I’ve been doing a lot of work on my Gentoo installation, even though I’ve found it frustrating at times. (Tip: if you want to use Linux for anything that requires good graphics, like OpenGL games or pretty drop shadows and translucency, do not buy an ATI video card!) Anyway, I posted some screenshots for your viewing pleasure. Be careful, they’re big (1280×1024).
Head over to the Brettia beta site to view the latest edition of my new design. Notice anything different? Unless your eyes are so good that you can see the minor imperfections generated in the graphics because of JPEG compression, it should look exactly the same. I’ve decided that the bleeding edge is not where I want to be for this site, simply becuase of the amount of users who will be unable to view it if I use PNG alpha transparency and stuff like that all over the place. So all of my enormous PNG files have been reformatted into compressed GIFs and JPGs (at the expense of being able to change colors easily later, but oh well). According to the Web Page Analyzer, I’ve improved the download time by 800% over the old time, but it still isn’t “lightweight” by any standards. With 50% of Americans using broadband now, I just don’t care that much. Either dial-up users can wait 36 seconds the first time and depend on cached graphics later, or they can just switch to broadband already (though if they can’t get it for some reason, I am truly sorry, for I have suffered with the unbearable slowness as well. I used to read a book while waiting for websites to load…).
For the past two years, I have been toying with the idea of switching to Linux as my primary operating system. Unfortunately, I am not writing today to gleefully announce that I have finally broken free from Microsoft’s stranglehold. After trying every major distribution and one or two lesser known ones, I have come to the conclusion that Linux, in its current state, is just not the operating system for me. Read on to learn why.
Less technical readers are probably wondering: what is Linux? Why should I care about it? Isn’t it some program made by a bunch of anti-Microsoft geeks? Though Linux directly competes with Microsoft Windows, which runs on about 90% of the world’s computers, it has evolved far beyond a means to circumvent Redmond’s wishes. Linux is not manufactured by one company or one person, but it came about because of the work of a single programmer, Linus Torvalds. In 1991-ish, he released the first version of a piece of code called the Linux kernel. An operating system’s kernel is the core driver of its functionality - without it, nothing would work. It’s primary function is to provide an interface between applications such as a web browser or music player and computer hardware, such as the hard drive(s), keyboard and mouse, and printers. Through the use of small modules called drivers, a hardware manufacturer can add support for their hardware to an operating system, all without affecting the applications running on the system. For example, under Linux, it would be possible to swap one secondary hard drive for another without changing any settings other than switching to a driver that supported the newer disk.
Because every OS has a kernel, the Linux kernel was certainly not the first of its kind. However, as more programmers joined the project, it proved to be more stable than just about any other, including the two kernels that Microsoft uses primarily, the NT kernel (found in Windows 2000 and XP) and the older kernel used in Windows 95, 98, and ME. Stability (along with security) is one of Linux’s main selling points.
So what exactly is Linux, then, other than a kernel? Well, that really is about all it is. Linux itself is just the kernel and the bundled drivers, and nothing else (or at least this is what I have always been told). The kernel is still maintained by Linus Torvalds and a huge community of programmers, and it is free software that can be downloaded and compiled and used as you see fit. But by itself, the kernel is useless - it needs applications to run on top of it.
Tens of thousands of Linux applications are out there, waiting to be downloaded and compiled (think of compiling as the Linux word for installing). But how does a user make sense of all of them and decide which ones they need? They download a distribution to do it all for them. Unlike Windows and Mac OS, which are single products with no variants, Linux can have an infinite number of variants, called distributions. There is no master distribution that all others deviate from, only a group of about a dozen distros (the shortened word for distributions) that are the most widely used. In order to create a distro, a company or group of programmers select a kernel and add in the applications and libraries (supporting code) that they feel are necessary. Then, they bundle the code up into packages, which are similar to Windows install files, make an installer for the distro itself, and put it up for download. As applications are updated by their individual developers, they are repackaged and included in a newer version of the distro, or users can update their packages using the distro’s update utility, similar to Microsoft’s WindowsUpdate (which all you Windows users had better be running regularly).
Why is the distro model better than the single product model? Because distros can be customized for certain functions. Some are optimized to be easy to use for newer users, while others offer unlimited customizability at the price of being harder to install and maintain. Rather than be stuck in a one-size-fits-all mentality, Linux distro maintainers can make an OS for every occasion.
Now that you know enough about Linux to understand me, I’ll move on with my tale. The first distro that I ever tried was Red Hat Linux 9, maintained by Red Hat, one of the largest Linux software companies. I was impressed by the easy install process, but, being a newbie, I quickly destroyed my installation and had to start over. This happened a lot back when I was still trying to figure out how everything worked - once I even changed the permissions on the /etc directory (where most configuration files are stored) so that applications couldn’t access their own settings. Immediately afterward, things started segfaulting (a recently coined verb for an error called a segmentation fault, which is like a blue screen of death but limited to a single application) and the OS crashed. Suffice to say, my early experiences with Linux were not good, but the main reason for that was my own incompetence.
Because I don’t feel like talking about distros that are now a year or two out of date, I’ll skip ahead to distros that I’ve tested more recently:
I really liked this one, a lot. SuSE is a German distribution that was recently acquired by Novell, maker of the login software on lots of school and corporate networks, among other useful things. The 9.1 release was before SuSE had been influenced heavily by Novell, but it was still very good. The interface was polished and easy to use, and it auto-detected all of my hardware and found drivers for it automatically. Also, the OS’s configuration panel was very easy to use and allowed me to tweak lots of settings that are normally hidden in configuration files. However, some packages were out of date, and I was put off by the fact that it would have cost me $70 for the professional version had I not bought it for $15 from another vendor (anyone can make and sell CDs with Linux distributions on them because Linux programs are usually released under the terms of the GPL, which forces distro makers to release their source code for free download). I am not a huge fan of distributions that are tied to large companies that want to make money off of me.
I did not like Mandrake when I tried it. The name is cool, but the installer was not the best designed, and again I felt like I was being prodded into joining their MandrakeClub support program, which gives you access to extra packages and allows you to download new releases of Mandrake Linux when they are released rather than a month afterward. Again, that whole “it’s free but you still have to pay for it” model is not something I like.
Red Hat Linux 9 was the last Red Hat Linux that Red Hat released. Opting to move into the more profitable server OS market, Red Hat spun off its flagship distro into the Fedora Project, a group of programmers and Red Hat employees with the mission of providing a bleeding edge distro to users. Because Fedora almost always contains packages that are very up-to-date, there are sometimes bugs, which are usually ironed out within a month or two of each release. This is fine with me - I’d rather have the latest and greatest features instead of outdated (though stable) programs. The latest version of Fedora, Fedora Core 3, is very polished and is easy to use and install. It supports both of Linux’s main desktop environments, KDE and Gnome, and it doesn’t favor one over the other like some distros do. Also, with some extra work, it can play most DVDs and music files without a problem, and it recently gained the capability to support 3D acceleration on ATI graphics cards, which made me very happy (I’d been waiting for that for a long time). All-in-all, the distro is complete and has barely any ties to a major company, though it retains some Red Hat branding. For a long time, it was my favorite, but I was still unhappy because I found it hard to find applications for Fedora that weren’t included by the maintainers and because there was still a lot of work involved in getting it to perform exactly the way I wanted it to.
Gentoo is very different from its peers in that it is a source-based distribution, meaning that all programs are compiled from source code. But what does this mean, exactly? Most distributions install programs using some kind of package manager, a tool that is similar to the way Windows users double-click on a setup.exe file to install something. The process is painless, clean, and automatic (usually), requiring minimal user effort. Also, installations are fast. On my machine, installing a game on Windows takes five minutes, and most application installations take seconds.
Portage, Gentoo’s package management tool, is different. To install something on a Gentoo machine, for example, PHP, I would type: emerge php. This is similar to Fedora’s package manager, Yum/RPM, which would do the same thing if I entered this command: yum install php. The difference here, however, is that when Portage installs something, it downloads the source code from a server and compiles it, a process that, on large programs, can take hours. With Yum, a precompiled package is simply downloaded from a server and the files it contains are extracted to the right places on the hard drive. Yum takes care of things like adding shortcuts and such automatically.
Why, then, would I want to wait hours for something to compile on Gentoo when I can install it in seconds on Fedora? Speed. By compiling a package myself, I can specify special options that optimize the program and make it faster (most of the time). Sometimes, the speed increase is almost impossible to notice, but there is a substantial increase in speed when you look at the operating system as a whole. Fedora is generally slower than Gentoo because all of its precompiled packages are compiled for the i386 architecture. This allows them to run on just about any computer, but the newer features on today’s processors are ignored in order to support older ones. I have a very new processor (an AMD Athlon 64 3200+), and it makes no sense to use packages compiled for a processor that was manufactured a decade ago.
Gentoo’s other strength is that it lets you build your system from scratch, if you want. This lets me choose exactly what software I want installed, freeing me from the bloat of other Linux distros. If you think of the way Linux has so many flavors as a means to break out of Microsoft’s one-size-fits-all OS, you can think of Gentoo as a way to circumvent the other Linux distros’ one-size-fits-all approach to the packages that they include and make one that is customized to your liking.
The time needed to install and maintain a Gentoo system is its biggest drawback. Not only do you need to know your computer intimately (in order to choose the right drivers for your hardware), but you need to know enough about Linux to do things from the command line (like Windows’ DOS Prompt) as well. The ability to work with the command line rather than a pretty user interface is a good skill to have with any Linux distro, but it is a necessity for Gentoo users. To be honest, it took me five attempts at installing it before I got everything right, even when I followed the excellent Gentoo Handbook down to the letter. However, Gentoo has a great community of knowledgeable users, so I quickly found answers to my questions.
The other problem with Gentoo is that, because you are almost always getting the unmodified source code straight from the programmers with barely any modification from the Gentoo developers (though there are several exceptions to this), your desktop will not look quite as good out of the box as Fedora’s or SuSE’s. Fonts have been a big issue for me because I hate looking at anything that isn’t smoothed and anti-aliased for better readability (a standard feature in Windows and Mac OS X), and I’ve found it difficult to get things working nicely on my Gentoo installation. There are other, smaller issues as well that I won’t go into, but the font problem is the big one (it doesn’t sound like it would be, but I’ve actually found that my eyes begin to hurt after a few hours of looking at a screen full of text with no anti-aliasing or subpixel hinting, especially on an LCD monitor which seems to make the imperfections in the font rendering even more obvious.
Right now, Gentoo has replaced Fedora as my main distro. I like the community (Fedora’s seems non-existent, or I just haven’t found it yet), I like the idea, and I especially like the fact that I don’t have to worry about having the maintainers of the distro solicit me for cash like Mandrake and SuSE seem to. Yes, I know it’s wrong to use their product without compensating them in any way, but I can always donate something via PayPal - there’s no need to get pushy about it.
You might be wondering why I said at the beginning of this article that Linux is not the operating system for me if I like Gentoo so much. The fact is, while I love Gentoo, I hate that I have to put so much effort into making it do my bidding. Though many anti-Microsoft geeks might hate to admit it, Windows, when used correctly and when tweaked right, is really not hard to use, and I find it to be quite fast. Sure, I have the Fisher Price user interface turned off so that it looks like Windows 2000, and I’ve run several tweaking programs to make it run much faster than the average PC user’s copy, but it still does the job for me. Also, I can’t run Photoshop on Linux without a third-party emulator (which can be costly), and I find that in Linux I spend less time getting work done and more time tweaking things and trying to get everything to run the way I want it to. In many ways, programming on Linux would be much better than programming on Windows because most programming languages were originally made for Linux and then were ported to Windows later. However, most Linux distros want me to use PHP version 4.3.10, and I want 5.0.3. That means that I have to circumvent the distro’s built in package manager (or in the case of Gentoo, use a 5.0.3 package from the testing branch, which means that I have to use libraries from the testing branch as well) and install 5.0.3, which ususally results in a system that is less stable than I would like. On Windows, I simply install the Apache web server using a setup file, install the MySQL database server using another setup file (and might I add that MySQL has done an amazing job in getting their Windows installer up to par - it is superb, to say the least), extract PHP 5.0.3 to c:\php, and edit two configuration files. Then I start everything up and I’m done. In fact, I did it Saturday in a record fifteen minutes. Compare that to the hours that I might spend achieving the same result on Fedora (though it is easier with Gentoo).
Most of the problems I’ve had in getting up and running on Linux stem from my lack of knowledge in using it. I’ve become a master with the command line (I even accidentally try to use the ls command to list the contents of a folder when using the Windows DOS Prompt sometimes rather than dir), but I want a pretty GUI to use like in Windows. In fact, I want a better one than Windows’. I just don’t know enough right now to easily solve problems when they come up when using Linux. With Windows, I’ve used it long enough that I know every bug and can solve just about any issue in a matter of minutes. Linux is just…different.
I think at least one reader is probably wondering why I don’t consider getting a Mac. I’d love to have one, but the problem there is that I’d have a great computer and a great OS, but nothing to install on it. The cost of a decent Mac would be at least $1500, and then I’d need to get Mac versions of all the programs I use, including games (and many of my games have no Mac version, which would be good in that I’d spend less time playing them and more time doing homework, but also bad in that I’d spend more time doing homework and less time playing games : ) ). If someone gave me $3000 so that I could get a top-of-the-line Mac along with Adobe Photoshop CS ($650) and Adobe Illustrator CS (also expensive) along with a copy of Virtual PC so that I could run Windows on it as well, then all would be right in the world. Unfortunately, that’s never going to happen, and even Macs aren’t perfect and would require more learning to use (albeit less learning than Linux). So right now, it looks I’m stuck in a world of Windows, and I’m just beginning to peer through the dirty glass at what lies beyond. Will I end up with fruit, a penguin, a demon-thing (FreeBSD), or something different entirely? Only time will tell.
After about ten hours of work, I finally finished a new theme for Brettia and Organon. You can see it at the beta site. For those with dial-up - you might want to wait until I’ve done some optimization on the images and such, because your wait time right now will be over three minutes. Kudos to the makers of the Website Speed Analyzer for telling me that.
Want to know why I hate Internet Explorer so much? Check out the new theme in it. (IE Users: I’m not going to take another week to make it work, so just switch to Firefox already and save yourself the pain of looking at it.)
Anyone who has read As I Lay Dying, a terribly boring and hard-to-understand book by William Faulkner, will understand the title of this entry. For those who haven’t read it, the book is divided into chapters that are written from the points of view of different characters, and one of the characters is a rather psychotic little boy. Most of the chapters are a good several pages in length, but about halfway through the book you come upon a chapter written from the boy’s point of view that consists of only one sentence: “My mother is a fish.” Now you know.
Anyway, I received another fake email today, this time from Washington Mutual. I wouldn’t have posted it here, but I was surprised by the similarities between it and the one from eBay. See below:
I guess this should just be a lesson to everyone that the Internet is just as unsafe as it can be convenient. I’ve had my credit card information stolen once before, as have my parents. My bank is pretty good about getting you your money back, but other consumers aren’t so lucky. My only advice to people is that, until better security is available for both email and websites, everyone should try to purchase items at real stores rather than over the Internet when possible. This is kind of a hypocritical statement since I recently (in July) bought a $1400 PC online, but I had done a lot of careful investigation and research on the company (ABS) before buying.
Read the first entry in this two-part series here.
My first attempt to write my own blogging system didn’t end well. I got tired of posting out of phpMyAdmin (a database-management application for MySQL), so I switched back to WordPress, though WordPress’ posting window isn’t amazingly advanced either. Still, I enjoy having BBCode-like functionality when I need to put in a link or make some text bold or something. Anyway, I desperately need to move my site in a new direction after such a long time without any major design updates or anything. The last version of the Organon design, version 5, was made about a year ago and ended up getting wiped out by comment spam sent via Movable Type. The last version of the Brettia website, version 7.5.1 (the number is internal, so don’t expect to see it on any pages) came online exactly a year ago tomorrow, and the design is grossly out of sync with my latest techniques. Changes need to be made.
I’ve been inspired to try harder by Andrew Ayer’s excellent personal site, which has just about everything that I’ve tried to include on Brettia in bits and pieces over the years without much success. But I think that with incremental improvements I can do better, continuously adding tools and content and functionality over a long time period. I would like to have a new design finished in time for Brettia’s third anniversary on May 8th, 2005, which gives me a little over a month. I think I’ll have time to work on it over Spring Break, so I should be done well before my deadline.
So how does this affect Organon? Well, my original plan still stands, with the following additions:
That’s about it for now, as far as the backend goes. Content-wise, Organon has slowly evolved from a personal journal to a more technology-oriented commentary. I’ll still post about more personal stuff, but it won’t happen as often. The most major thing for readers will be the new design, which I think is going to be the same as the Brettia one, perhaps with a different color scheme. Making two separate designs is just too much work for me right now (I easily spend ten or twenty hours on each design I make, tweaking and perfecting things), so this should make things a lot easier. I’m still waffling over whether or not I’ll support Internet Explorer because about 38% of my traffic still comes from that browser, so I might end up doing an enhanced version for Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Galeon, and K-Meleon, a regular version for users of KHTML-based browsers such as Konqueror and Safari, and a crappy, unstyled version for Internet Explorer users.
No matter what browser you use, the next version of Brettia (including Organon) will have lots of bells and whistles - whatever I can think of to add to it. Unfortunately, it might be next year by the time I get it all done.
Today, I received a fake email from “eBay Support”. Clicking the link it contains brought me to a fake website, where I was asked to fork over every scrap of personal information I have.
Now, I know a fraudulent website when I see one, but I began to wonder: what was it that triggered the subconscious warnings in my brain that kept me on my guard? Lately, I’ve been reading a book called Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, that talks about a process called thin-slicing that all humans do within seconds of meeting someone or discovering something. This is akin to the “gut feeling” that people get when they know that something is wrong without being able to say why. The powerful subconscious mind is good at quicky making sense of a situation, and this is why I could tell that the email and website were fraudulent right away. I should note that I don’t have an eBay account, at least not one that is attached to the email address to which the message was sent, and this also contributed to my reaction to the email. But many less knowledgable users are susceptible to these kinds of ploys (known as phishing), so I’ve decided to tell exactly what led me to think that the email and website were fake for the benefit of those who might be led astray in the future.
Let’s start with the email:
The first major warning flag here is the poor grammar in the message subject. However, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t trust any message with a spelling error in it. But this subject is barely even understandable.
We see another error in the body of the message, where “manner” should be “matter”. This is not a major mistake, but it is enough to make me think that someone else (a phisher) wrote the message text and then stuffed it into an HTML format copied from an official eBay mailing.
This one is a huge flashing, blaring, warning sign. To most people, the URL looks completely normal, appearing to be a link to a website located on an eBay domain. But hovering over this link in my mail program reveals that, with a clever bit of HTML, someone has disguised a link to their own server with an eBay one. Look, I can do it too: http://www.yahoo.com. The lesson here is that you should always hover over links before clicking them, especially when you’ve already seen other warning flags on the website or in the email.
I suppose the phisher thought that these logos would make the email look more official, and at first glance, they do. But looking closely at them, I have to wonder why eBay would put Fidelity Investments and 7-Up logos down there too.
And now for the website:
The first warning here that this site is fake is the URL. Suddenly, I am no longer on an eBay website; the domain has changed to “webz.cz”, which I think has a Czech Republic TLD (the .cz part). Also, the subdomain “verifingaccount” is iffy because of the missing “y” in “verifying”. Couple that with the possibility that the site is hosted in the Czech Repubic, and it looks more and more as if a foreigner wrote the email and the site. This is a common attribute among phishers because being located in another country makes them harder to catch.
Numbers two and three are similar in that they are minor errors that have a major effect on determining whether or not a site is legitimate. eBay generally has a nice design and layout, and the lack of anti-aliasing (smoothing the text) on “Security Validation” does not seem like a mistake that they would make. Also, an image fails to load.
See number two.
This is a nice touch, most likely copied from another eBay form. Logos are no proof of legitimacy.
I don’t see why they would need me to give them this information again, since they should have it already. It would make more sense if they asked me questions that only I would know (secret question, password, birthday, SSN, etc). Someone trying to use a form like this (were it legitimate) to steal users’ account details would probably not have all this information already. (If they did, why try to steal it?).
This was ironic.
So now you have some things to watch for. Even these tips might not be enough, but the best thing to remember is that if you feel uneasy about a website or an email, you’re probably right. There’s nothing wrong with emailing the company that the message or website appears to have come from, just to make sure. Phishing hurts companies just as much as it hurts consumers, and reporting phishing attempts to them (or at least checking to make sure that an email isn’t fake) can help them combat the problem.
Sorry for the lack of fluency in my language today…my fingers aren’t hitting the keys I tell them to and my mind isn’t coming up with the words I want it to…I think I need sleep.
For the past several months, rounded corners on web pages have become the bane of my existence. The technique involved really isn’t that difficult, but nor is it easy, either. Also, there are some problems with the current method, including superfluous HTML and CSS, issues with Internet Explorer (when are there not issues with Internet Explorer), and failures when using fixed positioning or padding on elements. However, my nightmare has come to an end with the wonderful new script developed by Alessandro Fulciniti called Nifty Corners. Fulciniti, frustrated in the same way that I have been with existing corner-rounding techniques, discovered a way to work around the problem using JavaScript. I won’t explain the method here; see his site for more information. More important is the impact of this new script, which, if it proves to be stable and error-free across all major browsing platforms (the current ones, not older browsers such as IE 5.0 and IE 5.2 for Mac that are either rarely used or on their way out) could be an incredible boon for web designers. Yes, clients will need JavaScript for it to function in their browsers, but at least 85% of web users have it enabled, and in the event that they don’t, the script fails gracefully, showing standard square corners instead of rounded ones. Also, not having to use small graphics for corners will cut down on page load times (if only slightly) as well as bandwidth consumption (again, probably not by a whole lot). On “heavily rounded” sites that use the old CSS method often, the difference might be more pronounced. Oh, and as a final plus to this method, we web designers tend to be a lazy lot (or at least I am; maybe it’s programmers who are the lazy ones), and it’s always nice to have a reason to not have to fire up Photoshop and make a rounded corner when we can do it effortlessly with JavaScript.
Web designers have forever been limited by the mediocre selection of fonts available for use on the Internet. However, Microsoft, who seems to be turning over many new leaves lately (IE7), is rumored to be releasing six new fonts in the next year or so. See them here.
None of these are anything too special, but anything is better than the old ones: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial, Courier, and Tahoma.
I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know if I want to know. Moving was not a joyful affair; it was not a grand adventure in which I meet new friends and keep in touch with old ones and find acceptance at a new school where teachers acknowledge your existence and four periods actually means less homework. I am Frodo, and I carry around my neck a great, self-imposed burden. I am descending into the depths of Mordor.
I have two selves. I don’t know if this means that I’m psychologically diseased and in dire need of therapy, or if it just means that I have finally realized a fact that has always been true for everyone. The self that is writing right now is my thoughtful self, the one that pens things that most people don’t like to read. This self is cynical, but also philosophical. It is composed of the deepest, innermost thoughts, most of which only appear in my mind long enough for me to notice them, certainly not long enough for them to be remembered and written out within the limits of language. The thoughtful self is also the one that is most prone to emotion. Feelings of anger, hatred, love, and happiness are all spawned by it.
The other self is the controller. It keeps the first self in check, allowing it to break free only when it is preoccupied with something else or when, in a temporary lapse of control, it is victim to the same emotions that plague the thoughtful self and the two selves, for a moment, act as one. My controller keeps my thoughtful self on a tight leash. But while the controller is akin to a conscience, that is not all that it is. The controlling self is also the superficial self - the image of me that others see. This image is bland and neutral compared to the image that people would see were my thoughtful self allowed to project it. The controller is very self-conscious and tries to fit its image into what it thinks is socially acceptable. This is almost always the opposite of what the thoughtful self wants. If it were not for my controller, I’d go to school dressed like a clown that had been dead in the ground for a few years. Or I’d find a Barney suit and some hockey gear and go around kicking things I don’t like with my skates. That sort of thing.
Unfortunately, there are various things outside the controller’s control, such as hormones and the way my thoughful self always has strange reactions to whatever my controller compels me to read or watch. This is unfortunate because these things heighten the risk of the controller losing control, allowing the thoughtful self to break free momentarily. This can be disastrous, resulting in angry words yelled, doors slammed, puppies kicked, and all manner of unhappy occurrences. And so, the controller, which has unlimited access to my brainpower (the mainframe), came up with a devious way of siphoning off the pressure: this blog. And here I sit, happily blogging away my troubles and fears without actually saying anything (notice how I started out all dour and suicidal, yet in three paragraphs I have regained my sense of humor).
The controller, upon realizing that the thoughtful self desperately wants to vomit out something dangerous, wriggling, and alive, has intervened, changing what could have been a long whine about how horrible everything is into something that just might have elicited a chuckle or involuntary belch from the reader’s depths. And yet, the thoughtful self continues to brood, deep down, waiting for the right moment. It has come before, and it will come again. This attempt has ended in failure - the Pepto-Bismol (which induces vomiting with its yummy, six-year-old-friendly bubble-gum taste) and the Tums (which may or may not quell violent bouts of hlaaling upon carpets) have been shoved down the imaginary throat of the thoughful self just in time.
I’ll be back.