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A bit of perfume always clings to the hand that gives the rose. -Chinese proverb

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As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
-William O. Douglas, judge (1898-1980)
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Normally I would not comment as this quote pretty much says it all, but I feel that our country is in this twilight now. And, just as the human eye can play tricks on its owner when the light is low, so too can the human mind when the information it is given is dark and menacing.

Busy week

I must have had fun. I don't remember most of it. ;-)

Monday, other than getting a very cool video card and spending an inordinate amount of time installing it, I also had a Taekwondo demon straitening. :-p Okay, so it was a demonstration but it had a large number of demons in small-children suits running around so I thought perhaps the first one was more accurate. Actually, they were fairly well behaved which says something considering these kids are in summer school. In fact, the second group was very lethargic all things considered. Fortunately, the first and third groups made up for it. We were only supposed to have two groups but just as the second group was leaving, a third group came in and virtually begged us to do another set. They were supposed to be in with the second group but did not receive the information in a timely manner. This just goes to show that the public schools don't communicate internally any better than the colleges or the sub-departments therein.

On Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, I had the misfortune to be nibbled upon by some form of arachnid. The little blighter chomped on my face about three quarters of an inch outside of my left eye. I did not wake up when "he" did this but in the morning, I looked like someone had belted me in the face. Now the swelling has gone down but I still have a hard lump under the skin about half an inch in diameter. For a while there I was in danger of losing sight in my left eye from it swelling shut. Thankfully that never happened. I feel somewhat betrayed. After all, I always try to avoid stepping on them and when found in the house, I will defend them from cat and room-mate alike until I can safely transport them outside. *shrug* Oh well. I may have rolled onto this one, but if I did, I don't think I killed it as there was no corpse in bed with me when I woke up.

I'm not sure what caused it, but Wednesday night (okay, Thursday morning, really) I was actually able to sit down and write. It wasn't this chronological drivel that I spew from time to time but rather it was actual free-flowing prose. It wasn't good but it has been a long time since I could sit down and write like that. Hmm. I think it's coming up on two years. Yes, it does coincide with my relational problems with my ex, the break up and eventual divorce. Go figure. :-p It would be truly nice if I could start writing again like I used to do. The stories were sometimes a lot of fun.

Well, me thinks that is all for now. Take care, all.

Video Card cometh

I purchase a refurbished ATI Radeon 9200 late last week and was delighted when it arrived today a day earlier than FedEx said it would. The physical installation went very well but the software was another story. I tried several times with different variations on order of installation but the device still had problems. The most notable problem was a series of lines in a block around the cursor. This didn't show up when using the default Windows driver but showed up as soon as I logged in while using ATI's latest driver. As it turned out, I had too many previous installations from previous video cards. Once I found a way to remove those old installations, I was able to reinstall and after one false start, it finished perfectly. I am pleased and look forward to utilizing this video card's capabilities.

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Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. -Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, editor and orator (1817-1895)

Speed punch.

I foolishly (?) executed a speed punch through a 1 inch pine board equivalent this evening. Unfortunately, my first punch wasn't fast enough so I ended up damaging my hand. *shrug* Oh well. I'll know better for next time. I just wish I had a picture or video of the occurrence. I'd like to study the form of my punch as well as the reaction of the board, other than breaking. Did it bend around my hand first or did it just separate at the seams? It must be time to invest in a digital video camera. ;)

In other news, my cat seems to be doing fairly well (knock on wood). He's not as "regular" as I'd like, but everything has been making it in the litter box, anyway. At the moment, he's snoozing on a small pile of unsorted papers on my desk. When he wishes, he can be extremely cute. :)

This morning, one of my roommates left for a two week trip. This is both good and bad. In theory, I will be able to accomplish a few things while this friend is elsewhere. Alas, I am now down to one roommate, thus the house is somewhat more lonely, too. *shrug* Oh well. It could be far worse on all fronts. I think I'll do my best to enjoy what is.

StarGate Atlantis premiered this evening here. This show has some serious potential as an excellent SciFi/Fantasy entertainer. I've watched a good share of the original StarGate and found the show to usually be very good. Some of them were a little fluffy for my tastes. In many cases, the SG teams were severely under powered for what they were confronting. In this one, rocket launchers are more readily used with positive effect. :) I do have a few issues as far as the "alien" races being fluent in the English tongue. After all, in the first series, they needed Dr. Jackson to translate most of the texts and a good share of the conversations, as well. In this one, everyone speaks English. :p Oh well. This one appears to be more Fantasy and less Science. Never-the-less, I still enjoyed it immensely and eagerly await the next installment. Oh, and I want one of the Atlantian ships. *heh heh heh*

I'm sure there was something else I was going to post about, but since I'm sleepy and somewhat forgetful at the moment, I think I'll finish this one and try to find out why my blog-posting interface has changed for the better. May you always get what is best for you.

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Revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst. -Walter Weckler

Unproductive

...an accurate description of my work day today. It wasn't that I didn't do anything, rather I just kept getting interrupted with "little" projects and I was never able to get back to a primary task. *sigh* Oh well. More tomorrow with the joy of looking forward to a fun-filled meeting.

Summer continues

Other than a lack of sleep, all is going well at the moment. The air is warm, the skies are blue (black, actually, since it's currently night) and I feel pretty good about just about everything. Sure, there are plenty of things that could be better but they're getting there. I am truly grateful for what I have, what has been given me and what I have created in my own life. I am happy. May I be granted the grace to continue this feeling. Blessed be.

Beautiful weekend

I have to admit ladies and gents, I had a very nice weekend. Saturday, after a bit (okay, a lot) of shopping at Sam's Club, I got together with some friends for video games, dinner, badminton and bowling. I even tried my hand at Para Para (pun intended). Mind you, the bowling alley blew goats with their vile shoes with wax covered soles, their extortionist's prices and their irritating disco-like lighting. We only stayed for one game because the lights were screwing up everyone's game and were giving several people in the party a headache. The smoke wasn't overly helpful either, but that's to be expected. The rest of the evening was spent with video game controller in hand and good friend's conversation in the ears. It was truly nice.

In other news, I think I may have found out what's wrong with my cat. For about a year or so now, he's been having some trouble correctly using the litter box for defecation purposes. I finally got him into the vet on Friday and after describing the symptoms and agreeing to an x-ray, the vet thinks he has something called Mega-Colon. Basically, it's a condition where the inside is bigger than the exit. This causes the cat to associate pain with using the litter box and thus they go elsewhere. Depending on severity, it is treatable. I'm still waiting to find out how severe this case is. Here's hoping it's a light one.

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If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom. -Dwight D.
Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

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A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
-Alexander Pope, poet (1688-1744)

A cup of tea...

a comfy couch and an episode of M*A*S*H.

This was an enjoyable evening even if I did sleep through an hour or so of it on the couch and considering I woke up this morning and felt like someone had thrown me off a four story building into wet concrete, I consider the evening to be even better. Hold the moments, good or bad, hold those instants in your heart, each breath, unlabored, each mouthful of food, delicious, savor them all and rejoice for you are alive.

(yeah, yeah, yeah, how long will that take?)

(There have been a couple of students with whom I would have liked to execute the above sequence. :D )

Coding went well today for a change. I actually felt somewhat less inept. If I can actually stay focused on a project, it usually goes fairly well. It's just the multitude of distractions (usually support questions) that keep me hopping from one project to another.

In other news, the lurking felis, exiled from the diddie.

The celebration of July 4th is imminent here in the states. Fireworks are being gathered and set-off as a pre-cursor to the big day. Travel plans have been made and many have already left for their intended destinations. But, to be honest, I don't feel the patriotism. I just read through The Declaration of Independence and I found an amazing number of similarities between King George III and our current leader, "George". Apparently, I'm not the first person to draw this conclusion, either. If I had time, I'd go through them but there are too many to list. I wonder if the name has something to do with it. As I recall, the last "George" we had in office wasn't much better.

Here's one last link. Warning: This lovely little song by Eric Idle contains "strong" language. ;-)

On that note, I think bed is calling.

Full moon

Oh holy crap.

I went into work today and discovered that the processor in my computer was running just a little warmer than it should. A co-worker suggested I replace the fan and heat-sink and since he had the parts handy, I took him up on the offer.

The first processor fan took a while to install correctly. The fan was bigger than the one I removed so everything had a slightly tighter squeeze to it. Unfortunately, thu fan was also a lot slower and actually cooled the processor less than the previous fan. After trying various configurations and finding them all unacceptable, I switched to a larger, variable speed fan and heat-sink combo. This monster was even bigger than the last one and required me to not only modify the thumb-tab on the heat-sink so that it would actually stay latched on to the processor socket but also required me to remove the power supply in my mid-tower case just to finish the install. The whole process was enormously frustrating. Fortunately, my computer is running again (while using the second fan, my computer would turn itself off shortly after power up) and cooler than ever. I'm not saying it was the best 3 hours I've spent, considering the job should have taken me about 15 minutes or so, but at least it is done.

Writing up this little tale doesn't really capture the essence of the experience. It seemed that at every turn, something else stood in my way to completing this task. Every time I tried something different, the problem was either the same or worse. It seemed that the hardware was conspiring against me or that Someone was testing my patience. Well, I half passed. I didn't break anything but I certainly cursed a blue-streak five times over.

I read an acquaintance's blog on my lunch break and noted that she, too, was having a rather bad time of it today. The "coincidence" made me wonder what was going on. Then, on the way home, I noted the full moon rising over the smog and wondered if that could be playing havoc with things. It has oft been noted that both people and animals act oddly during the full moon (or in my case, more oddly). So, was it simply me being less patient with things or were the things acting oddly, too?

It's really a rather interesting thought: What if every THING had awareness to some degree? What if your toaster decided that you weren't cleaning it enough and decided to burn your toast one morning and then give you soggy bread the next? What if your hair brush hid itself or your stereo would play nothing but polkas? What if your car would only make left turns during rush-hour or your computer had this nasty habit of popping up porn just as the boss walked in? What if your vacuum cleaner insisted on chewing on its own cord or the air conditioning unit blew 150 degree air until the repair person arrived at which point it immediately switched and blew air cold enough to freeze flame? Well, I think some of this was covered in The Brave Little Toaster (not the porn part) but the rest is briefly interesting, at least to me. Personally, I think it has a lot more to do with the attitude that one has at the moment. For example, the above tale of my heat-sink woes continued to get worse and worse up until the point where I realized what was going on and laughed at the ludicrousness of the situation. At that point, several more irritating things did occur, but I laughed at them instead of letting myself get angrier. It was absolutely stupid the number of times I tried to put on that last heat-sink and then had to remove it, wipe up the heat-sink goo, re-apply the heat-sink goo and start again but after about the third or fourth snort of laughter, everything started going right again. The processor fan and heat-sink finally slid into place with a satisfying click, the power supply squeezed back into the right spot and the computer booted and returned to the land of the living. If I could have acquired that attitude an hour earlier, I might have saved myself an hour of dicking around, but then again, maybe not. *shrug* In either case, hopefully tomorrow will be better for everyone concerned. :-)

Family is ...

If you know me and my family, you will know that we are odd ducks in this society. My family keeps to themselves for the most part. They like it that way, or so it seems. I "liked" it that way, too, until I was about 16 when I realized that there was a whole world out there that I was missing. Ah, but that's another story.

My grandmother called me this evening and even though I don't think she meant to, I detected luggage being packed for the proverbial guilt trip. My family (mother's side) gets together for anything and everything. Family is the social outlet. For most of the family, there isn't another. So, we get together for every birthday, every anniversary (there are getting to be fewer of those considering most of the group is divorced at least once) every major holiday (whether we practice that religion or not) and many minor holidays. Well, this 4th of July, I'm not available damn it. I'm spending most of the day with my father and then the evening with some friends. It is my father's birthday, after all.

Family is important. Family can be very important, but they are only a part of the equation. Family <> 1. Family may = 0.95 but unless you have a very diverse family, I wouldn't recommend it. My family used to = 1 for me. Now they equal ~0.60 and some of the family members don't seem to like the demotion. What they don't understand is that you can only learn so much from your own tribe. In order to become a better person, it's a good idea to incorporate other tribes in the mix. If you don't, you tend to get a very one-sided view of life. You may be able to perpetuate the "good" of the tribe, but you don't get the chance to incorporate other tribes' "good", too.

So where am I going with this? Ah, who knows? I'm probably just trying to come up with a good reason to break tribal law this next weekend. That, or I'm trying to say that you need friends, too. After all, they hang around because they like you. Your family is obligated to hang around, at least to some degree.

Enjoy your life, if you can.