The Mandelbear's Musings

A good (very good?) day. OK, very good. It started with two huge, looming problems for me to beat myself up over, and ended with both problems happily resolved, and watching what's been called the best performance ever on Olympic ice, with Colleen and Naomi, followed by loverly snuggle.

The first problem was having signed for the hospital beds back on Wednesday without counting boxes. What was I thinking? Nevertheless, the seller (contacted via Amazon's online email form) found the mattresses in about an hour. They should be arriving today. Whew!

The second was that the backlight on the XO I'd given to Naomi to give to her daughter on her sixth birthday appeared to be turning off at roughly 10-minute intervals. That turned out to be the kid accidentally hitting the backlight-control keys, without knowing what they were! I'm particularly thrilled that the kid figured it out herself. Geek-grrl in the making?

Note to self: you have no future in online tech support. None.

And the women's figure skating was spectacular. Wow.

All's well that ends better? I'll take it. Links under the cut, as usual.

Not a whole lot done yesterday. Calm, but not especially productive. No walk, no exercise.

Made my room reservations for Consonance and Norwescon. The con hotel for the latter is sold out (well, the con's room block and all the accessible rooms are sold out); I got a room at the nearby Hilton that the con specified as the alternate. Grump. Well, I know who to blame for that screw-up: me and my procrastination.

Dusted off the XO and upgraded it to the latest stable build. Painless. The trackpad is very flaky, and various attempts to recalibrate it were unsuccessful, so it will probably require disassembling the bottom and re-seating the cable. I'll pack a mouse just in case.

Attempts to install the Sugar desktop on my Debian desktop machine were similarly unsuccessful -- some parts appear to be incompatible with Gnome -- but that's a lot less important. Will try the USB bootable version at some point.

Nova (the fileserver) fell over on its nose while I was printing some business cards. No damned reason for it; top shows that the rasterizer hardly uses any resources at all. (That's no explanation for why it's so slow, especially when printing to the inkjet, but...) It handled backups just fine.

So it's either memory, or something weird on the MB (possibly involving writing the disk). In either case, I don't have time to track it down. Sometime between now and Wednesday I'll swap disks with Harmony (my workstation) and worry about building a new workstation when I get back from Conflikt. One more fscking expense I don't need...

In other news, my XO still hasn't arrived, and I got an email from them saying they didn't have my complete shipping address. More likely their cobbled-together software thinks that "suite 115" refers to a mailbox and not a connected set of offices. (I almost wrote "office suite", but that would be something else again.)

From Technoshaman we get a link to this post on groklaw where PJ describes her first encounter with her very own OLPC XO. It was given to her in a restaurant...

A younger guy sitting at a nearby table then piped up, "Just use Google Docs if you need Word documents." My brain about exploded. Of course! What can't you do that a businessman might typically want to do that he can't do on Google Docs? Note to countries thinking about whether or not to get the OLPC laptop and worrying about Word and Excel and all that: not only does the OLPC have equivalents, but if you want the kids to be able to function in a Microsoft environment, let them go to Google Docs and they can even share the work. An entire class and the teacher can all work on a project together. Here's how some others in the world are already using Google Docs.

"Nobody needs a hard drive any more," the young guy said. And you know what? It's true. So down topples another piece of anti-OLPC FUD.

But here's the best part. After we talked a while, I see a mom with her son, about 7 or 8 walking toward us. He's pulling on her hand, and from across the room, I can see the boy's eyes are fixed on the laptop and he is grinning from ear to ear. He looked like he'd just seen a dear friend. He walked right up to the table, and I immediately turned it his way so he could play, which he did without hesitation, without a word, still grinning.

His mother was nervous, thinking maybe he'd break it, or was being rude to butt in, but I told her I wanted him to play with it, so I could see what he did. He had absolutely NO difficulty at all, asked no one any questions, ignored us all totally, and played and played and played, grinning from ear to ear the entire time.

It's a kid magnet.

He wasn't intimidated by the laptop at all. It was like it was his, that it naturally belonged to him to play with. It was so cute. They have designed something so adorable that children, I saw, are drawn to it.

Kids just get it without a manual, but we, the adults, didn't.

I can't wait to get my hot little hands on mine... It's coming. Real Soon Now.

Maybe I should order another one?

Got email from OLPC this morning saying my XO won't be here for Christmas -- which I'd already suspected. Supposed to be arriving by Jan. 15, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of comparison articles: XO vs. Kindle on O'Reilly, and XO vs. Eee on sdorn.

Of course, what I really want is the XO's hardware in the Eee's case, with an IBM laptop keyboard. Hmm - I can buy one of those...

(Update 9:51: ordered. Lenovo's web shop sucks.)