Guinness is my Beer
I awoke hungry, clearly on a wrong track,
So I went to the shop that was near,
Picked some food, then cans painted black,
Guinness is my beer.
I've realised I'm on a mission,
Free from dangers to steer,
The TV to bring to submission,
Guinness is my beer.
Today's plan wasn't this fare,
I had a schedule quite clear,
But I didn't really care,
Guinness is my beer.
Now I'm feeling a little sad,
It's too late away to veer,
But what the heck,
Guinness is my beer.
I think I'm drunk. :*]
It was a long hot day. I needed a break. It's Saturday anyway! The rest is in that poem. ;*) 'Night! ...zzzzZZZZzzz...
Appreciation Day
Today is
System Administrator Appreciation Day. That means you have to be nice to me. ;) And, well, to everyone else administering computer systems.
Just today I'm to go on a drink with a couple of fellow administrators I haven't seen in almost a year. Now I will have to be nice to them. Damn. At least I'll get to drink
Guinness, this should offset any difficulties I might encounter. ;)
Music & Tennis
I've noticed two new summer promo mixes at
DJ GT's site. I'm not checking that site very often so they may have been there for quite some time already. Anyway, these latest two mixes (Voices of Summer 2004) seem a bit dull. I've listened to them for a while and suddenly I'm robbed of my enthusiasm and can't think of any sick remarks to serve to people. Perhaps this summer
is a bit dull and there's just no good material to make a mix from. On the other hand, suddenly all GT's mixes seem a bit dull to me. Maybe I'm just not in the mood for it. Yeah! The Matrix Soundtrack is what I need now! And that
Blacksmoke Post-Terrorist Modernism DIY MP3 EP! Mwahaha, let me build up some energy for a game of tennis this evening!
Tennis! I bought new tennis shoes today when I was leaving this site I mentioned in the earlier post. Shit, there I went, "yay, a sale, let me check it out," and the next thing I knew I bought a pair of
these tennis shoes. Is this how being a woman feels like? I think I'm very afraid now. ;>
Whow! My filthy mind is working again! C'mon ppl, you know you want to call me, just break something and call me, I'll be glad to be of assistance, nyeheeeheee...
Replacement
My boss is on vacation so I'm covering for him while he's away, enjoying the beaches of the Adriatic sea. Sicko. ;) And yesterday just everything started breaking down. Of course, I had absolutely no info about the operations my boss is maintaining. Well, he paid for it, I molested him over the cell phone for quite some time yesterday. :> That should've spiced up his phone bill a bit. :] And now I'm going on a site for a goose chase. A client is experiencing some networking bugs. I hope my boss didn't ditch the cellular somewhere to have some fun. Because then I will have some fun, too. I've no data, no passwords, nothing about that network. :> This shall be fun. Again.
Fed up
Gaah! I think I catched a cold. A mild one, but still. Damn weather can't maintain a normal temperature range - it is jumping between 10°C and 35°C the whole summer. Now I'm all irritated because of it. And sneezing. I'm short of equating it with an apocalypse to everyone. And if they want to cheer me up, I just slam them back with something sarcastic, using my sick sense of humor.
I've promised I'd write something on the topic of
linux for beginners some time ago. I think it was two months ago. It was to be published in a booklet. In Slovenian language, of course. The target audience would be office clerks and other computer illiterates, that use computers as tools for writing reports and similar, for managing some simple data in the form of spreadsheets, for e-mail, and for browsing the internet. I've written a few introductory words already and now they'd like me to write the rest. The deadline is August 15th. Aaaaa! Help! I completely forgot about this. I'm doomed. No milk today / my enthusiasm is gone away / the hope stands forlorn / a symbol of the dawn.
And now I'll just continue shooting bugs in a project I've been delaying for two weeks... Later on perhaps I'll morph into a robot. With a vocabulary full of pleasantries and a 24/7 work time. And when the world eats itself perhaps I'll steal a sunny beach somewhere where free drinks are served.
Davin's place with his fridge sounds nice. And then I'll throw a neverending party.
LDAP Revisited
Haaa! I knew LDAP is easy! Those books just wouldn't be thick enough if they wouldn't employ a good deal of intimidation. ;) I've applied for an
OID at
IANA and I've already designed the arc for my company. I've resolved all issues around
accessing LDAP server from within python scripts and now I'm in the process of designing attribute types and object identifiers for that portal I'm working on.
mod_python for
Apache is very simple to use, especially with the publisher handler - form data is already preprocessed, you just have to write functions that take form variables as arguments and return a string containing the resulting web page, and everything can be in one file, easilly sharing functions. Or not, it's on you to decide - very good! I must say,
python is very easy to learn; I know (and use) perhaps only 20% of its capability and this is more than enough for doing simple web processing. And there are libraries for virtually everything. I remember just 8 years ago writing sophisticated CGI data preprocessing functions in C; I used them quite a lot in little pet projects, mostly to handle registrations for various BBQs and pizza parties. ;) But now with python, web programming just can't get any easier. And I've also tried and used
PHP before. Compared to python, PHP is just ugly. And don't even talk to me about
perl. :>
I feel great! I think I'll go out for a beer or three, now that friends have rescheduled playing billiards to tomorrow. :]
Harvest
It's wheat harvest time. They've harvested barley without my help earlier in the month, but yesterday I had nothing else to do so I went to visit my mother and help with harvesting. The yield was outstanding, my uncle did a fine job. A lot of wheat. And straw. Bringing bales home was the heaviest job. A machine does the baling, nothing easier, but go on and lift a bale of moist straw. It's a bit heavy thing, but sure, I can do it... Only there were 120 bales. Even now, after a long night of sleeping, I feel tired. I think I need more food. So I'm off to lunch now to gain some energy for the return trip. ;)
Political Compass
I'm always a bit lost when found in the middle of a conversation about politics so I took the test at
The Political Compass web site to see what exactly is my political identity. The results are:
Economic Left/Right: -6.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.05
So I'm a libertarian leftist. In the same category as
Noam Chomsky,
Michael Moore, George Orwell, Gandhi,
The Dalai Lama, and then some. An impressive company. ;)
Heat
It's 34°C outside, officially. I've just returned from my office. With a bicycle. I was cycling for 5.7 km. I can't really cycle below 30 km/h, so I'm kind of wet now.
Very wet from sweat. The T-shirt, everything is wet. Sweat is dripping from me even as I type this. And there's this self-defense training just in few minutes. No way I'm going. I'd end up in a pool of goo.
Anyone out there fancy a beer? ;)
The Theory of Attraction and Sex
In the last few days, by some intriguing coincidence, I'm being bombarded by stories on the topic of love and sex. I guess The Big Summer Lack of Controversy has emerged. Hardly anyone is doing anything Grandiosely Wrong, so the old everlasting clash between opposites that at the same time defines them on the basic level, has come to the foreground: how shall we regulate this field of human interaction? Most of the time I'm just bored by these expressions of duality, the basic levers of control over an individual, but now I just couldn't help but notice the high number of those occurences. Maybe I'm just more sensitive to the topic in question because of the nonexistence of my significant other. Whatever, I browsed the web a little further and I found
The Ladder Theory. A cunning theory; it is so resilient to all attacks that I'm just not interested in disproving it. Maybe it's even true, or a non-disprovable dogma. ;>
The Internet is a Conspiracy
<AlesS> 'morning :]
<valen> Welcome my monday co-conspirator.
<AlesS> hello valen :]
<valen> So
<valen> It's Tuesday now. :)
<AlesS> yeah, a clear sign of conspiracy
<valen> What to do tonight
<valen> I'm running low on ideas. :/
<AlesS> want to uncover another conspiracy? :]
<valen> LOL
<valen> I'm conspiracied out for now. :)
<AlesS> oh, there's plenty of them, anything you can think of is a conspiracy
<valen> Yes
<valen> Humm
<AlesS> even the fact you can't think of anything is a clear sign of conspiracy: what is the probability there is no conspiracy? You've been brainwashed, clearly.
<valen> True
<valen> I mean... Look at the IRC servers.
<valen> I guess you could consider them a conspiracy
<valen> 4 out of the 5 servers I'm on are based on the exact same software.
<AlesS> no guessing necessary, it's a fact
<valen> One network to rule them all, one network to bind them, one network to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
<valen> In the land of Bahamut where the shadows lie.
<AlesS> irc has been designed to draw your attention from the reality around you to reduce the possibility of you recognising the rule of elite
<valen> Yes
<AlesS> it's quite obvious
<valen> Same as TV.
<valen> As seen on TV. :)
<AlesS> and they didn't stop at irc: there are lots of things, like web, IM, webcams, etc.
<valen> Haha
<AlesS> TV was insufficient, it engaged only lethargic folk
<valen> Behold the corporate rules.
<valen> Internet: W3C (www), IETF (Internet), DALnet (IRC), IM (AOL/MSN/Yahoo), ...
<AlesS> but now you can vent all your anger on internet in a benign manner for the rulers in shadows
<valen> Oh yea... ICANN and ARIN
<valen> They're part of the conspiracy too.
<AlesS> now it's even fashionable to have a blog, waste huge amounts of time posting in it and thus practically becoming a harmless individual they couldn't care less about
<valen> Yes
<valen> Google is known for that.
<valen> With "Blogger"
<valen> And LiveJournal as well.
<AlesS> they're taking all the power of reaction away from you and you even enjoy it
<valen> Yes
<AlesS> "why should I go out and do something about it? I'll just pour my frustrations out in the blog"
<valen> Bingo
<AlesS> and then you think you feel better but you haven't actually done anything
<AlesS> it's very obvious, but only to those that can recognise all the subtlety
<valen> Yep
<AlesS> internet is clearly the result of a conspiracy
<valen> Yep
<valen> No wonder it was formerly an ARPA project
<valen> If people are busy blogging, it's easier to attack them
<AlesS> of course, ARPA is just an executive arm of the elite, a tool for rule
<valen> Yes
<AlesS> but they don't have an attack in mind, there is nothing in it for them
<AlesS> they want to enslave us, they want to make us busy enough with all the mindless banter in forms they can control
<valen> Yes
<AlesS> and then they tax us
<AlesS> and we have to work
<AlesS> and whatever we don't like we can just put in our blogs
<AlesS> that has no effect, but we feel better, and that is all that matters
<valen> Yes
<valen> It's a big giant conspiracy
<AlesS> quite cunning
<valen> Yep
<AlesS> do you mind if I put this online? :>
<valen> Um
<valen> Just as long as you remove the AFK again. LOL
<AlesS> okay ;]
Foggy Feelings
I've just had a few beers with a friend and the conversation somehow also covered our student years living in dorms. Of course there's no way around it, the topic on women somehow creeped into the conversation from around the corner as if being my good old friend. Boy, was I an idiot! If you'd known how many times I've found myself in the middle of an opportunity most men only dream of, you'd most likely have me sent to a Tibetan monastery because of my failure to seize the opportunity. I think I'll just go bang through a few walls with my head now. And do something about my inavoidable hangover in the morning. :*]
Mondays are a Conspiracy
* AlesS wakes up and yawns
<AlesS> damn, I've slept for 9 hours
* AlesS makes some Earl Grey to help him dealing with Monday
<valen> It sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays.
<valen> LOL
<AlesS> it's conspiracy, surely
<Fafnir> surely.
<valen> Humm
<AlesS> well I don't have any evidence, but it's quite obvious
<valen> Haha
<valen> Did you use Occam's Razor to come to that conclusion?
<AlesS> but of course, it's the simplest scenario: "How do we make his life difficult?" "Introduce Mondays!"
<valen> Bingo.
<valen> Sounds like a plan.
<valen> Mondays... The biggest scam in history
<AlesS> indeed, it's a safe bet that religions are a scam
<AlesS> especially this one that introduced this Monday
<valen> Yea
<valen> Any religion that introduces stuff like Mondays is bad
<valen> However...
<valen> I do like religions that introduced Friday, Saturdays, and Sundays.
<AlesS> that was all one and the same religion
<AlesS> even you can't see through it
<AlesS> it's quite subtle
<valen> Yes
<valen> It is
<AlesS> I mean, what is the probability that the whole world without an exception would adopt the 7-day week from one religion?
<valen> Yep
<valen> I'm wondering why 7 days as well
<valen> Was it a Magic Number(tm)?
<AlesS> I don't know that (yet), but I'm sure it's to maximise the impact of conspiracy and to minimise its discovery
<valen> Yes
<valen> That sounds right
<valen> Humm. I wonder. Haha
<AlesS> it's just so improbable for this to be a random occurence, it's quite obvious it has been designed; people wouldn't just submit and accept this concept about weeks, they've all been brainwashed by the subtlety of their governments infiltrated by cabal
<valen> Oh yes.
<valen> And what's up with months.
<valen> Obviously, that has ties to the exact same conspiricy
<AlesS> not at all, the concept of months is older by far, and it has changed quite a lot through the history... this calendar we have now is not even 1000 years old
<valen> Ah
<valen> True
<AlesS> I believe this thing about months is just a diversion to occupy our attention; the concept of weeks is far older and hasn't ever changed
<valen> Oh. Very interesting. :)
<AlesS> May I publish this conversation on the web? :>
<valen> Sure. LOL
The Mastery of Words
The world can be an empty place
With a flat peering face.
No time to perfect your grace,
If you're going to be an ace.
Happiness is intermittent,
With words as the only retent,
And although with a good intent,
This is sadly insufficient.
Words can be a good approximation
To describe the feeling of elation,
But I want a better presentation,
Preferably a good manifestation.
Inspired by
Enjoy the Silence by
Depeche Mode.
Ordering T-shirts
The last September I wanted to order a few spiffy T-shirts from
ThinkGeek. I still do. There's one slight problem, though: they don't ship to my country. They even ship to Ecuador, Ghana, Mongolia, Nepal, and Ukraine, to name a few more "exotic" places, but no, they don't ship to Slovenia. Back then I got a bit upset about this fact and e-mailed them. I got this in response:
Unfortunately, we do not ship to your country at this time. This may be due to a variety of reasons (our carriers do not deliver there or we have products that cannot be easily shipped to your country).
How bloody difficult can it be to ship a T-shirt to Slovenia?! What do you mean, carriers don't deliver here? All of them do! Of course I replied that this answer was far from satisfactory. I got back a bit longer reply saying that this is management's decision and that they are considering additional destinations for shipping. I should wait.
How longer should I wait? We've become a part of the European Union in the mean time which means that import duties and thus perhaps also shipping charges should be unified accross the whole European Union; there should be no difference whether they ship to Austria, Italy, or Slovenia, it's just a matter of address! Well if they don't want to make business with me that's their decision, it just annoys me I can't get some of those T-shirts anywhere else.
Earthquake
At 15:04 the office started shaking and the 19" monitor on a table nearby started swaying left and right like it was a pendulum! Preliminary data shows it as a magnitude 5.1 quake on our border with Austria, somewhere 70 km south-west from Klagenfurt, if I'm reading the map correctly. I wonder what the official news will be. That is a bloody big quake and quite unexpected for that region!
Apology
I got an e-mail from a friend yesterday, a little beutiful poem about friends. It was a chain-letter actually, but I saw the deeper meaning behind it. I've been a bit rude to her the last autumn, quite thoughtless actually. I haven't heard from her since then, and I was in some sort of a turmoil at the time, so I've decided it's better to leave the things as they were or else I could just make them worse. At the end of 2002 I ended the civil service (a replacement service if you don't want to serve the army), lost my father and got a job at practically the same moment and this was quite a heavy burden for me. I've carried it out as well as I could, but there were casualties on the way nonetheless.
I replied to this friend with a poem of mine; I wrote it in the same way as the one in the chain letter. But it's not just her that I've trampled over, for sure there are others also. So I'm also publishing this poem here, let it be known: I'm sorry.
The past has always been error-prone,
But the future doesn't bear this stone.
I made thoughtless decisions plenty,
Considered as mistakes by many.
I feel as I've hurt you one time too much,
But I'm not sure, the veil falls thick.
You see I met some beasts, an unbeatable bunch
Or perhaps I just couldn't find an applicable stick.
I have a leash, an invisible one,
So as not to scare quite everyone.
But these beasts are an unpredictable hurd,
Restraints prove insufficient as exposure mounts,
And I even can't help it an angel to get hurt,
Although these beasts are entirely my faults.
Perhaps it's wrong, perhaps it's right,
Seclusion I've decided shall be quite alright.
Diminished as much as it can be,
This demon though is still with me.
Taught it of good manners largely I did,
But just to be sure it's not hungry again,
I'd ask you to be gentle with it.
Walk slow and mindful be as you can,
While I strive to finish this task of mine,
To make it beautiful again, a good man.
Your thoughts were always welcomed,
And certain be, of them I still am keen,
My affection for you can never be questioned.
And though much as odd as it might seem,
My behaviour a bit errant at times will be,
But you'll always be friends with me.
Bad Luck
My cousin is having a wedding this Saturday. So I went to my native place, Murska Sobota, to visit my mum, attend a wedding, and just have a jolly good time.
The train I was on arrived late about 35 minutes. That's because someone didn't want to live anymore and threw himself on the tracks before the train. Got killed I think. A baaaad omen.
When I got home I was introduced to the task of writing a speech. HUH?! A speech to be given at the bride's place (that's my cousin's). That's what you get when you're known as a good word juggler. Well I just wrote it. I'll also have to deliver it. That's what you get when you're known as a "good enough" speaker.
Damn suicidal maniac.
Playing Games
I don't play computer games. Some people just have a problem with that. Well I
don't play computer games. I find them boring. It's just not interesting to me to type on the keyboard, sometimes almost flattening keys, and have my face glued to the display. It's not appealing to me to observe what the computer will draw in response to my (and others') keypresses. But there will always be people, that just won't have a no for an answer. Take a look at
Davin, for example. He's all enthusiastic about a game he's making with
Game Maker. But I'm just unable to appreciate his new hobby. Therefore, to maintain his meaning of life, I must ask you, my dear netizens, to step in for me and nudge him a bit to send you his masterpiece. No doubt, he'll be very glad. ;) He told me it's a 1945 clone, whatever that means.
On the other note, I have a game installed on my computer. It's called Unreal Tournament. I only played it once. One of my flatmates got very vocal about it on one Tuesday not long ago, so I installed it. We played for about two hours. I kept losing. It was just boring. Then he gave up. I mean, what do people want? Blood? Is it then that you'll be convinced I really mean
no? :->
In general I have observed I'm not a
visual person. For example, I remember shapes, but I don't remember colours. I'll remember roughly what clothes you wore yesterday, but there's no way I'll be able to remember what colour they were. Of course I can see colours, but my mind works in a more abstract way, it's as if internally I process everything in shades of grey, in a basic flat linear manner; colours just don't matter. I mean, you should see my linux desktop: a black screen with a few xterms (basic terminal windows with no menus or icons, just rectangles with text) with black backgrounds and, of course, mozilla (a web browser). Rarely I have anything else open, too. I even use
fvwm as my window manager, an oooooold thing. As a side note, every person has a predominant sense that can be one of:
visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.
It's similar with games. If playing a computer game, then at one time I'll start yawning and if I won't stop soon afterwards I'll risk spraining my jaw. On the other hand, if you invite me to a game of tennis, I won't hesitate to join. Some people are not very interested in physical activities, as I'm not interested in "virtual" activities. I don't care about LAN parties, but I'll always be happy to join in cycling, running, playing tennis, and anything else you can teach me. ;) I like outdoor activities, with the exception of winter sports. I don't like winters.
Have a Laugh
Currently I'm setting up a compiler and I have a TV tuner app opened in the background to have some CNN chatter occasionally disturb my mind. Suddenly I overhear:
... the US fight jetters, err, fighter jets... Fight jetters! That anchorwoman must have some silly thoughts running through her mind.
Dullness
I'm tired. I've been working routine tasks for the previous couple of days. So boring, yet attention demanding. Just implement, and test, and reimplement, and retest, and optimize some more, and benchmark some more, and... bleurgh. A game of tennis yesterday helped, but only until I returned to work today. I think I'll finish it tomorrow and then return back to "pythonising". Without challenges the mind seems to be on the lookout for some tropical beach with a few palm trees and free drinks, while the body is left to its own devices. I really need a change of scenery around here. Perhaps I'll submit a request for a personal manager and character builder and motivator and subcontractor and so on. ;)
Motivation for Running
Yesterday morning I went for a run around the local hill. Until two years ago I did quite a lot of running, but then life got complicated and I stopped. As I was unraveling this big knot of life I noticed I was getting just sliiiiightly fat. FAT! ME! Whow. Now that's a surprise. I should start doing something. Like, start running more regularly. So there I went. I thought about 10 km of light running should be
sufficient for a start. I mean, there were times I managed 15 km of sustained running. Yea, right. I barely managed about 7 km of
intermittent running. Dude, I'm lame. And I only did that much because as I was running I kept meeting people running in the other direction. Some of them were women. Chicks with energy! My omnipotence factor dropped just a little. Ugh. But what chicks! I met one attractive blonde dressed in red twice! Each time I noticed only a few seconds later I had my jaw wide open. I'm still deciding why. But one thing is certain: I'll start running more frequently!
I actually woke up this morning at 5:27 all by myself. "Yay," I thought, "my subconscience is quite serious about this!" But, meh, I turned around and tried to get some more sleep. It wasn't quality sleep. Here I am yawning and stuff and no coffee will be able to help me. I know such mornings. I'll be all lame and tired and just annoying to everyone, including myself. I should've gone running. But so early... Running at 6:00 am? That's unprecedented! But hey, anything for health, right? And for pretty sights... ;)
LDAP
The life goes on, and so does my discontent. There's this huge book in my office about LDAP, 800 pages,
Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services. I've yet to find a book with more junk content. There's also a
new version of it, but as far as I can tell the ratio usable:junk hasn't significantly changed. I want to learn something about LDAP as I shall use it in that web portal mentioned in the previous post. Nowadays it's everything about having data about users in a
directory, directories are just the structures for whatever persistent data that doesn't change a lot or not at all, and databases are meant for everything else. Right, but I have no idea about LDAP other than some overall theory. I want to learn how to interface with an LDAP server, how it works, how and what kind of data does it devour, how to design a directory, in short how and in what format to stick some data in it and then how to pull it back out. Well, this book is precisely the one you wouldn't want to learn from about technical stuff like that. Sure it's got it covered somewhere. All over the place to be totally inexact. Dispersed in an ocean of smalltalk a technical manager without a practical clue could have given you in a local pub for a lot cheaper price of, say, a beer. I mean it. This book is for managers and pointy-haired bosses that won't write a line of code about it, but perhaps a strategic company plan for whatever mega integrated solution designed for centralized data acquisition and storage with a comprehensive and open approach to development that is required by circumstances of modern international trading or whatever. If you want, I can throw a lot more of useless words at you, but I think you got the gist of it. That's just how this book is written. I don't like it.
ldapguru shall do just fine, thank you very much. I'm very curious though who around here will find this book useful.
Debian
Never,
never use the linux distribution called
Debian. At least not the stable version. Just don't use it. Don't even think about it. It's old. OLD!
OOOOoooooold! I'm supposed to make a web portal. I'm kind of fed up with
PHP so I decided to use
Python, which I'm still in the process of learning, to see what's so groovy and hippy about it. You see, Python is
in nowadays and PHP is
out, and
perl is, well... perl is something nasty that modern mothers use to scare their newborn hackers with. (Did you notice those things all begin with the letter P? What's next? A language named pr0n?)
Of course I want to use a web framework to go with Python. No problem,
pso comes to mind but it's a bit unmaintained I think, so I wanted to go with
PyWork. "Naah, too much hassle," I thought, "I don't need all of this, it's just supposed to be a simplistic basic portal.
mod_python for
Apache shall suffice." Right. There I go,
apt-get install libapache-mod-python and feel the first signs of grooviness. Yay! Then I sketched myself a basic picture of what I'll need to do. Of course, sessions are a must. But they're automatically available only on Apache 2.x! No go with Apache 1.3.26 that comes with Debian stable. Okay, I'll need an additional python module that implements sessions. PyWork comes back to mind. No go, it uses Apache's sessions. Hrmpf. Then I found
Jon's Python modules. But it requires Python of version 2.2 at least! In fact I think nothing mentioned above works with Python 2.1.3 included with Debian stable. Argh!
I've no idea yet how I'm going to get out of this one, but one thing is for sure:
I am very annoyed by the age of Debian packages! I get just very slightly mad whenever I hear I've got to do something on a
Debian machine! I really don't like using the word
hate, but this time I'll make an exception: I
hate Debian!
Sure I could just (re)compile whatever, but that's not company policy. The company policy goes somewhere on the lines: "we use the original Debian packages, we try to abstain from compiling completely and compile something when there's absolutely no way around; the Debian packages maintainers are responsible people and they know what they are doing, we trust them. We want to have a framework where you can upgrade packages with the simple Debian interface
(the apt-get command) and be sure of the fact that such an upgraded package has the assurance of the corresponding Debian package maintainer of its fitness and high security level." I'd really like to perform a lobotomy on my boss when I hit such obstacles. But perhaps soon I won't have to anymore. It seems this "age" phenomenon is ever-so slightly getting on his nerves also. Discontent seems to be growing. Yay. I can't wait for another 2 years to pass for my boss to switch to some other distro...
I want to ride my bicycle
A nice hot sunny day emerged. At last! It's the 1st of July and the summer seems to have finally arrived. This thing is slightly odd: I wonder if the weather decided to introduce seasons on the 1st day of a month. I remember the past two years the autumn began exactly on the 1st of September. I mean: August the 31st was all sunny and hot, then the next day the temperatures dropped by 10 degrees Celsius and it got a bit windy and cloudy.
I used to ride my bicycle quite a lot the previous year, I even went to extremes which caused me to have a sore throat (angina) and right after that a flu. I was in bed for almost two weeks. Imagine, outside was a hot summer, temperatures ranging from 30 to 35 degrees Celsius, and I was sweating in my bed, with the body temperature around 39 degrees Celsius. It was awful. I even sprained my ankle a couple of weeks before, but that was while playing tennis, a subject for some other blog entry.
Back then, during June, I upgraded my bicycle quite significantly. The rear wheel was not quite circular anymore and I got fed up with exchanging broken spokes. It's quite annoying when you have to unscrew the freewheel to be able to fix a broken spoke. Actually I only got aware the wheel was an itsy bitsy tiny flat (twisted towards inside) during one of my mad raving and yelling ceremony as I couldn't unscrew the damn freewheel. I even damaged the notch where you're supposed to plug in a tool for unscrewing the freewheel. It was sitting very firm on that hub. Then I decided I had enough of these problems and I shall just buy a new wheel!
The decision was easy, but the world again conspired against me. There was just no substitute wheel available. The bicycle was out of production for a decade, maybe even more, what do I know. It was a ten-speed road-racing bicycle with 27" wheels after all. Today's standard wheel sizes are 26" and 28", 24" and 20" for juvenile (mountain) bikes. I bought the bicycle second-hand back in 2000. Now I really saw it was junk, much overpriced, but admiteddly still cheap. Whatever, the guy that sold it to me should've payed
me to be willing to take it.
Oooookay, I thought, to hell with my non-standard (for today) rear wheel, I'll build me my own new rear wheel. I could buy a rim just about anywhere, I could buy a hub just about anywhere, the same goes for spokes, a freewheel, a chain, a derailer, and a tyre. It shall be a superb wheel, top of the line (or somewhere towards the top). Above all, the bicycle shall have more speeds, one of those modern shimano cassette freewheels so I won't have any problems getting it down if I'd have to fix a broken spoke, and it won't have any of those junk derailers that just go weird in a year. I had absolutely no idea how I'm going to do it, but I'll think of something. How hard can it be? There are shops doing it. Therefore I don't need to build a factory just to build a wheel. I did some extensive search on the web. And here I must give my compliments to
Sheldon Brown. He has the most comprehensive and extensive web site about bicycles, virtually everything you need to ever know about a bicycle, and the most descriptive and just excellent guide on wheel building. I was thrilled.
Of course I wanted Shimano parts as far as freewheels and derailers go. I wouldn't settle for anything else. But those quality freehubs all came with 9, perhaps 8 sprockets. I mean, it's wide. And having an old 10-speed bicycle I had to watch for the width of the whole hub. Finally I found a part, quite rare to find a shop selling it, that was a shorter variant of a Shimano 7-speed freehub, I think Acera model, and corresponding cassette sprockets. (Maybe you're confused by the terminology: older freewheels were meant to be screwed on the hub, but nowadays they sell freehubs which are basically wide hubs on which you can stick cassette sprockets, which is basically a freewheel without the ratchet mechanism, as the ratchet mechanism is now inside the freehub.)
Now I was all set to go. I bought everything, even the tyres. It was a hot Saturday and I spent the whole of the day just building my first wheel. The longest it took me to connect spokes to the rim and the freehub and then adjust them properly so as not to break. They have to be firm, but not too firm. Putting the cassette sprockets on the freehubs was easy, just a couple of minutes' work. I really like this design -- you can exchange a single sprocket if you damage it, not the whole freewheel as was the case before. Then came the tyre, no big deal here. And then the moment of truth: will the wheel fit on the bicycle? Hardly. The hub was almost too wide, but it fit anyway. Would it have been just a bit wider I think I'd have been out buying a new frame. After being thrilled by my success, fitting the derailer and a new chain was just a two-hour stress-relief yelling show. I had a bit of a problem getting the old chain and the old derailer off the bicycle. It ended by me peeling through the chain. I must tell you, a factory-fixed chain is one tough thing to replace. But usually I think that doesn't matter because usually when you have to replace it it's broken anyway.
After I was all done I inflated the tyre and went for a test drive. I must tell you, it was amazing! The feeling was just awesome! The ride was smooth, the ratchet was not noisy at all, there were no bumps on the road (that's how I explained bumpy behaviour at first when I didn't know yet I had a faulty wheel), I mean: it could only be more perfect if the pedals were to move all on their own. But that wouldn't be so enjoying anymore. ;) I must have built it quite well. Not a single spoke broke afterwards, in fact nothing broke afterwards, and I was riding the bicycle practically every day during the summer.
And today was the first day of this year I was on my bicycle. I was a bit afraid I would find it in a state of decay or something, but really all I had to do was to brush the dust off the seat, inflate the tyres, and off I went! And here I am now, typing this after the 6.8 km ride to the office, all wet from sweat. :]
