infundibulum

I 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.

1. 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!
2. 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!
3. So, of course I need to use YAML, because, well, it’s leet.
4. But I’ll be needing a parser, then, you see… time to install Syck.
5. 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.
6. You know, it’s really time I upgrade my Fedora box.
7. But wait… my laptop is muuuch happier with Ubuntu than it ever was with Fedora…
8. What I really need to do, see, is I need to install Ubuntu on this desktop.
9. But it would make sense to install more RAM first.
10. Hmm… what kind of RAM does this box’s motherboard want, anyway?
11. I spend several hours in Linux chat rooms and bugging aforementioned Linux guru friend Kari to figure out how to figure that out…
12. Well, it looks like I need DDR. (No no no, not that DDR, you nincompoop… stop trying to distract me.)
13. But can I put 1G memory doohickies in there, or can I only add another 512M?
14. Apparently I have to reboot and ask the BIOS.
15. Okay, well, I can do that and then figure it out and then go buy some RAM.
16. Oh, man, there is so much dust around my computer. It’s grody.
17. 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.