Blogs on a bus

My last post "Blood, sex, and suffering" was written on the way to Kekirawa by bus.

Crammed into a tiny little seat, by clothing bag under my seat and the bag with Akane (my laptop, an IBM Thinkpad R50e to be precise) and digicam (a Kodak Z650), on my lap, some guy's elbow in my ribs, and the acid-sour smell of many many months of sweaty bodies emanating from the seat-back. This is the way that many of the people who travel long distance in Sri Lanka travel. Some of them. This was an air conditioned bus. Many others travel in un-airconditioned discomfort.

So there I was, half asleep and nothing to do, so I reached in the bag, pulled Akane out of her sleeping place and started hammering away at a blog post. I have a small shell script that I use to create and edit a blog post offline. Running on no-X11 mode so that I can squeeeze a bit more battery life out of the machine, I start writing my blog.

This of course started to create quite a bit of interest in the people around me. Not only was I using a machine, but I was typing on a green on black screen. And I didn't have a GUI running. All hail Linux. Things got even more interesting when I pulled out the cellphone and started browsing the net for URLs.

So, I learned a few things on the bus ride.

• Blogging on a bus means that you have no space for your elbows
• People look at you funny and look over your shoulder at what you're doing (annoying)
• Its like climbing Mount Fuji - if you don't do it you're a fool, if you do it more than once, you're a bigger fool