My Old Blog

I’m at the lake this weekend with the extended family. They all think I’m weird. I think they are weird too, just in a different way.

Today we went to breakfast at Staton’s Diner. My family’s lake place is in the middle of nowhere, and Staton’s is about 10 miles from that. It has a dirt parking lot with lots of old trucks in it.

The funny thing is that there are alot of new trucks too. This place is packed everytime we go. Everyone knows about it.

I got grits, 2 eggs, 2 sausages, biscuit and gravy and a bottomless cup of coffee for $2.49. The waitress was attentive and the food was good.

Personally, I don’t know how they can afford to stay open. You literally couldn’t go to the grocery store and cook it yourself for less.

But I do understand why its so popular. I pay more than $2.49 for a coffee at Starbucks.

I have read zillions of job posts over the past year. Some of them are Ok. Most of them are so puffed up with buzz-words and catch phrases I don’t even understand what they’re saying.

Its like there is some secret inventory of cryptic business jargon that spits out these job descriptions. The HR folks just cut and paste a meaningless garble of bullet point sentence fragments obviously looking for employees that can tell them what they hell they just meant to say.

Here is a nice average example of what employers want:

Who are these fucking people? Because I’ve never met them.

But when I do I am sure they will be “implementing” something and way too busy to talk to me. They will have deep and immodulated voices, maintain an unnatural amount of eye contact and repeat my name several times for no reason in our short “results oriented” conversation.

It would be funny if it weren’t so true…..

This is the second time I’ve installed Linux. The first time, about 4 years ago, I admit it was too much for me. I knew just about enough to install it, get confused and uninstall it without screwing up my MBR or my Windows partitions.

I tried Red Hat 8 this time. In fact, I am posting from linux for the first time ever. I’ll include a screenshot of my KDE desktop.

This is all pretty amazing considering. I have access to my Windows partitions, can connect to the internet, know how to take and edit a screen shot, uploaded a file by ftp to my web host and have managed not to destroy anything…yet. I find permissions very frustrating. And I can’t figure why you have to unmount your vfat directories to get the file system to update. I’ve had problems with disappearing files when I boot to Windows.

I don’t think I’ll ever be very good with linux. I hate the command line. I realize it can be more “robust”, but it can also cause you to spend time remembering a garble of syntax when you could be doing something useful, like basically anything else.

I’ve heard a lot about the linux community and was excited to participate. I’ve found the folks in the #linuxhelp IRC channels to be complete jackasses. They join the channel, talk arcane computer jargon with their buddies and flame all newcomers that ask questions.

I don’t have a problem with computer snobbery. I am a travel snob (though I hide it much better than they do). But if you’re gonna hang out in the #linuxhelp chatroom…be willing to help, or get out. Isn’t there a #linuxsnobs channel or something?

I don’t wait in the #traveladvice channel for college students planning spring break to ask about hash bars in Amsterdam and topless beaches on the Riviera.

Their idea of help is telling me to go find out for myself. Apparently I will never learn anything if they keep telling me how to do stuff. Well shit, there goes the whole concept of school.

You want to know the real reason Linux isn’t accepted as a desktop replacement for Windows? Not because of its user-friendliness, lack of common GUI, office productivity suites, or anything bordering on that. It is because their user community is a bunch of non-supportive, computer-elitest fucks that never got laid in high school and were excluded from every functioning social group. Now they have their own group and are determined not to let anyone in. I guess they feel its payback time for all those wedgies in gym class.

I realize my questions are stupid, but asking them does not make me lazy. It simply means I have more interesting things to do with my time than reinvent the wheel.

All that being said, I hope my opinion improves, because I really like learning new things. If you know something about linux are are willing to endure my questions, please contact me: kelliottdykes@yahoo.com.