The other weekend I was browsing the Ubuntu Planet after I posted about password stuff and saw this. Three posts in a row by women. How about that!

About a month and a half ago I left TekTonic and got myself a Linode VPS instead. There were a few things that spurred this change:

• Linode allows you to run an IRC client, TekTonic does not, which became a more important issue than I thought it would be
• Reliability was an issue with TekTonic, I didn’t care much, it was $13.50/month and I didn’t expect perfection, but the night I gave up and switched I was really in the mood to work on one of my sites, and it was just impossible, that annoyed me
• I met one of the Linode guys (yes, that’s what I’m going to call you) at PLUG a couple months back, he was cool, we chat in IRC often, and he nagged me until I switched (haha)

So it’s been over a month now. I LOVE this Linode. Plus I now have a lovely reversal, as demonstrated here on IRC:

-!- pleia2 [~lyz@your.worshipfulness.princessleia.com] has joined #irc-security
<@tr> no conceit in that host :P
<@pleia2> :)
< ScoT> modest as always
* PinkFreud has the sudden urge to worship pleia2
<@PinkFreud> no idea why

Almost enough for me to do away with my Ubuntu Member cloak on freenode. Hahaha.

Now that we’ve all gone web 2.0-y - what have you done with all the old static content on your website? Did you do nothing and just leave your site the way it was? Did you just leave it flapping out there on the internet and replace your main page with a blog, perhaps a menu to the old stuff? I have stuff going back to the first website I created a decade ago, I don’t want to delete it, but traffic has been dropping steadily these past few months, and I never really update anything but my blog anymore.

About a year and a half ago Michael and I had the opportunity to help editing a chapter of Carla Schroder’s Linux Networking Cookbook. I was disappointed to discover upon picking it up in the bookstore that we weren’t credited - it turns out she lost track of some of the people helping out, and as soon as she realized she missed me she shipped me a signed copy of the book - yay!

Aidy, you have a fansite. (Isn’t it lame when people put inside jokes in public blog entries? Yeah, sorry.)

I was supposed to get the truck back on Tuesday, they called Michael and told him it wouldn’t be done until Thursday or Friday. Thursday or Friday? OhDearMe. I’m not going stir crazy or anything, and I don’t expect I’d go anywhere if I had it anyway, but there is something about not having a vehicle that will make one restless.

My laptop is not doing well. One of the hinges started to go on it (as these old Inspiron’s are notorious for, it’s a miracle mine’s survived this long) and when I closed it to put it in my laptop bag a couple weekends ago I noticed it wouldn’t latch. I expect it not latching caused the screen to get bumped in a bad way during normal travel wear, because this week I booted it up the other evening and there were a couple lines going down the screen vertically. This evening I booted up and was greeted to this (and in console: this). From the look of it, the mess is confined to that space - like there is a crack inside the LCD that’s letting it fill with icky leakiness. Still, it seems this old thing really is on its way out :(

I wish my stuff would stop breaking.

I’m trying to have a PhillyChix meeting in April. I posted to the list for suggestions but you know how these things go, I’m just going to need to choose a venue and a date and hope it works out. Any suggestions? For this meeting we won’t have a presentation, pretty much just meeting up and chatting about Linux, so a restaurant is fine.

I started using Opera instead of FireFox. There are some annoyances - I miss the It’s All Text plugin for using vim in email, the aggressive caching can get on my nerves at times, and I’ve bumped into a few sites that simply don’t work properly Opera (one of my bank websites, for instance). It is nice not to have to restart the browser every few days due to it deciding to eat up have my RAM though, and the CPU load isn’t as bad as FireFox was. I’ve been opening FireFox for a few things, but that hasn’t been so bad. I’ve pretty much switched to Opera entirely on my laptop since the difference was so significant. Maybe I’ll stick with Opera, at least until FireFox decides they want to be a slim browser again, the Mozilla browser runs faster than it now on my machines (gasp, shock).

What else… oh yes, I should use my Google Calendar more, so I don’t overschedule things.