Did I mention that yesterday was my birthday?

Apparently not.

I stopped off at Beverages and More on the way home (a good move anyway because there was a serious accident blocking three lanes near my usual exit) and bought myself a bottle of good gin.

Colleen had bought me some CDs: a Dave Brubeck 4-disk set called Time Signatures, and Baez Sings Dylan.

Chili for dinner. Party tomorrow.

I seem to have come down with a mild cold.

The horror in the Dell

Looking back, I can see that the trouble began the day I started to configure a new desktop computer for work (I'd been using a rather ancient 400MHz machine with a large but very fuzzy monitor; my boss had suggested that I order a new one).

( the whole sorry tale )

Moral of the story, never buy any hardware that doesn't have open-source drivers. Never trust a sales droid. Never buy from Dell. Keep away from RedHat 8.0 -- anything.0, for that matter. Go down to Fry's, throw something together out of standard, supported parts, and put Debian on it.

Oh, well. The machine is nice and fast, the monitor is stunningly beautiful, and some day maybe someone will come up with a video driver for the FireGL E1 that supports multiple VTs.

And somewhere at Dell is the person who packaged up that driver and certified the board for use with Linux. Wonder how he'd look with...