Who Needs Information - May 2010

With a few days spare and bored with killing Greeks and Macedonians in RTW Gold I have been experimenting more with programs that organize information. Thailand is more or less shut, my Philippine validations lapsed, so nowhere to fly.

Zim is one program that I've spent some time getting used to. It lacks some features (automatic index of child pages for each parent) that I'd like but overall it is a useful personal wiki. I'm using the Macports version: reasonably stable. The HTML export works well. I'm mainly using Zim to support my aviation studies (tooling up for my trip to USA).

I have installed a minimal Debian 5 in VMWare. I did the normal install from a debian-504-i386-netinst.iso but then didn't add any groups of programs so that I started with the base system. This means that it only has the programs that I want. So far:

• xorg
• xdm
• fluxbox
• nedit
• diction
• links
• links2 (first time using this, and I like it)
• zim
• rpncalc
• dc
• ruby
• kernel headers
• make
• gcc 4.1
• psmisc
• plus of course what these depend on.

I installed VMWare Tools so that I could work with a reasonable resolution. Tools compiled and ran without any errors so I have a screen that almost fills my Macbook Pro screen.

I'll need to root around to find some of my old scripts to get it all as I want. I might even try getting xdmshutdown working again. I have another working Linux on my old desktop drive so I might get that up and running again as well.

I have a running BeOS 5, and a Haiku to play with in VMWare so I'll not be bored. But I plan to leave that fun until after I return from the USA.

Long Way From Home 2009-02-15

Interesting few days. I watched Avatar again. I read The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Keith. I read Coming Home To The Pleistocene by Paul Shepard. I worked on getting my paperwork in order for adding a type rating to my FAA Commercial Pilot Certificate. My MacBookPro died!

The MacBookPro disaster is the easiest thing to fix: I bought another one. Two days later I have my old user account copied over from Time Machine, Windows XP running in a Bootcamp partition, Windows XP running in VMware Fusion. I used the excellent winclone again to restore the last clone of my Windows XP partiton.

I hate having to run windows at all but aviation software that I use will only run in Windows. The new MacBookPro looks and runs great but I would have been happy to continue to use the old one for quite a while yet. The old Pro will get passed on after repair.

I recommend reading The Vegetarian Myth:Food, Justice and Sustainability. I do not have a vegetarian bashing agenda but the book contains so much helpful information about many aspects of eating correctly, agriculture, and civilization. A central theme is that for a human to live something else needs to die, and that when a human dies their body feeds the earth. This is a repeating flow of life from birth to death. The book is just excellent. I didn't have a problem with the Feminist views of the author myself but others might. I won't bore you or myself by trying to reinvent the wheel: read a review by Dr Mike Eades or Mark Sisson.

Coming Home To The Pleistocene is not as easy a read as The Vegetarian Myth but it is worthwhile. Paul Shepard writes about how humans do not live now as humans are meant to live. He offers pointers to what we can do to reclaim our humanness. I will read more Paul Shepard material before retuning to both of the books I've mentioned to gain a better understand of the subject: who we are, and how we should live.

I contemplate that caged factory chickens are like art reflecting our own lives: avian versions of ourselves. Too many humans in too small a space, diseased, and dysfunctional. We read of diseases of civilization: but the civilization is the disease. How do we not just step back in time but rediscover our essence and place in nature? Is there time for a rediscovery before we have destroyed our planet and ourselves? These questions are just the beginning.

The end apparently, really is nigh!