Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/02/05/the-first-monty/
So, I asked myself, “Self, isn’t it about time we learned Python?”
Being as I am more open-minded these days, I replied “Yes, let us do this! Then we can learn Medusa and re-implement Gallery!”
So, I went over to the Python website and started reading the Python Tutorial, and among the technical arguments in favor of Python, on the first page, I read:
By the way, the language is named after the BBC show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and has nothing to do with nasty reptiles. Making references to Monty Python skits in documentation is not only allowed, it is encouraged!
That alone convinces me that Python IS the Ultimate Programming Language Ever!
Ni!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2002/09/25/corporeal-ecosystem/
Cite de la Science et l’Industre, Paris.
Our body is a complex ecosystem comprised of specialized organs that behave according to their own advantage, with no greater concern for the whole. White blood cells have no opinion about disease, except that it is good to eat.
Human organization, like ecosystems, is an amalgamation of seperate entities with differing agendae. Governments, corporations, and other organizations, like brains, attempt to organize the free agents towards a conscious goal.
It would be interesting, for modern fiction, to see a world in which at the levels of body, human world, and natural ecosystem, are played out at each level, as something for the protagonist to deal with. Douglas Adams’ work comes to mind, or perhaps William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_, where the protagonist must work against other consciousnesses, some of which have set up his own body against him.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/08/13/penguins/
So, this week Jesse was in town, as part of his grand whirlwind tour of his civilian friends from across our great nation. This morning I dropped him off to the Airport, and North he rode to Portland, I think. Ultimately, he’ll be back on Okinawa. Back to the Marines for the balance of his enlistment.
But it was nice to see an old friend.
This week we went to the LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose. We attended the “Get Sloshed with Slashdot” party – free beer, and last night we went to a VA Research party, where you had to pay for your alcohol.
At one point, I was standing behind Eric Raymond, which was cool enough in itself, and noted he was talking to some guy about a message they’d exchanged the other day. The guy turned to leave, and I caught his profile and a little penguin icon popped up in my brain and I asked myself, “Is that Linus Torvalds?”
It was Linus Torvalds. I talked with Jesse and Dave and they’d both had similar experiences as I had of seeing this dude and realizing that it was Linus – this hero of computer geeks ’round the world. Not like we all think Linus is a God, but it felt like I’d been hanging out in the Silicon Valley, and here I am at this party and I see this guy who’s a great big celebrity, and I likened it in my brain to people who move to Hollywood and have similar experiences at parties where they turn and realize this movie star is a foot or two away from them.
(Thanks to Randy Loux for the photo.)
I thought it was really neat, anyway. Hollywood for geeks!
Anyway, as we were leaving, so too was Linus, to a cheering crowd as he entered a white limousine. Celebrity chiq, neh? Well, it blocked my way out for a minute or two and I bade a last parting glance at this attractive woman who after eyeing each other on the dance floor told me about one of VA’s new wonderful rack-mount servers. I think she said it was 2U with five bays, which I have to admit, impressed me. Well, if I get a call from her I’ll have to admit that Linux boxen were not the first thing on my mind when she caught my eye. I’m hoping the sales pitch was more a reflex action after a few days of conference, to some chatty party dude.
Not like any sane person goes to a geek party expecting to meet women.
Things are just weird out here.
As I was checking out the conference, a few different things went in to my head. The first was that it was interesting to see all these companies gathered with the intention of making money off a Freeware OS. Corel’s demonstration of their pre-beta distribution was the most poignant, for me. They had four graphical dialogs and after a point-click-click Linux was installed on a computer in four minutes, requiring no thought as to partitioning.
It booted in to a somewhat polished KDE desktop. It struck me as a rather hard sell aimed at users like my mom. I could give mom that Corel Linux CD and she could have Linux up and running as easily as any other program.
Of course, its a whole OS, so you have to boot it separately, but hey.
Another thing that struck me was that all those years spent as a geek child were somehow paying off. I was entering a conference of people with interests very similar to mine, along with living in a part of the world where computers is the thing – everywhere you look. It felt like I’d graduated some weird alien test and was entering the temple of the promised land.
But I don’t actually like computers that much. I wasn’t going nuts or anything, I just thought it was all kind of cool.
Revenge of the Nerds.
But what struck me as most interesting, in my mind, was how Linus must feel, strolling between the booths. A fun little project to write a useful OS back when he was a grad student has blossomed in to something huge, with growing momentum behind it. It must boggle his mind. He seems to keep it all in stride too, at least from what I can tell from an interview I recently read. I think without his attitude, Linus would have become a world-class dork by now. You know, like Bill.
One interesting thing about the attendees, was that most folks were young. Sure, there were the occasional scruffy-lookin’, old-school, Unix types, (Erm, you like that? I stole it from Sven’s site.) But most of the people there were twenty-somethings. Some were business types, and many were just geeks. there was definitely some undercurrent of revolutionary fervor. I proudly wore my FreeBSD tee-shirt, to show what flavor of geek I was. The FreeBSD people I ran in to tended to be older, and more scruffy-flavored.
Kickin’ it oldschool BSD at the Linux con.
Does this make sense to anyone? Only a select few, I’m guessing.
Heh.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/05/20/enteract/
Wed May 20 10:22:55 CDT 1998
I’m an admin guy – woohoo! finally getting paid money for doing the sort of thing I’ve been doing experimentally for at least the past two years – running systems. I was thinking the other day that we’re kinda like train crews in the old days – a chosen few who get to do the job of keeping these complicated machines that many people are depending on running, and running well, without crashing. Of course, much of the drama is lost in that our machines don’t barrel down iron rails or even weigh several tons, and nobody dies if we slip up, we just risk losing a lot of business by pissing off people who can’t do their email. Not that we’re gonna slip up in any big way of course.
No train though can route millions of email messages for tens of thousands of customers a day. Of course, I’m not actually certain how many customers we do have, but that’s not so much my concern.
I didn’t work for EnterAct at all last year, but records show I answered 73 support messages. Neat huh? I felt I had to make up for sasquatch’s free CoLo somehow ….
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/03/09/computer-literacy-narrative/
My history with computers begins Christmas of 1984 when Grandpa gave our family a Commodore 64 computer. It was several years before we had a complete system including disk drive, monitor, and printer. At first I was relegated to typing commands into the basic interpreter and playing cartridge-based games.
Upon graduating eighth grade in 1989, I convinced my family to reward my endeavors with an Amiga A500 computer, which blew the 64 away, holding twenty times more memory, much more speed, a capacity of 4,096 colors at higher resolution with special graphics chips, compared to the 64’s 16 colors, and best of all it had a cool built-in disk-drive on the side.
By 1992 I had saved up half the money required to make the purchase of an Amiga 1200, the descendant of the A500, with more advanced graphics, processing power, and a continued low price tag of around $600. The A1200 and A500 were cheap enough for my family to realistically afford, and gave a great amount of ability for the price. The graphics, sound, and multitasking Operating System were far superior to that offered on any other platform. Unfortunately, Commodore’s management and marketing sucked, and they went belly-up by 1996.
After being discharged from the Army in 1994, I began attending the University of Illinois in Winter of 1995, where I was for the first time exposed to NCSA Mosaic, and was induced to create my first web page. I remember the great effort it had been to find, scan, crop, and convert a small photo of me to augment what I had there. The web loaded a lot quicker before everyone started putting graphics all over the damn place like they do today.
Telecommunications has always been a strong interest of mine. Unfortunately, online services were priced beyond my reach throughout most of my childhood. By the time I came to the University I was finally making enough money to subscribe to a local Chicago Internet access provider. I’d felt like I missed a lot not having the financial capabilities to get on the networks sooner though.
When I first arrived at the University, my interest was in not going in to Computer Science, as I really only liked the Amiga, ever-waning in it’s popularity. That and I wasn’t particularly interested in making Math a great thing in my life. However, I eventually did join the CS department after my first experiences learning code – it was so fun and liberating! Now I had some power over computers, I could write the software, and do things the way I hoped they could be. And, after all, the other computers weren’t so bad. The Unix systems at least seemed to work well enough.
Well, Math of course, is not my strong suit. A year or so ago I met Brad in the Allen cafeteria, and was shocked at his approach of being a Rhetoric major with a minor in CS! Gee … I’d always enjoyed writing for my own personal interest, much as I loathed research papers. And I did hit the 99% percentile on the ACT for “Rhetoric” – whatever that was, I had not known at the time. And come to think of it, hadn’t I placed out of Rhet 105 three different ways?
The next week, I proudly made the switch.
The Internet continues to play a very big part in my life. My web site grows slowly every week. I keep my diary on-line for others to read. I write CGI applications. I’m a hard-core Unix geek, administering two of my own systems, writing my HTML and perl scripts in vi, wowwing friends with afterstep. I work for the networking group at NCSA, for the CSIL as a labsitter, and worked last summer at an ISP in Chicago called EnterAct, where I may very well return this summer.
I now use only Unix, and my old Amiga systems from time to time out of nostalgia and respect for history. I own two Unix boxen, four Amiga systems, and the old Commodore 64. While most of these are antiques, I still lend some systems out to others from time to time to facilitate their computing needs.
My fanatical Unix snobbery does mean that I know very little about Windows 95 or Mac. Because I have good computer karma, I still tend to negotiate such systems better than the average Joe, but I’m by no means a wiz. Instead I enjoy spending my time tinkering with completely open systems like FreeBSD. I am proud and inspired by the idea that there are now several very competent Operating Systems available even for normal users that are built and maintained entirely by volunteer effort. It is my goal to continue to learn and ultimately contribute to this effort as I can.
I hate Windows though. I find Microsoft’s philosophy of “Might Makes Right” peculiarly offensive. It seems a holy war between the dark forces of greed and the efforts of people writing useful stuff for free. I’m proud to say that not one byte of Microsoft code has ever run on any system that I own. In order to push this idea of independence I am even now writing a school paper in the archaic language of troff through vim, sending the job to the Dorm’s NT print server through lpr.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/01/23/brittle-fries-and-free-source/
The snow was falling very prettily as I walked home this evening from buying soap, deodorant and washcloths at Walgreens.
My mind is blank right now. Maybe I should read History. History set me asleep today. Foul portents.
Dinner tonight included chicken tenders and french fries. They’ve got the funky new lard-enriched fries like at Burger King. I’m not eating fries any more. I mean, I like a fry that’s not limp, but not brittle either. Yuck! I prefer limp to brittle but Americans seem good at settling for second best.
Ai!
There was a long line throughout dinner, people waiting on their fried foods. The cook came out and said that they only had two “fry-o-laters” with which to make the chicken and french fries, and so that we should all send email to the powers that be to get them newer, better, or more “fry-o-laters”
Whatever that thing is.
Oh, coolest news of the day: Netscape is releasing their source code!
Means two very important things to me. The first is that we can get the bugs outta Netscape and make it the way we want, adding customizability and porting it among platforms. It also means that Microsoft’s competitor is about to enroll tens of thousands of hackers throughout the world in it’s effort – people who work for free! If you’re gonna give your product away for free, you might as well have the community develop it for free. Linux and FreeBSD demonstrate that this philosophy actually produces a pretty damned fine product.
Or, even looking at things from the point of view of desperation, if the man is gonna run you down, you can do a lot worse than just giving the technology away and thus give the victor a rather hollow victory .. because now even if Netscape will be going out of business, there will still be a competing product out there. Makes me feel right patriotic to the freeware movement.
And grateful to Netscape for giving the community it’s hard-won gift in it’s totality.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/01/15/compaq/
Mom’s buying a new computer. A Compaq. My single greatest misgiving is that the memory system on there seems very non-standard, and despite Compaq’s promise of ass-kicking performance, I’m wary of it’s limitation of 48M of RAM, in an apparently proprietary format. But then, mom’s not much of a power user, the price was damn right, and in the worst case it’s not hard to replace a motherboard. She bought the system mail-order from Milwaukee, WI. No sales tax that way.
I payed bills today, and am now broke. Maybe I shouldn’t buy that harddrive I wanna get off Inspector’s Gadgets when I get back to town? I thought today that the beauty of credit cards is that you can spend money that you have not yet earned. Well, I know I’m in line for the money, about $300 or so … it seems kind of extravagant but I’m telling myself the most important use is supplying stumpy with enough space that it can keep a directory of FreeBSD source code and track -stable or maybe even -current if I feel bold. With source in hand, I can learn a bit more how the system works you see?
I can also amass more mp3s.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1998/01/15/technicalities/
Grandma is now online, dialing in to EnterAct with a term program called “Black Night” and reading her email with pine. “But ‘q’ is what I type to start Quick Mail at work!” It will take her awhile to get the hang of things through a shell. Luckily I have her password and stuff so I can wander in and set things up for her when need be.
As we were leaving her work at the University of Chicago, I remarked that this was the second occasion I had to be on a college campus during my vacation. The nice thing about college campuses being, imho, a good number of attractive women my age. I wasn’t particularly revelrous, if that is even a word, recalling my earlier occasion to be at Northwestern to attend a memorial service for Marcus Marinho, an EnterActer.
I knew Marcus very little, but he seemed like a good guy. This was affirmed over and over again as friends of his spoke of his good nature, his helpful attitude toward things. I didn’t feel such a loss, except for the fact that I don’t get a chance to know him. His comrades felt a very deep loss, which I could only barely grasp, I think. After all, he was a great guy, and what’s most jarring perhaps, was that he was young, and the fateful car crash in California that took his life was something people don’t normally expect from someone in their twenties.
And among the number of his comrades was most of EnterAct, which closed for the day so everyone could attend. I could tell that they were each grieved in some way, but they seemed to be taking things pretty well. I liked the chance to get together with all of them. We went out to a restaurant in Evanston, and sat together, seventeen people at a table, like a great extended family, and I a cousin come to visit from afar. I knew most of the people there, but some were new faces. I felt comfortable with everybody. It was nice to see Mike, Elyse, Tracy, Jim, Jess, Juan, Charlie and the others. I’m even more interested in working there now, having been reminded of what a good group there is that I could so easily be a part of.
I just sent Tracy my resume. Mike said they need people in the Network Operations Center.
Of course, if they find out that due to a brain fart I typed rm /etc/* the other day they might try to keep me away from the Unix systems. Moshen was helpful in my crisis when he told me that he had once accidentally nuked /etc himself on his own system.
For the unenlightened, that command kills off the important system configuration files. That kills a system, basically, if you don’t know what you’re doing. Luckily I’m half competent enough to have pulled my shit out of the fire even without backups to fall back on. As backups go though, I was lucky to have sasquatch at my disposal, and doubly lucky that it’s running the same, or near-same version of FreeBSD as stumpy here.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/10/10/cisco/
Last night I went to a company presentation for Cisco Systems – the “Microsoft of the Internet” – an analogy which I am uncomfortable with as Cisco products don’t yet suck. In fact, I’m pretty fond of Cisco and am impressed with its energy. It’s a place I might consider to work at, though I’m a bit wary of living in Silicon Valley, if my understanding of California Suburban Sprawl is true. San Francisco, an hour away, might offer a nice home though.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/07/13/political-pot-pourri/
(Watch out, rant coming forth!)
I met a cool freak yesterday at the Union lab. You see why I like labs? We’re both here now. He’s a self-educated computer geek, and a writing studies sort. You see his web page he’s working on a collaborative writing CGI. I was walking past and saw Perl code, did a double-take, and we started talking.
Well, that’s nice. Yesterday was an errand-running day. I returned library books, renewing one by Frederick Pohl that I haven’t finished with. Then I took the bus out to Jewel, spending nearly $40 on groceries, which is more than I’d wanted to spend, but I made a really good haul, so I can’t complain. I’ll be eating well. I bought lunchmeats, cheese, and romaine lettuce for lunchtimes. I’ve settled on purchasing milk, eggs and bread at local convenience stores though. Perishables I go through quickly see? Anyways, I didn’t skimp on ingredients. The cheese is sliced deli cheese, cheddar and swiss. The romaine lettuce don’t seem so cheap either. I also stocked in some Peanut Butter and Jelly, the old standby.
What else? Some Turkey dogs for Mac & Cheese, some spaghetti sauce, and garlic bread … mm! That’s gonna be good. I picked up some Matt’s Fig Newtons as I like Fig Newtons. They seemed right tasty. I made a rule for myself though that I shall only buy one package of cookies per shopping trip. Their expensive and spoil my appetite for a real meal if I’m reckless. Ah well.
Ran into Mary and Phil, we did a little bowling. I caught sight of Asao there and it messed with my game some. I still missed her. Still haven’t figured her out either. Well, managed to get it off my mind pretty well. She seemed to be enjoying her self pretty much. Hard to tell, of course as I didn’t approach her and she tends not to be too expressive.
So, I been thinkin’ you know … about the American electoral process. It sucks you know? You can run out of money, and have to withdraw from an election. That means that to be elected to public office you have to curry favor with the monied interests, and that’s not representative. That and ya got all these lamers who refuse to vote because they just don’t see any point to it. Whoever wins, the results will be pretty much the same, since the Democrats act like lame wannabe Republicans, or so it sometimes seems. Just this morning I heard that the White House put out some document on their thoughts on the Internet, and it was concerned mainly with how commerce could take place, not so much with the human potential the thing offers. As well, old man Clinton was supposedly defending the Communications Decency Act … sheesh!
I remember in PoliSci 150 with Joe Miller. He talked to us some about Proportional Representation, the idea that instead of winner-take-all you kinda break the political spoils down into a certain number of representatives per party depending on what percentage of the vote they got. Each party could have a list of candidates they’d send, and however many the election entitled them to, that’s how many of that list they’d send to office.
I proposed in class that perhaps any state willing to try could easily enact a scheme like this with their House representatives. Say, Illinois has 30 folks or however many they send to the House of Representatives, but instead of picking those by district, they just throw them all in a big ol’ PR pot and depending what percentage of the state vote their party gets, that’s how many get sent to Washington. Joe got all upset about this it seemed saying that it would be bad for people to not be represented geographically, but the way I see it, it’s more what your ideology is, isn’t it? Especially if you’re an obscure “radical” like Joe.
Anyways, if yer worried about rural representation, then a major party would have to represent itself to rural constituencies for fear that they might lose that constituency to another, possibly third party. This would alleviate voter angst somewhat, I’d think, because partys could fill niche rolls for different ideologies and interests. Staunch environmentalists could vote green, say. Farmers could vote for Farm-interest parties. When you get to Washington then the special interests are more clearly marked based on the popular constituencies, and less on PAC or corporate monies. At least, that’s what I’d hope. To be a successful major party then, one would need to develop a platform that appeals in some rational manner to a wide array of newly-awakened popular political interests.
Well, no-one said I was ever an expert.
Another time, I believe, it was proposed that with technology and all, direct participatory democracy could be achieved. Well, we run into the problems of “mobocracy” and the fact that it take a lot of work to run a government. Well, I’d think to take PR to it’s logical extreme conclusion then, which I would think would be proxy democracy.
See, take mom for example. I’m a politics geek moreso than she is. she has better things to do. Sometimes she’s consulted with me on ways to vote, you know, which candidate? Well, why bother with that, when she could say, just give me or someone else whose judgment she respects proxy power over her single vote? This would maybe work again in a forum like a House of Representatives where at least there you are in theory representing the individual voices of several Americans. I could in turn assign my proxy to another proxy broker or whatever, who I can consult with on his decisions, which might in turn be selecting another broker, or direct representative perhaps. See, this way people have much more encouragement to be involved in the system. Anyone could be their proxy, so it comes more instead of deciding between two bozos more of deciding who your ideal candidate might be .. like shopping for a car. By assigning your proxy to someone you’re stating that you feel confident in the decisions they might make. It’s a far more personal fit than a normal election, so you put more effort, more political awareness and activity, in to making the right choice. At least, one would hope.
In theory, you could then perhaps have several multitudes of representatives – small proxy holders. Well, it might get a bit crowded to implement. Of course, tele-whatever could be used for such folks to discuss the fate of their government, and act accordingly. But if you wanted to be more old-fashioned, you could make a cut-off, say … only the top 38 or whatever number of representatives you want get to go to Congress, with each of those representatives having their votes weighed in proportion to the number of voters they represent, the number of proxies they hold. Proxy holders who don’t have enough votes to make it to Congress have to select their most favored representative to assign their proxies to.
This might confuse the hell out of Corporate America, and other monetary contributers, as the system is very populist, a potential nightmare though, to implement! Imagine the paperwork.
But we don’t have to do this zaniness based on election cycle, eh? You know how a corporation works? Who owns the most stock controls the company, or who owns a significant proportion may sit on the board of directors? Well, say some fool starts making bad decisions, he starts losing his proxies. He makes enough bad decisions he’s outta office. The real power then, gets kinda defused in the larger intermediate proxy brokers who have much control over whether a candidate stays in office.
This also distributes the load of a representatives job. They’re responsible directly to a smaller group of proxy holders who trust them to be doing the job right. They can explain their decisions to this perhaps smallish group, and consult with these “wizened” leaders or whatever, who can in turn come around and address their proxy holders as to why the representative is making the calls he makes. Mr. Representative doesn’t have to commute so much to his district to be in touch with voters, his proxy holders give him the poop. And if they start acting too elitist or anything, of course they start losing their powers.
Fraud becomes much easier though. But then, perhaps, less likely, at least at higher levels, where you have a public trust that the media would be very interested in investigating, no?
Eh, I’m wacko.
NOTE – 19 February, 2002: I’m not the only wacko. And some folks take their own ideas more seriously. If this idea strikes your fancy at all, check out http://www.directrep.org/.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/04/07/enter-ncsa/
Dannyman starts at NCSA, among numerous other cool goings-on.
Yah, well after English today, where we had a good discussion about Quentin’s section in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” I wandered on over to ACB as scheduled and proceeded to start on my new job. I spliced my first patch cable today – that’s a 10 base-T connector used to hook a computer on to a network. I guess at least for now my workstation is a Macintosh, but with a little time I can make it useable, or hopefully “upgrade” to something better.
After that first lesson, we went over to ACB to lay some network cable for some Supercomputers that are being installed. Didn’t actually hook them up – I think that gets done sometime tomorrow. Those monsters are outrageous – something like 4G of RAM and some hundreds of Gigabytes of drive space. I saw a guy sliding a drive in to one of ’em, he told me it was a 9G Ultra-SCSI. There was a row in that machine of those. The memory, he told me, is installed in 256M SIMMs … and the machines come in pairs of units each with 32 CPUs. Neat! I wondered later what kind of memory cache those CPUs were treated to.
As I was helping place the cable under the floor – 100M fast Ethernet for now, to be augmented by 800M HIPPI cable later, I couldn’t help but flash over to the future sometime when Asao might be telling the grandkids something along the lines of “Back around the turn of the century, your Grandfather actually layed network cable for some of those ‘supercomputers’ they had at NCSA.” Who knows, maybe I’m a little over-psyched about playing a small part in a historical era. Someday though, I know these very same supercomputers that are so exotic today will seem quite quaint by the standards of a future modern day. I however, will be able to remember the old days when a computer with 32 CPUs or hundreds of gigabytes of storage would have been something to babble about.
After dinner, I got up to DCL where SIGNet conducted a tour of “Node 1” with Charley Kline. It’s an exciting place where cable of all kinds run thick. I understood a good deal, a lot of it was kinda mystical to me. Basically Node 1 is a little bunker where a great many of the Campus’ telephone and telecommunications equipment is routed. Basically a significant part of the campus’ “nervous system” … fascinating. Unfortunately though I accidentally hit the hidden button in my camera that causes it to panic and rewind the film, so no pictures, sorry. Chris should have some on the digital, though to be sure it’s not that visually fascinating anyway.
I’m actually pretty excited about my paper for Rhet 143 for a change. I got a C+ on the last one, which I kind of blew off as a pretty gay assignment. This one though I’d hope for an A. It’ll be on the web too don’t worry, so I’ll not bother to talk about it much for now. Just like to say that I enjoyed “Peer Editing” this morning in class. Actually, I should tell the TA that much, I think it’d do much for her in terms of … whatever.
Speaking of spreading the word of knowledge, I got some most excellent and thoughtful words from Matt Malooly. I agree with him most whole-heartedly. Here is a dude who has much the same beliefs as my own, only he can express them in a more coherent manner. All things in equal opposition, I’ve also been talking with Casey about her Religion, and was even questioned most insightfully on my beliefs by roommate Pat, who is part of the Campus Organised Christian scene. I appreciated his questioning, as for the time his intent was not at all to convert me or anything, but to get a genuine perspective on my beliefs. I was heartening.
Well, I could babble on forever about what a wonderful time I’ve been having of late, how I relish the increasingly busy schedule I face. Well, hey an occasionally Nihilistic guy like myself has to keep hisself outta trouble ya know! But anyways you readers gotta like occasional
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/03/18/18-march-1997/
Yesterday is the day the hardware died. I’m going to make a personal holiday of it. Personal holidays off-hand;
| 18 Jan 1976 |
Birthday |
| 14 Feb 1997 |
Asao & Dan’s Anniversary |
| — Mar 19– |
Jessie’s Birthday |
| 17 Mar 1997 |
Hardware Failure Day |
| 17 Apr |
Ex-Girlfriend Day (Jeong and Linda’s Birthdays!) |
| 4 Jul 1776 |
Independence Day |
| — Aug 19– |
Asao’s Birthday |
| — Aug 19– |
Mom’s Birthday |
| 25 Dec |
Christmas |
Well, among all those hard-hitters, I dunno whether Hardware Failure Day can really catch on. Lemme tell ya what happened.
So like 2:45AM I drop by my room and check on my pine session running on at sasquatch. Two new messages. Oooh, I hit return to read them, and get a message from pine saying that a very serious disk error was afoot, the sort you talk to your administrator about. A disk error of “type 5” and that’s the last I hear.
Well, after some jostling about, dashing an email here and there, I hear from Tom;
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 05:04:52 -0600 (CST)
From: “Thomas H. P—–” <t—-@enteract.com>
To: Dannyman <dannyman@enteract.com>
Subject: Re: *please* dannyland.org FRIED!
[…]
Your machine is making extremely weird loud grinding noises.
I checked all the patch cables and reset the box. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
—————-
Thomas P—— at EnterAct, L.L.C., Chicago, IL [t—@enteract.com]
—————-
“If you’re so special, why aren’t you dead?”
Yeah, that’s like not good. I’ll be coming home for Spring Break on Friday though. The next morning I checked my Amiga’s shell prompt …
PING sasquatch.dannyland.org (206.54.252.251): 56 data bytes
--- sasquatch.dannyland.org ping statistics ---
34749 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
Guess I’m in the market for a new hard drive?
But hard drives fail all the time. Hell, this would be my third dead hard disk. Anyways so me and Asao were making out a bit after dinner, and I’d left my glasses on her bed, and we took turns sitting on them. People kissing aren’t so attentive about what they might be sitting on. The arms were bent upwards, and I bent them back just fine. But, well … fine tuning the left arm it broke off. Ouch! Now I have a one-armed eyeglass.
Now Asao’s pretty conscientious about where my glasses keep themselves. She seemed to feel bad about being involved in their untimely destruction. That’s okay though, I’d been wanting to replace the lenses any way, they’re scratched. The frames are obviously quite aged too. This pair has lasted me many years, a good strong piece of workmanship. I’m truly impressed and hope to find an identical frame.
Rachel was wearing stretch pants today with a floral pattern. I thought that rather attractive. But anyway the bigger thing is turns out Rachel’s a budding optician, and offered to mend the “temple” temporarily. If this half-cocked set-up doesn’t work out, I may take her up on that.
I’m thinking, I’ve got some month’s-old backups of my home directory, but this “crash” has taken a lot out of me spiritually .. maybe it’s time to start things over … namely, my web page? We’ll see. I’m glad I’ll have Spring Break to give me free-time for restoring things! About all that’s new so far is I’ve added a recently-written story on line. When it was reviewed in class it was well-received for the convincing tone and excellent detail. The readers were then let down all the more, it would seem, by the somewhat farcical ending. You can judge yourself though.
I’ve got work to do, so that’s all for now.
Feedback Welcome
« Newer Stuff
Site Archive
