Hilly Kristal, owner of CBGB, dies at 75.

Sad to hear about it, but not surprising. I met him in March of last year, and he was obviously a sick man.

I was in New York over St. Patrick’s day weekend to see the Pogues, and on Sunday afternoon I stopped in at CBGB to see the place one last time and pick up some T-shirts for friends at home. Hilly was sitting at his desk in the foyer, going over some spreadsheets with an assistant. I was an interruption, but Hilly shook my hand and chatted with me for a few minutes before letting me go back into the club for a last look around.

I know he’d been talking about reopening the club in Las Vegas, which probably won’t happen now. And that’s for the best. CBGB belonged at the corner of Bowery and Bleecker, and Hilly Kristal belonged at his desk there.

I’ve tried so hard to keep myself from falling
Back into my bad old ways
And it chars my heart to always hear you calling
Calling for the good old days
Because there were no good old days
These are the good old days

i guess i was wondering....do you ever miss me?

…

anyway the point is, it feels like if we had just gotten through that shitty patch maybe we'd be enjoying the fruits of an adult relationship now

…

i feel like i missed out, big time...

…

you'd want to kick my ass and i'd want to kick my ass. i'm sorry you still feel bad about it. i don't really know what to do.....want me to sly out there for a weekend of sex and decision making?

That’s a hell of a thing to lay on a guy at 2:30 in the morning. What do you say to that? How do you even begin to formulate a response? Shit, I still can’t bear to listen to Chelsea Hotel #2 after what happened there. Lies and drugs and knives, scars, broken hands, nights that lasted for weeks…

You may be done with the past, but the past isn’t done with you.

I think I fixed the issue with images not showing up in Bloglines. If you read me via Bloglines, you should see a picture of a bunny here:

Thanks to Sebastian for pointing out the problem. If any of you folks see something broken on the site, please let me know and I’ll get it fixed.

Whew, doing 11 consecutive hours at school (8 hours of actual class time) on only 3 hours of sleep took a helluva lot more out of me than it would have just a few years ago. And tomorrow I get to do it all over again!

On the bright side, I’m getting all my weekly edumacating out of the way in just two long, miserable days.

Oh, and there’s college girls, too. Well, there are RUMORS of college girls. I’m majoring in CIS, so I’m surrounded by pasty, overweight geeks all day instead of nubile lovelies. And before anyone makes a crack about it, I’ll state for the record that I am NOT a pasty, overweight geek. I’m a vaguely swarthy, underweight geek.

So yeah, it’s a sausage fest. Last time around I was an econ major, and there weren’t any wimmen there, either. Maybe I need to do a degree in sociology or English or… uh… home economics, or whatever women actually study in college.

Speaking of studying, I’m highly inclined to launch an in-depth study on the process of ethanol metabolism in the human body right now. Empirical research can be a rewarding endeavor.

A side note for the guys in the group buy: the decTOPs finally shipped. Should be here by Friday, I hope.

When I was little, getting ready for school in the fall meant buying loose-leaf paper, pencils, binders, all the usual kid stuff. These days, back-to-school apparently entails lots of digging through CD spindles and watching progress bars.

I’m starting school bright and early at 10:10 tomorrow (which means I really shouldn’t be up and blogging at 4:30 AM, but I’m not the sharpest brick in the load…) and I’m taking a 100% CIS course load. And my school apparently does EVERYTHING on Windows, which I don’t use; I’m a Linux and Mac OS X guy. That means I’d probably be wise to arrange handy access to a Windows system.

So… I spent a good chunk of the evening setting up a Windows XP virtual machine running under QEMU on my laptop. For the non-techies, this lets my computer pretend to have another computer inside of it, and that pretend computer runs Windows.

To get it all set up, I first had to rummage through the aforementioned CD spindles to find an old XP CD-ROM, install it onto a new hard disk image, download and install eleventy-hoojillion patches and updates via Windows Update, and get everything configured the way I like it.

Then it was back to the spindles to hunt down a set of Office 2000 discs. Yeah, it’s ancient. I don’t care. I’m not shelling out seven grand or whatever the hell MS charges for an upgrade; 2000 still gets the job done. Oh, and Windows can still get the nasties when it’s running in a virtual machine; better add some antivirus and anti-spyware. And Firefox. And Java. And Flash. And 7zip. And and and…

Anyways, the damn thing is finally set up acceptably. And it really runs pretty well; my machine has a 1.8 GHz Pentium-M, and the Windows VM feels about like a 1 GHz PIII. No speed demon, but entirely usable.

A few tips for anyone else looking to do this:

• Use the KQEMU kernel module accelerator. Yes, you’ll probably have to manually compile it against your kernel. Do it anyways. The performance improvement is worth it.
• Disable ACPI with the -no-acpi flag. That’s another big performance boost.
• Turn off all the eye candy and switch to 16-bit color inside Windows. MOAR speed!
• Use the -tftp flag to activate QEMU’s built-in TFTP server, so you can easily move files from Linux to Windows and back.

A pretty screenshot:

… and I’m hittin’ the sack.

Whoops. I have an excuse, though: I’ve been busy getting ready for school.

Watching National Lampoon’s Vacation last week reminded me of Beverly D’Angelo, who played Ellen Griswold, one of the greatest movie MILFs of all time. She still looks great:

The first trailer for Aliens vs. Predator is online here. And since it’s NOT being directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who shat out 2004’s AVP, it might actually be, y’know, GOOD. It damn well looks gory enough.

td@thinkpad:~$ cd bloggingideas
td@thinkpad:~/bloggingideas$ ls -l
total 0
td@thinkpad:~/bloggingideas$ echo 'you fail it'
you fail it
td@thinkpad:~/bloggingideas$ exit

Yeah, I’m a geek.

The decTOPs for the group buy have been ordered; I should get them sometime next week. That’ll make for some blogfodder.

Kirsten Dunst robbed in New York City.

The thieves reportedly threatened her with a leaf blower.