Travels with Plink and Cthulhu: random travel notes

[mdlbear]

I've been having breakfast in the hotel this trip rather than the Continental breakfast at the con: protein and potassium are my friends.

I'm really glad I've developed the habit of keeping my room key in my right-hand pants pocket. I hardly ever leave a room without my pants. I have been known to leave without my shoulder bag. Recently.

The Red Lion at the convention center is undergoing extensive renovation. Sure, the carpets have been torn up most of the weekend. OTOH, the WiFi works perfectly in the rooms; this is the first year that's been true.

I've been trying to figure out how many years I've been coming to OSCon. This must be the fourth; first year I believe I was in the Inn at the Convention Center, and I've been at the RL at least twice before. I see LJ tags for OSCon 2006 and 2007. OK, also posts in 2005, and apparently none in 2004.

I've taken to wearing a luggage strap as a belt. Infinitely adjustable instantly, and no metal at all. Needs a way of temporarily attaching something that looks like a buckle when I want to be dressy.

The San Jose airport is also being extensively renovated; Terminal C has been rejiggered to put all of the shops inside the security zone. Finally. They also have free WiFi. Finally.

I still hate the Mac. The apple key, which exists only because they're using a one-button mouse, is exactly where I expect the ALT key to be. Emacs uses Alt-Q to rewrap a paragraph, and Alt-W to copy a selection. Fortunately you can configure the terminal to ask before closing a window or a tab, so as long as I run emacs in a terminal window and not the native version, I'm comparatively safe. (It also took me a long time to figure out how to configure the terminal to treat option as alt.)

The Mac laptop's keyboard is still wretched.

The food has been very good, though I don't like the fact that breakfast has been being served downstairs in the exhibit hall instead of upstairs outside the room where the keynotes are given.

I've been taking realtime notes (in a text file, using emacs). It would have been possible to turn that into real-time blogging using a couple of well-designed scripts and makefiles, but that will have to wait for the next time.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Which emacs are you using? In Aquamacs, at least, you can rebind the keys so (if you don't mind doing a bunch of work, which FOSS advocates keep telling me is no problem) you can fix it up the way you want. Someone may already have done the work, actually--you might be able to download it. If you just don't like the machine--and you've been telling us you don't for years, now--why not get something you like better & sell that one?

[mdlbear]

GNU emacs in a terminal window. My experience with Aquamacs was sufficiently traumatic to convince me never to try it again. One of the major problems is still that the Mac doesn't have an "alt" key where 20 years of training expect it to be. No amount of rebinding is likely to fix the fact that command-Q does what it does, and is where I expect alt-Q to be.

The machine isn't mine, it's $WORK's. Plus a lot of my coworkers are writing software for it, and there are some things (like wireless) that it does better and make it particularly useful for traveling.

I am, in fact, getting another machine -- a Thinkpad X series running Linux. Probably an X200, at this point.

[mdlbear]

I'm not sure who's telling you that "a bunch of work" is no problem. One of the main reasons I use free software, and Debian in particular, is that not only has somebody usually done the work, but it's been packaged up for my distribution and put where I can find it without having to spend two hours tweaking search parameters on Google, and another two hours fighting some horrendous configuration problem.

[andpuff.livejournal.com]

The only reason I'm using a PC now is that when I went to buy my first computer back in the '80s the keyboard of the Apple 2C was wretched. Seems things haven't changed...

[mdlbear]

Not so much, but I find almost all PCs' keyboards to be nearly as bad. The Lenovo (formerly IBM) Thinkpads are a welcome exception. And they're still Linux-friendly, too.