Storm rising

Just got off the phone to my Mom, who lives in Naples, Florida. As it turns out, she's south of the predicted path of Hurricane Charley, which hits landfall around Tampa Bay, so she's not in the area being evacuated. She has flood and hurricane insurance, though, and has things pretty well in hand around the house: lanai furniture either taken inside or sunk in the pool; things like that.

I seem to have missed updating my LJ for the last week, which has been moderately eventful. I'll try to catch up later.

Of Cars, Computers, and Picn*x

(The MandelBear's Weekend) Just to catch up briefly, I brought my car in to be serviced last Saturday, then headed out with the flower_cat and super_star_girl (the Younger Daughter) to the Linux Picnic. (Meanwhile the OD, chaoswolf, went off to a FurCon picnic.)

The picnic was relaxing; lots of good conversations and catching-up. The YD got bored after lunch, so I took her home to find Mayhem and Phil (both frequent visitors) just arriving. On the way home my service rep at Honda called to say my car was ready but was going to need more work soon.

On the way home, the Cat dropped me off to pick up my car. The minor service was cheap, but in another 7000 miles or so (i.e., at the next scheduled service) I'm going to need new front brakes: pads, calipers, and disks. Grumble.

Still, I couldn't complain too much, so (having dodged an $800 brake job this time), so on Sunday I started reading the Fry's ads a little more closely, and Tuesday went out to Fry's and snagged a motherboard/CPU combo and half a Gig of RAM to go in the new Antec Sonata case. It's an Athlon XP2700, i.e. something that would have been on the bleeding edge a year ago, which is the way I like to buy hardware. Total $180, bringing the total for the box up to about $240 before hard drive and CD-RW, both of which I had lying around the house.

Tuesday evening I started putting it together, after somehow getting a nasty papercut or something across the ball of my right thumb (which gave me an excuse not to play guitar on Wednesday). By a little after midnight I had everything but the hard drive in place, so I booted up Knoppix just to make sure it all worked.

(Edit -- I originally had Sunday as the purchase date of the new computer. I should remember to check my receipts before posting.)

End of an era

Julia Child is dead, at age 91. Grumble.

Windows has lower Total Cost of 0wnership

... for sufficiently 1337 spellings of "0".  See this article on /.

Do bad things come in three's?

If so, I can breath a sigh of relief. Not being particularly superstitious, I'll just try to be a little more alert when I drive.

The first one was Monday, coming home from work. I came off the Winchester offramp, turned left, and had nobody ahead of me in my lane at the Winchester light, which had just turned green. I just barely managed to stop in time to avoid the paramedic truck that came roaring through from my left.

Wednesday was the second: heading for work and going, um, a little too fast (i.e., keeping up with traffic -- people on that part of 280 slow down to 65 to change their tires) the idiot on my left started to veer into my lane. I overcompensated and swerved twice in a beautiful sine curve before regaining control. I managed to stay in my lane, but just barely.

And this morning, someone on my right blew out a tire and sent a hubcap rolling across my path, about 50 feet ahead.

Computers, part 2

Last week I inherited an Apple PowerBook from a recently-departed coworker. What a piece of crap! ( anti-Apple rant )

I hate Macs -- they're almost as bad as Windows machines. Worse, in some ways.

Meanwhile, I have the new computer mentioned earlier today happily up and running. That was a simple matter of putting in a hard drive, (which I had pre-partitioned on another system, since the Debian installer's partitioning tool is pretty tedious to use), booting the DeMuDi installer disk, answering a few questions, and waiting. I did it in the morning before going to work, so that I could do some configuration work and fire off a dist-upgrade before I left. Late in the afternoon I ssh'ed in and finished off a few minor configuration tasks.