the rock garden

Oh yeah.
Apparently the Columbus Museum of Art has always had a kick ass collection of impressionists. Lived here my whole life; never knew. I'm 33. Feel like a doof.

So, I first went through this art deco display of Ohio artists, from the period. Excellent. My girlfriend is doing the pottery thing now, so I have some clue as to what it takes to make some of the clay pieces. Very nice.

Then a large visiting showing of a Chicago photographer, mostly known for his work in the '60s. He used some kind of 12" by 20" camera to get very wide aspect photographs. Amazing. I didn't realize that billboards were largely populated by whiskey ads in the '60s. I should have been born 20 or 30 years earlier.

So I'm relaxing into things, people were blocking displays and getting on my nerves at first.

Next up is the impressionist display. I pop out for a smoke, my girl goes on in. So I take to the first room solo. Some heavy oil paintings, thick paint with dark colors. I soak it in, but I'm looking around after a few minutes. I have a thing, I'm not knowledgable when it comes to art, but I don't like heavy coats of oil paint typically. It seems too heavy, and the globs of paint distract me from the painting. Plus having done my share of motorcycle, lawnmower, and car repair (I'm from Appalachia after all) oil doesn't have an artistic connotation for me. Silly hang-up I guess. So I sees a nice light oil painting across the room, and I think I might like it. As I approach it, I notice that there are very few heavy oil strokes. I soak it in for a few minutes, really sucked in. Then I take a look at the the sign beside it, "Claude Monet". First my heart starts beating and the clouds part, a religious experience, I realize it's a real Monet, almost a hundred years old. No glass, just me and Claude's canvas. Wow. Then I realize that it was the first one I liked. I must have been born with taste :)
Then I realize that other names are familiar. What a gas! Lots of art from french and german artists from pre-WWI. Okay, belgian, etcetera as well.

Without going on and on there were two Van Goghs. The dude was fucked up, but I love it. I kind of 'got' the big names, so maybe I 'get' art somewhat. Wonderful Sunday.

School is going pretty kick ass right now, I think I may have largely adjusted to my new environment. I've been there almost a year now, and it has gone very quickly. Must suit me.

Posting from my server still, seems to be working out. The iBook is now running OSX, OpenBSD, and Fedora. Fedora has a learning curve after being away from it. It's a different animal. Maybe Debian and OpenBSD are what I should stick to for serious Unix work. But I'll probably keep playing with Fedora. It will take some work to get wireless going. I can't find xorgcfg to get X going. Sigh. Maybe I will try to install again.

Earlier I tried to get to get a full blown workstation install of Fedora, and it crapped out, couldn't find a package. So this time I did the absolute minimum install. It worked, and I set up yum, but I am really kind of stuck until I at least get X going. If I had let the installer do the work for me, I know life would be much easier. But why does it have to be so freakin complicated? Debian is fairly easy to get X going on, although some of the scripting backend stuff kicks me in the nuts sometimes. With OpenBSD you just do what you want, and there are no surprises. Sometimes I like surprises. Sometimes surprises make me want to kill something.

Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint.
                -- Mark Twain

Gotta love the Twain.

I'm finishing "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson. Saturday was a hide from the world and read day, quite pleasant. His main character ordered spicy chicken with black bean sauce. Now I am a chinese food connoisseur, or at least I eat a lot of it, with chopsticks no less. but I had never tried black bean sauce. Maybe my favorite chinese dish! I like the darker sauces anyway, this was great. And I like lots of chilis. My man Neil knows his stuff.

I've reread Cryptonomicon at least once, if you haven't read it, give yourself a few months of lunch hours, you will love the journey. He has a very fresh style, but has a lot of respect for hackers and is a technophile and hobbyist programmer. He was a mainframe person, then a Mac person, then a Linux and BEOS person, and now an OS X person. He are a hacker. And a damn smart person, who like a lot of writers has had lots of careers, and is well rounded and grounded. He has a good voice.

Watch out for those health books, he says as he sleeps the laptop and grabs a cig...