Frustration

When I was small, I remember playing a game in Sri Lanka called 'Ludo' in which four players would compete to bring their pieces all the way around the board to their 'home'. Once I arrived here, I found that Ludo had a fancy-pants incarnation called 'Frustration' (Or Sorry!, or Trouble), pop-o-matic dice-roller and all.

Anyone who's played the game knows that the frustration, of course, comes from having to take your pieces back to the beginning if another player lands on your space.

And while no one has 'landed' on me (or landed me, for that matter), I've been experiencing a lot frustration lately with all the work I've had to put into getting my PowerBook - yes, this is another of those posts - to a place even close to where it was before the hard drive crashed.

This process has been punctuated by realisations of all the irreplacable things I've lost: several years worth of e-mail, my schoolwork, my photographs, my 'ToDo' list. Thankfully - providentially, I suppose - I had backups of all the things I needed most.

On the other hand, some good things have come out of this; the whole debacle almost seems worth it, especially when it comes to my new-found inspiration concerning my portfolio. And, the whole rebuilding process has actually been quite interesting.

It would seem that the two most important pieces of software on my PowerBook - the ones I installed immediately after the OS - are Quicksilver (Launcher/Browser/Magic Application) and iScroll2 (A hack that enables two-finger scrolling on older laptops). Then of course, came the usual: Office, Creative Suite, iLife, iWork, etc.

The other 'oddities' I found myself installing almost immediately: Adium (IM), OmniOutlinerPro (For idea mapping and Kinkless), NewsFire (RSS - although I haven't been able to update my feeds as yet), VLC (Greatest mediaplayer. Ever.), Audacity (Audio editing), FFView (Comic book viewer), Transmit (FTP client), Font Explorer (Font manager), RealPlayer, Toast (CD writing), Transmission (BT Client), TextMate (Text-editor of choice. This post was written in TextMate), CopyWrite (Text Editor for school work), TriTag (MP3 tag editor), Coverflow (Album browser) and VirtualPC.

The weirdest part is that with all this installed and music, documents and the like copied over, I still have more free hard drive space than my old hard disk had in total.

But it's weird in a good way.

I'll edit the above in the next little bit to include links to the applications mentioned.

Update:Apparently, Ludo, Sorry! and Trouble are all adaptations of the 'cross-and-circle' board game Parchisi which hails from India. Here's a good summary of all the variations.

And finally, some music.

Man Fading
Kenna
From the Album New Sacred Cow

I need to be brilliant, electric
I wanted to be natural
This God should be fantastic
Let's start a revolution
A true revolution
I havn't felt the same
Snce I arrived I haven't slept a wink

I'm just a man fading
I've been a little bit jaded
Everybody wants to get on
The neon lights have got it all
I'm living a sensation
Walk inside invasions
Nobody wants to really know
The neon lights have got it all
Ihe neon lights

I need to be elected, perfected
Needs beyond the blue
Feel the satisfaction
I want to be the light source
A blaring night force
I havn't felt the same
Since I arrived I haven't slept a wink

And this is how it starts
Before we lose it all
I know we're not coming
God knows when I'm gone

I'm just a man fading
I've been a little bit jaded
Everybody wants to get on
The neon lights have got it all
I'm living a sensation
Walk inside invasions
Nobody wants to really know
The neon lights have got it all
Ihe neon lights

And this is how it starts
Before we lose it all
I know when I'm coming
God knows when I'm gone

I'm just a man fading
I've been a little bit jaded
Everybody wants to get on
The neon lights have got it all
I'm living a sensation
Walk inside invasions
Nobody wants to really know
The neon lights have got it all
Ihe neon lights

Hope everyone has a good great weekend.