Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Urk. Awake. Feeling unpleasantly interesting sensations from several of my body's subsystems at once. Hope this stabilizes shortly. (Hmm. One does not get hung over from merely contemplating drink, right? So some parts of how I feel are distinctly unfair. (Last night I had a hankering for hot buttered rum, but was stymied by a lack of butter and a pronounced unwillingness to find out how hot-margarined-rum would taste.))

First waking was from a dream set sort-of in World War II: I was armed and uniformed, and standing in my parents' front yard with another soldier (who I think outranked me). Except that the yard was larger and had more trees than in real life. It was dusk. We realized that German soldiers were approaching -- I think we heard a tank, because we knew there'd be one -- and came up with a plan to surprise them, but the plan that involved setting up an ambush in the front yard didn't work out so we went around back to find a place to observe from hiding. I wedged myself under a forsythia bush and hoped that I didn't make the bush move too much when I dragged my rifle off my back. The other American moved closer, toward the pine trees, and was spotted. There was shooting and shouting and we knew we weren't going to get a shot at disabling the tank (in some scenes it was more of an APC; in others it looked like a small tank). My buddy took a bullet in the leg. I felled a few Germans on the way to dragging him out. For some reason (movie-hero physics?) we were able to move more quickly despite his injury than the twenty or so German soldiers chasing us. Returning to the front yard, we found a German officer's limousine (yeah, long, black, shiny ... dream logic, okay?) and stole it to make our getaway. We changed into German uniforms, and I drove. We decided to drive east, to Germany, to hook up with other American forces there. Oddly enough, driving east took us through mountains instead of into the Atlantic ocean (huh; dream geography ... and I failed to note the incongruity of that detail until just now). We chatted as I drove, and both remarked on the incredibly smooth ride of the limo, and how amazingly pleasant and luxurious it was. When we stopped for food at a gas station in the mountains, I felt really bad about walking into a place owned by a sweet, elderly, Jewish couple while disguised as a Nazi soldier, but we had to maintain our cover (I guess the east coast was occupied ...?). Much later, we were in Europe, approaching positions where we might find American troops, and I wondered whether we were close enough to get a wireless TCP/IP connection to make contact with the folks we were hoping to join.

The geography glitch didn't wake me. The fact that the house I grew up in wasn't even built until well after WWII didn't wake me. The fact that WWII wasn't fought in Maryland didn't wake me. No, realizing that TCP/IP wasn't invented yet was what woke me. Go figure.

There are probably a whole slew of hitorical/cultural/weaponry errors in there as well. It was very much a pop-movie-ish version of things.

Yesterday was a yo-yo day: up for a while, trying to get things done; fade out and rest; get tired of resting and get up again; fall over; get a second burst of energy; etc. While I was up, I banged on a frustrating computer. It's one of the "fast" machines -- bearing in mind that in my house 350 MHz counts as fast, and I haven't gotten rid of all the 486/66 and Pentium/75 machines on my LAN yet -- and I'd previously tried to install Linux on it only to render it unbootable. (It arrived either with Windows on it or no OS; I've forgotten.) And when I say "unbootable" I mean that it would no longer even boot from a floppy or a CD! After a whole lot of "this shouldn't work but I'll try it anyhow because the problem I'm trying to solve shouldn't exist in the first place" tinkering, it suddenly decided to recognize its CD drive after all. *Whew* So I was able to put a current version of Linux on it -- the rest of my machines are running Mandrake 6 or Red Hat 7, except for the box that lonebear gave me that's running ... whatever version of Debian this is, probably a lot newer than anything else in the house other than what I installed last night.

My plan (assuming a steady enough supply of round tuits) is to configure the new box to replace an existing one, including its identity, then upgrade the old one and configure it to replace another old one, and so on until every Linux machine in the house is running something released this year. Then I'll probably not get around to upgrades again until the whole house is ten years out of date, but I'll have had a brief period of being current. Then maybe when I download an interesting package, I won't have to contemplate quite as many "but it requires version {mumble} or later of such-and-such first, and even if I put it on the file server those three boxes over there won't be able to run it" issues.

Saturday I had a brief period of perkiness in the morning that lasted until early afternoon, then crashed pretty hard; I was feeling a little more alive by evening, but not enough so to make it to the party I'd wanted to go to. Feh.

But now that it's a weekday, I've got urgent things to do that involve interacting with weekday-type-organizations. Ugh. Let's see how I feel after a bit of food and some ibuprofen. Just sitting still to write this seems to have helped a little.