. . . and then, from time to time, something comes through that makes me laugh so hard my sides hurt.

From: "Willie WheatonisaLoser"
Date: Mon Dec 9, 2002 21:28:38 US/Pacific
To: wil@wilwheaton.net
Subject: Unbelievable.

WiL,
cOmE oN nOw, YoU cAn'T bE sErIoUs. YoUr WeBsiTe Is ThE bIgGeSt JoKe, I mEaN wHaT's WiTh ThE dIaRy TyPe EnTrIeS aNd ThE wAcK hOmEmAdE tShIrTs? StAnD bY mE iS a GrEaT mOvIe, AnD tHeRe Is WhErE yOu PeAkEd. YoUr CuRrEnT pRoJeCtS aRe A jOkE, i MeAn ThE hOoTeRs StOrY hAd Me CrAcKiNg Up. YeA yOu "UsEd To Be An AcToR" bEcAuSe WhAt YoU'rE dOiN' nOw IsN't AcTiNg, It'S wIsHiNg ThAt YoU cOuLd Be AnY gOoD aT iT. i MeAn It'S nOt LiKe YoU hAvEn'T bEeN dIsCoVeReD, iT's JuSt ThAt No OnE wAnTs YoU iN tHeIr MoViEs BeCaUsE yOu ArE lAaAaAaAaAaAmE!!!!

Since I haven't written in the old /. journal in a few weeks, I thought I'd share with the five of you who read this an email I picked up today.

It's no secret that my political views and philosophies don't match up with the flag-waving "you're with us or against us" crowd.

From time to time, I get an email from one of these folks...and they always end up making an even better case against themselves than I could ever hope to, albeit unintentionally.

Enjoy.

I used to like you, but now I don't

Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 18:01:47 EST
From: Fodge837@aol.com
To: wil@wilwheaton.net

Hey Wil,

I don't know if you will even read this, or if you do read it, I don't know if you will care, but I am going to write it anyway.

I am a fan of Star Trek TNG, I don't really care much for the original series, but I like TNG a lot.I have been buying each season on DVD every other month, as they are released, starting with season 1.

I always wondered why you left the show, "Wesley" was one of my favorite characters on the show & I always felt that the show was not as good as it was after you left.

Let me get to the point......

It has always fascinated me when celebrities (or washed up celebrities in your case), try to become political experts/role models, I think it is a real joke.

Why is it that you people think that just because you were on TV, that it somehow transforms you into enlightened social/political beings? Just because you were some dork in "Stand By Me" or "genius geek boy" in TNG, means that you are now a political stud that you posess enlightenment over everyone else, for example you stated:

"I believe that if the state of politics in America doesn't piss you off, you either don't care, or you don't understand it. Either way, shame on you"

HOW ARROGANT IS THAT!!! & this political arrogance runs rampant in the celebrity community.

You are basically saying that if I don't agree with you, I am either apathetic or stupid. Seriously though, can you tell me why so many
celebrities are like this, its like a prerequisite for celebrity club membership.

I came up with a possible answer, I think that celebrities feel guilty, they feel guilty because what they do is basically useless, it is not necessity, it is not required for survival. Have you ever stopped and wondered about the amount of resources that are required to make a TV show or a movie, the amount of energy that is spent? If you sit down and just think about it, its mind boggling, I bet that more energy is used to make, promote, manufacturer, distribute & market entertainment than any other industry in the world. ALL THAT ENERGY SPENT ON SOMETHING WE DON'T EVEN NEED!! I think that this makes celebrities feel guilty, so it makes them want to try to save the "Unenlightened idiots" I think that the arrogance part comes form being worshiped, (for some odd reason celebrities are worshiped).

Let me let you in on a little secret, there are a lot of us non-celebrities out there that are not idiots, we have a brain, we are productive hard
working people in society, we have families & we care about our fellow citizens & the state of the world. I am a hardworking American, My wife and I try very hard to provide for our daughter. When I flip on the TV, I look to celebrities for entertainment, to enjoy characters like "Wesley Crusher" If you want to be a political figure, change careers, go to college, get a degree in political science, become a real expert, make it your passion & your life's work. CELEBRITIES ARE NOT EXPERTS ON THE STATE OF THE WORLD, THEY DON'T HAVE ALL OF THE INFORMATION, THAT OUR LEADERS DO. DO YOU THINK THAT OUR PRESIDENT IS GONNA CALL YOU UP FOR ADVICE ON WHAT HE SHOULD DO BECAUSE YOU
WERE ON TV???

You are a great actor, stick to acting! Life for the most part in America is great, It's been great for me & most of the people I know. I certainly think that life in America has been great for you too.

Have a good one,

Eric R. Fodge

You know what rules?

Sitting in my driveway, getting online through my WAP using the airport card in my iBook, and reading Slashdot.

Because I can.

Yesterday, I met Chris D for breakfast, joked about Maisy, got to meet his really cool wife and adorable daughter. The plan was to eat, and then head to my house so he could help me with some computer problems I've been having.

After breakfast, I tell him to just follow me there, but he tells me the he only needs the address, because he can input that info into his car, and it will just tell him where to go, like Knight Rider, or something.

Okay, Chris has this car that's like the freakin' Enterprise, man. It's got this integrated GPS system, and I'm pretty sure there are photon torpedoes under the hood, but I didn't get a chance to look. The thing is sleek and black, with tinted windows and leather seats. My little Golf TDI is like Rocketship-XM to his Battle Star Galactica.

We get to my house, and I'm a little embarrassed, to be honest...the technology level in my house is just lame. Most of my stuff is really out of date, and I'm nowhere near the cutting edge. Since I got married, and became responsible for providing for 3 other people, I haven't been able to buy as many toys as I once did.

Anyway, Chris sits down at my desk, and 30 minutes later, my two computers are talking to my WAP and getting online, I'm planning on warchalking my driveway, and everything is right with the world.

It felt odd to me, sitting here with one of the most well-known members of the OS community, while he fixed my lame computer problems. It got me thinking about how the Linux world has welcomed me in so graciously and made me feel so at home, and so many people are asking me to be a spokesman and stuff, and I don't even know how to set up a network printer.

I said that I want to be the world's biggest Linux cheerleader, right?

Damn, I have a long way to go.

Hey this will be cool, I think.

I've been using Mandrake 8.2 for a copuple of months, and I've really enjoyed the experience. Everything has worked beautifully...until recently, when suddenly without warning, my printer got possessed.

It went from printing only the first page of a job followed by a blank page, to printing the whole job...in 'landscape' mode, cutting off the tops and bottoms of the page.

Kinda made it hard for my kids to do their homework on the computer.

I wasn't too worried, though, I'd just upgrade to 9.0.

So I downloaded ISO images, and burned them myself, and prepared to do the upgrade. I was really excited about this, because flying the Enterprise notwithstanding, I am a total techology lamer. If you don't believe me, ask any of my smarter-than-me friends about the panicked late night phone calls.

So I power down, bidding a tearful farewell to my uptime (which would have been 14 days if my wife hadn't decided to turn the machine off "because I couldn't print and it pissed me off" the day before).

I put the 1st Cd in the drive, and literally hop with joy when I get the install screen...I choose "Upgrade" and an hour later, it's done.

Sort of.

See, it can't find my NIC, and I am too much of a lamer to know how to use modprobe, or insmod, or "please tell me how to make this fucking work" or whatever the spiffy command is...so I have this cool pretty looking Mandrake 9.0, which has found my USB devices, which was cool, but still doesn't print correctly, and now won't connect to the Internet.

The original Out Of Towners is on TV, so I decide to do a new install, leaving my /home partition alone, so I don't lose any pr0n^H^H^H^Himportant data. I am certain that this will work. I'll let it do the new install, which will take about 90 minutes, while I watch Jack Lemmon put everyone in New York on his list.

90 minutes later it's done...and it still won't print, and it still won't find the NIC. I decide that if I ever see "modprobe: could not locate module eth0" again, I will most likely kick something.

So a few hours later, my toes really hurt, and I decide to "downgrade" to 8.2, so I can at least get online.

As soon as I get back online, I send a desperate plea to Chris DiBona, who has graciously helped me in the past. He offers many solutions, none of which work, and now I think I've broken a toe.

So fast forward to last night: Chris is coming to LA, and offered to come over and help me fix my computer. He's gonna put Red Hat on it, leaving /home alone (ha! Home Alone! That kills me)

My local LUG is also doing a "Linux for lame asses who don't know how to load modules into their kernels or set their refresh correctly" class this month, so between the two, I hope to not be kicking anything anytime soon.

I feel sort of guilty about looking at Red Hat, because the guys from Mandrake have really welcomed me with open arms, and offered all sorts of help and advice...but nobody seems to know how to solve this problem over there, and I gotta go with what works.

Speaking of what works..an intresting thing happened yesterday...this VAIO that I've had forever which has never booted was going to get XP removed, and Red Hat installed. As soon as I put the CD in the drive, and I'm not making this up, it started up! Like it was saying, "No! No! I'll be good!"

So I have it here, on the other side of a KVM, running Knoppix right now, and I'm seriously thinking about taking XP off, like I'd originally planned, and loading either 9.0 or Red Hat 7.3 on it...I also have Debian ISOs for when I'm feeling particularly flagellant. I know that it's got TONS of RAM and a massive HD, so it should be able to handle WineX without any difficulty...so maybe that's another computer project.

Thinking about all these ISOs I have got me interested in buying a couple of beige boxes, and just hooking up different Linux installs in the house, eventually building a network, so I can play with the various distros and learn and stuff, so I think a trip to Fry's may be in my future... ...but don't tell my wife...she thinks I'm going there to get a new vaccuum.

Know what I love?

When some loser idiot wastes all his mod points modding me down.

Genius.

I'm sick of using slashdot for blogging, a purpose it isn't really suited for.

So I'm moving.

You can find my new blog hanging off my home page, or go here.

Hopefully this means I'll keep it a bit more up to date ...

Weird.

For the past couple of months, I've been tsk-tsking about the number of bus shelters and phone boxes around Edinburgh with broken glass and empty windows.

Then, this evening ...

Karen, Claudio, and I were on our way to a pub. It having turned cold, we crossed over Leith Walk to wait at a bus stop (for either a bus or a passing taxi). We were just approaching the bus stop when there was a loud pop -- and a sheet of glass about one metre by two disintegrated, dumping its advertising board all over the pavement, along with several kilos of toughened glass (reduced to fragments).

To say we were shaken is a bit of an understatement; if we'd been under the shelter it would probably have been call-an-ambulance time. There was nobody else within a hundred metres, though, and no other witnesses: this thing just exploded in front of us!

Talk about unpleasant surprises. It had been quite windy earlier, and the temperature had dropped about ten degrees (celsius) in the past three hours, and on our way back we passed a number of glass-free phone boxes, including one that had clearly broken really recently, as there was still glass on the pavement. Best guess we can come up with is that some of the toughened glass the Council are buying to put in their shelters is not suitable for low temperatures or high winds, but it's still alarming to nearly be on the receiving end of a face full of glass fragments.

Someone in The Guardian's editorial office has a clue; this lengthy quote from a former president seems a hell of a lot more applicable to the current situation than any other editorials I've read in the past couple of weeks. Or any of the frightening noises emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.

Back last June, I bought a laptop; a Sony Vaio PCG-FX103. (To Sony, if you're listening: this is the last piece of your shitware I'm ever buying unless you stop treating your customers like dumb cattle and start supplying electronic guts that match up to the cute exterior decor, instead of the pile of gangrenous filth that is the PCG-FX103. Crippleware. Yes, I'm pissed off. And yes, I'm going to tell everyone exactly why -- but not right now.)

The Vaio was, not to put too fine a point on it, so appallingly useless that I ended up using it as a book-end for most of the time, and forked out some hard-earned cash on a second-hand Toshiba Portege that, while slow and elderly, did exactly what needed doing without any fuss.

Last October a keycap on the Tosh broke, so I ordered a replacement keyboard and fitted it myself. (No, I didn't ship it to Belgium and wait ten weeks for some drone in a Sony service centre to stop wanking and pop the keyboard, then charge me a hundred and sixty pounds for the cornholing. I ordered the keyboard, it arrived two days later, and I fitted it myself in fifteen minutes. Begin to get the picture?)

Anyway, I put the mileage on that spanking new laptop keyboard at a frightening rate, sort of like the way a courier puts miles on a van. Inside four months I think I've written on the close order of 220,000 words of original fiction on it. I've also edited my way through three novels and written four monthly magazine columns, racking up another 50,000 words of non-fiction -- before you add in my email and usenet habits. You know something? The space bar is worn shiny-smooth, the decals on the keys are rubbing away, and a couple of them have begun sticking. Time for a new board ...

Now, for a while I'd been meaning to take a look at Linux -- which is my operating system of choice, as well as my bread and butter -- on PowerPC kit. And I happen to have a soft spot for Macs, because even though Steve Jobs is Bill Gates' Evil Twin, and Apple's software licenses and proprietary hardware must bring tears of joy to the devil's eye, they make nice machines. And in this situation -- old laptop now verging on ancient and in need of a new keyboard -- I made the mistake of blundering into the local Mac dealership in Edinburgh.

And blundering out again half an hour later with a spanking new iBook, 640Mb of RAM, DVD/CD-RW, and wireless ethernet. Drool.

Anyway, in a day or two I managed to repartition the iBook and configure it to triple-boot -- MacOS 9, MacOS X, and another mystery partition (currently loaded with Yellow Dog 2.1, but shortly to try Mandrake and SuSE Linux for PowerPC). And you know something? Much to my self-disgust I am finding that I am spending 90% of my time in MacOS X.

See, I'm an old UNIX head. And I've just bought a box with a cute, glitzy face that -- under the hood -- just happens to be running BSD. And sure there are problems with it; a surfeit of crap commercial payware, no decent package management system, lack of support for foreign filesystems (ext3, Apple, we need it bad!) ... but. But. But. It's got the cute front-end of MacOS, all the bells and whistles like iTunes, and something underneath that I can port my writing tools to and crank up vi or emacs on.

So if I've been a bit quiet lately, you know why. Meanwhile, here's Salad With Steve.

Okay, so Boing! Boing! is travelling really close to the speed of light in our reference frame, so a week there looks to be a very long week from outside. Right?

Actually, that's only one of my excuses for not writing recently. Another part of it is mild depression. I tend to sleep longer in winter, and for some reason I also tend to finish writing novels in winter. I've just stuck 1400 pages of manuscript in the post to my agent and, not to put too fine a point on it, I feel exhausted. One redrafted novel (118,000 words) and one wholly new novel (185,000 words) is enough. At least for one winter.

(The day trips to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Leeds didn't help either. Talk about alternate realities ...)

Meanwhile, cheer up: if you haven't met him already, here's Argon Zark.

... I've been over at Boing Boing, editing the guest blog. Feel free to visit.

Yet another SF-related link: this article explains, in the author's words, "How I was politically educated by The Prisoner". A thought-provoking look at a fascinating TV series and the way it put over a number of interesting politically- charged points at the height of the cold war.

Event Horizon interviewed Vernor Vinge in 1999 about his recent novels, the Singularity, and all sorts of interesting background stuff. If you're interested in current directions in SF and haven't read it, the interview is still on the web.

Some companies expect their employees to give an arm and a leg, but this is just taking the piss. (Er, or something like that ...)