August 2004 Archives

There's a good chance Alfred may come to the party. yay! I will fall over and die of happiness if he did. It would be the best birthday present ever.

I've had a really long weekend. I worked overtime on Saturday morning (midnight to 8 am), which was totally awesome. I turned all the lights off, turned my music up loud, and didn't have much to do at all. Saturday evening, Mike, Nathan, and I went to Jim's house. I'm thinking about moving in. $500/month isn't bad for rent + utilities, and it's a lot closer to work than the place I'm currently living. It's still a maybe; I really haven't decided.

I have to go make a $800 truck payment today. I abhor making truck payments. I have to drive all the way to the ass end of town - Jonesboro. Then I have to give it to the rednecks that own the dealership. I have nothing against rednecks, really I don't. I just wish the old guy would stop telling me to go get a tattoo from this shack down the road. Ew.

Other than that, not much to say. I haven't been in a very bloggy mood lately.

<3

I don't know what the topic means. I'm just so tired that it made sense to me as I typed it. 15 seconds later, it doesn't.

I'm going to start training soon, I think. I want to get good enough to race MotoGP. Wouldn't it totally rock to be the first female to win the MotoGP World Championships? Doubtless a pipe dream, but it makes me smile when I think about it. Why do something if you're not going to try to be the best?

I added a new link to the nav bar, events. My birthday is coming up, and we're planning on having a huge party at Mike's house. It's been a while since we've had a party, so I'm looking forward to it. He has a good house for events like that. A few hours into it, everyone is drunk off their asses, playing pool or chess, doing drugs, or haphazardly poking the alligator. Yes. Alligator. Not a good toy for drunk people. Keep this in mind should you attend.

I view life like I view riding: Why take the shorter, straight roads when the roads with the twists and turns are so much more fun?

Although it's generally not a good practice to feed the trolls, I posted this for the sake of teaching blog readers what not to do.

steamystart: ya hallo sektie: uh, hi. sektie: who are you? steamystart: a male.. steamystart: lol sektie: so's nearly half the world's population. steamystart: taking advantage of you... steamystart: thats right. sektie: netsex is really disgusting steamystart: you know nothing about me.. how do you feel? sektie: as are guys that think i'd even be interested in flirting over AIM. sektie: it's really creepy. get a life. steamystart: Netsex? how can I have it? steamystart: who says I'm gonna net sex? steamystart: you? sektie: I am not amused. steamystart: u know who I am? steamystart: and where I live? sektie: No. Generally I don't bother learning anything about a person once I see that they are too lazy to use the extra 2 keystrokes it takes to type 'you' instead of 'u'. steamystart: You know who I am? sektie: I just said No. steamystart: and where EYE live? steamystart: okay sektie: This is getting old quick. State your purpose or be blocked. steamystart: Masturbating you. sektie: blocked.

The motorcycle I've been riding has finally been fixed - kinda. It needs a new starter clutch, so it sounds sort of like a dying cat when it's starting up. It sounds hella sexy once it gets started though. Despite the fact that it isn't the fastest of crotch rockets, the dual exhaust sounds great. I've been riding it around the Atl all weekend. I even took it to work tonight. I got into a race with some guys on bikes on I-285, and probably got up to about 115mph or so. That was a thrill, although definitely not the brightest idea I could have. Oh well. I'm still alive and kicking, so luck must be with me. I love riding. I am a adrenaline freak, and motorcycles feed that addiction.

Back to work for me. It looks like it's going to be a pretty slow night, so I might see if I can get some more coding done. I'm planning on releasing the code for the blog, soon. Maybe. :)

There appears to be an issue with comments, currently.

Whenever a comment is posted, it emails me with the name/IP of the poster, along with the subject and the comment itself. I noticed one person commented, and it sent me the mail - however it didn't get added to the database. Seems like I must be not escaping something properly, but I can't find any errors in my logs. If you get an error posting a comment, please post the complete error text to this thread.

Thanks!

ghett0hax0r: jesus christ, my gf just broke up with me because i know you

Score!

I'm not sure what to do about this situation with Mike. I really have no idea what the "right thing" even is - although I generally don't base my decisions off what I think I should do. I base them off what I want to do. Generally not an intelligent practice, and doubtless part of the reason I've found myself in most of the situations I'm currently in.

Here's the rundown.

Mike and I have been dating since January 12th. The first 3 weeks, he never left my apartment. We hung out together constantly, and we hit it off very well. I lost my job and moved in with my father, at which point I started spending a lot of time over at Mike's house. He didn't really seem to mind, and eventually it got to the point at which he expected me there. If I didn't show up every morning after work to stay there the day, he'd think something was wrong. We've been living with that situation for about 4-5 months now. Ever since I started working at ISS, I pretty much stopped going home. He gave me a drawer in his dresser so I could keep clothes here. He gave me a key to the house. We discussed moving in together several times, and it became a definite "when" instead of an "if" about 3 months ago. We decided to move in together in the beginning of September. We were originally shooting for September, but then it moved to November because of financial reasons, but eventually we both decided September sounded good. It looked like one of Mike's roommates was going to move out, and Mike and Matt (his other roommate) asked me if I wanted to move in if he did. I said sure, sounds great. That way the financial situation of having to find a place together was already taken care of. There wouldn't be a deposit, because he'd already been living here. It turns out that Jason (the other roommate) wasn't going to leave, but that's not so much a concern here. The focus is now on Mike. After pushing the issue a bit, he told me that not moving in together wasn't a financial concern - it was because he wasn't ready. I can respect that, but I can't help but feel like he led me on a bit. He was ready for me to move in with him if Jason moved out, but now that Jason isn't moving out, Mike isn't ready? Something doesn't feel right. This was the problem we've been having for the past week, and the cause of my anxiety that's apparent in past entries. I feel like he doesn't have any trust in our relationship or in me. He says that while he was gone in Boston, I changed. I think he did. He doesn't want me to go to Boston to meet his family anymore, either. "Not yet", he says. Earlier he talked about taking me there for Thanksgiving.

So what do I do? I've been put in a situation in which I must move out from my fathers. I really don't want to get a place on my own, because it would be hella expensive and I would rather focus on paying off debts and getting a new motorcycle & laptop. The only reason I haven't been putting away money for a deposit for my own place was because I was counting on us moving in together. To say I'm disappointed is an understatement. "Crushed" is more like it.

I feel like he's lost faith in us, or that he's scared. I've been getting mixed responses from everyone. Some people say I should lay low for a while, take a break from the relationship. Others say I should ignore the problem. So I ask you, if you were in my position, what would you do?

For as much as I see him, you'd think I get to spend time with him.

I miss having a boyfriend that takes the time to make me feel pretty. It's not that he's not a good boyfriend. He is, and I love him. I just wish he'd see me when he looked at me. All we've been doing is fighting, lately. Anytime I try to bring up a sensitive subject, he gets that tone to his voice and acts offended. He wasn't like this when we did blow together. We could talk about anything, and we usually did. I know a lot of this is my fault, because I've been such an emotional flood the past few weeks, but I don't know how to stop that unless I find some way to fix what has been bothering me so much. He's been my rock with all of the problems that have been going on, but that part is gone. Now he's just a part of the problem instead of a relief from it.

I miss the way things used to be.

Hm. This bit of happiness should hopefully fix my admin interface and update it to the new FreeBSDGirl v3.0 standard.

I need to write a Girl RFC.

The RSS feed is now less ugly and more reliable. Before, I was updating it manually. Now it just pulls from the DB, and the title/description makes more sense.

Enjoy!

I love my current provider. I really do. However, I'm trying to find something local where I can colo a box.

My requirements:
- A company that will let me into the datacenter to work on my server should anything go wrong.
- At least 500G of transfer a month - preferably 1TB.
- Decent bandwidth. By decent, I want to be able to download from my server to my workstation at work at 1MB/sec or more. That's MB, not Mb.
- Atlanta based.
- No firewalls.
- Very little 'maintenance' downtime. I like keeping my connection on irc active. I must idle!
- 5-10 IP's
- Non-idiotic ToS/AUP

Any suggestions?

I'm so tired of hearing so much negativity about America. Although most of my readers are from the US, a large portion are not. So tell me, why is anti-americanism so rampant?

Admittedly, I used to be on the anti-american bandwagon as well. I hated our government. I hated our healthcare. I hated that I couldn't go to certain parts of the city and order a Big Mac at McDonalds without knowing Spanish - not that I would, I despise McDonalds. I hated that I can't get my nails done without knowing Chinese. I hated taxes (ok, still do. :P). I hated all the commercialism - even though I shop at the Gap and Banana Republic regularly. I hated the stupidity in our children. I hated the school systems for encouraging that stupidity. I hated the ego, the greed, and the ignorance of our culture. But I'm starting to come around.

Sure, there's a lot of blind sheep that live here. Go down to south Georgia around voting time, for example. All the women are talking about who their husband told them to vote for. People take what is mentioned on CNN as fact - and God help you if you try to argue with them. Show us a map, and I'm pretty sure 99% of the US can't point out where Malaysia is (although we have the entire country blocked in our spam filters). We have child molestors, religious wars fought in the form of stem cell research and pro-life advocacy, and media that thrives on bloodshed.

But what about what's great about America?

For once, just this once, can't we focus on the positive?

I have a car and a truck. I have unmutilated genitals (unless you count the hood piercing as mutilation, which I don't). I can vote. In theory, I mean just as much to this society as someone that makes millions of dollars a year. I can stay out as late as I want. I can fuck whoever I want. I can spend my paycheck on 500 gallons of Jello. My future isn't set in stone. I can come from nothing, and make something of myself. My education may not have been the best, but I taught myself what I needed to know outside of school. My future is open and free. Can people everywhere make that claim?

There are complaints I have about the US, sure. I'm not even going to claim it's perfect. We know the truth. We didn't elect this fucktard that's our current President. He didn't even get half the vote. The rest of the world may not know this, but our eyes are open. We may not agree on everything, and there's still those uneducated masses that just don't get it, but we have a voice.

I don't expect the poliltical situation in the US to change anytime soon. It may not even change in my lifetime. It will change eventually, though. I have theories, although some might disagree with them. There's a good possibility I'm wrong, but as I see it, there's going to be a war. Not this bullshit 9/11 crap that everyone keeps talking about, but a real war - one that involves more than the US bullying one little country. There's been death and violence and torture in this current 'war', but it'll be nothing compared to what is coming. We're looking at another world war. With the current technology, I've got to wonder who is going to survive. Ever read The Stand, by Stephen King? I've got an overactive imagination, but you've got to admit that it's got a ring of truth to it. It may not even be the US's fault. At this rate, I'm more scared of North Korea than anything.

I'm not scared for myself. I'm scared for my children, and for my children's children. What's going to happen when only a random few are left standing?

Hope that I'm wrong.

It's been a long day.

I don't really feel like writing, but it's either write or continue to play Collapse and try to ignore the chaos inside my head. I feel like I could sleep forever, which is amazing considering the amount of drugs I've done tonight. I'm scared that things might be over. Mike said he's going to take a while to figure out where we are going, and I can't help but wonder what his thought process is. This all started when we started talking about moving in. It's quite a long story, but the end result of it is that I now realize he's not as certain of us as I was. I love him with all my heart and soul. I would do anything for him - but what he's been asking me to do has been slowly destroying me. I feel dead inside, all emotion gone. I just want to sleep. I never want to wake up. I have to pick him up in the morning, and I'm dreading it. I know when I see him, all I will want to do is fall into his arms and cry, but I can't let myself do that.

Here's my heart. Take it. I don't want it anymore.

Gentoo is Rice

He's getting together all my stuff from his room. I'm picking it up tomorrow morning.

He wants to know why I'm doing this. I tried to explain.

He says it feels like it's over.

I didn't want to tell him that it probably is.

I saw a dead body today. I was driving home from work, and it was crumpled like a rag doll on the shoulder of I-285 at South Cobb Drive. It was raining out, so the police covered it with a white tent. I think it was a young woman. It was hard to tell, and I didn't want to be one of those assclowns that slams on their brakes to gape and stare. Still, it made me sad. I wonder who she was and what she was doing dead on the side of the interstate at 9 AM. I feel like crying for her, even though I didn't know her.

me - <random bitching>

mike - know what this is? <rubs three fingers together, signifying smallest violin in the world>

me - you whacking off?

Once upon a time, there was a little girl that tried. She tried to be pretty when everyone told her she was ugly. She tried to be smart when everyone told her she had potential. She tried to be a square peg for a square hole, because she didn't know she would never be anything but a circle.

She lived in a gray house in a small town where all the other houses were gray. She laughed at the jokes everyone told, even though she knew they were petty and cruel. She ate what everyone else ate. She read the books everyone else read. She watched the same TV shows everyone else watched. She tried to make her mind small. She tried to ignore herself.

Years passed. Everyone else got older, but the girl stayed the same. She was oblivious to the fact that she was different. She ate the words they fed her, and then she asked for more. She was dissatisfied with life, but she couldn't tell you this because she didn't know anything different.

One day, she was sitting quietly by herself, and she realized that something wasn't right. It was something she'd known deep inside for a long time, but lack of options prevented her from admitting it. She knew she couldn't pretend anymore. She didn't think the future could be anything different from the present, but she fought it, regardless.

She finally left this small town. She found out that not all houses were gray, but none of the other houses seemed to suit her, either. She met people that were different from the people she knew before, but she still couldn't make herself see eye to eye with them. She was trading one set of lies for another. She felt herself failing.

Eventually, she found people that told her everything would be alright. She started to believe them, and she tried to build a life for herself. She started a family, thinking "I will not tell my children to be square. I will let them decide for themselves what shape to be. They can decide what color their houses will be. They will think like me. I will have the family I have always lacked. I will be happy."

She built a family, but it fell. She despaired.

She still searches.

I'm picking Mike up from the airport in about 15 hours. I'm pretty excited about it, since we haven't seen each other since Saturday morning. I've had a lot more fun this week than I thought I would. It's been a while since I had to entertain myself. I told him today that I've been doing coke almost every night this week. Not that much, admittedly - only 2 or 3 lines - but it's made things a lot easier. I'm hella productive at work. Everyone has been remarking at how much I've been doing and how efficient I've been. I'm actually somewhat glad I've done this. The first few days weren't that great, but after that I started building up a little bit of a tolerance so the comedown isn't harsh at all. He wasn't too happy when I told him all of this, but I don't like keeping things from him. It's nice to have an honest relationship for once.

I got tags for my truck today. This is the first time I have gotten tags for any truck/car/motorcycle of mine, evar. IK feel very accomplished, although somewhat disappointed. It was kind of neat skirting the legal system for this long. I'm finally a tool of the man, a victim of society, a person that follows rules.

My dad informed me tonight that he's a Republican. He's pro-life. He also supports the laws against stem cell research. Why am I not surprised?

Someone included a link to some of the FreeBSD party pictures in a Slashdot comment.

:(

I'm utterly exhausted. I haven't slept well all week, probably because Mike's been gone. I just don't sleep well by myself, anymore. He'll be back Friday. Yay! Counting the minutes.

I'm not sure if I should laugh or be angry. When I was driving home from work in the morning, I was probably going about 80mph on I-285. A gorgeous silver Audi S4 is driving beside me, but I forgot about it as I started getting into the music that was on the radio and smoking my morning clove. A few minutes later, I hear him honking, so I look over. It turns out he's been driving next to me and staring at me the entire time, and then he holds up a big yellow piece of paper in his window, upon which he has written in black marker "I LIKE THE WAY YOU SMOKE". I start laughing, because I don't know what else to do, and he continues driving next to me, gesturing through his window and trying to talk. At this point I was kind of getting freaked out, so I dropped down into 4th gear, popped the clutch, and took off at about 120mph.

What would Jesus do?

naked.freebsdgirl.com is still where authenticated users should go. It's the exact same site as freebsdgirl.com, but with a few changes. Instead of locking out unauthenticated users on freebsdgirl.com from entire entries, I've implimented tags so I can just mark part of an entry as private. RSS was getting annoying to manage when there's 2 different sites to manage. The exact same RSS feed will work for both sites now.

Put your clothes back on.

No no, just kidding. For all of you authenticated users that view the blog with naked.freebsdgirl.com, you've probably noticed by now that it's kinda uh...broken.

Yeah, well I'm fixing that right now. Please be patient. :)

Here's some pictures of some people I hung out with after I left the Globe.

after_the_globe_closed/aaaafter_the_globe_closed/aabafter_the_globe_closed/aacafter_the_globe_closed/aadafter_the_globe_closed/aaeafter_the_globe_closed/aafafter_the_globe_closed/aagafter_the_globe_closed/aah

I'm still kind of sad that the Globe is shutting down. I have a lot of happy - and some not so happy - memories that tie into that place. I can't really explain it to anyone. I can't expect them to understand. The Globe represented a part of my life that I'm over with now, but I hate to see it shutting down.

I guess you can't stop progress.

This page has moved to http://freebsdgirl.com/?page_id=554.

On Friday when I got paid, I went to the T-Mobile store and bought Mike and I matching cell phones. I got us cute little Motorola bluetooth headsets as well. It was a lot of money, but totally worth it. I left thinking I got a kickass phone that I spent a lot of time researching before I bought it, and for the most part, this is true.

The Motorola V600 is probably one of the best phones I've owned. I just switched over from a Nokia 3650 with Cingular. Symbian OS is ass (in a bad way). That Nokia made me cry. It's just so ridiculous when you tell someone "I'll call you right back, my phone is crashing. I have to reboot it."

I've only found two problems with this phone thus far, which isn't bad at all. First, it doesn't support EDGE. Although this isn't a huge deal now because none of the US mobile providers have EDGE (except Cingular, that has it in areas but doesn't publicize it), but most of the major US GSM providers are scheduled to have it mostly implimented by Q2 2005. I have a plan that allows me unlimited GPRS data, because I wanted to pair my phone with my laptop over bluetooth and use it as a modem. Standard GPRS speeds are pretty slow, although I've noticed that T-Mobile is a lot faster than Cingular. I'm not sure why. I think GPRS is supposed to be about the equivelant of a 28.8k modem on an average day. It's fine for mail and SSH, but anything else is pretty annoying. I don't know how I survived on dialup when I was younger. Maybe it was because everyone had simpler webpages. Now everyone crams their sites with high res images, flash, java, whatever. The entire world isn't broadband yet, people. Conserve bandwidth!

The second problem had to do with using the V600 in conjunction with my Mac. I used to use my Nokia 3650 with my Mac with no problem, but Cingular has a slightly different setup than T-Mobile as far as authentication goes. It took me about 3 or 4 hours to get this working. Although google had a lot of information, none of it was very detailed, so I was going around in circles a lot until I started reading through the modem scripts from here. This was the first webpage I found, although it detailed connecting with Cingular. It also didn't say why some users had to use the Timeport scripts, and others used the GPRS CID1. I eventually figured this out after I read the GPRS CID1 script.

It's possible to dial up to your GPRS provider with either the ASN or a phone number that refers to the CID. Usually the phone number is in the format *99***[CID number]#. You can check your cell phone to figure out what the CID number is, but usually it's just 1. You can't use the *99 number if you use the GPRS CID1 script. I think the script was supposed to error out if you tried, but it doesn't appear to be working as it should. If you use the GPRS CID1 script, you have to specify your ASN. No where could I find anything that said you should use the ASN with T-Mobile. Everyone was using the *99 number, which I guess only works with the Timeport scripts, although I kept getting LCP timeouts and then getting disconnected. When I went on the T-Mobile developer forum, I found out about the 3 different ASN's for T-Mobile. internet.voicestream.com is used by most of the people that have the $5/month plans. It blocks high ports, and there's not much sense in using it. internet2.voicestream.com and internet3.voicestream.com are both valid ASN's and do not block ports. Something that I found that was kind of odd - if I used the Timeport script but put in an ASN instead of the *99, the script didn't know how to handle it, so it just sent it like a normal ATDT to the phone. internet2 caused my phone to dial 331-3, which somehow brought up my voicemail. Funky! internet2 made my phone dial 231-3, which didn't go to anything. I just thought it was kind of cool.

So, the moral of the story - use the ASN with the GPRS CID1 script, and if for some reason that doesn't work, you can try the *99 number with the Timeport script. I couldn't ever get the Timeport script to work, so I'd recommend sticking with the GPRS CID1 script.

Also, the Motorola V600 only uses SyncML to manage it's phone entries - which means at present time, it is incompatible with iSync. You can still copy a phonebook entry over manually, but it has to be done one by one.

Despite all these issues, this is still an awesome phone. I'd totally recommend it to anyone. The camera is pretty good quality, has 4x digital zoom and contrast settings. Probably the only downside to the software is the way it manages the phone book. I liked the way my Nokia would put all numbers under one name. The text completion far surpases anything I've ever seen before on a mobile phone. Unlike the Nokia, it learns words as you type, and predicts what word you are going to use fairly accurately. It's not your typical T9, which I always hated.

AIM also comes built in on the phone, and it has support for Java applications. I'm still trying to find some kind of ssh program that will work on it. I know there's a port of putty to Symbian OS, but it was shit. It crashed all the time, and I couldn't change the font, so it was this ugly italic thing that I couldn't read. Hate and Rage. I suppose I don't really need SSH on my phone since I can pair it with my laptop, but it would still be nice.