Well, well. Take a look at what arrived from Right Stuf this morning:

I know what I’m watching tonight…

I decided to sign onto Neopets this morning and feed my famished pet. While I was there I did the usual rounds, including the Tombola. For the first time in ages I actually won something nifty from it.

And when I saw my prize I started singing the Bottle Fairy theme song… because I acquired a “Bottled Air Faerie.” I’m pretty sure it’s Kururu, on account of it being a blue bottle…

(Yes, I’m a big ol’ geek. Your point?)

Fine. I gave in. And do you know why? Because one, I’m insatiably curious, and two, I couldn’t resist the urge to get a lock on the one Gmail address I’d ever actually want. (Or, more accurately, I wanted to keep anyone else from getting it.)

You can probably guess what my Gmail addy is. And if you can’t… who are you and what are you doing here? (Heh.)

Yes, folks, it’s true: I can be a sheep, too.

So far I’ve turned down not one but two offers of a Gmail account.

Yes, I’m that much of an iconoclast. Besides, I have my own domain and mail server. What the heck do I need another email addy for?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled, much more interesting, broadcast day.

UPDATE: Of course, the very day I post this, Dawn announces she has Gmail invites available. Heh.

I finally assembled all of the spare parts. Motherboards, processors, RAM, hard drives, power supplies, video cards. Somewhere in all of that silicon and plastic would be the genesis of a new, albeit clunky and kludgy, Linux-based home computer.

Alas, it was not meant to be. After hours of testing, only one combination of CPU, motherboard, power supply and video card would achieve anything more than the barest sign of functioning… and not one combination would even POST. Argh.

I ranted in frustration for a short while, and then I decided to turn my attention to something else geeky, something almost equally worthwhile.

I attached the cassette deck to my new receiver!

And that didn’t work out very well, actually. It turns out that, according to the manual for my Panasonic A/V receiver, one cannot record audio or video from one analog source to another. Helluva “feature” if you ask me, but that’s okay. I worked around it through the simple expedient of attaching the tape deck directly to the computer.

The roomie and I then spent a happy few hours combing through our respective cassette collections and pulling off songs we’d long been yearning to have in digital form. He went for an XTC song and a few tracks from a band I’d never even heard of (the name of which now escapes my recall), and I plucked B-sides off a couple of “cassingles” in addition to a couple of stand-out tracks on otherwise-forgettable albums. (Let’s face it, David Gilmour’s old solo album really only has one good song on it.)

I love that living-room PC, lemme tell ya. Not only does it make a great myHTPC platform (all the better to watch anime with), but thanks to the LiveDrive hardware and CoolEdit 2000 software I was able to pull in audio from those old tapes and clean it up in a jiffy.

The results speak, as it were, for themselves. So, who wants a copy of a B-side track from the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe album released back in ‘89?

ABWH – Vultures (8 megs, Ogg)