Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Thursday, 17 January 2002

# 10 PM

grumble

My CD-ROM reader/writer regularly wedges itself into a state where it won't do anything at all until I reboot the machine. I'm 99+% sure this has something to do with the ghodawful way IDE CD burners are handled under Linux. There's a translation layer in the kernel which makes the drive look like it's SCSI, and then you stack the SCSI CD-ROM driver on top of that. For burning and ripping, which is most of what I do with the damn thing, it's even worse: user space talks raw SCSI commands to the translation layer.

I understand that the situation is somewhat more sane under 2.4, however, everything else about 2.4 just makes me want to run away screaming, or even switch to FreeBSD. Maybe Marcelo will manage to straighten it out, but I'm not real optimistic.

lasagna

  • 1 box lasagna noodles
  • 1½ cups ricotta
  • 1½ cups parmesan cheese
  • mushroom sauce (3 cups):
    • 3 tbsp olive oil
    • 3 cloves garlic
    • 1 onion
    • 2 cups mushrooms
    • 28 oz plum tomatoes, canned
  • spinach
  • salt and pepper to taste

yum!

# 3 PM

the dirty dishes positive feedback loop

...is a common plight among lazy young men living alone, such as myself. It goes like this: One cooks a meal, and then puts all the dirty dishes in the sink intending to wash them later. When the time for the next meal comes around, one discovers that some essential piece of kitchenware is dirty. One then makes something which does not require it. Repeat until there are no clean dishes. At this point it is impossible to fit all the dishes into the drying rack in one batch, which provides another excuse not to do the dishes at all.

Most people in this bind will go out to eat, but I've got this psychosomatic quirk which makes it really easy to ignore the fact that I'm hungry, even as most higher cognitive functions shut down from lack of blood sugar. I get into a mental state where taking any action at all, even eating, is too much effort. If I do do something, it's grumpily and ineffectively. This has been known to go on for entire days.

Which is a roundabout way of apologizing for yesterday's entry.

is sex necessary?

...is the title of a charming little book by E.B. White and James Thurber, published in 1929 and still disturbingly accurate in its skewering of American courtship rituals and the associated support industries (psychotherapists, in particular).

It also makes a marvelous source of sound bites, such as:

Successfully to deal with a woman, a man must know what type she is.

It is even more difficult, and just as unimportant, to arrive at a zodiacal classification, because that is altogether dependent upon determining the year the woman was born, and because, even if you should ascertain her date of birth, the pishtosh of analysis and prediction which derives therefrom is a lot of mediæval guesswork.

If you don't care what punctuation mark you put after "darling," the chances are you are in love—although you may just be uneducated, who knows?

for those about to rot

...is an album I bought last week (see below), and this segment is to warn y'all not to do the same.

It was billed as "a tribute to AC/DC." This, I thought, would be a fine thing to have; AC/DC was not the greatest rock band of all time, but they did write some songs which are pleasant to hear now and then. As such, they would fit nicely into my current music- listening scheme, which may be described as "rip all one's CDs to disk, throw all the tracks except the ones I can't stand to hear ever again into an XMMS playlist, shuffle, and leave on all day."

The trouble is, the reason AC/DC songs are fun to listen to is their lyrics, which are clever and original. Bon Scott and Brian Johnson sang the lyrics so you could understand them. The cover bands on For Those About To Rot don't. This leaves you listening to the music, which is nothing special, and is obscured by the growling noises that I suppose are the attempt at singing.

Oh well — what I get for buying albums off the clearance rack because they're $1.95 and have scantily clad women on the cover.

# 2 AM

MTYWTKAIC has turned into a morass of HTML problems, so I'm going to put it aside for awhile.

The toilet broke. The landlord wouldn't let me fix it myself and bill them for the parts, and then the plumber he sent wouldn't believe me when I told him what was wrong. Grumble.

At work, I continue to fix problems that were fixed two years ago in upstream GCC.