Thus Goes My Brain
June 22nd, 2006I was joking around with my friend Kari, about how hilarious the concept “dictatorship tourism” would be. So of course, I started hacking up some html, because I find such things amusing.
- I decide on a list of nefarious dictators to include in the page — you know, package deals for touring Equatorial Guinea under Nguema; very, erm, structured tours of Pyongyang under Kim… you get the idea. The fun never stops!
- So then I start hacking up this silly website and I think to myself, “Self, you are not being DRY, you should put these names into a data structure, see, and then read the structure from a file, and generate the HTML that way. Then you can easily add more nefarious dictators later!
- So, of course I need to use YAML, because, well, it’s leet.
- But I’ll be needing a parser, then, you see… time to install Syck.
- Oh no, my precambrian Fedora distro (FC3!) came with Python2.3 as the default, and when I try to install Syck with yum, it wants to install the 2.3 version, instead of 2.4. Which we all know is unacceptable.
- You know, it’s really time I upgrade my Fedora box.
- But wait… my laptop is muuuch happier with Ubuntu than it ever was with Fedora…
- What I really need to do, see, is I need to install Ubuntu on this desktop.
- But it would make sense to install more RAM first.
- Hmm… what kind of RAM does this box’s motherboard want, anyway?
- I spend several hours in Linux chat rooms and bugging aforementioned Linux guru friend Kari to figure out how to figure that out…
- Well, it looks like I need DDR. (No no no, not that DDR, you nincompoop… stop trying to distract me.)
- But can I put 1G memory doohickies in there, or can I only add another 512M?
- Apparently I have to reboot and ask the BIOS.
- Okay, well, I can do that and then figure it out and then go buy some RAM.
- Oh, man, there is so much dust around my computer. It’s grody.
- I really need one of those hand-held vacuum cleaners.
Yes, children, that really is what my brain does all day. Data structures turn into vacuum cleaners.