Conversation

We were invited to Evan and Leslie Wilson's home for dinner last Sunday after church. It was very nice, Lasagne, red wine, salad, and Boston Cream Pie for dessert. The Wilsons have been living in a large Tudor-ish house, dubbed "The Big Haus" in the old part of town. They have been running it as an old-fashioned boarding house for Christian singles for around thirty years, so some of the young people at dinner were the children of of former boarders.
After dinner we retired to the 'Library', where the comfy chairs were. There were indeed books in the library, but I think they prefer to use the room for talking and smoking pipes and cigars. The conversation meandered around Christian manliness after one young woman expressed some dissatisfaction with the young men who wanted to date her but were content with spending their time playing video games and other forms of self-indulgence. "'Call me when you've conquered Norway.'" she said. Then we spent a couple of hours talking about what she meant.
A couple of thoughts. I have spent quite a bit of time myself like that: content to be taken care of, to live off of the wealth of others. I would probably still do so if I could, but I need a bigger budget for cars.
Is this a local concern, or a bigger cultural issue? I know that Evan's brother Douglas has been talking about manliness, in fact it seems to me sometimes that manliness and manly authority has become the whole theme over at Christ church. It's hard sometimes being in the middle of a culture to spot what people are being counter-cultural about. It isn't about bigoted anti-egalitarianism, as Leonidas would say, "Clearly you haven't met our women." What I think Doug says it's about is that it's how and why men either shoulder their responsibility or they don't, and the conditions under which they either cheerfully adopt an attitude of self-sacrificial love or not. So the women have a clear interest and preference in that outcome as well, even if they express it in enigmatic terms. I'll have to come back to this topic. It merits more thought.
I think I'm starting to get a bit of it, at least, family culture here in Idaho. I certainly have plenty to think about going forward, things to cultivate and things to repent of.
There was one other thing, unrelated. At some point Evan asked me who my favourite authors were. I want to blame the wine, but perhaps I really have been so immersed in math and computer stuff that I can hardly talk about anything else. I couldn't think of who they were, it was all kind of distant, a memory of a memory. 'Neal Stevenson' was all I could think of. I am now sitting next to my bookshelf. I can turn to the left and look at my books. Ribbons from old campaigns.

Utopia

I was down in the lab the other day sitting in front of my perfectly serviceable computer, and I got annoyed that I had to click three times and type a <t> in order to get a terminal window open so that I could stare at a command line in a bash shell. So I said to myself 'I hate the Unity desktop! There are over a hundred Linux distributions out there, there has to be a better OS than this.' So I killed the partition and installed Mint12RC instead. But the RC isn't the stable version, that won't be out till the end of the month. So the desktop was bigger than the screen even adjusted to its native resolution so I couldn't see both the top action bar and the bottom action bar and none of the corners where the menu buttons were supposed to be, and then the package manager hung every time I went looking for a library (and I'm always needing another library) and that was it. I said 'I'll go back to their last stable version.' so I deleted that partition and installed Mint11 instead. I didn't make the mistake of trying the nVidia drivers, because I knew through hard experience that nVidia not only has never heard of my monitor, but as a whole they find the experience of shaking hands with it so alienating that they never recognise another monitor ever again, as if my monitor (and it was a tremendous bargain) were made in the South Pacific on an uncharted island leased to the United States somehow but inhabited by Dagon-worshipping crypto-mermaids bent on a highly improbable outcome involving messing with people's graphics. But I still had the same problem with the desktop being too big. So I said 'Hey, everything I've tried so far has been Ubuntu-based, maybe I'll try Fedora instead.' Fedora 16 has a really cool background wallpaper, an undersea scene that really needs a hint of Cthulhu in it somewhere, but again, Gnome 3 has all the controls in the corners (where else are they going to be??) and the corners are all out of view. Tomorrow I think I'll try openSuSe12. What the heck. And then maybe (if I'm lucky) I'll just go back to Ubuntu11.10 where I started, because hey, it wasn't broken.

Think

For the last several months at least there has been a billboard standing in Moscow that says "Think before you believe." It has a picture of a young woman in a dim-but-thoughtful pose with her index finger over her slightly pursed lips. All in all a rather patronising, vaguely insulting, and somewhat ironic attempt at proselytising by some self-described humanists. We don't have any choice besides thinking about it first, but thinking isn't what was being appealed to in the ad. It was really more like a cigarette ad; you want to be cool and grown up, don't you? Lame and cynical, thank you for smoking. Who has utopian visions of a world without faith? Where love and beauty are burned at the stake by the Inquisition of Hard Rationality? I don't get it.
We all have the responsibility to help think things through, even if we're not all gifted thinkers. The conversation has been going on for a long time, and is part of our culture. I'm annoyed a bit that part of the conversation is going on in lowbrow billboard propaganda. That it's about attitude and being cool enough to rationally avoid what to me are the best parts of being human. Well, it's a much bigger topic than I can possibly do justice to in one puny blog entry, and I have school tomorrow.

Machine Language

So I have my first machine language program under my belt. I was pretty happy when I turned it in, I felt like I was on my way to being a real computer scientist. I'd heard about machine language, about how the only language that computers really understand was all ones and zeros. And it is just ones and zeros. High volts and low. But it's not like they learn it from their mothers. They really are machines, not even slightly sentient. A coherent instruction set architecture has to be hard-wired into place or there is no machine language. That being said, I am more and more astonished by computers, the complexity of the hardware, the equal complexity and depth of the software running on it and operating the protocols running between them. The engineering underlying all our daily computing just astonishes me. Of course I still shake my fist at them when I can't get something to work.
Writing a program in machine language isn't as tough as it sounds, even though the instructions are pretty limited. I've learned that there's a lot you can do with Load, Store, Add, And, and Not. But debugging was really tedious. Every time I needed to change a line in the code, I had to go back and recalculate the offset positions of all the memory addresses I was using, from hexadecimal to decimal and then back to binary. Wheew! Even Assembly languages do that for you. Could be worse though, I could be writing my program by punching holes into paper cards, feeding them into the computer, looking at the holes punched into other cards by the computer, and then trying to debug that. It's a marvellous modern world we live in.

Church Hunting

We visited All Souls Christian Church this morning. The pastor is Evan Wilson, and we've been curious about it for a while. I don't know why we have a thing about the Wilsons but we just do. We were nervous about it because once in the summer we were driving past on the way to First Pres and we saw people going in who were better dressed than we were. Well it wasn't so highfalutin as all that. We got there a couple minutes early and were greeted by Rev. Wilson, who knew we were visitors "because you're on time." People were very friendly, we liked everyone we talked to. The service started with some hymns as people were wandering in. After the first one the rest were requests shouted from the congregation. That how prayer requests were done too, except for the shouting. Then the prayers themselves were offered, as people were led ( men and women, unremarkable and non-controversial, but almost counter-cultural in parts of this town, i.e. Doug's church across town.) Scripture reading came next, and then...coffee break. We trooped downstairs, got some coffee (churches here aren't going to spring for actual cream, it's all powder all the time, but the coffee wasn't bad. Or maybe it was and I've just acclimatised.) and chatted some more. Fifteen minutes later and Evan herded us back upstairs for the sermon. And it was a pretty good sermon. A good hard look at Hezekiah and how you can get into trouble when you get too attached to your life and your stuff and your comfort. It was definitely not a Presbyterian service, though it was a pleasant example of doing things decently if in no particular order. All in all, we had a blast.

Linux 1.01

Roman numerals just weren't going to work out. I'm still a newbie though, so it could take a while to get to 2.0. I'm spending my afternoons down in Clint's lab in B13 of the JEB. Mostly it's been a couple of weeks of re-installing Ubuntu and various video cards trying to find something that will work. The cool-looking 'Unity' desktop is a bit of a clunker, and when it gets right down to it, the gui sys-admin tools are all useless nerfed crap and a damned waste of disc space. I suppose it's that way on purpose to look like a complete gui, while shielding the os from the modern end-user. They just figure the real geeks will just get in there and destroy the OS from the command line like they always used to and then just reinstall it and try again.
I've got LinuxMint 11 on my home computer, and Ubuntu 11.10 in the lab, neither computer seems to be able to use nVidia's proprietary drivers without hosing the display. Which is funny, or would be if it were happening to someone else. Linux is a monster, and I have to crawl into its guts, figure out how it works, and make it do what I want.
I've pretty much given up loading Windows during the week. I don't really need it for anything but the occasional sortee into Borderlands. Gotta figure out how to run Borderlands under Linux. Oh wait, my nVidia drivers don't work.

Linux I

So part of me doing what I came here for involves spending a lot of time cuddling rather promiscuously with a lot of flavours of Linux. Getting them to reveal their secrets, finding out what makes them tick, exploring their hidden files, that kind of thing. I'm sort of going steady with LinuxMint11 at home, but at the lab there's OpenSuse, Fedora, and that exotic minx Ubuntu. Ubuntu 11.10 in particular is getting all my attention lately as I've been trying to get her to give me her best 3D Unity desktop experience, but after three hours of wrestling with her I've come to the conclusion that I just don't have the hardware that she needs to really let loose. My computers' functional but aging nVidia 7600 GS with 256Mb just isn't enough to get her going. I'm going to have to let this new hotness go off to greener pastures and settle for an OS that's a little more mature, a little less demanding, and that doesn't mind dealing with my older hardware.