For a few days now, I’ve been swapping around three laptops each running a separate OS.  Why?  ‘Cuz apparently I’m devoid of life’s fine sweet nectar.  By which I would mean sex or food.

The aim has been tweaking the teeny tiny Asus eeepc, digging into the command line (which is only a meaningful sentence for the unwashed and unfriended.  That would be me.)  I’m damned if I can’t figure out how to install the kernel headers that would make the Cisco VPN client to install.

(Not that I want to be able to tunnel into work’s VPN, but, like a some sort of puny, sad Everest, I want to be able to say I can.)

The old, shitty, slow-booting, sad, clunky, Windows XP Winbook laptop was helpful in making some tools and, with the help of these guys, made my legal collection of iTunes songs playable anywhere.  More than anything, it helped for when I crashed my new toy’s drive with too much crap and too much stupidity.  In some kind of meta-dork-techno moment, I used an old Apple shuffle as the USB flash drive to create a bootable restore drive on the Windows brick and fixed up the Linux machine.

Good fucking god.  I just read the above.  I am freaking dull.

 Here’s something vaguely amusing.  On Sunday, I had it in my head to buy some new prescription shades to wear when we wander down to a few clicks from the equator in a week and a half.  Not exactly a tough errand.  Only, I’m retarded.

(By the way, I’m writing this little episode down, because a certain maile friend with whom I live and sleep suggested I wouldn’t.  Something about my making myself godlike and infallible on this little web domain for which I pay the bills.  Oh, how he doesn’t know me and my awesomely humble, self-deprecating ways.)

So, there we are in the mall in the LensCrafters, and some chick wants to help me.  Her English wasn’t great, and her salesmanship blew outright, as she tried to upsell me to the notion I could get progressive lenses in sunglasses. (Well, yeah, honey, I get that I could have hip old-lady shades for my peepers that were also bifocals.  But, I didn’t see myself reading or computering while driving or sunbathing or do any number of things I tend to do in bright sunlight.)

Anyway, as she’s annoying me and we chat, I unfold and place under her nose the paper I took from my nightstand expressly for this moment.  The folded up sheet of standard white was meant to be my copy of my spectacle perscription. Only, again, I’m retarded.

She, in confused, stalling English, said she didn’t know what to do with what I gave her.  Impatiently, I looked over her shoulder and saw the printout of the online ticket to Kooza, the Cirque du Soleil show we went to the night before.

What lady?  You can’t make me some glasses based on a barcode and directions to the Canadian circus?  What kind of glasses place is this?

I apologized, we left and I got glasses the next day at another Lenscrafters in a whole ‘nother town.