Thrills

I just Syu --ignore kernel26'd my system. I couldn't do a normal Syu because it throws up an error about nvidia-173xx being homosexual. I knew that nvidia would give me hell.

I upgraded, made inittab drop me into runlevel 3, installed nvidia-beta and nvidia-beta-utils, ran a yaourt Syu for good measure, reverted inittab, and now have everything working again, all shiny.

The thrill of fucking things up, then singlehandedly fixing them, is better than sex.

The power of vim

I've been using vimprobable and vimium for a while now, and the vim UI has gotten to me a bit. At least for web browsing, the keyboard shortcuts rock. Especially on dvorak, as the j and k keys are actually in a logical position for their functions, as are the h and l keys.

Being an inveterate emacs-lover, this disturbed me. So I pacman'd vim and tried it out for the first time in years.

I now understand the real reason people use vim: the annoyance of switching modes.

Emacs is powerful because you can do anything you want in it. Anything. This naturally imposes a steep learning curve that guarantees you'll pick up emacsfu in order to get anything done.

Vim is powerful because it beeps like the Roadrunner being sodomized, any time you try to inefficiently use Insert mode. You will learn the esoteric arts of text-manipulation commands simply to prevent this unholy shrieking. The less beeps you hear, the more efficiently you're taking advantage of it.

This gave me an idea for an Editor Alike Tutorial. Simple: construct a plain text document whose editing and manipulation takes advantage of no special features of either Emacs or Vim. Then, open up a contest to see which wins.

My environment

As I said before, I am distracted by hackability. I procrastinate by tweaking things. My programming environment fully reflects that I am the kind of person who finds config files a far more interesting form of entertainment than Farmville or television.

I've evolved what I consider the perfect environment. It is utterly hackable, completely inscrutable to the impatient and incurious, and it provides a rather more valuable avenue for procrastination than what most people would choose.

Here's my environment: Arch Linux, Xmonad, emacs, zsh, screen, uzbl, and conkeror. (Look in the sidebar for some of my dotfiles in github). In short, I can tweak anything, as much as I want, and never be absolutely done. 


The upshot is that my procrastination is guaranteed to teach me something, as well as putting more awesome in my day. The downside, as far as I can tell, is that I have no clue who or what Lady Gaga is without googling.


Make your environment hackable; it keeps you off potentially more distracting hobbies like black tar heroin.