July 2005 Archives

Earlier tonight, I went to Barnes and Nobles to pick up a few books that I needed for work. I was crossing my fingers, hoping none of my C coder friends would be there. If they saw me buying Perl books, I'd never live it down. It's like your priest seeing you buying a double sided dong (although the question remains, what would your priest be doing in a place that sells double sided dongs in the first place?)

Relating to the link above, I was trying to go snag it from IMDB, but I couldn't remember the name of the movie - despite the fact that I have it on DVD. So I turn to IRC. How's this for a movie description?

<sektie> what was that fucked up movie with the double sided dong
<sektie> the one with the drugs
<sektie> and the dude that had his arm chopped off
<sektie> it was totally pop culture
<sektie> and i can't remember the name
<sektie> it had the older woman in it that started taking uppers to look better so she could get on that gameshow, but then she went insane
<dekkon> uhhh
<c-rOCK> hoes with dildos
<blonde> requiem for a dream
<sektie> oh yeah
<sektie> thanks!

Well, someone had to know. It's a great movie, and my description doesn't do it's level of mind-fucking justice.

On to the books:
Regular Expression Pocket Reference, by Tony Stubblebine.
I have my little Perl Pocket Reference stuffed in my black leather Prada bag already. They are perfectly purse sized, so I can carry them with me everywhere. I'd like to pick up the CVS Pocket Reference to compliment my collection, but maybe later. You can never have enough pocket references.

Programming Perl, Third Edition, by Larry Wall, Jon Orwant, and Tom Christiansen.
It's not quite as introductory as Learning Perl, as it has good coverage of advanced topics as well as the basics. I think I used to have this book. Maybe I lost it. Regardless, money well spent, as it provides for a good reference book.

Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules by Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix.
This is one of the few books I could find on this subject. It covers perl OOP, a subject that most other perl books skim over if not ignore completely. I love this book. Buy it now.

Speaking of Prada bags, do you ever wonder how many O'Reilly books ever see the inside of one?

I've been using courier-imap for a while now, mostly because IMAP/Maildir is superior, and because I knew courier was fairly popular. I had no preference, so I gave it a go. I was fine with it for a while - no major issues, other than it randomly crapping itself for no reason. Logging and and restarting the service was less of a hassle than debugging it since I only had to do that every few months.

Yesterday I ran into a fun little problem, which quickly escalated to me tearing out my hair and wanting to stab someone. Courier only uses "INBOX." as the namespace for private folders, and I wanted to create folders outside of INBOX.. Most IMAP servers have a namespace of "", so that's not a huge issue. After poking around with Thunderbird/Mail.app in OS X seeing if I could find a suitable client-side hack, I gave up and installed dovecot. Problem solved. Fuck you, courier.

Now, on to bitching about Thunderbird. I've used it under FreeBSD and Windows with no problem. I generally prefered it over most other mail clients, with the exception of mutt. I wanted to try something other than Mail.app on OS X Tiger, so I downloaded and installed the latest version of Thunderbird, and it is buggy as hell. It keeps bringing up the right click context menus for folders while I'm trying to edit any of the preferences boxes that are displayed as shades, and half the time when I type something, some characters act like I've got the command key pressed when I hit them. I can't type "Mail" because it thinks Cmd+M is "Get New Messages" or some such - it comes out as "ail". Keep working on it, Mozilla.

I finished the first revision of my perl module, Sprunk.pm. I just couldn't think of another name. I can't release it because of the NDA I signed, but I guess some people just wouldn't know about that.

Still sick, still cranky. Mike bought me a shiny thing to cheer me up. I'll post pictures later. I wish he hadn't spent the money, but he said he had it set aside specifically for this purpose. What girl can turn down a shiny thing?

<Rjx`> Following up on last weeks report that Microsoft filed suit against Google for the hiring of former Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee, today Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez granted a temporary restraining order barring Lee from violating his noncompete agreement by performing the work that he was hired for by Google
<mst-> thats ridiculous... in Israel this'd be thrown out of court as frivolous
<sektie> in israel they'd be like SHUT UP AND JOIN TEH MILITARY, COMPUTER FAGGET

Kai-Fu Lee is the best name ever.

Also, I've been asked to get the word out about Michael Lynn, the guy I posted a link about a bit earlier in this post. The press doesn't appear to know yet that the FBI is performing an investigation now, starting with seizing equipment from Michael and his roommates. One of his roommates happens to be James, an ex-thingie of mine, and he's the person that contacted me with this information. The press doesn't seem to have much information on the current status of the case or Michael's whereabouts, so pass the info on. I'll be calling a few people and seeing what I can do as far as the press goes. Specifically, James wanted me to try to let someone over at Defcon not associated with ISS to pass it on, but I'm not familiar with that crowd. Here you go, breaking news from FreeBSDGirl.com! Heh.

I still can't seem to keep down any food. I'm rather eager to get my health insurance going so I can go see a doctor or something. It's rather worriesome, but you won't hear me complaining that loudly. Most of my skirts are falling off again. It's dreadfully inconvenient, but it still makes me smile.

I've been on the new job a week now. I work with an interesting crew, and I think we're getting along quite well. They're all bastards, and I'm a bitch, so we fill the silence with foul mouthed arguing and various insults. I'm finally being given slightly challenging work to do. I learned how to use expect, Expect.pm and Net::Telnet tonight. Yeah, that was interesting. I haven't really slept yet. Once I get caught up in something, it's hard for me to put it down. I've put together the bare bones for the project I was handed yesterday, and I'm hoping they will give me more to do with it today.

My coworkers are completely World of Warcraft nuts, and they're starting to drag me in, as well. I played quite a while ago with Paul, but I hadn't touched it since - mainly due to my lack of a Windows computer. Mark started playing, and his Paladin is a good balance for my Warlock. Mmmm. Warlock. God, I sound like such a RPG nerd.

Jessie, my hairstylist/accupressurist/friend is sort of living with us. Her roommates didn't pay their side of the rent, so everyone got kicked out. Mike's not totally fond of her, so I couldn't offer to let her stay here for very long. To be honest, even though she's my friend and I love her to death, I can't stand being around her for more than a few hours, either. She's very, very hyper and crazy, a complete exibitionist. Cute girl though. Reminds me of Lori Petty (Tank Girl). Although she is staying at a guys house, she's keeping her stuff here at the moment, since we've got this insane amount of space. She stopped by tonight to do my hair, but we didn't finish. Hopefully we'll have time tomorrow, and then it'll have some blue streaks in it. Having a hairstylist as a good friend definitely has perks.

Tomorrow, I'm bringing a copy of Wired and SysAdmin mag to work. The woman's bathroom (which I share with maybe 5 other females in the entire company) has 2 magazines in it. I'd never really noticed magazines in a womans bathroom before, so I took special notice of it - until I saw what magazines they were. One was some Celeb-watcher trash, and the other was "New You", a local magazine all about liposuction, face lifts, and other elective beauty surgeries. God, talk about being superficial. You women need some culture.

Mike's leaving for Charlotte, NC tomorrow - er, tonight. It's 6 AM. He should only be gone a day. It'll be nice to have the house to myself. I'm starting to utterly deplore the TV, and how he constantly keeps it on for background noise. I like the silence. Maybe I'll get my WoW on.

I've got a new role model.

Or rather, I would - if I was a lesbian. Regardless, she is at the top of my list of awesome females. She writes articles such as Hormoneland Security and The Freedom to Mary Cheney. She's also so gorgeous for being as old as I think she said she was. She didn't actually mention an exact age as far I know, and IMDB's entry on her doesn't say, but I have a hard time believing she is as old as she was letting on.

She's not going to be touring in Georgia anytime soon, so I'm thinking of heading to Womenfest as that's when my birthday is. It's in Florida though. Ugh. Florida. I'm supressing a shudder at the thought. Kate, are you worth it? :)

Has anyone else noticed some annoying tab-switching with Safari? Maybe this isn't a recent development, but I didn't notice it until I installed Tiger. I could just be that oblivious. If multiple tabs are open, one is loading a page but isn't my active tab, it will flip out and make itself the active tab once it's finished loading.

Is this some shitty "feature"? I am not pleased. Apple, choke on a cock.

<sad face>

Article here.

What is up with companies interviewing for a position before they have approval for the position even being filled? I mean, seriously. Why waste everyone's time? I'm getting rather irritated with the job market in general. There's lots of jobs on computerjobs, monster, all those places - but I keep wondering how many of those jobs are real jobs, not jobs of "we'd like to hire someone, we don't know if we can, let's interview someone anyways!"

It's a pain. I hate having to get dressed up. I'm just going to start meeting management in my pajamas. Fuck it.

I went out to the bar tonight, my first time in a while. It was kind of weird, two random people there knew me from my website. Hm. Fame. Rock!

You're not really famous until they name a hurricane after you. That's my new goal. Hurricane Randi, or Hurricane FreeBSDGirl.

I haven't really updated much lately (again). I've been sleeping 14-18 hours a day. Oddly, I've lost 30 lbs in the past 2-3 weeks. I didn't even notice. I was feeling fatter than usual today, so I stepped on the scale. No wonder my skirt didn't fit right. I only put on weight when I'm a sysadmin. Coding and sleeping is the best diet ever.