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i didn't post on my birthday! isn't that a capital offense?! the blog police will get me! i'll be locked in windowless room and forced research blogrolls selected at random for the rest of my life! i'll never see

yeah, i got bored just writing that.

i was twenty-three yesterday. (and i'm still twenty-three today, even!) i'm losing "recent college graduate" status and migrating into the great unknown. is it inappropriate to feel old at twenty-three? no matter: onward, to adulthood and doom!
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you may have noticed my lack of verbosity over the past two weeks. meet rohan.

before you ask: no, i did not intentionally copycat my brothers' lord of the rings naming scheme. i was flipping through my short collection of emily dickinson poems when howard shore's rohan theme soared in, and that was that.

i wish my camera had been operational when it arrived (i only just purchased new batteries for it), so i could have documented the entire procedure. it's got the weirdest ac adapter i've ever seen--forgot to take a picture, so visit the product page until i get one up. it doesn't look weird in their photo, but the plug that attaches the laptop cord to the power brick is just odd, and the plug itself forces the laptop cord to lay flat across the brick going the wrong direction. so stretching the cord to its full length actually stresses the plug. absolutely rotten design for a seven-pound laptop.

apologies, i started off on a negative!

(incidentally, it's currently 77 degrees [fahrenheit] outside.)

i love this laptop. i was skeptical at first, because it came with all the dell bundling and nonsense. took an hour or so to get that off and replace xp media center with xp professional. (my dual-boots always put linux last. saves a step.) had a minor panic once it was installed, though. see, my xp disk is pre-service-pack-1. old. complete with old drivers. so it didn't recognize the wireless card, video card, modem, sound card, touchpad, or (and this is the most important one) ethernet card (broadcom bcm4401 10/100). so thunk i, nevermind, my service pack 2 disk must have those. popped that one in, did the upgrade: still no drivers. i ended up getting the ethernet drivers off broadcom's website on the other laptop (hoping they were the right ones, because windows wasn't sure and i didn't think to check dell's [excellent] support website), burning them to a cd (no floppy drives here, baby), and shuttling them over to rohan. it was exciting, really.

so that's when i started loving this laptop. it's so fast. and the screen is so big. and it's got so much space. but why pontificate i thus? see for yourself:

Dell Inspiron 6000

• Processor: Intel Pentium M 760 (Dothan): 2GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB
• Display: Samsung 15.4" WSXGA+ LCD (native resolution: 1680x1050)
• Memory: 512MB Shared (?) DDR2, 533MHz, 1 Dimm
• Hard disk: Western Digital 80G SATA, 5400rpm
• Video: ATI Mobility Radeon X300, 128MB dedicated
• Optical: TSST DVD+/-RW TS-L532B, 8x
• Wireless: Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 internal, 802.11b/g @ 54Mbps
• Battery: 53 WHr 6-cell lithium-ion

those are all the exciting bits. anyway, i just realized i've written a book today, so i'll summarize the linux adventure quickly: i thought i'd try the new xgl livecd demo, but it died--widescreen resolution issues, i think? haven't tried it since and didn't spend any time troubleshooting, but i'd like to get it working if possible. gentoo went on beautifully, as always. used mostly the stage 1/3 for gcc 3.4.5 and glibc 2.4 installation method (thanks, bobp!), because i'm too wussy to go for gcc 4.1. wasn't nearly as complicated as i expected--you do a stage 3 install, update your USE and anything else, and rebuild everything. ooo, scary. but i was being brief! the only thing i haven't got working yet is a full-resolution framebuffer because the widescreen confuses it but i'll figure it out soon i hope and i'm using ratpoison because the ati binary driver agrees with xorg which is working perfectly with the screen and the touchpad and the wireless laser mouse and that's all! g'bye!

those of you who know me know my little laptop, purchased summer 2002, has been on its last legs for nearly a year. last april (i think) the power connection died altogether (or rather, lost contact with the system board, rendering the entire unit powerless); father-dear helped me patch up a hack-fix involving copper wire and a lot of solder, and the two of us (my laptop and i) have been stumbling along ever since.

recently, the problems have returned. if the power plug is moved at all (i.e., by readjusting the position of the laptop on a desk or some such), the board loses power and the whole unit shuts off. the wonky inverter board (causing the lcd backlight to cut out if the screen is adjusted, or if i woke up on the left side of the bed--only fix is to shutdown and re-plug the power cable) is a constant source of headache. (particularly in the middle of a starcraft game.) and turning the machine on doesn't necessarily get all the gears going. it tends to just stop, right before it hits bios. no abnormal noises, nothing on the screen. it just stops. usually, if i remove/reseat a random piece of hardware, like the battery or the cd-rom, it gets going again. (possibly related to the power issue?)

were it not for that last gem, i'd be sorely tempted to take the whole thing apart again, reseat the inverter board connection, and re-solder the copper wire. honestly, as far as i can tell, the rest of her is in great shape. (except the lcd, which is pink on one side and blue on the other--minor details!) (o, and the 'insert' key broke off. i taped it back on. who uses 'insert' anymore, really?) but i don't have the equipment, and i figure driving 60 miles to perform open-heart surgery (that very well may fail miserably, if those pre-bios hiccoughs are anything serious) on a four-year-old laptop qualifies as overkill.

so i've decided to let the old girl die. or at least find new life on ebay.

to come: summary of my hpzt1000-ic/gentoo experience (i know, you wait with bated breath) and specs on the (as yet un-named) newcomer.

from movie-news site i watch stuff:

Speaking last night at the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards (which mean absolutely nothing), producer Rick McCallum provided an update of the current Lucasfilm projects. Speaking about a Star Wars television series, McCallum claims the show will provide the dark, character-based drama fans were looking for in the prequels:

"That's not going to happen probably for another year and a half while we develop scripts and everything else. But it's fantastic; we've got some incredible writers. It's going to be much darker, much more character-based, and I think it's going to be everything the fans always wanted the prequels to be. They'll be one-hour episode. It takes place between Episodes III and IV. It's going to be all-new characters, maybe a few bounty hunters in there to start the series off."

shoot me. someone. now. please?

if the i'm-beautiful-because-i'm-so-in-love-no-it's-because-i'm-so-in-love-with-you prequels were the final throes of the star wars franchise, this is its mortal blow. a tv series? are they kidding?

words fail me. i'll leave you to imagine for yourself how this news registers with the millions of pre-prequels star wars fans. you'll find me crying into my beer, with the rest of my breed.

but before i go, here's another great clip from the same site:

[George Lucas]'s just finished the Indiana Jones script, and [Steven Spielberg]'s having that rewritten....

thanks, steve. WHERE WERE YOU IN 1999?!

here's the latest, for those of you following the tale: i have no idea "how the phone interview went", because i never know these things, but they called me back two hours later to schedule an in-person interview on monday morning. so i guess it went well.

and for post symmetry: performancing has a blogger bug that has supposedly been fixed in the beta build. so it'll be great, once it's not broken.

an advantage three-button-mouse-users have over two-button-mouse-users is their ability to close tabs in firefox with the middle button. (middle-click a tab. go ahead, i dare y--not this one!) an advantage linux users have over windows users is their ability to paste any selected text into the current text field with the middle button.

you see the disconnect? been driving me slowly nuts. in linux, instead of closing the tab, a middle-click tries to load any selected text. it's been one of my two windows perks (the other, of course, being starcraft). tonight, i finally broke down, and found a solution:

1. go to about:config
2. type 'middle' into the nifty search box
3. double-click the "middlemouse.content.LoadURL" line

yes, i know this was just absolutely not worth a whole blog post. lemme alone.

just a quick update: hours, mere hours after i published the previous entry, i got an email from adecco to the following effect: "got your resume, you're overqualified, here's a programmer contract that pays over twice as much, have fun." and today i scheduled a phone interview with a mail software company in henrietta. so if someone was praying, thanks very much.

firefox extension of the day: performancing. i haven't the foggiest idea why it's called "performancing", but it's an integrated blogging add-on/editor. i write to you now from the comfort and security of my browser, nary a "www.blogger.com" to be found. it does properly what i still haven't been able to convince flock to do. if you're a blogger, give it a shot. it's a bit laggy on my (perfectly respectable--no, really) machine, but not unusable. enjoy.

incidentally, i really am planning to throw some pictures back up. it's looking awfully drab even to me. i'm been too lazy to a) buy new batteries for my camera, and b) go through the arduous process of ftp site management. (it's such a burden.)

kelly services. adecco. monster.com. simplyhired.

just shoot me.

that's right folks, i'm in the midst of a desperate hunt for more work. i had a wretched nightmare last night that i couldn't find anything, and benjamin and i moved into the park because we couldn't afford an apartment, and i worked for wal*mart's public trolley system. i had to pull/push a lever from 12:30-18:00, five days a week. it was one of those dreams from which it takes several minutes to wake up--"i know if i just stay in bed the problem will go away!" and in the end, it does, but only partly, because those dreams are always based in reality (or else they wouldn't be so wretched), so you're left with this growing sense of impending doom mixed with a sort of half-satisfactory relief.

at any rate, i applied to four or five more jobs today, just to make myself feel better.

benjamin and blaine have picked up unreal tournament 2004 as their current game of choice, and have been obsessively battling away this week. i haven't played yet (don't know as i will--twitch games aren't really my forte), but it looks like good, solid fun. lovely graphics, ammo in really pretty colors, and gameplay that lets players essentially fly all over the place. (see why twitch games aren't my forte?)

in other news, a few firefox extensions to bring to your attention.

• the all-in-one sidebar. just met this character a few minutes ago. sets up a great little sidebar for most of firefox's "little windows": extensions, themes, page info, etc. very convenient.
• fission. stuffs the load progess indicator into the URL bar (or location bar, or address bar, or whatever the hey it's called), like it is in the new internet explorer and (apparently) safari. great feature, i'm addicted.

that's all.