Today was difficult due to a bad bout of insomnia last night. For whatever reason, I just couldn't seem to sleep no matter how much I lay there in bed. My mind raced in spite of grogginess, revolving predominately around my soon-to-be-arriving toy.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I'm excited about my new phone. Over the last three years having a proper smartphone has become essential to me. I use it as my music, device, my podcast system, often my IM client, and almost my GPS device. It's the modern Tricorder.

It's also an escape. Working for a tech company, I spend a huge amount of time in front of a monitor. For many years I couldn't imagine that coming home to spend more time in front of another monitor would have been a problem. "The trick," I told people, "was not to see the monitor, but to see through the monitor." The last year, however, that trick has become less and less effective. 

For whatever reason, that's less a problem with a smartphone. I can still maintain a social online presence without feeling the constant need to be productive. It's easier for me to lay on a bed, belly down, reading a book with a blackberry or an android device nearby without becoming tangled up in the notion that every, single, moment, must, be, productive.

Imagine your a novelist.

You have carried around a story in your head for almost an entire decade, but have been unable to write it. There have been several attempts, rewrites, false starts, and even one successful but aborted attempt. Life interrupts throughout all of this, making any attempt to sit down and get the damn thing onto parchment impossible.

You know the story covers about a year of time, encompassing four seasons in a familiar but alternate landscape. You want to see your story as short series of graphic novels -- four to match the number of seasons. You know that the seasons probably won't divide easily, but that's not your reason for selecting the length: Four books just feels right. 

And then you sit down and start running numbers. The first three books will be some 120 - 150 pages, so you agree on an average of about 137. The last book will be longer, almost 200. You decide to be ambitious and say 199. Okay, so you add it up: 137 * 3 + 199 = 610 pages.

610 pages.

Before you let the implication of that number set in, you decide to subdivide each book. A chapter runs about 23 to 27 pages. 25 on average. Divide. Average. You arrive at an estimate of 24 chapters.

610 pages. 24 chapters. 

24 stories. "Make bigger stories from several smaller ones," you recall from A Drifting Life. Use the smaller stories to resonate or explore the larger arcs. You look are your setting. Your characters. Subdivide. Take those subdivisions and explore them. Follow the characters as you look at that avenue. Is it interesting? How does this reflect on the overall theme?

Stop! Wait! you think, You can't possibly build a story like this! 

Or can you?

Sorry for the poor quality, I was in a dark room and only had a cell phone camera.

One of my favorite characters to think about in the Paper Girl story is Rasa. She's brash, highly technical, often snide, and very, very sure of herself. She's also of Punjabi decent.

One of the first challenges Pazi posed to me when working on the story was the race of Rasa and her twin brother Rama. I inherited the names from a friend's project, and -- like most caucazoid authors -- completely failed to consider race at all. I had felt obligated to avoid the issue entirely rather than step on people's toes. Pazi convinced me otherwise. I expect to make many, many stupid mistakes while writing Rasa. Hopefully she'll kick me in the ass when necessary.

You might have also wondered why I said Punjabi and not "Indian American". That's the funny thing about Paper Girl -- while it's set in northern Minnesota, it's not set in the United States...

The first social network I joined was LiveJournal back in 2001. At the time, I thought of it purely as an online journaling system. I didn't understand how the friending mechanism worked, nor the deceptive name applied to the feature (something that has thankfully been replaced with "following" on other sites). I often wrote entries there expecting no one to ever read them. It often felt like writing letters to no one in particular, then casting them upon the will of the four winds to whomever would find them.

The anonymity emboldened me. I wrote about things that were actually on my mind, instead of bottling them up as I had been raised. Frustration, fear, worry, depression, quixotism, fascination, and humor. Many say that the internet is where people put on masks; to me, it was the first place I was able to take mine off.

Things changed of course. LiveJournal became all the rage, creating a sprawling online community of people. I continued to write, but often with growing apprehension. I slowly began closing the loop and locking things down. No longer was it a wide open vista, but a room. The door was often open and the windows could be easily seen through, but there was a clearer separation between the Internet at large, and my little section.

Events occurred that forced me to close those openings completely. The windows were shuttered, the door was closed and locked. Little did I realize that the supply of fresh air was now also depleting. I ventured out rarely, and often only to lock things down all the more. Bars were installed. Boards nailed to the wall, cartoon-fashion.

Social networking often works the best for outgoing and open individuals that feel they have little to hide, or no one worth hiding from. My pessimism can't help but see that attitude as naive.

Today, the social networking scene has exploded across the entire world. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, and the new contender, Google Buzz. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of information one is required to read every day in order to say current. And lately, I often feel much like this:

I've been investigating switching my desktop distribution from Kubuntu to something more...seriously maintained. I love debian, and consider it one of the best distros out there, but Ubuntu's KDE variant is downright pathetic.

When I first started using Kubuntu, it was back in version 7.10 on Rei. After more than a year enduring Gentoo's progressively more disruptive effect on day to day use, I gave up and switched. At first, I was thrilled. The system worked with little problem, wireless configuration was dead-simple. I felt I finally found the desktop OS for me.

Then KDE 4 happened.

First of all, let me clear the air. KDE 4 does have problems, it also has a lot of potential. Plasma is a much more modern and versatile base on which to build the future of the platform. Changing that fundemental base, however, is not without it's problems. The 4.0 release wasn't even feature complete. I personally did not switch from 3.5 until 4.3 came out; call me shallow, but I couldn't live until the panel could auto-hide. As a programmer, and a IT professional, I knew that what KDE was attempting was ambitious. It wouldn't happen overnight and certainly not without user feedback. They couldn't sit on the code until it was "perfect", they needed to turn it out to users just so they could debug the thing properly. 

In short, KDE 4.0 = Plasma 1.0. Can anyone say "Early adopters beware?"

So how does this bare on my current dilemma? Distros have been slow on the uptake for KDE 4.0 for good reason (see above). Many remained on 3.5 offering the option to use Plasma as the standard desktop. Today, OpenSUSE is a shining example of what a proper KDE 4.x distro can look like. 

So why am I not using OpenSUSE? My reasons aren't terribly logical. One of my first Linux desktops ran Mandrake (now Mandriva), and package management was a damn nightmare. I didn't want to scour the internet like a Windows user looking for wayward pieces of software. It's not even a sensible strategy for a Linux system as the available applications are fewer, and installation is more complex due to library dependencies. When I was introduced to Debian, I was in package management heaven. Just login as root, type apt-get and it downloads and updates everything you need.  I've tried RPM based distros several times since 2000, but the situation hasn't improved as much as I had hoped. To date, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva just feel wrong to me.

If not OpenSuSE or Kubuntu, then what? I wanted to stick within the Debian ecosphere if at all possible, but I quickly found that impossible. There just doesn't seem to be a solid KDE 4.x, Debian-based distribution. Maybe a year from now Project Timelord will bear fruit and I can come back to my beloved Debian. For now, it looks like I have to go elsewhere.

But where? After some research online and a few helpful suggestions online, I've been pointed to Arch. The way they frame their Raison d'être is certainly enticing. Their installation method isn't as intimidating as Gentoo was in 2005, but it certainly isn't for the faint of heart. If the forum chatter is to believed, however, it's KDE credentials are best-of-breed.

Not having the time this weekend to do a full install, I decided to cheat a little and give The Chakra Project a spin. Chakra is an Arch-based LiveCD focusing on easy of use and considerable polish. Booting into it on my Dell Studio XPS 13, I felt I had come home. The system feels responsive, stable, and a far sight better than Kubuntu ever hoped to attain. 

Not everything is perfect, however. Even when booting with the non-free drivers enabled, my Wifi and sound failed to initialize. This unfortunately, stopped me from going any further than a LiveCD excursion today. Given my only other option is Windows Vista on my present system, I did not want to trash my current Linux installation no matter how flaky it is. Later when I have the wherewithal, I'll bother to slice off 20gb of space on my partition table and triple-boot the system. 

Until then, I won't know for sure if there even is the perfect KDE 4.x distro.