It was a kind of precision without accuracy, the novelty become a new routine. Full exploration, unlimited time and unyielding memory a curse, doomed to remain inside a house that kept growing with each trip outside. Reliance on novelty a failure, resignation to stability or a mindless search for the new. We try to speak without speaking, withdrawing every statement we say, artfully leaving connotations and nothing to deny. The old and formless..
I recently discovered that a book I've had for many years, with a semi-ornate sci-fi cover, actually has a slightly less ornate cover than I thought -- some of the decoration on the cover was actually schmutz of some sort. Cleaning it off, it looks sharper but somehow less .. refined. My guess is that someone spilled root beer on it at some point. Oh well.
Today at the beehive there's another one of those quiet interpersonal evangelist-types, and also an old loopy guy singing loudly to himself at a nearby table. I'm having a good time though, listening to some Sarah Silverman jokes (a la mp3), playing on the net, and reading previously mentioned now-destained-book.
Recent discoveries (in the unix world):
- The sort command understands fields! I no longer need to use perl quite as often to do complex sorts. Hurrah!
- yumdownloader will grab rpms but not install them. Handy!
- instanbul records Ogg Theora videos of desktops. Neat.
- scp doesn't behave at all like I'd expect when copying from one remote host to another. Instead of sending a stream from the first named site to the site issuing the command, and plumbing that to the second named site, it asks the first site to send a stream directly to the second site. This can be surprising when firewalls, private networks, and similar are involved.