As I write, I’m listening to Ray Charles singing the Kermit classic “It’s not easy being Green”. Ray Charles was so, unbelieveably, cool that he could have sung the birdie song (aka the chicken dance) and made it rock. The only reason it’s that song playing is that we are trying to redownload our entire music collection following a HARD DISK CRASH. ARRRRRRRGGGGGH! No warning, no early read-errors, SMART warnings or anything else. Friday night it was playing happily, saturday morning, totally buggered. <geek> Looks like physical damage to the bit of the disk containing the inode table and journal…grrrrr. Yup I tried thumping it, freezing it, dropping it, praying, chanting, shouting….no go.</geek>
So I had to drag my arse up to TCR on saturday to buy a new HD from one of the many computer fairs there. 50 quid for 120G…not bad I spose. Til it buggers up again. Could be worse, I have a lot of the tunes in another location and, thank fuck, Michele’s work (including PhD) was on another drive (and on an old DAT but I doubt it would have restored…)

Hey – did I ever tell you how superb gtk-gnutella is ? Forget Kazaa, gnutella still delivers the goods in record time. And it’s properly P2P – unstoppable!

Work…hmm…ok. The “project” is moving slowly. Partly because I’m still learning about the code I’m working on, and partly because it’s the start of term and so lots of sysadmin stuff keeps invading the development time. This will decrease and, as I believe I have mentioned before, Sue is learning scarily fast; a great comfort.

The US election has received a lot of coverage over here, and it’s very easy to get caught up in all of the bullshit. I keep finding myself thinking “Oh christ I couldn’t bear it if Bush gets re-elected”, and pitying the fools who want to vote for him. Then I get dragged back down to earth by something sensible. Noam Chomsky writes:

The herd does have a “function”: to trample periodically in support of one or another element of the leadership class in an election. Unstated is that the responsible men gain that status not by virtue of any special talent or knowledge but by willing subordination to the systems of actual power and loyalty to their operative priciples — crucially, that basic decisions over social and economic life are to be kept within institutions with top-down authoritarian control, while the participation of the beast is to be limited to a diminished public arena.

However, I think that the late Bill Hicks summed it up far more clearly:

I’ll show you politics in America, here it is right here:
“I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs. I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking…”. Hey wait a minute, there’s one guy holding up both puppets!
SHUT-UP! Go back to bed America, your government is in control! Here’s “Love Connection”; watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way keep drinking beer you fucking morons.

Not as eloquent…but just as accurate I’m sure you’ll agree.