We always put a couple of bells on the bottom of the tree. Because they are shiny and round, the cats always go for them first. This alerts us and we can verbally berate them for messing with the tree. This works most of the time to keep them in check. Even when I’m upstairs and I hear the bells I call down: “I know what you are doing” and they slink off. Sometimes they just ignore me and play with the tree anyways, which is fine because the bottom row is all plastic balls they can play with as much as they like.

I remember the first time one of our cats saw a Christmas tree, when he was a little kitten. I turned around for 10 secs, looked back and he was sitting proud on top of the tree. I laughed my ass off, until he realized he had no real way of getting down. So I laughed some more and fetched him off the tree. Good to get it out of the system I think, because he didn’t try that again.

I always feel like Microsoft is watching meeeeeee! And I have no product key woo ooo ooo

Yeah I love Ubuntu, it’s really fine. But I think because it’s easy and for a lot of people their first Linux, it’s seen as like the baby version of Linux. So people bitch about it a lot, as if it’s somehow inferior to other distros. Like if you don’t compile everything from scratch you are somehow not worthy?

Hard “Real programmer” vibes. https://xkcd.com/378/

And yes, I use pico as a text editor, it’s fine really.

Wow! That’s really cool, Debian Potato was so hype back then. And every new release was amazing, I had Sarge running for so long. And I had a little home made router with Debian Sarge and an uptime of like 3 years. I had to replace the NIC on it, from a 10mbit coax only to a coax and UTP model because I was switching over to UTP. I didn’t want to shutdown the server, so I live swapped the ISA cards, and it actually worked!

Those were the days.

Nah I went over to camp Debian for a long time, switched when Debian Potato was released. Then when Debian kinda stalled I was lured into Ubuntu because they had the latest and greatest. I know it isn’t the cool choice these days, but I have stuck with Ubuntu ever since.

I dug around in old boxes and found the book!

I started with SuSE 5 and it came with a book. I think it started with something like: “Don’t panic! You can do this!”

It was rough at first, but once I got into it I was hooked.

You’d be surprised how much a concrete pillar holding up an overpass can actually take. They don’t break like in the movies, they are specifically designed to take big truck impacts and not fail. Anybody crashing a Cybertruck at highway speeds into one of those is instantly turned into red colored mashed potatoes.