OMGPANCAKESDANGEROUS

3-1-06
Renewed exaspiration at existencial junk.
...Just kidding.
I've decided that being prepaired (with tools) doesn't necessarily mean carrying everything you could possibly need around. Why carry tools around when you can simply make them more available? The 99 cent store has pocket knives and multi tools, flashlights, LEDs, etc. all for 99 cents. Sure they're crap, but a crappy tool in the hand is worth two awesome ones at home... Anyways, buy 3 sets of tools and keep the sets at home, in the car, and at work. You don't have to carry all of it around, but it's still readily available if you forget what you usually carry.

I seem to be getting tired of my music. What I usually listen to isn't affecting me as it used to. Truthfully, though, I haven't been giving it the undevided attention it problably deserves. I need to devote some time to it.

Every once in a while I really just step back and marvel at all the functionality linux has. I learned by messing around with Macromedia flash that powerful tool sare hard to control (read the "hole hog" section of "in the beginning there was the command line"). I was reading the steps involved in moving a shape across teh screen and was simply dumbfounded at how complex they seemed to make this simple task. After learning more I realized that this program was capable of very complex actions and activities, and that with out those complexities it would be a simple tool with simple functions. The exact same can be said about Linux. if you can dream it, you can do it. It may take some research and learning to accomplish it, but it can be done. This is where Lunux/Unix deviates from other OS's on a philisophical level. Ease of use comes at the cost of function. I wrote a one-line bash script that parsed the ssecurity logs, found IPs that had more than 10 failed login attempts, and blocked them. Doing something similar in windows would be extremely difficult, and require substantial programming prowess. Yet Linux/Unix has these small, single-function tools ready for use, and provides a means for combining them to increase their abilities. Macs are like shopping at Target for furniture; you have a selection of furniture ready made and functional. Windows is like shopping at Ikea for furniture; you may have to work to get it functional, but it's not really that hard (plus more selection). Linux is like being handed tools and pointed at a tree. It takes skills and knowledge to get your furniture, but you have the option of making whatever you want, however you want, from beginning to end.

There are countless projects that attempt to make Linux more user-friendly, but it's not in Linux's nature to be that way. So they will always fail on some level, to some degree. A tiger doesn't change its stripes. Especially when it's been bred to be a tiger's tiger.