Hieroglyphics

Upon becoming frustrated with the enigmatic glyphs on the controls of his smartphone, my dad thought of the icons on the buttons in a particular computer program:

"In Unigraphics [a jet-engine-scale CAD program], a product I used to support, we have over a thousand symbols. Years ago, mankind invented phonetic writing so we wouldn't have to remember thousands of symbols, and now we're back to systems where we have to remember a thousand symbols!"

Having just finished a class on the era of civilization in which writing developed, I was highly amused. :)

PVU

So...

I like small airports. A lot.

I got a ride from a friend at 7 this morning to the Provo municipal airport. We pulled up to the Million Air building, got me unloaded, and off I went.

Through the normal doors, turn right, wait almost no time, check bags, step through the door, put everything through their one x-ray machine showing pass and ID after the metal detector, step into the waiting area/terminal. Board by walking across the tarmac and up a ramp.

Simple, condensed. Like this verbage.

They even let me board right after first class because I have no overhead bin item.

Cold seats though. That was a shock!

Cranky

You ever look down at your gas gauge and realize that you have drastically less fuel than you thought you did?

I feel like that today.

Just Go.

 "Why, I'm going to do as much as I can until I get kicked out of BYU," she huffed. I looked into her gaze, which she was casting condescendingly down her nose.

"Is that so? Why don't you just leave?" I demanded.

Touchpads

Computers are great.

Most of the time.

Linux is great too.

Most of the time.

I just want to thank bigbrovar for his blog post about getting HP Probook touchpads to actually work in Linux. The instructions worked nicely for me exactly as he wrote them. (OK, so I used a different temp directory...) (It also sheds a fair amount of light onto how to modify the source of an Ubuntu/Debian package and then proceed to use it as modified.)

I can now scroll with two fingers. Right clicking is not a phantasmagorical nightmare. Middle clicking actually can happen.

This is a happy thing. Verrra verra happy.

Graceful Exit

There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully.
-- Ellen Goodman


For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
-- Albert Camus


Thank you fortune-mod (1:1.99.1-3.1ubuntu4-1mint1)!

Running

Follow-on to Purging.

Tired. Keep going. Need this to work...

The flint and steel wasn't sparking. The pile of rags wasn't lighting. The metal monstrosity he was crouched in was dark, with rare pools of light filling corners here and there.

Maybe it was because the flint was actually diamond and the steel was duralloy.

Meh.

He needed the fire.

The Geiger counter slung from his belt was ticking idly--too many times the room he was crouched in was suddenly flooded with radiation as the structure decayed, and the purple light poured in from between the rooms...all that that left for him was to run...

---

He panted. This door was a different metal than the rest. It wasn't warm. It did have a complex opening mechanism, though, so he set about actuating locking rings and solving ciphers...

He didn't think about much else. The door offered a hope, and he had latched on to that.

This disrupted the self-exciting nuclear field that had developed around him, and the fuschia aura in the structural interstices began to die.

---

It's open. What's inside?

Shifting his weight into opening the door convinced it to slowly swing open, and he stepped through onto a hard surface. Reaching down, he ran his hand across the floor.

Cool. Stone.

He felt for the torch on his belt--a lucky find in the last room--and cast it down the passageway.

Rough hewn, and it keeps going.

He started walking.