Stupidfool.org

Why not blog it?

Mena asks me why I don't blog more. Tonight we're watching The Thorn Birds on the love channel, and Meggie has just all passive-aggressively told Ralph that the now-dead Dane was his son, and then he's crying mightily, and then she goes off and is having a big 5-minute long scene with her mom. And I'm wondering, what the hell happened to Fr Ralph? What's he doing during this time? And I picture him just still crumpled over against the fence with his head in his hands, but looking up ever so often to see if someone's coming around--waiting for someone to notice him (like the way he's always walking around reading his Bible, like someone's going to say "oh wow, there goes Fr Ralph with his Bible, how saintly and caring he is").

And I tell Mena that and she thinks it's funny. Kind of like Augie, she says.

I say that I am thinking of adopting Fr Ralph as my new online persona, FrRalph my new screen name. And she says that I should blog that.

And here is the reason that I'm not sure if I should blog it (other than the fact that I'm watching The Thorn Birds): because I can't see how anyone other than than Mena and I would think this is funny. Saying that it's an in-joke isn't really right, because The Thorn Birds by definition is too much of a universal joke to have an in-joke about it--who has in-jokes about The Thorn Birds, that's just sad. Rather it's just that it seems too bizarre.

But here we go: I blogged it anyway.

The Man Machine

Do you know what's interesting? I absolutely hate talking to people, and I particularly hate talking on the phone.

But whenever I have to call a customer support number, I *never* choose the automated support options. "If you'd like to hear your current account balance, press or say 1, now." Um, no thanks.

When it comes to customer support, I *love* talking to people. Or rather, I hate having machines do the job for me. It's as if I think the machine has some reason to give me false information or to lie.

But some underpaid worker who hates his job and couldn't care less about me or my problems: I know *he'll* tell me the truth.

Night Music

The other day I woke up early, and it was a great day.

I love it when it's 10:00am and I can say that I've been up for two and a half hours*. It feels like I'm actually getting something *done* for once.

But the trouble is, I also like being a night person; I like working at night, when it gets late, and when it's quiet. And I love the *idea* of staying up half the night while the rest of the world wastes the best hours of the day (though in practice it doesn't always work out quite as well).

Staying up all night long, though--that's not for me. I can't think of a feeling I hate more than watching the sun come up when I've been up all night.

* I know, I know; waking up at 7:30 isn't early for a lot of people. Unlucky you, I say.

Re-make/Re-model

I've never been one to remodel my computer desktop with loud colors/garish fonts/etc. I've always used a Mac, and my current Mac has just a plain yellow background ("Sunny"). I've installed Kaleidoscope in the past, but I always got tired of it and just went back to the standard Platinum theme.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the other night I installed Redhat Linux on our Intel machine, and since then have been experimenting with huge background images, fonts, colors, themes, etc. I installed a newer version of Enlightenment and I went wild.

Mena says it's kind of sad, and I tend to agree.

BUT: there's a reason for it, and I've figured it out today. The reason I keep messing about with backgrounds/themes/etc. in X (and, for that matter, why I always tended to do the same in Windows), is because the defaults are just so damn ugly. I've never seen an uglier desktop than the default I was given with Gnome (this is on a Redhat 6.2 install; it's certainly possible that the Gnome desktop has improved since then). It had this horrible blocky font, and these ugly gray buttons, and these ugly icons, and this drab blue background. It looked sort of Windows 3.1-ish.

So there it is.

And by the way, I still haven't come up with a look I'm happy with.