This may be the most pathetic Christmas ever.

Both my hubby and I are sick. We've both got a terrible stomach flu, and well, it isn't pretty. We've already had to cancel out of festivities tomorrow night, and I don't hold out much hope for Christmas Eve either.

On the bright side, we're catching up on a lot of movies...

We also finally found a counselor we like. She's great, an older lady with an 11-year-old Lhasa Apso, who patiently perches himself on her lap while she rocks and gestures and tells stories about her own life experiences in addition to listening to ours...

I have no idea whether she can help the marriage, but I feel very confident that she can help us - and that makes me feel like things can come out right.

Hope you're all spending a comfy cozy holiday with those you love.

Pixie

A strange thing happened to me yesterday. Not sure what to think about it, or even whether to think about it.

I am working in my hometown's downtown core, which is a rare treat. We have a +15 system here, where many buildings are connected by a whole bunch of 2nd story walkways, to keep us from having to go outside. Often, musicians will set up in the walkways, to play for change.

There is one musician that I've gone by several times, I often give him change, as I find his mandolin music very entertaining. He always calls me out of the crowd, to give him a smile, and so on.

Yesterday, he stopped playing, and pulled me out of the crowd to ask me what was wrong. He said he knew my 'soul was crying' and that I needed to talk to somebody about it. He noted that sometimes it helped to tell a complete stranger (I laughed at this when he said it, since I thought of you all immediately). It was disturbing. He looked and acted like he could see right through me. He also called me by name, which isn't exactly a mystery since I wear it around my neck (my little identity in-joke). The whole thing was odd, it was like I was in confession to a priest.

I can't decide whether I just have 'sucker' written on my forehead or what. That seems to be the most likely answer. Maybe this routine gets him laid.

It still really freaked me out though.

I couldn't help it, they had a martini bar and a kickass DJ. Nuf said.

I really was watching the girls, and I really have finally learned to be one - not that I'm Paris Hilton or anything, but I'd say I'm firmly in the fat part of the distribution curve now. Being me, I've applied a ridiculous amount of analysis to the process, and I think I've learned a few interesting things:

1. There is a *big* difference between fashion, and style.

2. People often buy ridiculous things because those things are fashionable, but a very few people have a style that can actually accommodate individually fashionable items. This is why the fashion industry hit the jackpot the day they convinced the world that shoes and handbags no longer have to match outfits. They have convinced an entire generation of women that "who" they are wearing has more meaning than what they are wearing.

3. It takes money. And time. The only way to learn what looks good on you is trial and error. Which means you must watch. And buy. And discard. It isn't just a case of brainwashing by the fashion industry - it is a matter of practice makes perfect - like anything else in life.

4. Eventually though, you hit a stride. You start to accumulate things that suit you, and not only that, they feel really good when you put them on - and not just one nice piece, but a whole ensemble that actually expresses who you are -- in fact, it gets hard not to adhere to your style.

This is the thing that I didn't understand: after a while, it gets easy. Not only does it get easy, but it ceases to be about pleasing others and just ends up being about pleasing yourself. It is another facet of a journey to 'know thyself'.

Lastly, the thing I learned from Ayn Rand is that you can live your life trying to give meaning to the beautiful things about you and never be happy - or you can be the meaning behind the beautiful things. To me, this last thing speaks to our previous conversation on posture - and so very much more.

Anyways, all this blabbering for me is a big deal - because it symbolizes the removal of a crutch that I have long leaned on. I always thought that being smart made up for not being as pretty or as stylish as all the girls that I secretly watched and wished I could emulate. Now I have learned that the physical stuff is just rote learning. I could have had it long ago, but for my own fear of failure.

fun night.

shit. cant spell straight.... except I love you all... damn I had big thoughts about laying out my last bit of life to you but I can't actually express it cause I 'm too damn drunk.

I'm reading stuff and thinking of you all.

biggest thing is I'm a girl now swear.. I can wear make up and look cool even though really I'm a geek. It's easier than I thought. All you have to do is pay attention. Tonight I'm at a corporate xmas party -- I'm trying to learn so Im looking at shoes they mostly suck.

of all the girls who work hard to look nice, maybe 5% succeed, how sad.

well I'm thinking of you all, thanks for friending me on multiply and mayb eI'll be a better communicator when I'm not drunk.

cheers

pixie whose normally pretty good at holding her alcohol

My microdrive in my Palm LifeDrive is dead. Actually it died a while ago, I just haven't had time to even contemplate what to do with it.

I could pay $150 for a fix/replacement from Palm.

OR.....

I could pay $75 for a CF card and run this really cool hack to replace the microdrive with compact flash. Of course, the hack requires imaging the original drive and then copying the image to the CF card. Hard to do when your drive has made terrible sounds and then quit. But *then* there's another hack which lets you reinstall to a blank microdrive.

Seems to me I should be able to install the CF card via hack#1 and then partition & install via hack#2... if it fails, I end up with a useless hulk that I probably can't send back to Palm even if I wanted to.

If it succeeds, I get a lighter, faster Palm that has no disk heads to crash...

What do you think? Doable?

Hack #1: http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Howto_replace_microdrive_with_compactflash_in_LifeDrive
Hack #2: http://trac.hackndev.com/projects/palmld/wiki/ReinstallingPalmOS

I'm going to Europe this fall, to speak at a conference! Cool, huh? I'm going to stay for an extra week after, and soak up some culture.

The reason why I can go, is that the company hosting the conference is paying for my airfare & hotel, so it isn't a burden on my company, who just couldn't justify the expense otherwise.

Turns out, I have two system-wide upgrade certificates that I could use to fly to London & back first class. I *really* want to use these certificates, this is a perfect opportunity since I'm flying alone, and dammit, I earned those babies.

BUT -- the SSW certificates don't apply to economy fares. Only to the 2nd tier of seat prices. So in order for me to use my upgrade certificates, I have to buy a more expensive ticket -- which means that this very nice company which has been generous to allow me to speak would end up paying more than it has to. Technically, the more-expensive ticket might be within their allocated travel budget -- but just because I have the budget, doesn't mean it's ethical to use it all if I don't have to.

Or else I pay the difference. I think that would be certainly more fair. But the difference is $600 CAD each way.

Meh, who am I kidding, I'm screwed. I think I'll be flying economy and letting my so-called upgrade certificates burn a whole in their fancy-but-useless folder.

I'd rather not have even gotten them. All they are is a fancy form of up-sell.

Can I be Heather Armstrong when I grow up? I grinned for an hour after reading this...

Dooce is my HERO

Different server, same web hosting company:

$ uptime
  13:16:43 up 1 day, 23:52, 9 users, load average: 949.54, 1004.56, 988.20

I think this one will be tough to beat :)

Pix

Remember the guy who dumped the propane bottle into the campfire and blew it up?

Well he was back at it this July long weekend. This time, the adults appear to have gotten completely wasted on various substances including but most definitely not limited to mushrooms and alcohol, just in time for the fireworks display.

I didn't even go next-door. I couldn't bear to see the mayhem. But I was treated to squeals of consternation and fear and various obviously dangerous looking flashes through the trees as several of the larger fireworks started out upright, and then proceeded to fall over and randomly spray the entire area with pyrotechnics. That whole thing on the instructions about securing the firework in something like sand -- psssht, who needs that?

Later they had the idea of jamming the firework into a tree so it wouldn't spray the crowd -- except in their intoxicated stupor, they jammed the firework in upside down, and sent everything bouncing across the lawn instead... ... and I'm sure they got their 7-year-old kids to throw the spent fireworks into the campfire. That's just par for the course.

Unbelievable. And people wonder why fireworks are illegal in so many places...

I will try not to belabour this, but I need to put it down.

I recently attended a conference, one of the favorites of my year. I've been attending forever and ever. Last year, one of the speakers was (gasp) female. She is an analyst, smart and pretty and matter-of-fact. She gave a fantastic presentation that didn't mince words, and received a lot of praise for both her content and her style.

This year I went back, expecting to see more. After all, she was now established, had even more experience and a greater body of work behind her. I can honestly say that I was really excited to see what she would do.

But I was disappointed. All the other analysts took the spotlight multiple times, but her one time to speak was foreshortened into non-existence because she was in the last spot and everyone else had taken her time. The rest of her presentations were taken out prior to the start of the conference because several proposed speakers that looked unavailable suddenly panned out at the last minute.

I was and am strangely upset. It is a stupid, unreasonable thing to care about. But I care a lot. When it happens to you, you can never really be sure that it wasn't just because you weren't right or good enough somehow. But I *know* this girl was good enough. She should have been prominently placed, but instead the organizers buried that ability and presence, apparently taking the slides she developed for her presos and distributing them to other speakers.

I'm sure that there's no patriarchal conspiracy here. Chances are, the same thing has happened to other analysts through the years. In fact, I doubt that many others noticed or cared. Except maybe the analyst herself - it's hard to know.

Here is the thing. It isn't about her deserving it. She deserved it then and still does, and her papers will still be just as great and the people around her all understand how brilliant she is. It is about owning it. It was about claiming it and holding it up for all to see and about declaring it to the world as a confirmation and a challenge to all comers. I wanted to see her not just do the work, but to do it in full acceptance and acknowledgement of her mastery.

What a loser I am. Stupid goofy hero-worshipping, living-in-my-head loser. There are lots of women around me who deserve praise. I just want to see someone in my field stand up and ask for their due. Talk about a pipe dream.

</vent>

Is there such a thing as BSD-licensing for dummies? Because I'd buy it.

I get that this is the license template. Now WTF do I do with it?

Do I put it in a single file in the root of my project? Do I have to add it (or something else) as a header for every file? Is there anything else that has to be done? I know assignment of copyright is a bitch, both retroactively and for future contributors, and I also have work to do on getting proof that code from one of my original contributors isn't entailed in any way -- but for now -- all I want to do is get the current moment's worth of code licensed and legal. Should that be so fricking difficult? It is impossible to find documentation that just says what to do and doesn't wax into philosophy. I don't give a rat's ass about the philosophy at this point. I don't care about proving anything down the line. I just want to know what text I have to add to what files in order to have a thing that is a BSD-licensed thing.

I need to go kick something.

I love it when a plan comes together :)

Turns out I was right to worry. So -- there are 3 kinds of partitioning schemes for a disk, when you go to partition, you have to know to click on "options" and then you'll see the three types:

• Guid Partition table -- this one lets you boot an Intel Mac off of the partition. This, oddly, was not the default.
• Apple Partition Map -- lets you boot a PPC Mac.
• Master Boot Record -- lets you boot dos/windows. This was the default.

When you use the "bless" command, information gets written into the HFS volume header -- which explains how a totally different machine could know that there was a boot partition on the drive.

As soon as I used a GUID partition table and reran rsync, everything looked great -- and I could tell it worked, by going to System Preferences->Startup disk -- my blessed partition now shows up as a bootable partition.

So all's well that ends well...

Cheers,

Pix

It's sunny - I'm at home listening to music on my stereo, with the back door open and a madras curry bubbling in the crockpot on the other side of the kitchen counter. I'm fixing bugs, staring down the inimitable gullet of C14N xml canonicalization, and smelling the lilacs in bloom.

Life is good. Very good. BTW the geeks in the crowd might find it funny that I ended up shelling out for a copy of Vista business - given that there is a high likelihood that I will be using my Vista VM to demonstrate Windows-only stuff to large numbers of people at some point, flagrantly violating the Vista EULA is probably not the brightest move.

As a result, I get to install and use an OS that is bloated with a whole bunch of crap I don't need and which takes extra resources for no good reason. Oh and which costs more. Swell. And MS employees wonder where all the hostility comes from...

Pix

[eggnog]$ uptime
  09:13:22 up 29 days, 1:44, 3 users, load average: 116.15, 94.25, 63.14
[eggnog]$

Seems that it's been 29 days since I last posted uptime for my server :) 10 bucks says they reboot - and here I almost made it a month with no reboots. Best of all, the support site is down too so I can't even whine to the sys-admins.

I'm pretty sure 116 is an all-time worst score for any box I've ever seen...

Hope this isn't too stupid a question:

I've run an rsync backup of my Mac to an external drive, and now I'm trying to prove to myself that my backup is capable of being externally booted in the case of disaster.

I reboot holding down the option key, and I select my external drive as the boot drive -- then the machine comes up and looks identical, regardless of which drive I boot from.

How do I know that it worked? df shows that both disks are mounted, but I don't see my external drive mounted as root -- isn't that bad? /etc/fstab is empty. All the files in /var/log look similar no matter what boot disk is specified, I don't see any kind of error. I don't know how exactly the OS finds the bootable partition that I ran the "bless" command on -- and what happens if I put multiple backups on the drive and therefore there are multiple "CoreServices" directories blessed?

I'm vewy confused... I need to get my OSX book back from my dogwalker dammit...

If you happen to have been here done that and can point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it :)

Pix