I think most of the computer upgrade disaster is over. I now have a new monitor, a new video card, and a new Linux installation. It took me about six hours to get everything installed with Linux and Windows 2000, most of that being Linux. I had to back up 9 gigs of personal info and work onto CD-R, then install RH8 three times, then I was stuck for an hour because networking didn’t work, and it turns out it was because I entered the wrong thing for the fucking gateway. Now, all is mostly well, except I have to undo all of the stupid Red Hat bells and whistles and get back to an actual functional operating environment. And as I say this, emacs looks deranged with all of these stupid banners and widgets and extra bullshit they have affixed to every side of my text window. They should put Richard Stallman on a hidden government installation hidden in the middle of the Nevada desert somewhere and do the world a load of good.

So now I have this monstrous screen - 21.1” actual viewable size, with a resolution of 1600x1200. It’s big enough that I can have a browser window opened to the maximum size and still have a fuckload of space. Text is very tiny, but I am too greedy to set it to a larger size. We’ll see how it works when I get some real writing underway.

Anyway, the monitor is cool. Also, the router fuckup let me figure out what was wrong with the Navy Seals game, and I got to play that online for a bit tonight. I totally got my ass kicked, but it’s pretty fun. And my iPod is on the way - it should be here tomorrow. It was back-ordered, so I slapped down another $200 to upgrade to the 20 Gig version, and it is in stock. So I’ll be all set there.

Very tired, and feeling a bit sick. Computer upgrades always stress me out, but at least it’s a short week next week…

My MiniDisc player broke! AGAIN! I just bought the fucking thing last April or something. And it’s a Japanese model, so I can’t return it, I can only put it on the slow boat and pay more than it originally cost to get it back in a year or two.

So I decided to buy an iPod. It looks like the best solution, and it is more compact and easier to work with. The only problem is getting it to work with Linux, but it appears there are hacks out there. The other option is to burn all of my CDs on my Windows partition and then install iTunes or whatever the Windows version of the software is on there. I’ll figure that out after I get it. I ordered the standard 5Gb model - I figure that should work for now.

I also decided to blow even more money and get a new monitor and video card. I got a Matrox G550 Millenium card - I was tempted to get a Radeon with twice as much memory, but the Matrox has Linux support, and that means more than billions of polygons a second or whatever. I also got a ViewSonic 20.1” LCD monitor. It’s very cool looking, black, has built-in speakers and microphone, and does 1600x1200. So I should be very happy once that bitch is on my desk.

I almost forgot - the books got here yesterday. They look good, and I’m happy with them. If you’re reading this and you want a copy, send me an email with your address and I’ll send you one for free. I only have ten of them, but I’m sure less than ten people read this regularly, so there you go.

It snowed like a motherfucker last night, and everything’s white outside. I wish I could get out there with the camcorder before it turns to grey sludge, but I’m here at work.

I feel like I missed a day somewhere, like I forgot to sleep for 24 hours and I can’t catch up. I took a sleeping pill Sunday, so on Monday I felt drunk and underwater and drugged and could barely think straight. I tried to fight this with caffeine and sugar and sleeping with my eyes open, but all I could think of was going home, getting into bed, falling asleep for days. My friend Bill was in town for the day, so we came back to my place, hung out, watched DVDs, played Red Faction, ate Thai food, and that was cool. A few hours of hassling with Premiere, and by midnight, it was bedtime, and… I was wide awake. I spent forever falling asleep, only to awake to the feeling that I missed a day somewhere.

Sunday night, when I took the Tylenol PM, I had the most fucked up terror nightmares ever. Some mystical force was attacking me on the subway, in some mathematical fashion, and I was so scared of it, I was yelling numbers or something, and I am pretty sure I was really yelling because it was the sort of thing where you try to scream in a dream and you can barely form the words or work the vocal chords. It was a total your-life-is-ending, Mothman conspiracy type of thing. I was hiding at Marie’s house and sleeping on her floor, and she vanished, and both of her cats were walking circles around me and talking, like it was some kind of Satanic ritual. (She actually has three cats, but one is newer, so she was not included. You ever notice how stuff in dreams is never up to date? Like how your dreams always happen in your childhood house?) Anyway she vanished, and then her dad showed up and took all of us on a tour of Knott’s Berry Farm, and I felt really guilty for interrupting the whole seance terror thing. I don’t remember much of the dream after that. But the terror part was pretty fucked up, and it bothered me for hours into the morning. I’ve been having more and more defined dreams, and I really hope that is an indicator that I will get off my butt and start writing something soon. My dreams were the best during the writing of Rumored, and it was no coincidence or anything.

So anyway. My tax refund is done and on the way to the bank, but I am torn between buying a gigantic monitor, going on a vacation, or just putting the damn thing in the bank for retirement. I would love to sit in front of 1600x1200 on a flat screen, but I was talking to Bill yesterday about land, houses, and all of that stuff, and it makes me think about that, too.

Not much else. Still very windy. I had a nice bit of Deja Vu this morning walking to work, in a crisp air of about 40 degrees with the rain just about to explode from the clouds. For some reason, it really reminded me of the early spring rains of Bloomington about ten years ago, walking around town without a car and with too much open road in front of me. It’s strange to think that was ten years ago, but it was. Damn.

Gotta call Ray. His mom is in town, and it’s even money that he put six .44 slugs in her head for some random reason. The parental cross-country buffer zone is great, but it means you have to put up with a years’ worth of cached misery in a week of time.

So I woke up yesterday around noon, and was messing with Internet Explorer on this new Windows 2000 installation, trying to get the google toolbar installed. In the course of that, I ended up going to the google news page, and the top story was something like “A history of the Shuttle program.” I thought, “That’s pretty bizarre for a top news story - google’s sort algorithm must’ve gone completely sideways.” Then I looked at the link and it mentioned the crash of the Columbia, and I thought, “shit, what a glaring error - it was just the anniversary of the Challenger crash, not the Columbia. The Columbia is still operational - it’s landing today…”

Then I realized that something was wrong, and I turned on the news and saw the Shuttle was in bite-sized pieces all over East Texas. Holy shit.

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When I was a kid, they used to gather us all in the library of our elementary school, or wheel in one of those A/V carts with a big, clunky, 1970s institutional-looking TV, so we could watch every Shuttle takeoff and landing. This was heady stuff in the height of the cold war; the demonstration of American might and technology. I ate this stuff up, too. I’d read every single book in the library about Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, Skylab. I knew every mission, every failure. I knew about Apollo 13 before Apollo 13 was a household word, when it was a seldom-mentioned blemish on our space program. Like many other ten-year-old kids of the era, I thought that in the million years it would take me to graduate high school and college, they would be running Shuttles to the moon and mars like Delta runs flights to Cancun, and in the distant future of 1998, I’d only need to make a quick trip via personal jetpack to the nearest spaceport for a Star Wars-like trip to the beyond. After I got bored of dinosaurs and before I found out about computers, space travel was a Big Deal.

One day we’re all watching a landing attempt, and this is a mission where they had some high winds and couldn’t land in California, so after a very tense one-day delay, (“Wow! Will they have enough air and Tang to last an extra day?”) they glided in to some other air force base, I think in Arizona or Nevada or something. I’d look this up, but I’m sure every Shuttle site on line is disconnected due to overload today. So just trust me on this one.

Anyway, the teachers are white-knuckling it, hoping the pride of the space fleet doesn’t have problems, while most of us are bored and wondering if we get to play kickball on recess today. And this one kid named Rick - maybe I should explain him. He looked like he could’ve made the final casting call to the movie Gummo, the kind of career hyperactive juvenile delinquent that spent so much time in the principal’s office, he had his own desk and phone in there. He lived in the trailer park white trash part of the school district, a small minority among the more typical whitebread, take-care-of-the-lawn-and-keep-up-with-the-Jonses folks that populated most of the subdivisions in the area. Rick was a prototypical headbanger, and the first kid I ever knew who was on Ritalin (although he chose to sell most of his dosage to other kids so they could cop a high while he ran rampant and caused chaos.) Coincidentally or not, Rick was also an amateur BMX racing star, the champion of his division in the state or maybe the world. It’s no surprise, considering they could put him in the chute on a stripped-down moly bike and have him punch the pedals like a motherfucker for two minutes of hyperactive rage.

Anyway, while the teachers are fearing the worst from this Shuttle problem, Rick jumps up and starts yelling “I HOPE IT CRASHES! I HOPE THE FUCKER BLOWS UP!” while he runs around the room in a Tasmanian Devil-like rage. The teachers had a fit at this act of total sacrelige and dragged him into a back room to beat him within inches of his life. (This was long before every square foot of elementary schools were wired with security cameras, and when teachers could still keep a rugby bat drilled with blood holes on their desk as a disciplinary aid.)

Fast-forward a few years, and I’m a high school freshman, sitting in a study hall and counting the minutes to lunch. In comes this dude who was much like Rick, the motorhead-type dude that was majoring in shop class and already had a mustache and two kids by the 9th grade. He came in and told me, “Dude! The fuckin’ Space Shuttle blew up! I just saw it on TV in the library!” Although partially amazed that he actually used his library pass to go to the library and not to go behind the school and inhale some glue, it also floored me that it could’ve happened. I thought maybe he was just pulling my leg, a prank concocted in a haze of cheap pot and model cement, an outburst like the one that Rick pulled years earlier. But by the time lunch started, there was more and more verification, and I knew it was real.

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I feel strange about the whole thing. In terms of human life lost, it’s seven people; on 9/11 I personally knew four people, and way more people obviously died that day. Any time an army chopper goes down in Afghanistan, it’s about as many people; many more than seven test pilots have lost their lives in the construction of these craft over the last few decades. It’s not going to stop air travel, and it’s not going to (directly) cause major economic issues. We won’t go to war with someone over this loss, and we don’t have to rebuild or mourn some large metropolitan area because of it.

But of course, the space program is fucked. The ISS is doomed, the Shuttles may never fly again, and forget any sort of funding for any of the various Shuttle replacements that are on the drawing board. It will be years until we send people back into space, and the Russians are far too broke to do anything more than get back the three guys that are stuck in the ISS right now. Any hopes you may have had in seeing a man on Mars within your lifetime are now lost. And that’s too bad. Like I said, twenty years ago, I read every single book I could find on the subject, fact or fiction, and I’ve spent the last two decades following everything, reading everything, and hoping that ISS would be the first step to bigger and better things. This really sucks.