Teel McClanahan

So … I hate to admit it, but after only two and a half years of use and up-to-the-minute upgrades with little in maintenance or up-keep, my iMac (one of the first flat-screen models off the line) had begun to freeze up with semi-regularity, and some applications had become unstable. Sigh. I think it was the two major OS “upgrades” instead of clean installs, first to Jaguar, then to Panther, that allowed little problems to slip in.

I’ve been working for a while to get everything in order for a buckup, format, and clean install of Panther (Mac OS X 10.3), and last night I did it. Actually, last night I spent around 8 hours fighting with trying to get my entire iTunes library backed up (which would have taken 10 minutes or so, had I an iPod) to DVDs and CDs. I eventually worked out that the problem was related to 2 corrupt MP3 files, but I’ll be sending a detailed email to Apple to explain what could have been done better, the errors I got, and as much information as I can about what went wrong. I “coastered” 6 DVD-R and 3 CD-R discs before I got all (ok, probably all) of my music backed up. Sigh.

I started copying music around 5PM. I started the clean install around 1AM. I went to bed at 3AM, after I’d started it downloading all the updates. Sadly the ISP up here disconnected me not long after that, so I’m still downloading updates now.

But I’m up and running, everything looks to be okay. I’m restoring data as I need it… I don’t just want to drop everything back in place, in case some of it was part of the problem. So, as I need something restored, I restore it. We’ll see how this goes, how much I don’t restore. And if the problems come back.

…

I’m pretty certain that part of the problem is that I am not simply a casual computer user. Not that I’m the sort of geek who gets in and re-writes the OS or runs terminal commands all the time, or who is constantly looking to add new cards and memory and whatever to upgrade an onld computer. No. I … I use applications that require intense amounts of system resources, and I use several of them at once. And if I’m not using resource-hungry apps like Photoshop, Quicken, Excel, Garageband, and various applications for copying DVDs, I’m running all the other apps at once: Safari (with a dozen tabs open), Mail, iChat, MSNIM, iTunes, iCal, etc… and realistically it’s some combination of the more intense and less intense, probably seven or eight at a time.

And I bought the top-of-the-line model of the flat-screen iMac on the day it debuted, but … well … I just need more computer, I think.

And I could probably do the same stuff I’m doing now on the top-of-the-line dual-G5 and still max out the system resources accidentally all the time.

I keep looking forward to the day when computers are so ridiculously fast that I’m the only person left in the world who wants more processing power, more memory, more resources, because then the industry will just stop and I’ll be left frustrated forever.

…

I’ve been dreaming for the last few nights … I’ve been developing in my mind a new computer model from Apple that is modular. The base unit would be a configurable (low through mid-high range) system that could stand alone, but would be partnered with additional purchasable modules that could be connected or disconnected from the base unit easily. The modules could represent, theoretically, any sort of components you wanted to upgrade, from memory to hard drives to processors. But what I want is for it to be processors. So that I’m working along, my computer isn’t going fast enough, I just order/buy another processor module, click it onto my base station (without shutting down) and I instantly have additional processing power. And I keep clicking modules onto my base station for years to come, keeping up with my needs.

See… there’s been some speculation recently by … knowledgable minds … that Apple may work with IBM to put together Mac OS X -compatible machines that run on Cell processors. This would not have to be to the exclusion of the “G5”-type processors (which are based on the Power4, and potentially soon to be based on the Power5 processors from IBM), but could power entry-level and mid-level machines… that could be modularly upgraded to high-end machines and beyond, since Cell processors work together effeciently in parallel, and can be combined … effectively in very high numbers.

…

And now I’m babbling.

I just want my computer to work faster.

Which it seems to be.

We’ll see if it continues.

And perhaps I shall post about something more “personal” in the near future. Or not. We’ll see.

I’ve been working on that bigger project, featuring GWB, for a while now, and it’s a while yet to go before it’s done. But to test some of the techniques I’ll be using on that, I decided to do a smaller piece. Thus, Screw Moo:

(click to see more images, or to buy “Screw Moo”)

It began as simple plywood. Aha! But then an artist got his hands on it, and it was transformed. Nearly seven hundred holes were drilled into a careful pattern in a carefully selected area of the wood, based on a series of computer simulations and artistic interpretation thereof. The wood was then sanded and prepared and spray-painted black. Three hundred and thirty three screws were carefully punched through sheets of paper so that they would all be facing head up, and their heads were spray-painted red. After the paint had dried sufficiently, the long and tedious process of carefully screwing hundreds of tiny screws into an intricately planned two-color design began. Last night, around four in the AM, the final screws were in place, and the piece was signed, dated and serialized.

…

Seriously though, I’m glad there’s only one color of screw to deal with in the GWB project. It makes the whole process a little easier, since I don’t have to refer constantly to diagrams and guides to determine where I am and where I am not supposed to put one type of screw or the other. Also, since it’s about 48″x32″, although it will be a lot more screwing, the end result should be more satisfying. Look for it in around a month. I hope.

Anyway, enjoy “Screw Moo” – a proof of concept, from which I gained some valuable experience.

So … yeah. Comment here if you can see what’s different and care. If you don’t notice and/or don’t care, don’t comment.

If you do notice and you do care, let me know.

I’m thinking and re-thinking some things. There are more changes down the road. We’ll see what happens.

I’m beginning to feel useless again. Or is it powerless that I feel?

I suppose I have some uses around here – mostly it’s manual labor at the instructions of the other people around here. Even that doesn’t manage to take up much time. Perhaps its a form of nihilism I’m slipping into.

You see, I know (sometimes) that I probably ought to be spending more time working on self-directed, self-motivated projects such as building furniture, which would theoretically result in the income that I need. But … there are things going on around here… it’s not likely that there will be an easy way for me to continue making furniture after a couple of months, or to sell it (though the selling hasn’t been going well so far with things the way they are now), and the whole thing, learning to make and making furniture, trying to sell the furniture, all of it just seems so futile. So I’m putting some time and some effort into it, but … certainly not as much as I would if I felt my time was being well spent.

And because I know I probably ought to be self-motivating, working on furniture projects I’ve invented somehow, working on property-clearing projects I don’t have any proper instructions for, something… I spend hours every day just puttering about, not doing anything. I have my own personal projects to do, art projects and writing projects and … heck, cleaning and reading books and re-working Modern Evil and completing a couple/few comics I’ve got in the works and working on that correspondence course I haven’t touched in an age, and … and I feel bad about doing any of those things because I feel like I ought to be doing proper “work” instead. But I don’t often have instructions for work to do, and the apparent futility of the furniture-building makes it nye-impossible to self-motivate… so I can’t get myself to work and I can’t get myself to do what I like to do either, and I end up not getting anything done, and then just feeling worse because another 24 hours, another 168 hours, and so on and so on goes by and what do I have to show for it?

Irritable bowels. Tension. Pain. You would have trouble believing the odors my ass has been producing tonight, the pains my intestines have been giving me these recent days and weeks and months. And it’s so easy to say it’s the food, or a bug going around, but I tend to believe it’s the stress.

And then I use a word like “Stress” and I feel worse than before because what do I have to be stressed out about? I don’t pay rent, or utilities, or car payments. I don’t even buy my own food most of the time. The only bills I have are debt payments from some poor decisions I made years ago. And so far they’ve stayed paid, though I haven’t looked for a job since I moved up here. And I have food and shelter and clothes and warmth on cold nights. And I have entertainments upon entertainments, music and movies and satellite TV and the internet. How can I use a word like “stress” to describe something like my life? I don’t deserve such words, it seems, and every time I find myself using them I feel worse.

+++

I’ve been trying to keep charts… calendars, really, but in reverse. I’ve never had much use for calendars into the future – I usually don’t know what I’m going to be doing next week or next month or next year besides the same-old-same old until the last minute when whoever’s in charge deigns to tell me. But calendars into the past, I’ve always thought there was some use there if I could just harness it.

So, for instance, I started tracking how many hours I sleep each night. Using the fancy-pants OS X application iCal (which is designed to be one of those future-looking calendars, I believe) I’ve actually been putting in the actual hours I sleep each night/morning for over a couple of months now. I can see, graphically, how my slumber moves around the hours of the day, and fluctuates in size. I had originally started doing this on a calendar I’d put together to track my Bowflex progress. But … I basically haven’t been doing any exercise, so … this month (Triober) when I put together the calendar in Excel I re-worked it again. Now I have fields for each day of the month for noting how much time I spent sleeping, working on furniture, working on art, and writing. Plus, two little spaces to note whether I took a shower, and whether I exercized. (I have devised simple codes to say whether I did Yoga or Bowflex or something else in the space provided.) So far this month (it’s the early morning of 344 as I write this, so it’s nearly two-thirds of the way through the month) it appears I’ve spent about 144.5 hours sleeping, about 12 hours working on art (actually, most of that was spent drilling holes. For an art project), about 12 hours working on furniture, and only 3 hours working on writing (I wrote the first draft of one of ten short stories for the anthology I’m working on). Looks like I did 40 minutes of Yoga one morning ten days ago, and have taken two showers (though I meant to take another shower today, and will likely have one tomorrow when I get up).

For those of you who don’t get off on math and spreadsheets like I do, that averages out to 8 hours of sleep a night, forty minutes each on art and furniture a day, ten minutes a day on writing, a shower every nine days (though if I shower in the morning it’ll be about a shower every 6 days), and effectively no exercise at all.

Well, I guess Focus On: Art isn’t going too poorly; I’m spending as much time working on art as I am working on the only thing around here that has real potential (::coughcough::) to earn money. And not spending too much time actually writing (though time spent working on the cover and editing of Dragons’ Truth is not included in that number, since I wasn’t actually “writing”), which was one of the goals of the whole Focus On thing.

But do you see how my time has been spent? Half an hour, up to a couple of hours in a day working on furniture or sometimes art, then days at a time where almost nothing gets done. Maybe I should figure out how to track time spent setting about the place, thinking about getting things done without actually accomplishing anything. Not time spent reading books or watching movies or actually doing things online, just all the hours I spend literally not doing anything but thinking about getting things done. I suspect it would be in close competition with sleeping.

Maybe I should start tracking how often I have gastrointestinal discomfort, while I’m at it.

Looking at the calendar for Ichiebmer (two months ago) which tracked sleep and work (not art and writing) and which only shows two showers, it looks like I spent 21 hours working on furniture (which is more, on average, than this month so far by two minutes a day) and 222.75 hours sleeping (with two days not reporting) for an average of very nearly 8 hours a night. Oh, and I worked out on the Bowflex on two different days. Which means that for what I’m tracking here, there is no real change from last month to this month. I’m not working more or less on furniture, not sleeping more or less, on average, each night, and not showering much more so far. Oh, and my weight hasn’t moved out of the 214 to 220 range in over two years, so that’s not really changing either.

(Okay, okay, yes. What about Remember, last month? 3 showers, 3 hours worked on furniture (if these numbers are to be believed), 206.5 hours slept (with 4 days not reporting) for an average of just under 8 hours a night. Which, yes, means I didn’t get much done on furniture last month. I wonder what I was doing instead. Probably the same old nihilism I’m feeling now, except this month my father is taking a little initiative to get furniture done and provising me with partial instructions to follow. Sigh.)

Aren’t statistics and numbers and things fun to play with? I think so. Like I said, calendars never really worked for me into the future, but they always made sense for looking into the past. So if I cross-reference my lack of drive to work with my lack of drive to post last month, I can see that maybe everything wasn’t peachy-keen.

Anyway, I’ve got to get to bed soon. I’ll probably sleep around 8 hours, which means that if I go to bed now I won’t be up until around 11. It takes me around an hour (minimum) to get around and get myself ready to face the day (most of this is emotional), so no one will see me until lunchtime, it seems. Later if I write any more of this tonight, or read any more of The Confusion. So straight to sleep for me it is. And perhaps in the morning a shower (which should set me back to before noon unless I take a little less sleep), and then perhaps I’ll try to get myself to get working.

Anyone have some advice that gets through nihilism and futility that could help me self-motivate? Or maybe you’re hiring for some job that doesn’t require me to interact with humans or set my own schedule – I’m good within structured environments. Start time, stop time, job description. Without that, I tend to work way too long or not at all. Like these posts. I write too much or nothing, it seems. Here’s one of the ones that goes on too long.

Last night I had a dream…

Okay, so it was this morning, within the last couple of hours. But… You know. Last night just sounds better.

I’m going to try to write down a few relevent plot points, as it is fading quickly from my mind, and there was something sweet about it I’d like to keep… but that I’m not sure will translate here.

Already I can’t recall exactly how it began, but somehow I managed to show up at a meeting that was apparantly a secret organization of [removed]. But they weren’t doing much secret conspiacy planning. I think they had a guest speaker, ’cause she was showing all these slides and was … simply not interesting enough to me … or that could have been because of this young woman I met there. She started out sitting on the floor next to the … large cushion I was reclining across, and … I won’t get into details, but suffice it to say I am as awkward and liable toward misunderstandings in serious flirting in my dreams as I am here. But we managed, and it went well and I’ve got them in my mind, but I’m not going into the details here of the subtle touching leading to less subtle touching, massage, and more, with lots of hushed conversation, trying not to distract from the woman who never stopped giving her lecture. And I’m trying to hold onto the young woman’s face, but it’s fading with the dream – I might recognize her if I saw her, but would she recognize me? And as I was about to ask her name, the alarm clock next to my bed went off, instantly ejecting me physically from what was going on in the dream. Not like I hear about sometimes where the alarm clock gets integrated into someone’s dream – that’s never happened to me – but just ::poof:: and I’m turning off the alarm and trying desperately to get my mind to return to the dream so I can learn her name.

But I seem to return to a point earlier in time, but aware of the other dream – as though I had been sleeping, dreaming, and woken up into this dream – though that is not exactly the case. So now I’m going about … whatever my normal business is, considering I don’t live in a city and this was taking place in a city, and I’m walking along a street towards a destination … I don’t know if I didn’t know my destination in the dream, or if I’ve forgotten it … and I came to a familiar street corner, but I knew I’d never been there before. And I remembered from my (earlier) dream that if I turned right, 1/4 mile down the road would be a restaurant I’d never even seen before, and I knew the name of it in my dream had sounded like IBN BIZA, and … thinking that I might be late for wherever I was supposed to be going, but believing I’d had a vision of this and ought to follow it, I turned right. And after a bit of walking, passing an obstruction the same white building that has been in my (earlier) dream appeared, with (and I can’t recall the exact letters, but within two letters and one phoneme of) IBN BIZA in big red letters – this was the place. There would be a secret meeting of a secret group here soon, I knew, and that young woman would be there, and I could meet her again, perhaps learn her name, perhaps have some good times, and … well, there’s a small part of me that believes that if I had learned her name in the dream I could look her up in life. Alas, it was not to be.

See, I went into the restaurant, and I knew the way to the secret back room, but I didn’t know who I was supposed to talk to or what I was supposed to say to be allowed in, so I ended up sortof hanging around in the front of the restaurant, hoping to see someone I recognized from what I was now thinking of as my vision of the future to follow them into the room. And the next person to come in was Jamie Kennedy. So at first I treated him like I was treating every other random person who walked in the door, I ignored him, just watching the door for the young woman I wanted to see or any of the other secret members. But apparently this put him at ease or perhaps in my dream he recognized me from either when we actually met at comicon or somehow when I saw him more recently he remembered my beard. Anyway, he was fumbling, carrying too much stuff, and handed me some of it while he picked up some he had dropped, and while he ordered from the take-out counter there. And then he came back over and we chatted for a while, about his cancelled show and his going back to school and a recent death in his family – I guess I’m as easy to talk to in my dreams as I am here – and at one point he handed me his … it was a digital device that was a date book and a phone and something else, but not configured like anything I’ve seen before… Maybe I should sketch it out and note some of the features I noticed … but what good would that do? It’ll come out or it won’t, and then what? Anyway, my hands were still full of his other stuff, so I dropped it – but it seemed to survive okay. And not much further into the conversation my alarm went off again – I supposed nine minutes had passed since I’d re-entered the dream state, and it seemed to be going by in real-time, so perhaps I was in The Dreaming, experiencing a shared experience.

It’s hard for me to say, but the second time the alarm woke me, I was just as frustrated by not getting more information from the young woman. I hate to say it – because so many people dismiss it – but we really hit it off right away. I can honestly say right now that I still feel an emotional connection to this person, who seemed to be experiencing the same thing for me at the time. That had it lasted longer I might be able to say it was “love at first sight”, because we really seemed to hit it off well, and things were going well – something I haven’t experienced here, in my life, in years and years. And who is this mystery woman, and would I recognize her if I saw here face here, and would she remember me? There is a strong part of my belief in dreams that involves believing that the other people who populate … certain dreams – I have never had trouble telling the difference between my own mind’s flights of fancy and The Dreaming …are actual people, actually dreaming. And maybe the [removed] know that and get together and have secret meetings in the most secret place – their dreams. And maybe that was a coincidence, but I’d sure like to believe that there are people out there I could fall in love with, who could fall equally for me. And since I had no faith that I could even so much as get back to the conversation with Jamie where I was just beginning to explain the vision or dream I’d had and about the young woman, I didn’t go back to sleep, I woke up full, got out of bed, got online.

And now there’s another person I’ve dreamt of whose name I didn’t get. And she reminds me of someone I’ve seen there before. Twice. And the only time I got any of her name, it was that one of her names (I can’t recall if it was first or last) started with a hard K sound. Which simply isn’t enough. But the smile, her smile, the feeling of being with her in The Dreaming, has been the same all three times. Once when I was 11, once around 19 or … maybe as old as 22 … I don’t recall exactly, and then this morning. Do I have to wait years to see her again? Will I ever meet her outside of The Dreaming? And if I don’t, can I be satisfied with what I do have? Maybe next time I see her there I’ll remember that I need to get her name sooner, that we’ve met before. We’ll see, I suppose, when the time comes.