Hi all,
I just received word today that "(Un/Re/I )Do" was nominated for a Pushcart prize. It originally appeared in this past summer's issue of Alligator Juniper.
In other news, I've been working on putting together my thesis for my final semester and I'm finding out that I won't be able to submit the full book as my thesis. The thesis limit is 200 pages, and I'm at well over 250 with 3 unfinished stories still to go in. This is kind of a sad revelation for me, but at the same time, I think it's going to give me a little more leverage room to assemble a smaller selection of already done stuff and then be able to spend more time on new material. I think the subset of Not an Autobiography will be masquerading as Fractured Self.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Zen and the art of computer fuckups
So I'm a computer guy, right? I should know better than to break my home computer. But you know what, I did just that. Below is a cautionary tale of sleep deprivation, time constraint pressures, and mild stupidity:
Two thirty AM and she still won't sleep. But bouncing, sootzing (everyone else calls them binkies, i call it a sootzer), and holding her close is keeping the howl from the depths of the abyss at bay. My only problem: I'm fucking exhausted. It's late into week three, and I'm leaving for school in a couple of days, and my child has not yet learned the blissful value of deep sleep.
Two thirty AM and I need to stay awake. Too many nights before I've nightmared about falling asleep with her in my arms--waking then in terror when she wasn't there only to find her in bed where she was all along.
Two thirty AM and I am reading release notes for SuSe 10.3. My laptop's already done the upgrade hoops. No frills, no problems there. Maybe I can take the leap tonight. Maybe I can upgrade the desktop too. Maybe it'll get done by the time my baby sleeps. Maybe I can do a wireless install.
Two thirty AM and that's one hell of a lot of Maybes. More rational, awake, aware minds would say, "Stop the fuck right there." Those minds weren't present that day at Two Thirty AM.
Not reading, the doc correctly, I fire up YaSt and tell all my packages to update from the server. Things go ok for a bit. Then the installs start failing. Packages die on the way to Nigel (that's the pc's name). Fuck. I abort, hoping not to have destroyed the system too badly.
Think fast at 3 am and you don't think thoroughly. I backup my fiction, and NOTHING else.
Three AM and I slap in the SuSe 10.3 install disk. I know this won't let me install over the network without a hardwire lan connection, but I figure I'll just do the base system and update in the morning.
Four AM, packages selected, install started, and the child is down for the count. System installs take forever, so I join my baby and we collectively hit the hay with my already sleeping wife. Till Day
Till it dawns on me when I check my PC that something seriously bad has happened. It's a failed package. I ignore it, clicking through, thinking "I've seen this before...probably a useless program that linux has 3 redundant similar programs to choose from." Package ignored, install continues, and I wait through it. Initial boot time comes, and INITRD fucks up. I don't know enough about linux to know much about this, but I do know that that means the bootloader just got fucked in the ass. And no bootloader = booting the OS. MOTHERFUCK is the proper term for the moment.
Still not thinking too horribly clearly, I try a full install update by hauling the pc down to the router and jacking into the lan. I waste the weekend with such configurations. It all boils down to a libzypp something or other that hates life and won't download or install.
I get desperate. School is rapidly approaching. I want to spend time with my wife and baby, and I still have all my workshop responses to do. I grab up a little bit of logic and reinstall version 10.2.
This works. Sorta. But it doesn't boot to the graphical system. Stupidity washes over me and I forget the "startx" command, and keep typing "Sax2" instead. (at least my monitor got configured, right?). At this point, If I would have stopped, thought, looked at a couple of things, I could have avoided everything that happened next. But I didn't do any of that, I boldly forged on and fucked up my computer to a point where someone from linuxquestions.org said "serious forensics" would be required to recover my data.
What did I do? A fresh install of SuSe 10.3. Fresh install means format drive, start over, page one.
Why would I do this without backing anything up other than my fiction, you say? Is it because I'd much rather deal with losing all our wedding pictures, honeymoon pictures, a lot of Sue's art, and 30 gigs of MP3s? No. You see, I thought that I backed everything up. My pc has 2 HDDs in it and the 2nd drive was supposed to be dedicated to holding my music collection, and being a 75gb drive, It had plenty of room left over. Under the 10.2 system, I thought I copied my home folder to the Music drive. Thinking and doing are 2 different things. The difference here lies in the fact that I didn't have the music drive mapped correctly, and actually, none of the data I stored in /music actually was on the 2ndary drive. All of it was on the primary.
So when the fresh squeaky version of 10.3 finally loaded and I mounted the music drive, every cell in my body said, "Oh Fuck!"
But I'm a computer guy, right. So all is not lost. (though I did give up for a few days, till my wife told me that many of those photos were required for Christmas gifts. [again Oh Fuck!]).
I flooded the n00b forum of linuxquestions.org and a coupla folks said "so sorry for you," while another couple said that my task was doable, but tricky.
Tricky because I couldn't remember if my filesystem before the format was reiserfs or ext2. And that's a big difference in systems. All I knew for sure was that my pc was ext3 at current.
So fortunately for me, SuSe when updating did a quick format, so I figured most of the data was still there. I downloaded a few live CDs, made specially for system repair, and lucked out with them. One of them allowed me to see the deleted partition, and restore it. Turns out it was reiserfs afterall...something that worked to my advantage because reiserfs has a goddamn wonderful command that allows you to restore a deleted partition. I did that, and within a few hours, data was restored.
In all, I recovered probably 90-95% of what was lost, with most of the loss hitting the mp3 collection (which fortunately is easy to replace).
During this ordeal I learned one hell of a lot about linux, and I also learned something more valuable than anything Pirsig ever talked about in the book that I stole this blog's title from: Never ever update your computer with a screaming infant in your hands.
Two thirty AM and she still won't sleep. But bouncing, sootzing (everyone else calls them binkies, i call it a sootzer), and holding her close is keeping the howl from the depths of the abyss at bay. My only problem: I'm fucking exhausted. It's late into week three, and I'm leaving for school in a couple of days, and my child has not yet learned the blissful value of deep sleep.
Two thirty AM and I need to stay awake. Too many nights before I've nightmared about falling asleep with her in my arms--waking then in terror when she wasn't there only to find her in bed where she was all along.
Two thirty AM and I am reading release notes for SuSe 10.3. My laptop's already done the upgrade hoops. No frills, no problems there. Maybe I can take the leap tonight. Maybe I can upgrade the desktop too. Maybe it'll get done by the time my baby sleeps. Maybe I can do a wireless install.
Two thirty AM and that's one hell of a lot of Maybes. More rational, awake, aware minds would say, "Stop the fuck right there." Those minds weren't present that day at Two Thirty AM.
Not reading, the doc correctly, I fire up YaSt and tell all my packages to update from the server. Things go ok for a bit. Then the installs start failing. Packages die on the way to Nigel (that's the pc's name). Fuck. I abort, hoping not to have destroyed the system too badly.
Think fast at 3 am and you don't think thoroughly. I backup my fiction, and NOTHING else.
Three AM and I slap in the SuSe 10.3 install disk. I know this won't let me install over the network without a hardwire lan connection, but I figure I'll just do the base system and update in the morning.
Four AM, packages selected, install started, and the child is down for the count. System installs take forever, so I join my baby and we collectively hit the hay with my already sleeping wife. Till Day
Till it dawns on me when I check my PC that something seriously bad has happened. It's a failed package. I ignore it, clicking through, thinking "I've seen this before...probably a useless program that linux has 3 redundant similar programs to choose from." Package ignored, install continues, and I wait through it. Initial boot time comes, and
Still not thinking too horribly clearly, I try a full install update by hauling the pc down to the router and jacking into the lan. I waste the weekend with such configurations. It all boils down to a libzypp something or other that hates life and won't download or install.
I get desperate. School is rapidly approaching. I want to spend time with my wife and baby, and I still have all my workshop responses to do. I grab up a little bit of logic and reinstall version 10.2.
This works. Sorta. But it doesn't boot to the graphical system. Stupidity washes over me and I forget the "startx" command, and keep typing "Sax2" instead. (at least my monitor got configured, right?). At this point, If I would have stopped, thought, looked at a couple of things, I could have avoided everything that happened next. But I didn't do any of that, I boldly forged on and fucked up my computer to a point where someone from linuxquestions.org said "serious forensics" would be required to recover my data.
What did I do? A fresh install of SuSe 10.3. Fresh install means format drive, start over, page one.
Why would I do this without backing anything up other than my fiction, you say? Is it because I'd much rather deal with losing all our wedding pictures, honeymoon pictures, a lot of Sue's art, and 30 gigs of MP3s? No. You see, I thought that I backed everything up. My pc has 2 HDDs in it and the 2nd drive was supposed to be dedicated to holding my music collection, and being a 75gb drive, It had plenty of room left over. Under the 10.2 system, I thought I copied my home folder to the Music drive. Thinking and doing are 2 different things. The difference here lies in the fact that I didn't have the music drive mapped correctly, and actually, none of the data I stored in /music actually was on the 2ndary drive. All of it was on the primary.
So when the fresh squeaky version of 10.3 finally loaded and I mounted the music drive, every cell in my body said, "Oh Fuck!"
But I'm a computer guy, right. So all is not lost. (though I did give up for a few days, till my wife told me that many of those photos were required for Christmas gifts. [again Oh Fuck!]).
I flooded the n00b forum of linuxquestions.org and a coupla folks said "so sorry for you," while another couple said that my task was doable, but tricky.
Tricky because I couldn't remember if my filesystem before the format was reiserfs or ext2. And that's a big difference in systems. All I knew for sure was that my pc was ext3 at current.
So fortunately for me, SuSe when updating did a quick format, so I figured most of the data was still there. I downloaded a few live CDs, made specially for system repair, and lucked out with them. One of them allowed me to see the deleted partition, and restore it. Turns out it was reiserfs afterall...something that worked to my advantage because reiserfs has a goddamn wonderful command that allows you to restore a deleted partition. I did that, and within a few hours, data was restored.
In all, I recovered probably 90-95% of what was lost, with most of the loss hitting the mp3 collection (which fortunately is easy to replace).
During this ordeal I learned one hell of a lot about linux, and I also learned something more valuable than anything Pirsig ever talked about in the book that I stole this blog's title from: Never ever update your computer with a screaming infant in your hands.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Live from Louisville
Emilie Simon:
You know, you'd think that since I'm in IT I'd be much more net savvy, but I missed out on the rise of the internet. I don't own a cellphone, and hope not to, nor do I Myspace or really YouTube...but slowly, like an old man, I'm learning the new technology of the time, and as you can see above, I've found the point to YouTube: watching music videos I want to see, unlike my highschool days and MTV where I spent my precious 30 minutes before the schoolbus hoping that Garbage's "Only Happy when it rains," or Collective Soul's "Shine" would play, because if they didn't, if I had to be subjected to fucking "no diggity" or Destiny's Child, I knew I would have a shitty day. Needless to say, I had a lot of shitty days in high school. I think if YouTube existed then, and I had a computer then, I would have enjoyed high school, I would have bee popular, and I wouldn't be live in Louisville now, because Popular people are generally too happy to be introspective enough to feel driven to the forced isolation of the writerly life.
Oh and I miss my wife and daughter immensely right now. Right up to the point that I don't care about using that adverb in the preceding sentence. In my defense, how could I not miss pumpkin butt:
You know, you'd think that since I'm in IT I'd be much more net savvy, but I missed out on the rise of the internet. I don't own a cellphone, and hope not to, nor do I Myspace or really YouTube...but slowly, like an old man, I'm learning the new technology of the time, and as you can see above, I've found the point to YouTube: watching music videos I want to see, unlike my highschool days and MTV where I spent my precious 30 minutes before the schoolbus hoping that Garbage's "Only Happy when it rains," or Collective Soul's "Shine" would play, because if they didn't, if I had to be subjected to fucking "no diggity" or Destiny's Child, I knew I would have a shitty day. Needless to say, I had a lot of shitty days in high school. I think if YouTube existed then, and I had a computer then, I would have enjoyed high school, I would have bee popular, and I wouldn't be live in Louisville now, because Popular people are generally too happy to be introspective enough to feel driven to the forced isolation of the writerly life.
Oh and I miss my wife and daughter immensely right now. Right up to the point that I don't care about using that adverb in the preceding sentence. In my defense, how could I not miss pumpkin butt:
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