A while ago, I posted a comment on another blog that was more flip than pithy. Hell, even I make mistakes. Actually, I make dozens of them, and freely admit it. Anyway, what I said was something to the effect of “you live to live,” but ultimately that seems pretty pointless. It’s like gaming to game or eating to eat.

The real answer to “Why do I bother to stay alive” struck me like a bolt out of the blue yesterday. Ultimately, you live for the future.

There’s always something that’s going to be coming along tomorow or in a week or two or a few months or maybe you even have some things you’re anticipating long-term. There’s always something to look forward, and you may not be thinking you’ll like it that much that it’ll be worth it, but that’s just because you’re not thinking clearly. When it happens, it’ll be awesome and you’ll enjoy it.

When you get right down to it, it’s all about opportunity cost. If you stop living now, you’re not going to have any future opportunities. The best thing ever could happen to you in fifteen minutes, and you’d miss out on it.

Apparently, all my vehicle needed was a tune-up. Apparently just needed it really badly. Works great now. I’m thinking there was never a transmission issue in the first place, and that’s a good thing.

Feels much better to have a working vehicle.

First, my car died. The engine runs. The transmission doesn’t really engage.

The timing on this could hardly have been less convenient, since I was supposed to be driving up to Spokane to fetch my brother. I ended up borrowing my mother’s Ford Explorer, which has various issues, including a radiator leak, an oil leak, and a leaky tire.

Between all of this, I ended up leaving town about three hours late and reached Spokane around noon. Lunch at Taco Bell with Jason and Beth. Walk up a hill that reminded me how in shape I’m not.

On the drive home, I missed my turn at Ritzville and realised it about forty miles later. Adding 80 miles to a 120 miles trip is a fairly serious goof. Fortunately, the Explorer didn’t give me any trouble after the first three hours getting it ready.

So, now my car is dead, my computer is dead…

…I hate life.

Okay, so my birthday itself wasn’t actually all that bad.

Beth and Jason came down and there was some hanging out and a good time was had by all. With the possible exception of Beth.

Not much in the way of presents, but Jason did see fit to expand my capital warship fleet by a Nightlord, an Essex, a Lola III, and another Kyushu (apparently he was trying for a Kirishima but missed.) That’s another 3.13 megatons, for a total of 5.22 M-tons for those of you keeping track at home. Unfortunately, none of the four new ships are painted (perhaps I should figure out how to paint them myself?), but they’ll still work for an AT2 game…presuming only that I ever play one again. :P

Beth brought me some cookies, which I have very nearly finished. My teeth don’t let me wolf down cookies like I used to — which isn’t exactly a bad thing. They’re a touch scorched on the bottom, but I don’t really mind.

Spent some time over the weekend hanging out at Steve Tate’s and playing a fair amount of Supreme Commander. It’s almost scary how much I still had to learn after being able to reliably defeat the game’s best AIs.

Three things bugged me:
1) I’m 26. In absolute terms, that’s not old, but I’m now closer to 30 than 20, no matter how I look at it, and I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be at this age.
2) My parents were both out of town. Both had legitimate reasons, but I missed them anyway. At least my brothers were around, and I even got to spend some time with Alison.
3) It being my birthday meant that Alison’s birthday is coming up, being only 5 days after mine. She’s still obsessing over Jonathan, the Canadian I can’t get her to give up, and things are getting worse. I finally contacted Alison’s father to try to get her some help, but I still really don’t know what to do.

In other news, I’ve finally got my un-named Kubuntu machine working for day-to-day tasks. AFAIK, Samba doesn’t work, but I have MPEG playback capabilities and Fallout and Fallout 2 are running with only minor glitches.

On the other hand, Apache2-php5-mySQL is being a bitch to set up for development purposes. The last time I installed it, it was displaying .html files fine, but kept trying to offer .php files for download rather than parsing them and displaying them as .html. Hopefully, a reinstall will fix this. *fingers crossed*

Although I declared some time ago that the entire month of June was to be an annual festival to celebrate my birth, this is the actual anniversary of June 8, 1981. I am officially 26. I feel old.

All things considered, I’m already declaring it my worst birthday ever. I begin to wonder why I wake up in the morning.

Despite my EVE Alliance(Ethereal Dawn)’s unfortunate initials, we proved over the weekend that we are not impotent.

A displaced navy from one of the northern Alliances (I neither know nor care which one) decided that our base in the new territories looked like a cozy place to settle in. They showed up with 38 capital ships and nearly 100 conventional fleet units and a number of control towers.

They easily broke our blockade at the r6 gateway and set up towers both there and in my corp(Black Lotus Heavy Industries)’s home system, seeking to establish sovereignty so that they could assault and capture our station. Using their massive capship fleet, they knocked our towers into reinforced mode, where most would hold for a day or more (unfortunately meaning that our claim of sovereignty would be cleared at midnight, allowing them to take over.)

Then their op fell apart. It had taken them six hours just to deploy against us, and with our towers in reinforced, the vast majority of them decided they had better things to do.

And then our counterattack began. Allies and even non-allies from all over the new territories began to show up to join our fleet as we battered down one after another of their towers. At some point I got made a Squad Commander due to my Leadership V skill, and then put on a gate camp that (and this is the good kind) never saw any action.

BLHI’s Logistics Wing sprang into action, quickly acquiring three new control towers and setting them up in record time. BLHI pilots also provided cyno beacon services and we even managed to field a single Dreadnought (we’re looking to expand this number to three as soon as possible.)

By downtime, our sovereignty was still held, and our enemy was requesting terms from the allied GOON SWARM for their surrender. My understanding was that the terms were “Get out! And stay out!”

At the end of the day, it was a good showing both by BLHI and ED. We retained our sovereignty, and BLHI took no losses beyond consumables (though these cost a bit.)

My main computer (RAKSHASA, my four-year-old E-machine) may be kaput. :( I set it up at my mom’s last night and it repeatedly froze while trying to boot. That’s what you call “Not good.” I’m not sure exactly what’s causing the problem, but due to its age (and consequent outmoded technology,) I’m thinking I may have to replace the whole thing, which I can’t afford right now. :P I am posting right now from my Linux machine, which at least lets me talk to the world.

I took a bit of a side trip on my way home from my mom’s this morning. I stopped by my bank’s Road 68 branch in Pasco (which should give you an idea of how long I was there. They open at 9am. :P) before heading down to the Franklin County courthouse on 4th Street to make an overdue payment. Then across to the Charter office in Kennewick for another late payment. There was quite a line to wait through, but I soldiered on, because my internet access means more to me than sleep. While there, I found out I could be paying less for cable TV and Internet than I’m now paying for just cable Internet. The TV service is being installed on Tuesday.

About three blocks from home, my Sidekick decided where I was having lunch by overheating (I have a bad radiator leak and it was a 98 degree afternoon) right in front of the subway. After pushing it into the parking lot, I let it sit for a while while I got myself a sammich. Great fun.