Why am I still at home this morning?

(8:30am) Power is still out at work -- at least on the circuit our router is plugged in to. Just as well that I'm going to be spending the morning taking my car in for an oilchange. I should really have powered down the two Linux boxen in my office before I left, but since they're backed up daily in several different places I'm not going to worry too much.

Next week I'm off to OSCon -- I'll be in Portland Tuesday afternoon through Saturday afternoon. ( contact info behind cut )

(9:55am) The car's likely to run me somewhere north of $400 by the time you add two new tires, an alignment job, and diagnosing the problem with the driver's side window to the oilchange it already needed. Power is still out at work.

I've been thinking again about getting a rolling duffel so that I can take my travel guitar (31" long) on plane trips. Still probably a bad idea; the duffels are awkward, wouldn't work well with my rolling briefcase, and in any case the travel guitar in its gig bag fits in the overhead rack. Looked briefly at some smaller travel guitars -- basically just six strings on a stick -- that might fit in a regular-size suitcase. About the price of two rolling duffels, but less than a car repair. It'll just have to wait, I guess.

Shiny!

Power and internet finally came back at work at about 11:30, by which time the flower_cat and I had managed to assemble an early lunch of Pon-Pon Chicken (basically shredded cold chicken, cucumber strips, and peanut sauce).

Sometime around 2pm our sysadmin came back from his Fry's run with my shiny new 15.4" Macbook Pro. It's the high-end one, with a 2.1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 100GB disk (actually more like 95, with almost 25GB of stuff already on it). It took the rest of the afternoon for it to download something approaching half a gig of updates over our T1 line. Meanwhile, I installed Firefox, fink, X11, the software development kit (called, for some unguessable marketing reason, X-code), and Emacs21, and copied my ssh keys over from my desktop.

Now, people who know me and my operating-system preference (Linux) may be wondering why I decided to get a Mac laptop. You may well ask. There are several reasons:

( detailed list behind the cut tag )

And, of course, it's a nice shiny silver color. Our traditional naming scheme is rivers, and my personal scheme is "rivers of Middle Earth", so I'll probably go with silverlode. It also ties back to the Silvermine River, that runs near my parents' old house in Connecticut.