Category: Misc

Amy said:

“If we go to war I’ll take pictures of it. Then I’ll have something to focus on besides my navel lint.”

Doesn’t that kind of sum it up? Suddenly everything has focus. After how many years of peace time, we have grown complacent. Sitcoms, books, music, all ending up with nothing to say, recycling the same old tropes endlessly, and it’s all been spreading out into brownian motion, losing focus, intensity fading. Now suddenly there’s nothing but focus. It may be coming from the spirit of revenge, it may be less justified than people think (given the degree of our hypocrisy), but it’s undeniable that the country is feeling united more than most people alive today can remember. Everyone has something to think about now. Whether that thinking will amount to anything, whether people will come to realize just how responsible the U.S. is for world anger, is another question.

It is all about anger disguised as righteousness. Think about the last time you had a real knock-down drag-out fight with someone, how your ability to see clearly became clouded. How winning became the only important thing — more important even than being correct. The entire fucking human race is now standing face to face in exactly that kind of argument. One of us is going to have to sleep on the couch.

Forgot to say… took John and Jamie to the East Bay Vivarium on a lark and while we were there they fed a live, full-grown rabbit to a 30-foot python. The second it was in the cage that sleeping snake pounced, subsumed the whole rabbit head into its jaws, and wrapped its snake body around rabbit body. The rabbit squirmed and kicked for about five minutes before it was dead. They my phone rang and I talked to the DSL tech while watching the python detach its jaw, get end-to-end with the rabbit, and just engulf the rabbit’s body with its own. It was an awesome and disturbing thing to witness. The whole episode was about 18″ away from us behind the glass.

Was digging through an ancient “misc docs” dir and came across this “found poem” I’ve been saving for years. Taken from the side of a “Warm ‘n Tender” doll box, circa 1993:

Fill me with warm water
I’ll fill you with love.

Fill my tummy
with warm water
oooh…ahhh.

Squooshy, Mooshy
Wiggly, Warm
Hug.

My thoughts from yesterday can be summarized like this:

Someone sent a postcard as big as our souls directly to the heart of America, and we haven’t even bothered to read what’s written on the back.

The issues I had installing logjam, and my correspondences with its developer resulted in a pretty interesting discussion about SSL assumptions / mistakes Mandrake made with 8.0, and the related issue of how much security is desirable for a public service like LJ. Read it here.

Trying to use gcombust to burn CDs in Linux last night… never made so many coasters in my life. Couldn’t figure out why, finally pulled the SCSI card and moved it to the Win machine, only to be beset by a ton of configuration and writing problems there as well (using Nero). Finally figured those out, but there are a dozen wasted CD blanks in the trash now. I don’t think I’ve ever made a blank in BeOS. Damn, Be got so much so right, made so much so easy.

Today found out that you pretty much have to change the priority level of the cd burning app in linux. One guy claims that

nice –15 gcombust &

will do the trick. That makes a certain amount of sense, but I’m not sure how to interpret this. Does it mean that:

A) The Linux scheduler is really dumb and can’t figure out anything for itself.

B) Linux is very coarsely multithreaded.

C) This is somehow “desired or expected behavior” and that a user so clueless that he didn’t know he had to do that to begin with has no business using Linux.

Breakthrough – finally punched out of RPM hell and got the exact combination of library versions of openssl, curl, and libcrypto symlinks to re-enable my Samba network (which I broke while trying to get logjam installed) and for the logjam installer itself to work.

It’s funny how there are so many things that are ridiculously difficult in Linux, and it’s easy to curse them for it because they shouldn’t be difficult, but that’s also what’s attractive about it – the problem solving and the education that comes with that.

But it’s funny – Amy said I only seem to swear at the computer when I’m using Linux, so why am I getting more into it? Good question.

The kitties were so cute today. They were sitting around smoking weed and listenting to Rush 2112. Then Plato wouldn’t budge from the couch and was bogarting the Cheetos bag. Louise was running around acting like she had just made a deal with the devil. It just kills me when they do that.

Someone called my cell phone at 6:30 with a wrong number (I hate that). Was at ‘s house by 10 with to help apply racing stripes to Chris’ Miata. Quite a tedious job, but kind of meditative. Way more difficult than it looks. The vinyl bubbles and buckles and you have to work out all the glitches with sponges and sewing needles.

Left there at 3:00 to meet up with Josh for a planned hike w/dog Stella in the Berkeley hills, to connect up, sweat in the afternoon sun, toss a frisbee to a joyous canine expressing her dog-hood through the bark and the sniff. Josh didn’t know what a Miata is. I asked, “What universe do you live in?” He answered, “You know what universe I live in. The one inhabited by bodhisattvas and free jazz musicians.” Sometimes I forget. It’s weird, Josh and I used to be so close, and he still lives right next door, but we’ve drifted in recent years, our interests so far apart in many ways. Yet we still share a bond, an understanding that goes beyond everything else.
My universe used to be inhabited by free jazz musicians and freaks on the weird-ass literary fringes. Now it’s all digital everything. Or mostly. Sometimes I forget that I’m unbalanced. Josh helps me remember in the kindest ways.
`
Off to the Edinburgh Castle in SF to meet with Andrew Orlowski, a journalist from The Register and Henry Kingman, an old friend from ZD, who later ran all the Linux stuff for CNET but who has just lost his job there (same story everywhere you turn these days). This pub does a trivia contest – the questions were harder than expected. Another of their friends, Robin Bandy, is part of the CLIQ collective, who do all kinds of programming and web hosting. They also offer DSL, and I’ve been shopping. Cool. Looks like I’ll be getting DSL from a tatooed geek collective in my own backyard. Reasonable deals, lots of freedom, good politics.

Great to get to know Andrew and Henry too. Henry had a good job suggestion: SSC, who run Linux Journal, and who almost published The BeOS Journal, which I labored my heart out on a couple of years ago. Hmm… very promising possibility. Andrew told me all about the internal workings of The Register, which I have always admired. What I like about them is that it’s sort of gonzo technology journalism, very different from the usual copycat mainstream tech journalism style. I think they have a great chance of ultimately succeeding because they come from anarchy, are growing organically, not the brainchild of some MBA with a bunch of startup funds and a product no one wants.

Somehow I feel a bit more connected to knowing what I want do next after this night out. Know that I want/need to hook up with something I believe in, something I can rally behind and not just work at for the sake of having a job. Not sure yet what that thing will be, but I don’t think I can go work for a big conglomerate monolith. But neither am I willing to go back to working for a dinky underdog with no hope and no future. Something in between. Increasingly, it’s seeming that Linux provides that perfect middle ground, and that I just need to find the right niche for myself in that world.

The Register is recapping my bootloader piece. The author, Andrew Orlowski, called me at home to tell me about it and to shoot the breeze. Interesting guy. Invited me to a geek beer thing in the city next week. Cool, I need more industry connections. Maybe I’ll get a job out of it.

In a week of messing around I still haven’t been able to install the logjam LiveJournal client for Linux, so finally started using this command line LJ client written in perl. Cool, now I can LJ in vi!