Bleah. Totally run down. Stressed out, burned out, and all-around fried. But still clinging desperately to life in the hopes that it might all settle down at some point. (It has to settle down, right?)
Thanks to a bumper crop of ragweed, I have spent the last two weeks wanting to claw my eyes out. Puffy. Sore. Goopy. Crusted over when I wake up. I feel like someone has scraped sandpaper over my corneas. I feel like I haven’t slept since the allergies really kicked in.
Work is a super giant happy fun ball of stress as I attempt to coordinate a lot of last-minute things, deal with incomprehensible bug reports, and generally attempt to save the world. So far… meh… I think the world’s still in trouble. It’s taken me until today to start working on the things I was supposed to be doing on Monday. I guess it would help if I could get more than five minutes of uninterrupted time, but apparently that’s out of the question at this point. *sigh*
I’m way behind on dealing with some vaguely important email for Clepy. I have had a tiff with DirecTV over their habit of failing to send me a bill and then charging me lots of late fees. (Surprisingly, not the first time they’ve done that to me…)
And it doesn’t help that I’ve had things to do every night this week: Clepy (and post-Clepy festivities) on Monday, wine group Tuesday, German class Wednesday, and an appointment tonight. Tomorrow, I expect I’ll probably just stay late at work, except that the parts for the new closet organizer system thing have arrived and I want to get started on that too.
Good lord, it’s Thursday, and I still haven’t picked up the new Star Wars DVD’s, with the Han-shoots-first-thank-you-very-much original cut. For those that know me, that should give you an indication of what a general shitstorm it’s been lately.
On the plus side, I finished The Confusion over Labor Day weekend. On the minus side, I still have about a thousand pages (hardback!) of The System of the World still to go… by which point I suspect that I will need to re-read Cryptonomicon since it has enough bits that tie in with the other books. It’d be easier if my eyes didn’t feel like they were about to explode out of my head (see above).
…And I think I might have finally hit the point where Gentoo in particular, and Linux in general, is dead to me, the way someone who crosses Tony Soprano ends up in the deli slicer, or taken out to the Pine Barrens and disappeared. Midway through my third (fourth?) day of trying to get the emerge -eav world step of the upgrade to gcc-4.1, I am just about at the end of my geek rope. I fell in love with Gentoo because its packaging and update system “just worked”, freeing me up to waste my time configuring and tweaking everything else to be just so. But this update is just insultingly murderous, as all kinds of supposedly stable things just won’t fucking build right–because, y’know, that would be too easy. So, even if I have to turn in my geek badge and live life as a lesser mortal, beholden to the software update whims of Apple, I think that’d be okay with me, because this kind of time-waste is something I simply cannot allow in my life any longer.
Grr. Argh!
- Mood:stressed
- Music:Bear McCreary - “The Shape of Things to Come”
Tags: books clepy computers geekery gentoo health house life linux naughty-words rants work5 CommentsPrint This Post
5 responses so far ↓
embrace the love of binary packages of ubuntu
hang in there man you can do it.
Meh. I liked the minimalism of Gentoo, the put-exactly-what-you-want-on-it-and-nothing-more… I forgave much for that.
I think I’m all out of Linux forgiveness for a while.
*huggles*
Do tell me about the books you’re reading after the stress subsides. I’m trying to read more genre fiction.
Okay, so this has been my Neal Stephenson year, because I’ve only had time to read him and geek books like wxPython in Action and Head First Design Patterns.
You’ve possibly heard of Cryptonomicon, which came out in the late 1990’s (1998 or 1999, I picked up a remaindered copy in 1999 and read it while flying back and forth to Chicago for IBM). Cryptonomicon follows two generations of families, the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes, with one timeline in WWII, and the other in the midst of dot-com mania, and is concerned with computer theory, encryption, data havens, and (eventually) the search for a lost treasure. The narrative flops back and forth between each family’s storylines and time settings, eventually managing to intersect them all. It’s a pretty heavy book, and spends a lot of time at the beginning blowing your mind with math and theory and such before becoming a lot more of a rollicking, thriller adventure sort of thing.
His next three books, which are what I’ve been reading this year, Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World (which I started on the plane yesterday and read 15 pages of before passing out for the next four hours), make up a larger work called The Baroque Cycle, and they are indeed quite baroque, with more characters, subplots, diversions, red herrings, and little embellishments than is safe to contemplate. These books cover a span of time from approximately 1660 to the early 1700’s (tSotW begins in 1714), and track the exploits of ancestors of the characters from Cryptonomicon, with a similar structure of winding and occasionally intersecting narratives. Subject matter includes encryption, the dawn of modern scientific thought, the philosophical fued between Newton and Leibniz, intrigues in the court of Louis XIV, piracy on the high seas, a circumnavigation of the world, alchemy, a certain treasure of special magnificence (yes, it looks like it’s the same one from Cryptonomicon), various European wars, English politics, and the dawn of modern financial and monetary systems. They are each in the neighborhood of 1000 pages of 10-pointish, single-spaced hardback print. When published in paperback form, each is broken into 2-3 separate novels. To say that the series requires a bit of a commitment is an understatement.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how tSotW wraps everything up, and like I said before, I might have to re-read Cryptonomicon once I’m done, so that I can catch all of the references between it and the Baroque Cycle books. If you’ve got the time and attention span (which I don’t always have), I highly recommend them.
s/fued/feud/