Notes from the day

[mdlbear]

Odd mood today: not exactly depressed, but not happy either. Kind of flat. As I said, odd.

Dragged my nice new data-transfer drive in to work; it took several hours to upload the big audio and video files. Would have taken a couple of weeks from home; work's connection is about 70 times faster. It even took most of an hour to copy them directly to the offsite backup drive. What this says about the potential bandwidth of my Honda Civic is disturbing.

Plane tickets for the Portland/Seattle trip are issued. I'll be in Portland for OSCon from the early afternoon of Tuesday, July 22 through noonish on Friday the 25th. Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday and Thursday evenings are mostly free. Colleen and I will both be getting in to SeaTac 2:30ish on Friday, staying in the Big Green Monster, and leaving 7:50pm on Sunday.

Had a good, brisk, hour-long walk, taking the extra hill both ways at full speed. Kind of fun to pass and easily outdistance a pair of young women half my age in running shoes. They caught up with me while I was stretching at the top of the hill, and we talked for a few minutes.

Spent almost the entire walk being attacked by a new song, loosely based on parts of my previous post. Still rather fragmentary. The one I was working on before and during Baycon may have to stand in line. The Cat says I've been listening to Amy. She may be right.

Comments

[madtom-o-bedlam.livejournal.com]

Not particularly related to this post, but i was wondering if you ever managed to get filk.com's player to work with FlowerCat's Asus 900? And your general impression. I'm considering picking up a tiny laptop of some sort, and I kinda like the eee pc.

[mdlbear]

No, and Asus's "support" is completely nonexistent. That's really the only problem, but it's serious enough to have made it a non-starter if we'd known. The current plan is to replace Xandros, the distribution they shipped on it, with Ubuntu.

There are getting to be a lot of little Linux subnotebooks either available or coming soon; I'd wait until July sometime.

[madtom-o-bedlam.livejournal.com]

Can you give me a clue what I should be watching for? I can set reminders to check on product releases and read the tech data if I know what I'm looking for.

I'm gonna need a working laptop soon. I'm changing jobs here at the office, and I'm going to be doing a LOT more field work. I'm losing my cube and desktop here in the office.

[madtom-o-bedlam.livejournal.com]

Oh and THANKS for your reply and help! I forget my manners now and again, but I'm appreciative.

[mdlbear]

Engadget and Gizmodo (both gadget-oriented blogs) seem to be a good place to keep an eye on -- that's where I get a lot of my info.

Acer and Dell come to mind as having recently announced.

I also recommend looking at the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 series -- they're a little larger (full-sized keyboard) and beefy enough to serve as a real desktop replacement running either Linux or Windows. The Eee and related subnotes are good secondary machines, but they can't replace a real desktop.

[mdlbear]

You might also consider a 15" or 17" laptop if you need a desktop replacement. Bigger screen, so more like what's on your desk now.