el rinconcito

A friend of mine had me work on this laptop last year because his niece hosed the Windows XP on it (porn? virus?). I rescued it using Puppy Linux, restored the Windows, and gave it back to him to give to her because I thought they were needy and she really needed the laptop for school. I worked hard on that thing to save the Windows and all her files, then she goes out and buys a nice new one, and my friend tried to sell the one I fixed, which kind of pissed me off a little because I felt I should have gotten first dibs on it, and a good price to boot for doing all that work for free.

Anyway, he shows up again today with the same laptop so I can give him a Windows/Internet lesson as he knows nothing about computers. About a minute after XP boots up, the hard drive goes "bam-klackety-klak" and the thing dies. I felt a little bad that it died while *my* hands were on the keyboard, but he kind of understood it wasn't my fault even though it's all foreign to him.

As he was leaving, he mentioned trying to sell it again, which brought back that old wound of mine about being used as a fixer just so he could sell something. I told him he might could get $20 for a several-year-old non-booting laptop if he was lucky (I just happened to have a 20 in my wallet, lol). At that moment, he said what I'd hoped for, "you worked so hard on it, just keep it and I'm going to buy a new one." Heck yeah! Hehehe.

I told him he could buy a new hard drive for it (about $70), and I'd put Linux on there for him, but he wants a new Windows one, so I felt I'd been honest and offered him all the options before saying "thanks" and making it mine!

It's a pretty little Toshiba Satellite M55-S135, and I'm sure Linux is going to run on it like a dream. I'm heading out to the store in a few minutes to get a hard drive for it, and already have a Linux iso coming in on the bittorrent. I selected Xubuntu for it as it's a little shy on the RAM and has a ghetto Celeron processor in it, so I want something that will run light. I thought about Debian, but Xubuntu will be more pre-configged.

I'll do another post later after I get the little bitch running again.

I new "used" laptop for me! woohoooo!

You might want to use this link to see the item full size so you can be on the lookout for it. The link is the same item as is displayed on the left.

Anyway, it only took me 4 DECADES, but I think I have finally been able to trace the evolution of my homosexuality back to one specific item and event. The dangerous item in the picture is involved! Here's the verbose, rambling, tongue-in-cheek story:

At the time when I was a child, kindergarten was optional. The law at that time said when you turned 6, you started 1st grade, but many parents would send their 5 year olds to kindergarten to get a head start. My parents, trying to be good parents, sent me to a kindergarten that had a good reputation at a nearby Methodist church. 4 decades later, I can still remember a lot about it. I thought it was a good place. We all learned to read really well, which put us way ahead of the 1st graders who didn't attend kindergarten. The teachers were kind, didn't sexually molest us too often, and didn't threaten to kill Santa Claus to shut us up when they did do a little groping "down there." You know I'm kidding, right?

We worked a lot with crayons, construction paper, glue, those blunt-nose scissors, AND, we not only learned how to tie our shoes, we learned how to tie them using difficult fancy knots while saying rhymes! As you can see, this was nearly a kinder xanadu. Then one day, the event that would seal my fate happened.

There has been a lot of research on the causes of homosexuality. There are many theories, copious speculation, and sometimes flat out lying involved as well. 40+ years later, and I'm finally sure of what caused it for me. I'm absolutely sure of it! It was the dreaded MAGIC BABY BOTTLE!

The magic baby bottle is a technological marvel. It looks to be full of milk, however when you turn it upside down, the milk drains away into somewhere, and the bottle looks empty. Turn it back the other way, and the milk reappears as if by magic. These things have been around for probably half a century all over the world. Surely you've seen one.

One day I saw one of these things for the first time at the Methodist xanadu kindergarten. Being a life-long technogeek, I was in awe and had to throughly investigate. I turned it over and over, amazed, and analyzed what could possibly be going on. I went to get one of my friends so that maybe 2 powerful brains could crack this riddle. THEN I CROSSED THE FATEFUL LINE. I put the little magic bottle in a babydoll's mouth to see if that had any effect on the bottle. This was purely a scientific investigation. My friend had already found a second magic bottle and was trying the same. Hell, while we were at it, I decided to pretty-up the scene a little by pulling a dollhouse over and arranging a little family with some other dolls plus our two experimental ones. AT THAT MOMENT a teacher walked by, froze, and nearly shrieked! She yanked us up, publicly shamed us, and said something about BOYS could play with footballs but only GIRLS played with dolls. Then to fucking top it off, she told our parents about it later that day. (My parents didn't give a shit, BTW)

It wasn't like I was sitting there in drag getting ready to do a Carmen Miranda number, I was doing a freaking scientific investigation! I just decided to make it realistic and aesthetically pleasing.

That did it for me. The shock was so great that it scarred me for life and made me gay. To this day football makes me uncomfortable. This has to be the precise reason for my homosexuality and the reason I didn't get a big job with NASA. It wasn't environmental, wasn't genetic, it was the MAGIC BABY BOTTLE that made me gay. I wonder what my brother's reason was. Oh the humanity!