No word on how he died, but I’m assuming it was a band of flumphs led by a tarrasqolich. Oh, and apparently he made a last-minute edit to the “religion” field of his CS as he saw the end approaching. No comment.

So for various reasons I showed up at the latest meeting of the committee that oversees the member of student government in charge of equity issues. Actually, I might as well say what the main reason was: the member in question was found to be a religiously homophobic asshole. So I presented my case, and lo and behold, the committee that oversees the homophobic asshole are also a bunch of religiously homophobic assholes.

That’s fucked up, right? It’s not just me? That the member of student government in charge of making sure that everyone gets a fair shake, as well as the committee that is supposed to make sure he’s doing his job properly are uniformly (or almost) homophobes?

We’ll see. Arg!

Update: not as bad as I thought, but there’s more downtime involved than I had hoped. Oh well.

Dehydration. Drink some water. Wait a while. Drink more water. Feeling any better? A bit? Wait a while. Drink more water. Still got the headache.

Caffeine withdrawal. I haven’t had any caffeine today. Get a coffee. Get a Coke to drink while the coffee is cooling. Drink the Coke and half the coffee. Feel better? No.

Hunger. No, I had a good-sized lunch. I was quite sated.

Protein deficiency. Nope, had lots of protein last night and today. And iron as well, as long as we’re counting.

Discounting the possibility of my just having caught some bug, this leaves one more cause: stress. My headache is probably caused by stress. And the bastarding thing about it is that there’s nothing I can do right now to fix that. The weekend’s coming up, so I’ll sleep then. Perhaps getting four hours a night all week wasn’t so great for me. But for now I’ve got to keep working for another hour or two and not think about the possibility that I’ll have to come in over the weekend.

Le sigh. Back to work.

I’m really looking forward to the time when I will have a home I live in for many years, not having to move every couple of years. Fuck.

Correction: Apple came out with a bunch of old toys in new packages. Let’s see: An MP3 player, smaller than a pack of gum. Yep, it has been done before. A medium-power computer that costs less than 500$? Really, there are too many links to present in a snarky way. You can find far more powerful machines for less on Froogle.

So what’s my point? Am I an embittered Linux PC user jealous of the slick line of designs that Apple has come out with? No. I’m all for making your stuff pretty. As a geek, I like the fact that Apple based their latest OS on Unix, even if it takes quite a bit of work to get it to a state that a diehard *n?x user would call usable. What I don’t like is that people are deluding themselves into thinking that they are buying something on the forefront of technology. I’d like to say that Apple is presenting their products as something they are not, but the ads are actually pretty honest: “You can already do exactly this, but now you can do it with style.” It’s just the users, perhaps suppressing some guilt at shelling out more dough than they ought for pretty packaging, who decide that Apple is all bleeding-edge.

The iPod is a perfect example: I keep hearing people talking about the iPod as if it were a breakthrough, as if it were the first hard drive-based MP3 player on the planet. In fact, it is (arguably) the slickest-looking. It’s not the most featureful, it’s not in any technical sense the “best”. But it does have a hell of an ad campaign. Do I think people should not buy iPods? Fuck that, I like to have pretty things as much as the next person. Buy an iPod. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that this is something new.

And then there’s a whole community of people rallying around the iPod and “inventing” supporting technologies for it. “Podcast” is a new term that’s been bandied around the internet over the past… months? A year, maybe? Before that it was known as “audioblogging”. Yes, I’m afraid so. Adam Curry and Dave Winer did not invent audioblogging. They coined a word. The success of the iPod was what made audioblogs so popular, and the creation of an easy interface to it made the technology accessible to the washed and manicured masses. But if you are a podcaster or a listener don’t fool yourself into thinking it is anything more than an MP3 version of the millions of people on Blogspot or Livejournal.

Anyway, a point. I think I’m supposed to have one of those. My point is, buy Apple’s machines, if you can justify spending the extra money. But know why you’re buying them. It’s okay to spend more for glitz, but know that you are.