Odds & Ends
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* About last time
I'd just like to reassure ... whoever, someone (possibly
myself) that I have not in fact gone off the deep end. That
thing, whatever it was, that I wrote last time [1] - let's
call it a work of surrealist fiction - was intended to be
exactly that. Well it started out as some musings on my
retreat from corporate social media, but I quickly realized
what I had to say wasn't that interesting. Or at least,
wasn't up to my usual standard, however interesting (or not)
that might be. So, I decided to use my imagination instead
of sticking to a strictly factual recounting of events. I
don't know how much fun it is to read, but it was fun to
write.
* Plan nein
After three years of always meaning to enroll in one of
those SDF Plan 9 bootcamps, I finally took the plunge. That
was what, a month or two ago? But I didn't get much further
than installing the client and attending the introductory
livestream. Oh, I did manage to connect to the server and
fire up the cat clock. But I got a cryptic error when I
tried to run COM and a couple of other things. I made a
desultory effort to get a web page going but even that
proved too difficult. Is it a misconfiguration? Did I miss
something in the docs? Beats me.
And that's about where I gave up. I haven't seen any
traffic on the mailing list, or much discussion on BBOARD,
and I don't really know what if anything is going on with
the rest of my cohort. Which is a bit de-motivating in
itself.
Of course, if I really cared that wouldn't matter, I'd work
through the documentation and eventually get past these
intial challenges. But I have to conclude I just don't care
that much.
And that thought leads to something I really need to
remember about myself, which is that I am a goal-oriented
learner. I'm much more motivated to pick up skills when
there's something I want to use them for. And while I think
Plan 9 is pretty cool conceptually, and I'm glad there are
people keeping it alive and developing it, realistically
I'll never be one of them. As I don't otherwise have a
practical use for it, I think this is where I'll leave it
for now.
* Well, that didn't take long
Back on November 11th, in the context of my Remembrance Day
post [2], I wondered if there would ever come a time when
singing "O Canada" would come to seem an act of resistance,
like Yvonne singing "La Marseillaise" in Rick's Cafe. And
here we are, barely 3 months later, treated to the spectacle
of duelling national anthems at the 4 nations face off
championship hockey game. With Yvonne - pardon me, Chantal
Kreviazuk - even making a pointed change to one of the
lyrics, as a gesture of protest.
I take no joy from my prescience.
References
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[1] My Time in the Codex
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jdd/phlog/20250215-codex.txt
[2] Lest We Forget
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jdd/phlog/20241111-remembrance.txt
Sat Feb 22 15:56:29 PST 2025
