(no subject)

I did just about everything I could to get drowsy last night so I could get to sleep. Considering that it was about four hours earlier than I'd been getting to bed, I figured I needed all the help I could get.

Well, I went to sleep, all right. And got about five hours of deep sleep, with vivid dreams. And then I woke up, completely undrowsy, spent a couple of hours tossing and turning, and here I am. It kind of annoys me, especially since today's the day I go in for the paperwork and stuff on that Quikdine job. I don't know whether that was actually all the sleep I needed, or just a bout of insomnia.

Today's also the meeting day of OzLug, one of the two Linux user-groups in town. I'm thinking of taking my computer down there to see if they can help me with an annoying problem I've been having. Ever since I did my most recent apt-get dist-upgrade, I've only been getting sound through one channel of my sound card. And I haven't gotten back a single response to the requests for help I posted in various Linux fora. So much for Linux being completely user-supported!

I'm about at the point where I'm thinking of having them rip out my current installation of Debian and reinstall it from scratch; this is only the latest in a number of disfunctions that lead me to believe that perhaps the piecemeal nature of my installation (little bit a'this, little bit a'that) could be causing some things not to work right with each other, and I'm about out of disk space. It annoys me because the amount of tweaking required to make a new installation work right is usually quite large, and as I'm starting a new job, I don't know that I'm going to have the time for it.

And I'm worried a little about the new job. Could you guess? I know that delivery driving sounds like fun to me now, but I'm afraid it'll soon shade into tedium—and I'm deathly afraid of having an accident with a new vehicle. Going to have to keep distractions down 'til I get the hang of it, for certain.

Oh well. I have enough anxiety without borrowing more. Just have to see how it goes today.

How my day went

Well, the job-training thing went well enough. Essentially, we went over the handbook—which was partly common sense, partly specific procedures for how to do things. Kind of neat, but a little scary, too...if I have an accident and it's my fault, I could be liable for up to $500 of damage. Gotta keep reminding myself to be very careful.

After that, came home, had a nap, then took my computer down to the local linux user-group meeting, in the hope that they could do something about the sound problem. However, the way things went, they got started talking, and only got around to looking at it 10 minutes before the end of the meeting. Which, of course, was too late to do anything about it. The fellow who looked at it suggested trying to back off to an earlier version of esd—but the earliest version available was the one I'd been using when I had the problem to begin with. And so far, the only response I've been able to get to my help request in linux is a fellow who seems to think maybe I have my balance control set wrong. I wish!

So anyway, now I'm extremely frustrated, because I've exhausted all the avenues of help I can think of, and I'm still without my sound working right. This really hits me hard, because I'm an audio-oriented sort of person...listening to music is how I relax, how I set my mood. I've tried everything I can think of to fix it, and nothing's working; the hell of it is, I wasn't even doing anything wrong when the sound broke. I just did the periodic software upgrade that I always do...but about one time out of ten when I do that, something breaks.

I really didn't need this added stress right when I'm starting a new job.

Update: And darned if it didn't turn out the fellow was right about the balance. Apparently it wasn't a problem with esd, but with the particular mixing app I was using.

Weird.