The forest for its species

I didn't leave my apartment today. It felt great.

They told us all to skip work today because the network and the phones would be down during cube-shuffling. My collection of crap could have been placed in my office chair and pushed the three aisles to my new cube. I'll still have to make up the time a couple hours each day next week. It's still nice to get some time off.

The day didn't even start differently. I just didn't turn the alarm clock on. Since I normally get up four hours before I punch in, waking up an hour late didn't even feel weird.

I changed the water in my fish's tank. I have a Betta named Ciro (Cerulean, as in the color of his top fins) living in a tall flower vas. This was my first attempt at changing the water, so I worried I'd kill him during the transition. I am pleased to report Ciro is fine -- I just wish he wasn't such a fussy eater.

I listened to NPR most of the afternoon while working on my computer. I've been trying to fix my Linux box so that my favorite email program (pine) will forward my replies directly to my old shell account. After copious research, experimentation and grimacing, I am pleased to report...

...that I'm going to open a new account on this machine. Bah. Humbug. It's not defeat if I can get back to work, right?

I watched four episodes of Star Trek: the Patrick Stewart Years. I'd like to be ashamed, but two of them were episodes I'd never seen before. Each of these involved a character nicknamed Broccoli, a nebbish. In the first one, he's Walter Mitty. In the second, he's more put together as a person but less coherent as a character.

I can't figure out how old he's supposed to be. He's balding, but he's nervous and inexperienced. He's a tech, but he's no geek. He seems like he'd be happier in a low-stress environment. So why does he work on a high-pressure deep-space ship? How in fuck did he get beyond a psych profile? Plot device boy.

What did I learn today? I learned that you can eat chicken wings by hoovering them. I also learned that some issues in the open-source world are intractable mainly because people want them to be.

Pine is an email program from the University of Washington (U-Dub). It's famous for handling all sorts of stuff easily -- no matter how you get your mail, it can read it. It saves email as text, so nothing gets too big. All the commands for moving around and getting basic stuff done are at the bottom of every screen. Oh, and it's called pine to spite the people behind an older email client called elm. It uses very little RAM, it's relatively fast...

...and upgrades are handed down by a choir of angels. It's not purely open-source anymore, which means the upgrade factor is more tightly bound. Doing things that should be simple, like saying "my ISP is blahblah.com so forward my email to there", is a bone of contention among the program's users. The documentation has lots of holes and loops. Obvious stuff has weird names. Certain things happen by default that don't make a lot of sense. Certain tweaks I make don't take effect. No other problem handles mail quite as well, so U-Dub holds its users over a barrel.

So I'm bummed that the best solution to my user-id problem has been to make a new account. I shouldn't have to give in to a lousy program. I don't feel I have a choice.

User ID. user-id. The id of the user. Drives, instincts, "the various appetites, passions and affections". We become known by our desires.

I should relax about this. I should let it all ride. I should put on some music and get to sleep.

Indeed, I shall.

-where I will find my inner cookie, ps/d