Let me describe the process: you’re sitting there, eagerly foaming at the mouth while looking at the download bar tick away the percentage, your new version of SVN just moments away from installation. Everything’s done, you install, and you’re ready to go. But wait, no you’re not! Because suddenly you can’t check anything out, or commit any changes. Your repository has just turned into a big indecipherable lump of data.
Fortunately, there’s a way to solve this. You just have to uninstall your latest version of SVN, reinstall an old version, dump your repository (which gets ever more painful the longer you’ve had to build up revisions), uninstall the old version of SVN, reinstall the new version of SVN, and load the repository dump you just created (which is just as painful as dumping it). This is made easier by the utility created by SVN — oh, wait, they didn’t make one. So, you’re just going to have to sit there, stabbing needles into your genetalia for (relative) entertainment while the SVN dump process completes and you uninstall and reinstall SVN till you’re blue in the face.
I did this all a while ago, and somehow it all worked out. Now I’m coming up on a situation where an old repository I missed the first time isn’t set up to work right. Now it’s back to the old drawing board. I dump the repository, reinstall, and then go to load, but wait. Access denied? Oh dear, it seems like my dump file is all that’s left of my repository, because it can’t be bothered to load. I created a brand new repository and everything, and somehow access is denied. To svnadmin.
But, in the meantime, I go to check on my other repositories (which I can’t for the life of me remember how to set up such that they’re accessible to the outside world on Windows and god knows the docs don’t help). As they’re inaccessible through the svn:// protocol, I go through file://, but now I get a mysterious “Unable to open an ra_local session” message. So, now all of my local repositories are walled off from me as well.
My good friend Google is silent on the matter. Well, he’s not silent so much as Autistic. He gives me results but they don’t have any answers in them, just echoes of what I’m saying to it. Other people have the problem, but almost always on svn import rather than svn co and no one seems to be able to provide any good answers. I know it’s not a Windows-only problem at least, though, because almost all the examples are from a Linux (or Linux-style) OS.
I’ve got the latest version of SVN, and the latest version of TortoiseSVN now. Before, somehow I was able to run SVN 1.3 and TortoiseSVN 1.4 and have them both interact with repositories, which should be impossible (1.3 uses format 3, 1.4 uses format 5). But, it worked. Now I try to do it the way I’m advised and everything breaks. Maybe I’ve missed something painfully obvious, or maybe SVN just sucks. I’m hoping it’s the former, because if it’s the latter then that means all my code for several projects stored locally is lost.
Thanks, SVN! You’re a pal!
]]>Now I’m less apologetic.
]]> That’s not to say I’m totally pleased with myself for the way I acted. I just understand it more, and see it less as the dark underbelly upon my soul than I did before. For once, I actually feel less bad about something that happened before, rather than more bad.From what I remembered, we were talking about some artists and their artwork, and I flew off the handle. Somehow I had turned being snooty into a brawl of words. I was shadowboxing because they didn’t know it was a fight and I was losing even then. When I woke up in the morning all I could remember was that I had suddenly gone rabid and no one was having fun anymore.
However, now I can see what happened a little more clearly. I get very incensed when I hear about things that rub me the wrong way. One of these things is the Body Works mentioned in the article at item #3, and in the picture at the head. It is, in essence, skinned bodies put on display like incredibly violent life-size Barbie dolls. The idea is that the bodies are donated, and that’d be all well and good if they could prove it, but they can’t. Even that wasn’t what bugged me. My friend told me he had taken his niece to see it.
She’s 8.
I don’t often get verbal when I get incensed as mentioned earlier. Usually I recognize it’s not my place to rear a friend’s brother’s child, and that such things will only lead to conflict with no resolution. However, as I mentioned, I was pretty messed up. So, someone took a child to see a display of grotesqueries that reminds me not so much of high art as of the freak shows of old, wherein people’s dignity was ripe for the raping by the members of the cackling public. To my addled mind, this represented a wrong requiring correction. With the only tools my voice, I proceeded to set about hacking away at this misdeed.
But, all that happened was that I insulted people for being so damn foolish, in my opinion. That didn’t go over so well, as I mentioned. My poise and prose was washed away hours earlier with a bottle of liquor. Ad hominem attacks were the best I could manage, and my feeble attempts met with laughter, as one laughs at the drunk on the street arguing with a mailbox. That’s when I got down into the nitty-gritty and called them idiots, and the laughter stopped. The party was officially over and all I felt was bad because I couldn’t remember even what we were talking about that got me so thoroughly riled. But now I remember, and I no longer feel the need to shave my head in penance.
Things piss me off, and then I respond. This is a natural reaction. Usually I bite my tongue, but it was too far loosened. So, I spoke out of turn. But, I didn’t speak out of the blue, and that’s where my concern came from.
]]>The smell of fall is in my nostrils again. An agitating feeling of nostalgia creeps over me. If there’s one phobia I have, it is of my memories. They are things that make you wish for the better times that you had to ruin by growing up and changing. The whole world changes and I accept it, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. One of these days I’ll figure that all out, but it’s not today. Today, the summer is dying.
I wish I could grasp it by the ethereal threads tethering it to the Earth, to my own little corner of it. Then I could pull it in, keeping it with me, keeping me warm. But instead, I hold nothing. My hands, opening closing on air, are distinctly human in their function and limitation. I can feel it there, or at least I think I can. The pulsating yet abstract notion of a time quickly passing by: it’s there in my hand but obviously it can’t be. God, I wish these feelings would just go away.
But they don’t. They never do.
All the time, I feel out-of-place. A stranger in my own land. And it’s worse than that. I feel I am a stranger in my own mind. Every thought I have is foreign, every sensation coming from somewhere else. It’s as though I am nothing but an observer on my own life. Maybe I am. Maybe we all are, and it’s just so easy to ignore the feeling that we blissfully walk along in our lives, content that we’re all actually here.
But we’re not. We never are.
We’re just as untouchable and unknowable as the fleeting summer days. I could reach out and touch you, and god I wish I could. But it’s nothing. All I can do is recoil at those contacts; retract, hermitlike, into a state of fear. It’s fear of the unknowable. I can never know you, and it breaks my heart. I simply want to share those little moments of raw emotion with someone else. But we’re all liars. All our thoughts come from somewhere else, and we just hide them away before anyone else can see. I don’t blame you; it’s a defense mechanism. Yet still, it breaks my heart.
I don’t see how I’m supposed to progress. The summer days are gone and the only thing left now is the cold embrace of memory in the swiftly approaching fall.
]]>And then there’s me.
]]> I’d like to say I’m very noble and all that; I mean, I certainly have the aspirations of a noble human being. I’d like to get into politics or something, not for the power but for the true possibility that if you position yourself right, you can make the world a better place. I try to help people out when I can, I talk to people that I just plain don’t like for hours when they’re feeling down in the dumps in hope that I can brighten their day.But it’s not enough to just try. Aside from actually achieving something, there’s got to be some effusive love for the entirety of humanity driving the system that I just don’t have. At least, right now I’m having trouble locating it. I think sometimes I do, and then other times I just hate everything. Right now I mostly just hate myself.
If all this seems random and out-of-context, I’m not surprised. Suffice it to say I was quite viciously rude to a friend of mine the other night, and to my boyfriend. I can’t even say it was witty, because I was too stupid from drinking and other impairments to make much sense. I talked to Larry about it tonight, and he told me he thought I would have run back to a corner if I could have, and he hit it closer than he probably thought.
I wasn’t just running to a corner for feeling bad about being mean. I was getting scared, because I was trying to make myself seem impressive in the face of overwhelming evidence that I was just being an idiot, but doing it while beating a hasty retreat. All of this lack of love for humanity, traces back I think to massive and conflicting feelings of superiority and inferiority that I’ve got. On the one hand, people have told me since I was young that I was smart, and my sister even once said “scary smart,” as though I were genuinely intimidating. I think it seeped through into my psyche like some water damage from hell, because now I constantly think of how much better I am than everyone. But then, I see people do things I can’t. They succeed at jobs while I fail miserably. They find great fun in activities that I just can’t get at. They set goals, and then they achieve them, while I merely talk or blog or just bitch about everything. Obviously I’m doing something, or quite probably everything, wrong.
How am I so smart if I can’t do the basic parts of my life right?
In any case, it all boils down to feeling better and smarter while, simultaneously, feeling far more inept and stupid than everyone else. How can you like people if you think you’re above them? How can you like people if they represent everything you want but are too moronic to get? Good shit has fallen in my lap since day one of my life, and I squander and flounder while people around me are struggling uphill with their boulders only to have them tumble down to the bottom again.
So what’s the solution? Well, step one is that I blog/bitch about it. I haven’t figured out step two. Some day maybe I’ll happen upon it but until then I guess I’ll just hate myself for being stupid, while continuing to, somehow, believe I’m the smartest shit hitting the fan of life.
]]>It was weird, while my mother was describing the “operation” it was like I could see myself being operated on. Naturally, being as how my heart was out of my body and there was nothing else to keep me “alive,” one could describe it as an out-of-body experience. At any rate, I spent the whole rest of the dream walking around with this thing in my chest and I felt entirely out-of-sorts, as though I could feel a lack of beating (because it didn’t just mimic the functionality of the heart, it somehow went around the necessity of pumping blood at all). I guess the best way you could describe it was that I felt hollow.
Ordinarily I can figure out what dreams mean, and I don’t like to let them bother me that much; but, lately, they’ve been creeping over my conscious hours and playing havoc with the rest of my day. I’ve been concerned for a while that I treat my body horribly and that one day my heart will simply fail. Seeing as how that’s always on my mind, that’s not what’s bugging me.
Right now I’ve got echoes of that hollow feeling.
]]>Maybe I spend too much time analyzing happiness, particularly my own. However, I like to think of it as determining what specifically it is that makes me happy so I can keep doing that. There are buttons that give you food and there are buttons that give you electric jolts; I just want to know which is which.
]]>I want to believe I have an effect on the universe. Sometimes I let myself believe it for a little while, but I always snap back to what I think is reality and I feel stupid for letting myself think such thoughts. I envy people who know reality to be something different. I think I am just a biological Von Neumann machine interacting with another machine to effect further inter-process communication. I’d love to think I have purpose here, that maybe I’m wasting time and god-given talents to change the world for the better, but I just think I’m lazy, and I’m not really meant for anything special.
Mostly, I’m just posting a blog to say I did. I’ll try to clarify this later but this is my second draft and I’m halfway towards deleting the whole damn thing all over again.
]]>Name: Mangy
HDD: 120gb ATA Hard Drive
RAM: 22048MB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM
Video: Mobile Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 with 64MB-251MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory / 17.0” diagonal widescreen TruBrite®TFT LCD display at 1440x900 native resolution (WXGA+)
OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1
Extras: Built in webcam and mic.
So yea, that is my new toy and I will enjoy it very much.
]]>We’ll see how it goes.
]]>I started off last week feeling not too shabby. No colds really, just the occasional realization that I’ll be going bald in the not too distant future (I’m looking at you, male ancestors). That’s relatively painless though, except for the laughs I get whenever I try to hit on hot chicks in a Rogaine commercial. Those cut deep.
Then, The Shed™ happened.
]]> I like my parents. I like helping them out. I like spending time with them. I also enjoy putting things together, some occasionally physical labor to offset my otherwise sedentary lifestyle at my desk job. So, I was going to go to my parents’ place this past Saturday and hang out, and when my mother said they were putting up a shed they bought, I said why the hell not. I spent Saturday leveling the ground in their yard and putting together the base frame upon which we were to set the shed. No big deal, I go home and all is ducky, with the promise of more work Sunday.Sunday comes and goes, we fight and fight and fight with the shed, and just after the sun goes down and the floodlights get put up, we realize we’re out of washers for the screws (to minimize potential rust). Well, damn. Oh, well, it’s largely in place and looking quite shed-like. I go home and all is content with the world.
Monday: I notice some bumps on my arm. Oh, hell, it’s poison ivy. OK, I just don’t scratch it and it doesn’t seem serious, but I put some band-aids over it to help me not scratch it even more (less than not at all?). The band-aids come off at the end of the day, and the bumps have multiplied. Oh well, still not itching real bad. I go to sleep. I wake up, there are bumps on my other arm, and my neck is itching (though no bumps). To cut an increasingly long story short: I am now marked in various random places (my legs and the top of my feet? The hell?) and the itching is getting worse. I accidentally scratch open my feet without realizing it was poison ivy at first and thus prone to popping. Band-aids to the rescue again!
Whatever, poison ivy sucks, but now it takes me a while to wash my hands because I’m trying not to agitate the spots near and on my hands. Then yesterday, I try to open a sealed-with-sugar bottle of Nestea, and I somehow manage to slice up my palm in that strange crevice between my thumb and forefinger. Well, shit, now my hand has gills. Plus, band-aids won’t stay on it. I’ve gone through four in the past day on this one spot, not to mention the band-aids everywhere else that the poison ivy is intensely irritated at (places where otherwise clothes would rub against and agitate it).
Now, my index finger’s nail has gotten separated from the skin under it slightly. It’s not bleeding but it’s that special kind of annoyingly painful that makes you want to beat on something when you hit it wrong. As it turns out, I do that a lot when typing (this blog has been fun). I’m debating putting a band-aid on it to keep it from getting irritated more, but then I’ll be composed of 90% band-aids and the number will inevitably only climb from there. I’m watching out for rakes because I swear to god I’m concerned I’ll accidentally step on one and have it smack me in the face for the comedy coup-d’état.
Every so often I have a bout of relatively minor problems that combined together are either dangerous or just really funny/annoying (the funny part is inapplicable to me). A few years ago I had some sort of bizarre foot fungus infection that caused my lymph nodes in my legs to swell like balloons and was intensely painful. I used Lotrimin for a week and never since then have I had a foot fungus problem. I had pink-eye three separate times in a 2 and a half month period about 3 years ago, and never since then have had an incidence. It’s just plain bizarre, but every now and again something just gets into my system and makes it go haywire. Maybe it’s the price I pay for not falling ill very often.
In closing: screw you, poison ivy. You ruined my life (temporarily)!
]]>Well, here’s the problem that’s confronted me since shortly after all of this started: I’m at work. I have to call everyone around and I hate talking to people I know on the phone. Well, none of this is a huge deal yet, the guy at the second place even says he’ll walk down and drive the car to his spot for me, being as how it’s so close. I wasn’t sure yet I wanted to go with him, so I put off the decision. Bad move.
Later on, I figured what the hell I don’t know any places at all, so it’s a crap shoot any way I go. I call back the first and second place and stumble and mutter my way through asking them to pick up the car. I need to fill out paperwork though to authorize the work. Well damn, I don’t even know when I leave work these days. I talk to my boss afterward though and supposedly we can leave in time.
Here’s where our other boss steps in and monopolizes everyone’s time (as he always does), until it’s too late to leave. Now I call back the place and ask them to fax me the paperwork instead. I tell my boss that after requesting we leave early, now we have to stay late. Super.
It takes them an hour and a half to try to fax the damn thing, we realize it isn’t working, and they then tell me that they can E-mail it. They could have done that a long time ago and we all would have been better off. So they do, and even that takes them a half an hour. Well, I print it out, fill it out, and then try to fax it back. It doesn’t work. Oh well, by now they’ve closed anyway, and we leave, with me not even having succeeded in my objective that delayed us two hours in leaving. What’s worse is that I spent a lot of that time on the phone and can’t even justify putting down hours for it; so I was at work for two hours that I won’t get paid for.
It wasn’t the worst day I’ve had but it was still pretty damn irritating. Also, I didn’t have a sandwich. I had pizza.
]]>Also, as a reminder, all of the pictures etc. I’ve ever mentioned in blog posts since the beginning of my site have been kept at this location. It’s interesting to browse through sometimes.
]]>So, at some point I’ll probably blog some more than this, but I’m at work and should probably be doing work-related things.
]]>