Eccentric Flower:200910/The Good The Bad

Good Things:

- It is October, the month of the year which should be the paradigm for all other months of the year, and the weather this morning was crisp, mid- to low-sixties, and the sky was blue. And as I walked to work in short sleeves and sandals, watching the rest of you insane people in coats (light coats, admittedly, but really, what is wrong with you? Are you lizards?), finally having weather that suits me, I managed to forget briefly how ephemeral this period is and just enjoy it.

- Alpha Centauri (and its very important expansion Alien Crossfire), the best game in the Civilization mold ever made (in a hotly contested intramural field), has never been updated or remade, unlike Civilization (now in, what, version four or five) or Colonization (recently reskinned and updated, and yet not as fetching or as entertaining as the DOS original). Thus it always pained me to know (from bitter experience) that the 1999 game didn't play under XP very well; it crashed frequently.

Well, my attention got drawn in that direction and I learned yesterday that the game is popular enough that it is still being sold, as is, and people are still occasionally buying it, 1999 graphics and all. And because it is still being sold, there is a patch that allows it to run on all them newfangled Windows versions, and I reinstalled my old CDs and patched and lo, it works a charm. And that's what I did all afternoon (slow work day and I was at home) and evening, and boy was it refreshing. A game of Alpha Centauri takes many hours to play and you tend to totally lose track of time when you're doing it, and it's not something you want to do every day, or even every month. But I was long overdue for a fix. There is no substitute.

- I have more or less mastered the voodoo of NFS automounts and our system of automounts in particular, which I believe qualifies me as a Hero(ine) of the Realm, especially since we have no documentation of a ridiculously convoluted system, with mounts from several servers and a periodic rebuild of the mount maps every ten minutes and a job that feeds data changes to NFS/NIS from our accounts database and the automounter having to coexist with an entirely different system of vfstab/dfstab based mounts of slices from our two ZFS pools .... eeeeeeeee.

If reading that paragraph makes your eyes glaze over, imagine how I felt while I was trying to learn about it forensically, the only way I could: By inspecting the various scripts and jobs and mount files.

Now I am armed with sufficient information to do what I really want to do: Throw seven-tenths of it out. On Monday I reduced our auto_vol map from eight printed pages of mounts to four. Nothing has sputtered and died since then. There is more pruning to come.

Bad Things:

- Watching my friends argue about Roman Polanski is tearing me to pieces. This strikes me as the kind of fight where people actually do stop speaking to each other. I don't like those kinds of fights.

- I'm still disgusted with the people I was disgusted with. In particular I am having trouble reading the entries of one person in question (you don't know her and she doesn't read here) because she is apparently going to try to reconcile with her jackass husband after his blatant infidelity, even though previous evidence suggests that he is no prize on any front to begin with. This wouldn't be such a sore spot if there were any evidence whatsoever that she'd learned a thing from her serial poor judgement in men. I have watched so many of her relationships fall apart over the years in nasty ways. After a while one starts to wonder if the problem is entirely with the mates and how much of it is with the person choosing the mates.

Thing In A Class By Itself:

- When I get old I want to be as good at being cranky as Gore Vidal. There is no cranky old man like a gay cranky old man. (Exhibit B: Quentin Crisp.)

Whether you agree or disagree with his contentious opinions is your own affair; I won't say which I agree with (or which I find tempting to agree with on some dark evil level, even if I think they're a touch overblown and don't bear scrutiny). I will say that Vidal does sometimes seem to be off on his own planet (qv. his inexplicable tolerance of Timothy MacVeigh; his apparent belief that McCain was lying about what happened to him in Hanoi). But that just adds to the fun.

Cherce bits, presented without comment or implied endorsement:

And, finally, the quote that Sullivan named as a Moore Award (ridiculously over-the-top left-wing rhetoric) contender: