Category: English

On diagnosis

If you were in my movie
I’d have you as the doctor
Small black bag
And a big black coat

I’d have you make a house call
To the woman
You could lay your
Diagnostic hand
Upon her belly and her throat

When someone has lived with a disorder for more than half his life and finally gets a diagnosis and starts a course of treatment, you would expect him to feel relief, anticipation, hope perhaps of a better life. That’s certainly what he expected, after years of living with the wrong diagnosis, being treated for the wrong disorder, and suspecting it all along. But when the day finally came—

Anticipation, yes, but fearful anticipation. Hesitation, every morning; a long time spent staring at his medication before finally swallowing it. Panic attacks in the evening, followed by uneasy sleep.

Do you understand? He doesn’t, at first. His wife suggests that he has lived with the disorder for so long that it has become a part of his identity, and he is now afraid of living without it, of becoming a man he does not know. He thinks she may be right, but it does not stop the panic attacks.

All he can do is wait, and hope.

This Just In

The SCO Group, Inc. has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. This is interesting news, but not necessarily good news.

For one, it increases the likelihood that the lawsuits will be settled rather than tried, leaving a lot of questions unanswered. It would be far better for the Linux community (and the F/OSS community in general) to have these questions answered once and for all in court.

Then there is the matter of timing. SCO’s bankruptcy filing comes at a very opportune time: first, they were just handed a summary judgment (which, contrary to McBride’s claims, they haven’t yet appealed) saying that they don’t own the Unix copyrights and trademarks after all, which means they owe Novell a boatload of money (95% of their SCOSource revenues, if memory serves); second, the Novell case was just about to go to trial, and SCO failed to secure a jury trial, which was the only way they would have had a chance of winning. Filing for bankruptcy means that

  • Novell isn’t likely to see any of that money any time soon, if ever
  • The trial is suspended indefinitely, because under chapter 11 rules, a creditor isn’t allowed to sue a debtor.

Considering SCOs past behavior, I have to wonder—do you see it coming?—whether this is, in fact, just the latest in a long series of deliberate delaying moves…

Ooh, skiffy!

Books I’ve been reading lately:

Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut. An absolute delight; a masterpiece of satire and black humor.

Player Piano, also by Vonnegut; his first novel, in fact. Far less enjoyable; he had not yet found his form. Pretty much the only element it has in common with his later work is its pessimism.

Archform: Beauty, by L. E. Modesitt, was very interesting because it is the only Modesitt novel I’ve read (and I’ve read most of what he’s written up until around 2000) where the main protagonist’s actions results in neither the collapse of the antagonist’s civilization nor the total obliteration of their real estate. Instead, the male protagonists buys the female protagonist flowers and asks her out. Far out.

Lilith: A Snake in the Grass, the first book in Jack L. Chalker‘s Four Lords of the Diamond series. I know it’s not nice to speak poorly of the deceased, but Chalker, a fairly well-respected SF author, managed to get pretty much all of the science wrong in this one. Continue reading “Ooh, skiffy!”

One step forward, two steps back

I play a fair number of games. I go through about one PS2 game a month, on average, plus various PC games once in a while—mostly platformers and first or third person shooters on the PS2, and strategy / adventure on the PC, with some puzzle gmaes like Oasis thrown in.

The one thing that never ceases to surprise me with these games—especially console games—is how most of them share the same two elementary flaws, which you’d think they’d discovered and fixed years ago. Continue reading “One step forward, two steps back”