All right, so when I woke up for work on the 31st, there was a distro upgrade available. At this point, I was about ready to throw my laptop out the window - 9.04 was buggy for me, with very unstable 3D acceleration, problems with sound output, the headphone jacks - there wasn't much that wasn't borked in some manner or another. Really not very fun to deal with - the CPU was working its ass off to keep things moving on the screen, so my battery life peaked at maybe 2 hours. Overall, it was piss-poor. So, I went for the upgrade without any research - fuck, if I lost everything, I wouldn't really give a damn. So, went for the upgrade, and went for work.

Came back home to find the boot screen on 9.10, Karmic Koala, and upon logging in, I found that all the problems had just evaporated. Proper video drivers, better sound, and with that there was the capacity for all sorts of eye-candy now that the machine was in proper order. Aside from that, there's some interesting new utilities - the Software Center replaces Add/Remove from later versions, which is actually pretty nice, despite skepticism. Additionally, there's an Art Manager for downloading appearance packs straight from art.gnome, which is really handy.

All in all I think it's a great upgrade, and I know lots of people with HP boxes were having big problems. I think that now would be the time to give Ubuntu a shot, if you're curious - this is definitely one of the better releases I've seen.

Although I do sort of reminisce about 6.06, way back in the day, when things were simple, and I was but a noob...

Okay, so my homie/friend and fellow typewriting enthusiast has been posting this series of journals for most of October about strange paranormal stuff to get everybody in the mood Halloween, or perhaps to upstage TAPS. Anyway, there's all these incidences detailed there, and as I read them, I started to wonder why I'd never seen anything so strange. Never even felt odd, you know?

Until last week, that was. I saw what might have possibly been the most bizarre and terrifying thing in my whole existence.

Okay, so I went to bed early in the morning, probably around 0130 or something like that. I make the bed, pull the covers over myself, and pass out. Pretty tired - I think I had been playing Timesplitters or something. Next morning, I wake up, get out of bed, and pull the blankets off to make the sheet again. I mean, the sheet that I have over the mattress isn't really tucked in very tight, and every morning it's a mess. This morning, I turn the lights on, and - get this - THE SHEET IS PERFECTLY SMOOTH AND MADE OUT. 100%.

So what is this? Clearly, it's flying straight in the face of the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics. It's never happened to me before, and I don't know what kind of circumstances would have to come together to get it to work out...

So yeah, beyond that, I sat down and finished Norwegian Wood. It was... well, not bad, but sort of average for Murakami, I thought. No crazy plot twists. Nobody who was particularly outrageous. Lots of people offing themselves. So, as far as concept goes, I enjoyed Wind-Up Bird and Hard-Boiled Wonderland much more, but it certainly wasn't bad. Reading his prose is really enjoyable for me, so I suppose that he could write a Ulysses sort of thing where absolutely fuckall happens and I'd still keep turning the pages.

Speaking of novels, my current work is pushing 45,000 words right now at about the 5/8ths mark... so maybe, allowing for a bit of slackening, some 60-75,000 words when completed? It's still in space, there's still SPACE CRIMES to be solved, but it's just longer. I couldn't exactly post it here, you see, mostly due to length and partially due to my intentions of publishing in the future, but take my word for it... it's pretty good.

So yeah, I'm gonna have to turn in the paperwork for another independent study at Northern Illinois, since the term's nearly up. Keeping on writing, though. The Olympia is still going strong, so there's no telling where I might stop.

^{As for this journal - well, it stops right here.}

So yeah, I finished off my Glenfiddich 12 last week, which left me without a scotch. Got paid, thought about it for a bit, and I had always wanted to try an Islay, so I figured that I'd get a good one. I got a bottle of 15-year Laphroaig, and I took it home after work, and after uncorking it, only then does it dawn on me that I've got a head cold, so it won't taste like much if I can't smell anything.

So, I kinda got all let down, but then I poured a little bit anyways - like half a finger. Still pretty damn good.

I think next weekend I'm gonna buy a big 1.75L of Black Label so I'll have something I can drink and not feel bad about.

...with whoever the crazy motherfucker who designed the Olympia SG3 is.

<sup>Okay, so this calls for some backstory. I've had one desktop typewriter for a while, a Royal KMM which I absolutely hate. It's tall, the touch adjustment is terrible (IMO) and I could just go on and on about how much I loathe it for being so goddamned huge. That aside, I've always liked the idea of having an absolutely huge desktop machine... mostly because they're badass, but it's also true that they have some pretty cool functions you just can't get on a portable.

Additionally, I'm an Olympia fan to the max, and everybody seems to love the SM1 and SM3 (Schreibmaschine Grosse, or Big Typewriter in English - hahaha), so when I saw one come up on Craigslist for $20 I jumped on it. Seemed like a pittance. I did the Blues Brothers thing and drove down to Joliet, picked it up, and took it home.</sup>

THE THING IS BLOODY HUGE. And that part didn't really shock me too much, though it's actually a thing of majesty to look at - it's bigger in every dimension than the KMM, which I thought was pretty impractically huge. That said, it's really an excellent machine. Since it's so huge, it's easy to clean, easy to work on, and the only thing that could really stop it would be a nuclear war... and that's only because it would kill off the humans that use them.

The surreal thing is that it bears a striking similarity to the SM9 - in fact, you could say it's just an SM9... but three times as big. Sure, there's no chrome on the carriage, but the coloration is the same, the hood is the same... it's just huge. It's surreal, though, when you look at the SG3 next to the SM9. The SG looks sort of comical, like the token fat kid or something.

^{Maybe, the better thing to say would be that it's just a caricature of the SM9. Was there supposed to be an element of postmodern humor in this?}

But I worked on it a bit last night after I took it home, with the usual brushes and compressed air and sewing machine oil on a few keys that had started to slow, and it's really very nice. Most interesting, perhaps, is the "paper injector", this big lever... you just sit the paper in the carriage, give it a yank, and it rolls it right up to the right place. I think this is incredibly cool, though I don't know why.

But yeah, having a geekasm here. I'll put up some comparison photos this weekend. Right now I'm busy writing... I'd offer some more details, but that'd be time that I'm not writing anything of consequence... y'know?

Barn sale was mostly a bust - got a SCM Corsair Deluxe of late 70s manufacture (I think) in its original box, which is pretty neat, but it takes proprietary ribbons and it's not exactly the best machine. In fact, it's actually pretty shitty. Weak strikes abound - but it's light, and it's small... though it's in no place to displace my Royal or Olympia ultraportables. Can't argue with $5, though. If anything, it's an interesting display piece.

So, a while ago I was really into postmodernism, and I recall one person saying that humans, for all intents and purposes, are cyborgs. Fair enough - many of our vital functions are carried out or otherwise enhanced by machines. Modern society wouldn't work without the integrated circuit.

So, I moved on from postmodernism and the idea basically went dormant until I started reading egalitarian biocentricism the other day, which I think is a crock of shit, but I mounted a counter-argument that stated that, since typewriters and other machines have "interests", in that certain actions enhance their intended function, while other actions could be considered "pains" for the machines - like if I were to jump on one of my typewriters. That would frustrate its desires in that it would impair its ability to function.

So, I presented this in order to torpedo the argument, which I managed to do pretty well, but then that old idea struck me: maybe it's not all bad to be considerate of our machines? At least, we should be mindful of them. Like how language determines the parameters in which we can think, our machines determine how we perceive the world. In essence, the printing press and the television, the radio and the automobile, affect tremendously the nature and amount of information that we ever take in, in the first place. All these machines form a sort of exoskeleton around us, you could say. The human experience of the 21st Century is fundamentally different from the human experience of the 19th Century because of the extension of our senses provided by the new machines of the Industrial Revolution, and so on and so forth.

So, FFS, Marshall McLuhan was right!

From that, I suppose you could extrapolate that changing the machines we interact with thus changes what kind of ideas propagate within us.