Well, it looks like my cunning fixery of the new Trouble hardware didn’t actually fix anything. It is still buggered, perhaps even more so than I had thought. It is still the SATA controller being screwed, and it is definitely only ocurring under Linux.

The night before last, Erin and I watched my shiny new (still in the shrink-wrap) copy of Ralph Bakshi’s “animated” Lord of The Rings (1978). I hav concluded that I would have been best equipped to appreciate this movie when it first hit the Cinemas, and have steadily lost that ability since then, as I developed critical faculties like the ability to discern a plot. Wow that was bad!

Today I began my new, um, career at Kaz. So far, so strange. Working for a firm that big is deeply scary. It’s a distinctly disturbing feeling noticing that ones employer is so huge and powerful that they distort the sconomic world around them. “Kaz?”, you may say, “Kaz aren’t that big!”. “No,” say I, “Telstra are that big.” It’s just spooky.

Today is a most excellent day. Make of that what you will!

The new incarnation of Trouble looms menacingly close to completion. The grief I had with Ubuntu and AHCI was fixed by one B. Meyer who pointed out to me that most modern AHCI implementations are incomplete leading me to try turning AHCI off, and further to update my bios. All is now well, and I am once more very impressed with Ubuntu, both as a server platform and as a desktop OS.

Today I tried to take a copy of /home off the old server. I say “tried” because shortly after I plugged the USB sneakernet drive into Trouble 1.0, it crashed and refused to come back up, or indeed to do much of anything, including power up its graphics card or make startup beeps. Not Good. Further examination revealed that it had cooked either motherboard or CPU for no particular reason. This was solved with a new CPU and motherboard and CPU and three hours cursing, swearing, sweating and furiously wielding a screwdriver. It is now up and running, in that same very precarious, temporary sense in which a card-tower is ‘up’. It is hopefully making me a nice big tarball of the entirety of /home too…

Since I have the magnificent power of comments once again, I am also doing a bit of a casting-call: I need a new wiki, a new web-logging tool, and a new gallery app for the new Trouble. Does anyone care to make any recommendations? Please explain why your idea is better.

Thank you!

I am teetering on the verge of re-enabling comments on this page.

To the best of my knowledge the folks who were posting comments I objected to are now IP-blocked from this entire web-server. In any case, they should be aware that I can and will block them if they post here again: I can block your IP. If you use an anonymous proxy, I can block their IP addresses too. If you use dhcp release/renew to rapidly shuffle your home IP, I will indiscriminately block your ISP’s entire range.

Ultimately, if there is sufficient reason, I will turn comments back off again. I could make the whole thing login-only, but that would seem to me to defeat the purpose of having a page in the first place, and I know how many legitimate comments would never happen if there was that much extra effort involved.

On another note: It has been pointed out to me that calling my prospective new employers “alien overlords” might be seen as a tad rude. If you’re reading this, and you’re from Kaz, please understand that this is a joke. It is vaguely even a Simpsons quote (Kent Brockman says something just like this, repeatedly). If I meant anything by it, it was only to imply that Kaz is radically larger than any of my previous employers, and I am savouring the novel feeling of being a tiny little cog in such a huge machine. Please forgive my bemusement: I meant no disrespect.

As of today I have officially been offered a position at Kaz, a huge australian IT firm wholly owned by Telstra! Yay!

The job is more systems administration, and it sounds like the best of both worlds: a full-time role with all the security and packaging that come with it at such a firm, plus a consultancy element which means there will always be new systems and new technologies.

The location is better too: I’m in the Melbourne Central Tower, nine stories above a Max Brenner Chocolate store. Dooom!

That’s all. Just popping up to say I for one wish to welcome our new alien overlords etc. etc…

This morning, in a session with someone who purports to be able to help me navigate the inside of my head, I happened upon some interesting questions, such as:
Is it ever justified to refuse oneself forgiveness?
There are some things that once done, should not be forgiven. This seems to be a fairly common thread throughout the english-speaking world where the word ‘forgiveness’ has a more or less constant meaning. But, my therapist says, this belief system prevents healing. Maybe she is right. Perhaps in my case she is right, but what about the abstract case? Had Adolf Hitler lived to truly comprehend the magnitude of his crimes from the perspective of one or more of his victims, would he ever be able to forgive himself? Would it ever be appropriate for him to do so? Surely the opinions of his victims must have some weight in this? What if his ongoing failure to forgive himself made him so crazy that he went on to hurt more people? I doubt that any of the surviving victims derive any comfort from the fact that he committed suicide. If you’re a holocaust survivor, or you know one, and you’re not offended by the bluntness of my inquiry, let me know: What does it mean to you that Adolf offed himself? Is it a good thing or a bad thing in your opinion?

In completely unrelated Ubuntu, a name which many people would lately have heard me evangelising, is currently in my bad books. Having spent awfully close to $2000 on Trouble 2.0, I am now discovering that the absolute latest release of Ubuntu, released a day ago, does not understand the disk controller. The controller in question is an Intel ICH7R… about as generic and comonplace as you can get. Grrr!

In other news of crapness and lameness beyond excuse: E and I went shopping tonight. One of the things we sought was a cheap DVD player. We went initially to K-mart in Burwood; an old haunt of ours since it is open 24/7. They had two suitable DVD players on display, but, as is so often the case at the mart of K, they were both out of stock, and no, they would not sell us the display models, even at full price. Peeved, we moved on to Coles in Brandon Park. There we found and MTV brand DVD player, with more features than the basic model at K’mart, for $50. Gleefully, we purchased it and took it outside to the car… to discover that it made an ominous loose-components-rattling-noise. Taking it back inside, we were promptly given a replacement; the second of the three in stock. This we took home, unwrapped, and found that the remote control had a pair of thoroughly leaked, corroded batteries in it, and the battery chamber was lined with battery-goo. This also, we took back. The third and final DVD player in stock at Brandon Park is now sitting in my lounge-room, awaitng me having the nerve to attempt to install it. Doubtless it will explode…

Just a mini blog, inspired by a particularly disturbing news article:
Soldiers bond with battlefield robots
If this article doesn’t scare you, you’re either not seeing what I see in it, or you’re already living, well adjusted, in the future; congratulations to you.

Walking to work this morning, an overwhelming idea occurred to me. Please consider:

Lucid Dreaming is a technique in which one trains oneself to check frequently if one is dreaming, with the aim of eventually being able to realise that one is dreaming during a dream. From this realisation, one can potentially take control of the dream, steering events in whatever direction one desires.

Cartesian Existentialism, loosely, is based around the exercise of systemmatically questioning all aspects of ones perceived reality. Descarte’s own line “I think, therefore I am” is a potential starting point for Cartesian reasoning. Descarte’s Meditations, in which this idea was introduced, compares perceived reality to a dream, and asks how we can know that this reality is not simply a very detailed dream, perhaps one induced by some entity to mislead us. This should be a familiar concept to fans of The Matrix.

Suppose then, that one asks this question: What if the reality all around us is a dream? If it is, can we then change the world around us simply by believing firmly enough that we are dreaming, and willing the change? If you think you’ve tried, what makes you sure that you’ve really believed? Is it even possible to believe such a thing and not be crazy? What are the implications of madness for effective lucid dreaming? …and so on.

Sweet dreams folks!

A couple of people have commented to me directly about that last post, and I thought I should add some clarifications:
Type 2 love is not without passion or joy or wild crazy jungle sex. It just isn’t driven by these things. Type 2 love is the kind that you have to sit up in your seat and steer, unlike type 1 love (‘infatuation’? Thank you D.B.) which has a pronounced tendency to be on rails.
I would also add that, contrary to the opinions voiced by those who use ‘being in love’ as an excuse for rampaging destruction, type 1 love is still a voluntary thing. As a very clever man said to me recently: “You may not be able to control how you feel, but you can control what you do about it.”

My new replacement at work seems to be doing his best to drive me mad before I leave. He is a manic little british guy with a very low sense of humour, who seems to delight in breaking my concentration. He can probably also use Google. *sigh* If you’re reading this, A, rest assured that I would probably get along with you just fine if I didn’t have to bare all my most embarrassing workplace disasters for your benefit, eight hours a day.

My car is almost functional again… It has been a bit of a saga: first the prang, as documented in previous posts, then the tail-lights and fuel light dead, seemingly due to prang-damage, then the service and the new shock absorbers, then the timing belt exploding, just a few kilometers short of home, coming back from Porepunkah. Two days after that it was the alternator, stone dead on the way to work. I am seriously wishing I had gone with plan B and sold the thing, opting for a Smart car instead. Now I feel vaguely that I should make an effort to get my money’s worth out of all of these repairs. My once powerful and cruisy car is now teetering along on great floaty shock absorbers which bottom out at the slightest bump, gurgling and rattling and shaking, unable to yield the least ounce of power. I am afraid to ask WJM (my mechanic) any questions though, lest it cost me still more money.
Cars. Who needs ’em?

As parents go, mine weren’t bad, but I have concluded that they somehow failed to teach me a handful of things which might have made my life radically easier and better. Better both in the sense of being more pleasant, and much more importantly, better in the sense of being a better person, making a better net contribution to the world.

So, the latest key thing I have decided I have to make sure my children (as yet hypothetical) understand:
There’s more than one kind of love.
Recently I have read most of The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck, started reading Authentic Happiness by Dr Martin Seligman, and am about half-way through Not “Just Friends” by Shirlet P. Glass. All of this reading has been in an attempt to better understand how and why I so utterly betrayed the trust of my partner Erin last year, that it might never happen again, and hopefully to ensure that our relationship can heal.

There has been at least one common thread of information through all of these books which was seriously news to me: The kind of love that one has for one’s partner (as distinct from platonic love) comes in two distinct and almost unrelated flavours.
1. There is the love of ‘falling in love’. This is the love that comes on like a drug. Driven, often unknowingly, by forces far from rational, I suspect that this is the love that so many songs are written about. All, or 99.99% of couples begin with this kind of love. It’s what keeps the species going… and it’s at least partly a great big lie. Why? Because it never lasts. This kind of love tells you nothing about compatibility, about your capacity to tolerate one another in the long term, or even to communicate effectively. That part takes work, comes later, and feels different.
2. That other part. The kind of love that lasts has nothing to do with the first kind of love. Movie makers almost never depict this kind of love because it’s not obvious, and it’s not interesting to watch from the outside. This is the love of trust and compromise, where another persons frailties and imperfections are met and accepted. There isn’t necessarily any underlying sense of attraction to drive it. It is a private matter; where the first kind might be demonstrative, this kind of love is like a business partnership: you don’t talk about the inner workings to people outside of it, even friends, without taking care to ensure fairness and openness; insider trading is a criminal act.

It is this second kind of love that it’s vital to explain. To tell the young victims of mass-media overload that there is another kind of love, that you can’t learn about by watching video hits. To make sure that they know the difference between and relative importance of thse two very different things. To make sure that they know about the second kind before they hurl themselves headlong into the jaws of the first kind.

I dearly wish I’d understood that difference when I finished High School. I’m sure I could have.

Long time no blog! Actually, I have blogged since that last post, but in vain… more of that in a moment.

I have also lately been reading an incredibly helpful book: “NOT ‘just friends'” by Shirley P Glass, PhD. I am presently only part way through the book, so a review will have to wait, but I am already feeling strongly inclined to recommend the book to all and sundry. So many things that seem obvious as soon as I read them, but which were far from it when it mattered. Enlightening.

Trouble has been troublesome lately in the sense that there are still on-going modem difficulties. My last post here was swallowed by one such outage, with Trouble falling over between my logging in and my pressing submit on the post. Grr! It has also been troubling insofar as I have not quite managed to put together the right finances to buy Trouble 2.0 yet. At least for this month, new shock absorbers have taken precedence, in the hope that my old car will stop grating itself on the driveway whenever I enter or leave. Specs for Trouble 2.0 are holding pretty firm at this stage, with all the alternatives being insufficiently cheaper to warrant their lack of performance. Presently:

…with the slim possiblity that I will pick up a cheap or free USB2 internal DAT-72 drive from work in the interim, removing the need for the expensive Maxtor disk box.