Eee-ouch. Procrastination is killing me lately. When I was little I was sure that procrastination was something that only happened in school. I always assumed that once I hit this "real life" thing were I had a job and what-have-you I would somehow outgrow the need to goof around and do anything except what I'm supposed to.

But here I am writing in my freaking /. journal instead of getting work done. The problem as I see is the essential Office Space conundrum. "Its not that I'm lazy Bob...I don't care." Not a lick about what I'm doing right now. Not a freaking lick. So I guess I need to quit soon or else figure something else out.

So what has been occupying my time other than the normal surfing the web and Sienfeld reruns... Got back into Halo because my brother finally started playing it, and the death matches in that game are amazing. Head to head is what that game was meant for and I've got to start playing this sucker online. (Mind you, I'll get rocked to high heaven, but then that's not the end of the world is it.).

That and women. The eternal distraction. Lately I've been thinking of writing a book on women, something on the order of "The Geek's Guide to Getting Real Girls". Not really thinking about actually doing it since I'm far from the authority - but I seem to manage and there has to be something I'm doing right.

Been thinking about it though lately. I just hit the big three-oh and lately I've been thinking that I should stop fucking around and settle down. Frankly I would if I found a girl that was perfect enough, but in the mean time I'm sort of enjoying the whole Tom-Cat thing. Got a date with Christina this weekend and that should be good. Anyway, going to try to pretend to get back to work now...

Well, its been two months and I'm playing with the PC less than I thought. Really, once I got everything working I really don't notice Mandrake any more. I expected to be learning all this damn stuff and instead I really just sort of log on, check my daily and weekly websites, check my mail and then log off.

I'm using my computer way less lately, but thats because I don't spend that much time in my bed room any more. Between a bevy of laptops, the XBox, the Gamecube and the general social atmosphere of the living room, why would I cloister myself in my bedroom on the PC. So Linux really was less of an adventure and more of an OS. Who knew?

The one thing I will be doing soon is finding some way of running Windows 95 or an emulator on the PC. I've been wanting to play XCom again and can't find a port (not surprising). Xenocide seems interesting, but its far from ready and I want to play now. (Maybe I'll see if there's something I can do to help the project along, but I'm not enough of a developer and I HATE play testing.)

Ok,

So with this whole imbroglio about SCO I found myself getting more and more irritated about the whole thing. What those turkeys are doing was genuinely pissing me off - and I realized I was reading about it in Internet Explorer while running Win2K on my home machine.

I know I should have been running Linux but the technicality of having a Red Hat partition that I never booted into was starting to wear thin. So, I formatted the hard drive, bought (yes, bought) a copy of the deluxe Mandrake set with the disks and the nicely formatted manual and I finally committed to something I'd agreed with in principle for a while.

So, I installed Mandrake, and damn if I wasn't going to run it this time. For serious. As if to reinforce my decision SoBig and Blaster hit this week - not that either would have been a problem for me, but it gave me a clearer perspective of what I've left behind.

Stupid Mandrake. No, I take that back, this last week has been more fun than any week of Windows ever was, but it's also been more work and more effort. Sometimes I just want to check my email and surf the web a little and instead I'm learning about libraries.

So, litany of issues: First I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. Wanted to be able to check my Hotmail and chat with people on MSN Messenger. (In Canada NO ONE uses AIM or really any of the others. I used to know one girl who used Yahoo IM, but that was only to talk to her friends in the US.) Installing the MSN plugin for GAIM was easy enough.

Then I got bold and installed Hotwayd which let me check my Hotmail and after a lesson in entering the correct path to a document when starting emacs, I managed to get that working too.

Then came the problems. The next two pieces of software I wanted were Bit Torrent and Opera for Linux. (I really liked Opera for Windows and didn't see any reason not to continue with it.) Well, apparently RPM Finder was down for a day or two, and at the same time my CD ROM crapped out. Getting the damn system to accept that the burner was going to be the new default CD ROM was WAY too damn hard, and in the process my system won't accept the CD that Mandrake provided me with with all the auxiliary RMPs and libraries that I need to install anything. So right now, new installs are on hold while I figure out this nonsense.

It gets better. I still haven't figured out a plugin to check one of my webmail accounts, and for some reason Konqueror won't load the page. So I try Mozilla. Crashes all to hell and takes X with it. So I try Galeon (hoping that it had something to do with the glossy finish and not the core program) and that crashed all to hell too.

Even disregarding the Mozilla/Galeon crashes, I've still had more crashes in the last week than I'd had in three or four months of running Win2k. Fear not, I'm not going back, I'm just accepting that I'm on the steep part of the learning curve. Downsides (some of which can be silver-lininged into upsides):
-I'm using the computer less when I'm frustrated or tired.
-I don't spend as long on the web, or surf to as many sites.
-It takes longer to start the freaking thing up and programs take way longer to launch.
-I've been irritated by a noticeable drop in performance - just surfing the web and listening to MP3s sometimes seems to cause problems.
-I've had more crashes in 10 days than I probably did in 10 months prior.

However, this is balanced by some serious upsides that seem to matter more:
-I like using the computer more.
-I don't feel vaguely embarrassed whenever I read (or mod) a post that is "Boo Windows, Yea Linux".
-I'm learning more than I was before and remembering how much I like actually learning.
-I'm enjoying the time I do spend fighting with the system more, and getting off a little on the power. I control this system! And dammit, I feel like I control it!

Anyway, that's it for now. I think I'm done with Mandrake for now. My friend Austin wants me to go over too Debain, but I think that's too big a move for me, so instead I'm going to buy a book and wrestle with a couple of distros until I settle into something I like. I figure I learn lots, have fun and end up with something I can feel good about running on my computer.

And probably document it all here since anything on my harddrive is likely to be formatted sever times over the coming months. Cheers, Nic.

This is one of those moments where I think of my friend Jeremy. For years his email signature read:

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work they should be doing at that moment.

So so true. It is a almost 7:30PM and here I am still at work. I should be finishing these work papers and instead I spend my valuable time reading /. and posting to my journal.

However, at least my thoughts are thoughts I probably wouldn't have at home. I've been thinking for the last few weeks that this life - the life I'm on the path to living right now isn't the life I'm supposed to lead.

I've got a good job at a good company with a good future. I'm already advancing - I don't have office politics issues ever and my job takes me into a different IT shop at a different client each week (or two sometimes). So basically, it's tolerable, the money is enough and I'm good at it.

I'd have to be crazy to leave... and yet it's all I think about. I've been growing more and more political over the last few years - really since the Bush/Gore election (which is weird because I'm Canadian). I just don't see myself being happy here in the long run, and I'm starting to see my company and way too many of it's clients as complicit in something I don't like. In a system that I see as responsible for a great many wrong things.

I went sky diving this weekend, and the second I hit that air and began my free fall, I knew that I was born for this. I loved every little thing about it, and I knew 3 seconds into my 40 second freefall that I would be doing this over and over. That falling through the air like that would be a part of my life for the rest of my life. It is a rare rare thing to have moments like that - but the problem with them is that they tend to throw other things into sharper relief. You start to look at other things in that part of my life/not part of my life dichotomy and you start seeing that there are a great number of things that shouldn't be there that are. And you start to suspect that there are a great deal more that should be there and are not.

Hrrrm. I need to think long and hard about this - but I need to decide if this job is going to be a part of my life. I think I've managed to get the 'not part of my life' things down to a manageable minimum - so - what's missing? Hrmmmm....