I love the night...

I always have. I've always been more of a night person than a morning person; even at a young age people would often remark at how my energy level would go up when the sun went down. For most of my life I've worked all day and come home to stay up most of the night. It's not that I ever really planned to stay up late... It just sorta works out that way.

But I've never really been much of an outdoors person. The childhood I remember has me playing out doors a lot, but my mom and dad both tell me that I was always more keen to stay inside and read than I was to go outside and play. I personally feel that my youth is actually a balance of the two, but that's neither here nor there.
The point is that since I've been older (early teens), I've spent most of my time inside. Much of that was spent on my computer doing geeky things like dial up BBS'es and playing games, to chatting with people from around the world, and more and more in my later years, watching anime. I've always been an avid reader, and only in recent years has my interest in music waned to a point where I almost find it distracting to listen to music.

But tonight... I had just finished watching "No Country For Old Men" with my sister, and had moved on to chatting with some friends and doing a bit of browsing the web. I had settled on listening to some more of "The Golden Compass" audiobook I've been slowly working through, when I suddenly decided to go for a walk.
The nights here are very nice, this one being cool and slightly humid with a fairly stiff breeze. There are only a few thin and wispy clouds out, and as I'm quite far from any metropolitan area the stars are brilliant in a velvet sky.

The first thing I am reminded of is the person who taught me how nice it was to move about at night under the stars. I don't know whether it's true or not, but I like to think that she actually taught me to like something that I previously avoided.

But as I walked my mind wandered, and I realised some very interesting things. Foremost of these is the realisation that the biggest recent change in my life is that I have stopped working. All my life I've worked outdoors, or at least in some kind of position that required manual labor to a large extent.
HVAC, Printing, Remodeling, Roofing, Landscaping, Fencing... For nearly 10 years I've worked hard all day and come home to get three to five hours of sleep and then do it all over again the next day.
The next part of this comes in when I have a phone conversation requiring me to think. I have a rather extreme habit of aimlessly walking while doing so. The more engaged I am in the conversation, the more intense my pacing becomes. Up until my late teens most of this pacing was done indoors in a sort of convoluted loop, but in later years (after I got my cell phone and began working at IBLP and had endless nighttime minutes to spend, as well as a deep and abiding interest in avoiding eavesdroppers) I began walking outside.
I have walked, non-stop, for the life of my phone battery (depending on which phone, about three hours) more times than I can count. Here recently, when I was in Kansas, friends would call late and I would just go outside in my sleeping pants and undershirt, not even bothering with socks or shoes of any kind, and walk along the quiet farmtown streets until my feet were raw from the pavement.
So: I have a long history with mental activity generating excessive physical energy. I guess anyone who reads this will say "DUH!", but for me... this is something of a new perspective:

I realised that since I moved home from Chicago, for whatever reason, I have become more and more isolated and reclusive while simultaneously becoming more lethargic and increasingly disinterested in life in general.
I became lazy - ok, so I've always been lazy, but here I mean mentally lazy: I have a fairly strong will that I use to develop specific habits of behavior to solve problems or strengthen weak spots. As I stopped working, I also stopped maintaining my mental vigils and slowly allowed my mental edge to deteriorate.
I have known all of this, but tonight it came to me from a different angle: perhaps my thinking deeply requires me to work physically. I remember when I used to come home from work, exhausted, shower and maybe eat, and have enough energy to stay up for 6 more hours blogging my massive blog posts of yore.
I only stopped blogging after I stopped working. Even back in the day when I used to do chores and hang out laundry, much of my story ideas were developed during that time. And how I hated laundry! Ugh! The same thing, over and over and over again eventually drove me inwards, and I created huge worlds of escape in my head.


I think the most interesting next step from this idea is that maybe I'm mostly better now. I can't sleep, not because I'm so tired any more but because I'm just not that sleepy. I'm bored - alarmingly so, in my opinion (who has never been bored in his life) - not because I am to sick or whatever to go do something, but because lack of work prevents me from having a car and access to a social life. I realised about a week ago that suddenly I had energy again. My mind is no longer a dead blank of exhaustion, but often my thoughts are so loud they wake me up. I'm starting to remember the fact that I have dreams - which might also have something to do with it.

For whatever reason, I'm feeling vastly better on a scale and with a suddenness that I can't really properly comprehend just now. I still hurt a lot, though my muscles don't spasm anywhere nearly as severely as they used to, but I have energy in spite of it. It takes a lot, sometimes, to get over the pain initially (some days I swear it's not worth getting out of bed)... But most of the time I get too antsy and bored to just lay or sit around all day.

I think it's ironic that for years I wanted a vacation to get away and find my center again - but now that I've got my center back I feel like I'm 16 again and stuck. No car, no job, no insurance...

But at least I know that things are changing for the better. I'm stuck somewhere new now, and that's more interesting than how things used to be. :)

Tadaima!

I am now officially a Linux user. I have had Linux on my box since my last update (though this is a newer install), and have only used XP three or four times since then.

Currently my only complaint is lack of software support. Wine runs windoze programs very well, but games and such that require hardware integration have some annoying bugs. Supreme Commander crashes after 60 minutes of gameplay, for instance.

Aside from the inability to play my favorite games, I'm completely in love. My system acts like it's far more powerful than it really is. I usually have so many windows open that I can't easily find the one I'm looking for, and Compiz-fusion provides wobbly windows, tranparencies, particle effects, reflections and more. The average person doesn't notice I'm not running windoze, but they see that everything looks very nice and smooth. For those of you who know what Vista is like, Compiz easily beats Vista's polished look any day.

Codec support for mainstream video and audio is also tricky. The codecs you get with windoze or OSX are licensed from their owners: Fraunhofer owns MP3, for instance. If you wish to encode a file using that technology, you must purchase a license from Fraunhofer for the right to use their proprietary technology. When you buy your copy of windoze, part of that cost goes to paying for the licenses.
Linux is free (as in free speech), and the open source community is based off the idea that software code is a form of speech, similar to a book. It's not about money, but ownership. Modern copyright law forces people to assume ownership of something - but you can't own an idea. The open source initiative, stemming as it does from the hacker culture, believes that ideas are a resource and should be freely usable as such to the public.
But I'm getting sidetracked. My point is that aside from open codecs like the Xiph.org projects (Ogg Vorbis (audio), Ogg Theora (video), and Speex (streaming speech)) or FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), no codec is actually free. Even things like XViD and x.264, which are free alternatives to DiVX and h.264 technically break copyright law because they perform the same function as the proprietary originals.
The end of all this mess is that the free distros of Linux do not come capable of playing any closed source media, including MP3 and DiVX. You have to add them all manually, during which process you will discover that you and millions of other people are breaking international copyright law by doing so. >sigh< But it's not like the owners are going to come kicking down your door for using these 'illegal' codecs... It just means more work for the user.

However, once they are installed, everything works far, far better than in windoze. I am pretty sure that even the video playback is better. I get better noise control and stronger, more contrasty colors.

The other annoyance is compiling software. I like to jump into something cold and figure it out while I'm drowning. But this time the river won't let me in... I'm actually going to have to ask someone for help on this, because I don't know the first step in rectifying these errors.

Oh well. It's all part of the fun!