Fri 28 May 2004

Mortality

Occasionally I notice that someday, not too far away, I'm going to die. Along the way, bits of me will stop working, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. My arm hurts, it will hurt for another 0–70 years, and then I won't be here to blog about it any more. Furthermore, I don't get a choice; that's life. If I don't like the terms, I can't go home. These are the rules.

It's enough to make you depressed (not the blogging bit, obviously!). I'm going to gradually break until I just stop. A year or two after I die, I will be forgotten; perhaps longer, but those who remember will die too. I don't remember my great-grandparents.

Where's the meaning in it? Sometimes I wish I were an ignorant purchaser of self-help volumes; if I were, I wouldn't simultaneously be struck by the innate beauty of it all and its astonishing transience. Not only my own mortality, but that of everything and the universe itself.

Everything ends sometime — otherwise there would be no beginnings, and nothing would really exist at all.

But I can still be pensive.

Apologies for the self-indulgent and gradually-swelling corpulent mess of a post.

Addendum: this is one reason I fear something like deafness — one day, I won't be able to hear a song that I would dearly love to. And one day I'll see my last sunset, and I won't know it — I'll never know it. And one day, someone I love will die, and I won't get to say goodbye just one more time. Morbid, but hey.

Posted at 2004-05-28 11:35:21 by RichardLink to Mortality
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Helper Applescripts

For some time now, I've been wanting to save myself a few clicks a day. Every morning, when I arrive at the office, I have to switch network locations: Apple MenuLocationAuthoxy. Every evening, I have to switch it back to Automatic, to switch away from my proxy server.

Of course, nothing useful is scriptable (I still can't be bothered to automatically switch off my AirPort when I arrive). But, thanks to the joy of the scriptable UI framework in Panther, here are a couple of scripts that will switch location for you. Edit and rename to match your locations, then use LaunchBar or Quicksilver to save yourself some mousing!

Nice.

In other news: we watched The Bourne Identity last night. I originally thought “Matt Damon — a secret agent? Hah!”, but he wasn't bad, and it was fairly gripping. Certainly worth a rental.

I still have Road to Perdition to watch, and they're due back tonight!

Posted at 2004-05-28 01:27:59 by RichardLink to Helper Applescript…
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