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[personal profile] pseydtonne
I'd typed a version of this a few minutes ago, but I accidentally deleted it. I typed this version as a text file and kept saving it locally. This may seem blatantly obvious, but I forget to do this every so often.

Now that I'm making money again, I let myself turn months of window-shopping into purchases today. I try to refrain from such splurges most of the time, but I'd been so good (and so broke) for so long that an eruption was my destiny.

The focus of my shopping was Maggie... well, her computer. Her machine is at my place for a while, so I'm upgrading it. I bought a stick of RAM so that her machine now has 256 meg instead of 128. I also bought her an optical trackball. Those pups used to be $70 but now sell for thirty. I'd say that's a fine bargain.

I also got myself some crap. I'd been wanting the Unix System Administration Handbook for several months, but I felt put off by the very cheesy front cover. (I judged a book by its cover, okay? I'm not prefect. I'm not even poifick, nor am I Pruferock.) Then [livejournal.com profile] hakamadare mentioned it was how he went from newbie git to wunderkind, so i was intrigued again. During my wait, the 1994 version was replaced with the 2002 version, now called Linux Administration Handbook and now centred on the flavor of Unix recommended by doctors and those that play them on teevee.


What had been "da Poiple book" is now a very 1981 shade of green. The cover drawing is still uglier than the online cartoon Look What I Brought Home, but now it has a penguin driving the car that's falling off a cliff. It still has more parsable information on one page than some books offer in three chapters. How can you beat a diagram that helps you figure out submasking? Perhaps with a section about configuring your own kernal that says:
"The driver code can't just be mooshed onto the kernel like a gob of Play-Doh".
Oh, and the text has very comfy typefaces for both the text and the code examples. Whoo! Worth the dough.

I also bought Tommy Keene's latest album, The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down. I had heard a couple tracks on college radio about a month ago. It was the 16-minute track "The Final Hour" that made me vote to buy the pup.

That wa the extent of my splurging. I also bought a couple other items in the past couple weeks, like a spindle of blank CDs (50 for $16 with a $10 rebate on the way so that's really $6), a screwdriver, and some cables.

Okay, enough about my adventures in the capitalist outdoors. I have computers to fix tonight and tomorrow before I attend the Finn Brothers concert tomorrow night. Life is good again. Please let me know if any of you need cheering.

-yaaaaaay, Dante

Date: 2002-07-19 09:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dilletante.livejournal.com
My copy of that book is red and doesn't mention Linux. But, it's a good intro to unix system administration.

Date: 2002-07-22 07:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hakamadare.livejournal.com
now i'm really intrigued to see what it is you picked up :) my copy is purple (and my other copy is red, and my other copy is yellow :) ). bring it along next time you come to a brunch, eh?

but congratulations on your purchases, and good luck in your continuing projects.

-steve

Renderking's hooked on PC's for Everyone

Date: 2002-07-23 06:40 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Hey Dante...

Safe bet the RAM you jammed is from the man at PC's for everyone. Thanks for hooking me up with those fine folks. Now I just got to get then them to do a price quote on a mondo multi-processor RenderServer!

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