Well, here it is some five months after I last posted. Whoa. What the hell? That has to be some kind of record for me. The truth is, I haven’t been writing anything. I guess I should catch up.
The major reason I haven’t written so much lately is because of the harassment I experienced at the Oneida County Library. The following is what happened to me on January 28, 2007:
Sometime around 3:00 or 3:30 PM on Thursday, January 25, 2007, I sat down at my usual spot at the back of the Oneida County Library and preceded to read through a couple magazines. At around 3:40 – 3:50 PM, I preceded to access the Internet with my laptop computer.
At around 4:30 PM, or shortly thereafter, I noticed one of the librarians approaching from my right. It was Kay Caldwell. It appeared at first as though she were going to say something, but when I looked up, I noticed that her attention was on something to my left. As she walked past me it became clear that whatever she was interested in was not only to my immediate left, but behind me as well.
Just as I was returning my attention to my laptop, Ms. Caldwell stated, “you know I can’t let you do that”. It was clear she was referring to the use of the electrical outlet next to my chair that my laptop was plugged into. When I looked up she was smirking at me so I returned a courteous smile and told her, “yes you can,” and returned my attention to my laptop.
At that point, Ms. Caldwell became visibly agitated and made some comment about how if she let me, she would have to let everyone else and how she couldn’t let people use her power (she actually used the word “my”), but that it I wanted to use my battery, I had her permission. I informed her that we were in a public library and that the power was ours to use. She stated again that she could not “allow” me to do it, and ordered me not to, then left in the direction that she had come.
At just after 4:50 PM, Ms. Caldwell approached from the bookshelves I faced and declared across the room in a loud, arrogant voice, “Are you about done?”. At that point, I became defensive and informed her that this was a public library and that she did not have authority to tell me what I can or cannot do. She then started to argue with me, but I cut her off and told her that if she had a problem with me then she needed to file charges against me in a legal court of law, and obtain a district court judgment against me. She abruptly turned around and declared “fine, I’ll just get that from Dustin tomorrow”, and stormed off.
I continued with what I had been doing until 5:15 or 5:20 PM when I left.
She never did get a that court order from “Dustin”, the stupid bitch. 😀 As if the local prosecutor can just conjure up a legal court order over night. Somebody watches too much Television. To bad for her this is America and due process requires that before a court order can legally be issued at the conclusion of a trail in which the defendant is presumed innocent and the plaintiff [prosecutor] bears the sole burden of proving guilt.
Regardless, I have not been to the library in months. They even stopped offering wireless because I was “abusing” it and causing a “security” treat. According to the slanderous notice that is currently posted on the front door. I did send a complaint to the board of trustees who answered by declaring that they did not recognize a violation of my rights. The have yet to receive a response to a second letter I sent concerning the slander. I guess I’ll have to make a bit more noise to get this issue resolved. My writing has suffered a great deal because of it.
In the mean time, I have become ensnared with a few distractions that have ended up being a complete waste of the entire time.
Sometime around the end of last year, I downloaded Kubuntu to try out. I wasn’t willing to wreck my perfect Debian installation on my laptop, so I assembled a desktop out of various components and spare parts that I have. The real reason I compiled the system was because the living room DVD player stopped working and the one my mom got for Christmas was taken down to her work space, so we didn’t have a DVD player upstairs anymore. So, I decided to get a computer working just so I could watch DVD movies.
That was the easy part.
The computer turned out to be a 450mhz PII which, of course, is useful for a great deal more than just watching movies. So, I’ve been playing with various Linux programs that I’ve been wanting to learn for a while. And it seemed so perfect as game station. I’m not really a gamer, its just not very practical, though I have always love console games (Nintendo, Sony Playstation, etc.). I have discovered Doom, thanks to some Linux ports. I have even explored Cinelerra, which may not be as wonderful as I was hoping-It would be better if it handled everything in raw formats or at the very least mpeg format instead of Windows avi’s and Quicktime formats only. I’ve been dabbling here and there, the list of software is endless.
Some of the things I wanted to try, just can’t be done with Ubuntu though. The reason I wanted to try Ubuntu in the first place was because I love Debian, but though Debian is stable, none of the cutting edge software is available for Sarge. Which is the problem. Ubuntu is just too unstable. It is, after all, based on Debian unstable. It is kinda like going back to Windows, only with a lot more software and instead of restarting the whole system, I just have to restart whatever process is causing the problem, mostly X. But, it’s still far superior to MS Windows.