Plexcompity

Success

It was a great success!
All the students mocked
while she cried
and they did not care.

She cried. It was
their success: stepping
on her defenseless
back, climbing her agony.

They did not care
nor did they repent;
their hearts closed,
bolted successfully.

And her tears
rolled down my cheeks
as I wonder
how can we be so cruel?

To Rachel, whose compassion and inclusiveness make me so proud.

Figure of Sheep

When you finally see
lupine eyes
beneath wooly curls

it has already been too late
for a very long time.

Two Linux Installs

Last weekend I successfully installed Fedora 9 on an older desktop. It’s pretty sweet. I think I could almost switch to it for full-time use. This weekend, I wanted to try to revive a weaker machine … a Compaq PIII 800 with 128 M of RAM.

I started out with Xubuntu, which couldn’t pull off the partitioning step. After multiple attempts with various settings, I gave fluxbuntu a shot. Fluxbuntu has a few rough edges, and I’m a bit surprised by some of the application choices (why OO.org Write but nothing else … I’d have brought in Impress or Draw but/and they included ABIword).

The FluxBox display manager has some ineresting features I’ll be playing with and learning to optimize. One bug, however, almost soured the milk. Adjusting the screen size doesn’t change the desktop size unless you alter the xconfig file. Enough window defaults have been set up that trying to use 640x480 (I thought I might use an old 9” monitor) is nearly impossible.

And, I still have my live desktop Fedora 9 on a USB that makes my laptop do wonderous things.