Why does every god in their life create around themselves a multitude of stones that they are then unable to lift? Do they need this for training? Do they expect to grow stronger and cope with the tasks they have set for themselves? Or do they act unconsciously, unable to manage their own might?

Continuing the rural theme — found it on fishki, I crawled under my chair laughing :)

Come morning you will walk to the office, Log your arrival in the book, Then mindlessly stare at the monitor, And another day for the country — just gone.

You’ll sit there in a fog of tedium, At war with boredom, losing fast, You’ll shuffle that same sheet of paper From one corner to the last.

There’s this fellow — Timur Shaov. One of his songs has latched onto me and just won’t let go, the wretched thing.

In the beginning was the Word, time passed.
God created beer, woman, and the Earth,
And God saw that it was good.
He had the village specifically in mind.
God ordained that we should dwell in villages.
I carry out the Lord's commandments in my life.
Our village is like the Garden of Eden:
I drift, I groove, I vibe, I'm blown away.

        My little village, three small windows.
        Come on over to me, my little kitten!

Here, with God's help, we grow beets,
Carrots, onions, potatoes of all kinds,
Dill, parsley — and what parsnip we have here!
Even Boris Leonidych himself would be proud!
The women here are full of natural fire,
No Freudian complexes — honest to God!
And at full gallop, maybe not a horse,
But a man she'll stop for sure!

        My little village, trousers full of patches.
        Come on over to me, my sweetheart!

Even the local small-time crooks here
Are more decent than the capital's decadents.
People here are simpler, they eat bread-and-water in the morning
And don't shove their intellect in your face.
And yes, the men here drink a lot —
That's so the soul doesn't grunt, but sings.
At least our coachmen
Don't freeze in the steppe, taking a nip for warmth

        My little village, little tail with a tassel.
        Come on over to me, my little feminist!

The scent of manure here is a symbol of purity,
For the connoisseur — more pleasant than Chanel.
We grow out of manure like flowers,
Like Leo Tolstoy from Gogol's "Overcoat."
For city folk, manure is just "crap" —
But here, for every kilogram of dung
There falls a pearl of grain.
Everyone here wears necklaces, like Papuans.

        My little village, underfinanced.
        Come on over to me, emancipated one!

What kind of life is there in the city? Not life — a prison!
Crowds, cops, cars, heaps of garbage,
Stench, racket, stress, prostitutes, MMM,
The boss is a rat, work is lousy, friends are Judases.
The tap water is copper sulfate,
The neighbors are vermin to the fifth generation.
Neurosis, arthrosis, thrombosis, leukosis, diarrhea —
The diseases of the urban population!

        My little village, down-at-heel.
        Come on over to me, my poor dear!

Leave the stinking city smog behind,
Come to us — your carriage awaits, your carriage!
Here there is a corner for the wounded soul,
Here a poet has something to drink and to eat.
Without Kashpirovsky, nature will heal you:
Grey hair turns black again, scars on the skin fade,
Potency grows, as does your belly and appetite,
Everything that can grow grows in size.

        My little village, horseradish with parsley.
        Come on over — and not alone, but with a girlfriend!

But the union of city and village is a disgrace!
So that sailors may trample our virginity!
The village, dear friends, is no trifling matter,
The village is the quintessence of morality!
You live so here — coarse-spun and simple,
Putting on a peasant coat and a rope for a belt.
You walk in bast shoes — there's your Tolstoy!
You dash off a novel — like a woman throwing herself under a train.

        My little village, drinks on payday.
        Why won't you come to me, you pampered creature!

The steppe mare treads down the feather-grass,
All the Scythians are squint-eyed with a hangover.
July, grasshoppers, the midday dust,
And the old God snores beneath the icons.
In the village your soul is cleansed,
The village sublimates space.
And there's good potatoes here too,
And I love them with melted butter.

– What are you waiting for, sir? – the smiling host asked me with friendly surprise. – Your number is 19. Go and meet your fate, my friend! – Yes, of course, – I smiled back, – thank you for reminding me why I came here… People are so absent-minded, and I am, after all, a person… – I had finally remembered what I was supposed to do. And I walked slowly deeper into the room, where solitary ladies from among the Waiting ones flitted about, lovely and not so lovely… A wild thought flashed through my mind: “I swear on my mother, no cop has ever gone looking for a mistress with someone arrested in his fist!” I grinned nervously and began to count: – One, two, three… – I couldn’t even see their faces; they blurred into one vague, swaying smudge, and I walked through that smudge with a foolish grin, – six, seven… what a pity I have quite a different number, unforgettable one… ten, eleven… excuse me… eighteen, nineteen! You’re the one I need, lady! – Are you doing it on purpose? Casting spells again? – a familiar voice asked quietly. – You shouldn’t, Sir Max. But there’s nothing to be done about it now… You don’t argue with fate, isn’t that right? I finally focused my eyes. The pale smudge of a face gradually took on familiar, dear features. Lady Melamori was watching me warily. She seemed unable to decide what would be better: to throw herself around my neck, or to flee. – This is too much! – I said quietly. – No, this is really too much! – And then I sat down on the floor and began to laugh. I didn’t care about decorum, or anything else for that matter! My mind flatly refused to take part in this absurd adventure… It seemed my hysteria convinced Melamori better than any words could that there had been no “conspiracy” against her. Never. – Let’s get out of here, Sir Max! – she said quietly, crouching down beside me and gently stroking my poor mad head. – You’ll frighten the visitors. Come on, you can finish laughing outside if you want! Get up! – And I obediently leaned on her small, strong hand. Sinful Magisters, this fragile lady lifted me to my feet without any effort! The fresh breeze quickly put everything back in its place, so my urge to laugh faded at once. – So many strange things happen in this foolish World, Melamori. – I said. And fell silent. What was there to say! – Max, – Melamori said quietly, – I’m very ashamed: in your bedroom… in short, now I understand I was talking terrible nonsense, but I was so frightened! I completely lost my head! – I can imagine… – I shrugged, – falling asleep in your own home and waking up God knows where… – Who is “God”? – Melamori asked indifferently. I had more than once had to untangle myself from such idiomatic misunderstandings, but this time I just waved my hand wearily. – What does it matter!… The thing is, I really didn’t do anything on purpose. I still have no idea how it could have happened… – I know, – Melamori nodded, – now I understand that you don’t yet realize yourself what you’re capable of, but… It doesn’t matter anymore. – Why? – Because… That’s just how things turned out. Only we’ll go to your place, not mine. I live too close, so… In short, let this last walk be a long one. – Last? Have you lost your mind, Melamori! You think I’m such a deadly fellow? That I’ll bite your head off in a fit of passion? – I tried to be cheerful, because I absolutely had to be cheerful right now, a hole in the sky above it all! – Of course you won’t bite my head off – it simply wouldn’t fit in your throat… – Melamori smiled helplessly. – But that’s not the point. Do you even understand where we met, Max? – In the Quarter of Rendezvous! You won’t believe it, but I don’t know how I ended up there myself… Think what you will, but I came there following a guy with a mother-of-pearl belt… You know about all that business with the belts, right?… – Melamori nodded, and I went on. – We roughhoused a bit, and then I arrested him. He’s still here! – And I showed Melamori my left fist with a smile. – You mean to say… – Lady Melamori burst out laughing. It ended with her taking a turn sitting down on the pavement. I sat beside her and put my arm around her shoulders. Melamori was groaning with laughter. – And I thought you were… Oh, I can’t! You are the most amazing fellow in the World, Sir Max. I adore you! What a… what a pity! In the end we walked on. – Have you never been to the Quarter of Rendezvous before? – Melamori asked quietly. – No… Where I come from, in the Empty Lands, things are somehow simpler… Or the other way around, more complicated – it depends on your point of view… In short, I’d never been there! – And you don’t know… – Melamori’s voice had dropped to a whisper, – you don’t know that people who meet in the Quarter of Rendezvous must spend the night together and then part? – In our case that’s completely impossible, – I smiled, though my heart was slowly sinking, – we’re both not about to give up our jobs, as I understand it… Melamori shook her head. – That’s not necessary. We can see each other as much as we like, but… we’ll be strangers, Max. I mean… Well, it’s clear enough. It’s tradition. Nothing to be done! It’s my own fault – I went there out of spite, wanted to prove something, I don’t even know to whom… I shouldn’t have gone anywhere today, and neither should you… Though who can be blamed here? People don’t decide such things themselves. – But… – I was completely lost. My head was already such a jumble that I could simply shut up. – Let’s not talk about it, Max, all right? Morning is still a long way off, and… They say fate is wiser than us… – All right, we won’t, – I shrugged, – but it seems to me all this is some primitive nonsense. We can decide for ourselves what to do. What do silly traditions have to do with anything? If you like, tonight we can simply take a walk, as if nothing has happened, we won’t tell anyone anything, and then later, when… – I don’t want to… and it’s impossible anyway! – Melamori sighed, smiled, and gently closed my mouth with her icy little palm… – I told you: enough of this, all right?

By allocating 128 megabytes of memory for video, I managed to render Windows completely inoperable — now it only works without the video card driver :(

Unclear what’s going on. Here’s a description of the symptoms:

I have an ASUS X51RL laptop with ATI onboard video that can use system RAM for its own purposes. After using the standard tools of the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) software to increase the amount of memory used by the video card (the manufacturers call it “UMA Buffer Size”) from the default 64 MB to 128 MB, Windows broke. The process of increasing the allocated memory was accompanied by a reboot (which was expected) and a “BIOS checksum error” message (which was already strange).

There’s a reason to congratulate the Alexanders I know, since December 6th is their name day ;)

Today was the first day of hard work (gig) as a civil servant. No impressions yet — everyone is sizing each other up. So far everything is fine — a typical example of a typical rural government office…

More precisely, I swapped my nice ASUS 3500L for the same brand’s X51RL. I was tempted by a gigabyte of RAM, a SATA hard drive at 5400 RPM, a glossy widescreen display. And the ATI graphics with Wi-Fi won’t hurt either.

The first discovery was the quirky driver situation for this model. I already knew it ships with FreeDOS and the bundled drivers only target Vista. But there’s the internet, there’s the manufacturer’s website, where you can grab whatever software you need. I armed myself with the previously-mentioned Kubuntu — it spotted the monitor just fine (though that’s arguably XOrg’s credit), set up a PPPoE connection without any trouble, and recognised the flash drive — everything works. So I head to the ASUS site. Finding only Vista and XP drivers there didn’t really bother me. I downloaded them and went to install my old friend Microsoft® Windows™ 2000. No need to have been afraid of the SATA drive — it recognised it natively (and I almost bought a USB floppy), installed just fine, looking all ugly at 640×480… ugh…

Today during the day, the first experiment with the African Linux was conducted. It served as a vivid illustration of the fact that you cannot install operating systems without beer :) Problem statement: install Kubuntu on a virtual machine. Purpose: evaluate the installation process, anticipate subtleties in order to account for them when installing on a real machine.

Procedure.

Introduction. The Kubuntu disc I have (7.04 for i386) is a live distribution. Booting it gives you a KDE desktop with a lone “Install” icon sitting on it. I loaded it on my long-suffering computer (750 MHz), allocating 180 MB of RAM to the virtual machine. It booted with noticeable lag. No reaction to clicking the aforementioned icon was observed. The obvious conclusion: “can’t hear without legs”… The experiment was moved to a 1600 MHz processor with 256 megabytes allocated. Still with the same lag (slow hard drive), but at least there was a reaction now. The graphical installer launches (hooray) and walks through six steps. 1. Language selection (for installation and system). Chose Ukrainian. 2. Keyboard layout selection. Fairly broad. Chose the national layout. 3. Time zone selection — UTC+2. 4. A choice between two options — install automatically to the entire drive or partition it manually. Chose manually. 5. The partitioning process itself. Reminds me of the FreeBSD graphical partition editor, to which a partition bar from PartitionMagic was added. (Right now, while writing this, it hit me — why on earth didn’t you take screenshots, huh?). 6. The question “Are you sure? All data on the hard drive……..”. With a firm index finger (why worry — it’s a virtual machine after all) I click “Yeah, sure”.

It turns out that my household members have a completely different daily schedule.

By the time my grey cells wake up and start doing productive work — calling for reinforcements in the form of tea (continuously) and cigarettes (once every 60 minutes) — everyone at home is already asleep, not at all pleased with the noise of the boiling kettle and the banging of doors. This, in fact, explains both the absence of journal entries and a certain pause in other forms of remote communication. It’s just not in me to turn on the computer in the morning and write a letter. And in the afternoon, household chores come up. Or more precisely, the people who come up with them do :)