Robot Monkeys

I’m in Pergolesi, and the 30ish guy across from me is yaking on his fucking headset (one of two he’s wearing) plugged into a 17″ macbook pro trying to plan this big long trip through Europe. (”Florence is the best city! It’s so beautiful! So it Paris! We can drive!”) Whatever. Most annoying is how he’s talking Valley Girl.

There’s just a whole superior attitude yuppies exude, that I can’t stand. It’s just so condescending and self important, and at the same time they seem to try to act so chummy, like you’re their “best bro’,” but at the same time you the vibe they give is that they’d beat with cue stick until you’ve got detached retinas for $20. I think that superiority is what brings on gentrification. “Oh this is so cool! Oh know! Precious Boopsie! Let’s clean up the neighborhood and make it a soulless! No wait! We’ll give it that artificial hip feel that can only come from planned communities! A Starbuck’s! And a Panera Bread! And soccer field! And an MLK Boulevard to show that we’re friends with the urban youth!”

Fuck them all.

(Yes, I’m acutely aware that that I’m in my 30s, typing this a 17″ Powerbook G4, and have (sort of) vacationed Europe.)

I’m tired of linux. Sure I still like unix. I’m comfortable in unix. Unix lets me do my work.

Linux on the other hand, is still just a buggy and worthless as ever.

I’m trying to get ESD to recognize my soundcard. ESD says I don’t have one. Actually it says, ALSA says I don’t have one. Funny, OSS can use ALSA just fine.

That’s when I realized that at no point in the 7 years I’ve used linux, I’ve never had all my hardware work at the same time. And not just work, but work Right™.

I’m tired of it. I am not a fucking sysadmin. I do not enjoy fucking sysadmining. Trying to find out out why I have to manually load a module to get USB to work is not my idea of fun. I don’t get my rocks off by screwing around with XF86Configs for a week only to get an image that almost fills the screen, and is almost straight across, and just has a little bit of white and black vertical lines in along the top and left edges. When I shove in my USB mouse, I want it to not only be recognized and made usable, but I want all 7 buttons to work damn it.

I am seriously considering getting a mac as my next machine. I just wish I could use my own window manager under it. I found out that someone got windowmaker to work under MacOSX using xfree4. Fuck, I don’t want to use XFree, I’d rather use whatever the hell macos uses, because then I know the hardware will be fully supported and properly configured. Then I found a link to the gnu-darwin project

GNU-Darwin aims to be the most free Darwin-based Unix distribution. Our mission is two-fold: Focus on new projects that leverage the unique capabilities of Darwin/Mach and help Apple users to enjoy the benefits of free software.

What’s that? Selfrightous software that doesn’t quite work, but it doesn’t matter because you’ve got the source that you’ll never look at? If that’s what’s most important to you, then you need to get the fuck out of the ACM office.