this girl drives a tank

So I come home from the office and Im really tired as I only had 3 hours sleep last night...and as I am opening the door to my apartment the little girl across the hall comes running out to say hi, she comes into my apartment and wanted to return a little stuffed penguin toy I had given her to play with, its a tux fridge magnet stuffed toy basically.

There was a fly on our patio door, so she walks up to the door, watches the fly for a moment and then takes a stab at swatting it with the stuffed toy, there is a loud pop, and the entire window, from ceiling to floor shatters! She starts screaming and crying, saying sorry sorry over and over, and I was totally freaked out that the window broke that easily.

I managed to calm her down and assure her that it was in no way her fault and she is happily sitting next to me now playing tuxracer on my laptop.

My landlord is cleaning up the glass and the "glass guy" is going to repair it this weekend. Im just so relived she didnt get cut or anything.

Tommorow is Canada Day and a national holiday, because it is a Thursday, we will in true Canadian fasion, take Friday off as well, I will be paid for both days, so I have as of this evening 4 days off in a row, I will not be working in the bar either, so it will be a good break.

Some one sent me an email saying they had seen my ad on an online dating website! Firstly, lets make it clear, although I see nothing wrong with people dating via websites, I have never done that

Secondly, that girl lives in Florida, I dont. And finally, I am presently involved with someone so I wouldnt even place an ad in the first place.

I decided to google "bzgirl" and found there are several girls out there with the same nickname.

One site is in German so I have no clue whats going on there:

German site

�BzGirl� : was w�rde passieren, wenn jeder KiSt-Zahler am Sonntag zur Messe erscheinen w�rde? und ich meine wirklich jeder?

ExtantSinger : dann m�ssten die Kirchen wieder erweitern

�BzGirl� : Extant, und wie wollen sie es finanzieren?

ExtantSinger : aber BzGirl, das Gegenteil ist der fall, kontinuierlich

�BzGirl� : wenn sie ihr Budget 100% f�r andere Zwecke verplant haben?

ingbobrov : Das Verm�gen der Kirchen steigt aber nun mal weiter an

ExtantSinger : und im Moment gehen Immobilien schlecht) Aktien verkauft man momentan auch nicht)

�BzGirl� : wird die KiSt angehoben?

ChurchConsult : BzGirl: KiSt wird nicht angehoben

�BzGirl� : church, das zeigt mir eigentlich nur, dass sie kassieren aber gar nicht dran interessiert sind, jedem einzelnen die Dienste auch wirklich anzubieten, weil das Geld in andere Zwecke einflie�t

Here are the two dating sites

Site 1
Site2

And finally a Korean bzgirl?

http://home.freechal.com/bzgirl/

And this thumbnail I found, I think from the same site.

Also, an msn photo gallery of another bzg.

And some more photos, none of them me!! http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=img&cs=utf8&q=bzgirl&rys=0&_sb_lang=pref

Oh and someone has registered bzgirl.net and is selling jewelery of some sort there, bzgirl.com is registered by a guy in Isreal, but the domain is for sale. :-\

So there ya go.

Oh the Liberals won the Election so basically we voted for another term with Paul Martin. The more things change the more they stay the same.

It is that time once again that we trudge off to the polls and cast our vote in the hope of electing a reasonably honest and sane individual that will lead this country out of its econimic quagmire.

I was this year, as I am every time I vote, faced with the prospect of voting against my local canditate whom I prefer, so that his party leader will not get elected,

I belive our system in Canada is similar to many "developed" nations, you vote for a local candidate, and it is a collection of these "mp's" that themselves elect a party leader who in turn will become the Prime Minister.

This is a flawed system in my view, let us have 2 votes, one for a local representative, and another for the whole kit and kaboodle. This would eliminate the need to vote against a candidate that you may very well like just to block any chance of his party leader getting power.

Another thing I find disturbing, and actually, its far more than disturbing, is that every time there is an election, the political parties are allowed to solicit funds from the corporate community in order to pay for anything from advertizing to travel expenses and so on.

Does anyone else see a problem with this? I still cannot belive that this legalized bribery is still allowed to continue. Why not have the goverment set aside a few million dollars every election year, lets say 5 million per party, so they dole this out to the party and tell them thats it, thats your budget, lets see what you can do with it.

This way the tabacco companies, the oil giants, to name a few, will have no influence on who is running this country. It still amazes me that Esso for example is allowed to contribute directly to a political party in hopes of gaining a friendly ear on the Parliment Hill.

I'm not saying Esso is evil, and I do realize the oil is important, but our goverment should not be in bribery buisness.

Anyway, it stinks, its always been like this and likely always will. I just get so mad when its so obvious what is going on, and nothing is done about it.

Beep media player is a branch of the venerable linux mp3 player Xmms. Beep or Bmp as it is now known, is not as full featured as xmms at the moment but does do most of the common things one would expect. I have been using it for a few weeks and the only real advantage I can see over xmms,is that it ican use Winamp's classic skins, offering a much wider variety than the usual, and flankly, quite dark and in many cases difficult to use, xmms skin collection.

As I surfed around looking at the various linux media players, I stumbled upon this site, reviewing a player called "juk" one of Juk's best features was:

"Idiot-proof girl/child-friendly gui"

Now I have to open my email client and load some venom into my keyboard.

Here are a couple of pics from my parents garden

My eight year old nephew wanted to play softball at my parents house this afternoon so not wanting let him think I was no good at it, I said bring it on punk.

The first ball I hit flew into the pool, skipped across the pool cover and right into the filter opening! Later, I managed to hit one to the corner of the yard but it landed in dog poop and no one would pick it up

After that I was designated the pitcher. Anyway we had aalot of fun and I took my camera and got some nice pictures of the garden which I will try to post later.

After watching several of the European Cup with my Dad, brothers and bf, I must admit having developed a almost semi-interest in how it all turns out.

Last night, I found out just how many Portuguese people live near me as they all went driving around our neighborhood, honking their horns and waving their flags.

Today I learned that France was eliminated, so many of the big teams are now gone. I am hoping that the Czech Republic will win as there is a player on that team I like

I was given Cure tickets for my birthday by Dad of all people! He is remarkably hip, my Dad is, and usually takes an interest in what I do or dont like musically. I didnt tell him that I already had tickets, so I will quietly get rid of mine.

I am happy also that The Rapture will be playing at that concert and am looking forward to seeing them as much as, if not more than the Cure.

As Dad wont be back until later this week, I have had to drive Mom around several times, one them happening to be at night, she noticed me squinting frequently and slowing slightly to read street signs.

Basically if there is traffic coming toward me, with their headlights on, I cannot see anything, it makes my eyes go all blurry and stuff, Mom said this is dangerous and I should see an eye specialist, I pretented not to hear her and turned up the radio.

In truth I have already seen a specialist, several months ago, and told him about the night driving, he suggested glasses for reading, using the computer and driving at night, and wrote a perscription for a "mild" lens that would just slightly help in those situations. The only reason I havent used it is that someone told me "once you start using that, your eyes will depend on it an grow weaker which scared me off enough not to bother, although I havent actually verified if that would be true or not.

Personally I think its because I used to use a 1280x1024 desktop, and recently went to a 1600X1200 one, which made all the fonts smaller, but I didnt tell Mom that.

As Purple_Cow kindly pointed out in irc, all I had to do to solve my cdrecord problems was

 cdrecord -v dev=ATA:0,1,0 -pad speed=24 *.wav 

Heh, do not ask me why I didn't try that first.

I was sent flowers at my office yesteday, it was embarrassing a little bit as the other girls went into an "ooing" and "ahhing" frenzy, and although I am not usually big on that type of gesture, I was happy inside that he sent them.

Then when I showed up to work later that evening, my boyfriend informed me he was taking me out to a late dinner instead, which was at a really nice place nearby, and we had a great relaxing meal.

I notice that "Hide the Flag" ( I'm not sure if thats what HTF means) is getting popular and thats good, I don't think the game will suffer at all from adding new gamestyles and in fact think it would be fun to at least consider other new ones as well. (not that I'd play anything other than league style ctf or decks...but you know, for the kids... )

I am having problems with my cd burner on the Gentoo laptop, I can burn an iso image with:

cdrecord -v dev=ATA:0,1,0 -pad speed=24 foobar.iso

and it will make a cd from that image no problem, but if I go into a directory with a bunch of wav files, intending to make an audio cd for my car, I would try something like:

 for i in *.wav;
      do cdrecord -v dev=ATA:0,1,0 -pad speed=24 $i;
      done

This of course, burns the first track, then fixates the disc and ejects it, making it impossible to burn the rest of the files. So much for trying to be clever

Anyway the point of this is that I tried xcdroast, gcombust and even compiled k3b which depends on kde-base and took 3 hours to build, but all of these graphical burners error out with different messages, instead of investigating, I'd just install a different package and try that..but now I am out of gui burning software and am forced to see whats going on here.

So Mom found out about the murderer and is absolutely flipping out, demanding I move home "This instant young lady..." and all sorts of other rantings. She is convinced that where I live is infested with panhandlers, drug dealers, murderers and prostitutes, which of course isnt true at all, there are hardly any panhandlers here.

I kinda like this song

You might recall the last building I lived in, was around the corner from here, well, there were two apartments in that building, ours was on the top floor and another large loft type apartment on the floor below us, there was also a small bedsitting room, one room, no windows, no kitchen, and a small washroom, but no shower.

This room was right next to us on the top floor, and it was quite unrentable, he wanted $400 a month for it, but as it was windowless and kitchenless, not to mention laundry-less, he had a hard time renting it. He did manage to get the skid-row types to rent it though. They never lasted as they could never pay the rent. One of the skids managed to stay there 3 months, he never worked, and hung out in the bar accross the street all day, and was drunk alot, sometimes knocking on our door to borrow stuff.

Sarah and I hated him and would always feel uncomfortable with him next door. So anyway, since we moved, I still bump into him at the local stores and what not, and make small talk with him..but really just say whatever I need to to make him go away..

Friday night I was coming home from work, it was about 4am and as I passed my old building, there was a cop standing on the street behind that yellow police tape. It turns out that night our old neighbour had gotten drunk and then stabbed some other guy to death! I couldnt belive it! He has been charged with second degree murder, Im not sure why I am rattled, I mean he was just someone who used to live next door to me, not an old friend or something, but still. All the times I had the doorman kick him out of our bar...and Sarah used to tell him to f-off all the time, we just didnt think he was the murdering type!

I'm pretty sleepy today, I worked yesterday at the office then last night at the bar until 3am, then this morning I had to drop my car off for Dad at 6am as I am lending it to him for his trip down east to fish with some of his old buddies.

He goes every year this time of year, and actually does quite well, always bringing back plenty of fish. My brothers sometimes go but this year only my older brother can make it, which is a relief as the thought of my younger brother going down there with my car is too much stress for me to deal with

No real computer news, I have had little time to do much except eat and sleep and work this week, so the good old geeky stuff will have to wait.

I had a chance to play a little bit since getting back online, but it wasnt really fun, I dunno why, it just wasnt. I should maybe play another style perhaps, like decks, or the HTF, I dont know why CTF is so much fun one time and totally a pain in the butt the next time.

My boss mentioned that my cell phones usage, if I were to be billed for it, would amount to $600-$800 a month, I told him its a good thing I'm not getting billed then.

In fairness to yours truly, I do make alot of work related calls on my cell's, in fact about 30% of my calls are work related

I have discovered the optimal number of pages one can attempt to copy and collate on our Canon photocopier that will cause it to clog every time, set off a bunch of red lights and grind the machine to halt, necessitating a visit from my favorite IT guy. I like to do this late in the afternoon, as I know they play Quake3 or something about that time each day.

Djimon Hounsou plays a painter living in drug addict's building, in the movie In America", his character is a neigbour of a young Irish couple with two beautiful litle girls struggling to make ends meet after arriving in New York, this painter is typically portrayed as many artists are, brooding, introverted with a quick and savage temper, but the two little girls bring out something in him, and suddenly we are exposed to his mesmeric charm.

The two girls are also a delight to watch, I dont know why I hadn't seen nor heard of this film before, but I'm glad I saw it now, its directed by the same guy (Jim Sheridan) that did "In the name of the Father..." and "My left Foot".

Be warned, its a major tear jerker, and I mean MAJOR! but dont let that put you off, its such a good change of pace from the kind of movies offered up at the cinema's these days.

I picked up some cd's on the way home today, Matthew Good, Goldfrapp and Air. As usual there were so many I wanted to buy I was really suprised that I showed some restraint and didnt spend $300 or something.

[you can play "pong" on the Air website ]

I will try to post a couple songs later on.

My roomates have rented a bunch of movies, some of which I will watch...one of them though has "ninja vampires" in it, I think I will give that a miss.

Sarah's boyfriend installed a ceiling fan downstairs yesterday, he took down the old one and proceeded to put up the new one grudginly at our request. It turns out, there was a red wire hanging down from the hole in the ceiling left over once he hooked everything up. I asked him what it was for and he said its the ground wire, and he wrapped it together with the green ground wire attached to the fan.

I dont know anything about this sort of thing, but it didnt seem right that you hook a green wire to a red wire, and mentioned this to him, only to be told not to worry. Anyway, when he turned the power on, there was a loud pop, and the fuse blew, along with some upstairs fuses, which turned off all my computers.

I just backed out of the room at that point. When I got home from work last night though, the fan was working so he must of figured it out.

I have reverted the desktop back to debian, and will do all of te gentoo stuff on my laptop, where I would more than likely benifit from any speed boost. I dont know what I did wrong, but I was able to install the OS, upgrade the kernel to 2.6.5 to enable high memory, set up alsa for sound, all by myself, but when it came down to downloading the nvidia graphics installer, something I had done at least 15 times before, I messed it all up somehow and had to get help

It doesnt bother me to ask for help mind you, but it does upset me to get help with something that is a.) simple and b.) a task I have done before many times without a second thought.

I had to watch another soccer game with my family today, it was ok England played France, some of those players are hotties

I went over to my parents today and made Dad his favorite buttermilk pancakes, and then wanted to take him to Lee Valley to get him something nice, but I didnt realize that today was the first day of the big soccer competiton in Europe, so my brothers and him were comfortably planted in front of the couch and were in no way shape or form going anywhere. I guess I will take him shopping some other time.

Mom and I went to the mall instead

Tonight I am reverting my desktop back to debian, I will leave gentoo on my laptop for a while, probably a long while as it seems to run really well.

Yay....I have finally gotten hooked up with my isp it seems! I am downloading 464 emails now, mostly linuxchix mailing list stuff...then I have some web surfing to do, and hopefully squeeze some irc time in tonight before work.

I checked my speed at a speedtest site, and it didnt look like the advertized speed, so I will give it a few days and see if it settles out before harrassing my ISP.

Oh, the Gentoo install on my laptop is fine, vim runs instantly, with no issues, I think the desktop was compilied with "~x86" stuff to get gnome 2.6 which the laptop didnt need as 2.6 was released into stable by the time I insalled, so I dont know what to do with the desktop now, I will have to think of something, maybe back to Debian or perhaps, reinstall Gentoo without the "~x86".

Anyway..I have surfing to do!

The last couple of weeks the bar has hired a dj on Thursday nights, and it has become quite busy now, so much so that it is actually hard-work-busy, the tips of course are much better, as now, instead of a mellow, chill-out crowd that we used to get, its more of a dance club now, the music is great, I do find the dj a little bit odd, aloof even, but I will work on him to see if he will let me snag some of that good music

Its really muggy here the last few days, like it usually is in the middle of the summer, I dont mind, I love the heat and am straight onto the patio as soon as I get home now to soak in the sun as best I can before dusk.

Tonight I watched Mystic River, yeah yeah, another movie, I must have watched 10 dvd's since the internet went kaput. I really liked this film, as disturbing as it was in parts, it was well written and I was suprised to learn directed by Clint Eastwood, I must say hes turned into a big time director now which I think personally suits him better than as an actor, perhaps his Westerns and Dirty Harry movies are more male-centric, but I never thought they were that great.

I called my ISP this morning and was informed that my connection will be ready to use on Friday. That would make it roughly 10 days with no internet. Could be worse I suppose.

We do not have a "computer room" anymore, and up to now my server was kept in my bedroom, but it is on all the time and I can hear it humming along in the night. I decided to put it in the laundry room. This required a small hole drilled into the back of my closet that passes into the laundry room, I then had to try to poke the cable through the hole in the wall which didnt work too good so I taped a coat hanger to it.

Once this was done, I ran the wire through the laundry room. When I booted it up, I tried to ssh into it (there is no keyboard,monitor or mouse) but it didnt work, so it turns out after doing all that work, there was something wrong with the cable, which I hadnt bothered to check.

I then went to the computer store and bought some connectors and a connector-squeezer tool and put new connectors on the ends of the cable, and this time it worked fine. Im worried about heat though, there are no windows in that room , and the washer and dryer are in use quite alot, so we will see.

I have stopped looking at my modem to see if the little orange flashing light has gone away to be replaced with a wistfully soothing, soft mellow green led, signifying and end to my digital exile.

I have taken the attitude that it will happen when it will happen.

Last night I made a nice dish that took 10 minutes to prepare. You need some bluecheese or gorganzola, some fresh penne, any type of fresh pasta would work, baby spinach leaves, half a cup of buttermilk, pine nuts, fresh parsely and salt & pepper.

Cook your noodles, while they are cooking, crumble the blue cheese into a bowl, add the buttermilk, parsely and salt and pepper, pour this over the drained, cooked noodles and toss, then mix in the spinach leaves and toss once more, top with toasted pine nuts and serve right away.

I have a lot of buttermilk left over and will try to make pancakes from scratch with it this weekend for my Dad, the worlds number one pancake fan.

Finally I got to see Kill Bill and thought it was a great movie, I am told volume 2 is even better so I look forward to that. For a laugh, to see what the fuss was about, Sarah and I rented Gigli, the infamous J-Lo and Ben movie.

It was pretty craptacular and I can see why it garnared such negative attention,I suppose it was the combination of Bens penchant for really bad acting and the couple's "look at us, we are in love and made a movie" self indulgent bile that stood out the most, but add to that a lame-lame-lame plot and dull flat directing, topped off with a putrid soundtrack and you got your self one hell of a bad movie.

It boggles my mind that Christopher Walken & Al Pacino both had roles in this movie...but anyway, its nice to be catty one in a while and revel in the failings of the Hollywood Elite.

I have discovered through bordem mainly, that if you randomly read man pages you are likely to learn something you didnt know about.

I was lurking in #tacobeam a while ago and Kergoth pasted into the channel the command he uses for the urxvt terminal.

 urxvt -fg grey -bg black  -ls -fn  "xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:pixelsize=20, xft:Andale Mono:pixelsize=11.5,9x15bold"

I seem to recall mentioning this to you before, however, there is one small problem, and it is to do with bold text.

By default I assume, urxvt paints the background of bolded text in an ugly (at least to me) fashion. I didn't know this was configurable with the "--colorBD" option. So..."--colorBD magenta" gives me this:

Or "--colorBD cyan" gives me:

And finally for good old fasioned white, "--colorBD white" :

So now I am happy. My terminal is fast, has nice anti aliased fonts and the bold text issue is solved (I will use cyan for now). Having that default method of bolding was a little bit annoying, not just for man page reading, but also irssi uses alot of bolding in its output, so it will make irc more readable, if I ever get back back online that is

I am having some issues with gentoo, namely vim, vi and gvim all take ages to start up, even in a terminal vi takes 10-12 seconds to appear which seems to long. I booted into Debian and tried vi there and it is instant, no problems whatsoever, so I even re-emerged vim but it didnt help.

Another thing I dont like is that it dosent seem to have a tool similar to Debian's modconf, I tried to get my didgital camera working but couldnt remember the name of the usb module to modprobe, after reading the man page, I found modprobe -l <search pattern> will let you search, but it is not the same as good old modconf.

I think to get the command lspci I need to emerge pciutils, but when I try to do that, it wants to go onto the net and get stuff so that aint gonna work.

One more annoyance is no thesaurus package, there is the usual dictd dictionaries, but not the "moby thesaurus" that I liked,

More than likely I will revert the desktop back to Debian, but keep using Gentoo on my laptop.

There is a glimmer of hope in my internetless life....a very nich tech guy at my ISP offered to set me up with a dial up account until they get our highspeed connection back up, So I said sure, and he gave me an account and a number to call. I had used dial up before, if you may remember back to Christmas time.

Thing is, at Christmas, I was using Debian, and had downloaded the driver for my laptop's crappy winmodem and then managed to cludge through some config files to get it to work. Easy I thought, I can do that again. So I unzipped the driver file and ran the install script....$bash: error: lspci unknown command

Apparently, Gentoo dosent come with the freaking lspci command ?! I do not even know what package installs it, but I cant get on the net to install it anyway.

There is another option, take the modem out of Sarah's old not used comp, and put it into the desktop that they use for XP, and get online with windows. This isnt a very appealing solution, but at least it might get me online. I wonder if there is a way to download the "lspci" command for gentoo from a windows machine and the emerge it into gentoo?

I am happy to say I have toned up quite a bit in the last 3-4 weeks, Not a lot mind you, but enough that I notice, and I certinally feel fitter. A new law went into affect this past week, banning any type of smoking in restraunts or bars. Now at least I am not tempted to smoke as no one smokes in the bar so thats better for me.

Last night was my second day without the net, I watched a really good movie with my boyfriend called "Monster", it was a very moving film, and I had hoped to garner some insight into my boyfreind by carefully observing his reaction to various scenes...this of course doesnt work as he isnt really a "heart on his sleeve" type of guy, choosing instead to bottle up his emotions like many men I know.

After he left, in what would have been my internet time, I was instead forced to watch television for the first time in god knows how long...nothing to report there..some lame sit-coms, a beauty pagent show.., people redecorating other peoples houses, guys assembling motorcycles and getting mad at each other,...... Basketball and Baseball, and music videos.

I turned on the music channel, turned the volume down and read a book instead.

bleh..

The phone is now hooked up back into our old number, but because it was cut off for over a day, the whole internet set up procedure has to be redone..I called my ISP and was told "at least a week", so that sux but not much I can do.

I will write my blog on offline and rysync it up when I finally do get my connection back.

Everything went well with the move, I cleaned out the old apartment last night and we are all settled away in the new, Sarah had told me today at 10am the phone would be hooked up, so because we didnt even miss a day of service last time we moved, we hadnt bothered to tell our isp anything this time.

What I hadn't counted on however, was Sarah neglecting to tell Bell Canada that we wanted to keep the same number, So today, at 10am, our phone was hooked up except we now have a new number, which sucks, as our isp has no idea about that and the dsl is still hooked to the old number that is now not in service

So, it is wednesday, I doubt very much my isp can get us online by the weekend. I am working alot in the evenings plus still going to the gym at least 3 times a week, so its not like I have a lot of internet time available to me, but when I do get an hour or so on the net, I really really make the most of it,

So this is day one with no internet, and I can see I am not going to like this...