Many random things on my mind tonight. It’s amazing what a 13 hour workday
will do for you 🙂
Someone from UCFV (my old school) is
visiting work to do some sort of alumni
story about grads and/or teachers from UCFV who work at work. Apparently
like, 4 people have taught there and another 4 are either grads or in one of
the programs there. Of course, it is the only school in the area
(well, at least for Chilliwack) so it’s not surprising that anyone who isn’t
totally self-taught in computers has passed through there at one time or
another. Still interesting. Maybe I should wear big fuzzy bunny slippers for
the photo shoot or whatever tomorrow? I’ll keep ya’ll posted on what goes on.
I finally took the plunge and am in the middle of updating my woody (it’s a linux distro you perverts)
system. Just recently X 4.0.x went in, along with perl 5.6, so either it’s
all tested and working perfectly (a distinct possibility) or it’s going to
horribly break everything (still likely). Debian’s got a good rep for
not breaking things (but having horribly long release cycles), except
for a minor incident of everything breaking last week for LIMOS (oops, but
then again, not my fault). So it’s currently unpacking (thank $DEITY for
broadband, 70+ megs downloaded in the time it took to write this so far), and
soon we’ll see how it goes. According to debianplanet.org things are nice and
working properly, the only thing I’m worried about on it is Quake3. Seems though as long as you
have your kernel to 2.4.0-test* with DRI and something or other installed,
you’ll have sweet 2D and 3D acceleration. Now I assume that means that X
(whoho! multi-head again! (no, dual monitors you sickos)) will have all the
gl stuff in it and everything. Well, hope anyway.
Checklist for stuff working:
- X runs
- Quake3 runs (without sucking)
- Truetype fonts work
If all the above works, that means I’ll be able to surf to my hearts content
and do all that I want to do 🙂
Bah, lost my old X4 configs when I redid my system. However, Debian’s little
“dexter” tool looks pretty cool. Just got to that stage now (wow, you even
get play by play commentary).
First problem. Replacing perl is nice and good and all, but when the program
that is used to install/configure uses perl, and you remove perl so that you
can replace it…. do you see a problem? Anyway, convinced it to
work by manually symlinking /usr/bin/perl5.6 to /usr/bin/perl…
X4 locked up my display by the way. So if you’re reconfiguring make sure you
have a system there that you can use to telnet/ssh into your system to
reboot it if that happens. Hopefully it’s just a configuration issue
though….
More Weirdness
So who chooses our path and our personality? I know that my soul (whatever
that may be) is my own, but certain bits and pieces of my personality,
mannerisms, etc, all belong to someone else. This bit from Jeremy in high
school, that bit from Kyle at my last job, another bit from someone else,
another from another. At what point is my personality my own? Is it my own
when all the other parts are combined in some special way, or is it never my
own and I live in entirty as some other person or people.
How do you become you? How does the soul exist? Do you ever sit and wonder,
outside of science and outside of religion, how you are put togeather? When
you move you arm… do it now, and it moves, how does that happen? How does
the thought (and sometimes not even concious thought) of moving your arm
upwards make it do it. Science will tell us it’s nerve receptors and brain
cell agitation or some such, and religion will tell us that $DEITY has graced
us with a soul or something, but that’s irrelevant. How does it happen when I
close my eyes and stare at the blackness of the insides of my eyelids, or
think about these words as I type. Or type. Or think.
I think I’m going to stop now before I realize that I don’t actually exist at
all and simply disap