Yes it’s that time again. I’ve left a book at the location that this photo was taken at (you can even see the book!). Tell us where it is, and go claim the book!
Don’t forget to register the catch on bookcrossing.com when you have the book.
So where is it?
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The latest announcement from Dell is that they will be offering desktop PCs and notebooks with Linux pre-installed. This is great news for the Linux community, and another step towards Linux being accepted as a desktop operating system.
Bringing this to the marketplace may seem like a daunting task, but it shouldn’t be that bad for a company like Dell. Back before Linux was a viable OS and before SCO were the bad guys, Dell were offering PCs with SCO Unix pre-installed. I was one of the few to own one and it was a great machine; nowhere near ready for the non-technical user but fantastic for geeks like me. Since then Dell have continued to support *nix based servers, switching from SCO to Linux which they have continued to support in the server market to this day. They have a support infrastructure in place so extending it to the desktop should be easy.
My only concern is that in the server market they promote the Red Hat and Novell SuSe distributions. These would be ok for the desktop too, but they should seriously consider something like Ubuntu instead.
Maybe with a company like Dell supporting desktop Linux other companies will sit up and take notice. Can we hope for Linux support from Videotron and Bell Sympatico anytime soon?
When we had our house, our music collection was stored in the basement on a clunky old PC with a noisy fan. Our pictures were stored on my laptop along with our home movies. We played DVDs on a regular DVD player.
Living in an apartment without a basement, big noisy PCs are an annoyance. Having all the pictures and movies on my laptop is a pain because to show them to a group involves hooking it up to the TV and if Jen wants to look at pictures when I’m not around she’s out of luck. Playing DVDs on a regular player just means one more piece of ugly kit in front of the TV.
The solution to all these problems? A Mac-Mini! I ordered one online last Monday and it arrived on Friday. It now has pride of place in front of our TV, hooked up to it with a DVI to HDMI cable. And it really is Mini, about the size of a box of teabags, and quiet to boot.
It now holds all our music, pictures and videos and plays our DVDs too. It even comes with a teeny tiny remote control for casual use, and I’ve hooked up a wireless keyboard and mouse for more serious usage.
All that remains is to install some decent email software (Postfix, Fetchmail, Procmail, SpamAssassin, imapd and Mutt) on it, then I can use it as my mail server too, eliminating the other big noisy PC we have sitting in our dining room.
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I dread trips to Ikea. Trips to Ikea mean much work for me. Being the man of the house means my wife cooks and cleans and takes care of the boy while I put together flatpack furniture.
But there are more things to dread before the actual assembly of said furniture. I’ll use this weekend as an example. We purchased three whimisical and eclectic bookcases for our office/playroom/junkroom/library/spareroom. These came flatpacked in boxes about the size of a door and weighing 75 pounds each.
My first job was to struggle with them up two flights of stairs. I made it up the first flight ok, but had to make Jen pause in her cooking and cleaning and looking after the boy to help me with them up the final flight.
Step two involves completely reorganizing the destination room to make space for the new furniture. Bear in mind that this is the room we’ve been putting stuff in that we didn’t have a place for, which is about 80% of everything we own. I emptied the room and reloaded it before I had a wall clear to put the new bookcases against.
Now it was time for the assembly. I unpacked the first box and carefully read the instructions. I inserted dowels in the right places. I tightened screws in the right spots. I installed funky widgets as instructed. For once (and I’ve done this many many many times) it all came together almost perfectly. I even managed to nail the backboard in place without exposing any nails on the other side. The second case went together equally well, and the third was going just fine until I couldn’t get the pretty bit at the top to go on right. I huffed and I puffed and I struggled and I hammered but no joy, the third case will never look as good as the other two. Sorry Jen.
But the ordeal wasn’t over yet. Oh no. Now we had three empty bookcases sitting in our spare room just begging to be filled. The rest of the afternoon was spent emptying boxes and installing their contents on our shiny new shelves. The shelves are now full, but not as full as they could be because Jen insists on having the junk interspersed with little decorative vignettes. I blame Changing Rooms.
The four year lease on our Mazda Protege ends at the end of April, so last night we went to our Mazda dealership with the intention of handing over a big cheque to buy our car.
We were about to hand over the aforementioned cheque when Jen said “So you’re not going to try to sell us another lease??”. Our salesman said we seemed set on buying our old car so he hadn’t bothered, but…
An hour later we walked out of the dealership with a lease agreement for a brand new sparkly silver Mazda 3. Somehow we managed to sell ourselves a new car; doesn’t that mean we should get the commission?
Here are a couple of views from my walk to work this morning. Commuting has never felt so good.
No, I didn’t leave a book up there.
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It was a dull race. Not a good sign for the rest of the season. However I did win $19 thanks to Lewis Hamilton getting on the podium (let’s just skip over the fact that Fisi,Renault and Anthony Davidson lost me $15).
It was good to see Hamilton giving Alonso a run for his money, although proclaiming him a future world champion after one race is just silly and is piling way too much pressure on his shoulders; calm down Ron.
Kovalainen was horrible. Hopefully that was just first race nerves otherwise I expect him to be out of a drive before mid-season. Maybe he should try rally driving.
Coulthard’s overtaking move was opportunistic to say the least, but at least he stepped forward with a mea culpa, and like he said, he was just racing. If more drivers took a few opportunistic stabs the sport might get exciting again.
The last two laps were the most exciting of the race, and yet nobody overtook anybody on the last two laps. That’s the story of the 2007 Australian Grand Prix.
It’s her birthday, and she blogged! Go wish her a happy day.
I’m sending her to a spa on Saturday for much pampering, and tonight I’m cooking buying us Sushi for the big birthday dinner.
Happy birthday oh love of my life!
BBC Sport is reporting that “Fernando Alonso says he can defend his world title in his first season with McLaren.”. Why is this news? What else is Fernando going to say? “Oh no, I’m going to suck, sorry, no chance of a world title for me this year.”