this page should be titled:

even yet still more ranting about computers and women:
a heartfelt treatise in seven chapters

but i'm too damn lazy to type enough to qualify it. (hell, formatting it by hand is a chore in itself!) so, we're stuck with the measley topic/s of this month's ("weekly"? who am i kidding?) insanity:

technology and sex

no, i'm not talking about cyberporn or something worse than beastiality, here, they're two separate topics. one is trying to take over my life, the other already has.

let's work backward, like any lecturer should. computers can tell that i'm learning more and more about them, and they see me as a threat. obviously, they are taking steps to thwart, discourage, and possibly even maim me.

yes, that's why the mathworks decided to remove the print option from the simulink plots in the new version for matlab 5... that's why it took me two hours just to get hard copy of what took me less than fifteen minutes to generate.

that's why the university's network connections are slowly degrading to the point that my 28.8 modem would download things faster than the 10baseT ethernet hubs --- if only UK's ppp server would let me connect at anything faster than 14.4 (see previous "insanities"). no shit, i tried to download a file from gatech this evening --- at six p.m., the download rate on my ecc machine (with its full speed ethernet connection to the engineering hub) was 886 bytes per second. yes, you read that right. that's why every damned unix machine that sees my login ID decides to feign a terrible crash, or at least in some bizarre way make everything i do difficult (extreme lag in cursor movement in vi (eerily reminiscent of PRIME-lag)).

even my beloved executor decided i had no business testing out a new window manager, and erased the default X fonts, sending xdm into and endless loop of

this left the machine flashing the screen at me for more than thirty seconds before i realized that my only option was the "Power" button. and, of course, since the startup scripts call xdm, the same thing happened on the next boot. finally a boot floppy allowed me to boot the system and change the default runlevel, effectively getting rid of xdm (this was probably more that you wanted to know about a unix system about ten lines ago, but i don't give a damn anymore) (... and leaving me only with the text-mode login prompt on my nifty 17" trinitron monitor. what a waste of resources, but it works without a hitch!) of course, everytime you kill a linux box by the power switch rather than the shutdown scripts, the system runs a filesystem check as part of the boot process, to make sure you didn't royally mung up any important files. with a 3.2GB hard disk, you go get a sandwich when you see the system stop at the "Parallelizing fsck" prompt. this is of course a real pain in the ass when you KNOW it's clean! thus, since three reboots took twenty minutes, it took me twenty minutes to find my damn problem, which was the mysterious erasure of a font that i never use, but without which X refuses to start. (as sensible as a mechanic refusing to touch your car because his soldering iron is broken....) then i had the joy of a thirty-minute re-install of the X Window System.... though i was smart enough to back up my config files so that the re-configuration took ten minutes rather than ten days.

my machine at work seems to be the only one holding up decently... it's been up far longer than any of the ecc's real servers (as of this writing, muppet has been up about 19 days (since the first day i turned it on), as opposed to skyhawk's 10. check for yourself --> muppet). except of course for that slight, teeny little problem of constantly filling up its two 300MB hard drives....

yes, technology has taken over my life. i'm sitting here, my feet freezing, because i'm too tied to the keyboard to go get a pair of socks.

that's also known as DUMB, you might say....

"no," i would counter, "DUMB is my reaction to the force that is attempting to take over my life.

the human sex drive is built-in, mostly chemical. no amount of philosophy or dogma can turn it off --- such tactics serve only to propagate and prolong undue guilt, self-induced misery, andsenseless anguish. why make your life more miserable, the chemicals do that for us! yes, this chemical nature makes the problem even more difficult to solve because chemical problems bypass the brain! to wit: i have just reversed my status as DUMB by procuring socks for my foot-cicles; however, i have in no way furthered myself toward resolution of an out-of-control libido, nor will i by any rational, logical plan.

let's clear something up, here: yes, i am saying that i wish to have sex.... with a female. yes, there's no denying that this forms the basis of my perpetual pining for a woman. however, that is not my sole goal in finding a woman to date. this is a rather basic notion that i think often gets misunderstood as it is rather subtle. women will often look distrustingly upon a man, saying "all you want to do is get in my pants." we men then must either lie through our teeth or admit that yes, we do, but that's not all. the problem comes with the "but that's not all" part. it's either ignored, disbelieved, or unheard. unfortunately there are many cases in which it is wise to disbelieve such a claim, but they are not all cases!!!

in my particular case, getting laid is quite low on the priority list, down there with eating brussel sprouts. this is fine wih me, since i know my chances are pitful anyway... to miss my point yet again, i just want some companionship. anything beyond that is icing on the cake. this last bit is pretty much consistent with the last such rant i made... but i still wonder why the hell i act the way i do if i know what i want. i guess it's chemicals.

(hey, look, now i can't even make sense! though, you'll have to admit, it's pretty hard to tell such a story without divulging the gory details... any, hey, one of these days i might get realy pissed and do just that.)

that said, i want to know why my brain and my penis have now teamed up to torture me.... i guess the answer is the real title for this page...

DUMB