Information Blues.

Okay, I just ate a quesadilla fried with a Thai bird pepper inside. It was only one pepper—-little guy, an inch long—-but enough to turn my kitchen into an airborn toxic event. Sometimes when you fry a good pepper, like a habañero, it actually creates a cloud of nerve gas. I snarted sneezing and coughing… then later when I ate it my eyes began a series of minor spasms.

But see, this is actually very nice; to me this is comfort food. It’s raining outside and I have the night to myself, so I sliced an anaheim chile into rings and blackened them next to my cheese thing. I was feeling experimental, so after they’d cooked a bit I laid strips of jack on top. The cheese fried inside the chile rings, forming a greasy, golden floor. It was sort of messed up, they were like the primitive ancestor to the jalapeño popper.

Then I wanted to make some cookies, because I seem to be turning into a strange breed of baker. I wanted to make Anzacs but didn’t have any oats on hand. So instead of walking to the corner store, high on endorphins and ‘poppers, I used a cup of raspberry cream granola.

It was a wild night for comfort experiments.

Sitting at my desk, Monday morning, I decide that I need a dose of Shirelles to go with my coffee. There’s something about a cacophonous girl group processed through multiple layers of plate reverb into a wall of sound that nicely complements how I feel in the morning.

A customer scampers up to my desk, ears perked to the music. “The Shirelles!” she exclaims, “who’s listening to The Shirelles?” We sit in the middle-office, in the system administrator’s cave, yet some mortals manage to breach our defenses to come in and yowl about music. I nod, “Yep, it’s The Shirelles.” She is beaming, “Well, how do YOU guys know about The Shirelles? From your GRANDMA?”

Oh, lady. It’s 2007. I’m sitting here at my desk at a small internet provider where I sling bits all day, and here you are, sauntering into the front office to inquire about DSL or maybe pay the monthly bill on your dialup account in person: I say lady, have you ever heard of the internet?

Last night I dreamt I went to McDonald’s and ordered a $360,000 hamburger. Then I ate it: it was small and otherworldly. The bun reminded me of a mini-pancake I made for Beth, it was glossy and molded. The patty was composed of dream soy.  It wasn’t very tasty.

Then the check came, and it said $360,000—-I think the dreaming me had been in denial, thought it must be a typo on the overhead menu. But no, it was really $360,000.

Posed over the plastic countertop I faced a dilemma.  I didn’t have that sort of $$$$, but nobody was really paying attention; the uniformed teen had left the bill unceremoniously and walked away. So I left $80 on the table, and woke up.

It was a lovely three day holiday weekend full of hikes, bikes and no dislikes until this morning when my lumbar panicked. This is weird, this has never really happened to me, but welcome to the 32nd year I guess?

Okay, this morning I stumbled out of bed ten minutes ’til a parking ticket and snuck out of San Francisco with two loads of clean laundry, an empty Camelbak and a muddy Iron Horse 7point7. I got home and was unloading the big bike from the back of my truck; I stood it up and lifted it over the railing then YEEP: it felt as if something in my lower back folded in half. Some muscle or network of muscles had formed a strike and immediately walked off the job leaving me with wide eyes and a 40lb bicycle held aloft.

It’s super strange to feel some part of your body riot, act completely against command, without warning. But it’s an effective reminder that the body and the mind are not the same thing. I know it’s obvious but I tend to forget.

My day was derailed; gone were visions of writing baseball fiction in a cafe or climbing a bicycle into the hills. It was Martin Luther King Jr Day and all I could do was lie on my back in bed and grimace while listening to NPR.

But you know what, maybe that’s actually good. We get so many days off per year, and it’s so seldom that we think about them. I tend to think about Point Reyes more than Presidents, and etc. But MLK was so amazing, he truly merits a day’s thought. I was lying in bed trying to stretch, getting misty eyed at the rememberances of an extraordinary person whose life ended too soon. Predictably, I went to my computer and donated early in an attempt to cut short the year’s first annoying pledge drive. Also predictably, I spent the day horizontally, thinking about everything I could think of, which resulted in the minor itch to blog. Somewhat less predictably, I’m now sitting here with a frozen bag of Trader Joe’s Organic Asian Mushroom Blend on my lower back.

So I’m sitting here moving music between harddrives. You wouldn’t think this would be anything that difficult, but it turns out my mp3’s require epic handholding.

I got a new 320G USB disk for xmas. I wanted to format it with a filesystem that would work with FreeBSD at work, Mac at home, Windows at home, Linux in the future. So I settled on Linux’ EXT2 format as all four OS’s allegedly knew how to handle it as long as you fetch the proper drivers.

But it turned out my USB drive enclosure was a dog; it couldn’t speak USB proficiently with my stupid motherboard. It would mount, copy for 30 seconds , then start cascading these:

Oooh, I want(ed) to destroy Windows.

Then I had the madcap idea of mounting the drive on my iBook and moving the 118GB of musica over my wireless network (named Taildragger after the T-Model Ford song.) However, the little White Man wouldn’t mount the EXT2 drive because it wasn’t clean; ie Windows had already barfed fragments of files all over it.

Okay, this may be something someone may find useful one day: the problem with using EXT2 filesystems between many computers that don’t include Linux is: how are you going to repair it when it (inevitably) gets indigestion? Mac can’t touch this, Windows is useless. At least FreeBSD claims to be able to fake it.

So I had to take the drive to work and have Dmo ext2_fsck it while we played Slap Ball. Then FreeBSD wouldn’t mount it due to “unsupported options” so we had to reformat it to use ABSOLUTELY ZERO MODERN PENGUIN TECHNOLOGY.

Now I’m sitting here at my desk assisting Windows move the files. I had to pop the disk out of the USB enclosure to get Windows to like it. Now we have to hold hands because whenever there’s an upper ascii character in the filename, like some lame Mac person’s “smart quotes” or Manu Chao with all of their inverted question marks and etc Windows immediately halts to tell me:

Insufficient system resources exist to copy a song with French punctuation??? I hate you.