nawl

Berkeley between semesters. Euclid is a ghost of its usual self. In late afternoon it might as well be 11 pm. Everything closed and dark, except for LaVal's, which almost seems welcoming in comparison.

There are Ridgelings around, but they only seem to come out late at night or early in the morning.

Days are spent lovingly configuring my new computer, making it pretty and wonderful in all the ways that I neglected the first time around in the rush to just get a laptop I could use before I left the continent. No more. I now have a dual-boot machine, and have been discovering the joys of ifconfig and interfaces, mount and fstab, init.d, alternatives, and so on, all in an effort to get this silly thing to configure itself and cooperate with windows.

The best discovery so far is that I can share email between windows and linux using Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client on both sides and setting the local mail directory somewhere on a partition that both can read. Also finding the answers to some of my Google queries in German or French. Couldn't do much about the ones in Czech, though.

I think what pleases me is not so much the actual process of spending hours searching for answers across man pages, Google, and config files, but that I have the time to sit down alone and focus on something resembling personal maintenance. It's a feeling of calm similar to an afternoon spent cooking when I'm not stressed about anything else. In a similar vein, I walked to Safeway today, bought vegetables and cheese, made myself a large salad as soon as I got home, and then spent a respectable portion of the evening either in a tangerine-flavored bath or in bed.