... general malaise...

It's one of those days... there's nothing really wrong, or at least nothing specific to me that's wrong... but things just seem kinda meaningless. It's been gray, I didn't manage to get my combinatorics done, the 2335 test today was a shaft, and things don't feel like they're going anywhere. I need to get excited about something, I think... I've been feeling kinda sullen, fairly likely to give voice to the complete non-sequiturs that tend to pop up and generally do strange things because I hadn't been coming up with reasons not to.

As I type, gentoo is getting installed on the hackmode server. We may have to host it in Tim's room, but that's rather closer than, say, Tallahassee. Really nice of him to offer... Apparently I'll be able to get everybody's old files off the OpenBSD filesystem... although we'll have to set up all the accounts again, because I'm a loser and blew away the old /etc. "emerge -u world" can take rather a long time on a 200 mHz machine...

I'm not excited about people getting killed :-\ This is rather less-than-happifying.

I think it's interesting that Al Gore is an advisor to Google and that he's going to be on the Board for Apple... maybe they'll give him a free iPod. He made a nice comment about Apple and their relationship with the Open Source world. That's rather a breath of fresh air after Microsoft claiming that software piracy funds terrorism... that whole conglomeration of things (Al Gore, Apple, Google, Open Source) feels a lot more... sort of ex-hippie liberal, more-or-less-realist-and-capitalist-but-still-humane... than a lot of other things in the world.

I'm looking forward to the summer. I'll go home, where it's bright and sunshine-y and warm, where my family is, and I'll run every day in the oppressively hot morning air and take a class about the Linux kernel and work out and be Really Healthy. Maybe some cool people will be around, and I'll hang out with them, and when I'm not hanging out with them, I'll read for fun and write device drivers.

I don't know why Tech doesn't work out quite like that... or at least it hasn't been. I shouldn't ascribe my malaise to the university. It's probably just me and the times and the weather... if it's not lightning-ing, I should go and run. That'd feel good.

I can't see anything, I've realized. I should get a new prescription for my glasses. Things just need to stop for a while. I caught myself mentally scouting out fantasy worlds and foreign countries I could move into... possibly something a bit more 80s-cyberpunkish would be interesting for my new reality. Are there any spots open for characters in Neuromancer? I tried to convince Marty that we all need to move to Hawaii or maybe some obscure South Pacific island where we can go and be Maoris. I've been trying to figure out how I can become Hispanic or maybe Black. I'd like to say that I want to get out of my own head for a while, except there's really nothing interesting going on in here anyway... really nothing to escape.

I went to LUG tonight, and that was pretty entertaining. We were trying to come up with the core sorts of things that somebody (May, particularly -- and this other new fellow, Josh) should know as a Linux user. I've been realizing recently that we don't know how to teach anybody anything about computers... CS education is really ad hoc, and it varies wildly from teacher to teacher, and we're not exactly sure quite what we're trying to get across, let alone how to go about getting it gotten.

I should read, or do work, or call somebody, or run, or eat something, or talk to somebody in person, or sleep, or something.