Computers suck. In retrospect, I think I could have gotten along just fine without them (personally), and feel that the countless hours I've spent looking listlessly into a monitor knowing that I'd rather do no other thing have been by and large wasted. I am bitter for it. I probably shouldn't be saying this as the CS President at Bishop's, but I believe it to be true. I think that the force that has recently woken me up from this dream of artificial lights and colours that I've been stuck in for the past umpteen years is benevolent in the way that by removing me from machines as much as possible I can figure out what I really *use* computers for, as opposed to the endless little tweaks and tangents of research or random thoughts that I find myself pouring my days into. While reading through the Debian package tree (yes - I read the entire thing. Sad.) I came upon something called WorkRave. It installs under Windows (currently giving Linux the finger right now), so I'm going to try it out and see its effects. Recent things I'm trying to figure out:

• In Gimp 2 (On XP), is it possible to tie in the Measure tool to a script or something such that I can get a list of the past 5 measurements taken and their average (all in a seperate window) and get that list to be exported to a text file?
• Why does my hand-compiled 2.6.5 kernel not finish booting properly (I get a kernel panic saying that VFS doesn't know what to do - that I have to specify a correct "root=" parameter. Right now I'm using grub with an argument like "root=0306" which I'm pretty sure specifies hda6, which is my / partition.) I've got a thread running on LinuxQuestions.com
• What am I going to do with this enormous 19" flat screen crt monitor on my desk? It's totally sweet, but I realize that I just don't have room for it. My entire desk is effectively taken up by it, and without a usb keyboard to attach to this laptop, I can't really use the laptop and the monitor at the same time without there being an uncomfortable angle between my arms typing on the laptop and my head looking at the monitor (the desk isn't deep enough to put the monitor and the laptop on the desk in front of each other). Maybe I'll just see about buying a cheap usb keyboard and seeing how that works. However this leads me to my next point.
• This room is a total mess. I cannot walk through it due to the immense amount of crap on the ground. Even with both Mel's and my best efforts, we only managed to clear away about half of the shit (this word has an interesting etymology - thanks Snow Crash) and it remains overpowering.
• Figure out why my upload speed is retarded. Stupid Sympatico.