I updated my Linux desktop image today. This weekend, I replaced Corel Linux with Mandrake Linux (or Linux Mandrake, as they like to call it...sounds dumb to me). If you've never used Linux and want to start now, I would suggest Mandrake over any other distribution. I've used RedHat, Caldera, and Corel, and Mandrake is by far the best. The installation process takes care of almost everything, so there's not much configuration needed by the time you boot into Linux. In fact, the install reminds me of the Windows 98 install. Mandrake is also more fully-loaded than any other distro I've used. Corel Linux is pretty bare-bones, and the learning curve on installing programs is pretty steep compared to Windows. I tried installing Licq (a Linux ICQ clone) in Corel Linux, and couldn't get it to work. In Mandrake, Licq comes already installed, so I didn't have to fool around with downloading, compiling, and all that other crap. Anyway, if you've never run Linux or are running a different distribution, give Mandrake a try. :)

DayQuil has got to be the greatest product ever created. I woke up about 2 hours ago, and I felt like total shit--my throat hurt extremely bad, and I had a headache (which may be partially due to a hangover). Anyway, I felt like I was gonna die. Then my wife informed me we had some DayQuil, so I took two of them, and I feel 300% better.

When I got home last night, my host was down. I don't know what the problem was, but stuff like this has been going on frequently the past couple days. I was going to update my page last night, but now I can't even remember what I was going to say. :)

IE is pissing me off. For some reason, it's not caching my new logo image at the top of the page. I had Ty check it out from work and he said it works fine. Anyone else having that problem? (If you're not sure, right-click the image and click Properties. If the file size reads -1 bytes, then something's wrong, like it is on my machine.)

I put a new poll up, just because a lot of people have mentioned that there are too many e/n sites out there lately. I have to agree with them, too. My link list gets bigger all the time, and it takes me 45 minutes to read all my daily reads, which I usually do 2 or 3 times daily. Damn, that's a lot of time. There are just too many sites that I really like, but it's getting to be more of an inconvenience to read them all, and I'm sure my wife hates it too. I spend 8 hours working on the computer all day, then spend a few more hours surfin' sites and messing around with my own site. And I don't see this "e/n craze" ending anytime soon. More and more people discover this genre every day, and some start up their own e/n site, which makes it easier for others to discover the whole thing...and the cycle starts all over again.

Not that I'm really complaining, because I think these sites are good and deserve more attention. I guess I just need to limit myself to how long I spend viewing them.

The Shlongster's back! :) He finally quit playing EverQuest, damn that must have sucked for him. I couldn't imagine throwing several hours away each day doing something like that and having nothing to show for it. Oh wait, isn't that what I do with this page? :)

I changed the layout a little bit today, and made a new logo graphic. This page now looks identical in IE and Netscape. I normally wouldn't care, but I have to use Netscape when I'm in Linux. Damnit, when is Micro$oft going to make an IE build for Linux?! :)

Two people (besides me) voted for this site in the E/N Site of the Year 2000 poll over at Aherdofturtles. Whoever you are, thanks. :)

Sharkey just posted the Slice of the Century over at BAMF, and boy is it a disappointment. He chose Natalie Portman. :( Not only is she pretty gumby-looking, she's like twelve years old or something.

For those of you who are also disappointed, I suggest you head over to portal.scurvy.net to get your fix. Now they've got the goods. :)

I found Perpetual Motion through my referrer logs. They look suspiciously like Pixelated Vision (they even have the same number of letters in each word of their name), but it's a good site nonetheless. :) I added it to my links section.

Sweet, my site is Site of the Week over at Syntekz Error. There must not have been much competition. :) I got 2 out of 5 stars in the "Interaction" category, and I decided to do something about that. I'm going to try to install News Publisher sometime in the next week or so. Get a little of that "Leave a Comment" action goin' on. :)

I'm also planning on registering a domain name soon, probably after I get all settled in to my new house. Unfortunately, I still can't think of a good idea for a name. :(

I installed Corel Linux last night, and I had a helluva time getting my modem and soundcard configured. After consulting Brad, I at least got my soundcard working (thank you Brad). There's a nifty util called sndconfig that automatically installed it (or something...I'm not exactly sure what it did). It was hell getting my modem to work, though. It's a U.S. Robotics 56K internal (ISA), and for some reason, though I had specified the correct settings, the dialer couldn't initialize it. I checked the config file, and the COM port and IRQ were set properly, but by playing around, I found a util called setserial, which I used to manually set the COM port and IRQ to what (I thought) had already been set, and it worked. At least I could dial in to my ISP. As soon as I connected, I got the error message, "The pppd daemon died unexpectedly!" I tried using the debug option to see what was wrong, but for some reason it couldn't open the logfile. After booting into win98, getting on the internet and searching for a fix, then booting back into linux several times, I finally got it to work. It took me about 7 hours total to get everything working to my satisfaction.

So anyhow, I added a screenshot of my linux desktop just below the win98 desktop over there on the left. Nifty, eh? :)

I've mentioned these sites before in previous posts, but I decided to add more permanent links in the right column:

John's Crawlspace has a pretty simple (but still good) layout, but there are some kickass CSS text effects. Damn, I gotta learn how to do that stuff. :)

File Spanker isn't exactly an e/n site, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. Actually, I just like the word "spank." :)

I just read Red Scare's latest post, and I thought that was the most times I had seen the work "fuck" used in a post.

But then I read Underwear Ninja's latest rant (from p.s.n), and I guess I thought wrong. :) BTW, that rant about PacBell sounds a lot like the shit U.S. West pulls all the time.

This is what the Salt Lake Tribune had to say about the power outage yesterday:

"A persistent overdue rainstorm that dissolved a buildup of bird excrement and dust on power-pole insulators is being blamed for knocking out power in Price for seven hours Tuesday morning."

It looks like I might be trying out AOL Instant Messenger (though I hate to contribute to AOL's continued success). :) In the last poll, it lost to ICQ by only one vote (32 to 31). Yahoo Messenger got 3 votes (it's a piece of shit) and MSN Messenger got 1.

I voted for Limp Bizkit in the new poll. For some reason, I can't envision Jon Davis kicking anyone's ass. :)

Random Link: Spank Me! Ok, so it's not so random :)

Geeklife seems to have picked up quite a bit today. For a while there, nobody was posting anything. Hopefully they stay this active for a while. :)

The power was out here from about 2 a.m. until 9:30 a.m., so that was about 2 1/2 hours I didn't have to work. :) I went for a drive this morning while the power was out (to see if there was any looting, of course), and all the stop lights in town were out, so the police had set up 2-way stop signs in the middle of each intersection. I was traveling south and came to one of the stop signs, and some jackass going west, who had the right-of-way, also stopped. He just stared at me like I had the right-of-way, and he was just waiting for me to go. So I just stared back at him for nearly a full minute before he finally went through the intersection. People are such idiots. Something similar happened at 2 other intersections. People just seem to lose all common sense when something just slightly out of the ordinary like this happens.

I've linked to this site for quite a while, but here's another plug: go check out The Element. It started out as a good site, and has only been getting better with age.

I changed my desktop image today. It's a huge version of my old logo; as you can see, I replaced it with that crap above. I'm not sure if I like it better, if not I'll just put the old logo back up. As you can see in my desktop image, I made a skin for ICQ. :) Almost all the skins on skinz.org were too gaudy, and I wanted something simple, so I made my own. Maybe someday I'll get the motivation to make a Winamp skin.

About the house: We offered $82K, the sellers countered with $83K, so we accepted. :) We're scheduled to close on or before February 29th, but it could be as early as February 15th. At least that's when I'll have enough cash for the down payment.

Woohoo, I made an offer on a house today! We should know by tomorrow whether or not the sellers will accept it. If they don't, we'll probably accept their counter-offer. I'm pretty excited. :)

Anyway, let's do some simple math, and see how badly lending institutions are raping everyone: Take an $85,000 home, a 30 year mortgage, 6.89% interest, and $657/mo payments. That comes to $236,520 over the course of 30 years. Damn near a quarter-mil...ouch.

A woman was booted from the University of Utah's theater department for refusing to swear during a scene in a play. Now she's suing the U for religious discrimination. She thinks that since she's not allowed to substitute "golly gosh darn" for "god damn," that it constitutes religious discrimination. I'm pretty sure there's already a legal precedent pertaining to acting jobs like this. It's like a male suing a movie company for not getting a part written for a female. If for some reason, you're not suited for the part, then tough shit. I hope the judge throws the case out of court. God damn it.

Source: Salt Lake Tribune

I stole this link from John's Crawlspace (pretty good site, btw), it's a text to speech converter that works online. You just type the text you want to hear, click the button, and it downloads a sound file (wav, au, or aiff) of what you typed. Ok, so it's not quite as efficient as the multitude of text to speech programs that actually run on your computer, but it's still a Neat-O^® idea. :)

Oh yeah, check out Asrnet. It's a pretty decent site.

I added a link to Random Online just now. I got an email from Po0, who is a bigger Sublime fan than I am. Cool, at least someone besides me worships the most underrated band of all time. :)

Extreme Tracking is really starting to piss me off. It said I got referrals from Brain Damage and Camworld today, but I know damn well they don't link to me. When I was using HitBox, it wasn't logging all the hits to my site. I would visit my page, but my hostname never showed up on the unique listing. Does anyone know of a good hit tracker? Let me know. :)

I just uploaded my new desktop image. :) There are some kickass wallpaper images over at Penny Arcade. I think they're all 800 X 600, so you'll probably have to do a little stretchin'.

Well, I was going to move into an apartment, but upon closer inspection, the place was a dump. I feel pretty foolish for not taking a closer look, but after I had moved a lot of stuff in, we moved it back out. Luckily, the landlord was OK with it...got my $900 back.

I'm really disenchanted with the whole apartment thing, so my wife and I did something drastic today: got approved for a $84,700.00 home loan. :) For the area I live in, that can buy a fairly decent house. I'm looking forward to it, and though it's kinda scary, at least I'll have something to keep me busy for a while. :)

I got a plug request from XenoZero today, and I usually don't plug unless it's a site I'd visit on a daily basis. So, uh...here it is. :)

Solo is back, finally. :)

I changed the poll just now. The last one may not have been correct because the cookie function wasn't working for a while, and some people with static IPs might have voted more than once. I actually voted twice just to make sure the cookie fix worked, but Dr. Pepper (my choice) still beat Pepsi by 3 votes.

I voted for ICQ on the current poll. How could you not like it the best? :)

Moving sucks. I spent all day today moving shit into my new place, and didn't get to break anything. We'll have to go next weekend.

The lanparty at Ty's kicked all kinds of ass last night! :) We started at 5:00 p.m. and went until 4:00 a.m. I spent most of the time getting my ass kicked all over the place, though. We mostly played Unreal Tournament, but had a few games of Quake and Quake II for old time's sake.

My video card sucks ass. When viewing certain sites (usually when scrolling down a page), my computer locks up. Usually, I can move the mouse for a bit before even that stops working, but ctrl-alt-del doesn't work, and nothing else I do will let me recover without rebooting. The sites that do it really bad are Neoflux and Zero. The reason I know it's my video card is because it does it in IE and Netscape, and usually only when I scroll, and my video card is the only thing that's doing any work at that time. Maybe it's time to get a new one... :)

My wife and I found an apartment to move into today! :) Currently, we're living at my mom's, which really sucks.

So anyway, I probably won't be updating this page much in the next few days. Tonight, we're having a lanparty at Ty's house, and this weekend, when I'm not breaking stuff, I'll be moving into my secret tweeker pad.

Hopefully this weekend, me, Ty, and some of our friends are going to destroy two 27" TVs and a picture tube from a computer monitor. We're not sure exactly how we're going to do this, so I need some input from you. :) Email me at dennis@wta.cx with any ideas you have on the destruction of electronics equipment. We are going to videotape it, and the mpegs should be up on Ty's site by next week sometime.

Some of the available destruction tools are: a sledgehammer, a 16-guage shotgun, a 30-06 hunting rifle (semi-auto with 3X9 scope), a 1979 Ford pickup, a 50-foot high cliff, a circular saw, a power drill, and numerous other household items (including lighter fluid). :)

Not much to post about lately. Oh well, hopefully something interesting enough to post about will happen tomorrow (or later today, rather).

I did get a new mouse, not that that's exciting or anything. It's a Logitech First Mouse+ three-button w/ scroll wheel. It's a helluva lot better than the piece of crap Microsoft mouse I had before, and the price was right ($21 at buy.com).

I also got my copy of The Shawshank Redemption on DVD. Though it didn't say so on MediaPlay's site when I ordered it, it's the widescreen version, and only cost me $12. Not too bad, eh? :)

I changed the layout a little bit today. I didn't like having that left column so long because I had to scroll down to click all the links. And yes, I'm aware that it looks like total shit in Netscape, but what doesn't? :) If I feel like it later, I may fix it.

I stole this link from SNoT: it's Pixelated Vision. For being new on the scene (well, new to me, at least), they've got a lot of content, and good stuff at that. :)

Heh...I always wanted to say that. :) I guess somebody's got to do it while Inferno is gone.

Moved: Schlyer's Absurdities Observed has moved to neoflux.com, and besides the new name, it has a comment section for each post. Fun, I like those. :)

New: The Tunk Tank. Check it out, it looks very promising. :) I also added it to the link column.

I was half-asleep earlier today when a TV commercial sorta woke me up. It was for Nads Hair Removal Gel. I heard "nads" and "hair removal" and just sat up in bed to see what the hell my wife was watching. It must be some foreign company that doesn't know you're not supposed to use the word "nads" in conjunction with "hair removal gel" in a sentence. :) For you really kinky guys out there, check out their website.

Sweet, Ty got the new layout up. I helped out a little with it, and made all the banners. I plan on making about 7 or 8 more, just so there's some variety, since a random banner loads on every page view.