DuskThe candles, the torch, the tongues reaching up the dark surface of the sky.. Lost information, things we cannot see, do not care enough to look, a closed door we just don't bother to open.. the harsh light, the busy day, it taunts our eye, like medication skipped, a passportic invitation to misunderstand. The oval sees less than the crescent. My hand crawls, scrambling through the chalky roots, free of the burden of the group, in seeking the end of shadows too deep, examined with a long pen, to stick to my eyes.
I finally became irritated enough with MySQL to track down a gotcha that started shortly after I installed it. I don't like MySQL, but I like MediaWiki, the software that Wikipedia uses, and I wanted to see what it'd be like to use a Wiki on my laptop for everyday document management. After getting it installed, and configuring it, I rebooted, and noticed that, according to the boot scripts, it failed to start and stop cleanly during each startup/shutdown, failing with some kind of a timeout. Oddly, the wiki still worked. I thought the database might've been slightly corrupt, and so I was getting ready to dump it, remove the software, and restore it, when I decided to check the sysVinit scripts. Apparently after the actual start of the database, it does a ping, which fails. I tried the ping myself, and it told me there was a permissions problem. Hmm... After a bit more prodding, I found the reasoning -- I followed the MySQL instructions, and set a root user password. The command the init scripts use to shutdown and check to see if the database is up happens to use the root account, which fails to run if there's a password set. Good system! Thanks for the directions!
Henry Kissinger is not likely to be having a good week. Despite his best efforts, more tapes of presidential conversations with Nixon were recently released. They range from reports of him drinking (which doesn't seem like such a big deal -- a lot of people occasionally get sloshed) to the engineering of the 1973 coup in Chile, a much more sinister act, albeit one that was essentially public knowledge. I really don't know what difference this makes though -- the common American seems uninterested in history, and the history textbooks are probably worried about appearing anti-American, so will continue to print the 'common standard knowledge' rather than the things that actually happened. It's probably always easier to understand the history of a nation by studying it from the vantage of another nation.
Ahh, the joy of reducing everything to economics..
Anyhow, I was going to do another post in Isa's blog, but the inspiration went away while I was messing with MySQL. Come to think of it, I think I'm going to skip philosophy tonight -- I am in serious need of mindless chill time. Life has been way too bumpy as of late. Maybe I'll go running or biking again tonight. It still takes me awhile to get unsore after I exercise the fnord out of myself (climbing tires me, but not in the same way), but I seem to be able to go for longer distances every time I go. In any case, there's been some free and unhealthy food at work that I need to burn off. Ahh.. chill...
Morning