All geek stuff ahead -- avoid taking internally

I don't update my LJ enough. This is because I don't have my own computer working properly because I'm a control freak slash perfectionist when it comes to building Win-Lin machines. I may not have a magic formula yet, but I'll be damned if I have to accept crap from my own hands.

Hint: If any of you know of a Linux kernel small enough to fit on a floppy along with a Linux version of fdisk, reply, eh? I have a 210 MB drive that may be more suited to the task, so if anyone knows of a small bootable distro, send that data my way please.

Oh, my latest theory:

1. Take a small hard drive and give it just enough of a Linux kernel and basic drive tools to make it a diagnostic bootable;
2. Use that to partition my big drive using Linux's fdisk, a superior piece of software engineering;
3. Boot with a Win9x rescue floppy, format the FAT32 partition of the drive (aka. /dev/hda1) and check that Linux-fdisk calling that bootable means DOS-fdisk thinks so as well;
4. Boot from my smaller Win98 drive and copy its contents to the bigger partition;
5. Take the smaller drive out of the loop and check that Win98 boots from the bigger partition;
6. Install Linux in the other partition and be done with this effort.

Do any of you fine computer aficionados have any refinements to offer?

I've got a long day ahead of me -- driving plenty, saying things into microphones, fixing computers, and showing my cousin the first Austin Powers flick so that she isn't lost when she sees the new flick tomorrow.

-end geeky transmission, Dante

Non-geeky post -- adults only, geek or not

I had the creepiest dream. It ended with a lounge singer ruining a couple of otherwise lame songs. He then sang a song that may have been an original. the words definitely spelled out a hit! However, his range was so bad that I was stuck with the song in my head ten minutes after I woke up. Then it left my head before I could write it down. Given my chances at making a recording career, I'm going to let that one fly.

The weirder part of the dream was the bit with the catalog. At some point I'm in a resort hotel in the Catskills or Glens Falls or something equally Hudson-centric, too poor to survive were it not for its old mansion hotels. If it weren't for this place being on a sizable hill, I'd say I was dreaming about the Otesaga in Cooperstown.

I'm lying on a bed in one of the rooms, flipping through what at first looks like a color brochure for stores in town. Then I flip to the end of the brochure, as I like to do, and find pr0n. Not just basic pee-arr-zero-enn, either -- it's two women and a man up to you can guess what, but it looks like they're on Bourbon Street. In the upper left corner of the page is a description befitting a Land's End or Ikea catalog and a price for the service -- $668. I remember thinking that was awful steep and that the price must have included tax.

I kept flipping backward and finding creepier and creepier situations for rent -- two women dressed in baby blue pajamas with feet waiting to be scolded before you schtup them (I think that was $800-odd); a good reaming from a well-endowed man for $413 (I'd think they'd charge more for that, but perhaps demand has been down with the recession and all); and some more traditional fare for $200 and change.

I recall that I was shocked for a moment but then I concluded that this was a classic example of upstate New York towns gaining revenue by being sin capitals in the middle of bucolic turf. Here's a cow, here's a Revolutionary War battlefield, here's hot backdoor action. (Guess which one doesn't need to be subsidized?) No one is expecting prostitution, just as no one is expecting a four-color, shiny flyer to go with it.

Until the 1950s, the city hall in my hometown was in the middle of the whorehouse district. I think that says a lot about Utica.

-does Ikea do pornography? Dante