I intend a long post updating my legions of fans about all the … all the stuff … that’s been going on.  But weird writer-Josh feels the need to do it as a careful and literate essay of a post.  He reminds the reader that such allusions to a post that doesn’t, in fact, yet exist are no substitute for the real thing and therefore will not get the author (indolent goof-off that he is) off the proverbial hook — but he will follow through on this.  In time.  But short time.

I hardly believe; finally the shades are raised.

I just tweeted (ugh these words) that anyone who knows me only by my tiny, strident snark feed on Twitter doesn’t have a very good grasp of me at all.  I’m more strident here than I am in real life, but I can be longer-form, and have more discussion and modifiers.  So if you landed here from Twitter — welcome.  And if you care to look around — also, welcome.

Whatever, if anything, you are celebrating in these weeks — please do so with love, warmth, peace, joy, tolerance (or at least privacy), and safety, and build the memories of which our lives should be made.

Loves to all.

Yes, I can be a real dick.  But comments by others suggest that I’m a dick at times when I’m wholly unaware of it.  Upon much reflection, here are the most likely contributing effects:

When I’m a dick by completely and callously trampling everything you believe and hold dear:  That’s largely the False Consensus Effect.  When I just charge through, assuming that the reader agrees that Fox News is unbalanced and unfair, religion in society can do great harm, Bush Ⅱ was a terrible president, evolution is a fact to the exact degree that gravitation is a fact, etc., and don’t substantiate my claims, this is frequently what’s at work.  In doing this, I am being inappropriately and inconsiderately inclusive.

When I’m a dick by apparently showing off or talking over your head:  That’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  There’s no humility in claiming that effect, because there is no reason to pretend to be humble: I do have a greater understanding of science, technology, logic, and mathematics than most other people, and I let them color my worldview more than does almost anyone [insert clever response about Dunning-Kruger and believing myself to have great understanding.]  It’s been pointed out to me that I throw around terms like “order of magnitude”, “factor”, “signal-to-noise ratio”, “imprecise”, “given”, “established”, and so many others; I mention things by initialisms; I reference things in passing that will require a Google search to unravel.  Most of the time, I’m honestly not trying to be a dick.  In doing this, I am being — ready? — inappropriately and inconsiderately inclusive.  The worst part about this one is that when I try explain more carefully, I frequently explain entirely the wrong things, which makes me seem both a dick and patronizing.

When I’m just being a dick:  That’s the Just Being a Dick Effect.  In doing this, I am inappropriately and inconsiderately just being a dick.  An example would be, for instance, when I try to ret-con my dickishness by pretending it to be inclusive.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to bin the instances appropriately.

On preview: “bin” as a verb; “mutually-exclusive”; “exercise for the reader”.  Sorry.

I’ve been reliving my youth courtesy of YouTube.  There are MTV Unplugged shows, vintage music videos — it’s awfully cool.  YouTube hasn’t been on my radar until recently, but it’s a nice incorporation into my life.  So, for nostalgia, I watched the Stone Temple Pilots MTV Unplugged show, and, as I will be transitioning from “thirty” to “thirtysomething” in a couple of weeks, I thought I would pause and reflect.

Here is “Plush” Unplugged.

Usually YouTube comments are impossibly inane.  I, of course, am not the first person to note this:

But I was oddly heartened by an exchange on the comments page:

Wrestling BC:  It sucks that I have to be in my 20s during this shitty decade.  I would gladly give away anything good about this time period … which is basically only the advancements in technology, if it meant I could go back in time an see these guys and others in their prime.

Calicsta:  I feel just the same.  I would give everything to be a part of this x-generation.

Years ago, I saw a defense of people of my generation.  The argument went like this: “We might not understand Woodstock, The British Invasion, free love, LSD.  But there’s plenty of stuff Boomers don’t know about: Tina Yothers, TrapperKeepers, etc.”

And I thought: “Yeah.  That’s not a very good trade.”

But that, of course, is not the real legacy of “Generation X”.

When “Generation Y” was first introduced some years back — I first encountered it in maybe 1995 — I thought it was kind of odd.  It bins my brother and me into different generations.  I’m at the tail-end of Gen X, he’s at the head of the subsequent generation, and that seemed somewhat ludicrous to me, even though it was reassuring to a teenager to be told there was a fundamental generational gap between you and your younger brother.

I was born in 1978.  I went to college when I was 16, which put my classmates as 1976ers, and the upperclassmen more solidly into Gen X.  Thirty is young to be reminiscing, but when I started college, we were one of the first classes to have email.  We used pine on a DEC Alpha.  Google?  Hell, there was no Altavista.  No one had heard of Amazon.com.  Yahoo! was run by a staff of volunteers.  Internet Explorer was but a gleam in a predatory company’s eye — I remember transitioning from Mosaic to Netscape Navigator.  There were people sincerely wondering whether “The Internet” was better than AOL.  Cell phones?  Blackberries?  Gah.  But, no, that’s not the biggest generational gap, either.

I graduated college in 1999.  My brother started college in — help, Dave?  2000?  I was a working adult when 9/11 occurred.  High school and college had been spent under Clinton, when American thought that a scandal was a blow job in the Oval Office.  My brother — Generation Y, remember — was 19 when the Towers collapsed.  His college days were drenched in Bush, in the worry of international terrorism, in illegal wars and unlawful presidencies and all the scary, scary shit that will take well into Generation Z++ to undo.  And, of course, there’s instant messaging.  There’s that.

So the X/Y division seemed oddly … prescient.  If it wasn’t real at the beginning, it sure as hell was true when the inhabitants became adults.  Dave, agree?

Back to music.  I’ve wondered over the years if this weren’t generational bigotry, but my first year as a teenager, here is a partial list of albums that were released:

• Nirvana “Nevermind”
• Pearl Jam “Ten”
• Guns ‘n’ Roses, “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II”
• Metallica, “Black Album”
• REM, “Out of Time”
• Queensrÿche, “Empire”
• Tori Amos, “Little Earthquakes”

That’s.  Partial.  I’ve tried to convince myself that anyone’s albums when they were 13 would seem as seminal, but, no, sorry.  This was different.  These were seminal.  And — oddly, utterly oddly — grunge was a fad, which brought celebrities with bipolar disorder into public consciousness more than at any time since, maybe, Chopin.

Rant, here.  If you look back on grunge as a fad: bless you eternally.  For real.  You are truly blessed.  I’m bipolar.  I have been for lots of years — as usual, symptoms showed up when I was a teenager, years before it was diagnosed.  If you listen to Nirvana’s “Lithium” and think, “cool bassline!” rather than “wow, Kurt, you fucking nailed what being on lithium is like”, seriously — utterly seriously — good for you.  It really isn’t our fault that people with severe dopamine disregulation problems find that strong opiates work better to make us functional than anything that’s been approved by the FDA for treatment.  If you listen to Stone Temple Pilots’ “Atlanta” and it doesn’t immediately occur to you that Scott has nailed what trying to stop opiates as a bipolar feels like — well, I’ve said it.  Bless you.  It’s a blessed accident that I didn’t become a heroin addict, and, frankly, it’s still something I have to be super-careful to not do.

I don’t think that intrusion of mental illness into popular culture has really been duplicated.  Do people with rage disorders think, “wow, nu-metal legitimizes us”?  Do despicable homophobes think Eminem (gods, that man is talented, I just wish I didn’t have to delouse after The Eminem Show) stands up for them?  Well, maybe.  I don’t really know.

So, I’m switching from 30 to 31.  I just had my ten-year college reunion.  I’ve been married, and been divorced.  I watch the Unplugged shows and think, “Holy shit, I’m older than all of these guys, and, holy shit, I used to think their hair was long” (mine has now passed the middle of my back again).  And — yes — I still look in the mirror in the morning, with somewhat-ratty long curly brown hair, jeans, a rock band t-shirt, and an open flannel, and think, “Hey, I look good”.

Hey, do you know what?  I think I do.  I may be stuck back in 1991.  But, seriously, there are worse times be stuck.  Grunge forever.  Better bipolar medications now.  I’ll shout both from the rooftops.  I hope you’ll join me.

I saved this as a file last week, when I was trying to get my wireless working.  In the end I got it working, but the reveal is more poignant if I start with just this.

Nerds are going to like this for content; I hope others (whom I know in meatspace) will learn a little bit about me, about how my mind works, and a suggestion (along with the Aspergers) of why I’m surprised when other people’s minds don’t work in the same way.

The setup, as Twitter readers will have seen so far, is that my Internet connection stopped working some days ago.  Tonight I arrived home, could not find my phone, and was very frustrated at not having had the ability to check my email in days.  So I wanted to fix it.  I thought today that an automatic Ubuntu update must have broken it.  That’s the intro.

A note about the Dramatis Personæ: the unitalicized speaker is my conscious train of thought.  The italicized speaker is a voice I’ve worked very hard to train, a voice that before now I haven’t needed a name for.  I considered “Meta”, and “Metashua”, and “Metash”, but I’m settling on “Dæmon”, for a (very) funny computer in-joke, and something not funny for a reason I discovered while thinking through this tonight.

OK, wireless.  Wireless stopped working.  An auto-update broke it.  Damn.  What do you do when an update breaks networking?  You can’t exactly go online to fix it.  But that’s OK, I have a “live” Micro SD card, and a keychain USB Micro SD card reader dongle thing.  Good.  That hasn’t been working.  Bad.  Maybe I can get it to work.

OK, backpack.  Got it.  Plug it in.  Hmm.  What’s supposed to happen?  “Nothing”, right?  I always disable all auto-load and auto-mounts on my system.  OK, Places→Computer.  “SD Card”.  Good.  Mount that.

OK, that doesn’t work.  Of course that doesn’t work.  It didn’t work before.  That’s why I took it off my keychain and put it in my backpack.  It didn’t work because of a bent pin, right?

[I take off the cover and remove the Micro SD card]

OK.  Yes, definitely a bent pin.  But my hand is shaking.  To get my hand to stop shaking, I’m going to have to drink a bunch of wine.  Why can’t they come up with something for essential tremor that’s less incapacitating than alcohol?  I just need a sympathetic nervous system depressant.  Benzos.  I have Ativan.  Can I spare some Ativan?  No, I’m super-low, and won’t be able to get more until Tuesday.  Scratch that.  We can move back to the bent pin.  I’ll try wiggling.

[I wiggle]

OK, good sign.  It’s coming in and out of view.  So something is sketchy in the adaptor, because the Micro SD card didn’t move.  Oh, wait.  Did it?  OK, wiggle and press in the Micro SD card.

There it is.  OK, mount.  Nope.  No mount.  It must be the bent pin.  I need to unbend the pin.  Except, I can’t unbend the pin.  Hand tremor.  Thanks, Grandad!  Thanks, Dad!  Fuck.  OK.

Why don’t I have a PCCARD card reader?  I have a slot for it in the desktop.  There’s a dummy piece of plastic there right now.  Right?

[I check]

OK, right.  Yeah.  OK.  I just need to read this card.

Stop.  You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to boot off a live USB device.

No.  You’re trying to reinstall a driver.

I’m trying to reinstall a driver.  OK.  What else?  Church computer?  No.  I’m not supposed to use those any longer, and, besides, I don’t have a USB drive, and I don’t have a blank CD-R.

CD-R.  That’s good.  I have a CD-R somewhere.  Older version, but it worked when you installed it.  But, crap, is updraging going to wreck my system?  Well, maybe.  But you’ll figure that out before you get to that point.

[I look for the CD-R]

Gah!  Fuck!  Why can’t I keep my desk cleaner?  It was right there!  On top of the printer.

Then maybe it’s next to the printer.

Good.  OK.  Dig dig dig.  There it is.  Thanks, Sebastian [cat]!

[I take it back to the workstation.]

OK, inserwaitaminute.  What’s that?  Oh, that’s a dent in the disc.  Aargh!  I don’t have another one.  Thanks, Sebastian [cat]!.

Actually, that’s probably not Sebastian [cat]‘s fault.  It’s right next to your sink.  You probably knocked something heavy and pointy over and didn’t notice.  God, I don’t see anything heavy and sharp.  Could a cat’s claw do that?

Not.  Helping.

Yeah, OK.  Well, Ubuntu live CDs can be burned onto a credit-card CD.  And this dent is at the outside.  Maybe it can load.  What’s the worst that could happen?  It wouldn’t load, right?  Or.  Hmm.  It could shatter.  If it’s enough off-balance, it can shatter.  Fine.

Or it could shatter and destroy the laser.

Yeah, it could shatter and destroy the laser.  But that’s unlikely.

Or it could shatter and jam your CD drive shut

Oh, yeah.  And my fallback for the evening is that David Mamet movie.

Fuck it.  I don’t care.

[I load the CD in X.]

“This disc has packages.  Do you want to open the package manager?”  Oh, good sign.  Now I need to boot off of it.

[Restarts the computer.  On boot-up, I get a BIOS warning that I'm using a 65W power adapter, which will yield suboptimal performance.]

Fuck.  God.  [racism redacted due to cowardice]

This.  Is.  Racist.  Knock it off!  And, besides, you’ve established that your power is wonky.  The A/C adapters blowing could be your fault.

But the fact that it’s 65W is sure not my fault!

Stop.  This isn’t helping.

Yeah.  OK, I’m at the CD menu.  “Install Ubuntu”.

[I scroll down and hit Return]

Please.  Please please.  Oh.  Hmm.  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”  OK.

[I reboot.]

Try again.  I can run it as a live CD.  The live CD part should probably be written close to the interior.  Wait, how sure am I of this?  Not remotely.  Anyway, it’s back again.  “Try Ubuntu without installing it.”  Good, I can probably download a replacement driver.  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”

But the boot part should be close the interior!  Wait, how sure am I?  Well, unsure enough to eject the disc and check it.

[I eject.]

Oh.  Yeah.  Congealed food on the interior.  Can’t really blame that on Sebastian [cat].  Clean that off.  OK, clean the whole surface off.  Insert.  Reboot.

[I insert and reboot.]

OK.  Run as live CD.  Good.  This is good.  This is longer than it went before.  Oh, there’s a roadsign.  OK, cool!  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”  Damn.

You’re boxed.  Step back.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to roll back a driver.

No.  You’re trying to connect to the Internet.

Yeah.  I have a USB wifi modem/antenna.  Somewhere.  God my desk is so fucking dirty!  It was rightohthereitis.  Antenna.  Antenna looks good.  Power.  Damn, no power cord.

[I look some more.]

Well, maybe I have something else that can power it.  What it is?

[Examines.  "5V / 2A".]

Is that an L-type plug?  I probably have something that matches.  In that box of cables from hardware that went to heaven.

Had.

Oh yeah.  Had.  God, downsizing can suck sometimes.  Well, does anything else run on this?  All I need is an adapter.  I could open the case of the modem, splice in the power, and go for it.  Except I don’t have a soldering iron.  That’s OK.  I can hold it in place.  I don’t need it to run very long.

No, actually, I can’t.  Hand tremor.  I’d need a bunch more wine, and then I wouldn’t be able to debug the problem.  OK, nix that.  USB wifi adapter?  I had one.  Oh, gave it to my mom.  Um.  I could buy one tomorrow.  But aren’t they like $54?  They used to be, anyway.  I don’t have that kind of money, especially if it’s an upgrade problem.  I could borrow it from her.  But maybe I took it back already?  Where would it be?  HellifIknow.

You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to get my wifi adapter working.  But I don’t even have any CAT-5!

No.  You’re trying to get on the Internet.

Yeah.  Maybe that Micro SD card was a good idea.  But I don’t have a reader.  But, wait, I have devices that take SD cards and have a USB connection!  My broken camera!  I can mount the SD card as a USB device!  But I need a Micro SD – Full-size SD adapter.  Where would that be?

Hmm.  What would I do with it?  I have switched over mostly to Micro SD.  Hey, maybe it’s in a device that takes a full-size device.  What are those?  Kindle –

[checks Kindle]

No.  Oh, it could be in the camera itself!

[checks camera]

Bingo!  OK.  There it is.  Turn it on — oh, yeah.  It’s broken because it can’t turn on.  But now you have a carriage to convert Micro to full-size.  “Carriage?”  “Adapter?”  Something.  Hmm.

Not important.

Yeah.  OK, I have a card reader here somewhere.  I think it’s powered off of USB.  I think I know where it is.

[Looks.]

Oh, golden!  It’s an Iomega multi-card-plus-floppy reader.  Floppy?  What the fuck?  No, stop, go on.  No power connection.  It must draw power from the USB port.  Good.

[I put the Micro SD card in the carriage, put that in the card reader, and plug that into a USB port.  Two "USB drive"s and a "Floppy drive" show up in "Computer".]

Which USB card is it?  Well, try them both.

[I try both.]

Oh.  But maybe one needs a powered USB port.  That has to be a powered port, doesn’t it?  And they wouldn’t show up at all if the device were not powered.

How certain of you are that?

Well, not at all.  But if I were designing this computer, I’d make the ports powered.  Actually, I’d make sure to power at least one.  That wouldn’t work, though, right?  You’d have to do it in pairs.  So maybe it’s the ones on the back.

[I try]

Nope.  Fails.

How certain are you that it has to be done in pairs?

Um: not certain enough that I shouldn’t try the last port.  Oh, great!  Light came on momentarily.  Will it work?!

No.  OK.  But there’s a floppy drive.  Do I have an Ubuntu boot floppy?  No, stop it, that’s ridiculous.  Do I have any sort of boot floppy?  Hmm.  Maybe a DOS 6.22 floppy.  Or did it take more than one floppy?  Well, for sure the first one was bootable.  Otherwise it wouldn’t work.  But I need something that would get my wireless working.  That sure as hell won’t.

Stop.  You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to get on the Internet.

Good.  Do you have any other way to get on the Internet?  Even for just a bit?

Oh, Kindle!  Thank You Amazon!  W00t!  Turn.  On.  Wireless. 

Wait, what am I looking for?  Damn.  Wait.  What?  Damn.  Stop with the wine.  You need to think clearly more than you need to stop shaking. 

Stop.  You’re boxed.  Why could this have stopped working.

A driver.

Look for stuff about the driver.

I don’t know what card I have.  I don’t know how to find out what card I have.  There’s no “Device Manager”.  How did I ever get qualified under Red Hat if I don’t know this shit?  Did I forget it all?  Did I ever know it?

Stop.

Stop.  What I need is to roll back a driver.  Search→”@web roll back Ubuntu driver”.  Good.  There’s an Ubuntu suggestion for someone wanting to roll back a driver.  Maybe it’s solved.  Maybe someone told him how it’s solved.

[I read thread.  The person is asking for a rollback feature in Ubuntu; he gives an example of being sysadmin at a company, added a new module, and networking stop working.]

Good.  This is good.  Solutions?

[I read more.  Someone has written "A sysadmin loads a module and doesn't test it and brings a whole company's network down?!  That sysadmin should be fired.]

Oh, ha ha.  So funny.  Fuckwad.  Could you answer the fucking question of whether I can roll back?

[My eyes see the words "module" and "modprobe".]

Oh, of course!  A kernel module!  That’s how it’s done in Linux!  Maybe a module became unloaded.  “lsmod”.  Damn, that’s a lot.  OK, “lsmod | sort | less”.  “ieee80211″.  Sounds promising.  Load it.  Restart networking.

[I restart.]

Failure.  Hmm.  Maybe the whole kernel got upgraded.  Maybe the module from the old kernel will work.

[I fuck around for a bit.  I see a bunch of wireless modules.  Maybe I can load them all, I think.  I start tinkering.]

STOP.  You’re messing with the kernel, using out-of-date modules.  You’re going to destroy the system.

But I can’t exactly roll back the kernel!

[Stares at me internally]

Oh.  Yeah.  Sure I can.  From lilo.  OK, reboot.  65W power adapter warning.  Shit!  I have two weeks to return it, right?  I really need to do that tomorrow.  Boot menu.  Bingo!  There’s the old kernel.

[I boot, try various tricks with the kernel.  No dice.]

OK, check online again.

Here’s where I stop writing the first night.