New Year's Day v. Spring Cleaning

Everybody makes New Year's resolutions and fail miserably, except me. Why? Am I a superhuman fantastic specimen of humanity? Yes, I am, but that has nothing to do with it. The reason I don't fail at New Year's resolutions is because I do not make them anymore. Instead, I wait until Spring, when I do Spring cleaning. I have found that Spring is considerably more inspiring than New Year's Eve/Day.

First of all, I am motivated to clean my apartment (something I hate doing) when Spring comes around, and as part of 'Spring Cleaning', I find that there are improvements to myself that I want to make.  Come New Year's Day, not only am I still pissed off that I couldn't go to such & such business on December 25th because of those fucking Christians, but I am fighting off my annual bout with seasonal depression, with my only weapon being that my birthday is only 35 days away and a hangover.

Second, the vernal equinox marks one of the only 2 times throughout the year that the sun is directly over the equator. Did you think the word 'equinox' was a coincidence? I can name 3 days that are spend recovering from gluttonous behavior, Jan. 1, Mar. 18, and the day after Thanksgiving. I could name more, but there is no need to spike the ball. So, overindulgence, at least in my eyes, seems less special than Spring. Later in the year, I will go into why Halloween is more than just candy (again, I will slam fucking Christians).

Third, New Year's day is arbitrary. Dick Clark freezing his nuts off at Times Square does not make New Year's Eve/Day important to anyone other than a TV executive. What does New Year's Day offer you? Sales from retailers for the shit they couldn't get you to buy before Christmas? Pathetic sporting events like the NHL's 'Winter Classic' (really, hockey outside, WHAT THE FUCK!) and college football (the reason why Johnny can't read, because being able to spell the word "diploma" doesn't disqualify you from getting one in this country)? The only thing that New Year's day is good for is dealing with a hangover. I don't have a celebration in honor of Spring, but as the weather (here in New York City) becomes more temperate (I'm a 65-85 degree day kind of guy), I want to open my windows and breathe the fresh air (as much as I can kind in New York City), in appreciation of the new beginning.

New Year's Day is a day, but Spring is a feeling. Over the past few years, I have made myself a better person in spite of New Year's Day, by finding my inspiration, and my inspiration is Spring. What I do is identify a goal for the new year (not New Year's) and work toward achieving it by Spring. While everyone else breaks their New Year's resolutions in 2 days and says, "Fuck it," I do not mark the finality of the past year as the point at which I am miraclulously a better person and face the disappointment of being the same piece of shit that I was the last time this planet was at the same position it was in relation to the sun when I don't live up to that expectation. As the flowers bloom, I grow.  It's a process.  Builid up to it, and enjoy the ride.

Server Migration

Here is what is on the agenda:

- Update all of my computers

- Migrate my server

The updates are simple enough, but the server migration will be interesting. Why? Well, first of all, I'm going from a whitebox with a 665MHz P3 and 512MB RAM to an IBM Thinkpad 600e with a 366MHz P2 and 224MB RAM. Second, I will have to use an external hard drive over a USB 1.1 port. Finally, given its lesser specs, I will have to decide how much I want to push this server.

I know what you are asking. Why the hell would you do such a thing? Are you a masochist? I might be a masochist, which would explain why I continue to go to my office, but the reason that I am making this move is three-fold.

First, if I am leaving something on all the time, I think it is prudent to pick the one that uses less power.

Second, the external drive holds a backup of data stored on another computer, so the slower bus speed really only effects my backup process (which I do every 2 weeks).

As far as how much I am looking to get out of this system, without X, I can do quite a few things with text and curses based tools. I managed to get a DVD burner in there, so burning discs is a breeze with cdw. Between the mv, cp, and rm commands and mc, I have file management taken care of. On this particular line of Thinkpads, configuring the sound card is a bitch, but once it is working, mp3blaster works well. For text-based web-browsing, I haven't decided between links2, w3m, or elinks yet, but they all do the job. I check my email with alpine. Nano is my text editor of choice, because it is simple (I'm not a programmer, I just need to edit a configuration file every once in a while). Saidar is cool system monitor, as is htop. I would use rtorrent for torrents, but this is a task that I do not think this piece of hardware can handle, though I may, on occasion wget a file or two. For a samba server (both file and print server), an SSH server, and a local DNS cache, I think this laptop will do everything that I need and not cost me as much on electricity (how many DNS cache server can you burn a DVD or listen to LTTLS on).

I'm having fun this weekend. I hope you have fun this weekend, too.

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