Molten Boron

This might get to be TMI or simply too emo to stand reading. After getting some if it out, it looks more like a guest list to a pity-party than anything really useful. I’d advise you to skip it if you can’t tolerate rampant dumbassery.

It’s just ideas I want to put order to. A lot are unspoken assumptions that operate right at the edge of awareness.

Some are facts to me. Some, if I think about them, I don’t believe — but they tend to affect my actions anyway. They aren’t things I’ve spent a long time considering and deciding, but things that just sort of came to be. Many are things I would rather not believe. Some are related to each other, but I haven’t sat down and drawn a map of them. It’s confusing. There will probably be duplicates.

• All the things that are easy or feel good are wrong.
• What I want is, by virtue of being what I want, inherently wrong. (See above.)
• Things tend to turn out as they should.
• I’m responsible for anything bad that happens around me. Good things happen in spite of my influence.
• There’s always something I could have done better.
• Strangers aren’t worth as much as friends.
• My friends, by being my friends, are to be suspected of poor judgment.
• My friends are astoundingly tolerant.
• Other people are supposed to (but cannot be expected to) behave rationally.
• There is absolutely nothing threatening about me. (In recent years, been proven false–but it’s still my default assumption.)
• Enjoyable things are their own purpose. (Seems insufficient.)
• The point of life is to generate more life. Otherwise, life is what we do while waiting to die. (I don’t like this one. I want more.)
• Anything good that happens to me is luck.
• I don’t want to influence anyone. If I do, I’m responsible for everything, and I’m probably wrong.
• I’m not where I should be. I’ve screwed up.
• Everyone else knows everything I don’t.

I hope no one believes these.

I’m tired. I don’t want to want so much. I’m going to try not drinking for a while. I want someone next to me, but ran away when I had it. I’m going to bed. This post has become everything I hate my posts to be, but if I don’t do something I regret I’ll never learn.

It’s not like I can embarrass myself further, anyway.

Dragon*Con… I can’t really talk about that yet. Way too drunk. A lot of its own assumptions surrounding my capability to deal with crowds, prejudices, and sex.

It was good, it was bad, it was great, it was awful.

My head’s still in a stir trying to evaluate everything.

As Dragon*Cons go, as objectively as I can determine, this one was rock solid. I didn’t see any of the usual “what the hell were they thinking” mishaps.

If I’m not comfortable with all of the decisions or behavior of drunk-me, then I shouldn’t be self-over-medicating with alcohol.

I went all crazy-go-nuts on the pocket schedule, trying to find a tasteful way to break it into usable chunks. They’ve transposed the axes of the grid, so that each page is a full day and the location/track spans pages. It’s a hell of an improvement over last year, but still a thick wad of newsprint to carry around. Fortunately, the new layout lets me just tear out a couple of pages for a day, and there we go.

Before I figured that out, though, I got it into my head that I really wanted to screw with this thing in a digital form. Google Docs are neat (another “kick ass, Dragon*Con team!” moment), but they lack some of the amenities I was hoping a regular spreadsheet would have. More familiar hotkeys, I guess. Not having a mouse slowed me down more than I expected, too.

The MacBook came with a “trial” version of Office 2004, so I figured I’d give Excel a try. It was awful. It’s unfair to judge it on so slim a use, but the interface made my teeth hurt and it was slow.

I tried OpenOffice.org 2.4, but it wouldn’t finish loading. It’d start up, and then do nothing.

I found some hints that there was a problem with the version of X11 that ships with this version of OS X, so I downloaded the latest one and installed it. Still no luck with OO.o. So, download the latest beta of OO.o 3, and that works.

(Mind you, each of these jumbo downloads is taking place over the hotel’s “high-speed” network. “Up to 50 times faster than dial-up.”)

…and now I don’t need it, ’cause I can do it all with scissors and paper. Bah. I should file this under ‘Bitching & Griping’ instead of ‘Technological.’

Woke. Packed. Showered. Went to bank. Went to lunch. Left town with Aowyn. Met Mustard and Shaft in La Vergne, transferred belongings to Shaft’s vehicle, continued to Atlanta. Annoyed Mustard mercilessly for most of the trip.

Arrived; Shaft dropped me off at the Marriott. Located Beth, obtained key, settled into room.

Went to get badge and register. Total time from start of line to leaving registration: 1h17m.

• Jayne hats: 3
• Doctor Horrible goggles: 2
• Captain Hammer Fan t-shirts: 1
• Pink hair: (lost count)
• Wolf t-shirts: 2
• Meatloaf t-shirts: 1
• Unfortunate corsets: 2
• Quantity sweated: 1.1 liters

Going to meet Big Jim and the gang for dinner.

Too much Saturday. Can’t now.

Been wrestling a funk since ~9pm.

Can’t get Donna out of my head. Well, not Donna, but Donna′, I guess.

(I recognize that this is repetitive and boring. Enough so that I interrupted this post for 20 minutes to de-fur my keyboard.)

If it doesn’t make enough sense for me to put down in words, how does it make enough sense to keep my mind so occupied that I can’t read a book or sleep?

Obsessing over things like this doesn’t do anyone any good. There isn’t some hidden meaning to it all. I can say this, I can write it here, but when it comes to applying this knowledge… I just don’t believe.

I know being in a relationship won’t solve anything, but I miss the motivation of pursuit. I’m too frequently falling into the pointlessness cascade, where there’s no reason to do anything at all. By myself, I am insufficient cause.

I can see how that could be false, and that I’d probably be a lot happier if it were.

Dragon*Con scares me.

Canceled my WoW account again. Even that’s pointless, as I’ll probably just renew it manually the moment it deactivates.

Going to try to sleep again. I don’t want to be this anymore. I want to look forward to things. Fuck, this is stupid. I’ll feel better tomorrow, and that will be stupid, too.

Two tools I’ve finally gotten around to learning about:

Synergy

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Synergy’s a hoot. I’ve got my desk laid out like this:

[MythTV] [Macbook] [XP PC]

So now when I’m sitting at my PC, I just move my mouse to the left of my screen — and now my mouse and keyboard are on the Mac. Move it to the left further — and I’m controlling the MythTV box. It’s wonderful.

rlwrap

rlwrap is a ‘readline wrapper’ that uses the GNU readline library to allow the editing of keyboard input for any other command. Input history is remembered across invocations, separately for each command; history completion and search work as in bash and completion word lists can be specified on the command line.

rlwrap is genius. I’ve been kvetching about Oracle’s sqlplus command-line-based tool for two years now, and rlwrap was practically written for it.

sqlplus has no line-editing features. If you make a typo, you have to backspace over the last half of the line to fix it, and then retype it all out. If you hit ENTER before noticing, you have to type or paste in the whole line again. rlwrap makes it a usable tool instead of a bile-inducing travesty of user interface failure.

(Posted in effort to keep things moving.)

Things picked up last Thursday. Toward the end of the day I solved a problem that had been bugging my boss and one of the PMs for a while. Felt good.

Friday was alright. Was still sort of high from Thursday’s success.

Saturday went to a party at the Saucer. That was fun. I probably got drunker than I should have, but that’s okay. There was a dead Dalek under the stairs in the parking lot; I don’t know what that was about.

Sunday, just kind of lazed about. Not in a depressed way, but in a kind of pleasant, drifting way.

Monday, leaving work, my mood crashed. Headache, incompetence, complete lack of worth, absolute futility, misguided hope, etc… wound up going straight to bed and sleeping for a couple hours. Started to get over it after playing WoW for an hour or so. Makes a decent distraction, I guess.

Tuesday was similar, but not as bad.

I’ve been spending 20m on a stationary bike about seven of the past ten days. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did at first, but I still feel skeezy afterward. I like to think that, someday, I’ll finish sweating.

I picked up a printer for my dad a couple weeks ago. Last week I finally got around to getting it set up on my MythTV box to be sure I could do it before taking it all the way out to his place. As part of this procedure, I reset the root password to something simple (just for a moment!) before scrambling it again.

What’s the worst that could happen? PermitRootLogin defaults to ‘no’, right?

Wrong. It defaults to ‘yes’, and I default to “get half way through something and forget what you’re doing.” So the root password remained ‘root’ when I went to bed. I forgot to do the whole “scrambling it again” part.

That was Tuesday night.

Friday morning, about 7:30 or so, I’m checking the BBS and catching up on webcomics and what-not before work, but my internet connection is in lousy shape. My XP machine is fine; nothing untoward going on. The MacBook is asleep. The router lights are going crazy.

…and my MythTV box has several dozen SMTP processes running. ‘last’ shows something like this (my logins removed, and order inverted):

root      123.100.1.73 Wed Aug  6 08:53 - 08:53 (00:00) (Beijing)
root      mcp.gov.ec   Wed Aug  6 10:55 - 10:55 (00:00) (Ecuador)
root      89.43.98.151 Wed Aug  6 13:24 - 13:29 (00:04) (Romania?)
postgres  89.43.98.151 Wed Aug  6 13:28 - 13:29 (00:00)
postgres  89.43.98.151 Wed Aug  6 14:52 - 14:52 (00:00)
postgres  89.43.98.151 Thu Aug  7 09:02 - 09:06 (00:04)
root      89.43.98.151 Fri Aug  8 04:29 - 04:29 (00:00)
cioplea   81.196.87.63 Fri Aug  8 04:35 - 07:06 (02:31) (Romania)
cioplea   81.196.87.63 Fri Aug  8 05:04 - down  (02:20)

Shit.

I don’t have PostgreSQL installed. I kill all the suspect processes, disable the cioplea and postgres accounts, reset root’s password to something sensible, change PermitRootLogin and reboot.

It comes back up, and — as far as I can determine — seems safe. I know conventional wisdom is to nuke it from orbit, but I haven’t seen any suspicious activity since then. Digging through root’s, cioplea’s, and postgres’s .bash_history files doesn’t indicate that the offender was particularly curious. Looks pretty bot-like to me. It was connected to an IRC server somewhere, and their mail spools were filled with bounced trojan-spam:

Hello friend !
You have just recieved a postcard Greeting from your friend.

Click [1]here if you want to download your Animated Greeting !

Thank you for using www.Greetings.com services. Please take this opportunity to let your friends hear about us by sending them a postcard from our collection !

References

1. http://e-greetings.(something else).com/e-greetings.exe

I’ll keep a closer eye on it in the future. Maybe something to text-message me anyone logs in from a non-pre-authorized location?

This is all pretty embarrassing. I really should have learned this lesson a long time ago. Specifically, three years ago, the last time I did almost the same damn thing.

It was only a minor relief that the printer worked fine at my dad’s, scanner functions included. (Half-hearted cheer.)

I don’t think I’m going to regret this, but it’s still gonna hurt.

A close relative of Sue’s is in a hospital up here. Serious, but not life-threatening. She’s pretty upset, so I said she could stay at my place between visiting hours. I’m on the couch. It’s a good couch.

This is really rough for her. Any awkwardness I feel is minimal to the things she’s dealing with right now.

Between visiting hours and sleep, we decided to watch a movie. Juno rang a lot of bells I wish it hadn’t. Good flick, but one I would rather have not seen with Sue.

I don’t really have much to say about all this right now, but feel I would be remiss in my blaaawwwwwgging duties were I not to mention it.

Trying not to think. Just going to get some WoW in and go to sleep.

Got stuck in a novella past my prime “falling-asleep” time–too long to finish and drift off, too short to just put down and finish tomorrow. Now I’m just drifting.

Rediscovered a link to The Nietzsche Family Circus. Probably not the best kind of thing to help me sleep.

Shada often looks cranky. She’s sitting curled up on her little mini-cat-condo-drum thing that she wrestles with, and her ears are cocked back like she’s annoyed.

I spent a solid twenty minutes on the stationary bike today.

I’m getting more comfortable with the MacBook.

I don’t know if this printer I picked up will work for my dad. I hope it does, but it’s one of those multifunction jobs, and they seem so fragile to me. I also think he’ll want more out of it than it’s capable of producing.

We’re coming up on 08-08-2008. I remember where I was on 08-08-1988. I went to work with dad that day, followed him around. I remember we went to Sanford, around Lake Monroe. That area always used to seem so incredibly far away when I was a kid. Google says it was only about ten miles from home.

I wonder where or if I’ll be on 08-08-2028. A lot’s changed in the last twenty years.

I’m going to try to sleep again.