It's ironic, really. I was having this long email thread with Gunnar Ljungstrand about the supernatural phenomena, specifically OBE and its implications to the nature of reality. It began as an email reply to his post in slashdot in a creationist discussion. In the thread, he claimed that he is able to enter some sort of astral plane or such, which in some way connected to real world, but said he wasn't particularly interested in being a test rabbit to scientists. Although I found his ideas a bit kooky, he came about as a fairly intelligent person. In the thread we drifter into the nature of reality, and at the final mail he told me he believed brain was just an interface to our actual soul.

And just was I was preparing my dazzling reply, today, I checked my mail to see a mail from his email address. It was his little brother who told me his older brother had died in an accident. I didn't really know him, but death is always a bit sad. I guess there isn't any specific reason, but this reminds me of the case of another fellow. He was a wizard in a MUD and great babylon 5 -fan. His plans often had dynamic counters to when b5 begins again, when next episode comes et cetera. Now, the first run of b5 in Finland on TV2 was nearing its end, the last episode (Sleeping In Light, the one where John Sheridan dies) was to be shown next saturday. I'm not certain of the exact timing, but he died in that week, I think, maybe 3 days before the last episode. I found that a bit ironic, too. If that means I have a twisted sense of humor, so be it (of course, some of his friends in the same mud set their plans to "Let Him Sleep in Light...").

Midst this death of people I never knew, my old boring life continues. For 5 days now, I've had this huge (2 floors, 13 largish rooms) house all to myself; my mother, little brother and two of his friends went to vacation. I didn't feel like coming along, so here I am. Making my own food, remembering to water the flowers, not locking myself out and all that type of thing is, unsurprisingly, not really that difficult feat as she seemed to think. I guess all mothers are like that. However, I do find this silent house a bit creepy. I mean, it's nice that I won't have this 11-year-old fellow constantly nagging me to reboot into windows so he can play nhl 2000, but sometimes it feels just strange not to see another human being for days. I suppose I should go out more before I turn mökkihöperö (according to my dictionary, it's stir-crazy in english), but I really don't know where and how. I suppose that's why I spend about 4 hours online every day, even though I really don't have anything to do even here besides writing overly lengthy daylogs.

I can say this, though: never, ever mix tarball and rpm style glibcs. My system is seriously screwed up after a couple of such attempts. The first one, year ago, barely left my system alive, and now, even seemingly simple operation of upgrading a RPM-installed glibc 2.1.3 to RPM glibc 2.2.3 totally screwed up my system. Now, after a couple of stuns and borrowed redhat CD, my system has again stabilized into a semblance of functionality with glibc 2.1.93, although for some reason cat file | head -2 spam a "broken pipe" error everytime if file is larger than 8192 bytes with more than two lines. The same doesn't happen if I, instead of cat file, generate the very same input dynamically through, say, perl. Exactly why this happens (and why screwing around with glibc and gcc) is a mystery to me, but I guess some things just aren't meant to be understood.