this girl drives a tank

Because of my abundance of IT calls I was, as you might remember, flagged to attend a couple of seminars on using Windows. So at today instead of our Friday lunch ritual, consisting of a bunch of girls sitting in a nearby deli, munching ceasar salads and catching up on our office gossip, I got to sit in a class with a couple of guys from our IT department and learn about managing my desktop and using keyboard sortcuts, at one point I told them "keyboard shortcuts are sooooooooo hard to remember, the only one I know is ctrl+alt+del"

I played the idiot for most of the class, oooing and aaahing at all the right moments, as they so generously shared their wisdom with me.

I needed some revenge. Occasionally, our engineering consultants will email me drawings in pdf format, I have a folder with 30 or so of them pertaining to our current projects. One of them he sent was corrupt and will crash Acrobat Reader pretty much every time.

I moved all the good pdf's to another folder and renamed the corrupt one 30 times to match the names of the others. Then I called IT and told them Acrobat Reader keeps crashing. the guy came over and I watched him sit there and open a pdf, watch Acrobat reader crash, uninstall Acrobat Reader, install Acrobat Reader, open different pdf, watch Acrobat reader crash, uninstall Acrobat Reader, install Acrobat Reader, open different pdf, watch Acrobat reader crash......

Every now and then, I would lean annoyingly over his shoulder and say "try a different file"

I was on my home late the other night and was waiting at red light to turn left, It was like 3:00am or therabouts so there was no one around. Anyway, I was sort of in a "haze" thinking about stuff and suddenly realized that I didnt want to turn left after all, but should go straight.

I glanced in the rearview, didnt see anything, and proceed to back up in the left turn lane, so that I could get into the lane next to me. I backed right into another car, that turned out to be a police car

I couldnt belive it! I was sure I didnt see anything in my mirror. The cops got out and started asking what I thought I was doing, their car didnt have any damage as I hit this big steel rack on the front of it, but my rear bumper had a small dent in it.

I told them I wanted to turn into the other lane and was backing up to do just that, and they must have pulled right up behind me as i was backing up. They said no, they were sitting there for a while and I just suddenly backed into them. I wasnt too happy but then noticed that the police car didnt even have its headlights on! It turned out they had just left someplace and drove off forgetting to turn their lights on. So I didnt get in any trouble and they seemed kind of sheepish about the headlight thing.

I dont care about the dent in my bumber as the car will be traded in this weekend. I have to go on Saturday with Dad and sign some papers, he wouldnt tell me where though over the phone, saying I'd have to wait and see....

So this weekend I will own a new car, whatever kind it may be.

I am grudginly resigned to the fact that I wont be in irc much now at all and will play even less bz. Its not that I am hardly using my computer anymore, I still have a bunch of stuff that needs daily attention, not to mention taming my wild mp3 collection, its just that bz and irc were always companions to my "everyday" stuff that had to be done, and as we all know, bz and irc are the best way to not get your work done, if that is ever your intent.

So for now I do my computer stuff, logoff and jump back into the hectic little whirlwind that has become my life. I did manage to play for about 20 minutes late sunday night, which was pretty good and I somehow even shot a few tanks despite my rustiness. I do however miss the decks on friday nights

I havent had time to even price out my hard drives that i plan to get, instead I will hold off for a while, I have as you might remember, a celeron 1.7ghz as my main desktop and although it is adequate for what I do, I have noticed that my old p3 866 could compile software much faster and if for example I was playing music in xmms, and then fired up a web browser, the celeron will skip and stutter on the song until the browser initializes, also playing bz and running xmms seems to cause the celeron some grief. Basically I might just upgrade and use the celeron for something else, or give it to my bro for his kids to break.

I was on my way home from work and it it was really sunny and bright, but this huge wall of black cloud was on the horizon. Before I knew it, there was a sudden thundershower, complete with lightning bolts and high winds, it subsided as quickly as it had appeared and in its wake, left the biggest, most vivid rainbow I have ever seen in my life.

It spanned what looked like the entire west end of the city out over Lake Ontario, towards the top of the arc the colors were what one would expect to see in an average rainbow, colorful, but sort of faded into the surrounding clouds, but at both ends of the rainbow as it reached the ground, the colors were spectacularly intense, it was absolutely amazing, I glanced at several drivers near me and they were all like me, wide eyed in awe.

So the rest of the trip my mind wondered at the marvels of Mother Nature. I cant remember the last time I was so excited to see a rainbow, probably it was when I was still a child.

I have some mixed feelings about portable mp3 players, some of my irc friends vote for the ipod, while others strongly disagree, citing battery issues among other things.

This one by Neurosaudio looks like it has the features I'd most likely use, but still even compared to the ipods, is quite pricey. I have to look at a exactly how and when I would really use such a device and see if its worth the cash. I know I dont need to hold 20gb of music, and a 128mb flash memory card would do the job fine for a trip to the gym for example, but other times, it might be kinda cool to have that much musicon hand, or I might not feel like having to decide what to load up each time I go out, so having a huge collection would solve that.

Maybe the cost of these things is off putting too, I pobably could ebay a PDA for the same price and listen to music that way.

No real news on the car, I was going to meet Dad this weekend to make a choice and go sign some papers, bur he said he wanted to look at one more model this week, so likely next weekend something will happen in that regard.

Its that time I dread the most, I will soon get to meet my boyfriends parents, I have been deliberately evasive when he brings up the subject, but can not put it off much longer or he might suspect something is up.

I am sure once I do meet them, I will realize how nice they are and that my anxiety was totally unfounded, but I cant help tormenting myself with questions like "What if his Dad thinks I am not good enough for him" or "maybe his Mom thinks I'm just some little tramp that will only be around until he gets bored of me"

Pretty nueurotic eh? Those are only a couple of the 300 or so scenarios I have come up with thus far. Maybe I should just relax and treat it like I would if I was casually introduced to one of his colleagues. I mean whats the big deal If his folks dont like me or dont approve? Its not like I will dump him or vice versa, and I know one thing for sure, no matter what his parents are like, my first meeting with them will pale in comparison with his first meeting of my semi-dysfunctional family..I will have to devote an evening prepping him to deal with my younger brother.

The movie I tried to watch last night had Swedish subtitles, so, I thought why not put the headphones on and listen to some music while I watched the movie, which was a bad idea, as I ended up jumping around my songlist playing stuff I hadnt heard in ages and not concentrating on the subtitles at all, so I didnt get far with that.

I dont think I can keep up 2 jobs much longer, wed and thur nights I worked, both times getting home at 3 am and getting up early for my real job, I squeezed in a visit to the gym in the evening after work but have little time for anything else.

We have this huge project undergo at work, switching hundreds of Ericsson and Lucent base station radios with Nortel Network ones. This normaly wouldn't affect my department as we are responsible for new site construction, but they decided to upgrade the cell phone antenna's at the same time, and run new cables from the antenna's to the base stations. So I have to look at every site we built in the last 5 years, and try to determine from the photos and drawings if there is room for these new antenna's and associated hardware.

It is a royal pain in the butt. I have contractors calling me all pissed off because they didnt recieve the proper work orders and what-not. (like I care)

My boss is all stressed out which dosent help, and to top it all off, that stupid windows workshop is starting soon and it looks like I will be forced go sit a classroom and learn all about how microsoft will make me a happy, productive little worker bee.

I havent played any bz since last weekend but have some time this evening before work, but to be honest I do not feel like playing and will probably watch a movie my roomates rented. It is a Swedish movie that got an Oscar nomination I think, thats all I know about it so far.

The budget we decided for my new car has made it a little bit more difficult to decide what model to get, the problem is, I could get a fully loaded Civic or for a tiny bit more, get an Accord which is a better car, but it wouldnt be fully loaded with all the nice options I'd like.

Same thing woth Toyota, a fully loaded Corrola or a lightly loaded Camry, same for Jetta's and Passats, the Jetta GLI is a really nice top end Jetta but the Passat GLS is almost the same price, and a step up from the Jetta on Volkswagens ladder, yet without all the options.

Dad has gotten all the prices and brochures for me to look at and has been test driving all these cars last week, this weekend I will probably go and sign the papers on one of the above mentioned cars.

I need some sort of portable mp3 player, I have decided to bump up my once a week gym visits to twice a week, I have managed to keep some sort of fitness regime going in the last few years, and now as it looks like the "party years" are behind me, I would like to get back into running again.

I am not a big fan of all out extreme fitness, nor am I interested in building muscles or even losing weight, but the cardio stuff I think could always use help. I feel guilty from smoking when I was in party mode, and would like to at least put some effort into getting healthier in that area.

So....to the point, I find it incredibly boring to work out without music and at the moment do not have a portable mp3 player. This week I will go to FutureShop and buy one of their players, but I dont know what to buy, I'd like it to obviously hold a boatload of tunes, but the main thing is linux compatability, do these things use the same storage formats as digital cameras? Can I access them in linux with the "mount" command? If you have one that works well with linux, let me know.

I was told "just get an ipod" but thats how you become a mac addict isnt it? one little hit off the ipod? Isnt that how it all starts?

I have been listening to a lot of classical music when I am on the computer or around the house, I especially like Bach, Shostakovich and Edward Grieg, the latter being one of my favorites.

Does this mean I am mellowed and have aquired some sort of higher musical taste? Or perhaps its just yet another wonderful flavour of music that has up till now been left under appreciated by me. Either way, I find it relaxing and a marvelous backdrop as I do my computer work.

I have been too busy to read the linuxchix mailing list, and now have several hundred emails to catch up on, unlike other lists, most of this stuff is really interesting (at least to me) and I am hesitant to mark any of it as read without actually reading it.

I watched Matchstickmen tonight and was actually plesantly suprised, Nicolas Cage was pretty good and Alison Lohman was awesome. If you like con man movies, and who dosent? you should like this one.

This is test of Rsync, usually I ssh into my host over the internet, then write the blog in vi, and then use rsync to back up ~/public_html on the remote host to my home desktop. This works fine, except sometimes the internet being what it is, writing in vi and waiting for the cursor to catch up with me is a pain. So, I decided to try writing the blog on my home desktop, and then once finished, simply rsyncing my local copy of public_html to the remote copy. Then I dont need to ssh in or anything like that. I hope this works.

I have recived an invitation to a wedding reception in the mail, the problem is, there is no info on the invitation as to who exactly is getting married! The card contains a little map the banquet hall and a nice card inviting me and my guest, but no date as to when to go, and no idea who the bride and groom is!

I will have to do some detective work on this one, but I am amazed those details were overlooked.

I noticed the other day that my drives on my desktop are becoming a little bit full. In fact with all this mp3 activity, there is room for little else on my drives now.

I will purchase a pair of hardrives pretty soon. This time I will get one for the desktop and one for server at the same time and then use rsync to keep them all syncronized. I cant believe how cool rsync is! Rsync, screen and ssh have to be the Holy Trinity of Unix tools.

Anyway, this is my desktop:

orchid@morcheeba orchid $ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2              57G   52G  2.4G  96% /
/dev/hdb1             9.2G  5.0G  3.8G  57% /mnt/hdb

And this is the server:

aec@suede aec $ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2             2.8G  616M  2.0G  24% /
/dev/VG01/mp3_lv       53G   23G   28G  45% /mp3

The server still has another 15gb of music to be added so it will be close to being filled quite soon. When I bought my last drives, I remember thinking how massive 30gb's was and wondering what I'd do with all the space, I dont even keep movies or tv videos and I'm still presssed for space.

I was advised not to go for expensive drives with 8mb cache on them, as these two new drives will be only for storage, not for fast read/write access, I should get the less expensive 2mb ones. Most likely I will get 2 x 120 GB or maybe only 100gb, havent really decided, but the 120 looks to be only a few dollars more than the 100's. That should keep me happy for the next year or so.

The only catch is it will undo all that logical volume stuff I had previously set up, but I could always redo it again I suppose.

No news on the car, Mom has cast her vote for safety, demanding a Volvo no less, but somehow I cant see that happening, I dont think they even make them in my "size", ie: compact fuel efficient, and even if they do, a Volvo might be outside my budget, nevertheless, Dad said it would get consideration.

My Dad drove my Honda Civic last week and called me after to complain it "drives like shit" Apparently I ride the clutch, as if thats something bad. Anyhow, he then decided I need to buy a new car, and set about making the arrangements. You have to understand that any large purchases I make, unless I totally understand what I am buying, I generally dont have alot of say in it. I know nothing about cars, I mean zilch, I can only say which one looks good to me but as far as I am concerned, if you buy any brand new car these days, the car itself will be of reasonable quality and as long as it gets me to where I am going, I could care less what kind of engine or whatever it has. So in that light, I dont mind letting my Dad choose the best deal for me and will be happy with whatever he picks, its a new car after all, so I'm sure I will like whatever it is. When I buy anything related to stereo's or televisions, I just give the money to my older brother and he goes and gets it for me. I know this sounds like I cannot make an informed descision on my own, and that might be partly true, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to sit down and research dvd playersor engine performance statistics, or compare automobliles on various car fan web sites, bleh...I'd rather just let Dad decide So he said that this week he will let me know what I will soon be driving. Yay for the new car smell

My roomate and his hockey buddies were all sitting around watching the Leaf's game last night, and Sarah and were talking about our favorite grocery store that had closed down and moved to a newer, larger location. One of the guys said he'd been there, and there are no checkout girls, its all automated and you scan your own food in, I thought this was pretty neat, although tough for young teens now who depend on those jobs for extra cash. So the guys we talking about all these new innovations and mentioned that even the shopping carts are new, they hover off the ground, on magnetic force and there are no wheels.

It made perfect sense to me, you put the magnets in the floor and its all hidden Then when you leave, you cant steal the carts as they wont work outside the supermarkets property. cool eh?

So today I phoned Sarah at work and we decided to meet up there after we get off work to check it out. Of course, there are no hover carts, and there's only a couple of the self check out aisles for "express" use, the rest was like any old grocery store, and Sarah and I were mocked relentlessly all evening and now are plotting some sort of revenge.

Guu, the irc bot is now able, with the help of menotume, to report match results to #bzleage as they occur, which is pretty neat, so I'm happy about that.

I think there is a chance of doing the league standings in this fasion also. Today I got a chance to play for a few minutes and was totally beaten about the field by my peers, it seems you need to play this game at least two hours a day or something to remain in top shape, so I will have to either find some time or accept the beatings.

Tonight I wont work at the bar and may just hang out here and watch the hockey playoffs.

I am pretty much sick of chocolate for the time being, its like crack cocaine for me I think, I had a pile of it this morning, and none left this evening, I just cant stop eating it if its there in front of me!

My sister in law and I cooked the Easter dinner this year, we made the usual roast turkey, with a dressing that included cranberries, toasted pine nuts, white wine and the usual onins and celery etc.

We also did a pork roast with garlic and ginger in the slow cooker, which we then braised in a searing hot pan to finish it off.

We made sweet potatoes this time, which are so simple to prepare and yummy to eat. You just dice them into bite sized chunks, drizzle them with olive oil, season them with ground pepper and sea salt, and bake at 350F for about 45 mins.

The night before we made mango sorbet in her ice cream maker ( I must get one of those ) We then had some old fasioned ice cream cones, the darker wafer kind, which we dipped in melted chocolate to cover the rims, filled them with the sorbet, and then topped them off with fresh strawberries that had been dusted with sugar nutmeg and cinnamon. Very decadant but absolutely delicious.

It was as usual tons of food that takes the better part of a day to prepare and no more than an hour or so to eat! But half the fun is in making it and then sitting back with a glass of wine or a nice cup of tea, while the men clean up and do the dishes

It is that time of year again, the National Hockey League playoffs have started and this city as usual has gone mad for the beloved yet beleagured Maple Leafs or as they are called here, "the buds"

Last night I could of went to see the game, but decided to go home and chill out instead, this didnt go over well with my brothers who were appalled that someone would turn down an opportunity to see a playoff game, but the Leaf's lost the game so I think I made a good choice.

I havent played bz all week and finally managed to squeeze in a few games today. I dont like how fast you lose your groove by not playing regularly. I doubt very much I can play every day now, so this means I will not be able to keep up with the league players and likely not be much help for my team, which is a drag, but it is just a game after all so I am not too worried about it.

I have had zero time to sit and rename the rest of my mp3's. I was planning on moving them to the mp3 server all in nice folders but that wont happen anytime soon, so I turned on the server again so people could access it and will try to get the files sorted out this week.

I am typing this from the office at the bar on my break. I get off work at 2am and after cashing out and cleaning up am home in bed by 3am, not too bad except I have to be up at 7 am for my regular job. I think I have gotten 13 hours sleep this week.

I am getting some grief from my parents about it, especially Dad, I stop at their house usually 3 mornings a week on my way to the office, and have a quick breakfast and cup of tea, they noticed Im pretty bleary eyed and Dad dosent understand why on earth I need this second job, the truth is I dont, but "mr new guy in my life" happens to own the bar with his brother

So basically I took the job because he asked me to so that we could see more of each other. I know... I know, how lame am I? But either that, or we see each other not even once a week. Mom knows the score, and is less critical, and more interested in how me and "mr new guy" are "getting along"

Yesterday at the office, my boss and the head of our entire department walks over to me, they had a problem, our company was doing a voicemail and fax upgrade for all our subscribers, so everyones messages could get deleted if it goes wrong, as a precaution we spam our customers with a broadcast call, their cell rings and they hear "Hello, this is service call from Foobar Mobility at no charge to you, we will be upgrading your mailbox etc..etc...and so on"

So anyhow, the girl who usually does the actual recorded message was no where to be found,and it had to go out that day, so they were in a mad panic to find her or someone else with a suitible voice to do it. Of course my dumbass boss suggests me to the department head. So they ask me to read the message for them. Im all nervous, as the big boss has never even acknowledged me before and is the type of guy that makes everyone pretend to be busy when he walks through your dept, very stern and no nonsense.

I read the stupid messag for them, and after im done, the big boss looks at my boss, and without ever looking at me says, hmmmm....a bit too "valley girl" and walks away! my boss throws me a halfassed apologetic look and scurries off. :-\

I have managed to rename all my mp3's and am now in the process of moving them into folders. There are scripts to do just this but my fetish for doing things the long slow and boring way has prevailed over common sense.

I started today and managed to get through all the bands that start with numbers like 808 State and worked my way up to the C's. This took me about an hour, So it wont take me too long to reach the Z's

We now have a bread maker, which none of us know how to use, and no one wants to read the manual, so I am sure some funny looking loafs will come out of our kitchen in the next week.

I am not regretting taking a part time job, but I am feeling it, I seem to be yawning all the time, thankfully my day job consists of alot of phone calls, so it's hard to doze off while talking to someone on the phone.

Oh on friday I got my new Motorola phone and also got our free entry level phone, a crappy little Siemens phone. I gave back 2 older phones and now have 3 cell phones, and yes, I use them all

It seems now that friday night is decks-fest, some of the bzflag developers and some #tacobeamers as well as yours truly, play a game on the latest cvs version of bzfla with the infamous Decks map.

The nice thing about it is we all know each other from irc and because it is a cvs version, the trouble makers in the game are not around.

Its fun, but for me I find my self hanging out on the ground doing my usual camping/sniping act that you all love so much. I am trying to learn to jump and play more like the FFA players do, but it really isnt my style, but then, you never know, I might get good at it one day.

Purple_Cow is wanting to set up a small decks league, which might be fun!

I watched the movie Gothika recently and was decidedly unimpressed, I'm not a huge horror fan as it is, but If the movie is done well, I can get into it a little. This movie wasnt all that great, no subtlety whatsover and a relatively predictable plot. I suppose the director of photography thought shooting most of the movie in a dull greyish blue would add to the ghost-like specter but all it really did was make things grey and blue looking. I would be hesitant to even recommend this film as a rental.

I had a great time at the Bowie concert. For a 57 year old, he's still got it! He voice is as a good as it ever was and he seems to have so sort of magical way of staying handsome

The thing I have always liked about Bowie was every album is different, he is never afraid to try new stuff, and that is a huge risk for many bands, I think some bands have had success reinventing their sound, U2 for example, but none to the degree that Bowie has.

He even covered a Pixies track, which was great. The next show I hope to attend is in fact the Pixies "reunion" tour.

I had to go seek some help with my "rename the mp3s" script, I guess for now bash still has defeated me, but oh well. I can now at least start tidying up my collection.

I ate half a box of oreos for supper tonight. That cant be good.

I was the victim of a little april fool's joke today, usually I am in a hyper-paranoid state on April 1st, expecting some sort of prank.

I have been seeing this guy for a few weeks now and I suppose you could say we are in that boyfriend/girlfriend zone almost. Not quite official yet but close enough. He's a super nice super cool guy, but with one appalling aberration, he uses Windows ME and likes it

He actually is not geeky at all, not in the least bit, never heard of Linux, and uses the net for email and light web surfing only.

So he he dosent understand why I would rather be looking at my laptop than a television. I have cut down on irc and bzflag and general computer use for the time being but will have to figure out a way to get my geek fixes.

I dont want want to push anything on him though, and will let him run Win ME if thats what he likes.

So anyhow....I am sitting at laptop and my roomate Sarah im's me on msn, and says she's bored at work etc etc... so we start chatting and she's asking about "mr new guy" as she puts it...so we start yakking and Im totally spilling the beans and whatever, telling her all the gossip, and then hear this laughing from downstairs, turns out it is her boyfreind, off work, sitting there with his buddy, and had logged onto Sarah's msn account at home.

I got all embarrassed and now am scheming up some sort of revenge. I have to go to see David Bowie tonight, so I havent time to come up with anything good.

I might resort to just punching him in the face on my way out. :-\