It's been a busy night. I've gotten lots of good sleep, but I think I did some sleep-walking.

Before going to bed, I took a hint from Huxley's Brave New World. I was going to use softly played audio to sooth my brain, give me the thoughts I needed, and empower me when the time again comes to re-enter the waking world. It will also increase my pleasure and sensitivity.

To set this up, I plucked around in some code I hadn't touched for years. Actually, I just looked at the shell scripts that call the compiled C code. I had forgotten what I had done. I had forgotten how I wake up every morning.

(But I just now found the C source on my hard drive, deeply buried in the directory nesting tree.)

You see, back when I was in college, I loved music. (Oh, what a surprise!) But I wanted to control volume levels. I wasn't satisfied with the prefab tools. I wanted to setup my window manager so that I could touch a key combo using a single hand, and fade audio in and out at whim. So I designed a personalized system that only I understood, and put in the necessary bindings for it.

But it wasn't smooth enough to satisfy me. Not on Dagobah. Not on a 133 megahertz machine. The looping in the shell scripts was choppy. It made the audio pop on my old SB16 ISA card.

So I had to come up with something better. I modified some GPL C code for a simple sound mixer, and edited it to take a few command line options. These options would allow me to smoothly fade audio in and out at whim. Bound to the proper window manager keys, I was a wizard in my dorm room.

I had to be, because my roommate Neelix (now Yanthor) got nervous with some of my music. He wasn't comfortable with it, so I kept it away from him. But I didn't hide it. I just smoothly hit the keys to make it almost disappear when it needed to go. Then, when he was away, I could bring it up to a level I liked. Most of this was happening on a subconscious level. I couldn't have told you in these words or with this clarity. It's just something that happens.

I don't know if I ever redistributed the code (or the binaries) for this fader. But I see that I have it now, and it's simple. Here. Take it. Look at it if you like. Put it to your own use. It's GPL. Adapt it to your own needs. Just remember the rules. If you change it, and want to share the changes with others, don't forget to share the source too. It's the law. rexifade.c

Now, getting back to my point. (One of them.)

Until last night, I hadn't played soft music while I slept for years. Why not? I search my memories.

I remember a time back in late '96 or early '97, one or the other. I think it was 97. I was playing Madonna's Something to Remember on my portable player, which was plugged into either my speakers or my headphones. I don't remember which. But I know this happened.

I left the cd playing and went to sleep. The player had been left on repeat. It ran all night. I don't know when it stopped, but it did. It had been plugged into the AC adaptor, so there was no lack of power. It just stopped. I had driven it too hard. It wasn't made for this.

Nowhere in the manual did it say that you weren't supposed to leave it on all night. But these players were cheap. I guess you get what you pay for sometimes.

The reason I say "these players" is because this was the second player I had bought with the SONY brand name attached to it. It was the second SONY player to go bad after a little over a year of use. The warranty on those players was 1 Year.

Coincidence? Conspiracy? A diabolical scheme plotted on behalf of the trilateral commission? You decide.

(But I'll have you know that the last time I was in a mental institution, I strongly believed that the answer to the last 2 questions was "yes", and I wanted to tell people about it. I wanted to tell people too much, and was too desperate. That's how I burned myself out. I try not to do that now.)

In any case, after that player failed, the psychological operant conditiioning finally stuck. I was strongly conditioned against disc players with the SONY brandname on them. To a much much lesser degree, I was conditioned against playing Something to Remember. It had a bad memory for it now. Fortunately, my logical brain would eventually override that part of the sillyness.

But the conditioning that I was never really consciously aware of was the conditioning I changed last night: Leaving music playing on repeat throughout the night. Because tonight, I left xmms going on random repeat all night long. I calmed down as it gradually faded, and then went to sleep. I would wake up several times, soaking in a cold sweat, but that wasn't because of the music. That was because my mind was overloaded with other stimulations, most of them imaginary. But nothing I couldn't handle.

The music I chose was something I knew I could trust. I wasn't going to go into a sleep mode while playing Lords of Acid. That might be useful if one needed to build the mind up into a near-impenetrable paranoid psycho defense mechanism against rape and genital mutilation.

I like Lords of Acid sometimes. But only in small, controlled doses. :)

No, instead I chose something I knew was good for nurturing the spirit of a toddler. At one point, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to sooo sick of Nelly when I wake up in the morning."

But I'm not. I barely even remember most of it. I just know I'm at peace.

[Brief MTV-style cut. We're going for Requiem for a Dream level penetration here.]

"No! No! No! Not my Ludwig Van. They CAN'T take my Ludwig Van. NOOOOOOOOOOO! I. WON'T. LET. THEM. Ludwig Van, where are you? Ludwig Van?"

[Cut back to the present with a white flash in a microsecond. Gradually fade in from white.]

I'm a white hat, but you might not always know it through casual observation.

About my C coding skills. I put them on my resume when I applied for a job, but they weren't really needed for the job I was doing at the office. So I slowly let them fade away, and forgot most of them.

You see, someone taught me by example long ago that when you're in the corporate world, you have to learn to survive by whatever means necessary. Skills can be an asset, but they can also become a liability. They're an asset when they help you to get hired for a job, or make a sale. They're a liability when you learn that if you're the only one who knows how to do a certain task, you will be asked to perform that task. You will not be pressured or coerced, you will be "asked".

Uh huh. Wouldn't want to be working overtime tonight, would we? Better meet that deadline. Maybe there will be a party if it happens. Do you think?

Ok, my time is up. I gotta take a shower, grab a bite of breakfast, and get going. Wouldn't want to be late today. Goodbye, Lounge.

P.S. I'm not bitter. My job is as good as anything right now. I get to run the distro of my choice on my desktop. I decorate my cube in whatever way I like. (Provided it doesn't violate the sexual harrassment code.) I get my work done, and nobody bugs me.

These are my lines. I repeat them, and I believe them. I repeat them because I believe them. I am an actor, sir. Nothing more, nothing less. Just like Shakespeare said:

All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players...

Now you finish it.