Public Service Announcement, Nerd-style:
The Wizards of the Coast stores, called The Gamekeeper here in Los Angeles, are all going out of business. Their stock is still pretty good, and everything is at least 40% off the cover.
So, if you’re like me and you were waiting to get the D&D 3.5 corebooks, now would be a good time. If you’re a poker nerd, you can also get clay chips there on the cheap, and if you’ve ever wanted to venture into games like Settlers of Catan or Diplomacy, they’ve got those as well. All 40% off.
Personally, I think most games are overpriced to begin with, so 40% off brings them right down to a very affordable and reasonable level.
Now go forth, and nerd-ify!

OK Computer plays from my CDRW drive as I write this. I’m using Windowmaker, which I haven’t touched since Red Hat 5.2. I ::heart:: wmaker. I forgot just how amazingly wonderful it is. I’ve got my iBook on my desk to my right, and I check it every 30 minutes or so for new e-mail.
I’m sure I paint a lovely image of computer geekery . . . but I’m booted into Knoppix 3.3, because somehow I hosed my login thingy (gdm, I think?) over the weekend. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the kde 3.2 install I did, but I’m not exactly sure. All I know right now is that my /home partition is safe, as are all the Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot files within said partition. I’m pretty confident that I can boot into runlevel 2 and fix it . . . but holy shit, man, I’ve been running Knoppix for . . .
knoppix@ttyp0[knoppix]$ uptime
23:05:52 up 11:05, 0 users, load average: 0.11, 0.30, 0.25
twenty-three hours eleven hours. (Yes, I realize what a total lameass I am. Here’s my cap, my pocket protector, and my sliderule. But you can have my polyhedral dice when you pry them from my cold, dead hands . . . provided I fail my saving throw, of course), and it’s awesome. Because I’m running Knoppix out of RAM, it’s moving at transwarp speed. If you’ve even shown the tiniest hint of geekery in your life, you owe it to yourself to give Knoppix (or any LiveCD, really) a go.
So the burning question is: do I get to a free spin on my propeller cap because I’m doing this from a live CD, using my CDRW drive to play an audio CD, and seriously looking at Gentoo, (The idea of a linux distro that’s optimized just for my machine is so alluring to me, and I’ve spent several hours looking at Gentoo’s site tonight) or do I lose 5d12+10 nerd points for not spending the last 23 11 hours tracking down the problem and fixing it?

I was out late last night, recording a commentary track for the upcoming DVD release of The Good Things, so I slept in until almost 8:45 this morning, when Riley exploded into my bedroom and onto my bed. Bad dog, but so cute and friendly. Or something.
The kids had already gone to school. I made oatmeal, and ate it at the dining room table. Anne sat across from me and sipped a cup of coffee.
“The kids are gone for three days,” I said. “Can I have you all to myself until they get back?”
“Of course,” she said.
“I’d like to start out the weekend by having a date tonight with my wife. Will you go on a date with me?”
“Sure,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”
“I dunno . . . maybe we can go out to dinner and see a movie?”
“Good job, Romeo. Way to bring out the ‘A’ material. Bravo.” Clap. Clap. Ah, the inner critic. I love him.
“I have a better idea,” she said.
“Oh yeah? What?”
“How about . . . we stay home . . .”
In the distance, I heard music: wakka wakka wakka chikka bow wow wakka wakka chikka wakka
She smiled. “How about we order some food . . .”
” . . . that sounds good . . .” I said. wakka chikka wakka
She took a surprisingly sexy drink of her coffee. ” . . . and we can make a fire in the fireplace . . . ”
” . . . getting better . . . ” chikka bow chikka chikka bow wow
She put her cup down, and leaned on her elbows. ” . . . and we can stay up late . . .”
” . . . go on . . .” I said. chikka chikka chikka bow wow wow wow
She leaned across the table, close to me. ” . . . and watch Family Guy on DVD . . . All. Night. Long.”
“You are so fuckin’ rad, baby. You rip.” I said.
She smiled, and kissed the tip of my nose.
wakka wakka wakka chikka bow wow wakka wakka chikka wakka bow wow wakka wakka chikka bow chikka bow chikka bow

I’m writing this in kate. In the terminal window below, konstruct is building kde 3.2. I don’t quite know why, but there is something immensely satisfying about watching hundreds of lines of code (that I completely don’t understand) scroll by. It’s so much more “real” than just watching an LED blink on and off. Hooray. Go me.
This talk of computers raises a question: Is the Fedora Project’s Core 1 release good enough to use on a daily basis? I’m still runing 9.0 with a ton of stuff in /usr/built/ and /home/wil/bin/ (So I guess I could call it the WheaTONIX version of 9.0 . . . 9.0.wHx? Seriously, I’m just killing myself this morning. Oh, afternoon. Sorry.)

It’s a wonderful morning here in Casa Wheaton. The kids are at school Anne just left for work, and I’ve got 64 ounces of Fair Trade coffee to fuel a morning of hopefully productive work. Behind me, Riley is chasing dust motes around in shafts of early morning sunlight, and Ferris is trying to convince Riley that she should stop chasing the dust, and start chasing her. Scattered clouds ride the tail end of a Pacific storm up and over the San Gabriel Mountains. Mount Wilson had snow on it yesterday.
I’m almost done with my column for blogging.la, then I have to write up bit of Valentine’s Day snark, for the cult of the one-eyed cat, so actual weblog-ish things are backing up (good thing I carry around a notebook with me everywhere — it’s actually a Nightmare Before Christmas diary, with a lock and everything, that my friend Martin gave me for Christmas, and the truth is I totally love it.) So in place of anything original and interesting, I direct you to an 4 February, 2004 Wil 36 Comments