It was bad enough when they opened one of those yuppie troves in my town, now it seems that Apple Stores are sprouting up everywhere. They opened one this week in San Francisco. I found this video online of the lemmings lined up for blocks to get in and be ripped off by Steve Jobs personally. "Gee, let's pay $3,000 (USD) for roughly $500 worth of hardware, thank you Mr. Jobs. We will leave our first born at the door as well." Ha, what sheep -- the lot of them. "A fool an his money is soon parted," they say. An Apple lemming and his money is retarded, I say.

I would have loved to see someone steal a bulldozer and mow down the entire line. This would undoubtedly put crApple out of business, being the majority of its card carrying cultists were standing on it. They probably all fly in from around the country to line up at each Apple Store opening in a megear attempt to make it seem like people actually use Macintrash computers in this day and age. Now that Linux has surpassed Apple in marketshare (Windoze, you're next) there is little to no reason for crApple to even exist, other than for artsy lemmings to burn cash on overpriced, underpowered hardware.

Windoze users are lemmings for using Windoze, but at least they don't pay four to five times what the hardware is worth for the misfortune. What does that make crApple fanatics? Lemmings++? Uber-lemmings? Hmmm, I will ponder this over a game of Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha. It goes without saying my fighter of choice is Dahlsim. "Yoga Fire!" Jacob out.

I must apologize for my absence. I have been away on a trip for the last three days, sans a computer. I have not perished, as one's comment suggested. In some ways it felt good to get away from my arsenal for a while, although seeing all the crapola Dells and Apple notebooks out "in the wild" was enough to make my blood boil. I made sure to wear Linux-centric clothing at all times, just to let the sheep know that I, for one, am not one of their flock.

I wish I had brought a notebook myself but all of the batteries in my portable-arsenal are no longer functional. I guess that's price you pay for scrounging up used parts. I was bored enough to write almost three-hundred lines of code on loose-leaf paper which I will wager compiles as transcribed, verbatim. I have recently put my language, LOO-LU, on the back-burner, but it’s time to get back to business.

As for now, I am off to play a few round of UFO: Alien Invasion, further proof to the naysayers that Linux gaming is on the rise. It gets better every day it seems.

I would like to thank the anonymous benefactor who has graciously supplied me with the domain name www.jacobschatter.com, free of charge. This is undoubtedly someone who is sympathetic to the cause (open source and Linux, Gentoo in particular).

While I have no grandiose plans for the domain name, it will serve as a convenience to those who have been visiting this web page, for I have set up URL-forwarding between domain names.

Clearly if I transfer the domain to my personal server every Apple and Windoze script-kiddie who has it in for me will attempt a DDOS attack. Not on my watch gentlemen. May I suggest you save your meager bag of tricks for a more suitable target?

I have purchased a vintage Zaxxon arcade machine from a local entrepreneur for the sum of $100. While the innards have long since been gutted, I am happy to report that it does in fact have a working CRT. My dilemma is this -- there is simply no room for it in my bedroom so I have been forced to house it in my bathroom. This would not be such a bad thing if not for the fact it smells like a dirty ashtray. I know my landlords, AKA parents, will undoubtedly complain when they discover this latest addition to my arsenal. Being neither one is capable of moving it I think it's safe to say it's staying right where it is for the foreseeable future.

My plans are as follows. I will install a Pentium III 733Mhz CPU and motherboard in the casing in order to make an authentic MAME machine. I, of course will be running MAME under Gentoo, being using Windoze for such as task is laughable (at best).

I am most excited to play Joust. At the tender age of seven, I was the Joust champion of my local arcade. My love for Joust was replaced in 1985 by Gauntlet which forever changed my life. It goes without saying that I will be playing a lot of Gauntlet 1 & 2 over the next few months. It also goes without saying that my character of choice is the wizard.

Tomorrow morning it's off to Radio Shack to collect the parts necessary to get the project started. Hopefully things will go smoothly as it's been far too long since last I brandished a solder gun. Update soon. If I do not post in several days it's safe to assume I burned the house down.

Using the technique explained here, I was able to snag a free song from Pepsi and crApple on a specially marked bottle of Pepsi (I was sad to see that Mountain Dew, my beverage of choice, was NOT included in the promotion). While winning was very easy, the hard part seemed to be cashing in said winnings.

I went to www.pepsi.com to see what steps I needed to take to receive my free song. I was somewhat miffed in that I had to install the CrapRoMedia Flash Plugin in order to fully experience Pepsi's site. I followed the promotions link which inevitably led me to Apple's iTunes website. Sigh. That was one corner of the Internet I would rather NOT traverse.

The first step was to download the iTunes application. No problem, I thought. To my dismay I could not find a Linux installer for the application. Upon further investigation I learned there is no Linux version, nor is there one in development. Typical of crApple to embrace Windoze and shun Linux being they are not-so-secretly being funded by M$. Oh well, undoubtedly Wine would make short work of my application dilemma. NAY! The installer for the Windoze version of iTunes will not work under Wine. I tried for well over four hours to get it working to no avail. A quick browse of Usenet and several Linux forums I frequent confirmed my suspicion that I was, as we say where I hail from, S.O.L.

It goes without saying I will be writing a strongly worded letter to Pepsi (and of course CCing crApple) to demand they send me a $0.99 gift certificate to Suncoast so I can exchange my worthless "winning" for a free song as their ad campaign promises. This is an outrage in that there is a national ad campaign promising "free music" which shuns a large percentage of American computer owners. I detect a conspiracy of the highest magnitude. Perhaps M$ has their foul hands in this somehow.

Well, I am off to drink a Coke and use Linux. Pepsi and Apple can go about being losers in their respective industries for all I care. Losers stick together it seems. I will post the response I receive from Pepsi as soon it arrives.

The kind folks at Epic Games have release a demo of Unreal Tournament 2004 for Linux. It seems my prediction of Linux becoming the prominent gaming platform is coming true. I was hesitant to install it at first because it does not include source code. Although it broke my heart to install something I cannot compile myself, I did so anyway. Three days later I have stopped playing only to sleep and check my web page for comments. It goes without saying, that many people have been "owned" by Jacob this weekend. Back to the game, Jacob out.

Oh well, it comes as no surprise to me that the Windoze source code has been leaked. Pretty much any shaved chimpanzee who is willing to sell his soul to M$ to become a MVP, or as I like to call them CHiMPs (Crappy Hacks in Microsoft's Possession), has access to the code. There is no doubt a disenchanted CHiMP grew tired of his daily lashings and released the code in a final act of defiance before turning over to the "light side" (Linux, Gentoo in particular).

I wait with bated breath for the inevitable onslaught of viri and security breaches which will follow. I also suspect Microsoft will pull a "SCO" and claim Linux and OSS developers are pilfering their code and using it in OSS projects. HA! As if anyone would use that buggy sack of crap for anything but an example of how not to code. Excuse me while I laugh. HA!.

Perhaps the best part is that now the Microsoft "crown jewels" are finally exposed. For years they have hidden secret APIs from third-party developers in order to give M$ apps an unfair performance advantage. These "secret APIs" will undoubtedly come to light now. I wonder how M$ are going to deny their existence now as they are exposed as clear as day.

So I was actually bored enough last night to attempt and install a 120-day evaluation copy of Windows XP I had laying around. I have an suitable PII 266Mhz notebook that is more than able to run Linux, however Windoze XP claims it cannot find the hard disk on install. <sarcasm>Yes, this is an easier install than Gentoo</sarcasm> Give me a break. I would have figured out what drivers I need to get it working but Enterprise was on so I watched that instead.

No word from Slashdot on my story, but I am still waiting. I am certain they are saving it for a big weekend feature. I was at the mall yesterday and flipped Apple Whipping Boy Lemming the bird as I walked by his crappy crApple store. I don’t think he saw me, but he better think twice before crossing me next time. I am not going to let some minimum wage Steve Jobs fanatic tell me where I can step foot. Perhaps I will don a disguse and sneak my way back in this weekend.

I have been blacklisted from the Apple Store. Yesterday evening, with nothing better to do, I decided to head over to the mall for A) a replacement for my badly scratched copy of A Farewell to Kings and B) a spindle of CDRs. I decided to make my bi-weekly trip to the crApple Store to see if there was anything new to write about on my web page. As soon as I walked in a gentleman (hereon referred to as "Apple Whipping Boy Lemming") approached me:

Apple Whipping Boy Lemming: "Can I help you?"

Me: "No thanks... I simply wish to browse your fine selection of Macintosh computers."

AWBL: "No you don't. You're here to make trouble, please leave the store right now."

Me: "I have every right to be here, sir."

AWBL: "No you do not. I am the manager. I have the right to say who may patronize my establishment. Please leave or I will be forced to call security."

Me: "May I please have your name and employee ID?"

He gave me his name but not his employee ID. I left before the rent-a-cops had to come and drag me out. I was almost willing to let it go that far but lucky for them I had more pressing business to attend to.

It goes without saying that I am in the process of drafting a strongly worded letter to Apple corporate headquarters about this lemming. I can go where I please and no Steve Jobs wannabe has to the right to kick me out of his store. Perhaps I will go there tomorrow and hurl my gutted tangerine iCrap through his windshield.

UPDATE: I have submitted my story to Slashdot, in hopes they will feature it in a Your Rights Online segment. I will keep you posted as to if it gets published or not. Keep your fingers crossed.

The tangerine iCrap I found 'diving contained a salvageable six-gigabyte IDE hard disk. I was able to mount it as a slave on Scotty (my multimedia box) and format it as ext2. Now I have a free six-gigabytes of storage for my Oggs.

Today's project is to convert my Rush collection from oggenc -q 7 to oggenc -q 9 thanks to the extra space courtesy of crApple.

Re-encoding 24 albums is no small feat. While that's churning away I figure I will fire up TuxNES and play through the original Metroid. Who needs new games and crappy nVidia drivers when you can play the classics?

The iCrap I found is toast. Nothing I have done seems to be able to resuscitate it. I was really looking forward to getting it up and running and installing Mac OS X to make fun of it too, shame. I think I will bring it out back and detonate it. Perhaps I will film the tangerine explosion and post it in VP3 (read: open source codec) format.

Oh well, I suppose the next best thing would be to install this 120-day evaluation copy of Windoze XP I have laying around. I have a spare 266Mhz PII here, perhaps I will install it and post a review on my web page.

Slashdot is reporting that KDE 3.2.0 has been released. What a laugh. I feel sorry for anyone willing to install that sack of crapola. I mean, talk about bloated. Anyone who knows me knows I prefer the ease and thinness of Blackbox above all others.

Today I saw a gentleman with a Windows 2000 sticker in the rear window of his car. As I was walking by I flipped him the bird. He had the stupid look about him of a Microsoft MCSE. I only wish it were Summer because I would have undoubtedly been wearing one of my Tux t-shirts. That loser would not have known what to say when confronted with someone who will ultimately replace him when Linux takes over.

This weekend I attended a Magic: The Gathering Type 1 tournament. While the card game is currently complete crapola, us old-school players know how to throw down. You should have seen the look on my opponents face in the last round when I pulled a Mox Diamond on my first draw. It goes without saying I walked home numero uno.

SCO is down. While I find this amusing, I suspect a conspiracy between Microsoft and SCO to make the Linux community look bad. I find it very strange that MyDoom effects both SCO and Microsoft. My guess is that they are both mustering for sympathy from the public being both of their flagship products are currently being rendered obsolete by Linux, Gentoo in particular. It wont be long before the rats all leave their sinking ships. This I assure you.

I did get in some good old fashion dumpster diving this weekend. The funny thing is that I found a Macintrash computer! It is one of the crappy orange iCraps. It does not seem to work when plugged in. Needless to say, I will be hard at work getting it up and running to see how crappy the new Apple OS is. I will keep you posted as to my progress.