@Wudan07

Dax’s birthday is today! Jabba’s is in a week! Mine is in 2.5 weeks!

Also, for theorb77: Oh NOES!

Well my work computer decided to die, and while I was in the process of seeing how bad it was I plugged an Ubuntu Live CD to assess the damage to the hard-drive. The primary partition was b0rked, which, well, borked the OS. Ubuntu hated to mount it, and basically took an extended break when I tried to browse it, and at the end of said break, decided to take it’s own life.

Well, I had intended to format the drive and plug Ubuntu on there. Ubuntu, who hated to try to read the drive, hated trying to understand the partition even more. Instead of trying to be friendly and say it couldn’t understand it, it decided to take the route of sitting there like a big, dumb, blank, blue screen. Blue screens on Linux? Yes, you heard right. Not a dump that tells me that my OS is poorly written, but a ‘I’m sitting here’ blue screen that tells me my OS is half written.

I wanted Linux, damnit.

Well, with Jabba, Sukie, and myself all getting hit with something ghastly in the past week it’s been a rough time.

On one particular night I absolutely could not sleep and went in to panicky states of deliriousness, followed by cravings for specific brands of taco meats.

i hit the ground running
i pounded my fists on the earth until it cracked
rage was my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters
for my discontent
i ground coal in to diamonds
emerged from the pits
a dirty bastard monster
with spite foaming from my mouth

for this they flayed me
wore me while wearing me down
broke me down
and shackled me
until you see me today
so tethered
withered
slithered
and full of rage

I think as a teenager we feel the angst, most of all, and it moves us to attempt to forge ourselves from the raw molten material of the not-child-not-adult. I think we get angry at ourselves, others, and maybe some just don’t feel any pressure at all.

I wonder what that would be like, with no pressure. I honestly don’t think I would survive, for as much as I loathe it, I have developed an addiction to pressure. I only really feel satisfied when I’m up against a big problem, you know? Like when something is weighing me down.

I guess I enjoy thinking that I’m a bit of a conundrum, like a chinese proverb or something. I’m not really, and it’s probably because I’m in the beginning throes and woes of an achy sickness that I’m saying this. I always wanted to be like my big brother theorb77. When he drew, his skill was such that I wanted to draw, too. I learned I had some skill at it, and when I felt I had drawn enough, I stopped. theorb77 also programmed on computers. He and Big Brother liked computers and game consoles. I am 3 years younger than my brother theorb77 and yet I think we’ve reached a good place. I don’t feel that I’m ready to accept that he might be sick with something serious, and I don’t like to see him depressed or upset. I am 8 years younger than my brother Big Brother, and I haven’t seen him in a long time. I was really impressed that he was learning to use 3d modelling and animation packages, since this has been a keen interest of mine for some time. I actually kind of wrote a 3d animation package, technically.

I was relating to Darth Yoshi and Meryl that Big Brother and I used to play Double Dragon II a lot. That game has a very complex combat setup for a D-pad and 2 button console game. I think I did pretty good, actually, and found the game to be almost enjoyable. I think the combat needs to be fixed because it’s hard to get out of the rythm of getting your assed kicked by Taco John or the Governator. But hey, what did game developers know about Q and A back then? The cutscenes were bad dialogue and sprites. Goddamn those were the days.

I was thinking about how all you know as a teenager is discontent and angst, and often, their bastard cousin Depression shows up and wants to throw around the pigskin. That’s life when you’re a teenager. I think you stop being a teenager when you see a teenager and say, “What the hell is that kid wearing?”

Well this has all been a clever attempt to just dump my brain on here when I’m in a vein of pissiness. The result probably reads something like Catcher in the Rye, but most of you probably haven’t read it. They said that it was controversial so I had to read it. I muddled through it, not getting why it inspires such hushed whispers about the content.

I was lucky enough to read some of Bob Dylan’s poetry when I was a lad, and I came across what I consider to be the best goddamn definition of angst EVER.

Your problem is that you wanna better word for world

Berserk has asked, “What do you think a human’s most advanced & weakest feature is?” and I was just going to post a comment response, but I think it warrants a post, so here goes:

Our capacity for empathy and compassion is our most advanced feature.

I was thinking of this when I was getting a drink from the fridge and thought about how my dog always shows such interest and ‘glee’ whenever we (the humans) are around.

I was thinking, how the hell do I know what my dog was thinking? And then I remembered watching animal planet and the people who keep crazy dangerous animals, like Tigers, and seem to think the damn Tiger reciprocates affection. I would think then, that such a person might imagine themselves safe within the tiger’s reach and then discover that the Tiger has much a much narrower emotional spectrum.

I’m sure there are other mishaps that occur with wild animals that are completely non-emotional, but I think sometimes we humans, the so-called most advanced species, can find ourselves applying emotion in undue places. I can’t really explain why that is, but sometimes you’ll just be going along fine and then find yourself emotionally affected by some random thing in a way that you were not expecting. I think in a way, emotions can be addicting, in the way that many members of the fairer sex flock to chick flicks, or men to action movies. Really, it’s just lights and sound, but we get it, in a way that you wouldn’t think you would.

But animals are also affected in a similar manner by the same stimuli, so what is it really? Well, you have to ask yourself how did such a fragile creature, such as man, ever come to this modern state of being, as a species?

I think I’ve derailed from the original question a bit, but there it is.

This is probably because I have read “The Most Dangerous Game” recently, and I was rather enthralled by it. I was thinking about the things that make us kill, and perhaps the slight perversions that occur within the spectrum of human emotion, and how it all connects, on a person to person and generation to generation scale.

Life has a funny way of bringing you down to it’s level. I was thinking of all the weaknesses humans have, and how fragile the human animal is, in that it’s most advanced feature is also it’s weakest.

Today while musing about Internet Security, I came to the conclusion (as many before me have) that even in the most secure of networks, the weakest point is the humans who have access to it. Therefore, a network should be as scaleable and self-sufficient as possible, and users should understand the services they need to access from it.

That’s a pretty geeky musing, I’ll admit, but after so much has happened over the last week or two, it’s all I can muster to fire off in to a blog entry.

Oh, and Jabba and I went up Ensign Peak. This is one of those things I would always think of as a grand thing to do when I was younger and naive – to look down on the works of man with discontent. Instead, the most majestic thing in my vision was my son, and I was glad to be there with him. His bravado and passion for learning whatever it is he can learn are nothing short of awesome, in the literal meaning of the word. Now that he’s in school and I am no longer his only source for knowledge, it’s kind of more fun, in a way, to see what it is that he does know, and to see what else he can absorb in to that little head of his.

Sukie bets that he’ll be a good father, too. I bet he gets a bad temper, just like me, and I think you can only fix maybe a few things from generation to generation. At least my son will know me, will (maybe) understand more of the things about how I felt about life.

I thought of all the Earth’s people, theorb77 would get the Animaniac’s reference. He did not, however.

I was trolling through the many message boards trying to see what the scoop is with that delicious Lockedown episode of Lost. Apparently, the producers released a higher resolution screencap of the inside of the blast door. It was cool, nuff said. There are at least two distinct writing styles, with one of the writers using just Latin (and not saying much in Latin, by the way), and the other writing is in legible English.

This weekend I was all revved up to go to Logan, and maybe Wendover, but no road trip happened. Road trips with Sukie are fun, I think, though I don’t know how theorb77 and Antigone survived the trips to and from Colorado in the back seat of the Civic.

Earlier tonight a driver of a just-big-enough-to-hurt-you Dodge truck ran a red light (it was very very red) and nearly hit our car. I was so worried, I was shaking really bad afterwards. I think I was more worried than the last time I nearly got in an accident because my family was in the car and I really like Sukie’s car.

We spent Friday afternoon cleaning out some fish tanks that had been abandoned by a previous tenant of a research facility. It was not as nasty as you’d imagine, but still nasty enough to make me wash my hands about a million times. We did net some rather swank tank filters in the process, though fish aquarium things are really Sukie’s domain, I just find it really easy to be interested in just about anything. No, seriously.

With all the talk of sleep apnea (my father has the apnea and I think theorb does as well, this explains the juice stains on his matress), we saw an episode of Mad About You (which Sukie is mad about … in the good way) where Paul and Jamie get tested for the apnea. One of the warning signs is apparently restless sleep, which … well, I sleep pretty damn good. When I get a good amount, I feel damn good!

So, no, I doubt I have the apnea. Don’t know why the hell I blogged about that, but you get what you get, and that’s all you got to get from me … for now.

I painted both a 55 gallon tank’s border as well as re-painted a cast iron tank stand for said tank (like new!) in the last couple of days. I think I like painting because it ‘renews’ an object and makes it ‘pimp’, which I like a lot.

What I don’t like at all, is uncertainty. I don’t like not knowing how a particular project is going to be carried out. Tonight, any minute now, Sukie and I will attempt to not only move furniture through our very very crowded and messy apartment, but also set up the previously mentioned 55 gallon tank.

This will certainly be quite the undertaking.

Well, here we are, the Ides of March. I was pointing out to Sukie that this time of year has historically been a timultuous time of year for us, from as far back as pre-marriage times. 7 years ago, at this time of year, Sukie and I got engaged (it’s not a very good story, I’m afraid.)

But still, today I am flying high (thanks, James Blunt), because yesterday I removed a rather annoying stumbling block from my Krakatoa engine (it’s Q3 based) which had vexed me for some time, and, well, with any large and difficult problem, when it’s fixed, you just feel damn good.

A lot of you have given me shit for not blogging so much. Well, for one, this pre-spring time is a time of deep reflection for me. Don’t ask why, maybe springtime just makes me realize that another damn year has gone by.

If I followed that train of thought further, my blog might sound a bit more like theorb77’s. If you want that kind of self-mutilating depressing stuff, well, theorb77 is linked on the right hand side.