Done yesterday (20111016 Su)

Most of the day -- a lot more than I wanted to spend -- was taken up by upgrading my netbook. I repartitioned it to give it separate root and home partitions. The new home/old root partition stayed bootable, which was a Good Thing, because I had trouble with Debian. The 3GB partition I set up was too small for a full desktop install, so I had to redo it with just a basic X system plus gnome. The other problem was finding the firmware for the stupid Broadcom wifi -- that turned out to be in firmware-b43-lpphy-installer.

Meanwhile, I tried installing the latest Ubuntu. It offered to upgrade the existing install, so I let it. Bletch. Even their alleged "classic" look is thoroughly wretched -- it looks like Gnome, but you can't add launchers to the panel! Esr's right -- they've jumped the shark.

Anyway, I finally have a usable Debian, so I'll happily delete Ubuntu and free up a whole lot of space. I'm sad about Ubuntu -- they've always given me a smooth install experience, recognizing all my devices out of the box. But their new UI is so dumbed-down as to be unusable.

I also rode my bike downtown to City Hall to spend some more time with Occupy San Jose. It's 2.9 miles each way, according to Google Maps, which also found me a nice safe route. Wish I'd known about that while I worked near the airport. (For reference, it's via Park Avenue, which has bike lanes on both sides of the railroad underpass.) I'm seriously out of shape -- between not walking much and not having gotten on my bike in nearly a year, it was an effort getting home.

So, all-in-all not too bad of a day, though there are as usual too many things left undone. I really wanted to have done more music, for example. But there it is.

Not many links, but Millions Withdrawn from Bank of America and Wells Fargo is encouraging. (A couple of local churches moved $4M into a credit union.)

( raw notes )