"happiness is like peeing your pants: everyone can see it, but only you can feel its warmth"

I figured I might as well take another month break from this place. Regular posting schedules are hard, man. I set up Google calendar to e-mail me every day a post is due, but I tend to just ignore the e-mails. I am bad, I know. But I'm out here again today, to praise my laptop.

And my trusty Eee has plenty of reasons to be praised. First, it gets you girls. That is usually not the case with technology, but there's something about a tiny laptop that attracts them like honey attracts bees. Maybe it's the cute factor, I don't know. I will refer you here and stop talking about it now. The second reason to praise my laptop is this: it's got linux on it. And that is cool, because it means that

• It never crashes
• You can click the little terminal button and noone will understand what you're doing anymore (including you, sometimes)
  
• Most things actually work
• Things that don't work magically start working some day, making you happy

I should stress that last point a little bit more: Linux makes you happy. It makes you happy because of a nifty thing called a "package manager". If this doesn't make sense, allow me to give you an example of how this works: Say you need to do task X on your computer, but you do not have software to do task X. A little googling reveals you need software Y. In windows, the next steps would be downloading Y from some website, agreeing to a EULA, clicking next a few dozen times, et cetera. On my laptop, you click the little terminal icon (losing all bystanders in the process), and type this:

sudo apt-get -y install Y

and that, my friends, is awesome. Not only does this install and set up the software ready for use, it will download future, newer versions of Y automagically, and set them up without your intervention. And that is why things that don't work suddenly start working someday, making you happy in the process.

what prompted this? Well, this morning I woke up and started my laptop as usual. I had obtained some Linkin Park music the previous day, and wanted to sync this to my iPod. This I do using the Banshee media player. It had sort-of kind-of iPod support, which means it will see your iPod. And after an inordinate amount of time, sometimes it loads some of the songs on it for playing on your pc. And you can drag files to it to upload them. Hopefully. However, today was different. Suddenly, everything worked flawlessly, within seconds. Turns out the trusty package manager had updated Banshee to its new version, 1.4.0, and this version works.

This, my friends, makes me happy.

Today's quote is unsourced. I saw it on bash.org, unsourced. You may have figured out already that I don't know what the source is.

"People accept their limitations so as to prevent themselves from wanting anything they might get"

I missed my posting deadline again today, this time by more than two hours. I'm sorry, I try to keep my schedule, but I hardly get time for a private thing like this except at night (though it can hardly be considered private if the website is there for all to see).

I've been quite happy with my Eee PC 901. You get noticed by everyone in the cafetaria (and sometimes mocked, but who cares?), and it's a nifty little thing to have around. Honestly, I sometimes think I only bought it for the cool-factor. You know, like drooling at the iPod section of a store? My inner gadget-freak acting up. However, the Xandros-based linux distro installed on the thing is, frankly... awfull. For, one, the simple GUI which seems to emphasize easy, is just too limiting. And the advanced mode is KDE based, which is just not my cup of tea.

So today I installed Eeebuntu on my little Eee pc, after first trying Eeedora and failing to get either wifi or ethernet working. Now, Eeebuntu doesn't actually support them out of the box either, but at least it makes it possible to install them. Let me show you a list of some things eeedora does not provide out of the box:

• GCC
• make
• G++
• wget
• man
• open-office
• any multimedia applications
  

And probably some more obscure things I forgot about or didn't try. But that is a list of pretty essential things. You don't have internet access to install them, and you can't compile packages from source either. I suppose I could have gone out to find .rpm files for all these, but I installed eeebuntu instead, and got all this and Wifi working by installing two .debs I transferred over via USB-drive. So now I actually have a smooth compiz-enabled desktop with every application I'll ever need. It's a shame that eeedora was being such a royal pain, since I prefer yum over apt-get, but I can live with the way things are right now.

today's quote was already harder to find. It comes from Celia Green. Also, WikiQuote is my newest friend.