Ulysses is, without qualification the worst book I have ever read. James Joyce makes me sick. The book is convoluted tour-de-force of bad writing and attempts to “push the boundaries of a novel,” all of which, individually and in essence, have been used to good effect… by other authors. The worst thing about this whole disaster is that there are sparkles of really amazing writing but they are mostly confined to passages where Stephen Dedalus speaks to some of his fellow teachers. The fact that you know Joyce can write this well makes the rest of the book that much more of a disappointment. I don’t know how Ulysses keeps making it to the top of editors choice lists. They must know something I don’t—and I would consider myself fairly well educated and well read. My advice: don’t waist your time reading Ulysses, unless you are hopelessly in love with Modernist writing.
person: “So, who do you work for?”
beggs: “The customer.”
person: “Who’s the customer?”
beggs: “No idea.”
person: “Ahhh, government contractor.”
beggs: “No comment.”
person: “I’ll drink to that.”
crashing linux
Ohh, Jebus junked-up Christ! I completely funked up my computer last night while trying to set up the DSL modem to come up and register automatically on boot. Somehow this trashed my X-windows setup so that it would not even start. Spent two hours hand rewriting my XF86Config file to get X to work again—then enlightenment would not start…. more headaches! Spent some time getting that to work, and now the DSL still does not come up on boot! I don’t know what else to do. I added the entry to the init and rc.d using chkconfig. Everything looks good during boot but then sometimes I can ping Verizon and no one else and sometimes I can’t ping anyone—but I can never ping everyone. And to add to this headache, I seam to have hosed up my gaim settings so that none of the plugins work which means I cannot connect to MSN with gaim—and that’s the network C███████ is on! Ahhh! The long and short of all this is that I spent five hours jerking off my laptop last night and nothing has changed. I love Linux!
net access
I finally have Internet access! So now I can update my journal! Probably lost all four or five of my regular readers in the past three weeks. Oh well, c’est la vie.
Anyway, not much new here to talk about. The biggest thing in my life is lack of things in my life. I am sitting on a chair I stole from my parents house—one of my three pieces of furniture; bed, chair and coffee table. I have finished painting my apartment—the bed room is fine, a few mistakes but those are my fault. The living room on the other hand is making me mad. I painted it red and not only is the red a brighter color then I thought it was but I can see all the roller lines and brush strokes, everywhere that the paint overlaps there is a darker spot—the color it is supposed to be! Problem is I put two coats on everything and have used all of my two gallons of paint! The other problem is when I pulled up the painters tape it took some spots of paint with it, so there are white marks here and there around the trim. And where it did not pull up the tape it looks like crap anyway because the paint somehow got under the tape so the trim does not form a nice clean line with the wall. All in all I feel like my paint job is significantly sub-par. Oh well. Nothing to do about it now—don’t have the money or desire to repaint it or paint another coat on it.
Anyway, bunch of stuff happened over the past few weeks that I would have posted journal entries on but not having net access at home prevented that and I’m just to lazy to try to post them now—not to mention I am having a Geritol moment thinking about it. But, I’m back on line—more post to come!
reach out and touch someone.
Communicate with the world—I have a phone! So now I can call people and speak with them. Make plans. Etc. After this week I should also have Internet service. Maybe then I will update the site more often. Been busy the past few weeks. Been lazy too. Still have not managed to finish painting my apartment. My excuses was that it has 12′ ceilings and I did not have a ladder, but I have one now. I just don’t want to do it tonight. Maybe I wait till tomorrow…