SRHuston Dot Net

As I mentioned in this post, I’ve been “reconnecting” a bit with folks.  Added some more people to my IM clients, and I even got some people to join me in IRC (though, the more the merrier – go ahead, click the link and say hi).  But now I’ve gone and done it.  I’ve done something I swore I would never do.  It started with LinkedIn, which I thought was okay because it’s a professional networking site.  I’m fine with that.  But no, I’ve sunk even deeper.  Yes, I’ve signed up on Facebook.  If you know me, it’s not too difficult to find me on there (and since you have to know me somewhat to even be able to see a glimmer of my profile, there’s not much point in putting a link here), so go ahead and send a friend request.  As long as I actually know you, I’ll confirm it :>

I swore I would never succumb to it.  I still steadfastly refuse to even look at MySpace, let alone get an account there.  But at least Facebook is a bit more grown-up, so I don’t feel like a grumpy old man hanging around at the wrong address.  And as my friend Will put it in his profile, “I hate facebook, myspace and everything else like it. But it’s the only way to actually find people I used to know so here I am. Hi.”  Well said.

Yes, the holiday season is upon us. Through my efforts of saving just about every dollar that I had in my possession for something which I ended up not spending on whatever it was, I had finally saved up enough cash to get the PS3 I’d been wanting ever since the MGS4 bundle was announced. Unfortunately, one can’t get a backwards compatible PS3 anymore (boo!) which means swapping between new and old games equals swapping cables around and whatnot. I’m still hoping that in the next few months, Sony wises up and offers it as a downloadable feature – even if it’s $50, I’d probably pay it.

Anyway, since people are always asking for gift ideas, the wish list has been updated. The very bottom lists the last updated date, though likely I won’t be buying anything off of it, so if anything I will have only added new things to it. I still have 5-6 demos I downloaded that I’ve yet to play, so they may end up on the list in the next week or so :>  Oh, and the new image on the left sidebar is a little thing for the Playstation Network – shows a little about me for others to see, though I’m not sure how useful it is right now since it doesn’t seem to say things like whether or not I’m playing a game at the time 😛

Yesterday was David’s first birthday (technically, the first anniversary of his birthday, but we won’t go into semantics).  I took the day off of work, and had hoped to spend a lot of quality time with him – unfortunately, with the threat of bad weather I spent a good chunk of the day doing yardwork to prepare for the winter.  In the evening when I would’ve had another opportunity to spend time rolling on the floor, I showered and got changed since I couldn’t do it right away (we had company over still), so by the time I was ready to play, he was ready for bed.  I felt pretty bad about this, but on the other hand I spent most of his birthday party on Saturday sitting in a recliner while he took his nap on my shoulder.  So while we may not have had a lot of quality play time, we had plenty of quality cuddle time :>

Been going through things and trying to increase connections with friends – there’s some I talk to every day because they’re hanging out with me in IRC, but there’s some that I talk to maybe once or twice a year because we don’t live close by, and they’re not in the same type of “always on, just idling away” communication modes.  So I started seeking out people’s profiles where they list their IM information, and adding it to the bitlbee instance I’m running.  At the very least, I’m always there, ’cause irssi is always running too (mostly because I run it in screen, as you can see here).  Also finally signed up for Twitter, mostly because I was interested in making sure I could use my usual name there, less because I plan on using it for anything.

Wouldn’t be me if the posts were any closer together, would it. After a couple people’s comments in IRC channels I frequent, I started looking into customizing Screen a bit more to my liking. Here is the end result (and here’s the screenrc that made it look like that). What you’re looking at is two nested screens (one home, one at work); the innermost statusbar tells you which machine you’re on, and the depth tells you how many you’re nested. The hostname and clock are fixed on the right side, and the window list will grow until it reaches them, then scroll off the left side (or back to the right if you move to previous windows) to try to keep the active window in the middle. I’ve already got used to it, and renaming screen instances on the fly so I can keep track of opened tabs – no more opening a terminal window to do something quickly, just Ctrl-A Ctrl-C and type away :>

Oh, and that’s obviously a small window. Almost none of my terminals are that small normally, I maximize them on whatever machine I’m using. And since irssi is one of the tabs there, I might as well show off my irssi setup too. Screenshot, and description:

• adv_windowlist – Gives the nice list at the bottom of the screen, nicer than just “Act: 2,3,6” to say which windows have activity.
• auto_whois – When someone sends me a /msg, it does a /whois on them automatically. Most people who /msg me, I know, but for those that I don’t it saves me the trouble.
• away_hilight_notice – If I’m /away and someone says something that hilights me, it sends them a single noticie to say I’m away and why. I emphasize “single” because there’s some scripts out there that will keep spamming people every time you hilight them, and those scripts suck.
• bantime – Aliased to /bans, it will tell you in normal terms how long a ban has existed (instead of in seconds).
• bitlbee_tab_completion – Tab completes some common bitlbee commands.
• bitlbee_typing_notice – Know how some IM clients tell you when the other person is typing? This adds that functionality to irssi & bitlbee. Looks neat too :>
• buf – Saves your current scrollback buffers for doing an /upgrade. Yes, irssi can be upgraded without really hurting your connection status. It rocks.
• conncount – Tells you how many users are connected to your IRC daemon, useful for opers who want to keep track of lusers.
• dispatch – Sends any unknown /commands directly to the server. No need to remember to /quite kline, just /kline.
• idlesince – Tells you how long someone was idle in the /whois response.
• kicks – Spice up your kick messages! Instead of just using your nick if you /kick without a reason, this will pull from a list of reasons and pick one automagically. I have the BOFH ones installed, which are a big hit in channels where I have to use them.
• mangle – I first got this for the rot13 ability, but some of the other bits are fun too. Lets you mangle your text appropriately.
• nickcolor – Colorizes nicks in the window. Helpful for tracking who said what.
• nicklist – I don’t currently use this, but it’s still loaded (occasionally crashes my irssi, probably because of bugs I’ve introduced). Displays a nicklist on the right side of the screen. My modification adds away-coloring, so people who go /away are colored dark blue in the list.
• per_window_prompt – Saves your input text so if you change to another window, it’s cleared, and restored when you change back. Great if someone asks you about a setting, and you start to reply and then Alt-1 to go to your status window to check something; you can see the setting and come back without clearing & retyping your response.
• screen_away – Automatically sets /away if you detach your last screen.
• scriptassist – Lets you download and upgrade scripts from irssi.org/scripts easily.
• scripthelp – I forget which script suggested I install this, but it helps with the help system for it. I don’t even know if I still need it, but there it is.
• timer – Create timers to do things. I think I’ve used it twice. Still neat though.
• topicsed – Ever want to change one word in a topic? /topicsed s/one/two/ does the trick.
• trackbar – See the line in that screenshot above, near the bottom of the screen? That’s where the chat had stopped last time I looked there. Damned handy if you’re in more than 1-2 windows and ever idle in IRC (which is what IRC is all about anyway).
• trigger – Most powerful script ever. Basically, “when something happens, do something.” Can be used to do just about anything.
• usercount – Gives the count of users/ops/voices/OPERs in a channel which sits in the statusbar.
• window_switcher – I don’t use this one as often anymore, but if you type Ctrl-G and start on the name of a window, it’ll let you switch to that window quickly. Now I’ve just aliased /w to /window, and do /w 28 or whatever.

Most of the above scripts can be found at the Irssi scripts page, the rest you can find with Google pretty quickly.

Those of you looking for the IRC server, it’ll be back soon. Why is it not there now? Because PECO sucks balls.

They turned off our power today for “nonpayment”. They claim that they spoke with someone about this, yet it was news to both of us when the asshole (and he was quite the fucking asshole) came out to actually do the shutdown. He didn’t have to be nearly as rude as he was – actually, he didn’t have to be rude at all – and would’ve had a much more pleasant experience with my wife’s questions if he answered nicely without extra commentary about “you people”. He’d have probably got shot by me, but that’s another story.

So anyway, we call them to find out what the hell is going on, and as I said they claim to have talked to someone about this. They also claim to have mailed something to us about it – however, then someone had an “Oh, yeah” moment when Stephanie asked them to look at our account where we mention that many times we don’t even get our bill (sometimes due to them, sometimes due to the post office – yet another issue). So we pay the bill over the phone, right then and there. Nevermind that they’ve got a check either on its way to them or in their hands already for the same amount. And then we’re told when they’ll turn things back on.

In 48 to 72 hours.

Yeah. We can shut off your power whenever the fuck we want to – or just have shitty systems that fail left and right and leave you with no power anyway – and get back to you in three days about getting it back on.

So yeah. PECO sucks balls. They can suck mine too. Supposedly there’s been a lot of complaints against them, I’m filing one with the PA Public Utility Commission later this afternoon.

Edit: Hm, maybe I should’ve said they can eat my ass instead. Then I could give them plenty of links like this one: PECO (it’s Wikipedia, but not exactly safe for work either)