Ministry of Intrigue

If you can see this post, that means that your ISP has updated its DNS cache and you are now viewing the Ministry of Intrigue at its new home!

Everything should work for you now, but in the off chance you left me a non-spammy comment inbetween the previous post and now there is a chance that it didn’t quite survive the move. If you think that’s the case, just leave your comment again and if it is a duplicate I’ll make sure to only display the one and delete the other.

Have a good weekend!

Just so you all know, it is extremely difficult to eat a cinnamon roll and look professional at the same time. You either pick it apart and end up with frosting all over your fingers, or you attempt to bite the roll whole leaving you looking like some sort of manchild with a face smeared with sugary paste.

“Cinnamon roll! Cinnamon roll! Me likey the sweet roll!”

It’s actually pretty embarrassing.

That is all.

I apologize for the delay between posts, but I’ve been a little busy the last couple days. However, I do have a few things in the works and hopefully I’ll be able to post quite a bit tomorrow, including my review of V for Vendetta.

Stay tuned.

I haven’t posted in a few days, in part because I’ve been pretty busy, and partly because I’ve been overhauling my system with a brand new Linux distribution.

I’m now running Gentoo and I absolutely love it. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Gentoo is special flavor of Linux that gives all the control back to the user. Absolutely every detail of your environment can be optimized for your hardware and configured to your taste. In addition, Gentoo uses a brilliant and practical approach to package management: Portage. With Portage, all packages are downloaded and compiled from scratch in order to ensure compatibility with your system. Best of all, Gentoo provides an environment variable called USE, that allows you to define what options Portage should use when compiling, which allows you to avoid needing to download a lot of excess dependencies that will only bog down your system if you have no intention of using those features. For example, if I set part of my USE variable to “-gnome kde”, my software will not be compiled with any Gnome support, which is just fine by me as I hate Gnome and never use it. Only the KDE components of the package will be compiled which saves me a lot of time and space in the long run.

Of course, like all good things this flexibility comes at an intimidating price. In order to install Gentoo, you need to manually install and compile your whole system from source. Certainly a non-trivial task, and it scared me away from it for a while. I actually attempted installing Gentoo a while ago, and successfully wrote my configuration files, compiled my kernel and was able to boot successfully into my new environment. Unfortunately, the automated configure scripts for my X server were not able to identify my graphics card and after a couple days of frustration as I tried to manually write my xorg.conf file, I gave up and went back to SuSE 9.3. I had projects I was working on and couldn’t afford the time away from my graphical desktop to fiddle with it. Oh, but it haunted me.

You see, I knew that Gentoo was what I really wanted, and it frustrated me that I gave up on it. My inner geek was emasculated by my failure to complete the installation. It ate at me day after day, and I found myself idly surfing the Gentoo forums debating to try another seven hour installation process.

The final straw was when Gentoo released their graphical LiveCD installer disk. The graphical installer is still experimental as is the dialog based command line installer on the disk, which is fine as those application are designed to make the process faster NOT easier. If I hadn’t had experience with the Gentoo manual install I would have had no idea what I was doing. Now, I don’t say this to scare you all away, but I just want to make sure no one goes and downloads the LiveCD iso thinking that it will do it all for them. I cannot stress enough how important a solid understanding of the manual install process works (which you can still use the LiveCD for). The graphical installer certainly did speed up the process quite a bit, but the best part of the new LiveCD is not the installer, it’s the embedded Gnome environment with sample applications. During the long compilations I was able to browse the web, chat on Gaim and play a few games, which made the installation time fly by. In addition, if you are using the graphical installer and instruct it to install Xorg then it will copy its dynamically generated xorg.conf file to your new system configuration, which you may need to tweak later, but it will be functional.

Since then, I’ve been playing with Gentoo, adding programs and tweaking my configuration. I did have some initial trouble getting my OpenGL acceleration working, which turned out to be a hardware problem with my computer’s chipset. Simple solution: I picked up an ATI Radeon 9250 video card, which I really should have gotten a while ago anyway. I recompiled my kernel (which is really no sweat once you’ve done it once or twice and gotten past the intimidation factor), installed the new drivers from Portage and ran the configuration script. It works beautifully!

Gentoo is certainly not for weak of heart, and you have to be willing to spend some time getting it all set up. However, once it is up and running it is one of the fastest and most stable distros I have ever used. If you work for it, you will be rewarded.

Last night I was monkeying around on my computer while enjoying the David Cross comedy album Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, and I noticed a dark shape out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see what it was and saw nothing, so I went back to my computing. A short moment later I detected the dark blur in my peripheral vision again and swung around to check and again saw nothing.

Okay, so moths move to slowly to pull this off so I’m probably just getting confused and seeing the rim of my glasses and misinterpreting it, I thought to myself.

A short moment later I saw it again, this time with an accompaning breeze striking my cheek. I turned quickly and saw that there was a panicked bat flying in circle around my apartment’s living room. I quickly ducked down and tried to evaluate the situation, dropping even farther to the floor each time the bat came my way. The first thing I could think of was that incident back in high school.

Shit, I thought, I do not want to hurt another bat tonight.

I tried to evaluate my other options. Using a blanket as a net would be too difficult and might just freak the little guy out more, there was no way to get him out the window because of the screens and as I didn’t know how he got in, I couldn’t just send him out the same way. I couldn’t call the property manager as I wasn’t sure it fell under the domain of their responsibilities and I didn’t want the bat in my apartment that long. I concluded that since the bat was flying in a panicky circle it must be looking for a way out, therefore if I can somehow get it to fly out the door I’ll just let it fly around the hallway and let the landlord deal with it tomorrow.

So I tried opening the door, but realized with the structure of the room that my holding it open from inside the apartment would increase the likelyhood that the little rodent would fly right into me. Propping it open was out of the question as I would need to be able to close it quickly once he flew out. So instead I adopted this ridiculous position. I went out into the building hallway and crouched down low on my knees pressing the palm of my hand against the inside of the door frame to keep it open. I then waited for my little friend to sense the opening by echolocation and come check it out.

Fifteen minutes passed, with the bat flying infuriating close to the door only to retreat farther back into my apartment. In the meantime, I am extrememely uncomfortable as my neighbors far down the hallway are coming and going, and while they don’t look down in my direction, it is only a matter of time as David Cross is still blaring from my computer speakers with his off-color brand of humor. At this point, the bat decides climbing up onto my verical blinds is a good idea and tries to make itself comfortable. In frustration, I picked up one of my sandals and carefully aimed it to strike the blinds hard enough to scare the bat without hurting it.

It did scare the bat. It also broke one of the blinds. I swore to myself as the bat retreated not out the door but farther back into one of the bedrooms.

Fuck, I thought, looks like I am hitting a bat tonight.

I went back into my apartment, donned my leather gloves and chose as my weapon a triangular pillow my sister brought me from Thailand. Hard enough to stun, soft enough that I may avoid injuring the little guy. I went back to my room and found him hanging from the blinds again. Once again, I tossed a sandal, although this time with far less force triggering the bats boring circle of doom.

I struck once with my death pillow and knocked him to the floor. However, as soon as I took a step he began flapping, flew confusedly at low altitude, and then resumed his flight pattern. So, I struck again with a little more force sending him sliding into my laundry. I couldn’t see him, so I assumed he must be buried. Cautiously, I approached and began peeling away clothes until I came upon him on the floor, very stunned. He tried to crawl a little ways forward and I quickly wrapped him up in an old sheet and deposited him outside the building. He appeared to be breathing, but was definately unconscious. He appeared to be uninjured, but I am no vet.

Goddammit bats! Why do you always make me hit you???

Many years ago, back when I was in high school, my three closest friends and I were called in to wage war against an opponent roughly 0.5% our size. You see, Quentin’s family had a bat that had snuck into their guest room and was trying to set up a life for itself in the shadows above the canopy bed. Naturally, his mother figured the best course of action would be to call in four sixteen-year-old boys to take care of the pest.

Unfortunately, the boys in question were a bunch of geeks.

So when we came in to inspect the situation we took turns peering above the canopy only to drop down to the floor in terror every time the bat decided to flap around the edge of the bed to intimidate us. (In our defense, I don’t think anyone actually screamed.) Realizing that this bat was crafty, we temporarily retreated in order to strategize. We realized that we were not going to be able to catch it easily without stunning it.

In short, we needed weapons.

Quickly we sorted through everything that seemed to meet our needs. One of us had a bat (not another animal, but rather a tool used by sports players), another was armed with NERF gun, I cannot remember what everyone wielded now, but I remember the secure feeling of my sword grip upon an elongated NERF dart. I remember being really irritated about not having my tennis racket on hand. Time after time, we would take turns whacking the bottom of the canopy to send the bat flying out into the room, so that we might swing wildly at it while ducking for cover.

This went on for a half hour before one of us managed to get a solid strike on the flapping rodent, knocking it to the ground. We cheered, but quickly realized we didn’t have any idea what to do with it now that it was down as it was still alive. Someone suggested trying to flush it down the toilet, but we recalled urban legends of bats clinging to the rims of toilets only to return when darkness descended upon the bowl, and rejected it. Eventually, Dan recommended taking it to the local park and letting it go in a wooded area, which appealed to our tender-hearted sensibilities now that the rush of adrenaline was gone.

We wrapped up the bat in a little towel and quickly drove down to the park and walked as far back into the trees as we could as we were afraid we would get in trouble. We set the bat on the ground, and upon inspecting realized to our horror that one of its wings was broken. Damn, this thing was done for, and we distantly considered whether there was any appropriate medical attention we could get for our former opponent. Failing that, we didn’t have the heart to kill it quickly, and instead chose to say goodbye with an apology and leave it with the repect that a fallen warrior deserves. After all, this was a bat that managed to terrify four strapping teenage boys until their adrenaline allowed them to overcome their fear and defeat him via superior weaponry.

Sometimes, I still think about that bat and I feel shitty that we hurt it so badly and as a result indirectly killed it. Which is part of the reason I had so much trouble last night, which will be detailed in Part 2.