This isn’t a funny-ha-ha because I’m currently living in the hottest, driest part of a summer scorcher in central Texas, but because I miss having weather to talk about. I miss having a change of seasons. I miss being thrilled when winter thaws to bring on the swell of spring, or when summer cools to bring the awe of autumn. There are cycles in weather. There are overcast days. There are clear blue skies. There’s frozen precipitation. A cold front is a guarantee of rain. And rain can go on for days. In central Texas, not so much.

I’ve been looking at pictures of Europe, Canada, and Alaska during the summertime, and I’m floored by how lush and vibrant everything is. Flowers on the hillsides. Mountains typically covered in snow are rolling in tall green grass. Even the areas less picturesque are still in bloom. Since the winters are harsh, sometimes unforgiving, everything that grows takes the fullest advantage when it can. So the greens are greener. The woods are thicker. Nature has a narrow window to thrive, and it does it at full power. Our green season is in April, but we’re south of the latitude that stays green. Everything below that turns brown and red and becomes arid, so our green season ends in June.

It’s been 11 years since I moved to Austin, and I will confess that I love this place. It’s usually dry, so the driving is decently safe, roadwise. It’s usually sunny, so the sightseeing is abundant. It’s usually warm, so people wear less more often. It’s a great town and a good area. But that’s just it: these are constants. We have our “cold” months between December and mid-march; maybe a bit of snow once or twice every three years. Otherwise, it’s the same-old. Excepting the four-month scorching drought of summer, this area is flatlined as far as seasons go.

Austin is the Paxil of seasonal weather.

I like that I can drive on dry roads and stroll around during 40°F nights during the winter, but I want some variety. There’s a reason most of the best electronic bands come from the north; for 5 months of the year, they’re locked in and snowed under with little to do outside. There’s a rich life indoors. And when the winter thaws, oh damn do they throw some parties. The ones locked up the most have the wildest throwdowns because that’s their limited window of opportunity. They have to bring out their colors. They have to bring on their rut. They have to live it up because that’s their time to shine in the sun. Winter is constantly around the corner, so motivation is strong.

It’s always nice weather here; even when it’s shitty, it’s still relatively nice. So what’s the rush here? There’s always a nice weekend to have a barbecue or sit on the porch. Central Texans live on a different clock. But when most northern cultures are living it up, we’re either stuck inside due to overheating (and hating the boredom) or biking/kayaking/climbing because that’s what hard-core “extreme” people do (the rest of us sweat miserably and do nothing because we’re stifled).

I know I don’t do well in cold weather, but that’s a matter of training and acclimation. I don’t think I would mind learning how to handle it. If the yankees will teach me how to survive the winter, I think I could find it in my heart to teach them how to survive the summer. Deal?

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.

Things are moving slowly as far as stuff for the site. Nothing new there. I have the usual Big Ideas that I’ve had since the inception of Phaysis that haven’t been brought to fruition. But some of those ideas I’m getting new ideas about. Since I am now prone to imbibe a daily intake of coffee, ideas are popping and I’m making little touches to some code here, drawing some designs there.

I’ve set up a portable test server on my laptop and am experimenting with different content management systems, trying to find one that will fit my needs best. Some months ago I took a hard look at my history of glacial progress and decided that if I’m to have any luck with my site that I should stick to learning and using a prebuilt CMS instead of rolling my own. Well, I tried that track and found a few that fit what I needed…kinda. But the knowledge, code snippets, and concepts I’ve gained from examining them, hacking them to work on the limited setup I currently have Phaysis on, I’ve gotten new notions about writing my own CMS. We’ll see how it all fares.

On a negative note, I’ve been getting more spam than ever, and I have a feeling it’s from unsubscribing from a mailing list provided by a local radio station. Where I was once getting 12-ish messages a day I’m now getting 30+, and that was since unsubscribing. So the moral to be learned here today is that you can’t even trust the ones you can trust; they may be in a “business partnership” with other companies who aren’t bound by the first company’s privacy policy. Keep that in mind.

For shame, KROX-FM/101X. For shame.

You just get that urge, y’know?

My teeth are doing better. The right fillings aren’t so sensitive anymore which is fortunate because the lefts are still tender from the week-old fillings. I’m having my right wisdoms removed this wednesday, so hopefully my left molars will be fine enough to eat on. After the wisdom holes heal up, I’ll be good to go until I can afford to get the left wisdoms removed. And then hopefully the dental drama will be over with.

I called my sister last wednesday to wish her a happy 28th birthday (that means I’m getting old, too). Surprise of all surprises, her cellphone is out of service. Looks to me like she and her hubby haven’t been paying the bill. I might try later this week, but shit at least I tried. Y’know?

Work is picking up. After a tedious week of very little to do, but with a ton of stuff just waiting on customer go-ahead, it’s finally avalanching and we have rush jobs and lots of stuff to do. Lots of ass is being kicked.

This Saturday is Eeyore’s Birthday Party down at Pease Park. It’s a rite of spring, a hippy holdover for 42 years running. It’s dirty, it’s hot, it’s dusty, it’s sweaty, there are massive drum circles, reggae and rasta bands, people in costumes, people wearing little more than shorts and body paint, the smell of cannabis floats in the air, and the cops just walk around and not care.

This is an event that I look forward to months in advance. My whole regimen of allergy shots is inspired by being able to go to EB without allergy problems. I bought a bike last year so I could ride it down there. And this year it is my hope that my mouth is well enough to let me go. I’d hate to miss it 2 years in a row.

Ok. Sun’s setting soon; should wrap this up and ride on home.

Starting to get mighty warm around here. Nothing like good heat and dense humidity. Mmmm. Makes opening my car door that much more pleasant. I swear, I gotta start cracking the windows or something to equalize the humidity. Sheesh.

I’ve been finding myself doing more programming lately. It’s now again starting to become fun, like a puzzle I do. The drill is simple: create a problem (if one doesn’t already pop-up while solving another problem), and write code to fix it. Some people have their crosswords, I have my programs. My current puzzle is trying to split and parse an SQL insert statement. I want to split off all the flag keywords and parse the remainder of the statement in any of the three standard ANSI SQL formats. I’ve been running into problems having my code differentiate between column text and actual column names. Currently, though, I think I’m on my way to getting this problem licked — I wrote a small finite-state automaton (a smart loop — a bot, basically) that steps through the statement, one character at a time, and tests that character against a small nested list of rules. To me, this is exciting stuff. So far, with a few logic problems aside, I think I really do have it beat. I hope so, anyway.

I want to thank each and every one of you who extended sympathies and shared in my anger at what happened to me a few days ago (as eloquently described in the last entry). You folks are indeed my good friends. Thanks.

:yawn: Ok. My eyes are getting droopy. Nothing like the cumulative effect of getting less than four hours of sleep a night for the past 4 evenings. I decided to head home early tonight, and that was the most perfect choice.

Gotta take better care of myself. You should do the same. G’nite!