After poking at the machine some more, concluded that since it had been upgraded continuously from 2000 or so (and was actually at sarge, not woody) that upgrading it to etch made it useful, and it can go directly to lenny when it comes out.

> dpreview reminds me that it's almost photokina, and I *should* wait and > see if canon announces an s7-is or something like it. But the s5 is my > most likely choice at this time. Actually ended up with the SP-570UZ, and am very pleased with the extra zoom, the "zoom ring" interface, and more accessible manual focus...

I *have* the 1st-gen openmoko - 850 band never got licensed. Mostly leaning towards only caring about the quad-band side and getting an e65 for the short term... Update: got an Android G1, which has worked out well.

gave up and kept it on the "work" laptop - but the "me" laptop (an eeepc) never touches work stuff, which serves the original goal.

I padded the travel a little so I have time to go down to the lakeshore and maybe see a museum or two.

I'm going to take at least an extra day for the chocolate party (look up "chocolate dispersion" if your curious about the kind of thing I'm experimenting with) but may *also* do a short trip to Cat Island if we get another long cloudy spell - but "yay jetblue" I don't actually have to plan that very far in advance.

Turns out the right answer is "don't worry about it for now, the car has OnStar" :-)

We got some sunlight, so I may defer the trip altogether. But though The Canaries (and NZ) are on the list for someday, the Carribean wins for a possible 5-day-weekend, since I can get to some place like Cat Island in about 4 hours from Boston :-)

Knowing my skills (and limitations) I started with the cross-build path. Got far enough in to see that it was going to be pretty hairy, had the SD card I was working on fail... and then realized there was an obvious third path: just put a whole ubuntu chroot on the flash card, and run the exact same kphotoalbum as I run on the big machine :-) This turns out to Just Work, so I'll actually be doing field captioning this weekend, less than 3 weeks after getting the EEE...

The EEE is actually shipping, and if I get it soon I can show it off to my mom and see if she wants one for christmas; the n810 is still different enough, and violates the keyboard rule... but more importantly, still isn't shipping :-) I'm half tempted to get it just to run garnet, though :-)

I backed up the raw windows partition, and installed gutsy there. Good thing too - suspend doesn't work (thinkpad + fglrx, already-reported bug) so I'm back on 6.06 anyway...

The instaboat is ahead of the portabote, but I'm going to look at inflatables again after all, and some of the smaller rigid paddlers... update: got a cheap Sevylor packraft to get me started, and learn more about what I need - inflatable tech is a lot more solid than I expected...

other constraints forced my hand

Apparently, we're using msproject for a couple of months while we continue to evaluate what's out there. And we're wasting an engineer on actually doing the tracking...

Despite many of the "get it now answers" being wrong (books *do* get cheaper, I already have 25 books in the "interesting/cool but haven't made time to read" pile that haven't even made it to shelves yet, and it appears to be *rather* hard core and at least somewhat more rigorous than visual) I succumbed, like I pretty much always do anyway, and ordered it :-)

MaraDNS looks interesting, I'll give that a try, thanks all!

I've only just gotten around to it, so I probably wouldn't have had anywhere near enough time to build something :-) I can save that for when I decide it needs to be quieter, as well as faster. (and no, no Xen machines, the one big server I have left runs zephyr so can't have multiple interfaces, plus it's never seemed worth the hassle :-)

Turns out that olympusamerica.com has a New York repair office that claims to be able to fix it for about $175. The Canon is still better (based on the things dpreview.com says actually *work* which don't on the olympus, like "zoom during movies" or "audio recording with IS on" or even "actually *choose* the autofocus target". A replacement olympus would also be almost exactly the same price as the canon. (Also - the S5 *has* the bugs worked out, it's mostly an "update" of the S3.) If the repair works, this will let me wait until canon actually does an 18x lens :-)

the etch installer turned out to be pretty clean, and I should really have at least one "real" debian machine around. Not that the modules are *there* but I'll actually take care of that...

The lobsters compel me! (even if the large-lobster ban is for a good reason :-)

but will stay away from the river

Ended up just syncing it back to the laptop over USB... the wifi was too sucktastic to actually use it anywhere...

tradition won out.

The FlashPac looks good, but I found the Archos PMA430 for cheap and I should be able to use it for captioning and flickring as well. [Also, they don't make 8G xD cards...]

sort of. Actually going birdwatching near Tortosa, which is inland, but may spend some time in Tarragona. (Clincher: "do you really want to spend 6 hours driving in the country/culture that invented the word macho?" :-)

Having used it for a day, it's pretty clear that it's worth hanging on to, especially for the travel I plan to do before the S5-IS actually ships. I'm using the usb cable directly to the camera for now.

I now feel justified in going with "not a Sony, Sony makes me twitch" :-) As for nikon, the only qualifying cameras are the S4 (which I'm upgrading *from*) and the S10 (which isn't really much of an improvement, though it does have IS.)

After playing with a similar-formfactor Olympus SP-550UZ for a day or two, I'm much more sure that I'd have real problems with a full sized camera, given the issues I'm having with this one :-) We'll see how it goes; it was also interesting to see that several people with SLR experience recommended I stick with this smaller camera. There will be lots of examples on flickr shortly...

Ended up going half-and-half (thanks Karl) - the wrt54g stays in bridge mode, a real machine handles dhcp for real addresses on the wireless net, but the wrt54g *also* does the NAT part locally for less special machines. (Since there isn't a "both" button...)

Set something on fire instead (I decided what I wanted to take apart but was too tired to finish it, so set it aside...)

janrain appears to be underdocumented, it looks like I need to grok the spec anyway so I'll at least implement a "drunken walk" through the spec so I know what the pieces all do. I'll go back and look at the existing ones again later...

In the end, the modbook wins on portability - comments on the net from cintiq users seem to be "think of it as a wireless cintiq" :-)

Turns out fastmail has "backscatter" support, where it checks bounces for plausibility and ignores them. (It's under spam filter -> advanced.)

ModBook (+sketchup Pro +omnigraffle etc) wins given the two choices; still deciding if I can justify it though.

there turns out to be gsm850 within a mile or two, so either it will get closer, or I can put up a powered repeater on the roof...

The view (and lack of neighbors) won :-)

laziness won :-)

The food-words choice won - except that for a variety of reasons I'm not going to the conference after all.

You're all wrong. (However, they'll get to see GPB later...)

Now shopping for a mountain retreat (*and* an apartment in cambridge :-)

Not going to Dallas after all - the first half of the year is getting crowded, and I can go to Vilnius in July instead.