Well, I’ve officially decided to abandon KDE. Why after all this time, you ask, when they’ve done so much work already to alienate and annoy former fans with the rather abrupt 4.x tree? Well, there’s Ubuntu bug #289264, but every large application has the chance of producing some kind of leaky program. No, I can forgive a rather hilarious and long-standing memory leak because I know how to circumvent and disable programs. What I can’t abide, however, is intentional sabotage. What am I talking about? Take a look at this process list.

A while ago, I decided to use Pylons to rebuild my site. I even went so far as to name the engine “BonePyl”, which just narrowly edged out “BonesAW” for “Bones’ Awesome Weblog”. While doing this, I’ve obviously had to orient myself with the API, which meant buying The Definitive Guide to Pylons and copious scouring of the web for secondary documentation on SQL Alchemy and FormEncode. It’s a lot to bite off, and I’m having trouble chewing, but considering my current site is a bunch of PHP I threw together back in 1999, I’m obviously in no hurry.

At great risk to myself and the poor SOB who offered to transport my disease-riddled carcass along Illinois highways, I’ve seen the nerve specialist, and am now the proud owner of something called a Type 1 RSD.

According to the doctor–a wizened Chinese man, likely a sage of unknowable renown–this effectively means that my ankle injury confused a nerve in my leg. My brain, like a sugar-infused five-year-old overreacted and went on a killing-spree. Effectively it thinks I’ve catastrophically savaged my foot, and the only way to save the rest of my body is to remove my leg at the knee. The signal from the nerve is so intense, that my brain has reacted by reducing blood flow to my leg in an attempt to starve it. Of course, the human body is incapable of carrying out this cunning plan, so instead of a clean amputation, my leg has simply transformed into a nexus of discomfort.

Over the fourth of long Fourth of July weekend, I decided to experiment with some of the other Linux distributions floating around out there. I made only stipulation: I use a netbook, therefore the distribution must install from a USB flash drive. I have an old 1GB Sony, and a newer 2GB Sandisk, so there’s no reason this should be a difficult task. I told myself, “Self, 2009 is halfway over. Surely the Linux community will not ignore that millions of potential Linux systems lack a CD-ROM.” Sadly, after attempting to install half a dozen variations, I found I overestimated this aspect of the Linux community in a staggeringly inaccurate manner.

I believe it’s time to return my body for a refund. I got my cast off yesterday, and my ankle still hurts. In fact, I think it’s worse than before the cast. So, what exactly is going on? Well, the orthopedist hypothesizes that I have nerve involvement. This means either my nerve is caught in a pain feedback loop, or is entrapped, possibly by my continuing aggravated ankle sprain.