mahiwaga

now I know I promised to stop being so pessimistic, but this sig I stole from someone made me laugh:

We are born naked, wet, and hungry. Then things get worse.

I am reminded of something that Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote in his epilogue to The Scarlet Letter. To paraphrase: love and hate are not very different emotions. (A more diametric opposite to love would be apathy and indifference.) Both require intimate knowledge of one's object of desire/derision. Both seem to exhibit characteristics that our modern age has deemed to name co-dependent behavior. Just as it is seemly to care about what one's beloved thinks of them when one is in love, in parallel, one who exhibits hatred often does so because they care too much about what the other person thinks of him/her. To rephrase it in pseudo-psychiatric lingo, the other person starts becoming an obsession, an idee fixee, that impinges upon one's own personal identity (as much as I think Freud was a quack, I will use his term ego.)

Or, in observance of what happens in prepubescent crushes, little boys make fun of and are cruel to little girls because, deep down, they like them, and they wish they didn't.

Hence, The Unix-Haters Handbook.

These people do not hate UNIX the way people hate Windows XP. These are people deeply committed (however involuntarily) to UNIX, who live and breathe the command-line, compile all their programs from source, and disdain GUIs. These are people who would be as incapacitated without a computer as some people are who develop serious brain disorders. The reason they hate UNIX so much is because of their deep intimacy with it. UNIX is that ex-girlfriend that you almost married, except that she keeps breaking your heart, and every time you try to get her out of your life, she finds her way back in. In contrast, Windows XP is a lot like a prostitute. You can't really hate her. After all, it is essentially a professional relationship. Obviously, you can't really love her either. There are no deep attachments here, just a fear of sexually transmitted disease (appropriate, given the amount of viral cross-contamination that occurs in the Windows world.)

OK, I obviously need to get a life.

for all you unfortunate folk who purchased an iBook between May 2002 and April 2003, this program is for you.

while my old iBook 14.1" 700MHz certainly falls under this category, and I shelled out $300 to try and get my iBook fixed, I'm not sure I want to go through the trouble of recovering my $300 since Apple decided to just give me an iBook G4 14.1" 933MHz. For $300, that's a pretty sweet upgrade. Of course, I had to get new RAM, and an Airport Extreme card, but I was able to pawn off my old RAM and Airport card to my sister, whom I convinced to purchase one of these afflicted iBooks (14.1" 933MHz with the old G3 processor) for around $900, a sweet deal given that this logic board repair program is in effect.

as a side note, my iBook G4 did break down already, quite possibly because I may have electrocuted it, although I still believe that I was properly grounded and I was careful not to touch any of my iBook's innards that shouldn't be touched, and I've been screwing around with the insides of computers since the early 1990s with few (although spectacular) mishaps. I would've probably shelled out another $300, but luckily it was Christmas time, and the guy at the genius bar wanted to give me a break, additionally considering my long, sordid history with the Apple repair depot (I haven't had a functioning iBook for 2 months even after three trips to the depot, and each time my iBook became less and less functional, such that by the end, I was reduced to booting it in console mode, and running only the command line. Even in this sorry state, I was still impressed, because the Darwin core properly initialized the Airport card, so I still had net access, and I could run X and hence GNOME. Not very pretty when compared to Quartz and Aqua, but functional. The anti-Microsoft bigot that I am, I would say it was still superior to a Win XP machine.)