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Happily Melancholy... I think that describes how I feel this evening. It's either a wistful recollection of happy times past, or a sadness that those times are past. I'm not sure which it is, but it's not an altogether unpleasant feeling.
On the other topic, well... There was a discussion on IRC earlier about interesting scars, and it occurs to me that I have a few. Y'see, I was born with a Simple Syndactyly: the index and middle fingers of my right hand are fused, or rather, they never finished separating. In the womb, human hands and feet develop as complicated plates of flesh and bone, then when the fetus is about 16 weeks old, they split into fingers and toes (targeted apoptosis: the cells not destined to make up the finished extremeties self-destruct). In some cases, this doesn't quite work right, and people like me are the result: it's rare, but I've run into two or three other people with the condition in my lifetime. Amusingly, Wikipedia doesn't believe I'm possible, as none of the five types of syndactyly it describes matches me. Go figure.
When I was a fair bit younger (low single-digit years), a series of surgeries was performed to separate the digits, and they were partially successful. I have independent movement in both (although they're still joined to just below the middle knuckle), although the fact that my middle finger is entirely missing its middle joint can be a bit of an inconvenience. For the most part, I've developed coping strategies that involve reassigning the fingers of my hand (these days, my ring finger does a damn good job as an index finger, for example). For the most part, people don't notice, and I'm fine with that. I'm not ashamed of being a little different (as those as know me will be very aware), but equally I see no need to shove it in people's faces. So yes, to finish this peculiar little medical digression, and to come back to the original topic: I have a tracery of almost faded, silvery graft and incision scars curling around my right index and middle fingers, from top to bottom.
Interesting? Perhaps. TMI? Quite possibly. So it goes. ...NaBloPoMo is hard :)
Today, so long as I go to bed before 1AM, was mostly spent playing Guild Wars. I've managed to fight my way across an entire mountain range (the Northern Shiverpeaks, for those with a map to hand), with refugees in tow, and settle said refugees in their new home. Not bad for a guy in his PJs.
Now I'm sat on my laptop... no, let's start that sentence again. Now I'm sat here, typing on my laptop, waiting for my linux box to finish scanning its big disk for errors. 2TB takes a fair old time to scan, so I'm just leaving it going (possibly overnight at this rate). I hope a damaged /home directory is the cause of the recent instability, but I'll probably stick a memtest disc in it when I next reboot, to be on the safe side. Hate unstable hardware. It's currently running Slackware 13, which is a nice current OS, but... has niggles. It's running KDE4.2, which means Amarok 2, which is a music player only its mother could love. The playlist system is horrible, it doesn't support characters that aren't in ASCII, so all the symphonic metal and indian/arabic music with interesting characters in the titles (and half the metal, to boot) currently hangs the damn player... There's that, and a few little stability-related niggles, and the fact that my graphics card isn't properly supported yet. It remains one of the nicest versions of Desktop Slackware to date, but I have to admit, the "install and use" nature of Ubuntu and OpenSUSE is looking pretty attractive right now. We'll see. If I'm lucky, the problems will be sorted out soon, because I LIKE Slack. At the same time, I like a system that Just Works once it's been set up.
The Winter In The Willows DT system design is starting to come together (well, the "Characters" package is, which is the bit I'm working on right now). I've got the data structures planned, and the object diagrams, now I just have to start implementing...
Wild ride ahead... ;)
Cet n'etait pas une post.
Well, that was an interesting morning...
My housemate Nik just went for a shower and, since he likes his showers hot, opened the window to let the steam escape. It seems that as winter approaches, the local Ladybirds have decided to nest and hibernate in the frames of our window and, as he opened the window, they came whirling out. So, our bathroom is currently full of ladybirds, and we can't close the window because some of them will get caught in the works and crushed. (This isn't a purely altruistic thing, much though I try to avoid harming animals when I can: ladybirds make a terrible mess when squished, and their bodily fluids contain a variety of foul agents designed to dissuade things from eating them, and we like our bathroom to smell relatively pleasant). The not closing the window thing does give us a lovely view across town from the bathroom, but the house backs on to a public path, so leaving the window open isn't a long-term solution.
So a swarm of ladybirds in the bathroom, a good number of which were driven off by the steam from Nik's shower. Wikipedia tells me this is a well-known problem, so I guess they'll be there a while. I'll try and get some photos tonight, to better illustrate the problem.
...any suggestions?
In other news, Seth Lakeman concert tonight, which should be pleasant. I found myself adding one of his CDs to my basket on Amazon a couple of nights ago, then thought again. Why not buy it on the night?
Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
No, quite. The original plot was to blow up the House of Lords while King James and the Royal Court were present. It seems to have been a plot aiming to decapitate the British Monarchy and install a new ruler (Princess Elizabeth) who was more sympathetic to the goals of Catholicism in England (the nation's leadership at the time being staunchly Protestant).
There are times when I think Fawkes might have had the right idea. In this day and age, there seem to be many of us (certainly myself, and a large subset of my circle of friends) who are greatly disillusioned with the national government. It doesn't seem that they represent us... the two main parties are much the same in terms of agenda and their ties to corporate and industrial interests, and none of the smaller parties get enough votes to have a meaningful voice (not to mention largely being single-issue wingnuts). The laws of the land seem to be getting more and more convoluted and restrictive, and protecting our interests less and less, and those with the deepest pockets more and more. Blowing up the Houses of Parliament starts to look tempting. If only we had something better to replace it with.
Having recently watched Die Hard 4, even if we had something better to replace it with, I'm not sure if it would be a good thing. The level of disruption and confusion such an attack would cause, coupled with the inevitable search for scapegoats and jingoistic calls to arms, would be dangerous for the country and likely run counter to any plans or intentions we had. People would die, all in the name of a better world, that wouldn't necessarily be any better. The machine of this country's political and legal infrastructure has too much momentum to change course easily, even in the face of serious damage, and although the course it's currently on worries a lot of people, there doesn't seem to be anything to be done.
Starting a new nation, a better nation, is still a possibility, but with the world more or less out of land, where would we go? It's easier to build the infrastructure than to change the infrastructure, by a fair distance. And it would involve fewer deaths, ideally none, which is always a goal. Of course, the Puritans tried that, and we ended up with America, so maybe it's not as easy as it looks.
These thoughts always occur to me around this time of year. For all I love this country, parts of it are a steaming pile of shit.