Life, Linux and the Pursuit of Happiness

The Mike Wallace Interview ran from 1957 to 1960 on ABC. In the early 60’s he donated his collected material to the Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. They have no digitized the material and put it online.

This is journalism from another era. Hard questions were not only expected but answered. The Aldous Huxley interview has many points which are just as relevant today as they were in 1958. At one point Wallace asks if we really need freedom and then doesn’t let him off with a simple yes.

I wish I had more time to watch them.

My building has a little mouse problem and by little I mean BIG. It isn’t any worse for me than some other places I’ve lived but my unit is pretty isolated from the rest of the building. In the entire time I’ve been here, I’ve seen two mice and nothing in the kitchen has ever been touched. I also haven’t seen any mouse poo. Others in the building are not so fortunate and so a pest control expert was brought it. Poison was put out and the mice problem started to go away. Then it got warm one day.

I guess you could say the building was/is infested. The poison did it’s work and the mice started to die off. The problem is that all those dead mice are in the walls of the building. I noticed the smell at the entrance to the building but others noticed it in their units. The poison was removed and an alternate is being investigated to deal with the problem. Problem still exists. Why you may ask? The mice eat the dead mice that are contaminated and they die and so on. There are that many mice. This hasn’t really been a problem for me until it got warm. Now the smell is coming from the entrance way up into my unit. Luckily not all of it but it’s worst in the area I use the most.

My friend Jamie refers to the walls as being “packed with meat” which reminded me of another story a friend told about “meat bombs”. “Meat bombs” might make another post.

I hate the smell.

Today on the bus I sat across from a guy that was obviously another geek. It’s not a matter of being able to identify your own but a case of stereo types coming together in one person.

The first thing I noticed about this individual was his glasses. At first glance they appeared to be horribly crooked. At second glance I realized that one eye is significantly lower than the other, just making his bent glasses seem worse. He sits down and opens up his backpack. Being a fellow geek I notice what many others would not, the merest sliver of a Spider Man lunch box. Then he pulls out a book on making comics. Once he started reading, the buck teeth popped ever so slightly over his bottom lip.

All of this is fine and normal awkward geek fare. The part that really stood out after he sat down was his toque. This was astounding. I don’t think I could purposefully do this. It sat on his head like a bashed up wizards hat. It was tall, wrinkled and had that slight bend to one side.

It was awesome.