It’s been a little while….

I’ve been busy as hell with work lately, and time for this place has, as I am sure you can imagine been less than existent, but I find myself with some time tonight, so I might as well fill the world in on the new toys, as well as the status of some older toys.

Opiate (The Compaq notebook) is dead. It was in my case about 2 weeks ago, I grabbed it on the way out of the store to head home, only to hear a stomach churning ‘thud’ as I realized I had not zipped up my laptop case. The machine still boots, I am able to access it over the network, and every thing seems to be fine, except the screen doesn’t come up at all. I have a tech who is looking at it, and I am hoping the repair bill will be less than $300.

Hush (The Asus EEEPC) is still kicking along with out a problem, except every since I did a dist-upgrade to xubuntu 8.04.1 my Atheros wireless card will not connect to any network that has encryption enabled. Pain in the ass. I plan on moving it back to Gutsy this weekend.

Flood (The Q6600 Media Beast White Box) is kicking along nicely as well, after being upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 as well, other than for some reason Apache will not run, it segfaults every time. I am planning on wiping the box clean this weekend, and reinstalling from scratch. Purging and reinstalling the Apache packages has not helped.

I picked up a Canon SD1000 Digital Camera around new years, I’ve put it to fairly good use, I just haven’t uploaded a lot of the pictures from it, I need to get back on that, and update the photolog script so that it works with the new systems, as well as the new host.

I bought a 1 gig iPod shuffle about 2 months ago. It’s junk.

My Blackberry 8310 has died a rather spectacular death due to leaving it in the car while camping all weekend, during a period of very heavy rain. I replaced it just yesterday with a Blackberry 8120, the Pearl with Wi-Fi. I’ve tested both the VO-IP abilities of the phone tonight, as well as the data capabilities using Wi-Fi, and so far I am impressed. Even with our cable modem maxed out on a torrent download (Debian DVD images) the call quality was reasonable, although not ideal. It would be considerably better if we had a more stable router. That’s something to ponder…

I’ve started painting again. This is detailed . It’s been nice to rekindle the old attachment, it is something that is fairly mindless for me, and let’s me take my mind off work for an hour at a time or so. I will upload more pics as my progress on that, as well as other pieces comes along.