Tuesday, December 19, 2000

 

1:07 a.m. I'm beginning to feel a teensy bit depressed, here. A little tiny bit overwhelmed. A little less than adequate, and you know. The loser of the millennium, the most miserable wretch in the world, a useless hunk of humanity.

I've done nothing holiday-ish. Pretty much nothing. I keep thinking that I have all the time in the world and that the holidays are a couple of weeks away and then suddenly I look up at the calendar and gasp and realize that ... you know. You know the calendar as well as I do.

Last night I was concentrating so deeply on a new discovery on the computer that I forgot I'd put a pot on the stove to cook and although I thought I smelled something -- crispy -- I kept right on working until the fire alarm went off and the plastic measuring cup I'd perched on the handle had melted all over the stove.

So, it's not that unusual that I'd misplace a whole week or so. That's my excuse.

I was all set to go to bed early last night because I really did feel lousy, but I started noodling around with some free downloaded stuff and one thing led to another and voila! Poof! Boom! I was suddenly an actual real-life server!

A little shareware program called Easy Serve turns my home computer into a full-fledged server and it seems to work just fine. I copied down the url and tried it from different machines and it worked; I tried it from my own machine and that worked, too. Amazing.

What this means, of course, if that I can basically stop paying a bill each month to the wonderful folks at Dreamhost and the less wonderful folks at Earthlink, keep all my files on my own machine, yadda yadda. It's the yadda part that's a little tricky, but not as bad as you'd think.

Once again, the total superiority of the Macintosh platform shines through. Ditto the Democratic. Yes.

But, we must plug on. For a long, long time now the only real chance for success and fame and glory is to keep on going. Dip the pen into the inkpot and dribble out some more words before dawn.

I've always wondered about artifacts and cataclysmic earthly upheavals and the people who translate those shards they pull from the mud. Sometimes all that's left from a civilization are a few beads and some scratchings on a sturdy surface. I don't know why I think it's important for the human hand and mind to persist eon to eon, but I do.

And now, before too many more eons pass, I'd better get on with the rest of the season. Really.