Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, the first novel to be awarded science fiction's Hugo Award in 1953, gets the award off to a stellar start. Although its Freudian conclusion / solution rings a little false and its vision of a future supercomputer is as silly as anything from the 50s, the novel holds up extremely well and is a crackerjack ride.

I think it was Damon Knight who (lovingly) opined that Bester's characters were a series of funny hats, but that he was so energetic a writer...

A very good thing to not do is to get a new version of the slackpkg utility & (whether because of fatigue, hurry or what have you) accidentally uncomment a line for a -stable mirror instead of the -current you are running. Because if you do that you will cluelessly downgrade yourself, at least partially, and wind up with a mess, and if you try to run slackpkg AGAIN to fix the mess you might get something that looks like this:

bash-3.1# slackpkg upgrade-all

Looking...

K. Mandla, archon of the wonderful blog Motho ke motho ka botho suggested, when I inquired for help installing CRUX, that I try installing Arch Linux first & use some of Arch's system-querying stuff to help with the kernel configuration stage of the CRUX installation.

And so, I wiped the partition that was causing me headaches and re-created it, and installed grub via Arch since lilo just didn't seem to be able to handle two Linux installations.

Installing Arch...

I've been posting some in re: my efforts to fill up the empty partition I was left with after the first "Compy Go Boom" incident ... because it hasn't gone well. In fact the way it HAS gone has led me to suspect there is something wrong with the partition in question ... though it certainly doesn't seem to mind having stuff installed to it.

When with the help of a very smart coworker I was attempting to analyze the situation via Puppy Linux, the partition was responding...

I hope it isn't too OT to post this kind of thing here.

As was the case, I am sure, with many ITfolken, I grew up on science fiction, fantasy and [insert genre here]. After I toddled and twiddled off to a too-long stint in college(s), I stopped reading the stuff very much, though I would occasionally dip back in ...

... I worked at SCIFI.com in Manhattan for a couple of years, began to rediscover my math/science roots a few years later (they'd been buried under three...