Fewer words strike more terror into the hearts of aspiring yogis than when the teacher casually tosses out the term "yogi's choice". What it essentially means is that you could choose to stay on in a wimpy form of the pose while the rest of the class and the teacher go into the more exotic variation - that just might have given you an infinitely more effective muscle stretch had you been able to do it. The harder you try and reach that variation, the more likely you are to wobble out of balance and end up with no pose at all. At which point you "honour your practice", which is actually just code for accepting that you totally missed the yoga elixir that was dangled before you minutes back.

Yoga totally whipped all of our hands and hearts yesterday... well, all EXCEPT (e:Paul) who was probably born with a strong dose of yogi's-choice-power-goo in his silver-yogi-spoon. I meant to complete this entry after class but I was so washed out after practice that I fell asleep at my "desk" and pretty much crawled into bed 3 metres away.

(e:Paul), on the other hand has been logged in the entire time and quite possibly coding in a frenzy. That's what happens when you outshine the entire class in just about every outlandish balance-act yoga-pose that is thrown your way. And there were tons that I can't even find the names for.


For instance, the L-pose at the wall above with a "yogi's choice" extreme T-variation where you raise one of your legs up in the air till it's perfectly perpendicular to your other leg and parallel to your arms. While the rest of the class wobbled with asymmetry across the studio, (e:Paul) literally flew through several of the poses AND he did the T-variation on both sides.

Wait. There is more. Later after class, while I bemoaned the lack of moonwalk fluidity, he totally denied knowing how to moonwalk WHILE his legs were moonwalking the hell out of the yoga studio floor. If all this doesn't silently scream "Clark Kent!!" to you... well, then it's time to go and see the movies or you could come to yoga. Your Yogi's choice.

I don't use a mouse at home because I have borderline RSI. Instead, I have a Wacom Bamboo tablet and stylus that I use for all kinds of input from simple pointing-and-clicking to drawing and painting on pressure-sensitive applications such as mypaint. A major frustration has been to make it work with any and all flavours of linux. Fedora has treated me no better than the *buntus.

I have a simple question. How can I assign functions to the two buttons on the stylus? I currently use one button as a right-click and the other one as a "grab and scroll" middle-click button. Is it SO tough to figure this out in linux? Apparently, it is. This supposedly authoritative "manual" for the wacom linux driver does not help me at all because it's so dense and jargon ridden. And no one in ubuntu forums answers these sort of questions:

I am so frustrated. The linux community is nothing better than a mass of self-centred mirror-image RTFM-chanting zealots who have zero empathy or patience for anyone other than themselves and their ad nauseum omg-M$-is-so-evil-and-you-are-so-dumb-for-using-it agendas.

I am going to try this piece of code from this forum this evening. I wish I understood what it's doing!

1. !/bin/bash
2. If you set XSW in your environment it will override the
3. script's default of /usr/bin/xsetwacom.
4. If you set PAD and/or STYLUS then those override the script's
5. defaults of 'Wacom Bamboo pad' and 'Wacom Bamboo' which are
6. known correct for Ubuntu 9.04

1. [ Do not change this bit: ]

test "x$XSW" = "x" && XSW=/usr/bin/xsetwacom
test -x $XSW || { echo "Cannot find xsetwacom in /usr/bin"; exit 1; }

test "x$PAD" = "x" && PAD="Wacom BambooFun 4x5 pad"
test "x$STYLUS" = "x" && STYLUS="Wacom BambooFun 4x5"

pad () {
$XSW set "$PAD" "$@"
}

stylus () {
$XSW set "$STYLUS" "$@"
}

1. [ Configurability from here down.]

1. Define the Bamboo buttons

pad AbsWDn "CORE KEY - "        # circle zoom in
pad AbsWUp "CORE KEY + "        # circle zoom out
pad Stripldn "CORE KEY - "        # strip in
pad Striplup "CORE KEY + "        # strip zoom out
pad Button1 "CORE KEY CTRL /z"        # key 1 () fill frame
pad Button4 "CORE KEY SHIFT"        # key 4 (FN2) SHIFT

stylus TPCButton "off"            # side switch mode
stylus mode "Absolute"            # positioning mode
stylus Button1 "Button 1"        # pentip click left
stylus Button2 "CORE KEY /x"        # Lower side switch click right
stylus Button3 "Button 3"        # Upper side switch click middle

So I tried to configure the xorg (wth?) wacom drivers using a text editor called gedit (wth?). When I opened it this bit of gibberish was waiting for me:

WALTOP needs a patched kernel driver, that isn't in mainline lk yet, so for now just let it fall through and be picked up by evdev instead.

Seriously? Am I supposed to nod in agreement or throw rocks at the screen?

This is why regular folks might not really want to go anywhere near any kind of linux. I have seen linux distributions with holier-that-thou taglines such as "software for humans". Does their definition of "humans" comes from a dictionary buried under Martian craters?!

At the Texas Salsa Congress!!



Too bad I can't be there to drool over their performance...

I was reminded recently why I don't eat out anymore. Vegetarian fare, even in prominently vegetarian restaurants such as Merge is so disappointing. I had their "smothered sweet potato fries" with some dairy-substitute called "daiya" last week. It was a hastily put-together mish-mash of soggy fried sweet potato fingers, a cheesy semi-solid bland-tasting thing that I can't describe very well, a smattering of bland french-lentils and wilted bland spinach - all put together in an environmentally unfriendly styrofoam box.

Call me a snob if you want, but I am very sure that I could take each one of these simple components and cook them so that I would want to eat the resulting meal for an entire week without getting bored. I couldn't even get through that one meal from Merge. It was just too bland and too uninteresting. I can see why people turn up their noses at the mention of "vegetarian". Self-proclaimed vegetarian-specialty restaurants such a Merge tarnish what it means to be vegetarian.

Why should I eat bland uninteresting things and pay for it too when I know that I can do a million times better at home?! It's so ridiculous that I forget this fact every now and then. This entry should serve as a reminder. The only thing worth eating out is butter on hot fresh-toasted bread - because really, no one could possibly mess that up however hard they tried.