MicroNaNo 2: Wayfaring Stranger

I am, and always will be, strange.

It’s not my looks, and it’s not my reputation, for I have neither. It’s not my mannerisms, for those are always perfect.

And yet, I am always strange, and always alone. Always.

---

I head into this new town — no, “Sheydin” is its name. Must remember that. I look around, unable to keep my optimism at bay. One young fellow waves at me, grinning impishly. This one — he is the apprentice. I catch him and ruffle his hair. He squirms free, tugging at my backpack. I swat his hand, and he runs off. The little rascal, I must remember to think of him as The little rascal.

I head to his — no, my home. I kiss - my wife, and she laughs at me, swatting me with her apron. I must remember now, for the wife always seems to be the first to suspect.

“Ma’dear! How’s ya’un the kids!”

I haven’t got the tone quite right, I can tell. Was it the gruffness? Yes, he wasn’t that gruff. I file through my thoughts and — she’s looking at me oddly. Oh no. Sweet Gods, don’t let it happen this soon! At least give me a single blessed week!

I scoop her up, and laugh boomingly, trying to make light of it. She buys it, laughs along, and jumps off and returns to her cooking. I sigh inaudibly and head upstairs, dropping off my backpack.

A novelty coin drops out, out of the pocket The little rascal’d opened. I pay it no mind and head upstairs. The boy screams “Dada!” and leaps into my arms. I spin him around once, and let him go, and he immediately runs downstairs. This is normal, I think — the kid’s getting a treat from his mother now.

I sit down on my bed — heavily, of course, this one seems incapable of anything else. The kid squeals from downstairs, and his mother’s voice filters up. I grin. I think I’m going to like living around that bundle of energy.

---

Moon’s Day, things went awry. I should have picked up the signs earlier, but I was careless. Happy.

I headed for the blacksmith’s, where he had worked. The little rascal was there, glaring at me. I didn’t know why. I tried to cheer him up, but he deliberately reached into the same pocket of my pack. I swatted at his hand, almost reflexively, and he leapt back as from a flame. I filed it away, but thought nothing of it.

The following day, The little rascal took his leave, to go hunting in the woods with some men. I’d have loved to go, but he wouldn’t have, so I worked away at the anvil and then headed home to my beautiful family.

It is that night. I wake up to see my wife, sobbing, attempting to smother me. Crying “Changeling”. They must’ve found the body — the rascal knew. I quickly shift to an agile form and leap out the window, marking Sheydin off my list.

---

I’m always strange, I said. Always found strange. Always run out when I try to be less alone.

Ah well. I look at the lights of the new city, licking a wolf bone. Bravik, maybe you’ll have me.

MicroNaNo 1: Transience

I am sitting. I am sitting on my couch and watching her, my baby girl. I watch her shakily rise, holding onto the appropriately ruggedised surface of the table, and suddenly become tremendously interested in the remote.

She grasps for it, and accidentally turns the tv on. This suprises her; she turns to see what has happened and falls. I’ve dived for her, but it’s too late. She doesn’t seem to notice — she’s looking wide-eyed, from the moving pictures to the plastic buttons in her hands, making the connection between the two. She giggles her charming adorable beautiful little giggle, and tries pressing another button. This one changes the channel, and she looks on in awe.

I gently reach over and grasp her, and bring her into my lap. I think she may be ignoring me, as she still hasn’t given a single sign that she knows I’m here. She presses another button, and this one turns the TV off.

I reach down to her and gently tease the remote out of her hands. She looks up at me, finally, and giggles. I smile down at her, and then lift her up and rub noses. She simply giggles and giggles, as if I’m the funniest thing she’s ever seen. That might even be true. When I pull away, her eyes gleam wickedly for a moment, and then she reaches over and grabs my nose.

I smile at her, and set her down. She lets go of my nose at the last possible second, and then immediately grabs the remote again. I try to tease it out of her hands, and she frowns and looks up at me sadly.

I stare into those sad eyes, into my sad little girl, and even as I release the remote some part of me is applauding her and cheering her on for learning what she can do this early.

I fall for it — of course I fall for it, and I know I will fall for it every single time for the years to follow. I let her have the remote. She immediately brightens up, giggles at me again, crawls out of my lap, and goes back to pressing the buttons. I smile back at her, but my heart aches. I know that this is just the beginning, that my beautiful little baby girl will grow up, and will do whatever she can to get whatever she wants. And I know that I will give it to her.

I reach over, grasp my giggling little girl, and envelope her by the waist and rest my head on hers. If that is to be, then let me spend some more time with her now. When all she wants is to play with the remote.

Rocket Man

(To the music of Rocket Man, by Elton John. I don’t claim to be a writer, so this is licensed under the GPLv2. Feel free to use, modify, and build upon this. Maybe we can get a proper tribute out of it.)

Is copyright still relevant? A discussion of change, new technology and an old idea.

(Note: this is part of a series of posts where I publish the essays I have had to write for the International Baccalaureate. I might as well get some mileage from them, right? See the index page for more details.)

For some reason this essay got a C. I still haven’t figured out why, and the IB doesn’t tell you.

This essay is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Here is a pdf, and source follows.

Mathematicians have the concept of rigorous proof, which leads to knowing something with complete certainty. Consider the extent to which complete certainty might be achievable in mathematics and at least one other area of knowledge.

(Note: this is part of a series of posts where I publish the essays I have had to write for the International Baccalaureate. I might as well get some mileage from them, right? See the index page for more details.)

This essay is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Here is a pdf, and source follows.

<rant>

I am angry today.

I am angry because today I have seen the culmination of something I have been dogged with ever since I learned to think rationally. I am also angry because I could have seen this before, but chose to placate myself instead, thinking “Oh, it can’t be that bad.”

I am angry because of an idea.

I have seen this idea in many different guises and forms in my life, from be courteous, have manners to if you can’t say something good, don’t say anything. It’s disguises and cloaks also include being wrong is bad, don’t speak until you are certain, and don’t question authority. A common masquerade is I am older than you, and thus I know more than you, and another common one is respect other people’s beliefs. I am angry that this idea has found its way into our vernacular, and currently goes by the name of politically correct speech.

What this idea boils down to, in all its forms, is don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t speak your mind, you may offend. Don’t try to change anything. Stick to the status quo.

I am angry because this is a horribly wrong, destructive and retarding idea. I am angry at the number of people that I respect who have succumbed to this idea, and I am angry that they are trying to force it upon those who disagree.

I am angry that people feel that change is bad purely because it causes a difference. I am angry that we, a species that prides itself on being intelligent, still have issues with avoiding stagnation.
I am angry that, as a culture, we still haven’t gone beyond the archaic trappings and imaginary friends of religion.

I am angry that a concept such as “social proof” even exists. I am also angry that I have caught myself succumbing to it.

I am going to attempt to combat this, as much as I can. I am going to adopt the motto Being wrong is not a bad thing, but feeling something is wrong and not speaking up terribly, horribly bad.

And no, I will not close that rant tag. I will only be closing it once I feel that this issue has been addressed.

It could be a while.

The Devices-Internet Rule

Some updates to HAL and/or dbus were posted to feisty-backports yesterday. After updating my system, I tried to connect my iPod.

No can do. dmesg spouted some random error I didn’t look too closely at. I had school, so I turned off the machine and left.

Reboots do work wonders, including broken automounting, apparently, so everything is fine on that front. On the other hand, seeing about 50 bazillionty thousand new podcasts waiting for sync in Amarok started me thinking.

I use my iPod primarily for podcasts. It seems rather … useless, to me, at this stage in my life, if it does not have fresh podcasts on it. I have formulated a rule describing this, even though this scenario is not the best application of it. Someone else has probably thought of this earlier as well, and it is entirely possible that I have read this somewhere and then forgotten I’ve read it.

Here it is: For any potentially-internet-enabled device, a seamless and usable connection to said internet increases the utility of said device by orders of magnitude.

It can be followed in stages, as with my iPod. It does not have an inbuilt connection to the internet, but it is able to sync with a desktop application, which does. This is near enough to seamless that it increases the utility of my iPod my quite a bit.

(The next stage is obviously built-in Wifi, like in the iPhone.)

My cell phone would seem to have done this, at first glance. However, EDGE networks = waiting ten minutes for wikipedia to load != usable. (It’s nowhere near seamless, either, but this problem is undershadowed by the EDGE).

This can also be extended to future items. Why shouldn’t cars have an internet connection, to automatically fetch fuel prices and traffic info? Why shouldn’t my TV be internet enabled, so I can watch pirated Youtube videos directly on it? Why shouldn’t our Extended Brain Memory Plus Enhanced Interface Embedded Chips (patent pending by Microsoft) be internet connected, so as to query Google whenever the answer wasn’t found in your brain?

Irony

I listen to a podcast called Buzz Out Loud. They used to do a thing where, every day, they would have some wacky holiday that it was, and they would mention it on the show. They stopped doing that sometime ago, but they pointed us of BuzzTown to where the calendar could be found.There was a Google calendar version, so, naturally, I decided to add it to my calendar.

So I was going over my calendar today, and I noticed that the 29th of May, 2007, is End of the Middle Ages Day. This is the same day that the overly Christian school I go to will shoehorn us in a hot sweaty room with blazers on for a one-point-five hour chapel service about Jesus and Christianity and how God wants you to put his trust in him, as they do once a term.

Isn’t that ironic.

On iPods and iPaqs and chargers

Right. Although I have my absolute FINAL NOGOINGBACK THISISITHONESTLY Italian exams in just over a week (one day before my birthday. I’m not sure if that’s irony.), I just had to blog this:

Some time ago, I had a Pocket PC (I still have it). Avevo un PPC. It had a flimsy charging cable, which eventually broke. Ha avuto un cavo magro di ricaricare, che eventualmente ha rotto. So, about two and a half years ago, we bought what was advertised as a “complete iPaq charging solution”. Così, circa due e mezzo anni fa, abbiamo comprato una cosa che pubblicizzava come “un soluzione completo per il ricaricare del’iPaq”. It had: Aveva:

• A cable that went from the PPC to a USB port. Una cava che va dal PPC al USB.
• A car power to USB adapter.
• A power point to USB adapter, with changeable power points (Australia, America, Europe and India). Un adapter, con spini variabili.

It worked very well, and I remember being impressed at the thought and modularity that had gone into it. Lavorava benissimo, e ricordo che avevo impressionato con il reflessione ed il modulare che in l’ha andata. So, when I received an iPod about a year ago, my first thought was if the charging kit would work with the iPod. Così, quando ho ricevuto un iPod, la mia idea prima era se gli attrezzi funzionareste con il iPod. And, I tried it and I thought that it didn’t. E ho lo provato e ho pensato che non lui funziona.

A day ago, I decided to try the car charger with my iPod. Un giorno fa, ho deciso che provarei utilisare la ricarcare della macchina con il mio iPod. And, it actually worked! E ha funzionato stranamente! So I tried the rest of the kit, and it worked as well! Cosi ho provato lo resto degli attrezzi, e funziona anche! I’m not sure why I thought it didn’t originally. Non sono certo perche ho pensato che non funziona. I think at the time I was used to a large “battery charging” icon, and didn’t check the little battery icon at the top right corner. Ho pensato che a questo tempo ho stato abituato ad un grande icona de “recaricare di batteria”, e non ho veduto alla icona piccola nel destra del cima.

I checked, and both USB power outputs are completely standard. Ho verificato, e entrambi de USB sono norma completamente. So now I have a complete charging kit for any USB powered device! Cosi adesso ho un soluzione completo per il ricaricare della qualcosa con carica de USB!

Dell Latitude c600

This is the last thing I have time to do now. Yet, here it is: another blog post!

I My parents just bought me an old Dell Latitude C600, off eBay, for schoolwork. The eBay listing is still up, so you can have a look at the specs here.

Awesome things about it include the general laptop-y-ness of it, a trackpoint, and a good tactile-feedback keyboard. But you don’t want to read about that, do you? Stuff that sucks about it are:

• Onboard ethernet doesn’t work. It comes with an old Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card — that has these weird ports that are really long and flat, without an adapter to be found for love or for money. To be fair, this is my fault for not reading the listing carefully enough and assuming that it would come with onboard ethernet.
• Since there are no usable networking networking capabilities, and since my parents don’t seem to want to get even an old PCMCIA standard ethernet card, I cannot connect even to the local network. This makes checking out my school svn repo for laptop use, which I always figured I was going to do, very clunky (I have to check it out to my iPod, transfer it to the laptop, do edits, then transfer the changed set back to the ipod, then check in. Yeah.)
  I also have practically no way to easily install software from the net on it (Ubuntu was horrible as it’s repository lists somehow didn’t sync properly; I’m hoping yumdownloader on Fedora Core will not have this problem), so I have to get a distro that comes on multiple CDs and hopefully contains most of what I want on those CDs.
• … but the CD drive is flaky. It will intermittently work and not work. It seems to not work after a period of heavy use — which makes installing any distro that comes with multiple CDs well nigh impossible. As of writing, I have installed, in quick succession, Ubuntu, Slackware, and half of Fedora. This, of course, wiped the Slackware partition, and the CD drive is acting up again, so I have a nice paperweight on my hands. Again, to be fair, the seller has responded very graciously to this, and a replacement drive is on it’s way as I write this.

So. in short, I’m having a very hard time. This rant made me feel slightly better.

Ah well. I better get back to that utterly boring “Deflection of a cantilever” prac writeup. I’ll have another blog post up Real Soon Now™. Yeah.

[Update] The new CD Drive has arrived. Unfortunately, it is physically broken, which makes it do a little *click-click* noise when I try to boot up Fedora Disc 1. This is not good.
I am currently debating whether to stick with this thing, or send the whole thing back. Of course, that would mean we’d have to pay for shipping. To the seller’s credit, he’s been very nice and helpful, and absolutely doesn’t care about the formatting of the hard drive, and is perfectly willing to send us another drive, if need be.

And of course, all this while, the laptop goes unused, and I’m forced to waste large swathes of time at school.

[Update] The new new CD drive arrived 23-Apr, and has been working perfectly. So has the PCMCIA wired ethernet card we bought; so school time is not wasted anymore! Battery life’s a bit low, but we have power points.

The laptop in general has been working perfectly for what I’m using it for, and life in general, at least when it comes to electronics, is simply peachy.