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No basketball tonight. After last week, where I got blisters on top of my blisters (literally!), despite the new shoes (which I do think helped. I wasn't completely incapacitated on Wednesday), I thought I'd take this Tuesday evening off, and just sort of chill out while Liz is at her Weight Watcher's meeting.

Boy am I bored.

Let's see... I'm playing in a fantasy baseball league with a few other people from my office. I used to be a big baseball fan as a kid (Cubbies, naturally), but sort of fell away from it as I got older and the players (seemingly) got more arrogant. Last year was fun though (Sammy Sosa!), and I think this will be kind of neat.

The basic idea is that you have a team, and you "draft" players to be on the team. How well they do in their real games earns them points. A hit is worth one point, striking out is worth negative one point, etc. The team with the most points at the end of the season wins. Or something. I have no idea how the World Series is handled.

So that's neat, and I'm learning about all sorts of players on teams that I never really heard of before. It's fun!

Braz visited Williamsburg on Saturday. It was a blast to see him, even if we did only hang out for about 3 hours or so. We went out to lunch, showed him our dirt (the place where our house will be), and generally had madly exuberant conversations.

It's extra-neat when Braz comes to town lately. You know how in the 1800s and such, Christian missionaries would go out into the wilds (the Dark Continent of Africa, the heathen islands, and New York), carrying Bibles and crucifixes, and proselytizing to the natives? Well, Braz is sort of like that, but infinitely cooler. He comes to town bearing cool Apple stuff. So my van has a new white Apple sticker on the back (exact same shape as the old logo, but all plain white instead of rainbow six-colors), and I've got a little packet of 5 iMac stickers with little sayings on them. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them, but they're cool.

I've been thinking lately about what I can do to learn more about Linux. The catch is that the best way to learn Linux is to have root on a box, and to play with it. Learn how the various services work, how to compile the kernel (the best saying I ever heard about Unix kernels was that if you had to read the kernel man pages, you probably shouldn't be playing with the kernel). So, if I'm going to learn Linux, I have to get another computer, since I don't think Liz wants me installing Linux on her computer (she's already a little tense about the number of MP3s on the hard drive), and mkLinux won't run on my 5200, and neither will LinuxPPC.

So, I'd have to get a new machine. And, since none of the new Macs run either mkLinux or LinuxPPC, I'd have to get a Wintel computer. Frankly, I don't want to. If I'm going to have to blow my savings account on a new computer (this'd obviously have to be after the move, and pending the state of said savings account), I want a Mac. Plain & simple.

There are a couple possible solutions I can see. The first is that I enter scavenger mode, and see what sorts of spare computer parts I can scrounge up and build a new computer. This is about as appealing as a stick in the eye. Possibility number two is to wait until one of those big computer bazaar type thingees opens up at the Coliseum or something, and see how decent of a computer I can slap together for under $500 or so.

I dunno. This is all just speculation right now, anyway. I think I'll go read a book.