While I have been a dabbler in Linux for a while (Slackware 3.3 on a huge stack of floppies, for those interested), I haven't had a Linux box connected to the Internet since dial-up days. Mostly because I haven't had Internet at home since then. Lately, I have come into possession of an old Dell Latitude D610, which sports built-in wireless (as, I understand from some of my younger friends, is the trend these days). Add Slackware (we're up to version 13 now) and wander into one of the countless free public wi-fi spots (yay MickeyD's!) and suddenly I'm back online outside of the office.
Concurrent with this happy development, my phone carrier forced a data plan on owners of Smart Phones. While I do know some who have argued with them and gotten the plan removed, my battle with customer service was less successful. I can always swap out to my old Nokia brick (about the dumbest phone around) which will let me drop the data plan, but Smart Phones are nice (my current one, perhaps, less so: suffice to say it is running an OS out of Redmond; actually, that's unfair. It's been a decent phone, despite its many critics).
My carrier (oh, why the anonymity: it's AT&T, ok?) is finally getting an Android phone: the Motorola Backflip. So, while not an Eris, it is a Linux phone, and I am due for an upgrade in November. So, maybe... At any rate, thanks to the forced increase in my bill, I now have Internet access wherever I have phone service. Blogging, RSS, web surfing, email, twitter, podcasts, YouTube videos, WorldCat searches, all whenever and wherever.
So this is what it feels like to live in the 21st century? Kinda cool.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
A Summer Memory To Help Distract Me From The Long Winter
It was back in those too, too warm days during the summer of 1983, shortly before my sixteenth birthday, that I met her. Well, that ain't exactly so. I had a vague awareness of who she was. She came from a large Catholic family and had a brother a grade ahead of me and a sister a grade behind. She was three years my junior, in my little brother's class, and she lived next to the city cemetery, which is where we first spoke to each other that summer.
Me and my circle spent more than a little time in the cemetery. In part because we liked hanging out among the dead, in part because we were all a bit too weird for normal company, but mostly because it was one of the few places to hangout in a tiny little Midwestern town. The river ran along the small wilderness just north of the cemetery, and the deer trails and fallen trees were as much a part of our territory as the gravel roads between the tombstones. Sometimes we even hauled our books and dice and character sheets out to the old concrete table in the rarely mowed "nature study" area just outside the cemetery where we battled breeze and bugs to play AD&D under the canopy of trees.
Mostly, however, we just walked and talked. We discovered time travel and reincarnation and warp drive and the perfect government and the funniest joke and the best strategy for dealing with the Kauffman retrograde, all while wandering among the silent gravestones. We bemoaned the tiny redneck culture we had been born into and waxed eloquently about the futures our dreams dared to believe in. We were young and foolish and full of ourselves. We were geeky children who believed ourselves destined to be high fantasty romantic heroes arising from our humble births.
But that first day I ran into her, walking in the cemetery, I was alone. It wasn't terribly uncommon for any of us to go on long strolls alone. Some thoughts need to sit a spell in the cool, dark cellars of the mind before they are ready to serve. Given the year, I was most likely reflecting upon the eternal struggle between Law and Chaos and the unique role humanity plays in that struggle (like many, Neil's title "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock" described my youth sadly perfectly). In those days, I favored Chaos over Law, but that is hardly the point of this memory.
She was in shorts and a tank top. A cute twelve-year-old with big eyes and an endearingly shy smile, as I learned when I said "hi" as we passed.
That was all, and we both went our own ways. And there was evening and morning, the first day.
The next day, as I was walking to the cemetery, my path took me past her house. This was my typical path into the cemetery, and I thought little of it when I saw her on her porch swing reading. Another "hi" as I waved and smiled, not even slowing down as I strode past the girl and through the gates into my kingdom.
When, five minutes later, I saw her approaching, I didn't think anything of it. If I had lived next door to a graveyard, I would have spent as much time as possible there. Just before we passed each other, she stopped and said "hi."
"Hi, again." I smiled. She smiled back, and my heart came alive.
We talked for a while, and I arrived home feeling a strange and wonderful happiness that lasted well into the night. And there was evening and morning, the second day.
Throughout that summer we would "happen" to meet in the cemetery, where we would talk for hours about life and music and our families and books and religion. We laughed and we teased and we listened to each other with all the intensity of the young, with all of the sincerity of nearly mystical communion. She was, in terms of secrets and trust and laughter and sharing, the closest friend I had ever known up til then (with all due respect to my friends, who were all good and true, this was... different, as I suspect most of them would understand). We never kissed, we never were a couple, it was never that kind of relationship. It was all purely and sweetly good, a magic moment in a time and place where one foot was always firmly planted in the realms of faerie.
And, naturally, it didn't last. The end of summer summoned us back to our regular lives, and that was good as well. It was a brief and delightful interlude in my life, one of many lights that linger in the twilight of my failing memories and dying heart.
Me and my circle spent more than a little time in the cemetery. In part because we liked hanging out among the dead, in part because we were all a bit too weird for normal company, but mostly because it was one of the few places to hangout in a tiny little Midwestern town. The river ran along the small wilderness just north of the cemetery, and the deer trails and fallen trees were as much a part of our territory as the gravel roads between the tombstones. Sometimes we even hauled our books and dice and character sheets out to the old concrete table in the rarely mowed "nature study" area just outside the cemetery where we battled breeze and bugs to play AD&D under the canopy of trees.
Mostly, however, we just walked and talked. We discovered time travel and reincarnation and warp drive and the perfect government and the funniest joke and the best strategy for dealing with the Kauffman retrograde, all while wandering among the silent gravestones. We bemoaned the tiny redneck culture we had been born into and waxed eloquently about the futures our dreams dared to believe in. We were young and foolish and full of ourselves. We were geeky children who believed ourselves destined to be high fantasty romantic heroes arising from our humble births.
But that first day I ran into her, walking in the cemetery, I was alone. It wasn't terribly uncommon for any of us to go on long strolls alone. Some thoughts need to sit a spell in the cool, dark cellars of the mind before they are ready to serve. Given the year, I was most likely reflecting upon the eternal struggle between Law and Chaos and the unique role humanity plays in that struggle (like many, Neil's title "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock" described my youth sadly perfectly). In those days, I favored Chaos over Law, but that is hardly the point of this memory.
She was in shorts and a tank top. A cute twelve-year-old with big eyes and an endearingly shy smile, as I learned when I said "hi" as we passed.
That was all, and we both went our own ways. And there was evening and morning, the first day.
The next day, as I was walking to the cemetery, my path took me past her house. This was my typical path into the cemetery, and I thought little of it when I saw her on her porch swing reading. Another "hi" as I waved and smiled, not even slowing down as I strode past the girl and through the gates into my kingdom.
When, five minutes later, I saw her approaching, I didn't think anything of it. If I had lived next door to a graveyard, I would have spent as much time as possible there. Just before we passed each other, she stopped and said "hi."
"Hi, again." I smiled. She smiled back, and my heart came alive.
We talked for a while, and I arrived home feeling a strange and wonderful happiness that lasted well into the night. And there was evening and morning, the second day.
Throughout that summer we would "happen" to meet in the cemetery, where we would talk for hours about life and music and our families and books and religion. We laughed and we teased and we listened to each other with all the intensity of the young, with all of the sincerity of nearly mystical communion. She was, in terms of secrets and trust and laughter and sharing, the closest friend I had ever known up til then (with all due respect to my friends, who were all good and true, this was... different, as I suspect most of them would understand). We never kissed, we never were a couple, it was never that kind of relationship. It was all purely and sweetly good, a magic moment in a time and place where one foot was always firmly planted in the realms of faerie.
And, naturally, it didn't last. The end of summer summoned us back to our regular lives, and that was good as well. It was a brief and delightful interlude in my life, one of many lights that linger in the twilight of my failing memories and dying heart.
Friday, February 12, 2010
The Morning The End Finally Started
"Now, there. My Zootie is a good girl. You can't say things like that about her!"
The speaker was Zootie's mother, Mrs. Gladys Reynolds. Mrs. Reynolds is a paragon of a certain type of Midwesterner: grossly overweight and even more grossly under-educated, clad in the very best of Wal-mart clearance, her head filled with reality TV, crime dramas, and conservative preachers. For some reason, I always think of people like her as human donuts.
Mrs. Reynolds had been called in by our fearless leader, Principal Edgars, to discuss this morning's incident. "Incident" may be too mild a word, since Sheriff Tommy Briggs was also present at this little meeting. Apparently, Zootie Johnson had attempted to drive a sharp pencil into the left eye of Steve Ellison. Steve is a bit of a trouble maker (and perhaps a bit more than a bit), but he's not "let's seriously maim this jerk" kind of trouble. And, to be fair to Mrs. Reynolds, Zootie is a good kid, not the kind to say a harsh word to anyone teasing her (and there were many who teased the girl), let alone one to take up sharp writing implements against her tormentors. But a classroom full of students were witnesses. Unfortunately, the teacher had his back to the class, writing out the quadratic equation on the chalkboard, and turned around just in time to see Steve forcing Zootie's hand (still gripping the pencil) to the desk while calling her a "crazy bitch." By the time I had reached the back row, the danger was over, and I had the lovely duty of escorting the two combatants down to Principal Edgars' office while the rest of the class worked on factoring equations 1-10 on page 52 of the textbook.
"Mrs. Reynolds, no one is saying Zootie's not a good girl," I said.
"I am," said Edgars, shooting me one of those "shut up, I don't need your kind of help" looks. Edgars would have fired me his first year as principal if he could have found even the slightest pretext. Unfortunately for him, I'm a good teacher with a squeaky clean life.
"Mrs. Reynolds," Edgars continued, "Your daughter attempted a lethal stabbing this morning. Her ineffectual weakness is the only reason Steve Ellison is still alive. Beyond being a violation of the school's policies concerning violence, this is a criminal matter." He nodded over at the sheriff.
Sheriff Tommy stirred a bit and made as if he might say something, but Edgars was on a roll. "Priscilla Johnson is a menace. Her antisocial ways have finally culminated in the violence that I believe I warned the faculty of on numerous occasions."
Mrs. Reynolds looked horrified, "You been talking about my Zootie to the teachers?"
"Not Zootie in particular," I inserted, before Edgars could continue his bashing of Zootie (and that was the first time I'd ever heard anyone refer to her by her given name), "but yes, Principal Edgars has expressed concern that some of our students are not as involved in school activities as he would like."
"Zootie doesn't like sports. She likes reading and writing. That don't make her bad."
"No," I agreed, "it doesn't."
"Well, I think this morning's events suggest otherwise. Self-involved dreamers are just waiting to snap. Students like Priscilla need to be engaged with other students. They need to have relationships with real people and not just live in their imaginary worlds, where they see real people as invasive and threatening. People like Steve Ellison." Edgars had no love for Ellison, but he obviously had a larger axe to grind with students like Zootie. For the life of me, though, I couldn't imagine why.
The speaker was Zootie's mother, Mrs. Gladys Reynolds. Mrs. Reynolds is a paragon of a certain type of Midwesterner: grossly overweight and even more grossly under-educated, clad in the very best of Wal-mart clearance, her head filled with reality TV, crime dramas, and conservative preachers. For some reason, I always think of people like her as human donuts.
Mrs. Reynolds had been called in by our fearless leader, Principal Edgars, to discuss this morning's incident. "Incident" may be too mild a word, since Sheriff Tommy Briggs was also present at this little meeting. Apparently, Zootie Johnson had attempted to drive a sharp pencil into the left eye of Steve Ellison. Steve is a bit of a trouble maker (and perhaps a bit more than a bit), but he's not "let's seriously maim this jerk" kind of trouble. And, to be fair to Mrs. Reynolds, Zootie is a good kid, not the kind to say a harsh word to anyone teasing her (and there were many who teased the girl), let alone one to take up sharp writing implements against her tormentors. But a classroom full of students were witnesses. Unfortunately, the teacher had his back to the class, writing out the quadratic equation on the chalkboard, and turned around just in time to see Steve forcing Zootie's hand (still gripping the pencil) to the desk while calling her a "crazy bitch." By the time I had reached the back row, the danger was over, and I had the lovely duty of escorting the two combatants down to Principal Edgars' office while the rest of the class worked on factoring equations 1-10 on page 52 of the textbook.
"Mrs. Reynolds, no one is saying Zootie's not a good girl," I said.
"I am," said Edgars, shooting me one of those "shut up, I don't need your kind of help" looks. Edgars would have fired me his first year as principal if he could have found even the slightest pretext. Unfortunately for him, I'm a good teacher with a squeaky clean life.
"Mrs. Reynolds," Edgars continued, "Your daughter attempted a lethal stabbing this morning. Her ineffectual weakness is the only reason Steve Ellison is still alive. Beyond being a violation of the school's policies concerning violence, this is a criminal matter." He nodded over at the sheriff.
Sheriff Tommy stirred a bit and made as if he might say something, but Edgars was on a roll. "Priscilla Johnson is a menace. Her antisocial ways have finally culminated in the violence that I believe I warned the faculty of on numerous occasions."
Mrs. Reynolds looked horrified, "You been talking about my Zootie to the teachers?"
"Not Zootie in particular," I inserted, before Edgars could continue his bashing of Zootie (and that was the first time I'd ever heard anyone refer to her by her given name), "but yes, Principal Edgars has expressed concern that some of our students are not as involved in school activities as he would like."
"Zootie doesn't like sports. She likes reading and writing. That don't make her bad."
"No," I agreed, "it doesn't."
"Well, I think this morning's events suggest otherwise. Self-involved dreamers are just waiting to snap. Students like Priscilla need to be engaged with other students. They need to have relationships with real people and not just live in their imaginary worlds, where they see real people as invasive and threatening. People like Steve Ellison." Edgars had no love for Ellison, but he obviously had a larger axe to grind with students like Zootie. For the life of me, though, I couldn't imagine why.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Autobiographical Random Nonsense Best Avoided By Readers with Discernment
Once upon a time I knew... everything. Well, everything that mattered. I knew the streets of my neighborhood, the names of my friends, and how to enjoy life. I walked, biked, tossed frisbees, even played a little ball with my best friend (poorly, but with a certain enjoyment). I read myths, novels, comic books, science books, and biographies. I prayed naively, without doubt and without pretense. I laughed and cried freely. I had parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and vague dreams of doing something in that distant time when I finally "grew up." I was in elementary school, and life was good.
Ok, so romanticizing childhood is a favored past-time of old people who feel they have missed the boat. I know just how whack my childhood was: I lived it, right? It was better than some and worse than others, but even then, I knew it was a blessing. A blessing that was dragged through mud and broken glass, a blessing that occasionally found itself lost in a metaphorical desert, bleeding and crying, but a blessing nonetheless.
I liked to draw as a kid. I was never any good, but I enjoyed art, especially in junior high. Painting and drawing, and, to a lesser degree, sculpting. Like shop class and home economics, art class produced something from working with my hands. Like most people, producing something tangible with my own hands was deeply satisfying.
I've always always enjoyed music. Not surprising, since most people I've met do. I have absolutely no skill in producing it. Strangely, in high school ALL of my friends were skilled musicians. One of my friends, a scientist-musician, once assured me that given my love of math, there was a musician inside me, but I'm still skeptical.
But there was never a question about my creative medium of choice. I've been writing for as long as I can remember. Not well, and not consistently, and (until the Internet) not publicly, but working with words, ideas, stories... has always been a part of who I am. At one point, in high school, I thought about becoming a writer, but even in high school, being "grown up" and making such decisions seemed far away (oh, silly dreamer! Methinks you needed a bucket of cold water and a swift kick in the rear).
It's odd, given the opportunities to write available to me now, that I don't. Well, not so odd. What keeps me from trying to produce anything of substance is fear. Fear that I have neither the ideas, the talent, nor the discipline to produce anything worth more than the self-published drivel that appears here. Strange, the ten-year-old me wrote a vampire story: pages of painful plot, silly dialogue, and stock characters. No fear, though. I kept it in a blue binder that had a Battlestar Galactica insignia sticker on the cover and spent hours on it: making changes, adding chapters, etc. Couldn't tell you whatever happened to it. It wasn't my first story, but it was the first one I remember working on.
Old people may romanticize childhood, and I am as guilty as the next codger. But maybe, in our defense, there was something romantic about childhood. Not merely the fabled innocence of childhood, the innocence being a necessary condition for the romance, but some largeness in our souls that, I don't know, for want of a better phrase, lived more than we do now.
Or maybe that's just more rose-colored navel-gazing. Dunno. I think of Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien: grown ups who, I believe, kept a romantic vision that most of us seem to lose. In my best moments, I can almost see the grail, shimmering in the last rays of twilight, calling me West. Sometimes, I can sense Chesterton, just beyond the pale, like a Christian Obi-Wan Kenobi, urging me to take up my sabre. But usually, I just pay my bills and take my meds. And, that, as they say, is life.
Ok, so romanticizing childhood is a favored past-time of old people who feel they have missed the boat. I know just how whack my childhood was: I lived it, right? It was better than some and worse than others, but even then, I knew it was a blessing. A blessing that was dragged through mud and broken glass, a blessing that occasionally found itself lost in a metaphorical desert, bleeding and crying, but a blessing nonetheless.
I liked to draw as a kid. I was never any good, but I enjoyed art, especially in junior high. Painting and drawing, and, to a lesser degree, sculpting. Like shop class and home economics, art class produced something from working with my hands. Like most people, producing something tangible with my own hands was deeply satisfying.
I've always always enjoyed music. Not surprising, since most people I've met do. I have absolutely no skill in producing it. Strangely, in high school ALL of my friends were skilled musicians. One of my friends, a scientist-musician, once assured me that given my love of math, there was a musician inside me, but I'm still skeptical.
But there was never a question about my creative medium of choice. I've been writing for as long as I can remember. Not well, and not consistently, and (until the Internet) not publicly, but working with words, ideas, stories... has always been a part of who I am. At one point, in high school, I thought about becoming a writer, but even in high school, being "grown up" and making such decisions seemed far away (oh, silly dreamer! Methinks you needed a bucket of cold water and a swift kick in the rear).
It's odd, given the opportunities to write available to me now, that I don't. Well, not so odd. What keeps me from trying to produce anything of substance is fear. Fear that I have neither the ideas, the talent, nor the discipline to produce anything worth more than the self-published drivel that appears here. Strange, the ten-year-old me wrote a vampire story: pages of painful plot, silly dialogue, and stock characters. No fear, though. I kept it in a blue binder that had a Battlestar Galactica insignia sticker on the cover and spent hours on it: making changes, adding chapters, etc. Couldn't tell you whatever happened to it. It wasn't my first story, but it was the first one I remember working on.
Old people may romanticize childhood, and I am as guilty as the next codger. But maybe, in our defense, there was something romantic about childhood. Not merely the fabled innocence of childhood, the innocence being a necessary condition for the romance, but some largeness in our souls that, I don't know, for want of a better phrase, lived more than we do now.
Or maybe that's just more rose-colored navel-gazing. Dunno. I think of Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien: grown ups who, I believe, kept a romantic vision that most of us seem to lose. In my best moments, I can almost see the grail, shimmering in the last rays of twilight, calling me West. Sometimes, I can sense Chesterton, just beyond the pale, like a Christian Obi-Wan Kenobi, urging me to take up my sabre. But usually, I just pay my bills and take my meds. And, that, as they say, is life.
In the Wake of the Rabbit Hole
jacob login:. welcome root. oh one two seven one eight three two. patch upload complete. sendmail compile in five four three two one.
wh1t3rabb1+: Hatter, you still online?
hatterm: Yeah, Rabbit. What's up?
wh1t3rabb1+: Not much, dullsville in server city tonight.
hatterm: Um...... ok?
wh1t3rabb1+: So, entertain me, man!
hatterm: Your dead end job. Not my problem. Besides, I'm kinda busy here.
wh1t3rabb1+: Do tell?
hatterm: I do have a life offline.
wh1t3rabb1+: So why are you typing right now?
hatterm: She's not here yet, and besides, I thought (foolishly!) that you might have wanted something important. Something related to the game.
wh1t3rabb1+: Game, shame, tame the lame, and does this SHE have a name?
hatterm: Not one you'd recognize.
wh1t3rabb1+: And what about our young friend with a penchant for blue gingham dresses and leather jackets? Does she know you're making late night tea with strange women?
hatterm: Why would she care?
wh1t3rabb1+: Oh, I doubt she would. But the question is, does she know?
hatterm: How would she? Some of us don't tweet our lives away. Speaking of: not a word of this!
wh1t3rabb1+: And why not? We've established no one cares.
hatterm: Yeah, well, my private life is, well, private.
wh1t3rabb1+: That's rich!
hatterm: I'd think a paranoid security freak would be sympathetic.
wh1t3rabb1+: Right, one who tweets his life away? I'm all about public things being as public as possible and private things being totally private. You texting your date makes it public.
hatterm: Whatever
wh1t3rabb1+: Anyway, compile's finished. Gotta reboot the email server. Don't do anything with her that I wouldn't!
hatterm: Dude, you're gay.
wh1t3rabb1+: And you could only be so lucky. Seriously, though. When the other she finds out, heads will roll. She might not care, but she cares, if you take my meaning. And even if you don't, I'm outta here )
wh1t3rabb1+: Hatter, you still online?
hatterm: Yeah, Rabbit. What's up?
wh1t3rabb1+: Not much, dullsville in server city tonight.
hatterm: Um...... ok?
wh1t3rabb1+: So, entertain me, man!
hatterm: Your dead end job. Not my problem. Besides, I'm kinda busy here.
wh1t3rabb1+: Do tell?
hatterm: I do have a life offline.
wh1t3rabb1+: So why are you typing right now?
hatterm: She's not here yet, and besides, I thought (foolishly!) that you might have wanted something important. Something related to the game.
wh1t3rabb1+: Game, shame, tame the lame, and does this SHE have a name?
hatterm: Not one you'd recognize.
wh1t3rabb1+: And what about our young friend with a penchant for blue gingham dresses and leather jackets? Does she know you're making late night tea with strange women?
hatterm: Why would she care?
wh1t3rabb1+: Oh, I doubt she would. But the question is, does she know?
hatterm: How would she? Some of us don't tweet our lives away. Speaking of: not a word of this!
wh1t3rabb1+: And why not? We've established no one cares.
hatterm: Yeah, well, my private life is, well, private.
wh1t3rabb1+: That's rich!
hatterm: I'd think a paranoid security freak would be sympathetic.
wh1t3rabb1+: Right, one who tweets his life away? I'm all about public things being as public as possible and private things being totally private. You texting your date makes it public.
hatterm: Whatever
wh1t3rabb1+: Anyway, compile's finished. Gotta reboot the email server. Don't do anything with her that I wouldn't!
hatterm: Dude, you're gay.
wh1t3rabb1+: And you could only be so lucky. Seriously, though. When the other she finds out, heads will roll. She might not care, but she cares, if you take my meaning. And even if you don't, I'm outta here )
Friday, February 05, 2010
Since When Does "Do No Evil" Include "Make Deals with Spooks"?!?
Google asks the NSA for help.
As loquacious as I am, I have no commentary. Just a prayer (and a rather strong desire to leave the Internet and buy a cabin in Montana or maybe one of those commercial flights into space, since US government sponsored flights are going to be a thing of the past, so kiss Starfleet good-bye, thank you very much Mr. President... but that, as they say, is another story.)
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