I'm starting grad school the week after next. Still full-time work, part-time school.

Both steine and I reaching the limit on our laptop disk capacity, thanks to things like photos and MP3s. I've been thinking for a while that we need a desktop system to do file serving and a lot of other useful and/or fun things, but getting an Apple desktop is prohibitively expensive.

(I don't know if/when we'll get around to this, but since it's on my mind at just this moment, I thought I'd ask.)

I've been reading goog things about Ubuntu linux, and so I'm thinking about a good PC to run it (possibly dual-boot, since I may need to use XP on occasion when VLANing into work). So my question for ya'll is: what machine vendors do you recommend these days? Who has good prices for what they sell? What systems have you found consistent reliability and performance from?

Bonus question: do you use Ubuntu? What do you think of it?

It's getting to be time for a radical change in hairstyle, piercings, etc. My nose is getting twitchy.

Found via aaangyl

Generous Inventor

One of my coworkers found the Sesame Stree "mahnamahna" MP3 on my shared iTunes at work, and decided to play it full volume on her desktop speakers.

Ahh, Fridays :)

She did wait until our supervisor left, however.

Edit: I don't usually give a fig for ringtones, but I would love to have this tune, as well as Gir singing the doom song.

Update: And then the Friday Beer:30 began. Aside from the pay, this university is rather like a start-up at times :)

Writing, in deconstructive terms, is never purely original; it is always secondary and derivative. Like God, self, history, and book, the idea of origin or absolute beginning is a theological notion that arises from a human need that can never be totally fulfilled. Writing does not express the individual intention of an original author. To the contrary, writing stages a play of repetition in which apparent production is actual reproduction. All writing, in other words, is rewriting. For this reason, there often seems to be something improper and transgressive about writing. It is not insignificant that Hermes, son of Zeus and messenger of the gods, is both a thief and the discoverer of writing. The words of the writer are always stolen. This (inevitable) theft establishes the writer's ineradicable secondariness and deprives him of originality. In writing, "I" discover my perpetual entanglement in a net or a web, which both surpasses and encompasses me. As I write, it becomes clear that "my" text is not my own. I slowly learn that a work is never the produce of a single author but always the work of many coauthors. The text is a fabric stitched and woven from multiple texts. The names of the authors are not always evident in the lines of the work and the thread of the argument. Usually their voices sound anonymously through seemingly empty white spaces of the text.

from Erring: A Postmodern A/theology by Mark C. Taylor

Coming soon: hormone-based contraceptive for men (via Feministe)

I shudder to anticipate the backlash of the anti-contraception fascists...

A fellow Naropa employee is soon to relocate to Santa Cruz to work on her PhD in Anthropology at UCSC (after she and her husband spend time vacationing in Europe). Is there anyone who might like to play friendly-like, volunteer to meet up with them for dinner sometime? It'll be months away, so it's a loose committment :)

Must see. NSFW.

I recommend not attempting to quaff a beverage or handle delicate instruments while at the same time.