idea until I am somewhat clued in as to what I'm doing.

I watched "Meet Joe Black" last night, it wasnt too bad, but I thought although Brad Pitt was as delicious as always to watch, it wasnt his best acting performance by any stretch.