Gulf War II: The Vengeance
It’s been slightly more than three years since the factory-install cassette deck in my car stopped working. Well, that’s not strictly true, there was a two month period in there someplace when it magically started working again, risen like Jesus, before ceasing to play tapes any more. I have wrestled with this is many different ways, but the primary two ways have been: playing music in a portable tape player that sat on the floor, and listening to NPR. The first solution wasn’t; it was a terrible, scratchy, mono-audio substitution, and I can’t believe I spent about fifty dollars on D batteries over the past three years. The second solution was a good one, a mature one. It has allowed me to get in touch with the events of the world and start to form opinions based on evidence instead of gut feelings and knee-jerk responses.
So what did I do on the second day of Gulf War II: The Vengeance? Bought a new factory-install cassette deck from a local junkyard. Time to listen to some music for a while.
Lost Time
I feel like I’ve spent all day fiddling with my computer. Working on The Brothel for a good part of the afternoon, trying to follow Nick Locking’s directions on how to personalize colors and format choices. Then home where my irritation with my inability to download a particular BitTorrent file led me to the Digital Archive Project which led me in turn to eDonkey which led me to fiddling about with Mac OS X’s UNIX emulator, Terminal. Flush with my partial success at installing eDonkey, I decided that had the ability to install the CLI version of UnRar for the Mac as well. Which led me to remember that I couldn’t get that webcam driver to work the other day…
Long story short, I remembered what it is about computers that attracted me to them so much years ago: the ability to lose all sense of time as one spirals around the gravity well of perfection, getting ever closer with each successive pass. Time stretches and eventually loses all meaning in a gravity well, and I love the possessive way in coding and commands and tinkering and noodling can leave one gasping for air and sleep when one finally surfaces and switches off the cathode ray gun. And while air and sleep are sweet after such a dive into the darkness of minutiae, I find that the lure of minutiae remains undiminished the next morning…
I, however, have 150 pages to read before tomorrow, and now I have four fewer hours in which to read them. Time to make some tea.
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