I dreamt about a woman whom I've had unrequited feelings for. She was hugging me and telling me that we'd always be friends. In retrospect, it was probably for the best. As if it could've turned out any other way.

I don't really know where it comes from. I just know it's from somewhere external. I did not learn it. I was informed of it. Probably some sort of romantic—or even Romantic—garbage that I came across in high school, about how you can look into someone's soul just by looking into their eyes. How you can identify intelligence by recognizing a spark.

is it possible to see at that depth with such clarity?
to plumb the hidden recesses of the universe with just
the force of thought?
I no longer believe it, yet still I am drawn
to the lofty and the sublime
though still wary of deceit, of confusion
is there wisdom behind the knowledge?
not just comprehension but understanding?

On these interminable commutes home, truly random thoughts will pop into my head, sometimes riffing off of something my iPod decided to play. I'm not even sure what song it was that prompted these ideas, but now I kind of want to write ti down and see if I can fit it into some story I might write some day:

The roar of traffic, the murmur and thrum of the crowd
and the mournful winter wind, scouring the desert sand
and the inside of my soul is silent and still
like a raging river flash-frozen in mid-torrent
and eons have passed, the axis of the earth precesses, and still there is no thaw.

Wow. It's been a while since I've felt this way. As I gazed mesmerized by the spinning barrels of the slot machine, I felt suddenly suffocated by an awful feeling of despair and loneliness. It was almost as bad as being short of breath. The feeling eventually passed, but I just feel spent, and my muscles are all tight with anxiousness.

Down to my last $20, I decided to hang out at the 1¢ slots, betting a measly 18¢ a pop. Over the next hour or so, the slots whittled down my 2,000 coins to a pathetic 200 coins. This was not without its ups-and-downs, though. At first, I kept telling myself that I would quit when I got down to $15. This actually took a while since the machine would intermittently give me 50-80 coins back. But when I hit $15, I decided to keep going, telling myself that I would stop at $10. Again, it was this slow game of attrition. At $5, I moved over to another machine. The slow trickle of coins lost continued. I found myself mulling over the miserable failures and disappointments in my life.

After switching from Linux to Mac OS X and after playing around with Ruby a little bit, and getting a feel for the philosophies of Objective C and SmallTalk, I guess I'm coming around to Andrew Tanenbaum's thoughts about microkernels.

I got tired of the way my old site looked. I was never really happy with it, actually. So this is what I've been working on for the past week in fits and starts. The actual amount of time I worked on it probably adds up to no more than a couple of hours at most, but what took up most of the time was the setup. Which is what most rational people would call procrastination.

This entry is obsolete. See GNOME 2.9.91 build order for updates.