journal for 2003-01-30
the answer is everything
I can’t even begin to explain how much I love the awful, awful beginning of an awful, awful short story — really more of a blurb — from Kuro5hin’s new fiction site.
How many things can you crush if you have no feeling?
Everything is the answer.
I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that this is my new motto. It will go on my family crest, and I will say it whenever the opportunity presents itself.
mdxi: Seen the new Zelda preview?
rjbs: Everything is the answer
mdxi: I'm so sick of you.
I kind of want that story to fester in the queue forever, but I don’t think it will happen. The new fiction section at k5 has inspired me to actually do some more browsing there, mostly because it’s all so incredibly awful. I don’t know whether to troll them with more awfulness, submit something that I think is not awful, or just enjoy the suck.
work
Today, I did just about my whole day’s work on knave (my laptop) and it was good. Bryan brought his Pismo, which just fanned my desire for a nice Mac laptop. I’d already been frothing for the 12” G4. Since most of what I do is run Vim, xmms, and epic, it was suggested that a G4 was probably overkill. Well, that’s true.
I decided that before thinking about spending thousands of dollars on a glorified VT220, I’d try to make sure I have some use for a laptop to begin with. I broke out knave, who’d been in hiding since his last upgrade, and got to work.
I realized that the keyboard, while twitchy, is nowhere near as bad as I’d thought. I actually did a good bit of vimming without problems. Maybe his keyboard is fine, and I’m just growing totally dependant on my m101’s… my sweet, precious m101’s. I loveses them, I does.
One of the things I did not do on my laptop was update my Big Board of projects. I set up a space on my corkboard, some months ago, organized into the “important and urgent” regions box. It’s goofy, but it works well. It had been getting a little sparse, as had my work schedule. For better or for worse, as of today’s it’s crowded again. I’m much busier than I’ve been in a long while, and I’m having a hard time getting anything done. I feel overwhelmed, and I have trouble focusing on one thing.
For the immediate future, at least, I should be able to focus on one or two things: my chart is clear. Sadly, the main thing on which I’m focusing is really complex, and while Trevor had some good ideas for the interface, I’m afraid that it will end up kludgy. I wish the people implementing ERP foo in Cardiff (who are, basically, smarties) and I could be a team. The fact that everyone doesn’t consider that project totally dead blows my mind. Still, mine is not to question why.
I really don’t want to end up like so many people I know, though: “I’m just here to collect a paycheck.” I want to have a positive impact. Maybe I just think I know better, and I’m actually wrong and should STFU. Who knows. Everything is the answer.
One of my former co-workers sent me a Christmas present, a magnetic poetry wall calendar. It’s pretty cool. I need to get in touch with her. Also, Gloria and I should figure out where to put our magnetic poetry stuff.
The more all of this goes on, the more I want to be working on a real OS with quality servers. IIS makes me cry, as does most of Win32. Daemons! Byte streams! X11! Where are they in my times of need? I’d settle for a Linux client for MS’s goofy firewall solution. At least I got 802.11 working again. It stopped working when we started using WEP; our standard card doesn’t work with WEP on Linux, for some reason. We had an old card, though, that Brian had used for AirSnort, and it dawned on me that we’d gotten that working with WEP. I schwicked it, configured it, and wandered around the building running an RDP client and ssh-tunnelling home. In related news: I built an ssh tunnel to manxome from work. SecureCRT just refused to work when receiving a non-local connection, but PuTTY was fine with it. Looks like I’m going to be becoming a PuTTY user.
soul calibur
I beat Soul Calibur (admittedly, on a fairly easy setting) this morning. I got Voldo’s profile and end story, and I was happy. I don’t know who I’ll learn next. I’m pretty psyched to be half-OK with Voldo. He’s the man.
Soul Calibur is a pretty great game. It’s making me interested in Soul Calibur 2, but I’m not too anxious. Soul Calibur itself is fine.
I guess that’s everything, which is the answer. I’ll wander off, now.