Mine was uneventful, but pleasant. I didn't have a date, so I stayed home, watched some Mythbusters, hung out with my kittens, and did some painting. All in all, a good evening, I think. And heh, while other people are sleeping off hangovers today, I'm doing just fine.

CON: You might manage to throw me into the volcano, but I'm taking two of y'all with me.

I'll attest to this statement. I'm a nice guy to the core, but I also have chronic anxiety about talking to strangers. And when I do manage to start a conversation, I seldom feel like I'm doing an adequate job. I read about this PUA stuff to develop a gameplan so I won't be so nervous. Even a little bit of success emboldens me and I do fine once I get rolling.

I'm also learning ways to make it evident that I'm not just a nice guy or an okay conversationalist, but also an attractive, masculine person. For example, I've become aware that even little gestures of intimacy can make a difference in a woman's perception of a man. So the last date I went on, I was a bit more tactile. She said something goofy and I bumped into her; and I told a story that allowed me, as an illustration, to run my fingers through her hair.

I'm a fan of anime. In fact, I recently placed an order for a couple new series for my collection. Giant Robo was one of them. I was debating between Fushigi Yugi and Bubblegum Crisis for the second. I ended up choosing Fushigi Yugi.

I watched Battle Athletes over the summer. I'm hoping to attract a girl sometime soon, with whom to watch Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou. I've been out of the "new" anime scene for quite some time. Kare Kano and Cowboy Bebop are the most recently published series in my collection. What's out there that's new and good?

This is where I stand. I've tried RedHat, Debian, and Gentoo. RedHat wasn't bad, but Debian and Gentoo both seemed to appeal to people who LOVE to fool around under the hood of their operating system. Right now I'm running KUbuntu on my laptop. When I build my new computer next year, I'll be running KUbuntu with a VMWare session for Windows XP. At that time, I expect to switch to XUbuntu on the laptop to get a little bit more performance out of it.

I'm working on not being alone, but it doesn't look very promising. If I can't get a date, I'll probably just stay home and go to bed early. No sense getting myself worked up over it.

One of my coworkers really did send out an email to a customer with a similar typo. He wrote something to the effect of, "We apologize for the delay. We expect that order to sh*t this afternoon."

Jokes and funny stories appear directly below poems, quotes and songs. Perhaps onlymanoj clicked on the wrong link and didn't realize it until after he'd posted his poem.

Sure. Algebra isn't so bad. Just don't ask me to teach you calculus. That's where I barely manage to understand it myself, let alone well enough to teach it to somebody else.

I actually meant the internal power cable to the drive. Your computer would still boot up and BIOS would take it so far before it recognized that there wasn't a good drive there. No worries, though. It was just fun to speculate.

I had sort of the opposite experience. I was chatting with a girl and she offered to send me some photo of her. I was absolutely not expecting pictures of her bare bottom and her shaved cooter. I didn't know what to say and she was kind of offended that I didn't express appreciation.

It's kind of a neat party trick and I used to be impressed by these. Really, though, you're inputting your telephone number into the equation. The rest of the math is just making sure that the numbers end up in the right place. In fact step 3 (add 1) and step 7 (subtract 250) are completely superfluous. They serve only to obfuscate the trick. Step 8 (divide by 2) would be unnecessary as well, except 80 x 250 = 20,000. If Step 1 were multiply by 40 or Step 4 were multiply by 125, then you could eliminate step 8.

3 = Blind Mice (See How They Run)
1 = Wheel on a Unicycle

I wouldn't exactly consider myself an otaku, but I enjoy anime, nonetheless. I'm using some of my Christmas loot to buy a few series. Giant Robo is a definite pick. Beyond that, I'm debating between Fushigi Yugi (The Mysterious Play) and Bubblegum Crisis. Any recommendations?

I have to voice my agreement for Singing on this point. I would like to believe that I seldom whine. Even when I do, however, I try to identify a SPECIFIC problem and to formulate a question about solving that problem.

I know that some people feel very close to JSH as a family or a community. To be perfectly honest, I don't. In my opinion, a web forum lacks the necessary intimacy for that. While I might complain without focus to a close friend, I try to avoid doing so at a place like this for a couple of reasons. One, as Singing has pointed out, it's kind of annoying. Two, it doesn't help anybody. If I'm willing to post my complaint to random acquaintances on the internet, I may as well go to a little bit more trouble and couch the complaint in a way that actually promotes discussion and results in useful advice.

Does anybody else here write letters anymore? I couldn't really say why, but I really enjoy communicating with people by post. My older relatives especially like getting mail from me.

It also happens that Minnesota is scrapbooking central or something, so there's a store around here called Archivers that specializes in scrapbooking supplies. I can get fancy paper there, which is good for letter-writing too. I printed out some double-sided stationery on colourful cards a while back, which are fun. I also picked up some translucent paper recently. I can put lined paper behind it, so my letters will look neat.

Probably either the IDE cable or the power cable wasn't plugged in. It happens all the time. You get working on the innards of the machine and you forget to plug something back in when you go to power-on again.

I was talking with a friend earlier and he suggested something to me that I found kind of distressing, but which DID offer some insight into some observable phenomena. His suggestion was that cultural and social effects aside, on a very primitive level, women are attracted to men who are sexually aggressive and dominant. This goes even further than the usual suggestion for men to be confident and assertive. He suggests that from a purely biological perspective, for a man to be successful in attracting a mate, he has to promote his sexuality from the outset and keep control of the sexual side of the relationship.

If this is true, then it offers a good foundation from which to explain the "friend zone" phenomenon. A man who is too sensitive and kind and not sexually aggressive enough establishes a non-sexual pattern that is difficult to break. On the other side of the coin, it illustrates why a-holes never seem to have problems getting a girl. Nice guys may be better at the skills required to maintain a successful long-term relationship, but it appears that they (we) are lacking in the skills required to attract a mate.

On the other hand, I find this notion distressing on two fronts. One, it suggests that a successful man will dictate sexual terms to "his woman" and she will obey them. Two, it suggests that at some deep-seated level, women WANT this. My initial protest to his theory was that it's repugnant for a man to try to coerce a woman into doing something she's stated she doesn't want to do. His response was that coercion isn't wrong when it's desired. I don't LIKE this idea, but it certainly seems to explain a lot. If most women genuinely find it attractive for the man to be assertive, even to the point of coercion, I might have to bite the bullet on this one.

mrosebro is right about using a boot loader (usually GRUB or Lilo.) If you're dual-booting, then even though Linux may operate entirely from the slave drive, your boot sector is located on the master drive.

StarWarsGeek, I'm a big fan of Risk 2210AD. I like that the game is no longer decided by the guy who happens to cash in for 80 men right after the guy who cashed in for 75 men ALMOST, but not quite won.