Peripheral perceptions

Ever have a moment where you see something out of the corner of your eye and think it's one thing, and it turns out to be totally different?

Sometimes it happens where you think your black cat is the 8-ball on a pool table until it meows at you and throws your reality askance.

Sometimes you think it's a gas pump holding you up with its nozzle as the gun. Oh, wait -- that one's for real.

Well, to be serious again, it happened to me this morning.

I was stopped at a light at a busy intersection when this late 1970s/early 1980s model car -- the make of which I cannot remember, but I'm reasonably sure it was an Olds or a Pontiac of some sort -- pulls up alongside mine in the left turn lane. I casually glance over, and I note the hood and front sides of the car are covered in aluminium foil, and the body's suffered some pretty general wear and tear in the form of several large, albeit shallow, dents.

My first thought was "Gee, dude, nice POS you have there."

...that is, until I looked at the occupants.

This car was not being piloted by some young latino or black punk with an attitude. It was an old man and his wife. They must have been easily 80 years old each, she in her headscarf and he in his day coat. Two people who probably bought the car way back when it was new and they could afford a last hurrah.

The car's condition on the inside was mediocre at best. The inside paneling was weather-worn but seemed to be holding up; the faux woodgrain on the dashboard was still visible, but I could see signs of fraying on the seats from where I was.

As the car pulled away to turn left, I could further see that the rear bumper was tenuously attached at best.

And I felt so sad for them. I don't know why. I mean, there's no way to tell what they're thinking. They could be thinking of the pleasant things coming as the day unfolds, or they could be sitting there thinking about when the end would come. It could be anything; as someone who's contemplated The End at various times over his life, age doesn't really matter all that much in that regard.

I guess I still have impressions that the elders of our society should be able to spend their time much better off than current economics will allow.

The elders are not taken seriously enough, I think. But that's a rant for another day.

Meanwhile, count your own blessings. If you have things that work, be grateful. If they're pretty and holding on by more than a thread, go and do something nice for someone else.

[Notice: My blog will probably go to "random-what-the-hell" format for a while until I feel so inclined to put more into it. I've been remiss as it is for long enough given the last six months of complete and total chaos, which is also a rant for another day. Deal with it -- but according to my records, nobody reads me anyway...]

Berkelian Rhapsody (Yes, I'm that Greywolf)

Berkelian Rhapsody
(based on Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen)

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Is this in real time? Is this in memory?
Caught in a for(;;) loop, no escape from this subroutine...
open() your files, branch through the do{}while()s and see
I'm just the kernel, I need no libraries
Because you boot me up, load and go
Branch from high, store to low
Any way the thread flows
Doesn't really matter to me
To me.

unlink() just killed a file
Filled it's data up with NULLs, cleared the inode, closed the holes
vfork(), life had just begun
Then kill(0, SIGKILL) blew it all away
mmap(), ooooooh, didn't mean to make it die
if (the parent process doesn't fork again) {
carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters;
}

Too late, init has died
Flush my buffers out from core, then reboot() and try once more
panic ("freeing free block"); I've got to crash
Got to enter kdb and see the truth
Init, ooooooooh (Any way the thread flows)
I've lost my tty
I wish my page hadn't been swapped out at all...

I see the signal trap vectors into core
Interrupt! Overrun! It will do a fandango
Data's skrogged like lightning, very very frightening me
Dennis Ritchie? Kenneth Thompson? Kirk McKusick? Eric Allman?
Someone help me! Robert Pike?
Oh, Kernighan (-an -an -an -an -an)

I'm just a quick hack, nobody uses me
He just makes sockets in his address family
Spare him a buffer in high memory

bind(); accept(); msg_send(); will it let me go?
munmap(); NO! It will not let you go (LET IT GO!)
munmap() just will not let you go (LET IT GO!)
munmap() just will not let you go (LET IT GO!)
Will not let you go (LET IT GO!)
Will not let you go
Will not let you go oh, oh, oh, oh
No, no, no, no, no, no, no!
kill(0, SIGKILL), exit(0); exit(0); let me go!
BSDi has a daemon set aside for me, for me, for meeeeeeeeeeeeee

So you think you can stomp on my stack space and text?
Skrog my image and data by calling exec()?
Ohh, page-d, can't do this to me page-d
Just gotta switch out, just context switch right out of here

Nothing really hashes, anyone can see
Every process thrashes, every disk drive crashes
On me

Any way the thread flows...

...by Greywolf, with posthumous apologies to Freddie Mercury.

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I wrote this back in 1991/1992 after having seen Wayne's World and while still being a UNIX fanatical student (not a lot's changed). I ended up posting it shortly after Freddie Mercury's death.

I must say I'm rather flattered to see that this bit of parody has been mirrored on so many sites -- I got 10+ pages worth of hits when I went to search for it!

Maybe I'll come up with something else someday...

[sound of breathing in as though surfacing from underwater]

Yes, I'm still here. Unfortunately, with a 1.5h commute, while I may think of profound things and the like on the way to work, I don't remember them by the time I have a moment to post. Isn't that the way it goes.

Maybe it's because, in all my ranting, I don't have much to say that hasn't already been said.

When I do, you, the followers of the Journeys of the Sound Chaser, will be the first to know!

My home site over at starwolf.com is down for the moment as I don't have a lot to go on about there, and I'm having a heckuva time setting up a good looking, yet minimally-overloaded web page. Sigh.

Kudos to the BlogSpot team for putting in Word Recognition as a requirement for posting to my pages. I'd hoped it was someone real posting to my pages, but nobody ever seems to.

My comments are currently moderated, but I'll try to pay more attention to this spot, so don't worry that what you say won't be seen (unless I reject it, which is no great loss, considering I'll delete it if I don't like it anyway, so this is just a precursory step to keep it from getting posted in the first place).

Thought: Great One. Have a great one. What's that mean?

1. A larger-than-average sized bottle of beer; 22 oz. "Have a Great One!"
2. A better than average intimate experience. "Have a Great One!"
3. Someone revered -- usually recently deceased or predated, if you are to "Have a Great One!" [Did you want fries with that?]

"This is Pete; go ahead, Honest..."

Home, Sweet Home? Not for long...

or,

Legalised Plundering for Fun and Profit

A man's home is his castle.

"Home, home again,
I like to be there when I can
When I come home, cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire..."         -- Pink Floyd, "Breathe (Reprise)"

Home.

What do you think of when you think of home? A warm fire, candle-lit dinner for two? Friendly chaos of you and your love and your children?

...just a place to sleep, shower and keep your stuff while you work and play and party away from it? Hey, don't laugh. For some people, this is home.

Or how about a place to hold gatherings with your closest friends?

What if the city decided that your property would be more valuable for the city in terms of tax revenue were it to be sold and developed?

Thanks to the Supreme Court ruling made today, this is now possible. A developer of any influence can approach the city and attempt to convince them that your property would be worth more if they could develop new business on it.

If they are successful in convincing the city of this, the city can seize your house and land and sell it to the developer for purposes of redevelopment.

So much for home, sweet home. I don't think you can protect against this even if you homestead the property.

I don't know about you, but I think this is just plain wrong. Remember when "at-will employment" became widespread? Well, we now have "at-will residence." The worst thing is that with a residence, you have just pumped much of your life's earnings into it. The city has the right to undercut your property's value when they seize it. Equity means nothing.

Welcome to the third American era of the robber baron.

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Congratulations, Amerika. You have what you wanted, and you will get to watch it turn into what we have always fought against.

Bush spoke of "Freedom, Justice and the American Way."

He has no more of a clue on any of the above words than the average person does on the subject of quark theory and rocket science.

You, the people, have doomed this country. Are you so blindly unaware that in 2001, Bush sold us down the river for oil interests? Was it that inobvious to you?

You, who have family over in Iraq, who have watched him turn attention away from the supposed culprit who plunged our nation into terror and to some puppet THAT WE PUT INTO POWER IN THE FIRST PLACE, to remove him from power and declare the world a safer place, how in the WORLD can you say this is a good choice? You have born offspring into the world and cared for them, nurtured them for 18 years or more, only to watch them die, and you think this is a GOOD THING?

You far-right Christians who think that you were created in God's image, that the world belongs to you above nature, that it is yours to rape and pillage and rend asunder, I hope you think it is all right when your civil liberties are violated, too, because they will be. Doesn't that saying go, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap"?

The demographics in this race are close enough that it should tell you that the reasonable, thinking people are not going to put up with the shenanigans of a dictatorship. We still hold dear the true values on which this country was founded: Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to redress our government for grievances.

Remember that once it was stated, roughly:

"When a government fails to meet the needs of the populace it represents, it is the right AND THE DUTY of the People to abolish it and start anew."

I think we are not far off. George W. Bush and his cronies, both domestic and foreign *cough*AlQaeda*cough*, have undone, in four years, the progress it has taken forty to achieve. In the next four years, they will probably succeed in undoing the other two hundred plus.

So Good Day, Amerika, with your bent on controlling people who do not think like you. Someday, we will reap a very bitter crop, and it will be your sown seeds to fault for this. I shudder to be counted among the people of such a nation.