This is the main reason I’m not at LFCS/DAM4 this week. Travel and high-intensity people stuff is just not going to happen right now. So, I’m sorry to those of you I’m missing in SFO, and to others who have wanted or needed my attention in recent weeks. As always, Pia gets the worst of it, but is wonderful regardless. Thank you.

The infuriating thing about depression is that it’s a despair without definition. If I could put my finger on it, I could solve it. Sure, I can point you to a confluence of things that were likely to set it off, but when it hits, it doesn’t really work that way.

Most people I’ve met who have depression use a physical or anthropomorphic metaphor as a way to understand or express it — a great example is Winston Churchill’s Black Dog. I tend towards the physical, seeing it in much the same way as my arthritis: Every now and then, my body stops working properly, and I can’t walk; every now and then, my brain stops working properly, and I can’t… do or feel much of anything at all.

People often ask whether I’d turn it off, if a relevant switch were provided. I don’t think so. Down here, my drive and motivation might be dangerously close to zero, but on balance, I could never trade the ferocity or infectiousness of up there. It’s too central to the culture of my creativity, as odd as that may sound.

The only way I’ve found to drag myself up is to choose something to do and kick the crap out of it until a sense of achievement sets in. I found a great therapy task a few days ago… but I’ll leave that story to a happier post!

If you don’t get it, but want to grok more, Beyond Blue has some good stuff to read.

Finally: Despite everything, I’m OK. I’ve been here before, and made it out fine. Back soon.

That’s right! NetFox produce a policy-based web filtering product, to protect you from the evils of the Internet and skyrocketing bandwidth bills care of your porn-hungry employees or students.

Which is precisely why they have this saucy minx on their front page, to clearly demonstrate the dangers of the Interweb. It’s probably just a stock photo, but that look demands to be understood. Some images utterly burst with intrigue, crying out for us to find out the story behind them. Like this one.

(I know of NetFox only via Tim Riley, of Ubuntu in SA schools fame.)

Good work?!

One of those “Life: The Forgotten Manual” things.

With a bit of expert advice from The Internet’s Larry Ewing, Pia and I bought a Canon EOS 400D today. What a delightful piece of hardware! This photo of John Ferlito is the best of today’s bunch.

It’s going to take a while to get back into the swing of using a real camera, but luckily I have all of linux.conf.au during which I can experiment. Rock on!

For Jaq’s most excellent Casaween party, Pia and I dressed as zombies… as a sociopolitical statement, or even protest.

“What kind of sociopolitical protestations do zombies harbour?” you may ask.

“Is there an analogy to be drawn between the brutal appetite of the lifeless zombie, and the violent spread of democracy by apathetic nations?” would be a cogent and astute question.

While there may be numerous thoughtful and potent allegories to be made between zombie and human, illuminating the futility of war, the clash of ideologies, and the condition of man… we chose to make a damning statement about deep-seated discrimination in pop culture.

Since when have you seen known people or established characters depicted as the undead in zombie films? For sure, the very excellent films Shaun of the Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn included family members and friends in the feeding frenzy, but in most cases, zombie films only depict the faceless and anonymous of the undead. Ha ha, faceless.

I’m looking forward to a film that depicts the fullness of zombie life, echewing the traditional discrimination towards cultural status of zombies. If your local milkman can become a zombie, why not your local representative? If your quarryman labourer, why not your rock star? What we’re demanding is realistic cultural representation of the undead in popular culture and entertainment. That’s all. Famous people can be zombies, too.

EXT. Streets of modern city. The undead prowl the streets. A small group of humans are held up in a supermarket. They have created a makeshift barricade of beer cases in front of the main entrance...

Our still-human heroes lay behind the barricade, the quiet chill of anticipation, flinching at every distant groan, holding their weapons in this hand and that, patting them down, and prodding each mechanism as if every touch would empower the weapon with sympathy for their dire situation…

“What the…? Did– did– did you see that?”

“What?”

“Over there, past the post office. That group.”

“Yeah. Okay, sure. Ugh. What about them?”

“Holy crap!”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Look at them! At the front!”

“… Oh man. No way.”

“Seriously!”

“No fucking way.”

“Am I right? That’s Avril Lavigne! Right?”

“No way. Don’t they have, like, security guards and stuff? That’s impossible.”

“Dude, isn’t that her security guard next to her? She’s eating his arm!”

“Uh, no. Oh man. Dude, that is Luciano Pavarotti.”

“No way.”

“Seriously.”

“No way!”

“Alright, screw this. I’m taking Avril. This is going to be fun.”

*cha-shick!*

Bonus zombie fun: Chasing Jaq’s new co-workers with a Google recruiting leaflet, groaning “braaaaaaaiiiins, braaaaaaiiins”.

Wow. I haven’t turned this on for several years. I’ve moved at least three or four times in that period. Now that piqued my interest — just what would I find on the disk? Which kernel version? Which GNOME version? What might I find in my home directory?

Logging in, I was struck by the timeless awesomeness of the GARNOME splash screen:

No surprises about the operating system: Debian unstable, circa November 2002. Linux 2.4.19 (with XFS patches, because back then I thought it was cool). GNOME 1.x from Debian, and… GARNOME 2.1.2! Awesome. The icons on my panel were: System Monitor, Galeon, Mozilla, X-Chat, GNOME CD and GNOME Terminal.

There’s a thumbnail picture of Bill Gates I used to keep on my desktop to remind me what we’re up against… I keep a thumbnail picture of Steve Jobs on my desktop now. The notes and working files are amusing to sift through. Seems the last time I turned this on, I had just moved (or was in the process of moving) to Newtown, where I lived with Mary and Andrew.

The screensaver? glsnake. Priceless.

Update: I have a screenshot taken around that time.