DOS, journaling, and modeless nightmares...
-------------------------------------------
Sun 27th Jan 2019 /cpj

It's been a little while since my last phlog. Work has been crazy lately
(one expects so, after the holidays, but in this case more so).

I have been reflecting on a few things this past week:

(solderpunk) Thanks for the invite to join the sundogs at the command line.
I've been exploring the small internet of the Zaibatsu, and enjoying it. I
hope I've been able to (and will) contribute in a meaningful way.

I've been thinking about your post on 'philosophy of mind', and in
particular personal responsibility. As the Buddha said,

> 'All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on
> our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with
> an evil thought, pain follows him as the wheel follows the foot of the ox
> that draws the wagon.' (Dhammapada 1,2)

In other words, Karma is a bitch.

Of course, as a fractured human in my own right, I am as much a prisoner of
my patterns and modes as anyone else. (My mind just treated me to a passing
nightmare in which Richard Stallman creates an epistemology applied to human
behaviour, where his solution is to replace our emotion neural net with a
lisp-based cognitive interpreter (MCP meets Emacs, meets _Bladerunner_ meets
_Total Recall_). It all went wrong when we were able to play _Tetris_ from
*inside* a modeless editor.)

Looking forward to the winning design of port:70 stickers. Need to send my
address in.

In my chats with leeb this week, I've been thinking a lot about my mainframe
days. Back then, to again use spring's "small internet" concept, it was all
"small internet". We had a discussion forum, similar to telem, but across
the by-default federated nature of the mainframe. It was called "Soapbox".

This led me today, on my down day, to start to compile resources to put up
on kaun.ca.[1] The usual suspects, perhaps, but a few original pieces, and
some 'frame-opera downloaded from Soapbox, and stored in my personal
archives for, umm, decades. Interestingly, a few SQZ archives that I
couldn't unpack found me setting up a FreeDOS VM. FreeDOS[2] has come a long
way from the early zero.minor entries in the late nineties. I easily fired
up networking and ended up (due to a lack of fuse support for the disk
image) ftp'ing my errant archives across for unpacking. Look for updates
soon, as I'm rolling ahead with classification and normalizing the file
structure.

Leeb also raised an interesting point, something that I have been noticing
since my (re)descent into text land -- gopher and the small internet is a
right of passage, and like Jedi, requires us to build our lightsabres.[3]
I've found myself building more things to enable gopherness. From 'phup' to
commissioning kaun.ca, to deep diving text editors (my current peeve with
'mg' is that, while small, lightweight, and fast, I haven't been able to get
it to let me bolt on 'aspell'). I believe the time has come for me to write a
gopher client. As leeb is building his in COBOL[4], I toyed with building
mine in REXX, but for the sheer pleasure, I may do it entirely in AWK (with
helper apps) or Perl.

Finally, all this time at the commandline has had me journaling lately. Or
should I say 'jrnl', my poison of choice.[5] I shouldn't have to tell you
why.

Peace, all.

[1] gopher://gopher.kaun.ca
[2] https://www.freedos.org/
[3] With equal credit to uwu for the conceptual framework.
[4] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~leeb/phlog/2019-01-23_Gopher-and-the-Jedi
[5] https://github.com/maebert/jrnl