It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold. It is so fucking cold.

I haven’t left the house since I got home Friday. I don’t even know how bad it is outside except that NY1 is saying it’s 10, and with the windchill, it’s -2. It is actually ten degrees WARMER at my birthplace of Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota. I spent my first few decades hearing the horror stories of how cold and miserable it was up there, and now it is WORSE here. Why haven’t scientists built some kind of weather dome to stop this shit? What about building a bunch of nuclear reactors that bilged into the Hudson River so the temperature went up about sixty degrees and we never had another fucking blackout again? And what the hell happened to that global warming we were supposed to be looking forward to? Jesus fucking christ.

At least this means I will have an even better trip to Vegas. I’m leaving on Friday morning, and I’m pretty psyched about getting out there. I haven’t actually thought about packing or what I will be bringing, but I am excited about seeing everyone again, eating some real food, and spending some money.

I’ve actually been spending some time reading Tom’s Hardware and all of the other usual sites to gear up for another big hardware upgrade. It’s been two years since I built my last machine (aside from the video and firewire upgrades) and I think it’s time to give her a new lease on life. I’m thinking about swapping in another motherboard with a fast Athlon 64 and a boatload of RAM, possibly swapping in a different video card, and maybe another drive (although I think I’ve only used 28% of the existing 40 Gig, so that could wait.) My ultimate goal is to run mythTV and turn the thing into a TiVO-killer. So I’ll probably try throwing in a TV tuner card and maybe two of them, one with an IR receiver and remote, and get everything built. I know that will be a bitch and a half, because I will have to upgrade to a new Linux distribution, and then get one that supports all of the new hardware, and I think Red Hat is about at the end of the line for me. I have vaguely thought about Debian, but I haven’t done any research yet. I know that will mean a whole new world of hurt, not because Debian is bad, but because I will have to unlearn all of the bad habits and small hacks I’ve picked up in the last six or seven years and start over.

Six or seven years?!?! Fuck, time is going too fast. I guess I did switch from Slackware to Red Hat back in 97 or so, when I got an unexpected bonus at my old job and nobody told me, and I seriously spent an entire weekend mortified because it looked like two paychecks had been direct deposited in my account, and I wondered if I should immediately call someone in payroll at 9AM on Monday morning or I should take the money out of my account immediately. I did call payroll, and they said nothing wrong had happened. About an hour later, my boss came in and said “sorry, I forgot to tell you on Friday. Good job, etc.”

I immediately concocted ways to upgrade my old computer that at the time had a fast 486 in it, which was about two generations behind the curve. Any time I have money in my pocket, it always seems to go to new hardware, because I can always justify the purchase of any equipment that could be use for writing. Peter, the guy across the hall from my office, was also hitting all of the hardware web sites, and told me about one of those hole-in-the-wall places that sold parts on the web, but they were also local and you could go in and buy stuff for the same prices, which sure beat going to CompUSA for stuff. So I rushed over there after work and bought a K6-2 motherboard and a bunch of RAM, a new hard drive, and the first CD-ROM ever to grace my computer. I got the newest shrinkwrapped Linux I could find at that point, which was Red Hat, I believe 4.0. And that started the allegiance to that particular distro.

Anyway, I have a horrible headache for some reason. Maybe I haven’t drank enough Coke. I should get back to playing SOCOM II for a while.

I was up almost all night last night, then woke up early and read until I could fall asleep again. Then I had a weird dream that I was listening to this new album that was by Stanley Clarke, but it sounded almost exactly like if Frank Zappa had come out with a new album that continued on from the stuff he did right before he died. I half woke up, and still heard music, and then heard that it was really shitty Spanish music, like the stuff that sounds like flamenco or almost country, but with some crooner guy singing in a really awful style. It turns out that the landlord had some guys working down in the basement all day, banging around and listening to this total shit. So I had to listen to Hammerfall and Slayer at top volume to drown it out and possibly scare the people.

I went to Barnes and Noble today, because it was pouring rain and it seemed like the thing to do. I’m reading this book that’s an oral history of New York, lots of interviews of people about New York in the postwar period. I think I got the book for free last summer when I bought more than fifty bucks at Coliseum, and never read it. I’m really digging through the house for stuff to read; I have stacks of books I haven’t read, but it’s all stuff I don’t want to read. Does that make sense? Anyway, I went to B&N and looked around for a while, mostly trying to find books under ten bucks. I ended up getting books on Pearl Harbor, Lincoln’s assassination, and a cool pocket editon of Tale of Two Cities that’s printed like one of those little Gideon bibles, with thin pages and Metal Curse fonts, but a very nice binding. I also finally found a copy of the new release of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I’m listening to the commentary right now in the background, which is funny in a strange way. The director, Renny Harlan, has that halting Finnish sort of accent, where his English is perfect, but it has just that little bit of a pronouncement to it. Anyway, it’s entertaining to me.

The gout is about gone, so everything worked. Still eating cherries by the firstful, though. OK, gotta get back to Renny.

OK, I think I figured out how to change this site over to 2004. I hope it works. I’m starving and need to find something to eat, and I don’t have time to dick around with this anymore.

Nothing else to report. It was very nice outside, but the sudden temp change has triggered my gout and now my toes are sporadically killing me. I know it sounds like some funny disease that old, crotchety people have, but it fucking kills me. Imagine someone slamming both of your big toes in the trunk of a car, and then leaving you there for a week. I’m popping allopurinol like candy and eating cherries by the pound. There’s some enzyme in cherries and strawberries that helps dissolve it. I can still walk fine, no problems or anything, it’s just at the annoying stage.

OK, food, before everything closes. Contrary to popular belief, the city of New York does sleep. Later.