I managed to install linux mint on my mom's oldish notebook computer, and so far, she is happy with it. It eliminates a lot of the slow down (spyware?) and now I know for sure what is running on it, and what is not.

Installation is a breeze, unless you have low memory, and then it's a bit awkward. But it includes support for nearly everything, so it's an easy switch from Windows.

I've got Death Race 2000 on it's way now, and hope to have
a review for you soon.

While I try to install linux on this old POS

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!

~Stanislaw Lem 'Cyberiad'

?

So, once upon a time, in a far away place, in New Jersey, a simple crocus bloomed auspiciously.

This wasn't unusual. However, Ted vomited as a result. I assume you know Ted? He's an ass.

Seriously. He's no fun at parties, unless you enjoy laughing awkwardly as someone pours his drink on his date's head and spews profanity in every direction like a particularly offensive malfunctioning septic tank. Anyway, this crocus was genetically modified to release noxious fumes when it bloomed.

The alien invasion had all sorts of trickery up it's figurative sleeves just like that. They spent a lot of time making sure we replaced all of our metal objects with low-quality plastics to ensure our defenselessness, and then resorted to petty pranks.

The latest of which was that damn crocus. The crocus spent it's childhood various schools, getting chewed on and starved by negligent children and pitied by poor teachers. Then an alien by the name of 'X'hcccrtryblax'tch teleported in one night and rescued it, along with some tadpoles and a lot of staples.

Ted was an ass, did I mention that? Oh, right. So this crocus gets modified with some standard DNA replication and some Whoopiematic Laughspew. Then 'X'hcccrtryblax'tch, disguised as a lilac dragon buzzed in and placed in on Ted's counter.

Ted didn't notice it, on account of all of the detritus and debris accumulated on his countertops, which mysteriously aided the growth of our crocus, and it bloomed.

I actually don't think the Laughspew was needed, that kitchen was nasty to begin with, and Gordy nearly tossed her cookies in there on a daily basis anyway.

Novel, II

Brick rubbed his eyes, and squinted at the martini glasses on the table before him. They shook a bit, and the room spun around them. He rubbed his eyes once again, and the room steadied. It was just the glasses moving.

"Um.." He was about to ask a question, but Dr. Spaulding beat him to it.

"That's my latest invention. It's an automechanical waiter!"

"Ah."

The glasses disappeared into the cavernous recesses of the machine, and a faint shattering noise resulted. Several fresh martinis were produced from another mysterious orifice, and were set down on the table.

"I think that's enough for me, actually," Brick said. He tossed another down to steady the room once again, and drew his firearm. He field-stripped it, and gave it a good once over. Once he had put it all back together, he fired a round through the window at a horrible face that vanished as quickly as it appeared.

"Maybe we should order some Molotov's." He quipped.