{phaysis}

Earlier tonight, a man I know tangientally from his association with friends of mine made a statement of his opinion regarding the status of Olympic Figureskating as an actual sport. His position was that since there was no objective metric to the performance of the activity, that it does not qualify as a sport, inasmuch as ballet qualifies as a sport. My opinion is that this is nonsense, and that even if the scoring is mostly subjective, it is still a sport.

His opinion really rubbed me the wrong way, and now I think differently of the guy. Subject matter aside, that is the part that troubles me the most: that one man’s opinion puts me so off my ease that I place the person in disdain. What the hell is with that? It is his right to make statements just as much as it is my right to make statements. So why the cold chill in my blood?

I’m an arrogant bastard, as is my training. See, in my 8 years of being a bible-toting, card-carrying Arkansas Baptist youth of the Evangelist persuasion, it was within my wont to issue unto the entire world my statements of Truth and Everlasting Life (because it was Truth, and not opinion, you see), and any person who was not “Of Us” who made any statement, whether related or unrelated, regarding their perception of truth was automatically analyzed and despised. Because if you are not for us, you are obviously against us.

It is in that way that the Baptist mindset poisoned my ability to observe other people’s opinions objectively, regardless of my own point of view. And my continued failure to observe and respect without emotional fury or feeling of damaged face leaves me gnashing my teeth at my inability to grow up.

It’s my sincerest wish that I could rise above my humanity, deprogram myself of the vitriol, and cease from passing the blame for my internal behavior on a decade of poor adolescent idealism.

So the apartment management saw fit to install a new central heater unit. After a week of having to use space heaters to keep the place thawed, the service techs came around Friday morning to cut down the old unit (vintage 1978) and replace the whole thing with a new one. They were even nice enough to leave the task of cleanup to me (how sweet).

But the upshot is that I now have central heat, which is all-too-important this week, what with the latest arctic blast sitting on top of us. We even got some sleet today. Zero accumulations, but sleet nonetheless.

The apartment management declined my written request for a discount on rent for the inconvenience and expense of running the space heaters. Said it was “uncustomary”, and that I only had to deal with it for a week, and that a space heater was provided by management, and yadda-yadda. Notch it up to another thing I dislike about this apartment.

“But Shawn, why don’t you just move when your lease expires at the end of next month, since you hate it so much? Aren’t we all just a little tired of your bitching?”

That’s a (pair of) complex question(s) in search of a simple answer. There is no simple answer. This is my space. I’ve been here two years; it is cavernous, clean, relatively quiet. Sure, there’re shitty things about this apartment complex, but the same is said about everywhere else. I just cannot justify the mental and financial expense of looking for another place and moving. If the lease renewal contract I get next month presents itself with a stupendous rise in rate, then yes, I’ll have no choice, obviously. But if it’s all the same, then I’d prefer to stay.

This is my god-damn neighborhood and has been for the past nine years, thank you.

Right now, it’s unbelievably cold. We’ve already hit our freezing mark this winter, but today’s bluster from the north has me chilled to the bones. Bundle up; tonight’s gonna be a cold and lonely one.

Currently listening to VAST’s album “April”. Mostly stuff done on a side-project and some demos. I wish this band would put out something that’s a top-notch production with polished surfaces like their first two albums. The intimacy of imperfection is fine, but please, wow my socks off again.

Speaking of not wowing my socks off, this upgrade to Debian on my laptop hasn’t been all rainbows and puppies. Luckily I had the forethought, back when I first put Ubuntu on this, to set aside a separate partition for my /home directory, because that allows me to keep all of my files, customizations, and configuration settings between OS installations. That allowed me to practically hit the ground running with minimal time configuring the new install. It’s a nice ideal.

But, be that as it may, some of the config differences between Ubuntu and Debian left me with some very weird problems. The Compiz compositor isn’t installed by default on Debian Squeeze (weird, I know), and my Xorg user config was configured to use it. This comically resulted in windows with no GUI chrome (titlebar, status bar, menus, etc), because the compositor draws those; Xorg only draws the window contents. I installed Compiz and its config tool and all was fixed. Also, the Debian variant of Gnome doesn’t provide GUI options to force passwords on resume from Hibernate or Standby, which is a damn handy feature from the Ubuntu version. A few minutes in GConf (at /apps/gnome-power-manager/lock) fixed that.

However, somewhere along the way I may have installed a package or driver or flipped a config switch to cause Xorg to hang on resume. Like, I press the power button after a hibernate/standby, the computer wakes up and resumes, initializes the display, provides me with the Xlock login dialog, wherein I enter the password, then X draws the background image and halts. The mouse is movable, but the video is locked. Can’t even switch to a virtual terminal, but I can log into the laptop via SSH from another host. The only hint I can find is in /var/log/messages where it mentions “bonobo-activation-server cannot associate with desktop session”. Bonobo is a deprecated part of the Gnome GUI framework, but for some reason, some part of Gnome is still using it and hanging when trying to hand off control of the display from Xlock/Xscreensaver to Compiz. Kinda pisses me off, because this worked in Ubuntu. What did they do to make it work?

As a stopgap measure, I simply disabled the password requirement on resume. It’s insecure, but there it is. Why file a bug report? It works as designed!

Speaking of productive, this was a productive week at work. I’ll cap to actually putting my head in the game. If only I’d do that all the time, my life would be easier. At least it’d feel more fulfilling. I hate dragging my feet and/or ass; it’s half my issue with my life/job/hobbies.

So there’s my update. Maybe some time I’ll drop some mad science on you people to show that I can have deep thoughts on occasion. I used to do that waaaay back in the day. But like any muscle, if you don’t exercise it, it will atrophy. And boy howdy, it sure has.

Yes. There’s that much going on in my life. You people have no idea how hard it is to live my fast-paced life. I can’t keep writing journal articles while I’m trying my best to find ways to kill the boredom, stiffle the ennui, and pay less attention to myself so I can actually focus on something else long enough to do something worthwhile. It’s a tough life, so stop yelling at me for not writing as often as you want me too. Jeez. So just lay off with the flood of blog comments, I hear you. Ok? Ok!

Thank you for understanding.

FIRST POST LOL!

And so begins a new day, a new month, new year, a new decade. I feel hopeful for my future…kinda like I always do at this time of year. But I hope some of my lost potential can be regained. I’m sitting at this coffeeshop at my laptop, and I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to life than this. I was up here last night doing the same thing, and 4 hours before the stroke of midnight I had a look around and noticed that the place was half-filled with a scattering of sad fucks at their laptops on a party night. It was then that I knew I didn’t want to be one of them. So I got up and left. Found a party.

There’s more to life, and sitting on my browser, hitting refresh constantly on Facebook, is not what I’d consider living fully. There are songs to be written. There are loves to be won. And that won’t happen here like this.