this girl drives a tank

Sometimes I get the mood to listen to an artist as opposed to a single song, for example, tonight I have had the urge to listen to some old stuff, so I loaded up xmms with The Smith's The Cure and Llyod Cole, other times I am in the mood for more contemporary music like Goldfrapp or Zero 7.

So with this in mind, I will try to make a bash script that will ask me for the name of a band or bands, search my mp3 directory, and load all the songs by those bands into xmms. As usual, I have no idea where to begin ;-)

Tommorow is the big football game, and for Jolly I am hoping the Boston Patriot's will win, but I am not sure I will watch it.

Ugh..a memo has circulated or office concerning a company led course aimed at improving our "day to day computing experience" Not every one got the memo, and apparently from what I can gather, only those with more IT calls than our general prison population were targeted. The course apparently will be offered in half-hour chunks on company time, so for if no other reason than to escape my cubicle of death, I might take the course, but I am afraid learning how to select and copy multiple files in windows explorer might actually be more boring than my job!

My IT guy did make personal visit to see If I had read the memo, and went as far to say the course "might actually help you get through the day more efficiently" This pissed me off a little, not what he said so much, but that he felt it necessary to personaly see If I will sign up. So later in the day I put a cdrom in my drive, then put another cdrom on top of the first, but not flat, sort of poking out of the tray, then I squished it closed with my fist.

I am unable to find any retailers for my Logitech Optical Trackball, this might actually force me to quit playing bz, I cannot play with a mouse as it physiclly hurts my arm, I have used trackballs for as long as I can recall, and people always tell me what about scrolling?!, well, I scroll with my other hand on the keyboard, I actually find web browsing faster with just the keyboard, once you remember the shortcuts, it is pretty easy. Anyhow, none of the big comp stores have these trackballs so I might have to have to order a crate of them directly from Logitech just to play bz ;-)

One of the most confusing aspects of linux for me is regular expressions, the concepts of words,tokens and all of that is very hard to figure out for us non programming types. On top of that, commands like find and grep use differnt ways to search for patterns in files. Glob, as it turns out, isnt the same thing as regular expressions. Fine. Why not?? why not make all the commands use the same method of searching?? Anyway, I found a pretty neat tool called txt2regex.

Basically, you follow the prompts, telling it, I want to look for a file that starts with a ^ has any number of letters in it and ends with 001.* , or something like that. It can be any combo you like. The script then lists a regex for any of the commmon tools on a linux system that you would use for such a task, like sed,find,vim and so on.

Its kinda cheating i suppose, i really should try harder to learn regex's without this kind of help, but there are so many little "gotcha's" it makes it frustrating to learn. Anyway, for now if i need a quick answer I can use this.

Here's a another pic courtesy of KR, he is somehow under the impression that women are tough to figure out. I really don't understand what gives men that idea!

I bumped into a couple of old players recently, kono and zig, I remember just before zig left, there was alot of speculation that he cheated amongst some players, I have to admit, his dodging was incredible, I mean even with the skill level of players I see now, I cannot think of many, if any that can dodge like zig could.

So anyhow, needless to say he always destroyed me, totally, like we'd play for 10 mins and it would be 15-2 for him, so he gets the new client, and I had to help him with the new options and stuff, and then we played for while, at first he was rusty, but still really good, and even made a couple of awesome dodges just like before. We ended up even after 20 mins, so either he is rusty or I have improved, I think probably a bit of both.

Then tonight I saw kono again. He was checking out the new client and doing really well on ducati. He was almost as sharp as he used to be. I told him that he is back in the team if he ever wanted to, and Id like that alot, then we can boot Sniper50 out. (j/k Sniper )

Oh and even Badger, the games original creator was playing the other night which was great to see, another great plaer thats also so nice to talk to. Ski will be happpy Apache is back playing so the venerable Avengers can play matches once again. There are still a lot of players that I think have drifted away though, Xos, Yeti, Riseman, Jrailtala all seem not to play anymore which is a shame.

I am a big fan of Linux but it sometimes makes me wonder what kind of degree I need to use it. This weeks nightmare is being able to print from linux to Sarah's windows 98 pc that has an old Lexmark ink-jet attached to it. I had to install Samba to enable me to see the windows shares. (This isnt too bad as I'd set up Samba before on other computers, but still takes 15mins or so to get it all running good) Once that was done, I had to download and installed Cups, The Common Unix Printing System. This wasnt hard to install but I had no real experience using it and it is mainly geared toward using a local printer attached to your Linux puter. There was a small blurb about printing to a windows pc, but nothing too in depth. So then I had to google alot and finally got it all set up, added a printer, and lo and behold....no driver for Linux :-\

So then I go find a driver, download and compile it, copy the printer definition file to my cups directory, then re configure cups to use this new driver, restart cups and test it. I sent a test page to print, the print applet opens up in windows 98, and nothing happens.

By comparison. I have a brand new WindowsXP installed on the same computer with vmware, I had never touched *any* printer configuration at all in this install. Yet when I opened up the printer page, there is the lexmark all ready to go, I didnt need to install or configure a single thing! Not even a driver.

I realize if printer companies wrote Linux drivers it would make life much easier for us, but I do wish for some simpler configuration sometimes. I did a fair amount of reading, fiddling around with config files and all for nothing!

It has been a tough few weeks for my gracious web space provider, his idiot IT guy was making excuses for the fact that hes incompetent and as a result my little bloggie had to go in hiding for a while, I thought about just quitting it anyhow, sometimes I have no idea what to say! I just start typing and see what happens. Anyway its back now for better or worse.

I went to the spa with my freind last weekend which was absolutely the best! It is by far the second most relaxing thing I have ever done in my life, and we had an awesome time.

Bz has gotten alot prettier, a new graphics facelift has really made the game look cooler. If only it were that easy for the rest of us ;-)

The bickering however seems to have risen its ugly head again and its not fun to play anymore :(

For the last 3 days our phone was down, no dial tone, people were able to call us and leave messages, but of course we couldnt hear them. It didnt affect our DSL line except made it drift in an out, and made me laggy on irc and in bz. The Bell Canada guy came over and tested everything and discovered that someone had attached another line into our phone box just outside our window, this line he traced down 2 floors into our landlords office! I am not sure what to make of this, but at least the phone works now as the tech cut the line and sealed off our box so it couldnt happen again.

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The largest indoor weed factory was busted by cops this week, just north of Toronto. They got a load of plants and equipment said to be worth $30 million dollars.

The building they used used to be a massive brewery for Molson's beer, and these guys had taken the beer vats and used them as incubators for the plants. Everyone was amazed at all this going on right under our noses, as the building sits right on the side of one of the busiest highways in Ontario.

I have no issuse with dope either way, not for it or against it, I have many potsmoking friends and although I dont smoke it, I do not care if they do. The funny thing is, when that building was a beer brewery, its product was in my view responsible for causing many times the problems in society than dope does, but people seem to turn a blind eye to that. Compare the average person that has consumed too much marijuana to the average dude all loaded, cant walk, talk etc...etc... having done plenty of bartending, I'd take the mellow guy with the munchies over the loud mouthed drunk anytime.

Last weekend we decided to stay in the apartment and do as little as possible. Sarah and I have a habit of getting home from work and immediately putting on flannel pyjama pants..this way when her boyfriend (who dosent have a car) gets home and wants a ride somewhere, we have an excuse. "i'd take you...but I'm already in my pyjama's"

Anyway, we decided to order groceries online, which was the first time we have done that. It went ok, and they delivered quite quickly, but the proccess of choosing which size and brand of everything you want takes forever. You could probably drive to grocery store and back in the same time, we couldn't do that of course as we were in our pyjama's ;-)

Then we decided to add each other to our instant messaging buddy lists.. so now we dont have to actually be in the same room to see if someone would like a cup of tea for example. Sarah's bf had never used messenger, and because he is a turtle typist that takes forever, he communicates in smilie's only. Not happy with the default smilieys, he added a bunch of other ones to convey every possible conversational phrase he could come up with, without actually typing anything. He also has been looking into text to speach software so that he dosent have to read his emails, the computer will read themn to him.

So yeah...we are getting pretty slack around here!

I am quite happy with the new Bzfalg release, the lates cvs version has hunting tanks in orange now so newbies dont shoot each other. :-) The spawn code on ctf servers seems to be better than the 1.7 releases, but still could use some tweaking maybe...the problem I suppose is that not every ctf game is league style, so any changes would have to benefit all styles, like the HIX map for example, and not just our little ducati games.

I'd still like to repop somewhere near my flag :) I try to play freestyle a little bit more but I am really no good at it, even the rabbit hunt stuff im hopeless at, so I will stick to ctf I guess.

I signed our ctf team up for Badin's tournement, but I dont expect we will play, I havent seen any of my teamates playing regularly in months, I cant even remeber the last match I played in!

My roomate wants to invite all his buddies over for this years Supergame coming up in a few weeks, which means an apartment full of drunks, yelling at the TV, I am already considering alternate plans that will place me anywhere but home on that night.

I somehow managed to find linuxchix.org, an awesome site with some great articles, least of which is this one, describing why there are fewer women in Linux and what we can do to remedy that. Here is an excerpt, detailing one of the many reasons for fewer women in computing.

2.2. Women have fewer opportunities for friendship or mentoring



Like any other discipline, computer science is easier to learn when you have friends and mentors
to ask questions of and form a community with. However, for various reasons,
men usually tend to mentor and become friends with other men. When the gender imbalance is as large as it is 
in computer science, women find themselves with few or no other women to share their interests with. 
While women have male friends and mentors, it's often harder and more difficult for women to find a community 
and then to fit in with it. Many women leave the field who would have stayed if they had been male.



It's true that this is a feedback loop, fewer women in computing leads to fewer women in computing. 
It's important to understand that this feedback loop causes women to leave computing who wouldn't have left if, 
all other things being equal, they had been men. This is important because male classmates often assume their female 
counterparts leave the field because they "just aren't good enough." 
Women's low self-estimation contributes to this false impression.

There is a girls only mailing list of which I am now a member, and I am delighted to read some of this stuff from hobbyists to kernel-hackers, sys admins and sofftware engineer's, all of which are women and take the time to answer qustions from people like me! ;-)

Anyway, Its kinda neat and I am glad to meet other geek girls, most of my online pals are male, with the exception of the few female bz players, and none of those girls are really into linux much.

I did, at ak|ra's insistance, compile Fluxbox from source and am happily using it now. My breif flirtation with KDE is over at last :)

Sometimes its fun to to do a 'select all' in a folder with several thousand job bids, and the click 'print'. This will get the IT guy at your desk in record time, with the added bonus of slowing your system down to a crawl. The cool thing was, because the gui is pretty much locked up by now he couldnt even kill the print job and had to reboot my puter. I wanted to say "You know, in Linux I'd have opened a virtual console and killed the process..." but decided to remain being "that dumb girl".

I have been listening alot to a band called Lemon Jelly. They are kinda downtempo but very melodic and relaxing to listen to, in honour of the little rover thingy on Mars, here is a song called Space Walk It is one of those "really grows on you" songs.

Am I the only one feeling all blah after Xmas? I really have no passion for anything right now, I had been going to the gym as part of some sort of ridiculous notion that I am overweight and worse, will easily get back to the level of fitness I had when I was 18 and running regularly.

Its affecting work also, I dont love my job, but I dont hate it either, and up till now had always wanted to do a good job each day and make sure I didnt get too far behind as we got more busy, right now though, I could care less and find myself distracted and wishing I was elsewhere.

I realize it partly because of the winter ahead, cold and slush, dirty city winter's, not even remotely pretty like the winter's you see on postcards and stuff, with the winter carnivals and ice sculpture's, and everyone smiling and sipping hot apple cider, breathing in the crisp clean sunny air. Its more like bleak and desperatley gray days, with wind that will cut you in half, sitting in traffic, shivering in your not yet warmed up car, and looking at this giant black-brown gross chunk of ice drop off the wheel-well of the truck in front of you....

Even my zest for linux has dropped off, Ive learned so much this last year and now know that if I really want to get good at this, I need to learn the shell better, regex and sed and all that stuff that makes it easy to later grasp the bigger stuff... but I cant bear to write those silly practice scripts and echo foo and cat bar, it bores me to tears. why cant they teach you stuff that is more practcal? Or at least make it more interesting.

Then there is bz, which lately I find my self driving around, not talking to anyone and just lazily shooting at who ever. I used to like seeing one of the really good players join the other team, then you get into those little battles within a battle, but now I dunno, Im not really into that. Hopefully this will pass, but I cant even say I'd be worried if it didnt.

Anyway, its not all bad, Im happy that Christmas went so well, its just that this year I seem to have the winter blah's before everyone else.