2006 Posts

It seems so fitting, and yet I didn’t even realize I had done it. And now that I realize it, I’m a bit sad. As of yesterday, I’ve been out of college for two years. It seems fitting then, that yesterday I finally cut the last remaining tie I had to Auburn and gave up the 334 cellphone number I’ve had for six years in favor of a more functional 256 Huntsville number. Yeah, it’s just a number, but it’s still a little sad to me. Hell, I don’t even pay bills to the University anymore, most of my friends have gone on or graduated, and I’m going on two years in Huntsville, but that number was the last reminder of college and of not having responsibilities. On the plus side, I did get a slick new Motorola Razr, though I feel like I’m Will Smith in Men In Black and I’m gonna break this thing. I hope it’s better than the LG it is replacing.

So, for those who have either been following the James Kim saga or have been forced to because it was every other item on digg, you likely know he has been found dead. We won’t know a final cause of death until an autopsy is performed, but I have no doubt that it will show he died of hypothermia and exposure to freezing temperatures. This is going to sound insensitive, but I’m going to say it because it needs to be said: if there is a poster child for having done every possible thing wrong in trying to survive in an emergency situation, James Kim is it. I’m sorry that he died, but he went into a situation unprepared and once there made the absolute wrong choices. I just hope everyone else learns from his mistakes.

I went down to Auburn for the game yesterday. Had a great time; Auburn let the game be more interesting then they should, but took care of things in the second half to cruise to a 38-7 win over Buffalo. Except for a brief visit in 2005, this is the first time I’d spent any significant amount of time in Auburn since I moved to Huntsville. It’s only been two years. It might as well have been twenty, because I hardly recognized the place. Roads are closed, new buildings are being constructed, and lots of activity is taking place. There are two giant buildings downtown that weren’t even in sight when I was there.Everything has changed so much. It felt strange, walking around Auburn. I saw four wonderful years of my life staring back at me as thought I had walked away from something unfinished. Almost like there’s some studying that needed to be done or a party to go to. As I walked around campus, in spite of how much had changed, I noticed how much had stayed the same. I saw a black bike parked outside Cary Hall and a freshman cursing because he has an 8PM biology lab and is missing Babylon 5. As I walked down towards the Extension - my dorm complex for my first two years at Auburn - I walked past a very familiar parking space and make note of all the changes. On one side of the complex is a brand new building that wasn’t even there when I lived there - it was a parking lot. The Village Kitchen - the place I ate so many meals - is now gone as well. But I only saw that for a second.Then I looked closer and saw a sophomore struggling to carry his laundry and books to the laundry room so that he could study while he waited for the dryers that never seemed to work quite right. As I stood in the stadium, I could almost feel the junior within me; with two of his fraternity brothers within him, drinking smuggled-in alcohol and talking at length about what Coach Tuberville was doing wrong at the half. During my time at Auburn, I was a frequent poster on the computer message boards of the school newspaper, the Auburn Plainsman.I remember one particular thread when discussing as we often did the endless administrative corruption that we were so fond of. We all saw the ghosts in the cupboard and then congratulated ourselves on being smart enough to see them. The topic got onto the perceived lack of alumni involvement in anything other than athletics, and I remember saying then that “having a piece of paper entitles you to only care about football.” And as I walked around Auburn yesterday, I came to understand how completely wrong I was. It’s not that we as alumni don’t care about our alma mater. It’s not a lack of caring, but a different perception. We don’t see the problems that students see because we don’t see Auburn as the current students see it. We see Auburn as it was for us. We see Auburn through the wide eyes of a freshman trying to find a room in Haley Center with only five minutes until class. We see Auburn as hanging out with friends in Foy, or band parties at fraternity houses, or late night study sessions and trips to coffee shops. We know the bars as they were for us (The Blue Room, Finks (before it was whatever it is now and before it was Tigris), etc). Our memories have glossed over any problems we faced to leave only the perfect image of four wonderful years. We see Auburn as a football game with friends on a warm autumn eve under a sky of orange and blue. I still miss college, and I miss Auburn. But more, I miss the Auburn that was for me. Maybe that’s why it hurts when I go back and see how much things have changed. I have this image in my heart of Auburn as it was when I drove down in August of 2000. I guess it hurt when I went back and saw how much it has changed. Auburn is moving on without me. And it hurts that, no matter how much I want to, I can never go back. “The arrow of time points in one direction only.”

Looking back over the historical record, one thing becomes clear: it is what is tangible that has defined our view of history. We go back all the way to the pyramids and tombs of Egypt, and we can read the hieroglyphs on the walls. The edifices themselves tell us stories of their builders. The Greeks and Romans produced copious amounts of literate for us to consume, and their structures still stand as a testament to the collective genius of their civilizations. Is it possible, then, that we could be living in one of the worst documented times in human history? A time that future historians, thousands of years from now, will regard as a “dark period” because of a lack of any real record of the era? Let it be said that more literature is being produced than ever before. Mass printing has completely changed the dynamics; now, almost anyone can produce anything simplistically. Modern construction methods have rendered the craft of the ancient stonemasons simple in that what once took years to be built can now literally be built in a matter of weeks. Is any of this durable, though? Will it last? So much of what we do now is on computers - the irony of writing this warning on a digital journal does not escape me, by the way - and once something is wiped from the magnetic memory of a hard disk it is gone forever. There is no storing in clay jars for a hard disk. Lots of things are being produced these days, but will any of it last? What will historians two millennia from now have to say about us as a civilization - of course assuming humanity is around at all, and that we haven’t destroyed ourselves in nuclear war or massive climate change, or been wiped out my Thor’s Hammer. Always best to end on a high note.

One of my big complaints about Gentoo is how they can’t seem to do the same thing on two different days. Portage is easy until they mess with it. Take, for instance, MySQL. I was upgrading PHP my test box to 5.1, and I figured I would go ahead and upgrade to My5 to take advantage of all the new features in some of the apps I’m working on. Unfortunately, someone at Gentoo who builds the MySQL ebuilds decided to do some weird “slotting” thing wherein they allow you to have multiple MySQL installations on the same box. So Portage was installing everything as “mysql-500” instead of “mysql” like it should. It also didn’t install a corresponding init script, making it essentially useless lest I have to go make my own init. In Googling about to find a solution for the problem, I find that “Due to the negative response from our user base, the MySQL team has decided to go back to unslotted MySQL.” They simply haven’t delegated the updated packages to all the mirrors yet (I synced before attempting) and still have the packages masked. So I had to unmerge the MySQL package I had installed, unmasked the working unslotted packages, and reemerge the newer “unslotted” version. This really sucks because this situation should never have happened. A change like this should never have been merged into the main tree without having been tested among a group of users to find their input. Instead, this package was put into the main tree to wait for the general userbase’s comments. It’s what I call the “Microsoft Method” of software development: why bother with testing when you can have your users test it for you?