I know, I know…you’re wondering where the blog entries have been for the past two days. Well, Sunday, I was too sleepy to write one (I went to bed far earlier than normal), and yesterday, well, I simply couldn’t think of anything to write about.

But this link should make up for it: We Made Out In A Tree And This Old Guy Sat And Watched Us.com. A strange name, I know (not to mention a really long domain!), but the site’s well worth checking out; it’s a collection of stupid, bizarre, and/or amusing quotations like, well, the one featured in the domain name. [Thanks to Kat for the link.]

While at the mall today, I couldn’t resist the urge to go and try out the Game Boy Advance demo unit at Electronics Boutique. And after having played it for a few minutes, all I can really say is: “Wow.”

First of all, the thing is small. I was expecting to see something the size of my old Sega Game Gear, but not only is the GBA far slimmer, its footprint isn’t all that much larger than that of the current Game Boy Color. And despite the fact that its screen has no backlight, the graphics are nonetheless amazingly clear; yes, granted, they’re a bit dark (especially in games that are in themselves rather dark, such as Castlevania), but even then the screen is much brighter than I’d have anticipated.

And no, just in case you’re wondering, I’m not planning on getting a Game Boy Advance as soon as they’re officially released on the 13th. I can wait, and I’m by no means a spendthrift. But once the selection of games has become reasonably large, I might be tempted to go and buy one after all…

Even if you aren’t a big fan of the comic strip, you may nonetheless want to check out Scott Adams’ Dilbert newsletter on the web. There are generally quite a few amusing bits in each newsletter (and in fact, only four or so newsletters are published each year), but the most hilarious feature by far is what Adams dubs “True Tales of Induhviduals”– stories of utter stupidity from everyday life, as observed by the newsletter’s loyal readers.

Which reminds me of Lewis Black‘s stand-up comedy special that aired earlier tonight on Comedy Central. (If you’ve never heard of him, go ahead and check out the link.) Perhaps his most well-known routine involves a spontaneous quotation he heard while dining at IHOP, one which he claims was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard until Quayle became vice-president: “If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.” He goes on from there to speculate that the cause of aneurysms is that such quotations become trapped in our heads with no means of escape…

So, got any quotes stupid enough to possibly induce aneurysm if you consider them long enough? Go ahead… send ’em to the address at the bottom of the page. I’ll post the best ones here to give zone:38 readers a nice headache. 😀

I just saw a TV commercial which stated that “the 10th annual 2001 MTV Movie Awards” would be airing tomorrow.

Excuse me? It’s the 10th annual MTV Movie Awards, or it’s the 2001 MTV Movie Awards, but combine the two and you’re left with something which defies all attempts at logical analysis. Heh.

After browsing 100000watts.com, I’ve come to one conclusion: Central Georgia has what may be the worst selection of radio stations in the country. And is it any surprise that nearly all of them are owned by either Clear Channel or the local conglomerate US Broadcasting?

If you’ve never read The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Vent” column, you’re missing out on quite an amusing source of commentary. It’s a simple concept, really: people call or e-mail the newspaper with witty comments, and the best ones are printed for the world to see. And it’s updated daily– hey, after all, it is a newspaper column…

[Updated 31 July 2001 – The URL for the Vent had changed since the original post.]

::sigh:: There must be some variation of Newton’s Third Law which states that every convenience must be accompanied by an equally heavy inconvenience.

Why do I say this? Y’see, the installation of Linux Mandrake that I had used was known as “lnx4win”; rather than creating a new partition for the Linux image, it simply creates a file on the Windows partition that acts as a virtual disk image. Not as elegant (not to mention quite a bit slower) than a dedicated partition, but it’s quite a bit more convenient, especially for those of us who are only dabbling in Linux.

But if that image gets slightly fragmented or corrupted, it’s hosed. Not a good thing when you’re dealing with a file that’s around a gigabyte. Especially not a good thing on a system that hasn’t been defragged in about a year. (Why do I keep procrastinating on it? The same reason I keep procrastinating on nearly everything else in my life. In short, I have no idea why, I’m just a compulsive procrastinator, heh.)

Anyway, the point is, once I’d rebooted and run a few things in Windows, I loaded Linux up again and suddenly the drivers refused to cooperate. The video card and NIC drivers seemed to be the main culprits, but various other errors appeared (repeatedly) in the boot screens as well; I couldn’t get into the X GUI, and even running commands at the shell prompt produced numerous errors.

To make a long story short, after quite a bit of fiddling around, I’ve wiped the Linux image and will eventually (when I feel like it) reinstall, probably after a nice defrag and scandisk. Ah well, it looked good there for a second…

(And amusingly enough, amidst the loading of those corrupt video card and network card drivers, the system correctly identified the aforementioned Wacom tablet from the previous log entry. Hah. Guess there’s a silver lining to everything…)

Well…after a couple hours in which I downloaded about a gigabyte’s worth of data (thank goodness I have a cable modem), I finally got Linux Mandrake 8.0 installed on my computer.

But that’s not the hard part. That would be actually configuring it. At least this time I got farther than I had with the previous version; version 8 ships with the correct driver for my network card, and thus I actually managed to connect to the Internet. Now I’ve got to get all the software working, as well as getting the blasted thing to recognize my USB graphics tablet. (The installer recognized that device perfectly fine…now why won’t the OS?! At least I have my old PS/2 MouseMan for backup…) And for some reason Mozilla won’t load, though Netscape Communicator works fine; I’ll have to fiddle around with that as well…

Now, to get on to some work I actually need to do, heh…

I don’t know why I remembered this at such a late hour, but the local Sam’s Club store has several Game Boy Advance games on sale. No, that’s not a typo, nor is it a misreading on my part; the boxes were clearly labeled “Game Boy Advance”, and the screenshots on the backs proved it. (The titles available were Earthworm Jim, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, and some shoot-em-up whose name I can’t recall at the moment.)

Anyway, the point is, they have games available for a system that isn’t even out yet. Heck, they weren’t even selling the system.

Is this some sort of conspiracy? I guess we’ll find out later this month, heh…

Heh. I just came across this Flash animation: The $20,000 ZIG. If you loved “All Your Base…”, you’re really going to enjoy this. [Thanks to memepool.com for the link.]