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August 26, 2003 /

Sumana recommended weeks ago that I read “In the Beginning was the Command Line,” a very long essay by Neal Stephenson about operating systems and Disney World and nuclear weapons. I’d heard of it before, and I like Stephenson a lot, although his direct-address form is so clear and dry that I spend a lot of time wondering if he’s making fun of me.

Anyway, today I got bored at work, and I read it (213k of plain text; I was very bored), and it got me all excited and I went home and dug out my reject iMac and now, a few hours of downloading later, I’m watching it brainwash itself with Yellow Dog Linux. This is way too easy. I want it to hit a snag now, so I won’t be won over.

You hear me? I won’t be won over!

I don’t know why I have such a grudge against Linux. Maybe it’s because my first experience with it was being thrown into the cold water of a bad implementation of Debian–a hacker’s imp, done by my hacker of a first professor, running chill and unfriendly in the basement that was the old Centre CS lab. (The new lab was still in the basement, it just ran Red Hat instead. I was shocked to realize Linux could do 24-bit color.)

Or maybe it’s just because I’ve been using Windows for such a long time, and I hate admitting I was wrong. Bleagh. Oh well.

The install’s 18% done, and I think I’m going to crash soon and let it run while I sleep. In the morning I should just about have a Linux box, as is only fitting for my first day of CS grad school.

The only problem now, really, is figuring out what I’m going to use it for. I’ve got my desktop publishing and image processing pretty well taken care of on this old warhorse (my PII), so I didn’t install any of that, but do I try to set up a friendly ftp server? Learn to write Xwindows apps? Run a MUD? Suggestions are welcome.

Pork-barrel entry-end tagalongs: I baked my first batch of chocolate chip cookies from scratch this evening, waiting for Yellow Dog to download. And they’re GOOD! I’ve been strutting around all night thanks to that. Also, The Devil’s Dictionary does in fact have an RSS feed, and its author, a Mr. Kn____, is apparently some kind of referral-log ninja. And I owe Maria big for letting me download and burn like a gig and a half of computer-geek stuff on her shiny new laptop, since my CD burner is still dead. Thanks, Maria! Get a blog!

This is what it’s like to live in Brendan’s head.

August 25, 2003 /

When you live in Brendan’s head, you can be silently gloating over the fact that you don’t have to get up early tomorrow, since you’re going to class, not work, and class doesn’t start until 1100 hrs. In fact, you can do this while making your sandwich for lunch at work tomorrow.

And that’s what it’s like to live in Brendan’s head.

August 25, 2003 /

Subject: stonecoldskywarp,Secret, Coca Cola, Disney, Sony,

and then it turns out to just be spam. That’s the most exciting subject line I’ve read in weeks! I feel cheated.

August 25, 2003 /

I just listened to two people having a conversation on the telephone while literally five feet away from each other. They could hear one another clearly before their voices ever came out the speaker on the other end. Welcome to technology!

Spam

August 22, 2003 /

Subject: If your having stomach problems,read this / vytr wqwtpekmqdtk

...

Since "Death begins in the colon," ...

What?

August 22, 2003 /

Bleagh. The facility from which Deep Fried, my current and past webhost, rented its space is filing for bankruptcy. The admin at Deep Fried is going to shut down his hosting operations (and it’s lucky I started trying to track him down, or I probably wouldn’t have known about this until my site suddenly disappeared). I’ve got everything copied over to PHPWebHosting now, but the domain transfer is looking to be a pain in th’ butt. I’m being forced to save local copies of all my journal entries, since I have no idea when xorph.com will suddenly start pointing somewhere new. When it does I’ll be unable to get to the old files, which means no copying. This is dumb. At least I managed to get out of going through the default, register.com.

Anyway, yeah, expect continued hesitations in content. I don’t much like the situation, but hopefully this will allow me to stave off another site move for a few years (at which point I will have a million dollars, and will buy my own damn dedicated server).

August 21, 2003 /

I had two fears come true in the last twenty-four hours. This morning, I wasn’t looking, and for the first time ever I got on the wrong bus for work. It took me another three hours just to get back to where I started. I don’t know how late I’ll be here tonight.

And last night my fish finally winged his way to The Land Where Fish Are Eternally Blessed. I don’t really know why–this was about the best his life has ever been. I’ve been changing his water regularly, feeding him once a day, and he hasn’t been moved in weeks.

When he first started acting oddly, Maria and I googled frantically for betta diseases, and checked him for all the symptoms. There was a little while when we thought he had a fungal infection, but we proved ourselves wrong. For all appearances, he was a perfectly healthy fish, except didn’t swim around–he just hovered at the top or sank to the bottom of the bowl. He was still breathing when I left for work yesterday morning, and he wasn’t when I got home.

I never liked the idea of flushing fish, so we gave him a burial, in a small cardboard box lined with paper towels. Maria suggested putting some of his things in with him, which we did: some of the red glass stones from the bottom of his bowl, and the little ceramic tank goblin.

We closed the box, said thank you and goodbye, and slid him into the trash chute. I think it came open on the way down, because it made a lot of noise, like stones hitting the walls. I was proud of this; he went out like a rock star.

He was only a fish, but since I’m a human, I ascribed to him more importance than fish usually get. He was a constant in almost-a-year of rapidly changing roommates. He was a dependent at a time when I very much needed to take care of something, as a means of being okay again myself. This was something Amanda knew, magically, empathically. In three years of gifts, he was the best she ever gave to me. I very nearly named him Hope.

I might get another betta eventually, but not until I have a bigger tank, a heater and a water filter. Some of the stuff I read while I was looking for symptoms the other night made me wonder how he lived this long at all (but then again, I’ve wondered how he lived through a lot of things).

He only started really flaring at a mirror a week and a half ago: he was learning to stand up for himself. When I had loud music on near him, he’d dance to it, out of time. He was quite a lot like me, or what I’d like to be: shy, red, beautiful, effortlessly able to forget.