the rock garden

The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an
"airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers while
seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference -- one can
see only a very few things at once.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.
I can relate, my iBook only does 800x600. Thanks for the quote, fortune :)

I wanted to thank Ozguru for linking to my poor little blog and for instantly solving my pet GLAT question while I struggled around out in left field like a ding dong. Thanks a lot. It doesn't matter, I'm still pursuing an alphabetic cipher solution :) Even though I don't think that's what the question writer had in mind. Hope you enjoyed the distraction Ozg :) Also Phil Pearson of bzero fame went in the same numeric solution direction instantly. Funny how people's brains are wired certain ways. Or we have predilections. I must have secretly been fascinated with the alphabetic stuff since reading Cryptonomicon *shrug*. Anyways, Ozg didn't post his idea to let the reader jump to their own conclusions. I was going to post his solution tonight, but I think I'll wait in the spirit of his post... Like anybody reads this anyway :) Ahh, vanity.

I do so enjoy stirring my own reckless meanderings into the primordial soup of the net. I got over being sick of myself long ago :) And I find myself actually having opinions as I get older. Today my boss was all wound up about the Fed being a private entity separate from the government, and said that 40% of all taxpayer dollars go to them to repay interest on the money that they mint and give to us in Deficit form. Cuck-oo, cuck-oo. I can tolerate having an uninteresting conversation about utter bullshit for so long, but I was just not in the mood today, first day back after a long weekend. I just had to politely look him in the eye and tell him I just flat didn't believe it, and it was not interesting to me in the least. I went through a wierd U.S. hating conspiracy theory phase years ago as an angry young man, I even read books on how democracy was taking our country to the toilet. I'm not sorry that I understand the different arguments, it was probably a backlash against my idyllic, stars and stripes childhood. I seriously wanted to go to law school and run for Senate when I was in high school democracy class. But now I'm full circle and am not interested in getting worked up about something that is utterly futile to get worked up about. Besides, my futility muscle is the strongest in my body. I do my daily futility exercises from 8:30 to 5.

I could go on rambling, I have been reading the newest Hunter S. Thompson, I should have warned you, "Kingdom of Fear". I have read all of his newer books, all of his Rolling Stone articles after about 1990, and... OK, probably all but two of his books. He doesn't ramble as badly as I do, and when he makes a point, it is MADE. He also has a command of prepositions and adjectives that I do not. King-hell and shit-rain. Sprayed with shit-mist. He called Christians rats running from a swoop fire. I am at a point in my life where I can't totally buy into his opinion that the new millenium is all downhill, after the '90s were the "No Fun Decade". But I get his point. The internet used to be fun, I imagine dating was fun in the '80s before AIDS, and could our advertising fueled economy possibly make our society any more commercialized? Blech, I have sugar shock. But I have learned to enjoy some things, and I have busted out of some ruts in my life. I am divorced, and I am a student, I used to be a gigging semi-pro guitarist, I used to be a salesman, I was poor, then not so poor, and now am poor again. I feel excited and liberated and scared. Nothing is definite. Whatever. C'est la vie. I've played it safe and I didn't like it. I'm going to do what I want to do. But I digress.

I am having trouble reading computer magazines anymore. I don't know if it's age, I honestly don't think so. I love reading Dvorak nuking tech products in PC Magazine, and technologies. A little spin busting, Dios mio. His tv show on TechTV was the greatest, like the Dennis Miller Show of old. A voice crying in the wilderness. Show me an article that isn't a gushing, ass-kissing "review" of some new product, patented technology, or "next-level" idea. People that write those things should kill themselves. Yes, I mean it. You are somewhere below plankton on the food chain. This message is for you, hee hee, do yourself in. Enjoy.

But things have taken an uncomfortable turn, my message has become heavy, Bubba. It's easy to shift into Hunter mode, but I can't pull it off :)

I haven't ranted for a long time, it feels nice. I would like to bring back my old blog content, which was basically all of my rants from around the Web. I will have to find them. Tobacco is calling my name, all of those luxurious tars and resins :) How was your day at work dear? Well, I shot Mr. Bumpus in the head, made violent love to Miss Tinsdale, and burned 400 copies of "Little Women today, my Dear. You have to love "The Seven Year Itch".

Like my title? I stole it. Fortune is working on the iBook now :) Except that I can't seem to get the stupid shell to accept my path changes! Grr. I know at one point it did. Also, apt-get did not complete for some reason (I'm talking OS X), I had to use fink Commander. Since I got wireless I've only been using OS X. I was thinking of trying Mandrake 10.1 PPC, since Yellowdog won't release for download their release candidates. Why would a Linux company do that? Don't want good testing of their prerelease versions? Doesn't Linux mean release early and often? Stupid. Debian and Red Hat allow you to update from the tree constantly, as well as the BSDs. Shit, I think OpenDarwin or whatever the development version for OS X allows CVS access. Yellowdog is a Fedora build for PPC, which is really what I think I would like. I'm loving Fedora at work. The scripts have finally gotten past the point of being complicated and somewhat broken to just complicated. But large amounts of automation requires complexity, or maybe I'm getting old and lazy. I no longer relish installing a system and only having vi and csh installed. Would you rather run redhat-config-printers or try to untangle lpd and ghostscript? I'd rather slam my nuts in a drawer on purpose than ever beat on lpd again. Printing is something I took for granted, even after only using Windows for about two years before switching to Linux. Yeah, I used DOS until 1998, and Windows until 2000 or 2001. But setting up printing in Slackware or OpenBSD will make you appreciate the complexity. There's a reason Unix was originally pretty much a dedicated typesetting and printing system, computer science development aside. Printing is a complicated land. Red Hat does it well, and so does OS X.