OK, so if you have my usa.net email address, you’ll need to email me from this ‘blog and get my newer one.

The reason? I’m canceling it.

The reason? I get a couple thousand virus warnings and bounce notifications a day through there.

So check your little address book thingie and make sure I’m not at a usa.net address. If I am, and you can’t figure out how to get the new one, send me an email through xanga.

O how I long for the days of ‘EXTEND YOUR PENIS!’

So earlier I was watching the President be interviewed by Britt Hume.

In other words, I was wasting time.

If you’re like me, you’ve always wanted to see lots of pictures of people touching public sculptures in inappropriate ways.

OK, that’s a lie. I haven’t always wanted to see lots of pictures of people touching sculptures in inappropriate ways. But it’s kind of amusing to see such pictures. And, the web being what it is, I’ll forget about all this by tomorrow.

So this week Brezsny’s talking about the overlapping of beginnings and endings in my life. How it’ll be hard to know what’s beginning and what’s ending within the experience of the shift.

There are some interesting projects on the horizon, and there are some seriously outdated things I need to get rid of. I think this can be said of anyone, and I think it can be said of any time, but somehow, especially now, it is, as we might say, In The Air.

Here’s an example.

Just the other night, I was out driving around at about 3am, because I was wired. It had just started raining; a mild sort of rain that’s more attitude than wetness.

I was following along behind this old Volvo station wagon, and it just simply drove right off the road. As if that’s what you were supposed to do in that circumstance. I stopped to see what the deal was.

There was a man in the driver’s seat, just waking up. He was in that slo-mo state of sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and said he was OK, and he fumbled with the door and generally stood there looking like he had a question mark over his head.

I gave him a ride home. He’s a photographer. I have his phone number.

Is this a beginning or an ending?

Got out today. Went up to US highway 20, and headed for Winthrop.

Since I got a late start, and the traffic was really horrible around Everett, I only made it as far as Washington Pass.



As you can see, it was dusk already. As I was driving toward the viewpoint, I could see that whole range lit up by that orange light. As I got closer and closer, the light went away. I pulled in to the parking area and rushed out of the car up to the top of the big rocks where you can see this view, but it was too late.

Afterward, I decided to come on home, since it’s 30 more miles to Winthrop. I must be getting old or something. I’ll have to go and have a BBQ duck breast quesadilla some other time.

I’m writing this using my throwaway Pentium 200, running Slackware Linux and KDE. I haven’t used the linux box for much of anything besides trying to install stuff on it, so this is a first.

My thoughts are that, first of all, there needs to be a desktop linux that doesn’t make you learn things in order to install it. I mean, you need to learn things, but not how to author an XFree86Config file. (I ‘blogged a while back about trying to get this thing hooked up to a relatively oddball monitor. The solution was to buy a new video card, which is not an acceptable, general-purpose type solution, is it?)

Anyway. I’m down with the geeky joy of learning this kind of stuff, but it gets tiresome that no matter what you’re trying to do, you end up searching Google so you can find out which command line argument to add so you can get it done. The point of having a GUI is so that you don’t have to learn that stuff.

KDE does a good job of hiding the scary stuff from view, though. And on a more modern machine than mine, it’s probably a joy to use. I found a window theme that looks like Mac OS X, complete with little red, yellow, and blue candy buttons. But the real user experience they’re trying to emulate is Windows, which is ironic, given that the righteous open-sourcers want to rid the world of Microsoft. Make that ‘self-righteous’… You get the idea.

Also: I used Mandrake initially, but it refuses to power down the machine properly. So I switched to Slackware, which doesn’t power down, but instead tells me: ‘Power down.’ But it also doesn’t end up in a kernel panic.

326 new emails from one server. 2 are not worms or spam.

UPDATE: I’ve received more than 1100 worm emails today from one account alone.

This’ll help you get there. Reverse direction to get back again.

I feel a mild euphoria. On the one hand, they’ve already set up the Halloween aisle at the grocery store, and it was beyond me to resist the call of processed sugar. So I’m sitting here amped up on a pair of ‘fun’ size Snickers which my belly is working overtime to digest.

And on the other hand, I did something quite astonishing today. It’s the sort of thing that isn’t really astonishing, but is just made astonishing by the fact that I managed to do it.

I went to the Dept. of Licensing and filled out a form to get a piece of paper that proves that the title to my derelict van is clear. That way I can sell the thing. I have a buyer and everything.

On Monday I had an anxiety attack because I couldn’t find the registration papers. On Tuesday I had an anxiety attack about going to the licensing office building itself, so I drove across town to where the van is so I could copy down the VIN, even though I didn’t know if I needed it. Earlier today I managed to go in and do the whole thing in less than 5 minutes.

I was in the building for slightly longer than the total time of most pop songs, and it took me three days to do it.

But now it’s done, so I can be relieved. Now to get back in touch with the guy, be rid of the van, and… well… whatever comes after owning a van.

The Gospel Of Supply Side Jesus