[Candles freshly lit, Bitscape sits down at Argo, and decides to begin with a rambling. Content first.]

Depending on the length, it may end with this rambling too. :)

Right now, I think this room is more pristine than it's been in months. The trash buffer is completely free of trash, debris, clutter, or any other form of pollutant. Nothing there at all. It's times like this that I wish I had a digital camera.

This morning, I got another minor annoyance taken care of: The west window, directly to my left. During the rearrangement, the windowsill was obviously the most convenient place for the left rear speaker to live. It's also home to the Dagobah memorial.

But ever since the Millennial Lair came into being, there has been a continuous dilemma: The window blinds. Keep them open, and all that nasty sunlight gets in. Close them, and the sound from the speaker becomes muffled. Open them, close them. Open them. Close them.

At night, that's not quite as much of a problem, but I don't exactly fancy the idea of voyeurs off the street peering in here either.

The fix: During the cleanup, I discovered some ancient black cloth that's been in my possession for ages. An idea from an email a few months ago returned. I went to the kitchen, found some of those generic style nails, and had myself a lovely pain in the ass of a time trying to get them pounded into the windowsill "roof" at an angle that would work. Eventually, I prevailed.

The cloth is right up next to the glass, leaving ample room for Dagobah and the speaker on the interior. Properly secured, it does a much more effective job of sealing off the light than the blinds. It also looks much neater than the taped trashbag job I hacked up last time around. So nice in fact, I might go out and buy some more cloth to do the other window.

(Stories like this make you wonder what the hell the people who design houses were thinking about in the first place. If windows are only there to annoy people and get in the way anyway, and all we do is try to cover them up so we can get some goddamn sleep, why not just leave them out from the beginning? Or at least design a more effective blocking mechanism than those pathetic blinds.)

Yeah, down with windows! Down with windows! Down with crappy security. Down with slipshod design! Down with Windows!

Wait, we are still talking about housing arrangements, aren't we?

So yes, I had a joyous time this morning doing that, and getting everything to fit in alloted shelf and drawer space, all the while entertaining myself with all sorts of good music over the audio system.

With the task partially complete, I was sitting back in my chair, doddling around, surfing the web, piping oggs from Argo into the receiver. I decided I felt like a little eye candy, and attempted to download cthugha. The packaged deb was out of date. (Or at least its dependencies were out of date -- no way I'm ever going back to those crappy old versions of MesaGL now that I've got it working through DRI. All hail XFree86 version 4.)

My options: Hack it out, probably modify a bunch of header files, or just forget it. Given that I wasn't particularly in any urgent need, I decided to forget it for the time being.

So yes, that entire anecdote was basicly a pointless rant.

Then I started playing around with xlock. Ran mode lament for a while. When I was dabbling with 3d accelleration a few months ago, using (then) unstable kernels and drivers, this one would occassionally cause crashes.

Put it in the root window, on the desktop where my xmms was playing. Became slightly nervous. If this was going to cause my system to crash, I wanted to know about it now. Moved windows over it, opened up Gimp, played around, surfed the web, and just let it run in the background while I did.

[Bitscape starts up a copy of xlock -mode lament right at this moment, and lets it run behind the batch of eterms.]

No crashes, and Argo wasn't even breaking a sweat. Ahahahahahahah!

I was just so jazzed about it, I made this screenshot.

Oh yes, and I also dipped into the unstable tree to pull down the stable debs of Gimp 1.2. (Confusing, eh?) Lovely, if I do say so myself. Although I haven't yet done any serious playing with it yet. Indeed, this past week has truly been phenomenal for software releases.

[It just dawns on Bitscape that there may or may not be a new X files episode already in progress.]

Eh, they've gotta be in rerun season. Since they started late, they'd have a least a couple weeks. No question. I think.

So yes, as of yet, no abrupt freezes while running 3d apps since my pre-fest upgrade. Now I'm gonna have to get blender again and start playing with it some more. Before, it was getting frustrating to get going on something, have it lock up, and have to reboot Argo without changes being saved. Maybe now....

So anyway, after a couple more hours of Lair fixing up, another pass with the vacuum, and that was done.

Next priority: Tobias.

Got off my ass, took a couple bills to mail while the engine warmed up, and returned to administer the oil change. This went somewhat more smoothly than the first time. Getting the filter off was a lot easier, because it had been me that put it on. In other words, it wasn't so ridiculously tight that it virtually had to be smashed before it would come off. That's how the first one had been.

After cleanup, and a happy Tobias, I took a little test drive. Got some spaghetti. Returned home and ate while watching the second episode of Farscape. (This time, the sound was being piped into my receiver. I was a little surprised at the quality.) Humblik's pirate tv show collection: Where the picture and sound quality is better than broadcast! :)

The spaghetti in my stomach caused a reaction in my brain. After Farscape, I tumbled over into bed. Went to sleep for a good couple hours. Woke up. Turned on my ogg player. Contemplated hacking a little source code. Decided to ramble first.

Now... we'll see what's next.