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! ;-)