I think I should emulate Skrud and clean this place. It's pretty bad. Possibly worse than when I was at Bishop's. I'll post the photos soon. I bought a new gi yesterday. I think the amount I've spent on these things is around 500$ now. It kind of blows. The best gi I've ever owned was from bujindesign.com - it had this internal liner that was totally sweet, it fit properly, and was super light. Then it shrunk. Fucker. I sent it back, then the replacement shrunk too. Fucker. Before that one, I had a judo gi from Genesport. It sucked. The old salesman convinced me into buying a gi that was clearly too big for me. Bastard. Not wanting to go through the waiting/"hoping that it fits when it gets here" period with Bu-Jin, I went back and got this super-strong karate gi from Genesport. When I first saw it, the thing was light blue. I said something like "wtf?". The guy said that the "really nice stuff from Japan" starts out blue, then the blue goes away when you wash it. I noticed that the gi I was looking at had some small defects to it, and asked to buy a different one (I forgot to remind "Lee", the nice guy who I was talking to, about it when I bought it, and forgot to get a replacement - fuck). Total cost for pants (that are SUPER wide, as it turns out - I hope they shrink so I can wear them) and gi: 200 bones. Last night I realized that for the same price, I could have gotten new Bu-Jin stuff. Not only is the Bu-Jin stuff a hundred times nicer than Genesport stuff, but the customer service I've had from them is impeccable. I've washed the gi in cold water a few times, and am now hoping that the silly light-blue tint comes out. The gi "seems" to fit, but I know from experience that the fit will change a lot between wearing it with a t-shirt in the store, and wearing it in the dojo. In conclusion: fuck. Genesport suX0rs. They also say that I can't return it (even for exchange) once I've washed it. I say that this is bullshit, and am so pissed off that I'd like to go through the experience that is small-claims court to settle my beef with them. PS- I am so incredibly broke. After this gi stuff and my alchol-induced Ebay purchase (this dm2 digital mixer thing I saw at Adrian's), I'm in the hole for like 300$. This totally blows. I'm also pissed at how much time this Linux BS is taking out of me. In the hopes of making a totally sweet Debian installation, I read through ALL the Debian packages dselect offers (note: there are thousands and thousands of packages - it took me like 6 hours of reading over two days to do). And in the end, I wound up with 5 and something gigs worth of stuff - too bad I've only got a 5 gig partition for Debian. While reading all the packages certainly taught me about what kind of stuff there is out there (among the most amusing were the dirty fortune programs, and similar ones in french and spanish), I also realised towards the end that I should really only pick one window manager, and then apt-get one of whatever application I really need. I think this is closer to the "Debian" idea. After trying the latter, I compiled a 2.6.5 kernel cleanly, taking out tons of crap I don't need. Result: it won't boot. Something about VFS complaining that I haven't specified "root=" properly, and something to do with the filesystem. I'm pretty sure that the problem is in the kernel, and not grub, but I haven't tried lilo yet (and don't really want to). Maybe it has something to do with my root/boot partition being Reiser FS. Argh. It's weird, because the stock 2.6.5 kernel boots, but with tons of complaints from VFS saying that it's not ext2, ext3, or cdrom format, and only after does it realize that it's reiser. I'm wondering if there's some place where it's trying to auto mount the partition, and if I can change that to specify what kind of fs I've got on my root partition. In any case, I've spent waaay too much time on Linux this past week. Although my knowledge about the system is far beyond what I knew before, the overall result is that I have dick-all. I probably could have been more productive on Windows. Blergh. In other news, I'll be volunteering at the Fringe fest. Yay for me.