Yeah, so I caved and bought a laptop, an IBM Thinkpad T41. It was killing me not being able to get any work done, and I told myself it would only be a waste of time not to get one now instead of like... later. I'm not going to say how much I paid for it, but I saved, say, $800 bucks, by buying it gently used off some dude on craigslist. He was getting rid of it because he wanted to buy a Thinkpad T41P or some shit. He wanted to talk my ear off about it and about this new GPS thing he bought for his car. I was lucky to get away.
Oh, one cool / irritating thing about this new thing is that it comes built-in with this hard drive shock-protection system, wherein this driver can detect when the laptop's being moved, so that... well, I don't know what practical application it actually has, but the Windows version of the software that come pre-installed seems to think that it's a great idea to literally suspend all PCI / IDE activity while the machine's getting moved around. Retarded. Fortunately, you can switch it off, and there's also this awesome display you can pull up with this little 3-D model of your laptop and if you tilt your laptop left, the little model tilts left, too. I could play with that all day.
So now I'm downloading a Knoppix CD that I boot off of to resize the Windows XP partition so that there's room for Debian (I'm keepin' XP this time around, for driver compatibility purposes and because the guy gave me Office 2003 and Photoshop for free). There's apparently this little unmarked, unpartitioned chunk of disk space at the end of the drive that I'm not supposed to overwrite because that's where IBM keeps a bunch of setup files and system restore data. What?! Retarded.
Umm... As soon as I get Linux set up, I'm going to set about adding thread cancellation support to Guile. That should be fun, if it's at all possible. Uh.
You talk big, little Devlin, but I think you'll find that even if people all deserve to be loved in some kind of intrinsic way, which I'm not really willing to take on faith, there's just too damn many of them out there, and their numbers are increasing all the time. Some of them have just got to go. And if one of them is me, so be it; just let me finish up this weblog entry first.
Today my usual Boss was having me take an inventory of sorts of every goddamn thing that we need to test in our software, and he was just sort of standing over my shoulder for a while not saying or doing anything, so I said, as a joke, "Are you jealous that I get to do all of this?" And I guess he wasn't really paying attention because he said, softly, "Hmmm. No." and just sort of wandered away.
No comments:
Post a Comment