The bathroom, the halls, sand has somehow crept into the floor, with cracked islands of normalcy and sand flowing around it. People try to go about their days as normal, desperately ignoring the pulse of the land, sitting on the back of something that wakes.

Over the last few days, a small problem with my laptop has come to a head. My Inspiron 8500 (hey, search engines) has a little peg to detect when the lid is open, but it eventually began to get stuck down. No problem (yet), as Linux doesn't know how to suspend on my laptop, and I wouldn't want it to anyhow because I like using my laptop as a MP3/OGG player while I bike to/from work, and it's closed in my bag while I do so. The problem is, while the peg is stuck down, all the special keys on my keyboard, being part of the same 'flap' on the keyboard, stop working. Earlier, you'll recall I mapped the volumeup/volumedown/mute keys to F-keys my laptop doesn't have (F13-F15), and then told windowmaker to run aumix to appropriately adjust the volume for each keybinding. So, with the peg getting stuck down recently in a way I can no longer pry it up, I pulled up the flap (probably should've turned off the laptop first, but eh...) and removed the peg. I can now adjust the sound anytime, without prying at the peg if I've closed the laptop recently. Downside: I learn why Dell had the peg also disable all those keys -- with the laptop shut, any jostling can easily cause the keys to accidentally be pushed, so now while I bike, the volume goes up and down randomly, and occasionally mutes. I thought I'd write a script to unmap those keys that I'd run before I close the laptop, and another to remap them when opening it. Unfortunately, I found that that doesn't work -- Windowmaker (my window manager) gets the KEYCODE and not the KEY EVENTS when it starts up, so removing the keymaps (which map keycodes to key events) doesn't help. No problem, says I, and I write a wrapper for aumix that only runs aumix if /tmp/laptop_is_closed does not exist, and some scripts to easily create and remove that file. I tell wmaker to call the wrapper instead of aumix, and everything's good.

I had my midterm in Cognitive Neuropsych yesterday.. I hope I did well.. and either way it's nice to not be cramming anymore. We were all nervous because it's one of those classes with no assignments, so it was hard to know what she'd ask.. I think I had a satisfactory answer for all the questions, although the quantity of what she wanted was very vague. Now that that's out of the way, I can start aiming my non-work-related attention back to getting my laptop ready for a reformat and install of Fedora2test1 (or maybe test2 if I take too long to get ready).

From a recent conversation on IM:

(10:07:26) Improv: Personally, I find it to be irritatingly fluffy that the art community decides that the definition of art has to have so much mythos around the term 'art', and systematically rejects any definition that comes about. I mean, yeah, it's a kind of hard term to define, but I get the feeling that people don't really even WANT it to be definable (10:08:02) Improv: Kind of like how people don't want the concept of 'soul' to be nailed down, because they feel it somehow diminishes them