An Exercise In Futility

Have you ever heard someone say “Let’s go play with the Legos”, instead of “Let’s go play with the Lego”? It drives me up the wall when people use “Lego” in a plural form. It is just so wrong! Does one say “Let’s build it using Meccanos”? No, of course not! The correct phrase is “Let’s build it using Meccano”, which implies ‘Meccano parts’, or ‘Pieces of Meccano’. You do know what Meccano is, don’t you? Various ways to use the word Lego: “Lego bricks”, “pieces of Lego”, “I like Lego!”, “I built it using Lego”. Now, the terminology on what the bricks are called is more open for debate, since building instructions and order forms are usually graphical - and usually you’re 4 or 5 when you start to play with Lego, so invent some very odd terms. For example, we had one’ers, two’ers, three’ers, fourers, sixers, eighters, and so on (each 1 wide). You could also have “thick” bricks (two wide), and “flat” bricks (1/3 the height of a normal brick). You could use a “round” modifier, a “tile” modifier, and postfixes like “light”.. and of course, bricks have colours, too. “Do you see any round red one’er lights?”; “I’m missing a thick flat black fourer”. I think that Lego is a great toy for kids because it allows them to practice sorting and classification. But also, if they really care about building with it, it forces them to invent a system of nomenclature, which i think is quite a step beyond just slapping some bricks together. Of course, i was pretty anal about building with lego, and even by age 5 had rules like “walls must be uniform in colour”, “bricks must overlap.. no vertical seams allowed!”, and the big one: “no chewing bricks!”. That included the biting-apart of stuck bricks. That’s about all I have to say about Lego today.

I am considering switching my entire page to CSS, so that i won’t have to use tables for positioning anymore. It bugs me that tables are a good way to provide a readable/navigable layout for non-CSS aware browsers. I’m extremely concerned that I haven’t been locking enough browsers out of my site with my CSS code up til now, so I definitely need to make sure that I don’t have any backwards compatability in my page. I mean, sure, I can override table layouts using CSS, but doing so would mean that the information on my page would be available to everybody! We certainly can’t have that. I urge all readers to do the same - switch to pure CSS! And don’t just go halfway with the ‘CSS-only hyperlinks’.. I mean, they’re a good start, but you have to go full out and make sure you deny access to as many browsers as possible. Ed: yes, this is sarcasm.

So, the time came that i needed to take the ol’ 486 out of storage and revive it as a firewall again, since the current firewall (P75) has a new future as a small web server And wouldn’t you know it, my all-time favorite distribution, famous for installing on pretty much ANYthing, won’t install on the 486! Now, let me clarify. When slackware moved from 8.0 to 8.1, they fucked something up. in 8.0 and previous, in order to install on a system that could not boot from a CDROM, you needed to boot with floppies and then mount the install CD. This required a bootdisk and one root disk. Now, in 8.1, they have moved to a SIX disk set: one boot disk, and a root disk spanned across FIVE floppies!!! So i found a nifty boot manager that allows you to boot from a CDROM on machines where the BIOS does not support that option, but yes of course, the root disk image on the CDROM is also very large. in either case, the 8MB of RAM in my 486 is insufficient to store the root disk image (which is probably something like 8.1 MB). So i am extrememly pissed off. Slackware, you have failed me.