Well, our plans to spend our New Year’s celebration in the snowy mountains of Show Low have busted. We got an unexpected tax bill from the tax man, and this was the straw that broke our back. It’s not like we could afford it before that, but at least we could take the hit. But, now all hope is lost. We’ll either be staying home and getting drunk on Hornito’s Sauza and eating lumpia, or be hanging with Drewberry and Cyndi-loo getting drunk on Hornito’s Sauza and eating lumpia. The coming year will find me trying to satisfy many goals: (1) Quit Smoking (2) Loose weight (3) Master Linux (4) Spend more time with my siren of a wife (that’s siren like the temptress kind, not the wailing kind on police cars). Wish me luck!

My Linux trials have finally brought me to a final distro. I’ve tried a bunch of distros, and read about even more of them. After much pondering, and many installs later, I’ve settled on Slackware — the Unix of Linux. I’m sure I will explore FreeBSD at some point, but I don’t think I am there yet. I really like Slackware’s emphasis on the command line. Learning the command line will allow me to port my knowledge to many different distros, whereas using GUI configurators included on many distros like Mandrake (which isn’t a bad distro at all), and Red Hate will make your knowledge very proprietary (at least this is the way it appears to a n00b like me). I finally got Wine installed, but have yet to get it configured right. It adds Windows API’s to Linux so you can run Windows proggies. The really cool thing is you don’t have to run any Micro$hit crap. That’s right, not even Windows itself. Now, that’s a breath of fresh air. So, you can take all the great things about a Windoze machine (i.e games), and run them almost natively on Linux. ;-)

Which brings us finally to Bad Habits… I hate to make mention of a growing phenomenon that I am witnessing all over the city. We all know taxes were raised on cigarettes (bastards). This makes it much harder for the kind and gentle smoker like myself to tame our cravings (yes, I’m well aware that we all should quit, but there should be peace on earth, too). Anyhoo, I’ve witnessed a bunch of desperado smokers out there who are apparently so hard up for a smoke, they resort to raiding the communal ashtrays found in public places. The first time I saw this, I wasn’t so surprised, as it was a homeless person doing it. Not that I have any assumption that homeless people ritualistically engage in such distasteful practices, but homeless people generally don’t have a steady pay check in the traditional sense — thus. The second time I saw this event was today at work: One of the techs here was very openly raiding the smoke baskets outside! He was very gently placing each salvaged butt into a nice plastic baggy to keep them clean!? Three things bother me about this: (1) He wasn’t shameful at all, going about his mission amidst open eyes. (2) He has a paycheck! A steady paycheck. A LARGE paycheck. Go buy some damn smokes! (3) It’s just fucking sick any way you look at it. Might as well drink from a communal spittoon!

Ok, nuff said. Have a great New Year’s everyone! Drink one (or six) for me! ;-)

Merry Christmas 2002! So far, this year’s Christmas has been very nice. We had a nice visit with Heidi’s side of the family last night (they do their thing on the eve). Grandpa Forrest dressed up as Santa to pay the kiddies a visit. I’m not sure they fell for it, but hey, he tried. We had a nice fire roaring in the fireplace for once. Scotch was flowing, as well as eggnog and other various drinks. As per tradition we cooked up some pizzas and pigged out! There was lots of desserts to be had — if you like that kind of thing. I had hot dogs and rice instead. :)

This morning Heidi and I woke up early at 11 am. :) Heidi made us some coffee (yum), and we gave Kahlua her gifts. She got some chews, and a stuffed pig (her new fav). We opened up our presents as well. Heidi got some crafty books which she likes a lot. She got a fertility vessel to help us in our efforts to have a child (next implant is closing in), as well as other trinkets and CANDY! Damn she got a lot of candy! I got a new pair of boots (a guy can never have too many boots), some linux books to help guide me into the Open Source community, and my fav was new Doro/Warlock CDs! What can I say? Doro rocks!

Next, we’re going to my uncle’s place for a grand ol’ feast. He’s the best chef on earth! Yep! Even better than that hack Wolfgang Puck! LOL… We’ll ok, Puck’s probably just as good as my uncle…

Merry Christmas everyone! Hang tough out there!

Here I sit, at a very ungodly hour of the day, after installing Mandrake again on my system again. This time only to realize that I really DIDN’T linke Mandrake, and the benefits I thought it would have were not there. Back to Slackware I go. It’s the one I’ve been most comfortable with so far. I wonder if I will ever be able to settle on a distro… It’s a curse I tell ya.

Well, my Mom’s surgery was today. She had to have a tumor removed from her thyroid. We arrived at 730 in the morning and mom was taken in around 830. It wasn’t till around 1330 that we finally got word that the surgery went fine. The doctors removed her thyroid and the tumor which was about an inch in size. They also “cleaned out” her lymph nodes. The doctor said the visual inspection of her lymph nodes revealed no cause for concern, however, they are sending them for tests to be sure the cancer has not spread. I anticipate we will get the results around Monday. All in all, the surgery went well and she is expected to recovery nicely, going home tomorrow.

It’s awfully sobering to see loved ones go under the knife. I hope my family has seen the last of these events for a long time. I hope all of our families don’t revist events like these any time soon…

Ok, so VecLinux kinda sucks. Instead of a Slackware-based distribution, I’d say it was a Slackware-hack distortion. Anyhoo, that’s prolly just the newbie in me. Back to Slackware! Oh wait… I lent my friggin CD to Drewberry. :( So, I had to sit here and make a new damn CD. Anyway, back to Slackware… Like I said, I like the name. ;-)

Well, I’m a dork. My A+ didn’t grow legs. It was just moved to another part of the office underneath a pile of papers. I took my stupid test today, and passed! Yay! So, I am free for the moment of academia. Time to sink my teeth into Linux now! :)

TDN was shut down today, giving us a nice break. During this time, however, we need to retool our systems so we can better support growth. My damn day job gets in the way of a lot of the admin work at TDN. Lucky Heidi gets to deal with most of this. :( This leaves packing and other non-timesensetive items for me.

As far as my Linux progress, I am installing my fourth flavor today: Vector Linux. It’s supposed to be a minimalistic Slackware-based distro. Sounds good to me. I started with Red Hat many years ago, and was promptly turned off by it. More recently I started with Mandrake 9.0 which I must admit was an amazingly easy and complete install. However, I now look at it as bloatware. It installs just too much shit. Also, I recently learned it was based on Red Hat (which I find more commonly known as Red Hate). The whole idea here is to get away from Micro$hit, and other companies like them. Red Hate is starting to go down that road. So, I went to my old standby, Slackware 8.1. Slackware is touted to be the UNIX of Linux, and I think that will have some benefits in the long run. Also, I like the name. ;-) But, while Slackware is true to UNIX and an all around great distro (BTW, both Red Hate and Mandrake are wonderful distros in spite of my personal opinion), it is also a bit like bloatware in my opinion. But, take this with a grain of salt, as I am quite anal about having a clean system to start from. So, this brings me to Vector Linux…

VecLinux is a Slackware-based minimalist distro (only somwhere around 250MB iso). I think this will do me fine. I’m at the part where I install X, so time to concentrate. This is the worst part… More to come.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!