Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"My life may suck, but it sucks exactly the way I like it!" -- Electron Mike, in the comic strip Diesel Sweeties, by R. Stevens, 2006.

[... which reminded me of:]

"Life sucks and it's wonderful." -- Kenny the Hobbit, in a note left on my dorm room door, 1981 or 1982.

And here's where I finally get to the one thing that, on waking, seemed to make this dream worth bothering to describe and share: I tried to edit the file right there on the chalkboard by writing vi commands on the board. First just dragging a fingertip through the dust on its surface, then picking up a piece of chalk to do it right. My supervisor questioned this, and I reassured him that it should work, and it nearly did. The only problem with this in the dream was that there was no termcap entry for the chalkboard, so I had to use vi in "open mode" (that is, as though the blackboard were a printing terminal instead of a screen -- open mode is where vi behaves like ex, a text editor that doesn't rely on being able to move the cursor around on the screen), and I'm not good at that, so I eventually gave up and went to the battered (and glitchy) Sun in the corner to finish editing the file.

And if any of you Emacs-using heretics have had dreams in which your editor worked just fine on a slate blackboard, I don't want to hear about it, okay? I'll go brush up on my 'ex' commands just in case the dream meant something.