Who Moved My Cheese (review)

I've been hearing people mention this book for quite some time now. I finally read Who Moved My Cheese yesterday. I skipped the intro and the afterward, but the meat (or cheese) of the book was pretty good.

(SPOILERS, sort of)
It's really an allegory about how once we have things easy in life (in business, personal, or just all-around), we ought not get too complacent and comfortable, lest we miss the signs that the "cheese" (the thing(s) that makes life worth living for you) is getting used up and will be gone soon.

In the story, Hem and Haw are shocked to discover one morning that the cheese they had worked so long and hard to attain is suddenly gone after it had been right there where they had found it for years and years. Of course the mice, Scriffy and Scurry, they were well aware of what was happening, and they've already gone racing off to find a new supply because, really, what else is there to do? But the humans, they're not so quick on the uptake because they have all these complex belief systems in their heads that get in the way. They get to thinking like, "Who moved my cheese!?" "Wait and it will come back," "We deserve cheese," etc.

The venerable Professor J. R. R. Tolkien said something to the effect that he detested allegory in all its forms. I guess I am not like him. I feel I understand what he is driving at: that allegory is icky insofar as it's someone else's rather blatant attempt to tell you what to think. Mr. Tolkien is correct--that's bad. However, allegory isn't always like that. Sometimes it can be a (admittedly heavy handed) way to explain something, or a way to remind you of something that you already knew or ought to know in a memorable way.

Now, I will be remembering the mice and littlepeople with their running shoes and track outfits zipping through the maze of life in pursuit of The Cheese for a long time. And hopefully it will remind me to not be complacent, to not get too comfortable with my cheese, and to know when to read the Handwriting on the Wall.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Puppy Linux / Firefox font

I'm waiting in the hospital right now with a family member. Seems like a great time to work on the laptop!

I'm still running Puppy linux. I've been thinking about switching to Ubuntu, but then there is this whole if-it-aint-broke thing. If I use this much more, I really need to figure out how to set up sudo rather than running as root all the time. Still, I always (improperly) run windows in a similarly powerful way, so I'm not too worried.

I've switched from a usb flash drive to an IDE hard drive that's connected via a USB drive caddy. Yeah, I know, but it's what I've got to work with right now. The laptop takes SATA and I don't have that right now.

I'm writing mostly to remind myself this: I found out the easy fix to the font problem in Firefox. X comes with almost no tolerable fonts, but it does come with Helvetica. So just go to Edit -> Preferences -> Content and set the default font to Helvetica. All of a sudden the awful Times will be replaced with the slightly less bad Helvetica.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Install Hell

It seems these days that on those rare occasions where I have to install an OS come along, it always turns into a long, protracted, excruciatingly painful experience. It's sort of like trying to pass medium sized kidney stones.

The hard drive died on my wife's computer. This probably has a lot to do with the amount of abuse this computer suffers on a daily basis.

So I really wanted to obtain an XP SP3 because trying to reinstall the Vista that it came with feels like a step backwards rather than forwards. Procuring the disk was difficult and, it turns out, ultimately futile as the computer failed to read all of the files. Nothing's more fun than staring at the blue windows install screen and watching it fail to copy multiple files, all of which have varying degrees of importance. On the low end, there's the files which I know I don't really need like "arial.ttf". On the high end, there's the files which I'm sure I really do need like "driver.cab". That one's so important it wasn't even compressed on the source cd.

So what did I do? Well, I wound up trading back and forth between the SP2 cd I had procured and the SP1 cd I already had. Wanna guess how well that worked? I wound up with a system that boots fine, everything comes up, yay. Only when you try to actually do something, like choose Start -> shutdown, explorer.exe crashes and restarts itself.

Currently, I have this same computer running using the very, very cool Puppy Linux. Why is Puppy so cool? Well, because it's really, really tiny and you can get to a vaguely-usable desktop in just a few minutes. I mean--this system that I'm on right now has no useable OS other than Puppy, and yet just with that I'm able to browse online and make this blog entry. I call that cool.

Now, back to the install... "Once more into the breach, dear friends..."

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Daily Words of Wisdom (or Whatever) #1

fortune(1) tells us:

Cynical? Well, maybe. However, it does turn out to be true rather frequently.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

First Post

First post!

perl -e ' print "\n\nHello, World.\n\n"; '

Welcome to the blog of The Wyrdest Geek. The exits are at the front of the theater, Non-Sequitor is a good comic strip, and one day I will change my last name to Wyrd.
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Furry cows moo and decompress.