2008-08-26»
false consciousness; true unconsciousnessยปSo yesterday was my first sincere attempt to get up at 6AM, in preparation for Ada not having to take letters to school apologising for my absence. It went pretty well: I successfully bludgeoned myself to sleep at around 10PM, and my gazmodic Sleeptracker Pro watch woke me up when it caught me in a light sleep cycle a little before the alarm went off (the watch spots this with an accelerometer — if you’re rolling around, you’re sleeping lightly and ready to be woken up).
Admittedly, I don’t actually have Ada to take to school today, so I mostly blundered around doing chores until I collapsed asleep around 8.30. That would be 8.30AM, unfortunately — I work up around tennish with my subconscious definitely smug about having made me simultaneously early to rise and late to work. Psych!
This evening, I didn’t have much to tell you lot apart from the fascinating vagaries of my sleep pattern, so instead I tinkered around getting the Sleeptracker Pro database software working. The watch not only wakes you when it sense your in a light sleep cycle, it stores all your lighter moments in a database which you can suck down over USB using a dangerous-looking crocodile clip. Somebody wonderful has written a Linux version of the Sleeptracker Pro client software (called “napkin”, marvellously), and I’ve just got it to work:
There, now burglars will know the best time to rob me. It’s not often that I have to compile software from scratch these days, and as I did so, I marvelled at the absolute trivia stored in my head that let me stumble towards getting this working. Oh, it needs gtkmm to work — well, that means it’ll need the libgtkmm-dev package. Hmm, actually it’s now saying it doesn’t have a MODULE. I’m guessing that’s not a thing called “MODULE” but that I don’t have the right gtkmm module. Let’s grep for gtkmm in the configuration file. Aha! Here we go, it’s expecting gtkmm version 2.4, so that would be libgtkmm2.4-dev. And so on.
It’s times like this when I wonder about what I call false consciousness among technology users. We’ve so often invested so much time learning all of this eldritch magic, that we end up loving the tyrant machine because of its trickle of rewards, and despise anything that gives us those rewards without vindicated the sunk costs of the trivia that we’ve so painfully learned. I wonder if OS X is popular among Linux ex-pats partly because it is both shinier, and one ends up having to use all of this craziness whenever one needs to do something tricky there, too: as opposed to Windows where all of this Unix knowledge is like knowing the Ancient Mayan for “browser plug-in”.
The worst part is that there’s no easy way to put this knowledge into words, because it’s practically unconscious for me now. I don’t think I could tell you how I got this program to work, even five minutes after I manhandled it into existence. It’s like my fingers and lower brain-stem knows Linux better than my conscious brain does.