Hacking… reel-to-reel… Xbox…

God damn.

We’re having a slow day in the office, so I decided to start some nice little project. I decided to breed a modern PC with an old reel-to-reel. One of those things your dad – or maybe even your grand dad – used to listen their pagan rock and roll music. Huh? Still no clue?

Why the hell would I do that? Well, I wanted to have a small – relatively – quiet PC at home I could use as a Linux server for web developement projects, watching movies and such. And since a guy at the office had bought a bunch of Flex-ATX (small) motherboards for twenty bucks, I decided I could do such thing without spending hardly any cash. I had a total budget of about one hundred dollars.

So, I went for a scavage hunt. Cut some parts out of old ATX case so I wouldn’t have to make all those holes for cards and connectors and such.

But when I came back from the prototype laboratory, my colleague asked me if I would be interested to buy an Xbox.

And at that moment, I could feel a thirty inch dong starting to grow out of my forehead.

I had thought about Xbox before, but I didn’t want to spend money for the mod-chips and all that crap. But now, I was offered an Xbox (with a mod-chip), few controllers, DVD-remote and all that for one hundred dollars – since he’s moving to Xbox 360.

Well, summa summarum, I decided to buy the Xbox instead of hacking the reel-to-pc together, since I can install Debian on the Xbox also.

So, I guess, this was my first lesson in project management.

1) do research
2) sketch
3) do

I think I skipped the first part.

First post… public transportation… transcendental meditation…

So, I decided to start a blog.

Like those 70,000 or so other guys do the same every single day. I’ve had few before, so this is not a new thing for me. You know, I’ve been around the block. Writing about the regular stuff people write about and all. The juice, the true essence, all things what it’s really all about – writing blog butt-naked, while eating ice cream. Right? RIGHT!

I feel such a pussy for even doing this.

Well, I guess I’ll just use this blog for ventilation, since I really don’t want to write about any certain topic. I’ve tried that before and I felt like like a total idiot. I mean, I wrote about the things I liked, but for some reason – I always felt writing a blog is egoistic. I guess when I write, I somehow think myself in the third person and get myself into a loop while thinking – why do I care what this guy thinks.

And like that isn’t enough for some random reader to consider whether I’m mentally stable, get this – I’ve been laughing my ass off while taking the subway. This has been going on for quite some time now. OK, well maybe a certain radio personality has something to do with it. Take a wild guess? Limbaugh? Boortz? Oh, go fuck yourself. Boortz is decent, but he’s nothing compared to Howard Stern. I’ve been listening to old tapes where they make fun of Fred Norris, who has been with Howard from the beginning. Who could keep a straight face while they’re breaking his balls for giving his mother Cookie Puss for mother’s day. But I guess when you live over here, where there isn’t really such great morning radio and where people’s faces are about as giddy as a cardboard box – it tends to raise few eyebrows when a guy like me starts to laugh suddenly for no apparent reason. I mean, music can’t be that fun, after all.

Anyways, I’m enjoying my life right now. Even though I buster my ankle and got a really bad cold – getting my throat infected, so I couldn’t talk for few days. And no, this happiness has nothing to do with the fact that my doctor prescribed me ethylmorphine for my throat. Nope, I’m just generally peachy.

I even thought starting transcendental meditation. I ordered Maharishi’s Art of Living and thought to go through it. The only thing I’m not that much into, I’ve read that there’s lots of stuff about religion and God in the book. And how one needs religion to become whole and all that. And to be honest, I’m really not that much into religion – not to mention God. I’m not a satanist, but just simply atheist. I don’t think there’s a supreme being, who would orchestrate this place we call the universe. But that doesn’t mean that understanding ethics, logic and philosophy in general, wouldn’t make a difference. I just don’t think you need a God to understand the right from wrong, beautiful from ugly and so forth. Since in the end, most of the things are subjective anyways. Let’s see what happens when I try to follow the guy’s book. I really don’t feel right to call him “His Holiness”, like they title him in the prologue. That’s just silly. I’ll do my best to understand the guy and hope that I’ll get something out from it.