Don't be wrapped in plastic!

lemme set the scene for ya...

i installed archbang, but made a fail on my grub bootloader issues.

that's the scene.

and why did that scene take place in our stage production?

too long with what i, unashamedly insultingly call, noob distros.

it may seem more convenient that everything "just works", but one of the beauties of them not working, is that it forces your hand to learn something.

and that i intend as the central theme here.  learning something!



there are two pieces to the jigsaw of my experience-led mental make-up, that i'd love to hammer home to the world... 

these experiences came from:
1: an episode of star trek where a society is in danger of collapse because a computer that has taken care of their every whim for ages without malfunction starts to break down, and no one knows a thing about it.
2: the gnu.org/philosophy pages.

i summed it up in a near bumper sticker sized quote on a forum...

if your life depends on a computer, then know how it works!
(~edit~ and even if it doesnt too)

or at the very least, start learning!

dont be wrapped in plastic.  basically.

y'know... dont shut yourself off from the world around you.

your operating system is part of that world, and chances are, (especially if you are sad enthusiastic enough to be reading this blog), a really important one!

with proprietary, you're just not really given the chance.  trade secret, keep out, not allowed.

maybe back in the DOS days you felt a little closer to truth, but then along came macs, and that just completely denied the "end user" any chance of knowing what was really going on in their machine, and the DOS lineage pretty much followed in this way.

well it ain my way, no more.

back in the days of reading up on the gnu philosophy, i thought i understood it then... and i did, i was intelectually sold on the idea, and now i hope i KNOW it.

and dont think that just once you also "get it" and make the decision to leave your long familiar proprietary operating system, that your days in a bubble are over... there's still plastic sheeting over many open source distros.

yeah, sure, u can take it off.  you are actually free to look under the hood, and perhaps on occasion you may be asked to, or even required to peek under the plastic wrap which separates you from being one step closer to truth and reality, once in a while.

but if you dont want to fall the way of those who's existence was at risk, you'll have a motivation to your curiosity, you'll look under that plastic hood, you'll want the truth, not the plastic convenience facade.

wont you...?

yeah... convenience has real allure.

Richard stallman warned me.   he warned us all.

and if he had the "Public Relations" budget of the corporations, we all might have heard him over the corporate roar.

well i consider myself getting closer to living the ideals i've long held, now that i have arch installed.

my grub problem?

oh, i fixed that pretty quick... see, i was just a bit rusty after too many years of not needing to think, letting the magic under the plastic wrap do it all for me.

no more.

now the arch way,
is my way.