The enemy saw my troops withdrawing from every battle, suddenly choosing to surrender hard-won fields, offering merely token resistance, withdrawing back towards the capital. Things had changed, and they simply yielded the fields, returning to the cities. It is time to go, the wave has formed, and the brief battles with the shark are now over. Time to go, time to go.. The Origami's fold points are being used..

"The wind is old, and still at play, but I must hurry upon my way, for I am running to paradise" -- William Yeats

Yes, I am running, and if you look closely, you can see that my footsteps are mere shadows of what they were, the face becomes the caricature as the essense dissolves.

I just finished talking with a friend whose life has gone a bit more wrong, from his perspective, than mine has by mine. It's strange how, when someone devotes their life to getting a certain kind of job, and the door is closed forever on them, they can become like someone stuck on an ex-so, saying that they'll never know job happiness again, so they might as well just 'play the game', stomp through the drudge, live life, and die. No -- in either case, life goes on, and things should get easier -- it's not easy, but people can find a new dream, find a new career, a new meaning in their life. If things ever get really bad, it's always possible, and generally desirable, to reach out, grab the dice, and roll again.

A few days ago, there was a beautiful rainbow as bright as I can remember. I think it was that way because it was one of those rare rainy days where it was also really bright out. Everyone I knew was talking about it for the rest of the day.. another moment of collective beauty that binds most of the people in the city together.

Sometimes when I'm in the car and am bored, I like to imagine music videos for songs I listen to. I thought of one for "I think I'm a Wolf" .. one thought, or conversation, I've dreamt of, notes that amateur producers of music videos are excessively literal with their following of the lyrics, but people are generally simple, so there's an art as to how divergent one should be. And then, na klar, there are the people who just smash things and stuff. Here's my shot... the music opens the song, and an orchestra in a dark room, all wearing dark vision goggles, with spotlights focusing on them to reveal their presence.. they play the intro.. and then, where the conductor would normally be, the singer shows up in the middle with a bright white spotlight as it's time for him to sing. He's holding two pieces of broken mirror, clutching them hard, with light blood visible streaming from his hands. He sings the first part, and our perspective is of him looking at his own face, with the mirror in each hand, as the words come out, and blood slowly streams down one of the mirrors. The first musical interlude has him move one of the pieces of mirror around as blood really starts to flow from that hand and that hand/arm begins to get dark. He finally flings it to the ground where it shatters, and that arm, bloody and hairy, is shaken as blood drips from it. He sings again, and we notice his eyes are beginning to get somewhat red and he's sweaty. During the narrative part, it fades to his confusing memory of the night before, and as it ends, we fade back in, and see that he's no longer at the conductor's stand, instead he's over what looks to be the body of one of the cellists, and there is blood on his mouth as if he's just taken a feast. As he notices we're watching, he nonchalantly wipes his mouth and steps back up to the stand, leaving the body behind. He continues to sing, but as he notices his eyes continuing to get redder, he flings the second mirror to the ground, and we see him directly in the spotlight, his skin now dark, his eyes now red, and the orchestra in the background looking frightened. Lest you think I'm totally insane, the song is about a guy worrying that he's become a werewolf.

I cooked that one up on the way back from IKEA -- while the highways there were clear, they were closed the other way, so clever Pat, who proved to be a bit less clever than he thought, took a route that proved to be very suboptimal back, and explored strange, new areas of Pittsburgh and vicinity. I did, however, find an interesting cousin to the waterfront shopping area -- I don't know it's name, but a branch of the local healthcare system, the UPMC, has a building called the UPMC Margaret there. Perhaps the whole area is called Margaret. My route then took me downtown via a route not too different than the street route back from Timbuktu, where I drove under the Pittsburgh Convention Centre, and by what is now the most beautiful stretch of coast that I've seen in Pittsburgh. I understand that years ago, Pittsburgh was known as an ugly, steel city, but while I never have seen that city, Pittsburgh today is nothing like that. The beauty of this city is beyond any place I've lived, and compares favourably to what I've seen of Europe and the West Coast of the U.S. Anyhow, IKEA is having a sale, and I got a little bit of furniture.. again though, I neglected something I always try to remember -- rearrange apartment first, THEN visit IKEA. When I don't rearrange first, I have no idea what areas of the apartment I'm trying to fill in, and I'm working with a lot less concrete imagination to decide what to get. I need to toss my mini-couch, I think -- Wally (now deceased), and then Beefalo and Tortfeasor (cats that Debb and I owned that went with Debb), slowly destroyed it. I really don't know if I should replace it before I save and move to a house -- while a couch might be nice, I don't mind sitting on the floor or the beanbag to read, and I don't watch enough TV to use it for that either. Maybe if I had guests more often.. Anyhow, I got another rack to organize my CDs, and a shelf/cabinet to hold/hide some of my TV-attached stuff.

Before that, I was at work today for a few hours, debugging an odd problem with a colleague we've seen with some of the NFS-homedirectory-setup systems we've been installing recently. A few days ago, I concluded that it was related to NFS locking, and not to NIS (GNOME/KDE logins failed, but mwm and twm both worked fine, and turning off NIS and still using NFS homedirs created identical problems). The setup is complicated -- we're getting to the NFS/NIS server over a VPN (using openvpn) connection, and we initially worried that the client-side locking daemon wasn't running because the kernel-mode lockd process doesn't show up until a NFS mount begins. Several kernel-compiles later, we found this out, switched back to the generic Fedora kernel, and my counterpart busted out the packet sniffers. It turns out that he really had the VPN network locked down -- allowing all traffic over the VPN made everything good, and eventually we found that NFS locking uses a dynamic port and a callback, which his default rules wern't sufficient to permit. He eventually found some sysctl stuff to force it to always use the same port, and all became good. Let this serve as a warning to people who try to be too restrictive with their firewall -- NFS locking, and NFS in general, can be an unruly beast to provide for.

Yesterday evening, I saw Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, .. err.. too many repeats in there. In any case, SSFWS was an incredible movie. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but it should be known that it's an incredible experience.

Rumsfeld says its unclear who is winning the war on terror. My guess? Maybe Mongolia is winning! Sorry, couldn't resist a joke.. Some other loony apparently was upset with zoning laws, so he armoured his bulldozer, and drove around town attacking buildings he didn't like.

Thank you, John Kerry, for reminding me that you're only a better-than-BushJr stopgap, and not someone I actually like as a president. Censorship really pisses me off. New weapons research promises a less-deadly way for the police to get people to comply in difficult situations.. Hmm.

I notice that the russian version of Wikipedia has better pictures than the english version of the same pages for russia-related topics. Imagine that! I am pleased to find that I can at least sound out things in Russian Cyrillic now, although since I dropped Russian, I won't be learning much more without a lot of effort. Maybe I'll take it again some later semester when I have more emotional energy.

Here's a fun jab at the settler movement in Israel. w00t!

In a way, RedHat is back on PowerPC -- FedoraPPC is here. It's by no means mature though -- they don't even have a bootable CD right now. I can't benefit from it now though -- I no longer have any hardware of that type..