¿Yo te quiero tamales...y Usted?

That's certainly one good thing about living in a predominantly Latino community...no shortage of tamales. They are especially traditional for the Christmas season. Another one of Richie's students' families dropped by today to bring us some of theirs. I got some Mole sauce together and we ate like Aztec Emperors. Yum! Yeah, maybe we're barely scraping by, but there's perks to teaching music, apparently. This year's been particularly good for these kind of gifts from Richie's students.

This is not really my holiday...that was settled when my dad died on 12/24/1975. Even during my Christian period I didn't celebrate...the people I "fellowshipped" with kind of looked down the nose at Christmas. Christmas was an adapted Pagan holiday, and actually commemorated the Roman god Saturn and the Zoroastrian demigod Mithras. It was one of many holidays coopted by the Roman Catholic Church in the 4th Century of the Common Era. We celebrated the traditional Jewish holidays instead...Passover instead of Easter, Chanukah instead of Christmas, and Rosh Ha'Shana.

One thing about the holiday...I was able to get some laundry done while most of the building was away at Christmas Day Mass. Usually it's pretty competitive on the weekends here for washer/dryer time.

Tomorrow I want to stay clear of the malls. I've bought enough crap to last me.

We might actually get some rain tomorrow, so maybe this will be the time to do the fixes/upgrades I desperately need to do for my "Daily Drive" computer. I've been waiting because static electricity has been so bad with the cold Santa Ana condition we've been having.

(warning: there be geekspeak ahead...skip the next two paragraphs if geekspeak impaired)

I have everything I need...a 120GB hard drive, a Pioneer DVD+/-RW drive, and a USB2 card. I'm also going to see if I can use the onboard sound and just move the sound card over to my Celeron 466MHz Windows computer, which needs to bypass the internal sound desperately. It's got an Intel 810 motherboard with very poor shielding for the sound circuit...you hear crosstalk from the IDE controller bleeding into the sound. Bleah! I mean, I do want to eventually migrate off of Windows forever. Microsoft might force my hand...I hate XP and am damn pissed that they are going to stop supporting 2000 next year sometime. There won't be a W2K SP5...SP4 is it. They are planning a "Security Rollup" for 2K next year, and that will be that.

I hope that some sort of Open Source virtualization technology finally happens for Linux...something that would allow me to run W2K as a "guest OS" on top of Linux, due to security concerns. I know that VMWare exists and works but unfortunately it's just too expensive and they don't really support Debian Linux which is becoming my Linux of choice. Win4Lin is somewhat less expensive, but they are very .RPM centric and they only support DOS-based Windows like 95 and 98 and 98SE. Hopefully Bochs or something like it and whatever "glue" it would need to run Windows will get to a point where I can use it. It's either that or I'm going to just dump Windows, period. Once Microsoft stops supporting 2K, I'm up a creek without a paddle. XP is just too damn slow and encrusted with tons of garbage. XP Home has neutered networking, and so on and so on.

Anyway, if you celebrate Christmas, I hope you had a good one.