So my sister has this broken laptop that nobody uses. Its screen freezes, its battery doesn’t hold a charge, and it has one too many stickers on it. One afternoon, we decided to salvage what we could from it, so I installed Ubuntu linux + SSH, so that I could control it from my own computer. On that first day, I got the wireless working and set a static private IP, and I was pretty damn proud.

Today, about 20 minutes ago, I was testing the audio card with some songs that I uploaded. So, I’m listening to Dead and Gone by T.I. and mplayer gets to this one part where he’s rapping about cardinal directions¹. For as long as I can remember, I associate certain characteristics with each of the four directions. East is the rich, excessive, and superficial society that prides itself in a cultured, structured, and sophisticated way of life. North is the forest-dwelling, mysterious and superbly awesome race of elf-like humanoids who are too self-important to share their coolness with anybody else. West is the casual bunch of present-hedonistic party-goers who get their work done, but much too slowly. South is cowboys and lazy farmers, what else? Ha, I’m just kidding². But when I was at the park today, I brought up my mental maps and the view towards each of the four directions actually reflected these descriptions fairly accurately. To the East.. was the road. Of course. The North side had this deep navy blue night sky with the silhouette of many trees. To the West were many houses with lights coming through the windows. The South had a couple of hills and dense foliage behind.

Now, I can plug in this laptop anywhere: one to the power outlet, another to speakers. I open two terminal windows: one for the mixer (volume) and the other for the command line music player.