this girl drives a tank

I got my "wedding hair" done today and this afternoon, using the wedding as an excuse, went to buy shoes. I was actually pretty restrained, buying only 2 pairs

My 200gb HD is still acting up a little, when the pc boots the disc now is reported under mount as "unknown type" for the filesystem, even though it is ext3, mount can no longer see that. I dont seem to have lost any data but it probably is only a matter of time. I will try to put a second drive in there, and reinstall the OS somtime soon I suppose. Ah well...

My bf has some relatives in town and they want to see Niagra Falls on Sunday, I am not sure if he thinks I am involved or not, but I'd prefer not to go to be honest. If I do go, at least i will have Monday off work as it is a holiday weekend here.

Lisa, one of my best friends is getting married this weekend and last night I went over to try on dresses and help her figure out a few of the details, I got there around 10pm and was happily sipping wine and playing "dress me up" when at 11:30 my boyfriend calls, he is swamped at the bar with customers and wanting me to go help. So then I drove downtown, worked until 3am and groggily dragged myself to work today. I have to go back there tonight which sucks as I needed to talk to Lisa a little bit more. She is totally getting cold-feet and wondering if shes doing the right thing, and then to top that off, she's all stressed out about flowers, meals... photographer and all those little details that turn a bride into a nervous wreck.

I am looking forward to the wedding, but frankly do not want to get all drunk and hungover like many of my friends will do, its too hard for me the next day, and I have to work in the bar the next night as well which is bad enough without a hangover.

I'm looking out my window now watching rain slide down the glass and pooling up on the sill. It has been like this, grey and damp on and off for the entire summer, not to say that i do not like rain, I do, but I also like a good heat wave in the summer, not a grossly hot one, but several weeks of steady, warm and sunny days, and it looks like this year the best we can do is 3 days of sun, 3 days of rain.

Last night I added "Advanced Power Management" to my laptop kernel and now have a battery monitor among other things to go along with wireless net access. I think thats enough of messing with it for now.

I really should take some notes in step by step fashion detailing all the changes I made to get the wireless stuff working. Admittedly it was a happy moment when it did finally work, I know that in six months down the road if I had to do it again, very little of it would come back to me and I would likely make the same mistakes again. This is a blow to one's confidence and I can only hope I am not the only one does stuff this way. I think I will make a folder inside ~/howto called Wireless and copy any pertinant congig file into it. This would give me a head start at least.

All said the wireless upgrade cost me $180 CDN which is about $135 USD or Euro: 111, so thats not too bad I guess. I dont know what to do with the old router though, I have no need for it really so it might get donated somewhere, maybe freenode could use it :-)

I bought some more cd's when I was out getting the second router, two Air albums ("Everybody Hertz" and "Moon Safari") that weren't new but as of then, not in my collection. Le voyage de Pnlope is another example of why Air remains, at least to me, the champions of chillout.

I also picked up Morcheeba's "Parts of The Process" which includes a 3 song DVD from a concert that I havent yet watched. Obligitory Morcheeba track here.

The last cd is The Avalanches's "Since I left You" and right now, Etoh has quickly become my favorite song.

Oh I got a curt email from my IT guy today reminding me that in the future, just because I experiance "confusion" logging into or uploading files to the company's ftp server, this does not allow me to email the "problematic files" to him directly and he will next time simply delete them.

heh.

It's not that I never wanted a wireless net connection for my laptp, its just one of those things I kept putting off. Yesteday evening I just suddenly decided that, yeah, it might be nice to browse the web whilst making breakfast in the kitchen or to catch up on email whilst sitting on the terrace in the morning, or even keep an eye on my irc buddies while watching a movie downstairs.

The first thing i checked was my kernel config to see what drivers were installed, and sure enough there was support for prism54 chipset cards already in the 2.6 kernel. I recompiled the kernel to build this driver right in an rushed off to Future Shop to buy one of these, a NetGear WG511 pcmcia card and a Linksys wifi router. I picked the linksys as my current non-wifi router is also a Linksys and I thought I could plug the new one right into the old one to speed up setup. Besides that, we all need two routers right?

I get home and start to configure the card. This got really tricky, I needed to install hotplug, pcmcia_cs, wireless-tools,linux-wlan-ng and a few other minor things. I couldnt find a good step by step guide for installing a pcmcia card in Gentoo. It turns out that although my card is supported by the kernel, that dosent necessarily mean it will work once the module is loaded. In actual fact it means it wont work yet.

I wasn't too happy as "supported by the kernel" generally means go for it, theres a driver there ready to use. After digging around a bit, I found this 45 page gem, and started reading. The post says "the gentoo way" but its not really official at all and you have various files from around the net, configure this, edit that and so forth. This took a while and stupid me left the ethernet cable plugged in all the time and this forced linux to use "eth1" for the wireless, so when I rebooted which was often, id pull the ethernet cable out and everything went over to "eth0" which wasnt configured for wireless yet :-\

Anyway I gave up on that last night and tried again this morning, this time following a different but similar guide. Finally it all worked and when I rebooted all was well, the card lit up and was ready to use. However, upon trying to configure the router, I found out that although I had 2 different routers, they both use http://192.168.1.1 as the address to webadmin them from. This wasnt good. I kept getting the old routers config page and not my new one. So I then had to take the old router right out of the picture and just use the new one. This worked, I set it up but then couldn't get the pcmcia card to talk to the router, so I to hell with it, I didnt feel like messing around all day with this and went back to the store and exchanged the Linksys for a NetGear router.

This time it worked out a little bit better. But I had to set up the lan all over and assign ip's, forward ports etc, but the good news was it got me on the net with the wireless card. The only lingering bug now is that if I enable wireless authentification using WEP, my laptop is not able to use dhcp to obtain an ip. So another hour of messing around with that turned up nothing, and I ended up disabling WEP alltogether.

My wireless network is still set to only accept a connection from my pcmcia card with a specific MAC address, and I will see if I can get away with not broadcasting my EESID. This isnt perfect but will have to do for now as I am fed up of looking at all those naughty little configuration files.

Its 6:00pm now and I should eat, all I had today so far was a lemon tart

As most girls usually do on a saturday morning, I awoke early, got a cup of tea and sat down to update my operating systems. On my Gentoo laptop, it looked like perl needed to be updated, so whilst that was happily compiling, I was about to tidy up some files on my Debian desktop and suddenly X froze.

I dropped into tty1 to see if I could run "top" or "ps" or anything to tell me what was going on, but allthough the system allowed me to see the console, I couldnt actually use it, it too was locked up but with this message....

 hda: DMA_timer_expiry: DMA status == 0x21 
                  hda: DMA timeout error

Ahh I thought, the old 0x21 error :-\ So basically there is likely something wrong with the drive? I rebooted and prayed, sure enough the system came back up and it seems to be fine now. "dmesg" looked ok, there was some filesystem checking done on the ext3 partition but other than that nothing really alarming to see. This drive is not only my backup drive of my mp3's but also my main working desktop with all my personal stuff, as well as a slew of work related files, so I am busy burning it all to cd just in case. The mp3's are mirrored with rsync to my fileserver, but I should really make cd back up of them. But how does one burn 50gb of music onto CD's?

I know there is a program called hardparm or something which I will look into today, its supposed to "finetune" your drives.

Last night I had to work untill 3am so Mom went home yesterday afternoon. We did watch a couple of movies though. "Paycheck" with Ben Affleck which further convinced me that this guy really really cant act! and "Masters and Commanders" with Russel Crowe, which was pretty good I thought, not mindblowing good, but entertaining and some majestic scenes with the big sailships.

I have done a fair bit of work from home this week and needed today to upload a bunch of files to our dept's ftp server. So I connected to it but the transfers seemed to hang and it appeared nothing really got put through. This stuff has to be looked at today by my boss's boss so it was rather important to me that it was there.

Finally I had to call IT and got "my guy" on the phone, he told me to try again and I did, we went over the login, checked passwords etc and everything looked ok in that regard. He then asked "what ftp program are you using?" and I said gftp, he paused and then said something along the lines of "Hmm, I havent heard of that", I guess he looked it up as he then said Is this 'leeenox' or something" and I said yeah. "Well there's your problem right there was his answer!!! So we had a little argument, and I ended up cutting the conversation short as it seemed pointless.

I then emailed the files (about 60) to him directly with a note telling him where they should go.

Im not sure what is wrong with the ftp server but I sure as hell know its nothing to do with linux.

Yesterday my roomates went up to their cottage in Muskoka and I found myself for the first time since we moved to this building alone at night. I got kinda spooked and was wide awake at every little noise. Im not in the mood to have my bf stay over with me this last week so I asked Mom to live with me for a while.

So today I did the grand cleanup, and me and Mom then went got a bunch of comfort food and some movies to watch. I then sat her in front of the computer and introduced her to the web. (My parents, despite having my little brother in the basement with dial up, have never actually "seen" the internet)

She thought it was impressive, and I found websites and all kinds of goodies pertaining to her hobbies which she thought was amazing. What she liked the most was when a gf of mine IM'd me, and I chatted to her for a second then let Mom talk to her. That was the highlight of her session So now I am kinda hoping she will get into it a bit and get herself and Dad a computer.

She had no problems using gnome, and was able to start up Mozilla on her own like an old pro. It made me wonder how different things would be if every PC manufacturer said to the customer "We can give you WinXP for a few hundred dollars or Debian for free, either one pre-installed" I feel that not knowing anything about computers, like many first time buyers dont, they would find Linux equally as alien as Windows, but would grow used to it over the long run.

I did manage to get my framebuffer stuff working on my laptop. I was missing several options in my kernel config file, basically I didnt think Id need this when I compiled the kernel last time.

CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE=y CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y

both of those I had said no to, so I enabled it and after recompiling the laptop booted up with lovely little fonts and a cute penguin logo Now I can go to a virtual console and actually have a screen I can fit alot of info on. I also discovered that under X, one usually presses ctrl+alt[1-7] to get consoles one through seven, but if you boot up without X, you only need to press alt+[1-7] which is nice as it similar to irssi.

So I got an invite for Gmail which is good as my hotmail account is collecting spam at an alarming rate, and by spam, I dont mean just letters from banks in Nigeria, or offers to "enlarge" myself, but also ad spam from websites that tell you your privacy is respected then start emailing you "newsletters" and such.

So bzgirlatgmaildotcom is where you can reach me now if you used to use the hotmail one. Remember though, Mr and Mrs Google read gmail so send the naughty stuff to my other account.

I figured out how to make gentoo not boot into X, which is my goal, and next, I'd like to see the console fonts on boot up small and crisp and clean, not all gross and ugly like they are now. This was easy to do in Debian, I made lilo use vga=791, when I went to my virtual consoles, it looked great and and I could fit alot of information on the screen.

Gentoo however uses grub, not lilo, and even though I added the vga line to my grub.conf, it dosent seem to work. I dont know alot about framebuffers and Vesa, but im working on it.

I have had huge huge cravings to smoke lately for some reason, its bothering me a little bit as I dont want to be a smoker again, especially as I nag my bf all the time about his smoking. Its not so bad when Im at the office as I dont go outside with the smokers, but bartending at night is a pain as constantly fight the urge to say "hey! gimme a puff of that!"

I have now for the past few days used mutt for all my email and i must confess it wasnt that hard to learn the kb controls, I can jump around between mailboxes and its great for mailing-lists. It nice because all my mail is on my file server, where my irc client also runs from, so I can drop out of a screened irc session, type "mutt" read any new mail and then sreen -r right back into irc.

Sarah was in my room last night and we were just chatting about her bf and my bf and the woe of it all She wasnt so impressed as I with mutt, wondering "how the hell can you look at pictures people send?!" I haven't set up a helper app that will open, like gqview or something if I want to see a pic, but I am sure it can be done.

I read some more of the C book today, its getting more and more difficult but I havent given it up yet. Instead, I am typing out the little code fragments with extra verbose comments Maybe that will help make it sink in.

I have had a chance now to start reading that C book I bought and do some of the samples that it shows. I dosent really have any programs that you write as a simple program and then improve it as you go along learning new things and adding those new capabilities to your project. I kinda thought that was a good way to learn.

This book instead just shows you the basics and some little example of the code to go along with a definition. It is ok, except sometimes, I see from other tutorials I have looked at, another way to do the same thing, and wonder what is the general rule to follow if you can do one operation several different ways.

Basically, I need to be able to raise my hand and ask the teacher stuff

Gentoo has a little tool called "mirrorselect" that you you emerge, then run "mirrorselect -a -s3" and off it goes knocking on servers doors all around the world, eventually finding the one with the fastest speed for you.

This tool doesnt come with a man page however..(tsk tsk, Debian wouldnt let you develop a package that has no man or info page) and I have to guess that -s3 means 3 results (it found 3 fast servers) but I am not sure what the -a does.

Two of the three servers were in Germany though!? and last seemed to be in the US. Anyway after doing emerge sync again with the new mirrors it does "seem" a little faster but not so much i could swear by it.

I guess you could say I had a small spat with my boyfriend and have been moping around a little in a cloud of self-pity. I dont think it will be a relationship ending thing, but its still not fun to fight.

My all important email is set up now with the much appreciated help from tupone, I should be able to do this stuff without help really, but I have never had to deal with procmail,exim fetchmail and Imap before individually, let alone all at once. I might even get some sort of spam filtering also as my ISP despite trying at least to get the obvious ones, still let a dozen or so through every time i check my mail.

I have a pet peeve with the whole hidden files practice in linux/unix, I am aware that users operate out of thier home directorys as you would normally not have write acces to most other place in the filesystem. So when you install vim for example, it will make a little file called .vimrc in your home directory well, after a while, when I do an ls -la or some such listing, my home folder is absolutely full of various hidden files or folders, some apps require a hidden folder and then the configuration file. Id like all apps to use .config , so I have only one extra folder, .xinitrc .xsession .xscreensaver .xsession-errors xauthority, could further be placed in ~/.config/X or along those lines.

I like my home folder clean, squeaky clean, and linux doesnt let me do that so much, and sadly I dont see an easy way to fix it, unless the app itself allows me to tell it where to store the config file, then I am outta luck and must live with it I guess.

It seems that our crafty ctf coach has aquired the rights to another player, and once again the face of Vbz has changed. Root has joined up now, so with the past addition of Ski, and now Root, we still have a pretty good team and hopefully can play some 3 on 3 matches where I dont suck so much, unlike my 2 on 2 efforts.

I have to confess being less than thrilled with not only my play lately but the game in general, its less likely now to see all your friends on the servers in part I suppose to the legion of new players that have taken to the game, and I guess in part of some of the older players simply finding other things to do.

I hope things get better as its still fun to shoot at people and blow stuff up, but I dont think I have the focus anymore that I once had, and play much more lazy now

Here are some of the songs I am listening to lately, some of them are especially nice and soothing whilst driving in heavy traffic, without my car stereo blaring away I can sometimes be quite the little hothead, muttering under my breath at the other drivers and so on, but with music pounding away I somehow forget about all the traffic and just sail happily along my way.

Latin Note and So Flute are by St. Germain.

Survival and the lovely Les Nuits are by Nightmares On Wax.

"It's Immaterial" is an old band that no one really listened to Well I mean they didnt have many albums out and were never on the radio or anything, but my brother had this record, and I used to make him play it for me all the time. I think they were from Scotland or someplace near. Here is Driving Away From Home" and a Remix of the same song.

This Goldfrapp song isnt for everyone, but its really trancy and I have added it to my bzflag playlist Strict Machine is from the Strict Machine EP which I bought last week.

Finally, two songs from Zero 7, Give it Away and my favorite song at the moment, Red Dust

I took my niece to Chapters this morning and bought her a bunch of books, and whilst there decided to poke around and see if there was anything I fancied for myself, this book chain used to be pretty good, although large, it carried all sorts of lesser known writers such as Knut Hamsun for example.

We went to the largest Chapters in Toronto, and lo and behold, no Knut Hamsun, not a single Flannery O'Conner, no Bukowski, no Tobias Wolff, every writer I could come up with, they didnt have.

I guess publishers are in the moneymaking game too and will only push whats "hot" but I will now revert to driving downtown to a little store on Queen St called "Pages" which has always had every kind of book I have wanted.

I did end up buying a Margret Atwood novel and some Patrick Lane poetry.

Oh, I peeked in the computer book section and amidst the sea of .Net, Visual Basic, C# and MacOS books, was a little Sams Regular Expressions book and a introductory book on C, both of which I purchased for around $30 in total which seemed ok at the time, and will be an even better deal if I actually read them (I fully intend to I will have you know)

I think by installing IMAP on my server and letting clients connect from my laptop and desktop will solve having to sync my email accross multiple puters, and, I can make IMAP convert my old mbox mail format to maildir. So thats the next project.

It looks like I might be getting one of these:

My friend in the hardware biz has called me several times and is getting quite insistant that I take it I am not sure how it will do playing bz, I heard lcd's are not the greatest for gaming but theres more to life than bz right? right.

My aquaintance the murderer, remember him?, is going on peliminary trial next week and my friends want to go down there to watch! I am not sure I really want to do this, but I have never seen a murder trial and I must admit it is somehow gruesomely tempting to go watch it all unfold. I think i might be worried he'd glare at us or something.

It has been a busy week and not that great a week I guess, so I do not feel like writing much :-\

I didn't manage to convert evolution's mbox email format into maildir format, so mutt cannot read my eamils, which sux. I tried some perl script, mb2md which I didnt really understand, and also tried a few other things like the command

"formail -I'From ' -s maildir MAILDIR >< mbox" which 

complained about maildir being a directory or somesuch. I am not really in the mood to investigate

We played a match today and lost against BaR, I think it is safe to say I am not exactly the type of player you need in a two on two game. I knew I wasnt very good in that regard, today I found out how bad I was

The guy that owns bzgirl.com wants $950 dollars to sell the domain, not bad eh? I thought I'd only be worth half of that

There are not many uglier words than than the word "blog" especially now with people saying stuff like "blogosphere" and "flashmobs" I dont know about you, but they seem awkward and contrived to spell and even pronounce. I am going to add one more word then to that list...blogiversary!!

Hehe, its been over a year now I have been writing this thing, how time flies! I should have had a party or something.

The other day at the bbq, my bf was playing with my neice and nephew, actually he was laying on the grass and they were screaming in glee jumping all over him. I was watching this from the terrace and thought "hmm he's really good with kids" and looked over at Mom who gave me this "look" which conveyed the exact same thought I had. It was realy weird and made me realize I am alot more like my Mom than I care to admit sometimes.

I have exim4,procmail,fetchmail and mutt all working for me now and only need to figure out how to make mutt read my evolution mail. Then I want to move all my email to the server so its in one central place for easy backups etc. That is the goal for today, but that big soccer game is on, so i dont know if I will have to watch it or not. I am hoping Greece wins, as they are a huge underdog, bu I suspect Potugal will prevail.

Here's a little bash tip lets say you do:

emerge -p world

and the next step is to "emerge world" you could press the up arrow to recall that last command, and then back track to the -p and delete it and press enter, or you could just type:

^-p

and it will remove any instance of "-p" from your last command and rerun the command. You can also do stuff like:

ls /usr/share/doc

then

^doc^man

Which will get you an ls of /usr/share/man instead.

aint that great?!

I went to yet another bbq last night, and ate a ton of shrimp There was lots of other food there, like steaks and chicken and ribs, but I am not a huge meat eating carnivore like the men in my family so I stuck to the garlic buttered shrimps and Chiliean red wine.

By the way if you want a cheap, and I mean really cheap delicious red wine, try Gato Negro Merlot I cannot believe how yummy this wine is for its price.

I am in the midst of switching from Evolution to Mutt one of the many text based email clients. Why you ask? Well, I dont like having mail spread out over multiple computers, I want all my email in one place, and the ability to read it and reply via ssh either from inside my network or from someplace far away accross the internet. Mutt seems to fit the bill for this job and can handle mailing lists and attachments, and will even open word docs with helper apps like abiword or run firefox to open a url.

So id like to maybe download all my mail to the server, and from any of my comps then ssh into the server and read my mail. This shouldnt be too hard then to back up my mail (I never delete mail!) I followed this guide to set it up but was unable to send mail, I can recieve it well enough but not send anything. Also I am worried that I cannot save my evolution mail as it might be in a format mutt cannot read.

I found a pretty good screensaver at this site, its a linux port of a windows/mac saver. I like the "lattice" and "fieldlines" ones alot.

I had a pretty great day yesterday, taking my niece and nephew out to the beach (the beach along lake ontario) in the morning and then a huge barbeque in the afternoon, and finally to see the fireworks last night. The kids had a great time and absolutely loved seeing all the the fireworks exploding and what not.

Whats really nice though is that today is friday, and I still have 2 more days plus today off work. yay

Heres an interesting site I was told about via #linuxchix, you decide...dog-toy or marital aid?

  

I did pretty good, getting 11 out of 14 on the first page, apperently I am to be trusted with a dog Not so good scores on the second page though.

And this site is an alternative to #flood for you irc users, pretty neat as your code or errors etc, will be there for as long as you need it to be viewed.

finally, this meet "giant oversized nosering guy"