saving it for a new subtitle

here's one of those stupid blog questionnaires. meh.

1. One book that changed your life
I don't really have a good answer for this. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams.

2. One book you've read more than once.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, also by Douglas Adams. How lame. Ooh, I have a good one! From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg.

3. One book you would probably want on a desert island.
I might actually read past the first few chapters of Gödel, Escher, Bach if I had it on a desert island. It occurs to me that nobody ever gives what should be the obvious answer to this question, which is something pornographic.

4. One book that made you laugh.
Note in the margin on page 118 of my copy of The C Programming Language: "i laughed aloud at that. god i'm sad."

5. One book that made you cry.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.

6. One book you wish had been written.
The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

7. One book you wish had never been written.
Mein Kampf.

8. One book you are currently reading.
Downtown by Pete Hamill.

9. One book you have been meaning to read.
The number one on this list for me is The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses. But it is just so long, so very very long.

link spam

why am i posting this here? will anyone who actually MAKES these websites read it because i posted it? the answer; is no.

but it makes me feel better...
when good restaurants do bad websites.

so in answer to your question, i don't know

An excellent sentence from the new york times: … the idea of a tarted-up hand puppet succeeding at the Helen Hayes portends a terrifying future in which the next stars of “Phantom” are Topo Gigio and Madame.

geekout with your leeks out

Today i threw out an old computer. I don't really feel sentimental about any pieces of technical equipment these days, but I've had this computer a long while and it has served me very well. I'm not really nostalgic about the machine, but I may be nostalgic about the things I used it for and how it marked certain changes in my life. Kind of like an old chair.

This was an NEC PowerMate V133, which ran a Pentium 133 and had I think 32MB of RAM when I bought it, which I thought was extravagant. It's very likely the RAM was upgraded somewhere along the line. I got the computer when I was a high school freshman. Mr. Hackney was jealous of it.

I used this computer to write pretty much everything I wrote in High School. I wrote a paper about my favorite short story, "The Toynbee Convector," on this computer. I wrote a paper about gender roles in the X-Files on this computer. I wrote my college entrance essays on this computer.

The first time I listened to a Star Wars soundtrack, it was through the CD player on this computer. When I sang "Saying Goodbye" on senior day, I typed out a crib sheet with the lyrics and chords on this computer. The first computer program I ever wrote ran on this computer.

I got a new computer when I went off to college (a notebook which died unceremoniously midway through my senior year). Sometime after that, the NEC, which stayed at home, got Debian linux installed on it. It wasn't really fast enough to run any of the fancy GNOME or KDE things, but I didn't really use it so much - only when visiting from school.

After moving back home after college, I used it as my main machine until I just couldn't take it anymore (probably about a month) and hooked up the one I am still using now (the one which replaced the notebook). The NEC became a mail server which ran and ran and ran and ran very quietly and very dependably until one day its power supply up and died.

I do name my computers, but not the way most people do; I reuse the names as the functions change. The first name the computer in question had was calvin, but later on the computer I'm using now became calvin and the machine I just threw out became "box." I called it that because all of my computer names are from calvin and hobbes, and when I first put linux on it, it felt like a computer should: like it had taken on the qualities of calvin's cardboard box. If I only turned it on its side, it could do anything I imagined.