Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-06-25 04:08 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-06-25 04:08 pm
The geek returns.
About time I updated, huh? We got back on Sunday and I've been farting around with various other things ever since.
The trip was nice. We took a power catamaran down the Erie Canal all the way from Buffalo to Troy. Things were occasionally tense and snappy given that there were three people and only so much space on the boat, but overall it was very relaxing to have a break from the interwebs. Wake up early, stop in a very hopefully-named town* for coffee, drive the boat for a while, try adventurously to cook breakfast in a tiny galley, go through a lock, veg out with a Patrick O'Brian book, go through another lock, drive the boat some more, reapply sunscreen, eat junk food all afternoon, go swimming, oh look more locks, take a nap, dock in another hopefully-named town, have dinner on shore, joke around with dad and brother over beer and/or rum-and-coke, go to bed at a reasonable hour. Lather rinse repeat for a week.
* We passed through, among others, Albion, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Lyons, Rome, Verona, and Medina. And I'm pretty sure we passed Athens on the drive home. Tour Europe and the Mediterranean without leaving upstate NY!
And what did I find awaiting me when I got home but my brand-new tiny computer. And omg is it ever tiny. About the size of a hardback book, only skinnier than most of the books I read. It's been running a little sluggish, but I still haven't installed the extra gig of RAM, so we'll see how that works out. As for the OS, it came with SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which I'm ambivalent about so far. I'm kind of poised in the middle between power user and Generic End User, having forgotten most of my *nix skillz but wanting more than the dumbed-down user-friendly interface it comes with. So, the irony: I want more than it's given me so far, but I've forgotten how to configure it to give me what I want. I'm sure I'll learn with time, though, and user-friendliness is at least convenient because it came packaged with Firefox and the wireless pretty much configured, and it claims to auto-mount external storage so I hopefully won't have to kick it and swear at it to transfer files off my external hard drive.
So, big and little things I need to do to it at some point: transfer my files, install the extra memory, set up a crippled guest account that can't modify anything or read my files, muck with the equivalent of the start menu to make it display things I actually use, tweak GNOME to be less of a resource pig or switch to a more lightweight window manager, install various things (GIMP, lj client, a dictionary program that runs off internal libraries instead of the 'net, some sort of sound/music editor à la Audacity, the list goes on), modify the deadkeys on my US-intl keyboard layout so I don't keep typing 'ś' by mistake, start experimenting with scripts to mass-edit little changes to my website, and maybe start messing around with Python because that's the language they teach in Smith's programming-for-dummies course. Which I intend to skip, and might not be able to skip if I don't polish up my rusty coding skills.
Actually, what I need to do after I've done the major things like file transfer and RAM is go back through those O'Reilly books on Linux and refresh my memory. Because the GUI for SuSE Enterprise is slick and it makes most of the everyday tasks nice and easy, but it gives you exactly zilch on getting down into the guts of the machine.
Oh yes, and I got piles of paperwork from Smith in the mail. I'm torn between "this is a pain in the ass" and "...I'm going to Smith! :D"
Also there is a trip to Paris in the works for the first two weeks of August. At the moment it's going to be me and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mmejavert, but let me know if you want to be on board with it. Or meet us there. I'm going to try to get a sublet apartment, which will be infinitely cooler than a hotel and probably less expensive. The ones I'm looking at are €250-500 a week, or €35-75 a night, and for that price in a hotel you'd be sleeping in a closet and walking down the hall to go to the bathroom. Much better to sleep in a real flat.
So yes, all is going well right now.
The trip was nice. We took a power catamaran down the Erie Canal all the way from Buffalo to Troy. Things were occasionally tense and snappy given that there were three people and only so much space on the boat, but overall it was very relaxing to have a break from the interwebs. Wake up early, stop in a very hopefully-named town* for coffee, drive the boat for a while, try adventurously to cook breakfast in a tiny galley, go through a lock, veg out with a Patrick O'Brian book, go through another lock, drive the boat some more, reapply sunscreen, eat junk food all afternoon, go swimming, oh look more locks, take a nap, dock in another hopefully-named town, have dinner on shore, joke around with dad and brother over beer and/or rum-and-coke, go to bed at a reasonable hour. Lather rinse repeat for a week.
* We passed through, among others, Albion, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Lyons, Rome, Verona, and Medina. And I'm pretty sure we passed Athens on the drive home. Tour Europe and the Mediterranean without leaving upstate NY!
And what did I find awaiting me when I got home but my brand-new tiny computer. And omg is it ever tiny. About the size of a hardback book, only skinnier than most of the books I read. It's been running a little sluggish, but I still haven't installed the extra gig of RAM, so we'll see how that works out. As for the OS, it came with SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which I'm ambivalent about so far. I'm kind of poised in the middle between power user and Generic End User, having forgotten most of my *nix skillz but wanting more than the dumbed-down user-friendly interface it comes with. So, the irony: I want more than it's given me so far, but I've forgotten how to configure it to give me what I want. I'm sure I'll learn with time, though, and user-friendliness is at least convenient because it came packaged with Firefox and the wireless pretty much configured, and it claims to auto-mount external storage so I hopefully won't have to kick it and swear at it to transfer files off my external hard drive.
So, big and little things I need to do to it at some point: transfer my files, install the extra memory, set up a crippled guest account that can't modify anything or read my files, muck with the equivalent of the start menu to make it display things I actually use, tweak GNOME to be less of a resource pig or switch to a more lightweight window manager, install various things (GIMP, lj client, a dictionary program that runs off internal libraries instead of the 'net, some sort of sound/music editor à la Audacity, the list goes on), modify the deadkeys on my US-intl keyboard layout so I don't keep typing 'ś' by mistake, start experimenting with scripts to mass-edit little changes to my website, and maybe start messing around with Python because that's the language they teach in Smith's programming-for-dummies course. Which I intend to skip, and might not be able to skip if I don't polish up my rusty coding skills.
Actually, what I need to do after I've done the major things like file transfer and RAM is go back through those O'Reilly books on Linux and refresh my memory. Because the GUI for SuSE Enterprise is slick and it makes most of the everyday tasks nice and easy, but it gives you exactly zilch on getting down into the guts of the machine.
Oh yes, and I got piles of paperwork from Smith in the mail. I'm torn between "this is a pain in the ass" and "...I'm going to Smith! :D"
Also there is a trip to Paris in the works for the first two weeks of August. At the moment it's going to be me and
mmejavert, but let me know if you want to be on board with it. Or meet us there. I'm going to try to get a sublet apartment, which will be infinitely cooler than a hotel and probably less expensive. The ones I'm looking at are €250-500 a week, or €35-75 a night, and for that price in a hotel you'd be sleeping in a closet and walking down the hall to go to the bathroom. Much better to sleep in a real flat.So yes, all is going well right now.