I only knew you for 1069 days. That doesn’t seem like very long anymore, but back then it was significantly more than 10% of my lifetime. And they were easily the most formative days of my life.

I don’t think there’s much more to be said. Or, more precisely, I could pretty easily write a million words or more, outlining and analysing every aspect of everything that happened in those thousand days and since, illustrating 20 years worth of thought about it all. I’ve been over it all in my head enough times.

But I think there’s no point in doing that. It won’t accomplish anything. It’s the same reason I generally don’t bother talking about it to people. I think it would only bring me pain and use up an inordinate amount of my time. Time that I could spend on productive, or at least enjoyable, things.

I think, and hope, that this will maybe be the last of these entries. I hope that the next 10 year milestone in 2033 might perhaps even manage to sneak by unnoticed. That would be pretty great. I’ve been low-key waiting for this milestone because I knew I had to observe it and post a (final? I hope) entry in this series today. It feels like maybe it’s an ending, a place for closure. That would be pretty great.

Things have changed even just in the 1000 days since the last entry. I understand so much more now than I did even then. Like for example just how wrong I was about you.

It occurs to me, going back and reading the previous entries, that I never said something important in either of them. And it’s something I had come to understand before the first entry in 2013:

It was all my fault. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I always will be.

I know I said that to you once when we spoke, but I realised today that I never “put it on the record”. So there it is.

I hope this is an end of an era. I hope this is goodbye.

If it is, just to be clear: What we had is inviolate and eternal. If this is an ending, that doesn’t change the fact that I still miss you. Or stop me from loving you.

I expect I always will.

7305 
3653

Technically today is 7317 days if we’re going by the previous count. I didn’t feel like writing anything on the 2nd. I don’t have much to say now. But I should at least note it down I guess.

I’d gleefully induce Sol to supernova if I thought the flash might seem significant next to you. Don’t even get me started on what I’d do to spend one more minute with you.

I hope Hugh Everett was right.

I shall put this here and tell archive.org to grab a copy, my love, so that we might live forever.

3653

1. Inhale
2. Exhale
3. Go to Step 1

Following these steps will provide you with a continuous oxygen supply unless you seal yourself away from the atmosphere (i.e: sealed room, underwater) or leave the planet.

Leaving the planet without an adequate oxygen supply is not recommended.

And on February 14th (Yeah, valentine’s day) – It will be 10 years since we first got together.

I still remember it so vividly.

It was a sunday afternoon. I was running late, as usual, to meet my friends at the St. Kilda festival.

So I got my shit together, and maybe 15 minutes late I turned up at the meeting spot. I was the last to arrive – everybody else was still there.

And somebody new.

I don’t know exactly what it was, but there was something about you that I saw straight away. I knew instantly that no amount of shyness on my part was going to stop me from talking to you. I knew that I wanted to get to know you instantly.

I knew all this so quickly that my mind went racing even before I figured out who you were. In the space of a couple of seconds, a huge number of thoughts flew through my mind. My thought processes went something like this:

1) “Oh. My. God: She’s fucking *gorgeous*!”
2) “Who is she, anyway?”
3) “Oh, I know who she is. This could be trouble.”

The “This could be trouble” was because you were my best friend’s sister, and I knew that I was going to be compelled to chase you. I didn’t want it to cause problems with my friendship. Of course, it did. But that’s another story.

I guess the point of this story is that since then I’ve pretty much believed in love at first sight.

Not literally, that would be stupid – I didn’t fall in love with you then and there. I don’t know exactly when I did fall in love with you – it snuck up on me: one day I realised that I’d do anything for you, and there it was.

But this wasn’t just attraction. I’d been attracted to pretty girls before, and I’ve been attracted since. This was not the same: there was more to it.

I can’t put my finger on it: maybe it was the expression on your face, maybe it was your pose, something in your body language. But it was there. And I saw it and knew straight away.

And I’ve never loved anyone the same way since. I don’t see it happening again.

I miss you.

Some thoughts:

It’s great! Very snappy and responsive – congrats and thank-you to Radek and the other contributors, you’ve done a fantastic job and you’ve made some great strides over the last couple of years.

I haven’t tried using it as a phone yet (I’m still put-off by my previous experiences, and don’t have a second SIM), but it looks like it might be *gasp* almost usable! :O I’m tempted to try it out as a phone…

I particularly like what you’ve done with the keyboard – I think it’s about as good as an on-screen keyboard is going to get on this device. Very nice. though I wish I could have it default to qwerty mode.

But it’s not perfect – everything I want doesn’t “just work” yet (though it is very good – things like wifi and bluetooth seem to just work). But that means I get to have some fun tinkering!

I’ve been messing about with making foxtrotgps work under QX on qtmoko for a little while, and wanted to jot down some notes and tips:

• When QX asks which X server to install, I recommend xorg – xglamo doesn’t seem to like being rotated. I’d love to make xglamo work, because it seems faster. (Performance with foxtrot on xorg is very usable, but faster == better.)
• You very likely want to apt-get install gconf2, or foxtrot won’t save user prefs (e.g mapset, postiion, etc) when you close it.
• Rotating the X screen with xrandr doesn’t rotate the touchscreen input properly. To fix this, you need to use xinput to swap the x-axis.

I’m using ‘xrandr -o right’ for my landscape orientation. This means that the USB plug on the freerunner is at the top. If you want to use ‘-o left’ you’ll need to play around with the axis swapping.

• There’s no onscreen keyboard for X apps. To fix this, apt-get install matchbox-keyboard matchbox-keyboard-im, and launch matchbox-keyboard –daemon before you start foxtrot. This will give you a keyboard which pops up when you select a textbox. After foxtrot closes, I kill matchbox-keyboard.
• QX has a ‘display always on’ option, but X has its own screensaver and blanking/dpms stuff. you’ll want to use xset to turn these off if you want your display always on.
• You need to start gpsd before you start foxtrot. I also kill gpsd when foxtrot closes. This means it can take a while to get a fix, but I haven’t done a huge amount of outdoor testing yet – all I’ve done is confirmed that it will get a fix.
• Pressing the AUX button to multitask while X is rotated under QT is ugly – qtmoko will work, but its display will be broken – it looks kinda like QVGA mode and is incorrectly rotated. If you can manage to hit AUX a couple of times to get back to QX, and then press ‘resume’ or ‘stop’ in QX, qtmoko will revert to an un-broken state. Ideally I’d like to disable qtmoko’s AUX-button handler while foxtrot is running, or capture focus events to unrotate on lostfocus and rotate on gotfocus, but I haven’t yet found a way to do either of these.
• The above ugliness will also happen if X dies while rotated, so you need to xrandr -o normal after foxtrot exits. This means you want to exit foxtrot gracefully. Since foxtrot doesn’t have an ‘exit’ menu item, this means you want to ‘use matchbox’ in the QX settings. You also want fullscreen.

I ended up doing the following to make a wrapper script for foxtrot. It’s a bit of a nasty hack, but it works for me. A slightly nicer way would be to use update-alternatives to use an alternate foxtrotgps launcher script, or saving the script as ‘foxtrot_launcher’, building a desktop entry for it, and setting up a QX favourite for it.

the script below could very easily be modified/generalised to run things other than foxtrotgps!

root@neo:~$ mv /usr/bin/foxtrotgps /usr/bin/foxtrotgps.bin
root@neo:~$ vi /usr/bin/foxtrotgps
              (insert content, below)
root@neo:~$ chmod a+x /usr/bin/foxtrotgps
 

/usr/bin/foxtrotgps:

#!/bin/bash
#Custom script for starting gpsd and foxtrotGPS in landscape mode:
#xinput stuff liberated from: http://lists.openmoko.org/nabble.html#nabble-td7561815

#ensure GPS is powered up:
om gps power 1
om gps om gps keep-on-in-suspend 1

#gpsd
#service gpsd start
gpsd /dev/ttySAC1

#sleep 1 
# we might have to wait some time before sending commands (I didnt)

#rotate:
xrandr -o right

#disable screen blanking:
xset s off -dpms 

#swap x axis:
xinput set-int-prop "Touchscreen" "Evdev Axis Inversion" 8 1 0
#no axis inversion
xinput set-int-prop "Touchscreen" "Evdev Axes Swap" 8 0
xinput set-int-prop "Touchscreen" "Evdev Axis Calibration" 32 98 911 918 107

#run the matchbox keyboard in daemon mode:
#with matchbox-keyboard-im this pops up automatically
matchbox-keyboard --daemon &

#run the real foxtrot:
foxtrotgps.bin --fullscreen

#foxtrot has closed, cleanup:

#kill keyboard:
killall matchbox-keyboard

#unrotate:
xrandr -o normal

#stop gpsd:
#service gpsd stop
killall gpsd