Three till Seven

Archive for September, 2006

1 Sep 06 screenshot and a photo

I’m at my parents’ house for the weekend and I’ve spent my evening tinkering on my computer. I copied all my photos off of my old drive to my new one, as well as some choice wallpapers. I also configured my desktop to have different wallpapers on the cube and behind it. The ’skydome’ image, as it’s called in gconf-editor’s Compiz preferences, I set to be a photo of the sky. It has this neat effect where it looks infinite, which I’m tickled with. See the screenshot:

cube from bottom
A screenshot of my current desktop.


See the lily photo on the bottom? I’d forgotten I’d even taken that, though it was back in 2004. The full-size photo is now in the gallery.

2 Sep 06 enneagram test - type 6

I just took an enneagram test I found on Trin’s site. It had a whopping two questions and is pretty darn accurate:

“I am affectionate and skeptical”

Questioners are responsible, trustworthy, and value loyalty to family, friends, groups, and causes. Their personalities range broadly from reserved and timid to outspoken and confrontative.

  • How to Get Along with Me
    • Be direct and clear.
    • Listen to me carefully.
    • Don’t judge me for my anxiety.
    • Work things through with me.
    • Reassure me that everything is OK between us.
    • Laugh and make jokes with me.
    • Gently push me toward new experiences.
    • Try not to overreact to my overreacting.
  • What I Like About Being a Six

    • being committed and faithful to family and friends
    • being responsible and hardworking
    • being compassionate toward others
    • having intellect and wit
    • being a nonconformist
    • confronting danger bravely
    • being direct and assertive
  • What’s Hard About Being a Six

    • the constant push and pull involved in trying to make up my mind
    • procrastinating because of fear of failure; having little confidence in myself
    • fearing being abandoned or taken advantage of
    • exhausting myself by worrying and scanning for danger
    • wishing I had a rule book at work so I could do everything right
    • being too critical of myself when I haven’t lived up to my expectations
  • Sixes as Children Often

    • are friendly, likable, and dependable, and/or sarcastic, bossy, and stubborn
    • are anxious and hypervigilant; anticipate danger
    • form a team of “us against them” with a best friend or parent
    • look to groups or authorities to protect them and/or question authority and rebel
    • are neglected or abused, come from unpredictable or alcoholic families, and/or take on the fearfulness of an overly anxious parent
  • Sixes as Parents

    • are often loving, nurturing, and have a strong sense of duty
    • are sometimes reluctant to give their children independence
    • worry more than most that their children will get hurt
    • sometimes have trouble saying no and setting boundaries

I also read an essay on the dialect of the Appalachian people that was interesting.

I made a new layout that I’m quite pleased with. It’s called Blue Flower, and I think you should give ‘er a go and see how you like it. I’ve only checked it in Firefox 2.0b2 and Opera on my Ubuntu system, so I have no idea how Safari, IE, or any other browsers fare with it. If you experience any problems, please let me know. The photo I used is one I took in 2004 of a lily by the side of our road, and the original version can be found in the gallery.

9 Sep 06 tobacco and swing dancing

I wanted to post an entry yesterday but Dreamhost seemed to be having some problems, because WordPress complained of being unable to reach the database. Never a good sign, but things seem to be back to normal today. I’m at Jessica’s house and we’ve been driving around fields all day, hauling drinks to everybody that’s working in tobacco. We worked in it ourselves for an hour or so, helping to hang it in their barn. Dirty work, especially when there are these disgusting tobacco worms crawling around.

Let’s see, a rundown of the past few days:

Tuesday
Ugh, back to work from the long weekend. However, Ashlee, Brent, Bentley, and I went to a UK Dance Club lesson and learned the basics for the foxtrot, the waltz, and swing. Ashlee and I were surprisingly the only girls; the guys outnumbered us! Jessica will be able to come next week, and I think we’re going to make this a tradition, at least us girls will. It’s $25 for the full year, which is dead cheap compared to one of the dance studios in Lexington that we tried. Ha, it was funny seeing Brent and Bentley dance together, which was necessary as there weren’t enough of us females. I was the dance instructor’s guinea pig any time he needed to demonstrate how the girl should do something, but that was fine because he was this cute little old man.

Wednesday
Mine and Todd’s 6-month anniversary. Check out the ring he got me! Photo 1 and photo 2.

Thursday
I had an interview with a possible future employer. One of the professors at UK needs some web development done, and my boss from Site Lab recommended me when he asked her, which is always nice. I think the interview went well, but it made me realize that I need to get my butt in gear and make a portfolio site that houses at least screenshots of all the work I’ve done online. I should hear within a few days if I got the position.

Friday
Ashlee and I hung out, thinking we’d just spend the evening by ourselves at Todd’s place, watching Project Runway on his big TV, but then the guys joined us. It was fun, though, because she brought along her Eskimo Spitz Ari, who is an insane but adorable fuzzball of a dog. The guys, and myself, enjoyed taunting her by slapping their thighs or giving high-fives; when something is hit around Ari, she goes nutso, barking like mad. It’s pretty funny to see. So the lot of us (Brent, Todd, me, Ashlee, Todd[1], Greg, and Chris) watched TV and just hung out in Todd’s living room until about 1 a.m., when Ashlee and I went home to get some sleep.

today
I got up around 9 a.m. and headed to Jessica’s house. We made a run to town for canning jars for her grandmother, chicken for us and for all the tobacco folks, and turkey for sandwiches later. When we got back to her grandmother’s, we ate lunch and then I helped break beans because I missed doing it. That’s kinda wild, since I never wanted to break beans or shuck corn when I was growing up, but now it was enjoyable. We just sat around talking for a while and her grandmother kept trying to feed us, which is what grandmothers just do, I guess. Not that I mind. However, after we’d finished our chicken meals, she asked us if we wanted anything more. I figured she’d offer cookies or something for dessert, but no, she was all, “Want a porkchop?” …What? That’s just so random. And the dang porkchop kept coming back in conversation, too. When we were eating tomatoes later, for example, I wanted salt, which turned out to be on the stove. “Were you using it to can?” I asked. “No, I was using it…” She paused to think. “On those porkchops earlier!”

10 Sep 06 Prussian Blue

So uh, what? Todd, Todd[1], and I were watching TV when an ad for a band made of two teenage girls came on, saying they’d be playing in Lexington sometime soon. The guys thought it was some white supremacist band they’d heard of, though it turned out not to be. I was intrigued by the idea of a band composed of two pretty blonde 14-year-olds that are also neo-Nazi douchebags. After a little searching online, I found out it’s true: Prussian Blue is the group. I read in this article that the name of the band is “the name of the blue residue left over by the use of Zyklon B, the poison the Nazis employed to kill millions of Jews and others in concentration camps during World War II.” How disgusting is that? Why do idiots like April Gaede, the girls’ mother, breed? I just can’t fathom how anything like neo-Nazism can still exist, let alone be embraced by anybody as valid or just. I’ve been reading on their forum and just getting increasingly angry. All these little dingbats talking about some “mulatto” girl (a Jew) as being “unsightly,” which is mild, I suppose, as far as racist hate talk goes, but it’s still just so ridiculous.

11 Sep 06 photos of Todd and I, Marvel superhero

I just took and posted new photos of Todd and I.

goofy
I like this one the best, I think. It was the first one we took and I didn’t know he was going to pull a face.

normal 1
Just a normal photo, though like in all of them, you can see up my nose.

constipated
Todd was trying not to laugh, so he looks constipated.

normal 2
Another normal one.

I took the Which Marvel superhero are you? quiz and got The Hulk. Yeah baby!

The product of a science experiment gone awry, Bruce Banner turns into the unstoppable green monster the “Hulk” whenever his temper rises. The more angry he gets, the stronger the Hulk becomes. Bruce travels the world, hoping to find a cure for the Hulk and bring his life back to normal. However, he often has to become the Hulk to save those he loves when danger threatens.

Bentley was Mr. Fantastic and Todd was The Punisher.

14 Sep 06 work work work and a cable

Wow, when it rains, it pours. I go from having my nice normal job at Lexmark and the probability of working again at a lab on campus next semester, where I always work, and then suddenly…:

  1. A professor, Dr. T, emails me from UK, saying that my boss at the lab where I usually work recommended me for a web developer for him. I interviewed with him the other day and I have the job, if we can work out times we can agree on.
  2. However, another professor, Dr. J, wants me to participate in his undergraduate bioinformatics research. That would take priority over any web developer job, since research would be more in my interests so far as resume-fluffing goes. If Dr. J gets his grant, I’ll do the research; if not, I’ll do the web development.
  3. Dr. J wants me to do a personal page for another professor, Dr. Tr.
  4. Dr. Tr wants me to redesign the computer science department’s layout.
  5. G, from where I worked this past summer, emailed me in a panic because he needs some last-minute changes done to a layout I had created for him.


Boy, do I feel needed. I’m thinking I’ll do everything but the web development for Dr. T, since that would be a full-time position and it would compete with the full-time position of research assistant. The personal page will take all of an afternoon, G’s last-minute changes can be done in a couple of afternoons (I started on them today, actually), and the CS department redesign can be spread across a long while, as long as everyone’s patient. All of this just makes me even more anxious to get my portfolio site finished and uploaded, but of course that’s just more web design I have to do. I’m swamped!

I had been using Steve’s ethernet cable to stretch across Todd’s kitchen and living room to my computer, but Steve needed it so I ran out to Best Buy earlier and bought my own. Todd estimated I needed 30′, but I got a 25′ one because I’m crazy. I told the clerk I needed “about 30′”, he gave me the 25′, and I left to find batteries. Der. So anyway, I get back and find I’m, haha, about 3 feet short. Sooo, I move my computer to the other side of Todd’s desk and, by gum, it reaches. I hope he doesn’t mind the rearrangement.

The two of us are going to hang out this evening and watch a movie while eating dinner. He’s in class currently and I’m starving, but I’m going to wait and eat with him. I’ll run out here in a little bit and get some Subway sandwiches for us or something, because I don’t feel like cooking. I don’t know what movie we’ll watch, maybe something from Disney.

The girls stopped by earlier because I was ignoring phone calls while I worked on G’s last-minute fixes. They told me I looked like I was about to cry, and I explained to them that I’m just frustrated from having so much crap to do. They were going to O’Charley’s and tried desperately to get me to come along, but I had to get some work done. At least the three of us will be hanging out tomorrow after work. I’m excited about it, though Ashlee possibly won’t be along as she may have a date with Brent. Brent being Todd’s brother. Those two have gone on a few dates now and they’re quite adorable. However, Jessica and I may have to put our feet down and demand she not renege on her hanging out duties.

20 Sep 06 Butterfly B.S. and the Food network

I just returned from seeing Julia Butterfly Hill with Ashlee and Jessica. Ashlee had to go for her women’s studies class, and Jess and I tagged along as part of our movie night. Ms. Hill sat in a tree to save it and the forest of Redwoods it was in from being destroyed by some company. The company was apparently breaking some laws by logging the trees, and she sat in the tree for over a year to protest this. I only know this from what Ashlee told me, so I may have the details wrong. Anywho, I may be a liberal, but I was not at all liberal enough for that lecture/community gathering. She used ‘divine,’ ’sacred,’ and ‘love’ way too much for me to not roll my eyes. We started it out with some black man with crazy hair hitting a ’singing Tibetan bowl’ and invoking the spirits of air, etc. That’s half the reason why I left the Wiccan religion: too much B.S. to go along with the sound ideals. One particular thing that bugged me was her saying that some days, she just wants to stay in bed and have a cup of ‘Vegan cocoa.’ Not the part about staying in bed, but the Vegan cocoa. Why the detail? Her whole thing tonight was about connecting with other people, and it seemed incongruous for her to be preaching connection when she’s distinguishing herself from all the non-Vegans. The type of cocoa was completely irrelevant to her point of “some days it’s hard to be an activist.” Jessica took the evening as complete bull shit, Ashlee was all for it, and I saw some truth surrounded by a lot of crap.

This Saturday is Todd’s birthday, so I’m going to his parents’ house with him and his brother. The whole family should be there, along with Steve (Todd’s sister’s boyfriend) and myself. It’ll be nice; their house is pleasant and I always seem to 1) sleep well, 2) watch a lot of Food network, and 3) lounge around on the couch. Those three things are hobbies that I miss greatly, as I’m busy during the week, so I’m looking forward to the visit.

22 Sep 06 LXer design to go live

My design for LXer Linux News will be going live this Sunday. I wanted to thank Dave of LXer for letting me give the place a new layout in the first place, Don for his help and keeping me up-to-date, my dad for his constructive criticism, and the LXer community for giving their feedback so I could better suit the design to their needs. I can’t wait to see the design up, and I hope the LXer folks like it!

23 Sep 06 zombies, Satan, God, and Indiana Jones

Note: This was a dream of mine. I have this warning here because some visitors have thought my life had just gone to pot, when really they were only reading one of my crazy dreams. :)

There were zombies out in the town that I lived in, and I was having to fight against them everywhere I went. I fought them by praying around them, because they were unable to get near me when I did that. I went into a large, pretty house at night and a friend of mine was there. She and I were discussing what to do about the zombies, when some man stumbled in the door. He was apparently my boyfriend, and I loved him. He didn’t look like a zombie, but he was acting like one. I went to him and I shook him, demanding he tell me if he were a zombie or not. He refused, so I started beating him up and crying because I had to do it. He let me hit him repeatedly in the face until he was all bloodied up, just standing there expressionless. Then he stopped me by saying that he wasn’t a zombie, he just wanted to look as beaten up as they did because then he could get close to them. He was going to do something to try and fight them. I started sobbing, knowing that I had just beaten my lover up, and he held me.

The dream shifted and I was sitting at the top of the stairs in the same house, Todd next to me. We looked to our right and saw Bentley sitting with two pretty blonde women who looked to be in their fifties and another man the same age. The two women were apparently Bentley’s lesbian mothers, and the man his actual dad. I couldn’t believe that Bentley had two mothers, and kept talking to Todd about it. He was getting annoyed that I wouldn’t shut up about it, so finally he just yelled at me to go to hell. I got up, extremely pissed off, and walked outside.

It was daytime and the Joseph-Beth bookstore had a lot of shelves and tables in the yard. There were lots and lots of displays of books, candles, fresh vegetables, and other groceries; I started to browse through the aisles. Other people were there, also looking through things. I got to the end of an aisle and suddenly the dream shifted again.

I was in Hell, but not as a regular damned soul: I was apparently some ruler in Hell. I wore a strange brown outfit that was like a hard shell. I had some kind of head gear on that was oblong in shape but had points on either end instead of rounded edges. It pointed out above my head several feet and below my chin to my stomach. It was made of the same material as the hard brown dress I had on. I had long hair and didn’t look like myself: my hair was curly and brown, and my face and body were different. I was in some room in Hell: there were cutouts in the walls for windows and a door on one side. Outside, there was just cracked brown dirt with some steep cliffs. Everything seemed to be burning; there were heat waves rising off of everything.

The room I was in had some other people in it. They crawled along the floor, weeping. There were also a few skeletons that were apparently like the policemen of hell; they held spears and wandered amongst the people, poking at them. Then we all paused, looking toward the door: Satan was coming. We just sensed some kind of powerful, dark force coming toward us. I glimpsed him through the window opening and then he opened the door. Satan was a huge skeleton with brown bones that looked either dusty or burnt. He stood about eight feet tall and wore a cloak around his shoulders, like a king’s robe. He came in and the other skeletons bowed to him; the people cowered down. I was apparently some kind of assistant to him, like a secretary. He brushed my cheek and asked me to go up to earth and do something for him, I don’t remember what.

Before I went up to earth, though, the dream shifted and I was sitting on a dark blue ridge of a cliff. There were concentric tiers of cliff edges, and they seemed to be the only non-burnt looking things in Hell. They were the nine circles of Hell, apparently. Satan was standing on the highest one, talking with one of the lesser demons and laughing about something. He made a comment about ‘poor Sarah down in the third circle’. I was sitting there, legs dangling over the edge of the cliff, next to a pot-bellied demon that was shivering. It was apparently cold there.

The dream shifted and I was Julia Butterfly Hill on some kind of archaeological expedition with Indiana Jones. We were in some old, dark ruins out in the middle of a forest. There was a huge snake that we’d unleashed and were trying to study without being eaten. However, I sensed something and yelled at Indiana to run, because something bad was coming. We began to run through the dark corridors toward the entrance to the ruins. Everything was rumbling and we could feel something terrible behind us. We burst out through the entrance and my perspective shifted: I was no longer seeing through the eyes of Julia, but instead from some fixed position beyond the ruins’ entrance. I watched Julia and Indiana run off to the right and then Satan, the dusty brown skeleton, tried to come barreling through the entrance after them. The edges of the entrance were these huge rock points jutting out, like the peels of an orange cut open. They suddenly pulled inward, pinching Satan like they were the fingers of a hand closing shut. Then a huge, booming voice came from above: it was God. He was saying that Satan wasn’t allowed to run loose in this world. However, this part of the dream was like a prequel to the parts I dreamed earlier, and I knew that Satan would get loose somehow. He was the one that set the zombies loose.

30 Sep 06 Review-You WPR

Review from Review-You WPR by Jem.

I’m having difficulty starting this review. Most reviews I start off with a quick summary of my first impression of a website — it’s hard to do that when you’ve been visiting a website for years.

Your new layout is not my favourite. I think the swirly zigzag pattern is fab — like a crazy 60s drug session (or so I’m assuming, heh) but the grey just doesn’t do it for me. I think the gradient divider and border could be made to match the header by using a darker version of any of the colours you’ve used. #6F686D is a dark alternative that might be worth trying.

(I’m going to be filling this review with blatant suck-up-y compliments: just thought I’d warn ya.)

Your site is incredibly functional. I noticed a while ago you started using big text which is great for those like me who’re blind as a bat (only minus that cool thing they do where they can ‘hear’ objects — I wish I could do that). Your link colour is fine for me, but the Juicy Studio Colour Contrast Analyser says there’s not enough contrast. It’s a groovy tool to play with. Your main navigation was immediately obvious and you even have a breadcrumb trail.

The content of 3till7 has got to be the main reason I come back — geeky entries and handy stuff about Ubuntu that has saved my ass on more than one occasion. When I did my first PHP project for my college work experience, it was one of your PHP articles that got me on track. Look at me now, eh.. says it all about the obvious quality of your tutorials I think.

The About Me page was a good combination of information and pictures keeping me entertained both mentally and visually. Always good to see a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel in a person’s favourites list, although Reaper Man is not my ultimate favourite (Monstrous Regiment is a great one — read that if you haven’t already). Good to know I’m not the only person that gets so deep into coding that the world could fall apart around us and we wouldn’t notice.

Your Image Generation in PHP tutorial is a handy dandy piece of knowledge to have, I wish I’d seen it months ago when I was fiddling with captchas. I hope your demo version for the PHP and Forms tutorial has validation of the input — you don’t want people inserting nasties in there. Regarding the line Hell, I don’t even have maxlength in any of the input fields!: I’d actually recommend leaving out maxlength. It’s the kind of thing that makes people think they’re secure but is so easy to get ’round. Check the length of fields server-side with other validation (e.g. if (strlen($input) > 15) { echo "error"; }) although I’m sure I’m trying to teach my Grandma how to suck eggs here.

Had a giggle at your Clichés of a Crappy Site article. Having recently seen people apply to The Quilting Bee using pixel/bitmap fonts on their entire site, I think I should start pointing people here. The point about sites working in all browsers is a current irritation with me. I’m seeing more and more websites that say “Best viewed in Firefox” where the webmasters don’t SEE the issue, and don’t see how this is identical to creating an IE only layout. I swear, we’re going backwards not forwards in the fight for compatibility (I wrote compatility first: really shouldn’t drink and review).

I have to say I love the way your site is organised for maximum click-through effect. Articles in your weblog being linked from your Writings page, archived, archived by category and listed under Possibly Related Posts — it’s like a massive interlinking orgy! Great SEO technique which I’m led to believe helps your rank in key search engines such as Google (though I’d mention that in case you didn’t know already).

Code-wise I expected your pages to validate — I know, I know, it’s rather presumptuous of me to expect your pages to validate perfectly simply because you’re a fellow geek, but there we go. Despite a few errors thrown up by the validator, I have found your website works impeccably in all of my browsers which is the most important thing. Nonetheless errors such as missing “/” in image tags (entry: photos of Todd and I) and unnecessary </p> tags (links page) are so easy to fix even if just for bragging rights.

I really don’t want to summarise this review already. I feel like I’ve added very little of any benefit and I’m kissing some major ass. If I’d waited about 15 months for a review I’d expect more than this.. but what can I say? I’m losing my touch, obviously. Anyway: your site is all things geeky. It’s accessible, usable, bold, beautiful, interesting and geeky — everything anyone with sense looks for in a website. Good work Sarah.