No matter how you look at it, despite a lot of energy spent on my part, today was a wasted day.

I set about trying to figure out how to upgrade an old Android tablet and get a writing program working on Linux. The results were mixed.

The Linux project actually went well, eventually, and then it didn’t. I finally figure out how to install WINE, which in classic Linux tradition stands for the tautological “WINE Is Not an Emulator” (This makes more sense when you realize that Linux is actually GNU/Linux and that GNU stands for “GNU is not Unix.)

WINE lets me run Windows programs on Linux. After some tinkering I got the writing program running. The problem is that although I could open a new project, I couldn’t open the old one. After much fiddling and restarting, I finally gave up and checked to see if things were working as they should on Windows.

They were, with no trouble at all, and that means I have to decide if I want to spend more energy on making things work or if I should just give up and try a different program.

This is representative of my only problem with Linux: although it’s free, it represents a new hobby. You have to decide you want to understand it and have to want to work with it. Even the easy to use distributions such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint are great right up until something goes wrong and you have to learn how to learn how to fix it. For example, I started using it at work back in 2006 and liked it a lot. Then the school where I work got a new printer that wasn’t compatible with Linux. I never did manage to make things work and gave up on Linux for a while.

As for the tablet, once She Who Must Be Obeyed and I remembered the PIN (long story almost resulting in divorce, sort of) I was able to get things working. The trouble is, the plan to root it and install new software hit the snag that 1) the tablet is made by an obscure Indonesian manufacturer which means 2) most information about it is in Indonesian which means 3) I’m not sure what’s compatible with it.

At this point, I’m trying to decide if trashing it might not be more worthwhile than playing with it. I already have enough hobbies, Linux, for example.

On the other hand, if I’m just going to throw it out, I might as well see how badly I can ruin it before I do. That might be kind of fun.

After last week’s adventure with an old computer, I thought that today I’d play with more old stuff.

Electronics tend to gather the way old, unread books do. They represent the triumph of hope over schedule. I intend to read the books, someday, and I tend to use/modify the old electronics but there are other things in the way, usually other books and other electronics. And other hobbies.

First I messed with the old computer for a while, and managed to avoid swearing at anything. Tomorrow, though, I’ll try to make some software work on it and I suspect our girls will learn some new words.

I also decided to play with an old tablet computer that I bought for She Who Must Be Obeyed a few years ago. My plan was to win her over the same way I won her over to digital cameras: introduce a cheap but useful one into her life and let her see the benefits. It turned out, though, to be a bad choice. The tablet was cheap and proved to be hard to use and she didn’t use it more than a couple days before abandoning it.

I kept it with plans to jailbreak it as a way to practice jailbreaking such things. Instead, it’s waited in a drawer for a long time. I’ll play with it tomorrow and see if it’s worth playing with more. If I can remember the pass code.

There’s also another tablet that I might get to play with, too. After the initial failure I bought a better one but it was barely taken out of the box. In fact, I think our oldest used it the most after we took her tablet away.

I’ll need to learn the pass code to that one, too.  I’ll have to ask our oldest about that.

I didn’t do much today, but I did get a lot done. More specifically I didn’t move much.

Although I spent most of the day at the computer, I was working on things that involved pens and paper but didn’t involve the actual computer. Instead the computer provided background noise and images for me whilst I worked on other things.

At one point I had my laptop set up on my desk in front of my regular computer so that I could work on a computer but not disturb old episodes of MythBusters. (Note: it is interesting to see the early seasons before they became popular. They had trouble getting stuff to use in their mythbusting. Then, they had an episode where they got the FBI to close off a highway and blow up a truck and you could tell they’d arrived.)

Somewhere in there, stuff got done, although there were a few odd computer issues. They weren’t that bad, though, so not much swearing was involved. Just a lot of angry sighing.

Tomorrow is another exam day and part of that will be spent watching movies as I attempt a double feature of sorts.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the biggest assholes at an elementary school sports day are the parents of the first graders. They are young, fast, and everything is still new and they will get those photos/videos at all costs.

To make matters worse, they bring along grandparents who are just as deadly because they’ve reached the age where they just don’t care.

Today was especially bad. There was even a judging controversy.

Today was our youngest’s last sports day in elementary school which meant she had a lot to do which meant I had a lot of pictures to take. As a rule, She Who Must Be Obeyed takes video and I take still pictures. We have battle plan of sorts that involves finding out approximately where our youngest will be at any given moment. I always set up my tripod at the back of the  zone of tarps. This lets me get good camera angles and puts me standing behind a zone where people usually sit.

In general, most parents are fairly well behaved. Not today. Today there were a lot of assholes around.

The tarp zone, which is usually one solid zone of tarps, had lots of small dirt gaps of several inches. This meant that any gap was a free zone where people could stand and the people behind could be damned.

None of these people care about anything but pictures of children. Even the cameraless woman in the center.

Luckily, I only was interested in a few events, but even those were complicated by women who brought parasols to protect their skin from the sun.

A pair of female assholes who probably won’t get skin cancer.

I can forgive all this, though, because, as a parent, I understand the urge to get as many pictures as possible.

The next level of asshole is the professional asshole who gets to roam around the field taking pictures where ever he wants and always manages to get in the way.

This asshole blocked several shots (our youngest is behind him). The bright side is, I know the best camera angles.

However, even I can forgive that. Sort of.

What I can’t forgive, is the asshole mother in the designated photo section. She had kid in her arms but no camera. She was up against the rope when she should have been toward the back. She was talking to her friend and kept bumping into me as I tried to take shots.

I kept my cool, but I asked She Who Must Be Obeyed what “Take a picture or get the fuck out” was in Japanese but she rather vehemently refused to translate for me.

To make matters worse, there was a judging controversy. Going into the final event–the big ball race–our youngest’s team was behind but was in striking distance of victory.

In the race, all members of each of the two teams help pass a large inflated ball down the line to a final resting place. I noticed right away that the teams seemed to be operating under different rules.

When the white team dropped the ball, they had to bring it back to the place it had touched the ground and start from there. The red team, though, was allowed to pick the ball up from where it had stopped and continue from there. I thought it might be a delusion created by my own parental bias, but it turned out an asshole was involved.

The red team won two races in a row and secured the overall victory. However, the judges for the white team had misunderstood the rules. Because part of each team is little kids who are shorter than the ball, they are allowed to roll the ball rather than try to keep it in the air. The asshole judge, however, insisted they move a “dropped” ball back and start from the drop point it had started rolling.

Next year’s sports day will be our youngest’s first in junior high school. There usually aren’t many assholes there, but we’ll see.