Oh please don't, not on my account

I think I've discovered a new way to spend my time. I always knew I could write a lot. I have a live journal, a xanga, four blogger (google) journals and an collection of blog-like facebook notes. Normally I order them so that the blogs with the most posts are the least likely to be seen, and blogs that are viewed the most (like my facebook notes) are what I hope are the most interesting. If you think I write a lot now, you should see the stuff I used post in my xanga. I wrote 19 pages about a girl once. I wan't even done, too. I started to realize that doing that kind of thing is creepy and unhealthy, so I stopped. I probably could have gotten that story up to about 21 pages, and this is all before double-spacing and wider margins.

Imagine if I could put all this literary energy to good use! Maybe I could actually meet people, real people, on the internet, just by typing words into my computer. Of course as I say this it is 1:18 AM local time on a Friday night, which means I should be in a bar, but I am too exhausted from my flight today. At least, I thought I was. I went to bed at 10:30 but it didn't take.

Oooh! My flight. I realize that hearing me talk about flying all the time might not be that interesting, but it is my life right now, and I really wanted to share this: I did a cross country flight and actually enjoyed it. I didn't get enormously stressed out and I wasn't sick of being in the airplane. During this flight my instructor mentioned he was evaluating my competance for doing solo cross country flights. This included things like making sure I wouldn't die if a storm rolled in and I had to divert to a different airport. Unfortunately, it also included things like not answering questions I asked. When you take ground school they constantly mention this thing called "using all available resources" which means knowing where you can get information, whether its from passengers, from someone on the radio, or from books and charts you bring along. I don't know about the next guy, but I consider a commercial and instrument rated flight instructor sitting right next to me to be a damn good "available resource." However sometimes when I ask a question he just shrugs and says "pretend I'm not here." It reminds me of people on the internet who tell you to google something because they are too busy looking at funny pictures of cats to answer your question. Often, the phrase "pretend I'm not here" is a euphemism for "call the tower and ask a dumb question." I don't like to do this, so my latest strategy is to just guess the answer to my question and roll with it until my instructor may or may not intervene by telling me the answer or telling me to call the tower with my dumb question. It's like a dangerous game of chicken, and I play it well.

I just plugged my camera into my computer in an attempt to copy some pictures off of it. That should be pretty easy in linux, right? Cameras implement the usb-storage interface, and most linux boxes...oh look, my Ubuntu computer just mounted my camera to some secret location other than /mnt or /media. This is a problem for me because I wanted to copy my pictures onto my computer using the command line. I believe that moving files from one location to another under normal circumstances does not demand such cognitive activity as to require a graphical interface, like the one Ubuntu just shoved in my face. Wow I really need to stop whinning about Ubuntu on here. I bet most of my friends stop reading at these points. The camera isn't even showing up with the df command. So my camera is mounted (twice, actually), but its not mounted--oh great it just shut itself off. Ok I turned it back on, and according to Ubuntu I just plugged in three cameras. I see nothing helpful in the df output, or in mtab, or in /mnt or /media. Ubuntu wants me to use some program called F-Spot to look at my pictures, but I can't bring myself to do it, because I know that F-Spot will probably try to copy them to some folder in my home directory I never wanted but which starts with a capital letter, and also because I know that my photos are stored as files on my camera, and I want to copy them as files. Copying files isn't difficult; I think we've been copying files since like 1976. We should have a pretty good handle on it now. Ha! I .... oh thats wierd. My photos, apparently, are stored in gphoto2://[usb:001,009]/store_00010001. I hate this. I hate it so much. I don't know what I hate, or who I hate for it, but I hate something. I hate it a lot. So my pictures are not files, but instead some kind of...resource to be accessed via a URI? Really? They look more like files to me. Like this one; this is a picture I took after a rousing game of Settlers which is definitely not as interesting as I thought it would be and it is named "100_0128.JPG" Who thinks that's a jpg file? So what I understand is, I can't access my pictures from the command line. We have an operating system here that can run on almost every device sporting an "on" button, but if I want to copy a file, that requires a mouse and monitor and an entire graphical windowing system. I've heard Ubuntu has a server version. I wonder if it just blue screens when you plug in a camera. I know of another operating system that did that....

Clearly, I should have stayed in bed. It was really boring though. Sleeping alone has always bothered me, not only for the loneliness but for the boredom. Maybe I should play video games while I'm waiting to fall asleep. Or I could put a coffee table next to my bed with a collection of beat up, month old magazines like the dentist office has. I think I may have insomnia. I've been thinking about taking sleeping pills, or just half a dose of benadryl, which I bet does a better job. I've heard you become dependent on them though. Of course, if the alternative is not sleeping I suppose it isn't such a bad idea. This is depressing: I think I just spent an hour writing this entry and it is so dumb I don't even want to post it. The only thing that can save this is finding a good James Bond quote for the title.