Purple Monkey Dishwasher.

I'm currently in the process of reformatting a USB stick (for the umpteenth time) to boot one of my many many downloaded Linux distributions from, in the vain hope that at some point this millenium, my computer will boot and run Linux successfully, and damn it, I will make it happen.

However, since I've a bit of time until it formats, I guess I should probably reveal more of my backstory to to keep you all entertained. By "you all", I clearly mean no-one, since I doubt that anyone in their right mind would read this and follow it.
Anyways, me. I'm 18, born in Croydon (a skidmark on the underpants of London), my parents are long since divorced -- a time in my life that, I do believe, has contributed to my wry, dark, cynical sense of humour -- and I am in a relationship with possibly the most amazing person I've met.

Though, you'd probably be more entertained if I discussed my intense dislike of computers right now.
It all began sometime around two weeks ago. I'd rediscovered my love of Spyro the Dragon (more specifically, Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon) and after obsessively completing the game to an impressive 117%, I decided it was time to move on. Now, my absolute favourite game in the whole world is Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer, but as it turns out, we don't have a copy of it in the house.

The logical next thought for someone of my personality? Why don't I just download a copy and burn it to a disc myself? It can't be that tricky.
If I could meet my past self, I'd probably have killed him by now.

Anyway, it turns out that PlayStation 1 discs have to be burnt at a specific speed. A speed that is too slow for my computers to handle burning at. Ok, so that's no real problem, there must be some way that I can run some sort of code to force it to run at the lowest speed. Apparently not.

So, in a bid to sort this new problem within a problem, I decided to install Linux on my old desktop computer. On any other computer, in any other person's life, this would be one of the simplest tasks ever. With me, not a chance in Hell. Beginning with booting from a Live-CD (a CD-ROM that has all the required files to boot up the computer from, instead of the hard drive), the boot kept hanging. By this point, I was getting a little annoyed. I was running into squashfs errors and kernel panic errors almost everywhere. I know what I'll do. I'll try and boot it from a USB stick!

WRONG IDEA. I discovered that my computer's BIOS was out of date. Oooh, a new problem! So, long story short, after an evening searching the Internet for a vintage BIOS update, I found one and flashed it, so that it could boot from a USB stick.

I am currently trying to run a version of Ubuntu 10.10 from the USB stick. Whether or not it will work is an entirely different matter. But all of this effort for the sake of saving a little bit of money on a PlayStation disc? Worth the effort? Definitely.

Insomniac Jon, signing out.