this girl drives a tank

Sunday we were supposed to get most of the moving done but it didnt exactly work out that way, Sarah and I got absolutelly hammered at the "Jack & Jill"

I dont know why, Its been ages since I have gotten that drunk, and frankly had not missed it. I thought those days were behind me. Apparently I was in my super-annoying mode as well, I woke up, looking at a pizza we had ordered and was immediately compelled to run to the bathroom to throw up

So, needless to say, we were not in shape then to start moving all our stuff. It will all get done though by Tuesday,

Oh, and I will never drink again.

One of the nice things about linux, is the number of little "nirvana" commands that you pick up along the way that make the daunting task of learning to use linux much more easy.

one such command:

 sdiff file1 file2 | less 

will display both filles side by side in your terminal for easy comparison.

Another little tip I recently discovered was using two pipes in a command, I already knew that using && between two commands,

 ping -c 3 some.host.com && wget http://some.host.com/file 

...will only run the second command if the first command is successful, but I didnt know you could reverse that behaviour with ||

 ping -c 3 192.168.1.1 || ifconfig eth0 

that will ping my router, and if fails then display the status of my network card.

yay!

Not all that time saving on its own, but pretty useful in a script.

We have the keys for the new apartment across the hall, and now have until tuesday I belive to move.

I have to go to the gym this evening, then clean the new empty apartment, then go to work tonight, then pack and move stuff tommorow morning and then tommorow night I have a "jack and jill" to attend for two friends that are getting married this summer. Then on Sunday I will try to finish moving the rest of my stuff.

It wont be too bad as like I said its right accross the hall, but still, it is picking up everything in your house and carrying it someplace else

I forgot to call the phone company and aslo didnt notify my isp we are moving, so, I do not know what will happen with the net, more than likely I will be offline until the new phone is hooked up, hopefully the net will magically still work as we will one again, keep the same number.

I have to go now and look at my building superintendent's PC, he just called and said his "homepage has dissapeared" :-|

So now my laptop runs gentoo, and i quite honestly see a big increase in speed, but the laptop used to run a 2.4 kernel with gnome 2.4, and now, its running a 2.6 kernel with gnome 2.6, so basically, you could argue that gentoo is much faster than debian, or that it is unfair to judge, as the not only are the kernels different, the Window Manager is not the same version either. I tend to side with the latter...

Our apartment is above a bunch of little cafe's and bistros, a deli, and several other boutiques, when you go upstairs from the shops, there are ten apartments facing the street with balconies, this is nice in the morning but we only get a little bit of sunshine as after 10am the sun is blocked out by one of the downtown buildings. The apartments accross the hall however, do not have balconies but instead each have a decent sized fenced, private back yard with grass, the rear apartments sit level with the top of the parking garage onto which this garden was built. So anyway, the rear apartments have no street noise, a large grassed back yard and sunshine all afternoon and evening.

We have wanted to get one of those apartments and finally this week were told we could move into a vacant one, mainly because our superintendant loves us

I have fixed his computer for him, removing all those pop ups and garbage that is part and parcel of running windows it seems. He is the same guy that had a dozen cold beer put in our fridge for us when we first moved in, before he even knew us. So he fixed it up that we could get the better apartment. It will mean of course getting the phone and mail relocated, but as for furniture and stuff, well, its two doors down and across the hall, so it shouldn't take very long to move this time.

I noticed, in an alley near the bar in which I work, a graffiti mural, it was quite a good one, very colorful, political in nature and signed with that classic "big-ass" graffiti signature, you know the one, they all look like the same guy wrote it, and you can never really make out the name. Anyway..off to the side of it, he'd also painted:

• 010 START
• 020 PRINT "Basic"
• 030 PRINT "Needs"
• 040 END
• 050 RUN

I do not know what language that is in, I would guess an early one, as it looks simple. But it made me wonder why we dont see more "Graffiti-Code"

I didn't mind the Last Samurai movie, it was ok but got a little bit silly at the end I thought, with good old Tom being the last man standing and what not, then all the Japanese soliders suddenly realizing its wrong to kill the Samurai, just after they'd killed them all....But the music and costumes were great, and some pretty scenes of the mountains which I liked..it just got a little bit too hollywood, which we all knew it would.

I guess after Magnolia, I held some measure of hope that Tom could turn out more mature and polished performances, with out cashing in on the pretty-boy charm stuff. I will have to wait some more it appears.

Last night my roomate was working on some song he does using Acid Pro> and he had rented the dvd of a clint Eastwood movie, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in order to sample some of the audio tracks.

He asked me if I could get the audio from chapter 31 into a 16 bit wav file. I said sure, no problem. I have never done anything like this before so I was told to use Transcode for this job, which I installed, and messed around with until I managed to get it right with something like:

transcode -p /dev/dvd  -x dvd -T 1,31,1 -a 0 -y wav -m gbu_chap_31.wav

Then while I was at it, I stuck in the movie Big Fish and watched that on my pc, its great movie. Albert Finney is amazing in it, as is the rest of the cast, although Billy Cruddup was a tad "flat" I thought. I was crying like a baby at the end

I will likely watch "The Last Samuri" today, if only to say that I have seen it.

My boyfreind had made plans to go up north boating with his friends, he invited me to go, but I am not exactly the worlds greatest boater, and decided to stay home and relax instead all weekend. Im not exactly impressed with him lately, on friday morning before he went away he went golfing with his buddies, I guess they were drinking thursday night and then again in the morning and they we being jackasses with the golf carts and rolled both of them over down a hill, the cart landed on him and he sprained his ankle, and is now using crutches, he refused to cancel his boating trip so he will have to hobble around on crutches I guess. I talked to his Mom last night, she said "they're idiot's. what did you expect?" Oh and all eight of them are banned for life from that golf course.

I have managed to see my parents a couple of times, will see my niece and nephew tommorow, Ive done groceries, cleaned out my closet and spend a good deal of time messing with Gentoo, which I managed to break btw yeasterday, and needed Tupone to shell in and rescue me once again.

If you "emerge" world, pretty much the equiv of "apt-get dist-upgrade" the new packages want to rewrite their /etc/[package.conf] files, like X windows for example. Gentoo will not let them overwrite these important, and often hand tweaked files, so it will leave a message to the console saying in my case: "34 unconfigured files in /etc"

Then your supposed to run "etc-update" and it will go through each file and show you the the existing and what the new one is, and you can decide, I didnt realize this and installed the new version so I overwrote alot of important files, and had modules not loading and X not working when I rebooted. So, live and learn I suppose, next time I will be more cautious.

I have gotten it into my head to reinstall my laptop, its accumulated alot of "cruft" and seems to be a little slower now than before, probably thats not true and just my imagination trying to get me to install more stuff

I was on the 401 headed east in the middle lane, talking to Mom on my cell, and listening to Portishead's "Glory Box" on the stereo, when a red Jetta pulled up behind me, we were both doing 120k/h and moving along nicely.

He was a little bit too close behind me for my liking but I was on the phone, so whatever...

A transport truck was ahead of me and as I came closer, I knew I'd have to slow down or pass him, I decided to pass, I checked my blind spot, pulled out into the next lane and floored it, as fast as that, I was past the truck and I slipped back into the middle lane, the guy behind me hadn't missed a beat and was right behind me every step of the way.

He then pulled out to pass me, but slowed as he drew alongside, I glanced over and he gave me a little "nod" and smile, like we were in some sort of Volkswagen fraternity that obligates subtle acknowledgment of our exeptional taste in automobiles.

I looked over at him, crinkled my brow, shook my head and mouthed "pfft..Jetta" He looked confused for a moment, I hung up with Mom, and slipped off onto the Allen Expressway and left him probably wondering who the "bitch" was

I put a frozen pizza in the oven for supper and went off to play "decks" for a while, the pizza usually takes 30 min on 400 degrees. I forgot to take it off the little carboard tray and thaat caught fire in the oven, so I had to suddenly leave the game. Anyhow, no major damage done, but the rest of my friday night will be spent cleaning the oven and de-stinking the kitchen.

Today at work, I had to drop off drawings to a job site, I was forced to wear a stupid shiny hard hat and work boots just to go up to the roof where the worker-guys were putting in antennas and radios and stuff. I have only ever had to do this a couple of times but I dont like it.

I walk out on the roof and see the foreman to give him the drawings, we start to talk,and about ten feet away is a guy knelt down doing some sort of work, so this guy, right in front of me mind you, looks up to the other workers who are on another roof one level above us, and yells to them "hey!" and then jerks his head towards my direction!

The other guys then peer over the wall, looking at me and then return to their work. I was so embarresed and mumbled something about being late and left. I cant belive theguy was so obvious like that! Its not like these guys do not know what women are, I am sure they have wives or gf's etc...I suppose just not many appear where they work, I dunno. Anyhow, that was my day..

Finally I got to download and compile Purple_Cow and Scanline's Xchat-gnome, and it built without a hitch.

It has a really nice feature that if I select a url, as soon as its selected, it opens my browser with the url in it, which I thought was pretty cool, they said it was "bug" though

Anyway, I dont see the fuss about "no tabs", personally it took me 5 mins to get used to the tree style of window management and I found that simple and easy to manage multiple windows/servers.

The only thing it dosent have is my beloved "split windows", I have grown used to irssi's split window feature, and can happily watch two or more channels at once. I wont pester them with a feature request for split windows, at least not for the time being. :P

I have decided to not work this weekend at all in the bar, its a long holiday weekend here and I want the time to myself, even if i do absolutely nothing but relax.

I must admit I feel a little bit fickle jumping on the Gentoo bandwagon after such a slow sweet and wonderful relationship with Debian. I have decided to run Gentoo on this desktop for one month and at least try to make an informed descision at that time on what OS is best for my humble needs.

I fixed the terminal problem thanks to bryjen for that, somehow I didnt have write perms to /dev/ptmx....yeah, imagine that?! Tupone helped me get the alsa stuff working too, so my system is pretty much ready to use.

So far a few Gentoo observations as I see them....

1. The installer: it is no less daunting to the newbie than Debians, but I can honestly say it didn't scare me off much, I am quite used to installing Debian and Gentoo has an excellent guide so although the steps involved are totally different, you do not need to know anything esoteric about linux, harddrives, memory, irq's and the like. That said, if it is your first linux install you will probably be better served with Mandrake/SuSE or Redhat
3. More on the Installer: you will need to know about compiler optimizationsm, an area that is new to yours truly, a little bit of reading and a lot of "asking my friends" will usually get you some safe yet effective optimizations for your system.

   Another really cool thing is that almost as soon as you boot to the cdrom, as long as your network card can get recognized, you can enable sshd, and at the very least ssh in your self and paste any problems you might have to a forum or irc, or even have a friend ssh into your machine and assist with the installation itself, really good feature.

5. Compiling: First you must build a compiler and some tools, then compile a base system and then a kernel, this is a long process, even on my fast new p4 it took 3 hours for Gnome alone to compile. Things like Mozilla will also take time, this is fine, keep in mind this *should* give you an overall faster system compared to Debian running on the same hardware, but I must admit, apt-getting some new app, just to check it out, then removing it was quick and easy on Debian.
7. Apt/Emerge: Apt-get could not be simpler, and with the bevy of apt tools out there now, there is no excuse for having a sloppy out of sync Debian system. Emerge however, from what I have seen so far is equally easy to use and I am happy that I can immediately Search for, install, upgrade or remove any piece of software I feel like. I think Debian will for a while yet hold the edge in the sheer number of packages available, but thats to be expected as its older, more mature, etc etc...
9. Admin Stuff: I was happy to discover /etc/init.d/"service" start|stop|restart was also in Gentoo and that helps, most of the config files in /etc look familiar also, no huge differance there, but many of the update commands are not the same, there is an "rc-update command which appears to be for setting things to run at various runlevels, I have yet to discover the command to update all the menu's for example after installing new software, or to set a default email client or Editor with the equivelant of Debian's "update-alternatives"

   This is just newbism shining through and I am sure in a month or so I will have that stuff down pat, but the lack of an obvious menu updater is a bit annoying.

11. Desktop Stuff: When your OS asks if you'd like to add a regular user to your system, said OS should at the very least, ask if that user can use the sound card, have access to the cdrom and all those normal day to day things one would do on a desktop pc, Debain fails in this respect and Gentoo did too, I know linux has its root in Unix and privledges like listening to music were not lightly given out, but at least dont make the user dick around with permissions on /dev/dsp and make them weasal their way into the audio group.

Like I said it will take me some time to get used to all of this and so far so good, I should also say that this is the first time I have used a 2.6 kernel with Alsa so the sound configuration woes I had, until rescued by Tupone, were not Gentoo's fault and I would likely have had the same issues with a Debian install using that kernel.

I would like to find a way to test the speed of my pc when booted into Gentoo and then Debian, so if you have any thoughts, let me know.

I installed bzflag and played a little bit with Ski tonight, Carny and DB were on the hunt for matches, nothing new there, but I havent seen those guys in 3 weeks and they are still all over my case to play a match, I will give them a point for effort and another point for consistancy at least

The Gentoo experiment is going ok I suppose, thanks in large part to Tupone, I amnaged to do the full "stage 1" install, and configured a kernel for 2.6.5, and then got Gnome 2.6 installed.

So thats quite good progress I think. There are some glitches however, fistly there is no sound, I added myself to the audio group, relaxed the permissions on /dev/dsp and installed xmms, but nothing. This kernel uses Alsa which I have not yet set up in Debian and will have to learn to use. I am not a the moment too worried about it as I have bigger fish to fry....

When I start Gnome, everything looks normal except when I open a terminal, the cursor sits in the top left corner and I cannot input any text at all. I trtried changing the font and the default encoding but still nothing.

Here's an example

So then I figured the gnome-terminal package must be broken, so I installed Aterm and Eterm, but there does not seem to be an obvious way to update menues in Gentoo like there is with Debian, so I could run them, of course typing "aterm" into the gnome terminal wont work as there are no fonts and the cursor never moves.

So then my boyfriend decides to pop over on his way to work and is sitting watching me struggle with all this, and closely watching my irc window I might add.

Anyhow, I opened nautalis and found /usr/bin/aterm and tried to run it from there but it opens and then immediately closes. Then I tried to ask in #gentoo.
My boyfriend says "who are those people"
me: "they are other computer users around the world"
him "do you talk to them all?"
me "of course not, but I do know some of them"

This went on for a little bit, and ended with me assuring him that irc is nothing for him to worry about :-\ Sometimes I wish I could send him an emphatic /quit

So anyhow, none of this solved my little terminal problem, and with no command line, X is somewhat crippled, it is useable, but I cannot call any app from a terminal which sux.

At this moment I am reinstalling X, with the vague notion that this will help. I guess I should redo Gnome but that took 2hrs55min to compile, so that will come later if necessary.

Most people seem to think its a font issue (I am using xfs) but if that were the case no fonts would be available for any of my apps no? I can open mozilla and type in the address bar no problem.

It has been suggested to me by several of my online friends that it is high time that I tried out Gentoo, so in part to follow thier advice (which has always been good) and in part to satisfy my curiosity, I created a 30gb partiton on my hard drive and will attempt to install it sometime this week.

I will try to do the "stage 1" install which is compile everything, although I do not know all the compile time options that would help gain the most speed out of the system, so it might be just as well to install the "stage 3" version

Likely I will do the stage 1 install if for no other reason than to make it difficult and frustrating and hopefully stressfull too

We seem to be barbequing anything that moves. The thing has been in use every day now since we got it, is this normal behaviour? I am not a huge meat eater generally but I must admit a BBQ'd chicken breast is delicious. I think "turkey burgers" are on the menu tonight.

Last night I went and invited some of our friends over for a barbeque. Then this morning I went out ont the balcony with my tea and noticed we dont actually have a bbq.

So today I wnt and bought one and Sarah and I assembled it whilst her boyfriend sat watching, saying "I'm the chef" when ever we asked him to help.

Now I have just had a huge steak and ceaser salad and am all sleepy.

I got the new kernel to compile and it now recognizes all of my ram, its unbeliveably fast, stuff opens instantly, even apps I have never ran before.

I found this pic whilst cleaning out some files on my old laptop, kinda funny shirt, reminds me of my brother's t-shirt that says "I failed at life"

I will try to update this thing semi regularly but I dont even have time to do that it seems. Ski has joined our ctf team, which is good for us as he is a very active player and as I havent seriously played in ages at least he can fill my spot.

So Volkswagen now sends me a little magazine with all kinds of stuff I can buy for my car, most of it doesnt make any sense to me, like a liscence plate holder with VW engraved in it, I mean, it already says "VW" on my car, why would I want it to say that on my liscence plate holder? And the digital tire pressure gage?! I have not, and never will check the tire pressure on anything.

So I have learned alot about compiling kernels these last few days, here are a couple of tips:

If you choose to make your root partiton ext3 ( a nice journaling filesystem that recovers very quickly form crashes or hard resets) Make sure that you compile ext3 support into the kernel, not as a loadable module, remember kids, the modules are loaded from the hard drive.

If you keep your operating system on an IDE hard drive, as is the case with many home and office PC's, again, compilie IDE support into the kernel, not as a module......the kernel cant load a module to initiate the hard drive if you keep the module stored on the drive

As for the actual compiling and stuff, I think i can do it on my own now for the most part, this is using Debian's kernel-package tools, the only probs I seem to get are poor configuration choices. I suppose that skill will come with practice.

I should learn the real linux way of kernal recompiles, instead of the Debian way, as one day I might have to do it on a Redhat box or god forbid, Gentoo!

The temperature today reached about 24C which, coupled with the low wind made it beautifully balmy and hot. It was probably the first such day of the spring and we went outside for lunch on the company picnic tables, everyone was sitting and eating but I found my self just leaning back and closing my eyes, letting the sun burn into me, you know how you squeeze your eyes tight shut but the sun is so bright it makes you see orange, even with them closed. I love that

I didnt pay any attention to the conversation, and instead just floated off into a sunny daze.

I am wearing a new nail polish, not that you care or anything, but the name of it is somewhat ironic

Ok so I dont need a new computer, but as I said before the celeron was making me mad, being all slow and sluggish, so I once again talked to my freind Debbie, and she told me "get over here, I was gonna call you!"

She hooked me up with a P4 3.0ghz, Asus P4P800-SE mainboard, a 200gb WD hard drive, with 8mb cache (which I am not sure what that does), and 1gb of ram. This cost, me about 60% less than if I had bought it retail or online. She actually wanted me to take this big Viewsonic LCD monitor, but I declined, not knowing if it would even work with Linux or not, as its a relatively new model.

I also have 1gb of ram in the old celeron, which I put in the new one, but my kernel dosent support more ram than 1gb without me recompiling it, which I havent had time to do yet. It is amazing how fast it is though, I compiled bzflag last night...

real    1m46.533s

user    1m32.730s

sys     0m5.650s

It might have even took longer to download bzflag than to compile it

So yeah, all is well now in my little computer world.

I finally met my boyfriends parents for the first time, and as I expected they were absolutely the nicest people ever. All my anxiety was a complete waste of time and just another sensless stress trip.

Both his Father and Mother are quite well off, Him being a senior Civil Engineer for this massive Canadian construction company and She is a Laywer. They live in a pretty posh part of Toronto, and I guess all of that can be intimidating.

Anyway they were total sweethearts and we had a great dinner and relaxed and chatted away the rest of the evening.

I really dont like this celeron I am using and am now looking around for a better cpu, It is fast enough for for running most apps I suppose, but It can't handle doing more than one thing at a time, and Im not talking about cpu intensive apps, like ripping cd's or something, I mean stuff like running xmms, and then while it opens up xchat, xmms skipps and stutters, untill xchat initializes. This shouldnt be, in my opinion, and the celeron will probably be relagated to server duties or perhaps even a spare windows comp for my roomates.

I am told, Athlons are a better choice for linux but then I know nothing about them really, the last Athlon I had was a 350k6, so I imagine they have gotten a little bit better since then. I need to start reading up on this stuff I guess but its so confusing with all the choices available.

This week end I hope to get some time to myself and perhaps even play a little bz, although today I could have played but chose to continue organizing my mp3'sinstead.

I am still waiting for Gnome2.6 to go into Sid, but I think that a Sarge release is coming up soon, and that the Debian people have some goals of putting 2.6 into Sarge..so for now I still dont get to try out Gnome-xchat

I was in the Yorkdale shopping center recently and went into to the Sony Store to see what portable mp3 players they had. There was a circular showcase with a guy in the middle that contained all the Walkmans and digital cameras and the like.

Presumably, the guy's job was to attend to that little part of the store. So I asked him if Sony made any harddrive based mp3 players. He said yes, and pointed me to a 256mb compact flash player. I said "Thats not hardrive based" and he said "yes it is".

I tried to explain I wanted a player that held at least 5-10 GB of music, to which he replied, "This one is better, it can hold 256 megabytes!!"

I then said "Oh my god, wow!!!" and then asked him to let me think it over, he attented to another customer and I left.

I dont know if I am being nitpicky, but it would be nice if sales people actually understood the products they were assigned to sell, most times these days they seem to just hover around you looking anxious and dumb, hoping I assume that you will make a purchase so they get their commision.

I would have thought though, the more knowledge you have about what you are selling, would directly boost the number of sales you make??

Last night I got home from the bar around 3:30-4am and didnt feel tired like I normally do, maybe the adrenaline from driving a new car kept me awake?

I had picked up a 120 gb drive earlier in the week and decided to install it, I backed up some stuff and shut the server down, then removed one of the old drives and put in my new one. That left me with a 30gb Maxtor drive and my my new 120gb drive.

I then booted the computer with my woody cd and started to install Debian, everything worked out well, and not to sound like some sort of pro, but I have found I can fly through a Debian install now, having long since remebered what the usual options are that I use. After installing Lilo, it was time to reboot, but there was something wrong, lilo started and the filled the screen with "02" over and over again.

Hmmm..so then I redid the install, as I tried booting to rescue mode but got kernel panics, but alas, got the same results. I redid the install a third time, this time installing Lilo to the first sector of the boot device instead of the mbr, but this was a shot in the dark, as lilo has always worked previously for me, so then I thought, maybe the disc is scratched right on the part that lilo is stored on, so another run through the installation process, this time getting the base system entirely off the net, but that didnt work either.

So then i suspected the old 30gb drive was crappy, and to make sure, I quickly installed Windows XP, formatted the drive in ntfs and at the reboot part of the XP install in hung. Then I took the drive right out, threw it on the floor, and put in the other 30gb Quantum Fireball, this time it all worked and at around 5:30 am I got the system rebooted and the users home directories restored, along with the webserver back in place.

Then I set rsync to work and as I slept it faithfully copied all my mp3's onto the new drive.

The Pixies are touring again and I have tickets for the show in November. I cant wait, I have seen Frank Black twice as a solo act and he was absolutely phenomenal but I have never seen him as "Black Francis" the frontman for the Pixies. If you have no idea who the pixies are, you might remember at the end of the movie Fight Club, as all the buildings were exploding, they played Where is my mind?".

Dad came and got me this morning at 7:30 am, I really wanted to sleep in more than anything, but we went out to breakfast, and after a few cups of tea and some pancakes I was feeling a little less groggy. We then went to my parents place to see Mom, another cup of tea and waited for the dealership to open.

Finally I got to see the car I was buying, a beautiful Volkswagen Passat GLS V6. It looks really cool I must say, and I am happy and thankful that Dad took on doing all the tedious pricing and research etc. I drove it out of the lot and was all smilies driving around for the first time in it. I cant belive how fast it is, not sure if this is a good thing or not, but I hardly have to touch the gas pedal and it zooms off!

I plan on getting a little gift for papa, for all the work he did, he of course refused, saying "if you learn how to drive properly, that will be the best gift for me"