i should be working on my 1500 word paper due tomorrow, or on my speech i have to give tomorrow. but something important came up.
a few minutes ago, i went to go let the dog in. he was standing at the door, woofing intently towards the west side of the house. i won't pretend he knew what was going on, and was alerting me to it, but that doesn't matter. what matters is that he got me to look over there, where the cable box is. so i, of course, did, and noticed that there was a huge vine growing up the wall. a bit of investigation showed that it had climbed from across the back yard, to the cable box, and was then growing up through the cable box and then up the wall by aid of the coax.
our cable junction box is already kinda dead, so i figured it wouldn't need any help fucking up. and we had been getting some weird interference, so hey, might as well remove the vine. can't hurt.
so i went and started pulling down the vine, and reached a snag when i got down to the box. i figured it was all tangled up in the box, so i went back inside and got a knife to help me liberate the box. once i came back out, i realized the box was really falling off the wall. it had always been like that, they did a really shitty job of securing it initially, but i wasn't one to bitch. so i go down and realize that yeah, it must be all tangled inside, and try to find my way in.
these boxes are supposed to be locked and secured. mine was neither, so i just popped open the shitty plastic box and examined the insides.
it was like fucking 'aliens' in there. technology all interspersed with webbing and egg sacs and . . shit. i look around a bit more and see a spider. ok, i can deal with spiders. i mean, there's only a handfull of species that are poisonous at all. most just want to get away from you. . . . except this web was really disorganized . . most spiders weave a really organized web . . except . . well . .
then i examined it a bit closer.
my camera refused to focus on it, because it was small, just larger than a dime not counting the legs. and the blurry red dot? yeah, that's an hourglass.
yes, my cable junction box is overrun by a fucking black widow spider. i cleaned out the vines, took these pictures, and closed it back up. it didn't want to stay closed, so i secured it with the top of an ink well i canibalized from a pen, and then duct-taped it shut.
now i just get to hope it dies a horrible prolonged death, and it's offspring all die, and they all just die die die die die.
the end.
[ps: the radiohead concert was exceedingly cool] [10.07.03@13:44]
i'm not sure if i mentioned it, but last week i decided to write up a list. it was titled "reasons why i'm not using linux right now". it had quite a few things on it, but it was based off of what i knew then.
so i went off in search of answers. soon i found that oops, i can cross off everything on this list for sure except:
so tomorrow i'm starting the long process of installing gentoo linux, and getting used to my first truly new operating system in nearly 10 years. [10.17.03@06:31]
this whole "install lunix from source" thing has been going rather good. everyone had always said "OMG IT'S GOING TO TAKE 87 HOURS FOR U TO FINISH INSTALLING GENTOO KUZ IT COMPILEZ EVERYTHING DOOD!". well. it hasn't taken long. emerge sync took about 30 minutes. bootstrap took about an hour. emerge system took about an hour. getting my kernel built, and modules installed, that took about an hour tops. configuration took about 30 minutes.
so why am i not fully in gentoo? emerge kde fluxbox. 67 packages to emerge. i started at 1100 thismorning. it is currently 1548. i am only at 35 packages done of 67.
luckily that's the last thing for me to do. and i'm in knoppix, so i've been sitting here reading the sa forums, which makes the load time kinda bearable. but anyways, i'd be done by now if i didn't keep passing out during compiles. oh well, time to go find something to do. [10.18.03@14:51]
so i finished installing everything about 24 hrs after i started. i booted into gentoo, and started screwing around a bit . . . and realized i didn't know why the fuck i bothered in the first place. i couldn't remember what i expected to get out of it, probably because i never thought it through that far.
so i went back to windows, because windows works.
i'll probably stay here till wednesday. on wednesday i'll try nuking kde [which sucks], installing gnome [which sucks less], and attempt to get more things working. then go from there. i've found that i can switch back and forth right now by swapping two cables and rebooting, so it's not THAT big of an issue.
but oh well. i didn't really expect all that much from my first foray into desktop lunix. [10.18.03@23:55]
it is 0245. i am sitting here in the dark. sitting doing nothing. and what am i thinking?
"i could be doing nothing . . . in linux."
someone please help me. i think i'm broken. [10.21.03@01:47]
i had a nice surprisingly vivid dream last night. i was on a road trip with a small group of people. i can't remember who they are, and i can't remember where all we went, but at one point we stumbled upon an old-school arcade. at some point during the dream, after playing galaga, some awesome pinball machines [like the twilight zone pinball machine, bride of pin-bot, and the terminator 2 pinball machine with the launcher that's a gun], and some required stuff like skee ball and the lesser known incarnations of pacman, it dawned on me. i had been here before.
i asked the guy who was running the place "hey, hey, where are we? i've been here before. i want to know where this is, so i can come back". and he said something completely incoherent. i yelled at him a bit, and demanded coherency, because i loves me some videogames. he just became more incoherent, and agitated. then he started . . uh . . glitching.
then i realized it was a dream, and that it seemed so familiar because i had been there before. it was being recreated from what's probably a decade-old memory. i still can't remember where it is, and this disturbs me. because there were some fucking awesome games in there. [10.23.03@15:16]
where things currently stand, in my amazing venture into lunix:
right, well screw that. gentoo and i are no longer on speaking terms. after attempting to install xmms, it decided it no longer wanted to emerge things. when i did try to emerge things, it would decide it wanted me to get the message, and proceed to hard-lock my computer
you do not do that.
nothing hard-locks my computer. nothing. if gentoo decides it's going to hard lock my computer, well then it can fuck off.
granted, if i magically come across a way to get emerge working again, i'll give it another go, and pick up where i left off.
i really want to like linux, i really want to enjoy it, but i also want a computer that works. [10.26.03@00:21]
