Tonight I was given the chance to work on one of my many projects, or, for added fun, take a trip to Draper with my honey Sukie and get some saltwater aquarium rocks to seed our large 75 gallon saltwater tank. Oh me oh my, I chose door number 2 and we trekked on out to what should only be described as the Salt Lake Valley’s nether-regions.

As the old story goes, hilarity ensued. Not only did I keep working myself up to being angry at not having PRECISE coordinates (though we had a map that was pretty much useless unless the directions to the location were followed (which they weren’t)) I tried to keep cool under the mounting annoyance that so many of my evenings are spent on fruitless endeavors and so many of my days are spent engaged in working for ‘the man’.

After all the chips were down, we gave up, and I had a delcious peanut-butter and chocolate chip shake out of the deal (too many shakes give Wudan the shakes!) Tip to all you hip young kids: ask Jabba (the boy) to say, “You’re Welcome.” It’s an excercise in hilarity. 100 points to your house if you get what Jabba is refering to.

I’ve decided to try to blog more often, since so much of life is worth noting. I usually run in to someone, and tell them about the things I would blog about, and then never blog about them. How much of life is wasted away, talking to you people, when I could fill my blog with volumes of witty insight and clever observation?

I was thinking today about the fragile anatomy of contra-culture, especially since in my estimation, EMO culture was most likely originated as a contra-culture. Once it gains notoriety, it is subject to duplication and therefore, is no longer a contra-culture. The truly beautiful things in life are not apt to be things that are brought before you, such as the TV is a passive educator and its experiences cheapened by the fact that you had to do nothing to experience them, except sit and watch.

On that note, The Office returns September 21st (and probably My Name is Earl, as well) as does Gray’s Anatomy. I’ve watched both seasons of Gray’s, but I don’t think I’ve learned anything. Oh, except maybe that surgeons might have lives more complex than the minions of a certain Orange County.

So I spent Friday assessing what computer parts I have as well as what I can put together. Summed up, I got a nice haul from a dumpster down the street from where I work. I drove by today but apparently the well of goodness has dried up. That’s fine with me, I got my share of the haul. I’m not crazy either, as I’ve driven by the same dumpster only an hour after I’ve picked over it and found guys dressed much nicer than me picking through it.

I put together an hard-drive, DVD drive, mobo, proc, vid card, LAN card, and audio mixer card I already have to build my first Linux box. It took much longer than I thought it would because (a) I couldn’t find my Breezy Badger install disc; and (b) I first tried using a former X-Box hard-drive.

Whoops, you have to do some flashy firmware flashiness stuff to those hard-drives. No matter, they are only 10 Gig, no wonder they weren’t being used. I imagine putting them all in a striped raid array, just for kicks. I thought I might use them before, but then I cracked open a rather heavy cube shaped server and found 4 identical 80 Gig HDs. Nice. Nice. So very, very nice.
So basically, once i had downloaded and installed Ubuntu 6.06 (aka Dapper Drake), it has been fun to learn to use it (just imagine that your entire OS looks like gAIM.) Jabba wanted to use my computer so I let him, he sat down, looked at the screen, turned and said to me, “What did you do to your computer?”

“That’s Linux.” His jaw dropped and slowly turned to face the perplexing screen again. (Firefox was up, so it was kind of familiar.)