this girl drives a tank

Mom came over yesterday to help, and I guess to inspect She was generally happy about the new place, It is clean, bright, a great location and on a much quieter street than my last one. There was a bar underneath me at the last place, the one that I used to work in, and also, accross the street was a Hip-Hop club, that would play really loud, really bad music, untill 3am, and then there would be huge fights outside almost every friday and saturday night, it was pretty bad, and really loud. So this new place is only about a 4 minute walk from where I used to live, but on a very quiet, side street adjacent to the local park (the park with the skating loop and gazeebo)

The bathroom wasnt especially nice looking here, and Mom was kind enough to point that out, it was clean, I used a full roll of paper towel, 950ml of Lysol and then recleaned it with a scented bathroom cleaner, changed all the fittings, new towel racks and soap holders, I even put a new toilet seat in, but it was bland looking, painted in a sort of faded eggshell color. So I went to Walmart, and bought some paint, and painted evrything yellow with blue trim, also I picked up a nice shower curtain and liner, that matched the yellow and blue paint. Now my bathroom looks like Sweden.

I will set up my server today, and set up Sarah's laptop in the living room. She dosen't know that she's going to be using KDE on Debian, she actually dosent know what linux is at all, but her old computer, a win 98 machine, celeron 400, 64/mb ram, was pop-up infested, took 6 minutes to boot up and was generally a pig to do anything on. Her requirements are msn messenger (gaim) a web browser (mozilla) and email (undecided..) also she might need to open the odd word doc or spreadsheet, so, I am not sure what to do there, I can install Open office I guess, but the laptop is only a celeron 500, also with 64mb of ram, so OO might be slow. Or I could install abiword for word docs and some other spreadsheet program.

Email I guess Kmail? I dont know, maybe I should let her use evolution, its pretty good, I use it now on my laptop. Suggestions for word doc, emails client and spreadsheet apps are welcome.

Last week I noticed some holes in my mp3 collection, I have around 350 cd's that I bought myself, so I thought I had burned them all, however, I was looking for some ELO to play while I unpacked and in my mp3's there was only 4 ELO songs, despite the fact that I have 2 ELO albums, same thing for Suede and Beautiful South, So I will reburn all of my own albums, It is easier than trying to find the ones that I have missed.

I also want to reconfigure my server, it has 2 3ogb drives in it, and one is now full of mp3's, so Id like to make the OS see both drives as one filesystem, I am not sure If i can do that or not. I dont want mp3's in /mnt/mp3 on /dev/hda2 and then in /mnt/moremp3/ on /dev/hdb1, Id like linux to combine both drives into one transparent filesystem, even if it means reinstalling, thats ok by me. Sound doable?

Although the place looks like a bomb hit it, with stuff laying around everywhere, we are finally all moved in. My younger brother notwithstanding, it went pretty smoothly. He was in charge of getting a van for us, this would be no problem he assured me, he'd get his work van, he decided on thursday to flip out at his boss and quit his job.

He then decided to tell me this thursday night around 9:30pm, long after there was any chance of us finding a rental van, this didn't go over too well of course with me, and then when Dad found out, my brother's life suddendly became a little bit more complicated. The result of Dad's involvement was my brother returning to work the next morning, and showing up at my place with the van a few hours later. I dont know what happened or how he got his job back, and I really didnt care.

I spent most of the day carrying small boxes over to the new place, and then attempting to make the new place "surgical room clean" It is actually a nice place, freshly painted and with all new appliances, but still I cant just move in with out a total cleaning of the house. Even my Dad said a few times "why are you cleaning that? its clean already" and I think I muttered something about "you wouldnt understand".

Nothing got broken or smashed, except a small dent in my hope chest which I wasnt happy to see, but I can't be mad at anyone that agrees to lift all my furniture and put it into a van, then carry it once again into a new house. However, I do have a pretty good and relatively expensive office chair, you know the kind with like 5 different adjustment knobs and paddles under the seat... really comfortable, anyway, my dumbass brother decides to ride down the sidewalk spinning around in the seat, he hit a lip in the concrete and fell off the chair, unfortunately he didn't break his neck, but broke off one of the wheels of my chair.

So I am sitting here typing this in a wonky chair, I guess I will have to find a wheel for it or replace it or something. My ISP is awesome, my net connection was there all set up as soon as the phone was hooked up, I did some speed test last night. Only my laptop and desktop are hooked up now, so my roomates aren't doing the kazza thing, sucking away my bandwith. I am still getting 3000kbps down and 680kbps up, so thats not bad. The end of this month Bell-Nexxia, the company that owns all the phone lines here, will upgrade their service to compete with the recently "uncapped" cable providers. My isp, a reseller, will also do the same, so I think it was something like 4.5Mbps and 800 upload that I can expect. The upload increase should help any bzflag server that I may choose to run, if only I can find a way to keep Sarah and her bf off of kazza :-\

Today will be more cleaning, more packing away of "stuff" and some groceries I guess, my tooth is still hurting a little, I have an appointment for monday, I havent eaten anything since Thursday lunchtime, but today I guess I really should eat! I can survive on tea and water untill monday though if I need too.

About an hour or so before Dad and my brother came over to help me move some things and check out the new place, I developed this horrible toothache, it was even bleeding at one point, and Dad was starting in with his usual "why dont you just buy a house" routine, I get that alot, my Mom takes care of the "so...are serious with this "one", do I hear wedding bells?" kinda stuff and my Dad is in charge of the "buying the house" pressure. It appears they have sat down and worked out how best to coerce me. My brother was slinging my boxes of stuff around as if he worked at the airport luggage center, at one point, all this, plus my toothache, I was actually crying.

After they left, I took 3 tylenols and opened a bottle of Yellow Label Australian Cabernet Savignon, and went on irc. This isnt good. You really should limit your irc time to moments when your actually lucid. I was blabbing on about anything that popped into my head. SportChick and I ended up playing a fun match against Learner and JBDigriz, it was actually a great game, no one lagged, they took the lead, we tied it up, we took the lead and then with 9 seconds left they tied it up. I think Donna will be great at ctf, she's really getting the hang of it now.

Yesterday, I wondered out loud in irc what to do with my old celeron 500/64mb ram, Dell notebook, it has retired as a bz server and has been sitting on my dresser idle for several weeks. JBDgriz said to install BSD on it, so, like most girls, I happened to have a a copy of FreeBSD 5.0 on my shelf and started installing, I choose to let the OS partiton the disc however it wanted, and also installed pretty much all the different software groups, developer, x windows, whatever... In about 40 mins, I had it all set up and logged in with X running, so that was cool, I cant however get the pcmcia card to work, the little lights on the dongle are lit up, but I dont know how to make it connect to the internet, any networking tool i try gives me "no route to host" or "network unreachable"

I think I will use this as the living room laptop at the new place, as the computer room will be upstairs, We will have this notebook down in the living room for general use. So I will try to get the networking thing going today or failing that, install Debian on it.

Tommorow morning the phone will be cut off, and hooked back up at the new place tommorow afternoon, plunging my internet connection into the abyss. Tonight I will pack up all my computer stuff and await my net connection to return from terra incognita. So you might not see anything here for a while.

It is late and Im tired, sitting here typing and drinking Earl Grey decaffeinated tea, We started moving some stuff tonight, mostly boxes of books and cd's and all the little knick-knaks you collect over the years. I dont have alot of those kinds of things, I do have some cool candles and candle holders, and some masks that I get traveling friends to get me when they visit an faraway land..some other smaller statues and my small but flourishing family of cactus plants. Other than that its clothes, books, cd's and computer stuff. (Oh, I do have a ton of nice kitchen ware, stainless pots and pans etc..)

Sarah on the other hand has enough stuff to fill an curiosity/antiqity store 3 times over! We are still carefully packing all of it up. But anyway..by the time friday night comes around, we will be all done and into the new place. The net connection is a little worrying, my ISP says it will not have to do much, depending on how Bell Canada switches our line over, Bell is scheduled to cut the phone off on Friday moring and hook it up in the new place later that day, but I can see them messing that up! I am doubtful that I will have internet at all for several days after friday, but no sense worrying about it, as its out of my hands.

So Tupone showed me how to compile add joystick support, we did menuconfig and added that option, built the modules and fixed lilo to boot to the new kernel, everything went smooth, except of course the nvidia driver wouldn't load, so that needed re compiling to get back into X and the last thing is vmware wont run, I will fix that next time I need a windows app.

Playing bz with a joystick is weird! It actually isnt harder, you already know the moves you need to make, its just the speed of the joystick is not the same as my mouse was. I have a "Resolution 1600" option in my XF86config file, plus I fool around with xset to get a nice balance between how far your mouse pointer moves in relation to hand movement. There is no obvious way to do this for a joystick, most of the calibration programs dont have acceleration as an option.

There was an article posted on the BBC's website concerning women and gaming. A Counter Strike tournement had $600,000 in prize money..

The imbalance between men and women was clear to see, with almost 50 male teams taking part, compared with just seven female squads. And as in the world of sport, there were separate competitions for each gender.

What I do not understand is the need to segregate the men and women?! It was hinted but not verified in some of the readers comments, that the women asked for that, I am highly skeptical of that, I belive there is absolutely no difference in ability between the genders when it comes to computer gaming. I couldn't imagine my reaction if I was told all the girls that play bzflag have to form their own league.

Here's a joke for you....

There is a Scottish guy stranded on a desert island....hes been there alone for 10 years....one day he sees a scuba diver swimming towards the island, as the diver comes on to the beach, he see's it is the the most beautiful woman he has ever seen! She walks up to him and asks "how long has it been since you had a cigarette? he says "about ten years, so she unzips a shoulder pocket and opens a watertight packet of cigarettes, he is amazed and takes a huge long drag off the smoke. She then says "how long since you've had drink of whiskey?", and again he replies ten years, so from another pocket she pulls out a small silver flask and offers it to him, he takes it and drinks a big gulp, realizing it is the finest single malt whiskey in the world. So she then says to him, as she starts to unzip her wet suit "how long has it been since you played around?" and the guy's eyes are so wide they almost pop out of his head... He says:"Sweet Jesus!! Dont tell me you got a set of golf clubs in there!!

heh

I downloaded and installed a nice pool game called foobillard I is a pretty good game and according to their website, multiplayer, so one of you who has some pool skills could download it an play me!

I am not bad at pool, most of the bars I have worked in had pool tables and I found it a good way to pass the time, the pool hall date is also a good call in my book :-) I have played a few bzplayers on yahoo's game site, but it is a java client and not very good. This game is much better, nicer to look at and has all the right sounds as well.

Tupone has been tirelessly working on SDL support for bzflag, I managed to get it to compilewith the intent of testing the joystick out. I cant however get my joystick to be registered as a device under linux, still working on that one. I like the toggling between full screen, window, and minimized that SDL now gives you. You can quickly minimize the game if your boss walks in.

Is it just me or has orkut lost its appeal? perhaps it is because most of the communities I joined have less than active forums, and besides the forums, what else is there to do? ok...so theres profile roaming, you could spend hours digging through peoples profiles, discovering their blogs and all of that..and I suppose the dating component is of some interest, but I have a hard enough time dating guys in real life, dating a guy over the internet would pose some extra problems of its own.

I guess orkut's email system was broken too, several people I invited have yet to get the invitation. So for one or all of the above reasons, I find myself logging in less and less.

Most of my old books and clothing are donated now, I was mildy ruthless in deciding what to keep and what to donate, but I suppose spring is around the corner, and a little shopping spree might just help my now depleted wardrobe.

Sarah and I had to deal with her boyfriend and his drunk buddies last night, they were over and we just hung out here for the evening, it was pretty good actually and I got a tad tipsy :-) When I awoke early this morning two of them were passed out on the computer room floor. I remebered that silly badger flash movie that has been making the rounds on the net, so I loaded that up on the computer hooked to the stereo, turned up the volume all the way and then went out to get some groceries.

Oh and Guu, the Supybot irc bot is back in #project24 and #bzflag, this is a newer version than the last on I had used, and has some nice new features, including now a sourceforge query module among other things.

There has been some hardware changes on this webhost, this blog used to run on a RH 8 machine called asgard, but now runs Debian testing on a new machine called Sasami. I do not know what sasami is or means, but it runs Debian and thats fine by me. Now I can install stuff without learning all those silly rpm commands :-)

JeffM has become quite proficient at installing Debian, which can only be a good thing right? I am not sure how long it will take for the domain to switch over, you wont need to update any bookmarks, but just in case, the real address to this blog is http://aec.bakadigital.com

I am happy to see outside my window today, mist, fog and snow melting, this can only mean one thing, summer is here! well ok, it means that maybe, just maybe, we have past winters worst point? One can only hope. The spring will surely rejuvenate me, and I cannot wait. Oh, we got the keys to the new place yesterday, so I plan to go over and bring some of my stuff this weekend. Next weekend will be the moving day. I havent talked to my isp yet, we assume that because Bell Canada will switch our existing phone line to the new place without changing our number, that dialing out on or DSL line will still work at the new place. I had better look into that today. Last year, moving into this place we had no net for a week I think as it all got hooked up. Funny how no internet for a week scares you now huh?

I remember the very first time I had ther internet hooked up, I went to chatelaine.com, read some stuff, then wondered what to do next! I think I used the internet once ever 4 or 5 days back then. You guys are lucky you didnt know me back when I thought E-cards and jokes of the day were the coolest thing ever! I was quite the little spamster.

It seems there is always things in Linux that make life easier, but you never learn them until you have been doing things the hard way for some set period of time, Its like someone decides "ok, I've had enough of watching her bastardize the command line, enough already, time to show her a few things"

One of the enlightenments I have found is that there are 2 ways to change the mode on files, lets say I needed read,write,execute on a file, but wanted everyone else to have read and execute only, I would do 2 chmod's chmod u+rwx file.txt ; chmod go+rx file.txt

I knew about "absolute" or "octal" permissions, but never understood how they worked, chmod 755 file.txt will do the same thing.

All you have to do is add up the numbers, so read+write+execute for user=700 and read+execute for group=50 and for other=5 giving you 755

I guess all I have to remember is 4,2,1 and it shouldnt be too hard to figure out from there.

Another minor thing that I couldnt figure out, was that on my BSD shell account, Vim is installled, but every time I had used it, the arrow keys wouldnt move the cursor around, they'd print stuff like C,D etc... very annoying as I cant use the hjkl method of moving around, I didnt know untill yesterday that I needed to create a .vimrc file, empty even, and that makes Vim behave like Vim, and not like Vi. Apperently they do this for the "old schoolers" who insist on life without arrow keys and syntax highlighting, you know who you are :-\

So I suppose Its back to bitching up the commandline for me, armed at least with a few more little tidbits, until the $bash God's decide I am worthy of more knowledge.

The second worst thing about moving is packing, I suppose the actual moving is worse, but packing is horrible too. I have decided to part with some of my worldy possesions, I satrted with books that in the last 5-10 years have remained unread, I have books on top of books and despite the pace at which I read them, I know some of them will never be read because of lack of interest, sometimes I am given a book, like some novel, and its a very "harold robbins" type of book, money, sex and power, totally not what I usually read, but as it is a gift, I have to keep it around for a while, but now I will donate all of those to the library.

My wardrobe is another issue, stacks of clothes that I will likely never wear, dresses that have been worn 2 times in 5 years, and shoes....well...we wont go into that, but It breaks my heart to give these away even if I grudginly know I must, so there will be some tough decisions to make in that area.

I played a fun match today with jh and Chiko against 2 of the Zee's and Asinur. It wasnt that much fun, as we lost, but what wasnt so good is the lag, all of us were in US/Canada and they were in Germany. With the server being German, it is, at least I think, an advantage for them. If you shoot at them head on, they die, if they are sideways, it seems bullets just brush off them. I guess I would like to say that it isnt enough to cancel a match, but just leaves you with a bad feeling about losing that way, knowing that some shots they just didnt die.

I dont mind losing, god knows I have had my share of losses, but a game on equal terms would be nice for a change. And what do you say to the other team?? You cannot complain as they are all good freinds and wonderful oponents, and I hate to make them mad or think Im just a bad loser. I am beginning to think now that bz isnt suited to ctf, the margins are too close, perhaps the 5 shot FFA servers are the right thing after all? Or perhaps I should play less and do something else to relax, something less frustrating

hmmm, maybe asdf had a point about lag last night after all... ;-)

Last night Jolly and I played a freindly match against Ares (asdf) and Anteater, we beat them pretty bad and it was fun playing with J. I guess asdf got upset at the end, he was complaining about lag and I suspect does not like the idea of losing to 2 girls. I personally dont see the big deal, and wonder how many of my bz friends secretely resent a girl that can handle herself in this game. For those that dont know, there was a short lived girls team called the tanktops.

We took alot of kidding about that logo, especially the placement of the rockets, Bamf made it for us and I now wonder if he put the rockets there on purpose...:-) Anyhow, we never did get to play an official match, but it was a good idea. Chiko, Jolly and I talked to today about challenging one of the teams to another fun match. We figure we are all pretty decent players, Chiko is great at flagging now and Jolly isas good as I have ever seen her, and I of course still have my "cowardly hiding behind stuff and picking you off" style.

So together I think we could make a pretty strong team. (Thats pretty, and strong :P) It is likely that the pressure to win would be greater for the guys that we played, at least thats the plan.

I spent some time trying to upgrade my blog to the 2.6 version, It took me several tries and finally I got it to work, but some of the template variables had changed and required re-editing etc, so finally today I got it all fixed, then realized there was a "bug" in it and looked to see that version 2.7 has been released!

So for now I just reverted back to the old version I was using, and will try again later.

Valentines day was nice ;-) I accepted an invitation to dinner at very posh downtown Toronto seafood restraunt. I know alot of guys think Valentines is a fabricated day, invented by us to make you at least try to be romantic one day of the year. This may or may not be true, I dont care :)

In order to get my blog software to use comments, I will need to upgrade it to a new version, so do not be suprised If it looks really crappy for a few days, or if I make some mistake and totally wipe it out.

Nothing else really new going on, We have decided to move by the end of the month, even if by law we can stay 2 months from the first of next month. There happened to be a really nice place available right away, which is about a 2 min walk from where we are now. We told our landlord to give us a months rent, plus our deposit back and we would think about it, so he agreed, and handed over a check that will pay first and last at our new place and still leave us with a $1000 roughly left over! It is a pain to move on such short notice, but we will have to do it eventually anyway, and this way we get some cash out of it.

I was invited to join Orkut.com, which is a "trusted, invite only, network of friends" Basically it has a bunch of people that can join "communities" based on specific intrests, for example I joined a bzflag group, a linuxchix group and a Debian one among others. Each user has a list of friends, and you can see the profiles of these people and so on. I was suprised to see the number of bz players already signed up.

It is somewhat "yahooish" in that you have these communities each with its own forum, ranging from dating to computers and music, books and the like. But the real diversion (for me) anyway is looking at all these peoples profiles ;-)

Anyhow, Im not sure where it will lead, if anywhere, but it is worth while to check it out.

I went skating tonight in a little park near my house. It has these winding footpaths which they flood every winter, and this lovely old gazeebo, all lit up with old style park lanterns. I always get a warm feeling in me skating around slowly with all the children whizzing by you, couples holding hands as they skate and all that :) It somehow makes me feel like I am part of a very "Canadian" moment, sounds silly I know, but I am at a loss how else to explain it.

Feb 1st our lease on the apartment ran out, yesterday we get the notice that the landlord has sold the building and we have to move out by the end of this month! We are to say the least not too happy, I HATE moving, and we have only been here a year :(

Under Ontario law, as best as I can tell, if a lease expires, and no agreement to vacate or renew the lease has been made, the lease is assumed again on a month to month basis. This does not however cover a sale of the building. There is an official form that he gve us, stating the building is sold , but when you buy a building in Ontario, that contains less than 3 apartments, you have to state that you wish to take residency in one of those apartments, there is a check box on the from we were given for the new owner to state that, but they didnt check it off.

The present landlord wants to meet with us today, but Sarah is out of town, so I will talk to him without her there. In the meantime I will have to look up exactly what rights we have etc..finding a new apartment in 20 days is next to impossible in Toronto. So far I have found this, but little else, I think I will spend monday on the phone with some beurocrat :-)

Lost in Translation turned out to be a not so good movie, I have in the past been impressed with Sofia coppala's movies, and in terms of mood and setting it was very nice, with a great soundtrack, also, not many movies are shot in Tokyo, and it was great to see little bits of that city.

The problem for me was the chemistry between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murry, I accept the younger woman/older man storyline...it is not uncomman, and understand how two people in a foreign country, lonely and homesick could wander into this type of relationship, but there was no real spark between them, and without that, it got boring, real fast.

Not to belabour a point, but now the "authorities" are considering investigating Janet Jackson because of "nipple-gate". I cannot belive that anyone would go to that effort just to defend the rights of the poor children that happened to be watching the half-time show when the infamous "boob" made an appearance.

Ok, so that is offensive? Well, this ad ran on Canadian television, in primetime, in front of the same helpless kids that Janet offended so much, but no one seemed to complain about this one. Go figure.

Bamf sent me his old arena-bowl map, (thanks B!) and it is running on my server at port 6000 for those that have a fondess for that map, I set the tanks to highspeed of course, just for fun.

Roomies rented Lost in Translation which I will try to watch tonight if I can get some time.

There is an intersting piece of software called Bitlbee that has recently gotten some attention on Freshmeat. What it basically does, is act as anirc gateway to all your instant messenger clients. The software installs an irc server on your local computer. (only you can connect to it by default) You then connect xchat to this server, (/server localhost/6667) and your automatically joined to #bitlbee, the only other user is "root", who is there to help configure some things, you then use /register and /identify to set up an account, then add a few users.. "add 0 OSCAR <screename> <alias for their screen name or number>" once some users are added, you will see when they come on line, as they will also join #bitlbee and you can then chat to them as you would in a normal irc session.

So it all works ok, takes some time to set up though, It would be really nice for a script to read your .gamrc or .jabber whatever, so that you need not do any configuration. Why do this isn the first place? Well for me I rarely turn on Yahoo or msn, icq as I do not enjoy having multiple little chat windows, I much prefer irc and xchat/irrsi, and this will allow me to use one app to talk to any of my contacts.

By now you must have heard about Janet Jackson at the half-time show, I dont think she did it on purpose like many now say, she never has done that sort of thing in the past at least. And having done lifegarding and alot of swimming, I have had the odd "costume malfunction" myself ;-) so I can sympathisze.

Today was -2C without a breath of wind, I drove out to my niece and nephew's place, picked them up and took them tobogganing. (Did you know "toboggan" is a slang form of the American Indian word "odabagen" for sled, I know this as I had to look up the spelling ;-))

Anyway, it was one of those beautiful winter days, with the wind almost nonexistent, and the sun was lovely and warm on your face the entire day and sparkling so brightly of Lake Ontario. The kids loved it and I had a blast too. You never really grow out of tobogganing, and that was evident today by the number of adults I saw, myself included, screaming with glee as you hit a big bump on the way down the hill and fall off your sled! The kids loved it too and wanted to stay all day.

This evening I manged to sit through an hour or so of the big football game, without asking too many stupid questions ;-)