Category Archives: rambles

linux, rambles, Uncategorized

Why I Hate Perfection

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I hear it a lot. The people who say they would install Linux, but they want their stuff to “just work”. All the daily posts on Ubuntu Forums (which I lurk) from people saying they tried Linux, but are leaving it because it doesn’t “just work”. You know, that is a perfectly acceptable and understandable answer. But it’s not one I can relate to.

Stuff that just works is boring.

Stuff that just works makes me complacent.

Stuff that just works doesn’t teach me anything.

Stuff that just works doesn’t let me fix it.

I have a little secret to let you guys in on. I am addicted to fixing things. Broken things are enticing and magnetic. If you dropped some sort of ceramic ornament or vase on the floor and it shattered into a million pieces I would be on the floor picking up those million pieces and attempting to piece them back into place like a puzzle and trying to glue it back together. This has actually happened. More than once. Do I succeed? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t stop me from trying.

I value my sleep– I value my sleep very much. But if my computer is broken I don’t sleep until it is fixed. Period. Abandoning some broken project at home because I have to go to work or something is sheer torture. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished calling in “because something is broken” was as valid an excuse as “calling in sick”, because heaven knows I’m certainly in no mental state to actually do any work when my entire mind is preoccupied with my project.

Fixing things is mind-clearing and you learn from the experience. If you fix something, you come out of it knowing how to recognize and fix that problem in the future. You feel rejuvenated and useful.

…and you’re telling me you want an operating system that you don’t have to rip apart and completely fix every six months?

I would die of boredom.

I respect you, Millions of People With That Opinion. But I don’t understand you. No hard feelings. <3

art, rambles, supergeekery

Now You’re Thinking With Closets!: AKA The Furry Post

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So, the title of my last post. While I was amused by the number of comments on here/Twitter who thought I was actually coming out as gay, I was even more amused by the number of comments on here/Twitter who thought I was coming out as a furry.

So you know what? Let’s do this. I’m Pike, and I’m a furry.

Most anyone who has been on the internet for more than a few hours knows what a furry is: someone who likes cartoon or anthropomorphic animals.

I can hear a few of you now. “Ewww, Pike! This is seriously your weird fetish?”

Actually, (for me anyway), fetish has nothing to do with it. And I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to dodge admitting weird fetishes. Heck, I am basically one of the most open people ever when it comes to my weird fetishes (c wut i did thar?) But furry isn’t one of them. No, it’s simply an art and storytelling style that I have always been fond of.

It has its seeds in the Disney cartoons I grew up with, I’m sure, and the way I’m pretty sure the Comics page of the newspaper is largely responsible for teaching me to read. The “Redwall” series of books and “Watership Down” cemented it. When I was about 8 or 9 years old I was drawing my own “comic strips” starring talking cat characters that I’d invented. And by the time I was about 15 years old and decided it was time to finally sit down and “learn how to draw”, it’s… a pretty obvious guess what said drawings involved.

You can do a lot with a cartoon animal that it’s difficult to do with people. Ears and tails are immensely expressive, which is perfect for the pantomime and exaggeration based medium that is cartooning. Master artists use this to much advantage (Fact: I would sell my soul to be able to draw half as well as Tracy Butler).

And you know what? Cartoon animals are just plain fun to draw:

Goggles Bear tanks with magical eyewear.

There is a lot you can do with anthro characters from a storytelling perspective, as well. How does the character’s “animal-ness” effect their… “human-ness”? Do these conflict with each other? Does the character or species struggle with it? Or perhaps you are trying to make a point, like an Aesop’s Fable. There is a lot to work with.

Now that all of that is out of the way, though, comes the next side of the confession, which is that I really never became a part of the “Furry Community”. I mean, I dunno if you’ve noticed, but there is a huge network of furries on Twitter/Livejournal/etc. and I swear they all follow each other. I never really fell into that group. Not so much because I don’t want to, but because there are other things that rank higher than furry on the Pike Self-Identity Chart. I’m a F/OSS geek, I’m a member of the WoW blogging community, I’m a steampunk, and I’m a sci-fi nerd/Trekkie… and I’m a furry, too, but that’s farther down the list, see. I’d probably go to a Fur Con if one happened to be in the area (not happening), but not before I went to a Linux Con or BlizzCon or a Steampunk Con or a Star Trek Con. Get what I’m saying?

Still, I don’t beat around the bush regarding my furriness. I used to sort of call myself a “closet furry” but then I realized how many people figured it out without me telling them (apparently I make it obvious?) so trying to hide it is pretty pointless. I like drawing (and writing about) cartoon animals– so there.

Also I wear goggles and am made of brass. Everything Pike loves, in a nutshell...
life of pike, rambles, random

Top Three Things I Am Addicted To At The Moment

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1. STRING CHEESE

The other day I bought a 12-pack of string cheese, my reasoning being that it would give me a couple weeks’ worth of snacks. Yeah, three days later I’m down to… one, I think? This isn’t counting the string cheese I buy with my lunch every day at work.

I don’t know, they’re just so stringable and munchable and have I mentioned that I love mozzarella? Mozzarella and provolone are my two cheese loves. (Oh wait, did I forget Colby Jack? Let’s throw that in there too.)

2. ALTOIDS

I dunno, I just go through about five of them a day. (Mints, not entire tins. Yeah, I’m not quite that addicted.) As an aside, does anyone else remember when these were The Big Cool Thing in middle school? Or was that just my school being weird?

There are apparently fruit-flavored Altoids, also, which makes me wonder if their slogan is “Curiously Fruity”. Mostly because I crack up just thinking about it.

3.)

P-P-P-POKER FACE

So I was late to the Lady Gaga party but fortunately this has been remedied. Now, a little thing about me: I tend to binge when it comes to music. I’m not one of those “Load up the whole playlist and hit shuffle” people… rather, I get into something (or, frequently, rediscover something) and listen to it until most peoples’ ears would bleed. A couple weeks ago it was U2… lately it’s Poker Face on repeat. Oh, and Sonic the Hedgehog fans: This cannot be unheard.

This completely pointless blog post has been brought to you by Clockwork Hare Inc.!

life of pike, rambles

Poetry in Motion

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I remember very well a certain day in math class in high school. It was algebra or something, and the teacher had just finished filling up the whiteboard with numbers and variables and equations– a step-by-step proof of how she had solved a particular problem.

And I remember looking at it and thinking it belonged in a book of poetry. Because there were patterns there; patterns and rhythm just like in a sonnet or some other verse, and it was telling a story, just like poems do.

And then I thought, “…does anyone else think like I do?”

This actually bothered me a lot throughout high school. In a time when we were supposed to be deciding what we wanted to be when we grew up, I struggled to decide if I was a writey/artsy person or a mathy/sciency person. Because public school made it all pretty black and white that way.

We took all sorts of tests to help sort of steer us in career directions. These did nothing but further muddle the issue to me. “Right-brained/left-brained” tests invariably stuck me right in the middle, 50/50. The “What Career is Best For You?” tests usually told me my top two career possibilities were “artist” and “analytical scientist”. And don’t get me started on those Myers-Briggs tests, which would tell me I was something completely different every time (“Introvert” being the only constant.)

As the whole university thing loomed closer this dilemma only got bigger, and it troubled me a lot because I felt as though I would never find a niche. All around me I saw the artsy kids and the mathy kids. And then there was me, writing love poems from the point of view of chemical elements. I felt as though I would never be able to find a niche.

This whole issue persisted through my rather haphazard college years, ultimately leaving me rather unsatisfied and wondering if I had made a bunch of wrong choices. (Although, looking back on it, I think I probably would have wondered the same thing regardless of what I majored in.)

Thus began the soul-searching and the wandering around, trying to figure out what I actually wanted to DO.

And finally– just over the past few months, really– I came to a conclusion that I should have come to a long, long time ago:

There is no hard line between my interests. Things aren’t black and white like that.

Instead of trying to choose between what seemed like conflicting interests, why couldn’t I embrace them all? And were they even actually conflicting in the first place, despite what had been drilled into me by neatly defined school classes?

The answer to that last question is no. Because there is beauty in function, and there is poetry in science. And the other way around, as well.

Of course, now that I have had this little epiphany of self-discovery… now comes the hard part, which is trying to figure out what one DOES if one likes a little art in one’s tech, or a little tech in one’s art.

…other than, you know, being drawn like a magnet to things that exemplify that train of thought.

Datamancer is my hero.

I’m still not quite sure what the answer to that question is, but I have faith that I will find it, somehow. It’s hidden away in the serpentine paths of cogwheels and in the milky orange-yellow-violet-white of glowing Neon and in the symphony of the melody of rain on my windshield and my car’s wipers keeping time. It’s in carbon, that element that is valuable as a diamond but even more valuable as the graphite in my pencil which I draw and write with. It’s in the sky and it’s in the extraordinarily complicated flying machines that allow us to experience the romance that is the sky. It’s a story that should no longer go untold. How am I gonna tell it? Well, frankly, your guess is as good as mine.

I do know one thing for certain, though. Question convention. Don’t just step outside of the box, but stop allowing yourself to be defined by it. You just might find yourself in the unlikeliest of places. And that’s probably a good thing.

free/open source software, life of pike, linux, rambles

The Linux Conundrum

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When I was blogging at Aspect of the Hare I had the rather unique privilege of becoming one of the most well-known Linux users in the WoW blogging community. I talked about it a lot, made techie posts, and made no secret of the fact that Linux was my main (and for quite some time, only) operating system.

This had an interesting side effect: a LOT of people were inspired by me to try Linux for themselves. I got tons of e-mails and comments to this degree.

And this, in and of itself, had another interesting side effect, one that took me a little while to get used to: a good 80% or so of these comments and e-mails were people documenting their negative experiences with Linux.

Imagine, if you will… that you love something a lot and are excited when people want to try out that thing you love. Now imagine most of them hating it. Now maybe you understand why this was always a bit awkward for me.

Where am I going with this?

A few places. First of all, I feel there is something I should say as an unofficial spokesperson of the Linux community in this little corner of the Blogosphere:

LINUX ISN’T FOR EVERYONE.

Now before you go all crazy on me, I’m not trying to be elitist and say it’s only for programmers/leet hax0rs/hardcore geeks/etc. Rather, I’m trying to say that there are a lot of people who, I think, come to Linux with the completely wrong expectations and end up being disappointed.

Examples:

* If you can’t live without iTunes/Photoshop/the latest super-shiny computer games, guess what: don’t install Linux. Seriously. It’s probably not worth the hassle unless you’re a freetard like me who is willing to make sacrifices.

* If you don’t like using the command line, don’t install Linux. Now, granted, stuff like Ubuntu is making it easier and easier to do lots in Linux without the command line, but it is still very much CLI-oriented compared to, say, something like Windows.

* If you don’t like stuff randomly breaking, don’t install Linux. That’s not to say that Windows doesn’t break either, cause good ol’ XP broke on me plenty of times. But one of the best analogies I ever heard was that Windows is like a die-cast toy car, and Linux is a car made out of Legos. They can both break. The Lego car is much more likely to “break”. But that’s the point. You’re supposed to break it and put it back together.

I’m kind of mental (and possibly masochistic) when it comes to this sort of thing; dealing with computer problems gives me a strange sort of high that little else can give me. So I embrace the Lego-OS. If you are not of that mindset, or at least don’t want to deal with it at home, don’t install Linux.

* If you aren’t willing to spend hours on Google getting something simple like wireless working, don’t install Linux. In defense of Linux, this is frequently a driver support issue more than a Linux issue. But the end result remains.

* If you are looking for a clone of Windows that is somehow mysteriously “better”, don’t install Linux. Linux is not Windows. Just because you saw some YouTube movie of a guy showing off his shiny Compiz cube and desktop effects, doesn’t mean it worked entirely out-of-the-box for him. It probably didn’t. Is the tradeoff for having the Compiz cube really worth the effort, especially now that most people are using Vista/Win7? …well, that one’s up to you, but think about it.

“Piiiiike. I thought you loved Linux. Now you’re just trying to talk everyone out of trying it. What gives?”

I’m not trying to talk everyone out of it. I just want people to be aware of the commitment. Sort of like the animal rescuers who screen anyone who is thinking of adopting one of their “babies”. If you want to try Linux, that’s awesome, and I’m excited for you. Trying new things is always good, as far as I’m concerned. But you have to go into it with an open mind. Maybe you’ll end up really liking it.

But if you decide it’s not for you, that’s fine too. Use whatever operating system you feel comfortable with and suits your needs.

And remember the other side of the coin, too: for some of us, Linux is what suits our needs. Yes, some of us actually like this crazy mysterious operating system. Some of us like it for the utility, some of us for the bash terminal, some of us for the security, some of us for the F/OSS philosophy, some of us for two or more of the above, or myriad other reasons.

Oh, and the penguins. Can’t forget the penguins…



(Disclaimer: This ramble is not directed toward anyone or any event in particular. It’s sort of an amalgam of thoughts that have been floating around in my mind for months, and more than one LJ entry I’ve written on the same subject over the years.)