Miles travelled, to worlds apart,
to one singular moment,
when they collide.

People change, lie and cheat.
But for one great moment of arrival,
all is forgotten.

I’m the one in the corner,
the one you do not see.
I’m the shoulder you cry on,
when your lover cheats on you.
I’m the one you can lay naked by,
with out feeling my lust.
I’m the one with secrets,
with who you always trust.

I am the friend, always there.
My feelings no less strong,
just better hidden.
Do you do it intentionally?
Do you laugh behind my back,
The poor soul,
to afraid to chance friendship,
in the hope of something more.

Flying so high, but you do not believe.
I can fly, fly above the clouds.
Why do you not believe?
I show you, pivoting around your head on fingers of air.
You ignore me, flying in the face of the facts.
I can fly, but you do not care.
I fly away, leaving you for someone who cares.
And then, you call me back, finding what you lost.
But I am gone, gone through the air which was my prison.
Now my freedom.

I am a shell.
Like all people, I am but one half. I have yet to find the other half that fits me.
The other half which fits so precisly as to be an exact copy, but mirriored, so we
may fit. This vessel, now capable of carrying, should fill.

I have no love.
I have not loved, been loved, nor known love.
I have not felt the tender brush of a lover’s hand, the gentle carressing words
when I grieve. I have not felt the racing pulse and the utter joy when one’s
love is seen.

I have a heart.
It beats, but only with blood, not with happiness. There is no happiness to my existance,
no sweet remembering of the time gone by or the happiness when one looks to the future.
All I see in the furture is darkness, a darkness of the soul where I continue to flounder
reaching for the love which I do not have. So dark that it sucks any warmth from my body,
slowing, stopping the heart which would carry what I do not have.

And so, my heart does not beat. Any love I had, for the world or myself leaves. My blood,
with nothing to guide, stops. I am a shell, sinking towards the darkness of the abys, where
I will be crushed. The other half, if it exists, will never find me. The shell will never
be complete, never filled.

Did you feel my passing? Did you watch the half of the shell slipping, falling, dying as
it is crushed? Did you love me?

No.

Forgive me Linus, for I have sinned. I have taken the shaft, bent down and taken the evils fruits of Gates into my heart. But I had reasons.

As of writing this, I have had Windows 98 (SE) on my computer for a little over twelve hours. Previously I had Linux installed. I still do, but on a seperate hard drive. There is a simple reason for this, and it’s to do with money. I don’t have any. I rely on making enough money out of freelance webdesigning to keep myself in the style to which I would like to be accostumed. Since the monitor on the family PC became too dark to properly do graphics, I have to switch to using my machine. Previously this was running Linux so I could listen to Mp3s on a 486 with a very old monitor and graphics card. Since then, I’ve eithier begged, borrowed, or flat out paid for a P100 cpu, motherboard and a one meg PCI graphics card. Oh, and a 17″ monitor. It now has the requisit grunt to do web publishing and design on. So far, I have spent a week and a half trying to get Linux to run X11 (Linuxs GUI) in 16 bit colour and find a decent web browser.
I can’t. Therefore, I have to run MS Windows because it does.

Before someone starts pointing out browsers which are ‘adaquate’ let me point out my position. As a web designer I require the absoloute best browser I can lay my hands on without breaking the bank. At the moment, this seems to be MS IE. Mozilla is too slow on my machine. I find taking 42 seconds to render half a page of text that is on the local webserver down the hall unacceptable. I find the stupid way that Netscape does not allow Debian to distribute Navigator as a standered .deb package causing me hours of wrestling with config files and settings intensly aggravating.

Normally I wouldn’t complain. I know that doing anything away from the standered installs of ‘easy’ Linux distributions such as RedHat and S.u.S.E. means hours of fiddling and reading of HOWTO files. I know that my distribution, Debian, is aimed very squarly at the people who really know what they’re doing. I also know that I need money now, and that I don’t have that time. I have spent maybe five hours on this computer since I started installing Windows 98. In that time, I have set up an Mp3 player, ICQ, a good web browser, my email, an graphics program, a 16 bit colour GUI, and finished off and fired away one of my samples to a prospective customer. Under Linux, it has taken me on and off over six months to get even half way, and I still haven’t managed to getting anything productive done other than edit my fiction in a simple text editor. Right now, for me, on my desktop computer, Linux isn’t working.

Before I discourage you from ever looking at Linux again, let me poitn out that I have very specfic requirements, not to mention a lack of time and money. Let me also point out that I have a very functional install of Linux that’s unlikely to get changed in the next few months. That install is on my dial-up/webserver box. There is no way I am going to change that baby over to Windows. It runs a auto-dialing ppp connection, IP-masqurdaing and the apache webserver ona Cyrix 486 dx2-50 with 8 megs ram without turning a hair. I have squezzed the entire install into 40 megs. That box took about three hours to setup, with about another five hours of fine tuning since then. My point is that while Linux has not satisfied the requirements for my desktop, it has satisfied a different one. I urge you to install Linux at some point, if for nothing else because it will open up insights into computers and strangly MS Windows that you are unlikely to find anywhere else. Lastly, I urge you, that if you do give up on Linux, do it from the same position I feel I have obtained. That I gave up, not from a point of failure, but from a point of success.