Drumlin: Unfortunately, we don't live in that world.
Arroway: Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it.

And so, after a relatively lengthy drought, I return to catch up on some much-backed-up narrative. There's a lot to cover, so I'll just jump right in.

Sunday

Well, actually it goes back to Saturday, but the meat of it is Sunday. I had spent several hours Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning devouring info and reviews regarding choice PC hardware. Since I sort of tend to pay a lot less attention to topics such as "which brand and model of motherboard/video card/sound card is currently the best deal" unless I'm seriously planning to purchase in the near future, I had some catching up to do. Decisions, decisions.

Sunday afternoon, I went out to a few meatspace stores to check out the merchandise, but found the selection lacking. I decided online purchasing would be the way to go. But which retailer to buy from? Where to even begin? Well, I discovered a nice little place to look. :)

Not surprisingly, many of the stores which had priced components the cheapest also had a lot complaints and poor ratings from users. But then I found what I was looking for. CompuCheap had gained an amazing 7.0 (perfect) from a relatively large pool of users, and every comment about it was extremely positive.

I wandered in, hoping this place might have some of the stuff I was looking for. And holy cow, did they ever! All the premier parts which had been recommended as top quality by the reviewers, even to the brand name of the case. It was reasonably priced, too. Not bottom basement clearance prices, but reasonable.

I decided it would be just as well to order everything I needed from this site. Then, it became a matter of choosing a combination items which would fit my budget, making sure all the bank balances were in order to cover everything, and placing the order. (A process which took several hours, most of which was spent window shopping with barely concealed drool seeping out of the corners of my mouth.)

Or not.

Case. Clicked "Buy". Back came the cgi form with an error that the item is currently out of stock. (Their policy is never to take back orders. It's a good one, cause for bleeding edge people, who wants to wait a month until the item is worth half what you signed up to pay for it?) Doh! Oh well. I tried my "second choice" for a case, also a most cool item. Bingo. Picked motherboard. Processor. No problem. Then, it came time for memory.

Out of stock. Now there's a showstopper. Yes, I could have ordered everything else, and bought the memory at a local retailer or something. (Assuming the next items on my list would have been in stock; I didn't check.) I decided I just didn't want the hassle. I evisioned putting everything together, having the thing not boot, and then having to guess whether to return the memory to a local shop, or send the motherboard/chip back to CompuCheap. Nah. I like CompuCheap anyway. Best to just order everything from there.

I figure I can come back next week, or even better, next month, when my bank account won't be quite as stretched as it would have been anyway. Hopefully, by then their hardware supply won't be quite as scarce. Hopefully.

Sunday Night

Alright, Sunday night is often my most difficult night of the week when it comes to convincing my silly little head to go to sleep. This time, I decided to take some preemptive measures. I recently got a tip from a friend, who gave glowing reviews about melatonin, and how it could do wonders for your sleeping patterns. Imagine actually waking up in the morning and feeling rested! Quite an appealing concept. Available over the counter.

So, I wandered out to Safeway, thinking I would just wander over to the drug section and grab a bottle. I searched and I searched, particularly combing through the sleeping pill section. No melatonin, nor anything that listed it as an active ingredient.

Went to King Soopers, and then Wal Mart. Same result: Nothing. Desperate, and not wanting all my time spent wandering through the drug sections of various stores to be totally wasted, I foolishly picked up a little bottle of stuff which claimed to be good at putting you to sleep. Bad idea. The first inactive ingredient should have clued me in: FD&C Blue No. 1.

Had I learned nothing -- NOTHING? -- from Neo?

Oh, it put me to sleep alright. Eventually. According to the directions, it was supposed to be taken a half hour before going to bed. I took it, and an hour later, I was still laying awake. Then, I felt it. Squeezing the insides of my brain. Ripping away bits of my consciousness in repeated bursts of dizziness. Smack. Gotta give some credit where credit is due. I was asleep.

Monday morning was hell. I did manage to drag myself out of bed and into the shower, but it required at least twice the normal effort -- even for a Monday. Usually, my initial tiredness somewhat wears off by the time I arrive at work. When I sat down in my cube, it still felt like I was just waking up from bed. Ugggh.

By lunchtime, I was feeling almost normal again, although still slightly phased out. With a full stomach, I was pretty much back to normal for the afternoon work day.

Monday night

Here's some advise: If it's after 2300, you're fortunate enough to have a DVD player along with some good discs, you've already watched Fight Club, and you're having a bit of difficulty in getting to sleep, do NOT put in the Pink Floyd The Wall DVD, hit play, and watch it in its entirity until after 0100. It's just a bad idea. Trust me.

So anyway, I knew better than to take the blue pill again (maybe I'll take one again on a Friday night some time, when I know it won't be a problem for me to remain in bed for greater than 24 hours), so I entertained myself with The Wall (awesome music, awesome film making; I marvel at how well they were able to put it together, given the year it was made). After the movie was over, I must have laid awake for around 20 minutes in the dark. Went to sleep.

Tuesday morning

Waking up was much easier than it had been on Monday. In fact, I was surprised at how energetic I felt, given the late hour at which I had gone to bed. Got to work, and all morning, my wide awake mind was plagued my recurring images -- daydreaming nightmares -- of Pink and his... ahem... adventures. (Adventures is certainly not the right word for it, but I gotta say something.) My brain was feeling seriously fscked -- on the inside. Not what therapists would call "positive thinking".

I don't suppose the decoration on my cube wall -- acting as a constant subliminal reenforcement -- was helping any either. "VA Linux: The Wall" Yeah. And of course, given my task for the morning (which turned out to take up most all of my day), well... Disturbing thoughts are to be expected. lol.

And just what was my task this morning? I'll get to it, but first, a little background.

It has come as an unfortunate situation that anybody who wishes to do what some would call "advanced" web development -- things like javascript, layers, dhtml (especially dhtml)... Anybody who wants to have code they write work on the majority of systems in use today... Anybody whose product is being targetted at the less than clueful sectors of society must eventually face the fact that the dumbed down masses use software which runs on less than desirable platforms.

For a long time, I was able to escape this. I was able to maintain some illusion of purity. Running only Linux on my work machine, I felt cleaner -- better. I had deprived billg of the satisfaction of having complete and total tyranny over all things.

All of us who remember know what it feels like to take that final step, when we fdisk-ed away the last FAT partition, hoping we'd never have to see or subject our computers to such a hideous monstrosity ever again. Dagobah experienced it. Festery experienced it. Defiant experienced. it. Yukon experienced it. The freedom. The joy. The wonder at realizing, "Yes! I can live without Windows. I can do everything I need on a true operating system: My programming, my web browsing, my game playing, my checkbook balancing. And not only can I do it, but I can do it better!" It's a wonderful feeling.

Alas, the situation in corporate America is not nearly so bright and cheery as we have it in our haven. Such is reality, and so it must be dealt with.

Getting back to my illusion of purity. I say "illusion" because that is exactly what it was. Throwing together some code, and then casting off onto others the responsibility for making sure that it works is something akin to the king who took a shit in his neighbor's yard and then won an award because his own lawn was beautiful and spotless. (And yes, I know that that analogy made absolutely no sense. Too Damn Bad. lol.)

A typical exchange:

B: (hollered over the cube walls) "Hey A!"

A: "Yeah!"

B: "Could you see if page X works right in IE?"

A: (sigh) "Okay."

[Brief pause. Footsteps as B walks the whole 10 meters.)

B: "How does it look?"

A: "Error, no such object at line 279."

B: "Aw fsck! Lemme try again." (walks back to cube)

[Two minutes later, after one line of code has been altered...]

B: "Hey A, could you try it again?"

A: (sighing more heavily) "Oh, alright."

B: "Does it work now?"

A: "Yeah, but it's displaying this text in the wrong place."

B: "Let me see what it looks like."

[More footsteps.]

B: "Ok, I think I know what needs to be done. Give me ten minutes, and I'll have it working right. Really, I will! Thanks for looking at it."

A: Yer welcome.

Ad infinitum.

Ok, obviously such occurrences are not optimal for anybody's productivity. Besides, I think I was getting almost as sick of having to constantly bother coworkers whenever I was working on a new javascript feature/bug as they were of repeatedly hitting reload on IE.

And so it came to pass that B raised no objection whatsoever when handed a Windows 98 install cd, a copy of MS Office 2000 (cause while we're at it, StarOffice is no star at importing/exporting Word docs), and a new VMWare license. (And yes, I really did appreciate that last part; it not only blunted the pain of being subjected to the wrath of the Empire, but actually made an otherwise wearisome and draining process into a fun experience.)

And now, it is quite past my bedtime, so I shall attempt to be brief. But aw fsck, I haven't even gotten to what I did after work yet. I guess this is what I get for shirking my duties as feeder of the content vultures for a few days. ;)

But I really MUST get a drink of water. brb.

[...]

Back.

Ok, where was I? Installing VMWare. Right.

Yes, well, installing VMWare was easy. rpm -i VMWare<tab><Enter> Yeah. Configuring it through its little auto-config script thingee was equally trivial. I let it make me a nice big ole virtual FAT disk under my home directory, and then the big moment. I inserted the Windows cd, and "booted".

When I say "booted", I'm really not joking. If you throw that thing into full screen mode, it's like jumping into some sort of parallel surreal psycho-reality. It throws it into text mode, goes through the little memory test ritual, complete with a perfectly plausable looking bootup screen. You can hit F2 to get to the BIOS config, which comes complete with an interface that behaves just like a Pheonix BIOS, all the options in tact. Of course, at any time, you can hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc to get back to the nice, friendly X desktop. Utterly nuts.

Not surprisingly, the most trouble during the installation came -- not from VMWare, which has to be a candidate the most amazing feat of software engineering I've ever seen -- but from Microsoft's crummy install program. First, it was silly copy protection schemes. Me and H spent a fair amount of time trying to get around those, and finally managed to locate an un-crippled disc to use. (And yes, I just added a new "letter-name" on-the-fly.)

Ok, I'm trying to be brief, so I'll just say that many a GPF and many a "reboot" later, by late afternoon, I had something that could vaguely resemble a usable Windows desktop. I must have run through that stupid install program... what? Four times during the course of the day? Five? Something in there. Well, see: there's the "original" Windows 98, and then the upgrade to Second Edition. (Thank you Microsoft for ever-more-meaningless versioning systems.) Anyway, I'll save everyone the boredom of missing dlls, mismatched versions of said dlls, dialogs saying "Explorer has performed an illegal operation", and various random lockups. (And yes, a lot of this was probably caused by the fact that there were four different Windows cds which were put to use during the course of getting the damn thing to install.)

Anyway, eventually, I did get a system that appeared to be fully functional, and actually ran for five minutes without crashing. But here's the amazing bit: Not ONCE, throughout the entire ordeal, did VMWare hiccup at all. Anytime the "machine" would totally freeze, capslock would die, and even Ctrl-Alt-Delete would become useless, and I hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc, back would come my X desktop. Unscathed. At the end of the day, my work machine's uptime was in tact. Now THAT just rocks! :)

And here's the other cool bit: When I finally did get a working Windows system installed, I shut down, exited VMWare, went to an xterm, cd-ed into the vmware directory, and ran cp -R win98. What better way to use a few hundred begs of spare hard drive space? Now, if anything gets deleted, some install program fscks up the dlls, or, Windows being Windows, if the system mysteriously becomes unstable over time, I can just copy that entire directory back, and have a fresh install. Nice.

Anyway, when I finally left work after 1800, I felt like the whole day had disappeared. I had gotten very little real work done, but I hadn't really been goofing off either. Usually, I end the day having done at least one of the two. Preferably more of the former. :) But today, it was like... nothing. Ok, not quite nothing. For a while, I did manage to convince myself that the Windows install would be equally stupid whether I sat there an babysat it or not, and jumped to another desktop to do some coding. But whenever my brain would start getting into the rhythm, a beep of the PC speaker would call me running back to the Windows install desktop. Usually just one of those pointless reboots, but you never know for sure.

Aw, fsck. Midnight. I've been rambling for three hours. Alright, brief:

Tuesday Evening

After work, I wasn't feeling particularly hungry, despite the fact that it had been nearly six hours since my last morsel. But I could tell that such was not the case for Tobias. His stomach was rumbling. Quite loudly in fact. I took him to the feeding center and gave him a complete supplement. Now, with a full stomach, Tobias was ready and raring to go, but he needed more care. Tobias was dirty. Tobias needed a bath. Badly.

Unfortunately, the integrated bathing facilities at the feeding center were out of service. Tobias didn't seem terribly concerned about this, but I knew that if he didn't get his bath soon, he would not only become an embarrassment to his owner, but his skin would get itchy, and he would become irritable. I had to do something.

I decided that the best course of action would be to head for a dedicated bathing center in Boulder. I had been there before, and I knew of its quality. Not one of those automated swishers where you just drag 'em through and let the machines handle 'em. No, this place lets the owner lovingly apply the soap and water directly, so Tobias would get the best treatment. And he deserved it, darn it! Tobias had been a good boy.

On the way, I stopped in at target, where I bought some towels to dry Tobias off with, so he could feel nice and dry afterwards. I also took the opportunity to purchase for Tobias a cool shader so poor Tobias won't be quite so hot on all those nasty summer days with the sun beating down. I also briefly considered procuring... but nah, I didn't buy it, so let's not go there.

I brushed off his fur and gave Tobias a nice long bath, inserting extra quarters as necessary. Tobias grinned with an appreciative smile as the sudsy water washed away all the dirt. This time, after the rinse, I made sure not to give Tobias any wax. Tobias doesn't like wax. It makes him sick.

After Tobias was done with his bath, I took him out into open are of the cool twilight, and wiped him dry with the fresh towels. I noted that some soapy residue had gathered in some of the crevices which hadn't been rinsed out. Have to watch more carefully for that next time.

As Tobias and I made our way down Canyon Boulevard, a pleasant breeze caressing both of us, I decided it was time to get myself a little grub. In a break from habit, we headed up to the hill, where I left Tobias to rest as I walked around the area. I finally settled on Abo's pizza, where I ordered a slice of pepperoni, and as I ate, admired various members of the opposite gender as they passed by outside the window.

After eating, I made my way back through the streets -- by now, evening crowds were forming -- and once again took the helm. With darkness falling, Tobias and I returned to the Louisville Compound, where I promptly sat down in front of the computer screen, and set out to record the events of the past few days.

The End

P.S. If you think I'm psycho, or high, it's not my fault. Blame Jaeger. He caused it all. It's him, I tell you! He's the one responsible! For all of it! All Of It! I played no part. I swear!

Now if you're REALLY up for some sick fun, take the last section, and s/Tobias/Gabrielle/g, s/him/her/g, s/he/she/g, s/his/her/g, and maybe a couple other pronouns I've forgotten. I guarantee you will really, REALLY think someone has gone off the deep end. Or that this is all some truly perverse S&M theme. But it's not my fault, I tell you. I'm innocent! Blame Jaeger! Blame Jaeger!

[And in chimes the chorus, set to the tune of "Blame Canada"...]

Blame Jaeger
Blame Jaeger
...

I'm going to bed, all. This is outta control...