The Previous Customer
Looking through my receipts, one of mine was still attached to that of the previous customer. Not realizing it was another person's groceries, I was quite perplexed until I found my receipt connected at the bottom.
My receipt:
2 cups of yogurt
half gallon of non-concentrate OJ
sushi rolls
chicken wrap
half pound granny smith apples
third pound black plumbsThe previous customer:
rolls
gallon of milk
frozen pizza
"Lunch Makers" (similar to "Lunchables")
3 candy barsA noticeable difference. While I consume a lot of crap food also, I've managed to exclude the worst offenders (candy bars and frozen pizza).
Ubuntu Ugliness
Ubuntu is the pretty girlfriend who treats you like garbage, yet you continue to go back for more, under the insane idea that she cares about you and things will improve, it'll be better next time, she'll give back what you're putting in.
But not really. She continues to treat you like waste and you don't get squat. Is there a halfway house for abused users?
My first successful Debian install was on a junk Gateway laptop and I've been hooked on it ever since. Many friends raved about Ubuntu and its additional features, newer software, better interface...unfortunately, my experience has been poor. The one-size-fits-all approach has left it with too many annoyances for my taste. While I could modify it however I wished, I prefer configuring a bare Debian install to reconfiguring an overzealous Ubuntu one.
I've been running Ubuntu on two laptops for about a year, one x86 and one PPC. I'm still fixing the upgrade from Breezy to Dapper on the x86 and I'm not prepared to start on the PPC one. While Dapper did obviously improve some things, such as the 15s GDM login, it also removed or broke many working software packages I had--such rare and obtuse programs as
xscreensaver and
xine.
The upgrade process itself was strange.
update-manager wanted to download another dozen packages after
aptitude dist-upgrade had already downloaded all it thought it needed. Dapper came out 800MB larger than my Breezy installation, on what bloat I don't know. And things were broken. Suck.
Within Debian, anything obtained from the main repositories is supported in some fashion and does not get accepted without verifying that it works (or at least doesn't break anything). My experience with Ubuntu's
universe and
multiverse sections made me extremely wary--an attempt to get kerberized ssh working broke my entire ssh config because the kerberized universe package conflicted with other packages I had.
The administrators seem to have an extremely zealous (overzealous?) approach to copyright that makes it very difficult to play
free media codecs. I had a working
xine installation before I upgraded...
In short, it's all hype. It's not a bad distribution and I'm going to continue running it, but it's not something I can just give to someone without providing assistance. It doesn't
just work yet. And even once you have it working, it treats you like a Microsoft or Apple junkie and changes your setup until something is broken.
It's just an envelope, stupid!
There are times when I'm struck by a realization so amazingly obvious after the fact that I feel blazingly moronic for failing to see it earlier. Then I consider that no one ever mentioned it to me, and the thought, far more frightening than my own idiocy, devolves to encompass the stupidity of everyone around me for their unmatched ignorance. It is bliss, they say.
I don't know when recycling became important to me; at some point I realized how easy it was and how much it could accomplish and I've been working for it ever since. I turned much of my packrat ways around to reuse and renew rather than simply storing. Baby food jars are perfect for small screws and wire ties (or use 35mm film cannisters or medicine bottles); baby formula cans (just like coffee cans) hold many computer parts, larger screws, zip ties; baby wipe holders (seeing a pattern?) are built just like toolboxes; I used an empty tea cannister for assorted small tubes of medicine and miscellaneous, cleaning up a particularly baneful cabinet in my kitchen. My largest challenge has been disposing of the vast amounts of cardboard in my garage, mostly from delivery packages (very
large segments of cardboard).
I was cleaning up my office last week. Many receipts were covering my desk, waiting to be sorted into envelopes for storage in case of an audit; I had run out of envelopes and the ones I had were far too large, security envelopes where I prefer the smaller correspondence size. As I was sorting credit card statements, I threw the remainder of the mailer in my recycle bin.
I was throwing envelopes into recycling.Along with each original envelope, often damaged by mailing and rough opening, was a reply envelope for my payment. Much smaller than what I'd had, these were perfect. I immediately fished out the others from my recycle bin and paperclipped them together to sort my receipts later (which I did).
No one had ever mentioned the idea of reusing reply envelopes. When I think about it, it's so amazingly simple. How many other things are overlooked? As a child, I recall going upstairs to my grandparents' apartment and scribbling all over sheets of paper my grandmother had brought home from the community center, mostly flyers that were blank on one side and perfect for my work. We live in such lifestyles of abundance, we often overlook the simplicity.
