We Should See Other Blogs

I was always setting things aside
for a grander idea:
I dabbed and swept
impatiently
(the way I wrote poems),
unsatified but willing
try a different colour
on a different canvas,
but when it came to you
I was not writing or painting
or getting somewhere.
You did not have
the hum of asphalt or
oil on your fingertips
and it was like writing a novel.

You were always polishing
phrases until they
were uniquely weathered,
the same colours in streaks
and gashes so carefully
constructed;
but when it came to me
you weren’t writing or painting
or getting somewhere.
I had the tactile sense of
a work unfinished
but one too jumbled to
aid precision
and I was in awe of you
when you abandoned for
the familiar.

We are safe now, here,
in our warrens. If that
means what it means then
we are safe.
If not, I will wander through
your thoughts
and set the china
on the garage roof
the way you wander through
mine with a pen,
connecting dots.

If you want to check this out, go ahead: I’ve created a Frapper Map which you can add yourself to as a blog visitor of mine. It’ll be interesting to see where you’re all from… even those of you who never ever leave comments…

dan (always on the lookout for cool stuff)

You get one shot. Do you ever stop to understand that? It’s almost crazy; you’d think you get a few tries to get it right, but no. You come into the world screaming, maybe leave it that way too, and that’s it. Boom. The mortal coil unwinds and you fade from memory.

That scares me more than anything – that I’ll be forgotten. It scares me that the people left behind will go on, and the people I loved will eventually have moments when they forget I existed. And then it’ll almost be as if I hadn’t existed at all.

See, I had one of those moment this morning: I woke up, got out of bed, brushed my teeth, and was spitting water into the sink to watch it swirl out of sight when I remembered why I shouldn’t be happy. Even then for a few seconds it puzzled me. What was there to be sad about?

Oh, you. When the memory came back, it came back full force and hit me like a falling building. And it went, again, after a little while. You’ve gone sideways, and I’ve kept moving forward. But it seems unjust, somehow. I should be in a deep, dark pit of despair I can’t escape from. I should write bitter prose about life and its chance and design.

I should, but every day it’s longer before I recall why I almost stopped breathing. My heart maybe skips a beat, but it goes on.

There’s something about people, as they say, and that something always seems to kick me in the back of the head when I’m not looking.

It’s motivation. Everyone has them. Generally, I think, people’s motivations are good. In Christian circles more than anywhere else. Mine certainly aren’t always good, but I like to judge other people – or try to – with a degree of love.

But you know what? Motivation is not the litmus test for the fitness of an idea. That’s like trying to tell something is a sheep because it has four legs.

When a person says “I meant well!” I usually like to ask why that should matter: once you’ve determined you have good motives you can just go ahead and never look back? No. Once you’ve determined you have pure motives or a reasonable faximile thereof, you come up with a good idea, a sound plan. In fact, in an entirely effective way, your motivations don’t really matter.

dan (the road to hell is paved with… well meaning people’s bones)

As many or few of you may know, I’ve tried many Linux distributions in the past, and haven’t been satisfied with many of them at all. For instance, SuSE, which uses KDE as its windowing environment, was trouble and more trouble for me in the hardware/software department. It wasn’t easy to install things, and due the fact that it uses (or used, this was a year back) RPMs, I constantly ran into dependancy issues. And let me tell you, I have no time for dependancy issues when I’m trying to install something as simple as Xine.

I’ve also tried Fedora Core 4 more recently, but also disliked it. It installed nicely, but the bare install was… well… bare. And again, it was hard to install anything on it. Maybe I didn’t give it enough of a shot, but just to get it up and running was hard enough. It used Gnome instead of KDE, which I liked a whole lot more. Fewer native applications, but much prettier and easier to use. Yet, FC4 seemed like it was missing that special something.

I’ve also installed a Thin Linux version on one of our workstations at the shop, one that had crashed and I had fixed. Basically, I didn’t have a Win98 disc around, and I needed something to access a spreadsheet on. Considering that our office has already deployed OpenOffice.org, such a thing was simple: get Samba running so I could connect to our (unfortunately) Win2k server, mount the share at /mnt/share/ at startup, and be done with it. I can’t remember the name of the distro, but it fit on one CD-ROM, and worked pretty well right out of the box (thanks to, I think, the archaic hardware of that particular box). OpenOffice.org boots up lickety-split, and all is well, although I had to actually compile OO.o, which took – as you can imagine – a zillion years to do.

However, most recently I was presented with the problem of making an automated backup server at work. Okay, so I made the problem up myself, but the backups had to get done somehow, and in the absence of a rack of tape drives, I decided to backup weekly, monthly, and daily to two different hard drives. And, having heard some good things about it on the interweb, I decided to install Ubuntu on it. I know, I should have gone with a server install, but you know what? I like having to use the command prompt as little as possible.

Having said that, I downloaded the ISO, burned the single disc it required – as opposed to the 3 or 4 for FC4 – and bought a cheap $600 box without XP installed. Popped the cd in the drive, went with the default partitioning and such, and was away in literally 15 minutes. Everything worked perfectly off the one install disc, and you know what? It looks nice. It works nice. Using apt-get (and its graphical frontend) is an absolute pleasure, and the amount of stuff available in the offical/universe/multiverse repositories is simply stunning. I’ve since downloaded several different packages (yes, including some spiffy puzzle games) all of which have worked like a charm.

And while I have a few tiny gripes about it still – there are some settings that don’t stick unless you edit .conf files – I have never had such a good time with any Linux distro ever. End of story. Even installing themes in Gnome is a breeze: you download a gzipped file off the web and drag it to the Themes window and it installs automagically. Really, a pleasure to work with.

dan (enough phanboy ranting now… I’m going to bed)

You know what bugs the crap out of me? Here’s what, and pardon me for sounding off about such things on my blog of all places. People that suggest you do something, and when you actually decide to do it, they go “Oh ho ho! Betcha can’t do it!”

I mean, what the fudge? Is that supposed to be a motivational technique of some sort? Is that supposed to give me the impetus to actually do it? Goodness gracious, affirmation is not the hardest thing in the world. If you make a suggestion and someone follows it, you pat them on the back and maybe offer to help in any way you can. The end. This is not a very hard thing to do, at all.

Imagine being at a praise evening planning thing, and suggesting that instead of some vapid worship chorus you play a hymn. Then, when the leader says, “Hey, that’s a good idea. Let’s do that!” you’re like, “betcha can’t play that hymn because you’re too used to that other crap!” How far do you think you’re going to get? Yeah, maybe it’ll produce some result because the guy’s going to want to prove you wrong, but in the process, you’ve made yourself into a gigantic ass, and any further suggestions you give are going be like a fart in a tornado.

There. I’m done.

dan (a little frustrated here)

We write words backwards
at the corners of mouths
that curve upwards
and beside eyes that
crinkle like newspaper;
these are words in a mirror
we roll up and toss
aside for guttersnipes
and urchins in
search of phrases to admire
themselves in;
we write words backwards
and they are
frowning.

Belowdeck they rumble
like chattel shifting awkwardly
to the tune of pitching oak
all tar to the ocean’s
feather -
above the consonant crackle
and whipsnap sail trimmed
to bound for shore -
we are five hundred souls
praying for something
and not quite certain what
it is -
tomorrow perhaps
coral will empty our pockets -
today maybe
Jim will shoot an
albatross.

As I’ve spent a little more time with The GIMP, I’ve figured out how to get it to do all those things that PhotoPaint could do, and a few more that I’d never really wanted to know before but find enormously useful now. Like paths. I’d never used paths before, believe it or not.

So, in the spirit of using our good Open Source friends, I’ve decided to monkey around with a few of my – for some odd reason – leftover photos from the other evening. The results are… delightful.

Again, these images are not for the broadband-challenged. Unless you like looking at the thumbnails. Nothing wrong with that. Think small!

Other: What might grass be like… if it were purple?

Speckled: Rust isn’t really this colour, for your information.

Rust: This is probably one of my favorite pictures that I’ve ever taken.

Fall: For the record, this picture was very, very dark before I got my photo-editing fingers on it.

Blue: Not much blue in nature. Until now.

Cobain: What better way to celebrate Kurt than with oddly-coloured rust?

From between the laticed
board and plaster I
am a roving iris to
pachyderms passing.
If my heartbeat were as
deliberate as their footsteps,
if it pounded less dramatically
like drums in my ears,
less like the frantic ticking
of a grandfather clock
in its final seconds,
I’d tear my eyes from this.
From between the tenpenny
nails they seem
a palindrome,
blood on each and every hand,
slowly walking by.