robotech_master

Well, last night the Linux user group meeting went decently; a few people brought computers down to receive the gift of Linux, and there was even an Xbox there to have its guts messed with and Linux slapped on. I got to meet up with a couple of old friends again, one of whom had the most unholy chimerical laptop I think I've ever seen. An old 20 mhz 486 SX Thinkpad with 20 megs of RAM...but 20 gigs of hard disk. "I can get KDE to run on it, but it takes ten minutes to load up."

After that, we all went out to dinner at the Pasta House, for which I used to deliver when I drove for Quikdine, which made suprisingly mediocre spaghetti for a pasta place. Good salad and bread, though. Things including laying fiber optics (and having to grind your own ends, which is a terribly funny phrase if taken out of context) and the movie Equilibrium were talked about. To my amusement, one of my old friend referred to me as a "net god" due to my moderating gigs for rec.games.mecha & rec.toys.transformers.moderated.

Today was spent largely in wandering all over town with my laptop looking for cool new hotspots, and reading a new webcomic I discovered, Life of Riley. One of those strips that starts out all zany and then suddenly the overarching plot comes around and smacks you in the head. Pretty neat.

Now I'm sitting in the Mudhouse again, noodling on my computer, listening to a pretty cool album of Beatles covers, and generally enjoying being in a non-home environment. I don't know why I like this so much...I mean, this laptop is nowhere near as powerful as my home machine. At home, I have 5.1 speakers, a mega-powerful Athlon chip, and my cat...but here I have access to the Internet so I can do everything that matters that I could at home, and I can even listen to my tunes thanks to the 18 gigs of mp3s and AACs that live on my laptop's hard drive. I can be in the company of other people, heck, I can even go order a café mocha and have it brought out to my table. (In fact, I think I will! Yum!) It's a nice change of environment. Really, I guess if all I'm going to do is noodle around on the Internet, I might as well be somewhere fun while I'm doing it.

Oh, and Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there (

liralen,

artmomz, anyone else I'm missing...and of course my own Mom, though I already phoned her to tell her). You do one of the most important jobs in the world, and don't ever forget it.

Almost worth 99 cents...