Sleep
I really need to, but my back has been giving me some trouble. It’s probably just stress. I upgraded the blog again, so now there are… duh Duh DUUUUH… Threaded Comments. Actually it’s pretty cool, so check it out if you get a chance. I should probably put the XSPF player back in my sidebar, but that requires mucking about with the PHP in the sidebar, and I don’t feel like it just at the moment.
I’m really enjoying Twitter, as it’s given me a new way to read certain feeds a lot faster, which is what I wanted from some, but not all of my RSS feeds anyway. I think I’ll take Techmeme and Akihabara News out of my RSS reader, as I’ve got Engadget and Techmeme through Twitter now. I stopped reading Engadget because of all the fanboi nonsense coming from the writers themselves, but this way I can read the headlines and skip the crap.
Still no job in sight. Getting more than a little worried as we came up short this month and it’s coming out of next month’s bills. Having no steady job and having to come up with a grand every month is really wearing on me. Not sure if the independent consultant business is still viable right now.
Really cool article
Botany and Kabbalah in the Samarkand carpets
Twitter Experiment
I signed up for Twitter tonight, and I have to say that it’s pretty easy to use. The lack of search capabilities makes it useless for networking, but I’m pretty satisfied with doing networking through Irreality, Livejournal, and Yahoo! Groups (and I suppose through Facebook and Myspace in a passive sort of way). It seems easy enough to separate content between Twitter and WordPress just based on length or whether any actual writing (writing, reviewing, editing cycle) goes into it. The only thing I think could cross over is some dreams. Some of my dreams are very short and so I haven’t bothered to post them. Twitter will make a great outlet for that sort of thing now. Speaking of which…
I dreamed that I was in Porterville again. Kris and I were with my mom, and I saw Adam. He was on his way somewhere so I followed him. I caught up with him and he said it was pretty important that I see Leonard. We got to Leonard’s house, and L’s eyes were really puffy and he looked sick. He lived in an apartment above Main Street. We sat down and L and A started to smoke a joint, when the police busted in. They took all three of us in, but let me tell K what was going on as I was leaving. She went and got Lil, so I could say goodbye, and I cried. I woke up terrified.
Empire’s hunger
I read an interesting tidbit about Esau in a book by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner (called Honey from the Rock). He’s talking about the opposing aspects of Jacob and Esau, and mentions that according to Midrash (I assume), Esau was the ancestor of the Roman Empire. He also notes that Esau’s ambition basically started when he was hungry. I take the ancestral attribution with a grain of salt, but also recognize that it’s a mythic truth (more true than a literal truth). Esau was the skillful hunter, the dominant male, and a man’s man. The recognition of this aspect as the mythic Father of Empire is extremely poignant, I think. As of the past few years, owing to the many challenges back and forth between privacy and security, many people have become terrified of a dark future in which some bizarre fascism emerges from the corpse of the American Republic. However, I find it odd, because in looking at the facts of what is going on, it doesn’t appear that any transformation of that magnitude is actually occurring. There is a re-balancing going on between our priorities of privacy and security, but facetious comparisons to previous fascistic transformations seem unwarranted. So why do such comparisons persist? As Philip K. Dick said, “The Empire never ended.” The current that fathered the Roman Empire (and perhaps also fascism as well – a pathological form), is the same that fathered our current political condition. However, I would not say it fathered our country. I think that there’s a trigger, something that opens the national collective psyche to this state. That trigger is hunger: in our case, the Great Depression. I have noticed that many of the people in my grandparents’ generation have defined their own roles and their relationship to society based on how they coped with the Depression. As I’ve noted previously, when dealing with enormous trauma, we must look at how it shapes reactions to all subsequent problems. How does Esau deal with his hunger? How does America’s reaction compare? Lastly, has the Imperial current evolved through it’s macrocosmic projection (and how)?
eMac Update
Well, Feisty on my ex-eMac (the Combo) is going great. Beryl runs very nicely on the built-in ATI Radeon 9600, and with the exception of Adobe Flash, most everything we use has a PPC Linux version. Hopefully PS3 users installing Linux will create a push for an open source Flash plugin of some sort (I doubt there will ever be an official PPC Linux version). On the other hand, if there’s no Flash, my kids won’t get caught up playing Flash games instead of doing research for school or actually reading articles on the web (gasp!). There are lots of packages available for Ubuntu, and the whole OS is very responsive and snappy, so all in all, I’m pretty happy with the results of my Linux experiment.
Tempestuousness
I’ve been reading The Tempest lately, so it comes as no surprise to me that my life has become somewhat strange. This last week or so I’ve been working on a job for AT&T which was actually a lot of fun. I got to meet a few individuals from the IT community here locally with varying levels of knowledge and skill. Even highly skilled people have their roles they play, and their lines they repeat over and over again. I used to respond, but I realized later that people don’t want responses. They want to be heard. So I let them repeat their lines out loud, and wait it out. One guy wanted to talk about the fact that he had taken on a leadership role in his religious community, but I didn’t want to discuss his religion. Another guy just wanted to talk about how knowledgeable he was about everything. Those are the moments when I feel like everything really is like a JRPG. NPC’s only have one line that they repeat over and over again. Sometimes it doesn’t even change when the world around them makes the line irrelevant. Seeing it in a game is one thing, but seeing it in life is just downright depressing.
“…These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;”
- Prospero, The Tempest, (IV.i.148-150)
Dream
I dreamed I was walking into my grandparent’s house. There were a few spiderwebs in the hall, but I brushed them aside and thought nothing of it. As I walked through the living room they grew thicker and I kept pulling them down. I walked into the kitchen and there they were very thick, and I used both hands and all of my frustration to pull down the fat daddy-long-legs and their handiwork. Then I woke up.
eMac Refresh
I’m going to be embarking on a new experiment. A couple of years ago I bought an eMac for my two older kids. It didn’t go over well, as they spent most of their time fighting with the unfamiliar aspects of the OSX interface. Consistently the complaint was that it wasn’t Windows-y enough. So I’m going to try something else. During a recent upgrade, I ended up with a minor bug that halts the login screen (right as the blue bar fills to the top). It’s simple to fix, if you have your original disc. I unfortunately, seem to have lost said disc in the move from Ivanhoe, so without a lot of tiresome *nix hacking, I’m SOL. So I think what I’m going to do is install PPC Ubuntu on the machine, and see if the kids can get into that a bit more. What the heck, it’ll build character.
Linkies! said Velma…
Cool. The universe just gave us a brief glimpse of sanity. Isn’t that nice?
I also think that the new Google Reader offline functionality (based on the Google Gears Beta) is pretty cool.
The ambiguity between “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) and “Allahu Achbar” (God is a Mouse?) reminds me of the similar sounding Fremen words Muad’Dib and Mahdi, except there’s a touch of Mon Calamari added in.
VGN-UX180P Refresh
The other day, while browsing the Micro PC Talk forums, I noticed that someone was talking about having installed a 32 GB SSD drive in their UX. I had previously been curious as to whether this was possible or not, but hadn’t really researched it, feeling that it was probably out of reach for me. However, in this case, I had a part number and a price to look at (Credit, anyone?). The deciding factor for me was the availability of instructions for swapping out the drive in the UX. So I took the plunge and on my doorstep, a week later, was the drive. I was pretty cautious about taking it apart; I’ve taken apart other small handheld devices with some success. So after some struggling with the tiny ZIF connector, I heard a tiny little click when I inserted it. Booted it up, and the BIOS saw it. After a couple more boots, I found the “Enable External Boot Devices” option that let me boot from a USB CD ROM drive, and promptly installed Vista on it. Sony had added the SmartWi software that enables WWAN connectivity, so I was ready to get started installing all the drivers. Luckily, Enterman on the Micro PC Talk forums had gathered them all together and given an approximate order to install them in. So after installing everything, I changed my Power profile. Now I’m getting 2 hours and 48 minutes of actual on-time without sacrificing much performance at all. Quite a change from when I had the 60 GB HD, and I could scrape 3 hours (in XP!) if I turned every power setting down as much as I could.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with it at the moment. Of course, I’m looking forward to when my EDGE contract runs out with Cingular/AT&T, at which point, I’m going Ubuntu!
