"Middle-aged white guy since 1981"

I bought a calligraphy fountain pen today.

Now that sentence is problematic for several reasons. I don’t really need one, so you could say that this would be frivolous spending. My handwriting is terrible, so I can’t really show of anything that I am writing with it. But…

There is always a “but”. Some way to justify your latest purchase. Office supplies are a guilty pleasure for me. Somebody once pointed out how people tend to sexualize the tools that they use every day, so I guess having an obsession with nice pens kinda fits this failed writer. This thing is a pleasure to look at and to hold. My fist Lamy, never had one in school, and now I see what all the fuzz was about. Great products. And it is fun to use. When I take my time I am actually producing something readable with this one. So chances are that I might actually improve my handwriting with it. I had looked up several pens over the last days, and since the day went rather well, I felt like treating myself.

Buying this I found a new smut-peddler (office supply store) that I really like and I found out something about Hundertwasser architecture that is worrying me. But I am saving that for later posts.

This is short and I am rambling. Sorry, busy with my new toy.

Fear is holding me back. Fear of all kinds of things. Being more aware of that lately is not helping, really, it mostly adds to the torture. I put things of because I am scared of the outcome, neither positive or negative outcomes are free of results that make me feel anxious. After delaying what needs to be done I feel fear of being too late. Of having failed by default. It’s a vicious circle, I’m not seeing a shrink for nothing.

So how did I overcome my fear today?

By admitting it to someone. I might feel alone in my position, unreasonable, embarrassed, really. Sharing your fearful thoughts with somebody you trust will get you perspective.

By having somebody offer to hold your hand. I hope that all of you are in a position where you have someone to do that. You don’t need to take them up on it, but hearing “Talk to me when you are done” helps a lot.

By confronting anxiety. I often confuse anxiety and fear. “Fear is knowing that there is a bear out there, anxiety is thinking there might be a bear out there.” Confront what you are anxious about and you may find out that you don’t need to be scared.

By having somebody keeping you on your toes. Don’t trust your conscience, it’s a part of you that is unreliable. Be grateful of the people that remind you of the things you fear.

4 things that worked today, 4 people that I am grateful to know. Feeling better about tomorrow. I hope you guys do, too.

Yeah. He’s not gonna get into the debate team, I know. But he knows what he is talking about. He made this, after all:

Yepp, that is Sleeps record/song “Dopesmoker”. One track, the whole album, 64 minutes long. And there you have the whole history of Stoner Rock/Metal/Doom, condensed. Only ministry did it faster, they managed to put all of Industrial Metal on an album with a 44:38 playtime.

A few things to observe here:

• Notice how they are riding this one note, playing riffs that are slight variations, or explorations of song foundation. Discuss where Sludge would be without this record nowadays.
• Who said stoners are not productive? “Drop out of life with bong in hand”? And yet they manage to produce this magnificent bastard of a neckbreaker.
• This album was deemed unpublishable by their record company. It got released as “Jerusalem”, a recut, remastered version. What we have here is the directors cut, really. These 3 dudes had enough drive, pride and integrity to give up the little security they had with their record label contract and quit. They found somebody who loved this record as much as they did, did it justice and became legends. That is how it is done. Admirable.

Chances are that your computer that you are using to read this is at home, and that it is connected to some sort of network switch our router that supports high speed data transfer rates, much faster than what you are getting through your DSL line or whatever you have to look at silly pictures of cats on the internet. That bandwidth in your home network is untapped potential for one of the most useful appliances of our modern times: the home server.

Computers are incredibly cheap now and they also are rather green lately, the really cheap ones pride themselves on using much less power than you might think. One of the benefits is better battery life for portables, so the often belittled netbook, once it has outlived its usefulness as Facebook machine and pretentious writers gimmick (only once step above a berret, really), is a perfect fit for an always on device that does not much more than connect a hard drive to your networks and run a bunch of programs.

Here is a little list of apps that go above and beyond just sharing a drive or folder with the network and  make my life with my new digital roommate pure bliss:

• VNC: You want to be able to remote control that computer from any machine in your network. If at all possible, you want that computer to run without anything, even input devices or a monitor. VNC servers and clients are the tool to do so. For a Windows server, I recommend TightVNC.
• BitTorrent: For Linux distributions, you know? Seriously, do whatever you are comfortable with, but the fact that this PC is supposed to run permanently in a spot where it won’t bother you makes it perfect for these long downloads of big files. Nothing beats uTorrent for that, mostly because of the remote access features it gives you.
• Dropbox: Dropbox is one of these apps that everybody needs, but everyone has a different use for it. In this little project it helps with automation. An example: uTorrent has a feature to monitor certain folders for .torrent-files and automatically add these to the download queue. That folder could live inside your Dropbox, so that you can add files to that from other PCs or even smartphones with a Dropbox client. Bonus: Belvedere. Belvedere, or any similar tool like Hazel watches folders on your hard drive and can be set to perform certain actions on files in these folders. I use this to move .torrent files that I download from the download folder to the Dropbox, and uTorrent on the server picks them out of it seconds later. One click solution to start a BitTorrent download on a remote machine.
• iTunes: Love it or hate it, iTunes is still the best solution to manage Apple portable devices (which I happen to like) and it has some nice robust features for sharing the library on the server with any other machine running iTunes on the network. I experimented with having the client machine access the iTunes library files on the network drive directly, but that somehow feels like it has too much potential to mess up the library files, and who wants to go in and re-rate 18.000 songs? (52 days of music straight? Holy shit, I need an intervention)

Did I miss anything?

I am NOT getting a Mac!

So the new router is installed, I have high data transfer speeds without having to put cables through the whole apartment and the new Eee PC is nice and snappy. Time to retire the old one to his new role as a fileserver in a corner of the living room.

I would like it to run Ubuntu, but the lack of iTunes is a deal breaker for me still. So lets start it’s new life with a fresh install of the Windows XP license it came with. Better download the latest Service Pack, SP3 before that, so that we save some time on security updates, right?

36 hours later and the machine is still updating. You read that right. Hundreds of what Microsoft is deeming to be “important security updates”. That warrants another Service Pack, wouldn’t you agree?

I had it running over night, not to lose progress, because some nitwit had the marvelous idea to put some updates in there that you need to click through, agreeing to EULAs and other stuff that should be front loaded for the user to deal with once and in bulk, but the worst offender is Internet Explorer. The vanilla Windows installation for that machine still comes with IE6, and updating means going through the motions of downloading and installing 2 obsolete versions of the worst browser nobody uses anymore, each time going through a bunch of infuriating dialogue boxes. To add insult to injury: one of the last ones lets you choose an alternative browser, no doubt the great result of the European anti-trust lawsuit.

Ninite afterwards was a small relief. That got most of the 3rd party software that I am intending to use on my little server installed painlessly.

NO, I WILL NOT GET A MAC, ANDREAS!

So this exists. Dog owners with young dogs can drive to a pet obedience school, and the trainers will let all the puppies run around the compound to play with each other. And it is every bit as adorable as you imagine.

The way I understand it, the point of the whole exercise is to take the puppies fears of other dogs, to socialize them and prepare them for proper training. The trainers obviously advertise courses they offer, but they dish out a healthy dose of free advise and insight, too, so every new dog owner is sure to take home one or two good hints on how to get along with their little runts.

Unfortunately it was freezing cold (I might have lost a toe or two in my steel cap boots there), but the turnout was still really good. All kinds of breeds and sizes were there. The little Shih Tzu in the video is Sanza, my roommates dog. The British Bulldog was awesome, it had already figured out that it would come furthest in life by just sitting down on the other dogs and smiling like a moron, while all the humans go “D’Awwww!”

The tiny dachshund you can see in the vid was the dog that stole my heart in the end though. It wouldn’t stop howling in the beginning because every other dog there was much bigger, and it hid behind peoples feet, tail between the legs. But towards the end of the hour, it was running around with the other dogs, careful, but clearly more relaxed. Beautiful, really.

Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?

My big Christmas present this year were tickets to “Betaville”, a play based on the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick.

“Do Androids…” is always brought up as the book that “Blade Runner” is based on. I love the movie, I think it is the best piece of cinema ever created. I read the book, too, and I love it, but I think it’s fair to say that the book and the movie don’t have much in common anymore.

“Betaville” by the Jena Theaterhaus takes it’s own liberties with the novel, but stays much closer than the movie. The most peculiar aspect of the play was that it was performed in total darkness. We arrived at the venue and were split up in groups of six, were told to form a chain by putting our hand on the shoulder of the person walking in front of us and were then led down into some kind of basement, around some corners and through some low door frames, blocked by heavy courtains.

I was not aware of how seldom we are subject to total darkness. There is some minor source of light around us most of the time, even if its only a small bit of moonlight coming through the shades at night. Not here. It was so dark that even the luminescent handles on my watch were a distraction and i had to turn it around the arm so that was facing my body.

The actors were moving around, presumably hugging the walls for orientation, and the fact that you couldn’t see them sneaking around meant that they could just speak up right next to you, startling the unknowing audience. They used a variety of sound effects, too, to get echo effects or static in radio transmissions. All of that together created an effect that went far and beyond what you get from a radio play or audio book that you listen to on stereo headphones. Great experience.

The way that they adapted the novel was reasonable. You obviously lose things when you need to trim the material down to a little over 60 minutes. Most of the cuts were parts that I remember to be very atmospheric, but really confusing (which is pretty much the same for this book, if you haven’t read it yet).

What is less forgivable is that the female actress, playing all the female roles herself, had 2 moments where she shortly forgot her text. It wasn’t extremely obvious, but it was amplified by the otherwise brilliant performance of all 3 actors and the lack of visual information.

Lastly, audiences ruin all theater. I don’t think the crowd ever completely stopped mumbling, one chick even semi-loudly proclaimed to her friends that she had no idea how to get out of the completely dark room, but that she had to pee and that she would try anyways. Brilliant idea.

Otherwise: great entertainment.

Image by Khatinka on DeviantArt