Glass Half Empty

So, I'm flying across the World Pond to Colorado on Tuesday the 18th May (today), with my housemate Nik. I'm going to the wedding of my old friends Rachael and Mike, and I'll be out there until the 29th of May (give or take a bit for the time-difference).

Normal service should resume somewhere over that weekend. Until then, I'm kinda out of contact. Email should still work, but that's about it.

Don't do anything I wouldn't do. On second thoughts, do things I wouldn't do. There's some things I wouldn't do that look quite interesting...

The Glass: half-empty

So.

I'm still here, as you've probably surmised from the fact that I'm talking, and it's been a busy few months. Doesn't look like it's going to get any better any time soon either, so while this is an update, it's not a return to the old frequency of posting, at least not yet. Sorry about that, if it bothers you.

Hell, some of you may be enjoying the break.

Anyway, yes. I'm currently writing my thesis, and it's draining pretty much any reserves I have of cope, happy and other useful things, so I'm ... well, not so much fun to be around at the moment. For that I'm sorry. I hope people will put up with me leeching sanity from them for a little while.

In my Copious Free Time, I am still gaming. Maelstrom event 1 was a few weeks back, and was a fair bit of fun - the wind and rain and mud weren't great, but the rest of the event made up for it, and next event promises to be better for a variety of reasons. Here's hoping.

Also, a group of friends (Firecat Masquerade) have started running a fest-larp system based loosely on Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows. Because I am mad, but also because they needed the help and it's a great way to burn off stress, I've volunteered to crew it. Event 1 was an astounding success by all accounts, and hopefully event 2 will be at least as good. Since E2 is set a little over a month after my thesis handin deadline, I may be slightly crazed at that point. But it'll be fiiiiiine.

Fencing ... is not going so well. Despite being on the committee, due to noone else standing for armourer and the club needing one, I've not made it to the great majority of training sessions this year. Feel quite crap about this, as they do rely on me to some extent, but there are people there who can repair most things, and two full evenings a week is simply more than I can spare at the moment. I managed to get along tonight, and they were only slightly pissed off, which is comforting. So it goes. Will persevere there, and might even fence again at some point.

To sum up, life is hard, real damn hard right now, but I'm still cracking on with it. I'm doing some slightly crazy stuff in an effort to stay sane, and trying not to neglect my obligations, tricky though that is in turn. I aim to write some more here soon, so stay tuned. Distinct risk of pseudophilosophical bullshit, but I guess we'll see what happens.

It's got to be better than total radio silence, right?

The Glass: empty

Imagine, if you will, a vast and level plain. It's probably sandy. It's night-time, and the darkness above is absolute: there are no clouds, no skyglow from cities on the horizon, just the hard, bright, stars slowly marching across the sky.

Campfires dot the plain. Each fire is surrounded by a circle of tiny figures, talking, singing, laughing, drinking... Doing whatever it is that people do. Zoom in a little, jink left... a bit more... there. That's us, right there, you, me and the others. Some lead, some follow, some stoke the fire. Each of them is doing something, something useful.

And there I am, patrolling the edge of the circle of light. Every so often I look towards the fire, maybe even step inward a bit, but the brightness burns my eyes. Other times, I drift off into the darkness that separates the fires from each other, but the cold brings me back before too long. It's bitterly cold out here, alone from the fires.

Worse, there seems to be something out here with me. Every time I stop paying attention and look inward, let the fire dance on my face and actually look at the people I circle, I become aware of a low growling, a presence in the dark. I've caught glimpses of it before, a big, dark, canine creature, but it never comes close enough to see clearly. Not from the front, anyway, I've felt it breathing down my neck before, without any warning. It doesn't stay long, thankfully, and it hasn't done me any harm. Yet. I don't even know if it's the worst that's out here.

There are others, circling other fires. If we come close enough, we nod and half-smile to each other: we never say anything. A knowing smile speaks volumes, and means we needn't disturb the others with sudden, unexpected noises. There's a certain weary familiarity when we recognise another of our kind, I think: someone who has been where we've been.

Not that it has any meaning out here, but I think it's getting late, and I can hear the creature again. It's close, just beyond my sight... has been for a while, I think. Best you get back to the fire, and I'll get back to ... what I do.

Islands in the dark, each connected to its peers only loosely. Each one with its guardians, and each with its talkers, its singers and its providers. And the stars wheel on.

VNV Nation are an industrial, electronic, etc. band based in England and Ireland. Last year, they released a new album: I own it, I like it, and I'm listening to it now. The tone of the album is adverserial, confrontational, very much "where-is-the-future-we-were-promised, why-is-everything-rubbish?". The title of the album, suitably jingoistic in tone when viewed together with the cover art, is "Of Faith, Power and Glory".

It seems to me that the title (when considered along with the content) is intended almost as a list of things a person needs to be happy in life, a list of life goals. This feels pretty overdone to me. Faith, Power and Glory? So much noise, pain and risk.

Then I got to thinking. Faith needn't be an unshakable belief in a deity, a sure certainty that what you are doing is right and just. Faith can just as easily be a small, quiet voice telling you that you can do this, everything will be alright, almost as if the roles were reversed. Perhaps someone has faith in you. Faith's little brother is Trust.

Power. Well, power's a problem. It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and ... to be honest, I don't see how it can not. Think about it. The power to do anything at all, to wish it and have it occur. How long would it be before you started hurting people, because they're in your way or don't share your views? How small, how limited we would all soon seem to you. Of course, the reverse is no better. We all need a modicum of control over ourselves, our actions and out surroundings, for sanity reasons if nothing else. This middle ground is called Agency, the ability to act within the limits of one's environment.

Finally, Glory. To be celebrated, revered, adored. I suspect that gets old pretty quickly: the number of celebrities who seem to be overwhelmed by their fame and end up fleeing the public eye... I half wonder if Glory is something that people deal best with once they are dead and only remembered. Scale it back a bit, though, step it down so we're not blinded by it, and glory becomes something much simpler and more important. Respect, or Recognition (I'm not quite certain which). To be known as someone who is good at a particular thing, or who knows where something can be found, or who has good, well-considered opinions on things... that's far more important than being followed around by cameras, and having your every act catalogued for posterity, surely?

So, FAITH, POWER AND GLORY, not so much. The simpler, scaled-down version is something I think we all look for in our lives. Trust, Agency and Respect.

Maybe it's not such a jingoistic title after all.

The Glass: half-empty

Today ... has not gone to plan.

Oddly, I think it started to go wrong on the way home, rather than while I was still at work (although I got no words written today on account of having to fight a series of administrative fires). I was happily cycling home in the dark, lights and high-vis on, everything more or less OK, when my rear wheel started to vibrate interestingly. I've been here before. I pulled over. Rear tyre, completely flat. Arse.

So I pushed my ironically-named pushbike home, and locked it to the mooring loop, as usual, and took the rear wheel off and brought it in with me, to fix the puncture. Since I'd just cycled/walked home, I took five minutes to spod on the 'net, and my music collection disappeared. The player stopped in the middle of a song, and when I went to check it there were no songs. No songs, no directory, nothing.

Troubling. I could swear they were here only a minute ago.

So, it seems the highly reliable RAID I built a couple of years back to store my stuff ... isn't so highly reliable any more. It's a 3 disk array, which means it can lose any one disk without losing any data. It's dropped one particular disk a couple of times recently, both times pretty soon after street-wide power cuts, so I figured it was a little tired, and planned to make backups etc. Real Soon. Unfortunately, now it's dropped that disk, and its brother... Array Failure.

RAID arrays spread the contents of a file across multiple disks to increase redundancy, so I don't even have a few of my many files intact on the remaining disk: I just have bits of the vast majority of my files. Those bits don't add up to a whole, in most cases. None of my skills with Linux seemed to be working, and I couldn't get it to rebuild.

Then, dwm turned up on IRC, and guided me through a six-hour rebuild that hasn't quite finished yet, but looks like it's going to work. Once it's done, I need to pull important things off that drive, then see what happens, I guess. I'm not quite sure what's wrong with the machine, but signs point to one of the SATA controllers going bad, which would be very annoying.

So, bit of a wakeup call there. A lot of my data is pretty insignificant, but I'd miss it if it were gone. So I must implement a Proper Backup Strategy in the soon-after...

I eventually solved the bicycle problem too. Patched the tube, went round the tyre to find the cause, found a 10mm shard of road-grit that had gone right through the tyre wall and slashed the tube. Yet another reason to hate snowy weather...

Oh well. The world turns, things happen, or don't, according to their own inscrutable timetable, and we all get slowly older. This is the way of things.

The Glass: empty

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a Japanese businessman, more or less unremarkable in almost every way. He worked for a shipbuilding company during the Second World War. There is really only one thing that makes him special. He was on a business trip to Hiroshima in August 1945, when the United States dropped a nuclear weapon there. He survived the attack with severe burns, then decided to go home to recover.

To Nagasaki, just in time to be bombed again.

He was the only recognised survivor of both bombings, and he died on Monday from stomach cancer at age 93. He has, apparently, written several books and songs about his experiences. Another piece of history crystallises, hopefully not to be forgotten.

In other news, it's snowing out again. I think we've got about an inch settled now, and it's starting to compact into ice on the footpaths. The roads are mostly clear, thanks to gritters and snowploughs, but I've already seen one Council truck jack-knifed in its parking area, so that may not continue. Conditions treacherous. I decided the footpath outside ours needed some attention this time (it's on a ~20 degree slope, so ice is a bad thing), so went to B&Q to buy a shovel. They very tolerantly didn't laugh at me, and ended up selling me a dutch hoe (with a sharp stainless steel blade) and a stiff broom instead, which are making a decent account of themselves, much though the job is taking ages. I'll just burn off a lot of energy doing it, I guess, which is probably good for me.

The glass: half-empty