Kylog

FC5 on a Dell 3.6Ghz P4 with XP preinstalled:

Ultimate Boot CD — great tool! and Partition Magic handy

used Partition Magic to shrink the XP partition and then created 3 more (boot: ~200 MB, swap ~35 GB, too large this will get reused, root: ~100 GB)

FC5 install: do the media check! aargh it sucks if the dvd craps out part way through

FC5 install: do the custom install initially
this P4 supports x86_64! didn’t realize Intel had snuck that in ahead of the Core line

do not use the pirut package manager (accessed via Add/Remove software); it’s slow and not stable; use cmdline yum or try out yumex (install this by yum install yumex)

plan is to use vmware and point it at the windows partition — this is a major hassle with SATA drives; still haven’t gotten this to work after wasting too much time on it; on hold

install i686 (32-bit) firefox off mozilla.com, instead of the FC5-build x86_64 version; this gets the latest and allows use of, e.g., the 32-bit flash7 from Adobe

kde doesn’t have the nice default or controls as gnome re fonts, so need to go into ControlCenter/Appearances/Fonts and select anti-aliasing and play with which settings look best, I chose SubPixel hinting, Vertical RGB, Hinting Style: Full

confused yum by doing some cmd-line yum and yumex at the same time: “yum clean metadata” is your friend

DNS hell: 1) first one of the work DNS servers was busted and no one had noticed (maybe Windows clients are quicker about falling back to a second DNS server?), 2) some servers you might need to disable IPv6, by adding “alias net-pf-10 off” to /etc/modprobe.conf

FWIW, my vmware networking setup, which I’ve never had a chance to use: 192.168.42.1/255.255.255.0, with the host-only subnet 192.168.43.1/255.255.255.0, something is on port 904 (instead of 902)

yum’ing wine was a little awkward:

1) it didn’t pick up a dependency: be sure to update sane-backend before installing wine

2) the directory /usr/share/wine/ had permissions of 754, so users couldn’t get at its contents (which were all 755); doh!

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights. 152-3

[I] sat in my chair thinking about Harry Jones and his story. It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact. 165

He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse. 166

I hung there motionless, like a lazy fish in water. 167

The little dead man sat silent in his chair, beyond fear, beyond change. 174

… my mouth was open and the ache at the side of my jaws told me it was open wide and strained back, mimicking the rictus of death carved upon the face of Harry Jones. 174

“He’s like all mechanics. Always got his face in a job he ought to have done last week.” 181

She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes. 186

Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house. 186

The word of the day recently was epithalamion, a poem honoring a wedding. I know of only two contemporary examples: the rap done at my wedding (thank you, Barry) and J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. So I decided to reread Salinger’s novella, for the first time in years and years.

How perfect is the closing image of that novella, where the narrator Buddy imagines sending a cigar butt to his elder brother Seymour as a wedding present, “wrapped in a blank sheet of paper, by way of explanation.” For a wedding that didn’t happen, after a non-reception in Buddy’s apartment, attended by people who couldn’t be further from Sappho’s carpenters with their lack of sympathy (for the groom at least), including a deaf-mute who understood nothing of what transpired but left a cigar butt. Yes, a blank sheet of paper would be the perfect explanation for such a wedding gift.

Despite the perfect coherence of the story, and despite Salinger’s incomparable fluency as a writer, always a marvel and a joy to experience, I didn’t find myself as moved by the story as I remember being in the past. The Glass family schtick of bitter-sweet remembrances of this incredibly clever, intellectual family, led after a fashion by Seymour and his taste for Zen philosophy, lyric Greek poetry, and epiphanies of the mundane; it’s all very intriguing but it didn’t get under my skin this time.

I’ve speculated 3 reasons: first, that I’ve simply internalized it all so much, and been around others who’ve internalized it all so much, that it’s not new; second, that Salinger’s novelty has gotten diluted over the years as I’ve read others from his generation, like Delmore Schwartz; and third, that I myself am no longer quite the angst-ridden Glass-like philosophe of my 20s. Now though, I read Salinger in a new light, fitting into my new gloss of the 50s. I juxtapose Salinger with Schwartz, and the Beatniks, and Eisenhower and Oppenheimer and it all makes an eerie sense.

But returning to the book, it is a lovely homage to the time and to Seymour. One unavoidable in reading this book is the filial love, as befits an epithalamion, even or especially one for such an un-wedding.