Weird: I have Timothy Leary's signature

Saturday afternoon I took the girls to a number of places, including the bookstore. I go to Half Price mostly to get rid of books: my shelves overfloweth and my ebook collection has an alarming one billion words in it. While they were looking through the small collection, I browsed the shelves. I looked up and noticed a buzz of excitement running through the people at the counter. One of the books I had brought was Timothy Leary's The Intelligence Agents, and I had forgotten that it was signed. They offered me $20 for it, but I took it back. I think I'll keep it.

I'd forgotten that I'd met Tim in 1992, back when he and G. Gordon Liddy had this philosophical roadshow going. It was fascinating stuff, although it wasn't really a "debate," but more like watching two different one-man shows side-by-side. Liddy was very much about being in the real world and understanding just how untrustworthy your own nervous system could be; Leary's monologue was about the ways one could monkey with that nervous system and his open-ended fear that Coporations would find a way to into your brain by direct alteration someday. Maybe they will.

Still, it's neat to have his signature. Too bad the book's in terrible shape. It was when he signed it, though.

Computers fail in packs: must be a cosmic rule.

Earlier this week, I started upgrading two of my computers: my laptop, and my colo. The colo never failed, thank the gods, but my laptop started to experience the worst kind of failures: random packages would fail for no apparent reason. I tracked this down to a "feature": GCC 4.1 has a different C++ ABI than GCC 3.4, one they say is more in line with the specification, but one which unfortunately breaks many C++ programs.

I spent two days letting the laptop churn through the updates, and then other things mysteriously started failing. No idea why, but they were important things: my PDF viewer, and my editor. When Emacs won't start, programmers panic.

I tracked it down: I had motif version 2.1 and 2.2 on my system, and during the upgrade 2.1 had mysteriously vanished, but many things were still trying to link against it. It took three days, but my laptop is running fine. Actually, I never lost that much functionality on it: Emacs was only down for a day, and I can still use VI.

But last night I had a jonesing to play something other than an ID game. I had acquired a copy of BloodRayne 2 for $4 (twice the price I paid for Daikatana, and probably not worth it), so I tried installing it. It wouldn't run. Neither would Tron, Half-Life 2, Warcraft III, or any game that required 3D. I checked: My video card is an eVGA GeForce FX 5500 w/256MB RAM, I have the right drivers, all of those games are rated for Windows 98, and Win98 says the driver is for the GeForce. WTF? I tried a number of different re-installs, but nothing seemed to give.

Sigh. Maybe I should upgrade GameOS to XP.