It’s gone.

Tonight, the inventory’s done. The few boxes of Mom’s things are sitting on the checkout counter, ready to be carried home. I went over to get a jar of lemonade, and I forgot my keys. I went to the house to get a spare from mom, and I realized that this is what it’s going to be like. The store’s closed now. Go away now. It’s not yours now. If you want something, we’ll be open in the morning, now. Goodnight, now.

Carrie proposed to me in the back room there. We lived in the back room when we first arrived in Ridgway, our little stove and a cot in there. Tonight we just held each other and cried. The familiar jingle of juice-jars rattled as we walked down the aisle to the back. My mom’s neat handwriting on index cards hanging from the shelves. “Suntime is Fun time. Remember the sunscreen” reads a sign. “Cucumbers” reads another. “Celery”, “Colorado Peaches”, “Fuji”, “Braeburn”, “Gala”, “Pink Lady”. It seems like a fantasy land, a little oasis of simplicity and honesty. The prices were always reasonable, just enough to get by. She wasn’t in it to get rich.

I feel like I’m losing the best parts of my mother. It’s there that I saw her smile, always friendly to everyone who walked in. Her neat arrangements, everything orderly and pleasant and nice.

I feel betrayed.

One for the ooold campers.

What do you call the spawn of Satan that’s quite the image of hir father?

Solon-oid

Badump, ching!

Waffles.

Last night, Carrie and I biked 20 miles for pizza and beer. It was great. Our friends Ethan and Eric make pizza every other week, and we all come hang out and contribute.

My wrists are killing me from biking that far with no grips on my handlebars. Oh, well. I’ll heal.

Score.

Yesterday, Carrie and I found H. K. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford University press, 1950 printing) in good condition. There was another copy of The Elements of Style (revised edition). The former is excellent, with some very brief and direct discourse on several hundred topics. It is not too dated. Among its words are such gems as “of shares with another word of the same length, as, the evil glory of being accessory to more crimes against grammar than any other.”

Quite the find, I’d say.

Holey <expletive/>, Kim gives good mix.

Word-maven Vruba lambasts meaningful probe to quash evil utilization of grammar. Calls for bolstering the bastion of prescriptive grammar. Has issues with attempts to revamp clash of values.

Good article on how to improve GUI and command-line integration.

There’s a lot of shit going down this month. Wait it out if you can.</cryptic>

I missed a friend messaging me last night under the influence of Meth. Have I ever mentioned what I think of that drug? It’s highly addictive, it’s dangerous, and there’s a non-zero chance it was made wrong, and is instead one of the lethal precursors, all of which are white and crystalline.

I honestly think that one’s stupid, no matter how much it feels like it opens you up emotionaly, mmmkay?

So imagine the Chinese Restaurant voice mixed with someone with a peach inspediment mixed with the Transylvanian girl from Young Frankenstein who came out of John Cleese’s handbag.

Day from hell, still trying to accomplish for me what I wanted to do this morning. Oh, well. I did make a good chunk of cash.

A profile.

I’m a hacker. My day job is running a small but forward ISP in rural Colorado. My passions, computer-wise are toying with interfaces, making fun technologies play nice and find the more useful permutations of their combinations, and thinking about new communication systems.

My pet projects, mostly unfinished, are a mailing list manager, a rhythmbox-alike music player, and a jabber-IRC hybrid server with MUD-like abilities, as well as various ruby modules. I also spend a lot of time reasearching distance cluster filesystems, one of the more interesting problems in large-scale high-availability cluster computing.

My programming language of choice is Ruby, with a style inspired by much reading about LISP, Arc, Scheme, SmallTalk and Objective C and a functional style started with trying to make PHP not crash when it had memory management issues.

My company specializes in making internet service simple, and encouraging our customers to become good citizens, both on the net and off. We provide dial-up service, and are expanding into DSL. We host a service to build-your-own-website, and are open to custom hosting projects of an interesting nature.

I’ve been playing with BLAM! a bit this morning, and I really like it. It has the same clean feel that Gossip, Evolution 1.5 and Epiphany have. It is, however, missing some important features. The most important for me is “mark all as read”. I read about a hundred and twenty feeds, with one or two gems for every ten articles. Eight extra clicks to mark things as read isn’t cool on the tendonitis. Equally annoying is that there’s no notification of new articles. I have to open BLAM! to check. The final is that it doesn’t obey /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels = TRUE.

That last nit is the single feature that keeps me sane using a traditional desktop under the influence of tendonitis. For years, I used sawfish with some very custom keybindings, just so I’d never have to use the hated mouse, which aggravates my tendonitis far more than the keyboard. Why GNOME decided to turn it off by default is a mystery to me, unless it was a case of the Moveable Toolbar problem that MS Word has. A total mystery is why it was buried with no UI at all, when the moveable toolbars get a nice little checkbox in the control-center. Re-assigning hotkeys is useful. Moving toolbars around isn’t. (Face it: How many people reading this use toolbars anywhere but the top of the window. I rest my case.)

So at about 15:00, betelgeuse, my workstation crashed. I took it down to plug in a faster hard drive to help solve its unbearable slowness, and I discovered a few leaky capacitors on the motherboard. Since it hadn’t seemed to hurt it before I took it apart, I figured it’d still work when I started it up. Wrongo.

Thankfully, my dad had a very nice spare motherboard and case around, so I replaced the hideous case and various other parts, and by 19:00, I had a working machine again. I left it moving files to the new drive as I walked out of the office.

Such a lovely way to spend the day instead of working. It was enjoyable, but at 19:00, I was getting to where I started nine hours earlier.