A few nights ago, I upgraded to the latest Dapper beta for Kubuntu. After a failed attempt last week at doing a dist-upgrade to Flight 6 that caused all kinds of catastrophic errors and having to wipe and reinstall Breezy 5.10 (thankfully I had the presence of mind to make a backup of my home folder), I decided to just do a clean install from CD. I already had pretty much everything backed up and there was really nothing to lose and hey, it’s Beta, right?

While I realize that I spoiled my geeky Xmas morning delight of being able to upgrade to Dapper final on June 1st, fuck it. I’ve always hated waiting for goodies and shee-it, the move was totally worth my while. Dapper is hot.

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After playing off and on for over two years, last winter I finally decided to wean myself away from EverQuest 1, also aptly known as EverCrack.

For those of you not in the know, EverQuest is a MMORPG, or an Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game a.k.a. HFNWC or Heroin for Nerds With Computers. There’s no shame here, daveb waves his freak flag high and mighty. Admittedly, it’s not the best conversation opener if you’re looking to get laid later in the evening. “I have a level 36 Mage and last week, my guild killed two dragons” just really doesn’t do much for girls. But hey, what’s a sex life compared compared to slaying a mythical winged beast?

On Friday, I finally bit the bullet and picked up a copy of EverQuest 2 at a store near my office. No big deal, I thought. I’ll head home, install it, futz with it for a couple hours and then walk away having spent an appropriate amount of time playing and go do something wholesome like ramming splinters under my fingernails or writing angry, illucid emails to the Pope.

The next thing I knew, it was Sunday night and I’d once again joined the ranks of EQ crackheads. I was virtually running all over the place, grouping with other people and slaying all manner of minor creatures. I was working on making potions, scribing spells, making tea, earning money, paying rent on an apartment and all sorts of mundane things, only these things weren’t real outside of the confines of a game server. I’d slept a total of no more than six or eight hours the whole weekend and on upon hitting the street this morning to catch the subway to work, I was taken aback by reality. Shit, I’m thirty, human and I live in the ghetto and cannot grow thistle-like spiked armor out of my skin using arcane means…right.

Fucking EverCrack. At least it’s not like I don’t know a shitload of other thirty-somethings who are completely addicted. Still, being a fan of online RPGs sort of entails you having to relinquish any plausible deniability over the fact that you are a hopeless, gibbering nerd. I feel myself just steps away from the pocket-protector and duct-taped glasses. I have EQ running on one computer and Linux on another with a KDE switch so I can bounce back and forth with ease. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, give yourself a hug and understand that you are indeed a fortunate human being. Just understand that in daveb’s Apartment of Doom, the geek meter registers pretty fucking high and that’s…okay.

Lately, daveb has been ruminating on his geekiness. He’s quite violently defensive of it. He’s fucking proud to be an alien from another planet and as far as he’s concerned, the weirder he gets, the better.

His recent foray into Linux has sparked a number of ideas for future projects to further distance himself from society and it’s acceptable lifestyles. TO start things off, daveb needs a computer in every single room of his apartment of doom. He’s already running two, but why stop there. This plan includes the bathroom and daveb is currently trying to fathom how to realistically waterproof a keyboard, monitor and mouse for the shower of doom.

Next item on the geek list is a homemade degausser. For those of you not in the know, a degausser is basically just a really powerful electromagnet used to blast magnetic memory storage (hard drives, etc.) and permanently wipe it’s contents. It can be assembled for only a few dollars with items from Radio Shack and a hardware store. Hidden in or near the exit to his apartment of doom should protect the information on his drives from being compromised by theft or seizure. Somebody tries to remove the machine and ZAP, all the info is gone. not that daveb has anything particularly sensitive on his hard drives, unless you count game saves in which case you win an award for being a bigger loser than daveb. He just likes the idea of it. Degaussers are cool.

Third and last on his current list of geeky things to do (this last being the one item that honestly will likely never see fruition) is to assemble a pneumatic cannon. An air compressor, a big old metal tube to serve as cannon, tripod and plenty of ammo in the form of paint cans filled with cement. That way when they come for daveb, shit will get taken care of, evil dictator style. He’ll just point at the sound of the bullhorn and fire through the walls. Original geeky gangster style (O.G.G). Once again, not that daveb needs this in the literal sense, but he does crave it, for his own reasons. However, daveb’s not sure if that’s exactly legal in NYC (or if there’s even a law covering homemade cannons) and he’s not about to risk getting thrown in the slammer for building one, so whatever, whenever.